ABSTRACT
The social message of the generic process that culminates in this explanation is a contradictory one, and may be read both at the level of content and of form. On the one hand, we must interpret the purification of monism as a tacit confession of subjective conjuncturality, of the fragmentary character of the material experience from which ethos is drawn. The ethical explanation of political failure cannot cover over the imperturbable difference of political desire or ethos, any more than can the theological explanation that is generically dominant only in the heavenly portions of the poem. Nonetheless, the poem does make a direct allegorical statement in its assertion of an ethical ethos. The natural psychology of paradise asserts the Cultural Revolution by celebrating its displaced result: the ethical subject of emergent capitalism, whose narrative dynamic is determined by its paradoxical distance from itself, or in other words by constitutive lack.
