The untimely Geoffrey Hartman

Julian Wolfreys in a recent review of the excellent (and award winning) Geoffrey Hartman Reader says something we all have seemed to know for a long time now, but never really can fully appreciate regarding Geoffrey Hartman. I suppose it is the nature of the thing, which Nietzsche tried to show us long ago by calling it untimely or inopportune (unzeitgemäss). Regardless, Wolfreys makes it explicit: collecting Hartman's readings together, he says

is to be welcomed as an accessible, comprehensive, and perhaps even urgent reintroduction to a culture of vision, through some of the most perspicacious and perspicuous interventions in what we call literature and culture. And if this is a reintroduction to a culture of vision it must also be read as both a timely and untimely invention of a vision of culture. Like all the best writers, Hartman remains other to his times, and in this exhibits an abiding apprehension that ‘criticism is not the place where language goes to die’ [he is quoting Hartman], alongside a persistent demand that criticism should not succumb to a certain ‘narcissism’ [again Hartman] prevalent in much critical writing today.

I wouldn't say, however, that what has kept Hartman so fresh is that he resists, on the one hand, lending a sort of authority to interpretation (once it is interpreted, the text is killed off, closed, not needed to be opened again), and, on the other, lending a sort of authority to the interpreter--though Wolfreys is right to suggest both points. I fear even this tribute does not do justice to the the way Hartman is indeed other to his times. I find his continual freshness, rather, in the interesting patience one encounters in Hartman's writings, which does not have the anxious tone of a critic in this sort of double bind. To me, it seems to come from an unbelievable confidence that a responsiveness to history can produce. I mean history in its hugest, almost inhuman sense: that is, not in any (new or old) historicist sense of the word, which thinks it in terms of important dates and solid periods (that is, when they aren't being changed by the historicist--for indeed there is nothing wrong with dates and periods in themselves I think), and theories of influence, progress, and continuity (spanning any apparent discontinuity or, by stupidly asserting/fetishizing discontinuity even more than dumb deconstruction, preserving the continuity).


Open up 1980's Criticism in the Wilderness, and you will find issues there that, of course, are not perennially relevant, but come just about as close to this as possible--precisely because they are so much of their time. Hartman has a knack for what will be of interest in a situation, because he is always attentive to the duration, the historicity, of any event, and sees criticism as the attempt to interpret only beyond this horizon, this perceivable limit of historicity's presence. Interpretation beyond experience: this is what he praises in Derrida in Saving the Text, and (in an earlier text) this is why he sees it as so urgent (and so nearly impossible) to move "beyond formalism." What is "The Voice of the Shuttle" but an attempt at this impossible phenomenology? As he says in "Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony:"

The seduction of understanding through a fiction should provoke something more active than bemusement or suspended disbelief: it should provoke me to break, however provisionally, the very frame of meaning I bring to the text.

I should be taken to that horizon of sense, of what defines my moment and my comportment to the fiction, and from there, return while remaining as open as possible to what can come from beyond. Indeed, wherever he falters, it is only because he is interpreting his particular moment and from his moment too much (to be only slightly more specific--further posts will justify this claim--such is the case with his fear of the mechanical and the methodological in hermeneutics; his fear that "to methodize indeterminacy would be to forget the reason for the concept," also in the essay last quoted: this responds to a particularly crude McLuhan-like conception of the mechanical, though probably only because it has in mind Auschwitz).


So this isn't so much an attempt to escape narcissism on the one hand and objectivity on the other: even these are too local concerns for him. What is at stake is indeed, again, something Nietzschian (not touched upon enough in Deleuze's book on him, nor explicitly enough in Derrida's Spurs): the will to economize, while being precisely in the inhuman, the unexperienced, the unformed. The great via naturaliter negativa he elaborates so deftly in the early Wordsworth's Poetry is, when thought in slightly different terms, precisely this: the going down and under (Untergang) of Zarathustra, conceived as far as possible as an ascent, as a holding-together, as a formalism. Hartman needs to be seen--and in fact can't help but be seen (thus his freshness, his quirkyness, his disarming perspicuity and vagueness, his untimeliness)--as one of the few, perhaps, who indeed have somehow of necessity understood Nietzsche:

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched babble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand style--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...
-The Anti-Christ, Foreword

The supplement here ("And") as a step back--part of the step-no-step (démarcher) of that openness to what is beyond experience, at the limits of a time's historicity--as a holding together or binding of what is unbound... In other words, economizing in the grand style: this is what we really need to understand in (and as) Hartman's untimeliness.