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PARTISAN REVIEW
idiom of the critical establishment. Like Raymond Chandler's
Marlowe, Hartman shows that he can still speak English when his
business demands it. But the tone is provocative, more in the
manner of Pater and Wilde, laced with a little Hegel and Heidegger,
than the establishment is likely to find palatable. The critical ideal
remains unremittingly Freudo-Derridian, the aim to establish a
deconstructionist "garden" in the "wilderness" of criticism left by the
Anglo-American fathers. The use of the garden metaphor to indicate
the kind of criticism that Hartman envisions
s~ggests
the differences
that he admits to between Derrida and himself. Derrida is a bit too
extreme for Hartman, a bit too "religious," a bit too "fed by the milk
of mourning," to sanction that playfulness which Hartman sees as
the only antidote that literature and criticism can offer to the totali–
tarianism of modern society.
For, strange as it may seem in the light of what I have written
thus far, Hartman is ultimately interested in the political signifi–
cance of literary criticism. "Great art is radical," he says, "But art's
contribution to the political sphere remains difficult to formulate."
He rejects the easy formulations of this relationship offered by right,
center, and left alike. They are all too moralistic for him, and this
includes Marxist critical theory. His own inclinations are to view art
as a "radical critique of representation" itself, political as well as lin–
guistic and imagistic, following the direction marked out by
Kenneth Burke.
It
is the mark of all totalitarian regimes to insist on
the "purity" of their "representational" practices. Art, by contrast, at
least in Hartman's version, "recalls the artificial nature or purely
conventional status of formal arguments or proofs; the fact that
human agreements remain conveniences with the force oflaw, meta–
phors with the force of institutions, opinions with the force of
dogma. It recalls the prevalence of propaganda, both in open soci–
eties ... and in controlled societies." And so, he concludes, should
criticism in our time aspire to anything less? Should criticism con–
tinue to pursue the ideal of "purity" when purity itself is art's own
worst enemy?
Hartman's obsession with the malignant effects of the ideal of
purity suggests the extent to which he views modern political institu–
tions as crypto-religious formations. And it perhaps explains his
preference for Hegel over Marx, Heidegger over Sartre, Benjamin
over Lukacs. For, like every obsessive, Hartman is deeply ambiva–
lent about religion, still fascinated by the sacred though suspicious of
priests, still enamored of justice though suspicious of judges. This
