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henceforth
to
be located. Or was all this a consequence? For the gap Kant
described did not open only in metaphysics. What had come about was an end
to
the feeling of rapport with essence, an end to the immediate reception of
things in depth. This predicament has been accounted for in every
conceivable way: attributed
to,
for example, the collapse of belief; the rise of
reason; the dissociation of sensibility; revolution; the move from rural
to
urban order, and so on. But that a change occurred seems evident; and when
it did, the
joy
of plenitude gave way to nothingness and dread. Substance
vanished into the void, leaving in its wake that sense of absence-Ie
neant des
choses humaines,
as Rousseau put it-central to Romantic and therefore
to
modern consciousness.
At some point in the 18th century, that is, an obsessive awareness of loss
and emptiness began to haunt men's deepest thoughts; and by the beginning
of the Romantic period, the condition of absence had become one of the
principal determinants of aesthetic representation. The development of
modern painting-its collapse of perspective, its celebration of texture and
surface, its denial of any world beyond itself-is one example. Modern
literature, with its emphasis on symbolism and language-worlds, is another.
In
Blindness andInsight,
Paul de Man goes so far as to suggest that literature,
by its very nature as a self-conscious fiction, is a representation of absence.
Literary works take their origin in "the presence of a nothingness," de Man
argues; and "poetic language names this void with ever-renewed under–
standing." The assumption here is that all signification, whatever else it may
serve or point to, signifies finally the absence of that which is signified. Any
text is the image of something
not
present; or as Valery said of poetry, it
"never speaks but of absent things." De Man puts it this way: "here the
human selfhas experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far
from filling the void, asserts itselfas pure nothingness." Literature, therefore,
which was once the supreme concentration of truth and ineffable
presence-" In the beginning was the Word" -now becomes an em–
bodiment of the world's emptiness. As in Beckett's work, there is only the
word, nothing but the word, and the word persisting in its own nonbeing.
Among the principal bearers of meaning in human experience are the
self and other selves, the world as a bounded totality, and, of course, works of
art: all possess a surface (the medium of their concrete being) which conveys a
corresponding depth (the feeling of significance), such that the presence of
surface
is
the presence of depth. What has now been lost is the capacity for
immediate engagement with surface-as-depth. This, as I have suggested, is
the situation which Kant brought to focus. He left it to Hegel to bridge the
gap, and Hegel was equal to the task. Having lost its immediacy, essence
would have to be reconstituted in thought. The immediate would have to be
