Founder: Professor Wolfe Mays

Seize forcibly the wench for whom you feel!
Thus thinks a man. Women don’t rob, they steal. *1

‘Enlightenment,’ Kant tells us, ‘is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.’*2 Defined as emancipation from the traditional, the personal, the historical, enlightenment becomes a process of retreat, ever renewing demands that preparation and prefaces – theoretical holders – be provided for the appropriate interpretation of the traditional, the personal, the historical. Once hopes of grand theoretical holders with a legitimacy derived from outside of history wane, the promise of enlightenment is fulfilled from the inside, that is, via the employment of historical contingencies as pretexts for a critical retreat from historical contingencies. When the time comes for even versions of critical retreat to be understood as contingent, then they too begin to function as pretexts for enlightenment, pretexts that continue to be prefaced, but in increasingly empty fashion; the promise of emancipation is sustained by critical practices that grow uniform, anonymous. What appear to be opposed – strong and weak thought – are stages in enlightenment as the retreat of critical thought.

1. Prefaces

In 1816, following a now infamous ghost-story competition, a young woman of 19 began to create a monster. Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most well-known, though not most widely read, novels in English literature. Not most widely read, for knowledge of Frankenstein has usually been acquired via its many theatrical productions and, later, film adaptations, and via its consequent ubiquity in Western popular culture: that for this culture the name ‘Frankenstein’ most often designates the monster and not his creator is proof of the layers of representation through which most are familiar with this most familiar of texts. Even scholarly readers, however, are confronted quite explicitly with problems about access to the novel Frankenstein, given the existence of its numerous editions, given the collaborative nature of its authorship, given its multiple narrators and enclosures of narratives within narratives, and given the recent publication of the draft and fair copies of its manuscripts as Charles E. Robinson’s The Frankenstein Notebooks.*3

Given this, any notion of ‘the beginning’ of Shelley’s project is somewhat complicated of course, but ‘at the beginning’ of the project – that is, in the short preface to the first published, 1818, edition of Frankenstein*4 – there appears an intriguing incongruity. On the one hand, the preface explicitly places the novel within a contemporary philosophical debate, between materialists and non-materialists. Its opening sentence is:
      "The event on which this fiction has been founded has been supposed, by Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence." *5 

On the other hand, the preface establishes the novel as an exercise in entertainment, removed from the domain of philosophical thought:

     "The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader: yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding the [sic] enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind." *6 

This preface was not written by Mary Shelly, but by her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, who shared with Mary’s father, William Godwin, a range of commitments now often identified as ‘Romantic Enlightenment’ and all tending towards a belief in the perfectibility of the human race through the exercise of its capacity for reason. *7 The novel Frankenstein has been read and reread, and very convincingly, as a critique of Romantic Enlightenment, but of interest here is the manner in which Percy Shelley’s preface simultaneously establishes the novel’s potential for critique in terms of critique as self-conscious, theoretical, deliberate, and undermines the novel’s potential for critique by identifying it as a mere ‘exhibition’ of domestic virtues and ‘exercise’ in mental facility.

With the recent publication of Robinson’s The Frankenstein Notebooks, the extent to which Percy Shelley directly contributed to the writing of Frankenstein itself, and not its preface only, has at last emerged: Robinson estimates that some four thousand words in the novel’s 1818 edition were written by its author’s husband.*8 And, around at least one of Percy’s interjections there now emerges a degree of controversy: when, early in the novel and before he undertakes his famous task, the protagonist Victor Frankenstein listens to the advice of Professor Waldman, his Chemistry teacher at the University of Ingolstadt, we are now to read the following of Waldman’s words as the words of Percy and not Mary: ‘The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.’*9 Percy had, by the time of this contribution, already read a draft of the novel, so it seems unlikely that Waldman’s words were inserted to bolster a conviction in human perfectibility in the face of Frankenstein’s challenge to this conviction; such a short contribution so early in the novel could have little effect in that regard. And yet, that Percy should submit more explicitly for critique a belief in enlightenment to which he was strongly attached all his life seems equally baffling. This confusion aside, however, what is again of interest here is the mode of Percy’s contribution: its insertion of a theoretical position within which the novel’s events might be read and understood.

Responding to the rumour – often taken as fact when the novel first appeared in public – that Percy Shelley, and not his wife, is the author of Frankenstein, Robinson, editor of The Frankenstein Notebooks, writes:

If we take Robinson’s image of Mary as the creative genius and Percy as the able midwife, we can observe that at least one feature of Percy Shelley’s ‘hand’ in the novel Frankenstein was to establish the possibility of its animation within a paradigm for which philosophical thought and literary exercise are set at odds.

In 1820, Mary Shelley sent to her father, Godwin, the manuscript of another novel, Matilda, which tells a tragic story of the incestuous love of a father for his daughter. By the time of its writing, Mary – whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after Mary’s birth – had survived the deaths of two infant children, in 1818 and 1819, and the suicide of her half-sister Fanny Imlay (probably brought on, at least in part, by Mary’s elopement with Percy Shelley to Italy); letters from the time indicate that Mary was, not surprisingly, seriously depressed and Matilda’s critical reception has been dominated by psycho-biographical interpretations. But that did not happen for one hundred and forty years, for Matilda was not published until 1959.*11 Godwin was appalled by the manuscript and refused to forward it to publishers, as Mary had expected him to do. And, though she herself had a copy of the manuscript, it seems that she was brought around to Godwin’s view that here was a story certainly not worth the public telling. But why not? We cannot assume that it was the subject matter that offended: incestuous love was not so taboo a topic at the time, and had even been idealised as a purer type of relation by, among others, Percy Shelley himself.*12 A clue comes from Godwin’s letter to Mary, upon receipt of the Matilda manuscript, in which he pronounces the story ‘disgusting and detestable,’ and laments its lack of ‘a preface to prepare the minds of the readers, and to prevent them from being tormented by the apprehension from moment to moment of the fall of the heroine.’*13 In fact, an earlier version of Matilda – entitled The Fields of Fancy*14 – did ‘prepare the minds of the readers,’ not with a preface but with a third-person, framing narrator; the revision of that version, which became Matilda, dispenses with this ‘preparation’ and is written in the first-person only. In consequence, Godwin found the manuscript to be the mere indulgence of private experiences and, a century and a half later, its critical reception was still dominated by the same concerns: Jane Blumberg, for instance, claims that 
     

     "Mathilda is an uncontrolled, certainly therapeutic purge of psychological tensions and anxieties surrounding Shelley’s relationship with her father. Shelley herself came to see how inappropriate it was for public consumption, unworthy to follow the distinguished Frankenstein…[It presents] the raw feelings and unbridled emotional expression that one would expect to find in an author’s private writings."*15

That Shelley did, at least during and immediately after its completion, intend her manuscript for publication exposes to question the distinction between public and private expression – between writing about melancholia and ‘merely’ expressing melancholia – that contemporary critics share with William Godwin, and throws into relief the demand, emergent from Godwin’s response to the manuscript, that readers be ‘prepared’ and writing be ‘prefaced.’

But the debate that constitutes this distinction between self-conscious, ‘theoretical’ writing and ‘raw, unbridled’ ‘exercises’ was already going on about the genre of Gothic fiction itself, in which Frankenstein and Matilda are written and which Godwin so influentially modified as to found a sub-genre all his own: the Godwinian novel. Gothic fiction sustained a widespread popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is conventionally associated with the ‘mere’ manipulation of emotions like fear, suspense and horror. However, critical revisions of the genre – to which the novel Frankenstein has made no small contribution – point out the socio political import of Gothic fiction during the Romantic period*16 ; indeed, ‘the Godwinian novel’ is above all else identifiable by its turning of Gothic conventions to critical effect.*17 Thus, and in apparent tension with the suggestions of her husband and father that her writing requires an element of self-reflexivity in order to be taken seriously, Mary Shelley was writing in a genre already in the throes of some ambivalence about the distinction between ‘abstract’ or ‘philosophical’ thought and, for the sake of brevity, ‘exhibition,’ ‘exercise’ and ‘expression.’

However, matters are not so straightforward. An early instance of the challenge to conventional accounts of Gothic fiction, Walter Scott’s 1818 review of Frankenstein acknowledges the critical potential of the Gothic novel.*18 Not all Gothic novels, he says, are written as if ‘the marvellous is itself the principal and most important object both to the author and reader’; there is, as he describes it, a ‘more philosophical and refined’ kind of Gothic novel, in which

     "the laws of nature are represented as altered, not for the purpose of pampering the imagination with wonders, but in order to shew the probable effect which the supposed miracles would produce on those who witnessed them."*19

So here is still a distinction between indulgent or ‘pampering’ writing and, conversely, the employment of wonderful events as pretexts for the illumination of human nature. Which brings us back to Percy Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein, in which, following the sentence that explicitly places the novel within a contemporary philosophical debate featuring, among others, Charles Darwin, is written:

     "I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops, and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield."*20

One writes seriously, Percy tells us, so long as the events (and the theories behind them) of which one writes function as pretexts for the generation of a ‘point of view’ from which ‘more comprehensive and commanding’ insights arise, a point of view distant from ‘the ordinary relations of existing events.’

2. Pretexts

Published in 1955, Georges Bataille’s biographical and critical study of the painter Manet portrays Manet as ‘a man of destiny’ called upon to preside over the ‘metamorphosis of the arts’*21 that Bataille identifies with the demise of royal patronage and the accompanying emergence of the artist-as-creator, author of his own destiny:

     "Hitherto art had been the appanage of kings and princes; its mission had been to express an inordinate, unexceptionable majesty which, tyrannically, unified men. But of the majestic nothing remained that an artisan could take any pride in serving. From now on the men of letters, the sculptors, the painters who had once been ‘artisans’ were ‘artists’ and had nothing else but their own personality to express; they were their own masters, their own sovereign." *22 

But the ‘metamorphosis of the arts’ over which Bataille has Manet preside is a curious one. Much appears to remain the same. Under the patronage of the powerful, art was mere ‘rhetoric,’*23 that is, constrained to the representation of certain subject matter, of certain servile truths, of things as they were. Now, art no longer represents, no longer serves, no longer points to things. But this change may not be apparent, for there continue to be conventions of ‘art’ even if those conventions are now also in question for ‘art.’ Bataille says:

     "To suppress and destroy the subject is exactly what modern painting does, but this does not mean that the subject is altogether absent. To some extent every picture has its subject, its title, but now these have shrunk to insignificance; they are mere pretexts for the painting itself."*24

‘The painting itself’: for Bataille, the servile representationalism of patronised art, devoted to rhetoric in the public taste, is opposed by the ‘natural silence,’ the ‘utter freedom,’ of ‘painting for its own sake.’ *25 Subject matter, of course, still obtains; events, emotions, details and things are still there: but these are pretexts, insignificant except in their role as conductors for ‘painting itself.’

But how is it that the conventional elements of an artwork play this role? How are they made to accommodate a shrink from their own significance? Bataille takes as decisive in this regard Manet’s Olympia, from 1863, whose subject matter might be taken as central to the painting’s import, given its close questioning relationship to its precursor, Titian’s Urbino Venus (1538), and given too the confrontational daring of its central figure, naked, reclined, and staring straight out from the canvas at the unseen visitor whose presence is incarnated in the black cat, back arched and tail raised, standing at the end of the bed. For Bataille, these details are ‘unimportant in themselves’ except as pretexts, as ‘the outward signs of the transition from one world to another,’*26 that is, from the world of royal patronage to the world of modern artists:

     "All of a sudden the divine figure burst from the mists in which, unaffected by the human condition, the majesty and beauty of superhuman forms had once towered so high. She awoke with a start to the everyday world. Venus was heavy with languor; Olympia sits up and asserts her presence, shifting her elbow, gazing straight at us like the pert and very real young woman she is… " *27

The details of Olympia – the everyday aspect of its reclining figure, the substitution of startled cat for sleeping dog, the replacement of a distant maid with the black servant engaged with her mistress – are, for Bataille, all pretexts for something else, ploys for the realisation of a much more ‘comprehensive and commanding’ insight into the changed status of ‘art,’ its emergence from the mists of a patronage for which traditional conventions were crucial, to a new, assertive, autonomy. Hence, for ‘She awoke with a start to the everyday world’ Bataille would have us read ‘Art was shaken from its royal servitude into ordinary life.’

But here was a new problem for Manet, according to Bataille: again (in the very next paragraph) Bataille describes the changes that characterise Olympia’s relation to Urbino Venus as ‘unimportant,’ and again except as pretexts, but this time it is insofar as ‘they brought Manet face to face with a problem that had once seemed insoluble: how is the artist to treat the prosaic aspects of contemporary man?’*28 This, second, ‘unimportant except as pretexts’ is related to the first one, of course: if, with the transition from one world to another, art no longer waits upon the royal, naturally it now confronts the challenge of painting without the detachment from the prosaic that royalty guaranteed, of painting the prosaic, for the prosaic, with the prosaic. But this is not quite the problem that Bataille describes Manet as facing: the problem is not how art is to interact with the everyday, to represent the everyday perhaps, or to communicate with the everyday, but how it is to distance itself from the everyday. In other words, the question ‘How is the artist to treat the prosaic aspects of contemporary man?’ is, on Bataille’s account, really the question ‘How is the artist to maintain his distance from the prosaic aspects of contemporary man?’ ‘The prosaic aspects of contemporary man,’ the ‘ordinary relations of existing events,’ are, so Bataille’s interpretation of Manet goes, insignificant, pretexts for a grander claim, a ruse to make the abstract point about painting itself, an excuse for the ‘autonomy’*29 of art. Bataille writes:

     "Olympia was the height of elegance in that both its rarified color-scheme and the negation of a convention-bound world were carried to the same pitch of intensity. Conventions were meaningless here since the subject, whose meaning was cancelled out, was no more than a pretext for the act – the gamble – of painting." *30

She ‘awoke with a start’ indeed: Olympia reduced, like the aspect of her maid and her startled black cat and every other detail in the painting, to an excuse for painting itself; Olympia, ancient goddess and modern woman, cancelled out, no more than a pretext.

     "Thus was majesty retrieved by the suppression of its outward blandishments – a majesty for everyone and no one, for everything and nothing, belonging simply to what is by reason of its being, and brought home by the power of painting." *31 

Still Bataille is concerned with majesty, a majesty for everyone but only to the extent that it is for no one: one does not leave the patronage of court for the prosaic backstreets; one continues the retreat from contemporary life traditionally afforded to art by its powerful patrons, and retreats still further. ‘Hitherto art had been the appanage of kings and princes; its mission had been to express an inordinate, unexceptionable majesty which, tyrannically, unified men’; ‘of the majestic nothing remained that an artisan could take any pride in serving,’ but the majestic is ‘retrieved’ via a strategic employment of the ‘outward blandishments,’ of both the royal and the prosaic, to cancel eachother out and effect art’s further retreat. The outward blandishments of old-style majesty are cancelled by the insistent everydayness of Olympia’s attitude and pert stare; but the everydayness of Olympia’s attitude and pert stare is utterly absorbed in its role as revoker of old-style majesty. What is left is ‘painting itself,’ that is, self-conscious, academic, insights into the nature of ‘painting itself.’ Of Manet’s Ball at the Opera (1873), Bataille writes:

     "These men in their top hats and the constumed women with them are only a hair’s breadth from the vulgarity of the cartoons featured in the lighter journals of the period. If they are saved from cheapness, it is only thanks to that active, constructive indifference to the subject typical of Manet, by which he reduced them to mere pretexts for his picture. Their grave dignity resides in their very meaninglessness, brilliantly, masterfully accentuated by an art that turns their frivolity into the byways of profundity." *32 

3. Philosophy

Can philosophy be ‘constructive’? *33 This is perhaps the question with which philosophical hermeneutics is concerned. That is, can philosophy – once we acknowledge what Gadamer calls the ‘effectivity’ of history in all understanding – do something other than undermine the naïve justificatory edifices of old by exposing their misguided reliance upon the alleged a prioricity of philosophical foundations? Can philosophy tell us, for example, what to do, or at least how to do it, and not simply what not to do, and how not to do it? Or must we rely upon other resources – tradition, society, intuition? – for guidance in being constructive? And, if so, what is the relation of philosophy to these other resources? Gianni Vattimo is certain at least of this:

    " [T]he realization that the credibility of first principles has melted away does not transmute into the assumption that the only absolutes left are our historical condition and our membership in a community. " *34

Remaining to us still is the chance for a critical (a philosophical?) perspective that is not identical with any particular historical condition or community, though it no longer has grounds of its own from which to adopt this perspective on particular conditions and communities.

For Vattimo, it is the decline of philosophy that is vital here; more particularly, the keeping of philosophy’s decline in our sights, ‘as our beacon’ *35:

     "The history of the dissolution of metaphysics, and in general of the reduction of the sacred to human dimensions, has its own logic, to which we belong and which supplies us, in the absence of eternal truths, with the only guide we have for arguing rationally and orienting ourselves in the matter of ethical choice.*36

Alongside our social, political, economic, legal practices, there runs – as their ‘rhetorical accessory’*37 – a ‘typology’*38 of theoretical holders and their dissolutions, which does not yield any new critical insight (does not ‘harden into a metaphysics’ *39) but, if we stay with the logic of dissolutions rather than move on to something new, gives us a perspective on social, political, economic, legal practices that is not identical with the condition or community in which they unfold. What is the nature of this perspective, if it does not rest upon new critical grounds? It is summarized in the ‘sole criterion: no silencing’*40 – no peremptory closing off of others’ chance to be heard. This criterion emerges from the history of the dissolutions of philosophical efforts to determine the bounds of what can be heard, but does not amount to a new, ‘hard,’ theoretical holder because, as Vattimo puts it, ‘there are no positive reasons here’*41 for adopting it. No positive reasons, for it is adopted on negative grounds, that is, on the grounds of the history of the dissolutions of attempts to found insights on positive grounds: these attempts, if kept in our sights, function as pretexts for a perspective that does not, for this reason, require grounds of its own.

Weak philosophy, then, is weak because it operates with the weakest principle of all (‘no silencing’ – a Kantian style imperative but ‘stripped of dogma’*42 ) with the weakest legitimacy of all (instead of reasons for its justification, we have pretexts for it in past philosophical criticisms of previous philosophical edifices). Weak philosophy is weak, because it relativises conditions and communities without predetermining the outcome of that relativisation in any manner whatsoever (this is the beauty of hermeneutical circles of interpretation; how one gets into a circle does not matter much). Weak philosophy constructs, but only weakly, merely by regulating practices towards openness and inclusiveness and away from hardness and intolerance. It is weak so as to provide perspective without prejudice; weak because ‘theory’ is now worth ‘little’*43 (even ‘theory’ is historically effected); weak because the reason for this (human historicity) can be neither satisfied nor ignored; weak, not from weakness but from conviction and compassion: conviction that philosophical edifices, and the philosophical dissolutions of those edifices, are subject to historical conditions, but compassion still for the history of philosophical edifices and their dissolutions, which prevents our ‘new’ weak philosophical sensibility from hardening into anything else. Conviction keeps us from returning to the substance of past insights, from repeating their naivety with regard to history; compassion for their dissolution keeps us from going forward too boldly with a new substantial insight to take their place. Weak philosophy, then, uses the only available material for philosophical constructions: the dissolutions of attempts at strong philosophy, which give us, not positive reasons, but pretexts for a compassionate ‘no silencing’ and all that follows from it.

In his contribution to Weakening Philosophy, the 2007 collection of essays in honour of Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann points out that ‘[c]ompassion is considered a forte of the so-called weak sex.’*44 And Schürmann reminds us that Neitzsche points out that using weakness as a pretext for something else is an achievement also characteristic of women.
     "All women are subtle in exaggerating their weaknesses; they are inventive when it comes to weaknesses in order to appear as utterly fragile ornaments who are hurt even by a speck of dust. Their existence is supposed to make men feel clumsy, and guilty on that score. Thus they defend themselves against the strong and the law of the jungle." *45 

They are, as Schürmann puts it, ‘superficial out of profundity’*46 ; the inanity of their ways, as Bataille observes of the ‘vulgar details’ in Manet’s paintings, might be the stuff of ‘lighter journals,’ ‘cheap’ and trivial. But, if practiced as a ruse, as a pretext for greater things, a certain ‘dignity’ comes to ‘reside in their meaninglessness’; frivolity turns into ‘the byways of profundity.’

But how are we to tell the difference? How to distinguish Manet’s Ball at the Opera from vulgar illustrations in the lighter journals? What is the ‘hair’s breadth’ difference between a coquette, superficial because she cannot be anything else, and Nietzsche’s woman, superficial because she’s profound?:
     "To Nietzsche, weakness is an invention: women ‘invent weaknesses, thus they defend themselves against the strong and their “fist-right.”’ Vattimo does not tell us how he views ‘post-metaphysical humanity’…I worry whether it will draw its strength from the invention of weakness, or from enfeebled – because disarticulated – versions of the old fistright." *47 

Is not the difference in the conviction that motivates our weakness and the compassion that sustains it? We are ‘weak’ because we are convinced of the historicity of all, even philosophical, practices; we allow our claims to be provisional; we try to accommodate opinions and commitments other than our own. And we are weak because we feel compassion for all, including philosophical, efforts to discover the truth, articulate the just, practice the good; after all, there is no longer any justification for silencing these efforts. Bataille describes the difference between a Manet and a contemporary cartoon in terms of the former’s ‘secret royalty’ (58). Weak philosophy too has a secret royalty: it is royal because it facilitates the further retreat of critical thought – the difference between good and bad weakness lies in its (meta)theoretical holder – to ‘a majesty for everyone and no one’: ‘a majesty for everyone and no one’ because it is founded upon a conviction in effective history that has all the hallmarks of old-style philosophical edifices (it has its imperative; it is a condition of the possibility of; it generates and endlessly demands prefaces, and their institutional channels (academic conferences, papers, books)); but ‘a majesty for everyone and no one,’ because it does not (allegedly) attach itself to any particular substance, but shows compassion for all, is open to all. Hence, its royalty is secret: like the emperor’s new clothes, it can be seen by everyone, and no one.

For Schürmann, there are two problems here: the ideal of compassion, goodwill, or openness to different views amounts to a weakness of thought that ‘comes close to abdication.’*48 It generates a hermeneutical tolerance, yes, but this may, as Vattimo fears, be ‘the most banal and futile’ attitude of all: what will hermeneutical tolerance have to say once all, out of compassion, have been heard? *49 ‘Constructive indifference,’ as Bataille describes the secret ingredient of Manet’s otherwise ‘light and trivial’ painting, seems to purchase its constructive insights with nothing more than its abdication of accountability, of interest, of commitment. The second problem and the reason behind this abdication – this critical retreat – is, for Schürmann, the desire still for something constructive:

     "Has ‘constructivity’…not been the very craze of strong thinking, that is, its ever new fad and its mania? How can weak thinking end up as a companion to the oldest deformation professionelle among philosophers, the rage to build ever new edifices of obligation under some ultimate representation?" *50 

I would differ from Schürmann: the desire for constructivity is not the problem, but the desire to be ‘among philosophers,’ when ‘an essential prerequisite of philosophy’ is, still according to Vattimo, to begin with an ‘“introduction,”’ in order to theorize the ‘“logical” necessity’ of taking up the topics one does. *51

I wonder at the ‘hair’s breadth difference’ between what Schürmann calls ‘the bad weakness of the strong sex’ still looking for old-style critical standards, and the ‘good weakness of the weak sex’ *52 apparently looking only for ‘radically temporalized’ ‘measures’*53 but out of a strong conviction still that the standards of critical thought must be majestic (for everyone and no one), and out of a compassion that makes it very difficult to discern the ‘hair’s breadth difference’ between the ‘good weakness of the weak sex’ and the ‘bad weakness of the weak sex,’*54 that is, between insights proposed weakly out of self-conscious, profound, compassionate conviction, and insights proposed weakly either because that is all we have or because we are too apathetic or too ill-informed to propose them in any other way. My thought is that the difference between strong and weak philosophy is that while strong philosophy forcibly robs its majestic position, weak philosophy would, from a much more distant critical retreat, rather steal it.

But who am I in all of this? Schürmann’s advice is that we take as our model another type from Nietzsche’s line-up, this time the ‘shrewd older woman’:

     "I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they consider the superficiality of existence its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this “truth,” a very welcome veil over a pudendum – in other words, a matter of decency and shame, and no more than that."*55

Shrewd older women do not make pretexts of the superficial, the contingent, the historical. For them, profundity is a veil placed over superficiality, and not the other way around. Skepticism is the attitude of the shrew: she tolerates the veils of profundity, even welcomes the decency they afford; but, if they come in the way, she shows them to be the veils they are, not with shock, nor in a spirit of chastisement, but because that is what they are, in their different ways depending upon the contingencies they cover over. Perhaps this is what one does in philosophy these days. Perhaps this makes one want to be elsewhere than in philosophy these days.

Because, even for Schürmann, shrewish scepticism on its own does not suffice. It requires ‘a masculine undertone’*56 to ring through its cynicism:

     ‘A deep and powerful alto voice of the kind one sometimes hears in the theatre can suddenly raise the curtain upon possibilities in which we usually do not believe.’ *57

Without this voice, our critical possibilities are entirely negative and leave us without any recourse (but force, perhaps) for being constructive, for making resolutions. Vattimo too is alive to this problem, that is, to the danger that shrewish philosophers do too much unveiling and have nothing to say about potential or actual conflicts in the world.*58 But the shrew wonders whether Schürmann can be allowed his alto voice, or at least be allowed it on the terms on which he introduces it. What might motivate this disembodied voice from nowhere, which supplements the veil-raising achievements of the shrew with intermittent curtain-raising upon possibilities in which we do not usually believe? Who might listen to this voice and why? What might its effects be? Is it another ‘theoretical’ voice, sounded from the tradition of retreat? And has it not been heard before: in Vattimo’s call for ‘no silencing’; in Percy Shelley’s ‘hand’ in the novel Frankenstein; in Godwin’s disgust at Matilda; in Bataille’s assurance that we can be ‘indifferent’ to the vulgar details before our eyes?

1 - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), ¶22.
2 - Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?,’ On History, trans. and ed. L. White Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963), 3.
3 - The Frankenstein Notebooks. A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Manuscript Novel, 1816-17 (With Alterations in the Hand of Percy Bysshe Shelley) as it Survives in Draft and Fair Copy Deposited by Lord Abinger in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Dep. c. 477/1 and Dep. c. 534/1-2), 2 vols., ed. Charles E. Robinson, Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, vol. IX (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996).
4 - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1818).
5 - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 1994), 11.
6 - bid., 11-12.
7 - See Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993).
8 - The Frankenstein Notebooks, vol. 1, lxviii.
9 - Frankenstein (Penguin), 47.
10 - The Frankenstein Notebooks, vol.1, lxvii.
11 - Mary Shelley, Mathilda, ed. Elizabeth Nitchie, in Studies in Philology, 3 October 1959 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959).
12 - See P. B. Shelley, The Cenci (1819), The Poems of Shelley, vol. II: 1817-1819, eds. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (London and New York: Longman, 1989).
13 - For Godwin’s comments, see Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 44.
14 - The texts of The Fields of Fancy and Matilda are held in the Abinger Collection of Shelley papers in the Bodleian Library, The University of Oxford, and are classified as MS Dep. d. 374/2 and parts of Bodleian MS Shelley d.1.
15 - Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley’s Early Novels: ‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’ (London: Macmillan, 1993), 225.
16 - Writing of Mary Shelley’s preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Allen points out: ‘Her account of her objective in thinking of a story appears to relate her novel to a class of fiction (Gothic) which has for its prime motive the generation of pleasure through the exploitation of fear, suspense and horror. The assumption appears to be that as a Gothic novel Frankenstein’s intent upon the reader is to provide pleasure rather than to instruct or to affect (influence) public opinion on important socio-political issues of the day. This is an assumption which works only if we view the genre of Gothic fiction as being essentially apolitical, a mode of novel writing outside of ideological conflicts and debates. Such an understanding of Gothic literature is, as most critics would now agree, fundamentally untenable. The Gothic novel played an important and diverse part in ‘the war of ideas’ during and beyond the Romantic period.’ Graham Allen, The Reader’s Guide to Frankenstein (forthcoming).
17 - Allen desciribes the Godwinian novelistic tradition as one ‘in which novels make it their business to present the apparently contradictory and aporetic nature of “things as they are”’ and ‘challenge readers through contradiction and unresolved problematics to exercise their own faculties of rational judgement.’ Graham Allen, Mary Shelley (London: Palgrave, 2008), 178.
18 - Scott’s review is included in Frankenstein, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999).
19 - Ibid., 300-301.
20 - Frankenstein (Penguin), 11.
21 - Georges Bataille, Manet (Skira, 1953), 26.
22 - Ibid., 26.
23 - Ibid., 37.
24 - Ibid., 52.
25 - Ibid., 37.
26 - Ibid., 69.
27 - Ibid., 69.
28 - Ibid., 69.
29 - Ibid., 36.
30 - Ibid., 82.
31 - Ibid., 75.
32 - Ibid., 95-96.
33 - This term is taken from Gianni Vattimo’s Introduction to Nihilism and Emancipation, the collection of essays that he characterises as ‘a first attempt to develop the discourse of hermeneutics in [a] constructive direction.’ Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics & Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McGuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xxix.
34 - Vattimo, Ethics of Provenance,’ Nihilism and Emancipation, 41.
35 - Vattimo, ‘Philosophy and the Decline of the West,’ Nihilism and Emancipation, 30.
36 - Ibid., 32.
37 - Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 91.
38 - Vattimo, ‘Philosophy and the Decline of the West,’ 25.
39 - Vattimo, Introduction, Nihilism and Emancipation, xxvii.
40 - Vattimo, ‘Doing the Law Justice,’ Nihilism and Emancipation, 151.
41 - Vattimo, ‘Ethics of Provenance,’ Nihilism and Emancipation, 47.
42 - Ibid., 46.
43 - Vattimo, Introduction, xxix-xxx.
44 - Reiner Schürmann, ‘Deconstruction Is Not Enough: On Gianni Vattimo’s Call for “Weak Thinking,”’ in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 126.
45 - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¶66.
46 - Schürmann, 126.
47 - bid., 126.
48 - Ibid., 129.
49 - Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 114.
50 - Schürmann, 128.
51 - Vattimo, ‘Philosophy and the Decline of the West,’ 24.
52 - Schürmann, 126.
53 - Ibid., 125.
54 - Ibid., 126.
55 - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¶64
56 - Schürmann, 127.
57 - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 127.
58 - Vattimo, ‘Philosophy and the Decline of the West,’ 29.