David Collings

After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence

Familiar narratives of secularization rely on an unexamined but pivotal negation of telos, a negation that at once marks and undermines modernity’s difference from tradition. In statements characteristic of romantic‐era writing, Wordsworth’s five‐book Prelude captures this non‐dialectical negation by foregrounding how the rainbow covenant no longer wards off the threat of a Biblical flood, and Malthus’s Essay locates a similar threat in the principle of population. In both cases, modernity inscribes its version of transcendence in an incontestable material process that is at once a threat to and precondition for human survival. Both texts suggest that such a process cancels the covenantal protection from the God of the deluge, making humanity vulnerable once again – as before the rainbow covenant – to a disastrous transcendence. In their versions of the aesthetics of the sublime, Kant and Wordsworth attempt to incorporate this devastating transcendence into a higher faculty of mind, whereas Malthus attempts to make into a founding principle of liberal governmentality. But crafting a disastrous mode of subjectivity or biopower cannot subdue nature in its material otherness; instead, it produces an awareness that neither nature nor humanity can master the other, a relation of mutual negation.

Bentham's auto‐icon: Utilitarianism and the evisceration of the common body

The auto‐icon — the stuffed corpse of Jeremy Bentham — exemplifies the logic of both utilitarian reformism and its failure. Like Benthams reforms of penal law, it attempts to undo older cultural forms of theatricalized power, punishment, or collective representation, which are often dependent on the metaphor of the social body, with a form of power that seems irreversible, uniform, and literal. But instead it makes unusually visible the necessary impasses of such an attempt, showing how some element even in Benthams corpus resists functionalization, escapes the calculus of utility, and speaks of the ineradicable alterity of death.

The Discipline of Death: Knowledge and Power in An Essay on the Principle of Population

Certain telling passages in the early editions of Malthuss Essay suggest that the figure of disaster captures a logic immanent to society, a logic that can become the object of a novel form of power/knowledge. On the basis of such knowledge the Essay proposes cancelling policies that once protected English subjects from the effects of scarcity, thereby rendering the market into a form of social discipline. But its proposals are effective only because English plebeians are already losing access to a basis for subsistence outside the waged economy. The Essay is thus an exemplary statement of a modern regime of subordination, for it justifies the subordination of plebeians to the threat of deferred death.