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McGrath, Brian;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
Though the words impasse and impassive come to English from two different etymological sources—impasse from the French, meaning without a pass; impassive from the Latin, meaning without suffering or without feeling—English invites confusion. In part because one cannot write directly about an impasse without making it less of one, this essay takes up the question of the impasse through the available pun: that is, with attention to impassivity. It begins with the origin of impasse in Voltaire and then, following the Oxford English Dictionary, turns to uses of impassive in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shelley’s Hellas to explore the interplay between feeling (the feeling of being blocked, for instance) and feeling’s absence.
Kuiken, Kir;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
While “impasse” in politics implies deadlock or standstill, this essay examines how a counter-tradition, exemplified by Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, treats impasse as the condition of possibility of a new form of community. Focusing on Blanchot’s conception of the “community of lovers,” the essay examines why Blanchot associates this with the events of May 1968. This association centers on the notion of an “impossible community” that challenges the very structure of the state as the realization of the community’s sovereignty. The essay then turns to Kleist, mentioned briefly in Blanchot’s treatise, as a paradigmatic case of the literary dimension of impossible community. Focusing on Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, the essay argues that the novella articulates the episodic and insurrectional element of Blanchot’s conception of community. Rather than understand the titular character’s revolt in terms of his fanatical adherence to the universality of law, the essay argues that Kohlhaas’s insurrection is predicated on the death of his wife, Lisbeth, whose post-mortem appearance in the novella introduces a promise that is structurally prior to the state’s constitution. This promise transforms impasse into enactment, impossibility into actuality.
Terada, Rei;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
Spatial figures of impasse appear when politics is in trouble, and preserve political expectation when its prospects are poor. They take their meaning from the assumption that the political order is synonymous with social reality—as though people could do nothing when political movement is blocked. Focusing on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the critical reception of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic among other references, this essay argues that the model of impasse and breakthrough occludes politics’ narrowness as compared with other organizations of collective well-being. By seeming to preserve political potential, perceptions of impasse encourage people to accept political processes as the only social reality despite their violence, their limitation of reality, and their contempt for the agential resources of nonpolitical being.
Hanson, Lenora;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
This article proposes that eighteenth-century and Romantic-era accounts of dreams offer a useful model for understanding the phenomenon of enclosure, or what Marx famously labeled “so-called primitive accumulation.” Rather than a historical event or a set of particular laws, enclosure can be understood as a process by which gendered labor and criminalized mobility, two forms of what Marxist critics call “non-work,” became integral features of capital accumulation over the course of the Romantic period. This article pursues an analogy between what John Hunter defined as the “ludicrous anachronisms” of dreams and such forms of “non-work” as they appear in Mary Robinson’s 1791 poem “The Maniac.” Framed as an opium-induced dream that enables Robinson to share a psycho-physiological state akin to the wanderer “mad Jemmy,” Robinson forges relations between the poet and Jemmy that complicate any straightforward or sympathetic identification. Instead, her use of rhetorical indirection and inversion establishes analogies between the two through the effects of enclosure, highlighting the ambivalent ways in which subjects came to be indirectly related to one another through an historical inversion of their means of subsistence into conditions of vulnerability.
Schey, Taylor;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
Theories of historical and political change often rely on the idea of a breaking point at which radical action becomes a necessity. Theories of impasse—whether historical, political, or linguistic in focus—respond more or less directly to the assumptions behind this idea. This essay queries these assumptions. Opening with a discussion of how the concept of “the intolerable” features in the work of radical thinkers, the first section examines Lauren Berlant’s project in Cruel Optimism and explores her notion of “the impasse of the present.” The second section then turns to the work of Paul de Man, who, from Allegories of Reading on, develops a complementary theory of the impasse of the present that grows out of his theory of rhetorical reading. Although Berlant and de Man are each preoccupied in different ways with the idea of impasse, both ultimately demonstrate that impasse is best understood as an impossibility. Through readings of KC Green’s webcomics “On Fire” (best known as the source text of the “This is Fine” meme) and “This is Not Fine,” the essay illustrates and considers the broader implications of this impossibility.
Mendicino, Kristina;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
Whatever may be said to come to pass could not have happened once, if its iterability is what will have permitted each word thereof to pass for such a one. The very terms for speaking of an occurrence would thus seem to be the impasse that renders each a fiction of no moment, in all senses of that phrase. But this often-cited feature of language could neither be affirmed nor denied once and for all, since either alternative would pretend to address as an established fact that which troubles every establishment. Rather, it is what each time solicits yet another attempt to retrace the turns and detours of those writings that are emphatically marked by the errancy, anachronism, and forgetfulness that recurrence and iterability entail. It is in such an attempt that this article offers commentaries upon several passages from the oeuvres of Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, and Robert Musil that articulate what could be called the moment of no moment, and that thereby expose the untimely intersections that may come to pass through writing.
Mieszkowski, Jan;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
This essay seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: what takes place when someone claims to be remarking on something “in passing”? The first part focuses on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, where the politico-economic order is shaken by challenges to the discourse of passes, passports, and licenses. The protagonist struggles in his quest for justice, because he cannot win the right to pass from one place to the next until he has first won the right to pass from one verbal element to the next. The second part of the essay considers how Jacques Derrida’s attempt to break with the methodological paths of metaphysics leads him to articulate a conception of passing language. Discussing utterances made en passant, Derrida puts pressure on the distinction between essential and incidental remarks. Ultimately, he suggests that some of his own most memorable slogans, in particular “democracy to come,” gain their power from their conflicted status as both constant and mercurial, grave and frivolous, passing and impassing.
François, Anne-Lise;Schey, Taylor;Mieszkowski, Jan
From Carolyn Merchant to Theodor Adorno, historians and critics of capitalist modernity have described its expansion as the story of the lifting of traditional taboos, or inversely as the laying down of a ban on taboo itself such that nothing is to remain off-limits or untouched. Yet, despite the absence of an answering authority to lay down the law and cry “halt,” and perhaps because of it, environmental harm continues to be imagined through the figure of trespass and in terms of an invisible line past which human activity, otherwise compelled by capitalism to limitless accumulation, must not go. At the same time, the more fungible the differences between ecological spheres, the more rigid the enforcement of state and private property lines, so that the discourse of trespass whereby one might hope to prosecute environmental crime in fact criminalizes once permitted commoning practices. This essay seeks to thread a way out of this impasse by turning to passages from John Clare, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, and William Wordsworth that map human and animal passing onto seasonal passage and mime the different levels and seasonal periods of permeability and impermeability found in ecological relations. Rather than accept the strict dichotomies of the logic of enclosure, the essay explores how these poets enact and theorize modes of passing in order to renew attention to temporary and seasonally determined forms of impasse and passage.
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