Looking at the Stars Forever
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Rei Terada, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine, is the author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Harvard, 2001) and Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard, 2009).
Footnotes
To further complicate things, Hesiod’s Works and Days, among other sources, tells that the Titan reign coincides with the Golden Age of human life (The Works of Hesiod, Translated from the Greek by Mr. Cooke [London: N. Blandford, 1728]: 1:154–63). Daniel Watkins finds Titan civilization “presented as a collective and shared world of plenty that is being destroyed” while the “imperialistic” “world of the Olympians is a world where individual consciousness is a frontier to be explored” (Keats’s Poetry and Politics, 100). The idea of a golden age is itself propaganda in support of another order; but the involvement of the legend in various propaganda contests makes its use harder to read.
1. John Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) 1:350–53. All citations from Keats’s work are from this edition.
2. The sense that the universality of the voice either gives it simultaneous interiority and externality, or something beyond either interiority or externality fits with the fact that Coelus is Hyperion’s father—in the distant way that immortals have parents.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19, trans. modified. [Phäuomenologie des Geistes. Werke in Zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)].
4. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), vii.
5. On the Christian connotations of these phrases in Hegel, see Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005), 38.
6. Thomas Pfau points out that the image “embodies the transitional function of representation overall of which Hegel tells us that it is ‘the middle between the immediacy of intelligence finding itself determined, and the free intelligence of thought’ ” (Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 [Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005], quoting G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Human Sciences, vol. 3, trans. Michael John Petry [Dordrecht, Boston: D. Reidel, 1977], §451). For critical analysis of Hegel’s hierarchizations, see John Sallis, “Imagination and Presentation in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, ed. Peter G. Stillman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987): 66–88.
7. Donald Verene notes that in Hegel’s Phenomenology “I must look (i.e., recollect) and see (the ingenious moment).” Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 23.
8. The armature over which light needs to play to constitute the negative is what Keats often calls a “face.” The face therefore can be a masklike thing, behind or through which light can be perceived. Moneta’s face is partly opaque, partly porous. The drama over the invisibility, then exposure, of her face suggests that her face is also the screen that supports the necessary and inevitable anthropomorphization of the inhuman. Keats’s acknowledgment of this anthropomorphization complicates what it would mean to “bear witness” in The Fall of Hyperion: the narrator is interested in the inhuman as much as the human, and cannot exactly witness the inhuman.
9. See also Encyclopedia §448.
10. “Converts” is the loaded word for “umkehrt” chosen by A. V. Miller.
11. Hegel, Encyclopedia, §445; my emphasis.
12. On affinities between Keats’s negative capability, the Kantian aesthetic, Heideggerian attention, and inoperability, see Tilottama Rajan, “Keats, Poetry, and ‘The Absence of the Work,”’ Modern Philology 9 (1998), especially 344. Rajan’s final word is that “it is the aesthetic attitude” of caring for what history has been unable to use “that makes archaeology possible” (351). The looking that Keats wants is sublime in its embrace of impasse and selfstrengthening purpose. It’s a finite sublimity, though, that...
