What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

Since his death in 1951 and the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work have been a subject of intense fascination for poets, novelists, and playwrights. Wittgenstein’s signature approach to writing as a mode of discovery – of writing as philosophical investigation – factors into and emerges out of the literary response to his life and work. That response takes many forms, from a quick reference or veiled allusion to parodic imitation to more extended, complex, or subtle forms of inspiration, influence, or acknowledgment. After examining a number of uses of Wittgenstein’s work in texts by mid-twentieth-century authors (Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, David Markson), ones that construe the philosopher as alternately a logical positivist or a silent mystic, the chapter turns to more contemporary, twenty-first-century responses to Wittgenstein by authors including Maggie Nelson, Kathy Acker, Lydia Davis, Ben Lerner, Nicholas Mosley, W. G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace, and Amiri Baraka. These more contemporary literary responses to Wittgenstein are less uniform in their references to the man and his work but more diverse in their use of Wittgenstein’s concepts, arguments, or writings, particularly from the later philosophy.