THE ONTOTHEOLOGY OF THE LITERARY AESTHETIC: HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC ASPECTS

Abstract

In spite of Deconstruction or New Historicism there have been a number of notable efforts in the Eighties or Nineties to re-establish a metaphysics or even religion of the literary work of art. This article proposes to clarify some of the historical and structural preconditions of these attempts. For this purpose, the 'ontotheology' of literature is traced back to the aesthetic rhetorization of religious language following the Protestant abolition of those ritual practices during the Reformation which hitherto had ensured God's substantial and 'Real Presence' in the world. Starting out from Sidney's poetics, the article then focuses on those formal features of literature which may have been able to compensate for the growing modern con sciousness of the contingency of the extraneous reference God and, there fore, the world itself. These are above all, as can be shown, self-reference, energeia, 'substantiality' and the spatio-temporal closure of form. Furthermore the paper briefly discusses the concept of 'otherness' and concludes with a short speculation on the possibility of theology in a postmodem age of difference. The rise of a religion or an 'ontotheology' of the aesthetic is the reverse side of the decline of western theology. This seems widely accepted. But under which historical conditions and with which structural devices could an aesthet ics of literature (of art in general) nurture the illusion that poetry (or a painting) is a place of 'Real Presence' and that a literary (pictorial, musical) work of art may be a means of compensating for modern contingency? Why are many people still led to believe that art and religion have some 'common ground'1 and that literature may provide us with a privileged access to the transcendent? In order to cast some light on these questions, I should like to concentrate not so much on 'Real Presences' as on the material presence, particularly of the literary work of art and on its relationship with modem contingency. © Oxford University Press 1998 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:40:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms