Understanding becomes a matter of time. (86)

“What just happened?” Tragedic plots have played out the temporality of a delayed understanding of one’s own actions to great dramatic effect, from Agaue’s slow realization that she decapitated her own son in Euripides’s Bacchae to Penthesilea’s fatal confusion of biting and kissing her lover Achilles. Yet there is a much more mundane aspect to the temporality of a type of impervious aggression hovering close if not inextricably bound to affection: the slow realization, for example, after politely responding “Thank you” to a compliment, that it was meant more as an insult. Calling this complicated entanglement of affection and aggression—or love and the wish to harm—“ambiguous aggression” and locating it in the contexts of flirtation, passive aggressiveness, and domestic violence is a theoretical achievement in itself; taking it as a conceptual outline for reading canonical works of German realism and modernism promises to open up a world of “drama” operating on a much more elusive level than that of the classical tragedies.

“Whereas we only notice domestic violence when it is exceptional, it by definition belongs to the ordinary. . . . The ordinary, however, elides us if we do not pay close attention to it, precisely because it is ordinary” (75). Paying close attention is Barbara Natalie Nagel’s most striking talent, her book contains ample evidence of that. Naomi Schor’s now classic study Reading in Detail might be the most obvious precursor to Ambiguous Aggression insofar as both projects look at works of an exclusively male-authored canon of literature in a feminist attempt to detect the male fears and fantasies via the details, the subtleties, the things easily overlooked, in full awareness that such attention has traditionally been coded as “feminine.” Yet Nagel also explicitly aligns herself with the contemporary discourse around “ordinary affects” (Kathleen Stewart), “ugly feelings” (Sianne Ngai), “quasi-events” (Elizabeth Povinelli), “microaggressions” (Claudia Rankine), and the “female complaint” (Lauren Berlant), thereby, as she declares, resisting “idealist aesthetics and its hierarchizing of what is important or unimportant” (13). She thus establishes herself as a voice in a discussion concerned with challenging the tradition of trivializing the things women deem worthy to speak of, laying the groundwork for what Emily Apter calls “unexceptional politics”—as opposed to the long-established conjuring of the grand “event.” A decisive wager, certainly, but also one that makes for surprisingly amusing reading. Ambiguous Aggression is, in excess of all its scholarly merits, a highly entertaining book—there is plenty of humor, suspense, and surprise to be had—qualities not exactly ubiquitous in publications of (literary) theory. This book will even have something to offer to those outside the field of academia, as long as they have an inclination to follow Nagel into the realms of the quizzical, the absurd and share her enjoyment of staring at familiar words and phrases until they turn bizarre, silly, or monstrous.

The book is also very much of the contemporary moment as it might well be read as one of the early—and still urgently needed—theoretizations of #MeToo. A phenomenon whose exceptional nature arguably lies in just this focus on the ordinary, the domestic, the quotidian, possibly juridically negligible. Let me quote a lengthy passage from the book’s first chapter, “Love Exploded on a Time Fuse,” which opens with a typical post–#MeToo concern:

What people who ask “can’t we even flirt anymore?” have not yet understood is that flirtation is not where you take a break from more serious business; flirtation is not the more innocuous alternative to forcing someone to have sex with you. Do you really think anyone who is after abusing their power will try flirtation instead? Those who impose themselves aggressively upon the Other generally have a terror of flirtation. This is because the real risk in flirtation is not so much to accidentally harass somebody but in fact to crumble under the force of equalization that flirtation brings about—the real challenge consists in being able to endure the (precarious, volatile) balance of terror. (20–21)

Nagel then suggests that flirtation is inherently “anarchic”—that it disturbs hierarchies and binaries and that it crucially differs from sexual harassment in its a-teleological nature: the flirt adheres to the logic of the “purposiveness without purpose” of Kant’s aesthetic judgment (21) and thereby would always resist a capitalist demand for an “outcome” or “surplus value.” Yet, I would claim, it is exactly this ambiguity that characterizes #MeToo on many levels: Who gets to decide whether a flirtatious remark constitutes harassment? How do you know what you are after and when you are “after abusing your power”? Might not one person think they are flirting while the counterpart feels they are being harassed?

In a project that has its origins in the volume she coedited in 2015 (alongside Daniel Hoffmann-Schwartz and Lauren Shizuko Stone), Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, Nagel sets out to establish flirtation as a term of indecision, as something of a “third term,” following a logic one could hazard to identify as deconstructive (which, for some, will imply “decontextualized,” even “romanticized”). She thus pits flirtation explicitly against seduction, the latter being associated with purposiveness, manipulation, even instrumentalization. The hierarchy is clear, yet I would like to linger with this decision of Nagel’s a little longer.

In employing terms like “latency,” “belatedness,” “deferral,” and after all, “ambiguousness,” the psychoanalytic idiom is tightly woven into the language of the book overall. Yet it appears that Freud stands as somewhat of an antagonist in the discourse on flirtation as well as that of domestic violence. In order to bring into relief what remains largely submerged in the book, that is, the contribution of psychoanalysis, I would like to relate two concepts to the discussion of sexual relation and ambiguous aggression: hysteria, and—hear me out—seduction.

Nagel remains critical of Brian Massumi’s Deleuzian approach to affect and skeptical, hence, vis-à-vis much of what goes under “affect theory” today. She insists that affects “with the nineteenth century become increasingly difficult to read, at least to decode—nevertheless, this does not mean that we could simply stop reading affects, contenting ourselves with ‘The Autonomy of the Affect’” (6). Yet this urge to “decode” is a source of frustration particularly for the male author who implores his romantic other to make herself understandable or to please stop misunderstanding him in his “pleas and mandates for a hermeneutics” (70). Nagel carefully negotiates the difficult task of reading closely without repeating the fury to decode she finds in her male authors. What their attempts at understanding and even the resulting countless misunderstandings ensure is mainly one thing: unlike a punch in the face, they keep the communication alive. As long as there is a “what do you mean?” or “this is not it!” there is need for a response. Jacques Lacan calls this “hysterical intersubjectivity,” as opposed to “obsessive intrasubjectivity,” a form of communication driven by a desire to understand the other’s desire and be understood in return, as well as an enjoyment in maintaining that same desire. The hysteric makes her issues your business, meaning: she will involve others in her conflicts, stage them as a power play and incite just this kind of entanglement that will prolong the exchange indefinitely. Which leads me to the second characteristic: the enjoyment of the hysteric—her desire is never to be satisfied; whatever you give her (attention, a diagnosis, a confession), it’s not “it.” In the chapter on “Twice-Read Love Letters,” Nagel poignantly shows us this in all its tragedy as well as comedy: In Kafka’s case, the pleading is actually quite unambiguously hysterical in the clinical sense; he keeps poor Felice busy with his demands for more and more letters and one begins to suspect—as did quite possibly Felice herself—that there can never be letters enough for Kafka. Fontane seems to be a little closer to acknowledging this dilemma: he is always disappointed in the brevity of his wife’s letters, which, at the same time, “lose their charm as soon as you get to the second page” (Fontane, quoted at 54). Not only does she not have what he wants, she does not even want to give it to him!

In making a striking case for a rhetorical inquiry into scenes of domestic violence, Nagel establishes the hyperbaton as the “master trope of domestic violence” (80). For it is this moment of syntactical suspense, of not-knowing, which encapsulates the “ambiguity of violence as well as the violence of ambiguity” (88)—all the more if it appears on the muddy grounds of love and cruelty where these acts will only have the meaning one is going to ascertain retroactively. Nagel’s contention that “understanding becomes a matter of time” (86), its “belatedness” is the common characteristic of all acts of ambiguous aggression—like poison, they take their time.

Nagel suggests, and she is certainly not alone in this, that Freud’s famous decision to abandon his early theory of seduction might have laid the ground for a questionable definition of ambiguity, one that would today be referred to as “blaming the victim” (cf. 28–29). The Freud of Studies on Hysteria established the affect-trauma model, which interprets symptoms as conversions of affects that accompanied an early experience of sexual molestation the child could not understand at the time. Later, in a phase of sexual maturity, these affects present themselves as somatic symptoms triggered by a recent event with the power to evoke the earlier one. Surrendering this seduction theory, in a famous phrase formulated in a letter to Fliess—“I no longer believe in my neurotica” (September 21st, 1897)—Freud came to shift his focus to the importance of fantasies for the child’s psychosexual development—a move that seemingly opened a Pandora’s Box of “she was asking for it” and accusations of fabulation.

One might wonder why Freud called his early model a “theory of seduction” in the first place and not a “theory of rape,” as John Forrester did in his argument for reading Freud’s move not so much as a break but rather as a logical development of his thought. Or, as Jean Laplanche did, pick up where Freud left off when he abandoned the importance of seduction by reframing seductions as “enigmatic messages” the grown-up conveys to the infant. Laplanche thus insists that while not all fathers may be perverts, all parents will impose their unconscious with its sexual “contaminations,” in one way or the other, on the child. Seduction, according to Laplanche, principally and originally confronts us with a task of translation—a task that, for the child, always comes “too soon.” Both approaches turn away from a limited understanding of “seduction” as a synonym for “rape” or “sexual abuse” and expand the term by formulating a “general theory of seduction” (Laplanche) or by taking a literal approach to the term: Forrester, for example, suggests that the adult is leading the child away in seduction (“Ver-führung”), namely, away from childhood. Jacques Lacan might have added that the traumatic potential of this exchange lies in the fact that the child is here addressed as an object for the other, as an instrument of enjoyment for the other. The famous formula “che vuoi?” thus comes to mean “what do you want?” as in “what do you want from me?” but also “what do you want to do to me?” hence encapsulating the traumatic process of being confronted with an unsymbolizable desire—the desire of the m(Other).

Looking at the word “seduction” and the German “ver-führen,” I would like to suggest to translate it neither as “leading to” or “leading away,” or at least not exclusively in this topological logic marking a starting and an end point, but perhaps rather in the sense of “leading astray.” Then it would not be much of a leading in any strong sense of the word but rather something of a “leading on”—a crime that is, after all, a predominantly feminine one and, one might argue, a more contemporary equivalent of Simmel’s “coquetry.” Simmel’s eponymous essay is indeed one of Nagel’s key texts on flirtation and as such serves as a cornerstone for her insistence on the idiosyncrasy of flirtation. But what exactly is flirtation? Do we know it when we see it? Do we know it when we’re doing it?

Nagel insists that flirtation is a game but a serious one for there is something at stake in it (cf. 20). Flirtation has “a far more radical effect than even the #MeToo movement could dream of: first, flirtation upsets gender dichotomies, which right now return through the back door in discussions around #MeToo that pitch ‘women’ against ‘men’” (21). But does it really upset those dichotomies? Isn’t “being a flirt” the quintessential female crime? Aren’t there sources aplenty, ranging from the Bible to the incel manifesto of Elliot Rodger, agreeing that the female is tempting, seductive qua her physical presence alone? Some doubt remains, to my mind, that flirtation involves a “queer role switch” (22) as Nagel insists, when it renders the man helpless and insecure before the woman’s “imagined . . . control of erotic potentiality” (22) (which is, of course, what many men tell themselves to justify their transgressions). It is rather a confrontation with the desire for the other’s desire which could be taken up in the form of a hysterical interaction in which both parties address this desire for the other’s desire, or, worst case, turn it into a game of “negging”—one of the ambiguously aggressive tactics the mastering of which constitute a whole other type of “game,” namely, the ability to make a woman desire you as it is cultivated in the “seduction community” of “pickup artists.”

And while a woman may be abusing her power in being “a flirt” as well as a man might be, say, Kierkegaard’s paradigmatic seducer in his elaborate trap-setting, the #MeToo scenes, as they have become so ubiquitous since November 2017, seem to have one thing in common: They, however “belatedly,” make too much sense as they suddenly relegate women—often from a perspective of a general accomplishment of “equality”—to their position. This is a position as historically charged as it carries a prospective truth: “this is how it has been and how it will be.” The power women supposedly yield in flirtation might lie in nothing more than the fact that it is impossible to symbolize their desire. A symbolic “lack” of which much has been made in feminist critiques of psychoanalysis and which Luce Irigaray explains by locating its origins in childhood scenes of seduction: “the father forces her [the little girl, N.H.] to accept that, while he alone can satisfy her and give her access to pleasure, he prefers the added sexual enjoyment from laying down the law, and therefore penalizes her for her (or his own?) ‘seduction fantasies’” (Luce Irigaray, Speculum, 60).

The deconstructionist move of defining flirtation by way of its ambiguity and its elusiveness paradoxically brings about a new, more forceful dualism, namely that of flirtation on the one and seduction on the other hand. Flirtation thereby runs the risk of losing its ambiguity by being modeled as an ideal. If I have tried to bring to the surface some of the psychoanalytic preconditions and submerged coordinates of Nagel’s work, it was to insist that psychoanalysis might help to avoid this idealization and purification of the flirt that would remain just as short-sighted as Freud himself was when he famously dismissed the “American flirtation” (in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” published in 1915) as a frivolous and ultimately harmless enterprise.

Additional References

Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jacques Lacan. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits, 197–268. New York: Norton, 2002.

Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

———. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957.

Freud, Sigmund, Josef Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. London: Hogarth, 1955.

I was ambling along aimlessly. The aimlessness I forgave myself wholeheartedly since I realized that we have reason to treat ourselves with forbearance. An intangible sleepiness came over my most tangled being. A broom is what I ought to have taken to sweep myself forward. I got stuck in the muck while gaping lovingly at the velvet blue of the sky.

—Robert Walser

“Well then, if you like it, I’m more and more unable to see your objection to what I propose.”

“I’m afraid I can’t make you understand.”

“You ought at least to try. I’ve a fair intelligence. Are you afraid—afraid of the climate? We can easily live elsewhere, you know. You can pick out your climate, the whole world over.”

—Henry James

Under sufficient pressure, it’s perhaps impossible to distinguish literal violence from its figurative complement. It’s seemingly in this spirit that Nagel’s eloquent study of German realism ends—quietly, disquietingly—with Paul Celan’s “grave in the sky” (Grab in den Lüften), a formulation whose harrow, Celan insists in a letter to Walter Jens, “is neither borrowing nor metaphor.”1 Appearing stain-like in each of the four stanzas of his searing poem “Todesfugue,” the sky grave’s meditation on the concentrationary universe suggests the paucity of our own terms. If metaphor fails to do justice to the formulation’s vertiginous inversions, the language of literalism no less comes up short. Poetic intensity haunts the interface between these registers. “The evidence for all this,” Allen Grossman writes, “is embedded in poetic discourse itself. Arcadia, like fictional world-systems in general, is always encountered at the point of dissolution. This dissolution is a stage in one of two linear processes. Either (a) the devolution of the ideal into history, that is, into antinomic system; or (b) the evolution of the historical, the antinomic system, toward the ideal or eschatological.”2

Nagel’s text insists on the ambiguity of aggression as a necessary provocation, since to insist on violence’s self-evidence leaves peripheral and therefore unremarked those intensities distributed so thoroughly across the scenic as to seem inseparable from the world itself:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped. . . .3

Ambiguity isn’t unrelated to the concerns of Celan’s poem, although I’m thinking here less of the unthinkable grimoire alchemy of our “black milk” thirst, what John Felstiner calls the truth claim of its “relentless quotidian cadence,”4 than of a spatial illogic buried within ambiguity itself. After all, the lactary perseveration of these lines doesn’t render choice between mutually exclusive meanings impossible so much as beyond election, much less satisfaction or dissatisfaction. By contrast, the “grave in the air” (in Felstiner’s translation) attests to ambiguity’s implacably unplaceable dwelling. Cramped, but not too cramped: a somatic experience of the sides of the grave, air or sky (in Jerome Rothenberg’s translation) calls our attention to the strange distortion by which ambiguity has come to mean one or the other notwithstanding the boundless surround of its prefixial ambi.5

My preference for “grave in the air” over “grave in the sky” lies in the former’s disabuse of the scenic in favor of distribution beyond normative sensorial apparatus. “We cannot perceive ambiguity,” writes Grossman vis-à-vis Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, “we can only gather or collect it from discrete occasions of manifestation and perception.”6 Emily Dickinson, a poet whose investment in hermetic precision may be only partially gleaned from the appearance of “ambiguity,” in concordances to both her poems and correspondence, exactly zero times (only partially, given the chasm between a desire for or interest in experiencing ambiguity and the relative terra firma of the word itself), appositely ends “I dwell in Possibility” with “The spreading wide my/narrow Hands/To gather paradise.”7 That Dickinson’s “paradise” extends an ironized version of Grossman’s “ambiguity” is suggested in the etymological constraints of paradise itself: “per,” near, against, around; “diz” to make or form (a wall). What paradise names, that is, comes into being only in the “narrow hands” that gather it, designating the already-fallen miniature to which possibility is reduced in our effort to grasp it at all.

As an Emersonian, it’s impossible for me not to understand the phenomenological pathos of grasping apart from Emerson’s heartbreaking meditation on “the evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest” as “the most unhandsome part of our condition.”8 Nagel’s study helps illuminate Emerson’s movement from this awful empty-handedness to the swaddled violence of Nature with which the passage ends. “Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” Shifting registers to the quotidian that is her principal subject, I think here of Nagel’s attention to the unspoken hand in Walser’s short story, “A Slap in the Face, Etc.” (1925), a series of detached episodes observed in turn by a narrator serially smitten with the aphorisms to which he reduces the world. To a certain extent, both the intimated hand and the narrator’s aphoristic mode belong to Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan, referenced in the Walser text’s opening paragraph:

Once again I tasted the new Twann wine, and saw an ingenious play at the municipal theater. It was awfully nice, the tiny auditorium. Looked at a new railway station, stroked the chin of a lady bartender. When feeling cheerful, one likes to act like a man of the world. In the play I was speaking of there was an actress who had nothing to say the whole evening except “Yes, Mamma”; she did so in every conceivable key. That was frightfully amusing. I was in the standing room, right behind a young woman. Since I had a suspicion her husband was in the immediate vicinity, I feigned indifference, remaining stoical and at ease. When the husband approached, he probably thought I was being quite proper. The smoothly delivered work comes from the pen of a person whom society let drop because of some faux pas. A peculiar pleasure, to delight in scenes whose inventor came to such grief! The entertainment that his talent affords you makes you drop into the most profound astonishment at the possibility of human metamorphosis. I’m speaking of Oscar Wilde.9

The aloof staccato of the narrator’s disposition registers even nominal experience as indistinguishable from the distilled scenes and epigraphs to which recounting reduces experiential substance. This first sequence of quasi-events (to borrow from Nagel’s engagement with Elizabeth Povinelli)10 ends with the titular slap. “No person on good terms with himself would care to enjoy his existence undeservedly; if things didn’t go badly for him now and then, he would feel he were insulting his fellow men. I asked a woman at an advanced hour: ‘Mind if I take you along?’ By way of answer she said: ‘A slap in the face, that’s what you can take!’ A car drove up, and she stepped in. When accosted, women have, I think, the right to respond with whatever crosses their minds. Plucky [Mutige] words from pretty lips can only sound delightful [anmutig].”11

Given the narrator’s tendency to treat textual and material arrangement as coextensive, it may not surprise us that the story’s slap doesn’t mark the text in any exceptional way beyond the brief lingering of it gestural threat. It’s unclear to what extent the woman’s rejoinder has its intended effect, since the seamless timing of the car removes her with all the convenient alacrity of a trapdoor. At the same time, the narrator’s inexhaustible superficiality makes it all but impossible to distinguish how little the threat seems to affect the course of his performative misogyny from the possibility of discomfiture (embarrassment, rage, etc.) deflected or otherwise obscured—“we lived,” he later opines, “in postered up times”12—by his willful translation of the woman’s aversion into pluck: as though even her disgust were configurable as another fruit for his taking. The ease with which his objectifying gusto converts her threat into the next object of his consumption informs the “Etc.” [Und Sondstiges] of the story’s title, daring us as it does to treat the “slap in the face” as fungibly unremarkable, no more nor less symptomatically expressive than any of the other terms left unnamed in the miscellany.

Not coincidentally, the unrealized hand that momentarily stops Walser’s narrator in his tracks calls back to the opening scene of Wilde’s Windermere:

Lady Windermere:       There is not a good woman in London who would not applaud me. We have been too lax. We must make an example. I propose to begin to-night. [Picking up fan.] Yes, you gave me this fan to-day; it was your birthday present. If that woman crosses my threshold, I shall strike her across the face with it.

Lord Windermere:      Margaret, you couldn’t do such a thing.

Lady Windermere:      You don’t know me!13

Echoing the above passage’s spirited confusion of giving and knowing (as Mrs. Erlynne will go on to say to Lady Windermere, “You haven’t got the kind of brains that enables a woman to get back”),14 the slap in the face at the outset of Walser’s text no less anticipates in its condensation the idiom of taking and being taken to which Nagel’s analysis of Walser will turn. The setup, as Nagel succinctly notes, is “a man and a woman deeply engaged in conversation, a flirtation of sorts, if indeed the sound of lyrical language is to be trusted. . . . He is talking and she is taking in every word of his babbling until, at some point, he utters ‘a certain little word’ (‘ein gewisses Wörtchen’) and the woman almost gives way under the weight of the word” (121). That what transpires suggests a flirtation but only “of sorts” is implied in the asymmetry of the couple’s discursive positions:

The young lady was virtually sagging, was getting noticeably smaller under the load. Under which load? I’ll let you know. She was about to beam. Otherwise quite a nice fellow; she, as I said, charmed. He, full of witty tales; she, full of desire to listen to his fizzing. In her eagerness not to miss anything she practically cocked her ears. Just then that word escaped from his mouth. He meant no harm by it; it popped out quite inadvertently. A quiet, restrained torment twitched across her face.15

Caught in the geometry of not one but two vectors of mansplaining egotism, no wonder the “young lady” sags, at once shrinking and growing further dense as though beneath the ever-expanding load of gravity itself or, at least, the gravity of her companion’s self-seriousness, even in the endless expenditure of his fizzing wit.16 That the man and the woman seem governed by opposing laws of physics seems less astonishing than the suggestion that the scene’s intractable violence is a matter of physics in the first place. Like Deleuze’s study of Francis Bacon, Walser’s narrator attends to the way the body of his fizzing counterpart “exerts itself in a very precise manner, or waits to escape from itself in a very precise manner. It is not I who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of . . . in short, a spasm. . . . Perhaps this is Bacon’s approximation of horror or abjection.”17

The word that “escape[s]” from the man’s mouth is BEGRIFSCH; in other words, “GOT IT?” For the sake of further teasing the queer resonance of Nagel’s project, I imagine in closing (such as that is) Walser’s amphitheatrical exchange alongside the opening scene of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts:

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.18

Barbara Nagel’s rich, deceptively compact book joins a growing body of scholarship on the history of feelings. More specifically, it extends an ongoing intervention within the turn to affect by scholars including Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Eugenie Brinkema, Mel Y. Chen, and Marta Figlerowicz, insisting that affect can, and even should or must, be read. There is much that one could say about the importance of this intervention for literary and media studies, and for the critical humanities broadly speaking. Among other things, it gives critics something to do. Departing from an ontological strain of affect theory that risks, ironically, reifying the very materiality that it celebrates into yet another abstraction precisely by declaring it ineffable, these feminist and queer theorists adopt the methods of phenomenology and aesthetics. By replacing “openness” with ambiguity, Nagel opens affect itself to close reading. In so doing, she also renders it a fruitful site for reading the social.

Ambiguous Aggression is making at least two innovations within the current that it joins and advances. The second half of its title announces both. First there is its archive. While the scholars I mention above focus primarily on Anglo-American and occasionally French texts, Nagel turns to a different and idiosyncratic corpus: German Realism. She does not simply apply concepts from affect theory to new examples or case studies, however. She makes the stronger claim that German realism helped generate them. “There are, admittedly, more common associations than realism when writing of German emotionality,” Nagel writes, referring to Sturm und Drang, the age of Empfindsamkeit and Romanticism. “But the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth offer more untapped literary resources for thinking about emotionality and affect—the literary contemporaries of Nietzsche and Freud, i.e., of those theorists who are still arguably the main influences for contemporary affect theory” (12).

This brings me to her second innovation. By defining her subject as German Realism and Beyond Nagel asserts a novel approach to the familiar problem of periodization. Against the academic norm of “cutting time into pieces” (3) she insists that “one period only becomes graspable through the next” (4). She is after “something that exceeds realism and spills over into the modernist era, namely a heightened skepticism about the readability of affect and an intensified effort to capture those new, confusingly ambivalent affective constellations” (5). What is striking about this method is how it mirrors her core claims about the processes by which emotions come to be defined: Namely, later. It is a claim that I have found fruitful for thinking about phenomena apparently distant from German realism, in the weeks since I have read Ambiguous Aggression—about ongoing social movements and the proprietary algorithms that mediate them. It is a sign of Nagel’s methodological daring that she herself “goes there,” briefly; her framework points toward many more things remaining to be said.

Within this frame, Nagel makes three broad claims about the history of feelings that strike me as particularly pertinent to the present. They appear tightly coiled in one another in the opening pages. The first, as I have hinted above, is that well-defined emotion, to the extent that it is available to us at all, is always “a phenomenon of belatedness” (1). The second is that this belatedness of emotion plays a special role in relation to three “contested forms of social violence” that Nagel will explore: flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence. What does she mean by describing these experiences this way? I take “social violence” to refer to forms of harm that not only arise from social structures but also structure them; that are not deviant but normal, and perhaps even normative. We might think, in light of recent events, of how the ever-present threat of racialized and gendered violence structure public and private space in US American cities, for instance. If we had more time, I might ask whether such violence does not create that distinction itself. As Nagel’s colleague Ruha Benjamin has put it, “racism is productive; it produces.” For now, let’s turn to Nagel’s third claim.

Nagel asserts that we can better understand forms of social violence by examining their mediation by literary form. German realism first registers flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence, she writes, not in spite of being a quiet, bourgeois, non-revolutionary style but because it is these things. The authors she examines, in a different way to their French and British counterparts, opened up literature to the everyday. What Nagel does not state explicitly, here at the outset, but strikes me as crucial is the nature of the relationship between belatedness, contestation, and literariness. If (named) emotion is always belated, this means that we are always working out what we feel with other people, including the other people who we ourselves become in time. Emotion is always, therefore, social. It is also always contested and contestable. Emotion is a name given to an affect by a reader, or group of readers, who have agreed on this much, at least for now. The ambiguity of affect can, however, always rattle what has been named out of its fixity. A reader can always take emotion back up.

In this sense, flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence constitute epitomes, not anomalies. These forms of interaction are particularly contested insofar as they attract more than average skepticism. The defining feature of at least the first two is plausible deniability. All three bring high risks of gaslighting, if not about whether certain things literally were done or said (although that too, often) then about what those things meant. You know how much I love you. The abuser’s answer to the victim who describes what they just did attempts, above all, to foreclose interpretation. But so does the insistence that, They’re just an X—a colleague, friend, whatever—in response to the (rightly?) jealous partner who has just glimpsed a flirtatious text message sent to somebody else. Literature refuses this kind of blunt assertion of authority over meaning in that it leaves—it is—a public record. It does not settle things once and for all but remains, inviting anyone who cares to come and contest its meanings, back.

What realist literature captures, in particular, is that the most apparently mundane feelings are not exempt from these fights over meaning. Indeed, such feelings may invite particularly intense contestation, in which the forms or threats of violence informing everyday life suddenly lurch into view. Because, in the same way that the abuser who insists they know you know they love you is issuing an ultimatum, the most fundamental exercise of power by the powerful may be to police what can or cannot be taken up. Power includes, perhaps even springs from, the power to decide who is making a big deal out of nothing. That’s just common sense, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro both like to say. It was just a joke. And so in claiming to know the “real” meaning of everyday ambiguities power reveals itself with special force, and reveals its arbitrary nature.

Nagel begins her chapter on flirtation by pushing back against the claim, which became common during the backlash to #MeToo, that her subject is trivial. This is a claim that writers Daphne Merkin and Laura Kipnis, as well as the signatories of a notorious open letter in Le Monde, made: “insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime.” These declarations generally took care to announce that their authors were not defending monsters. But they also said that young activists were overreacting. In the framing that #MeToo had “gone too far,” flirting became shorthand for whole zones of human activity that, these writers argued, young activists were illegitimately trying to politicize.

Nagel pushes back against this tendency to mark flirting as either trivial or obvious. “Flirtation is not where you take a break from more serious business,” she writes (20). Moreover, she points out that there is something dubious, and often a bit hysterical, about the very desire to distinguish between “clearly unambiguous” cases (like Harvey Weinstein) and permissibly ambiguous activities that, by extension or implication, should not end up in shared Google documents or the HR office. What would a “clearly unambiguous” case of “just flirting” be? Flirting is constitutively ambiguous. Once ambiguity is gone, you have moved from flirting to something else. What flirting is is, among other things, a shared state of pleasurable and slightly painful uncertainty.

Biologists have surmised that in flirting humans demonstrate evolutionary fitness by showing off their ability to manipulate complex symbolic systems, connotations, and double entendres. Machine learning engineers know that it is why flirting, like irony, is exceedingly difficult to teach software to do. But I digress. My point is: the constitutive uncertainty of flirting can produce authentic misunderstandings. A person may have thought he was only flirting, while his counterpart experienced the same interaction as threatening. That there will be some misunderstanding is a risk that flirting entails. (One way of seeing cases like the shaming of Aziz Ansari on the website Babe.net, a friend once suggested to me, is evidence of how digital media have disrupted the prior distribution of risk: Whereas it has long been understood that a woman going alone into a man’s apartment was making herself vulnerable, now the man must recognize the same thing.) By the same token, there are, to paraphrase the comedian Michelle Wolf ribbed at the 2018 White House Press Association Dinner, “#MeToos that work out.” But I am certain that flirting cannot be unambiguous, much less “clearly” so.

In her rather delicious critique of Georg Simmel’s 1909 essay on Koketterie, Nagel shows how the male theorist attempts to overcome the anxiety that the constitutive ambiguity of the act provokes in him by projecting his own confusion onto women. “It is as if the non-mastery characterizing flirtation as such inverts or upsets Simmel’s own argument; that is, as if the basic irrationality and lack of consciousness that Simmel imputes on woman ricochets back upon himself,” Nagel observes (26). The power of the woman in question comes only from the speaker’s desire, and yet Simmel experiences this very having granted power to a woman as an attack. What the female flirt threatens is his—or the idealized male—power to know what he wants. Like many men who were outraged to find themselves described in tweets about taking their subordinates to “creepy lunches,” Simmel objects to seeing himself seen; the experience turns him into a hysteric.

The apparatus that Nagel uses to analyze flirting, and ambiguous aggression generally, helps me make sense of one aspect of #MeToo, and other hashtag activisms, that has long puzzled me. So much of what they reveal, of the revelations that drive them, are not, in fact, news. I write in the midst of an uprising sparked by a viral video that showed an event at once horrific, and ordinary: the police murder of a black man. Other cops shot and killed at least five other men in the United States that day. Police shot and killed Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend, and her young daughter, just minutes north, by car, of where George Floyd died, in 2017. The horror is that these horrors are so ordinary. But then sometimes, a series of contingencies generate a new form of affect, and a different future flashes up.

To return to #MeToo: Even the most shocking details did not surprise you, exactly. They had joked about Harvey Weinstein at the Oscars, and broadcast those jokes to tens of millions of people, years ago. If his predations were secret, they were an open secret. It struck me at the time that what was really happening was not so much a revelation as a reevaluation of how we felt about what we already knew and, maybe, always had. This itself is not new. I Never Called It Rape, the title of the first nationwide study on campus sexual assault, published in 1988, says. If what we are doing in moments like #MeToo is collectively naming that we have never named certain experiences of social violence, then this raises the question: Why do so now? (Or then?)

Liberal disgust with Trump and his shamelessness clearly had something to do with the outpouring in the fall of 2017, although it should not be forgotten that Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly of Fox News took down Roger Ailes more than a year earlier, before even the Access Hollywood tape. But the entire thing was unthinkable without social media and the transformations of temporality, as well as sociability, that social media affected. Nagel argues that, as a genre, literary realism opened up new dimensions of emotionality for analysis by taking the everyday ambiguities as its subject. Ubiquitous, digitally networked computers are creating new forms of feeling by capturing ever more of the data of experience and reorganizing them according to proprietary algorithms.

Critics of #MeToo, and social media movements, often describe them as forms of “mob” behavior. But the digital technologies coordinating them are not, in fact, massifying; they are mass-personalizing. The novelty of the forms into which contemporary platforms are rearranging everyday life, now, is creating new forms of feeling about ordinary social violence. These forms will, in turn, inform new kinds of contests to name what the feelings they produce means—and will mean to the future.

The social scientists danah boyd and Alice Marwick have argued that digital networks produce “context collapse.” Online, various public and counterpublic spheres cross streams with an ease that would have been unthinkable in the print era. A Google Doc that remains up for all of twelve minutes can be screenshotted and shared enough times, during that time, to provoke an industry-wide crisis. The New York Times and the Atlantic can hyperlink easily to Babe.net. The metaphor has been interpreted as, chiefly, spatial. But #MeToo demonstrated that context collapse also happens in time. The combination of asynchrony and algorithmic coordination that characterizes social media produced new simultaneities. Consider the furor that ensued when a decades-old photograph of Al Franken groping a woman resurfaced and was almost instantaneously, globally shared.

Now now now say the screens that we now spend our days on. Nagel helps me understand this: Our reevaluations of what we felt, and feel, about our open secrets, is a way of giving new names to the feelings arising from new genres of writing, and media, giving form to them. I tend to think that one cannot judge past behavior by present standards as easily as software can lift an old photograph into a feed and replicate it across timelines. But the sense of belatedness that many women felt as they reconsidered normal aggressions that they had smiled through long ago does not discredit their reconsideration. On the contrary, it reflects the only way we have to name emotion, which, as Nagel shows, whether we like it or not, is also: together.

Even if Barbara Nagel’s Ambiguous Aggression: Aggression in German Realism and Beyond had omitted the “beyond” from its title and focused only on nineteenth-century texts commonly counted as realist, the monograph would still have made an essential and groundbreaking contribution to the study of affect and gendered violence in modern German-language literature. The strength of the concept of ambiguous aggression, and its resonance with theoretical discourses of the #MeToo era, is already proven in the creative and highly convincing close readings of Storm, Keller, Fontane and Stifter. It is a tribute to Nagel’s depth and breadth of insight that, with the book’s final chapter, she moves into the twentieth century and successfully adapts the concept of ambiguous aggression to systematically address of the most vexing aspects of Robert Walser’s prose. In what follows, I will recapitulate and further apply Nagel’s reading of Walser, and so will hopefully preview its potential for future scholarship.

In the opening of her chapter, “‘What Murderously Peaceful People There Are’: On Aggression in Robert Walser,” Nagel takes distance from a common approach to Walser that identifies “sublimated forms” of affect in his writing (103). Some of Walser’s most iconic readers have remarked on the emotional dissonance of his prose: the enthusiastic, joyful, “cute” tone of his prose hints at a concealed inner sorrow. Walter Benjamin, in his highly influential tribute essay, wrote that Walser’s figures have a “festive shine in their eye,” but are “perturbed and sad to the point of tears” (351). Benjamin’s most memorable line on Walser is: “weeping is the melody of Walser’s chattiness” (351). The musical form (melody) of Walser’s prose is sadness; the lingual form (chattiness) is happiness. The oddity of Benjamin’s mixed metaphor suggests a juxtaposition that is very hard to put into words, and actually leaves open the question as to which emotion is more fundamental. W. G. Sebald, himself heavily influenced by Benjamin, writes of Walser in similar terms as an author “who was so filled with shadows, and nevertheless spread the friendliest light over every page, who fashioned humoresques out of pure despair” (132). Here the critic identifies a tone that is at odds with the original feeling that gave rise to the text, a feeling of fear and despair yields a deceptively happy prose. Sebald and Benjamin both intuit something lurking underneath, a dark feeling disguised in jolly, ludic prose. A problem raised by such readings, especially Sebald’s, is that they risk projecting an identifiable psychological state onto the author, which can be retroactively deciphered—and in this way, might fail to capture how the emotional registers of the text actually operate. This is exactly where Nagel’s Ambiguous Aggression intervenes with a novel and utterly convincing solution: “Walser’s texts construct layers of affects—however, these layers are not hierarchized in the sense that one layer of affect would be closer to ‘the truth’ than the other; rather, affects cover each other up or hover between foreground and background” (111). In other words, Walser’s writing is a game of latency. It cannot be simply understood, as Nagel points out, using the paradigm of repression, since it is actually playing with appearances of repression. In the process, Nagel argues, Walser’s prose teaches us a variety of strategies for how affect can be channeled, disguised, spirited away, and smuggled back into language.

Nagel’s understanding of Walser’s game of latency opens up an opportunity to revisit some of the more unsettling and confusing plot points of his final novel, The Robber, which is also the final primary text studied in Ambiguous Aggression. Nagel’s reading excavates a thread of evasive aggression in the novel: the robber-protagonist provokes aggression of those around him by himself refusing to be openly aggressive. With this reading in mind, it is interesting to consider one of the novel’s most disturbing moments: the thematization of the 1922 assassination of the German politician, industrialist, and intellectual Walter Rathenau by antisemitic right-wing nationalists associated with the Freikorps—in short, by proto-Nazis. Walser’s protagonist is apparently overjoyed when he sees a poster announcing Rathenau’s murder: “What did the wonderful, strange rascal do, he clapped his hands, instead of collapsing in horror and sorrow at such devastating news” (20).1 Walser’s narrator, ever evasive and digressive, deflects a political interpretation of the robber’s applause by trying to explain that his joy in that moment can be written up to his happy memory (relayed over the next two pages) of a widow flirtatiously feeding him coffee with a spoon. But this deflection is never enough, and the narrator’s excuses proliferate alongside this longwinded spoon-story; once his “bravo” at Rathenau’s death is excused with a reference to Nietzsche that ostensibly preserves the viewpoint that the murder was a tragedy: “For is not according to Friedrich Nietzsche the witnessing, the experiencing of a tragedy a joy in a finer and higher sense, an enrichment of life?” But the narrator’s words elsewhere are dripping with sympathy for the proto-fascist murderers; Rathenau is a “mighty man” who was “defeated by few underdogs” (21); he was “shot down by very respectably-thinking people” (22). The narrator, however, continues to treat the robber’s applause as an unsolved mystery that cannot be unlocked, an absolutely spontaneous outburst with no discernable cause: “Still the hand-clapping remains a puzzle to us. The bravo-cry we chalk up to his sky-blue shamelessness. Apparently, it was the sunniest thoughtlessness” (22–23). The possibility that the robber shares the political desires of the murderers is brought up only to dismiss it: “Did the death of Rathenau appear to him beautiful, promising a better future? That would be hard to corroborate” (23). The narrator embraces the tactic of plausible deniability: dogwhistling and then gaslighting the reader, and so making intention behind the applause more mysterious than it might otherwise be.

It is no great leap from The Robber to this vocabulary describing contemporary neofascist speech of Donald Trump and the Alt-Right—Nagel aptly introduces the discussion of these in the conclusion, just following her reading of The Robber. She notes that “the rhetoric of white supremacy actually makes ample use of latent aggression,” indulging in “the comfort of engaging in aggression without taking responsibility for it. . . . Ambiguous aggression today means gaslighting and dogwhistling” (139). And indeed, today it is hard to read the circumlocutory discourse around Rathenau’s murder in The Robber without invoking these two terms that capture the venting and masking of fascist ideology. This is why it is so important to follow Nagel’s mildly iconoclastic questioning, at the start of her chapter on Walser, of the “innocence” that so many prominent readers have projected onto the writer (105). As Nagel writes in the conclusion with a citation of the journalist Sebastian Haffner, “ambiguous aggression actually enables denial, i.e., ‘to commit murder but to not know it’” (141). Walser’s robber is not a murderer, but his evasive existence in the equally evasive discourse of his narrator, is nothing if not analogous form of denial that is happy to abet murder.

The Robber almost seems to address and redress such an ethical concern—but it is only a feint. As Nagel notes, The Robber is a work where “ambiguous aggression becomes ubiquitous” (138). Even the characters who seem to explicitly condemn the robber for applauding Rathenau’s murder are themselves bound up in the web of uncertainty. In the novel’s climactic scene, when Edith (non-fatally) shoots the robber at the end of a public speech he has held, which was meant to explain his fickle love for her. When Edith is asked why she shot the robber, she offers a political explanation—and then retracts it:

“Because someone told me that he applauded the death of Walter Rathenau.” This statement awoke a certain admiration in those who had the good fortune to hear it. Edith seemed like the delegate of some committee. “Is that the truth?” proved Frau von Hochberg. “No, I just said it so.” (182)

For a split second, The Robber seems like it is bookended by two moments of recognizable political conflict: assassination and revenge, with Edith inhabiting a proper political position as a “delegate of some committee.” But Edith has only improvised her explanation spontaneously; her act is rendered as opaque and inexplicable as the robber’s applause supposedly was. It is, as Jan Plug writes, “mere saying,” which at most is meant to trigger a positive response in Edith’s listeners but does not represent any political commitment (Plug, 114). There remains of course also a private explanation for the shooting: Edith’s pent-up rage at the robber for (as Nagel notes) himself refusing to get angry (Nagel, 124). But this domestic violence (which is of course also public), remains overshadowed by the political drama that The Robber refuses to take seriously. Nagel’s Ambiguous Aggression points us towards a way to taking it seriously, not by ignoring its ambiguity but by precisely attending to the ways in which ambiguity abets violence.

The reading of this proto-fascist moment in late Walser leads me to consider a key ambiguity, established in the final pages of Nagel’s book, regarding the practice of historicizing literary texts. In her conclusion, in summarizing the historical significance of literary ambiguous aggression, Nagel speculates “that an intensification of ambiguous aggression or resentment could be taken as a litmus test for a more general rise of aggression, an aggression on the verge of eruption”—an eruption that occurred in Germany in the 1930s and is occurring all around us at the contemporary moment (141). In the next paragraph, Nagel makes an intriguing turn away from this contextualization, writing that “After this spirited historicization, it is time to de-historicize the previous claims and to reflect upon language as such and its relation to both ambiguity and aggression” (141). The voice invoked to this end is that of Werner Hamacher, who writes that “violence belongs to the structural unconscious of our language” (142). Nagel does not simply let Hamacher’s quotation speak for itself as the final truth, and gestures towards a possible historicization of his discourse by considering the extent to which Hamacher’s theory expresses a conception of language that is culturally specific German conception of language—a potential re-historicization of the de-historicization. In carrying forward the insights of Nagel’s book, I am inclined to take sides with Nagel’s historicizing path, over the structural one represented by Hamacher—among other things, as part of a citational politics that doesn’t give the last word a patriarch of German philology, who was dismissive of “crude historicization” and lamented the “antiphilological affect” of contemporary literary studies (Hamacher, 138; 109). What I see in Nagel’s book is an opportunity to historicize what has stood as one of the unquestioned desiderata of philological literary studies: ambiguity. Not, of course, in the interest of definitively establishing what every case ambiguity “really” signifies or thinking that we could somehow get rid of ambiguity once and for all, but for highlighting historical cases when ambiguity as ambiguity is a power strategy deployed from a broad spectrum of social and narrative positions to different ends—and not just the inevitable effect of language as such, as deconstruction would have it. Philological forms of literary studies are typically committed to an ethics of reading that vows to not “do violence to the text” through oversimplifying readings, such as vulgar historicizations and psychological projections. “Not doing violence to the text” typically means respecting ambiguity; defending undecidability and semantic openness becomes an ethical imperative. Nagel’s concept of ambiguous aggression—itself grounded in a rigorous ethics of close reading—provides the wonderful and unsettling insight that that ambiguity can itself be an expression of aggression; a sanctimonious insistence that ambiguity be protected at all costs can be a form of passive aggression; and that these forms of aggression are not isolated from the social realm in which, as Ingeborg Bachmann wrote, “war is no longer declared / but rather continued” (viii).

Works Cited

Bachmann, Ingeborg. The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977.

Hamacher, Werner. Minima Philologica. Translated by Catharine Diehl and Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Nagel, Barbara N. Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond. Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Plug, Jan. They Have All Been Healed: Reading Robert Walser. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Sebald, W. G. Logis in einem Landhaus. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002.

Walser, Robert. Der Räuber. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986.