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.