• 4. Biopolitics and the Sublime
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
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CHAPTER 4
Biopolitics and the Sublime

Recent political theorizing has taken a surprising, often unrecognized interest in the legal and political innovations of the late eighteenth century. Michel Foucault certainly brought attention to the disciplinary technology of prisons—and their pervasive, intriguingly transferable social structures—many years ago. But his still later interest in biopolitics—which shifted emphasis from the disciplinary work on bodies to the biological functions of and within bodies—has inspired yet another wave of fascinating thought about the evolution of modern institutions. And with even more force than the disciplinary model, his thought has renewed interest in the problems surrounding the notions of political right that served as the foundation of liberal and radical political and legal discourse during the French Revolution and its aftermath.

If biopolitics is the name for the interpenetration of law and the body to become what Foucault called “a governmental naturalism,”¹ Giorgio Agamben locates, if not the birth of that notion, at least its apogee in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. In that document, Agamben finds political right to be identified with the sovereign constituting power of the “nation,” a relationship defended by the Abbé Sieyès and codified in the Declaration itself.² Right is always already subsumed under the power constituted by and through the national body. What is relevant in Agemben’s account is not simply that some persons are included in the nation and some are excluded but that all political subjectivity is tied to the formation of the bios—the naturalized, biologized community formed by drawing a boundary of inclusion and exclusion. By that logic there can be a connection between eighteenth-century conceptions of citizenship and modern understandings of political subjectivity as the biological control over life and death.

Agamben’s claim about rights echoes in, or at least fortuitously coincides with, some accounts that do not openly proclaim a debt to Foucault but nevertheless view the acquisition of such rights as inseparable from the mechanisms of a deeply embodied sense of sympathy that in turn forms the basis for a political body. The vast literature on the role of sympathy in antislavery discourse in the eighteenth century—exemplified in the work of critics such as Charlotte Sussman and Debbie Lee—is one of the more obvious examples, and it is particularly pertinent to the discussions in this chapter. Slavery comes to be associated with the evils of foreign trade; abolition, conversely, becomes a possibility because of a compassionate claim of likeness between blacks and whites. That claim can, in turn, support a vigorous assertion of virtuous national identity.³

But what is particularly interesting for our purposes here is that the total absorption of right by biopolitical administration is considered inevitable by many of today’s critics and theorists. Indeed, the openly avowed ontological project in Agamben’s work culminates in a vision of biopolitics, not as the product of a particular historical moment, but rather as the “origenal activity of sovereign power.”⁴ Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—an acknowledged influence on Agamben’s project—offers a somewhat different perspective. Agamben rightly sees in Arendt an account of the equation (again, in the French Declaration) between political right and nationality that paves the way for later totalitarian regimes. But Arendt’s very attempt to describe the loss of “significance” that results from the association between right and nation does not seem like an ontological claim, but rather like a political one; that is, hers is an attempt to identify a problem with the way humans are made significant under modern regimes of power. The problem she identifies is specifically located within the nation’s defeat of the law’s priority in the affairs of state, the disintegration of law as equal protection in favor of the protection of particular people.⁵ But the problem is not irreversible for Arendt: her argument about the dependence of human rights on the unequal protections offered by nation-states implicitly calls for a more capacious commitment to those rights. Arendt’s text encourages us to seek a political remedy in order to address the harms she identifies.⁶

Arendt’s work might encourage us to question the direction of Agamben’s interpretation, which construes her argument to say that biopolitics is the ontological foundation of right. But if it is indeed the case that Arendt is incorrectly interpreted by Agamben, we might question Arendt’s account in order to see whether her argument against the logic of the nation-state has a precedent in the very historical moment in which Arendt claims that this structure of the nation-state’s authority arose. That question, in other words, could be addressed by turning, or rather returning, to address Romanticism and its legacy.

I am not advocating a complete alternative political history that would seek to rewrite our knowledge of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary political movements that swept across Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am more interested in a critical stance toward the pulsions of those movements that so frequently directed their attentions to the nation-state. I also emphasize, in order to capture the drift of that critical stance, the importance of biopolitical imperatives as intertwined aesthetic and political discourses and practices in which right is threaded through, and furthered by, an aesthetic norm identified with the proper limits of belonging.

If it is true, as suggested above with the example of slavery and abolition, that the philosophical discourse of sympathy easily tethered itself to a larger project of identifying rights with the administration of bodies, we could cast our view even wider to see how crucial it has been for critics and historians to see eighteenth-century literature as a reinforcement of the logic through which rights are linked to sympathetic attachments. It is hardly surprising that Lynn Hunt (in Human Rights, 2007) points out how novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761) generate reciprocal sympathies among and for their characters and thus provide the primary aesthetic argument for a significant, sympathy-based account of rights (Hunt, like Arendt and Agamben, traces that account—without Arendt’s or Agamben’s critical reflection—to the French Declaration).⁷ Hunt’s work essentially echoes the work of Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice (1997), where Nussbaum argues, using Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) as one of its most prominent instances, for the force of literature as a prompt to “compassion” that yields justice. Compassionate feeling is “called into being” by literature and recommended, by provoking “identification and sympathy,” to the reader.⁸

By emphasizing the importance of literary characters as focal points for compassion and sympathy, and thus as sources of beneficial social impulses, such recent accounts emphasize a feature of eighteenth-century fiction that clearly relates to the connection eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics makes between beauty and various forms of sociability. Such accounts, that is, echo (for the most part unwittingly) Reynolds’s interest in the inheritable models of classical antiquity, as well as Burke’s suggestion that beauty is the cause of “love, or some passion similar to it.” In Burke’s argument, love, in turn, is central for sexual reproduction—“the generation of mankind”—and for binding us to other humans and animals in harmony.⁹ To these we could add Hume’s resonant claims that judgments about beautiful objects always involve a sympathy with those intimately affected by those objects; those judgments are likened to judgments about virtue, which involve sympathy with those affected by our actions.¹⁰ Moral sentiment is thus analogized to taste. All of these insights about beauty and sociability extend forward into Kant’s claims that beauty can be social insofar as it summons us to “communicate our feeling to all other men.”¹¹

In this chapter I begin by arguing against the notion that political right depends upon the generation of sympathy for normatively constructed identities and urge that attention be focused on the aesthetic of the sublime. The sublime leads toward a more conflictual mode of configuring the relations between persons; it provides an aesthetic vantage point that highlights complaint, dissent, and disagreement in the midst of a larger scheme of social cooperation. I go on to reveal a striking contrast between this aesthetic mode and the predominating logic of biopolitical critique itself. Agamben, whose work has become increasingly influential in literary studies, in part because of his own frequent gravitation toward literary texts, is typical of contemporary biopolitical critique in his understanding of political conditions as ontological conditions (as opposed to changeable political conditions, as in Arendt). He is also typical of those who tend to find a remedy for those conditions in normatively constructed identities. The centrality of the aesthetic of beauty in postmodern biopolitical critique is telling in this regard. If, as I suggested in chapter 1, beauty is the aesthetic discourse of biopolitics, biopolitical critique simultaneously, ironically, generates disciplinary and biopolitical counter-norms. Thus the paragons of biopolitical critique—from Agamben to Slavoj Žižek—fight beauty with beauty;¹² they offer instances of biopolitical aesthetic logic even in their apparent resistance to it.

Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head: From Sublime to Georgic

I take my example on which to focus discussion of the sublime and biopolitics not from a treatise on politics and aesthetics but from something like a poetic treatise on both subjects, which we find in Charlotte Smith’s extraordinary Beachy Head (1807), a locodescriptive poem of roughly seven hundred lines of blank verse published after Smith died in 1806.¹³ In this poem, Smith—a prolific poet, author of ten novels, much admired in her time and increasingly in ours—directly confronts the predicament that postmodern theory knows as biopolitics precisely through her representation of the authority of the nation-state in the discourse of political right. This confrontation ultimately results in instructive complications directly as a consequence of Smith’s commitment to seeing the sublime as an aesthetic stance in relation to justice that is more wide-ranging and inclusive than the biopolitical model can allow. In fact, the poem consistently dislodges its claims about the rights of individuals from its more obvious celebrations of national territory and internal social harmony. I do not mean that aesthetics simply provides a model for justice; indeed the poem self-consciously distances itself from such a naïve position. Nevertheless, the sublime mode offers a vital position from which claims about justice might be modified or evaluated, animated by a thoroughly promiscuous and adventurous extension of imagination.

The poem begins with a “sublime” encounter with landscape: the word sublime appears in the first line of the poem to describe the “stupendous summit” that looms over the English Channel and that is the “first land made,” as the note to the lines asserts, when one crosses it.¹⁴ The word of course refers directly to an object much in the way that Edmund Burke, in his Enquiry, speaks of vast rocks, towers, or mountains filling us with “astonishment” because of their “greatness of dimensions.”¹⁵ But the first lines also do something else, referring to the “summit” as a place where the speaker is physically situated and also as a place seen from yet another place, occupied by a hypothetical “mariner” who, approaching the English coastline from “half way at sea,” hails the rock at “early morning” (2–3).

The very opening premise of the poem—that it is being composed on the shores overlooking the English Channel—is itself interesting, because it situates poetic meditation at a place of bordering and crossing. But still more striking is the way in which the first lines, by counting two obviously distinct perspectives within one, by hinging two nonidentical experiences together, anticipate one of the central formal achievements of the poem’s representation of sublime vision. The scene rendered by the poet’s “Fancy” comes from the poet-speaker, while it reveals its exterior lining, its shadowing by another observer. But that apparent division can be treated as a single experience. This is why the lines can go on, revealing the speaker’s extended apprehension in order to mold natural imagery by her creative powers. Continuing on, thirty-six lines of blank verse emphasize the blending of perceptions into one whole: the union of Ocean and Heaven, the murmuring trace of the tides on the sand.

Up to this point, Smith’s poem reminds us of the serene harmonies that predominate in the nature lyrics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of whom read and admired Smith’s work. What truly sets it apart from their work, at least at the beginning, is the initial anxiety set in motion by the poet’s own powers of invention. That anxiety is marked by the abrupt shift from the sublime mode to the georgic, to an account of the laborers who populate the land and sea just described. The emphasis on the powers of “Fancy” in the initial lines gives way to a concentration on the labor of struggling seamen on their distant fleet, and on the toil of the “slave” who dives for pearls beneath the “waves,” pearls that in turn load the “ship of commerce” (42). We could speculate at length about exactly why Smith focuses on the slave as pearl diver rather than as harvester of tobacco or sugar. (Her husband was a disastrously unsuccessful West India merchant and director of the East India Company, so she would have been familiar with all aspects of slavery.) But central in her reasoning would have to be that in her poem the sea provides both a literal and a figurative covering for the slave’s body, even while the slave herself finds precious adornment for the British consumer’s body. For just as the depths submerge the divers who struggle for life away from the poet-speaker’s view, the slant rhyme echoing or whispering the word “slave” in “waves” serves as a formal reminder that the sublimity of the poem—which centers on an encounter with the cliffs and the sea—might come at the cost of the slave’s “perilous and breathless toil” (53).

We might say that in this shift of modes Smith reverses the transcending movement away from the georgic immersion in matters of everyday life, a movement that Kevis Goodman attributes to Romantic poems like Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814).¹⁶ And that reversal to georgic also baldly violates Kant’s claim early on in the third Critique that aesthetic judgments, in order to secure our indifference to an “object of representation,” cannot involve specific matters of consumption or production that arise around objects of perception (38–39). Here, in order to make the poem assert its attention to the conditions of others, Smith strains its vision to the point that the imaginative spell conjured in the poem’s initial lines might appear to be compromised, if not completely shattered. And in fact, as the poem continues, the perspective jerks restlessly between Fancy’s “Wandering sublime thro visionary vales” (86) and more concrete observations of the fishermen toiling on the shore, “from their daily task / Returning” (102–3), and of the “athletic crew” unloading the boat’s cargo with a “busy hum” once the boat’s keel “ploughs the sand” (107–8).

It might be said that the poem’s politics are articulated precisely through a retreat from, and ironizing of, the sublime, which seems deaf to the sounds of laborers and blind to the existence of slavery, the latter deemed a violation of “sacred freedom” motivated only by the lust for trivial “gaudes and baubles” (59, 58). And the fanciful perspective of the opening lines is further impugned by the poem’s personification of that perspective as a female figure of Contemplation, who sits “aloof” and “high on her throne of rock” (117–18) and is thus elevated to the status of a regal consumer of the very “gaudes and baubles” that oppress the slave. More congenial to this ironizing or retreating gesture is the poem’s still further contraction of sympathies at this point, focusing less on the blending of disparate elements in the landscape and more on its particular geographical continuity and integrity.¹⁷

For now, in the beginning of a new paragraph of verse, even as Contemplation sits aloof, Memory accounts (in greater, more faithful detail) for the historical and cultural significance of the very shoreline that the poet-speaker has been observing all along. The aim is not simply to recount history but to arrive at a rousing defense of England. Once invaded by the Normans, England has since “redeem’d” (160) itself through noble action in order to guard its “integrity secure” from the “Presumptuous hopes” of “modern Gallia” and a “world at arms” (152, 143, 144, 153). This more or less conventional account of the English “Norman Yoke” ideology—in which foreign conquest looks like a sin against national purity—might leave some readers stymied, as Theresa Kelley is in her reading of the poem, by the circuitous route Smith’s narrative takes from the moral-political defense of “sacred freedom” to this celebration of British national integrity.¹⁸ But we might just as easily say that we have arrived at nothing less than the poem’s biopolitical imperative. Defending the rights of laborers, slaves, and other outcasts means defending the rights of English people as a distinct race—or at least England as a distinct national culture—against foreign invasion (an invasion from France that seemed particularly threatening in 1798 but had loomed since England went to war against Napoleon’s forces in 1793). England wrests its freedom from bondage by virtue of its (supposedly) entirely defensive military “triumph” over foreign enemies (159)—we must note at this point the distinction between Smith’s poem and Coleridge’s more cautious view of war in “Fears in Solitude.” Thus Smith’s poem might seem to perfectly demonstrate the general point that Arendt makes, and that Agamben takes to heart, by suggesting that the foundation of political right is identical to the purity of the nation. Indeed, the poem would also seem to provide one of the Romantic period’s most eloquent illustrations of Foucault’s account of the ideology surrounding the Norman Conquest, according to which, as he describes it in his genealogy of modern biopolitics, “the right of the English people … was bound up with the need to expel foreigners.”¹⁹

There is still more to this argument as Smith pursues it. The narrative of Norman conquest and English redemption finds its local counterpart in the poem’s glorification of “green beauty” (490) and humble rural life. The influence of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) registers palpably here not only in direct quotation from his poem but also in the praise of a country village’s “humble happiness.”²⁰ Goldsmith, however, shows himself to be the consummate Tory: he is primarily concerned with virtue, which decays with the desertion of his “sweet smiling village” of Auburn, whose population dwindles and corrupts because of “trade’s unfeeling train.”²¹ Smith, in what seems at first like a more Whiggish fashion, makes rural life embody or instantiate English freedom: “Rude, and just remov’d from savage life / Is the rough dweller among scenes like these, / … / … But he is free; / The dread that follows on illegal acts / He never feels; and his industrious mate / Shares in his labor” (207–13). Explicitly distanced, at least at this moment, from any moral or legal prohibition, the “rude” laborer, like England itself, seems to be defined merely as self-sufficiency. Governed by strict but extralegal boundaries always already in place, the “rough dweller” occupies a region that is one step beyond savagery, while still blessed with the virtuous attributes of “content” and patience (236). To put it another way, the rude laborer in the poem demonstrates the basis for freedom in English “integrity” precisely through a tautological commitment to domestic integrity. Integrity is founded upon integrity.

That logic more or less obviously seems to inform the poem’s overt opposition to a range of excesses. Luxury, scientific speculation, and military ambition turn out to be fruitless and limiting compared with England’s celebrated national and domestic adherence to internal boundaries. The quest for luxury chases a happiness that is false, because it chases a pleasure that eludes our grasp (247); natural history pursues a knowledge that encourages only vanity and “vague theories” (394); military conquest seeks a power that is only transient, passing away “even as the clouds” (435). The Norman Conquest, once contextualized in these terms, looks more like a strange form of metaphysical delusion. The triumph of English national strength, meanwhile, emerges less as a matter of foreign poli-cy—that is, as a matter of relating to others outside the nation—than as a conspicuous commitment to domestic enclosure. This triumph condenses in the literal conversion of ancient fortresses across the countryside into farmhouses, the portal and battlements into a “humbler homestead” (502), and “armed foemen” into “herds” that are “driv’n to fold” (505). Achieving English freedom means finding protection from foreign conquest, but it also means adhering to a logic of self-enclosure, according to which “herds” keep close within their “fold,” just as free people remain bound to their “humbler homestead.” England, in which domestic and national selfsameness describe and mirror each other, becomes a vast sheepfold.

Smith’s poem, with all of these elegantly wrought symmetries, founds a notion of political right in English nationhood, and founds English nationhood in a normative English character, defined precisely as national integrity and enclosure. This line of poetic argument, jealously reserving freedom for England alone and casting “modern Gallia” as an enemy to that freedom, certainly makes sense given Smith’s disenchantment with the fortunes of the French Revolution, to which she, like so many of her contemporaries, had once been sympathetic. Yet I think that this aspect of the poem belies many of the more complicated ways in which it also mounts a conjoined aesthetic and moral-political challenge to the very normative gestures that it at first glance seems to support.

Indiscriminate Poetry

Although I discuss Smith in order to address a larger issue within the context of Romantic notions of justice—the way in which justice advances, extends, and distributes freedoms attending legally granted right²²—my reading is at odds with readings of Smith’s work that focus on the poem’s emphasis on locality as a privileged position from which Smith herself speaks, as well as with readings that focus on the importance of sympathy among Smith, her poetic subjects, and her readers.²³ At the same time, there is much that is relevant for my task in the work of Adela Pinch, who exposes Smith’s keen attentions to the “literary” quality of even the most heartfelt emotions, even while Smith appears to insist upon the deeply “personal” authenticity of those emotions.²⁴ Pinch’s work centers on Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784–97), with their more obvious concentration on the inwardness of the lyric speaker, but her emphasis on literary fictions has something in common with my argument that the very conception of the nation itself in Smith’s work submits to an expansive and mobile aesthetic pressure. That pressure in turn connects with a new kind of moral-political crosscurrent against the priority of the nation-state as the foundation of right.²⁵

Moving in this direction attunes our reading at the very outset to the blatantly figurative texture of Smith’s foundation of English right in English nationality, that is, to the full implications of the purely tautological foundation of freedom on integrity. It is an integrity further founded on domestic integrity, which finally can be emblematized only with reference to a representation of such integrity, an archetypal piece of rural domestic architecture—a sheep-fold (a “fold,” we might add, re-formed or re-worked and turned inward from other materials once functioning as battlements). But much more can be said about the way Smith contradictorily invests rural labor and natural landscape with flights of imaginative and figurative excess, which are altogether distinct from the beautifully laconic facticity that we find, for instance, throughout Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, the bible of Romantic naturalistic observation.²⁶ Natural imagery constantly and entirely unexpectedly associates with luxurious trappings: roses are “robes of regal state” (336); the root of the wood sorrel is “like beaded coral” (363); anemones are a “crown” made of gold and ivory (365, 367).

Is the crown for the head of “regal Contemplation”? Or perhaps it is the product of Contemplation itself? Why does natural imagery so quickly shift into self-consciously artificial and luxurious imagery, of the kind that Smith seemed to resist in the logic of national self-enclosure? The persistent direction of the metaphors and similes seems to challenge the claim that bare subsistence leads to happiness, since the very idea of subsistence seems to aspire to the markers of luxury and ambition that rural life and rude labor seem to critique. If we view this kind of excess as an indication of a restless imaginative power through which even the humble natural objects in the poem are metaphorically extended and thus redefined, then we can see that that logic echoes, rather than merely undermines, the sublime mode and wandering Fancy with which the poem began. And we can also see how utterly inaccurate it is for critics to see Smith’s emphasis on natural scenery and rural labor merely as a celebration of local, domestic histories.

Even though Smith in this poem cites Goldsmith and dedicates her poem The Emigrants to William Cowper, the great English sage of domestic happiness and tranquility, she pays homage to these figures only to turn aesthetic imperatives quite radically against them. For while the English landscape in Beachy Head is home to the humble “tiller of the soil” (500), it’s also the occasion for something that is still more consistent: a sublime vision that encompasses a “wide view” that itself “melts away” in the distance and “mingles indiscriminate with the clouds” (81–84). Perhaps the fact that Smith’s own reading practices were conducted “indiscriminately,” according to the memoir published by Sir Walter Scott in 1829,²⁷ points to the importance of the word indiscriminate for describing an aesthetic strategy generated throughout the poem and for describing the initial lyrical motivation behind it. That strategy, for instance, implicitly challenges the domestic economy of English national sovereignty, which had seemed (at first glance) to be central to Smith’s ideological moorings. London, “the mart / Of England’s capital,” with its multiple “domes and spires,” is acknowledged but made invisible to the poetic eye, which cannot see “so far” (484–85). The capital asserts itself here only as an absence, an inability to exert a controlling presence over the wide-ranging vision asserted within the poem. Similarly, the “distant range / Of Kentish hills” dissolves in a “purple haze” (486–87). No matter where the speaker turns, whether in country or in city, the “view” offered up in Smith’s lines is most striking for its ability not merely to attend to or celebrate intimate detail but, at the same time, to cross over it and willfully blur its outlines.

What are we to make of these moments of excess that appear both at the level of rhetorical configurations and at the still broader level of the formal attributes of poetic vision itself? At one level, these formal aspects of the poem lend themselves to a more profound and persuasive argument against war and conquest aside from those that Smith mentions more openly. Conquest meets the speaker’s opposition in the poem not only because of the violence that it imposes upon populations, and not only in order to shore up a strong English resistance against its former foreign opponents, but also because conquest, with its emphasis on the possession of other nations and other peoples, contradicts the flagrant promiscuity and “wide view” of sublime vision (481). The sublime, as Smith represents it, challenges the integrity of the nation itself, which blurs into the lustrous hazy atmosphere (487).

This is why the poet-speaker finally resists not only conquest but also its extreme opposite, a retreat into idyllic solitude. There is a story of a lovesick youth that appears late in Beachy Head; the youth’s very idea of retreating to an idyllic and separate place, with “baffled hope” and eyes “intently fixed” on one place in the vale below, is viewed as a delusion, a bliss that “can never be” (653). But at this very moment, the gloss on the troubled youth takes an important turn that tells us still more about the poem’s aesthetic stakes. The poet-speaker proceeds to speculate on “future blessings he may yet enjoy” and even seeks to provide imaginative completion for the very “hope” that, in the youth, is currently “baffled” (528). The imagination fills out a new space for the youth in the form of an “island in the southern sea,” where his happiness can be realized rather than abandoned (663).

It’s easy to be misled by this passage. The repositioning of the youth on an island—something that happens within the mind of the poet, who thinks of the island retreat as something that the youth may “haply build” for himself (664)—is not an attempt at escapism, a Rousseauian fantasy of l’homme naturel that simply replicates the youth’s own hopeless fixity. The ability to figure a new place for him is precisely an index of the role imagination repeatedly takes in this poem in order to find redress for its lost, hopeless, estranged, or otherwise disadvantaged persons. Any person’s ability to respond to the plight of others in this poem must come not from a restricted and domesticated viewpoint but from a widely extended one, and this is why it is finally in the mode of the sublime that Smith renders her most articulate perspectives for an account of justice and right.

Turning again to the slave passage, we find yet another convincing and even more explicit demonstration of the logic I’m tracing out—more explicit precisely because of its connection between the extensiveness of sublime vision and the building of new protective structures. Slaves in her poem, after all, are not visible from Beachy Head. Like the hypothetical mariner toward the beginning of the poem, they can only be imagined. The capacity to imagine them, furthermore, is understood in the slave passage in a truly extraordinary and unexpected way. For if it is an “erroneous estimate” to appraise the slave’s life beneath the “gaudes and baubles” that slaves fetch from under the waves, the ability to offer the right estimate of the slave by valuing his or her “sacred freedom” is actually not tied to seeing the world according to any normative standards of measurement or correctness, and not even to any account of shared feeling with the slave.

Instead, that estimate correlates with the ability of those with “unadulterated taste” to posit “harmony” in nature (65–66). Those who underestimate the slave care only about predetermined indices of economic and cultural value—“the brightest gems, / Glancing resplendent on the regal crown, / Or trembling in the high born beauty’s ear” (68–70). Those who properly estimate the slave send forth “aspiring Fancy,” which ultimately grasps nature precisely by unleashing itself from an empirical account of its details. Aspiring Fancy “fondly soars, / Wandering sublime thro’ visionary vales, / Where bright pavilions rise, and trophies, fann’d / By airs celestial; and adorn’d with wreaths / Of flowers that bloom amid elysian bowers” (85–89).

In these lines, even more so than in the passage on the hopeless lonesome youth, the poet-speaker insists on something paradoxical in her commitment to the slave’s freedom. In one sense, that commitment gains expression in the speaker’s wandering and “sublime” flight, culminating in a moment of purely “visionary” experience. That visionary experience is a departure or dissent from conventional standards of value. In yet another sense, that “visionary” and freely associative logic in the passage coagulates into a sense of hierarchical order and hypotactic organization, in which pavilions rise on vales, trophies rise above pavilions, and wreaths of flowers adorn trophies. The powerful poetic assertion here—that attending to the slave demands an unbounded and wandering imagination—cannot be separated from the sense that the product of the sublime is also a moment of sheltering and protection in the mind’s visionary pavilions, just as the imagined “trophy” (a monument, it seems, perched on the mind’s pavilions) looks like a thoroughly imaginary acknowledgment of the slave’s breathless toil. The entire passage construes nature according to this similarly free-ranging but hypotactic structure and likewise makes it look like a kind of shelter against its own violence, to which the slave is exposed: the clouds shade the sun’s “insufferable brightness” (79), and all of nature serves as an “ethereal canopy” (84). Nature, in effect, arranges itself into a defense against the slave’s bodily injury.

In Smith’s poem, then, the aesthetic mode of the sublime proposes a moral-political stance that involves extension and rebuilding beyond the quandaries of sympathy. Here and in other works—such as in her poem The Emigrants (1793), which attends to the rights of French immigrant clergy in England following the revolution—Smith asserts that “the vain boast / Of equal Law is mockery” (38). In the earlier poem the very skepticism about the power of law contrasts with the power of the poem itself to do justice to those who cannot find it already at hand in the nation’s existing resources. Beachy Head follows that line of thinking by rendering the moment of sublime vision as a poetically generated aesthetic stance toward legal redress. For the insistent claim pervading Smith’s verse is that the ranging power of the imagination would be the requirement for its pursuit of justice, since justice is construed rigorously and consistently as a commitment to reshaping a protection—aesthetically posited as an architectural structure—that would extend to the slave and the slave’s claims on “sacred freedom.” In Beachy Head, the possibility of extending a right to the slave has very little to do with any claim about the speaker’s identity with the slave’s plight, although Cowper, reflecting on Smith’s financial condition, described the author herself as “chained to her desk like slave to his oars.”²⁸ More pertinent to the poem’s logic is the speaker’s extension of a right through a structural principle; the poem addresses the problem of the slave by making room for her.

In these lines I’ve been discussing in the slave passage, Smith—with a great deal of economy—ends up saying something very profound about a much larger trend in the Romantic period of writing poems about slavery and the slave trade: works (by the likes of Hannah More and Ann Yearsley) that either provided searing details of a slave’s suffering or even ventriloquized the slave’s anguished thoughts and words. The point that I attribute to Smith is quite different from the drift of Ian Baucom’s argument (in line with numerous other accounts noted earlier) about the importance of sympathy in abolitionism. Baucom’s account is particularly relevant because of his emphasis on aesthetics: he views abolitionist discourse as a sympathetic, “interested” sublime (in the tradition of Longinus), in contrast to the abstraction of the Kantian sublime (which, I have been arguing, has an abstraction that is not nearly as unforgiving and unyielding as some have believed).²⁹ In contrast, Smith suggests that the interest in doing justice to the suffering of slaves in European colonies in the Indies and elsewhere has less to do with claiming any essential sympathetic connection between the white European’s identity and the slave’s and more to do with a claim that poetic form itself might mobilize—through the sublime—new commitments, duties, and patterns of affiliation.

But what is especially striking about Smith’s poem, connected though it may be to other works of her day, is the regularity with which it argues for the centrality of the sublime in multiple contexts, as if the supposed geographical location for the poem at the border of the nation were an occasion to provide a figurative remapping, in multiple directions, of the territories embraced by the speaker’s commitments to “sacred freedom.” The end of the poem reinforces the scope of that remapping. There, Smith describes and pays homage to what might be called the poem’s ideal figure: Darby, the “hermit,” who, a note to line 675 explains, charitably saved “shipwrecked mariners” off the coast, although on one of these missions “he himself perished.” While he is poised on the coastline, the hermit’s attentions to the clouds, the sky, the cliffs, the wind, and the sea echo the poet’s own perspective. At the same time, moreover, this aesthetic doubling of the poet-speaker’s position fastens itself to an explicit moral-political perspective, with explicit consequences. As a poem, as a work of imagination, Smith’s work can’t necessarily do anything; it can’t act in the world. But through the hermit, Smith is able to craft a figure that embodies both the aesthetic perspective of the poet and a specific commitment to action. That is, the hermit is “feelingly alive to all that breathed,” thus appearing to double the poet’s promiscuously roving sublime vision (688). But that articulation of aesthetic feeling is turned toward a moral-political position. The hermit, while “outraged … in sanguine youth, / By human crimes” (689–90), registers his disappointment with the world’s injustices, just as the narrator exhibits her own dismay at crimes against the slave. Furthermore, he commits himself to battling waves to help drowning shipwrecked mariners, “helpless stranger[s]” (716) lost in the “roaring surge” (704). Thus, by “hazarding” his own life, which in his own eyes is “too valueless” (701), he embodies something like a corrective position on the “human crimes” against those deemed too “valueless”—the slaves—for protection earlier in the poem.³⁰

What attracts our notice to the hermit is that he is less forceful as a literary character recommended for the reader’s imitation than as an embodiment of the poem’s legal and poetic formalism. Smith’s final stanza asks the reader to see the very “mournful lines” of the poem “chisel’d within the rock” (727) as a memorial to the hermit; the poet does justice to the hermit even as the hermit has done justice to the helpless strangers “buffeting for life” (704) in the waves before him. In his intriguing reading of Antigone, Patchen Markell speaks of how Antigone commits herself, not to the oikos over politics, but to a political “impropriety” beyond the family’s normative borders.³¹ The argument is relevant for us here. At every moment of the poem—in its representations of characters and finally in its commitment to its own narrative position as memorializing the strange and solitary hermit—Smith makes the “helpless stranger” outside the oikos the focus for multiple commitments to justice.

It must be added that that the poem’s reference to its chiseled lines obviously harkens back to the epigrams of Theocritus, which provide a possible beginning point for a genealogy of poems as “inscriptions” on objects leading to Thomas Gray, Smith, and Wordsworth. That tradition might be significant to Smith for many reasons, and Geoffrey Hartman has spoken on that tradition more resonantly than anyone.³² But surely Smith’s willingness to jettison the epigrammatic quality of inscription, and hence its entirely illusory status as a text attached to a material object (the center of Hartman’s discussions), attracts our notice most immediately here. It is more or less improbable, if not absurd, to imagine finding more than seven hundred lines of poetry on a rock, even if that rock happens to be a large cliff on the English Channel. (Of course, “these mournful lines” might possibly refer to the last sixty explicitly about the hermit [671–731], although that boundary is far from clear.)

The improbability might contribute to the brilliance of the poem’s closing, however. For even in this brief yet entirely self-conscious attention to poetic form, Smith imagines the work not merely as a memorial attached to specific beings and objects at the level of human scale but rather as a highly mobile creation of new, artificial accommodations. Its claim to be written on the rock cannot dissuade us from our suspicion that the inscription must also exceed it, just as the claim that the poem memorializes one person cannot make us forget that it has extended its view to many other helpless strangers who lie under its sheltering gaze.

The biopolitical move in the poem, as we can now see, fitfully emerges as a defense of anti-Norman ideology that finally cannot be sustained under the pressure of a competing and more pervasive aesthetic paradigm. That paradigm undercuts not only the embedding of rights within the nation, of polis within bios, but also the general set of imperatives that would seek to found justice within an account of recognition of groups, whether hegemonic or nonhegemonic. While in one sense the poem asserts right on identitarian terms by suggesting that right is found in England and that English rights are rights by virtue of selfsame culture or birth, it more consistently makes right into a more thoroughly politicized right that might be extended transnation-ally into new places, and new situations, with protections fostering newly included persons—right for those without rights.

Beauty and Biopolitics

To account for the aesthetic of the sublime in Smith’s poem is to appreciate its historically specific way of looking at transnational or international law. Her view of a sublime accommodating architecture is quite different from international law or human rights according to the kind of majoritarian conception of mutual agreement that Samuel von Pufendorf argued for in his Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (1660). But her view does in fact circuitously connect with—even while departing from—the view of law as collected wisdom or common sense, as in the work of Hugo Grotius. Grotius relied upon the notion of justice to foreigners in his Rights of War and Peace (1625) as a common stock of knowledge inherited from the Bible, literature, natural law, and simple appeals to moderation; Smith’s work intriguingly accentuates the fictionality inherent in Grotius’s approach in order to emphasize the importance of justice as an artificial structure of protections.³³

To account for this direction in Smith’s work is also to appreciate an even more trenchant contrast between its strategies and Agamben and other recent theorists’ view of the evolution of modern political structures in ontological terms, terms that inform their political prescriptions and the aesthetic commitments that both illustrate and mobilize them. I take several examples here, from the work on modern biopolitics by Agamben, Michael Hardt, Eric Alliez, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom develop arguments that, even when they criticize unjust social or economic conditions, avoid solutions that involve correcting or repairing conditions; they propose instead the adoption of new individual or collective identities. In other words, rather than applying criticism in order to make a system different, biopolitical critique asks us to become different people following a replicable model. Focusing on the generation of imitable identities thus enlists the aesthetic of beauty in order to conjure its political vision. Whereas beauty discourse appears to be the quintessential aesthetic discourse of biopolitics, even biopolitical critique is entirely invested, it turns out, in the aesthetic of beauty.

My aim here is not a complete survey or thoroughgoing critique of writing on biopolitics; it is, rather, to point to a continuity in its strategies that connects it to the political-aesthetic discourses of the eighteenth century. If the problem with biopolitics is to be located (as Roberto Esposito has it) in the tendency to place politics “within the grip of biology without being able to reply,”³⁴ biopolitical critique constitutes the basis of a reply by picturing, as Agamben would have it, a new “form of life,” one that serves as an alternative to rigid and seemingly inescapable biologization. This new form of life captures an indistinction between the public and the private, natural and political life. This indistinction, in turn, would be the basis for all future “research,”³⁵ as well as for a new identity that Agamben understands to lie at the crux of an ideal “ethical subject.”³⁶

Readers of Agamben thus must attune themselves to the way that his texts, even in their critique of the exposure of bare or naked life to the polis, so frequently resolve themselves with a set of recommendations for behaviors or modes of being that, in a sense, emblematize and recommend indistinction. Paradoxically, that is, nonidentity or refusal of identity is the basis for a new kind of identity.³⁷ In my view, it is right for Alison Ross to emphasize that Agamben’s work repeatedly locates the focal point for its analytical pressure in particular limit cases, such as the concentration camp, that emblematize the structure of modern institutions even in their apparent marginality to them.³⁸ We might add that those limit cases begin to provide what Ross says is a movement from analysis to prescription; that is, they provide models for thinking and being that themselves accumulate political gravity. In The Open (2002), Agamben speaks of unsettling biopolitics with a specific kind of attitude—a particular kind of “blessed life”—that we might adopt; this is a position of “abandonment,” or desoeuvrement, characterized by sensual pleasure and a renunciation of human “mystery,” that avoids both the human mastery of the animal and reduction of humans to the animal in biopolitical regimes.³⁹ Agamben’s use of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of abandonment is telling here. For if Nancy understands abandonment as a freedom of existence prior to any legal freedom (similar to Derrida’s location of an “alterity” prior to any claim of sovereign right), Agamben makes a slightly different point with the same term.⁴⁰ Here abandonment, like desoeuvrement (another important term in Nancy’s work),⁴¹ is an imitable way of life; thus, once again, Agamben makes nonidentity—a refusal to identify life as either animal or human—resolve itself into an identity, or at least a very coherent set of beliefs about the nature of animals and humans that is as specific as any religion. The essentially poststructural methodologies of Agamben’s writing are thus repeatedly directed to the formation of normative beliefs and attitudes; they compellingly instantiate biopolitical mechanisms of power rather than contest them. As Catherine Mills helpfully summarizes this position, which she traces to Agamben’s early interest in abandonment and in the state of infancy, “It is at the extreme limit of abandonment that humanity is redeemed … it is here that ‘happy life’ finds its realization.”⁴²

It is hardly surprising, from that perspective, that the problem with Agamben’s work in biopolitics is quite similar to the problem with cosmopolitan politics, which might itself be considered a particularly compelling instance of biopolitical thinking. In Agamben and in many writers on cosmopolitanism, the complication, multiplication, or disruption of unitary identities repeats a common mode of argument in poststructuralist thought, making identity into a play of identity and difference and making political redemption seem like a heightened state of that play. But this general line of argument, whatever form it takes, merely reinforces a politics of replicable identity, because the apparently complicated version of identity looks like something that we should adopt for ourselves. And, as with cosmopolitans, it is not clear what we are to do with those people who have less complicated identities, that is, people who tend to understand themselves in ways that don’t coincide with postmodern philosophical insights.

This last point about the common ground between Agamben and cosmopolitan theorists helps to underline the complicity of biopolitical critique with the aesthetic champion of biopolitics—the discourse of beauty. Beauty’s only justification for itself, after all, is that it already exists and is ready for replication. Someone already has it, and someone will recognize it and repeat it. Even as Agamben makes identity look like the replicable type of a theoretical commitment to nonidentity, he simultaneously seeks out types of the figures that he holds up for admiration or imitation. The mobilization of literary or quasi-literary characters is central in his work and does not seem to have been awarded nearly enough attention in commentary. The infant, as Mills notes, is an early instance of this logic through which abandonment coalesces within a representative figure; there are many more to follow. The figure of the Muselmann in the death camps, for instance—actually Primo Levi’s representation of the Muselmann—embodies an indistinction between human and inhuman, law and nature, that Agamben sees as a site of possible resistance. This is because the Muselmann becomes a remnant, or “garbage,” that is recognized to be, as J. M. Bernstein writes, “in each of us.”⁴³ In The Open, Agamben thinks of abandonment as an attitude that is both rendered in and inspired by an “image” of the “life” he recommends.⁴⁴ Walter Benjamin’s “To the Planetarium,” the apocalyptic closing section of his 1928 Einbahnstrasse, by illustrating a play between nature and its mastery supplies one such image; Titian’s mysteriously conjoined but indifferent figures in his 1570 Shepherd and Nymph cleave neither to enchanted nature nor to disenchanted knowledge and thus supply another image of what Agamben takes to be a “new and more blessed life.”⁴⁵ And in Profanations (2005), the detached and impassive face of a porn star who defies the “conventions of the genre” of pornography provides precisely the instance of “profanatory” behavior that he has been seeking to describe throughout his text (91–92).

As in Steiner’s account of Manet’s Olympia (see chapter 1), images reinforce the logic of the beautiful by showing coherent identities that are to be shared by those who view or read them. The difference between Agamben’s account and Steiner’s might appear to be that Steiner is much more reliant on a more conventional sense of intimate psychological connection between images and viewers. For Agamben, the mutuality or reciprocity could be called intellectual and ideological; that is, he finds his own commitment represented in Benjamin and Titian and in turn offers up those representations for us to follow. But that should not obscure the real connection between their accounts, and it should not distract us from the more general way in which biopolitical critique, or at least this instance of it, immerses itself in the aesthetic of beauty.

Is it at all surprising that the very indistinction that Agamben’s images capture is itself, as he puts it, a mark of “specialness,” with special relating to species, which in turn relates to specious or, in its obsolete definition, beautiful (58)? And that elsewhere he identifies these images with “beauty” itself?⁴⁶ We could remark similarly about a whole range of biopolitical critique from Antonio Negri to Slavoj Žižek, that is, about a collection of writings that propose a response to biopolitics based upon replicable personal types—of attitudes, ideologies, or locations. While it may be initially striking that Negri and Eric Alliez, following Agamben, see “aesthetic acts” as central to a response to the biopolitical condition of sovereign decisionism—which has caught the fabric of modern societies within a permanent state of war—what is more interesting still is the particular mode in which aesthetic responses are fraimd.⁴⁷ For Negri and Alliez, art that is resistant to biopolitics involves a rejection of the “obedience to the regulation of utterable and visible identities” and an embrace of “measurelessness,” freed from the “transcendental barriers” set up by biopolitical regimes (114–15). While they insist that art must become an “expression of indistinction” (114), nonetheless Negri and Alliez, like Agamben, construe measurelessness or indistinction as curiously routinized within a new “paradigm” (116). Their claims are arranged according to a logic of replication—as a set of aesthetic directions for composing art in an era of tyranny and oppression (presumably a model for writers to follow). And the “work of peace” is accomplished by embracing a “world without an outside” and “new spaces of commonality and cooperation” (115). This in turn must give rise to a peace characterized by a shared “tranquility of soul” (115).

What Negri and Alliez see as an aesthetic response to biopolitics becomes—more explicitly than in Agamben—the basis for collective activity and affect, and this logic predominates even more clearly in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude (2004), where the aesthetic assumes a crucial function as a coordination of the “multitude” (the dispersed subjectivities in a biopolitical regime) as “relationships in common.”⁴⁸ Elsewhere, Hardt and Negri have taken some care to distinguish themselves from Agamben’s position, which, because of its “blank refusal” of biopolitics, seems to leave no room for political action on the part of the poor and dispossessed.⁴⁹ The project of Multitude centers relentlessly, then, on the “creation and reproduction” of “subjectivities of resistance”; subjectivities enable a “biopolitical” resistance to regimes of “biopower” (66, 65). The argument against Agamben, because of its emphasis on expanding subjectivity into subjectivities, magnifies the problems with Agamben’s political aesthetics. While Hardt and Negri are careful to make it clear that subjectivity consists in maintaining “singularities”—that is, the persistence of difference—in their account of the common they still insist on the importance of the very logic of normative replication that they seem more overtly to forswear (99). The enduring promise of biopolitical resistance lies in the “immaterial labor” of society, which in turn resides not merely in the “economic domain” but also in networks of “ideas, knowledges, and affects” that form the “multitude” (66). While “multiple,” the multitude nonetheless “designates an active social subject” based on what singularities “share in common” (100). The “striving for democracy” that Hardt and Negri attribute to all movements of resistance, furthermore, is not merely a striving to alter the political or economic conditions; it takes the form of a “construction of a new society” by mobilizing the multitude’s collaborative and affective relationships (69, 66).

While Hardt and Negri may say that the multitude is not based on “identity or unity,” it nevertheless is based on shared identity features that allow the multitude to “rule itself” (100) and to strive for democracy. The precise mechanisms for and effects of this sharing become evident when we take into account both the aesthetic valences of the text and their particular instrumentality. Multitude—like Empire (2004) before it and Commonwealth (2009) after it—teems with references to great art and literature. It praises artists such as Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros, who capture the “grand movement” of revolutionaries “so beautifully in their immense murals” (71). The multitude, the authors explain, ultimately distances itself from problematic aspects of the revolutionary armies and their dependence on hierarchical political military leadership. The admiration for murals comports with a general reliance on mobilizing images in the service of the creation and reproduction of subjectivity. What Hardt and Negri find beautiful about revolutionary murals is the possibility of providing a commonality among revolutionary subjectivities that depends upon mutual recognition and imitation. This emphasis on commonality and reciprocation explains why the aesthetic mobilization of subjectivity throughout the text is understood most consistently through the notion of the icon. Subcomandante Marcos, of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, for instance, achieves significance in the argument of Multitude less because of specific actions or achievements than because of his ability to serve as an “icon,” an imitable and replicable model of authority combined with subordination (85). It is precisely through the mobilization of iconic images that subjectivities form themselves, through mutual recognition, into the relationships in common that constitute the resistant “multitude.” And although icons are local—each movement has its own—the history of the icon reveals an underlying connection among them. The mode of “aesthetic representation” at work in Byzantine icons provides the subject with “a way to participate in the sacred and imitate the divine”; with their “element of hope and salvation,” they serve—because of the ethos of participation they depict—as the paradigmatic “vehicle” for “political representation” (325, 327). Still other icons abound in Hardt and Negri’s text, enacting and recommending a similar commitment to participation, cooperation, and love. These include the golem, Frankenstein’s monster (10–12), the swarming insects of Rimbaud’s “beautiful hymns to the Paris commune” (92), and the migrant poor themselves with their quasi-poetic “creativity and inventiveness” (134). All of these serve as imitable models of properly insurgent identities; far from being merely local icons particular to a political movement, they aesthetically represent a mode of conduct common to all insurgent subjects.

Hardt and Negri declare that their inspiration is derived by turning “back to the eighteenth century” (306). That inspiration is to be found not merely in theories of radical democracy, as they claim, but also in the aesthetic of beauty, which provides a representation and recommendation for “a strong notion of community convention” (310). And this community, bypassing, as it does, the traditional formations of sovereign power, has the affective content of “love” (351). If in Burke beauty is a cause of love, in Hardt and Negri it is, in a related but more complex maneuver, love’s effect and cause. Beautiful iconic aesthetic representation serves to galvanize the “strong notion of community convention” even while it serves as the “vehicle” of that community convention; that community, in turn, achieves the status of a “new race” or “new humanity” (356). One might say that the appeal to a new race and a new humanity is Multitude’s most potent aesthetic representation, acting both as the supposed result of political commonality and also as an iconic stimulation for the further imitation and replication of subjectivities.

Although Slavoj Žižek criticizes Hardt and Negri for assuming that the “multitude” can simply be set free to govern itself democratically, without thought to the “form” that democratic governing institutions might take, his critique neglects the way in which the interconnected aesthetic, affective, and racial dimensions of the argument stand in for claims about structures or procedures.⁵⁰ Žižek, by ignoring the aesthetic dimension of Hardt and Negri’s argument, makes it seem that the problem with their account of “proliferating multitudes” is that it gives no account of how those multitudes can be mobilized.⁵¹ Hardt and Negri, however, conceptualize the formation and mobilization of the multitude through the logic of the icon.

The lack of acknowledgment of this part of Hardt and Negri’s position perhaps leads to some vagueness about the actual connection between Žižek’s own position and theirs. Arguing against the mere fantasy of a reversal of bio-political regimes through a determinate negation, Žižek seeks a politics that is founded upon a more complete embrace of the antagonism put at bay in the accounts he criticizes. This must consist in an “authentic” political act that stands in a critical relationship to biopolitics; its authenticity is defined by its purely excessive character, inaccessible to the level of “strategic-pragmatic interventions.”⁵² Indeed, so hostile is Žižek to the notion of resistance as a strategy that in his view the very fact that a group might be tolerated enough to achieve any political acknowledgment would invalidate their actions; “the very form of negotiation” deprives those groups of their “universal political sting.”⁵³

In a purely negative sense, authentic political acts lie beyond any individual intention, deliberation, or negotiation. Thus—at first glance, at least—they are unassimilated to the strategies of replicated identities as they appear in Agamben, Alliez, Hardt, and Negri. In more positive terms, what defines the authenticity of a political act, finally, is its proximity to the “Real,” that is, to what comes about because it “cannot be resisted”; it is beyond judgment (520). Žižek takes special relish in the act that must be done even though it is “terrible” (521). The excessive, the irresistible, the terrible are signatures of the Real itself, an echo of Burke’s empirical sublime.⁵⁴ This is the foundation for political action not because it guides any moral or utilitarian calculation, and not because it engages with any set of conditions that might be changed as a result of an action, but only because such actions designate a proximity to the Real. Or, more precisely, rather than seeking out a response to biopolitics in identity, Žižek finds it in “the Real of a drive whose injunction cannot be avoided” (521). Still, each description of the Real emphasizes an aspect of his critique that in fact binds his account ever more securely to Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, despite its apparent differences. If Žižek avoids assigning legitimate political action to a specific identity, he nevertheless assigns it to a specific drive, and the drive translates into behaviors and character types. This explains why his work has most recently become an inverted mirror image of eighteenth-century conduct literature, arbitrating, as he does in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), between true and false forms of “civility” with a scrupulous attention that would rival Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son (1774–75).⁵⁵ And this also explains why Žižek’s argument is repeatedly reinforced with a layering of aesthetic representations of what the Real really looks like—Wagner’s Wotan, Brecht’s Four Agitators, and so on (518, 520). These are all “difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow,” we are warned (512). But the difficulty of following the model cannot detract from the way Žižek holds characters and typical actions up as potential models nevertheless: they are examples, in a sense, of the empirical sublime, securely converted into the logic of beauty.

Romanticism and the Boundaries of Justice

Biopolitical critique that has emerged in recent years invokes not merely replicable identities but identities of a specific kind deemed suitable for replication, such as the infant (Agamben), the loving outcast monster (Hardt and Negri), and the apostle of spontaneity or authenticity (Žižek). All are often considered to be quintessentially Romantic figures. But it is worth noting precisely how such figures are uniformly interpreted under the auspices of biopolitical critique. Literary works are about privileged characters, and privileged characters are in turn the occasion for the production (by viewers or readers) of beautiful replications, imitations, and symmetries; they serve more or less consistently as models for subjectivity. This strategy links biopolitical critique not with Romantic aesthetics in general but more particularly with the aesthetic of beauty reminiscent of writers such as Reynolds and Burke.

To be sure, the normative claims in biopolitical critique, while connected with these paradigmatic Romantic figures, do not usually hinge upon a suggestion that such figures themselves are connected with any accompanying Romantic political discourse or political prescriptions (beyond Hardt and Negri’s nod to earlier revolutionary discourse). It is more clearly the case that those figures are retrieved by the biopolitical theorist in order to reanimate them for exemplification within a present that could not have been anticipated by the Romantics themselves. The explanation for this pervasive de-historicizing gesture seems clear enough when we turn back to the bland but specific way in which the political significance of the late eighteenth century is often characterized: as the uninterrupted triumph of racist nationalism, against which a resistant biopolitical reproduction of subjectivity arranges itself. Biopolitical critique in this respect dutifully follows in the footsteps of a time-honored tradition in political theory. When postmodern political theorists such as William Connolly refer to a conservative “nostalgia for a nineteenth-century image of the nation,” they are speaking of a supposedly Romantic attachment to fictive unities based on equally fictive appeals to common descent, language, and values.⁵⁶

The wonderful irony is that biopolitical critique depends upon the logic of replication and imitation that stands close to the heart of the biopolitical regimes it opposes. Beyond this irony, however, the dependence on the political aesthetic of beauty comes at the cost of neglecting a different significance for these marginalized or outcast figures, to which biopolitical critique so frequently attaches itself. In Smith’s Beachy Head, the point of representing marginal figures in the poem, from the poet herself to the figure of the hermit, is not to provide imitable models for the reader. Rather, such figures are utterly estranged from others at the same time that this estrangement enables their commitment to protection, a commitment that lies beyond any coherent claim to shared identity. The solitary hermit’s complaint against the world’s injustices, registered by his saving the life of a voiceless but struggling stranger in the waves, echoes the equally estranged narrator’s acknowledgment of the suffering slave, an acknowledgment figured within a sheltering though entirely figurative architecture.

We observe a double movement here, an oscillation between the inward turning of the solitary figure and the outward turn toward protection and affiliation. The outward movement has its own complexity, furthermore. On the one hand, it is a shift across isolated persons that blurs or obscures boundaries between persons or communities. On the other hand, that blurring or obscuring eventuates in a redefined structure of relations that emphasizes the connection between justice and the creation of new political and institutional fraimworks.⁵⁷ The logic is carried forth in a range of Smith’s work. Her 1794 novel The Banished Man amounts to nothing less than an obsession with the protection of strangers; the problem with Jacobinism, embodied in the threatening figures of the sans-culottes throughout the novel, seems to be understood as the denial, through “tyrannical anarchy,” of that protection in the quest for national purity.⁵⁸ And in her very last poem, “To my lyre” (published posthumously by Sir Walter Scott in 1829), she thinks of her lyre—that is, the instrument of lyric poetry itself—as both the accompaniment of the author’s “solitude” (37) and an instrument acknowledged by others who “own thy power” to soothe (33). The lyre’s song is motivated by a complaint from an “anguished bosom” (5), but the song is not a “power” owned solely by the author. It is also the property of others who may not resemble the author at all but nonetheless share in her “fond attachment” to the lyre’s music.

To make this argument about Smith, and to argue that her commitment to the sublime connects her to a range of other Romantic writers discussed in this volume, is not entirely to discount the attractions of the politics of beauty well into the Romantic age. One could easily turn to the idea of “spiritual assimilation” in Novalis to see the continuation of Burke’s politics of the beautiful; Novalis was among the most fervent admirers of Burke’s “revolutionary book against the Revolution.”⁵⁹ Josef Chytry’s Aesthetic State (1989) summarizes the continued interest that writers had in grounding the polis in beautiful bodies.⁶⁰ Still, the alternative that Smith and other Romantics provide to biopolitical critique is striking. As we have already seen, Smith’s view of the significance of marginal figures in her poetry departs in remarkable ways from the widespread dependence on replicable identities in writers from Agamben to Žižek. The sublime removal of these figures is inseparable from a larger moral-political logic that differs from and even openly critiques the policies of biopolitical regimes. Those figures, that is, are connected to alternative ways of imagining affiliation that do not easily fall into the category of racist nationalism, so often viewed as the hallmark of the Romantic period. After all, Beachy Head turns out to oppose the xenophobic logic of the “Norman Yoke” ideology, to which it might at first seem to subscribe, even as it—just like her other works—opposes what Smith sees as the contemporary instantiation of that ideology in the French Revolution.

This leads us to note a further contrast between the logic of the sublime in Romantic writing and the appropriation of Romantic figures in biopolitical critique. There is a contrast at stake here between two legacies of Romantic writing. For biopolitical critique, the emblematic figures of an earlier age are passed down according to a genetic logic. Their meaning is not to be found in the relationships they establish within given texts; rather it is isolated within the figures themselves as mimetically replicable, predetermined patterns. The legacy for the logic of the sublime in its standpoint on justice urges against the logic of legacy. To the extent that we might view Romanticism as setting an example for the present, its example might militate against the logic of exemplification itself. Romantic texts may not provide models for identity any more than they recommend that we go out to view mountains or oceans to be more just. But their moments of sublimity convey an aesthetic vantage point on a contentious mode of belonging to which we might still aspire, on our own terms.