The impetus for this collection of essays came from a recent conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on “Romanticism and Rights” that, in evoking discourses of natural and human rights, also raised the question of the right to, or of, the negative. As Jean-Luc Nancy admits, in critiquing rights which have “pragmatic definitions,” the “suppression or suspension” of such rights “opens directly onto the intolerable” (2). But as Lyotard suggests, rights are no simple matter: there are “wrongs” which cannot be remedied through “rights” because they cannot be phrased in a “language common to . . . the other party” (28). Lyotard is more broadly concerned with a differend that eludes capture in discourse and that will always persist even if a new discourse and the right to it are established. Since the utopianism of human rights discourse is only one aspect of a larger foreclosure, the bigger question here is of what is left out by the emphasis on the public (or even counter-public) sphere that has come to dominate much writing on Romanticism, and for which rights—juridical or otherwise—are only a metonym. Within a discourse that assumes the sufficiency of the public sphere, there are things that cannot be said or done, because a discourse for them does not, or does not yet, or may not ever exist; there are things that cannot be published, to give an example used by Lyotard (4), which is pertinent to this collection.

The essays in this collection are not necessarily concerned with rights in a juridical sense, though not surprisingly the issue does come up in the two pieces on Godwin. Indeed, the right of the negative inevitably entails a use of that word that is more metaphoric and elusive than any positive right. We speak here of the “right” of the negative because the plural might imply a range of rights that can be specified, but it is also necessary to think in terms of “rights” because the effects of this right, and indeed what an effect is, are far from clear. And we speak of a right “of” rather than “to” the negative because the right not to be or do something, as in civil disobedience, risks being a determinate negation that is simply an antithetical form of positivity. These essays, by contrast, explore a certain insistence of the negative that cannot always be encompassed in the right not to do or be something: an insistence that traverses a subject such as Christabel without exactly being something that she “has” or of which she, or even Coleridge, is fully conscious. Christabel’s odd passivity, explored in Marc Mazur’s essay, makes her no more than a channel for a negativity that cannot be easily located. But we must also speak of a right “to” the negative, as a way of conveying the force that the negative can have, for instance in my own essay on Godwin’s Mandeville, whose protagonist, even as a “non-ens” (439), insists on his right to be in the mode of not being. Hegel explores this retreat from the collectivity, which is more perverse, more difficult of access, than non-conformity, when he describes a self that is “turned against its structure” so that “the negative thing is the structure itself.” In Hegel’s words, “the organism is then in the opposed forms of being and self; and the self is precisely that for which the negative of itself is,” that which “relates itself to itself as a negative” (428).

If the aleatory doubt that becomes the very structure of the novel comes from Godwin’s emphasis on “the right of private judgment” (Enquiry 1: 170), our next essay moves to a genre more traditionally allied with a retreat from the public, namely the lyric. Readings by Abrams and Wasserman that saw the Romantic lyric as conjoining self and nature, inside and outside, or subject and object, have long since ceased to be the norm, given that critics after de Man have seen the greater Romantic lyric as invoking this paradigm only in the mode of compensation. But in his essay on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Samuel Rowe questions the marginalization of Smith as a sentimental poetess, and makes a bold claim for Smith (rather than Coleridge) as having initiated a tradition of lyric negativity. The negative turn in her sonnets (referring to a thematic but also a formal turn at the sestet or couplet) is particularly radical because while the poems are about loss, Smith will not divulge what has been lost. The containment of elegy within the sonnet’s tightness rather than the more sprawling forms of Lycidas or In Memoriam contributes to this reserve, which refuses any return from object loss through “normal” mourning. Thus unlike Adorno in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Smith thinks the lyric outside of a correlationism in which withdrawal from the social sustains “the integrity of a coercive reality precisely by refusing to align with it” (Rowe par.17). In thus protecting the Real of loss, Smith does claim a right “to” the negative, a right “not to communicate” (par. 25), but this claim, by declining all phenomenal content, produces an “empty” subjectification that holds “subjectivity in a contentless void” (pars. 5,19).

Like Rowe, David Collings in his essay “Positive Negation” focuses on the lyric, or more precisely the short poem, since Coleridge’s “Limbo,” “Ne Plus Ultra,” “Human Life” and his late poems generally, are less easily categorizable than Smith’s sonnets. Using these fundamentally metaphysical poems to theorize negativity, Collings raises the philosophical problem of how the negative can have “rights.” How can it make a demand, when it has not been named and “given specific powers within a discourse or practice” (par. 2)? Whereas Smith’s right not to communicate does exist within a discursive practice and so is still a right exercised by a subject, for Collings the idea that what cannot be posited has rights is metaphysically an oxymoron. And yet non-being, even as absolute nullity, somehow is: a problem also faced in Ages of the World by Schelling, who comes up both in this essay and my own. For Schelling the negative is not simply privative. Not only is negation originary, because the positive can have being “only by repressing the negating force in itself”; a being also “cannot negate itself as actual without at the same time positing itself as the actualizing potency that begets itself” (17–18). To describe the presence of absence, or how that which has no being, can assume a “face, voice, or agency” through a “trope of direct embodiment” (par. 2; emphasis mine), Collings borrows the term “positive Negation” from Coleridge’s “Limbo.” Milton’s Death, invoked by Coleridge, provides a first “template” (par. 14) for this right of the negative to be posited as that which (it) is not: a claim for which Coleridge’s own “positive Negation” is also a catachresis.

The difficulty of thinking this catachresis may be why Coleridge did not publish these poems for many years, and then too only as anomalies. This withholding surfaces repeatedly in Romanticism, in work referred to in several essays—for instance, Smith’s right not to communicate, Schelling’s unpublished Weltalter project, and Goya’s Disasters of War in David Clark’s essay, which were never exhibited. It is the explicit concern of the next article by Marc Mazur, which explores Coleridge’s delay in publishing “Christabel” even as he circulated it privately, and the continuing “retreat into self” (Schelling 6) that characterizes the published versions. Mazur begins by theorizing two versions of this retreat based on work by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and by Catherine Malabou. In the former’s Retreating the Political (as in Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society”), what is involved is a withdrawal that re-treats the political. Such withdrawal, as we have already seen, risks being caught in a correlationism that reconfirms what it retreats from. But for Malabou the retreat is not voluntary, not political; it does not assume the intentionality of a fully constituted subject, and so is not even readable. What Mazur notes as the “indifference” that attends the narration in the unpublished versions of Christabel (par.18) allows for this unreadability; we can think of these versions as written in the third person, le neutre in Blanchot’s term, which Esposito sees as resisting any interpellation into civic personhood. But in the “Conclusion to Part the Second,” added in 1816, the Symbolic Order is reestablished through the pact between Geraldine and Sir Leoline, even as Christabel herself retreats from the empty place of this reconstitution of the social. Coleridge tries to take control of the poem as narrator, intervening into a narration whose earlier indifference had cathected the trauma or unassimilable effraction traced by Malabou in Ontology of the Accident (par. 4). And yet in finally publishing the poem, Coleridge does not so much complete it as himself retreat from it by handing it over to a public about which he remains deeply ambivalent: an ambivalence mirrored in the ineffectuality of Bard Bracy, as the poem “turns over and over again around an insoluble secret which retreats from the author” (par. 8).

Retreat is also at the center of my own essay on Godwin’s Mandeville (1817), a historical novel whose protagonist never enters history as he progressively retreats into the closet of his psychic history. The novel, which has many resonances with Godwin’s own time, is set in the interregnum, the only period when Britain had no King, and is bookended by two rebellions: the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and Mandeville’s private attack on his unimpeachably good classmate Clifford, who is about to marry Mandeville’s sister in a domestic simulation of the impending Restoration. By way of the protagonist’s “eternal war” on Clifford, the novel engages in an almost pathological deconstruction of the beautiful, the good, and the true. It ends shockingly with his accidental defacement by Clifford, an effraction that dis-figures all schemes of restoration. Against readers who find the climax hard to absorb and feel that Godwin meant to “complete” the novel otherwise, I argue that he deliberately stages a psychoanalysis of “taste” and indeed of aesthetics itself, as what Baumgarten calls the art of thinking beautifully (533). Godwin wrote the novel after a long retreat of his own following the failure of 1790s radicalism, during which he struggled with how to write history negatively, or how to write the negative as history, as positive Negation. In this history, the fanaticism of the seventeenth century and its later secularization as the misanthropy that so fascinated him are tropes that must be turned round and back in on themselves, so as to discern within them “something not yet made good” that “pushes its essence forward” (Habermas 78). Yet in the context of the novel, this potential remains “contracted and self-negated” (Schelling 18), withheld in an absolute reserve.