This essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of poverty, aided by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, however, embraces the possibility of new beginning; the wind that stirs and in whose uneven gusts the potential for the revision of the self emerges.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most politically influential books to appear in Britain during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810). This was a book that many commentators at the time felt had an impact on the political life of the nation second only to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pasley calls upon Britain to wage an aggressive war of conquest to resist Napoleonic France. The nation must, he contends, build a universal empire as the only bulwark against French conquest of Europe. Although he insists that British conquests will form an empire of liberty, his calls for aggressive military action also seek to remodel Britain itself in relation to far-reaching demands of military security. Considering, in turn, why he was so widely praised as a writer, more a poet than a statesman in Wordsworth’s view, this chapter proposes that Pasley displaced the traditional patriotic functions of the national bard to establish a new kind of national wartime narrative, a sublime liberal epic founded on the nation’s traumatic confrontation with war.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.

The relationship between law and religion can be imagined as a conjunction or a disjunction. Beginning with the suggestion that the terms “law” and “religion,” when their meaning has not been taken for granted, have become too invested with ideological weight, as a result of debates over secularism, to be of much use for analytical purposes, this essay substitutes a series of alternative dichotomies: among others, auctoritas versus potestas, the constituting versus the constituted power, and charisma versus law. Examining the history and interplay of such categories, I suggest that such dualities often describe the dynamic tension between sovereignty and legality that defines an existing order. Special attention is given to the historical examples of the pardon power and the Pauline opposition between charis and nomos, as well as to David Daube’s argument that redemption in biblical traditions was a sacralized legal concept. Through a series of thought experiments, I suggest that law and religion may be understood in some cases as twins, born together and inseparable, just as law cannot be fully distinguished from sovereignty.

Chapter 7 conceptualizes how, if monotheism “separates” God from the political sphere this does not result in what Mouffe denounced as depoliticization. I examine Christ as manifesting the monotheistic “separation” from the political sphere while agonistically engaging the mechanisms of scapegoating. In Christ the victimized-divinity we do not have a regression into polytheism; nor yet do we find an “escape” from the sacrifice and exclusion that polytheism contained. Rejecting both as insufficient, I consider Girard’s paradox that Christianity is an “exit from religion in the form of a demythified religion.” Drawing cues from Mouffe’s critiques of liberalism, I see in monotheism not an escape from intolerance into an exclusion-free utopia, but something more like exclusion-in-reverse in which intolerance is a photographic negative. I thus illustrate Christ as embodying a monotheism that – precisely through, not despite, his intolerance – points us toward the marginalized other and pluralistic concerns today.

In this first of paired chapters bearing down on the evolutionary history and philosophy of literary language, Victorian narratives differently concerned with the term “medium” – George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – undergo an intensive reading that opens directly onto Giorgio Agamben’s investigations into the always mysterious ontological conjuncture of idea and its sayability, object and its name, in human discourse – and since then onto conceptual poet John Cayley’s theory of “grammalepsy.” Literary examples of prose under duress, from Herman Melville to D. H. Lawrence, return reading to a more close-grained application of Agamben’s poetics (rather than ontology), where the “give” – and take back – of a medium’s oscillatory potential can only be played out before us, tacitly at least, in a foundational contrast to the logic (following Agamben) of the non-extensive point in calculus, the signifying unit that has, unlike syllabic language, no subsidiary elements.

Events, including the encouragement to eat potatoes, are best understood when they are seen as part of larger sets of ideas, rather than as singularities. The pan-European potato vogue reflected the new political importance that eating acquired during the Enlightenment, as politicians and philosophers began to link individual diets to the strength and wealth of nations. They framed this debate within a language of choice and the individual pursuit of happiness. The connections between everyday life, individualism and the state forged in the late eighteenth century, of which the history of the potato’s emergence as an Enlightenment super-food forms a part, continue to shape today’s debates about how to balance personal dietary freedom with the health of the body politic. The potato’s history also reminds us not to overlook the contributions of small-scale agriculture to the larger history of innovation and change. Recognising peasant contributions to the history of the potato is not simply a matter of historical justice. It is also relevant for our future. Biodiversity is today identified as an essential component of both long-term environmental sustainability and global food security.