From the previous fragments we can derive that the person of Beau Brummell ceased, to a certain extent, being such to become a character, that is, a literary mask (0.13). His bios went from a real to an imaginary convention. But viewed carefully one can sense that Brummell’s intentions went beyond that. Of the authors cited in the previous entry, Hazlitt in particular was very insightful when it came to revealing Brummell’s modus operandi and, as he states in his essay, Brummell’s true art consists of “extracting something from nothing,” a task that necessarily requires penetrating the threshold between “something” and “nothing.”

It may be true, as Hazlitt says, that “it is impossible for anyone to go beyond [Brummell] without falling flat into insignificance and insipidity: he has touched the ne plus ultra that divides the dandy from the dunce,” or in other words, he has planted himself well into the aforementioned threshold. But, even if it is difficult to not take his commentaries as simple trifles and banalities, there is something rather special to them. Some examples:

It is said that upon meeting a duke in one of the society salons, Brummell asked him: “do you call that thing a coat?” Hazlitt: 

It seems all at once a vulgar prejudice to suppose that a coat is a coat, the commonest of all common things —it is here lifted into an ineffable essence, so that a coat is no longer a thing; or that it would take infinite gradations of fashion, taste, and refinement, for a thing to aspire to the undefined privileges, and mysterious attributes of a coat. Finer “fooling” than this cannot be imagined.

This jab is simultaneously bold, ambiguous and, strangely enough, very subtle when it comes to suggesting that an object is not simply an object, a matter we will delve into shortly. But Brummell is even more daring when referring to himself:

A friend one day called upon him, and found him confined to his room from a lameness in one foot, upon which he expressed his concern at the accident. “I am sorry for it too,” answered Brummell very gravely, “particularly as it’s my favourite leg!”

Why would someone have a “favorite” leg over the other? Are not both of them equally important? And even further, why refer to a part of one’s body with an adjective commonly used for a thing. In this passage, Beau Brummell treats himself as if he were not himself, as if he were one of the objects he admired so much. This desire to suppress himself, his person (bios), is even more evident in Virginia Woolf’s passage about the neck-cloth (2.7). His “technique of tying a cravat,” says Giorgio Agamben, “—worthy a zen master— … was rigorous in the elimination of any intentionality...”

In the abolition of any trace of subjectivity from his own person, no one has ever reached the radicalism of Beau Brummell. With an asceticism that equals the most mortifying mystical techniques, he constantly cancels from himself any trace of personality. This is the extremely serious sense of a number of his witticisms, such as “Robinson, which of the lakes do I prefer.”¹

Brummell, firmly planted in the threshold between something and nothing, wanted to disappear as a subject, as an individual. ¿But what becomes of a person when it disappears as an entity capable of subjectivity? Could it be that, emptied of subjectivity, the dandy becomes an object?

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1. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, 53. ↩︎