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Having articulated an account of joint activity in terms of joint commitment, and hence of those social groups that arise through the joint activity of certain persons, this chapter returns to social groups in general, and societies in particular. Defining a plural subject as a set of persons who are jointly committed in some way, it argues for an account of social groups as plural subjects. It argues that plural subjects can be large and possess the features of anonymity, hierarchy, impersonality, and inclusiveness. These features are typically associated with a society as a special type of social group.

This chapter argues that Nietzsche is a naturalist in the sense that he is committed to a species of theorizing that explains phenomena by locating their causes, where the explanation is not falsified by science. Brian Leiter's interpretation of a ‘results continuity’ and ‘methods continuity’ with science is argued to overstate Nietzsche's attachment to science. Nietzsche's criticisms of Rée's attempt at a genealogy of morality are examined. The would-be scientific impersonality of Rée is a chief criticism. The chapter centres on the thesis that for Nietzsche, engagement of the investigator's own affects is essential to his genealogical enterprise, both because the true causal factors underlying moral attitudes are inherited affects, and because genealogy's further aim is to encourage us to ‘feel differently’. Nietzsche's complaints against the ineffectiveness of cool, impersonal detachment as a method of enquiry show a lack of continuity with science as he sees it.

This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.

This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.

This chapter analyzes the tension between modernist ideas of impersonality and the growing fascination with the celebrity poet. At the same moment in which writers like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein were exploring ideas of impersonality in their writing, the circulation of their bodies within society as celebrity writers in newspapers, journals, and at public lectures and readings was determining the ways their work was being read. In order to address the relationship of the authorial body and its personality or impersonality to her work, it turns to analysis of the ASL poetry of Debbie Rennie, Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner, work that by structural necessity is always negotiating that relationship. Drawing on these poetic texts in conversation with queer theory, the chapter argues that sign literature enacts a model of embodied impersonality—a self-shattering that nevertheless refuses the disavowal of the embodied subject. Such a model of social interaction through literature allows for new interpretations of Sherwood Anderson’s two volumes of critically ignored poetry: A New Testament and Mid-American Chants. Taken together, these poetic texts suggest a model of poetic ethics based on interpenetration that paradoxically foregrounds the embodied subject even as it challenges its boundaries.

Life in Highgate proves peaceful but somewhat unfulfilling. Coleridge's persisting battle with opium addiction, in which he is only partly triumphant, is accompanied by sad recognition that his love for Sara Hutchinson is now dead. At the same time, interest is being shown by some young men in developing his ideas—notably his having advocated the cultivation of a ‘clerisy’. John Sterling, one of his chief disciples, is nevertheless disillusioned to find him less reliable and less truthful than he had hoped and expected. Coleridge himself is pleased to acknowledge in Anglicanism a steady resource, writing an essay in exposition of his views in which he urges the importance of distinguishing between the Church as ecclesia and as enclesia; yet he mourns his inability to find true fellowship in any Christian body. Some riddles, also, are still unsolved. Notably, while delighting in the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, Coleridge remains uncertain about the personality or impersonality of the divine at a fuller level.

This chapter examines the question of the ‘place’ of thought, generally located inside the mind of individual people. This placement is precisely what constitutes the philosophical presupposition of the juridical order, founded on the idea of the personal responsibility of the individual. Outside this tradition, which is both a philosophical and political-theological one, there stand a few thinkers who, in various forms, tend to conceive of thought not as a property of the individual person, but as a common resource that can be drawn on every time one thinks, without necessarily making it one’s own. For these thinkers, thought is a sort of potentiality external to the human mind that is actualized whenever someone is thinking. Authors such as Averroes (the great interpreter of Aristotle), Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze belong in various ways to this heretical conception that forms in opposition to the political-theological tradition.

Leavis is often thought of as a naively moral critic, concerned with the moral content and tendency of the work to the exclusion of other values which might be covered by the term aesthetic. To the contrary, the imaginative component in creativity is crucial to his conception of literature, and its relation to history. Since he effectively worked out for himself an understanding of literature, language, and the making of history, this chapter is partly devoted to an exposition of Leavis's thought through these parallels. It illuminates the agon of personality and impersonality in Leavis and shows the intrinsic difficulty for him of collaboration. In this respect, he is a latter-day Rousseau, required to instantiate the virtues he affirms, and with a built-in propensity to paranoia.

Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes traces of Flaubert in Joyce’s early writing – the critical essays written between 1899 and 1902; entries in the Paris and Pola ‘Commonplace Book’ that Joyce kept in 1902–3 and then 1903–4; the short snippets of dramatic or narrative writing, collected between 1900 and 1903, to which he referred as ‘epiphanies’; and Stephen Hero. Contrary to W. B. Yeats’s assertion that Flaubert’s works were difficult to obtain in early twentieth-century Dublin, this chapter establishes that a number of Flaubert’s books were available to Joyce at the National Library of Ireland at that time, and, even more significantly, that Joyce purchased his own copies of both Madame Bovary and L’éducation sentimentale, in original French editions, as early as 1901. Even at this early stage, Flaubertian echoes adumbrate the importance of Joyce’s intertextual relationship to his French precursor in later works.

Chapter 2 is devoted to a close intertextual reading of both authors’ collections of stories, Trois Contes (1877) and Dubliners (1914). The argument focuses on the word ‘gnomon’, which famously appears in italics in the opening paragraph of Joyce’s collection, and which affiliates it to Flaubert’s short story, ‘Hérodias’, in which it also features. The use of this rare word is read as a gesture of acknowledgement on Joyce’s part, indicating a subtle but extensive semantic, thematic, symbolic, and structural intertextuality between his and Flaubert’s short stories. The chapter also considers Joyce’s response on a technical level, exploring the modes of his elaborations on Flaubert in such areas as the splicing of the realistic and the symbolic, the blurring of the boundaries between the static and the dynamic, and the deployment of cinematographic writing.

Chapter 3 examines Flaubertian intertextuality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It considers references to Flaubert’s letters in the novel (with a particular focus on Stephen’s borrowed analogy between the artist and the God of Creation) and argues that although Stephen Dedalus may be wrestling with something resembling Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, Joyce himself had already, even at this relatively early stage in his writing career, come to see his relationship to Flaubert as a matter of playful engagement rather than of rivalrous angst. It also considers Joyce’s engagement with Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, the likely connection between the contrapuntal structures of A Portrait and L’éducation sentimentale (whereby characters alternate between states of exhilaration and disillusionment), and both authors’ cultivation of effects of contrast and simultaneity.

This chapter analyzes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It notes her tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time — a tendency evident in her contemporaries but is particularly pronounced in Plath. Moreover, this tendency applies even to such a seemingly abstract concept as poetic impersonality, a concept which can easily be depicted in terms of Laingian depersonalisation. With the simplifying wrong-way telescope of hindsight, Plath could be said to have moved from a paradigm of poetic impersonality to a personalised aesthetic of confessionalism or extremism. But in fact many of the intriguing and valuable tensions in her later work proceed from how she is attempting to make use of the material of the latter while still evincing considerable attachment both to the paradigm of the former and to the fashion for the dramatic soliloquy and dramatic monologue, a mode to which she kept returning, even in the last poems of 1963.

The introduction describes the author's process of discovering the ultimate shape and focus of the book with its emphasis on circularity. It describes Murry's career before meeting Lawrence and Mansfield, and his first encounters with modernist art in Paris. It sets forth the theoretical issues of confessionalism, the dynamics of influence, the concept of genius, and the problem of modernist impersonality.

This chapter is concerned with the growing success of both Mansfield and Murry. It shows how Mansfield's critical practice parallels Murry's in their mutual concern about the change in consciousness brought about by the Great War, and their disdain for post-war complacency and hypocrisy. Their cautious reaction to modernist innovations is considered in connection with a general progression of their thought towards a consolidation of modernist principles instead of an automatic reaction against traditional literary conventions. The chapter discusses their critiques of literary impressionism, their interest in the concept of impersonality, and their further interactions with Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Mansfield's tuberculosis continues to affect her marriage to Murry, and she interprets this dilemma in her story, ‘The Man Without a Temperament.’

This section asks whether Edgar/Tom can be understood in the light of Simone Weil’s understanding of decreation and renunciation, an absolute affliction that reduces oneself to impersonality, and thus to our essential condition of nothingness, returning to God what is God’s. This cannot be a willed renunciation. It must be suffered. God’s kenosis is the model for a radically negative ontology. Weil identifies King Lear as one of the great models of such affliction. Edgar/Tom experiences it doubly: Tom-as-Tom, an existent nothing; and Edgar-in-Tom, forced to endure a renunciation of self he did not choose. This condition is the truest truth of Edgar’s immersive probation, its most necessary point of self-recognition. The necessary thing is to pay attention to Tom. But that is the hardest thing.

This chapter argues that one of the most famous invalids of the age—and one of the most important political theorists—used her many writings on illness to imagine a model of impersonality uniquely well suited to the responsibilities of legislation. The relation of the legislator to the community represents a recurring problem for utilitarianism: if self-interest is the only reliable motivation, it becomes difficult to account for the legislator's—and hence, the ideal citizen's—supposed commitment to the common good. In Harriet Martineau's account, only the enlightened sufferer is able to regard all persons as equally valuable, and hence, their own pain is of no greater or lesser consequence than that experienced by anyone else.