Renunciation

Abstract

In their ruminations on Mark Rothko’s Chapel paintings, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit posit a mode of aesthetic consciousness produced by acts of renunciation. Rothko deliberately relinquishes his paintings’ visibility and thus, like Beckett and Resnais, impoverishes a primary feature of his artistic medium. Bersani and Dutoit’s concept of renunciation undermines modernist medium specificity and points to a form of pseudomorphosis that reveals the fundamental homo-ness between the arts. This speculative essay builds on their argument that such renunciative gestures produce aesthetic models of nondual consciousness and brings Bersani’s later writings into conversation with musical experience. In Bersani’s encounter with Proust and music, musical experience proffers a powerful ego solvent in favor of ontological interpenetration. An attention to music—here, that of Morton Feldman and Joan La Barbara—avers the power of modernism to shatter the modern ego.