Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists by Ross Posnock, and: Exhaustion: A History by Anna Katharina Schaffner (review)

Posnock’s Renunciation deals with people who have in some way renounced things they have done and become famous for doing. The list includes writers (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Hoffmanstahl, Kafka, Celan, Bernhard, Salinger, and others), philosophers (Emerson, Kierkegaard, William James, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein), and “artists” (Ad Reinhardt, Bob Dylan, Glenn Gould, Agnes Martin), as well as some figures harder to classify (the quasi-Mrs. Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, Susan Sontag). The book also features a cameo appearance by Bartleby the Scrivener, “American literature’s iconic renunciant.” The author remarks that “renunciation is as American as apple pie, and as old as the Greek cynics.” One does not easily associate Wittgenstein with cynicism, or Mallarmé with apple pie. Fortunately, little intellectual history is otherwise attempted or committed. Given its list of subjects, one expects, though, that sundry varieties of renunciation will be enumerated and defined. Even if many of the author’s descriptions are helpful and sensible, there appears to be an important difference that goes undiscussed between deciding not to do something and deciding to do nothing. If so, renunciation can have vastly different, and possibly incompatible, meanings. There is not one kind that we can label “acts of abandonment.” The book’s unifying thread is not expressed by its title.

Schaffner’s book is simpler in structure. Its subject does appear to be exhaustion, the concept, and the study’s animus is nosological. Since intellectual history is remorselessly committed, however, no such concept could survive the book. The nosology has, moreover, a Whiggish quality. Her recounting the progressive adventures of Galen and Cassian, “the Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas,” and Ficino, as much as her approach to discussing masturbation, the death drive, Oblomov, and capitalism, point to an enlightened author who is comfortably on the right side of history. One suspects that her certainties about the present (for example, that chronic fatigue syndrome is an effect of “the rapid rise of neoliberalism”) will one day occupy the quaint gallery where the Desert Fathers fought their desert demons. Condescension, alas, breeds condescension.

Despite substantial differences in sophistication and knowledge, there is a family resemblance between these books. Both bear simple nouns as titles, a welcome ebb after the flood of gerunds in recent titles (the chapters in Schaffner’s book are also taciturnly announced). And, of course, there is something that renunciation and exhaustion have in common. Independently, both nouns suggest a measure of anxiety about what literary scholars might find to do in a world where literary studies are quickly receding. Those scholars feel exhausted and are willing to renounce their trade. Both of these books are, in that sense, obliquely autobiographical and to that extent, perhaps, of historical interest.