The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday

Abstract

Objective teleologies for human life have been in ill repute for some time, at least in advanced intellectual circles in Western societies. Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among many others, felt the constraints of increasingly codified and bureaucratic commodity society along with the decline of the authority of traditional religion and metaphysics, and they suggested the open-ended cultivation of resistant, unplotted subjectivities as an animating alternative. Modernist intensities, including Joycean epiphanies and Benjaminian dialectics at a standstill, move within this orbit, as did the New Critical favoring of the strength to bear coherent paradoxes. Reflecting on his encounter with an overwhelming, ungraspable mass of chestnut tree roots, Antoine Roquentin, the central figure of Sartre's Nausea, thinks