Ex-silentio Eloquence

poetry and philosophy in the middle of it

Page II

Baker’s second chapter deals with another cluster of three authors: Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille. Here, Baker takes his cue from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra when he decides that the translocative function of the extravagant assumes other proportions. For instance, quite literally, Baker allows Zarathustra to speak through him, and as befits Zarathustra he then puts words in Baker’s mouth thus dictating: the dynamics of the three mentioned above must be that of “going under” and “crossing over.” Words in this chapter wander from volatile imagination to concrete faces: of destroyed idolatry (in Nietzsche), of transfiguration (in Rimbaud), and of ecstatic and ruinous eroticism (in Bataille). The word of illumination passed through such disfigured and transformed mouths can only be a word of Faustian prophecy. What I myself find wonderful in the three poet-philosophers discussed is their irreverent approach to the notion of the sublime. I try to imagine them as 60s trendsetters, getting high on drugs, smashing love and procreation myths, and instituting a state of “rapturous crisis.” The only thing missing from their aesthetic program is championing women’s liberation movement. Baker is at his best in this middle passage, and it is clear that he deliberately lets his heroes channel his own language through the discourse of the negative.

Unlike in the first three, Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard, for whom the message is the medium—thought itself as mediated by imagination is sublime—for Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Bataille, the medium is the message: bring in the hammer, off with their heads. Such concreteness doesn’t go unnoticed. The extravagant here thus gives itself through a level of concreteness that surpasses abstractness. The stoned prophet limits his world to experiencing it through simple articulation, as if saying: ‘the sublime, that’s beautiful, man!’ The tension between high and low collisions and crises of representation—between that which cannot be represented, the je-ne-sais-quoi, and that which can be known by way of repetition (vernacular wisdom is usually passed down through lots of swearing)—is eased first by Nietzsche’s craft—he paved the stone road with the smashed pieces from solid thought edifices—then by Rimbaud’s metaphysics, and then by Bataille’s insistence on bringing theology close to one’s underwear—no priest’s black vestment here, only pink bodies.

With Zarathustra leading the way, Baker suggests that Nietzsche invests energy in the fragment, Rimbaud in the ruin, and Bataille in the remains. The consequence is that they thus produce “crisis texts” all the way through. But the crisis text itself creates a certain kind of energy in turn—an energy that can only be channeled through dialogue. Here it’s interesting to note how Baker himself engages in dialogue not only with the authors he discusses but also with their protagonists. I quote an exchange to illustrate. First says Zarathustra:

Verily, my friends […] I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men. This is what is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcherfield. And when my eyes flee from the now to the past, they always find the same: fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents—but no human beings. (Z, 138) (94)

And then says Baker:

All three, therefore, affirm that a movement destroying the structures that have ruined us—structures at once internal and external—is inseparable from a movement unloosing buried powers. A destructive voyage through the dark, a Faustian version of the “dark night of the soul,” is imagined as the path leading to a creative light and an altered horizon. This is of course a familiar mythic and religious pattern, one of particular importance in apocalyptic, gnostic, and mystical traditions. (95)

What is well demonstrated in this chapter is that the Faustian quest leaves from a premise that the creative and metamorphic horizon towards which all movement is made is necessarily made up not by the wandering of the figure of the One but by the Other.

In the third part, which is also the third and last chapter of the book, Baker talks about “apocalyptic soundings of abyssal negativity” in Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida. So things can only get better. If the previous three authors had a solid ground on which to unfold their philosophies—with Zarathustra’s walking up the mountain to have a better view of the horizon as a concatenation of heights of despair—here the operative wandering word is “boundless.” Baker is good at emphasizing the seminal keywords in the abysmal four authors, yet it is interesting to note that in spite of what the word “abyss” conjures in terms of intangibility—the ‘nothing’ that is—the images are always very graphic. Thus, we have in Kierkegaard the phrase “keeping the wound of the negative open”; Derrida goes solo in an act of self-representation manifested in the figure of “the last of the eschatologists”; and Dickinson and Mallarmé perform an active “unmooring” of subjectivity from earlier stale metaphysical ideas.

Although Baker doesn’t mention the phrase, “the law of the excluded middle” is what informs the whole of this chapter. This foundational principle in logic states that something must be either A or not A, but not both. The ‘both’ is the middle position that is excluded by the law. Baker sees particularly Dickinson and Mallarmé as embodiments of both the romantic and the modernist traditions, and he aligns them with Nietzsche. The trio of the excluded middle opens the door for “going where you cannot go.” Baker quotes this phrase from Angelus Silesius(2) and points to Derrida’s identifying this topos en passage, as it were, as “a ‘messianic’ expectation emptied of any concrete ‘messianism’ ” (44). One can make the inference that this is the law of the excluded middle in action.(3) Baker’s claim is that Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy draws both on Nietzsche and avant-gardist “rhetorics of hyperbole” when he emphasizes the extravagant as occupying the counter-paradoxical middle position (in opposition to the high point of a hyperbole). As Baker puts it, in Derrida: “there is a drift that drifts through things” (256). What is suggested here is that apocalyptic negativity—one wanders and wanders from end to end, not from beginning to end, or through the “Desert of the Promise” as envisaged by Derrida’s eschatological vision—is a form of liberating freedom.(4) Says Baker in a central passage:

Derrida’s discourse of the “ruin of presence” can be read as an inventive turn in a long tradition of prophets and poets who—whether in despair, elation, or both at once—have explored the “ruin of the finite” as bafflingly disclosive, enigmatically promising. “Not only is there no kingdom of difference but difference instigates the subversion of every kingdom” (MP, 22). This sort of language […] belongs not only to a tradition of modern poetry but also to a tradition of prophetic or apocalyptic expectation within both Judaism and Christianity. The crossing of freedom, according to a tradition reaching back to the biblical prophets, begins with a shattering of the many idols of our bondage […] It is a tradition that in modern culture has been reinvented, above all, in passages of the extravagant in romantic and modernist poetry and in critical philosophies written in communication with these passages. And these passages frequently evoke a movement of exodus […] This movement often sounds like an invocation of some opening toward which we are able to reach only in riddles. Kierkegaard calls it the passion of the infinite. Dickinson figures it as a participation in the mystery and the distance of vanishing. Mallarmé explores it as a virtual death of the poet passing through a ghostly play of words in echo. Derrida characterizes it as the ruin of the present obliquely disclosing the impossible. They are all going where they cannot go. For that (among other reasons) we were given words. (257-258).

As a natural consequence of going where one cannot go, being both here and not here, a Messiah and Faust, a prophet and a profaner of the gravity of thought, Baker’s book ends with an epilogue (after a concluding chapter that detours through a host of other authors, notably, for instance, André Breton and T.S. Eliot) called “The Miracle of Place.” This is a brilliant move to considering poets such as Paul Celan, George Oppen, and Geoffrey Hill, for whom the radical, the extreme, and the extravagant situate themselves miraculously not in the margins but right in the middle of things. If Kierkegaard has been famously known for his attempts to understand the meaning of making a leap of faith, if Nietzsche has been notorious for his saying that, in Baker’s rendition, “not everyone has the right to his prophetic thought” (163), if Rimbaud has achieved celebrity status for always posing disturbingly right questions, such as this one: “What is my nothingness compared to the stupor that awaits you?” (Oeuvres, 264), in the epilogue, Celan, Oppen, and Hill make eloquent the silence that necessarily institutes itself after faith is rendered in skeptical terms, prophesy in visions of metamorphic power rather than an unknown yet ruinous future, and nothingness as a potential for movement.

George Oppen kept silent 25 years after having written some very interesting essays and poems in the 30s. He became a political activist and did not return to poetry until the late 50s, when his writing career also culminated with the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Thus, one reads his line in one of the poems “the open/ Miracle// Of Place” as a sounding of his name beyond the boundless. What the open miracle of space suggests is that the place where we cannot go, but do go, is a locus where questions are posed beyond skepticism: “Belief?/ What do we believe?/ To live with? Answer./ Not invent—just answer—all/ That verse attempts./ That we can somehow add to each other?” (Collected Poems, 52) Baker chooses to juxtapose the Structuralist framework of the oppositional and ultimately adversarial pair, question and answer, with the suggestion that silence, as it passes through poetic vision, is articulated against a throwing movement. The epigraph to the whole book, a quote from Celan, clearly indicates that much: “Discus,/ Starred with premonitions,/ throw yourself out of yourself.” This is how poetic language works: through ex-locutio eloquence. Baker quotes Geoffrey Hill, who enhances this thought:

Even now, I tell myself, there is a language
to which I might speak and which
would rightly hear me;
responding with eloquence; in its turn,
negotiating sense without insult
given or injury taken.
Familiar to those who already know it
elsewhere as justice,
it is met also in the form of silence.
(The Triumph of Love, XXXV, 18-19)

The point is that, in poetry, it is impossible to create too much narrative. If one comes close to that, one can blame it on quotes. My quoting the poets, here, instead of Baker, is a demonstration of the fact that if extravagance occurs, it does so by virtue of “spacing,” as Derrida would have it. Via Keats, for whom Psyche without Eros is at a loss, Baker makes the final point that vision without companionship is like an abiding openness that does not allow for the mystery of ‘nothing’ to reveal itself as a miracle of place. The miracle of place, and by extension also space, is itself an extravagant passage between the kind of articulation that comes out of nothing and its elaboration within the framework of what Baker calls “abiding interanimation.” Ex-locutio eloquence thus becomes an open space where ex silentio eloquence can unfold itself. In her seminal work, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt elaborates a notion of a community that constitutes itself through active reasoning. Through action, Arendt, intimates, a community is able to create better dilemmas for itself. Such a community of reason is a boundless community.(5) Although Baker does not engage with Arendt, however useful that may have been, he does make a similar point in his linking the boundless with a strong sense of a ‘reasoning’ community when discussing Oppen’s poetics of appropriation through quotation. Oppen’s master opus Of Being Numerous is an example of ‘being in the world’ through interanimation and through networks of connections. I would suggest here that what an ‘interanimated’ community does, in terms of action, is articulate a middle position for the proliferations of relations. Being ‘in the middle of it,’ inhabiting “all limitations” and “all boundaries,” is not a static relation but a traversing action or form of becoming one of the numerous. Thus, spoke the poets, and the philosophers follow.

In conclusion, and in good extravagant fashion, I’ll say this: Baker’s book is absolutely fascinating, interesting, and compelling, in spite of its forcing the reader to wander almost to exhaustion—but then such is the nature of both the extravagant and the negative. (Note: I feel tempted to quote Emperor Joseph II in the film Amadeus who, although clueless, insists on pointing out to Mozart what he thinks is wrong with one of his pieces: “too many notes.”) (That being said in parenthesis,) Baker’s study furthermore is not only an intelligent read but also a tool which enhances any reader’s capacity to think the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unrepresentable, and the unsaid. This is no small accomplishment. In the days when ad hoc solutions to all things are more valued than the imaginative way we take to get there, or the ingenious process we devise in order to heighten our sense of language, a book such as Baker’s is a reminder of the fact that what makes the world go round is not saying yes to everything, but saying no to all affirmations of conventionality. One must thus praise not only the writer but also the publisher for daring to perform extravagant acts—such as posing the question and its answer in the form of a counter-question: poetry or philosophy?—is there is difference? In thinking this difference itself, “for that, we were given [more] words.”

© Camelia Elias—Nietzsche Circle, 2008

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008)

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