Style in Theory

Between Literature and Philosophy

Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441159007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Theorie der Literaturkritik

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?' Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed. Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux.

1

Style as polemics

Giuseppe Mazzotta

We usually speak of the “spirit” of a place or of a historical period, say, the Baroque period with its contorted lines and its hyperboles, or of the Old Delhi bungalows and bazaars vibrant with noises, with baskets of peanuts and piles of ginger, and we know what we mean by it: the essence of that place or the genius loci. We even speak directly of a “French style,” or “Greek style,” to mean, respectively, the spectacle of country-houses, chateaux, ateliers, the Louvre, Provincial furniture, or the rugged landscape of whitewashed villages perched on rocky hills and the silhouette of the Parthenon. This sort of style evokes for us the look of things, the taste and unique quality of a whole culture, and calling it the “spirit” of a place or its style is a way of pulling together impressions drawn from architecture, sounds, ways of life, and values.

When we leave behind issues pertinent to travelogues and turn to an appraisal of style in related literary and philosophical theories, we are confronted with polemics, even when we turn our sentences into interrogatives. It is as if style, from the Latin stilus or stylus, meaning stake or a pointed weapon, never lost its etymological resonance. Derrida, for one, encapsulates the common concerns with the stylistics of our times by seeking to explore “la question du style” in an epochal modern thinker such as Nietzsche (Derrida 1979; see also Kofman 1984). Style, in this context, does not just designate the unique, distinct voice of Nietzsche. For Derrida, rather, his reflection is a strategy, a way of putting into question the very possibility of a fixed sense as well as the likely desire to impart a unidirectional intention to a text’s meaning. We witness the triumph, in many ways a liberating experience, of the style of suspicion. The reason for the questioning is to be found in the groundlessness of our knowledge and our beliefs. In this sense, Nietzsche marks a new departure in the style of traditional philosophical speculations on account of his aesthetic philosophy, his way of abandoning traditional metaphysics and seeking to systematically yoke together literature and philosophy. As is widely known, he found this mode of representation in part thanks to his friend Burckhardt’s studies on the Renaissance, but mostly in the aesthetic vision of the world expressed by the ancient Greeks.

There can hardly be any doubt that Nietzsche’s aesthetic insight inaugurates philosophy’s modern, radical turn, at odds with the metaphysical, rational abstractions of nineteenth-century German thought, for instance in Kant and Hegel. It is this aesthetic insight that triggers his project of reorientation of the intellectual, moral, and political tradition of Western thought. One needs to pinpoint the essential trait of his aesthetic vision. Over his world hovers a theory of art, which shows him, as The Birth of Tragedy argues, that we are trapped in a double bind, the foundation of which are two mythical categories of representation. On the one hand, we grapple with the vast display of illusions and appearances, namely, Apollo’s dream-world that is steadily evoked as the expression of surface values and as a meditative style. On the other, we witness the exposure of the “horror of existence,” the chaos of tragic contradictions and the depths or “abyss” of the will that is dramatized by the wild ecstasy of Dionysus and is expressed in a joyous, adventurous language of passion. This aesthetic vision leads Nietzsche to propose, among other things, as one can read at the opening of Human, All Too Human, the announcement of a new Enlightenment for the modern age. The emblem of the new epoch is a new style, a style to which Nietzsche refers as one of “historical philosophizing,” one which we call perspectival thinking. Or, in other words, “Everything, however, has come to be; there are no eternal facts: just as there are no absolute truths. From now on therefore, historical philosophizing will be necessary, and along with it the virtue of modesty” (Nietzsche 1997, 17).¹

The question of style turns up, in the wake of Nietzsche, in most modern philosophical speculations (as well as in Derrida’s own deconstructive project). Style is again a question for so-called les enfants de Nietzsche (to use the title of Sarah Kofman’s study of the Ecce Homo), and they include Deleuze, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, Derrida, and Kofman herself, etc. (see Kofman 1993). Within this philosophical ambit, style is not reducible merely to a question of techniques, craft, or to the power to wrap one’s thoughts in a sort of gauze of artificiality and eloquence. To the contrary, these representatives of the “French Nietzsche” (a critical strain that focuses on Nietzsche’s semiotics) grasp style as a mode of thought that reflects on the meta-literary aspects of narratives, that reaches out toward enigmatic utterances (under the influence of Heidegger), and plays with etymologies, puns, and bold webs of metaphorical resonances in order to eschew the temptation of metaphysics.

We could call it an extraterritorial, cosmopolitan style of thought, which apparently shuns history but which comes through as a form of suspicion toward what are perceived as superannuated, grand philosophies of culture. And yet, for all its abstractions, this newfangled stylistic mode of philosophizing coincides with a perception of the phenomenal, material, and physical realities of experience. We are all too familiar with some avant-garde, postmodern versions of philosophical style: Lyotard’s skeptical views of grand meta-narratives, Ansell-Pearson’s neo-baroque fascination with simulacra and artifices, or Roland Barthes’s view of style as a “metaphor” (Barthes 1970, 12).² The past, so they argue, can only be retrieved from a detached, ironic perspective. To grasp how much they all owe to Nietzsche’s inimitable and yet, paradoxically, exemplary style we should briefly look at the precise genealogy of Nietzsche’s own adventurous understanding of style: the traditions of pre-Socratic aphorisms and, more generally, the framework of the Sophists.

The term, from sophizo, refers to those teachers of ancient Greece (Protagoras, Gorgias of Lentini, who held that nothing exists, Cratylus, etc.) condemned by Socrates and Xenophon for their redefinition of wisdom or Sophia, and for teaching not the truth but the appearances of the truth as well as the strategies of rhetorical arguments to pursue them. Like latter-day lawyers, atomists, and Heracliteans, but unlike Socrates, the sophists treated knowledge skeptically as a thing that could be sold for a price, and, thereby, they severed it from any idea of a metaphysical truth. Plato hated their conjunction of wisdom and the marketplace, a sort of relation that cast religion, ethics, law, and politics to a matter of viewpoints to be decided by the power of one’s rhetoric. In our time, the sophists are viewed with increased sympathy. Their thinking that nothing exists, and that if anything did exist we could know nothing about it, comes through as an act of liberation from the shackles of metaphysical, abstract generalities.

There is no doubt that when Nietzsche asks in Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense, “What therefore is truth?,” he answers in the specific sophistical mode of the sophistai (those who possess wisdom). He grasps and endorses the power principle that underlies their ancient revival of eloquence. So, “What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after a long usage seems to a nation fixed, canonic, and binding: truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metals” (Nietzsche 1965, 508).

Nietzsche’s reflection goes on to acknowledge his puzzlement about the origin of the human impulse to truth. The brunt of the passage, which restates one of Vico’s aphorisms in his New Science, gravitates nonetheless within a temporal horizon. The metamorphosis of an originary metaphorical figure into a subsequent proper or literal noun takes place within the flow of time. The sense of the contingency and shiftiness of figurative language cannot but trigger a deep distrust against any idealism, against all illusions of eternity or omnipresence, and the belief in nature’s infallible laws. The reader, moreover, cannot but be struck by the metaphor of a “mobile army” of metaphors: the metaphor for the play of metaphors implies a war-like, polemical understanding of language. It can destroy or protect from destruction, and, as if it were a praxis, it can modify the material ambiance of the world.

The idea of figurative language as a polemical weapon and a form of power pervades Nietzsche’s thought. His polemics turn against Socrates, and it is equally well known that in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, as he focuses on the style of the philosophers, he arranges his argument around the idea of an opposition between two styles, the metaphorical style (which designates the richness of life and its affirmation), and the needy, ascetic style of the rationalist philosophers. Within this radically dualistic pattern, Nietzsche places Heraclitus against Aristotle, an opposition which repeats the original duality between Dionysius and Apollo, Euripides versus Aeschylus—and they all reenact the struggle between sublime imaginative, aesthetic beauty versus dry scientific constructions of reality. These sharply drastic, reductive dualities are certainly questioned by Nietzsche as he shows the tenuousness of conceptual boundaries. Nonetheless, he distances himself from Aristotle, who is accused of the intellectual crime of rejection of Heraclitus. Aristotle is acknowledged as “the greatest man of the concept”; at the same time, on the basis of his strict adherence to the authority of the logos and the “concept,” he attacked Heraclitus’ devaluation of the “principle of non-contradiction.” (I take these considerations from Kofman 1993, 18–22.)

The style of interpretive violence Nietzsche adopts, and he may well do so ultimately to argue for the desirability of an imaginative and intellectual openness over and against the rigidity of closed systems, is certainly designed to arouse the consciousness of the sources of violence in the contradictory assertions and values occurring in history. In effect, however, the “philosophy of the future” he advances can be defined as a way of thinking that opens up to an unpredictable future and leaves behind the narrow scaffolding of dogmatic constructions. Yet, his thinking still presupposes a belief in the existence of objective categories, such as the Dionysian impulse and the Apollonian dream. What determines the superiority of the Dionysian category over the Apollonian one is a question of the will to power. From this standpoint, Nietzsche’s idea of a style, as necessarily polemical, as necessarily the locus for the staging of clashing viewpoints, is far from being radical or new. Actually, it is rooted in ancient Hellenistic grounds and echoes not just the sophists but a whole tradition of philosophical theories of style that stretches from Aristotle well into the early modern period.

Nietzsche’s polemic with Aristotle, conducted in the name of the energy and affirmation of multiplicity, comes to a focus on one specific issue. He does not attack Aristotle’s theory of style. Rather, in his radical skepticism toward dialectics and all abstractions, he finds that Aristotle brackets the exploration of the complexity of human personality and suppresses the mythical origins of Western culture. If Nietzsche means by this charge that Aristotle did not regard poetics or what can be called the aesthetic faculty as the source of all knowledge (though, like Plato, he casts Homer as the very voice of Greek wisdom), he is right in pointing out the rational thrust of the Greek philosopher. Aristotle writes in the unabashed conviction that the logos of Greece, defined by him as the power of speech and reasoning, is the home of all understanding.

Accordingly, both his Poetics and his Rhetoric devote an extraordinary attention to what one can call an ethics of style, to the persuasion that style always entails a revaluation of values (Aristotle 1982, 1954). Aristotle views both texts as therapeutic of the disorder within language and the values it embodies. In the Poetics the judgment over the proper style of literary language and of the theater carries ethical and political implications. In the Rhetoric, his thoughts range from the classification of metaphors to questions about the foundation of good style “in the correctness of language” (III, 5, 1407a). At the same time, forensic and political oratory (with subtly ironic remarks about Gorgias), their rhythm, and their order of moral contents are treated with extraordinary detail. What particularly the philosopher puts at the forefront of his reflections is the notion of rhetoric as a system of assertions and refutations, as a game of opponents who plead in court and refute each other (III, 17, 1418b). Like rhetoric, which poses as a remedy to all differences, style embodies a system of order and, at the same time, it barely conceals the fact of oppositions and differences (the barbarisms) within the social reality.

In the Poetics (chapters 19–22) language (along with character, plot, thought, melody, and spectacle) is viewed as a constituent part of tragedy. The qualities of style—lexis—are listed: the virtue of clarity is primary. But the text quickly moves to an analysis of “an impressive style” (chapter 22, 1458), that which surpasses the ordinary and includes “foreign words, metaphors, expanded words, and whatever departs from normal usage” (1458a). The foreign words, a sort of an incomprehensible riddle, produce barbarisms, which threaten the clarity of the ordinary Greek language. Confronted with this stylistic crisis, Aristotle recommends “. . . a blend . . . of these ingredients, since the unfamiliar element (the foreign word, the metaphor, the ornamental word, and the other types mentioned) will save the diction from being commonplace and drab, while the colloquial element will ensure clarity” (22, 1458b). The confluence of two idioms, the assimilation of the “foreign” elements to the natural ones to form an ordered style, no doubt, reflect Aristotle’s ethical theory of the “median” between virtues and vices (Nicomachean Ethics, II, chapters 5–9). The ethical model for style subordinates rhetoric to ethics as if they were part of the same practical and political science.

Aristotle never formulates a critique of the foreign or the “stranger” (a figure that steadily recurs in ancient philosophical texts), but he is not alone in reflecting on ways in which style and language can cope with the intrusion of what is alien to Greek self-consciousness. Let me turn briefly to the famous speech of Pericles, the leading statesman in fifth-century Athens, as it is reported by Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War (II, 35ff.; the speech is available in Kagan and Viggiano, 205–10). The speech, as is known, was part of the funeral ceremonies held, by ancient custom, to remember and honor the soldiers who had first fallen in battle. Because of his eminence and widely acknowledged wisdom, Pericles was chosen to deliver their eulogy. Rather than directly eulogizing the valor and sacrifice of the soldiers, Pericles chose to deliver the panegyric of the city of Athens, of the liberal democracy it created and the values it promoted. These values, so he argues, are worth dying for.

In this classic of political oratory (the genre that Aristotle places at the heart of his Rhetoric), Pericles’ speech unfolds by joining together rhetoric, politics, and ethics, that is, by recalling the bare facts of Athenian culture: “I shall begin,” he is recorded to say, “with our ancestors; . . . Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look at the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity; . . . The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. . . . But all th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Style in theory: Between literature and philosophy
•  1  Style as polemics
•  2  Petrarch and the birth of style in the Collatio laureationis and the Familiares
•  3  Style, rhetoric, and identity in Shakespearean soliloquy
•  4  Style and history in Diderot and Winckelmann
•  5  Nietzsche, style, body
•  6  Crimes against fecundity: Style and crime, from Joyce to Poe and back
•  7  Style and arrogance: The ethics of Heidegger’s style
•  8  Style is the man: Meillassoux, Heidegger, and finitude
•  9  Style in communication: The hip swing of Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés
• 10  St!le-in-deconstruction
• 11  “This song to come, this reader to become”: The style of paradoxical anachrony in Blanchot’s “René Char”
• 12  V for style: Gilles Deleuze on a mobile cusp
• 13  Styling theory à la mode cixousienne
• 14  Theory . . . for life
• 15  Learning to style finally: Lateness in theory
• Notes on contributors
• Index