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Abstract
In his Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert Musil has the character Clarisse comment on a debate between her husband, Walter, and Ulrich, the “man without qualities,” about the “impossible” relation between art and life. “‘Ich find das doch sehr wichtig,’ sagte sie, ‘daß in uns allen etwas Unmögliches ist. Es erklärt so vieles. Ich habe, wie ich zuhörte, den Eindruck gehabt, wenn man uns aufschneiden könnte, so würde unser ganzes Leben vielleicht wie ein Ring aussehen, bloß so rund um etwas.’ Sie hatte schon vorher ihren Ehering abgezogen und guckte nur durch seine Öffnung gegen die belichtete Wand. ‘Ich meine, in seiner Mitte ist doch nichts, und doch sieht er genau so aus, als ob es ihm nur darauf ankäme.’” The English translation is even stronger: “There is nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely what matters most.” This essay interrogates this “nothing” that matters most in relation to the crown of royal authority, the “hollow crown,” as Richard II calls it in Shakespeare’s play. I further flesh out the matter and materiality of this bit of nothing in relation to the struggle between Creon and Antigone in Sophocles’ play about the foundations of royal authority. The queen in the former play and Antigone in the latter are presented as being too much sad, as manifesting a grief that pertains to this nothing, to an indeterminate loss they both “encyst” (upon) in their subjective stances.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Hölderlin’s poem was first published in his novel Hyperion. The final lines read, “Doch uns ist gegeben, / Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen, / Es schwinden, es fallen / Die leidenden Menschen / Blindlings von einer / Stunde zur andern, / Wie Wasser von Klippe / Zu Klippe geworfen, / Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.” In Michael Hamburger’s translation: “But we are fated / To find no foothold, no rest, / And suffering mortals / Dwindle and fall / Headlong from one / Hour to the next, / Hurled like water / From ledge to ledge / Downward for years to the vague abyss” (Hölderlin 27).
2 We might say, with Beckett, the queen’s eyes are gazing worstward, toward the unnullable least of her sorrow (106).
3 In his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke uses the term, die Fortgeworfenen, the outcasts, to characterize various people Malte encounters on the streets of Paris. Malte insists that these are not merely homeless people, beggars, rabble, or any other familiar identifiable class but rather people who have been, as it were, pushed to the edge of the space of meaning, drawn into the orbit of this Fort.
4 A modern adaptation of the play might replace the phrase, “to monarchize,” with to monetize. My book, The Weight of All Flesh, tries to give the rationale for such an adaptation.
5 The full line reads, “There is too much of you – and of your marriage!” (Sophocles, Antigone 284). Fagles renders the line, “Enough, enough – you and your talk of marriage!” (Sophocles, Three Theban Plays 90).
6 To use Marx’s terms, this is what makes humans a genus-being, a Gattungswesen, rather than a species-being among others; we are, as it were, birthmarked by an indetermination that keeps us from settling in a determinate species-being. I am grateful to Florian Klinger for helping me to articulate this thought.
7 This account of the convergence of a gap in knowledge and the proliferation of thoughts, images, sensations may help to explain why Musil’s novel – one caught in the gravitational field of an indeterminate ohne – could never be completed. What Freud and Musil share is life in a society richly, even oppressively, endowed mit ohne was.
8 To use Marx’s terms once more, it’s those glitches that render a human being a Gattungswesen rather than a species-being.
9 One might also think of Franz Rosenzweig’s notion, developed in The Star of Redemption, of the ever-present protocosmos, die immerwährende Vorwelt, a presupposed, quasi-mythic dimension of the revealed world he elaborated through a discussion of, among other things, Greek tragedy. See especially Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption 70–80.
10 I would suggest that one misses the radical nature of Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit if one understands it as a claim about the historical conditions of human existence, that human life can only be grasped holistically, within the context of a historical form of life to which we belong, though it means that too. For Heidegger, the whole of all holisms is, in fact, never whole; that is, I think, what Heidegger ultimately means by facticity. Anxiety as the “mood” that registers facticity, the mode in which it affects us, pertains to that hole in the whole. Freud understood the therapy for the treatment of trauma as requiring a Nachholen der Angstbereitschaft, a recuperation of anxiety, with respect to contingent encounters with holes in the whole, where the whole is emphatically failing to be whole.
11 If metaphysics can be said to begin in wonder, with thaumazein, we might say that the enigma, why there is something rather than nothing, injects into human life – into the body – a kind of unceasing post-thaumatic stress disorder. It thus makes sense that not only Freud but also Wittgenstein conceived of his mode of doing philosophy as a kind of therapy for philosophy. Franz Rosenzweig’s Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand (Understanding the Sick and the Healthy) offers a kind of twelve-step program for this philosophical variant of PTSD.
12 Bonnie Honig’s extraordinary work, Antigone Interrupted, has been my guide in this literature.
13 In his dialogue with Haemon, Creon alludes to the ethos of hoplite soldiers – in contrast to the “Homeric” combat between Eteocles and Polyneices that ends the war – as the very model of citizenship. As Honig puts it, “The hoplites fought in phalanx formation and lived and died by an economy of substitution: when one fell, one from the next line would move in immediately to take his place” (106).
14 As Honig has argued, Antigone’s dirge is a rhetorically complex speech. In it she appropriates Creon’s logic of replaceability. He had earlier said to Ismene that after Antigone’s death his son will have other furrows for his plow. She seems also to allude to the story of Intaphrenes’ wife related by Herodotus. In the story, King Darius allows her to save one of her captured relatives who had been accused of treason. Rather than her husband or children, she chooses her brother based on his irreplaceability (just as with Antigone, her parents are dead). In the story, Darius shows himself to be a far more magnanimous king than Creon: he frees not only her brother but also a son. (See Honig 132–40.)
15 Badiou characterizes Creon’s excess as a “formal too-muchness” (162).
16 In his discussion of the notion of mana, Durkheim cites the German ethnologist, Konrad Preuss, who for his part characterizes it as the quasi-material, quasi-carnal aspect of impersonal powers and forces which only later come to be understood as spirit or soul. As he paraphrases Preuss’s observations, these forces are initially conceived “in the form of vague discharges spontaneously emitted from the things in which mana resides, and sometimes tending to escape using all available routes: mouth, nose, and every other body opening, breath, gaze, speech, and so on” (Durkheim 204). Mana is, I would suggest, one of the names of what is at issue in what issues from our sphinxters. In Agamben’s terms, political power always involves the struggle to get a hold of our sphinxters. At some level, this is the deeper truth of Donald Trump’s infamous claim that he, like other famous men, can grab women’s genitals at will.