All You Need is Love: Critical Reflections on Paul Bové's Love's Shadow

For a book about love, Paul A. Bové's Love's Shadow seems motivated by a certain amount of critical animus.¹ Of course, the title should tip us off that it is not a book just about love but also what falls under its shadow. What shadows love is not only the inevitable critical project that is linked to its articulation, but also that which must be eschewed or rejected for love to flourish.

The vision of love articulated by the book is less about romantic love, although Bové provides a powerful account of its transformative power in his readings of Shakespeare's late comedies, but rather love as the basis for a renewed critical project for the humanities. In contrast to the forms of rote theorization and scorched-earth critique that he sees as the dominant critical trends in contemporary literary criticism, he posits a renewed humanist and democratic criticism, one that does not work in the service of "nonliterary extratextual programs" but instead posits the work of the imagination that inheres in the world-making capacities of art to point us toward a newly robust humanism (7). Such an understanding of art makes it central to projects of democratic and social renewal. It provides the visionary dimension of world-imagining, what Bové describes as the "capacity of strong imagination to produce poetic alternatives to the inherited and in the face of claims made to limit the imagination by the real" (18). Such an understanding of poesis as proleptic would be central to a reinvigorated humanities which would no longer be complicit "in creating ruins of the human world" by reading ruin everywhere (14).

While my own theoretical leanings tend toward the posthumanist and antihumanist as much as the radical humanist, I am sympathetic to the argument that we need a revitalized and positive mission for the humanities.² I am also willing to meet Bové halfway toward imagining a critical, secular humanism for the twenty-first century, particularly as part of his conception of humanism is centered around Marx's understanding of species being (366), as a shared orientation toward praxis that defines the human. While Bové discusses a notion of "species quality," which replaces Marx's active conception with something more contemplative, his conception of "poesis" as literary making fits within the broad framework of Marx's account of human action on and with the materials of the given world (339). A reinvigorated and proleptic humanist vision which is about the alternate social and material systems we can build to sustain human and nonhuman flourishing is crucial for our moment of genuine crisis both in the academy and outside of it.

Where I break with Bové, however, is not only in the characterization of this crisis and what it entails, but also what kinds of scholarly work promise a visionary way forward in the present moment. It is precisely the tradition of Western Marxist literary interpretation, associated most forcefully in the United States with the life work of Fredric Jameson, which provides the most powerful version of how literary and artistic texts can anticipate "some new postindividualistic collective formal organization."³ It is this tradition, and the version of allegoresis that is associated with Benjamin and, most strongly, with Jameson that most of Bové's animus is directed.

While I agree with the need for a critical renewal of the humanities, Bové misapprehends both the current crisis in the humanities and the most effective way of responding to it. For him, the crisis seems to be the dominance of the field by Jamesonians who employ the framework of allegoresis to all forms of literature, reading ruination and the promise of utopia everywhere. Central to this interpretive strategy is the positing of "the presumed truth of certain extraliterary political and economic beliefs" (8). Certainly, we can all name critical moves, innovative at the time, that have become emptied of insight and force through overuse (and while I am deeply influenced in my own work by Jameson, I too have tried to move away from allegory as a...