Brief Notices

Brief Notices

The author of this challenging book is Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her earlier books include The Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), and In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999).

In the present volume she offers sensitive, detailed, and highly original readings of six works widely separated in respect to place, time, and culture. The first four texts are firmly situated within the canon of literary and philosophical discourse—Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Symposium and Republic, and Hamann's "Aesthetica in nuce." The last two, Sebald's The Emigrants and Jane Campion's film The Piano, cross traditional lines of narrative genre and address, not by chance, two major ethical concerns in contemporary critical practice. What emerges in this exemplary sextet is not merely a sequence of scenes dramatizing the power of institutions to coerce ethical judgments through the force of language, but the unsettling, disruptive role of an examined language, a non-prescriptive "literary ethics" of another order that "offers a resistance to power and simplistic conceptualizations of truth, an emancipation from the 'must-be' that implies an ever to be renewed renegotiation":

We read here works that openly stake our ethico-political positions, but are no less bound to disrupt them. Six works that set up side by side, as parallel worlds, literal and letteral tyrannies: the power of the state, polis, Reich, of patriarchy, of divine law and its unshakable judgment, for example, alongside unproblematic powers of representation and prescription. Six works that at the same time skirt their own prescriptions, ethical and linguistic, by way of meditations that may, as in Plato and Hamann, speak directly about language, but which more incisively perform its complexities and thus question their own will to unmediated truth and moral certitude.

(xvii)

Jacobs readily acknowledges that for the responsible, responsive reader "there is no way to avoid skirting the ethical." Her book is both a response to and an elaboration of the call for "an ethics of reading" raised some years ago by Hillis Miller in his Wellek Lectures. (Both critics clearly recognize that a "readerly" ethics is not just another name for situational ethics.) By extending this call to include the notion of "skirting," which is neither simple evasion nor simple accommodation, she suggests the peculiar responsibilities of attending to her authors' subtle disruptions of our (and often their own) complacencies.

To cite but one "red thread" of concern running through her finely nuanced meditation on the tasks of the responsible reader, one could consider how the political and ethical positions read here can be "sometimes overtly and often famously bound up with the question of gender":

Jane Campion's film, The Piano, is to all eyes, at least from a certain point of view, a feminist film if ever there was one. Hamann's best known work, "Aesthetica in nuce," directs us to a little celebrated corner of his opus in which the definitions of good and evil pivot around the virtue of a biblical heroine. The Symposium is conditional upon expelling women from the scene of discourse, though Socrates, in a speech which one tends to take as Plato's final word in the matter of love, ventriloquizes his female mentor. In the Republic we find Socrates forced to turn back and transvaluate the place of woman in the polis before his ideal state can be fully conceived (Book V). It is gender politics as well that are so often understood to govern Antigone's affront to the state: by Creon in the tragedy and by many of Sophocles' most striking readers—Hegel and Irigaray, for example—for whom the formation of the state and the ethical in general cannot but pass by way of woman.

(xx)

After comments on how the politics of identity functions as gender and as state in Plato and Hegel...