Delirious Milton Part 1.

In his book Delirious Milton: the Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2006 ), Gordon Teskey makes some interesting claims which have an indirect relation to Agamben's ideas.


In the interest of both providing a summary of Teskey's book and laying a groundwork for further work on Milton in relation to Heidegger and Agamben, I've tried to write some of my intital thoughts on Teskey's Delirious Milton.


Describing Milton as a theoretical poet, Teskey locates Milton's creative consciousness in an origin of delirium. Through this delirium, Milton simultaneously looks backward toward the original Creation of all existence and forward to the future of the uncreated, including what is to be created by him as a poet. “Delirium” aptly describes this continual divergence and return from the idea of a being created to the idea of a being creating.


Making clever, but not unproblematic, allusions to the Heideggerian concept of Being as a totality of existence—although only fathomed under its erasure, for the minute we attempt to think of Being, we find that we only do so through our own being, which is grounded in a temporality necessarily removed from this very totality—Teskey suggests that this rift between divine Creation and human creation grants Milton a shaman-like power.


The role of the Shaman is the mantle of artists in Modernity, bestowing upon them the ability to not only represent an experience but to participate in that experience, and, in turn, to entangle the spectators in the same. Yet this is not the experience of a fixed and stable presence, but the flickering on and off of the lights—the constant swaying to and fro between the hallucination of presence and the erasure of that presence.


Complicating the initial idea of a rift between the idea of being created and being a creator, this experience simultaneously negates and restores the idea of a stable reality. It is what Teskey considers our experience of Modernity:


Modernity appears to consist not in any stable vision of the world but rather in a succession of incompatible hallucinations, like the flickering of lights in a train car or the shuddering of forest boughs beneath electric light. This change began, to speak approximately, as we must, in the seventeenth century and may be described as the transition in the art from a poetics of hallucination typical of Spender to a poetics delirium, inaugurated by Milton...in which the dependence of imagery not on any objective, metaphysical order but on the subjective will of the speaker removes any need for consistency among images and permits them to be rapidly changed (15).


The hallucination of a world divinely ordered demands a unified aesthetic vision, one which corresponds to the idea of an externally-created universe. For Teskey, the seventeenth century marks the eclipse of an aesthetics built upon the idea of portraying a consistent hallucination (one which is applied topically through allegory) in favor of an aesthetics which springs from an internal, subjective process of creating.


However, this breaking away from the poetics of hallucination is never complete. In fact, it is the never-completed-breaking-away which creates the poetics of delirium. The artist is torn between belief in her or his hallucination and the recognition of its artificiality.


Delirium becomes a creative force in its own right, a meaning that can never be reduced to meaning per se precisely because it operates by destabilizing the poetic vehicles which transmit meaning: “delirium is not an experience without truth but rather the destabilization of experience itself by succession” (15). Teskey's final chapter, where he uncovers an aesthetics of delirium predicated on a fundamentally violent vision, is critical. For Teskey, this violence is integral to the theoretical poetics of Milton and, more broadly, to the aesthetics of Modernity.

Milton and Agamben

Over the last few months I've been reading Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, and found it increasingly hard to study Agamben's ideas without seriously considering their relation to Milton.


I've found it harder still to think of England's interregnum period (with the iconic figures of Cromwell, Charles, Hobbes looming in the backdrop) without seeing a strong correlation between what Agamben—drawing on Schmitt—terms the state of exception and the events of the civil war period, even down to appropriations of Republican ideology by Cromwellians.


Now this is not to be construed as a proposal to look at everything through Agamben-colored glasses, but I would argue that the philosophical and theoretical issues saturating Milton's poetry and, in turn, the historical context of the early modern period are indelibly linked to the paradigms of sovereign power that Agamben brings to the surface in Homo Sacer. To say the least, Agamben's work at its finest and most provocative troubles notions of a reductive and traditional reading of anti-sovereign motifs in Milton's poetry, if only by complicating any simplistic conception of sovereign power or sovereignty.


I would go so far as to say that the philosophy of sovereignty, with all its political and religious ramifications, is a central tension throughout Milton's poetry. For example, Victoria Kahn has argued that Samson Agonsites stems from Milton's struggle to understand the state of exception as the inaugurating moment of political theology.[1] Without slipping into too much of a deconstructive type of reading, the crowning tension of Milton's three major poetic achievements is indeed his attempt to think the limit point of sovereignty.


But by sovereignty, I mean sovereignty as an idea that ties life to law in a fundamental way. In a way that is more extensive than conceptions of sovereignty that stop short at the relation of politics and ontology ( a relation Agamben finds always already at work in a Hobbesian account of the state of nature ).


Moreover, it is important not to ignore the fact that Milton chooses to think the limit point of politics and religion through poetry, for there is a link between Milton's aesthetics (poetry) and Milton's theoretical and philosophical concerns.


Anyway, as these rather general ideas suggest, I do think there is a great deal of work to be done concerning Milton and sovereignty, work which pushes beyond previous studies on the issue. Fortunately, Agamben has opened up many fascinating and incisive avenues for doing so.


[1]Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Reason of State in Samson Agonistes,”South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (fall 1996): 1066.

Milton and Justice

Because Milton is often hailed as a proponent of liberal thought, it becomes quite easy to insist that Milton saw a one-to-one equivalency between human and divine ideas of justice, and that he fully intended his God to possess a sort of rational justice and goodness towards his creation.¹

In trying to resolve this tension, Harold Skulsky has gone as far as to read Paradise Lost as a trial between man and God with Satan as the accuser.²Skulsky resolves his theological and philosophical arguments by stating that Milton has God share in humanity's suffering in the form of the son.³Without perhaps intending to, Skulsky has here implied that the only way one can reconcile God 's justice with human ideas of justice is to have God partake in a human ontology.

It is indeed something anterior to ethics and theodicy which connects politics and theology to suffering so tightly in Paradise Lost. By realizing God's apparent incongruence with the ideas of law and justice, we come upon “the moment in which the foundation of law remains suspended in the void or over the abyss, suspended by a pure performative act that would not have to answer to or before anyone.”⁴ Divine justice is anterior to humanly-held ideas of justice and law, but it is also the force which creates them, and therefore has a direct correspondence to Milton's theory of political obligation:

...unjust thou say'st

Flatly unjust, to bind with Laws the free,

And equal over equals to let Reign

One over all with unsucceeded power

Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute

With him the points of liberty, who made

Thee what thou art, and form'd the Pow'rs of Heav'n

Such as he pleas'd, and circumscrib'd thir being? (PL. V. 818-825)

This is Abdiel's retort to Satan's assertion that God forces laws upon those whose “being [is] ordain'd to govern, not to serve” (PL.V. 802). Yet the fact that Satan insists that his being was made to govern because he “without Law errs not” (PL.V.798-99) only reinforces Abdiel's rebuttal, for it shows that Satan cannot really comprehend an existence which is anterior to law. The word “err” implies that his perspective is precedented on law.

Abdiel's reply refers the argument back to its inseparable connection with ontology. Satan's status as a created being imposes the law over his actions and makes it impossible for him to argue against the nonlaw of the creator—“shalt thou give Law to God” (PL. V. 822). Consequently, Abdiel pictures Satan's argument as ludicrous, reminding him that law is intrinsic to one's being. Satan cannot argue with the creator who made him what he was.

He cannot argue with one who as he “pleas'd circumscrib'd thir being”(PL. V. 825) because his ontology contains its own limits. The rebuttal is simply and always that there is a difference that cannot be effaced between creator and created.

For Milton, the demonic is to conceal one's creation, and therefore to conceal one's ontological difference with the divine. Hence, Satan replies to Abdiel, “...remember'st thou / Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? / We know no time when we were not as now” (PL.V.857-859). Politics meets ontology with this statement. Satan insists that there was no origin, no founding act which gave him law and gave him being. He thus believes there is nothing but creaturely law, or the laws established by created beings. He refuses to acknowledge that God in a moment that was neither just nor unjust—in a movement anterior to such constructions of justice—created the laws.

Yet because God is anterior to the law, Abdiel declares that granting sovereignty to someone who was created in the law, to an equal, is the great injustice: “But to grant it thee unjust, / That equal over equals Monarch Reign" (PL. V. 831-832). Concealment of one's origin as a created being is not merely abhorrent because it is blasphemous, but abhorrent because it separates law from one's intrinsic ontology and ignores the inscription of the law within each individual.

It turns the law into something ignorant of the originary power which gives it being and which is woven into the ontology of every created thing. The demonic reduces the political to a series of external roles, all the time claiming “we know no time when we were not as now” (PL. V. 859) in its defense.

For this reason, it is not surprising that Abdiel reflects the dissenting position, where outward conformity and inward conformity cannot be separated because politics and ontology cannot be separated; and politics and ontology cannot be separated because they have a divine origin.⁵

If the demonic obscures the relationship between politics and ontology, divine wrath recovers it: “Then who created thee lamenting learn, / When he who can uncreate thee thou shalt know” (PL. VI. 894-895). This is Abdiel's final reply to Satan's refutation of a divine creation. The only way Satan will realize that his law is inscribed in his being is when he experiences suffering and, ultimately, destruction; then and only then will politics return to his ontology.

1See Dennis Danielson,Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), 149-154.

2See Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in Paradise Lost (Newark: University of Delaware University Press, 2000).

3Skulsky,172-227.

4Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundation of Authority,'” in Acts of Religion, ed. by Gil Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228-298.

5Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 120-127.