Sometime during 1819, Percy Shelley interrupted the process of drafting his longest prose text, A Philosophical View of Reform, and began working on an essay equally fated to remain a fragment— “On Life,” which Shelley wrote into the back of the same notebook he was drafting the Philosophical View of Reform in. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, the editors of the Norton Critical Edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, write that the fragment “grew directly from an early passage” in the former text (505, n. 1). Their choice of metaphor characterizes an essay “on life” as an organic, living outgrowth of a treatise on politics—as if life were continuous with and already contained by politics. At the same time, the animation bestowed by the metaphor renders the relationship of the two texts decidedly apolitical—not so much an action or even a response to a historical or writerly exigency, but rather the manifestation of a natural process, perhaps one as inevitable as Shelley’s individual disposition towards abstract and ineffectual musings. Yet, and notwithstanding the suicidal irony of an enlivened politics that, following this metaphor, does not so much politicize life as depoliticize politics, the significance of the inscription of “On Life” in the pages of the draft of A Philosophical View of Reform might have less to do with what compelled Shelley to turn from a treatise on politics—a survey of the historical and contemporary workings of political power that was to demonstrate a “necessary” because “inevitable” political change and to culminate in a practical proposal to enact a more egalitarian political model—to a metaphysically tinged reflection on life, than in the fact that he did so. From this perspective, the sheer material coincidence of these two fragments indicates an historical and theoretical exigency in which politics—the possibility of political change and more just government—comes to be staked on life and life predicated on politics. In this light, the conjunction of the two texts allegorizes a biopolitical relation between power and life, and so furnishes an occasion to read romanticism’s engagement with “life” as a formative moment in the modern genealogy of biopolitics. How, then, to read this turn to life?

At first sight, “On Life” would seem to suggest that life offers an escape from politics. In the opening paragraph Shelley asks: “What are the changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religions and of political systems to life?” (505). The question is the first of three, and, insofar as it is merely rhetorical, is a more effective way of asserting that power is trivial next to the magnificence of life. However, this reading is immediately complicated by the fact that, of the three questions, this is the only one lacking the phrase “compared with” that unequivocally tells us that life is being measured or weighed up against something else. While the question can still be rhetorical, without the comparative prepositional phrase it also becomes increasingly legible as a sincere question: what is the relation of power to life? This is not only a question of what power makes of life, where life is rendered as the object of power, for insofar as the speaker asks what the cycles of power are “to” life, it is almost as if life itself, indirectly apostrophized, were called upon to give an account of its relation with power.

This question is further sounded in the figuration of power’s historical forms as themselves alive: beginning in “birth” and ending in “extinction,” political power takes on the properties of a living being—a figuration that calls to mind Foucault’s quip about biopower as a “magnificent beast” (“bête magnifique,” qtd. in Chebili 142). Life, then, is not merely being compared to, or even being valued over, power when the very act of that assertion renders the relation of life and power indistinct. Shelley’s question instead suggests that power is staked on the separability and difference of “life” from itself, and that to intervene in politics always also entails coming to grips with the uncertain legibility of the relation between power and life.

We would like to take Shelley’s meditation on the relation between power and life as the occasion to introduce a collection of scholarship intended to initiate a conversation about and between what is called “biopolitics” and what is called “romanticism.” The broad contention of this volume is that the study of biopolitics reanimates the question of romanticism. We mean this in two senses. First, the set of conceptual resources provided in recent work on biopolitics opens up inventive lines of inquiry that enable scholars to re-think the already established awareness that the literature, philosophy, and culture of romanticism displays an obsession with life. Biopolitics reanimates romanticism in the additional sense that the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power marks the radical survival of romanticism. If romanticism responds well when examined in the light of contemporary biopolitical theory, then a constitutive part of this response is a certain resistance to biopolitical theory. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the biopolitical intervention on life—the political project of targeting, capturing, making, and taking life—engages paradoxes, predicaments, and aporias that have been widely or fully appreciated neither by theorists of biopolitics nor by critics who take up their work. Romanticism, we suggest, is a privileged locus for the awareness that even the most assured representation of life turns upon an irreducible “literariness.”

I. Biopolitics

Of the many, often divergent articulations of biopolitics, the seminal account of Michel Foucault and its reinterpretation by Giorgio Agamben have been the most influential; they figure prominently in the essays collected here, and so deserve some elaboration. Foucault introduced his use of the terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” in a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in early 1976 and in the introductory volume of the History of Sexuality also from 1976. Following on his earlier analyses of power in The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault traced the emergence, around the turn of the nineteenth century, of a new form of power—“biopower”— that came to “complement,” “penetrate” and “permeate” the sovereign power of the state. If sovereign power’s characteristic expression had been the right to kill, to “take life or let live,” biopower named a new, opposing right: the “right to make live and let die” (‘Society’ 241). Power no longer worked principally by means of deduction, “a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods, and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects”; instead, it began to work in positive manner to make its objects grow, “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it” (History 136). In short, biopower witnesses the “entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomenon peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (History 141).

Foucault specifies that life entered into the calculations of power in two ways. From the end of the seventeenth century the individual body was targeted “as a machine: it disciplining the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” (History 139). In the second half of the eighteenth century this form of biopower was supplemented by a second, properly biopolitical technique that worked on biological features that became meaningful and efficient only when aggregated and understood at the level of populations. From the perspective of biopolitics the relation of “life” to an individual body is aleatory, but regular with regard to a collection of bodies that exists over an extended period of time. It hence became possible to establish control mechanisms—“forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures”—whose “purpose is not ... to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomenon are determined, at the level of their generality” (‘Society’ 246). The biopolitical intervention on life concerns not individual subjects, but rather the production of figures—statistics, estimates, data, totals, sums—that provide, and indeed are, the means to regularize, but also isolate and contain, the “random element inherent in a population of living beings” so as to “optimize a state of life” (246).

That the project of biopower was to “make live” does not mean, however, that the old sovereign right of death simply disappears. It is rather subordinated to the power of making live, and manifests itself, Foucault writes, as “the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain and develop its life” (History 136). The power of death is no longer wielded “in the name of a sovereign who must be defended” but rather to protect the biological existence of a population (‘Society’ 137). And since “death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, . . . the limit, or the end of power too” (‘Society’ 248), the power over death itself becomes unbounded, freed from all previously existing constraints. This, then, is a principal paradox of biopolitics: to the very degree that biopower makes it its mission to foster and guarantee life, life itself comes to be threatened by ever growing political and technological means of destruction: “It is,” Foucault writes, “as managers of life and survival . . . that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed” (History 137). Foucault accounts for this paradoxical “death-function in the economy of biopower” with the paradigm of racism, which serves two important purposes (‘Society’ 258). It provides, first, the means to create biological “caesuras within the [population]” that allow a line to be drawn “between what must live and what must die” and, secondly, it creates a “positive relationship” in which “the death of the bad race ... is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer” (254-55). Racism’s inscription in the biopolitical in this way at once justifies, exacerbates and regulates the asymmetrical play between the unbounded power over death and biopower’s control over life—a “play” that constitutively exposes state and population to the limits of its life-fostering power: death (260).

Both Foucault and Agamben’s accounts of biopolitics can be articulated in terms of the relation of signifier and signified. As in Foucault, for Agamben biopolitics emerges at the moment life enters into representation, but it does so in a quite different sense. While for Foucault, representation concerns the relations—technical, material, and mechanical—that bind a signifier to a signified (that apply to it), for Agamben representation includes the de facto exclusion of the signified from the signifier, its de jure inclusion being merely the form of representation. The exemplary, paradigmatic figure of this predicament is the obscure Roman legal figure of the homo sacer, “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (8, original emphasis). Banned from the political community and abandoned by the law, he no longer can be licitly represented in the politico-juridical order of the state, and thus can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed, precisely because, in the first case, there can be no penalty for murdering someone who has no legal existence, and, in the second case, his very lack of representation protects him from being sacrificed. For Agamben, in other words, the entry into representation is always also accompanied by an exit from it; indeed, homo sacer occupies the threshold of representation and its constitutive outside, always already half live, half dead. With reference to Foucault, then, we might say that homo sacer appears at and marks the discursive limits, not only of biopower, but of sovereign power.

Agamben’s theoretical intervention in this rearticulates the genealogy and horizon of biopolitics outlined by Foucault. Insisting on an archaic, originary complicity between the biopower and sovereignty, Agamben argues that, far from being peculiar to our modernity, the inclusive exclusion of life in the Greek polis meant that Western politics had from the very beginning been a biopolitics (181). Foucault’s historical rupture is thus supplanted by a schema in which modernity is distinguished from earlier periods merely by the acceleration of bare life’s movement from the margins of political existence to the center of the political order. Hence, Agamben writes, “the exception becomes the rule, and the difference between inside and outside, fact and law enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction” (9). As a consequence, the Nazi camps, which for Foucault were a contingent, singular paroxysm in which the field of biopolitics became “absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right kill,” in no way can be considered a historical exception but must rather be understood as the “fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181). In the last instance, then, biopolitics always amounts to a thanatopolitics, a murderous politics of death. As Eva Geulen concisely puts it in her contribution to the present volume, “For Agamben, then, sovereign politics is biopolitics and biopolitics is, at bottom, always a politics of death and killing.” Indeed, the secret link binding bare life to sovereign power—in short, biopolitics—has all along determined the trajectory of Western politics. Hence our present political moment becomes legible, in Agamben’s view, as the disastrous endpoint of a political tradition that, extending from ancient Greece to the Nazi concentration camps and beyond, exhibits an “inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” (10).

II. Romanticism and Biopolitics

Despite the tangled knot of effaced references to and disavowed enactments of romanticism in biopolitical theory, critics have long agreed that romanticism concerns itself in a fundamental way with life. Indeed, scholars of romanticism have long characterized the years Foucault and Agamben identify as a turning point in the history of biopolitics as one of modernity’s most prominent and consequential sites for the intense thematization of life. In discussing the various controlling categories that positively define romanticism, M. H. Abrams gives life special prominence when he asserts that for romanticism, “The ground-concept is life.” Indeed, he continues, “Life is itself the highest good, the residence and measure of other goods, and the generator of the controlling categories of Romantic thought. . . . Life is the premise and paradigm for what is most innovative and distinctive in Romantic thinkers” (Natural Supernaturalism 431). For Abrams, the two principal signs of the life of romanticism are “vitalism” — “the celebration of that which lives, moves, and evolves by an internal energy, over whatever is lifeless, inert, and unchanging” — and “organicism”— “the metaphorical translation into the categories and norms of intellection of the attributes of a growing thing, which unfolds its inner form and assimilates to itself alien elements, until it reaches the fullness of its complex, organic unity” (ibid. 431-32). Abrams extends this growth in life to figural language, most particularly to those tropes whose “valid animation of natural objects … now came to be a major index to the sovereign faculty of imagination, and almost in itself a sufficient criterion of the highest poetry” (Mirror 55). Romanticism is a poetic project whose aim is to ‘make live’, and whose very rhetoricity denoted the sovereignty of its animating powers—not a political but a poetic sovereignty, a sovereignty of art on the far side of politics.

Nonetheless, the focus on the figure of life in the archive of romantic poetry, philosophy, and science has yet to be matched by a complex understanding of the relation between life and power. Recent research has no doubt complicated Abrams’ proposition that life unproblematically generated “love” defined as “the confraternity of the one life shared not only with other men but also with a milieu in which man can feel fully at home” (Natural Supernaturalism 431). Nicolas Roe and Sharon Ruston have shown how vitalist and materialist positions in the debate about the nature of life at the turn of the century translated into normative political positions; Gigante point to the way in which poetic and scientific conceptions of life were understood to be a form of discursive, if not political, power; and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and others have demonstrated the ease with which modern political programs invoke romantic organicism. What remains outside the conceptualization of such approaches—and what biopolitical theory offers to teach us—is an appreciation of the possibility that “life” in romanticism is neither just the analogue nor simply a form of power, but also and fundamentally a referent of political power.

III. The Literariness of Life

We hasten to add that we are not offering the electrifying proposition, le romanticisme, c’est biopolitique, let alone that romanticism is biopolitics. Nor are we making the historical assertion that romanticism is the—or the principal—origin of modern biopolitics. Romanticism is surely in the historical DNA of biopolitics, but the contemporary biopolitical situation claims a diversely branching genealogical web with multiple and often competing sources, not a single or genetic origin. Yet we are arguing, to introduce the second sense of our central hypothesis, that inasmuch as romanticism as a rhetoric of life responds to the question of biopolitics, it does so not just as something we are not yet done with, but also as something that is not yet done with us. Indeed, in our view, biopolitical theory is one of the more vital instances of what Ian Baucom has called the “afterlives of romanticism.” Biopolitics maintains romanticism’s afterlife in this sense not because life would be a romantic concept, but because claims to have made or to make life available—as an object of cognition, food for thought, or the grounds for action—call on the “life and afterlives” of romanticism as a compelling and not merely archival name of the difficulties such projects encounter (Baucom 20). The very fact that the emergence of biopolitics has been accompanied by legible effacement of romanticism in its official genealogies suggests that the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power, far from simply indicating a loss of romanticism, marks its radical survival.

If contemporary biopolitical theory has become a necessary condition of our awareness of the political stakes of romanticism’s obsession with life, one way we might remark on romanticism’s biopolitical survival is to note that biopolitics, in constituting its principle object of inquiry, actualizes that trope most proper to romanticism: the substitution of language for life. As the focus of biopolitical studies on biomedicine, biocapital, sovereignty, humanitarianism, and so on all too easily allow us to forget, life, both in the work of Foucault and Agamben as well as of other theorists of biopolitics, becomes accessible to biopolitical intervention, not as such, but through its entry into language and representation. In Foucault’s account, the intersection of language and life takes the form of a discursive threshold, but not one that is located in any single subject or body. Rather, insofar as politics intervenes on life through the production, regulation and manipulation of figural regimes—the statistics, estimates, data, totals, and sums that represent the life of the population at a general level—the objective of power is to control the “random element inherent in a population of living beings,” where the “random element” names an anomaly in a statistical distribution with regard to the norm that is identified by means of a calculating apparatus rather than by discursive means (2003, 246). What is decisive is not any positive knowledge of the relation of power and life, but rather the mere facticity of the substitution of language for life that enables that intervention in the first place.

A principal contention of the current volume is that if biopolitics is intimately involved with and intervenes on a language about life deeply informed by the legacy of romanticism, romanticism’s “literariness” might itself provide a compelling avenue to critically rethink the most influential biopolitical theories. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, in romantic texts the biopolitical intervention on life—the political project of targeting, capturing, making, and taking life—plays out as a venture fraught with difficulties and contingencies that unsettle theoretical models of biopolitics. In this sense, the encounter with romanticism reanimates biopolitics, restoring to it not a lost life but rather a critical awareness of the contingency of the uncertain literariness of its making live.

IV. Romanticism, Biopolitics, and Literature

The present collection began life as a special session of the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco in December 2008. Despite being scheduled at the last timeslot of the last day of the convention, the session drew such a sizeable and enthusiastic crowd that we were encouraged to seek a larger avenue for the project. Continuities and differences between the two iterations of the project are worth noting. Marc Redfield’s and Emily Sun’s articles are substantially revised versions of the papers they presented at the convention; Sara Guyer chose to contribute to the present volume an entirely new piece on John Clare, loosely based on of the one she presented in 2008. Eva Geulen was not present at the MLA convention, and her essay responds to the version of the articles collected in this volume.

Scholars of romanticism should not be surprised to see that we asked Sara Guyer to contribute to our volume. Her book, Romanticism After Auschwitz (2007) is the first and so far only book-length study of, among other things, romanticism, biopolitics, and literature. Guyer’s essay “Biopoetics” opens by elegantly noting that it was not just natural and social scientists who became interested in life around 1800, but also poets. What, Guyer asks, would be a poetic understanding of the relationship between literature, power, and life? To answer this question, she turns to Barbara Johnson’s account of the relation of poetic apostrophe, a rhetorical figure of animation, and the politics of abortion. Elaborating on her insight that the apostrophe to the not-yet born makes it “impossible to tell whether language is what gives life or what kills” (Johnson 34)—a gesture that anticipates Agamben’s notion of a “zone of indistinction” between life and politics—Guyer argues that “what occurs in the sphere of politics shares a structure with—indeed is—a problem in poetry. What Johnson reveals is not a literary biopolitics, but biopolitics as indissociable from literature and its indeterminacies.” While Guyer’s turn in the second half of her essay to John Clare’s romantic-period poem, “To Mary,” might come as a surprise—the poem thematizes neither biopolitics nor abortion—the conjugation of Clare and Johnson in itself already suggests that what is at stake in the relationship between romanticism, biopolitics, and literature is not a shared thematic representation of life but, rather, a shared predicament concerning the representation of life. Guyer reveals the nature of this predicament in an economic reading of the poem’s apostrophic complex. If the speaker’s address to his dead lover fails to make her live or to let her die, then this ineffectivity is precisely what Guyer calls the “lyric structure of sovereignty.” Life is not simply a given to be quantified or captured, nor is the life of the lyric subject who makes live and lets die simply the life of a sovereign opposed to naked life. What rather emerges is a life whose viability is contested, a life contingent upon a failed abortion. Thus the lyric is not the symptom of some romantic ideology; it is the structure of power—and contestation. Such is the lesson of what Guyer, in a powerfully speculative coda, calls biopoetics: “This biopoetics sets out, as this essay set out, by admitting two scenes of making live, and it concludes by exposing the impossibility of a politics of life or a science of literature that would be free from poetics.”

The event that Emily Sun treats in her essay “Mill’s Wordsworthian Turn: Poetry, Politics, Eloquence” is well known: John Stuart Mill’s emotional breakdown at the age of 20 and the important role that the poetry of William Wordsworth played in his recovery. What is so novel is her reading of this event as a real-world encounter between biopolitics and romantic poetics. Indeed the conditions that make the event such an encounter are so precise as to approximate those of a controlled laboratory experiment. Mill’s breakdown took the form of a loss of faith in utilitarianism. And utilitarianism, Sun observes, with its assumption that the good life can be measured, calculated, and manipulated provided—and arguably still provides—a crucial part of the liberal social scientific method for the efficient biopolitical administration of life. Reading the account of Mill’s crisis in his Autobiography, Sun demonstrates that the utilitarian reformer finds that his personal life is unaccounted for in the world he is supposed to reform. What restores his happiness, on the far side of utilitarianism, is an experience of reading poetry, specifically the poetry of Wordsworth. Indeed, the tropes by which Mill accounts for his recovery repeat and displace those of Wordsworth: where Wordsworth has Nature to aid him overcome his crises, Mill has Wordsworth’s poetry of Nature. Reading Mill’s essay “What is poetry?” as the account of poetry’s capacity to lead the self beyond the manufactured subjectivity of a strict utilitarian upbringing, Sun argues, against the critical opinion that Mill’s expressivist conception of poetry is apolitical or antipolitical, that the essay complicates the distinction between political speech and poetic speech. Poetry, for Mill, is not simply the antithesis of eloquence, somehow outside the circuits that tie it to an audience. For in characterizing poetry as “soliloquy,” he defines it as having an audience in a mode that exposes the audience’s world as incomplete. “If, according to Aristotle in the Politics, the human as a political animal is an animal that has speech,” Sun writes in a manner that resonates with the argument of Jacques Rancière, “Mill’s theatrical theory of poetry seems to imply that the human is the animal for whom what it means to have speech always remains in question. Politics, then, would consist of the interminable interrogation of that question and the renewal of the criteria for eloquence.”

Anyone who has read Phantom Formations (1996) and The Politics of Aesthetics (2003) knows how much Marc Redfield has taught us about the thick entanglement of aesthetics and politics that we call romanticism. He opens his contribution to the collection, “Aesthetics, Sovereignty, Biopower,” by effortlessly grasping the power of the concept of biopolitics to illuminate aesthetics: “biopolitics is precisely what the aesthetic, particularly in its modern form, has always claimed to be.” However, his principal contention is that the very density of aesthetics means that biopolitics may not be exactly what contemporary theorists claim it to be. As much as aesthetics can be read as an extension of biopolitics, biopolitical sovereignty finds itself subject to the technicity of aesthetics. The biopolitical reach of modern aesthetics is exemplified, Redfield argues, in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Explicitly a political response to and solution for the violence of the French Revolution, Schiller’s treatise outlines an aesthetic program that aims for nothing less than a body at one with the law. What aesthetic education forms—or at least tries to form—is a political body whose life expresses the law. This intimacy of life and art is in principle non-coercive, as Schiller insists, and yet such insistence also turns out to reveal aesthetics’ capacity for violence. What Redfield focuses on, however, is not just the violence that sovereignty performs and disavows, but also the force that it exploits yet cannot control. To elaborate this claim, he turns to a text published in the same year (1795) as Schiller’s treatise, Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees. In some ways a parodic response to Schiller aesthetic program, the unusual text comprises seven stories, all of which are intended by their refugee tellers to embody the promises of aesthetic culture to restore the moral and political order of the ancien régime after the violence of the French Revolution. The controlling figure for this order is, in the words of the leader of the refugees, the Baroness, der gute Ton, a literal translation of the French bon ton. Yet Ton in German also means “noise.” Exploiting this double meaning, Redfield traces a remarkably consistent pattern by which sovereign responses to shocking noises in the frame narrative and the seven stories reproduce rather than put an end to the revolutionary shock such noises are associated with. “Ton is Goethe’s deceptively modest figure for aesthetics as a discourse animated by shock.” Insofar as Goethe’s text is itself an aesthetico-pedagogical effort to disseminate den guten Ton, it allegorizes its own inability to rigorously distinguish between the shock to which it responds and the shock upon which it turns. What Redfield usefully points out to us is “a fundamental powerlessness underlying the violent operations of body-making.” Summing up his argument in his climactic reading, Redfield’s suggests that the story of an aesthetically reformed political revolutionary is “a story about the unruly critical force of aesthetic discourse, which exposes the violence and incoherence it is supposed at all costs to conceal.”

Eva Geulen’s response to the essays included in this volume is both bold and provocative. Drawing upon both her extensive work on modern literature and aesthetics since German romanticism (The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel [2006]) and her comprehensive familiarity with the work of Agamben (Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung [2005]), she contends that all three essays more or less explicitly defend romanticism “from any biopolitical charges and suspicions” by calling on the literary aesthetic, a move she takes as an indication that what is at stake for our contributors is not so much biopolitics as such as it is “aesthetics by way of biopolitics.” Rather than opening up new lines of inquiry, the appearance of theoretical accounts of biopolitics provides the occasion to redraw, however contingently, the lines defending the literary aesthetic. In view of her earlier observation that all three essays tend to “use [the term] biopolitics in such a way that it encompasses disciplinary strategies while the [the regulatory aspect of biopower] is eclipsed entirely,” we might read Geulen’s concession that there nonetheless might be “no better, more interesting or specific way of considering the question of romanticism and biopolitics” than by way of aesthetics to bear witness to the difficulty of conceiving the relation of literature to a form of politics that targets the biological life of a population rather than, say, the psychic life of an individual subject.

It is perhaps for this reason that Geulen’s discussion turns to and remains focused on Agamben’s account of sovereignty and bare life. On her reading, the concept of sovereignty provides a critical, if tenuous, opening onto the relation of biopolitics and literature. Indeed, it is as if the intersection of Agamben’s claim that sovereign power is always already biopower with the well known romantic-era conception of the sovereignty of art (cf. Beiser, Menke) itself forms the nexus of biopolitics and aesthetic theory. Yet contrary to the readings offered by Guyer, Redfield, and Sun, Geulen suggests that aesthetics does not as much mark an aesthetic resistance to biopolitics as it paradoxically participates in and furthers biopolitical violence. Following Agamben’s critique of deconstruction in Homo Sacer, Geulen argues that merely identifying and recognizing moments of textual ambivalence and rhetorical undecidability—which Guyer and Redfield, more so than Sun, cast as signs of a literary-aesthetic resistance to biopolitics—does little to resist, let alone change, the effectivity of the biopolitical structure.

Geulen’s skepticism stems from her agreement with Agamben that what is ultimately at stake in biopolitics is the question of relationality. Drawing on his discussion of forma-di-vita, Geulen insists that the challenge to biopolitics, as well as the promise of the literary aesthetic, lies in thinking the nexus of life and law otherwise than in terms of a relation, since the form of relation as such always already “succumb[s] to the logic of the ban which … is the most extreme, most tenuous, hence most powerful form of all possible relations.” If any attempt to ‘relate’ aesthetics and politics runs the danger of being co-opted by biopolitics, the alternative she proposes at the close of her essay curiously bypasses both the question of Romanticism and that of aesthetics’ complicity with biopolitics. Through a reading of Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel as a “site where the question of form and life is played out exclusively as a problem of aesthetic form,” and thus also as a test of Agamben’s “enigmatic idea of non-relationality,” Geulen takes issue with the idea that one can “draw the line between aesthetic forms and politics,” (which, since it presupposes their relation, would be to remain caught up in the logic of the sovereign ban). What emerges from her reading is the account of the novel as “a form of life in which no bare life can be separated, whose law is life and whose life is its law,” with the consequence that “[t]here is no politics of the novel and there can never be one, neither biopolitical nor sovereign.” In the novelistic beyond of relation, then, and at an indistinct remove from Romanticism, the question of politics loses its force, and the novel comes to be “not about art but about life.” But if we are unable to decide whether this is a triumph of art or the evacuation of its critical force, what Geulen’s turn to modernism’s quest to “abolish or transform the distinction between art and life” does suggest is that the very idea of a “form-of-life” beyond politics, even and precisely in its turn away from the question of romanticism, reiterates romanticism’s substitution of language for life in the very effacement of what might yet be its critical legacy.