Blank Splendour: Mere Existence in British Romanticism

Certain moments in British Romantic poetry and art depict a state from which the attributes of existence – time and space, subject and object, language and visuality – have fallen away, leaving a domain prior to the world and to thought, the condition of mere existence. As Blank Splendour demonstrates, poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Clare as well as paintings by Turner evoke a condition that transpires in a time without time, a life without life.

David Collings argues that these works invite us to move beyond the subtle remnants of ontology that linger in current versions of posthuman thought, such as affect theory and speculative realism, by opening up a domain of affect without affect, a world without objects. Anticipating the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, these works bring into view the mode of a deconstruction that emerged before the linguistic turn, one that meditates on the blank condition underlying modernity. Ultimately, Blank Splendour reveals how these works speak to our own moment, when thought, forced to contemplate its own extinction, enters a new form of mere existence.

David Collings is a professor of English at Bowdoin College.