Ecology of Writing

Both thematically and procedurally, the analytic of the “outside” Henry Sussman attempts in the recent Idylls of the Wanderer can be traced all the way to the surveys of “exteriority,” “interiority,” and “difference” from his 1982 book, The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James. Closer to us, The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (1997) and The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion (2005) make for a more readily apparent, if incomplete, genealogy. A quick look at these two books (possibly alongside Acts of Narrative, which Sussman and Carol Jacobs co-edited in 2003) suggests that “Outside in Literature and Theory” is not just Idylls’ subtitle but also an accurate description of a project the critic has been pursuing across a number of books with a consistency and an acumen that have passed the test of successive shifts of theoretical paradigm—a most urgent, demonstrably necessary and impossible project at once, I hasten to add. In fact, the author admits to this impossibility himself, in Idylls and elsewhere in his writing, in his scholarship as well as in his teaching (xiii). But if the outside marks an “impossible position” (63), how can we tackle it? How can we step out of the linguistic-cultural familiar turf of discourse to discourse on the outside? How can we even formulate these questions if there is no hors-dehors, so to speak? Speaking of speaking (on this particular subject): in what language, I should also ask (“Every word is a prejudice,” Nietzsche famously wrote in “The Wanderer and Its Shadow,” to which Sussman’s title alludes). That is to say, what injunctions of rhetoric, common sense, and culture must one sidestep in order to think through the uncanny thematics of exteriority? Yet again, this problem or set of problematic couples—outside and inside, here and there, territory and boundary, home and elsewhere, us and them, self and other, sameness and difference, and so forth—presents itself today with salient urgency. Countless critics and artists have pointed out that the “network society” has sparked a crisis of this sociological and epistemological outside, so much so that writers like Andrei Codrescu and Don DeLillo have not hesitated to sound its death knell: the outside and its exotic geography, we are told, have “disappeared” or are dying out. (The Disappearance of the Outside is the title of Codrescu’s 1990 book.) At the very least, they are in short supply. And, raised by Sussman directly and indirectly, the questions are: Why should “we,” “insiders,” care about it—and if we do, what can we actually do?

Let me establish first, in complete agreement with the critic, that we are or more exactly accede to the insider condition, that is, start speaking from an inside, from a physical home or conceptual abode (38), from a position of stability if not necessarily of privilege and hegemony, as soon as we “address” (65) and otherwise “thematize” outsideness. The access is problematic and calls for scrutiny, no question about it. In practice, it often blinds us to what it presupposes, to that which we unwittingly or not so unwittingly set aside and outside (on the other side, of “others,” “out there,” and “otherwise”) so that “we” can go ahead and lay exclusive claim to a certain topology and typology of culture. “Exclusive” is keynote, and its strong association with “exclusion” must be emphasized, as I am here, because the excluded, the repressed, the bouc émissaire, and so forth stand testimony, in their eloquent absence, to the radical difference we had to disallow or expel in order for us to become what we are or, more likely, fancy we are. If this is the case, if, in other words, the outside along with the alien, the different, the singular, and cognate facets of the Levinasian other makes possible the founding routines of selfhood—if the ethical relation sets up the ontological and thereby, tout court, being rests on being-with—then the crisis of exteriority truly becomes a domestic (“internal”) affair, concerns “us” “in here” deeply, not only ethically (insofar as we...