As philosophically rich as it is provocative, Audrey Wasser’s The Work of Difference is a book about many things: the rhetoric of modernist fiction, the lingering presence of romantic ideals in twentieth-century criticism, and the relevance of Deleuze’s ontology to thinking about the production of literary works. It is also, as I read it, a book about Kant and his reception. Wasser’s central claim is that the experimental writing of early German romanticism, especially as this writing engaged with the system-building philosophy of its time, left us with a legacy that continues to control the way we think about literary newness, literary form, and the relationship between literature and truth” (2). The argument demands of literary critics a sustained rethinking of their relationship to the intellectual line inaugurated by Kant and directed towards literature by romanticism. As Wasser shows, through close and convincing analyses of texts by Cleanth Brooks, Maurice Blanchot, and others, the basic conceptual coordinates of modern criticism—that is, a reliance on certain notions of subjectivity, autonomy, intention, possibility, and reflection—were set in the Kantian-romantic moment. Even more striking, Wasser demonstrates that many shortcomings of modern criticism can also be traced back to Kant and his romantic followers. Thus, the failure of twentieth-century criticism to satisfactorily address how literary works come to be is actually a failure latent in Kantian-romantic thought.

My response will begin by reconstructing this important argument. I agree with Wasser about the romantic premises of much critical practice. I also find myself in sympathy with her aim of articulating a new ontology of literary production. Indeed, the question of genesis, or of the “production of the new” (6), seems to me both essential and in desperate need of the reorientation undertaken here. (Among its many virtues, Wasser’s book shows that such themes can be treated without ever appealing to an indeterminate “vibrancy” of matter.) I hesitate, however, to affirm the call for “a non-romantic theory of literature” (3), especially as the basis for a rethinking of literary production. This is not because, as Paul de Man once argued, romanticism has dismantled in advance all of our genetic narratives. Rather, it is because romanticism, under the guise of the philosophy of nature, offers significant resources for thinking about these precise problems of genesis and production. In the later part of my response, I signal some points of contact between Wasser’s project and the romanticism it would leave behind.

What are the limits of Kantianism and how do they condition the work of critics in the twentieth century and today? For Wasser, the answers to this question are several. First of all, the romantic adoption of Kant’s basic conceptual framework, with its separations and mediations between freedom and necessity, reflection and production, art and nature, has made it impossible to pose the question of literature’s genesis. This is a point worth dwelling on. When Kant proposes, in the third Critique, that aesthetic and teleological judgments mediate between our moral and intellectual freedom and the necessity of the natural world, he offers up the experience of beauty as a response to our most pressing philosophical needs. The Jena romantics in particular understood this to mean that aesthetics is the highest form of thought. Indeed, for Friedrich and August Schlegel, Novalis, and others, Kant legitimated “a model of literary form as speculation” (4). As Wasser demonstrates, through a subtle reading of the Athenaeum Fragments, romanticism transforms Kant’s aesthetics into a theory of literature as the completion of philosophy. Thus, she writes, “the true innovation of romanticism takes place in literature for philosophy” (26).

The problem with this romantic innovation is that it merely relocates all of the oppositions supposed to be overcome by the aesthetic. By identifying the literary fragment as a reflection of the absolute, as evidence of an underlying unity and herald of a “total Work” to come (30), the romantics assign to literature an infinite and impossible task. Through its very presence, the fragment obscures the absolute it is intended to evoke. Even more important, in insisting on the paradoxical and self-reflexive nature of the fragmentary work—on its incompletion and its infinitude, its partiality and its autonomy, its need of a critic or reader and its spontaneous self-production—romanticism reiterates the oppositions it aims to transcend. According to Wasser’s lucid exposition, “in reflecting on itself and in giving itself to reflection, the work attempts to approach a reconciliation of the philosophical conflict between necessity and freedom, form and formation, that I traced back to Kant’s conception of the subject. In fact, this model of the work succeeds only in perpetuating—indeed, in making absolute—the terms of this tension” (37). Since romanticism’s encounter with Kant, the theory of literature has struggled to think its way out of these opposing categories.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the twentieth century’s failed efforts to explain literary production. Tracing familiar romantic binaries in the New Critics, Blanchot, and Derrida, Wasser masterfully shows how each draws up before and finds unanswerable “the question of how to relate an autonomous structure to its genesis, or how to relate the autonomy of a work to the necessity of the causal relationship that produces it” (66). Whenever literary theory presupposes a divide between freedom and necessity, this will be its fate.

This leads us to the book’s second major point about the limits of Kantianism. It is related to, but more fundamental, than the first, and it emerges most clearly in the final chapter, on Gertrude Stein. “To think the new is the task of any contemporary philosophy of art,” Wasser reiterates (154). As we have seen, by opposing the work’s freedom to its necessary contexts and causes, Kantian-romantic thought cannot grasp the emergence of new works. But the problem is greater than a single conceptual opposition. Drawing on Deleuze, Wasser now takes aim at Kant’s entire manner of “conceptual determination.” As marshaled by Kant and his romantic followers, she argues, “concepts absorb the singular—they absorb the truly new—into a preexisting system of representation.” In other words, in Kantian transcendental philosophy, “the real is limited by a priori forms (space and time, as well as the categories that depend on them), which are granted primacy over sense experience, determining in advance the texture and consistency experience will have, and assuring its conformity to a transcendental subject envisioned as purely receptive” (155). No new work or aesthetic experience is ever thinkable in the terms of a system where, Wasser contends, the limits of experience are set in advance.

So, we began with the division between freedom and necessity, only to discover that the problem is really one of possible experience and its forms. But as Kant himself suggests, in the Critique of Pure Reason, these are perhaps two ways of talking about the same thing: the categories, or “the original pure concepts of synthesis that the understanding contains a priori” (A80/B106). Now Kant contends that, for us, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, necessity and contingency are all irreducible functions of the understanding. They render our experience of empirical reality coherent. Freedom is not a category of the understanding but a “pure transcendental idea”; it exceeds experience, yet it still plays a powerful explanatory role (A532-4/B560-2). These are together the precise concepts and oppositions that Wasser finds constraining modern criticism. She therefore asks, again with Deleuze, if experience might be thought differently, in a way that would make room for the new.

Others have objected to Kant’s table of categories. Hegel, for instance, claims in the Encyclopaedia Logic, “We are all well aware that Kant’s philosophy took the easy way in its finding of the categories” and it simply appealed to “the various kinds of judgment already specified empirically in the traditional logic” (84). For Hegel, the table of categories is basically arbitrary and constraining in its formalism. It remains for later idealism to deduce the categories of thought in their real necessity; idealism must take a genetic perspective. For Wasser too, as we have seen, the problem of genesis is central. Accordingly, she looks to the genetic ontologies of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Deleuze, an avowedly non-Kantian intellectual line, for new conceptual tools. In these thinkers, Wasser seeks the metaphysical basis for “a ‘more profound aesthetic’ . . . [one that] would accord a creative priority to experience itself, granting it the power to compose characteristic and local forms ‘step by step’” (155). Only such an aesthetic would explain the emergence of new literary works and experiences.

Just before her compelling account of the “differential production” of literary works, Wasser draws an interesting biological analogy. Past theories of literary production, she remarks, have followed the logic of either “preformism” or “spontaneous creation” (75). These opposing biological theories, prevalent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both sought to account for the emergence and development of organic beings. While preformism assumed the existence of minuscule seeds, in which all the parts of a fully grown organism were contained in miniature, spontaneous generation saw organic life as a contingent product of inanimate matter. Wasser is right, I think, to point out the persistent, incompatible logics at work here. To reduce a work to its context or to its author’s intention is to rely on a kind of preformism; to sever a work from its preexisting causes is to propose a spontaneous generation. Wasser, however, refuses this “false choice, a choice premised on a reductive opposition between the Being and Non-Being of causation” (75). Instead, she proposes “an account of the problematic genesis of literary works” (76), premised on the work’s emergence from and its ongoing differential relation to the field of problems that condition it. Process, individuation, and experiment are key.

Rather than restate Wasser’s own theory of the literary work, I’ll close by drawing a few more links to the Kantian-romantic moment. I began by noting that romanticism might actually help us think about generation and production. Even before encountering the biological analogies discussed above, I wondered as I read if the romantic philosophy of nature might resonate with Wasser’s project. What would happen if, for “problematic genesis,” we were to read “epigenesis,” that conceptual cornerstone of romantic biology? In the third Critique, Kant invokes epigenesis to resolve the deadlock between preformation and spontaneous, or “equivocal,” generation: “For in considering those things whose origin can be conceived only in terms of a causality of purposes, this theory, at least as far as propagation is concerned, regards nature as itself producing them rather than as merely developing them,” he writes (311). Epigenesis attributes a “formative impulse” to living beings, a drive by which they emerge and evolve in unprecedented ways. In the Critique of Pure Reason, it also serves as an analogy for the workings of the categories themselves. Neither preformed by God nor derived from experience in a spontaneous generation, the categories of the understanding dynamically unfold according to “a system of epigenesis, as it were, of pure reason” (B167). In moments such as these, Kant’s categories seem surprisingly lively, as they respond to intuitions and enter into new configurations.

It is, however, only in Friedrich Schelling’s thought that epigenesis takes on a truly central role. There are powerful affinities to be explored between Schelling’s philosophy of nature and Wasser’s theory of problematic genesis. For Schelling, writing in the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, “all formation occurs through epigenesis” (48)—from the first primal fluids and inorganic forces to the highest expressions of consciousness. The formative impulse invoked by Kant as a regulative explanatory principle becomes a constitutive part of reality. More fundamental than any of the romantic oppositions detailed above, Schelling’s non-teleological formative drive strongly evokes Deleuze’s and Wasser’s “creativity of the real” (155). I cite just one particularly apt formulation, in which the opposition of freedom and necessity is at stake:

The concept of the “formative drive” contains, 1) Freedom. Freedom is in the organic product because no simple productivity operates here, but a compound one, through which the appearance of freedom comes in the process of production. The individual action cannot produce anything in this antagonism that is in accordance with its nature; it is intensified to a higher productivity through the limitation in which it exists. However, 2) that freedom cannot be lawlessness. Although each individual action produces what it would not produce according to its nature alone, what it would necessarily produce if left to itself, then in this antagonism it cannot produce anything other than precisely that which it does produce.—To this extent, therefore, the product is again a necessary one. Thus, unification of freedom and necessity. (48)

Here, Schelling outlines a theory of production that weaves together free action and expression with the necessity of a causal context. In the generative relations between impulse and environment, formative intention and formed product, we discover the grounds for the necessary genesis of an autonomous object. This process is what Schelling calls “epigenesis.” As I noted above, it traverses the real and undoes the distinction between natural and artistic production. Indeed, Schelling’s later philosophies of art and mythology insist on just this. So, in closing, a question: might we still be thinking with romanticism about the epigenesis of the work?

Bibliography

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets et al. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

———. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Schelling, F. W. J. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Translated by Keith R. Peterson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Wasser, Audrey. The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Audrey Wasser has produced what has become so rare and wonderful in the present field of literary studies—an original work of literary theory. I confess immediately to being guilty of nostalgia for a time when at least it seemed as though this kind of work formed the pinnacle of ambition for literary scholars, when attention to form and thought constituted in clear terms what counts as the production of new knowledge in the discipline. It is uncontroversial to say now that this is not the case, and that even the originator and last great holdout of literary theory, comparative literature, has shifted as a discipline to honor historical, linguistic, and national particularity, even in comparative terms, over grand theoretical claims. Wasser’s book, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, provides a welcome response to this turn, and demonstrates how superb knowledge of form in literary history can be marshaled for significant theoretical insight.

That insight resides in how Wasser moves from what she calls “the problem of the new” to the essence of literature itself. She proves throughout the volume that to tackle the question of the new in explicitly conceptual turns is required to understand the question of what literature is. Her stated aim is “to articulate a non-romantic theory of literature” (3), which she achieves (and she does achieve it) only through a faithful rendering of romantic and modernist theories of literature as they are themselves articulated in response to the question of newness. At stake is how contemporary theories of literature have lost touch with the genealogy of their assumptions, and in particular how the metaphysical implications of Romantic conceptions of the literary are unacknowledged but crucial to the concept of the literary as it functions today. Wasser’s profound and systemic knowledge of the philosophical traditions underpinning Romantic thought, in particular from the German tradition, allows her to isolate the kinds of system-building apparatus that becomes integral to the way that the literary becomes thought of as an immanent dimension of literature itself.

The book moves in two separate but complementary parts, laying out a genealogy of the question of the literary as it is constituted in relation to the new in Romantic, modernist, and postwar French thought, and the connections Wasser draws are surprising and significant for literary and intellectual historians. Even more unlikely than the debts she shows the New Critics owe to Romantic thinkers they at times professed to despise are the connections between the New Critics and the thought of Blanchot, of whom she performs a loving but trenchant critique. The broader intellectual and conceptual history concludes with a dazzling and instructive reading of Deleuze and Wasser’s own theorization of the literary extended from it. She then puts this thought into practice through a series of original readings of major modernist writers, including Beckett, Proust, and Stein. The result of these readings is that Wasser emphatically demonstrates that her account of literature does elevate the theory of literature she extrapolates from Deleuze to something more capacious and significant than Deleuze himself claimed for it. Her elevation and extension of the conception of the literary through problems provides an important starting point for any critic working today.

The claim about Romantic thought in The Work of Difference rests on Wasser’s periodization of a brief moment in which the idea of what literature is moves from an external to an internal one—it’s between 1798 and 1800, she says, that our contemporary conception of literature most clearly emerges, with Schlegel’s Athenaeum writings. This claim is elaborated in a robust chapter on the legacies of Romanticism that includes a superb overview of “the question of literature” in both poststructuralist thought and in its longer philosophical history. Like Wasser’s later breakdown of Deleuze, this overview is pedagogically dazzling for its combination of clarity, concision, and capaciousness.

The careful groundwork Wasser lays in Romantic philosophy makes her counterintuitive history of the New Critics, written largely via Coleridge, follow quite naturally, and the New Critics look very different in Wasser’s account than they appear in the proliferating intellectual histories of the postwar period. These histories focus on public debates, author networks, and popular figures much more than on the formal nuance worked out in the movement. Wasser’s critique thereby also recovers some of their sophistication. All of this builds to the signature two readings of the book—Wasser’s loving but intractable dismissal of Blanchot and her arrival at Deleuze.

In her chapter on Blanchot, “Tyranny of the Possible,” Wasser shows not only his structural continuity with the New Critical problems of unity and intention, but also how that continuity, in her view, provides clear limits on the capacities for what literature can both be and do in the world. Although I am more comfortable with the formal operations that result in a literature that communicates by “communicating itself” (58), Wasser convincingly shows what kind of foreclosures and negativities Blanchot’s theory of literary origin places on the possibilities for literary freedom and creation in both his own writing and in its legacies in poststructuralism. And her conclusion is particularly resonant today: “At bottom, for Blanchot, each work is nothing but the site of a greater truth in which literature is overcome—or better, in which literature is revealed as the force of its own self-overcoming, the privileged producer of sad allegories of its own phenomenal and linguistic predicament” (71). It’s hard not to sympathize with her frustration with the production of “sad allegories” as opposed to a messier and more transformative concept.

Transformation is instead what arrives at the true heart of The Work of Difference, which is Wasser’s brilliant chapter on Deleuze. In it, she unequivocally establishes Deleuze as one of the great literary theorists of the late twentieth century, and does so by looking to where he was perhaps more modest about the literary aspirations of the thought. One of the most remarkable aspects of the book, and one I imagine I will be assigning to students for years to come, is the set of “five theses on the literary object” that Wasser develops to elaborate and extend a Deleuzean ontology of the literary object. These theses, whose fleshing out fills the rest of the chapter and indeed the literary readings that follow, form a set of claims about literary production in relation to problems and its process. The theses are too perfect to reproduce entirely here rather than leave in their context. When Wasser asks her readers to “consider the idea that literary works arise in relation to problems,” her detailed account of the power and legacy of Romantic thought makes this proposal seem appropriately jarring, and her moves through philosophical propositions that become ontological claims about literary objects undo the closures of Blanchot and the New Critics, and the Romantics behind them. Problems beget transformations, and transformations are the work of literature on its own constitutive elements.

Wasser’s final thesis shows how literary criticism, like literature itself, is conditioned by problems, and the final three chapters of the book play this out. In the familiar territory of the new she finds in literary modernism, Wasser moves through Beckett, Proust (the book’s other hero), and Stein by focusing on rhetorical figures: the self-corrective epanorthosis (Beckett), claims as noncoincidence and hyperbole (Proust), and repetition and system building (Stein). Each of these more detailed encounters involves a serious reconfiguration of the author’s relationship to both assumptions about modernist art and about the production of the literary work, and each provides new insight into well-known areas of their work. What The Work of Difference ultimately does is rewrite the standard narrative about the modernist work of art within a much broader account of the history of literary thought since Romanticism. Wasser’s theory of literature is the kind of ambitious, conceptual, and broad thinking that contemporary criticism needs urgently.

Audrey Wasser’s brilliant and engrossing first book begins with a striking reminder: “The problem of art in the modern era is the problem of the new” (1). If The Work of Difference is also one of the most important recent monographs on the legacy of early Jena Romanticism, it is because then, as she puts it, “‘newness’ has a particular history”; a history which is “in no small way, our inheritance” (1), and which finds its locus classicus in the early romantic “valorization of the modern and the interesting” at the very end of the eighteenth century (2). Significantly, unlike its various conservative or “postmodern” discontents, while Wasser thus defines the “aim” of her book as the articulation of “a non-romantic theory of literature” (3), she pursues this not by seeking to efface or undo “the problem of the new” that, following Kant’s account of genius, the early romantics made the very centre of their thinking. Instead, The Work of Difference outlines what she terms an “alternative [non-romantic] philosophical tradition” for thinking such newness that, going by way of Spinoza, Nietzsche and (most importantly) Bergson, “culminates in Gilles Deleuze’s reworking of classical notions of system and determination” (20).

Of course, one might reasonably wonder just how “alternative” such a tradition really is. Certainly, there would be good grounds for arguing that a broadly post-Deleuzian “affirmationism” constitutes what is in fact an increasingly “dominant and largely unremarked doxa” in the Anglo-American academy; at least so far as the primarily “postwar French context” through which literary theory is framed by Wasser is concerned. As Ben Noys has most forcefully observed, theoretical appeals to the power of negation—exemplified, for Wasser, by Blanchot’s post-romantic account of an “essential negativity” in literature (6)—face a somewhat “inhospitable environment” within much of the contemporary humanities.1 Indeed, Wasser implicitly acknowledges as much, noting in her conclusion a would-be “‘postcritical’ approach to texts” that marks “recent critical trends, from ‘surface reading’ and ‘affect theory’ to ‘thing theory,’ ‘object-oriented ontology,’ and an assortment of ‘new materialisms’” (160), many of which have taken inspiration from Deleuze, and all of which are characterised by a suspicion of the supposed negativity of critique. In this context, the ambition of The Work of Difference is not so much to break with this emergent doxa, as it is to provide a more nuanced and serious attention to “the genealogy of the [romantic] concepts they seek to criticize,” without which, Wasser argues, such “trends risk rehashing the same critical maneuvers of previous generations” (161). At the same time, Wasser is rightly suspicious of the various under-theorised desires within such trends “for the extratextual real, for the more immediately political, for the concreteness of objects or affects over abstract questions of language and form” (160)—although, noticeably, she doesn’t much comment upon the influential role that the later Deleuze avec Guattari has often played in this. As she thus concludes in her final paragraph, the aim is to defend a broadly philosophical (rather than strictly formalist) concern with “questions of form,” which is focused on the specificity of literature qua literature as an art which belongs to the domain of “concrete forms of experience” rather than of the Idea. In this sense, both “autonomous,” to the degree that it requires “the specificity of a genuine literary thinking,” and yet never self-identical, or always differing from itself, the literary work resists being “conceived along the lines of a reflection of ideas located elsewhere . . . the shadow or fragment of a truth that has a wider import than itself” (162).

As a materialist interrogation of those “unquestioned, metaphysical assumptions” that have “been transmitted through mid-century theory to present-day criticism,” many of the “targets” at which the book takes aim, particularly in the first two chapters, are pretty “familiar” ones, as Wasser acknowledges—that is, “those presumptions of unity, closure and self-reflection that govern reading practices no less than they determine conceptions of literary form” (161). More striking, and challenging, is her claim that that other (non-Hegelian) romanticism famously sought in Blanchot, and later in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (53), for which the early romantic theorization of the fragment may also be regarded as the source of a precisely non-organic conception of the artwork, equally repeats the same essential “speculative logic of romanticism” itself, albeit in a negative form as the “endless repetition” of its “failure,” so making perpetual an “indissoluble metaphysical tension” between “necessity and freedom, form and formation” after Kant (37).

In this critique of Blanchot, one recognises, of course, a now familiar pitting of affirmation against negativity, creativity against criticism, construction against deferral, which has come to define, in often self-serving ways, a shift from the purportedly “deconstructive” to the Deleuzian in contemporary theory—although Wasser is wise enough to foreground Blanchot’s work rather more than that of Derrida himself in posing her “alternative tradition” against an “generalized negativity” (65).2 It is interesting, at any rate, to compare here The Work of Difference with, say, Olivier Schefer’s recent essay on Deleuze and Jena Romanticism, which mobilizes a very similar critique of the Blanchotian legacy of readings of the fragmentary, but which does so in order not to vanquish romanticism per se, but rather to reread it as far closer to Wasser’s “alternative tradition,” as itself “a strategy linked to a theory of becoming.” As such, and laying particular emphasis on the celebrated Athenaeum Fragment 116, Schefer proposes a contemporary “Deleuzean approach to Romanticism, rather than . . . a Heideggerian and Blanchotian one, according to which art reveals and emphasizes the truth (Being itself), through self-sufficiency and non-mimetic procedures” (emphasis added).3 In this sense, the same opposition between a Deleuzian “positivity”—on “making connections rather than thinking them”—and a deconstructive conception of the fragmentary as a form of infinite désœuvrement leads Schefer not to a “non-romantic theory of literature,” but, rather, to what he calls a “third way” to be found at work within romanticism itself; one which has a lot to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” and “plateau”: a sort of open and mobile system made of fragments, without any centre or stable position (auto-position), . . . a whole that is not absolute but variable and always in process.”4

I don’t want (or have the space here) to adjudicate between these different readings of Deleuze’s proximity to romanticism), nor the ways in which a preference for the earlier or later Deleuze might play some role in this. Instead, what seems of more interest to me is the ways in which it is precisely the same basic “ontological” opposition between the “positive” and “negative” that serves to frame such divergent readings themselves. The question I would want to ask is, then, not so much one of whether it is preferable to seek an ontological principle in either affirmation or negativity, but of what is the cost of these moves to ontologise “the new” as such?

Wasser is not shy about this: as she makes clear, her concern is precisely with “the ontological investigations in Deleuze’s philosophical works, especially Difference and Repetition (1968),” rather than, by and large, with his own literary readings (something true even of the chapter on Proust). The considerable cost of this primarily ontological bent, however, is that The Work of Difference cannot but rely upon what, I think, can only be described as a kind of concomitant ontologization of the question of what we mean by modernity (or modernism) itself. What Wasser in her introduction identifies therefore as, for example, “the experimental ethos of literary modernism epitomized by Ezra Pound’s exhortation to ‘make it new’”—and its pre-history in “the early nineteenth century” and “romanticism’s valorization of modernity against neoclassical standards of beauty” (1)—must, despite its apparently specific historical location, be effectively identified, at the same time, with some kind of transhistorically and “virtually” present creativity of essentially metaphysical significance, which is itself reliant upon an ontology of “becoming” and a conception of the “real in all its spatiotemporal richness and inventiveness” (162). A specific ontology of the literary work (or even of the twentieth-century work), where “difference itself is conceived as form” (161), is, in other words, ultimately subordinated to what is, at its limits, a kind of affirmation of the temporal dynamic of the real as “itself” the endlessly different or new—a dynamic which, detached from all “negativity” (construed as ontologically “secondary”), also risks being unmoored from any historical analysis through which the work of art might be rendered socially as well as “artistically” meaningful.

This is not to say that Wasser doesn’t pay due attention to the ways in which the “ontological question” that concerns her—what is literature?—and the ambition to elaborate a “non-romantic theory of literature” that follows from this, concerns “a historically contingent object” (3), and one that is “the product of a fairly recent history” at that (14). Indeed, the first chapter of The Work of Difference, in particular, is very good on this, and on the ways in which, for example, over the course of the eighteenth century—under pressure, as Schlegel recognised, from the emergence of the novel as a kind of uniquely modern “genre without genre”—the term “literature” came to displace “poetry” as the most “useful” “umbrella term” (15). Yet the inevitable tension that results—particularly once we come to the book’s chapters on Blanchot and Deleuze—is one between a historically specific dynamic of the “problem of the new” that defines the “problem of art in the modern era”5—more broadly associated in Marx and others with the distinctive “deterritorializing” forms of capitalist modernity, and one that is already registered, in some sense, in Schlegel’s historicized distinction between the classical and modern (or “romantic”), subsequently taken up by Hegel—and Deleuze’s own tendency towards a more general ontologization of time itself as sheer movement, flow or change, which effectively denies any distinctiveness of modernity as a temporalization of history (whether we date its emergence to the eighteenth century or earlier) in favour of a sense of time simply as the generalized New. It is not so surprising in this sense that it is Bergson, in particular—for whom duration simply is “invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new”6—who is credited by Wasser as the key influence on her Deleuzian thinking in this regard. However, the price paid for this suturing of a thinking of modernism to an ontologisation of the new as simply the time of becoming as such is an inevitable loss of specificity in any articulation of the precisely differential “value” of modernity or modernism as distinctive concepts of historical time, rather than, say, “duration” as that which always “differs from itself.” The danger is that in throwing out the bathwater of “German Idealism” (73), The Work of Difference ends up throwing out the baby of historical differentiation altogether.

In this regard it is hard to know what to make of the connection Wasser posits between the claim (to which I am entirely sympathetic) that “to think the new is the task of any contemporary philosophy of art” (my emphasis) and the claim that, since existence is “the domain of art,” “to think the being of a work of art requires granting creative powers to existence itself” (154). To be sure, “creativity” is indeed a question of “real, sensual existence.” What materialist would think otherwise? But “existence”—and, indeed, the “work of art”—in what sense? All existence? All works of art (including those we have only retrospectively described as such)? And if this is so absolutely generalizable, what possible purchase can this give us on either “modern” or “contemporary” art (or existence) specifically—let alone on any break between, say, the forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature—and the specific forms of “newness” with which Wasser elsewhere indicates her concern. The problem is that in theorizing “creativity” at the most general level, as that which constitutes the being of all “existence,” the character of modernity or modernism as specific historical formations or realities cannot but become blurred.

Precisely as a “contemporary philosophy of art,” The Work of Difference seems at the very least vulnerable, then, in its appeals to the sheer “creativity of the real” (155), to those critiques of “Bergsonism” that were already present during the early twentieth century.7 Walter Benjamin’s 1938 essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”—devoted to a theorization of the newness of Baudelaire’s lyric poetry, which, Benjamin famously argues, “indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock”8—would be exemplary in this respect. For Benjamin, Bergson’s work is distinguished by the ways in which it attempts to respond to changes in the structures of experience within “modernity” by laying “hold of” the “structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical [or ontological] pattern of experience” per se. Yet, as Benjamin observes, in doing so it is “not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory.” On the contrary, the aim is precisely “to stay clear of that experience [of capitalist modernity] from which his own philosophy evolved. . . . In shutting out this experience the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, so to speak. Bergson’s philosophy represents an attempt to give the details of this afterimage and to fix it as a permanent record.”9

Similarly, in Max Horkheimer’s 1934 essay “On Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time,” it is the problematic relationship between time and history (insofar as the latter is also a question of time) that is described as the fundamental tension which “disrupts his philosophy in its totality.10 And one does not have to accept Horkheimer’s no-doubt-debatable implication that Bergson can, as a result, have no philosophy of history tout court, to take seriously the more basic point that in “absolutizing” change or creativity per se, as the very “being” of the “real” as such, such a philosophy of the new fails to recognise the possibility that its metaphysics might be itself “also dependent on historical conditions.”11 As a result, it has immense difficulties in registering or differentiating the historical and social relations that connect the newness of anything like artistic or literary “modernism” immanently to, for instance, the specific temporal forms of capital accumulation, industrialism or metropolitan experience in (historical) “modernity” itself, since its “ontological commitment” requires it effectively to see the “newness” of modernity as virtually “everywhere.”12

As in much so-called “post-critical” theory, the danger then is simply that in starting from the purely philosophical affirmation of a single ontological “plane of immanence”—severed from any critical or “negative” moment—such immanence can, brought back to the level of the literary work, only finally reenact an idea of the new at its most abstract, as the “permanent” invention of creative beginnings, rather than working through the social divisions and violences within which the artistically new might be differentially produced under the changing conditions of the present. As that other exemplary thinker of negativity Theodor Adorno insists, if newness is indeed a question of “real, sensual existence,” the “immanent historicity” of the art or literary work “which seems to be the mere self-locomotion of the material” is, necessarily, itself “of the same origin as is the social process, by whose traces it is continually permeated.” Hence, the ways in which, for any materialism, the “unresolved antagonisms of reality return to artworks as immanent problems of form.”13 It is this historicity or facticity from which no call to remake “our concept of the literary object on the basis of a different set of ontological claims” can ultimately be disentangled (6).

By contrast, superb as Wasser’s account of Deleuze’s metaphysics may be, my fear is that the central theoretical sections of The Work of Difference render the problem of the new, first and foremost, as an abstract question of “alternative” ontological commitments to the metaphysically positive or negative in themselves. Deleuzian creativity is set against here Derrida’s and Blanchot’s similarly “ontological” treatment, as Wasser reads it, of what she terms the “paradox of the new,” and of how this confronts the (modern) “imperative to grasp art as new” with “the deeper, conceptual difficulty of how one ought to negotiate the relation between system and event, or between history and innovation. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the determinate orders of history, language use or the social?” (2–3). (Note, here, how “history” is implicitly opposed to “innovation.”) On Wasser’s reading, if the artwork can then only ever appear to be infinitely paradoxical, for Blanchot and Derrida, it is because this paradox is tied to the ontological form of a “Hegelian logic” whereby “negation is necessary to determination [of the new] as such.” Since the new is only possible on the basis of “its rupture with any set of present possibilities,” ontologically speaking, “impossibility alone remains its true condition” (67). Hence, it is concluded, the need for a turn to that “treatment of creation” in Deleuze and Bergson that would think the new free of “the brace of negative determination” (67).

Yet, this account of the (im)possible—which seems to me far too quickly inserted into the rather different terms of a Bergsonian distinction between the possible and the virtual—is, in some respects, an odd reading of what Derrida is arguing here. For to say, as Derrida does, that “the conditions of possibility of the new—that the new be unforeseeable, unprogrammable, and, at the limit, unrecognizable—appear simultaneously to be the conditions of its impossibility” (67) is clearly not to say that there is therefore no newness, only that such newness is never absolutely so, since to be absolutely new, or absolutely other, in this sense, would be to render the “new” itself as (impossibly) “self-sufficient” or self-present, precisely without difference or relation to anything other than itself. There is some sort of “paradox” or “aporia” here, for sure, but not one that is thus destructive of all newness, or particularly tied to any ontology of “negativity” as such. Instead, all questions about the new become about the specific forms of newness that may be constituted through the singular context of a general economy of relationality or difference in which they emerge.

Among other things, it is not clear, in this sense, to what degree a distinctive “poetics of difference,” worked through in relation to the book’s startling readings of Proust and Stein in its final chapters, as texts that “depart from the forms of the nineteenth century” (161; emphasis added), can really—other than polemically—be kept apart from some dynamic of negation or creative destruction, as Wasser wishes. Certainly one might ask whether such “departure” can really be understood other than as departure from some determinate “forms” of art, “orders of history, language use or the social,” that are encapsulated in the periodizing category of “the nineteenth century” itself. (It is perhaps for this reason that The Work of Difference is, bar a few comments about the “nineteenth-century genre of family chronicle” and realism in the chapter on Stein (140), not terribly specific about what this difference from some outmoded “nineteenth-century” conception of literature might exactly be.) Like it or not, the “new” is always a comparative concept. And, at the very least, this requires a great deal of rhetorical weight be placed on a Deleuzian vocabulary of “experiment” and the “genuinely creative” simply to ward off any relapse into the dreaded “negative” at this point (10).

Of course, as Noys argues, one might sense here various larger problems with Deleuze’s own attempts, announced as early as the 1956 essay on Bergson, to expunge the negative from his account of being as affirmation altogether, or to transform it into an entirely positivized theory of difference, where it is precisely the problem of the “truly new” that provokes a certain “concession to the negative” in the form of a “creative work of destruction,” even if one that must ultimately be subordinated to the ontological primacy of affirmation.14 However one views this, it is not terribly clear to me, at any rate, why Stein’s Making of Americans, for example, has to be either a “positive or constructive” or an “essentially negative exercise,” rather than constituted in its newness though the relationship between the two (141). Brilliant as it is—and Wasser’s final chapter is one of most exciting bits of work on Stein I’ve read for a long time—there are places here where the desire to place Stein so firmly on the side of affirmation can come rather close to tendentiously attributing to her a kind of Deleuzism avant la lettre. Wasser constructs a strong argument that Making of Americans provides us with “a model for thinking production as immanent to repetition” (148). But this cannot in itself address the question of what made such strategies of repetition themselves historically new. The danger is then that what we get instead is an account of the similarities between Deleuze’s comments on the aesthetic and Stein’s own “interest . . . in the genesis of categories and concepts,” as these are—I can think of no other word—reflected in the ways in which, in the novel, “ways of living and forms of knowing are produced creatively in time and space” (154).

None of this is to say that much of what Wasser has to say about the tendency toward a “pathos” of “irresolvable paradoxes” in, say, Blanchot’s “negativity” is not broadly true, nor that this is not a critique with which one might certainly sympathise. However, it does ignore somewhat the ways in which the broader connection of literature to death also constitutes a response on Blanchot’s part both to romanticism’s understanding of modernity as a “fragmented age” (29; my emphasis) and to Hegel’s notorious “death of art” thesis itself, and thus to the specific historicisation of the “newness” of romantic and post-romantic art and literature as modern that underlies it. That is to say, Blanchot’s arguments about “literature” involve, in at least some sense, what is as much a historical as a strictly ontological thesis; or, if one likes, a question of a specifically historical ontology of the literary work.15 In rendering this, however, as simply a question of competing “ontological commitments” in general, The Work of Difference characteristically risks eliding—or, at the very least, downplaying—the profoundly historical thesis on which not only Blanchot’s but the Schlegels’ conception of the “romantic” is partly based—that is, the modernity of the “now” in which, for example, Schlegel declares in Critical Fragment 60 that “all the classical poetical genres have now become ridiculous in their rigid purity.”16

As the writings of the romantics themselves make clear, this kind of historicization of the modern as itself a form of historical temporalization is not without its own risks—specifically, the danger of mythicizing, in the fashion of the early Lukács, some happy premodern age untroubled by any such “problematisation” of the “accomplishment of a work” (55), and for which, as Wasser rightly notes, “traces of freedom can be retained in the work . . . only in the form of a loss” (66; emphasis added). (Derrida, again it should be said, is very much alive to this danger in Blanchot and in the latter’s Heideggerianism.) Nonetheless, without such a historical conception of modernity, the risk is that one simply dissolves the distinctive social and cultural conditions through which the “problem of art” as the “problem of the new” comes to be differentially articulated into an effectively transhistorical metaphysics of newness as indistinguishable from the dynamism of the “real” as such. The Work of Difference is a remarkable book—in its readings of Proust and Stein, and in as good an exposition of the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition as could be imagined—but, in the end, it’s not clear, for me, that its work of difference is quite differentiated enough.