Anonymous Life

Regret Without Limit: The Ends of Agency and Genre in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch

“…Jacques Khalip argues, for example, that Romantic subjectivity is defined not by interiority but by "its fascination with anonymity as an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence," an ethics in which both the self and its acts remain "unfinished" and unfold "without any teleological purpose" precisely "because we cannot claim to control or be in full possession of our actions toward others." 59 While Khalip resists Enlightenment ideals of a fixed, autonomous self and teleological action, his argument nevertheless retains traces of what Arendt characterizes as the "disastrous" response to ideals of sovereignty: anonymous agency responds ethically to the alterity of the other through a "withdrawal from the stages of the world" because nonaction poses the only remaining form of political "intervention" when the ideal of sovereign political action fails. 60 That such acts of "engaged withdrawal" or "strategic reticence" bear a relation to the ideology of the isolated, Romantic lyric poet is particularly evident in Anne-Lise François's theory of "recessive action" or "desistance," where nonaction becomes allied explicitly to lyric.…”

“…59 While Khalip resists Enlightenment ideals of a fixed, autonomous self and teleological action, his argument nevertheless retains traces of what Arendt characterizes as the "disastrous" response to ideals of sovereignty: anonymous agency responds ethically to the alterity of the other through a "withdrawal from the stages of the world" because nonaction poses the only remaining form of political "intervention" when the ideal of sovereign political action fails. 60 That such acts of "engaged withdrawal" or "strategic reticence" bear a relation to the ideology of the isolated, Romantic lyric poet is particularly evident in Anne-Lise François's theory of "recessive action" or "desistance," where nonaction becomes allied explicitly to lyric. François's inclination to read moments of inaction as the sanguine expression of a lyric consciousness that resists narrative teleology recapitulates the very alignment of genre, agency, and subjectivity that the Romantics themselves had explored.…”

“…With respect to eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century literature and philosophy, this problem of "global moral responsibility" was something that thinkers such as Hume and Smith acknowledged in their theories of sympathy yet sought to delimit. 58 I interpret the generic dichotomy between lyric and narrative that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as shaped by similar ethical concerns. In this context, Arendt's assessment that the identification of freedom with autonomy either results in abstention from acting or feeling guilt for a world that enmeshes us in regrettable consequences offers a schema for understanding the generic binary of lyric and narrative as well.…”