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Adorno’s infamous phrase that “to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But this book pursues
suspicion of art deeper into the roots of our civilisation.
Josipovici traces the turn away from trust as far back
as Plato’s response to Homer and St Paul’s to the Bible.
Plato turned the gaze of reason on The Iliad and found
it wanting, while St Paul took strict moral lessons from
Old Testament stories where, as Josipovici show us,
there is only ambiguity. Both responses indicate a radical
shift in consciousness, one that we are still mired
in. The essay on Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy
reminds us of what came before. Josipovici calls it “the
double vision”: “a sense of life in all its goodness, happiness,
abundance; and death as finality, which must
be accepted as part of that abundance.” Despite our
promisingly Godless age, this sense of life and death
remains alien, probably because there is a space left
by God’s departure. We would rather have this space
for our purpose than be void of purpose, to rephrase
Nietzsche. Josipovici says this is the legacy of Plato’s
and St Paul’s removal of death as finality. Without the
immortality of the soul, the real world of goodness,
happiness and abundance comes under suspicion.
Emphasis is then placed on the individual. He or
she is subtly dislocated from the communal tradition.
As a result ‘a whole new world of inwardness’ is
opened. Hence the rise in Confessional literature (St.
Augustine, Rousseau), something still mistaken for the
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
deepest possible insight. Josipovici sums up this shift
in a startlingly sweeping passage:
“[the] denial of the dual vision … in the end entails
a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of ourselves
as embodied beings existing within that world.
Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed,
it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-consistent
world, not simply an alternative way of looking
at things but the only way there can possibly be.”
This is remarkable because it questions the cultural
traditions of two millennia. Yet it is precisely tradition
that Josipovici sees as the way to resist suspicion. For
despite the internalisation of the shift inward, the legacy
of the ancients remained enough to appear in the work
of the most profound artists; Dante and Shakespeare
in particular. They show how we can always turn to
the past for help. These writers appear as pivotal in the
history of Western literature, and so too in the story this
book tells.
In spite of working within a craft tradition, both writers
managed to include in their work the sense of its
breakdown. Dante’s troubled yet necessary move away
from Latin into vernacular Italian was made with the
help, literally and fictionally, of Virgil, and Shakespeare
adapted stories of kings losing authority (Richard II and
Lear being the examples here) to represent the ‘essence
of a vanishing world’ – that is, the tradition of consensus
turning into one of authority – although of course ‘au-
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