Language, Discourse, Society For well over twenty-five years the Language, Discourse, Society series has been at the forefront of multidisciplinary studies, publishing innovative work on topics ranging from biology to aesthetics, sociology to literature, visual theory and linguistics, philosophy to art and cinema. Recognising that language, discourse and society are to be grasped together, the series is committed to both formal analysis and historical explanation, and to assessing and reinvigorating contemporary critical thought. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14006 Ben Ware Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination Living Wrong Life Rightly Ben Ware University of London London, United Kingdom Language, Discourse, Society ISBN 978-1-137-55502-1 ISBN 978-1-137-55503-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958528 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: Image courtesy of Gerhard Richter © Gerhard Richter Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom For my Parents, Bernie & Phil Ware ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, whose generous financial support, in the form of an Early Career Fellowship, made writing this book possible. The Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester provided me with an institutional home for the duration of my Fellowship, and I wish to express my gratitude to the colleagues and students (especially those on my ‘Literature and Philosophy’ module) with whom I was able to discuss some of the material in this study. The final stages of the writing were carried out as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and I am grateful to Wim van Mierlo for facilitating this appointment. The ideas in this work have benefited from conversations and corre- spondence with Jay Bernstein, Peter Buse, Dani Caselli, Tony Crowley, Terry Eagleton, Warwick Gould, W.J.T. Mitchell, Denise Riley and Natalie Wulfing. Valuable comments on early versions of some of the chapters were also provided by David Cunningham, Sebastian Sunday Grève, Ilyas Khan, Graham MacPhee, Jakub Mácha and Marcus Pound. I wish to thank the series editors of Language, Discourse, Society – Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Denise Riley – and also Felicity Plester and Heloise Harding at Palgrave. As always, I am grateful to both my parents and to Lucie Ware for their support, enthusiasm and generosity. Finally, to Sarah, whose love con- tinues to be the condition of possibility for my every endeavour. vii CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Right in Front of Our Eyes: Aspect-Perception, Ethics and the Utopian Imagination in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations 7 3 Johannes de Silentio and the Art of Subtraction: From Voice to Love in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling 37 4 Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s Endgame 67 5 Living Wrong Life Rightly: Kant avec Marx 91 6 Absence, Perversion and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Revisited: A Reading of Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ 123 Bibliography 161 Index 177 ix LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 2.1 Wittgenstein’s image of the ‘duck-rabbit’ 19 xi CHAPTER 1 Introduction I. [I]f a man could write a book about Ethics which really was a book on Ethics this would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. 1 Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture on Ethics’ II. This book has one simple aim: to explore the possibility of living a right life in a wrong world and to assess what light modernist philosophy and literature can shed upon this endeavour. The book does not attempt to provide a unifying ‘theory’ of modernist ethics; nor does it seek to furnish an exhaustive account of modernism’s various ‘ethical turns’ – one might pity anyone who set out to accomplish either of these tasks. Instead the work is best understood as an album of sketches – to use a description from 2 the writings of the later Wittgenstein – which seek to map out a number of hitherto unexamined interactions between modernism, ethics and politics. In each chapter, the attempt is made to demonstrate how a particular philosophical or literary text can, once it has been blasted out of its traditional genre, bring us to a new understanding of an issue (or constellation of issues) which contemporary radical thought must re-visit: utopia, repetition, tragedy, critique, absence, negativity, political love. © The Author(s) 2017 1 B. Ware, Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination, Language, Discourse, Society, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8_1