Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect by John Brenkman (review)

"The task is not to celebrate breaks, but to explain folds" (1). In this way, John Brenkman portrays the relationship between the linguistic turn and the affective turn in the recent philosophical-theoretical landscape. From there, Brenkman moves to the Heideggerian triad of mood–understanding–discourse, an interconnected set of terms that ground and guide the present study. Brenkman explains the three hypotheses of his text as follows: "First, mood and trope are so intimately connected that there is not the one without the other…. Second, affect…is complexly structured; there is a many-sidedness or layeredness to emotion. Third, the key to the discursive manifestation of affect lies in the énonciation, not the énoncé" (9). That is, the "two sides" of the linguistic-affective debate are really two sides of the same coin.

With this triad and these hypotheses in mind, Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect sustains two main, intertwined efforts. First, it engages the "philosophical quartet" of Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze, four philosophers who center "the question of affect on literary and aesthetic experience" (16). Brenkman writes that the value of these four "lies in becoming attuned to the dissonance they produce" (17), and he brings this attunement about with an even-handed approach that does not privilege any of the four in particular but rather combines and recombines them according the concept at hand, letting each encounter play out in a back-and-forth, often in conjunction with texts by other artists and thinkers. Second, Brenkman offers readings of works by (to name only a few) Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Li-Young Lee, Tino Sehgal, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Jorie Graham. What this "two-tiered dialogue" (16) makes possible, beyond an exchange between philosophy and art, is a clear and evocative discussion of poetics and aesthetic experience.

Mood and Trope is divided into two main sections, each made up of three chapters. The first part of the book, titled "The Poetics of Affect," begins with a discussion of Kant and Merleau-Ponty in order to trouble the distinction between inside and outside and the place of self-affection in affect. After pointing out that Stimmung (mood, attunement, state-of-mind) is for Heidegger the basis of the subject's self-intuition, Brenkman arrives at "the question of the difference between the (deconstructed) Cartesian I and the…poetic or lyrical I" (55). Of particular interest is how, responding to de Man's reading of the relationship between two poems by Baudelaire, "Correspondances" and "Obsession," which represent "two manifestations of attunement (Gestimmtsein) in Heidegger's sense," Brenkman asserts that "in effect, in each poem we encounter trope as mood and mood as trope" (65-66). Thus, Baudelaire's Spleen and Ideal—much like the linguistic turn and affective turn—must be considered in terms of "the crease in the fold that differentiates and connects them" (72) rather than as mutually exclusive, polar opposites. In other words, they both fuel Baudelaire's creative endeavors; taking up Blanchot's claim that literature is a passion that, in a peculiar way, puts the writer in danger, Brenkman concludes that Baudelaire "undergoes, he suffers, he succumbs, he is enamored, he is intoxicated, he is afflicted, he is addicted. So, too, then, he is aesthetically receptive to an unprecedented extreme" (81).

After assessing, as another example of a creative affect such as Baudelaire's Spleen, the "fury" of Li-Young Lee's poetry—and the way in which he is shaped by "the entire flow of involuntary and voluntary memory" (83)—Brenkman takes up Nietzsche's "ecstatic contradictions" and the way that he and Hegel confront "the question of poetry's nonsubjective subjectivity" (89). The subject, as poet, becomes Other, which in turn leads to a further problem: for the one who is an artist, that is, "the question Who is speaking? teeters into an alternative: does I become Not I or does Not I become I?" (91). Art's...