Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism by Sara Guyer

Abstract

Book Reviews Sara Guyer. Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 131. $26. Sara Guyer’s Reading withJohn Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism is a slim but dense volume that, not unlike the writings of the poet that form the object and axis of her readings, releases a subtle and powerful light of soft-laser steadiness and intensity. It accomplishes several things. On the most evident level, it constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship on Clare, providing new readings of poems and prose and staging ways of using biographical and contextual material that, altogether, model a fresh approach to the genre of the single-author monograph. Clearly, it re­ positions Clare among the Romantics for Romanticists. More than that, though, it makes a case to students and scholars of other fields and disci­ plines for the significance of Clare—long considered minor, marginal, a vi­ olet by a mossy stone, a poet for the cognoscenti—as a writer with whom to interrogate major philosophical and theoretical questions of modernity. Addressing readers of Clare and readers who should and need to read Clare, Guyer’s study brings the poet’s writing into dialogue with—or, rather, exposes its always already having been in dialogue with—funda­ mental concepts in Romantic and Postromantic aesthetic and political thought, rearticulating in the process the contemporaneity ofRomanticism for the global present. In its practice of careful reading, it shows and argues for a renewed attentiveness to the play and questioning of language whereby Romanticism doubly participates in and promises to open up the structures of what, after Foucault and Agamben, critical discourse has termed “biopolitical modernity.” In late works spanning the History ofSexuality to his last 1975—76 lectures at the College de France, Foucault conceptualized and analyzed a new dis­ position ofpower that emerged in the long nineteenth century in Western Europe. Supplanting the older, classical definition of sovereign power, this new disposition—biopolitics—defines itself as a power over life, rather than death, as a power to “make live and let die” manifest in an array of concrete arrangements—including techniques such as vaccination and new forms of record-keeping—that allow for the administration of bodies and the calculated management oflife. With his 20-year confinement in mental asylums in High Beach, Epping, and Northamptonshire, Clare wrote from SiR, 55 (Winter 2016) 585 586 BOOK REVIEWS within the very institutional settings of biopolitical administration. As testi­ monies to the effects of the Enclosure Acts of 1809 and following, his po­ ems bear witness to the effects on land and communities of privatizing mechanisms that dismantle the commons. Guyer suggests, without making fully explicit, that an analogous logic of confinement is operative in the psychiatric incarceration ofbodies, a placement that bespeaks displacement, and the political economic arrangement of land enclosure, a production of place as property that likewise occasions displacement. In terms of historical chronology, Romanticism coincides with the emergence of biopolitics. Guyer coins the cognate term “biopoetics,” in­ troduced in the subtitle of the book in apposition with “sovereignty” and “romanticism,” to theorize and analyze this claim. What is the relationship between biopolitics and biopoetics? The two are complicit insofar as Ro­ mantic literature internalizes and shows preoccupation with the new cate­ gories of life, such as “race,” “species,” and “population,” terms wherein the human is subject to mathematization. In the Romantic troping ofliter­ ary power itself in terms of a sovereign lyric subjectivity presumed capable of animating or giving life—a feature long taken to demarcate Romanti­ cism as movement, as period, and as field—Guyer discerns a core intimacy between the biopoetic and the biopolitical. Yet, biopoetics, in her analysis, designates more than just this complicity but also a practice and process of its undoing, an undoing that one may call “dis-enclosure,” in affinity with Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous investigation in Christian theological and posttheological writing of the gesture to open up a self-enclosed world, whereby that which is called “life” would be exposed as inadequate to, performatively in excess of, its nominal and normative determination. In the book’s five chapters, framed by the chiasmically titled “Introduc­ tion: The Life...