Reviewed by: The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics by Aidan Tynan Cory Stockwell Aidan Tynan, The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics, Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 254 pp. This is a fantastic book, one that challenges and indeed moves the reader on virtually every page. It is worth reading for this alone—the sense one has, while reading it, of being in the presence of a brilliant mind moving from one original, well-crafted idea to the next. Per its title, the book deals with the ways modern literature and philosophy have taken up the theme of the desert; per its subtitle, it configures this engagement as a "wasteland aesthetics." As one might already guess, Tynan is deeply concerned with our current ecological predicament. His gesture, however, is not one of despair: the desert, for him, is a site from which we might begin to think outside of aesthetic models (inherited from Romanticism) that judge nature according to the fullness or totality of the world it creates. Tynan's interest in the desert lies in the fact that, in its seeming impoverishment, it provides a way out of this framework—out of this world. The imperative of overcoming the concept of world is one of the major themes of the book, one that Tynan interrogates mainly through readings of Heidegger and Deleuze. Per Tynan's own admission, this is a provocative pairing, but he argues that these thinkers come together in their criticisms of world. This may seem strange where Heidegger is concerned, given the importance of this concept for his philosophy. Tynan, however, notes that Heidegger, far from positing the world as an embeddedness or surrounding environment, argues that it arises only in those moments at which it ceases to hold together—moments of boredom and anxiety, for example, in which meaningfulness begins to fall apart. Tynan therefore argues that for Heidegger, thinking the world "requires the experience of worldlessness" (29), insofar as our being-in-the-world always "contains some form of awareness, subsequently repressed or forgotten, of a worldlessness without which there would be no being-in-the-world at all" (30). Indeed, Tynan goes so far as to claim that "World is its own loss or impoverishment" (30). Tynan relates this to a certain ungrounding that, he argues, is central to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "geophilosophy." Taken at face value, the concept might seem to be close to that of world, but in fact it is anything but: Tynan characterizes it as "an attempt to reorient philosophy away from the relationship between subject and object and towards one between territories and the Earth" (63–64). For Deleuze and Guattari, the foundation of territories—which are always territories of meaning—always takes place upon a ground, a prior coherence. This ground, however, is never constituted once and for all: every true foundation creates its own ground and is hence simultaneously an ungrounding. Meaning is therefore always susceptible to being overturned: to do so requires causing the ground "to rise up seismically into the world of representations, [End Page 495] fracturing them along with the putative unity they grant consciousness" (65); an instance of this in Deleuze and Guattari's theory is the body of the catatonic schizophrenic: "The catatonic body, having cast off the organs clinging to its surface, is an embodiment of the unground, the Earth-body that has risen up to shatter the world" (65–66). If Heidegger points toward a productive worldlessness that arises in moments of uncanniness, Deleuze and Guattari push the envelope that much further, allowing us to imagine a deterritorialized Earth that precedes and ceaselessly threatens the world; for Tynan, the desert acts as one of the major figures of this deterritorialization. The desert, in other words, allows for the cancellation of distinctions between surface and depth, such as the Bedeutung and Bedeutsamkeit (meaning and meaningfulness) on which Heidegger's world depends, and this is the task that the desert imposes upon thinking: for Deleuze and Guattari, "philosophy emerges when the ground gives way to an unground beneath it," giving rise to "a desertified expanse" (68) that itself is "a form of depth...
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Apr 1, 2024
Alex Underwood 
Open Access