Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger by David Simpson

Abstract

David Simpson. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 288. $31. Stunning in its breadth and bold in its implications, David Simpson's Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger tracks the figure of the and the strangeness of figurative language--and of literature more generally-- in and beyond British Romanticism. In both the Romantic period and our own, Simpson diagnoses an attitude he calls the the primary symptom of which is a pervasive ambivalence toward the stranger, foreigner, or intruder. Following the logic of Derrida's pharmakon--the medicine that may poison, and the poison that may heal--the describes a continuous dialectic in which the is both desired and abjected, loved and feared, welcomed and yet always suspect. It is an inexhaustible oscillation between hospitality and hostility that reminds us never to conceive of kindness and cruelty as utterly (229). Divided into three movements, the book shifts with impressive ease from author-centered chapters to chapters focusing on literary techniques of estrangement and translation, to chapters organized typologically around the figures of the slave and the woman who exemplify the way we abject most the strangers we most need. Even more striking, though, is the bold agility with which Simpson moves between close readings of literary texts from the Romantic period and overt criticism of the political and ethical contradictions of our contemporary culture. In the former he finds that (and its dispersion of both troops and refugees), revolution, the Terror, the abolition movement, and the constitution and reconstitution of nation states put enormous pressure on acts and attitudes of hospitality, causing a distinct ramping up of the depth and scope of the syndrome (10). Likewise, he finds our own everywhere in the U.S. after 9/11, and he is startlingly explicit, without being heavy-handed, about its detrimental effects on our culture. The book is thus a compelling reminder of the political relevance of work in the humanities, as Simpson explores contemporary attitudes in the U.S. toward immigration and refugees, the legitimacy of violence and the state of exception, welfare and the poverty crisis, sexual violence, and the decision to go to in Iraq (which Simpson approaches through a reading of Donald Rumsfeld's warmongering tongue twister about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns [3]). In Romantic literature, Simpson finds not the source of our latter-day syndrome, but rather a resource for understanding and articulating our own contradictions and ambivalences. Simpson's juxtaposition of the Romantic period with our own goes beyond the familiar connection between the post-revolutionary Terror and post 9/11 war on terror, since he identifies terror as but one of many ways that the logic of the pharmakon shapes the period's political and ethical life. Both today and in the 1790s, terror works by doing double duty as friend and enemy, as that which protects the state and that which the state most fears and must suppress (2). But terror is only one instance of this logic among an extraordinary list of (sometimes unlikely) strangers in Romantic texts: pineapple, woman, discharged soldier, footnote, slave, opium, Jew, glossed word, tea, chocolate, Arab, textile, albatross, metaphor, enemy. The force of Simpson's book comes from the strangeness of these juxtapositions. Indeed, the risk of such a heterogeneous list might be that the term stranger would become so ubiquitous (as the title to his introduction After 9/11: The Ubiquity of Others suggests) as to lose its meaning; yet Simpson's precise historical research and careful close readings allow him to move effortlessly from pineapple to enemy without losing either specificity or rigor. The book's introduction provides an impressive, expansive account of the philosophy of the (who is not necessarily foreign) in a range of thinkers, including Freud, Habermas, Husserl, Levinas, Schmitt, and Ricoeur. …