238 Book Reviews evoking a kind of hermeneutic melancholy because, though it can be read, its internal secret will never be revealed or decoded (184). These various locations of the archive might signal the very ubiquity that Boulter is suggesting: negotiating the past and memorializing history are everywhere in contemporary fiction. Unfortunately, Boulter does not spend enough time meditating on the differences that emerge from his readings of his four literary authors. While he insists that they are, for the most part, responding to local traumas, Boulter positions each in a globalized economy of the archive (14). When Boulter does contrast the specifics of his literary texts as when he argues the significance of the archive s location, be it in human-controlled locations (Auster) or organic sites (Murakami) he is particularly convincing. While Melancholy and the Archive would have benefitted from an extended comparative analysis, its strength lies in Boulter s attention to detail in his insightful literary readings. ROB LEDERER University of Edinburgh DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2012.0056 Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg (eds), Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York and Wien: Peter Lang, 2010). 390 pp., ISBN 9783039114092, 41.90. Maurice Merleau-Ponty closes his preface to the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) by emphasizing the largely unappreciated confluence of phenomenology with modern thought. It is this convergence of phenomenology in particular the thinking of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger with modernist and postmodernist literature (as well as, to a lesser extent, art and architecture) that serves as the point of departure for this volume of varied, interdisciplinary, and original essays. Phenomenology shares with modernism a call to dispense with pre-established modes of thinking, writing, and perceiving in short with habits, prejudices, and expectations so as to stimulate direct contact with experience. The relation of modernist tactics of defamiliarization and disorientation resonate in curious ways with the phenomenological époché as described by Husserl, the suspension of usual modes of perceiving that promises to disclose the essential structures of consciousness and permit a return to the things themselves.
Book Reviews 239 If phenomenology, as Michel Collot observes in his contribution to the volume, gives back to literature its dimension as experience (319), then its critical advantage might be said to stem from its kinship with art. Kevin Hart s preface emphasizes an odd claim in one of Husserl s letters: that the artist, like the phenomenologist, sees into the heart of things, into how meaning is made (xi). In their introduction, editors Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg draw out this unity of preoccupation between phenomenology and modernism (15). They acknowledge the elusive versatility of both movements, and the necessity of distilling from them general themes so as to explore their points of intersection. Using Husserl as a touchstone, the editors avoid getting involved in the debates internal to the movement. Summaries of its major ideas make this volume accessible for readers with little exposure to phenomenology. We are given an account of the reduction (époché), the importance of the body to later versions of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), the intentional structure of consciousness (the idea that consciousness is always about something) and the concept of the horizon. The volume s twelve essays, rather than advertising phenomenology as a critical tool, signal a new way of conceptualizing the relation between philosophy and literature. The editors do, at times, describe phenomenology as a critical tool, assuring us that no single collection of critical essays has promoted phenomenology as a tool to bring to light central themes of modernism across the arts (4). Similarly, they praise phenomenology as the ideal tool with which to approach modern literature in its quest for the unattainable (18). But with these exceptions, the introduction tends toward a more enriching, comparative approach: Following Tania Ørum, we are encouraged to think of modernist writing as a form of phenomenological reduction, in its attempt to return to the foundation for human perceptions and expressions (15). Thinking modernism with phenomenology may lead us to question accepted ideas about its major tenets. For instance, modernism s affinity with phenomenology accents its grounding in the world of things, countering the charge that modernist writers are, in Terry Eagleton s words, brooding self-reflexively (6) or that high-minded erudition distances them from the everyday world. Acknowledging modernism s phenomenological dimension discourages the mind-world opposition commonly associated with it (7). Moreover, if modernism can be said to perform its own version of the époché, then by bracketing or suspending received ideas it might encourage, like phenomenology, a return to the things themselves. The volume interprets postmodernism, texts by
240 Book Reviews Robbe-Grillet, Oppen, and Deguy for instance, less as a deconstruction of modernism than a variation of its preoccupations. Extending the dialogue between phenomenology and modernism offers constructive postmodernism (21) as an alternative to the all-too-common dismissal of postmodern writing as absurdist or nihilist. The volume s strongest essays show that the most subtle and important insights about the efforts that animate modernism and phenomenology emerge when phenomenology is not used as a critical tool or lens for theorizing, but when the movements are brought into dialogue. Eoghan Walls s contribution models this approach; his essay aims to show how modernism and phenomenology were engaging with the same questions, and coming up with often very similar answers (170). Both Husserl and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the fathers of phenomenology and modernist poetry respectively, proposed that pure, transcendent essences could be distilled from the raw stuff of experience (170), and both invented or substantially re-invented their terms because they needed new language for the newness of their ideas (170). Walls compares Husserl s concept of eidos with Hopkins s notion of instress and inscape. These invented terms, for poet as for phenomenologist, describe a primary level or transcendent essence that formed the necessary cornerstone for all understanding (170). Like modernism, phenomenology seeks radical newness and understands the necessity of reinventing language if one is to approach the ineffable. Other highlights of Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond include Ariane Mildenberg s essay, which argues that a pre-reflective dimension of experience serves as a source of creativity in Woolf, Stein, and Stevens. Mildenberg considers Stein s way of stripping from language the closure of its habitual forms, and invokes the etymological root of tender (tendere, to stretch out or extend) to suggest that Stein s Buttons are Tender because we, the readers, stretch them back and forth through the blind passage between the thing itself and the thing as named (63). Lack of closure in certain texts is less a sign of powerlessness or aesthetic failure than an embracing of the openness intrinsic to creativity (60). Another high point is Raymond Monelle s discussion of the little phrase of Vinteuil s sonata in Swann s Way. Monelle traces the manner in which music re-stimulates Swann s erotic, irrational attachment to Odette. Drawing on Deleuze (Proust and Signs, 1964) and Merleau- Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible, 1964), he shows that the musical phrase, known to have been composed by Saint-Saëns (whom Proust claimed not to have liked) illustrates the erotic nature of our relation
Book Reviews 241 to an artwork, defined by inseparability between signified and signifier. By offering a thousand things better than words, music reveals the underlying truths of the process of signification [...] as the showing forth of the nature of things (120). Yet a third intriguing essay is Hanna Meretoja s study of how phenomenological aspects in Robbe-Grillet s nouveau roman overturn the idea of a subject that constitutes meaning and investigate (after the manner of the reduction) how meaning gets projected onto things. The idea that phenomenology studies the very process of meaning-giving (148) allows Meretoja to read phenomenology and the nouveau roman as responses to the crisis of European humanism in the first half of the twentieth century, and to the ensuing need to orient oneself in a labyrinthine world in which common horizons of meaning have collapsed (128). Phenomenology, juxtaposed against the flexibilities of artistic modernism, shows its vulnerability to critique: Minna Niemi and Justin Parks, reading themes of home and homelessness in James Joyce and Claude McKay, argue that home for the Afro-Caribbean modernist involves vagabondage in a world dominated by white values. They criticize phenomenology s (and, to a lesser extent, modernism s) inattention to racial and sexual difference, suggesting Franz Fanon s notion of the epidermal schema (improving upon Merleau-Ponty s body-schema ) and Sara Ahmed s work on queer phenomenology as correctives. In another essay, Matt Ffychte finds in the instability of George Oppen s poetry an indirect critique of Heidegger. Phenomenology, subtended by idealist assumptions about the uniformity of pre-reflective truths, protects itself against instability, which reveals itself in terms of difficult social and ethical choices in which the subject finds itself to be immersed (213). In a similar vein, Walls s reading of Hopkins brings up the question of language in phenomenology. His reading of Hopkins allows him to take issue with Derrida s claim that Husserl has to postpone the question of language (170) and to suggest that both phenomenology and modernism attempt to return us to a language of the thing itself. He mentions Merleau-Ponty as an example of a phenomenologist who views language as intrinsic to his project (185). Bourne-Taylor s essay discerns in Michel Deguy s poésophie a phenomenological emphasis on the relationship between language and space. She cites Deguy s ambition to record the ontological topography of the visible world (338) before discussing his critique of the culturel, or the virtualization, hyperrealism and the hallucinatory cinematic images that threaten real perception and
242 Book Reviews authenticity (355). For Deguy, the poet s responsibility is to dismantle the culturel and to liberate being through the conversion of reality into possibility (352). As a whole, this volume powerfully illuminates phenomenology and modernism s common cause: to re-instate, by dismantling deadening forms of habit, something of the contingency, vibrancy, and creativity of the perceived world. A problem raised in the volume s fifth section, about how words and images may alter experience through their descriptions of it (thus questioning the ideal of unmediated experience) is perhaps not given as much attention as it deserves. But in its illumination of thematic convergences between phenomenology and modernism, this volume offers its readers a truly comparative and dialogic approach to the study of philosophy with literature. AMANDA DENNIS DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2012.0057 Peggy Kamuf, To Follow:The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010 The Frontiers of Theory Series). 201 pp., ISBN 9780748641543, 65.00. The book is a collection of essays by one of the closest friends and greatest translators of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The essays are almost all written after Derrida s death in 2004 and they can be read as singular pieces of reading in the wake of the lost friend and teacher. At a certain point in the text Kamuf acknowledges that we now mourn the one [Derrida] who taught/learned how to live in the mourning that dawns with every relation to the other. And how to love life and living not despite but because of the fact that it mourns itself in us from the first given word (62). This passage offers one the key to access this book and to think more about it. It is a book on mourning as the original structure of the living and of life in general. This knowledge about mourning is what this book affirms and, at the same time, that in the name of which it somehow swears and appeals to swear. Here, I would like to look closer at some articulations of Kamuf s text, to focus on her argument and, at the same time, respond to her call to commitment. (One should not forget Derrida s remarks, in Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, on the two poles of the announcement democracy to come, the constative analysis of the concept to come of democracy and the performative commitment and appeal to commit to resist the rhetoric about the presence of democracy in the present or the alibi of