The Future Of Possibility 
Pieter Vermeulen 
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
pieter.vermeulen@arts.kuleuven.be 
(c) 2008 Pieter Vermeulen.
All rights reserved. 

Review of:
Anne-Lise Francois. Open Secrets: The Literature of 
Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. 

1. Anne-Lise Francois's Open Secrets: The Literature 
of Uncounted Experience announces on its back cover 
that it will deal with movements of "affirmative reticence" 
and of "recessive action." So what do we make of these 
deliberately near-paradoxical phrases? Throughout her 
book, which consists of a chapter gesturing "Toward a 
Theory of Recessive Action" and three long chapters of 
literary analysis, Francois continues to offer carefully 
worded near-synonyms that together circumscribe the 
particular kind of experience that she is interested in; we 
read about a "nonemphatic," a "self-canceling," and a "non-
epiphanic" "revelation," about an "affirmative passivity," or 
about a "reticent assertion" (xvi, 3, 43, 267, xix). It is easy 
enough to see that all of these phrases are structured in a 
similar way: a moment of affirmation goes together with 
an element that checks the thrust of that affirmation. Yet it 
is crucial that we do not simply understand the tension 
between these two conjoined elements as a movement of 
disappointment or limitation: Francois insists that we read 
it in the opposite direction and instead consider this tension 
as the expression of a "nonappropriative" or "minimal" 
contentment, as, indeed, an "oddly satisfying reprieve or 
'letdown'" (xvii-xxi). We must, in other words, understand 
the book's signature list of near-synonymous near-
paradoxes not only as compressed movements of self-
restraint or disillusionment, but also as the expression of 
a capacity to find sufficiency and value in ostensibly non-
promising, and potentially disappointing, places. Such 
admittedly unspectacular experiences of a mildly 
surprising lack of disappointment, grief, or pain are at the 
heart of Francois's book. 

2. These experiences suggest a manifestly non-heroic 
capacity to, quite simply, make do with less. That Open 
Secrets phrases this suggestion in a vocabulary that 
combines more or less familiar theoretical lexicons 
points to its ambition to articulate its "less is, if not 
more, then at least enough" ethos as an original 
theoretical intervention in its own right. The most 
obvious positions from which the book's appreciation 
of "patient or benevolent abandonment" (xx) is to be 
differentiated are traditional utilitarian ideologies of 
improvement. Such ideologies measure the value of a 
given action by looking at what this action materially 
produces; they go together with an implicit or explicit 
call to convert all potentialities into an actual yield 
(Francois's paradigm here is the biblical parable of the 
talents). This ethos is unwilling to credit a desire 
unless its externalization is actively pursued; it remains 
blind to experiences that do not enter the public record; 
it impels us to act upon the knowledge we have. As 
such, it presents an immensely influential model of 
action that defines action as "confer[ring] actuality on 
the previously latent" (16). The unobtrusive movements 
that Francois deals with set aside the domination of 
actualization and production by making room for 
"experiences that may not want, need, or be capable of 
louder articulation" (16). The point of these experiences 
is that they manage to credit the merely private life of 
desires that are not relentlessly pursued and of wishes 
that are, for whatever reason, not accomplished. The 
latency and potentiality of these experiences is not 
condemned as defective or incomplete--they are simply 
not considered from the point of view of maximization 
or fulfillment. Francois's main example here is the story 
of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678). 
In this novel, the death of the heroine's husband leaves 
her free to pursue her passion for the man she loves, a 
possibility that she rather startlingly leaves unactualized. 
While doing nothing so heroic as resisting the ethos of 
production and actualization, the princess manages to 
render it inoperative. 

3. The critique of Enlightenment discourses of utility and 
improvement has of course long been a staple of literary 
and cultural studies. What is remarkable in Francois's book 
is that her insistence on the sufficiency of potentiality 
(independent of its manifest and material actualization) 
allows her to show that many critical discourses--notably 
deconstruction and the new historicism--simply adopt the 
primacy of actuality. Where proponents of the 
Enlightenment only count achieved production and full 
articulation, these critical perspectives admittedly do 
consider that there are forces and experiences below the 
visible surface of things; still, they tend to interpret these 
things' lack of visibility too one-sidedly as the result of a 
violent repression, as an injustice that they then seek to 
rectify by bringing hidden experiences to light. Like more 
traditional perspectives, deconstruction and the new 
historicism (and any number of projects that aim to 
recover the historical experiences of non-privileged 
groups) thus fail to consider latency and potentiality as 
anything other than a defective, imperfect articulation. 
Intent on recovering hidden meanings and lost histories, 
they remain unprepared to accept the evidence of 
experiences that do not require "either the work of 
disclosure or the effort of recovery" (xvi). Especially in 
her discussion of the poetry of Dickinson and 
Wordsworth, Francois presents poetic instances of 
apparent indifference, blankness, or "tonelessness" that 
are, as she argues, not so much the result of the willful 
suppression of particular historical experiences or of 
the elision of inexpressible grief, but simply "a form of 
constative simplicity" (157); these examples indeed 
produce very little emotional effect, and they convey a 
sense of energies carelessly spent, but this 
unremarkableness is a property of these experiences 
themselves, and emphatically not of the wilful 
repression of a positive content. As such, they make 
clear that the revisionist and redemptive zeal of many 
critical studies misses an admittedly slight but vital 
dimension of experience. 

4. While criticism since the 1970s has confronted the 
Western tradition by recovering (racial, sexual, cultural, 
etc.) perspectives that have remained "uncounted" in 
that tradition, Open Secrets corrects these approaches 
by showing that their ethos of recovery in its turn fails 
to count the kind of experiences that do not require 
the effort of recovery. The reason Francois's book 
does not itself qualify as another work of retrieval is 
quite simply that the experiences she focuses on 
escape the opposition between absence and actuality, 
and thus the movement from loss to recovery. For all 
their inconspicuousness, these experiences remain 
outside the very dialectic of loss and retrieval that 
has been so important for criticism since the 1970s. 
As critics like Eric Santer and Greg Forter have argued,[1] 
the categories of loss and absence determine the 
"melancholic" model of subjectivity that has reigned in 
many dominant critical currents: so the poststructuralist 
subject is a linguistic being who lacks the fullness of 
being, and politicized critical agendas tend to define 
the subject through the particular losses he or she has 
endured. Francois's correction of this dominant 
"melancholic" trend is nowhere more clear than in her 
discussion of the "graveside loiterers" that abound in 
Wordsworth's poetry and of Thomas Hardy's 
dispassionate poems on the death of his wife; these 
poems, she writes, stage mourners who abjure "the 
heroism of loss" (131): "Hardy's elegist cannot make 
himself feel the difference between his wife's absence 
in life and in death," and the poem thus only revisits 
her death in order to affirm that he has "not suffered 
a loss" (153-54). 

5. These "indifferent mourner[s]" or "bearer[s] of 
weightless loss" (194) recognize that the loss of a life 
does not always lead to unbearable feelings of guilt or 
grief (and what is equally important is that this lack 
of feeling does in its turn not lead to feelings of guilt
about not feeling guilty enough). Francois's critique 
of the dialectic of loss and recovery also takes issue 
with a tendency in much contemporary theory to 
invest an almost infinite ethical responsibility in the 
subject who finds him- or herself confronted with 
injustice and loss.[2] She shows how such an 
imperative to act and to speak out is complicit with 
the conception of action as production and articulation. 
Francois not only discerns this conception in the 
standard Western "fantasy of the all-responsible 
subject" (267), but, more surprisingly perhaps, also 
in "the numerous tropes of passive agency, singularity, 
and nonrelation informing postmodern ethical 
thought" (27). Such an "overemphasis on limitless 
responsibility and infinite debt" is most famously 
encountered in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and 
they tend to "elevate the infinitesimal to the status of 
an impossible and absolute ideal" (61-64). Because 
situations that are perceived as not entirely satisfactory 
or complete are all too hastily interpreted as radically 
lacking, these perspectives fail to account for those 
elements of experience that do not require either 
articulation or actualization, and for those aspects 
of our response to reality that are experienced as 
simply adequate and sufficient.[3] 

6. The greatest merit of Open Secrets is the way in 
which its attention to the intrinsic sufficiency of 
minimal experiences allows us to appreciate the 
continuity between many of the dominant critical 
paradigms in postmodern thought and 
Enlightenment models of action-as-production. 
Because these critical paradigms tend to interpret 
every representational inadequacy as a violent 
repression, they cultivate the loss of a particular 
content and attempt to restore it to full actuality. 
This insistence on full actualization, which these 
perspectives inherit from the very tradition they 
criticize, cannot but lead to a disappointment with 
the real world; the injustices and the losses in this 
world place a demand upon the subject that it can 
never hope to meet. Wordsworth's poet, Hardy's 
indifferent mourner, and Lafayette's princess 
confront this tradition (and the more recent 
"tradition" of criticisms of that earlier tradition) 
with instances that escape its organizing dialectic. 
They are, Francois writes, protagonists who "show 
their colors, sometimes to shocking effect, by what 
they are prepared to accept and settle on--if not as 
'normal' then as 'sufficient'" (65). 

7. The truly strange thing about the alternative that 
Francois formulates is that the instances she 
presents are, as the last quote makes clear, at the 
same time deliberately unremarkable and 
potentially "shocking." In order to understand this 
almost paradoxical combination, we must be 
aware to what extent we in our critical climate 
have grown accustomed to seeing in figures of 
unobtrusive passivity, of unemployment, of 
desoeuvrement, a subversive or even a messianic 
potential. When the protagonists of the book claim 
"the privilege to ignore" (2), I think that we are 
entitled to see them as not-so-distant relatives of 
that unlikely hero of contemporary theory, Bartleby, 
the Scrivener. Thanks to Giorgio Agamben's 
discussion of Melville's famous story in his 
influential work on potentiality, we have learned 
to consider Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" as 
the expression of an attitude that neither consents 
nor refuses, but that instead declines the choice 
between these two options. For Agamben, Bartleby's 
deflection effectively renders inoperative the logic 
that would force him to choose. Bartleby's potentiality 
not to participate is thus thoroughly effective as 
such, without it having to pass into actuality 
(through, for instance, a form of active resistance). 
Francois's attention to her protagonists' setting 
aside of the demands put upon them by ideologies 
of improvement similarly wants to propose a 
potential "that is already fully effective and significant 
as potential and whose value has nothing to do with 
its being realized" (104). 

8. This comes so close to Agamben's work on 
potentiality that it is hard to avoid viewing Francois's 
protagonists through the lens of Agamben's Homo 
Sacer and to resist attributing to them a radical, even 
messianic significance. That Francois yet wants to 
avoid these claims is most clear when she mentions 
Agamben's recent work as symptomatic of the current 
theoretical compulsion to radicalize negativity (64). 
Another indication that we should not take the 
insistence on "affirmative passivity" as part of a 
messianic politics is the book's choice of Fanny in 
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as its clearest example 
of such a passivity. Fanny, Francois writes, sits 
uneasily "between the sense of passivity as 
submissive acquiescence and that of passivity as 
privileged leisure" (267); I believe that Francois 
intends the explicitly bourgeois and politically 
tainted status of this example--to which Edward 
Said, among others, has made us attentive--to 
keep her theory from being misread as a radical 
political statement (and the same goes for her 
candid acknowledgement that the "open secret" 
in her title, which indicates something that is 
simply there without lending itself to investigation 
or affirmation, can be considered as "a trope for 
the implicit workings of ideology itself" [5]). 

9. The care with which Francois attempts to render 
the experiences on which she focuses unavailable 
for political recuperation gives us a better clue to 
the political import of her book than do Agamben's 
grandiose claims for figures of potentiality. The 
book intuits that what may be required in order to 
maintain the effectivity of potentiality as such is an 
active intervention that pre-empts the actualization 
of potentiality. In a brief passage, Francois tells us 
that the book began as a thought-experiment to 
understand the strange value accorded in 
environmentalist discourse to doing "as little as 
possible." Her example of such a quiet intervention 
is the practice of tree spiking, in which eco-activists 
drive ceramic nails into trees in order to discourage 
logging, because the nails threaten to damage the 
logging machines. The activist thus attempts to 
render these trees safe by arming them "with a power 
to harm that she hopes they will never actually have 
to use" (37). Apart from offering an example where 
(a) potentiality (to harm) becomes effective as such, 
this practice also removes the possibility of using 
the trees' wood for industrial purposes (in the same 
way, I would argue, that Francois's book renders her 
protagonists unavailable for political recuperation). 
The activists, in Francois's words, "give notice of an 
unrealized x and, just as surely and swiftly, put it 
irretrievably 'off limits,' beyond development" (36); 
they exemplify a "type of minimally inflected transition 
from the latency of unactualized, dormant possibility 
. . . to 'more' absolute privation" (38). While this is not 
the place to discuss all the ramifications of this 
immunization of (a) potentiality (for abuse), it seems 
safe to say that it has less to do with the "strong" 
messianism of Agamben than with the more minimalist 
"weak" messianism of Benjamin, who wrote that 
"every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away 
from the conformism that is working to overpower it
 . . . even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if 
he is victorious" (391). 

10. Although I focus here on Open Secrets' theoretical 
merits, I need to add that Francois's readings of 
literature not only reveal a stunning capacity to 
concentrate on formal details, but also manage to put 
forward interpretations that future critics of the works 
in question will likely have to contend with for a long 
time to come. Francois's choice of texts--a seventeenth-
century French novel, three poetical oeuvres from the 
very long nineteenth century (Hardy, Wordsworth, and 
Dickinson), and a novel by a writer who is famously 
hard to periodize (Mansfield Park)--seems almost 
deliberately to bracket questions of literary history. 
What interests Francois is the formal means through 
which these works make room for "recessive action" 
and for potentiality in two genres that serve as 
important ideological tools of the dominant ethos of 
production and articulation: the novel, which raises 
the expectation of goal-oriented action and self-
improvement, and the lyric, which generally serves as 
a vehicle for self-expression. Francois shows how an 
"antinovelistic conception of experience" (200) is 
embodied in La Princesse de Cleves through the use of 
the passe simple, the "tense of completed action," the 
tense that locates "the event outside of the person of 
the narrator," which contributes to an impersonal style 
that allows the princess a "release from responsibility" 
(87, 84, 89). In the case of Austen's novel, Francois 
demonstrates that the novel allows Fanny to escape the 
ideology of improvement through the use of free 
indirect speech. This tense "makes available for silent 
reading experiences that may not want, need, or be 
capable of louder articulation" without conferring actuality 
"on the previously latent" (16). By presenting Fanny's 
experience through such third-person narration, the 
novel "relieves Fanny from first-person assertions" (224), 
in the same way that the passe simple releases the 
princess from the burden of having to take responsibility 
for her each and every action. In the discussion of the 
poetry of Hardy, Wordsworth, and Dickinson, finally, the 
focus is firmly on the distinction between "narrative telos 
and lyric inconsequence" (139). Francois coins a "lyric 
subgenre," the "lyric of inconsequence," which attempts 
to give shape to a release from narrative expectations and 
to make room for "the possibilities of nonsequential 
connection" (154). The poems of Wordsworth, Hardy, and 
Dickinson that she categorizes under this label "release" 
temporal difference "from the obligation to produce 
significant narrative difference" (180). While we can only 
hope that these literary analyses point the way to further 
research on the formal means through which other media 
shape such a release from teleological progression--
"temporal" media such as music and film immediately 
come to mind--it is no small merit of Open Secrets that 
it so convincingly argues for the possibility of wresting 
literary media away from their recuperation by ideologies 
of production and articulation. 

Literature Faculty
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
pieter.vermeulen@arts.kuleuven.be 

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Notes 

1. See Greg Forter, "Against Melancholia: Contemporary 
Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the 
Politics of Unfinished Grief," differences 14.2 (2003): 134-70, 
and Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and 
Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). 

2. This critique brings her work close to Erik Gray's The Poetry 
of Indifference from the Romantics to the Rubaiyat (Amherst: 
U of Massachusetts P, 2005) and to Amanda Anderson, who 
similarly oppose what Anderson calls such fantasies of 
"aggrandized agency" (46). 

3. It is no surprise that the work of Stanley Cavell, and 
especially his thinking on the dialectic of skeptic doubt and 
acknowledgement, is one of Francois's most important 
influences. See especially her extensive discussion of 
Cavell's notion of acknowledgement on pages 212-17, and 
her repeated insistence on the sufficiency of the common 
and the everyday (xxii-xxiii, 62). 

Works Cited 
Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in 
Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford 
UP, 1999.
Anderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the 
Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. "On the Concept of History." Selected Writings. 
Vol. 4. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: 
Harvard UP, 2006. 389-411.