With Wandering Steps: Generative Ambiguity in Milton’s Poetics. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz, eds. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. xix + 244 pp. $70.
make space for a negativity that is not automatically sacrificed on the way to establishing some higher vantage point or truth, or at least to explore and luxuriate in such a space before that apparently inevitable sublation happens. As the (perhaps cautionary) example of Bataille demonstrates, thinking outside the dialectic—theorizing negativity in such a way as not, in turn, to maneuver it into a distinct position or to positivize it as an alternative, transgressive ideal in its own right—is no easy matter. McEleney is at pains to point out, for example, that even those critics who celebrate the speciously empty rhetoric of Thomas Nashe effectively “revalorize that ‘nothing’ by viewing it as a positive strategy, a deliberately transgressive affront to . . . logocentric . . . values” (67), a hedge that gets repeated every time negativity is in danger of being fetishized as radical, liberating, progressive, or perverse. Much of the book, indeed, is concerned with the vanishing ground on which the “futilitarian” critic stands (or, more accurately, falls), as unstable irony undercuts or evacuates every statement he or she posits, regardless of whether it is “for” negativity or “against.” The argument concludes, in fact, with the ultimate hedge: the wager that it is possible to have it both ways, “to have one’s utility (or futility) and eat it too” (164). “Pleasure” is perhaps the key problematic here. For, like a number of the theorists on which it draws—Freud, Bataille, Derrida, Barthes—this book seeks to go beyond the pleasure principle: beyond the satisfactions of having something to say, of acculturation, of mastery, of achieving a supposedly higher level of thought, so as to enter the strange and counterlogical place of the death drive. Characterized by an absolute absence, emptiness, or lack that proves inimical to theorization if not to thinking itself, the death drive can nonetheless be experienced and arguably nowhere more so than in literature. This experience is not pleasurable as such, but rather abject, shattered: closer perhaps to what Leo Bersani characterizes as the pleasurable-unpleasurable tension of masochistic bliss.