Abstract

When Freud described the “oceanic feeling” of intimated plenitude that haunted the boundaries of consciousness he both intensified a post-enlightenment aesthetics that imagined the beyond of civilization is female, fluid, and undifferentiated and gave modernist poetics a theory of an almost unthinkable serenity beyond the limits of identity. European Romanticism and modernism, for all their differences, operated largely with the assumption that being a subject required abandoning an original maternal plenitude. In The Deep, Rivers Solomon provides a counter-oedipal politics and aesthetics that affirms a difference and intensity in the depths of history and the sea, taking life and difference beyond the binaries of male/female and nature/culture.