Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations by Alexander Regier (review)

Abstract

that must be sublimated, might prove non-threatening, according to Gottlieb, and thus, paradoxically, allow for the utopian promise of dystopia. Sigler’s essay, in its reading of the torus in Lacan, exemplifies what the whole collection does best: it mobilizes little-known and understudied Lacanian concepts into enlivening juxtapositions and engagements with a surprising selection of Romantic-era authors and texts. A torus, Sigler relates, is “a hollow tube with a hole in the middle” (think donuts, Homer) and for Lacan “human subjectivity was shaped as a torus” (119, 120). Here is the unexpected enlivening: in The Prelude, Sigler argues, “wordsworth’s relation to his thoughts and memories . . . is actually a torus. A torus maintains a boundary between internal and external space but traverses that boundary as a single surface, much as the speaker’s own feelings can be understood to ‘oppress’ the heart” (120). “In Book I of The Prelude,” as Sigler reads it, “such a process, seen topologically, reveals the function of fantasy in subject formation: fantasy ties the Real to the Imaginary to create, however provisionally, the structural conditions that could accommodate and support the subject’s arrival as an ‘individual’ and socially” (120). Reading tori, however, works on several different levels since Lacan’s “topological work was often staged through a renunciation of poetic language” (120), even as Lacan “warns . . . against any psychoanalysis that does not attend specifically to language and syntax” (123). For Sigler, then, later Lacan does not break from earlier Lacan and his theories, and this “reading across levels,” “enables us . . . to actually analyze metaphor” (132). Enablement of this sort, that is, analyses of metaphor, of the literary and the aesthetic, sends us around the tube of the torus to the inside, as it were, of the volume’s clarion call for a Romantic re-investment in close reading and aesthetic analyses in general rather than the bludgeoning imperative to always historicize that has long had a stranglehold on the field. Much more than a clutch of theoretical studies on a period already largely identified with theory, one even, for a time, identified as theory, the scholars herein impel and enable us to think the tori, to traverse the internal and external of Romanticism and, perhaps unexpectedly, to find new ways to resist the oppressions of the heart.