PLACE, AND IN PARTICULAR, THE LOCAL, HAVE BECOME KEY TERMS IN Romantic ecocriticism s rage against the machine. This rage is as impotent as it is loud--indeed rhetorical affect is here in direct proportion to marginalization. (2) Moreover, this impotent rage is itself an ironic barrier to a genuine (sense of) interrelationship between beings--the kind desired, posited and/or predicted by ecological thinking itself. Elsewhere I have called it "beautiful soul syndrome" after Hegel's brilliant characterization of Romantic subjectivity as a "beautiful soul" that perceives a chasm between consciousness and the world. This chasm cannot be fully bridged; not, at any rate, without compromising the beauty of the soul itself. (3) Ideas such as "place" and "the local," let alone "nation," entail subject positions--"places" from which Romantic ideas of place make sense. For this reason, it is all the more important for us to consider deeply the idea of place, and in general the Romantic attitude to "nature" prevalent today (we are still, in effect, within the Romantic period). We should not throw the baby of place out with the Romantic bathwater. Instead of wondering how to bridge the unbridgeable gap, ecological thinking might pose another kind of question. Indeed, to pose a question is to reveal how our sense of place and what we mean by terms such as question, aporia, of wonder, are interconnected. What if globalization, via an ironic negative path, revealed that place was never very coherent in the first place?
