The Value of Suspending Values, Bartoloni +

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PAOLO BARTOLONI

THE VALUE OF SUSPENDING VALUES

This article sets out to interrogate the notion of literary value by placing it within abroader discussion of literatures relation to truth. It asks, in other words, if it is possible toevince the value of literature by assuming that literature is a carrier of certain truths. Insti-tutions have in turn been called upon or even created to evaluate and demonstrate itsvalueaccording to a series of criteria often based on the investigation of the relation au-thor-work-audience. I argue that the dynamicity of literary values, their development andchangeability, is related to the priority that one of the terms of the relation author-work-audience has enjoyed over the others at different historical times. I also argue thatthe emphasis on the link between literary values and strong truths (demonstrable truths)has produced disabling dichotomies and, perhaps more importantly, violated the nature ofliterature in relation to experience phenomenological, ontological, metaphysical or aes-thetic experience. This article introduces an alternative approach to literary value predi-cated not so much on strong truth as on weak truth. In this context reference will be madeto the work of the Italian philosophers Mario Perniola and Gianni Vattimo.

THE ARTIST AS ALTER DEUS

The belief that literature has value and that there are values in literature, originates inthe contiguity between literature and truth. The implications of this relation are, how-

ever, complex and require careful consideration. Could the truth of literature be extri-cated, for instance, from the mystical aura that, at various periods of history, has sur-

rounded the author? It is in the Renaissance first and during the romantic period laterthat the idea of the artist as genius and creator acquires connotations that elevate the

poet to the category ofalter deus. These are, in fact, the very terms with which GiulioCesare Scaligero refers to the poet in his 1561 Poetices libri septem,1 one of the mostcomprehensive treatises of the period on the ars poetica. If it is true that the poet par-

takes of some divine qualities whereby she can create freely and from nothing, it fol-

03244652/$20.00 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest 2007 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest Springer, Dordrecht

Neohelicon XXXIV (2007) 1, 115122DOI: 10.1007/s11059-007-1011-0

1 Quoted in Rdiger Bubner, Esperienza estetica, trans. Monica Ferrando (Torino: Rosenberg &

Sellier, 1992), p. 41.

Paolo Bartoloni, Italian Studies & International and Comparative Literary Studies, University of

Sydney, A18NSW, 2006, Australia; E-mail: [email protected]


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116 PAOLO BARTOLONI

lows that artistic creation is firstly removed from a given truth, and secondly that it isnaturally connected with a transcendental truth. In other words, the poet as genius

does not simply reproduce what is already available in reality, she instead accesses(attinge) a truth which is at once removed and invisible to the level of quotidian life.

But this in itself does not mean that artistic creation explains and makes available thetruth, it only means that creation contains the truth which, however, might very wellremain undisclosed.

The work only speaks its truth disinterestedly and unknowingly. It is in this sensethat the significance of Kants articulation of the aesthetic experience becomes

obvious: ifthe work assuch is silent asto its own word, itis the readerwho may give ita voice resonating with truths and values. But, in order to apprehend these values and

truths, the reader, like the work itself, must be disinterested; she must, in other words,

renounce the already known in order to capture that which is by necessity removedfrom and invisible at the level of reality.

Truth is, in this sense, three times removed from the work of art; it is in the first in-stance, historically speaking, within the domain of the author, in the second instance

that of the reader, and in the third instance that of an experience which, although re-volving around the work, leaves it behind, pointing to a further goal which is often

equated with secrecy and, in more contemporary time, negativity.

HEIDEGGERS TURN

An interesting instance in which the value of literature is renewed from the outside,often regardless of the intentions of the author and that of the work, is found in the

philosophical interpretation of literary texts. Examples abound, and yet the most nota-ble case, the one that inaugurated a long and illustrious series of literary texts read and

commented by philosophers, is Martin Heideggers investigation of German poetry,notably that of George, Hlderlin, Rilke and Trakl. Heideggers famous turn(Kehre), that is, the work afterBeing and Time, is strongly indebted to his growing in-

terest in poetic language. The obvious reference is the bookOn the Way to Language2

in which Heidegger embarks once again on an exploration of language by way of

reading a series of poems by George and Trakl. One poem in particular Das Wort

(Word) by Stefan George catches Heideggers attention. There is no thing where

the word breaks, writes George, a realization that elicits in the poet an aesthetic ac-knowledgement and a poetic disposition: thus I sadly learned to renounce. Thesetwo lines sent Heidegger into a philosophical trajectory whose outcome has been ex-

traordinarily important for the history of twentieth century hermeneutics and decon-struction. Heidegger essentially interprets Georges words as the emblem of a dis-

course on which the discussion of negativity still hinges, persisting in the view that if

2 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper,

1982).


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truth exists, it has to be found in language. And yet language, poetic language, haslearned to renounce the effability of truth since the proximity between truth and lan-

guage is also their mutual negation. It is either truth or language, and their simultane-ity remains impossible, or, as Giorgio Agamben would say, an impossible possibil-

ity.3

Heideggers innovation, however, is not so much the statement that language doesnot speak truth as the proposition that language retains truth by renouncing it. But lan-

guages keeping of truth is also truths inevitable loss. This condition decrees at oncethe greatness of poetic language but also its weakness. We will return shortly to the

notion of weakness to discuss Gianni Vattimos famous conceptualisation of weakthought.

A further clarification must be made at this stage; if it is true that for Heidegger the

mutual appropriation of language and truth leads to their inevitable separation, it isalso true that this language is no common language; it is specifically poetic language.

The language of communication, according to Heidegger, has no communion withtruth. Truth and language can recreate their natural belonging only if humans accept a

new experience of language, and allow language to be as such, to be just language.Poetic language, states Heidegger as he interprets this poem by George, is the human

language that comes closer to language as such through learning to renounce the ef-forts of conceptualisation, rationalisation and effability with regard to truth. By con-trast, and paradoxically, poetic language says the truth by removing it or, as Derrida

would say, by deferring it ad infinitum.Heideggers philosophical position, as we see, is far from negating any notion of

truth, it indeed celebrates it by suspending it or, as Vattimo would say, by making itstronger through exposing its weakness which is its dispersal, its negativity and its

disappearance/appearance among the folds of language.Many critics have more than a few doubts as to the accuracy of Heideggers inter-

pretation of his favourite German poets.4 They are probably correct when they state

that Heideggers interventions do not add to the scholarly discussion of German liter-ature or, at worst, that they are mystifying and misguided. Heidegger embarked on

what many other critics have done and still do with regard to works of art: he readthese texts to advance his own theory and views, and to anchor and support his cri-

tique of metaphysics. And yet he could not have done it, or done it as well as he did,without these texts. Heidegger may have disregarded the intention of the author andthe intention of the work, but in doing so he has also made a long lasting contribution

to continental philosophy, renewing in the process the literary value of those texts inconjunction with his philosophical texts. It would be impossible to understand the

work of Agamben, Blanchot, Derrida, Gadamer, Vattimo, to name only a few, with-

THE VALUE OF SUSPENDING VALUES 117

3 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 88105.4 Cf. Anthony Gottlieb, Heidegger for Fun and Profit, New York Times Book Review, January 7,

1990; and Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).


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out the support of Heideggers conceptualisation of language and being along theparadigmatic axis of Verzicht(renunciation) and Gelassenheit(abandonment).5

This brings us to a reassessment of literary value according to the relation au-thor-work-audience. If literature retains a value in virtue of its connection to truth, this

would be an ethical value, and not necessarily an aesthetic value. The ethical value inliterature resides in its weak truths.

VATTIMOS WEAK THOUGHT

Gianni Vattimo has coined the notion of weak thought (pensiero debole) in the do-

mains of aesthetics, ethics and politics.6 Vattimos weak thought is a reconceptualiza-

tion and an extension of Heideggers philosophical project which, as we saw earlier,is underpinned by a conceptualization of language and being, the main thrust of whichis to rethink and go beyond metaphysics.7 According to Heidegger, Western meta-physics is predicated upon a series of polarizations rotating around the all-encom-

passing opposition subject-object that in the end forget and even obliterate the es-sence of Being. In the context of metaphysics truth, for instance, is always and already

external to being, either as the Platonic idea or the Catholic and Jewish God. More-over, the metaphysical truth is a strong truth that requires obedience and reverence.

Heideggers project is to challenge metaphysics by undermining its transcendentalspirit, and he does so by emphasizing the facticity of life and its throwness in theworld. When, for example, Heidegger says that language is being and that being is

language,8 an equation that Vattimo picks up immediately,9 he stresses their contigu-ity and their mutual appropriation. Distinction, exclusion and separateness are re-

moved from Heideggers thought in the attempt to bring about a new experience ofBeing, and truth. This is the state of aletheia, a Greek word meaning unconcealment

but also truth, in which individuals open themselves to the world and are appropriatedby the world but also appropriate the world. Mutuality and togetherness are some ofthe concepts that resonate strongly in Heideggers philosophy. It is because of this

that Vattimo recognizes in Heideggers philosophy a democratic and inclusive ele-ment that he sets out to explore. 10

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5 For a discussion of renunciation in Heidegger see also my Renunciation: Heidegger, Agamben,Blanchot, Heideggerian Consequences, ed. Vrasidas Karalis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, forthcoming).

6 A recent volume of collected essays, including works by Umberto Eco, Jean-Luc Nancy andCharles Taylor, explores the relevance of Vattimos philosophy, especially in relation to weak

thought, Ed. Santiago Zabala, Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo(McGill: Queens University Press, 2006).

7 For a discussion of being in Heidegger see the recent book by Santiago Zabala, The Remains ofBeing(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2007).

8 Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to Language, op. cit., p. 94.9 Gianni Vattimo, Let dellinterpretazione, op. cit., p. 63.

10 Gianni Vattimo, Heidegger: A Philosopher of Democracy, Heideggerian Consequences, ed.Vrasidas Karalis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).


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A mutual appropriation, as Vattimo understands it, implies a symbiotic relation totruth which, by remaining internal, might lose a sense of direction and urgency, espe-

cially in those who are used to follow ready- made truths. And yet it is by switchingthe attention from that which is outside to that which is naturally inside that an ethics

and also an aesthetics of democracy might commence.To stress this point, Vattimo turns to the Gospels, and especially to Paul, relating

Pauls discussion of weakness (asthens) and love (agpe) to Heideggers philoso-

phy. Pauls thought is predicated upon weakness11 as the ultimate strength that firsthas enabled God to provide the ultimate sign of love by allowing his son to die on the

cross for the salvation of humans, and second to establish his Church on the weaknessand sins of individuals. But this can be achieved only if the love for the truth, and

therefore the love for God, is not thought and seen, as in Catholicism or Judaism for

instance, as a love that flows from people to deity, rather from deity to people. It is bydemonstrating his unconditional love regardless of laws (Judaism) and sins (Catholi-

cism) that the Christian God comes down from the sky and the cross and becomes oneof many. But in turning form one to many, the love of God becomes the love for each

other and a love which is simultaneously within and without.12 In Vattimos reflec-tions on religion,13 one finds the mutual appropriation of human and God, of being

and Being along a path that arrives at an interesting discussion of democracy via Pauland Heideggers thought.

Weak thought is, therefore, the thought that unites the community by suspending

truth, which does not mean that truth is negated; it means that truth is appropriated,questioning the false strength of transcendental and metaphysical truth.

PERNIOLAS INTERESTED DISINTEREST

Can renunciation and weakness have value today? In other words, What value can befound in suspending values?

Literature is fast disappearing from the university curricula, and literary texts are

seldom read unless as a pretext to illustrate some topical issues. Is it possible, then, toregain literatures dignity and role, and its significance as a vehicle of ethic and aes-

thetic values? One possible answer to these questions is: yes, but providing that litera-ture and its conventional value systems are brought to react with various other sys-

tems of values, both contingently and historically. This ought not to be a confronta-tion, not even a comparison, in that comparison itself retains the uniqueness and thespecificity of the terms of comparison. This would be more like a transversal experi-

ence through which the very notion of values, knowledge and attendant prescriptions


11 Corinthians, 1, 2229; 2, 15; and Corinthians 2, 12, 110.12 On love in Paul see also Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), especially pp. 5253.13 Gianni Vattimo, Credere di Credere (Milano: Garzanti, 1998); Gianni Vattimo and Jacques

Derrida, Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).


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will be suspended and momentarily renounced. I am using renunciation in theHeideggerian sense ofVerzicht,14 which implies a process of becoming knowledge-

able by virtue of learning renunciation. It is the path toward learning renuncia-tion that, according to Heiddegger, eventually leads to a new experience in his case

of language and Being in our case of values.How do we learn renunciation? Through the literary canon, and its embodiment

as suspended language within other suspended languages from, for instance, the

philosophical canon. This is not, in other words, a process enacted by spectacularizeddestruction, nor by amnesia or forgetfulness. It is, rather, a process a hermeneutic

process that may renew the significance of values by virtue of suspending and re-nouncing them. This is, for instance, the path that Mario Perniola announces in an

important essay, La letteratura nonostante tutto, anzi a maggior ragione (Litera-

ture in spite of all, more of it as a matter of fact). 15 But it is also a more general aes-thetic attitude that the Italian philosopher explores with considerable insights in other

recent works such as Contro la comunicazione (Against Communication) and Si-lence: The Utmost in Ambiguity.16 In these works, Perniola advocates a form of

open intellectual hostility against the superficial emotions of the contemporaneousthrough the mobilisation of aesthetic acts informed by discretion and selection which

are predicated on what, in a contemporary shift of the Kantian paradigm, he termsdisinteresse interessato (interested disinterest). This takes into consideration the needto engage the contemporaneous head on with regard to its very core value, economy,

and question it through a profession of rational critique which collides frontally withephemeral and immediate requirements of aesthetic gratification.

Perniolas is an original discussion and reconfiguration of modern and contempo-rary tropes informed by suspension and renunciation. One of the most emblematic ex-

amples of suspension is Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener. As we all know this isthe story of a scrivener who chooses not to carry out the tasks he is assigned. Bartlebysimply prefers not to do what he is required of him. He sits in the legal office, closed

off from the other employees by a screen that the principal has provided him with. Be-hind the screen this man who can copy more quickly and effectively than all the other

clerks in the office, remains idle, and yet always potentially ready to act and produce,should he prefer to. Bartlebys behaviour and presence charisma, mysticism ? are

so uncanny that his employer is not only disarmed, but also wonderfully touchedand disconcerted.17 The lawyer himself, the narrator of Melvilles Bartleby, tellsus that Bartleby appears to be engaging in some kind of passive resistance. 18

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14 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, op. cit., pp. 139156.15 Mario Perniola, La letteratura nonostante tutto, anzi a maggior ragione, Agalma 12 (Septem-

ber 2006): 122125.16 Mario Perniola, Contro la comunicazione (Turin: Einaudi, 2004); Silence: The Utmost in Am-

biguity, Ambiguity, eds. Paolo Bartoloni and Anthony Stephens (West Lafayette: Purdue Uni-

versity Press, forthcoming).17 Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (Vermont: Everyman, 1993), p. 105.18 Ibid., p. 107.


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PASSIVE RESISTANCE

Maurice Blanchot picks the notion of passive resistance up with relish in The Writ-

ing of Disaster in which he defines Bartlebys action as non-action. According to

Blanchot, Bartlebys is in fact an abdication which equates with a relinquishment ofidentity.19 Blanchot pairs this form of refusal with another kind of refusal in which a

decision is expressed; a refusal that does not yet allow separation from thepower of consciousness.20 Blanchots very own literary production is based on anactive refusal and renunciation of conventional language and narrative strategies, and

yet one cannot help but think that this renunciation in action is the result of a longerprocess of learning renunciation that may very well need to pass via passive renun-

ciation, and via that abdication of identity that Blanchot speaks of in relation to

Bartleby.Is Bartleby, then, a model, a value, the necessary starting point from which a rene-

gotiation of literature its production and consumption might commence? In valueterms, this would mean to suspend our ability, willingness, desire to judge, but not be-

cause we do not want or because we cannot, but because we prefer not to.Perniola understands the risks inherent in a thought and a literature which have

made passivity and negativity their paradigmatic raison dtre. In fact, he reaches theconclusion that the cause of literatures demise might very well imputed to the pro-

cess of self-reflexivity and insularity that, starting with Mallarm, ends withBlanchot. According to Perniola, literature arrives with Blanchot at a state of separa-tion and detachment from the world, which, although producing a form of refusal, is

equated with a position of aristocratic contemplation. The refusal, in Perniola, cannotbe just disinterested, it must instead gain a purchase on the world via its main vector,

economy. It must become, in other words, an interesse disinteressato.The values inscribed in the literature of passivity cannot be underestimated. They

lie in the demands that they as literary texts implicitly and explicitly make, andthese demands need to be transversed by us. We might start judging again, but only

from the threshold of the suspension of judgement, from that position, that is, inwhich we could always already decide that we prefer not to. Our judgement will bemarked by the ability to return, paraphrasing an Italian contemporary poet, Giorgio

Caproni, to where we have never been.In 1971 Caproni wrote the poem Ritorno (Return) and published it in the col-

lection of poems Il muro della terra [1975] (The Wall of The Earth).21 In keeping toCapronis style, the poem is simple, paired down, unaffected and yet incredibly am-biguous, refractory. In time it has become a powerful symbol of suspension and inde-


19 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Ne-

braska Press, 1986), p. 17.20 Ibid.21 Giorgio Caproni, The Wall of The Earth, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Montreal: Guernica, 1992).


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terminacy.22 It reads: I returned there/ where I had never been./ Nothing, from how itwas not, has changed./ on the table (the checkered/ cloth), half filled/ I found the

glass/ never filled. Everything/ is still as/ I have never left it.23 We are where we havenever been, and yet we are not. The topos that Caproni sketches in Return is not so

much the moment of arrival or departure as the movement that maintains and inces-santly reconstitutes the known as foreign and the foreign as known. Literature mightas well have a future, remarks Perniola, but it must first of all bid adieu to the cultural

mechanisms it has become entangled with.

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22 On this see also my Literature of Indistinction: Blanchot and Caproni, After Blanchot: Litera-

ture, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson & Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: Uni-

versity of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 238256.23 Giorgio Caproni, The Wall of the Earth, op. cit., p. 81.

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The Value of Suspending Values, Bartoloni +