Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

Chapter 3. Donne and the State of Exception

63 Donne and the State of Exception Greg Kneidel But [Donne] remains the exception, and his admirers will do him no good in the long run if they pretend he was anything else. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Metaphysicals and Milton (1956) In his 1926 Clark Lecture on “The Metaphysical Conceit,” T. S. Eliot calls John Donne “the great ruler of that borderland of fading and change.”1 As Eliot sees it, Donne rules this borderland according to his metaphysical method, by which he first pursues “the meaning of the idea, letting it flow into the usual sequence of thought,” and then “arrests it, in order to extract every possible ounce of the emotion suspended in it.”2 Eliot is here subverting Dr. Johnson’s influential and damning definition of the metaphysical style, in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”3 Johnson’s Donne unites ideas, but he does so violently . Eliot’s Donne, by contrast, neither unites nor divides, 3v 64 Donne and the State of Exception but rather extenuates, arrests, suspends, and fades. More recently, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy have sided with Eliot on the subject of Donne’s method while also giving it a more explicit political valence. Describing what they call the Renaissance’s dominant trope of “moment” in Donne’s sermons, but with a glance back to his poem “The Ecstasy,” Carrithers and Hardy write that Donne insisted on the judicial function of the individual conscience, even as he endorsed the concentration of executive power (and perhaps most legislative initiative) in a king. He understood, though, that in a fallen world some attenuation, some parceling out of power into powers—legislative, executive, judicial—might be prudent, and so, too, the attenuation or parceling out of powers into procedures. It was not, or was scarcely, for Donne a matter of what we have come tendentiously to call either “checks and balances” or “gridlock.” It was rather a matter of providing maximum occasion, as if “space,” for saving turnings back from wickedness toward life, a way of redeeming time, for the days were (as if spatially) evil.4 Looking beyond the Renaissance’s more familiar republican rhetoric of liberty, loyalty, and order, Carrithers and Hardy indicate instead that Donne’s attenuation of the moment anticipates two salient features of modern liberalism. The first is the limitation of state authority achieved by dividing its power into powers and then subjecting these powers to the procedural rule of law. The second, more subtly implied feature is the corresponding subordination of this divided, proceduralized , public state to the individual, spontaneous, private conscience that can avail itself of “maximum occasion[s]... for saving turnings back from wickedness to life.” Where Eliot saw a vaguely medieval “great ruler,” Carrithers and Hardy imagine a sort of Augustinian James Madison. This essay will attempt to reassess these political analogies for Donne’s method of attenuating, arresting, and suspending thought. How exactly did Donne rule the “borderland of Greg Kneidel 65 fading and change”? To answer this question, I will bring some of Donne’s most canonical love poetry within the ambit of the twentieth century’s great political theorist of “fading and change,” the archconservative German jurist and staunch enemy of liberalism, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was Eliot’s exact contemporary, and his death in 1985 occasioned a reevaluation of his life and legacy, with an attendant boom in English translations of his writings. As “self-appointed ideologue of the Nazis,” godfather of American neoconservatism , and unreconstructed anti-Semite, Schmitt holds a strange fascination for modern cultural critics, the more because of the “irritating” esteem with which a host of major German-Jewish intellectuals held him.5 To read Schmitt is to discover, in Victoria Kahn’s apt phrase, “a T. W. Adorno or Walter Benjamin of the right, a political theorist and cultural critic with the same epigrammatic style and dialectical cast of thought, but with much less appealing politics.”6 Schmitt’s style, his cast of thought, and especially his axiomatic fixation on “the state of exception” make him read at times like a political theorist after Donne’s own heart. The lingering question is: are Donne’s politics any more appealing? “AS PRINCES DO IN TIMES OF ACTION GET” Such a question about Donne’s politics is perversely put, and not only because it is difficult to imagine politics less appealing than...