ABSTRACT
Power itself is such a limit-description, which is to say it is something we keep discovering and that discovers us. Montale’s description of life as flux, life as “squandered waste,” both futile and vain, is also such a description, that is, a translation and measuring of life into competing descriptions. Limit-descriptions, especially those that give us a picture of the kind of thing life is, are unconstrained. Although compared to our everyday descriptions of people, they are more open-ended and underdetermined compared to our everyday descriptions of people. In Austen’s novels, modes of perception lead to modes of description, which lead to modes of evaluation, which lead to kinds of actions. All of these modes function as parts of feedback loops, so that description affects perception and evaluation effects description and action effects evaluation, and so on. Heda Margolius Kovály offers an example of how to bring a life into visibility.
