Neohelicon (2013) 40:11–21 DOI 10.1007/s11059-013-0168-y
The ‘‘adulterous’’ theory On the adventurous character of theoretical truth Vladimir Biti
Published online: 21 March 2013 Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2013
Abstract The shortest possible definition of theory might read ‘‘an eye-opening affair with someone beyond our familiar world’’. The Greek word theo¯rós designated a special envoy of community sent to the inter-communal religious ceremonies to request the divine wisdom and transfer it, with tranquilizing effects, back to community members disquieted by an unexpected occurrence. It is this regained essence of community life, discerned from an authorized distance, that Aristotle dubs the truth. Yet theory was since its Greek origins constantly confronted with misunderstandings of its aspiration to truth. It is as if the theorist’s ‘‘adultery with the foreigners’’, which enabled such an aspiration to begin with, simultaneously prevented its acknowledgment arousing suspicion. To defy such a mistrust of community’s ‘‘simple minds’’ and foster the necessary consensus for its supposedly divine contemplation, theory was forced to make its sublime vision of the truth available to a broad spectatorship. Due to such a brute exposure to the mob prejudice that was to be exposed itself, theory, instead of providing a privileged personal insight into the divine truth, became a public performance dependent on the confirmation in the earthly gaze. Without ever being able to completely assimilate this benighted peasant or philistine gaze into the illuminating divine truth provided by ‘‘adultery’’ but remaining dependent on the crowd’s uncertain approval, theory was, despite its insistent efforts to deactivate the community’s ignorant selfevidence, constantly threatened to reaffirm it. The suspicion follows ‘‘adultery’’ like a shadow. Keywords
Theory Adultery Observation Authorization Truth Eurocentrism
V. Biti (&) Institu¨t fu¨r Slawistik, Universita¨t Wien, Spitalgasse 2-4/Hof 3, 1090 Vienna, Austria e-mail:
[email protected]
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The shortest possible definition of theory might read ‘‘an eye-opening affair with someone beyond our familiar world.’’ As proper insight without the risk of selfestrangement seems to be impossible, theorizing would be a brave act. Yet it is not necessarily a deliberate undertaking. Displacement into the amazing area ‘‘beyond the boundary,’’ initially resonating with pulse-quickening and adrenalin-increasing associations, can sometimes mean the most desperate emigration or exile uncoupled from any eye-opening intention. Despite the much-trumpeted cognitive benefits of border-crossing, e´migre´s and exiles, if they had the choice, would probably prefer, however short-sightedly, to stay in their familiar world. Is it therefore advisable, as Mayer (1975) and Said (1993, p. 403) suggested, to distinguish between the two kinds of ‘‘outsiders,’’ the ‘‘heroic’’ and ‘‘enlightened’’ intentional ones and the ‘‘sacrificial’’ and ‘‘benighted’’ existential ones, or are enlightenment and benightedness, heroism and victimhood, inextricable attributes of ‘‘theoretical outsideness’’? Charting a genealogy of American comparative literature as the institutional domicile of literary theory after the Second World War, Emily Apter, for example, derived its endemic feeling of placelessness out of exilic consciousness continuously passed and refined from one comparatist generation to another. According to Apter 1995 this deeply ingrained constant of the field lent it its ‘‘consistency of character as a relentlessly distantiating mode of criticality’’ (Comparative, p. 87), i.e. a profile which is today usually attributed to literary theory. Early American comparatists, many of them European emigrants like Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Rene´ Wellek, and Wolfgang Kayser, had a distaste for nationalism which paved the way for ‘‘the nation-neutral textuality of American New Criticism’’ and developed theoretically based pedagogies for which ‘‘no visa was necessary (p. 88).’’ Because the lingua franca of the burgeoning discipline was German, similarly to the theories of alienation and subjective estrangement expounded by the likes of Marx, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin and Luka´cs, comparative literature was characterized by an ethics of linguistic estrangement and secessionism from mainstream American culture (p. 89). Through their exilic experience first comparatists were banished from the world of purely esthetic forms but the trauma of exodus resonated even louder for the next melancholic generation of deconstructionists who, beginning with Jewish epistemological placelessness, speak of the ‘‘anxiety of influence,’’ ‘‘agonism,’’ and ‘‘criticism in wilderness’’ (p. 90). The current postcolonial generation of exilic critics, finally, is anti-Eurocentric, non-German-speaking, nonwhite, antipatriarchal, and hostile to elite literariness and yet, like its antecedents, imbued with ‘‘melancholia, Heimlosigkeit, cultural ambivalence, consciousness of linguistic loss, amnesia of origins, border trauma (p. 90).’’ Like Leo Spitzer, Homi Bhabha for instance activates cultural difference and disinheritance as engines of literary analysis, which is why theorization of Heimlosigkeit, with its unbroken decades-long persistence, turns comparative literature as the traditional domicile of literary theory into ‘‘a placeless place that is homely in its unhomeliness,’’ ‘‘the institutional and pedagogical space of not-being-there (p. 93).’’ ‘‘This unhomely voice, together with the restless, migratory thought patterns of the discipline’s theory and methods, highlights the extent to which comparative literature’s very disciplinarity has been and continues to be grounded in exilic consciousness (p. 94).’’
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In her more recent book The Translation Zone (2006), which explores the genealogy of exilic consciousness of comparative literature, Apter turns to what she terms ‘‘philological humanism’’ of Jewish prewar and war e´migre´s to Turkey, such as Spitzer and Auerbach in their pre-American emigrant episode that produced the conditions conducive to the establishment of American comparative literature. A fascinating two-way collision occurred in Istanbul between a new-nations ideology dedicated to constructing a modern Turkish identity with the latest European pedagogies, and an ideology of European culture dedicated to preserving ideals of Western humanism against the ravages of nationalism (p. 50). Leo Spitzer claimed in his essay Learning Turkish (1934), that ‘‘any language is human prior to being national,’’ i.e. associating philology with linguistically interrelated and intertwined etymological roots as well as human ratio rather than race, defended a kind of transnational humanism or global translatio of national languages. His ‘‘resistance philology’’ was used as a prophylactic against the nationalist leveling differences to rescue them from reductive politicization (pp. 57–58). Being a foreigner in the Turkish national corpus, he developed an interest for bottomless, dehumanized aspects of language which, according to de Man’s (1986, pp. 85–86) interpretation of Benjamin, cause suffering in the authenticity of every mother tongue (die Wehen des Eigenen) in the manner the most valuable translations do. Spitzer forged a worldly paradigm of translatio studii with strong links to the history, both past and present, of translatio imperii. (…) The practice of global translatio, as Spitzer defined it, is patterned after untranslatable affective gaps, the nub of intractable semantic difference, episodes of violent cultural transference and countertransference, and unexpected love affairs (p. 64). What else but such amazing affairs could better suit ‘‘the pulse-quickening thrill of dangerous liaisons (p. 63)’’ inherent to today’s comparative literature and its representative product theory? Yet in the aftermath of the First World War many of the East-Central European literary theorists developed their ideas out of the political dislocation and consequent linguistic and cultural displacement. The lives, for example, of Trubetskoy, Jakobson, Luka´cs, Bogatyre¨v, Sˇklovskij and Wellek were deeply marked by the experience of exile and emigration, coercive evacuation from their familiar universe. As Tihanov (2004, p. 419) pointed out, their /e/xile and emigration were the extreme embodiment of heterotopia and polyglossia, triggered by drastic historical changes that brought about the traumas of dislocation, but also, as part of this, the productive insecurity of having to face and make use of more than one language and culture. Living as dislocated remnants of the broken multinational East-Central European empires within the environments of the new nation-states, these intellectuals embodied ‘‘transcendental homelessness,’’ an existential feeling detected by Luka´cs, in a typical transference maneuver, in the behavior of the novelistic hero.
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As the elected representatives of this post-imperial generation were unable to identify either with German or Russian culture as their own meaning horizon, they consistently challenged both of them, raising the evacuation of empirical evidence to the basic operation of modern literary theory. ‘‘Appropriating literature theoretically meant, after all, being able to transcend its (and one’s) national embeddedness by electing to position oneself as an outsider contemplating its abstract laws’’ (Tihanov 2004, p. 420). Interestingly enough, far from being an exclusive feature of modern theory, such contemplation of abstract laws after an enforced detour is, after Blumenberg (1987) a well-established legacy of European theory since the time of Greek theo¯ría. The Greek word theo¯rós, according to Hannelore Rausch, designated a special envoy sent to inter-communal religious ceremonies to request the divine wisdom and relay it, with consecrating effects, back to community members (Rausch 1982, pp. 9–10). The purpose of theo¯ría and the objective of theo¯rós were therefore to tranquilize community fears caused by inexplicable occurrences (Blumenberg 1987, p. 12). Jean-Michel Rabate´ observed: ‘‘in his authorized gaze everyday deeds will be integrated into a sacred ‘theater’; there, things will be seen under their most essential aspect, so that they can be recorded officially (Rabate´ 2002, p. 114).’’ This essence of community life, discerned from an authorized remote position by means of theoretical insight, was dubbed the truth by Aristotle (Rausch 1982, p. 11). The truth introduces the divine perspective into the shattered community horizon, re-centering it through its extension. As European culture, because of its persistently enforced detours, was challenged to continuously extend its communal horizon in this manner, Blumenberg (1987, pp. 158–159) interprets theory as its consistently unifying telos. Theory’s persistent search after the truth, as long as it has the ambition to restore the community’s jeopardized consensus through a cosmopolitan reordering of the disquieted habitual perspective, seems to be warranted for the unbroken continuity of European history. The tacit corollary to Blumenberg’s argument is that this distinguishes Europe from the self-enclosed history of other cultural circles ignorant of or inimical to the others. In the conclusion of his book, Blumenberg sticks to Husserl’s consensual conception of theory that persistently assimilates earthly resistances to its truth in a broadening horizon as against Heidegger’s revolutionary conception of theory that, as exemplified in The Question after the Thing (1935/6), ignores and rejects these resistances. Following Nietzsche, Heidegger refuses any communal verification of theory’s judgment, making the truth the privilege of an elected and insightful minority (Blumenberg 1987, p. 148). This philosophical minority finds the confirmation of its superiority in the community’s rejection of its truth, an elitist stance that, after Blumenberg, betrays the democratic function of theory in the history of European culture and ends its development. Blumenberg’s tacit disagreement with Heidegger’s dismissal of public judgment broadly corresponds with the attitude of Hannah Arendt, who openly criticizes Heidegger’s alienation of professional philosopher from human being in terms of practical concerns (Taminiaux 1998, pp. 132–133). Both Blumenberg and Arendt, who hold different philosophical positions in a distinctively European tradition, advocate a democratic reintegration of theory into communal horizon through the cosmopolitan extension
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of the latter. Never calling into question the possibility of such reasonable dialogue between community and its theo¯rós, neither of them considers the irrevocable and inassimilable character of theorist’s outsideness. Theory was nonetheless from the Greek time constantly subject to misunderstandings that questioned its pretension to truth. Apparently the theorist’s ‘‘adultery with the foreigners’’ that in the first place enabled such pretension simultaneously prevented its acknowledgment. This is the gist of the famous anecdote on Tales and the Thracian maid, recounted by Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, whose numerous transformations Blumenberg attentively investigates to demonstrate theory’s persistent vulnerability to laughter and mockery. Theorists’ privilege with regard to peasant or philistine community members cannot be accomplished without simultaneous exposure to their down-to-earth judgment. To counter the mistrust of ‘‘simple minds’’ and foster the necessary consensus for its supposedly divine contemplation, theory was forced to make its sublime vision of the truth available to a broad spectatorship (Gasche´ 2007, p. 198). Because of this brutal exposure to the same mob prejudice that was envisaged to be dismantled, theory, instead of providing a privileged personal insight into the divine truth, became a public performance dependent on the confirmation of the earthly gaze. Without ever being able completely to assimilate this benighted philistine gaze in the illuminating divine truth provided by ‘‘adultery,’’ but remaining dependent on the crowd’s uncertain approval, theory, despite its strenuous efforts to deactivate the community’s ignorant self-evidence, was at constant risk to reaffirm it. As if embodying this irritating legacy of the competent theorist observed by the incompetent philistines, early German Romanticists, whom Rodolphe Gasche´ in his genealogy in The Honor of Thinking (2007) raises to the most important relay between Greek theo¯ría and modern theory, were the first theorists who questioned the empirical truths of literature. As communal judgment at the micro and macro level was now immensely diversified and all empirical truths polluted by nonreflected self-evidence, theory was obliged to open up the self-enclosure of these truths raising the universal truth of literature to the dialogic horizon of their eventual reconciliation. Early Romanticists thus introduced the self-reflective age of modern theory, compelled to observe the intracommunal and intercommunal differences and measure them against each other. To accomplish world reconciliation, something downplayed in Gasche´’s reading, early Romanticist theory was first diverted toward a comparative detour through the reigning dissent, a phenomenon overemphasized by Gasche´. It therefore focused first on the difference between literature and every acknowledged truth of it, instead of directly upon literature in its putative essence, systematically evacuating the self-evidence of the latter. No theoretical location was authorized in advance but all were compelled to reflect critically on their down-toearth indebtedness. Unlike a substantially less mobile Greek theory whose divine truth enjoyed an only domestically questioned authority, such a persistent bracketing of numerous earthly truths exterior to each other, because they were exterior to the universal truth of literature, followed from their growing social and international dispersal. No particular literary work, genre or corpus, however broadly acclaimed by a given social group or national community, could represent the final truth of literature anymore. But what early Romanticists were eventually
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aiming at, pace Gasche´’s interpretation, was the final overcoming of this exteriority through its interiorizing into literature’s truth itself. The early German Romanticists’ self-reflective concept of literature is ‘‘rooted in a comparative approach to literature that transcends linguistic and national boundaries’’ by making literature into the medium of permanent reflection of one national literature or literary genre in the other (Gasche´ The Honor, p. 178). Gasche´ prioritizes the logic of permanent opposition following Benjamin’s insight that the early Romantic concept of criticism comprises not just the direct knowledge of its object but also an indirect knowledge that this knowledge will not suffice and that, as nobody’s knowledge is all-inclusive, this insufficiency is inevitable. The selfreflective critic must therefore be able (Gasche´ refers here to August Schlegel) ‘‘to block out his personal predilections and blind habits in order to transpose himself into the singularities of other peoples and ages, and to experience them from their center as it were’’ (Schlegel 1966, p. 18). According to August Schlegel (p. 21), …there is no fundamental force in the whole nature that would be so simple as to prevent self-division, and not separate into opposite directions. The whole play of living movement is based on agreement and opposition. Why would this phenomenon not repeat itself on a grander scale in the history of mankind? Consequently, if dissent is the driving force of the whole history of humankind, why should theory be spared the endless differentiation of its judgment? On the contrary, it ought to be its highest representative. After its elaboration by Kant in a number of treatises from 1785 to 1798 (Kant 2006), cosmopolitanism loomed large on the intellectual horizon, entailing the proliferation and juxtaposition of the firsthand evidences which the truth was expected to assimilate in order to authorize itself. Yet, pace Gasche´, this infinite detour, because it was treacherous with regard to the ‘‘visited’’ self-evidences, did not mean that the truth lost control of the alluring labyrinth of theirs. Discussing the establishment of proper esthetic judgment in § 40 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant (1956) obliges the reader to compare his or her judgments not only with the real but also merely possible judgments of other readers by transposing himself or herself into the place of everybody else (dass man sein Urteil an anderer, nicht sowohl wirkliche, als vielmehr bloß mo¨gliche Urteile hält, und sich in die Stelle jedes andern versetzt). He imagined the appropriate reception of an artwork as a constitutively open yet nonetheless authoritatively guided undertaking. The reader’s imagination is, though free in terms of its adulterous ‘‘foreign affairs,’’ not completely directionless and unleashed but hideously orientated and governed by the integrative movement of an ultimate authority. The latter is associated by Kant with worldwide community (Weltpublikum) as the last-instance corrective of judgmental aberrations. This Weltpublikum functions as what, especially in his late philosophy, he repeatedly calls the ‘‘touchstone of truth’’ (Probierstein der Wahrheit; in Critique, p. 64, translated as ‘‘criterion’’; Political, p. 249; Anthropology, 2006, p. 17, 113). Even if it leaves a decisively secular and democratic impression compared with the explicitly divine character of the transmitted truth in Aristotle’s philosophy, Kant’s secularization of the authorization procedure of the truth, which obviously
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paves the way for the early Romanticists’ repositioning of literary theory as the official purveyor of literature’s truth, by no means suspends but reaffirm the truth’s divine character. Despite innumerous questioning detours, the theorist remains unquestioningly loyal to it. This is exactly the point at which Gasche´’s interpretation of early German Romanticist legacy, which follows the exegesis introduced by Walter Benjamin and continued for example by Ernst Behler, Winfried Menninghaus and Samuel Weber, falls short in its generous attempt to save the ‘‘honor of thinking.’’ Kant’s Weltpublikum is obviously aligned with his key politicalphilosophical concept of the human race (Menschenrasse), introduced as a longterm historical agency necessary to emancipate a short-term human being from its basically ‘‘animal’’ natural disposition (Naturanlage). Still clearly associated with the universal ratio in God’s mind (Apter 2006, p. 32) Kant’s human race is saturated with divine attributes. Although religion was proudly rejected as a superstition to be overcome if humankind was to achieve maturity, the very idea of the human being gradually maturing on its own transfers divine ratio onto the ‘‘great chain of being’’ or, in Kant’s rendering, ‘‘series of generations’’ (Reihe der Zeugungen). The dispersed divine substance is from the outset constitutively involved in the course of history. In early German Romanticism the truth in continuous historical displacement substitutes for the Greek truth sent from abroad, but history is equally piously taken by its word as was this abroad. Now, how honorable can thinking be if it asks to be authorized by something that is in advance exempt from questioning? Goethe as usual hit the nail on the head in Makariens Archiv: ‘‘The truth is godlike; it does not appear to us immediately; we have to derive it from its manifestations’’ (Das Wahre ist gottähnlich; es erscheint nicht unmittelbar, wir müssen es aus seinen Manifestationen errathen (Sämtliche I 10, 1986, p. 746)). Far from being accidental and isolated, this claim is in full accordance with a motto from Kunst und Altertum (VI 1) in that one can learn the truth only from its effects (Die Wahrheit lässt sich erst an ihren Folgen erkennen) and with the letter to Iken of September 27, 1827 in which the God-like author Goethe confides in his addressee that he long ago decided to drive his attentive reader to derive the secret meaning of his work from its counter-positioned and mutually mirroring constituents (so habe ich seit langem das Mittel gewählt, durch einander gegenüber gestellte und sich gleichsam in einander abspiegelnde Gebilde den geheimeren Sinn dem Aufmerkenden zu offenbaren) (Goethes IV 43, p. 83). This explains why Romanticist artists and philosophers must authorize their truth—the community’s common sense (Gemeinsinn)—through the accumulation and mutual comparison of its most manifold international effects. The truth emerges through a series of selftranspositions into the most diverse perspectives but this authorization procedure is now carried out by a self that searches for accreditation. What therefore distinguishes the early Romanticist from the old Greek theorist is that this authorizing ‘‘adultery with the foreigners’’ is not real but imagined by the theorist’s self. The inter-community that is expected to accomplish the reconciliation of the theorist’s divided community by introducing into it the ultimate truth is projected by the theorist’s location. How can the theorist’s self be plausibly authorized by a community that is invented by him or her? How can such subjectively biased community reestablish the common sense? This is why the community’s suspicion
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of the theorist’s ‘‘foreign affairs,’’ analyzed by Blumenberg in the case of the old Greek theo¯ría, must hold sway over early German Romanticism as well. The reconciliation of the antagonistic self-evidences in the horizon of literature’s truth is again destined to fail. This important point on the arbitrary character of theoretical authorization, with its necessary corollaries for the understanding of early German Romanticist theory, was made by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard in their illuminating reading of Kant’s political philosophy (Lyotard 1991, p. 224; Arendt 1992, p. 43). Kant’s cosmopolitan transpositions were led by his intention to establish an impartial and superior philosophical self. Yet far from being all-inclusive in this attempt, Kant was at permanent pains to exclude his philosophical gaze from the ordinary perspectives of uncultivated fellow-creatures and lower human species. Unlike fine souls, they were not the destinations of his self-transpositions. Both ‘‘savages’’ and ‘‘natural humans’’ whom (Kant 2006, p. 46) describes as ‘‘animals in need of a master’’ are already excluded from this elite company. As for the ‘‘savages,’’ he is disarmingly frank in his Physical Geography: ‘‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent, the Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples (Kant 1997, p. 63).’’ Unlike Europeans, none of these three lowest human races can continue to grow in intelligence (pp. 63–64). In the treatise On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (1788) Kant classifies human races after their dependence on long-term bodily lineage. As European races are considered to be free moral agents primarily determined by reason, he makes the physiological body into the repository solely of the non-European racial identity. Possessing all forces and talents as well as capability for unlimited progress, Europeans are the ideal model of universal humanity (Eze 1995, pp. 203–204; p. 216). This is why the authorizing series of transpositions, instead of entailing an othering of the self, amounts to the exploitation of others for the sake of its own aggrandizement. Kant was not isolated in the self-centered and Eurocentric authorization of his truth. Proposing the prismatic refraction of the truth and its multifaceted effects, Goethe was aiming at the similarly sovereign German-centered European self. The latter is a clear distance from the ignorant and barbarous mob addicted to the security of ‘‘house piety’’ (Sämtliche I 10, p. 514). To feed its superficial and dispersive consumer habits the crowd only requires from literature swift and powerful effects (Schriften, pp. 173–175). Next to these benighted creatures that dwell in parochial self-sufficiency, Goethe is equally critical of the self-enclosed non-European cultures as well. ‘‘Chinese, Indian, Egyptian antiquities are always just curiosities; it is recommended to make oneself and the world acquainted with them; but they would be not especially fruitful for our moral and esthetic education/ formation (Bildung)’’ (p. 284). This is the reason why ‘‘Orientals’’ can never stand comparison with the Greeks and Romans or the Naturdichtung like Serbian epic or Nibelungen with the Iliad (p. 174). Oriental culture can be used just as a ‘‘refreshing source’’ to ‘‘strengthen the peculiarity of our spirit’’ but certainly not as its lawgiving pattern (Sämtliche II 6, p. 642). The same goes for Naturdichtung: being original but primitive, it can be reasonably exploited only as a raw material. From the Western perspective together they constitute ‘‘the rest’’ which ‘‘we must look at
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only historically; appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes’’ (Schriften, p. 250). Yet even prominent European literature like the French, English or Italian that acknowledged, praised, translated, staged and reviewed Goethe’s work (1887, p. 243) in the final analysis contributed merely to his imperial selfunderstanding (Meyer-Kalkus 2010, pp. 105–106). Through their activity the world became for Goethe an ‘‘expanded fatherland,’’ i.e. a substantially improved version of what he was desperately missing at home. Neither was Goethe alone in his elitist predilections. In 1793 Herder stated that Germans should ‘‘appropriate the best of all the peoples and in such a way become among them what man became among the fellow and co-creatures (Neben- und Mitgeschöpfe) from which he learned his skills (Künste). He came at the end, took from everybody his art and now he surpasses and rules all of them’’ (Herder 1991, p. 551, italics mine). Several years later Novalis in an equally cosmopolitan project Christendom or Europe (1799) suggested that whereas other European countries were ‘‘occupied by war, speculation and partisanship (Parthey-Geist), the German builds himself with all diligence into an associate (Genosse) of a higher epoch of culture and this preliminary step must give him in the course of time great predominance (ein großes Uebergewicht) over the others’’ (Novalis Hardenberg 1983, p. 519, italics mine). In the same self-fostering vein Goethe entrusted German language with the role of the medium of permanent translation of one into another literature. It is called upon to set the course for everybody’s national currency (Münzsorten) ‘‘not by repelling the foreign but devouring it’’ (Goethe 1987, p. 243). If such ‘‘devouring’’ is the true background of the early Romanticists’ generous world reconciliation (Weltversöhnung), then there is something other than ‘‘pure humanity’’ (reine Menschlichkeit) behind Weimar’s esthetic program which tried to ‘‘unite again the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty’’ (die politisch geteilte Welt unter der Fahne der Wahrheit und Schönheit wieder zu vereinigen) (Schiller 1991, p. 109). When August Schlegel, the key figure of Gasche´’s cosmopolitan argument, stated ‘‘that the moment is not so remote when German will become a general organ of communication for all educated nations’’ (Geschichte, 1965, p. 27), allocating to the Germans the mission ‘‘to unite all the advantages of most various nationalities’’ in order ‘‘to create a cosmopolitan midpoint for the human spirit’’ (p. 36), he was merely expressing the common view of the time. Novalis’s typically pregnant formulation in a letter to him from 1797 reflects the same cosmopolitan patriotism: ‘‘Germanness is cosmopolitanism mixed with the most powerful individuality’’ (Deutschheit ist Kosmopolitismus mit der kräftigsten Individualität gemischt) (Fink 1993, p. 39). As this was obviously a compensatory response to the deep-seated inferiority feeling of Germans at that time, we must agree with Koch (2002, p. 235) that such megalomaniac statements ‘‘strike us today as extravagant, if not explicitly funny.’’ Contrary to Gasche´’s claim, therefore, the early German Romanticist cosmopolitan literary theory was dedicated to the self-consoling glorification of the German self. If early Romanticists took the latter to be the very epitome of universal human spirit, what obliges us today, equipped as we unfortunately are with the privilege of retrospection, to endorse their opinion? This point is important not just because it revises the entrenched stereotypic distinction between the allegedly cosmopolitan early and the allegedly nationalist
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late German Romanticism—praising the first at the cost of the second which, especially if looked at retroactively, ‘‘pollutes’’ the German putatively genuine cosmopolitanism—but in the first place because it questions the open cosmopolitan spirit of ‘‘proper literary theory.’’ If early Romanticist theory set itself the ‘‘infinite task’’ of interiorizing all its exterior critical observers in order to establish a completely sovereign observation of the world, then it was German-centered and Eurocentric rather than truly cosmopolitan and open. It is significant that Gasche´ uses the term ‘‘infinite task’’ in the title of his most recent book (2009), inspired by the idea of Europe developed in the late work of Edmund Husserl, and thus endorses the same philosophical tradition which Blumenberg’s investigation of the idea of theory in Das Lachen der Thrakerin embraced. Husserl attempted to solve ‘‘the crisis of European humanity’’ in the same way as Blumenberg and Gasche´ do, by reattaching Europe to its genuine ‘‘task’’ of rescuing ‘‘universal humankind’’ by gradually suspending limitations caused by others. Theory, according to these thinkers, is an eminently European mission. Being open ‘‘toward transcendence, toward the other, and what is other than Europe’’ (Gasche´ 2009, p. 27), an inborn ‘‘interiorizer of exteriorities’’ so to speak, Europe is interpreted by Gasche´ to be the most reponsible representative of universal humankind (p. 31). It is an epitome of theoretical behavior that never stops questioning itself. One of Gasche´’s spokespersons, Jan Patocˇka had this to say: ‘‘In contrast to ordinary life which confines itself to never questioned self-evidence and security, never aiming at anything beyond, spiritual man lives expressly from the negative’’ (p. 221; Patocˇka 1990, p. 247). Associating this consistently self-interrogating life with the spiritual rather than historical or geographical Europeans, Gasche´ confronts every human being irrespective of location (p. 27) with this ‘‘common task’’ in the same way as Kant confronted every man with the obligation to become a responsible person, forgetting that the great majority of humans, put under the long-term rule of Europeans, were made incapable of assuming such responsibility. As Walter Mignolo once put it: ‘‘Kant obviously was not thinking about the Amerindians, the Africans, or the Hindus as paradigmatic examples of his characterization’’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 734). If we subscribe uncritically to the idea of theory as the infinite task of suspending all material differences for the benefit of one spiritual truth, we are, advertently or otherwise, fostering the early Romanticists’ remedial heroization of the self. It may be that Europe today desperately needs such consolation but, if theory is to maintain its democratic character, it must not strive toward a compensatory suspension but consistent reaffirmation of its non-theorizable ‘‘output.’’ Since it is never so universal as it claims to be, the authority drawn from its ‘‘murky foreign affairs’’ should be unremittingly exposed to observation. The heart of spiritual enlightenment conceals the moment of material benightedness.
References Apter, E. (1995). Comparative exile: Competing margins in the history of comparative literature. In C. Bernheimer (Ed.), Comparative literature in the age of multiculturalism (pp. 86–97). Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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