Daniel Rhodes: Thank you for joining me for a discussion of your recent book, An Aesthetics of Injury. Your choice of title suggests that a fresh form of aestheticism in general is perhaps as much at stake in your book as is your careful, yet exciting, analysis of literary and filmic violence. Prof. Fleishman, in brief, how would you describe aestheticism?

Ian Fleishman: Among other things, aestheticism, in my idiosyncratic usage, refers to the ambivalent triumph, alluded to above, of the ‘textual’ (or, in another discourse, ‘symbolic’) over what one might be tempted to think of as an unpresentable ‘real’. Throughout the course of the literary, cinematic and intellectual history sketched by An Aesthetics of Injury, the different filmmakers, authors and thinkers examined increasingly attempt to literalize images or idioms of injury (‘That comment cuts me to the bone!’) in order to restore the potency of what Nietzsche might have called worn-out metaphors deprived of sensuous power. But dead metaphors are hard to resurrect and my contention is that the repeated attempt to literalize the metaphorical only ends up making real, often autobiographical, experience into a metaphor or metonymy for something else — as it is, for instance, in Schroeter’s adaptation of Bachmann’s novel Malina, where the author’s real-life burn wounds come to symbolize a textual strategy of fragmentation and dismemberment or, perhaps even more pointedly, if less poignantly, in Rainald Goetz, where a live performative slash across the author’s forehead becomes a signifier for the evocation of blood it had been intended to illustrate and realize.



DR: A closely related concept, decadence, also plays a fundamental role in your critique. As with aestheticism, you’ve deliberately reimagined the term; making the inverse assertion that “if decadence […] upsets the hegemony of the whole over the part (or fragment), what I am calling aestheticism goes so far as to trouble the primacy of reality with regard to (its textual) representation.” What is the relationship between a text’s aestheticism and its decadence? In what sense do these literary traits inform each other?



IF: Yes, exactly. Given the way I define aestheticism, decadence would refer to the kind of productive textual fragmentation discussed above — or, more specifically, to the breakdown of a text into ever smaller parts: in Baudelaire, the collapse of a volume of poetry into its constitutive poems; in Cixous, the parsing of a sentence or phrase into its constitutive phonemes. I’m not entirely sure, now that you ask, if the relationship between these redefinitions of decadence and aestheticism is ever sufficiently explained in the book itself (although I certainly hope it is!), but essentially, the authors, thinkers and filmmakers discussed in An Aesthetics of Injury all attempt to access some purportedly more profound or more essential corporeal reality through strategies of textual dismemberment, to open the text, through its own undoing, to some deeper meaning that would exceed representation.



DR: Your story begins within the context of a specific literary tradition. A tradition built, at least in part, upon the assumption that good literature hurts. Or, as Kafka would famously have it, “we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.” What does it mean for literature to wound? Why must corporeal harm be the only true indicator of good literature?



IF: That’s the question. Part of what the book ended up being about was how fuzzy and abstract the appropriation of injury ultimately becomes as a poetic strategy. There’s something romantic and delightfully morbid about the notion that the true measure of an artwork is its capacity to visit harm upon its audience. When I began working on the project, I think I had, if maybe not entirely consciously, intended to celebrate this aesthetic of immediacy — to extol the affective potency of those texts that seek, paraphrasing Kafka, to bite and sting and stab. The longer I worked on this canon of what I’m calling a kind of pseudo-genre of the narrative wound, though, the more critical I became of the aesthetic mode it represents. The ceaseless insistence on literal, physical harm as a model for the artwork began to seem to me symptomatic of an attempted overcompensation for a disavowed rhetorical sterility or perceived aesthetic anesthesia. Which isn’t to say that the films and novels read in the book aren’t powerful or moving — far from it — but rather that the infliction of pain isn’t necessarily the best indicator of their aesthetic success.



DR: But why must this sense of immediacy be gained by horrifying the audience? In your book, you cite Cixous’ claim that “Ce qui est coupé repousse” (What is cut off, repulses/regrows), but isn’t it equally true that mutilation can lead to sublime, rather than repulsive, creations?



IF: In many, if not most, cases treated in the book, aesthetic mutilation, literal and/or figurative, is an attempt at a variety of sublime experience, certainly — especially in Bataille, perhaps. Rosemarie Brucher, for instance, has insightfully read bodily self-injury in performance art against the backdrop of the Kantian sublime. While the injuries I examine tend to be less literal, we might choose to regard the grotesque and the sublime as related, maybe complementary, modes or ‘forms’ of what Bataille would call the informe. My point is, of course, and this is probably the book’s central contention, that the literary or filmic (or, when it comes to Rainald Goetz, actual, corporeal) wound, is itself inscriptive, itself a kind of text: it doesn’t truly transcend symbolic structures or offer some immediate point of contact with an unmediated, ‘extratextual’ reality. Quite the opposite. To this extent, the phenomenon I’m describing might indeed resemble a kind of Kantian sublime, which ultimately involves the triumph of the human intellect over presentational, representational disintegration, of our capacity for conceptualization over unruly objects that would otherwise seem to exceed our comprehension.



Cixous’s assertion, on my reading, would be more aligned with your earlier question on decadence: it has less to do with epistemological issues than it does with a concrete poetics. What I discovered — in Baudelaire (where six censored poems are replaced by six times that many in subsequent editions), in Bataille (whose final novel builds on what remains of burnt drafts for a first), in Genet (whose “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Precise Little Squares and Flushed Down the Shitter” elevates a crisis of writerly confidence and ensuing textual dismemberment to an avant-garde aesthetic strategy), in Cixous (who rewrites and unwrites an early fiction to conceal, or at least to obscure, the trauma inspiring it), in Tarantino (whose Kill Bill works to transform the scars of studio censorship into a pleasurable game of hide-and-seek for viewers in the know) — is that sometimes, often even, it is precisely the points of rupture, caesura or omission that prove the most generative. So much on the subject of growth, regrowth. The notion of revulsion (the other meaning of ‘Ce qui est coupé repousse’, as you point out) is in no way foreign to the sublime, which, for Burke, you’ll remember, involves plenty of unpleasantness, pain and even ugliness.



Embarrassingly enough, I actually came to this understanding of decadence in Baudelaire while, predictably, reading Bakhtin (who describes the grotesque in terms of bodies-in-becoming) and, by unpredictable but fortuitous coincidence, listening to a song by a band called the Maccabees with the lyrics “Body don’t break / Body don’t break / Body don’t break / Till broken / Body’s gonna make / Body’s gonna make / Body’s gonna make / Another body.” Basically, I guess my assertion is that a body-in-unbecoming is also a body-in-becoming, if that makes any sense. Sadly, an English indie rock band got there first.



DR: And yet, this admission is made considerably less surprising when we consider, if only for a wonderful moment, that you once taught a course entitled ‘Hipster Philosophy from Marx to Zizek.’

IF: [Laughs.] Indeed. I hope I’m not getting a reputation.