On Posterity

I. The Romantic Culture of Posterity

Writers, artists, philosophers, and other manufacturers of cultural artifacts have a perennial fascination with the immortality effect, the ability of a poem, novel, statue, painting, photograph, symphony, or philosophical work to survive beyond the death of its originating individual. The appeal to posterity is a conventional topos in literary and cultural thinking, and poetry in particular has always been bound up with the possibility of living on. In his “Epilogue” to Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid declares that “not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword / Nor the devouring ages can destroy” his work; and that after his death he will “be borne, / The finer part of me, above the stars, / Immortal, and my name shall never die.” ¹ Similarly, Horace famously asserts poetic immortality in the last of his odes—“non omnis moriar.” The tradition is also more generally an aspect of the cultural inheritance of the West: as Heraclitus tells us, “The best choose one thing in exchange for all, everflowing fame among mortals.” ² “Writing so as not to die,” comments Foucault, glossing Blanchot, “is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.” ³

While the impulse to write for immortal fame may be understood to be as old as writing itself, the institution of the aesthetic in late-eighteenth-century Europe may be said to be bound up with a new sense of the necessity of deferral as an element of critical reception. Once the genius has been defined in terms of originality, in terms of an inaugural break with tradition or convention, then a delay between the production of a work and its reception becomes inevitable. ⁴ As Wordsworth argues in his 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” the poet must create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. ⁵ During the eighteenth century, in fact, the category of the aesthetic is increasingly linked to the belief that contemporary obscurity or neglect is the necessary (although not of course sufficient) condition for posthumous recognition: the true artist is ahead of her time. As Leo Braudy comments, the idea of neglected genius is the Romantic era’s “special turn on the old Horatian paean to posterity.” ⁶ Far from being a thing of the past, as Hegel will argue, art, the realm of the aesthetic, in its inaugural moment, is constituted as a thing of the future. ⁷ If the artwork is original, that is to say, if it expresses a fundamentally new kind of experience, then the audience will be expected to need time to “catch up” with its newness, to become acclimatized to the inaugurating moment of its production. But, as we shall see, there is a latent paradox embedded within this notion of reception, since if the work is to be defined by its reception as new or original, then once the audience has been habituated to its particular mode or acclimatized to its new conventions, the work will no longer figure as original, new, or unique. For the work to be eternally the work of genius it must be resistant to acculturation—indeed, resistant to reception itself. In this respect, the work must be indefinitely future-oriented and prospective: to the extent that aesthetics determine the artwork as original, that originality is also determined as a quality of the work which will inhere beyond the time of its own production. The work of art is directed towards an infinitely deferred and always future reception—even while that very direction towards an indefinite future may be read, differently, as an appeal to the critical sensibilities of the artist’s contemporaries. In this respect, the inauguration of the aesthetic may be said to involve a reinvention of posterity itself. The aesthetic involves the assertion that the poem will be read, the artwork appreciated, but not now.

Even the contemporary reception of such work is complicit in this futuring, figuring itself as incomplete, as only the precursor of a larger, more universal, just and timeless appreciation. Crucial to the discourse of the aesthetic is the tearing or splitting of the present from the future, a lapse of history, the...