Rebuilding the Profession: Comparative Literature, Intercultural Studies and the Humanities in the Age of Globalization [1 ed.] 9783737010931, 9783847110934

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Reflections on (In)Humanity

Volume 10

Edited by Sorin Antohi, Chun-Chieh Huang and Jörn Rüsen

Assistant Editors: Stefan Jordan (München), Marius Turda (Oxford) Editorial Assistant: Angelika Wulff (Witten) Editorial Board: Aziz Al-Azmeh (Budapest), Hubert Cancik (Berlin), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chicago), Pumla Gobodo-Madizikela (Cape Town), Moshe Idel (Jerusalem), Oliver Kozlarek (Morelia), Grazia Marchiank (Montepulciano), Jutta Scherrer (Paris / Berlin), Hayden White † (Santa Cruz), Zhang Longxi (Hong Kong)

Dorothy Figueira (ed.)

Rebuilding the Profession Comparative Literature, Intercultural Studies and the Humanities in the Age of Globalization

Essays in Honor of Mihai I. Spariosu

V& R unipress

This book series is sponsored by the Orbis Tertius Association, Bucharest.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de.  2020, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Gçttingen, Germany All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Cover drawing by John F Schweppe Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage j www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2198-5278 ISBN 978-3-7370-1093-1

Contents

Dorothy M. Figueira Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I The Profession Dorothy M. Figueira Chapter 1: How Have We Rebuilt the Profession?

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Gerald Gillespie Chapter 2: The Way(s) Forward: Further Self-Mappings by the Motley Crew of International Comparative Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Stanley A. Corngold Chapter 3: The Future of the Humanities in 1975

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ovidiu Verdes¸ Chapter 4: Dionysus, Nietzsche, and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Vlad B. Jecan Chapter 5: Towards Irenic Mixed Reality : An Experiment in Play and the Cybernetic Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part II Spariosu, his Work, and his World

Dong Yang Chapter 6: Infinite Cartography : Spariosu, Deleuze, and the Practice of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Adela Fofiu Chapter 7: An Auto-Ethnography of Hope

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

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Contents

Corina-Mihaela Beleaua Chapter 8: Practices of Intercultural Studies in Teaching Literature . . . . 143 Florin Berindeanu Chapter 9: Mihai I. Spariosu Between Theory and Philosophy

. . . . . . 157

Victor Neumann Chapter 10: The Romanian Anti-Totalitarian Revolt of 1989: The Role of Timis‚ oara and the Beginnings of Political Change in Romania . . . . . . 161 Rjbert G#frik Chapter 11: Imagining the Orient in Central Europe: An Intercultural Studies Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Part III The Divine, Animism, and Mimesis Mikhail Epstein Chapter 12: Theses on Poor Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Gabriele Schwab Chapter 13: Experimental Animisms: Humans and their Others

. . . . . 207

Monica Spiridon Chapter 14: Reversed Mimesis: Real Life and the Rules of the Literary Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Dragan Kujundzˇic´ Chapter 15: Beyond Comparison: Auerbach’s Comparative Literature as a Diasporic Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Frederick Turner Tribute: An Olive Wreath for Mihai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Dorothy M. Figueira

Introduction

This volume is meant to be a retrospective look at our field as it has developed in the past two decades, as well as a reflection on its future direction if it is to remain relevant (and innovative) as a field of study. From its inception in the second half of the twentieth century, Comparative Literature in the United States has been conceived as a cross-disciplinary, cross-national, and cross-cultural enterprise that brings together theoretical developments in various fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences to reflect on the most important intellectual and cultural trends in various parts of the world from a comparative perspective through the lens of literary studies. Most of the founders of Comparative Literature were distinguished European scholars who sought a safe haven from the ravages of World War II and its aftermath and who, understandably, focused on the Western literary, intellectual, and cultural traditions, which at the time were in danger of being annihilated by the onslaught of fascism and communism. With the advent of the age of globalization, our field has become increasingly diverse and must, therefore, be reoriented and reorganized accordingly. This collection of essays starts from the premise formulated in Mihai Spariosu’s most recent work that in a global age, the most productive direction of development for Comparative Literature and for the Humanities in general is toward intercultural studies. In this respect, one should draw a distinction between the field of cultural studies, which deals mostly with pop culture and narrow, ideological and political interests, and the field of comparative, intercultural studies, which should deal with the interplay and cross-fertilization of specific cultures within a global frame of reference. In other words, cultural studies adopt a local perspective with a single (”Western”) culture, whereas comparative literary and intercultural studies adopt a global perspective on the mutual feedback between a large variety of literatures and cultures. Cultural studies often projects one ideology (Marxist, neoliberal, and/or ”Western”) on vastly diverse cultural phenomena, whereas intercultural studies seeks to look at each culture as both an independent entity and an interdependent element of human civilization as a whole. I would go so far as to say that Comparative

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Literature thus configured serves as an ideal locus of “global humanities,” the purpose of which would be to generate transformative, intercultural, and transdisciplinary research and academic programs that will remap and integrate traditional knowledge with the latest developments in information and communication technology. In this process of cognitive remapping and integration, literature and literary studies can play a key role. Literary discourse has often situated itself at the intersection of other forms of discourse, such as philosophical, religious, political, ethical, sociological, and scientific ones, staging and often challenging them. Literature also situates itself at the intersection of language and culture, being not only the highest expression of the language and the repository of the most cherished values and beliefs of a human community, but also an important vehicle of cognitive, ethical, and sociocultural transformation of that community. In future global and crosscultural interchanges, traditional cognitive fields and boundaries will increasingly be challenged and reconfigured. A broadly envisioned Comparative Literature can help this process along by contributing to the development of specific blueprints for future re-conceptualizations of knowledge. Such blueprints might well need to display the kind of ontological flexibility and epistemological inventiveness that have always been the mark of literary discourse. This present volume is also intended as a Festschrift to honor Mihai Spariosu’s seventy-fifth birthday and celebrate his retirement after a long a fruitful career in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Georgia. I have assembled in this present volume a group of colleagues, former students, and present students to pay homage to him as a scholar, friend, and mentor. I am personally grateful to him, doubting whether I would have survived the perils of publishing my early quite unconventional scholarly forays in comparative analyses using Sanskrit material had Mihai not offered me a forum for my work in his series with the SUNY Press. For me, he epitomizes a type of comparatist —open to alternative discourses, not compromised by slavish adherence to any critical fad, cosmopolitan in his perspective—that one encounters not as often as one might wish today. His wide range of scholarly interests and professional activities span Comparative Literature, this history of ideas, cultural history, global and intercultural studies, philosophy of education, and the digital humanities. Acknowledging Mihai Spariosu and Lionel Gossman’s collective volume, Building the Profession, Rebuilding the Profession looks at how Comparative Literature is different today from what it was twenty-five years ago. It also examines how Spariosu’s work reflects these changes as well as his former and present worlds. In this opening chapter, I trace the history of Comparative Literature since that initial generation of American comparatists voiced their vision of the discipline in Building the Profession. In investigate how pedagogical and

Introduction

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theoretical emplotments of the Other in academia (particularly in the US) have fostered a climate in literary studies where otherness and its simulacra play a vital role in the fetishization of difference and the corporate-style management of minorities. Gerald Gillespie picks up this thematic of the state of the profession in his investigation of how this initial task of Comparative Literature flourished for many years through the activity of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) and the activities of its various research committees. But here too, the international organization has changed to suit developments in the profession: the ICLA has sought to respond to the challenges posed by the globalization of Comparative Literature and the subordination it has undergone to intercultural initiatives and ideological waves. Part I concludes with Stanley A. Corngold’s return to the sources in his examination of Walter Kaufmann’s groundbreaking treatise on The Future of the Humanities. Corngold discusses how, already in 1977, Kaufmann envisioned how the Humanities (perhaps much like Comparative Literature today) lost their way. Amidst the visionaries and the scholastics, what rule remained for the Socratics to play? How would Kaufmann today deal with the demands of scholarship that sees its task in forms of social criticism far removed from the university classroom? What becomes the ”correct reading,” especially in the inter-subjective model that Kaufmann rejected? Corngold sees in Kaufmann the precision of thought and the consideration of alternative views emanating out of conviction, those very tendencies so forcefully articulated in Building the Profession as well as in the world of the scholar we celebrate in these pages. Part II takes up a more detailed examination of Spariosu’s corpus. Chapter 4 provides a translation of a 1997 Romanian article by Ovidiu Verdes¸ that examines the theory of play expounded upon in Spariosu’s Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse; God of Many Names: Play, Poetry and Power in Hellenic Thought, From Homer to Aristotle; Literature, Mimesis and Play ; and The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. It examines his theory of play to other with other theories of play and the rise of scientific discourse in literary analysis in general and through the optic of Spariosu’s reading of Nietzsche. This comprehensive essay synthesizes Spariosu’s major work on play, a topic that Vlad Jecan takes up in the next chapter, which deals with the implications of Spariosu’s theories on play in the digital age, with particular emphasis placed on cybernetic and virtual reality. Jecan examines Spariosu’s theories on play as preliminary to his more recent work on cultural dialogue and intercultural studies and the Quantum Relations Principle. In Chapter 6, Dong Yang examines Spariosu’s work as a late elaboration of issues raised by the scientific revolution whose origins he traces from the En-

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lightenment encyclopedists through the Romantics, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Latour, and Spariosu. Chapter 7 offers a self-reflection on how Spariosu’s work influenced Adela Fofiu’s own understanding, development, and initiatives in ecology in Romania. Fofiu sees Spariosu’s forays into non-linear concepts from the natural sciences as creating a bridge to the humanities, the arts, and spirituality. In particular, she examines how Spariosu’s collaborative project on the Quantum Relations Principle offers a vision for a sustainable future in which traditional wisdom is combined with scientific knowledge and technology. Corina Beleaua continues in this same vein in Chapter 8, where she examines how Spariosu’s theory of intercultural studies can be used in the classroom to vitalize our approach to the teaching of literature. In Chapter 9, Florin Berindeanu offers a brief analysis of Spariosu’s recent fictional work, in particular The Seventh Letter. Victor Neumann then shifts emphasis from Spariosu’s individual works to its context in Romania and specifically, the anti-totalitarian revolt of 1989 and the role of his native city in the events of the day. For those readers unfamiliar with the timeline, development, and ramifications of this event, this essay offers a clear analysis of the manner in which political change began in Romania. Part II concludes with Rjbert G#frik’s analysis of an overlooked chapter, even for Indologists such as myself: the emplotment of the Orient in Central Europe. G#frik frames his discussion using the intercultural model influenced by Spariosu’s theories on mentalities of power. Part III opens with Mikhail Epstein, who carries on the discussion of the former Soviet-controlled world of Part II to post-atheist Russia and its spiritual life. Specifically, he investigates what he terms the concepts of poor faith, a notion he compares to Grotowski’s poor theatre and its expressions in literature, science, theodicy, and theocracy. Epstein focuses on the dynamics of poor faith as it manifests itself in poor messianism. Chapter 13 begins with Gabriele Schwab’s reading of the Surrealist Remedios Varo’s painting Mimetismo through the lens of Marx. She then embarks on a more general study of commodity fetishism in the literary theory of Derrida before engaging in an analysis of animism in the contemporary cultural imagination in the works of Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, and Latour. Chapter 14 takes the concept of reversed mimesis, elaborated upon by Spariosu in his book Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, to examine the British rural novel genre, particularly Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Monica Spiridon views its reversal of mimesis as an attempt to forge an alternative universe to the real world. In Chapter 15, Dragan Kujundzˇic´ follows up on this discussion of mimesis with an examination of Auerbach’s vision of Comparative Literature as diasporic experience. He brings us back to the initial impetus of this volume: the manner in which Comparative Literature at its inception in the US was a discipline marked by its initial practitioners’ experiences of immigration and exile. Kujundzˇic´ investigates how this legacy of up-

Introduction

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rootedness continues to inform our understanding of mimesis and is encoded in current theories of alterity in literary studies. Finally, this volume concludes with a poetic tribute to Mihai Spariosu by Frederick Turner.

Part I The Profession

Dorothy M. Figueira

Chapter 1: How Have We Rebuilt the Profession?

Introduction I remember reading Mihai Spariosu and Lionel Gossman’s collective volume on Building a Profession at the beginning of my career and being impressed both with the accounts the contributors gave of why they became comparatists and what they left unsaid. My appreciation for this book has not waned over time, as I learned when I assigned it a few years ago to a graduate course that touched upon the contours of the discipline. In fact, it was in rereading this 1994 volume that I came up with the idea of compiling a follow-up volume to commemorate Mihai Spariosu’s seventy-fifth birthday. What I appreciate most about Building a Profession was the manner in which, through personal reminiscence, it caught the spirit of the discipline of Comparative Literature (CL) in its initial configuration in the United States after the Second World War. It illuminated what was the impetus for forming this “new” discipline in the US and how, in its development, it differed from European CL configurations. I will summarize how and in what direction the discipline of CL has developed in America in the intervening years. I would also like to investigate how the persona of the comparatist has evolved. In current political discourse, discussions regarding immigration and refugee status have become omnipresent and the topic of choice, it seems, from pulpits (both ecclesiastical and secular) throughout the nation. So, since the field of CL deals increasingly with theoretical conceptions regarding the Other, let us begin with a rather trite statement: “There are refugees and there are refugees.” Somehow, between the post-World War II era and the present, the exile and refugee have taken on a more metaphorical connotation. At the inception of CL in the US, the refugees and exiles were real. They first escaped the Nazis and subsequently fled Communist regimes. CL was marked by their experience of exile or multiple exiles. In Building a Profession, a number of newly American comparatists speak about their experiences of forced exile as the result of nationalism gone berserk. Most of them began as national literature scholars, but it

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was their experiences of what “national” could morph into that pushed them in a more cosmopolitan direction. As Europeans, they were the recipients of a broad philological training and a breadth of knowledge that only the German concept of Bildung could have installed in them. The average European scholar of any literature would, of necessity, have ancillary knowledge of Latin and Greek philology in addition to familiarity with their native European literature and, perhaps, another literature or two and, maybe some English. So, when they had to flee from either the Nazis or Ceausescu, they had considerable scholarly skills. The breadth of their knowledge is documented in their ensuing work and alluded to in Building a Profession. They came to an America that, while not harboring ALL the poor, hungry and persecuted, was willing to harbor members of the educated elite. There was support from those who emigrated a bit earlier, and certain institutions were quite willing to make room for Jewish academics fleeing the Nazis. To call the discipline they created here “elite”1 because its initial practitioners were highly educated and often quite cultured when they fled and survived in exile by using the skills they had, borders on the obscene. The accounts of Ulrich Weisstein, Wolfgang Holdheim, and Lilian Furst (to name a few examples from the book) make clear how this process functioned. My students today (from India or China) marvel at how jobs were found, stipends made available, and career trajectories facilitated. While elite institutions were often anti-Semitic, there was recognition before and during World War II, not always shared in Washington, that some accommodation for European Jews was needed. There were exiles and there were “exiles.” Moreover, those persons doing the hiring were often themselves Europhile snobs.2 It is important to distinguish the World War II- and Cold War-era exiles, from today’s “exiles,” individuals who call themselves “exiles” for having chosen to attend graduate school in the US or having accepted remunerative (compared to salaries in Europe, Asia and Africa) employment in America. How, in recent years, these two populations have merged is the interesting story I now wish to explore. It has to do with developments in the profession, the rise of Identity Studies, and the contrived institutionalization of inclusion practices.

1 This designation of CL as “elite” was voiced in the first two ACLA reports. CL was elite in the sense that it demanded considerable language proficiency and such standards were a source of pride (Robert J. Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis and Standards [New York: MLA, 1978]: 52–54). 2 The role of an intellectual such as Mary McCarthy is representative. Just as Simone Weil would never have been immediately translated and promoted in the US, there would have been no Paul De Man without Mary McCarthy.

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Pedagogies of Alterity3 The conceptual roots of Identity Studies can be traced to Black Studies and Women’s Studies Programs that came into existence in the 1970s and were devised to represent the experience and cultural production of then underrepresented Blacks and women in academia. The addition to the curriculum of texts written by Blacks and women closely followed administrative efforts to diversify the faculty under the mandate of Affirmative Action. Over time, the recruitment of underrepresented groups expanded to include other minorities (such as Hispanics and Native Americans) and hyphenated ethnicities (such as Asian Americans). Such diversity initiatives coincided with attempts within the humanities to revamp their curriculum. These two separate events—diversifying the canon as well as the university community—resulted in the formation and implementation of a broad range of courses dealing with issues of identity that came to be popularly known as multiculturalism. These new courses were supported by a theoretical superstructure that was devised to justify their existence. Multiculturalism was, therefore, institutionalized in American academia from its inception as a bureaucratic structure purporting to foster minority rights.4 Ideally, it sought to facilitate dead white authors in the canon being supplanted by authors from underrepresented groups and dead-wood white male professors being supplanted in the classroom by women and minorities. Multiculturalism claimed to re-envision the world from a decolonizing and antiracist perspective. Its rapid growth is attributable to a concerted effort on the part of administrators to appear more cutting-edge and inclusive. In an odd twist of fate, this search for relevance coincided and competed with the theory craze that was then sweeping the United States. English Departments that under multiculturalist initiatives had increased their subject material to include a broad range of American ethnic literature were now emboldened to incorporate continental theory into their syllabi. French and German literary theories, traditionally housed in smaller and more vulnerable CL departments, were now being taught in translation (and often not well) in English Departments.5 The next stage in the process of “engaging” multiple cultures extended beyond the American context. With the dismantling of Cold War-era Area Studies programs6 and the emergence of postcolonial criticism as a discipline, Identity 3 For a more complete investigation of these pedagogies, see Dorothy Figueira, Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory (New York: SUNY P, 2008). 4 It also existed to rectify an institution’s racist history, particularly in the American South. 5 Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. 6 Charles Bernheimer warned against the adoption of Area Studies as a model (Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993], 14).

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Studies and multiculturalism now expanded to include the study of those populations that had been colonized. Postcolonial criticism claimed to offer a broad critique of the history of Western hegemony over its others by revealing the discourse that informed the West’s assumption of cultural superiority.7 Just like identity studies and multiculturalism before it, postcolonial criticism presumed to offer a reading of previously unstudied texts and authors, as well as an oppositional examination of canonical authors and an alternative literary history. It also posited the existence of a body of texts that purported to share a common project that differed from canonical literature in its narrative structure and political, economic, and cultural concerns. Also, like multiculturalism and Identity Studies, postcolonial criticism claimed to focus on the lives and struggles of the oppressed and underrepresented masses.8 Postcolonial studies shared multiculturalism’s pragmatism, since it too claimed to offer a new and cuttingedge theory. It took great pride in its alleged progressive project. However, essentialism soon beset discussions of postcolonial criticism. What could be included under its rubric quickly expanded to the degree that any society, it seemed, could be labelled postcolonial. In other words, the term “postcolonial” became over-determined so quickly that it was rendered meaningless. Even though postcolonial critics pretended to engage the special and distinctive regional characteristics of the cultures and literatures under investigation, more often than not, their analyses revealed little cultural and historical specificity.9 Postcolonial critics were often ignorant of key cultural signifiers in the narratives they sought to deconstruct. The postcolonial archive proved to be quite limited, a handful of endlessly recycled articles by a small group of theorists and a discrete body of published texts in English. Over time, texts in French were added to this corpus, once Romance Language Departments realized the boon of this new critical trend. Practitioners of postcolonial criticism never really questioned that these two languages of empire did not represent the totality of what could be termed the postcolonial experience. Besides, knowledge of indigenous languages would have required the cross-cultural work of a comparatist even under conditions of controlled simplification, because truly engaging the Other requires precise linguistic expression as the basis for thoughtful dialogue. But, if postcolonial criticism could study the globalized colonized world and 7 Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. 8 Contrary to what English Departments and narrowly focused comparatists might assert, there had existed and there continues to exist in ever-increasing numbers, comparatists working with Asian and African languages and literatures. In fact, these areas of studies could be found in university curricula well before English Departments and Postcolonial Studies discovered their existence! 9 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “The Third World Academic in Other Places; or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Revisited,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (Spring 1997): 603–05.

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could do it in an English department, then why not? How much better was it if postcolonial criticism could ignore those texts, vernacular or not, that did not fit its discourse of oppression and voicelessness? In short, the scope of postcolonial criticism differed radically from that of CL: It not only sought to deal with the world on a global level without CL’s linguistic competency ; it also eschewed CL’s openness to engage alternative theoretical and discursive approaches.10 In fact, the acontextual and fragmentary analyses of postcolonial criticism appeared, at least to those working in these literatures, to exhibit a deep cynicism regarding the other as a fossilized object of clinical experimentation. But, by now, cynicism was the order of the day. Just as multiculturalism could bring a field such as Native-American Studies onto campuses as a “polite pseudo-intellectual vehicle to provide the appearance of ethnic diversity,” so now the cultural production of Asia and Africa could now be taught in a diluted and uninformed manner in order to validate the insights and conclusions of Euro-American academia.11 But, as opposed to the potential investigation that non-Western literatures might undergo in the CL context, with care given to their anthropological, religious or historical context as well as their languages, the project of multiculturalism and postcolonial criticism offered no alternative to Eurocentrism and its institutions. In fact, they obscured issues of power and privilege. If non-white authored texts are perceived as “addons” to white structures, they never address the centrality and dominance of the latter or the institutional and structural determinants of inequality.12 Rather, they promoted an ethos of recognition that did not question Euro-Amerocentric definitions of knowledge. They ultimately delivered stasis and consolidated control. Class divisions and systemic inequalities remained intact. The non-white culture must seek legitimacy and recognition from white culture in order “to be” or 10 With its closed and rigid system, postcolonial criticism could even be said to mimic colonial thinking. While it claimed to problematize the binaries of Western historicism, it still ordered the globe according to the colonial and the postcolonial (Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31–32 [1992]: 86), the colonized and the colonizer. In postcolonial theory’s reliance on this binary logic, the very oppositional structure that it claimed to dismantle, there was little room for cosmopolitan and ambivalent voices to surface. One colonial experience came to resemble another. Relying exclusively on the experience of modern colonialism, the postcolonial critic divided history into manageable and isolated segments, while at the same time arguing against the false homogenization of orientalist projects (Deepika Bahri, “Once More With Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” Ariel 26.1 [1995]: 52). 11 M. Annette Jaimes Guerrero, “American Indian Studies and Multiculturalism,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996), 56. 12 Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996), 79, 87.

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“speak out.” Non-white or non-Western culture must use the languages of white Western culture to produce itself.13 This same criticism can be leveled against the next pedagogy that surfaced promising to replace CL: World Literature. There is nothing new about the recent American formulation of World Literature; it is just a reformulation of the old rubric of “General Literature.”14 It is actually a rebranding of the old Area Studies concentration, the Cold-War Pentagon construct for managing the Second and Third Worlds. Some theorists suggested that CL remold itself in this format, not realizing that Area Studies had fallen into disrepute decades ago,15 when it was forced to question the colonizing impulses that underpinned its methodology as well as its use (or exploitation) of native informants to perform the actual labor for white Western academics.16 Here was yet another bureaucratic academic structure under which the literary production of the world could exclusively be read in English translation. Like its precursors, World Literature also shared a messianic claim to recognize the contributions of neglected groups and offer a reform project heralding diversity and promoting a progressive politics. What I have termed pedagogies of alterity (Identity Studies, multiculturalism, postcolonial criticism and now World Literature) all tend to honor difference on a superficial level and implement a cooptive strategy of canon revision justified by an ethos of recognition. They seek to “liberalize” the canon by the addition of minority or non-Western literature. However, such tokenization has been seen as monolingual arrogance and cultural isolationism,1718 despite its avowed liberal (and liberatory) agenda. Its

13 Fazal Rizvi, “The Arts, Education and the Politics of Multiculturalism,” in Culture, Difference and the Arts, eds. Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin 1994), 63. 14 Dorothy Figueira and Gerald Gillespie, “Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and New Disciplines,” Critical Practice 19 (2014). 15 Roger Sanjek, “Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers,” Anthropology Today 9.2 (April 1993). 16 The native informants, who had become an embarrassment to Area Studies and cause for its ill repute, are now functioning in American WL as translators. In a curious parallel movement, Western social scientists, sensing that their fields were slightly tainted from years of speaking on behalf of mute subalterns, are now rehabilitating themselves as newly minted comparatists (one thinks of a scholar such as Sheldon Pollock in the field of Indology). As CL scholars became Area Studies enthusiasts, Area Studies scholars yearned to be comparatists. Neither seem to realize exactly what the other was doing. 17 Mary Louise Pratt, “Humanities for the Future: Reflection on the Western Culture Debate at Stanford,” in Falling Into Theory : Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, ed. David Richter (Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994), 59. 18 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 113.

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“prematurely congratulatory”19 political project merely promises to speak in terms of intervention and resistance. CL never really had such a defining mission, even though it regularly used theoretical approaches that individually might claim to engage in a political or social process of reform. However, once the myth that scholars were engaged in real political action invaded the academic consciousness a few decades ago, each new theoretical school would claim to offer a unique and valid campaign promise. Theory was no longer a tool for reading, it now had become a convenient form of activism. Many literary critics sincerely believe that our present condition, although seemingly benign, imposes an existential limit and that theory alone can liberate us from systemic and violent constraints that limit the reader.20 With the politicization of theory, the text recedes from view to be replaced by ideological postures. Yet, in the various pedagogies of alterity that have arisen since the publication of Building a Profession, we see few attempts to question how a text’s appearance as a network of hegemonic or subversive gestures suits the state of literary theoretical professionalism. Few have speculated how theory allows critics, who are cut off from any effective social action and buoyed by their security as academic professionals, to claim solidarity with the disenfranchised. At work here is the pretense that academic criticism can function as a political act and “textual culture” can displace “activist culture.”21 The critic’s location and theory’s narrative of oppression have become overarching, eclipsing the very historical situation and exegetical context that a comparative analysis champions. Rather than studying and comparing cultures on their own terms, as was the practice of CL, the American academic focus on the study of the Other has prioritized recognition, tolerance and the acknowledgement of victimhood. A sense of empathy had always been an operant factor in Identity Studies, from its inception. It was then carried over to Multiculturalism, Postcolonial Studies and into more recently theorized forms, such as Queer Studies, White Male Studies, and Fat Studies. In these latter sub-disciplines, there are seldom any literary texts even involved in analysis, just some theoretical articles. On the rare occasion when there is a literary text involved, one looks less at the actual text and more at the critics’ experience of it in terms of their subjectivity (as Queer, White, Fat, etc.). So, in opposition to CL, where the literary texts being compared still count

19 Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 87. 20 Winfried Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism,” in Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature, eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996), 216. 21 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 1.

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for something, one need no longer even talk about cultural products, since critics can talk about themselves. Interestingly, the discipline of CL was quite aware of the underlying issues social and procedural concerns that brought these various pedagogies of the Other into being and fostered their agenda. Already the Levin Report on the Profession (1965) suggested that “peripheral” languages might be read in translation. Such a formulation, however, betrayed the understanding that English and the major European languages (French, German, and Italian) comprised the central languages of the discipline.22 The next state of the discipline document, the Greene Report on the Profession (1975), repeated the need for knowledge of foreign languages as still fundamental to CL. The WWII refugees had now been followed by another generation of polyglot comparatists fleeing Eastern Europe. So, while the inability of non-immigrant American students to be multilingual was still a problem, it was not yet a full-blown crisis situation. Both the Levin Report and the Greene Report lament the language problem, yet hold the line on not using translations. The Greene Report also sounded the clarion call on the dangers of the discipline’s overreliance or intoxication with theory. Cross-disciplinary work was also seen as a dangerous trend, adding to the dilution of the field.23 The Bernheimer Report (1993) reiterated the problem of language proficiency,24 but also noted (for the first time) that CL needs to be progressive, i. e. CL needs to be global in its perspective and interdisciplinary.25 Bernheimer here acknowledged the role of multiculturalism as a key element of CL. The discipline’s canon must reflect this mandate by “reconceiving the canon or offering non-canonical readings of canonical texts.” So, if one cannot read those “peripheral” texts,26 one can at least read them in a non-canonical way. We can avoid non-canonical literatures and language acquisition by this theoretical detour of the “non-canonical reading.” The Bernheimer Report also announced CL’s adoption of a politics of inclusion. In response to this position statement, two “solutions” to the issues plaguing CL could now be proposed. CL could morph into what would be called World Literature,27 a pedagogy that accepted the linguistic proficiency problem found among American students. Whereas the language proficiency problem had initially been interpreted in 1965 as a failure of the discipline to bring students up to the linguistic capacity to effect dialogue 22 23 24 25 26 27

Bernheimer, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 40. Ibid, 40. Ibid, 45. Ibid, 47. Ibid, 40. I prefer the formulation “American World Literature” since it differs significantly from what scholars in Europe and Asia consider World Literature in its aims.

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among cultures, it was now presented in quite different terms. We can read the world in translation, and it is not illegitimate or imperialistic to do so. In fact, as a theorist of World Literature has opined, it is a democratic endeavor. With World Literature, those who are not in elite institutions and have fewer opportunities to learn those foreign languages that CL demands, can still study literature from a global perspective. As someone who works in a CL department in a state university that houses programs in Vietnamese, Yoruba, Swahili, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi, this understanding of how non-elite universities in the US function is not only dismissive but ill–informed. It begs the question: what vision do scholars in elite institutions who write these reports on the discipline have of what actually occurs in the trenches of the public universities?28 In first-tiered institutions, the effects of such a reformulation of CL can be negligible, as is reflected in the Saussy Report (2006) which announces the optimistic news that the CL controversy is over, everyone wants to be a comparatist; transnational and interdisciplinary specializations are the order of the day. This response, while comforting, is misguided. It pertains only to those institutions where CL is safe—private elite institutions. A far cry from the experiences in those universities, such as my own, that function at the whims of predatory, budget-crunching administrators answering to university trustees who are actually car sale franchise owners and wealthy chicken farmers rather than pedagogical visionaries. CL in such places is not a priority department. It can be the dumping ground for otherwise unemployable spousal hires (even from other specializations), professors rejected for some reason from their home departments, and faculty rerouted from moribund or no longer economically viable departments. All can be lumped together, as in the reconfigured CL program at SUNY Stony Brook in the 1980s that consisted of Talmudic Studies, Korean Buddhism, Classics and Comparative Literature or simply shut down, like the once significant CL program at the University of Alberta or the University of Illinois in the 1990s.29 Vulnerable CL programs run the risk of being replaced by World Literature. This rebranding can be justified by the argument that CL has died, is imperialistic because its “elitist” level of engagement demands content-based and linguistic expertise. With World Literature, so the logic goes, those of us who are not at Harvard can still study literature in a global perspective. We no longer, as a 28 This disconnect between the fate of CL in private elite institutions as opposed to the publically funded institutions has been highlighted by Clements (1978). 29 When the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was told to reconfigure itself, the faculty was asked to look at how other departments had made such a transition, we spent hours talking to the bovine fertility people who had joined with bovine anatomy. We were asked why we could not just join with some other literature program. Seven years later, after its closure, CL at Illinois was reopened with considerable input from the English Department.

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comparatist would, have to enter into the target culture, learn its languages and histories, study it on its own terms as distinctive enough to compare and contrast with other internal and external cultures and their products. World Literature’s response to the “dumbing down” of the US curriculum in languages and literature is to universalize it.30 What CL saw as serious and respectful is now seen as hegemonic. The foreign culture need not exist in its own right; it can now exist as a construct molded to suit undereducated students in the corporate university, large publishing conglomerates churning out anthologies, and a consumersavvy professoriate. The various pedagogies of alterity outlined in this essay stand in sharp contrast to CL. They set the standard for how little we can expect from literary engagement with the Other in the age of globalization. Moreover, they all seem to reach the same conclusion. By exposing the existence of unequal distribution of power and the underrepresentation and marginalization of certain groups, they claim to deconstruct repressive metaphysical modes of thought.31 Yet, in the thirty years that theory has been reaching these conclusions, its insights have effected no change and liberated no one.

Politics of Projects The question then is the following: Why, in this age of globalization, when we are presumably engaging the world in a more informed manner and on its own terms, is CL being replaced by a pedagogy in which the literatures of the world are promoted in English translation? Why is an academic study of literature that follows a Cold War political project of managing the Other in the language of the hegemon not deemed hegemonic? Why should CL, a discipline focused on reading literatures in their own context and language, be replaced by such a pedagogy? What is at work in this levelling out of the world’s literary production and the linguistic triumphalism of the English language? How are these projects of “doing” the Other in translation and in the fragmentary form offered by anthologies not cause for ethical concern? One reason is that the corporate university is not concerned with ethics. It is a business and its monolingual administrators (often scientists), whose main task is budgetary oversight, immediately recognized the advantages of such co-optations. In the world of STEM research priorities, literature is not that important. It does not bring in grant money. If English departments can “do” English 30 Figueira and Gillespie, “Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and New Disciplines.” 31 Alfred J. Ljpez and Robert P. Marzec, ”Postcolonial Studies at the Twenty-Five Year Mark” Modern Fiction Studies 56.4 (Winter 2010): 677.

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literature, why should they not handle other literatures as well, including the literatures of the whole world?32 With such logic, there was really no reason to retain those “boutique” national language and CL departments33 especially since English departments could now recruit scholars trained in English literature from “postcolonial” areas and thereby also diversify the faculty. It is significant that the new “diversity” often involves elites from the “Third World,” rather than members of traditional American minority groups, who remain grossly underrepresented in American universities.34 But this imbalance did not particularly matter, since the introduction of foreign English-literature trained scholars from “postcolonial” sites provided a rather ideal solution to institutional racial politics.3536 University administrators could now transform their monochromatic campuses into something more “colorful” without having to confront the racism still operant in American universities or address the continued disenfranchisement of America’s traditional minorities.37 Yes, faculties were racially enhanced by the presence of scholars from abroad, who inevitably stemmed from privileged segments of the population (where the study of English literature still carries a significant class marker) and could “represent” their country of origin and all its cultural production by their mere presence, even if they had actually never studied their home cultures.38 I wish to emphasize here that the problem was not the increased hiring of immigrants and certainly today, with the controversies surrounding anti-immigrant sentiments, I am not suggesting any such thing, as a child and parent of immigrants myself and a practitioner of CL, a largely immigrant discipline as Building a Profession so aptly showed. The problem centers on the discrepancies

32 This was the logic behind the dismantling of the CL program at the University of Illinois in the 1990s. 33 As in the University of Illinois debacle, a dean’s career can be made by such “innovative” costcutting reorganizations of departmental units and staff. Illinois closed down an excellent state university program and saved the price of half a secretary’s salary. 34 Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004). 35 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2000). 36 Figueira and Gillespie, “Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and New Disciplines.” 37 While campuses become less monochromatic, the numbers of African American, Hispanic, and Native American faculty and students (particularly male) in institutions of higher education between 1970 and the present plummeted, as has their representation in underrepresented fields, such as the hard sciences. For a summary of this literature, see Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. 38 In the age of Identity Studies, ethnics are thought to be genetically suited to teach their own ethnicity, hence the numerous interviews I personally experienced where someone on the hiring committee would ask me, as someone trained in Hinduism, how I would teach Liberation Theology, assuming it to be my natural field of expertise.

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between the practices of hiring and institutional discourses of inclusion.39 There is a clear disconnect between espoused “diversity initiatives” and administrative window-dressing, as anyone perusing glossy university publications showcasing an institution’s diverse population will attest. In Otherwise Occupied, I examined this bureaucratic manipulation of race and how, aided by various theoretical and pedagogical strategies, it undercut Affirmative Action. I examined how traditional minorities, when they appeared on campuses, were usually routed into ethnic studies.40 One need not hire an African American chemist, if an American Black could be found in African American Studies. As in all corporate offices of diversity management (and, I repeat, universities are corporations), the minority presence on campuses was thus effectively contained. Minorities could enter the groves of academia if they settled for studying themselves and could be balkanized in fields for which they were deemed genetically predisposed. They remained underrepresented in “real” fields of study.41 Racialist institutional politics and the further erosion of Affirmative Action define the situation that we find it today in many institutions.42 In the first decades of this millennium, universities still engage in exclusionary processes with regard to traditional minorities even, ironically, in those disciplines that purport to “speak for” or “represent” the Other. The case could arguably be made that those initial comparatists in Building a Profession were just the elites of their Old World who were then being persecuted. It can also be argued that they too promoted a fictionalization of their own lives as Others for consumption in the West. They too may have sought to speak for the 39 There is a vast literature on multiculturalism in American academia, see, in particular Gordon and Newfield, Mapping Multiculturalism; Steven C. Rockefeller, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay, by Charles Taylor, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992); Joan Wallach Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity” October 61 (Summer 1992), 12–19; Joan Wallach Scott, “Higher Education and Middle Eastern Studies Following September 11, 2001.” Academe 88.6 (2002): 50–55; Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”; and Figueira, Otherwise Occupied. 40 Hired as a comparatist with skills as a Sanskritist at the University of Illinois in the 1990s, I questioned the dean as to where I might be reassigned when they closed the CL department into which I was hired within weeks of my arrival on campus. It was suggested that I should find a home in the Spanish department. 41 The concept of “real” enters into such discussions. Once, when recruited at Indiana University for a possible minority appointment, I was told by the hiring dean that I could not be considered in the minority pool because I had too many publications. I would have to be considered in the “real” list of possible hires. I have always thought that universities tipped their hand when the code phrase for minority hires, a Target of Opportunity, is used. This military term denotes not the desired target to be hit, but an alternate target, once the intended target is missed or inaccessible. 42 R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” Harvard Business Review 69 (March–April 1990).

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other Others not as fortunate as they had been to escape. But there is a significant difference between the earlier exiles and today’s metaphorical exiles. The former exiles fled nationalism and formed CL as an antidote to it; the latter seems to have fetishized it and ignore the nativist underpinnings of their venture.

A Shared Crisis43 In order to contextualize this point further, we might want to draw a parallel between the relative silence regarding what has occurred in literary studies with regard to its emplotment of the Other and the debates that are currently raging in the field of sociology. In sociology, critics have begun to question the degree to which their discipline actually engages alterity. Some sociologists have recognized that the primary focus of their field now centers on the unveiling and denouncing of structures of domination within society and emancipating victims of systemic violence. They see gestures of militancy as the operative agenda today in sociology, rather than inquiry and analysis. A summing up of this debate recently appeared in Le D8bat (2017). I could not help but draw a parallel between sociology and literary studies. Both fields have experienced a similar intellectual shift in their disciplinary contours from analytic research toward ideology. Both sociology and literary studies promote militant subjectivity over critical objectivity. Both disciplines, significantly influenced by the theory of domination articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, are indebted to a strain of criticism that involves the unveiling of hidden power differentials and the denunciation of hegemonic forces. Just as Bourdieu sought to redo sociology in response to his elders (i. e., just as he had to inter Raymond Aron after 1968), so too do those heralding the death of CL seem motivated by the same need to “kill the fathers” and “discover” a new discipline (World Literature) touted as more progressive than its predecessor. Like professors of sociology, literary scholars also feel they can speak for the less-voiced victims of epistemic violence and unveil for them the inequalities under which they suffer. In Le D8bat, the sociologists Gerald Bronner and Etienne G8hin question the social determinism that they see sociology positing as the origin of all the miseries from which people suffer. In the same issue, Dominique Schnapper views sociology as enthralled by the illusion that its fight against discrimination and racism is easy and sufficient, while Olivier Galland 43 A version of this section appears in Dorothy Figueira, “Instituting the Other: Ethical Fault Lines in Readings and Pedagogies of Alterity,” in Fault Lines of Modernity : The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature, eds. Kitty Millet and Dorothy Figueira (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 199–216.

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shows the degree to which it is not. The point I wish to make by comparing this French debate in sociology to the current state of affairs in literary studies is the following: the degree of introspection and critical distance evinced in the field of sociology today is absent in literary studies. Literary scholars have not only not reached this level of self-inquiry, they are singularly blind to it. The politicization of sociology and literary studies has instilled in scholars the desire, a vestige of the 1960s, to appear always and everywhere politically correct. It was important for critics positioned in First-World metropolitan centers to show that they were connected to and could relate to or “inhabit” the experience of the world’s less privileged. Another carry over from the 1960s was that you could become whatever you wanted—all you had to do was claim the desired positionality within your own scientific/disciplinary space. Theoretically, the First World could legitimately speak for the Other. Whites could channel the Black experience. Asian and African elites perform as ventriloquists, speaking for those very populations whose oppression when they are back home may not have moved them to action. Foreign-born scholars who vacation in America suffer as “nomads.” Coming to graduate school in New York or Palo Alto makes one an “exile.” All of a sudden, everyone seems to be a victim. Just as calling refugee comparatists elitists is in very bad taste, so too is the general movement of relatively privileged individuals, who ignore issues of their own classist social and professional trajectories, to minoritize themselves. It is particularly offensive at the time when actual minority representation was plummeting in US universities.

Conclusion I have been chided for being cynical in my assessment of the situation. But simply, as first-generation American, who has deigned to enter the profession and “uppity” enough not to be satisfied just studying herself, I have, perhaps, encountered more blatant expressions of the operant racism than certain colleagues,44 and these experiences have given me insight into how the Other has been qualified and managed in American academia. In all the rhetoric of mi44 I learned early on to take it in my stride the colleague who told students how to find me: Look for the woman who looks like Carmen, the colleague who finding me in the departmental office one evening asking if I was the new “cleaning lady,” the Harvard theology professor inquiring whether I was one of those new-fangled minorities they had to accept now, the Chicago dean asking me if I was the Puerto Rican who was trying to learn Sanskrit, the Bryn Mawr interviewer who asked me how my mother felt when I expressed interest in getting educated, the Georgia dean who told me I could teach Hindu (he meant Hindi) because I “looked like one of them,” etc.

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grants, exiles, nomads, and gestures of inclusion, racism is still the subtext that always seems at play beneath the smoke and mirrors of university corporate strategies. The movement away from nationalism that was the hallmark of the first generation of immigrant CL scholars has now been replaced by American arrogance in viewing the world through the optic of the English language, the fetishization of difference and the management of the Others. Is CL dead or dying, as it is purported to be doing for all these decades, or has it morphed into the field that harbors Others who tend not to be all that “Other” and self-identified minorities taking up the places that even the New York Times (3/17/2019) admits was once reserved for real minorities? There was a time chronicled in Building a Profession when CL scholars lived comparative lives, when it was a field for those engaging in interdisciplinary work or even those who could not decide which of several disciplines they enjoyed they should choose as their specialization. CL harbored these people. But, given the endemic racism in the US and in American academia, CL seems to have now become a place to warehouse the professional Others and those who identify as and seek to profit from the “victim” culture we have installed in our universities in order to avoid the more pressing and legitimate issues of racial discrimination in America today.

Bibliography Ahmad, Aijaz.. In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. Bahri, Deepika. “Once More With Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” Ariel 26.1 (1995): 51–82. Bernheimer, Charles. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. –. “The Fascist Longings in Our Midst.” Ariel 26.1 (January 1995): 23–50. –. “Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies: Issues of Pedagogy in Multiculturalism.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, 103–18. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Clements, Robert J. Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis and Standards. New York: MLA, 1978. Figueira, Dorothy. Otherwise Occupied: Pedagogies of Alterity and the Brahminization of Theory. New York: SUNY P, 2008. –. “Instituting the Other : Ethical Fault Lines in Readings and Pedagogies of Alterity.” In Fault Lines of Modernity : The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature, edited by Kitty Millet and Dorothy Figueira, 199–216. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. – and Gerald Gillespie. “Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and New Disciplines.” Critical Practice 21 (2014): 32–41.

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Fluck, Winfried. “The Americanization of Literary Studies.” American Studies International 28.2 (1990): 9–22. –. “The ‘Americanization’ of History in New Historicism.” Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur 84.2 (1992): 220–28. –. “Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism.” In Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature, edited by Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann, 211–34. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996. Gordon, Avery F. and Christopher Newfield, eds. Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996. Gossman, Lionel and Mihai I. Spariosu. Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1994. Guerrero, M. Annette Jaimes. “American Indian Studies and Multiculturalism.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, 49–63. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996. Lilla, Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. Ljpez, Alfred J. and Robert P. Marzec, ”Postcolonial Studies at the Twenty-Five Year Mark.” Modern Fiction Studies 56.4 (Winter 2010): 677–88. McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism.’” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 84–98. Newfield, Christopher and Avery F. Gordon. “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, 76–115. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2000. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Humanities for the Future: Reflection on the Western Culture Debate at Stanford.” In Falling Into Theory : Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, edited by David Richter, 55–63. Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994. Rizvi, Fazal. “The Arts, Education and the Politics of Multiculturalism.” In Culture, Difference and the Arts, edited by Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi, 54–68. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Rockefeller, Steven C. “Comment.” In Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay, by Charles Taylor, edited by Amy Gutmann, 87–98. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Sanjek, Roger. “Anthropology’s Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and their Ethnographers.” Anthropology Today 9.2 (April 1993): 13–18. San Juan, Jr. E. “The Cult of Ethnicity and the Fetish of Pluralism: A Counter Hegemonic Critique.” Cultural Critique 18 (Spring 1991): 215–29. –. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations; Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P, 1992. –. Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Albany : State U New York P, 1995. –. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998. –. Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

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Scott, Joan Wallach. “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity.” October 61 (Summer 1992): 12–19. –. “Higher Education and Middle Eastern Studies Following September 11, 2001.” Academe 88.6 (2002): 50–55. Sowell, Thomas. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. “The Third World Academic in Other Places; or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Revisited.” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (Spring 1997): 596–616. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. –. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP 1994. Thomas, R. Roosevelt. “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.” Harvard Business Review 69 (March–April 1990): 107–17.

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Chapter 2: The Way(s) Forward: Further Self-Mappings by the Motley Crew of International Comparative Literature

When in 1994 Mihai Spariosu and Lionel Gossman brought out the timely volume Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, many pioneers of the celebrated “restart” of this sprawling enterprise just after World War II were still on the scene and had been joined by eager new recruits. This stock-taking, or prise de conscience, or Bestandaufnahme, or however otherwise it was variously termed was very welcome. American institutions had served as one of the principal channels enabling international scholars to speculate on and experiment in the development of our complex field that incessantly sought to define its own shape and purpose. Unsurprisingly, canonical European literature itself already offered valuable clues as to the issues at stake because of the ever-increasing interaction of cultures and their extensive sharing in the modern era. Consider for example Daniel Defoe’s exilic romance Robinson Crusoe of 1719 in which the first-person narrator Crusoe, an international adventurer (in the fiction British by birth, German by descent, direct observer of distinctions between savage and civilized stages of evolution on various shores and waters, ecumenical Christian of Protestant origins, Brazilian by his own main act of migration), eventually founds a new rational commonwealth based on cooperation and composed of citizens recruited from diverse older nations and cultures. As Crusoe enters old age at the story’s conclusion, he becomes a freely roaming and cosmopolitan tutelary spirit, gadding about on the international plane. With slight shifts of occupations and contexts as our eye nowadays roves around the globe, not a bad ancestral model for leaders in international studies in the twenty-first century of the so-called Common Era! Today our de facto commonwealth with no fixed capital city is the International Comparative Literature Association. Its foundation has been well chronicled. Scholars from the United States and several West and East European nations plus postwar Japan were the predominant forces instrumental in forming the Association in the 1950s. And the Spariosu-Grossman volume, in chronicling the further growth pangs of the overlapping “restart” generations in

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America—one of the original larger participant countries backing ICLA at its birth—confirmed what was becoming more clearly evident by the 1990s. Indeed, the ICLA already was thriving as it anticipated the arrival of our new millennium. As of the year 2000 it counted eventually some three dozen national and regional societies of Comparative Literature (henceforth abbreviated CL) as affiliates and was expanding its global presence through its many self-activated research committees which volunteers from various nations created. These quite variegated committees, soon passing the hundred mark in number, have held a diverse range of topically focused conferences at sites on every continent and published a remarkable number of findings. Their treatment of themes, structures, cultural functions, and relationships among the arts has reflected the natural development of cross-cultural enthusiasms regionally and internationally. Moreover, by the early decades of our present century, adding to its pioneer venues in North America and Europe, ICLA was able to sponsor its major triennial world congresses in Africa, Asia, and South America just as it had earlier in North America and Europe. Today ICLA is fostering an impressive variety of efforts collectively labeled CL which naturally often have a noticeable flavor deriving from the history of particular real geocultural formations, and not from arid abstractions. There is a strong contingent of experts in today’s ICLA who are able to bridge huge realms of culture and to investigate phenomena both in more narrowly focused settings and across widely separate regions, and to do so both synchronically and diachronically. ICLA also fosters study of relations between literary activity and other arts, intellectual history, and social formations. Crucial to the prowess of ICLA is that large numbers of its members are not limited solely to examining more recent phenomena when cultures worldwide are more homogenized in many respects. Likewise vital is that members with deeper historical reach can interact fruitfully with those whose main focus is on more recent and contemporary phenomena. Nonetheless, concurrent with the genuine globalization of CL in its current stage there remain three persistent challenges: (a) the nuisance factor that unqualified persons will adopt the label “comparatist” as camouflage because of its perceived prestige; (b) pressures that are exerted from within the ranks of the academy in many cultures to sideline CL or to coopt it as part of the dominant “national” language portfolio; (b) attempts to subordinate the necessarily more generous, multifarious portfolio of CL to intra-cultural programs or ideological waves, choking off CL’s immense potential. The fact that English functions currently as the primary global lingua franca presents a special challenge everywhere for comparatists who are also Anglicists, both in English-language territories and in territories where one or several other languages predominate in the local culture. In real-world situations comparatists who are Anglicists often must struggle against the predisposition of some col-

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leagues in English and Anglo-American departments who confuse the values in studying English-language works for satisfactory explanations of distinctly different values expressed in other language systems current or past. Sometimes faculty in powerful English and Anglo-American departments in cultures which possess one or several established non-English local literary languages are tempted to act as privileged cartel members and wrongly presume they enjoy intellectual competence as comparatists just because they work in an Englishlanguage group. Relatively less harmful outside of English-language territories is analogous gang behavior by “national” literature departments with strong pedigrees whose members are tempted to overreach because they mistake their dominance within their own natural cultural space for universal competence. The struggle among departments for resources in educational systems varies enormously from place to place around the globe, so that a myriad of specific political compromises in funding areas of teaching and expertise often determine that actual comparatists will be housed awkwardly under local auspices. However, in many institutions which recognize CL as a complex field, placement of comparatists with “split” appointments in a disciplinary variety of humanities and social science departments or programs can be quite positive. Such arrangements can be especially fruitful if CL also exists as a distinct department in its own right and is supplemented by natural crossovers with other groups. By now, readers will surely have noticed that I do not refer to specific persons or places by name, for fear that individuals or groups will misconstrue my remarks as invidious, rather than a broad-gauged assessment of our real-world situation. These allusions to pragmatic limitations will cause shudders in some administrators of colleges and universities who must fret about budgets in real economies and they will evoke sighs by numerous comparatists who face the bleak prospect that their institution cannot afford to support CL to any meaningful extent. In fuller array CL is very expensive; it is without doubt an elitist enterprise; by and large most schools cannot manage more than a partial crosssection of cultural offerings in any depth, and CL instructors who teach overview courses in so-called world literature or in actual slices of CL frequently are limited to gesturing at what is not being represented under their local roof. Short is the list of independent or state-funded institutions around the globe robust enough to mount advanced courses illuminating literature and arts as they exist in a rich array of different cultural blocs. I will forgo posting any sample list and encourage the cognoscenti in the field of CL to call some of the preeminent names to mind, just as they would in advising their own students. The question naturally springs to mind: What remedies exist for ambitious students who cannot from the start attend one of the top institutions that promote CL? One possibility is that they imitate a habit still in practice beyond the European Middle Ages and widespread in some more recent university traditions ( for example the German)

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of moving in stages among several institutions in the student’s homeland as students explore their own interests and build-out their range of expertise. In parallel is the already well-established practice of exploiting educational opportunities in one’s own homeland and then enhancing that experience by pursuing training in other distinct cultures. In many respects such itinerant behavior apes the reality that many prominent comparatists in our contemporary teaching ranks do migrate from country to country in the course of their careers and quite a few return to their homelands at some juncture with their accrued experience as a valuable asset, while not a few elect to settle longerterm elsewhere. This circulation of scholars of diverse cultural backgrounds nourishes the field both locally and globally. I hope that these foregoing parsimonious remarks will suffice to allow me to return to my main topic, a challenging question: How can international, and within the global spectrum specifically non-national, CL confront the today enormously expanded range of the field? A useful pointer can be taken from the actual history of research projects carried out by ICLA. These, in the aggregate, interlace all the levels of cultural interactions from the local over the regional to the transregional and international. We are blessed with some individual scholars who undertake studies of heroic proportions; but, in general, recent and future work depends far more on the interaction of CL scholars of impressive breadth across the board in collaborative projects. There is, in fact, already a rough correlation between the geocultural expansion of ICLA membership over the past six decades and the bold undertaking of complex collaborative projects in ever increasing number. The initial mega-project sponsored by ICLA was a series on the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. It roamed roughly from the ending Middle Ages to the present in volumes organized mainly by periods and genres and even reached into New World and other colonial extensions such as in Africa where European languages took hold. In due course subseries of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages were devoted to regions such as Scandinavia, the Slavic territories, and remnants from the old Byzantine realm that hitherto had enjoyed less attention. By the 1980s configurations of ICLA scholars and their expert recruits began to reassess the enormous cultural complexity of the Indic region which had multiple roots and language streams on a scale like those of Europe. Likewise scholars whose expertise embraced the long cultural history of the ChineseKorean-Japanese triangle and its interchanges with other areas of the world began elaborating projects and publishing results. It is difficult to imagine how all these initiatives could have been plotted and executed except by teams of comparatists who understood how to mobilize the requisite expertise and to present the phenomena in context to a world audience.

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Seeing the value of such pioneering efforts, by the arrival of the new millennium important university presses in Europe and America have begun outright to co-opt a range of ICLA initiatives. These are good omens by and large, because as the old adage says: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Of course—what is virtually inevitable—some prominent American and British academic publishers have cleverly eroded the boundaries of serious CL work by pandering to local social and ideological fads in treatments by outright partisans aimed at their several markets. I deliberately do not name illustrative names and titles but leave it to serious advocates of an international CL to identify the pulsations of propaganda that posture as CL scholarship. At the risk of sounding redundant, I will affirm that propagandistic exercises are indeed subject matter which merits careful analysis by comparatists as cultural materials, especially if the relevant scripts leap governmental boundaries. And once again we come around to the potential paradox that the arm’s-length treatment by international CL of all local cultural phenomena (such as political propaganda pieces posing as CL!) will naturally appear to “engaged” advocates inside many cultures to be a political betrayal. Allow me to interject an extravagant “metaphoric” analogy. To the most ardent advocates of an actual or hoped-for “national” literature today, the citadels of international CL may well appear somewhat as the strongholds of the international order of Knights Templar appeared to the kings of England and France when these territories were trending toward becoming nation states in the waning Middle Ages. The successful international order of Knights Templar with its far-flung trade routes and banking network seemed a system whose riches, at a minimum, might be confiscated. And, as a rival power exceeding the English and French frontiers, but being already well placed internally in France and England, the Templars were a force that the kings duly feared. To carry this historical metaphor even further, we could analogize that some newcomers to ICLA would vaguely resemble some smaller kingdoms and territories like Portugal and Scotland which, jealous of the bigger kingdoms and hoping to bolster their positions vis-/-vis established powers, invited the ejected Knights Templar as welcome enhancements when the bigger kingdoms ejected them. *** In the face of an explosion of interest in CL worldwide, the majority of institutions of higher education in so-called “developed” countries as well as in “developing” countries simply were and extensively remain unable on their own to mount a full array of basic and advanced courses adequate to the challenge of international CL. The relatively small set of 8lite “world-class” institutions themselves often were or still are lacking one or more of the very desirable

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components of cultural expertise or can manage only to offer a basis in language training in some areas “remote” from the habitual past emphases for their particular geocultural territory. To a welcome extent, the further spread of interest in CL in recent decades has stimulated new major centers, as well as older citadels of CL, so that they realize the value of cultivating new approaches to minor language traditions of their own regions and in general. Nonetheless, international CL today faces several intimidating challenges: It cannot ignore literary life in “minor” languages (“minor” in the current stereotypical view of other dominant groups). It cannot ignore literary life in spoken languages that hitherto have not developed or borrowed systems of writing. It cannot ignore literary life in earlier recorded but no longer spoken languages. It cannot evade the complex histories of long-lived literary systems in some deeply rooted traditions (e. g., during and after the Greco-Roman era, throughout the ancient and medieval Indic complex, over millennia of Chinese tradition, and so forth). The “world”—rational observers must admit—is too large and too heavy a burden almost everywhere for the majority of institutions of higher learning to carry. Their obvious main mission and obligation is to train and guide the population of their own regions, although many leading educational centers have for centuries been attracting students from afar. The today prospering wealthy older centers will continue to enjoy a special role; we can only guess which new key centers will emerge during the present century. But in the near future we can at least count on the presence of a significant group of stronger universities worldwide that already have developed or promise to solidify big pieces of the ideal global repertory pedagogically and thereby to support international CL more fully. This means that tenacious CL aspirants as advanced students can seek out a potential remedy ; they can attempt to transfer between a couple or among several outstanding broader-gauged centers and in real terms to come much closer to obtaining an ideal composite training in a large part of today’s formidable “super”-repertory. And CL students who examine interactions among various arts and/or are well versed in one or two major cultural areas, too, will have the advantage of fitting in more productively both with such instructional superstars and with high-level specialists who are doing outstanding research in particular cultures and cultural episodes. In my view there is no inherent moral superiority in being an international CL expert of one or another kind; assiduous, productive, honest scholarship in more circumscribed subject matters such as in a single “national” repertory merits comparable advocacy and support. By the same token, a competent international comparatist can function as a sincere advocate of his or her native culture,whether in the aggregate or in some aspect, and should dialogue with peers in such circuits. Given the real limits in cultivating any deeper appreciation of multiple cultural streams, international CL of the future is likely to increase the

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promotion of team collaborative efforts in research and teaching out of sheer necessity. I beg the reader’s indulgence for the following speculations about possible directions for CL in the next decades. I start from the simple observation that today, worldwide, the troupe of practicing literary comparatists is miniscule. That is only natural, given the number of major and minor literary languages globally. These demand the primary attention of millions of teachers and critics and scholars. Simultaneously, the practical mechanisms of governance on earth are divided over a vast spread of territories that vary extraordinarily in their size, varieties of institutions, and kinds of control groups. Everything under the sun may and in real instances does today qualify as a “nation” on the world scene: a clutch of smaller islands, an ethnically jumbled state that has emerged from colonial rule, more coherent remnants of older empires, anciently rooted states, newer immigrant nations that emerged starting in the Renaissance, and so forth—the list of non-matching entities is baffling, all the more so since subordinate territories with their own strong cultural attributes (and some in a state of insurrection!) are excluded meanwhile from the unstable political definition of “nation” in “international” affairs. The fact that participants in “international” CL are technically citizens of one or more “nations” greatly complicates our work, and not only because from time to time better positioned colleagues must rally to the defense of colleagues under threat from their governments for supposed unpatriotic inclinations. While quite often some aspect of national identity may be relevant in literary analysis and we strive to define that clearly, there are numberless cultural contexts in which “national” factors have no place, although governments will try to butt in. Moreover, it can be remarkably illuminating to explore even arch-nationalist traits in bigger contexts outside the doctrinairely defined national spaces. For pragmatic purposes I suggest that international practitioners of CL quite deliberately not employ any critical system which is clearly identifiable as part of the faddish internal debates within any particular culture (especially their own home culture) or has been imported as a new fashion from a closely related culture (for example, “deconstruction” from France into America during the late 1960s and onward). Rather, while international comparatists may usefully present such materials as points of orientation to appropriate audiences, they need to subordinate them as cultural data that have a bearing on moments in one or more cultures, and not as universally illuminating paradigms. One approach useful in this regard is general systems theory which recognizes a number of basic truisms. To recall a few of these: Cultures can and do borrow and export materials. The adoption of cultural “interferences” over time can modify a culture meaningfully (for example, the movement of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc., into new territories; the spreading adoption of a newer international

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lingua franca, etc.). Even relatively smaller cultures experience the flux of materials internally, over time, back and forth between their core (more apparently dominant traits) and periphery (residual or secondary traits, at least during certain historical episodes). It is not necessary for the CL scholar to endorse or reject cultural attributes; only to observe and report them as clearly as possible. This very simplified outline must suffice for now to illustrate the main point, which is that, because of its difficult task of discerning operations and materials at play in a variety of cultures, international CL is drawn into the orbit of the social sciences, even though CL, being a very high order of the humanistic disciplines, must master the vocabularies of the several arts. And at the same time, in examining the various concepts of the humanities and social sciences as they flourish and interrelate in various cultures, international CL always holds them at arm’s length as reportorial items. The arsenal of concepts cultivated by any culture remains a subject matter that international CL must be prepared to consider first and foremost as part of the particular cultural repertory under consideration. This remains true, even if one of the prominent or noticeable components of a specific culture happens to be its sharing, to some extent, the drive of international CL to analyze and understand a society’s various cultural factors. Hence international comparatists need to consider even their own scholarly activities at arm’s length. This seeming paradox is a natural consequence that flows from the principle of being as honest as one is able, given one’s own (always finally limited) range of knowledge in relationship to the inherent demands of a specific large task undertaken. Of course, at times —though apprehensive over personal weaknesses—the international comparatist may well (with clear indication of the fact) be tempted to speculate; and sometimes our instinctively venturing a hypothesis may prove to yield a very useful key. Just as the collaboration of international comparatists can stimulate serendipitous insights in joint research ventures and at scholarly meetings, so too on a larger scale can the interaction of educational institutions within large countries and among sets of countries help stimulate productive insights by scholars and students both of local literatures and CL. These productive interactions can reach across barriers for smaller educational systems as well as larger. Thus, if socioeconomic constraints have determined that in a larger country its prized university X has been restricted to raising a particular foreign language and literature group H to top status—while university Y has managed to cultivate foreign group L comparably, and university Z has succeeded in mounting respectable teaching and research in foreign cultural areas M and Q, and similarly further strong institutions overlap or supplement with further areas of study outside the local culture—then the blending of these resources obviously already furnishes a fine platform for aspiring to the new demands of today’s “worldwide-interna-

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tional” CL. But obviously, the entire confraternity of comparatists should be sensitive to the societal problems for certain comparatists who happen to originate from territories that are just now coming into the active sphere of international CL. These fellow scholars may sometimes need protective cover if political types at home promote a low-level tone in their local institutions. Some of our fellow CL scholars may be ardent nationalists, some may be cosmopolitan spirits, but collectively we cannot function very well unless we meet and consort under friendly international auspices. In effect, just as sets of universities in large countries can create stimulative networks that cover much of world culture, so too does ICLA promote the creation of overlapping networks of institutions in larger, middle-sized, and smaller countries and even of isolated individuals who wish to pursue CL. In closing, I wish to apologize for deliberately not attaching names to salient points, out of a concern to avoid even the appearance of invidious remarks or partisan favor. In the most practical terms dictated by real history, participants in the international CL movement have not entered and cannot enter the currents of our enormous enterprise in unison, but by necessity join in a complex dialogue that is already long underway. I am appending a partial bibliography of my own earlier commentaries on CL. Besides leading to the present more abstract sketch, the items cited will furnish many names of comparatists and groups in the more recent decades of CL.

Bibliography BessiHre, Jean and Gerald Gillespie. “Comparative Literature/World Literature Reconsidered; Litt8rature compar8e/litt8rature mondiale: Nouveaux examens.” In Le comparatisme comme approche critique/Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach, edited by Anne Tomiche, 47–61. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017. Gillespie, Gerald. “Problematics of the Scholarly Search for ‘Mentalities.’” Synthesis 11 (1984): 45–51. –. “Temporal Axes in the Teaching of Comparative and General Literature in the United States.” Neohelicon 12.1 (1985): 123–30. –. “Elitist Dilemmas: Cross-Cultural Currents and the Prospects of Cultural Studies on the National and Global Levels.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 14 (1987): 116–23. –. “Newer Trends of Comparative the West.” In Aspects of Comparative Literature: Current Approaches, edited by Chandra Mohan, 17–34. New Delhi: India Publishers and Distributors, 1989. –. “The ‘Impossibility’ of Comparative Literature, or Coping with Cultural Diversity.” In Comparative Literature and National Literatures: Differential Multilogue, edited by Gurbaghat Singh, 20–32. Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1991.

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–. “Rhinoceros, Unicorn, or Chimera?—A Polysystemic View of Possible Kinds of Comparative Literature in the New Century.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 19 (1992): 14–21. –. “The Difficulty of Correlating Psychohistorical Analysis with a General History of Literature.” Comparatistica 5 (1993): 41–53. –. “Hometruth and Institutional Falsehoods.” In Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, edited by Mihai Spariosu and Lionel Grossman, 159–175. Albany : State University of New York Press, 1994. –. “Auf den multikulturellen Irrwegen der amerikanischen Komparatistik: Kontrast und Mahnbild für ein junges Europa.” In Weltliteratur heute, edited by Manfred Schmeling, 85–99. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. –. “La Literatura comparada de los aÇos 90 en Estados Unidos.” 1616 9 (1995): 39–49. –. “The Internationalization of Comparative Literature in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.” CNL/World Report 9 (1996): 13–42. –. “Regionalism, Globalism, and the Philosophy of History : A ‘New World’ Perspective on Comparatism.” In Beträge zur Komparatistik und Sozialgeschichte der Literatur : Festschrift für Alberto Martino, edited by Norbert Bachleitner, Alfred Noe, and Hans-Gert Roloff, 879–87. Amsterdam: L Rodopi, 1997. –. “The Conflict between Synthetic Globalism and the Desire for Cultural Identity.” Interlitteraria 8 (2003): 10–17. –. “Comparative Literary History as an Elitist Metanarrative.” Neohelicon 30.2 (2003): 59–64. –. “Literary Studies: General and Comparative.” Neohelicon 32.2 (2005): 337–41. – “North/South, East/West, and Other Intersections.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 35 (2008): 192–203. –. “Internal Liminalities, Transcultural Complexities: Expanding Frontiers for Comparative Literature.” In Old Margins and New Centers: The Legacy of European Literatures in a Globalized Age/Anciennes frontiers et nouveaux centres: l’H8ritage litt8raire europ8en dans une Hre de globalization, edited by Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter, 1–14. Bruxelles: Presses Interuniversitaires Europ8ennes-Peter Lang, 2011. –. “Comparative Literature in the United States.” In Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Literature Studies, edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Tutun Mukherjee, 11–24. New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2013. Gillespie, Gerald and Dorothy Figueira. “Das scheinbar ›neue‹ Konzept der Weltliteratur im Dienst restaurativer Beschränkung kultureller Kompetenz.” Kultur/Poetik 14.1 (Spring 2014): 113–24.

Stanley A. Corngold

Chapter 3: The Future of the Humanities in 19751

Over the years these fierce unconditional loyalties—to a country, a God, an idea, or a man—have come to terrify me. The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest. —Tony Judt2

This essay, which means to honor the distinguished humanist Mihai Spariosu, addresses an earlier work by Walter Kaufmann—philosopher, humanist, and “heretic”—titled The Future of the Humanities for the interest it might bring to the main concerns of our volume. Kaufmann fled Nazi Germany in 1939 at the age of eighteen, emigrating alone to the United States. After studies at Williams College and Harvard, a time interrupted by his service in US Military Intelligence, he began a distinguished career as a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, writing some dozen major books. He acquired a grand reputation at a relatively early age with the publication in 1950 of a stunning monograph on Nietzsche, tendentiously subtilted “Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.” Kaufmann’s exemplarily creative life was interrupted by his sudden death in 1980, allegedly from his having ingested, at a scholarly banquet in Nigeria, a parasite that attacked his heart. He was a world traveler, having gone around the world five times, and seemed to have covered most of the ground by walking. He inspected the places in Asia and the Middle East that armchair globalists only include in syllabi. Few scholars come to mind who share, in the words of the historian Martin Jay, “Kaufmann’s extraordinary range of interests, philosophical and literary.”3 The Future of the Humanities, written in 1975 and published in 1977, is a book conceived in “wrath,” with the sadness and anger of a betrayed lover. Kaufmann 1 This essay is adapted from a chapter in my book titled Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2018). 2 Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (New York: 2010), 207. 3 In a private communication with the author, June 15, 2017.

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dedicates this work “to those from whom I acquired my first love of the humanities.” But what has happened to the love of wisdom in disenchanted times? Readers, especially, of Kaufmann’s Critique of Philosophy and Religion (1958), would have had inklings all along of his indignation at the betrayal of the promise of philosophy. It has become another profession—an academic department—an opportunity for specialists bent on cleverness or sport or peer approval. Along with philosophy, the humanities have lost their way and need to be orientated to their proper goal, for they are, Kaufmann declares, indispensable to the survival of what we think of as humanity. Here, to begin, are four reasons for teaching them (“There is a virtue in conciseness”).4 Much of history is utterly depressing, a ceaseless tale of human folly, blindness, and brutality. Yet not all this misery has been pointless; occasional triumphs redeem at least some of the suffering…. We should be traitors to humanity if we did not try to transmit … [“this priceless heritage”] to generations to come. (FH xvii)

A second reason is the aptness of the humanities to address “the ends of life, the possible goals of human existence, our ultimate purposes” (FH xviii); a third, its value as a medium for teaching vision—Kaufmann will clarify this idea; a fourth, as a platform for the study of comparative religion, for “few works of literature can brook comparison with the Bible, the Dhammapada, or the Tao Teh Ching.” Moreover, you cannot understand paintings, sculptures, architecture, and music if you are ignorant of their religious context (FH xx).5 Here we have a glimpse of what Kaufmann understands in the first place by “the humanities”: works created by men and women that admirably convey their experience of life, present worldviews, and critically examine “our values, faith, and moral actions” (FH 37). If books, they are books that need to be read more than once (FH 47).6 Finally, they are persuasive in being (like) subjects, not objects: by channeling the intellectual personality of their authors, they bring the reader into an I-You (Du) relation. A humanist culture is produced chiefly by two kinds of mind—“visionaries” and “scholastics.” The latter are open to scorn for they “travel in schools” and as 4 Walter Kaufmann, The Future of the Humanities (New York: Reader’s Digest P, 1977), xiv. Henceforth, references to this work will be written in the text as FH followed by a page number, viz. “FH xiv.” 5 For relevance, compare Christopher Hitchens: “I myself am a strong believer in the study of religion, first because culture and education involve a respect for tradition and for origins, and also because some of the early religious texts were among our first attempts at literature.” “Introduction,” in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, ed. Christopher Hitchens (Philadelphia: da Capo P, 2007), xvii. 6 Kaufmann defines the classics that will make up most of the syllabus of humanities courses as “books or poems that are presumed to be worth reading more than once because they are considered inherently important and not merely sources of information about something else” (FH 47).

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professionals are merely parasitic on the discoveries of the grand innovators— the likes (somewhat pell-mell) “of Einstein and Goethe, Beethoven and Michelangelo, Plato and Moses” (FH 7). But to value these types in so opposing, so Manichean a way is to overlook the fact that “not every distinctive vision is plausible, beautiful or fruitful. And it may require the concerted efforts of a great many scholastics to work out the details of a vision before we can judge its value” (FH 8). Visionaries are not likely to feel at home in university departments, and Kaufmann is informative about specific cases: “Spinoza knew [this] when he declined an invitation to become a professor at Heidelberg, as Nietzsche found out before he resigned his chair of classical philology at Basel, and as Wittgenstein found out at Cambridge University” (FH 11). It will be difficult not to think that with this mention of his intellectual exemplars Kaufmann is thinking of himself at Princeton, where he taught. How can the reader avoid feeling this undertow? So, what kind of mind is his? A visionary’s? A “creeper’s”? (Scholastics are creepers because they are anaclitic on these giant oaks). Inevitably, “we have to introduce a third type”—the Socratic: “the most striking feature of this type is its concentration on criticism.” Like Socrates, the critic “examines the faith and morals of his time, ridicules claims to knowledge that are based on an uncritical reliance on consensus, and exerts himself to show how ignorant, confused, and credulous most people are— including the most famous teachers, politicians, and popular oracles” (FH 14). This, surely, is Kaufmann’s own preferred—and deserved—profile, and it is this (Socratic) ethos that he would have taught in all humanities departments as “an indispensable ingredient” (FH 24, 28). Professors—the pure type of the scholastic, with a residual element of the Socratic waiting to be aroused—need to commit themselves to the Socratic task. Let them reverse the precedence of types in their intellectual character and assume their bounden duty of “rigorously examining the faith and morals of the time, giving pride of place to those convictions which are widely shared and rarely questioned” (FH 22). Interestingly, in his Introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), the late literary scholar and activist Edward Said also supplies a four-part typology of literary critical minds, in several points paralleling Kaufmann’s typology while presumably being unaware of it.7 For Said these habits of mind consist in (1) the journalistic and (2) the visionary, such as the mind of the French literary theorist at least at the beginning of the heyday of literary theory, in the early 1960s;8 and two types of the scholastic: (3) the “academic literary historian,” whose practice returns to “such nineteenth-century specialties as 7 Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983). 8 Said instances Ferdinand de Saussure, Georges Bataille, Claude L8vi-Strauss, along with a resuscitated Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Ibid, 3.

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classical scholarship, philology, and cultural history ;” and (4) the appreciative, whose “beneficiaries … are all those … who have learned in a classroom how to read a poem, how to enjoy the complexity of a metaphysical conceit, how to think of literature and figurative language as having characteristics that are unique and not reducible to a simple moral or political message.”9 Although Said’s own work necessarily partakes of each of these approaches, he means to align the essays in his book with none of them individually in order to approach more nearly Kaufmann’s Socratic type: “If what in this volume I called criticism or critical consciousness has any contribution to make, it is the attempt to go beyond the four forms as defined above” and to attend, as the blurb has it, “to political, social, and human values.” This ethic, which is Kaufmann’s, butts heads, I’ll note, with the professorial ethic that will be familiar to many readers of the work of Stanley Fish, the Socratic critic—and journalist. Fish made his views plain in The New York Times two decades after Said and four after Kaufmann. The crux of his opposing argument is that academics—meaning scholastics—should do their social criticism far from the university classroom. “Academic freedom” means just what the words say—in an unexpected sense. That such freedom is academic only is a point of truth for Fish, but a point for ironical reversal for Kaufmann, who wants that freedom to be more than “academic.” Writing in the Times of January 6, 2008, on the question “of what use are the humanities?” Fish answers: The only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.10

As an exchange between professor and student on the meaning of books and art objects, the study of the humanities is least of all an arena for “the rigorous examination of the faith and morals of the time.” Fish’s “formalism” invited many thunderous rebukes from readers of his piece. Kaufmann’s response—had he lived to see the day—like the name of Abou ben Adhem would have “led all the rest.” But the bitter question does remain open, whether the fact that more and more professors, ostensibly consorting with Kaufmann’s ideal, today use their classroom as a pulpit for attacking social injustice, has in fact weakened the idea of a Socratic education. Kaufmann was concerned in 1970 “that the prestige of the scholastics has grown enormously … while that of the Socratic ethos has declined.” In fact, I’ll add, the rise of something like a new Socratic ethos, in Kaufmann’s words, bent on “the critical 9 Ibid, 1. 10 (Author’s disclosure): I read this essay in 2008 but was put on its trail again by “Stanley Fish” in Wikipedia.

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examination of our values, faith, and moral notions” but including their materialization in the actual life of society, may have prolonged the future of the humanities, reinvigorating their relation to immediate experience.11 Meanwhile, it is not that Kaufmann was unaware of the demand for “relevance”: he lived through the Sixties in America. And so he was qualified to make important discriminations in this matter and was appalled at what he considered the general breakdown of all standards of (Socratic) competence with unqualified professors delivering emotionally-charged dicta and obiter dicta, he wrote, outside the classroom but conjuring with the authority of their status. It had not yet come to the theater of today, when broadsides, in lieu of precise and deeply thought-out positions, are delivered in the classroom. For him this new academic turn would signal one thing only : the end of the republic of letters! *** The issue of correct reading is clearly crucial to the entire enterprise of the humanities. The relation between student and teacher—visionary, scholastic, Socratic, or, for Kaufmann, reprehensibly journalistic—is evidently mediated by the books they read and study in the classroom. Their relation is, in principle, in no way immediately intersubjective, with the professor playing the role of father or mother or analyst and the student appropriately subaltern; their relation is ideally shaped by the texts they share. This is a hard lesson to learn and not one easily accepted, as consider the normal way of naming the dissertation director in several academic departments Doktorvater or Doktormutter. Even in this theater of false consciousness, reading goes on. The correction, as Kaufmann explains, lies in encouraging a certain manner of reading, a way of being in relation to the text. There are many false starts, such as the exegetical (the relation that Kaufmann regularly codes with the name “Heidegger”), which holds the text to be authoritative: it knows what I, the reader, do not know, and the more arcane it seems, the more deeply I submit to it. In the kind of exegesis that Kaufmann pillories, exegetes “endow the text with authority, then read their own ideas into it, and then get them back endowed with authority” (FH 48). Another variation of the exegetical mode is the claim to understand an author better than himself. Kaufmann cites Rabbi Akiba, who “in the late first and second centuries of the Christian era … read his often strikingly humane ideas into the Torah, using exegetical devices that would have surprised Moses ….” Akiba and his fellow rabbis “believed that God had revealed to Moses or through Moses more than Moses himself had understood” (FH 49). Their approach, I’ll 11 Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy (New York: Peter Wyden, 1973), 37.

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note, anticipates a brilliant exchange among German Romantic theorists, including J.G. Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), on this very topic. Unnerved by the limitations Kant set on understanding, they advanced the proposition that a reader must understand better than the author what the author had intended or might have intended if he were as perceptive as his reader. Schlegel’s famous aphorism reads: “To understand someone, one must first of all be cleverer than he, then precisely as clever, and then also precisely as stupid.” Schlegel continues: “It is not enough that one understand the true meaning (den eigentlichen Sinn) of a confused work better than the author has understood it. One must also be able to know, characterize, and reconstruct (construieren) the confusion itself.”12 Kaufmann would have little truck with this idea, which ascribes superhuman powers of divination to the exegete. And when the exegete’s feeling that such powers have abandoned him, he is inclined to use—and recommend—a salubrious “violence,” as do Heidegger and thereafter Paul de Man. What is missing in this approach is the sense that the patient of the scrutiny is a You (Du). Kaufmann sums up this first way of reading with the words, “We don’t know and he does,” but we have seen how readily the pattern slips into its obverse, a second way : “We know and he doesn’t.” This is the dogmatic side of exegesis (FH 55). This mode breaks down into three types of condescension: in plain language there is stance (a): “Had he known X, he would not have said what he did”; (b) “Had he possessed our superior techniques, he would not have said what he did.” Type (c) reads: “He wasn’t altogether hopeless and at points came close to some of us” (FH 56–7). Here Kaufmann instances American scholars who, for example, “have read Heidegger, trying to show that in places he says what John Dewey … has said better.” It is quite certain that Kaufmann is thinking somewhat impertinently of the work of his colleague Richard Rorty. A third type of reader essentially declares, “We don’t know and suspend judgment about truth.” The truth of the text is not at stake. This is the “agnostic” way of reading, which is also practiced in three modes: the “antiquarian;” the (merely) “aesthetic,” which is concerned solely with the “beauty and style” of the text; and the “microscopic,” which now (at the time of Kaufmann’s writing) runs rampant. By dint of focusing on a single small portion of a work, let alone avoiding the author’s oeuvre as a whole, “the author is spirited away, the encounter with a challenging You is avoided, and one deals with small pieces that can be taken apart” (FH 58). This is Kaufmann’s prescient formulation of what later became the charge of “the death of the author” (viz. the pertinent essays by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al.). But Kaufmann was not 12 Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958), 18: 63.

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responding to the thrust of French theory of the 1960s and 1970s; he drew a borderline around his reading, leaving Paris isolated, outre-Rhin. What he is resisting is the American New Criticism, with which he had become well acquainted during his years of study at Harvard, and its centerpiece, the so-called intentional fallacy, which practically demands that the reader in no way make the acquaintance of the author and his implied, and in some cases, explicit intentions. Kaufmann is shrewd in noting that here “once again the reader reigns supreme and does not risk himself, his views, and his preconceptions” (FH 58). This very objection to the New Criticism of the 1950s appears again in the criticism leveled against the deconstructive theory of the last fifty years. In a very revealing text, de Man, well known as the progenitor of deconstruction in America, traced his “own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary instruction” to a course taught by Professor Reuben Brower at Harvard in the 1950s, in which students were told not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge. (emphasis added, SC)13

Of course, Kaufmann would have no objection to Brower’s—and de Man’s—first requirement—close reading. He quotes a professor who, when shown by a student that a passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology said exactly the opposite of what the professor had claimed Hegel had meant, replied, “What is dialectical is precisely that the text contradicts the author’s intention” (FH 60). This jest is instructive in highlighting the distinction between Kaufmann and de Man (who, in this discussion, can stand in for deconstruction pur sang). Whereas the reply of Kaufmann’s professor is an exemplary mistake, fully corrigible, de Man, takes the mistake further, into the domain of ineluctable error, writing, “Not only does the critic say something that the work does not say, but he even says something that he himself does not mean to say.”14 Kaufmann would have none of that. Their divergence is most vivid when de Man’s own parti pris declares its hand in the last words of his memoir : he speaks derisively of a “humanistic knowledge” counterfeited by clich8s. 13 Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986), 23. 14 Geoffrey Hartman, “Looking Back on Paul de Man,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1989), 6.

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At no point does Kaufmann encourage reading for the payoff of such rarely specified “humanistic cant.”15 The phrase “human stakes” might be more accurate. Kaufmann wants not to recover certainties from books but to experience the shock of a disturbing newness that comes from encountering another subject who tests you. The condition of this adventure is the existence of an author in the work. Thinking, in the past, of Kaufmann’s poetics, I called this intuited authorial presence a “poetic self” and sought to develop Kaufmann’s idea: The poetic self cannot be known in advance of its articulation. It can come to life only for a reader. But he just not produced ab ovo by that reader. It is present to him as the being that intended by an act of writing to be present to the future of that act. Yet the poetic self is more than the work’s ghostly, hypothetical double, its pure aesthetic correlative. It comes to life with the fire and mud of the empirical personality still clinging to it, conveying the thrust of the writer’s being to enact, identify, constitute, or bear witness to itself. Literature, for these writers, is the discourse of a subject whose saying, by virtue of how it is said, stands for the self in the future.16

We can now expect to hear, finally, of a fourth, more appropriate way of reading that assumes “we don’t know everything, and he (the author) doesn’t; but we have some intelligence and he does; and we shall try to transcend some errors by engaging in a common quest, confronting the voice of the text as a You” (FH 59). This view is once again opposite to the deconstructive view that considers error an irremediable feature of linguistic exchange.17 What Kaufmann has in mind is a procedure he calls, with little originality, dialectical. He is no naive purist, imagining a future of the humanities in which all reading would be dialectical in his elaborated sense. Experience in and around universities makes it plain that professors, and their students, will read, on occasion, in the different ways marked exegetical (say, reading “Isaiah”), antiquarian (say, reading Gilgamesh), aesthetic (say, reading Santayana), dogmatic (say, reading the Upanishads), microscopic (say, reading Nietzsche—wrongly) and, let us add, deconstructive (say, reading Yeats to show how “cognitive” and “performative” aspects of the poetry tear it apart). But dialectical reading is a pedagogical consummation devoutly to be wished. Certainly, the term “dialectical reading” needs to be defined anew, and Kaufmann does so by having it subtend a familiar triad: its labels are Socratic, dialogical, and philosophical-historical, each of which answers to an ethical or experiential good essential for full personal development—the ultimate de15 Hartman, “Looking Back,” 5. 16 Stanley Corngold, The Fate of the Self (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), 1. 17 Stanley Corngold, “Error in Paul de Man,” in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1983), 90–108.

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sideratum. The Socratic mode invites an experience of multiplicity, a full consciousness of the abundance of standpoints that you have failed to consider, what Kaufmann calls, again and again, alternatives (unlike today’s term of choice, “otherness,” for which Kaufmann deserves our gratitude). A Socratically-inflected dialogical reading “seeks vantage points outside the various consensuses by which … [the reader] has been conditioned. The text is to help him to liberate himself” (FH 61). For Kaufmann, dialogical reading requires you to engage with a foreveraudible voice, a forever-apprehensible meaning in the text flowing from a living mind, the maker of this meaning. “In many texts [this meaning] reflects a distinctive experience of life” (FH 66). We can assume that the new criticism and neo-structuralism have made serious inroads into this mimetic ideal. Kaufmann offers another, finer qualification of his thesis: “The new critics never tired of insisting how important it is to attend carefully to an author’s language. In this way students were at least brought face to face with a distinctive sensibility” (emphasis added) (FH 66). The author comes into the text as an afterthought, by a concession, through a somewhat restricted entrance. In the last resort, dialogical reading does not go to words to find connections with other words but goes behind words to what Kaufmann considers a humanly accessible substance, a conveyance of spirit from one subject to another. This is the “‘You’—the subject’s distinctive voice and meaning” (FH 69). This drama presupposes that a rare questioning can take place—not only the expectable questioning of the text by the detached reader but the reader caught in the force field of a questioning triggered by the text. “Force field” is apt: there is a point to Kaufmann’s “harping on culture shock, challenge, and offence.” Every reading experience asks Kaufmann—and you!—“What have you done with the gift your life?” and prompts the injunction: “You must change your life!” Earlier I stressed that Kaufmann had rejected an intersubjective model of correct reading, in which the professor imparts the meaning of books to the student-reader without mediation, as if pouring clear water from a pitcher into a glass. It is noteworthy, however, that Kaufmann’s rejection of this model by no means “spirits away” the intersubjective factor but instead displaces it into the relation of the student-reader to the authority—though one not absolute—of the person in the text. It is far from certain that in all this Kaufmann has discarded the robes of what Martin Jay calls “intellectual historians who seek the holy grail of subjective intentionality that ostensibly lies behind texts.”18 Something of a solution to the awkwardness of this smuggled intersubjectivity emerges a bit 18 Jamie Keesling and Spencer A. Leonard, “Critical Theory, Marxism, Social Evolution: An Interview with Martin Jay,” Platypus Review 83 (February 2016). http://platypus1917.org/ 2016/01/30/critical-theory-marxism-social-evolution-an-interview-with-martin-jay/.

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further on, when Kaufmann protests the thoughtless expense of scholastic labor in producing complete critical editions of eminent writers—voluminous series drowning in minutiae, usually indefinitely incomplete, which few readers can live long enough to master. Before entering this labyrinth, the reader needs to pose the question: “Why [am I studying] this writer rather then that one? And why this work rather than that? What is the point of it?” What makes it worth studying? Now, surely there is more at stake here than making the difficult acquaintance of what Kaufmann calls the “geistige Persönlichkeit” (intellectualspiritual personality) of the author. “The obvious reason” for such a study, he declares, is to make available to others something one considers especially beautiful or important—a work that says something vital that should not be ignored. It may be new information or a new way of seeing things, a striking criticism of accepted views, or perhaps a book, fragment, or sequence of letters that places a person, movement, or a period in a new light. (FH 123)

The encounter with the person in the book does not end with the giving and taking of offence; it must end with the reader’s conveying to others the import of this intellectual shock. We address the final component of dialectical reading, the philosophicalhistorical approach, which harbors the self-evident demand that the reader know as much as he can about the history of the work and the entire oeuvre in which the work belongs before venturing to claim an understanding. The eminent Germanist Gerhard Neumann describes the requirement for reading seriously at the University of Freiburg in the 1950s; it would conform to Kaufmann’s ideal. Neumann praises the seminars of Professor Gerhart Baumann, which were schools for the precise reading of texts, sometimes only of a few lines during an entire seminar [sic]…. Baumann’s requirement: you will read the entire works of an author before daring to read in such a way. It is only then, after such seclusion [alone with the author], that understanding dawns; and it is only then, entirely from the reading of the text, that conceptual categories take shape; and it is only then, at the very end, that you can write something about these texts…. This school, if it was such a thing and if they were not merely ascetic spiritual exercises, appealed to me. And so I read the ca. one hundred and forty volumes of the Sophie-edition in order to participate in a Goethe seminar ; I read the Steiner edition of the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal; I read the oeuvre of Robert Musil in the giant three-volume edition of Adolf Fris8, etc.19

19 Gerhard Neumann, “Chronik der Lektüren,” in Wissenschaft und Universität. Selbstportrait einer Generation. Wolfgang Frühwald zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Martin Huber and Gerhard Lauer (Köln: Dumont, 2005), 250.

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Such discipline is not much seen in American universities in the decades following. Dialectical completeness requires that the reader supplement his reading with a sense of the historical moment of the work. Walter Benjamin’s dogmatically asserted thesis that “no poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” would strike Kaufmann as utterly implausible.20 He asks too that the text by which the commentator defines the author’s meaning be central to his oeuvre and not, let us say, as in the case of Hegel, his students’ notes, or in the case of Nietzsche, a scrap from his unpublished writings. A confirmation for the reader that the meaning he has taken from the work is better than his own projection might lie in the fact that that meaning can be found in other works of the author—although a moment’s reflection will show that this is a poor argument. One can project meaning illicitly into one work of the author but find it elsewhere in the oeuvre. I shall remind the interested reader of an example taken from the work of de Man, where de Man mistranslates a sentence from Nietzsche’s paralipomena to make Nietzsche say that where there is consciousness there is (necessary) error.21 The sentence says no such thing. It says that where there is consciousness, and only there, the possibility of error arises. But de Man can cite a sentence from The Will to Power, again from Nietzsche’s unpublished work, to argue the necessary domination of error in all acts of consciousness, where error is the error constitutive of all acts of thought or willing—the error of positing a continuum between consciousness and material nature.22 Even here, however, other of Nietzsche’s aperÅus published on pages next to the one that de Man has chosen discuss error in ways that lend no support to the view that Nietzsche has this one allegedly essential, inextirpable error in mind. Kaufmann repeatedly calls readers’ attention to “the human being behind the texts.” In this way they will read like “Nietzsche and Freud, who are of special importance for the dialectical reader because, more than anyone before them, they called attention to the human being who finds expression in a text.” In repeating his insistence, I am writing like Kaufmann, who in this way makes all literary criticism a psychology, thereby anticipating the major work he was to 20 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Selected Writings, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), I:253. For an incisive, unrelentingly negative review of Benjamin’s essay, see David Bellos, “Halting Walter,” Cambridge Literary Review 1.3: 207–20. 21 “Von Intelligenz kann nur in einem Reiche die Rede sein, wo etwas verfehlt werden kann, wo der Irrthum stattfindet — im Reiche des Bewußtseins,” Nietzsches Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe III-3, Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1869 bis Herbst 1872, Aphorism 5 (83). I discuss the matter in detail in Corngold, “Error in Paul de Man,” 90–108. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 479, 265–66.

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complete just before his death—his three-volume Discovering the Mind, a study of important philosophers, all of whom are distinguished readers.23 The works of these thinkers are, in Kaufmann’s view, only as good as they display the insights of great psychologists: it will come as no surprise that Nietzsche and Freud are exemplary figures. Here, at a place in The Future of the Humanities, which could just as well be marked the future of the humanist Walter Kaufmann, we encounter Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “enormous interest in nuances” (emphasis added). Kaufmann’s intent is to make the patient in the text, again and again, that invisible but felt author, whose sensibility exceeds any range of “nuances” one might find in a work read merely as a weave of words. We have arrived at the clearest understanding of the principle behind Kaufmann’s “humanism”: it is the claim that the human being is a richer object of study than any of his works, the value of which is measured in turn by the degree of felt presence of the man. Kaufmann’s postulate stands boldly formulated: “The antipsychological bias of so many scholastics in the humanities is ultimately anithumanistic” (FH 71).24 It is a war of extreme banners swung by readers who, on the one hand, feel the author’s wildly beating, broken heart; on the other, detect various textual sites of “disjunctive ensemble operations.”25 Kaufmann strikes a well-placed blow: “If we do not care what the author meant, why take his name in vain? In that case we might just as well stay home and play real chess” (FH 81). He makes no distinction between “a philosophical dimension” of the text and what he rather surprisingly reintroduces as “the experience of life [that these texts] express or their challenge to us.” Some of the rich pondering of alternatives—including the view in which certain experiences are constituted for the author, as his own reader, in the text and are in no sense the expression of an 23 Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980). Vol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel; Vol. II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber; Vol. III: Freud versus Adler and Jung; afterwards, Freud, Adler, and Jung. With a new introduction by Ivan Soll (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991–1992). 24 In an essay by Vlad Chituc and Paul Henne, “The Data Against Kant,” we read: “In the last decade or so, the ‘experimental philosophy’ movement has argued for greater use of empirical science to inform and shape the discussion of philosophical problems. We [the authors] agree: Philosophers ought to pay more attention to their colleagues in the psychology department (even if they can’t)” (The New York Times, February 19, 2016). Kaufmann’s idea of what psychology ought and can’t do is no doubt different in its procedure from that of the authors—Kaufmann’s methods are empathy, intuition, rational introspection, and empathy (or licensed projection)—but even “experimental philosophy” would surely deserve consideration as an “alternative.” 25 From a work in progress by Sanders Creasy of the University of California at Berkeley, who writes as follows of Kafka’s breakthrough story “The Judgment”: “The figures of Georg [Bendemann] and his father are not characters with coherent minds, intentions or histories; nor are they integral bodies with metaphorically or symbolically significant gestures. They are mere sites of disjunctive ensemble operations.”

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already mastered “experience of life”—is here reduced to doctrine for Kaufmann’s less experienced reader. This chapter concludes with the demand—it is a tall order—that Kaufmann means to place on the professor of the humanities now assigned to teach “the art of reading.” In all likelihood this professor will be unable to execute “the dialectical approach” because he does not know enough. This (missing) competence would attempt to address frontally “the great philosophers [who] were not ordinary people”: Plato and Aristotle made all the knowledge then available in Athens their province. Descartes and Leibniz where as great as mathematicians as they were as philosophers. Spinoza was an encyclopedic philosopher, wrote a Hebrew grammar, and pioneered Biblical criticism. Hobbes translated Homer and Thucydides. Hume wrote a multivolume History of England. Kant advanced a major astronomical theory and, almost as much as Hegel after him, dealt with almost all the major fields of knowledge. Nietzsche, a classical philologist, was also the first great psychologist as well as a major poet. In different ways, the Greek tragic poets and Dante, Goethe, and Tolstoy are no less awesome. [And yet] no reform of education especially in the humanities, can hope to get far if it does not pay attention to the ways in which students are taught to read…. Neither television nor computers can save the humanities if the art of reading texts is lost. (FH 82–83)

This catalogue contains a suggestion of Kaufmann’s own competence; he would not list these strengths if he did not possess a great many of them, absent the sciences. A crucial part of the assumed competence of humanities professors is, of course, the sort of reviews their work receives. Kaufmann is witty on this topic, about which he is well informed, both as reviewer and reviewed. Because, as he declares (to put this mildly) not every book reviewer is ready to stand behind his judgments with heart and soul—or intellectual capability—we can expect a good deal of casual misrepresentation. This dismal business is egregious when a book that claims to be taken seriously is extolled in one journal and ripped apart in another. Kaufmann’s own work was by no means immune to such treatment. A review of his earlier Without Guilt and Justice (1973) by John Moran, a professor of political science, judged the book as a whole awkward, superficial, and morally distasteful: “Announced as a new autonomous morality, and dedicated to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the present book is a hodgepodge of pseudo-scholarship, neologisms, self-help lists and sophistic attacks on such mildly liberal concessions as equal opportunity and affirmative action.”26 Meanwhile, Donald Kuspit, a formidable art critic, writing in Philosophy and Phenomenological 26 John Moran, review of Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy, Science and Society 40.1 (Spring 1976): 84.

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Research, judged the same work “an extraordinary, lucidly written book,” concluding that Kaufmann’s “ethos of autonomy makes superb sense. Praise for this book cannot be too great.”27 Assuming that Kaufmann read his reviews—and, even if he was disinclined to take them seriously, he was nonetheless bound to be vexed—he would want to create opportunities for redress, and so he proposes that the journal that published an attack on an author’s book allot the author 150 words for his defense. Yet, I’ll add, if contemporary practice is followed, the author who takes the bait may find himself even more abusively misrepresented in the additional 300 words that, to his dismay, have been allotted to his reviewer, who, to protect the reputation of the editor, must not be proven wrong, whence the conversation is closed and the new, even more abusive attack left unanswered. At universities I know, where, let us say, dissertations or exams receive grades at polar extremes—one reader giving the work “A” and the other a “C”—a third reader is asked to adjudicate, and his grade is the final one. This situation would be a model for inviting a mediator where a book is reviewed so differently in two places, and this mediator might once again be the wretched object of this exercise, the author himself, allowed in a third journal to offer a reasonable explanation for the disparity. As there is a mostly neglected ethics of reviewing, we encounter similar shortcomings among translators. Most cannot be helped, owing to the disparity in quality between the classic work to be translated and the stylistic competence, even in his or her own language, of the translator. This is a wide, already wellploughed field: nonetheless, Kaufmann makes a number of instructive points. From Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s translation of the Hebrew Bible he introduces the concept of Leitworte (“guiding words”), understandable in its parallel with leitmotifs. Philosophical texts, especially, will elaborate such key words, and it is crucial to keep them constant throughout the translation. “The German Geist has no perfect equivalent in English, but if in a philosophical work we should render it now as spirit and now as mind, and sometimes as ghost, wit, and intellect, we would make it impossible for students as well as others who rely on our version to discuss the author’s conception of Geist or his attitude toward reason without misconstruing many passages” (FH 100). This example obviously refers to Kaufmann’s claim, in his study of Nietzsche, of Nietzsche’s fundamental advocacy of Geist as reason. It would be amusing to learn of Kaufmann’s reaction to Kenneth Burke’s contribution to this problem. In his Language as Symbolic Action, he writes,

27 Donald B. Kuspit, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34.2 (Dec. 1973): 294–95.

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Once, when I was translating a German biography, I found the word [Geist] particularly bothersome. We were told that the character’s Geist did this, the character’s Geist did that, … and so on. Did his spirit do it? Did his mind do it? Did his wit do it, or his essence, or disposition, or demon? I tried all sorts of synonyms, and none seemed quite natural in English. Then, of a sudden, a breakthrough; whereupon, lo! I translated simply : “He did it.”28

But Geist, in a philosophical work, cannot just be translated by the subject’s pronoun. In an instance of the sort of inconsistency that Kaufmann deplores, John E. Woods, translator of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, renders, at a crucial juncture, the word Donnerschlag as “thunderbolt”; when it reappears, at an equally crucial juncture, it is as “thunderclap.” As a result, the reader is deprived of the opportunity to perceive the explicit parallel made by Mann between the commotion leading to Hans Castorp’s abrupt flight from his sanatorium on “the magic mountain” and the breakout of war on the flatlands of Europe in 1914. Kaufmann is strongly in favor of a practice he believes scarcely exists but ought to: equipping the translations of modern works with footnotes to explain subtleties, puns, or obscure terms—in a word, “untranslatables.” He was evidently unaware that Norton critical editions follow this practice; he would be happy to see that one of his many suggested lifelines to the humanities had been grasped. The goal of translation, as with all interpretation, is, once again, to bring to life the unique You of the text, “different from all other writers” (FH 95). A sophisticated literary critic, one of our finest, writing now, fifty years after Kaufmann, has recently written succinctly of a rule in interpretation, which can function as a rule in translation, wholly in line with Kaufmann’s emphasis: the question of all such operations on a primary text is whether it “adds emotional depth or only an odd and undigested complication.”29 “Complication” is the Leitwort for Kaufmann’s objection to critical editions. “The besetting fault of most critical editions,” the product of the toil of scholastics, “is that they show extraordinarily little feeling for the author,” who was very likely a visionary. The ancients spoke of the mountain that was in labor and brought forth a mouse. What we are witnessing is rather how colonies of ants bury giants under unsightly hills that are of use mainly to the ants who live there…. I am certainly not against all critical editions. The crux is whether the editors help the author speak to us, or whether they get in his way. (FH 104) 28 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1966), 167. 29 David Bromwich, “AWhite Father at the ‘Indian Camp’?” The New York Review of Books 63.4 (March 10, 2016): 50.

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On the question of editing, the most interesting of Kaufmann’s comments concern the critical edition of Nietzsche by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Of course one is curious to know whether Kaufmann will exempt their work from his general animadversions against the massive investment in trivial pieces of the writer’s corpus. The answer is Yes: he considers their solution to the question of Nietzsche’s letters ingenious, although it is hard to gauge his tone when he continues: They have decided to publish all of Nietzsche’s cards and letters in chronological order in six and a half volumes, and all extant cards and letters to him also in six and a half volumes, in chronological sequence. The first volume, which begins with Nietzsche at the age of five and ends before his twentieth birthday, contains the material he wrote, including many such items as “Nietzsche requests permission to purchase ink,” on pages 1–297, and the material written to him on pages 299–436. After that, the letters from Nietzsche and to him are presented in separate volumes. A selection of letters about Nietzsche will comprise four volumes, and the editorial apparatus three more, making for a total of twenty volumes…. It would be premature to judge this particular endeavor…. (FH 111)

This rather discreet approval soon becomes a more explicit concern: Let us assume that Nietzsche’s case is exceptionally favorable for a “critical total edition,” also because few writers since 1800 were so interesting and influential. Even then some serious problems remain. First and most important, all the books he wrote have been issued in two volumes on thin paper. If it were not for these books, his letters would not be of any interest to anybody, and the very thought of publishing the letters sent to him would be absurd. It would seem that those interested in Nietzsche should above all study the books he wrote. But now they are invited to divide their time and energy between his books, the Nachlass, and the letters, not to speak of secondary literature. Hardly anyone has time enough for Nietzsche to digest all that, and what naturally happens for the most part is that the time spent on the nonbooks comes out of the time that might well have been spent on Nietzsche’s books. In this way what is most significant always tends to be drowned in a sea of what is relatively insignificant. To vary the metaphor slightly : Nietzsche’s voice is drowned out by the voices that addressed him and that talked about him. (FH 112)

This is all essentially good Kaufmann—we have his precision, the consideration of alternative views, and the driving force of sincere conviction. One comes away, to speak with Milton’s Samson Agonistes, with a “new acquist of true experience,” present in a single, trenchant distinction: an archive is one thing, a critical edition another. “An archive may aim to make ‘everything’ available’; books require editorial judgment” (FH 110). Hegel’s youthful theological writings deserved to come out of the archive as a separate book, as did Marx’s early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—Kaufmann made important use

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of both texts in his book on Hegel and then again in Without Guilt and Justice— but other citable examples of such importance are rare (FH 108). The crux of this discussion of critical editions is that they must not bury their subject in minutiae, no amount of which will generate objective readings—at last! This extreme efflux of the scholastic spirit misses the mark; more than that, it never aimed at the heart of the matter. None of the dead who are worth listening to can be wooed with sweat, and they are loath to reveal their inmost thoughts and their personalities to scholars who shrink from the dangers of subjectivity. The writers, composers, and artists of the past … were people of passion, people who loved and perhaps also hated; and anyone would like to make them speak must be congenial to them at least in some measure. (FH 124–25).

The question arises how this call for congeniality jibes with the equally important demand that this encounter, once again, be an affair of “culture shock, challenge, and offence.” Perhaps in one’s finding in oneself a ghost of the hater in the great writer under study and learning to hate that ghost in turn. It is not so easy to conjure an example, but I will venture one: let us imagine T.S. Eliot reading Louis-Ferdinand C8line. I think Kaufmann would find congenial Kafka’s extreme meditation on this matter of subjectivity and truth: we have this daring trial of thought. Kafka saw the “commentators’ despair” as follows. “That which one is”—“one” being the reader changed by the act of reading—“one cannot express, for it is precisely this that one is. One can only communicate what one is not, ergo, the lie. It is only in the chorus [of lies] that a certain truth may be present.”30 Kaufmann would, I think, agree: There is more truth in the work of a community of bold interpreters than a team of scholastic editors aiming at literal totality. Reading Kaufmann’s “humanist poetics of reading,” one is faced with the challenge of organizing into a coherent theory at least these four strains: (1) the task of encountering a large You, a flesh and blood author whose iconic shadow is cast by the lines of the text; (2) equally, of being, beforehand, as a reader, congenial to the author—i. e., one having the character to be able to profit from the rich negativity of the encounter ; for (3) it must give “culture shock, challenge, and offence” but only because (4) the author’s words strike the reader as beautiful, incomparably interesting, or new. I conclude that this organization is something to which no verbal description is equal but which occurs as an event. This outcome, if it were to arise from the marriage of shock and beauty, would be a type of the feeling of the sublime, nascent in every humanist encounter. Roland Barthes, more humanist than supposed, advanced the aphorism that “all criti30 Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1992), 348.

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cism is affectionate,” in which I will stress less liking than the fact of affect. Barthes went on to say, “This [point] should be carried even further, almost to the postulation of a theory of affect as the motive force of criticism.”31 I often feel such elation in my reading of Kaufmann, and that is why I contribute these pages, with the hope that you, too, reader will find them, in Kaufmann’s sense, a congenial object of study. It would be wrong, however, to leave Kaufmann’s study without conveying its final and deeply felt insistence. This is his repeated claim of the folly of constructing a reading program for the humanities without attending to texts held to be sacred: hence Kaufmann’s chapter-long insistence on “The Place of Religion in Higher Education” (FH 126–53). For him, there is no more privileged source of reflection on “faith and morals and the ideologies and values of … society”—in short, on the great question of how one is to live a justified life—than the study of comparative religion (FH 129–30). This chapter is composed with a great deal of verve, wisdom, and fascinating information. As part of Kaufmann’s demonstration of the superficial honor in which religion has been held for a century, at least, in colleges and universities, Kaufmann recalls that before Firestone library was built at Princeton, its base had to be lowered several feet into the ground so that it would not be as tall as the revered Princeton chapel, a chiefly unattended Gothic hulk (FH 126–27). But books that might be spoken of, piece-meal, in the chapel call for solid study in the library and classroom. “Indeed, we should seriously consider whether some knowledge of comparative religion should not be required of all college students” (emphasis added, SC). At the very least, “knowledge of the Old and New Testaments adds a dimension to the study of European and American history and literature” (FH 130–31). These assertions have worn well: among many examples, one can instance Robert Alter’s Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible of 2010, which prompted one critic to conclude that “Pen of Iron makes a convincing case that it is impossible to fully appreciate American literature without knowing the King James Bible—indeed, without knowing it almost instinctively, the way generations of Americans used to know it.”32 Kaufmann then constructs a one-term syllabus, emphasizing texts from the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and thereafter the Dhammapada, the BhagavadGita, the Confucian Analects, and the Tao-Teh-Ching. “That students are able to graduate from elite institutions having read a vast amount of drivel but never any 31 “A few years ago [ca. 1975], criticism was still a very analytical activity, very rational, subject to a superego of impartiality and objectivity, and I wanted to react against this approach.” “Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (1979),” The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 331. 32 Adam Kirsch, “Heirs to the Throne,” The New Republic, May 11, 2010. https://newrepublic. com/article/74801/heirs-the-throne.

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of the books mentioned here, is certainly grotesque” (FH 132). (But Kaufmann’s challenge does not profit from such overkill.) Since the rest of Kaufmann’s chapter is devoted to a plan for the study of comparative religion at universities, I am tempted to break off this narrative, as surely you are too, reader, to rush off and begin immediately reading (at best, rereading) the sacred books mentioned above—above all, Genesis, which Kaufmann loves the best: there is no book “greater or more beautiful, profound and influential” (FH 136). The right translation must capture its extraordinary spareness, but that is not the King James Bible, which “makes it sound remote, rhetorical, and churchly, and blinds us to its unsurpassed directness and simplicity” (FH 138). The great virtues of the King James Bible are a commonplace, but having been “appointed to be read in churches,” it deliberately flattens out the differences between the authors and their styles…. The tone is uniformly elevated everywhere. The effect is numbing. One feels impressed but ceases to hear what is being said…. (FH 133)

Kaufmann’s judgment is echoed by the formidable critic James Wood, who, reviewing Robert Alter’s translations of the psalms, observes how “the result greatly refreshes, sometimes productively estranges, words that may now be too familiar to those who grew up with the King James Bible.”33 In Kaufmann’s syllabus, of course, there would be no risk of false notes, since “I shall abide,” he declares, “by my practice of quoting the Bible in my own translations”[!] (FH 134). These would strive to give the student some idea of the distinctive style of Genesis…. It is not lush and gorgeous but has the austere beauty of the Sinai desert and of the scenery around Jerusalem that is littered with rocks and ancient olive trees…. Nowhere is the light more lucid and the air so clear. Nor is there any other prose that equals Genesis in its terse and simple grandeur. (FH 137)

The Hebrew Biblical myth is the foundation of humanism. It has special importance for Kaufmann’s humanism. He argues forcefully : The notion that all men were descended from a single couple led to the conception that all men are brothers; and the story that man was made in the image of God and that God breathed his spirit into him led to the notion that man, and by no means just some king or priest, was more similar to God than to the other animals. Flatly contradicting what strikes us as the abundant evidence of senses, men was held to be by no means a mere speck in nature but essentially discontinuous with it and vastly more important. (FH 142) 33 James Wood, “BOOKS: ‘Desert Storm,’” a review of Robert Alter’s translation The Book of Psalms (New York: Norton, 2007) in The New Yorker (October 1, 2007). http://www.new yorker.com/magazine/2007/10/01/desert-storm.

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There are many different accounts of the root of humanism; many writers would fix the root some seven centuries later, in the Italian Renaissance, singling out Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate (On the dignity of man). Or its program might be better attached to the development of the notion of Bildung, of self-cultivation, associated with early seventeenth-century German pietism. Many commentators have perceived the connection of the ideas of humanism and such self-cultivation, which involves a substantial knowledge of classical texts. Mark Greif notes, Humanism has always been animated by texts. The fifteenth-century umanistsi projected their philosophical focus onto man to escape supernaturalism and Christianity, and develop Renaissance learning. They were capable of doing so because they had inherited and plumbed … the manuscripts of classical antiquity.34

The link was there from the start. In thinking about humanism, Greif quotes a number of thinkers who have contributed to the humanist debate, one of the most trenchant being Peter Sloterdijk, who points out that humanism has always had an aggressive, an antithetical face: it is poised to attack barbarism.35 Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus constitutes a grand meditation on this struggle. This is a wide field in which Kaufmann has planted his imperturbable banner : “What was distinctive in Genesis was the implication that all men are brothers and have a divine dignity” (emphasis added). This word has become a much discussed keyword in current political philosophy : witness George Kateb’s Human Dignity and Michael Rosen’s Dignity: Its History and Meaning.36 Kaufmann would have all students study and learn to value—there would be little resistance—especially the magnificent first nineteen verses of Genesis 22— the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. “The Christian idea that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,’ in the Gospel according to John (3:16) clearly harks back to Genesis 22.” The notion that no sacrifice could be greater than giving up one’s son—this intense love of the father for his son—is found in many places in the Hebrew Bible: you hear it in David’s cry of grief at his rebellious son Absalom: “there is nothing comparable to this in ancient Indian, Greek, or 34 Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015), 103. Greif is of the opinion that the truly “meaningful intellectual trajectory” of the crisis of man and humanism in America had, by 1951, found its place in “the novel.” I would certainly look for its further development, not (only) in the novel, but in critique, as in Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy (above, chapters 3 and 4). 35 Peter Slotendijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortsschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), cited in Grief, ibid. 36 Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap P, 2011); Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 2012).

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Chinese literature” (FH 147). Here Kaufmann’s scholarship shows to his advantage. It would also be instructive to compare the ancient Jewish mosaic of the Akedah in the synagogue of Bet Alpha in Israel with later Christian mosaics. The story is also illustrated in medieval Hebrew Bibles and prayer books, and the early Christians dealt with it in paint, glass, and Ivory. Major Italian artists who took up this theme include Ghiberti, Donatello, Andrea del Sarto, Sodoma, Titian, Caravaggio, Guardi, and Tiepolo. Ghiberti’s two bronze doors at the Baptistery in Florence are world-famous. The one completed first is adorned with scenes from the New Testament, the second door presents Old Testament themes and is known as the Gates of Paradise—a tribute first paid to Ghiberti’s artistry by Michelangelo. It is less well known that each of the seven artists who competed for the original assignment had to do a bronze Akedah. Ghiberti won, and his version and that of the runner up, Brunelleschi, who later built the dome of the cathedral of Florence, are now in the Bargello in Florence. Rembrandt treated the story in an etching and a famous painting. And in our time, Igor Stravinsky composed Akedah Yizhak, a ballad for baritone and chamber orchestra set to a Hebrew text. (FH 151)

Finally, I will quote Kaufmann at some length once more, meaning to honor, elliptically, the extraordinary work that he had just accomplished—an encyclopedia in five hundred closely printed pages titled Religions in Four Dimensions: Existential and Aesthetic, Historical and Comparative.37 The passage concluding the chapter on “The Place of Religion in Higher Education” in The Future of the Humanities alludes to the compendium that preceded it. In asking how one would set about teaching Buddhism to undergraduates as an indispensable element of their education Kaufmann remarks: Buddhism is not only literature but also Angkor Thom in Cambodia and Borobodur in Java, Thai bronzes and Japanese statues carved from wood, people pouring water over gilded images on the great terrace of the Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon and palmistry in Mandalay ; the emperor Ashoka and the caves at Ajanta as well as Zen and the art of swordsmanship. Any notion that religion is mainly theology is a betrayal of man. Religion is far too important to be left to theologians. (FH 152)

37 Walter Kaufmann, Religions in Four Dimensions: Existential and Aesthetic, Historical and Comparative (New York: Reader’s Digest P, 1976).

Part II Spariosu, his Work, and his World

Ovidiu Verdes¸ (1997)

Chapter 4: Dionysus, Nietzsche, and Literature

Dionysus does not seem to have a place in philology and science, where what rules is what Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, used to call the satisfied serenity of a theoretician. Though, as the god of transgression, metamorphosis, and haunting, he could ironically “return” in order to subvert claims of truth, and knowledge. Modernity, which, at its beginnings, uses play as a mediating principle, soon discovers the Dionysian abyss of unlimited play and the possibility for everything to be put into play. By then it tries to turn its face away from this truth, or, as in the case of Nietzsche and his followers, it succumbs to fascination, hoping to regenerate, purified from its own past. This would be the central idea of the present study : Dionysus cannot be invoked in the discourse of knowledge except at the risk of an unlimited deconstruction. From this point of view, Nietzsche offers an example that is both exemplary and singular. His journey reveals that, essentially, Dionysus and discourse—any discourse, except perhaps poetry—are incompatible. Play and the aesthetic represent a theme of modernity that, through Nietzsche, tends to become the norm of postmodernity. Such a post-modern perspective is to be found in Mihai Spariosu’s Dionysus Reborn, where the author converts the ludic-aesthetic theme into a tool of cultural diagnosis. Aware of the complexity of this thematic field, Spariosu presents his study as a series of lax connected essays and as an open inquiry on Western ways of thinking: He proposes a critical-historical model which exploits the Nietzschean genealogy and has a heuristic rather than a systemic approach. When outlining the perspective and the methodology of this essay, the classic literary reference on play cannot be ignored: Huizinga’s famous essay,1 Homo Ludens, provides the landmark text for which the theory of play, in Spariosu’s Dionysus Reborn proposes new insights. For Huizinga, the association of play with the aesthetic is fundamentally coordinated. Spariosu, however, skeptically observed the significant number of works through which play threatens to be1 Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. H.R. Radian (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1977).

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come an expedient way to remedy the old split between the subject and the object, correcting all our metaphysical and practical problems. In particular, he questions the possibility of direct and systemic descriptions of the phenomenon of play, insisting on the limits of the phenomenological description. Huizinga criticized the arguments of post-Kantian aesthetics, and scientific theories that reduce play to biological or psychological ends and he postulated the original and universal character of “play,” underlining its autonomy : “the absolute primary category of life, which cannot be grounded in any rational context.”2 Autonomy was, however, methodologically transposed as non-contextuality. Huizinga defined playful phenomenon as supposedly identical to itself and then identified its various forms. Huizinga’s definition included a list of formal or negative traits (in relation to the usual reality),3 most of which were aesthetic. Huizinga revealed both the inconsistency in the structured character of play and its specific of alterity. He added two other features—competition and pre-presentation—calling them functions. It was thus clear, from the beginning, that, despite the breadth of his definition, Huizinga’s concept of play was hardly unified; he forcefully added new contexts. The same premises, amphibolic and paradoxical character of play as phenomena, determine Mihai Spariosu’s frame of reference and its indirect or oblique approach. His intentions were not to determine what and how is play itself. Rather he sought its uses in various discourses and among different authors. Short, he looked at play as a speculative instrument or concept that had been given to us and has animated Western thinking. By privileging its context, Spariosu avoided definitions, and recognized from the start a number of play concepts with historical and cultural connotations. These were not, however, irreducibly different: they possessed lax systematics, they were grouped by their traits or by Wittgenstein’s similarities. Spariosu’s play concepts possess an internal dynamism that can best be identified in an agonal vocabulary : they attack … or they retreat, they form alliances, they either accept or reject their connections. In this respect, the interpretative-configurative model that Spariosu opts for is Victorian or Nietzschean, and rejects a Hegelian synthesis. The concepts of play have many interpretations—in the sense of Nietzsche—and they are not seen as disinterested abstractions, but rather as manifestations of the will to power that challenge cultural authority in different domains and epochs. 2 Ibid, 37. 3 “A free action, conscious of its ‘unintentionality’ and out of ordinary life, […] which can, however, completely absorb a judge, an action of which no direct material interest and no purpose are bound, […] occurring within a certain time and specific space, which occurs in order, according to certain rules, and which gives rise to community relations willing to be surrounded by secrecy or to be accentuated by disguise, as being different from the ordinary world” (Ibid, 49–50).

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The result of this agon is changeable and never definitive, since, paradoxically, the defeated return to the scene and can overturn the situation. The stage here is the plan of consciousness, of the momentary discursive configuration or of cultural actuality. The return is also a return to the surface of what was temporarily suppressed: Here, Spariosu uses the analogous Freudian model of the psyche in which, by virtue of its great plasticity, submerged primitive stages can be updated at any time. Finally, insofar as analyzed discourses are representative, the changing conceptual spectrum of play becomes relevant on the level of the entire culture: The history of what we call “playing” in the Western world is … the history of a rivalry between antagonistic concepts, which become dominant, experience decline, and come back to the surface in accordance with the needs of different groups and different individuals who disputed their cultural authority in certain historical periods. The movement of these concepts takes place between a prerational and a rational pole: the distinction between the two fundamental mentalities differently emphasizes one and the same concept (for example, mimesis or -als ob play). The picture of these mentalities and their historical alternation sharply absorbs, as Spariosu points out, the main models of oral-scripturalism (E.R. Dodds, Freud, L8vy-Bruhl, Ren8 Girard, etc.). But the exemplum remains Nietzsche: the philologist who overturned Greece’s canonical image with the Dionysiac category and the philosopher who rediscovered the world’s pre-Socratic image as an open play of forces. Based on this model, Spariosu can criticize claims of the hermeneutic neutrality of any phenomenological description, showing that any definition or description of play starts from assumptions that culturally anchor it. In Spariosu’s optics, Huizinga’s definition would belong to rationalist aesthetics, despite his postulating the irrationality of play. Spariosu does not discuss Homo Ludens in a distinct chapter, but his identification of the typical rationalist manner of approaching play, clearly denote Huizinga’s demonstration. Such a hypothesis argues, for instance, for the distinction between the superior or cultural forms of play—those that have a structure, with a noticeable social character- and primitive play (rather biological or psychological) in which the ludic element is irreducible.4 It is important to bring into discussion the distinction by which play is separated from power even though, as in archaic cultures, it entails competition where “the game was a fight and the fight was a game.” Huizinga adds that the concept of play had cultural connotations only when the agon was in the game. It was not related to “the will to power or the will to dominate, but to the temptation to overtake others and as such to be honored.”5 Finally, Huizinga’s problem with the cultural-historical evolution of the term play recalls Vico’s 4 Ibid, 41. 5 Ibid, 101.

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metaphorical theory of native language: the ludic in its purest expression is found in primitive cultures and “moves on the last plane while at the same time experiencing cultural evolution.”6 The succession of epochs, as described in the second last chapter of Homo Ludens, involved the idea of degeneration and culminated in the “fake” and “childish” play one finds in contemporary society. To the hypothesis of the degradation of the essence, Spariosu opposes a schema of the perpetual alternation between rational and prerational values, mentalities, and ages, a Viconian corsi e ricorsi, but modified by the suggestion of the etheric Nietzschean return.7 Applying this model to the history of Western culture since the 18th-century leads to a refutation of the standard description of a single turn of play or aesthetic mutations. Schiller remains a very important writer for Spariosu because he rehabilitates the philosophical theme as a philosophical theme, and gives it a cognitive function and insists on its ability to mediate between reason and inanimation, the sensible and the intelligible. Real life is one of the rational concepts of play—a concept in which play is subordinated directly to reason and intellect is separated by agon and power. In fact, by taking over these concepts from Plato and Aristotle, Schiller redefines the repression to which they, the present-day calls for rationality have been ordered. Switching to a rational mentality introduced myopic language into autonomous discourses, which are later structured as distinct fields and disciplines. It also presupposes the substitution of the archaic concept of “mimesis-play” (performative, ritualistic, agonal) with the rational concept of “mimesis-imitation” (thereby producing imperfect, ontological-secondary images), which deprives poetry of its attribute of truth. In Dionysus Reborn, the accent is placed on the continuity imposed by Plato which “separates mythological language from its central function in the prerational mentality,” transforming poetry into literature and conferring on it the function as an “auxiliary of philosophy in the work of supporting new rational values.”8 Trapped in the Platonic moment, it is a necessary preamble of the modern historical concept of play. There will be a second aesthetic mutation— one inaugurated by Nietzsche and developed by contemporary metaphysicians and artists so that prerational play can be refigured in philosophical discourse. In his main chapter dedicated to Nietzsche, Spariosu shows how no other philosopher before and after him formulated more clearly and with such positive 6 Ibid, 96. 7 Spariosu repeatedly states that the return of play concepts “is not a return of the same” in the sense that each return will have distinct traits depending on the field or the discourse in which it occurs (Ibid, 33). But neither is the Nietzschean “eternal return” a repetition of the identical, as he points out in the chapter devoted to Nietzsche, adopting the Deleuzian-Derridian perspective of the “repetition-difference.” 8 Ibid, 27.

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connotations the correlation between play, art, and power. The game-power relationship is circular in the Weltspiel ontology, where play, the ultimate theme, is “the main knot in which power conceives itself,” and is purged as a violent, innocent and exuberant game, similar to child’s play (from Heraclitus’s famous fragment) or as the artist’s play. Art is an exemplary embodiment of power as play situated beyond good and evil; Nietzsche forms an aesthetic vision of the world starting with an analysis of Greek culture that regains the archaic origins of art in the violent, exuberant and innocent game of power. However, this revaluation of art does not come from the perspective of a world in which the superego models people as the artist shapes material. It rather springs from an intermediate stage. The predisposition of two power-centered mentalities is, therefore, Nietzschean. It bears an “idiosyncratic and subjective” character. In the light of the central concept of willpower, Nietzsche could denounce the socalled will to truth of philosophers and scholars, indicating power as the hidden source of Western metaphysics. But this denunciation is inseparable from a new affirmation of the principle of power in any prerational sense, which would establish an aesthetic vision of the world as perpetually becoming-creation, putting an end to the cycle of negativity, guilt, and resentment. Heidegger and other so-called metaphysician-artists continue Nietzsche’s mission and are sometimes paradoxically animated by the desire to improve upon it. Such is the case of Heidegger, who, in Spariosu’s reading, interprets the will of power as a volunteering act (the will to will) and describes the relationship of Being and Dasein in concepts specific to prerational play (especially in his latest work, Weltspiel Ontology). As a rule, Nietzsche’s commentators, art-metaphysics (such as Fink, Gadamer, Deleuze and Derrida) develop their ideas and style in order to overthrow Platonism. They incorporate concepts such as the game without players, ideal play, and free play, in order to direct one to a world of unlimited development without oppositions and metaphysical hierarchies. Nietzsche and the Nietzscheans are isolated even within the circle of philosophical discourse: despite their subversive tendencies. The canonical acceptance of play remains one that is imposed by the aesthetics of German Romantic Idealism. The influence of this concept is so prevailing that we find it even in the first writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The second aesthetic mutation does not have an equivalent in scientific discourse, despite the late Romantic revolution that marks the division of empiricism and positivism. Spariosu interprets it as proof of incompatibility due to the grounded rationalism of science. The success of evolutionary theory introduces the theme of play as a cognitive factor in biology and psychology, acknowledging its subordination to utilitarian criteria. Despite some outward resemblances, Nietzsche’s agonistic view differs radically from Darwin’s struggle for survival. Spariosu points out that the theme of play in scientific discourse is directly

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proportional to rationalization and idealization, constantly eluding its negative aspects of power. For some other scholars, the equivalents would be orderrationality and hazard-irrationality ; for others, the consequences of evolutionism are moderated through human contact. The theme of play has a real impact on science only in the twentieth-century physics. The philosophy of science to which it most corresponds is that of Vaihinger which attempt to reconcile German idealism and positivism, and seeks to save scientific truth by resorting to aesthetic arguments.9 Physicists with a speculative appetite switch to new ways of validating theories: they insist on the role of imagination in the process of discovery, but, symptomatically, they want to dissociate the scientific imagination from the artistic one; some of them emphasize the historical and cultural character of scientific concepts, but this seemingly outward step is, in fact, a re-legitimation of their cognitive privilege. The vision of some adherents of quantum mechanics strikingly resembles the Nietzschean vision of the world as a game of forces: This prerational ontology is corrected by an epistemology that, despite the recognition of the subjective element in theoretical elaborations, remains rational (where the only alternative would be, in fact, the abandonment of science). Spariosu is skeptical about philosophy’s and contemporary history of science’s forays into modernization. The Kuhn model of scientific revolutions does not deny novelty in relation to legitimation through the myth of progress, but its limits are highlighted: Aesthetic orientation remains valid only for extraordinary science, and paradigms are only recognized by the power of innovation—not through any conservative process. Among the non-conformist interpreters of science, the closest to Nietzsche seems to be Feyerabend, with his anarchist attack on method, rationality and objectivity. Spariosu analyzes his critique of epistemology—from the Baconian-Cartesian tradition to contemporary theses, which argue for the separation between the world of opinion and that of scientific knowledge, taking as the norm the exact sciences (Popper’s falsification and the research programs of Lakatos). However, he sanctions the naivety of the conclusions drawn from this radical criticism of dogmatism and the totalitarianism of modern science: that of a free society envisaged by Feyerabend, in which science would be separated from the state (after separation from the church) and returned to its place as a mere tradition, purely utopian, among others.

9 In line with intellectualist positivism that, against empiricism or “realism,” emphasizes the heuristic role of theoretical and speculative beliefs, we can also remember the work of Bachelard’s epistemology : La formation de l’esprit scientifique and particularly, La philosophie du non.

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The development of this historical course suggest that Spariosu’s evaluative standards of hermeneutics are Nietzschean. The relationship with this model is not at all simple, later on. In this essay, we will examine how being Nietzschean, as a historian or as a philosopher of culture, is an extremely difficult task. For the present, we are placing our analysis in two broader contexts: that of Spariosu’s writings and that of its contemporary theoretical framework, to which the author replies by stating that historiography has returned to its hermeneutical roots. *** Some of Spariosu’s books are stages of a larger theoretical project, which tries to define the relationship between literature and other discourses based on the notions of play, mimesis and power. The starting point is always literature—not philosophy or science. What is the relation between poetry, ethics, and politics? What is the nature of the interaction between art, culture, and power? Why was literary discourse so marginalized in the history of Western thought? How can literature contribute to the creation of new ethical and cultural values?10 For Literature, Mimesis and Play : Essays on Literary Theory,11 the guiding theses are the following: 1. There is a strong bound between mimesis and play in European culture, starting with Plato and Aristotle; 2. They are subordinated to a principle of power at the foundation of this culture. Two historical thresholds providing the schema for aesthetic mutations are emphasized: the process of suppressing prerational play by the concept of mimesis (thus the poetic song by the metaphysical truth) initiated by Plato and Aristotle and its opposite, the return, inaugurated by Kant and Schiller. The search for an alternative to mimetic thinking is in part a response to the controversy between the American neo-realist and anti-mimetic writers. The same point is made by Spariosu in his anthology on Mimesis in contemporary theory,12 whose publisher also addresses the problem of a new type of language that would give up hierarchy and segregation … to the omnipresent principle of power. In a critical essay that places Spariosu’s theorization in this postmodern literary context, Marcel Cornis-Pope appreciates Spariosu’s concept of non-conflictual 10 Mihai I. Spariosu, God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), ix–x. 11 Mihai I. Spariosu, Literature, Mimesis and Play: Essays in Literary Theory (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982), 9. 12 Mihai I. Spariosu, “Mimesis and Contemporary French Theory,” in, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory : An Interdisciplinary Approach (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984), 99.

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language as more lucid and more coherent than homologous concepts, such as the stream-language of sur-fictionists. The non-phallocentric writing of feminists, and the petits-r8cits one finds in Lyotard. It would not involve eliminating the differences in cultural transactions, but an economy of the performative, playful, participative difference, as opposed to appropriating dialectics.13 From this point of view, Spariosu seems to overcome the dichotomy that American literary postmodernism inherits directly from the European avant-garde manifestations. God of Many Names, the complementary study of Dionysus Reborn, revises the classic distinction between Greek archaic, classic culture, from a Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean perspective: they are called proto-logical-rational and logo-rational, underlining their common affiliation to the power mentality. Significantly, here the prerational-rational antagonism is pursued as a gradual transition rather than a discontinuity.14 The five chapters of the book reconstitute the conflict between two mentalities beginning in the great Hellenic texts: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, the Work and Days, and continuing through fragments of the pre-Socratics, the Republic, Laws, Poetics, and Politics. The process is no longer called “suppression,” but “blooming,” and Plato, far from the schematic hypostasis of rationalism in Literature, Mimesis, and Play, appears marked by his first love, drama, the form of dialogues revealing a mediation between philosophy and poetry, a possible “third way”15. Another book, which, with the author’s generosity, I read in manuscript form, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of Literature,16 represents at the same time a continuation and a break from previous studies. Spariosu approaches the possibility of an alternative mentality based on the principle of primordial peace. The symbol of olive trees suggests an alternative world, immeasurable with our world, in which competition becomes co-operative, and power, as a self-generated historical principle that organizes life and human relationships in terms of force exerted by individuals and communities on each other and their environment in direct or mediated forms is overcome. The first 13 For instance, in Ronald Suckenick’s Manifesto, Cornis-Pope distinguishes a similar consciousness of the connection between mimesis and power, leading to the criticism of the falseuniversalist discourse of modernity. But this revisionist fictional concept keeps the ambiguity between political subversion and negativity. See Ronald Bogue and Marcel CornisPope, “Introduction: Paradigms of Conflict and Mediation in Literary and Cultural Imagination” in Violence and Mediation in Contemporary Culture, eds. Ronald Bogue and Marcel Cornis-Pope (Albany : 1995), 11. 14 Spariosu, God of Many Names, xi. 15 See the chapter titled “Plato and the Birth of Philosophy from the Spirit of Poetry,” Ibid, 141–94. 16 Mihai I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of Literature. (Albany : SUNY P, 1997).

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part of this book proposes an irrational theory of liminality in literature and culture. The ludic-aesthetic category of earlier studies is transposed into the notion of a liminal nature, through which literature and art generally can contribute to the creation of irenic worlds. We will come back to this notion in analyzing the relationship between what Spariosu calls discourses. The most significant change in perspective in relation to Dionysus Reborn is found in the third chapter : the notion of ludic-irenic liminality, that is opposed to the contemporary philosophy of difference. The ancient origins of the concept of difference are highlighted in order to illuminate the agonal presuppositions of modern and contemporary philosophers. In the second part, this irrelevant theme is analyzed in several modernist and postmodern literary works. Spariosu interprets the motive of crime as play in Dostoevsky, Gide, and Aiken, as a discussion of Nietzschean voluntariness (we remember that in Dionysus Reborn, the label of voluntariness was rejected). Novels of Rebreanu, Eliade, and Devi are then grouped as literary approaches to ethnic-cultural difference. In the texts of Lowry, Nabokov, and Orwell, Spariosu examines a postmodernist change in the author-reader relationship that implicitly denounces the arbitrary and auctorial nature of interpretation and truth. The chapter, “Criticism as Irenic Play : The Case of the Victorian Sages,” (Arnold, Ruskin, Wilde) presents a liberal alternative to the suspicion of hermeneutics, set up in the same period by Marx and Nietzsche. This brief summary shows the extent to which cultural hermeneutics practiced by Spariosu answers problems of the present philosophical-theoretical moment. I believe that the author would agree with the designation of this moment as an interpretative mutation that succeeded the history of the epistemological and linguistic mutation.17 Mostly, it has the same content as the aesthetic mutation analyzed in Dionysus Reborn, the difference being its (anti) epistemological accent. It is not by chance that the most pronounced name in contemporary debates regarding interpretation and hermeneutics is that of Nietzsche (but it is, in part, another Nietzsche than that of metaphysical artists, a list that culminates with Spariosu). The most commonly cited Nietzschean concept is the interpretation of the mechanism by which the will to power denounces the so-called will to truth. As the negative, dissimulated form of power, it is the principle by which prerational mentality even if defeated by rational mentality, becomes its double, its camouflaged origin. Using an anti-Hegelian genealogical method, Nietzsche shows, for example, that philosophical truth is an authority imposed by its frequent use and the forgetting of its immanent origin (which the philosopher reveals as a metaphor): 17 See David. R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., “Introduction,” in The Interpretative Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).

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What is truth? An army in motion of metaphors, metamorphisms and, anthropomorphisms has a network of human relationships that poetry and rhetoric have elevated, transposed and embellished them, and which, as a result of this long use, seem stable to people, canonical and constraining: truths are illusions, metaphors that have been worn out and have lost their sensitive force, coins from which the image has been wiped out and that comes into discussion not as a currency but as a metal.18

In this context, metaphor is synonymous with human relations in the sense of interpretation (the quote belongs to a stage where this last concept was not fixed): the truth is only an interpretation that triumphed over others insofar as it has concealed its subjective origin. The theory is put to work against the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, starting with being.19 Similarly, in another famous fragment, Nietzsche deciphers the modern idol of science: The construction of concepts primarily addresses language and later on science. Just as the bee builds the cells simultaneously and fills them with honey, science is working unmistakably at this concept edifice in which it buries intuitions; builds floors over clean floors, restores old cellars, strives to fill this enormous monstrous escape, and renders it the empirical or anthropomorphic world. While the man of action devotes his life to reason and concepts in order not to be driven by the current and not to lose himself, the scientist builds his own house right next to the science tower, so he can always give a helping hand and find protection for himself.20

Spariosu’s analysis of scientific discourse could use this passage as a motto, since it brilliantly anticipates the stratification that Kuhn will term the puzzle-solving activity of normal science. Interpretation as a form of the will to power is a powerful weapon today, in the critique of metaphysical essentiality or epistemological foundation. Since everything is an interpretation, knowledge is always at stake; there are no founding rules or conventions, there is no Derrida—no center or transcendental signified that would limit the play of structures. The legitimacy of a hermeneutical universalism in which no criterion of validation of the interpretations resists can be the only conclusion of such a theory. When, as Rorty says, interpretation becomes the only game in town, the concept of interpretation itself does not refer to 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, Le livre de philosophie, trans. A.J. Marinetti (Aubier: Apud); Paul Ricoeur, Metafora vie, trans. Irina Mavrodin (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1977), 445. 19 “Concept of Being! As if its empirical origin would not appear in the etymology of the word! That is, it really means to ‘breathe.’ If people use the word to talk about all sorts of things it is because, by doing a metaphor, that is, by a ludicrous process, they transpose to things the property of breathing and living all the aspects that they conceive through human analogy. But very soon the original meaning of the word is wiped out” (Nietzsche, Le livre de philosophe, 225). 20 Ibid, 193–95 (author’s translation).

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an opposite concept, and relativism displaces not only positivist type of quest, but any quest at all. Many scholars or historians of the internalist science actually believe that they have broken off from the rationalist-epistemological tradition to the extent that they place emphasis on the limits of the induction, ludic and heuristic, of fiction and artifact. The advocates of externalism (a history of science centered not on products, but on institutions and relationships) reproach them claiming that modernizing rationality or scientific objectivity is a mere diversion meant to keep away social scientific institutions. Recent approaches, known in the Anglo-Saxon countries as anthropology or sociology of science, like the older, radical technology or feminist criticisms, generally refuse to adopt the vocabulary of the winner.21 They are even more insightful. By proposing to treat science as a social fact, one often practices nothing but a kind of psychological or ideological reductionism. Science is not only a negative entity in current hermeneutical debates. The traditional distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences is often analyzed from the concept of paradigm or what Kuhn substituted for generic rationality. The idea that the paradigm is primarily practical, and not the result of someone’s creation, has two implications: on the one hand, it signifies the incommensurability of the empirical theoretical references, and on the other hand, it relegates the demarcation between scientific knowledge and simple opinion. Isabelle Stengers22 notes that, despite the fictional character of the invention that science attributes to objects (science creates something that it explains, almost as Nietzsche’s interpretation generates the facts), a paradigm imposes on the scholar an empiricist-realistic mentality. It does it indirectly through the strong report it maintains with the phenomenal field and through its distinction between scientific and non-scientific, similar to the difference between after and forward. It claims, by emphasizing discontinuities,23 a rhetoric of progress and objectivity that Lyotard calls the grands r8cits. Hence, for Kuhn, any description of the social organization of the sciences in which social sciences are called preparadigmatic will always retain the handicap of a dual dependence on heterogeneous facts and socio-cultural context. After the appearance of the Scientific Revolution Structure, this description has undergone important changes. Although, the exact sciences have lost their role as the standard, they can, through their natural or fictional characteristics, provide examples of radical interpretation in the sense of creating new realities. Sometimes, as a paradox of the earlier anti-positivist moment (including the Nietzschean genealogy), it is said 21 See Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, eds., La science telle qu’elle se fait (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991). 22 Isabelle Stengers, L’invention des sciences modernes (Paris: Flammarion. Coll., 1995), 60–65. 23 See Toma Pavel “Critique of Structuralist Rhetorics,” trans. Mioara Tapalaga, in Mirajul Lingvistic: eseu asupra moderniza˘rii intelectuale (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1993).

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that the rejection of the distinctions of the human sciences comes mainly from the direction of the philosophy of science. The traditionalist-realistic vision of the exact sciences is accredited thus by humanists, out of a need to maintain their hermeneutical privilege.24 *** Let us return to Dionysus Reborn and ask the following question: what is the connection between prerational-rational fundamental dichotomy and the rejection of discourses? We have seen that Spariosu’s broader theoretical project is centered on literature in its relationships with other fields of study. However, in Dionysus Reborn, the analysis does not include literature: literary discourse is invoked several times or in a generic way either through philosophers or scholarly ideas about aesthetics, art, poetry. This counterpoint presence or backdrop has, however, a normative efficacy. Unlike philosophical or scientific discourse, in literary discourse, it is said that play has always played an important role.25 It is not just a theme and not even a topos, but a homology supported by ontological affinity. Literary discourse thus appears more and more homogeneous than its rivals. It presents a representation of play : poetry and play have not, incidentally, known the same fluctuations. A deeper reflection on the juxtaposition of philosophical and scientific discourses is Nietzschean: philosophy and science are those interpretations which, through an act of de-simulationusurpation, have imposed themselves as truth and excluded the other discourses in the field of knowledge. Although more present in the thematic-conceptualization process of play, this third literary discourse haunts the other two, as Dionysus haunts Apollonian constructions. Dionysus Reborn can also be read as a replica of the numerous (and often reducible) interpretations of the artist from a philosophical or scientific perspective. Literary discourse and/or play will, this time, dictate how philosophy and science are interpreted. There is, however, a negligible obstacle to this reverse perspective that would transform the ludic-aesthetic into the norm. In other words, the genealogical dramatization of antagonism opposes the historical or contextual factor. Under 24 Instructive in this sense is the dispute between Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, and Richard Rorty, where the first two consider that the goal of natural sciences is to have access to an independent reality of the subject, a de-vulgarization of our beliefs, the third accusing them of “realism of significance.” For Taylor, human sciences are “double interpretations” (they propose interpretations of interpretations), their reflexivity does not have equivalent in the natural sciences. From an anti-essentialist position, Rorty advocates for contextualism without disciplinary boundaries, but recognizes its skeptical implications (The Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980); texts are republished in Hiley, et al., The Interpretative Turn). 25 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 11.

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the premises of Spartacus, we cannot know what play in itself is, if it is nothing more than play, it must have some uses and must remain valid for art, poetry, literature, even if only on a phenomenal level. It cannot be achieved conceptually. Paradoxically, it is precisely the ludic discourse of excellence that is undermined: Although it represents play, it cannot tell anything directly about itself or about play. In other words, everything we are saying is mediated by two other cognitive discourses. It should be noted that Dionysus Reborn does not always respect this principle: although it cites many aesthetical-literary concepts, Spariosu analyzes them from his own perspective of the aesthetic and literary, or proceeds as if the aesthetic literary has direct significance and is normative in itself. But this in itself is seen as a concept or interpretation, in the Nietzschean interpretation of play and art from a prerational perspective. This is, in fact, the norm for the evaluation of other discourses and/or concepts. At first glance, we are explicitly distancing ourselves from Nietzsche or any other philosopher for whom art and the artist are only intermediate stations on the way to Super-ego, by which the Platonic suppression of poetry, and the Platonic valuation of poetry is reconsidered. Nietzsche is far from the exception to the rule. One distinction on which Spariosu repeatedly insists is that between artistic aesthetics and philosophical aesthetics and / or scientific: the first can be seen as a reaction to totalitarian claims of philosophy and science, and the second can be seen as a reaction to an epistemological crisis, a circumstantial alliance with art, serving only the re-legitimization of philosophy and science.26 Philosophical-scientific aesthetics intervenes in Spariosu’s argumentation as a correlative valid in all cases where philosophers (not only Nietzsche, Heidegger and metaphysical artists) or scholars (not only the Darwinists but also the neophysicists of quantum physics and Feuerbend) feel drawn by art and poetry. Fascinated by the Other, they eventually, more or less consciously, take refuge in the identity of their own field, especially in the situation where they have to choose between art and philosophy or science. For example, metaphysiciansartists, are said to “use art, aesthetics and play to save that cultural authority that philosophy was in danger of losing in the last century.”27 In this situation, the parallelism play-art breaks down: thinkers who make an apology for play or build ontologies, such as the Nietzschean Weltspiel do not epistemologically rehabilitate art. Spariosu interprets their inadvertence as a symptom of the principle of power underlying Western thought: if an ontology of prerational play can cohabitate (though contradictorily) with a rationalist epistemology, a prerational ontology of art would necessarily imply abandoning its own discourse. For, if play is indefinite and can be conceptualized on an 26 Ibid, 6. 27 Ibid, 124–25.

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ambiguous or utopian horizon, art is determined by its the place among other discourses, an economy in which it continues to signify cognitive exteriority. This metaphysical-epistemological threshold cannot be crossed; the concept of philosophical-scientific aesthetics responds to the historical reality of transactions between discourses, while deeply maintaining their irreducible antagonism. This is why Nietzsche’s vision of art can be re-actualized by Spariosu in spite of Nietzsche himself: from the positions of artistic aesthetics. The author does not explicitly adhere to it as a historical attitude, and even criticizes the complicity between the modern autonomy of aesthetics and the cognitive depreciation of art. But, by invoking literary discourse as an opponent, he explicitly denounces the totalitarian claims of philosophy and science. Thus, although it is recognized that the dominant aesthetics in Western culture is the rationalist, according to German Idealism, the alternative to the Nietzschean aesthetics (the play-art-power equation) opens the possibility of a critique and a new repression of art through philosophy. The adoption of literary discourse as a norm and Nietzschean genealogy as a method can be deciphered in the constant turn of hermeneutical reasoning: rational thinkers limit, subordinate or idealize play, recognize it on the condition that it stays in a position as mediator or even as instrument. But who is playing, since there is no definition of the phenomenon? Obviously, the Nietzschean prerational play sometimes appears in Spariosu’s work—as we will have the opportunity to show, as play tout court. Spariosu’s examination of the distinction between the two types of aesthetics largely explains the relationship between discourses and mentalities. In Dionysus Reborn, the prerational-rational distinction corresponds, as a whole to the discourse of philosophical and/or scientific discourse. Spariosu does not dispute the historical diversity of discourses and their reciprocal interaction (basically this provides the substance of his study), but he regulates it through examples of play-concepts as analogies or homologies between two mentalities: the dynamics of discourse finally confirms the alternation scheme prerational-rational. But—we can ask—is this result of the historical inquiry not, in part, the projection of the genealogical schema that postulates that the philosophical discourse is rational as the poetic discourse is prerational? Let us note that the notion of discourse is not defined, since it is the underlying epiphenomenon of mentality. This overlap raises a whole series of problems, some examined and others left in theoretical suspension. The first problem can be seen in the choice of texts examined: the commented authors are representative of the Western mentality as a whole. But is the only trait that designates this ensemble not the pre-eminence of the co-factor of some continuity in the alternation of prerational and rational mentality? Is representation itself another name of power, especially at the theoretical-conceptual

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point where Spariosu deliberately restrains his analysis? In his preface to the volume, he presents it more as a convergence between individual discourses, the collective discourse of a discipline or a field and mentality. In doing so, does not the author subscribe to a certain discursive configuration of the moment—and implicitly to the immanent logic of power? He admits that this corpus contains more or less representative authors, the latter who are particularly interested in their contributions to play. This observation deduces, in fact, the criteria of representativeness: there is a tension between the representativeness from a thematic point of view versus a discursive viewpoint. Eugen Fink, for example, the only consistent follower of the Nietzsche an Weltspiel, is undoubtedly an interesting figure, but joining together Heidegger, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Derrida is, from their celebrity status, an act of poetic justice. The observation may be extended to several other contemporary scholars such as: Bateson, Monod, Thom, Eiden, and Winkler who do not go beyond the regional or disciplinary boundaries as have Spencer, Freud, Piaget, Einstein, or Schrodinger have and have not thematized play as clearly. Distinctions can be multiplied even on a thematic level: the authors’ representative characters derive from the weight they give to play, from the more or less important role they attribute to it, and from statements they have made that had theoretical consequences. Finally, beyond the thematic level, we may wonder in what sense Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Einstein, or Feyerabend are representative of the dominant mentality angle. Schiller, whose concept of play seems to be generalized in science, remains less representative of modernity than Nietzsche, whose concept of play was not always understood by his direct followers. From a different perspective, however, Schiller’s concept appears more representative of what ethnologists or sociologists would call mentality, while Nietzsche or Heidegger are representative in a theoretical sense. This epistemological cleavage leads to a second important problem, that of the concept. By setting up his analysis of play concepts, Spariosu resorts to an economic method of analyzing philosophical and scientific discourses as conceptual in nature. Even if it does not accept the concept of play in a rigorous logical or epistemological, but rather a historical or even pragmatic manner. Spariosu easily identifies recurrent concepts, referred to in terms of their context (in the linguistic sense). This method does not apply to literary discourse or the discourse of a mentality, where play remains—even thematized—an ambiguous, polysemic, immanent-contextual consciousness. The transgression of these epistemological distinctions is inherent in Spariosu’s historical approach, however, it can also entail hermeneutical process fed by a Nietzschean genealogy. Let us re-examine the three types of discourses in Dionysus Reborn. a) The philosophical discourse. Justifying the choice of the eighteenth century as a chronological reference, Spariosu invoked the principle according to which

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“attempts at conceptualization or introspection occur in times when dominant tacit suppositions begin to lose authority and go through a crisis.”28 As far as Schiller is concerned, Spariosu sees him more as philosopher than a poet in the way he conceptualized play. This vision of the conceptual is not only historical but also genetic and once again extends the Nietzschean genealogy.29 Moreover, it implies that there is a certain discontinuity between the concept and the mentality from which it derives. Of course, the theme of play was chosen precisely because, by its very nature, it highlights the internal contradictions of concepts, the complicities between them, and various non-theoretical assumptions, images, beliefs and attitudes (in this respect, Spariosu’s thematic option has a Derridean strategic side). On the other hand, even if it is not strictly rational, conceptualization varies in relation to that intermediate power of the rational mentality. To a large extent, the rational or philosophical mentality is not convincing without recourse to concepts (Huizinga also points out that the unification of notions of play takes place at a late stage of Greco-Latin culture). Spariosu does not insist on this aspect, but it is quite clear from his description of the mechanisms of change for a mentality : The metamorphosis of the configurations of unmediated power in the configurations of mediated, representative power, often has a double effect: a suppression of origins and a nostalgia for them. On the other hand, the rational mentality suppresses the prerational, labeling it as “wild,” “barbarian” and “primitive” […]. On the other hand, it undergoes transition to “forms of interceding power as a blur and as a need for (absolute) authority.30 As noticed in God of Many Names, Spariosu did not present the issue of origins in the same way, or he attenuates it by the statement that both mentalities appear from the beginning. The rational concepts by which play can be resuscitated are themselves vocalized, in other words, play can never be subordinated to reason without side effects or symptoms. If we add this analogy to the Freudian evolution of the psyche, it becomes clear that the double effect discussed here confirms the eternal alternation of rational and prerational. But one could also argue that nostalgia is not only the characteristic of the first rational aesthetic mutation but more often that of the prerational-Nietzschean mentality. Why would Nietzschean concepts not be articulated and why would they not bear side effects? In fact, the return of the prerational play in Nietzsche is programmatic and conceptual: a theoretical elaboration cannot be more consistently prerational than the typology it proposes. In a rigorous sense, one cannot speak of a 28 Ibid, 32. 29 See Nietzsche’s metaphor-philosophical concept from the perspective of previous quotes. In this regard, we believe that some observations about the Nietzschean type or style of conceptualization would have been appropriate in the chapter devoted to Nietzsche. 30 Ibid, 20.

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prerational concept of play even if we admit that a prerational mentality conceptualizes it in a holistic sense of knowledge. In comparison to the analysis in God of Many Names, Dionysus Reborn argues that the process of instauration of the rational mentality appears simply heuristically and even dramatized, since the focus rests on the discontinuity of the Plato-Aristotle moment. Plato and Aristotle both appear to be directly responsible for the historical process by which mimesis has evolved into a realistic (scientific or artistic) form in the nineteenth century. The distinction between “before” and “after” can be termed Foucauldian (cf. Les mots et les choses) in as much as it offers an implicit critique of a rational mentality, but according to a narrative scheme typical of another rationalism—also that of scientific progress.31 Intentionality is genealogical: Spariosu opted for a Nietzschean type of dramatization for his model. On the one hand, concepts arise in the context of the crisis of silent suppositions; on the other hand, seen from a historical angle, they are “scandalous” and that is why they become material for a hermeneutic-study. But genealogical suspicion is mainly about rational concepts, and as such, raises a number of questions. The return of prerational play could be viewed from another perspective, as a utopian rhetoric of crisis, whose conceptual plan cannot connote the fullness or rationalization of play at the level of mentality. It may even be psychoanalyzed, in the sense of demonstrating that—according to the mythological scenarios of Dionysus—it has the logic of fantasy. An analysis of the dynamics of play and the dynamics of the psyche imply, if extended, an affinity between philosophical-scientific “suppression” and the “repentance” found in psychoanalysis. The difference, however, is that the latter does not come back in the sphere of proper discourse, but as symptoms, which eventually are articulated in secondary speech, intelligible only to the analyst. b) Scientific discourse. By insisting in a historical-genealogical manner on the rational filiation of science, Spariosu proves that a second aesthetic mutation would be incomparable with the rigors and conditions of scientific discourse. This discourse, therefore, appears as a derived philosophical discourse and ignores its philosophical foundations. Starting from these premises, Dionysus Reborn bravely juxtaposes two forms of speech, surpassing what a positivistepistemological optics might consider an untapped obstacle: their heterogeneity. It is true, scientific discourse is rejected because it is a meta-discipline through which science self-interprets and re-legitimizes itself. It includes the utterances of philosophers and science historians or extraordinary scholars who can overcome the tacit nature of the paradigm (to speak in Thomas Kuhn’s terms). But Spariosu himself admits that there are discontinuities between the scientific practice of some scholars, its justification and the digressions through which it is 31 See previous remarks about “demarcationist” rhetoric.

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anchored in a cultural horizon. The determinism-indeterminism dilemma, for example, is never purely scientific. But, according to the same rationalist filiation, one could say that science itself does not have a “discourse.” From a Cartesian standpoint, it is a perfectly understandable discourse; from an anti-Cartesian standpoint (such as Feyerabend’s, for example), science can be legitimized by any discourse, including the literary or religious. In this regard, the discourse of science as Spariosu defines it, would have a little relevance to science itself. In an exchange of correspondence with Charles Taylor, twenty years after the Structure of Scientific Revolutions,32 Kuhn points out that the paradigm, although it was the hermeneutical basis of science at a given time, is implicit and therefore remains at the stage of nonhermeneutic “puzzle-solving” until, after several generations, its interpretation becomes discursive-hermeneutical. Instead, the discourse of the human sciences is hermeneutical not only through vocabulary but also because sciences are preparadigmatic. In other words, the paradigm is a kind of unconscious speech, in which the “normal” scholar by nature is enclosed. Kuhn highlights the immanence of scientific training, its similarity to language learning or, for the anthropologist of science, as an initiation into the mysteries of an exotic culture. He points out that there is a stage in which scientific concepts prove to be as much anchored in culture as in its interpretations. They describe “other” systems and they are equally ethnocentrically-violent. Of course, what Kuhn omitted to say was that, by its indeterminate character, the paradigm does not have a univocal meaning; its significance relies on descriptions or narrations in which it is evoked, coming either from the direction of Orthodox epistemologists, or, as more of for today, from the direction of human sciences. The implicit criticism of scientific rationality can be found in the courageous modernizations, such as Spariosu’s practice, that represent an example of such a hermeneutical rematch. Here, however, as the “extraordinary” scientist is often sanctioned on grounds of unrecognized ideology ; one can reproach the humanist that his script is only an interpretation. c) Literary Discourse. The Platonic decision by which, at the confluence of the two mentalities, literature is constituted in the sense of a mimesis-imitation that is sovereign to rational values, continues to bring to one’s attention, even today, the problem of the anthropological status of literature or the quest for a connection between history and human imagination. Spariosu’s answer, from the critique of this literary concept, is that real and fictional objects constitute 32 We can note here that the author, strictly following the thematic contexts, reserves Freud a rather insignificant role in the history of play, even though he would also point out other correlations with the prerational concept of play, in a context in which play is not designated as such.

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anthropological normative evidence with the same significance. But this answer is normative (or nostalgic): contextual or it is, as we suggested, a contemporary defense of poetry. Spariosu relies on literature in the contemporary play in speech. By joining Nietzsche, for whom the artist is the one who maintains a connection with the world of senses, of becoming and power, he considers that, despite the secular repression it was subjected to, art (poetry, literature) remains an indispensable element in the power game unfolded in culture as a whole. It is no longer a local return of the suppressed, but an exile beyond knowledge, for which paradoxically literature could act as a free stand-alone space or a neutral playing field where a number of models of reality and alternatives to reality can be proposed, tested, adopted or rejected. Valorizing difference as alterity and, ultimately, applying the literary approach to this Nietzschean assertion, Spariosu concludes that literary discourse alone allows rival, philosophical and scientific discourses “to be invested with the authority of knowledge and truth.”33 It is this argument that, on agonistic grounds, emphasizes the paradoxical unity of the two irreducible adversaries—in the Heideggerian sense of a dispute. In The Wreath of Wild Olive such agonistic connotations fade away : Spariosu reformulates the current dialectic of center and margins in the sense of a liminal theory inspired by the theories of Bakhtin and the anthropologist Victor Turner. What seems to be marginal by virtue of historical play offers a ludic opening to incommensurable alternative worlds: literature does not merely emphasize or reinforce the depictions of historically-existing things; it makes it possible to switch to other historical worlds. By its essential scientific nature, literature implies and transcends at the same time the socio-cultural contextualism in which it appears, adopting an “as if” perspective towards ethical norms of a given community and culture. In Dionysus Reborn, there were two concepts of als ob: a prerational one and a rational one. The theory of liminality seems to lean towards the second one: it credits literature with its cognitive function in an irenic way, as a dialogical mediator. An interpretation of philosophy and science from the perspective of the aesthetic and the literary is agonistic. It may even seem reductionist to the extent that it dislocates telos and speech norms. It does not start from the ambiguous, or even negative, cognitive status of the arts—the result of the historical suppression process—as much as the Nietzschean archetype of the world as a work of art. Significantly it seems to us that through literary discourse, Spariosu understands the discourse of texts and not their critical-aesthetic (theoretical) discourse. The distinction is similar—but in opposition—to the one we notice in the case of (meta) scientific discourse. If he were to stop at the level of discourse “about” 33 Ibid, 35.

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literature, the literary would be equally rational: genealogically speaking, literary criticism—we were once told—is a philosophical instrument invented by Plato and Aristotle to control or explain poems. Conversely, if he admits that literary literature is not a discourse, Spariosu should designate it als ob. By not doing so, he exposes himself to an epistemological paradox, establishing as a norm what remains, at most, a desideratum, in the present discursive context. The so-called antagonism between the literary and scientific-philosophical “discourses” genealogically reverses the course of history. Historically, this opposition could be confirmed by numerous examples, right from modernity. It is true, it could be confirmed by many other examples, also Spariosu chooses that of literary discourse. It can be argued, however, that in the absence of examples, literary discourse becomes an essence or a “strong concept” that sustains the agonal model. For Nietzsche, this rehabilitation through the prerational archetype was an alternative to the philosophic tradition and to Western metaphysics. The reversal of maintaining art in the rational horizon provides a critique of modernist decadence, understood as philosophical-intellectual emancipation in art. For Spariosu, the stakes seem to be the same—but in a context that cannot fully explain the philosophical tradition or artistic archetypes. Here, we reach the earlier noted discussion regarding the contemporary defense of poetry. Cognitively supporting literary discourse -through difference-, Spariosu genealogically recovers the authority of the truth that philosophy and science have always abrogated. Again, we might still caution that, by thoroughly dividing discourses, his theory pushes aside phenomena such as interference and borrowing, thereby losing the very historical or contextual character that it claims. The cooperation of philosophy, science, and art is basically a cultural constant as important as their antagonism. Inter-discursive exchanges, circumvented by convention in an agonistic dramatization, could explain equally well—eventually as a complementary model—what the dynamics of elements submerging or resurfacing already suggests without their being rigorously conceptualized (as Freud himself recognizes, the Freudian topic remains a metaphor with local validity). In addition to the idea of complementarity, one could also question what art produces, through its structures, immanence, and the cognitive syntheses to justify its epistemological hierarchies.34 Thus, risking another paradox, we would say that, although the cognitive dignity of art tends not to be valued today (lacking a philosophical system that is altruistic enough to assume the task), postmodernism also does not adequately rehabilitate poetry. *** 34 See for instance, the concept of the chef-d-oeuvre as “epistemological metaphor” that elaborates in Open Work.

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Narrating an “open” history, Dionysus Reborn… does not admit definitive critical conclusions. The issue of discourse and concepts directly involves us as individuals and as representatives of discourses or, as is often said today, “competent” (a euphemism of rational power, or of signatures, as Derrida would say). The Nietzschean view of play was that of the total turnaround, with a prophetic or utopian dimension. Spariosu’s “Viconian or Nietzschean” model indicates a perspective that refers to an indefinable alternation between prerational and rational dualism that, sooner or later, is predictable, as the irenic alternative already points out. In the present study- part of an inexhaustible project—Spariosu opted for the Nietzschean approach to play as a manifestation of power and as an allusion to the realm of art. This perspective provides a pertinent critique of modernity and suggests a radical interrogation of the present moment. Considering our synthesis of Dionysus Reborn as a modern history of play concepts, we will finally formulate a few questions which, in light of a certain theoretical discourse, have the tone of critical objections and represent the reflexive contribution of a translator, regarding the translated text. Our questions concern play, the possibility of diagnosing mentalities and the heuristic relationship with the Nietzschean model, all through the prerational/ rationale distinction. 1. Play and rules. By opting for a Nietzschean sense of play as a manifestation of power, Spariosu considers that order, structure, or rules of play are rational. This idea offers a response to philosophers or scholars (Schiller, Gadamer, Spencer, Gross, Piaget, etc.) who dissociate play as in the case of Huizinga. Thus, although Spariosu seems to maintain the plurality of play concepts and their rational-prerational symmetry, the genealogical accent implicitly leads to the “prerational” play in relation to “games” (see play-games distinction). One should notice the privilege of an indefinite and global phenomenon over determined phenomena—both formal and historical alike. From this point of view, Spariosu owes a debt of gratitude to Nietzsche, but also to “metaphysical artists.” From the concept of ideal play (Deleuze) or free play (Derrida), Spariosu assumes the notion of a pure, original ludic (as opposed to “normal”) play, guided by rules which are the mere imitations of non-honest models (economic, moral, etc.). Such transcendent distinctions make us wonder whether the rules are indeed “rational,” as a restrictive code. Huizinga, for example, would object, along with any ethnologist, that play in archaic cultures—similar to poetry or art—exhibits repetitiveness and a rigid formalization that we cannot attribute to primitive ad hoc rationalism. The Nietzschean hypothesis of art and play relates to the world of the senses and as such is denied by the morphological analyzes of Worringer, as well as by anthropologists such as Leroi-Gourhan, gestalt-type analysis of the figurative (R. Arnheim) and the semiotic analyses of Lotman on the aesthetics of identity. The further we progress, the structure of play ritual

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appears more rigorous, repetitive, and abstract. From another perspective, the Lacanian analysis of infant play reveals, through the concept of repetitive automatism, that the laws of danger are those of symbolic determination.35 Jean Baudrillard, who criticized Deleuze’s ideal play, argues that abusively disjointed play is usually nothing but a utopia.36 The rule is conventional, and not motivated as in the case of the Saussurian sign convention, it simply offers the opportunity for play to forge a dual space where chance does not exist. From this perspective, the intensity of playing or player’s passion cannot be conceived beyond the rules and repetitions that fascinate precisely because they oppose the laws that usually govern existence. According to various authors, the structure or rules of play seem to persist, not in terms of a late rationality, but because of the constitutive constraints of the symbolic, which precede the prerational-rational distinction, independently of how well-founded Spariosu’s criticism on “rationalist aesthetics” might be. Rules do not necessarily impose equivalence of structure and rationality. This equivalence is required in Dionysus Reborn as an effect of maintaining the analysis at a conceptual level. 2. The agonal paradox. How is it possible that meditation triumphs over the immediate manifestation or, in other words, why does the conflictual mentality come out of this fight? When framing this perspective, Spariosu lends agonalviolent features to the rational mentality that make it perfectly homologous to the prerational (see for example, the fragment about the archaic hypostases of Athens in the chapter devoted to Schiller). But in all likelihood—and as the analysis of God of Many Names shows—the confrontation between the two mentalities was not dramatic, not consumed between two face-to-face presences, but between a presence already split (the direct power) and a more subtle principle, in absentia, of some type of law or concept. The Nietzschean metaphor of struggle does not retain this difference in the scriptural economy—that is, this difference destroys the archaic economy of the highest law. For the same reasons, the act by which Plato and Aristotle regain the poetic-aristocratic mentality through a sort of separation of internal division, fixing mimesis-play in mimesisimitation that can be attributed to someone other and not in a genealogicalmetaphorical way. In this respect, despite the differences in method, when referring to archaic cultures or prerational mentality, Spariosu and Huizinga offer a sort of holistic horizon in which poetic representation covers “the whole order of existence.”37 Is the prerational play concept, in turn, idealized?

35 Jacques Lacan, “L’inconscient et la repetition,” in Seminaire: Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 36 Jean Baudrillard. De la Seduction (Paris: Denoel, 1989). 37 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 53.

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3. Nietzsche’s legacy. Spariosu’s hermeneutics does not conceal his filiation with the Nietzschean concept of interpretation, understood as a form of the will to power and generalized on the scale of culture as a whole. Marcel Cornis-Pope appreciates how the model developed in Dionysus Reborn is “a model of mediabased significance” that Spariosu would oppose to traditional models of agon and power. This critical point of view does not resonate well with the ontology of the Wettspiel’s and with the theory of interpretation—both Nietzschean—it is my contention, become norms for the evaluation of other discourses. “Meditation” would be the feature of the first Schillerian aesthetic mutation, in which play is given this role in the field of philosophy. In the chapter devoted to Nietzsche, Spariosu insists on the polemic that Nietzsche’s philosophy should be (re)interpreted from a consistent prerational perspective that he establishes, after having abandoned labels such as “voluntarism,” “nihilism,” or “cognitive relativism.” Moreover, his case studies indicate the point where certain authors (Feyerabend, for example), although starting from Nietzschean premises, abandon their argument in the name of Nietzschean radicalism. There are inevitable tensions between Nietzsche as a philosophic model and the exigencies of an historical model. Elsewhere, Spariosu approaches Nietzsche is a more nuanced way ; and there is a certain critical distancing. In the preface to the God of Many Names for example, this model is presented as appropriate to describe the “fundamental unity of Western mentality” without idealizations or denigration, “diagnosing” the various “metaphysical forms in which the Nietzschean will to power materialized themselves in the Western world.” Nietzsche would propose, as Spariosu notes, an opening beyond the horizon of the two power-centered mentalities. Spariosu acknowledges his indebtedness to Nietzsche on the “heuristic” level, but also his desire to overcome the concept of willpower : for him, power does not have the ontological priority or that supreme existential value that it has for Nietzsche … it is only one possible path, not necessarily the best way for people to construct the world or to relate to the world. In the chapter on Nietzsche in the Wreath of Wild Olive (centered on the Genealogy of Morals) Spariosu shows that an ethical alternative cannot be based on the “volunteer” type of thinking, not on a rationalist one, but on an irrational mentality. In this case, one wonders whether his distancing from Nietzsche does not contradict his heuristic indebtedness and insistence that Nietzschean philosophy be interpreted from its own perspective? The contradiction does not obviously arise only from any prudent-circumstantial reserve; it comes from its unique historical approach.The fact that the denunciation of power is always the direct work of power can be assumed as a given by Nietzsche’s critics, but not by historians of culture. An analysis of power placed beyond the power game or beyond interpretation would be rejected by Nietzsche as an avatar of the “will to truth.”

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4. Rational vs. prerational. This study concludes with the idea of the agon forever undecided between rational and prerational values: quite a general conclusion, especially if we relate it to the dithyrambic-prophetic tone of the Nietzschean model. In the end, we can decipher the necessary compromise between a Nietzschean genealogy and the exigencies of historical meta-narrative. We would say that Nietzsche offers adequate tools to dramatize discontinuities and conflicts, but his tools are inappropriate for any synthesis of cultural history, no matter how “enriched” the model may be. Spariosu’s welldocumented journey seems in some cases threatened by a certain allegoric dualism that excludes overturning the situation or strengthening the recurrence of historical becoming. Ultimately, the terms “rational” and “prerational” might ask for a reconceptualization; otherwise, where could one reach the certainty that their confrontation remains open-ended. The concept of “prerational mentality” seems especially problematic, since it exceeds too easily the hermeneutical threshold that such a mentality demands. One gets the impression that, in some cases, its invocation is analogous, tending towards an overturned projection of local rationality (or what its name might unravel) and philosophical negativity (rather than historical alterity). To what extent can such a concept be embedded in a historical model if we admit that our notion of history is itself fundamentally marked by rationality? In changing the perspective embedded in the “irenic,” we can consider approaching Dionysus Reborn not only thematically, but also methodologically and philosophically. Thus, with all its unmediated and “real” cultural consequences, Dionysus Reborn represents perhaps more a constant of our imaginary than a historical process with a determined d8nouement. God of Many Names reveals its ambiguous, hallucinatory essence because it does not leave room for metaphorical or paradigmatic conceptualization and modeling. Spariosu’s work offers valuable genealogical suggestions for the ever-changing process of the current discourse of philosophy and science. Thus, it becomes one of the most coherent answers, admirable mostly for the risks it assumes in analyzing the complex issues of power. Translated by Corina-Mihaela Beleaua

Vlad B. Jecan

Chapter 5: Towards Irenic Mixed Reality: An Experiment in Play and the Cybernetic Imagination

In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith named Mihai I. Spariosu one of the “truly great twentieth-century play theorists” alongside Johan Huizinga and Robert Fagen.1 Spariosu’s study of play is not limited to the formal characteristics of games or specific conducts of the play-element. Instead, for Spariosu play is amphibolous, in gray areas where nothing is settled but, nevertheless, manifests itself in our phenomenal world, in rational and prerational mentalities and irenic and violent games. While we have a sense of play, our difficulty in defining it rests in the possibility that play transcends our logical or illogical categories and is, therefore, “unthinkable.”2 Cyberspace is said to be “a tool for examining our sense of reality.”3 However, current research and popular impressions of our digital future do not necessarily offer dispassionate evaluations of cyberspace in rapport to reality but portray a pessimistic, dark future. For an unknown reason, we agree that the replacement of reality by virtual worlds is inevitable and expect, to a point of accepting defeat, that robots will take over the world while our future is bound to resemble a cyberpunk dystopia. In this essay, through deploying Spariosu’s evaluations of play to the cybernetic imagination in a series of science fiction stories, we attempt to inquire into the possibility of mixed reality. Of course, this discussion is quite complex, difficult, and hardly able to address all relevant issues and questions at this point, but it is through the influence of Mihai I. Spariosu’s works that I have arrived at these concerns and I find no other place better suited for this scholarly experiment. This essay is not intended to summarize Spariosu’s research on play, which can be consulted in his books, Literature, Mimesis and Play (1982), Dionysus Reborn (1989), God of Many Names (1991), and The Wreath of Wild Olive (1997), 1 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), ix. 2 Mihai I. Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 2–3. 3 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 82.

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but to deploy his theory of play to study the tension between cyberspace and physical reality. In doing so, we will inevitably depart significantly, but not entirely, from the technology and digital services available today that are enabled through cyberspace to propose a new direction of thinking about digital technology outside notions concerning its replacement. Furthermore, we will have to move away completely from discussing contemporary attempts to regulate cyberspace and ideological perspectives on the topic, as additional references to plays of power are hardly necessary.

Play of Replacement In a short story, The Veldt (1950), Ray Bradbury imagines a special room where “you send out your thoughts” and “whatever you want would appear.”4 Therefore, the individual, being completely in control of the room, is always able to choose what to imagine. “Veldt” is a term referring to an open field characteristically of southern Africa. Its clever deployment in this story lies in the fact that the Germanic root of the word means “field” but for an English reader it sounds as the German word “Welt,” which means world. Therefore, the room is a metaphor for an artificial world in a perpetual state of emergence due to constant input from human imagination. The room, sometimes referred to as “the nursery” is an addition to the house of our protagonists, a typical family, but it gradually starts to erode familial bonds to a point that children utilize the room itself to murder their parents who intended to shut it down. In the end, the technology presented in the story, with its ability to replicate items from reality, was left to users who inevitably, it appears, proceeded to guard the artificial world from the threats of replacement by the old, traditionally and seemingly distant reality. This procedure of “human creates—creation kills human” is certainly not new. Also known as the Frankenstein Complex, it even precedes the famous novel by Mary Shelley. For example, Goethe romanticized Prometheus as the maker of man in defiance of Zeus. The successive renewal of the Greek pantheon itself is a case in point: Zeus defeats Chronos, then Prometheus defines him by giving humanity the tools of self-sufficiency only for them to declare that God is dead and now await their own inevitable replacement by artificial intelligence. While oversimplified, this tendency is a constant form of violent play, with the obvious outcome of replacement, in the development of civilization. For Johan Huizinga, play as contest generates the parameters for the development of culture. Brian Sutton-Smith notes that “Huizinga’s position is that there is a morphological 4 Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt,” in Simulations, ed. Karie Jacobson (New York: Citadel P, 1993), 9.

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parallelism between playful contests and the actual contestive conduct of politics, the law, scholarship, and the arts. The forms of culture arise, he says, in such playful antitheses.”5 While Spariosu, too, acknowledges the ordering potential of play in developing coherent cultures as rational play, he also suggests play as disorder. In Modernism and Exile (2015), he writes that Huizinga’s “most important contribution to a theory of culture as play is to have drawn attention, in the wake of Nietzsche, to the fact that violent contest, such as war, is a favored cultural form of play in Western civilization.”6 In addition, Spariosu relates the play concept to the history of Western mentality which “has always fluctuated between various rational and prerational sets of values,”7 but agonistic play remains constant. In Archaic Greece, Spariosu notes, play is “inextricably linked to the notion of immediate physical force, as in such words as agon and athlon—gradually loses its link until it becomes paidia, a word that initially denotes only the harmless play of children and then becomes, in Plato, a philosophical term for nonviolent cultural play in general.”8 In the Homeric epics, play resembles moments when heroes seek out aristeia (a war game) to display arete (virtue). During this play, they become “charmed” (from charme, battle-lust) with the adrenaline of battle. However, the Iliad also presents moments when agonistic play is suspended during various ritual and leisure games such as the funeral rites of fallen warriors and public events.9 In the Odyssey, the king of Ithaca temporarily replaces his warrior identity with that of a “country gentleman, which indicates a shift of values from unscrupulous cunning to becoming a peace-loving negotiator.”10 Hesiod who, according to Spariosu, is “one of the first thinkers to promote median values in the Hellenic world”11 deploys elements of agonistic values of physical prowess to question them and offer alternatives, as irenic values. These values are also present in Heraclitus: “time is a game played beautifully by children.”12 Mechthild Nagel observes through appealing to Spariosu’s God of Many Names (1991) that in this game “an agonism drives the rules.” In the 5 Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 78. 6 Mihai I. Spariosu, Modernism and Exile: Play, Liminality, and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 21. 7 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, ix. 8 Ibid, 6. 9 Mihai I. Spariosu, God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 23. 10 Mechthild Nagel, Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (New York: Lexington, 2002), 10. 11 Spariosu, God of Many Names, 37. 12 Heraclitus, Fragments. The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Viking, 2001), 79. For example: “The poet was a fool who wanted to conflict among us, gods or people. Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman,” or “War, as father of all things, and king, names few to serve as gods, and the rest makes these men slaves, those free.”

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Homeric epics, too, while play departs occasionally from violent contest, agon looms closely in the background. In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates is a playful philosopher. This type of paidia is the result of the ever-present eros as education and eros that unites sensitivity, poetry and rhetoric.13 In the Republic, Plato connects play, mimesis and drama as well as the serious business of philosophy and “nowhere is the blend of seriousness and play better suited to the purpose than in the discussion of mimesis, which is play par excellence.”14 However, the dangers of mimesis need to be addressed through the regulation of mousike, the “art of the Muses,” that is the ability imparted by the Muses to create art, dancing, poetry, and music.15 Play, therefore, should be kept safe from the dangers of non-values and non-truth. In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and the Thirty Tyrants, Plato wants to separate agon from the virtue of aristoi where violent contest is the preferred form of arete. Spariosu writes that “Socrates retains the concept of play as agon in his ideal state, but in a logo-rational, nonviolent form reminiscent of Hesiod’s good eris (strife).”16 In doing so, Socrates develops mousike in terms of logorational play rather than violent, physical contest. Spariosu observes that Socrates’ overall intention is to cleanse play from violence and replace it in the realm of the logo-rational to reintroduce play as an important tool for education in his ideals state. According to Spariosu, Plato challenges “vainglory,” personal achievement as violent agon.17 Ultimately, true arete can only be achieved through proper philosophical inquiry rather than through prowess in battle. In Western culture, agon is traceable in various instances of power plays. In Dionysys Reborn, Spariosu mentions that play is rather ambiguous and difficult to define but it is, nevertheless, “das stumme Wissen,” tacit knowledge easily recognized by the observer. Indeed, power is silent too. Power is recognizable but we are unable to define it properly. Spariosu, then, suggests that play and power have always been interpreted through a “divided nature” of prerational and rational mentalities. Power, in its prerational mentality is violent contest, almost always involving immediate physical force. Authority, therefore, rests on physical strength or cunning intelligence in the presence of violence, as portrayed through Achilles and Odysseus. Within a rational mentality, however, “power does not present but rather re-presents itself, being increasingly mediated and shared. Authority depends less on strength than on intellectual ability or on

13 Paul Plass, “‘Play’ and Philosophic Detachment in Plato,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 98 (1967), 358. 14 Max Statkiewicz, “Rigor and Play in the ‘Republic,’” MLN 115.5 (December 2000), 1024–25. 15 Ibid, 299–301. 16 Spariosu, God of Many Names, 171. 17 Spariosu, God of Many Names, 182.

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knowledge and truth.”18 Moral values, law and justice are reformulated throughout time in terms of prerational or rational mentalities. For example, in a prerational mentality, law corresponds to the principle of might makes right. The principle of might makes right always implies the use of violence, revenge and retribution. In a rational mentality, however, might and right exist concomitantly. Within this mentality, we discover the separation between power and justice and the moral responsibility of the individual towards the community. In the prerational mentality, learning and knowledge remain in the practice of physical education and craftsmanship while mousike, the arts, music, and poetry, holds a background position. In the rational culture, on the other hand, knowledge is divided into philosophy, history, rhetoric, and natural science.19 Play is idealized and aligned with the sentimental notion of a “golden age” in a prerational mentality while rational mentality separates play from both unmediated or “innocent” power and raw violence. “It sees play as a form of mediation between what is now repressed and the “irrational” (the chaotic conflict of physical forces, the disorderly eruption of violent emotion, the unashamed gratification of the physical senses, etc.) and controlling Reason, or the Will to Order.”20 Indeed, as we have said before, the Homeric epics define arete as violent contest that sets the ethical standards of aristoi (aristocrats). In the view of Spariosu, “although it is usually translated as “virtue” or “excellence,” cunning “is the main agonistic virtue needed in the assembly, physical prowess is the main arete needed on the battlefield, and aristeia is the most important means by which the hero can display this arete.”21 Again, in Plato’s project, true virtue is not displayed in battle, but through dialectics. Nietzsche proposes to return to an archaic mentality of power and reconsider value judgements of good and evil. Spariosu observes that “Nietzsche distinguishes between the valuation set of good and bad and that of good and evil, contending that these sets have divergent historical sources. The first set belongs to the aristocratic code of conduct, or a “master ethics,” while the second is the outcome of a rancorous “slave ethics.” For Nietzsche, however, both these ethics have upperclass origins, being different manifestations of the same Will to Power.”22 These mentalities are constantly competing for dominance. What one holds true and honorable the other abhors. However, Spariosu notes that what Nietzsche disparagingly calls a “slave ethics” can neutrally be called a median morality, the aim of which is to restrain and moderate the often self-destructive,

18 19 20 21 22

Ibid, 7. Ibid, 8. Ibid, 12. Spariosu, God of Many Names, 9. Mihai I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive (Albany : SUNY P, 1997), 4.

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violent competitiveness of warlike communities.”23 Both of these mentalities are present at all times regardless of social class and constraints. Therefore, Nietzsche’s intention to replace a median mentality with an archaic one is bound to fail “as Nietzsche unwittingly proves by his own breakdown in Turin, it is easier, from the viewpoint of power, to teach a cat to behave like a mouse, than a mouse to behave like a cat.”24 Perhaps we can understand that our capitulation to intelligent machines and cyberspace is just another reiteration of agonistic play set this time more into the playground of the logo-rational. If we do not find a way out or around violent contest, then the expectations of replacement that we imagine will be inevitably acted out through science. However, cyberspace also provides the tools to reimagine our future in different parameters that do not involve our forced exile into artificial worlds but encourage us to proceed towards a mixed reality where the virtual may serve humanity. The task is tremendously difficult. Spariosu advises that we need to consider that it is hard to imagine the existence, even the possibility, of an irenic alternative when our historical experience reveals the opposite. Even if we could recognize that alternative, we do not have the proper language to describe it in order to convince us of its existence.25 With this in mind, we can proceed as if something (authentic irenic worlds, for example) known outside our world of power, even though that something may be incommensurable with our own knowledge. Venturing outside our circle of knowledge would not mean denying the worlds we live in or dismissing them as “delusions” in a Buddhist, Christian, or Schopenhauerian manner. Rather, it would mean gradually moving away from them or turning our back on them, as it were. And we can begin moving away only when our imagination accepts the possibility of worlds outside those with which we are already familiar. Once we entertain rather than exclude this possibility, new worlds and new values will slowly emerge as we muddle along. […] But if what we do follows from what we are (operari sequitur esse), it is no less true that what we are follows from what we do. Once we change our actions, thoughts, and feelings, we also change our nature or what we are. Nothing can stop us from creating ourselves anew, from producing alternative values and, consequently, new worlds, if we become dissatisfied with our old ones.26

Cyberspace and virtual reality give us this opportunity. Cyberspace is a “metaphysical laboratory” that provides the necessary liminal space to evaluate the ethics of living the moral life with emerging technology. It is “Platonism as a working product”27 that enables complete immersion into an artificial world in 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid, 6. Ibid, 23. Ibid, 25. Ibid, 26–27. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 89.

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perpetual emergence through human imagination. We can, then, choose to reproduce our agonistic games and solely consider it the “fifth battlespace” and proceed with our attempts to conquer and destroy or acknowledge its additional potential to simulate and model peaceful alternatives. For example, in cyberspace we can produce viable models of intercultural harmony and conflict utilizing observable historical data to understand the causes and preferences of cultural dialogue.28 In addition, the digital humanities have tools and methods to observe ideological and cultural interactions in contemporary social media. Facebook, with the tremendous amount of personal data collected from its users, may reveal unknown processes of intercultural dialogue of a global scale. Therefore, we do have the means to produce new worlds and experiment with alternative values.

Plays of Replacement: The Matrix and The Machine Stops The Matrix offers perhaps the clearest example of violent play of replacement, in cyberspace and through virtual reality. Of course, the film has numerous interpretations through generous metaphors that can be reviewed through various political and ethical perspectives. The question of reality, however, is most prevalent. After all, Morpheus, the god of dreams, asks Neo, an anagram for the One, “What is real?” The other major idea in the film concerns the inevitable replacement of humanity by sentient machines that have found it necessary to turn people into sources of energy if both man and machine want to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist, a hacker who goes by the alias Neo, is retrieved from artificial reality and set into the real world. Throughout the film, the characters “jack in” the Matrix for various operations in the ongoing battle against the machines. “Jacking in” is the usual process of entering cyberspace in cyberpunk literature and marks the separation of the real world of the other, artificial reality. The actions of the characters and the constant fighting with machines in both simulated and real worlds put forward the violent play of replacement. The 28 The results of a research project led by Mihai I. Spariosu that sought the possibility of computer models of intercultural contact in borderland regions have been published in the volume Intercultural Conflict and Harmony in the Central European Borderlands (Göttingen: V& R unipress, 2017). On the subject of the digital humanities and intercultural studies, see Vlad Jecan and Radu Meza, “Co–Citation Mapping and the Intercultural Dialogue of the Intellectual Communities in Arad and Timisoara” in that work, 355–67, and Vlad Jecan and Radu Meza, “Concept Mapping of Ideological Positioning in Cultural and Political Periodicals in the Interbellum Cluj,” Romanian Journal of Information Science and Technology 16.2–3 (2013): 237–50.

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people living in the real world, in the subterranean city of Zion, do not attempt to hack the machines, either in the Matrix or in “the desert of the real,” with the intention to rebuild the planet, but instead they try to eradicate them and reestablish human dominance in the (real) world. It is, therefore, a violent contest of power for power itself. The machines do not do anything else but to behave according to the inputs of the human creator. It would be impossible to expect benevolent machines when their design principle is predicated on violent contest. The real world, as a result, is irrelevant and can be very well a simulation itself. Cyberspace is a simulation and it is assumed to be meaningless. Moreover, it is thought that it may erode the possibility of meaning. Jean Baudrillard’s nihilism in Simulacra and Simulation, which has inspired the Wachowskies to create The Matrix, is a simple negation of the potential of digital technology guised in cryptic language. He writes that “by crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra.”29 The simulation, then, in an effort of replacement, becomes the substitution of the real to a point that “never again will the real have a chance to produce itself.”30 The conclusion is that we no longer live in reality. It is a good point in favor of the simulation argument, which finds no compelling reason not to assume that our reality is a computer simulation.31 In the end, it is irrelevant whether our reality is a computer simulation or not; it is the only reality that we have. And even if we are in a computer simulation, Baudrillard’s position betrays the same agonistic fear of replacement that drives the Matrix. If we can code such complex artificial worlds, then why not use this opportunity to move toward irenic values rather than complain nostalgically about the loss of reality? It would be wise for us to adapt to new digital technologies and seriously consider the ethical possibilities of our emerging mixed reality, in which we already live to some degree. In 1909, E. M. Forster begins his influential short story The Machine Stops with a call to “imagine, if you can” a room carved deep beneath the surface big enough to host a single individual. No furniture is necessary, other than a comfortable armchair and a control panel in the form of a reading desk. Music is playing in the room without instruments or players. Suddenly, an “electric bell” rings pulling the protagonist Vashti out of comfort. When she accepts the call 29 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor : U Michigan P, 1994), 2. 30 Ibid, 2. 31 Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53.211 (April 2003): 243–55.

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from her son, a blurry image of Kuno is projected in front of her. Vashti is connected simultaneously to thousands of other users but isolates herself to give no more than five minutes of her full attention to her son. Indeed, Forster writes at the beginning of the twentieth century about what is common today. Kuno asks his mother to visit him in person so they could talk about the future of the Machine. Vashti, irritated, tells her son that physical interaction is “contrary to the spirit of the age” to which Kuno replies “Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?”32 The Machine provides music, clothing, or “marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with swarm deodorized liquid” and even literature, at the touch of a button. The Machine can animate a room, “though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she [Vashti] cared for in the world.”33 Life on the surface is impossible. Similar to The Matrix, the causes may be environmental. People retreated underneath the earth and through the digital services of the Machine they can sit comfortably in their armchairs and engage in virtual conferences in the pursuit of abstract ideas and humanities studies. Troubled with the request to visit Kuno, and more concerned with her upcoming lecture on music, the protagonist picks up an instruction manual, the Book of the Machine, and finds herself in prayer, “O Machine! O Machine,” for a solution to this problem. “Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence,” Forster writes. The environmental disaster that caused people to retreat in chambers beneath the ground to survive sets humanity on the path to “defeat the sun.” Successful, “dawn, midday, twilight, the zodiacal path, touched neither men’s lives nor their hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate herself upon problems that she was certain of solving.”34 In consequence, exploration and experimentation, the quintessential ludic elements of progress and the delightful irrational curiosity of “what if” have been removed. Physical stagnation is revealed from the beginning, but now, when Kuno calls out his mother for worshiping the Machine, stagnation infests the logo-rational as well. All humanity partakes in the global simulation created by the Machine which imports features of agon into the logo-rational. The Machine of E. M. Forster successfully removed “all the fear and the superstition that existed once” but it took their place. Once in complete control, the Machine selects the newborns apt to live in confined spaces and dispenses of infants who show athletic potential. Kuno, a highly energetic boy who managed to evade the selection process, is 32 E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” in The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 149. 33 Ibid, 150. 34 Ibid, 160.

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driven by curiosity to see what lies above the surface. Thus, he makes his way through the “artificial light” of the Machine and rejoices in the gaps of darkness placed “beyond its power.” Upon his confession of his doings to his mother, Vashti reacts, as expected. She exiles her son. She is ashamed that Kuno, who once had the “right” ideas, now attempts to venture to the surface and discover the possibility of life on Earth, outside the control of the Machine. His behavior is interpreted by Vashti as delinquency and she sees his hope for a time when humanity may return to the surface as heresy. However, the Machine gradually exhibits signs of malfunction, perhaps due to Kuno’s interventions. “The Machine stops,” Kuno tells his mother. But humanity is bound to fall with the Machine: “Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven,”35 Forster writes. Kuno is unable to grasp an alternative future for humanity than annihilation. Since it cannot live without the Machine, the agonistic, power dependent mentality sees the glorious death in battle against the Machine as the only suitable action. Either humanity is in control or the Machine controls humanity. So, Kuno’s sacrifice makes sense and he becomes a hero. He simply does not have the language to imagine an alternative, since his view of the future rests on impressions of the past that lead to a future that will be antagonistic to the Machine. In other words, given the opportunity of building an alternative to facilitate an irenic mixed reality, Kuno acts in a manner similar to his mother when she denounced her son for not pursuing the right ideas. In the end, the Machine revealed the formation of two antagonistic mentalities, each engaged in the replacement of the other. In a different outcome, outside of the agonistic play of replacement, Kuno would have seen the potential of cyberspace emerging through the intellectual input of its global users. A similar attitude is identified by Spariosu in the epic of Gilgamesh. The hero ignores the potential of the Netherworld, to live in between the world of the living and the world of the gods, where he meets the survivor of the Great Flood, Noah and his family, and instead returns to Uruk “and seeks the only type of “immortality” that the power-oriented, modern consciousness can understand, that is, the grandiose architectural projects that celebrate or “immortalize” the mightiness of their creators.”36 But are irenic alternatives even conceivable? In the sense of Meno’s paradox in Plato, how can one search for something that is unknown? 35 Ibid, 196. 36 Spariosu, Modernism and Exile, 50.

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Irenic Alternatives: Story of Your Life, Ready Player One and the Quantum Relations Principle The possibility of alternatives to play of replacement and the discovery of the appropriate language for this endeavor, has been explored by Ted Chiang in Story of Your Life, adapted as Arrival (2016) in the film by Denis Villeneuve. In this short story, visiting aliens try to establish communication with humanity. The aliens called “heptapods” because their bodies “looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs”37 speak an unknown language and have different rapports to concepts that we take for granted.38 As one can imagine, world governments react with suspicion and worry, expecting imminent military invasion. For example, a linguist in Ft. Worth interacting frequently with the aliens notes that “[w]e’ve been through this with the heptapods many times. They maintain that they’re here to observe, and they maintain that information is not tradable,” Mr. Hossner, a representative from the State Department, reveals the agonistic element by responding “So they would have us believe” […] “That may be a tactical maneuver on their part.” When the protagonist explains that the situation is not about our gain and their loss or vice versa and that mutual benefit for both humanity and aliens is achievable, this interpretation becomes inconceivable for the power-driven mindset. This issue is better portrayed in the movie adaptation when the world is a step away from global war due to aliens promising to give a “weapon.” In the film, governments prepare accordingly : each is deeply suspicious of the other’s intentions, expecting spies, destruction, and death. Upon receiving news of a “weapon,” the Chinese military prepares for a war to defend humanity. However, interpretation of the “weapon” appears to me to be similar to the misinterpretation of the word “sword” in Matthew 10:34 when Jesus says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In the Biblical context, the sword is not a tool of war but represents the struggle faced by Christians in ceasing violent contest and seeking to “love your enemies” (Luke 6:27). Once the protagonist understands the language of the heptapods, a change of mentality occurs as well. Suddenly, alternative irenic worlds are possible: “Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.”39 The aliens are able to communicate multidimensionally, knowing 37 Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” in Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 97. 38 Ibid, 118. 39 Ibid, 134.

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the beginning and the end of the sentence, its original intent and outcome, the past, present and the future. They act out their speech, even if they know the future, they can be only certain of it if they act it out. If there is anything that Ted Chiang’s story and Arrival tell us it is that irenic alternatives are attainable. Reality need not be antagonistic to virtual reality. Such is the case in Ready Player One. The story is set in a not-so-distant future where Oasis, the creation of James Halliday, a free-to-play massive multiplayer online game without rules or limitations, is one step away from replacing reality altogether. Wade Watts, the protagonist, known as Parzival or Z online, informs us that “[p]eople came to the Oasis for all the things they can do. People stay for what they can be.” In the dystopian offline world of Ready Player One, people are severely limited in their options of economic prosperity and retreat to the comfort of virtual reality. However, troubled by the effects of the Oasis, James Halliday leaves an intriguing challenge for the players: find the hidden three keys to unlock the “Easter egg,” an item of tremendous power in the game, and turn Oasis off. Initially, Parzival plays the game as everyone else, with the desire to find the keys and receive the in-game rewards, which include a significant amount of money. The film introduces us to Art3mis, a competent player and Parzival’s love interest who desires to shut down the Oasis so people can tend to the real world. The first challenge is a race and, as expected, the players believe that whoever is able to overcome the obstacles and finish first will receive the key as a prize for winning. This premise makes sense only from an agonistic, play-as-contest mentality. However, Parzival’s meticulous research of Halliday’s memories stored in an interactive archive in the Oasis reveals that the way to get the key is not by winning the race first, but by simply driving in the opposite direction. Indeed, the other players can understand only play as contest. For the second challenge, Parzival and friends focus on the most meaningful part of Halliday’s life, a regret of “the step not taken” in pursuing his love for Kira. Love, in this instance, is a reminder of things truly important. Love is a game played not to win. It is a non-zero-sum game where both players win. The final challenge is a struggle to play against and, simultaneously, with the mentality of replacement. However, to receive the third key, the player must not seek to defeat the game but to enjoy the game itself.40 As Wade puts it: “it is not about winning. It is about playing.” In the aftermath of their success, Parzival, Art3mis and friends need to decide what to do with the Oasis. In the mindset of replacement, the choice would be similar to that of Kuno or Neo, the Oasis should be shut down and the victory of reality over the artificial world proclaimed. The group, instead, decides to turn 40 Vlad B. Jecan, “Ready Player One and the Truce Between Realities,” The Classic City Review (forthcoming).

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off the Oasis for two days per week so that humanity can attend to the offline world. This decision, while modest is nevertheless significant and marks a first step in the adoption of a mixed reality. Cyberspace resembles many of the features of communication in Story of Your Life and play in Ready Player One. After all, cyberspace enables the retrieval of information and knowledge from the past, present, and possibly from the future as well, and in multimedia formats. What is required is a new theoretical direction for coding irenic experiments in cyberspace. This new theory needs to offer a new view of reality, one that situate itself in the liminal space between physical reality and virtual reality with the ability of drawing from both. In The Quantum Relations Principle, Mihai I. Spariosu and co-author Hardy F. Schloer, provide a new theory that “brings together, in transdisciplinary fashion, the study of physical phenomena with that of mental and social phenomena, on the assumption of the underlying unity of all phenomena.”41 The Quantum Relations Principle (QR) departs from a singular view of reality proposing instead that “nothing exists independently in our universe and that reality arises primarily not as permanent constituted objects and entities, but as dynamic networks of relations among objects and entities that are in a state of continuous flux.”42 QR , therefore, allows us to learn from the simultaneous account of recorded experience of multiple actors in cyberspace. In QR, reality is not given nor static, but changeable and generated by the perpetual interactions of systems. These systems can be physical or mental, real or artificial. The authors note that “our universe generates an enormous, perhaps, infinite number of systems embedded within our systems. […] QR assumes that systems are what they do.”43 Therefore, the Quantum Relations Principle is the optimal coding theory for our irenic cybernetic imagination. In QR, we do not require a point of entry, such as “jacking in”; it assumes that systems interact regardless of their physical or artificial nature. What counts is the interactions of the properties and methods of the systems. In QR, cyberspace can be defined as a “superstructure,” a conglomerate of numerous QR objects, which are, in turn, sets of interactors exhibiting the properties of social entities, such as people, institutions, and countries, as well as concepts, habits, preferences, memories and other mental objects. Objects interact with one another in what the authors define as “Data Fusion Objects” (DFOs), “because these objects “fuse” two different characteristics: properties and methods.” For example, a house has multiple properties from its number of 41 Hardy F. Schloer and Mihai I. Spariosu, The Quantum Relations Principle: Managing our Future in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Göttingen: V& R unipress, 2016), 23. 42 Ibid, 24. 43 Ibid, 24.

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floors or windows, location, street address and also various methods of usage including heating, unlocking the door and so on.44 The “superstructure” provides the rules for the interactions of the objects within it. Objects interact with the superstructure and with DFOs, as well as with other superstructures. In other words, QR posits itself between virtual and physical reality while being present simultaneously in both. In effect, QR is applied amphibolous play as a working product, and through determining the rules of frames of references (FOR) for the interactions of the QR objects and DFOs, we can experiment with virtual reality to model fusions of properties and methods of observable cultural data that may generate new rules, some perhaps contrary to the initial ones, and new models without additional input. In QR, “everything arises contingent on conditions or events, understood in both physical and a mental sense. Things do not possess an unchanging, abiding essence. They arise co-dependently, so that physical reality can be described only in terms of relations among objects, entities, and self-organizing systems, nestled within each other and within our universe. In turn, our universe is nestled within larger universes or relational frameworks.”45 The Quantum Relations Principle provides, in effect, a solution to violent contest and disposes of the play of replacement altogether. With the anticipated, dramatic effects of virtual reality on society and the upcoming challenges of automation in the workforce, we desperately need a new approach to incorporate digital technology for the benefit of humanity since our traditional agonistic mentalities hinder (some of) us from prosperity. While we have a lot more work to do in this area, this essay is a modest attempt to highlight that the possibility exists and irenic mixed reality is, at least, achievable.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor : U Michigan P, 1994. Bostrom, Nick. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53.211 (April 2003): 243–55. Bradbury, Ray. “The Veldt.” In Simulations, edited by Karie Jacobson, 3–20. New York: Citadel Press, 1993. Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” In Stories of Your Life and Others, 91–145. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Forster, E. M. The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

44 Ibid, 53. 45 Ibid, 24.

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Heraclitus. Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. Translated by Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking, 2001. Jecan, Vlad B. “Ready Player One and the Truce Between Realities.” The Classic City Review (forthcoming). Nagel, Mechthild. Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play. New York: Lexington, 2002. Plass, Paul. “‘Play’ and Philosophic Detachment in Plato.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 98 (1967): 343–64. Schloer, Hardy F. and Mihai I. Spariosu. The Quantum Relations Principle: Managing Our Future in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Göttingen: V& R Unipress, 2016. Spariosu, Mihai I. Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. –. God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. –. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. Albany : State U New York P, 1997. –. Modernism and Exile: Play, Liminality, and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Statkiewicz, Max. “Rigor and Play in the ‘Republic.’” MLN 115.5 (December 2000): 1019–51. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Villeneuve, Denis (director). Arrival. FilmNation Entertainment, 2016. The Wachowskis (directors). The Matrix. Warner Bros., 1999.

Dong Yang

Chapter 6: Infinite Cartography: Spariosu, Deleuze, and the Practice of Knowledge

By 2014, Henry Kissinger—then nearly ninety years old—was no longer optimistic about America’s role in the formulation, implementation, and maintenance of the rules-based global system that had prevailed since the end of WWII, one that promoted such “Western values” as “embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting a participatory and democratic system of governance.”1 The validity and potency of the “American consensus” that demands unconditional cooperation from states have largely and gradually become undermined and challenged due to the continuous reorganizations and variations of nations—especially those that have historically participated only minimally in the very construction of such arrangements. Under the dualistic tendencies of both the waning of the technological and ideological dominance of the US on the global scale and the burgeoning aspiration for autonomous self-determinacy of particularly non-western nations, it is almost certain that the tension engendered by these tendencies will eventually lead to the collapse of the rules-based global system, and hence, to a new strategic conception of “world order” —though Kissinger admits the utopian and idealistic essence of such a concept2—that attends to and accommodates the status quo of the reality of the contemporary world and is in urgent need of valorization. 1 Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2015), 1. 2 As Kissinger points out, drawing on the European model of the peace conference in seventeenth-century Westphalia, the temporary unity signifies only “a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests” (Ibid, 3, emphasis mine). In other words, the model of world order established three centuries ago results only from an eclectic and collaborative effort that by no means justifies a universal law of order, but rather entails a practical endeavor to reach a peaceful state through a balance of power : “it reserved judgment on the absolute in favor of the practical and ecumenical; it sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint” (Ibid, 4). His interpretation of the Westphalia peace conference, in turn, explains the conclusion he

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Facing the infinite and temporally-spatially sensitive reshuffle of valences of regional and global forces, the new theory of world order Kissinger proposes alludes to two focal points in his grand strategy : a transition from hard power, military or economic situations, to soft power based principally on the human condition. As he writes, “success in such an effort will require an approach that respects both the multifariousness of the human condition and the ingrained human quest for freedom. Order in this sense must be cultivated; it cannot be imposed.”3 As well as an ongoing evaluation of the dynamism assembled through the collaboration of all the nations on the planet, “[A] balance of forces does not in itself secure peace, but if thoughtfully assembled and invoked, it can limit the scope and frequency of fundamental challenges and curtail their chance of succeeding when they do occur.”4 The source of the understanding of world order comes not from an unchanging cartography of a monotonous simulacrum; rather, it must reside primarily in the pluralistic flow of global interactions, including both peaceful communications and occasional confrontations, for timely adjustments in accord with the holistic map of world peace. In the light of Kissinger’s explication of the concept of world order, this essay attempts to provide several cultural and theoretical apparatuses for practically engaging global interactive currents, especially in terms of the perennial question or even suspicion regarding the practical aspects of the humanities: a highly valid and necessary inquiry that has been largely ignored, perhaps intentionally and blindly, by humanities scholars. I examine Kissinger’s project of weaving a dynamic cartography in response to Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclop8die, Novalis’s critical revisionism, Mihai Spariosu’s local-global triad theory of power mentality, and Deleuze’s empiricist fabrication of the concept of rhizome, all of which touched upon not only the infinitely dynamic and vital nature of a world cartography of power fluidity, but also points to areas of penetration in which humanities scholars involve themselves in the real world. At the end of the essay, however, I also seek to address the potential power inherent in theoretical and philosophical knowledge itself and the manner in which it requires constant caution and critical self-reflection.

reaches at the very beginning of the section on world order : “No truly global ‘world order’ has ever existed” (Ibid, 2). 3 Ibid, 8. 4 Ibid, 9.

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The Encyclopedic Imagination and the Transcendental Touch on the World The European philosophical spirit of the Enlightenment from the mid-seventeenth century onward was nourished primarily through the exponentially increasing scientific discoveries and the gradually accumulated general understanding of human capacity. As Dan Edelstein concisely synthesizes the age of reason and underlines the connection between philosophical knowledge and scientific advancement, “the present age (sie`cle) was ‘enlightened’ (e´claire´) because the ‘philosophical spirit’ of the Scientific Revolution had spread to the educated classes, institutions of learning, and even parts of the government. More generally, they argued, changes in science had led to changes in society.”5 One consequence of the Scientific Revolution can be found in the philosophical investigation of the capacity of reason as well as the material body to acknowledge the limits it sets on the extension of knowledge, with perhaps Baruch Spinoza as a rebellious exception. The relentless Cartesian dualism and the insistence on the privilege of mind over body ; the Kantian twelve categories of knowledge along with the four antinomies that eventually force him to posit the unknown and unknowable noumena; the British empiricist David Hume’s debunking of a priori knowledge and the formulation of an epistemology grounded in the applications of principles of human nature that act upon the delirious human mind by the means of affective experience, all underline a seemingly intentional and collaborative philosophical attempt to move beyond cultural and national restraints and engage themes pertaining to all humanity on a global level. Edelstein continues, “the defining feature of the Enlightenment was not so much a new outlook on the world as a new outlook on the way in which people —in particular the educated elite—looked at the world.”6 A global consciousness emerges in the Enlightenment. The pinnacle of this intellectual movement was also bolstered by political and economic currents in the eighteenth century, concerning both the widespread conception of liberal economic theory and, unfortunately, the colonial expansion and the Atlantic slave trade.7 In such a spirit, intensified perhaps—as Chad Wellmon remarks— by the anxiety sprung from the proliferation of books that defy mastery by human memory8, philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert undertook a laborious project of creating a world cartography of knowledge 5 6 7 8

Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2010), 2. Ibid, 23. Madeleine Dobie, “Going Global: Diderot, 1770–1784,” Diderot Studies 31 (2009): 9–10. Chad Wellmon, “Touching Books: Diderot, Novalis, and the Encyclopedia of the Future,” Representations 114.1 (2011): 65.

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—titled the Encyclop8die—which would encompass all knowledge in commerce, arts, and sciences. D’Alembert demonstrates, in the preface volume, the two fundamental purposes of the work’s compilation—both a construction of the map of human knowledge and a collection of universal principles that condition all subjects—that consequentially constitute its cardinal necessity : The work whose first volume we are presenting today has two aims. As an Encyclopedia, it is to set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge. As a Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades, it is to contain the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each.9

D’Alembert’s awareness of the gradual fragmentation and disconnectedness produced by the Scientific Revolution led to the efforts in Encyclop8die to establish relations and connections to enclose the globe within a network of knowledge. After initially tracing the historical development of human rationality and knowledge, D’Alembert explicates the function of the Encyclop8die among the scattered fragments of knowledge: “it remains for us only to make a genealogical or encyclopedic tree which will gather the various branches of knowledge together under a single point of view and will serve to indicate their origin and their relationship to one another.”10 The Encyclop8die, therefore, is not merely a collection of condensed and summarized knowledge, but it also includes an organic system that imitates the form and mechanism of nature and consist of both individual items and relations. James Creech poetically describes the encyclopedic project: “It is a liminal demarcation of inside and outside, of repr8sent8 and repr8sentant, of spectator and spectacle embedded deeply within the encyclopedic body.”11 The knowledge contained in the Encyclop8die actively reflects and interacts with the world, serving as an encompassing cartography that explains and expands the information accumulated as human history moves on. The curious metaphor D’Alembert explores—“encyclopedic tree”—entails an enduring belief in the vitality of the encyclopedic system that grows and expands with time, a sense of reference that “future generations will look back in order to measure their progress since that moment.”12 The epistemological cartography Diderot and D’Alembert aim to achieve covers both—horizontal and vertical dimensions, concerning the historical accumulation of individual concepts and the rhizomic connections they develop 9 Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), 4. 10 Ibid, 45–46. 11 James Creech, “‘Chasing After Advances’: Diderot’s Article ‘Encyclopedia,’” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 185. 12 Ibid, 189.

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in conjunction with other concepts as well as with the work’s readers: “Our metaphysical analysis of the origin and connection of the sciences has been of great utility in designing the encyclopedic tree; an historical analysis of the order in which our knowledge has developed in successive steps will be no less useful in enlightening us concerning the way we ought to convey this knowledge to our readers.”13 The authors are indeed formulating a cartography that actively keeps track of the development of human knowledge: From there he can see at a glance the objects of their speculations and the operations which can be made on these objects; he can discern the general branches of human knowledge, the points that separate or unite them; and sometimes he can even glimpse the secrets that relate them to one another. It is a kind of world map which is to show the principal counties, their position and their mutual dependence, the road that leads directly from one to the other.14

At the very heart of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s philosophical and bibliographical enterprise is the avant-garde creation of an epistemological machine that transcribes all knowledge across all time and space into volumes of books, which, however, inevitably confronts the aporia between the increase of human understanding of the world and the reflection and recording of it in the material form in books. The encyclopedic endeavor, therefore, becomes an exercise in the parallel coexistence of two material and indifferent spheres lacking direct contact. At stake is the question: what is the position of the human? How should one situate humanity—the initiation and purpose of the project—within the two spheres? Books, after all, are materials. The encyclopedic model created by Diderot and D’Alembert reduces the burden of human memory. Ironically, it excludes the human by emphasizing a material parallel between books and the world, which eventually renders human knowledge inactive. Nature and world need human understanding, just as books can be mere unread decorations. An immaterial affectivity is needed to enable and ensure human interactions with books and the world and to animate their purely material spheres. Through a series of precise explications and delicate analyses of Novalis’s explorations of the similar notion of the encyclopedia, Chad Wellmon shows how Novalis’s conception of the encyclopedia—assembling functions Diderot and D’Alembert envisioned—overcomes the materiality of books by claiming the dualistic nature as both a transcendental epistemological reflection on the dynamic development of knowledge and its physicality and concreteness: “While his Enzyklopädistik is a transcendental reflection on the very processes of knowledge, it also embodies this 13 Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, 60. 14 Ibid, 47 (emphasis mine).

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reflection precisely in the form of the book, in the body that is the book.”15 Whereas the transcription and recording of the flow of human intellectual development demands continuous attention and explication, the materiality of the book is inexorable, given “Novalis’s point that not only encyclopedic knowledge is bound up with print but also that printed books are not transparent—that is, they are dense, opaque, and in themselves impenetrable. Their materiality is predicated on their resistance to simple appropriation. They mark the simple but overlooked fact that there is always something physical.”16 In Wellmon’s reading of Novalis, the life of the encyclopedia as a dynamic and evolving cartography of the world of human knowledge thus necessarily activates and stimulates the affective understanding of the readers that is irreducible to mere linguistic and material components: The affective potential of a particular book cannot be reduced or limited to the apparent semantic limitations of a book but neither can it be limited to its material form. Books are the organs of memory that bridge internal and external, mind and body, perceptions and reflections. Reading as memory hovers between the material and the ideal. Books do not just signify. They simulate.17

Novalis thus calls forth an encyclopedic reading of books as a necessary affective connection established and situated between the materiality of the book and that of the world. Thus the practice of knowledge grounds the ongoing generation and perpetuation of real and external relations between the world and an epistemological world cartography that connects points, lines, and planes. Practicing knowledge through the affective reading of the encyclopedia is, for Novalis, grounded in the theoretical motto that “To know is to touch, to make contact, not to see.”18

Cartographical Power and its Discontents: Mihai Spariosu and his Global Triad System “Power is everywhere,” Foucault famously declares in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, “not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”19 Contrary to a simplistic interpretation of power as a hierarchical property possessed only by the dominant social class, Foucault views it 15 16 17 18 19

Chad Wellmon, “Touching Books,” 82. Ibid, 86. Ibid, 91. Ibid, 68. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality : Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 93.

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as an all-encompassing and self-sufficient system that functions as the inescapable condition for endless social conflicts and hegemonies between subjects of different power valences. Two characteristics of power are highlighted: the immanent nature of the force relations and the formless strength of forces that originate and then divert and manipulate various types of social mobilities20 : immanent in the sense that the existence of power does not require any concrete basis but only the different forms of discourse that serve as “the vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of forms of subjugation and schemas of knowledge,”21 and the parasitic essence of power upon social struggles and confrontations. After Foucault, historical studies no longer merely trace power relations, but now unearth, reveal and make explicit the hidden mechanism of power fluidity. The task of the historian, thus, has undergone a radical shift from investigating such concrete entities as persons, objects, and events to variations of social and cultural relations that determine “techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse”;22 in other words, historical inquiries have ceased to be based on the “effects” of social productions and have turned to investigating the reciprocal and dynamic transitions between causes and effects—i. e. the power flow—in order to discover the logic of movement in human history. Regardless of the scope and coverage of knowledge, Foucault passionately warns us against the potential tendency of power that immanently forms an intensive and dominating hierarchy at the price of the vitality of the other, primarily through the corruption of language and discourse. The universalizing effort of Diderot and D’Alembert in constructing a dynamic global cartography is subject to Foucault’s scrutiny with respect to the power of language as it is exploited in the very composition of Encyclop8die. The arbitrariness expressed in the alphabetical order in the organization23 and display of knowledge as well as the translation and subordination of foreign materials to the French language signify a form of linguistic violence. Long before the coming into being of Foucault’s systematic theory of power, he already highlighted in The Order of Things the interconnectedness of power and language that aspires to enfold a certain form of universality : “The universal characteristic and ideology stand in the same opposition to one another as do the universality of language in general

20 21 22 23

Ibid, 92. Ibid, 98. Ibid, 98. D’Alembert acknowledges the consequence of following an alphabetical order in the classification and display of knowledge in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot.

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[…] and the universality of an exhaustive discourse.”24 Foucault goes on to argue, by invoking the idealistic writing on the notion of absolute encyclopedia by Charles Bonnet that the universality that seems necessary in any attempt to establish an all-encompassing encyclopedia of knowledge, only leads to reconciliation and accommodation: Against this background of an absolute Encyclopaedia, human beings constitute intermediary forms of a composite and limited universality : alphabetical encyclopaedias, which accommodate the greatest possible quantity of learning in the arbitrary order provided by letters; pasigraphies, which make it possible to transcribe all the languages of the world by means of a single system of figures; polyvalent lexicons, which establish synonymies between a greater or lesser number of languages; and, finally, rational encyclopaedias […]25

The encyclopedic endeavor to formulate a world cartography of knowledge, Foucault cautions us, must at the same time undergo investigation into the potential of the power flow that contributes to the gathering, condensation, and coercion present in the form of language. The practice of knowledge in the spirit of Foucault, thus, invites one to constantly examine the linguistic variations that signal a sea-change of power valences. The encyclopedic cartography of knowledge—be it concrete as Diderot and D’Alembert describe it, or virtual as in the information age—regenerates vigorously and dynamically. The observations and adjustments of the reversible changes among the disparities of power, culturally, and linguistically, become points dHntr8e of humanistic practice. Mihai Spariosu has been deeply influenced by the writings of Foucault.26 Spariosu’s traumatic childhood memory of Romania under the totalitarian control of the socialist regime as well as his philosophical dispositions in line with post-structuralism ground to a significant extent his earlier thought concerning the alternations of power, endowing him with a rather reserved and hesitant stance on the ultimate function and essence of political revolution and the repetitious rotations of power dominance, especially those involving military violence and civilians as victims, no matter the cause. Three seminal philosophical themes prevail throughout his academic career: power mentality ; global intercultural communication; and the strategy for the ICT (information 24 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 85. 25 Ibid, 86. 26 As he writes in his autobiographical essay, “Theory was now the rage, and I was very much attracted to French deconstruction, the work of Michel Foucault, and the anthropological theories of Ren8 Girard” (Mihai I. Spariosu, “Exile, Play, and Intellectual Autobiography,” in Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, eds. Lionel Gossman and Mihai I. Spariosu [Albany : SUNY, 1994], 208), though he later becomes rather reserved about the above-mentioned theorists.

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and communication technology) era, all of which are grounded in his early inquiries into the power mentality in Ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Quite obviously in Spariosu’s early writings, specifically Dionysius Reborn and God of Many Names, a vigorous sense of radicalism that challenges mainstream scholarly readings of literature and philosophy that are based largely on a consensual and “correct” ways of interpretation. Spariosu deems the Nietzschean will to power as a deep-rooted problematic that has fostered atrocities in twentieth-century history. The morbidly and overly expanded and lauded Marxist rendering of the key social function of economic foundations and the Freudian theory of the pleasure principle are also considered to have led fin-desiHcle modernity astray. But Spariosu by no means merely intends to offer a few critical remarks: his profound scheme is centered on searching for alternative patterns of mentalities from the ancient traditions of wisdom—the axial age coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers—that are potent enough to adjust and ameliorate the bellicose and bestial nature of man; as well the construction of pedagogical plans and methodologies that serve to help future generations escape power conflicts and violence. In his seminal work, God of Many Names, Spariosu traces the source of modern social and political disorder on the international level and argues that an enduring misunderstanding and simplistic reading of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy by modern thinkers may have been its primary cause. From Hellenistic literature and play, Spariosu identifies two types of mentality concerning the function of power : one is what he terms the archaic mentality (or proto-logo-rational mode of thought) that prioritizes the role of physical strength with the motto “might makes right”; and the median mentality (or logorational mode of thought) that pacifies violent tendencies. As Spariosu explains, […] in archaic Greece, a proto-logo-rational mode of thought has its origin in an aristocratic, warlike mentality that transpires especially in the Homeric epic, but that, later on, can in principle be adopted by any individual or social group in a given community. In turn, a logo-rational mode of thought betokens a median mentality that finds initial expression in traditional gnomic poetry […]27

Hence, in Spariosu’s early works, the dualistic mentality applies to both individuals and their communities. In addition, the archaic and median mentalities do not contain any elements of static universals that ground the impossibility of transmutation. Rather, Spariosu contends that the prevalence and adoption of either mentality are a result of communal choice in a given culture. He notes, “Both archaic and median values appear on record in Greece from the 27 Mihai I. Spariosu, God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought From Homer to Aristotle (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), xi.

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earliest historical times, and therefore the question of a shift from one kind of mentality to another is not an evolutionary one, but one of cultural emphasis.”28 The potentiality of the transition between mentalities entails a dynamism in cultural pattern and development. To ensure a healthy and median mentality in a community, therefore, requires consistent evaluation and examination of the immanent valences of power, echoing the Foucauldian methods of practice. Inspired by the concept of play in Homeric and Platonic texts, Spariosu goes on to advocate play as a cure that initiates and facilitates a switch of mentalities from the immediate to the non-violent. Through a close exigence of ago¯n and athlos in Homeric combative descriptions, Spariosu reaches the optimistic conclusion that “the semantic development of ago¯n and athlos equally reflects the shift in emphasis from an archaic to a median mentality in Hellenic thought, where the aristocratic notion of contest undergoes a process of ethical polarization, acquiring an increasingly ambivalent emotional value.”29 The archaic and median patterns of mentality and play as a medium that helps engender transition serve as the foundational theoretical pattern for Spariosu’s analyses of the dynamic power flow in the global sphere. In Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age, Spariosu postulates a theory of the “local-global”—after decades of inquiries and witnessing the transformation and turbulence in the process of globalization—to designate the status of cultural community in the age of globalization as a co-presence of both local and global elements. He emphasizes the necessity of establishing “a transdisciplinary field of intercultural studies”30 to surpass the limitations cast by conventional cultural models. This symbiotic cultural theory entails an inevitable and everlasting tension between a self-sufficient and exclusive localism and an expanding and encompassing globalism; and during such a continuous conflict, culture emerges as a product. Spariosu warns against the will to the forceful implementation of doctrines for the purpose of forging a unitary globality, a dangerous idea he terms “globalitarianism;”31 as well as the radical resistance from the self-enclosed ideology of the local, typically presented in the form of terrorism. The new dynamism of global intercultural contact—envisioned by Spariosu recognitizes the emergence of technology and information science— should orient itself principally toward fostering the well-being of “any future human community”32 and interdependence through nonviolent dialogues. The advancement of Quantum Relations in theoretical physics—Spariosu argues— 28 Ibid, xi. 29 Ibid, 6. 30 Mihai I. Spariosu, Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 34. 31 Ibid, viii. 32 Ibid, ix.

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marshals a cluster of viable tools for the study of global cultural interactions, considering its adherence to such fundamental notions as alterity and adversity. Such a theory of cultural globalization finds its foundation in Heidegger’s ontology, which—through an analysis of the work of art as a microcosmic exemplar—highlights the essential strife between the world, “the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people,” and the earth that “is self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing.”33 The holistic notion of Being (Sein) necessarily, for Heidegger, assumes instability and conflict as the grounds for its very sustainability : “World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict, belligerent by nature.”34 The world parallels the notion of the local in cultural studies, though its openness belongs only to the historical community ; whereas the earth corresponds to the universal tendency of cultural hegemony to appropriate the particular and the local. What is important in the opposing conflict between openness and concealment for Heidegger, is that the conflict serves as the source of truth, which “happens only by establishing itself in the conflict and sphere opened up by truth itself”35 and in turn addresses the significance of the studies of cultural interactions between the various locals on a global scale. The rapidly-growing information and communication technology and its gradual seamless immersion into everyday life have presented themselves as the latest radical paradigm shift in the humanities and social sciences that are consequentially in urgent need of analysis and investigation. But the question —especially for humanities scholars—remains simple: how can we participate in and practice knowledge to formulate understanding in accordance with the global wave of technological development? Doubtless the development of hightech industries has accelerated the speed of globalization and the expansion of human social networks. The inevitable negative consequences that have ensued—including the unbalance of economic conditions between developing and developed nations, the enlarged disparities of wealth accumulation—encourage one to rethink the nature of the machine. Predicting the repetition of power structure in the aid of ICT, Spariosu urgently suggests that we divert our attention from the advancement of the machine to a deeper understanding of the human: If machines are our extensions, they will simply replicate and enhance our will to power or any other principle around which we choose to organize our lives. By the same token, fear of machines is fear of ourselves, of the kind of unspeakable monsters that ourenthralled imaginations might awaken and drag to the surface. Unless we turn away 33 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2013), 47. 34 Ibid, 53–54. 35 Ibid, 59.

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from our mentality of power, and transvaluate all of our values in the process, including the utilitarian ones, our culture will continue to spawn and release into the world a plethora of ‘monsters’ like Kaczynski, together with countless other dangerous selfreplicators.36

For Spariosu, the study of technology is, therefore, is fundamentally a quest for an ultimate understanding of the human, specifically the power mentality that drives the development of human global intelligence. “Radical breaks do not come from changes in technology, but from changes in mentality, which will then generate other technologies, in keeping with its main values and goals.”37 In Spariosu’s philosophical framework, the practice of knowledge regarding power on the individual and communal level, globalization on the world scale, and the explication of technology in the Information Age, are grounded in the dynamic and cartographical cognizance and intervention with the dualistic model of power mentality. What is implicit in the Spariosu’s triad system of power mentality, global intercultural communication, and the strategy for the ICT in the machine age is its insistence on an alliance between the human and the irreducible and the insuppressible force of Life.

Deleuzian Rhizome and an Empiricist Embrace of the World In addition to the publication of the collaborative work Anti-Oedipus in 1972, another significant intellectual event that Gilles Deleuze participated in was the thoughtful and reflexive dialogue he conducted with Foucault subsequently entitled “Intellectual and Power.” In this dialogue, Deleuze provided an original and compelling account of the meanings and relations between theory and practice—perhaps the most remarkable and well-thought piece in his oeuvre— which to a great degree, preceded and determined the tone of certain central themes he and Guattari went on to develop in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus. When asked bluntly and directly by Foucault to clarify his political position that had been hitherto regarded as ambiguous and enigmatic, Deleuze did not shy away from tackling the problem of practice and elaborated on the necessary concurrence and affiliation between theory and practice. Against the totalizing tendency imbedded in a conventional explication of the relationship of practice and theory that indicates a conjoining and mutually enhancing effort, Deleuze underlined the fragmentary nature of theory due to the limitation of the field of origin: “a theory is always local and related to a limited

36 Mihai I. Spariosu, Remapping Knowledge, 113. 37 Ibid, 114.

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field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it.”38 While implying the necessity of theory to be applied and tested in different fields, by no means did Deleuze posit the identification between application and practice; rather, he saw practice as serving primarily as an operative scaffolding for the process of the application of theory, functioning as a symbiotic and affective impetus—along with theory—to facilitate the free and nomadic movements between different domains on the cartography of the world. Deleuze designated the applications to a set of relays, ensuring the removal of obstacles and smooth transitions in the process of the application of theory : “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall.”39 The application of theory to different sites of inquiry and the application of practice is a necessary procedure to remove the barriers and walls on the way to forming theoretical multiplicities: they are both affective and pragmatic actions that aim to execute the functions of establishing or reducing external relations in the process of forming additive conjunctions involuntarily : “[…] theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks […] A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function […] A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.”40 Deleuze’s position on the interdependent and combinatory relationship and pragmatic functions of theory and practice sheds new light on the meaning of practical philosophy. To practice knowledge is to construct empiricist external relations with the other, to weave a new dynamic cartography of multiplicity in the world, and to take on real actions in the form of thought experiments or actual movements as a vital momentum in the hylomorphic universal flow empowered by the incessantly and infinitely productive desiring machine. Such a conjunctive tendency, he termed a few years after the conversation with Foucault, as a “rhizome” in order to designate the non-hierarchical and non-signifying logic of the world that freely and haphazardly forms empirical relations without the limitations of categories that demarcate concrete and abstract entities. The illustrations of theory and practice articulated in the dialogue stand out, therefore, as an explanatory line of thought for the formulation of his concept of the rhizome and, at the same time, affirm the practical potentialities and possibilities of his philosophy. 38 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 205. 39 Ibid, 206. 40 Ibid, 206–08.

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The concurrent applications of theory and practice in the flow of vital force and the heterogeneous multiplicities that determine the actuality and futurity of conjunctive movements find their basis in empiricism. Early, during his years under the tutelage of his mentor Jean Wahl, Deleuze became fascinated by AngloAmerican empiricist philosophy—especially David Hume and William James, whose manifesto for radical empiricism subsequently contributed to the formation of Deleuze’s system of transcendental empiricism.41 He devoted his first monograph to the studies of David Hume titled Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. As Deleuze declared in his preface to the English edition of Dialogue II, “I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.”42 A pluralist and empiricist stance differs fundamentally from the totalitarian and rationalist perspective in its positive affirmation of individual difference and its location of the source of rationality in the external world rather than a priori principles in the mind. Deleuze wrote: “Every multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhizome. We constantly oppose the rhizome to the tree, like two conceptions and even two very different ways of thinking.”43 As we have seen, the Enlightenment philosophers collectively exhibited a propensity to unbind human rationality and place it above any worldly or prosaic constraints, such as nationality and culture. They sought eventually to extend and apply the validity of such a thread of thought to the entire world. In terms of the cartographical project, the empiricist and rationalist schools do not seem to have diverged to any great degree. Humean empiricism, which postulates the middle of things in the plethora of external experience has helped lay a crucial bedrock for the formation of Deleuze’s global vision. In Deleuze’s late work, particularly What Is Philosophy?, we may discern Hume’s seminal impact on his thoughts concerning not only the formation of a constant brain a posteriori under the maneuver of the principles of human nature, but also a natural extension of thought, the fabrication of an empirical and vital cartography that embraces the world, only implied in the association of the brain with the world. Hume provides us with both an innovative understanding of the nature of contraction or passive synthesis—a process in which pure differences become organized in time and generate life—which Hume calls

41 For a detailed account of Deleuze’s acceptance and revision of both Hume’s and James’ models of empiricism, see Dong Yang, Action and Relation: The Spinozian and Humean Foundations of Deleuze and Guattari’s Theory of Affect (master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2017). 42 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogue II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), vii. 43 Ibid, viii.

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“habit”; and a theory of mind in which the contemplating44 imagination functions in the mind, in which the process of contraction can proceed. Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things. We can dispense with Fechner and Conan Doyle’s splendid hypothesis of a nervous system of the earth only because the force of contracting or of preserving, that is to say, of feeling appears only as a global brain in relation to the elements contracted directly and to the mode of contraction, which differ depending on the domain and constitute precisely irreducible varieties […] the same ultimate elements and the same withdrawn force constitute a single plane of composition bearing all interpretations […] This can be seen even in […] the formation of habits: although everything seems to take place by active connections and progressive integrations, from one test to another, the tests or cases, the occurrences, must, as Hume showed, be contracted in a contemplating “imagination” while remaining distinct in relation to actions and to knowledge.45

Hume constructs a pre-critical philosophy of mind that makes possible Deleuze’s own concept of the plane of consistency. Also on display here is the philosophical system of a world-cartography that covers both the micro level of the individual development of humanity and the macro level of global networks of intensive movement. What further needs to be shown, however, is why empiricism operates more effectively than rationalism in unveiling the ongoing and concurring ontology of things and movements in the world. Deleuze lauds the underlining principle of empiricism, the principle of external relation. “Hume’s originality —or one of Hume’s originalities—comes from the force with which he asserts that relations are external to their terms.”46 Unlike the rationalists, who seek to include both the terms and relations within a new term of a higher order of significance, Hume devises a dualistic model of empiricist ontology that grants the autonomy of sensory impressions and innate ideas and the relations that come into being as a result of the principles of human nature:

44 Regarding the concept of contemplation, Deleuze takes a Neoplatonic approach: to contemplate is to bear such sensibility that happens simultaneously with the process of contraction and use a power to sense the material, before the formation of any sense organs. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, “perceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are […] At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia UP, 1994], 73). 45 Gilles Deleuze and F8lix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 213. Deleuze makes roughly the same points in Difference and Repetition, 72–75. 46 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 37.

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Hume’s thought is built up in a double way : through the atomism that shows how ideas or sensory impressions refer to punctual minima producing time and space; and through the associationism that shows how relations are established between these terms, always external to them, and dependent on other principles.47

The dualistic model of Humean empiricism composed of atomism and associationism, therefore, serves as the condition for the dynamism and vitality of the “global brain.” As Deleuze comments, Hume discovers “a conjunctive world of atoms and relations.”48 External relations that constitute an irreducible component of the empiricist world cartography explicated in Deleuze’s early writings on Hume transform into the concept of the rhizome in his collaborative work with Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari present three types of logic that function in the world: arboreal logic; taproot logic; and rhizomic logic. They then demonstrate that the true logic of the world is one that is able to form an infinite number of conjunctions with no pre-established structures. The arboreal or classical logic—classical because it culminates in Platonic philosophy— signifies the logic of one eternal form that hovers over and haunts all matter, and thus generates a hierarchy of the spirit, with inert matter passively waiting for the moment of life-giving light. The most substantial characteristic —and also the foremost problematic—is that even though it produces representations built upon the content of nature, it affirms a simultaneous differentiation and distinction from nature, which serves as the key to the execution of its power. Deleuze and Guattari then turn to a modified form of binary logic, that of “the radicle-system, or fascicular root,” in which “the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed.”49 In the radicle-system, “an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development.”50 Yet, even though such a logic is able to avoid the limitation of two and develop from the one to the multiple, for Deleuze and Guattari, it still does not reach the level of pure multiplicity, since a trunk still controls the multiple growth. The radicle-system is finally informed by the formula n + 1: there is always a One—the Platonic Idea, the Freudian father, and so on—that stratifies the multiple and places it under the dominance of the signifier. Hence, “[t]he binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no better understanding 47 Ibid, 38. 48 Ibid, 38 (emphasis mine). 49 Gilles Deleuze and F8lix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: AThousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987), 5. 50 Ibid, 5.

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of multiplicity than the dichotomous root.”51 The problematic of binary logic, we may conclude, lies not in the multiple, and the static and dominating ONE that comes from nature but at the same time detaches itself from nature due to its human construction. The model that Deleuze and Guattari propose is a rhizome that freely develops in all dimensions and each of whose elements is able to connect to any other. The rhizome breaks the priority of structural limitations and demonstrates the rhizomic logic of the world. The central theme is to develop a fundamental definition of nature that does not presuppose any subject, strata, or signification. Nonetheless, for Deleuze and Guattari, it is an undeniable fact that entities, be they concepts, things or logic, do exist in the world, and in their philosophical system, this status is tolerable; the key problem is how to situate these unsatisfactory existences in a suitable place where becomings, lines of flight, and affects are not hindered. As far as the model of the rhizome is concerned—that of infinite unbounded relation—Deleuze and Guattari do have a special place reserved for it, with a reversal of order : instead of having the trunk or binary logic dominate the multiplicity, they suggest situating the ungrounded and free rhizomic multiplicity before the formation of the trunk. By such a reversal, Deleuze and Guattari maintain the factual aspect of the world and at the same time cancel the solemn power of the One. Multiplicity without One, that is the central definition of Deleuze and Guattari’s new theory of relation, which can be expressed with the formula: n-1. Deleuze and Guattari remark, “the multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, but dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n— 1. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted.”52 The italicized emphasis of “must be made” points toward Deleuze and Guattari’s new adaptation of and concentration on pragmatics: the rhizome is always in the making so that the true nature of reality can be shown. The intentional move of subtracting the man-made or spiritual One marks the difference between the theory of relation outlined in Deleuze’s studies of Spinoza and Hume and the theory of relation developed in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Only by making relations in such a rhizomic way can we arrive at the true rhizome: “A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles.”53 In the empiricist theories of relation, especially the Humean model, relations, though bearing the characteristic of externality, remain, to some extent, passive. 51 Ibid, 5. 52 Ibid, 6. 53 Ibid, 6.

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We should recall that for Hume, relations of ideas come into being only after being acted upon by the principles of human nature, and this activity is indeed the primary function of such principles. The passivity of relations, if one considers the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical system as a whole, is incompatible with the positive power or force they adopt. We can discern a revision of the notion of relation in A Thousand Plateaus: relation, or rhizome, is now endowed with an active power to reach out to the external world and form connections to all kinds of entities. The legacy of empiricism resides exactly in the idea of being in the middle of the naturalistic, acentered, and nonsubjectifying flow that, as a result, renders the all-directional rhizomic movements and conjunctions possible. Deleuze and Guattari evoke six principles that clarify the nature of rhizome and arrive at its comprehensive elucidation: a rhizome constantly extends its roots to others, and forms a powerful and nonstructural map: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be,”54 and thus “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”55 Juxtaposing Deleuze’s conception of theory formulated during the conversation with Foucault as exhibiting a local and regional velocity that—together with the indispensable and distinctive force of practice—trespasses dissimilar fields and forms vital to varying multiplicities, with the rigorous concept of rhizome coined with Guattari, one may sense the scope of its application: the rhizome is concerned with the world, evident in the global vision under the inspiration of Humean inspiration. Among the principles of the rhizome, the last two—termed as principle of cartography and decalcomania and presented already in the form of a rhizomic alliance—stand out as a clear indication of the planetary tendency of the rhizome. How do we comprehend the relationship between a particular rhizomic itinerary and the infinite synchronic others? Rhizomic movement, the authors explain, rejects any organized and static schema with predetermined courses conjured up according to syntagmatic or generic structures, crystalized and reproduced in the form of a tracing. In contrast, the experimental and acentered nature of the rhizome enables it to conjointly compose an effectual cartography of the unconscious that is able to embrace the world empirically : The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconsciousness closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections 54 Ibid, 7. 55 Ibid, 7.

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between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions […]56

Constantly undergoing variations in the additions and reductions of external relations, the Deleuze-Guattarian map functions—unlike the mimetic image constructed in accord with the arboreal or radicle logics57—as an ever-updating open system equipped with the rhizomic logic that “forms a rhizome with the world,”58 solely in the domain of the real. Yet Deleuze and Guattari are no utopians. They admit, in the same vein as their political theory, the world cartography in theorizing epitomizes and not merely deterritorializes intensive lines; rather, it retains the rigid and static tracings and considers them of necessity concomitant, which, in turn, casts imminent danger on the rhizome, as the tracing “injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration.”59 The dangerous tendency of tracing to stifle the rhizome and generate signifying and reterritorializing strata on the map requires an interminable deterritorializing effort within the map, in addition to the formulations of heterogeneous multiplicities with the outside: “Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome.”60 To prevent the rhizomic multiplicities from conforming themselves to stratification and territorialization, theory and practice need to take heed continually of the power valences both outside and within the existent conjunctions, in other words, the world.

Latour’s Detour and the Ethical Limit of Practice The two-fold framework that Deleuze and Guattari lay out—touching upon empirical and rhizomic global map-making—involves a double gesture concerning both reaching out to and connecting with the outside as well as cultivating an attentive consciousness of self-reflection regarding the multiplicities within. In this regard, an implied ethical assumption that guards against the violence and appropriation in global cultural communications, as Spariosu arduously promotes, may well be deployed. It may also be beneficial to consider Bruno Latour’s contribution that suggests a rather originary and positive detour. 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid, 12. See their descriptions of the major features of the “root-book,” Ibid, 5. Ibid, 11 (emphasis mine). Ibid, 13. Ibid, 14.

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In his 2003 Stanford presidential lecture, Latour engaged in a heartfelt selfreflection, after having observed the worrisome state of affairs in critical theory that vehemently and blindly accused all scientific and objective facts of being ideologically constructed. Latour accurately diagnosed that such arguments, while relentlessly denying the certainty of matters of fact, lead to the demolition of their own ground, such that “There is no sure ground even for criticism.”61 This selfconflicting dilemma arises from the Kantian misrecognition of the given—the already formed and disparate empirical objects—as the target of criticism, a typical example of the spirit in modern philosophy that aims to fabricate an account of reason without any interference by empiricism. By invoking Heideggerian Thing theory, as well as his own contemplation of the four-fold organization of the earth, Latour strives to call forth a retrieval of a premodern ontology and a renewal of empiricism by encouraging us to move closer to facts and direct our attention to their gathering and interconnected condition, which requires a realist and time-sensitive methodology and—more importantly— mindfulness for the varying and dynamic compositions of the network of facts. Latour opines, “the crucial point for me now is that what allowed historians, philosophers, humanists, and critics to trace the difference between modern and premodern, namely, the sudden and somewhat miraculous appearance of matters of fact, is now thrown into doubt with the merging of matters of fact into highly complex, historically situated, richly diverse matters of concern.”62 The practice of knowledge and criticism, in the light of the detour that Latour initiates, will eventually lead us away from the notorious “critical barbarity”63 based on endless negation, separation, and rhetorical gimmickry ; humanities scholars can then undertake the task of unearthing and revealing the vital relations between various cohabiting things and the manner in which their state of cohabitation endures. “The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of na"ve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather,”64 Latour resolutely proclaims, “The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.”65 The soul-searching and ethical issues Latour addresses are timely and profound in terms of both his self-reflection and attention to global concerns re-

61 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 237. 62 Ibid, 236–37. 63 Ibid, 240. 64 Ibid, 246. 65 Ibid, 247.

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lating to the planetary networks, which perhaps needs to be adopted as an imperative ethical axiom for any practice of knowledge in the future.

Bibliography Creech, James. “‘Chasing After Advances’: Diderot’s Article ‘Encyclopedia.’” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 183–97. D’Alembert, Jean le Rond. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex. New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1963. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. –. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and F8lix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. –. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogue II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Dobie, Madeleine. “Going Global: Diderot, 1770–1784,” Diderot Studies 31 (2009): 7–23. Edelstein, Dan. The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. –. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. –. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 2013. Kissinger, Henry. World Order. New York: Penguin, 2015. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 225–48. Spariosu, Mihai I. God of Many Names: Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. –. “Exile, Play, and Intellectual Autobiography.” In Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, edited by Lionel Gossman and Mihai I. Spariosu, 205–16. Albany : SUNY, 1994. –. Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Wellmon, Chad. “Touching Books: Diderot, Novalis, and the Encyclopedia of the Future.” Representations 114.1 (2011): 65–102. Yang, Dong. Action and Relation: The Spinozian and Humean Foundations of Deleuze and Guattari’s Theory of Affect. Master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 2017.

Adela Fofiu

Chapter 7: An Auto-Ethnography of Hope

The Prophet Muhammad’s “Prayer of Light” Short version by Hazrat Pir Moineddin Jablonski Ya Allah, Give me light in my heart and light in my speech, And light in my hearing and light in my sight, And light in my feeling and light in my body, And light before me and light behind me. Give me, I pray Thee, Light on my right hand and light on my left hand, And light above me and light below me, Oh Lord, increase light within me, And give me light and illuminate me. Verily, to be thus illuminated means to be contemplated by The Light of Lights.

Beyond. Spiritual Message by Tina Turner We need a repeated discipline And genuine training to let go Of our old habits of mind And to find and sustain A new way of seeing Take the journey, take the journey inside of you To become quiet to hear the beyond To become patient to receive the beyond To become open to invite the beyond And be grateful, be grateful to allow the beyond

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Introduction Professor’s Spariosu’s work is alchemical, it has the power to transmute information and knowledge in a visionary wisdom very much needed in our day and age. Few are the works and thinking models that combine with such elegance a deep understanding of science and of spirituality, with critical appreciation of the role of technologies in human development. The result is a complex eutopian foresight that pledges for a paradigmatic shift in our cultures and civilizations. “Heal the world, make it a better place” is a pop song chorus that I have grown up with. It is a mystery to me, even to this day, why I have never, as a child, questioned why the world needed healing. I always knew why and I always knew I—and all of us—need to prepare, to train just for that. Meeting Professor Spariosu and being open to this lifetime opportunity of studying under his guidance allowed me to acknowledge on a deep level this life mission. In honor of my Professor, and inspired by his words, I write this essay as an exercise of self-reflection: “Our planet might indeed be on the brink of a radical paradigmatic shift. This shift may or may not occur, whether in this generation or next, independent of the multiplying prophecies of impending doom or commercial paradise. But if it does, it will be brought about neither by our technosciences, nor by neoliberal market forces, nor by “freedom,” “resistance,” and “fundamentalist” movements, nor by a New World Order, nor by new barbarians. Rather, it will be brought about by each of us. Far from being helpless spectators, we human beings are directly implicated in what the immediate future holds. Each of us is responsible for what will happen next, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not. Hence, global awareness means understanding not only interdependence of all localities within the global framework, but also the enhanced individual responsibilities that result from it.”1

The following pages will take us on a walk through an auto-ethnography of hope. I will highlight Professor Spariosu’s utopian thinking, discussing to the best of my abilities how utopia can be a lived experience in a culture dominated by the will to power. Power is the strongest and the most intense cultural dynamic of our age, and any attempt to interact with it in innovative ways is a consistent source of knowledge, as long as there are ears to hear and eyes to see. I position myself, then, in the tradition of sociological thinking of C. Wright Mills,2 and argue that, for a paradigmatic shift to occur, we need to develop our sociological imagination and deepen our understanding of personal troubles as actual public or societal issues. In my personal experience and experiments with concrete uto1 Mihai I. Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning, (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004), 3–4 (my emphasis). 2 See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959).

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pias, I have found myself in the joy and travails that brought color to my life and to my thinking, but I, at the same time, experienced isolation and a self-perceived exile as a result of shedding new light on norms and values. At that time, studying Professor Spariosu’s work and vision lifted my spirit and helped me gain a larger view and understanding of how social and cultural change can happen in should happen for the days to come. The “enhanced individual responsibilities” that arise from global awareness challenge body, mind and emotion—the physical, the abstract and the affective. The fascinating intertwining of technology, science and spirituality that characterizes Professor Spariosu’s work has the potential to facilitate a new way of seeing for future generations of students. I gained this understanding with humbleness and joy, as I deeply believe that one way to reach the field beyond the will to power is to practice congruence between our three main actions: thought, word, and deed.

A Journey through the Ecology of Life Missions Professor Spariosu argues for just such congruence in the ways science and the scientific communities approach the world. After centuries of reductionism and cartesianism, we have come at an age when we need to revive an interdisciplinary and interconnected understanding of our non-linear world. In his work “Global Intelligence and Human Development,” Professor Spariosu engages in an elaborate critique of scientific reductionism in order to develop an ecological model of science grounded in a mentality of peace: I argue that from the standpoint of this irenic, ecological model, there is ultimately only one kind of science, which is human science, comprising any number of branches of learning and knowledge production, including the physical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities and the arts.3

By emphasizing the human dimension of the sciences, beyond the hard-soft division, Professor Spariosu places the source of power and of influence on the individual level. A savant with an irenic mindset grasps the non-linearity and the dynamic complexity of the world, thus gaining access to ways of knowing that reductionism and the linear scientific method have disregarded, if not plainly rejected. An ecology of science, in this respect, requires not only ecological literacy beyond the utilitarianism that characterizes the technological and economic development of the last century, but rather it needs and elicits ecological awareness and attentiveness.

3 Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development, 20.

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Emergent ethics of global intelligence ought to be based on a mentality of peace, defined not in opposition to war, but as an alternative mode of being and acting in the world, with its own system of values and beliefs, and reference frame.4

In my own work, this view of science has stimulated an integrated approach to teaching social research methods at undergraduate and graduate levels. My courses and seminars have been, for more than ten years, informed by non-linear thinking in the research process, intimately connected to an ecological awareness of the role research and researchers play locally and globally. Beyond John Searle’s ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity, I have witnessed how, year after year, students of social sciences nurtured their interest in ways in which observation, scientific or otherwise, interact with what is being observed. Such an interest, a clear step forward from seeking linear rigor in research designs, indicates that the ecological vision of a global intelligence that Professor Spariosu argues for has begun to find a fertile ground. The steps are small, indeed, but they are, in my estimation, a delightful play between Bloch’s the Not Yet Conscious and the Not Yet Become.5 Working daily to stimulate the awakening of the Not Yet Conscious—the abstract understanding of futures—is a necessary step in seeding hope for the Not Yet Become, the fundamental ingredient for action and change. In this sense, Professor Spariosu does mention that recognizing the interdisciplinarity and interconnectedness of the world is not sufficient for a paradigm shift. Even an interconnected world can be an Armageddon, where risks and crises are not met with innovative solutions to how interdisciplinarity should be used. To this shortcoming, Professor Spariosu’s answer is education and lifelong learning in the development of global intelligence: I define global intelligence as the ability to understand, respond to, and work toward what is in the best interest of and will benefit all human beings and all other life on our planet. […] Thus, global intelligence, or intercultural responsive understanding and action, is what contemporary nonlinear science calls an emergent phenomenon, involving lifelong learning processes.6

In his exercise to go beyond the hard-soft definitions of science, Professor Spariosu reviews a series of nonlinear concepts from natural sciences—Gaia hypothesis, autopoiesis, fractal geometry, dissipative structures—that beautifully create a bridge towards the humanities, the arts and spirituality. I have witnessed, not without emotion, how Professor Spariosu’s guidance has become 4 Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development, 18. 5 See Ruth Levitas, “Marxism, Romanticism and Utopia: Ernst Bloch and William Morris,” Radical Philosophy 51 (1989): 27–36. 6 Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development, 6 (my emphasis).

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invaluable in recent years as students’ interest in the interconnectedness and Web-of-Life nature of our world has steadily increased. The strongest point of convergence in the work of Professor Spariosu can be seen in the way spirituality informs scientific thinking. His appeal to Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism in connection to the modern day Web of Life and Gaia theory is, in my view, a commendable effort, making the case for the healing of what Max Weber rightfully called the disenchantment of the world.7 The lyrical character of Capra’s expression, the Web of Life, does not reduce its power. On the contrary, the great service of a poetical nuance to scientific rigor is that it clearly shows how knowledge uplifts not only our minds, but also our spirits. Ancient religious and traditional knowledge, along with shamanic traditions and world mythologies, stresses the invaluable interconnectedness of all forms of existence. Once the unseen is acknowledged in such a manner, we can step forward or away from a disenchanted experience of the world. Indeed, even if modernity and technological development have brought about a loss of spirit and of magic, this process is not irreversible. [A] global approach to knowledge, moreover, implies the recognition (present, for example, in contemporary Western general systems theory, but also in early Buddhist thinking in India, early Taoist thinking in China and, later on, in Islamic Sufism) that there are many levels, or reference frames, of reality with their own specific “logic” and operating principles. In turn, these levels may be interconnected either in chain-like fashion—according to what one calls “linear causality” in philosophy and science—or in a looplike, interdependent fashion, mutually nourishing each other, that is, according to mutual or reciprocal causality.8

In his collaborative project with Hardy Schloer, “The Quantum Relations Principle,”9 Professor Spariosu offers a vision for a sustainable future of the world, a future which combines traditional wisdom with scientific knowledge and highend, state-of-the-art technology. This integration of resources and knowledge is the premise for the planetary wisdom we so deeply need in order to transform the global crisis in an opportunity for further human development, in close relation to the wholeness and living rhythm of Gaia. This is a project that illustrates how technology, once at the root of our disenchantment of the world, can contribute to awakening of reenchantment through deliberate and elaborate work. Quantum Relations (QR) technology offers us the capacity to move to the next civilizational stage, that of global intelligence and planetary wisdom. QR is a 7 Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” Max Weber Studies 1.1 (2000): 11–32. 8 Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development, 16. 9 Hardy F. Schloer and Mihai I. Spariosu, The Quantum Relations Principle: Managing Our Future in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Goettingen: V& R unipress, 2016).

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tool that combines the knowledge of relativity, general systems theory, quantum mechanics, cognitive and social sciences, in an innovative fashion that not only bridges the gap between hard sciences and soft sciences, but combines them in a revolutionary transdisciplinary perspective that can bring, once applied, our world into a renewed state of cohesion and integration. The QR technology timely addresses the challenges and risks of the Anthropocene, and is beyond doubt useful, particularly given the urgency of sustainability. In my experience, sustainability is approached by the academic community in a fragmented, isolated, project-based fashion, which fails to explore and provide solutions that are applicable locally and globally. QR does just that. Professor Spariosu and Dr. Schloer explain and illustrate how this technology can feed on existing problems and transform them in global interconnected networks of knowledge and practice that can heal the world. The scholarship that informs this project combines the thought of thinkers such as Capra, Laszlo, Wiener, and Maruyama with the experience and knowledge of scholars in computer science, physics and mathematics, as well as the ancient wisdom of Taoism and Buddhism. The approach that Professor Spariosu uses in bringing together science, technology and spirituality provides a nuanced advantage. The philosophical influence of Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism frames Professor Spariosu’s understanding of the role each human being plays in the future of our world and in the development of a planetary wisdom. This frame is non-material and based on an intention of developing pure consciousness. The human agency described and proposed in Professor Spariosu’s work, i. e., to attain global intelligence and an irenic human development, evokes Al-Insa¯n al-Ka¯mil, the Perfect Man in Islamic thought—the true identity and absolute consciousness of a human being, contrasted to physically bounded material humans limited by their senses and perception. David Abram makes a strong case for the need to re-enliven magic in our world not only through the wonders of technology that respond and talk to us, but also through the as yet numbed sensory connection with the physical wisdom of the natural world.10 Although Abram over-simplifies the social structure of the world—those trapped in urban hyper-technological bubbles, characterized by techno-optimism, and those intimately tied to their rural lives, characterized by oozing anxiety over deeply disrupted patterns of seasons and broken environments—he makes a good point when he observes that the fascination with artificial intelligence is an unacknowledged effort to reenchant the so-called inanimate world, after objects have become quiet for humanity today. The alphabet and book religions have disrupted the intimate 10 David Abram, “Magic and the Machine,” Emergence Magazine 3 (2018), https://emergence magazine.org/story/magic-and-the-machine.

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relationship that animistic cultures held with nature and the elements. Abram argues that technology is built to interact vocally with its owners and operators as a modern form of animism that fails to revive magic. The only way to reenchant the world, Abram suggests, is to awaken (or activate?) our sensory relationship with the natural world. Abram, just as Professor Spariosu, highlights the importance of individual behavior and responsibility in this re-enchantment of the world. A “repeated discipline,” as the lyrics that open this essay evoke, of higher ethics and higher consciousness must include a purposeful practice of realigning our body with the Body of the land. The Gaia hypothesis is quite accessible and tangible when we consider how sensory perception functions here as a kind of glue, binding one’s individual nervous system into the larger ecosystem. When our animal senses are all awake, our skin rippling with sensations as we palpate the surroundings with ears and eyes and flaring nostrils, it sometimes happens that our body becomes part of the larger Body of the land—that our sensate flesh is taken up within the wider Flesh of the breathing Earth— and so we begin to glimpse events unfolding at other locations within the broad Body of the land.11

Some years ago, my companion cat developed an infection from a cat fight that did not heal, even after three weeks of hospitalization, surgery, and antibiotics. With saddened, but peaceful heart, I signed the hospital check out papers and took him home, to pass away in a familiar and peaceful environment. Around this time I had attended a workshop on shamanic practices, with the curiosity of the social scientist who had never had direct contact with the subject. The workshop facilitator spoke about power plant healing and power animal healing, about totems and about our innate ability, as humans, to tune into the wisdom of other beings around us, regardless of their capacity to speak words. When I got back home to my cat, my intuition—what a wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom!—led me to try and heal my cat with what I had learned in the workshop. I will never forget how, after a few moments of silencing my mind and praying for a cure, the names of four medicinal plants came to me as whispers: calendula, comfrey, chamomile, and St. John’s wort. My scientific mind made me smile and reflect that I was a savant and not a healer! Some time later, I went to the pharmacy nearby and asked for an ointment suitable for open wounds. The pharmacist sold me this quite cheap tube of a plant-based cream, which I bought without thinking. Back home, after I had already applied the ointment to my cat’s open wound, I read the label: scar healing ointment with calendula, comfrey, chamomile, and St. John’s wort. A silent humbleness streamed through me. Three days later, my cat’s open wound was closed, and he lived two more years. 11 Ibid.

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This experience touched me on so many levels, that I began exploring more and more what the web of life means, how we can connect to our environments and how we can nurture a higher consciousness of relational intelligence. My whole reductionist understanding of scientific research—the academic tradition in which I had been educated—had to be re-examined and re-defined. It was about this same time that I met Professor Spariosu and was offered the chance to explore answers for my new questions in his work. Similar experiences of connections with unseen information and unseen knowledge are recounted by Abram (2018), Drouot (1998), Eliade (2004), Est8s (1996), Jaff8 and Jung (1963). Their work speaks to us about a type of subtle ecological awareness that is envisioned in Professor Spariosu’s work. Patrick Drouot’s writing on how a quantum physicist became a mystic due to shamanic experiences with the unseen world12 is a beautiful narrative that bridges the higher consciousness of global intelligence and planetary wisdom—Professor Spariosu’s vision—and the individual sensory experience of pulsating life in what we unjustly perceive as inanimate—Abram’s vision. A global human culture that acknowledges and nurtures all these aspects—science, technology, higher consciousness and bodyawareness spirituality—provides a much needed paradigm to motivate further the work of Professor Spariosu and his students, myself included. Such work is utopian in nature. In “Modernism and Exile,” Professor Spariosu discusses the utopian imaginary in Western literature, an excursus that has more empirical and applicable value than one might first think. The most important point that Professor Spariosu makes on the history of utopian thinking in Western traditions is that utopia has often been conceived as a form of exile, in the sense that it is invariably placed away from the author’s homeland, in a remote or imaginary location, or in a distant past or future, that is, in a liminal time-space.13

As such, utopia is hard, but not impossible, to reach: although utopias are deliberately removed from the actual world, they nevertheless maintain subtle and complex links with this world, being ultimately designed to effect substantial changes on it.14

Because what else is a utopian time-space meant to do, if not answer the question “what if”? “What is” is the lived experience of the world, as it comes to our culturally tailored senses and expectations. “What if” is a stimulation and simulation of future-oriented thinking and of aspirations that aim at reinventing 12 Patrick Drouot, Le chaman, le physicien et le mystique (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1998). 13 Mihai I. Spariosu, Modernism and Exile: Liminality and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 32. 14 Ibid, 33.

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the world in order to change, to heal, to better or, sometimes, to preserve what is. Professor Spariosu’s analysis ventures into a variety of literary genres and epochs; it also touches on how cinematography has taken to visualizing utopias. This diversity of his examples allows us to enter into the playful liminality of nuanced terms ascribed to “what if”: eutopia, atopia, achronia, euchronia, dystopia, dyschronia, and, even, the apocalypse. But Professor Spariosu rightfully comments that the Western historical and cultural models of utopian thinking are co-opted by the will to power, by the same dynamic that fragments and reduces the world. Around 2012, the year of the presumed Mayan apocalypse intensely mediatized and reproduced in the public sphere, there was an upsurge of not only media productions on the end of the world, but also of academic events and academic literature debating the apocalypse. My own work was part of this trend, discussing right-wing extremism in Romania and the European Union as a manifestation of apocalyptic fears nurtured by the dystopian perceptions of the systemic crises unfolding with the onset of the economic crash of 2008.15 This academic interest in apocalyptic discourses subsequently gave way to a civic curiosity—which grew into passion—for concrete utopias and intentional communities. Influenced by a subtle phenomenon of social change that Ray and Anderson call “the cultural creatives,”16 I decided in 2013 to transform my home in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, into a cultural space of social innovation and utopian play. For the following four years, I have observed and lived the experience of the exilic-utopia, a paradox of a lively environment enclaved in the urban time-space of my city. The open doors of my home welcomed people, projects, and ideas based on a utopian ethical system of values that borrowed from social movements such as voluntary simplicity, social permaculture, deep ecology and gift economy. During four years, around 2,500 people from across the globe visited our utopian space, and one social, political or artistic event on average, took place daily in our community lounge. The intentions and hopes of everyone involved in this lively laboratory of social innovation followed well15 Adela Fofiu, “Apocalyptic Recounts on the Romanian Internet: The New Right Warning on the End of Romania,” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai—Studia Sociologia 1, (2011): 151–78; Adela Fofiu, “Europe Might Exist No More: The Story of Europe’s Apocalypse as Told On-line by the Romanian Far Right,” Europolis, Journal Of Political Science And Theory 5.1 (2011): 17–40; Adela Fofiu, “Extremist Manipulations of Apocalyptic Fears: A Case Study of de-Christianisation and Islamisation Discourses on the Romanian New Right Blog,” Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe 5.1 (2012): 55–67; Adela Fofiu, Apocalypse on the Net: Extreme Threat and the Majority-Minority Relationship on the Romanian Internet (New York: Peter Lang, 2013); Adela Fofiu, “Stories of a White Apocalypse on the Romanian Internet,” in Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century : Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions, eds. Veronica Watson, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, and Lisa Spanierman, 29–39 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 16 Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (New York: Three Rivers P, 2000).

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known patterns of utopianism. Building a good place, an eu-topos, is a daily practice, a lived experience, that requires sustained efforts to see beyond and to go beyond the known, and more often than not, this effort consumes and creates tension and conflict. The more inspiring and envisioning the community within our utopia has grown outward, the more agonistic and antagonistic it became. The major focus of the eutopia and euchronia near the Botanical Garden of ClujNapoca was opposition and even rejection of the mainstream and normalized practices of the city. As such, the community isolated itself in a form of enclaved exile, surrounded by the communist blocks of flats and the capitalist villas of the neighbourhood. The diversity of practices hosted in the house—from political debates flavored with the vocabulary of the Occupy Movement, shamanic practices, yoga seminars, heirloom seed swaps, activist documentaries, and meditation dance evenings—created a temporary culture of well-being, awareness, and attentiveness to our interaction with the larger world, with the otherness and the familiarity of beings surrounding us and with intense “what ifs.” The delicate nature of the new ways of being in the world that these practices and utopian playfulness brought about was, still, affected by the agonistic will to power, as Professor Spariosu names it, that characterizes today’s systemic dynamic. On one hand, I witnessed how various communities of practice in the field of social innovation were affected by a sense of self-righteousness close to elitism, which was at the root of a self-exiling behaviour. Bridges with the outside world subside in such vibrations, and social change loses much of its strength. On the other hand, when dystopian fears nourish people’s curiosity in utopian experimentation, imagination is deeply agonistic, at its strongest when unacknowledged as such. In 2014–2015, our utopian space hosted a trans-European experimental programme “Future Fabulators”, where the participants imagined the future of Cluj-Napoca in 2065. The agonistic imaginary was visible in the later stages of the programme, when people narrated how they imagined the city after a “deep spiritual awakening”—one of the social change scenarios the facilitators brought forth: technology, even analog technology, and physical comfort and well-being were close to absent in people’s stories. This conclusion of the programme was very telling: the most important shortcoming that I observed in the lived experience of the utopia in my home was that social change, even when understood and verbalized clearly by those participating in it, depends almost fully on the coherence of individual engagements in the play of making the world a better place. As long as individual values are framed by the will to power, the actions of communities and groups that come together in eutopos and euchronos will be agonistic and antagonistic. The fear that any type of change that would save our world from disaster should also take technology away from us and cast us back into pre-technological lifestyles was the foundational emotion

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that nurtured the Future Fabulators. Such was the conclusion I drew regarding the effects of the will to power on utopian hopes! I call my learning experience with Professor Spariosu an ethnography of hope because his writings and the conversations we have had over time have revived the spark of hope in my being, in relation to the challenges of the Anthropocene and our roles in utopian futures. The models and the solutions that Professor Spariosu brings forth have the capacity to end the exile in utopian thinking: [T]he 21st century must become the Age of Global Learning, in which we as a species must concentrate all of our efforts on what is the hardest and most valuable of all sciences: the science of being human. Such a desideratum may sound like pie in the sky, especially to those members of our elites who are enamored with power and who will dismiss it as one more wishful dream of the exilic-utopian imagination. Fortunately, however, utopian thinking, despite dire warnings and prophesies against it, has not disappeared from the Western contemporary sociocultural scene—it simply needs to be redirected, away from the will to power.17 At any rate, ultimately the issue is not to be pro-utopian, anti-utopian, or dystopian, but to go beyond the agonistic dynamic of utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse in social thinking and action. Instead, one should create and/or adopt alternative ideas, emotions, and behaviors—or systems of values and beliefs—that transcend a mentality of power. I believe that the current projects of civil society would have the greatest chance of being successful on a global scale if they adopted (and adapted to contemporary conditions) the irenic values of the ancient tradition of wisdom. Fortunately, this ancient tradition, known also as the philosophia perennis, has returned in our age.18

A Closing Word Ultimately, Professor Spariosu’s utopian imaginary is visionary, in the large body of utopian literature and utopian practice, due to its irenic character that transgresses proclivities of separation, fragmentation, reductionism, agony and antagonism. The proposal is not merely to bring together pieces of knowledge that we already hold, but to go beyond the already known and to step into the seemingly unknown with new ways of seeing, new ways of being and new ways of doing. Professor Spariosu’s vision becomes, thus, post-ideological and comforting. There is still hope in the world, as we, his students, have the knowledge and the vision to heal the world with our sciences, our technologies, our spirituality and, I must add, our capacity to embody our practices. The utopian triad of Professor Spariosu—science, technology and spirituality—needs to be embodied in order for us to acquire developed capacities of relating to the world and 17 Spariosu, Modernism and Exile, 182. 18 Ibid, 184.

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to the future. Indeed, the accent falls not on what we have and what we know, but on how and who we are—human: [T]the deciding factor in human development is not so much how effective a scientific theory might be, or how close it might be to the truth, or how easily it can be turned into a “powerful” technology. Rather, it is our daily ethos or practice. We might possess the “best” scientific theory, such as deep ecology, the “best” information and communication technology, such as digital and quantum computers, or the “best” political system, such as democracy. And yet, we may end up putting them all to inappropriate and counterproductive uses, as we have seen happen repeatedly throughout the history of scientific and technological development, as well as the history of world politics.19 All sciences are human sciences, because human beings produce them. Consequently, all branches of science, whether we call them natural, animal, or human, should serve the same purpose, that is, human development. In turn, such development will always be mindful of, and in harmony with, all other life on earth. In the end, the “hardest” of sciences, which has also been the most neglected by our mainstream scientists, is the science of being human.20

Last, but not least, the deepest lesson I have learned from my professor is the beauty of hard work to achieve a vision: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Bibliography Abram, David. “Magic and the Machine.” Emergence Magazine 3 (2018). https://emergencemagazine.org/story/magic-and-the-machine. Drouot, Patrick. Le chaman, le physicien et le mystique. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1998. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Est8s, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. Fofiu, Adela. “Apocalyptic Recounts on the Romanian Internet: The New Right Warning on the End of Romania.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai—Studia Sociologia 1 (2011): 151–78. –. “Europe Might Exist No More: The Story of Europe’s Apocalypse as Told On-line by the Romanian Far Right.” Europolis, Journal Of Political Science And Theory 5.1 (2011): 17–40. –. “Extremist Manipulations of Apocalyptic Fears: A Case Study of de-Christianisation and Islamisation Discourses on the Romanian New Right Blog.” Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe 5.1 (2012): 55–67. –. Apocalypse on the Net: Extreme Threat and the Majority-Minority Relationship on the Romanian Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 19 Ibid, 21. 20 Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development, 161.

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–. “Stories of a White Apocalypse on the Romanian Internet.” In Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century : Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions, edited by Veronica Watson, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, and Lisa Spanierman, 29–39. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Future Fabulators. 2014. https://libarynth.org/future_fabulators/future_of_the_city. Jablonski, Hazrat Pir Moineddin. “The Prophet Muhammad’s Prayer of Light” (short form). Sufi Ruhaniat Europe. https://ruhaniateurope.org/documents/PrayerofLight_eng.pdf. Jaff8, Aniela. Apparitions and Precognition: A Study from the Point of View of C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology. New York: University Books, 1963. Jenkins, Richard. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1.1 (2000): 11–32. Levitas, Ruth. “Marxism, Romanticism and Utopia: Ernst Bloch and William Morris.” Radical Philosophy 51 (1989): 27–36. Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959. Ray, Paul H. and Sherry Ruth Anderson. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New York: Three Rivers P, 2000. Schloer, Hardy and Mihai I. Spariosu. The Quantum Relations Principle: Managing Our Future in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Goettingen: V& R Unipress, 2016. Spariosu, Mihai I. Global Intelligence and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. –. Modernism and Exile: Liminality and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Turner, Tina. “Beyond: Spiritual Message.” On Beyond: Buddhist and Christian Prayers, produced by Gunther Mende and Mee Eun Kim-Mende. Decca 4763714, 00289 4763714 1. Released June 2009. https://www.the-world-of-tina.com/beyond—album.html.

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Chapter 8: Practices of Intercultural Studies in Teaching Literature

“At present, there is grievous need for such return [great traditions, lines of spiritual descent]. All about us flourishes the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read short words or words of hatred and tawdriness but cannot grasp the meaning of language when it is in the condition of beauty or of truth.”1

The purpose of this essay is to reconfirm the role literature professors play in helping students recognize and eventually embody the central classical values of goodness, beauty and truth, through moral development, aesthetic freedom, and self-discovery. It is also an invitation to literature professors to reconsider their methodology since, Educators agree that the overarching goal of education is to develop informed, thinking citizens capable of participating in both domestic and world affairs. The development of such citizens depends not only upon education for citizenship, but also upon other essentials of education shared by all subjects.2

The practice of intercultural studies in the teaching of literature, as proposed by Mihai Spariosu, is essential in preparing students for a global age. This essay will present several possible examples of good practices that seek to nurture students’ attentiveness and openness. For centuries, literature has been an important area of study in all educational systems. Regarded both as a source of entertainment and an educational pillar, the discipline of literature seeks to instill in students a sense of beauty. From Plato to Goethe and Matthew Arnold, poetry and fictional texts stand at the core of 1 George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky : An Essay in the Old Criticism, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 5. “I should like to believe that there is clear proof of the need, in our particular society a greater need than ever before, for both scholar and critic [and teacher, I may add] to do a particular job of work: the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art: to do the job of intermediary” (R.P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955], 183–84). 2 Alan. C. Purves and Olive Niles, “The Challenge to Education to Produce Literate Citizens,” in Becoming Readers in a Complex Society, ed. Alan C. Purves and Olive Niles, 11 (Illinois: U Chicago P, 1984).

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instruction. Teaching literature presupposes extensive reading experience and philological studies. Many European professors hold on to the traditional ways of teaching by lecturing. While this method helps sustain the transmission of core values, it no longer seems to attract students. In the current technological context, speed and effectiveness defeat the natural rhythms of study. Today, it is essential to offer students the opportunity to get involved in activities that raise their awareness of cultural difference and cultivate empathy. Professors should acknowledge the need for such interaction by sharing their own views on reading. Merely listening to the unprocessed ideas that professors might spout tends to block the students’ thinking process and limit new interpretative paths. There are few chances for students to go beyond traditional frameworks already in place within the profession. Yet, students need to be allowed to have a voice and to share their ideas. The mere reproduction of information is not enough. On the contrary, it is damaging to students’ creativity and imagination. As mentors, professors should elicit the students’ engagement with texts, by also focusing on fostering their empathy. The French inaugurated this teaching philosophy through dissertations3 that were part of the writing component of any literature or philosophy class. By writing a dissertation, students learned how to challenge their own point of view and develop strong arguments. This essential teaching technique needs to be retailed and applied to other educational systems. One of the core values of literature classes in America is their grounding in the real. The process of inviting students to step into the fictional world of literature can be seen as an opportunity to nurture empathy4. The students are more aware 3 The French dissertation is a five-paragraph essay that needs to include a thesis, antithesis, and a synthesis. 4 For instance, in the context of a literature and medicine class that prepares pre-med students for their encounter with future patients, there are a couple of texts that one could read in order to help students understand how disease affects the lives of those suffering, or investigating the psychological repercussions of the disease, by reading texts such as Chekhov’s Ward 6 (1892). Disease and the way it is experienced can be theoretically explored through texts such as: Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1998), Matei Ca˘linescu’s Matthew’s Enigma: A Father’s Portrait of His Autistic Son (2009), Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999), Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (2001). By reading authors who discuss the limits of the medical investigation, students will acquire practical skills for coping with such life contexts. MoliHre with his Imaginary Invalid (1673), Lev Tolstoy with The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), and Chekhov with his Collection of Medical Tales (2003) are readings that can be used in order to offer a rich understanding of the problem of death. There are many other appealing themes and topics one could include in a Literature and Medicine class. Improving the doctor-patient relationship, or at least raising students’ awareness about the importance of that approach would be one of the main aims for such a class. Bulgakov’s stories about A Country Doctor’s Notebook. ([1963], 2010); Richard Selzer’s article entitled What I Saw at the Abortion (1976) and Plato’s Phaedo (On the Soul) are texts that challenge students to put themselves in the shoes of characters and find solutions to delicate situations.

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of others the more they can try to engage better in dialogue, without necessarily imposing their own thoughts, but rather listening to the other. Literature, in this manner, helps prepare students to become good citizens. In addition to the indepth knowledge specific for their field of study, interdisciplinary approaches provide students with a holistic view on life. I approach teaching not in terms of theorizing, explaining and conceptualizing alterity, but rather in terms of facilitating an encounter with alterity. Alterity can be taught as a movement or process toward others. Teaching alterity is not a stagnant theoretical process, but rather a dynamic recognition of the Other through direct encounter. The teaching of literature would be incomplete if: – we limit our activities to a critical interpretation of texts through a decontextualized close reading; – if literature courses focus exclusively on the Aristotelian distinction between genres (lyrical, narrative, and dramatic) without connecting the various means of expression to universal feelings, placed in the readers’ particular contexts; – if it limit ourselves to the most popular interpretation that critics assign to a given text5, without allowing an unmediated encounter between the reader and the text; – if it limit ourselves to a single perspective, isolated from a dialogical approach; – if we do not seek to smooth the way for the reader to encounter the other through a text or any subsequent encounter with the real others; – if we only follow the pedagogical restrictions of a national curriculum, without seeking a more open understanding; – if teachers do not completely understand their role as mediators and translators of the Other in a language understood by students. Ideally, teachers acknowledge that their role surpasses the theories and methods of teaching (such as Dale’s learning cones,6 Kolb’s cycle of learning styles,7 5 For instance, it would be dangerous to look at Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), only through the general view of those French scholars who view the text exclusively in the category of literature of the absurd. Yves Ansel’s book on Camus presents an enriching reading that contradicts this general French categorization. Ansel denies the vox populi and works with Camus’ text at a different level, by comparing the general edition with the manuscript that Camus’ daughter Catherine shared with Ansel. After filling in the black spots of the book with Camus’ self-censored paragraphs, Ansel reaches an unexpected result: Mersault’s crime is not absurdly motivated by the effects of a powerful sun, but well premeditated. Ansel’s text proves that one needs guidance in his/her reading because missing such details might lead to false interpretations of texts. See Yves Ansel, Albert Camus, totem et tabou. Politique de la post8rit8 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012). 202. 6 See Edgar Dale, Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching (New York: Dryden P, 1946).

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Bloom’s taxonomy8), course design, grading, class discussions, and evaluation, because their ultimate purpose is to foster empathic, free citizens who can think by themselves and who are ready to engage in peaceful encounters. When teaching literature, one needs to be aware of the deontology9 of the discipline and respect its values10. Regardless of the type of literature course we teach, there are a couple of core perennial values that should frame teachers’ planning. They should nurture in students an awareness of the present moment, in relation to past and future. They need to explain the difference between fiction and reality, by emphasizing the “here and now” that goes beyond a limited hedonistic approach and entails an awareness of the present. By focusing exclusively on either the future or the past, people have the tendency to ignore the present. Literature has the capacity to raise awareness and prevent us from sinking into absent-mindedness. Another essential lesson that students can learn concerns the construction of reality. Literature professors can discuss with their students what reality means for them, in order to open their students’ perceptions and encourage dialogue from various angles. Plato’s Myth of the Cave presents an excellent text that offers a graphical understanding of reality. Also, students need to learn about the limitless conceptualizations of reality and understand that divergent opinions need not be the seeds of conflict, but can enrich one’s perspective. Myths, stories, histories are intellectually nourishing because they reduce one’s fear of the unknown through an encounter with alterity. The real Other is viewed by analogy with the fictional Other, creating an element of familiarity that facilitates one’s approach to the Other11. The Other destroys the order of the ego, but literature gives us the means to face this challenge by acknowledging both shared similarities and differences.

7 See David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development, vol. 1. (Upper Saddle River : Prentice Hall, 1984). 8 See Benjamin S. Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1956). 9 According to Andr8 Labande, the term was first coined in 1825 by Jeremy Bentham from the Greek words deon (duty) and logos (science/word). It was made public in 1834, in “Deontology or the Science of Morality.” Deontology represents a set of professional duties, or the science of what one needs to do at work. See Constantin Cucos¸ , “Schit¸a˘ pentru o deontologie a cadrelor didactice.” in Pedagogie, 2nd ed., revised (Bucharest: Polirom, 2002); Maria T. Pira˘ u, Introducere iˆn pedagogie, 2nd ed., revised. (Cluj-Napoca: Risoprint, 2008). 10 In her Introducere iˆn pedagogie, Maria Pira˘ u mentions that one should nurture those values and attitudes that bring people together, by recognizing one’s right to difference (Art 8.1.). 11 “On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other” (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1977], 111).

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Literature professors should also take into account the need to reshape the way students look at others. Instead of transforming the Other into an alien, or even a monster, fiction offers students the opportunity to learn hospitality in relation to others. Abstaining from premature judgements by first listening to the Other, requires acceptance and care. Students need professors who act as role models and who can lead them in reading texts that can help them frame their future in relation to others, irrespective of race, gender, spiritual view, or age. Literature shows how difficult it is to connect to others because of differences, fake expectations or prejudices. However, they also facilitate students becoming aware of the beauty inherent in accepting the Other. In Why Teach?, Mark Edmundson argues that reading is an essential power.12 It determines (self)-understanding, attentiveness, and empathy. Today’s society gives ready access to various means of communication and tends to minimize the role of literature as a form of communication that builds identity. For this reason, formal training is needed so that students might be guided into identifying moral values and examples of good practices. Educating “through and for values”13 serves as key societal aim and literature teachers who should pay attention to both the selective canon (bibliography) and the hermeneutic canon (practices and interpretative methods meant to expose students to educational values).14 They should combine the linguistic competence,15 with persuasive competence,16 so as to offer students a broad perspective and a ple-

12 Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 194. 13 Sorin Cristea. “Educat¸ie prin s¸ i pentru Valori.” Didactica Pro. Revista˘ de Teorie s¸i Practica˘ Educat¸ionala˘ . 35.1 (2006): 56. 14 Educational, pedagogical or didactic values and cognitive component (informative, referential); affective component (subjective, personal); axiological component (education and cultivation of values); moral component (behavioral, ethical); aesthetic component (creative, artistic for beauty recognition and cultivation); initiatory component (formative, initiatory); identity component (intrapersonal and interpersonal component of the self); prophylactic or therapeutic component (securing, relational, integrative); the playful component (recreational, fun, fulfilling pleasure for pleasure’s sake). My translation for : “Valori formative, pedagogice sau didactice s¸ i componenta cognitiva˘ (informativa˘ , referent¸iala˘ ); componenta afectiva˘ (subiectiva˘ , personala˘ ); componenta axiologica˘ (educarea s¸ i cultivarea valorilor); componenta morala˘ (comportamentala˘ , etica˘ ); componenta estetica˘ (creativa˘ , artistica˘ s¸ i de recunoas¸ tere s¸ i cultivare a frumosului); componenta init¸iatica˘ (formativa˘ , init¸iatica˘ ); componenta identitara˘ (componenta intrapersonala˘ s¸ i interpersonala˘ a sinelui); componenta profilactica˘ sau terapeutica˘ (de securizare, relat¸ionala˘ , integrativa˘ ); componenta ludica˘ (recreativa˘ , distractiva˘ , de %mplinire a pla˘ cerii gratuite) (Mircea Breaz, “Valori Educative %n Literatura pentru Copii. Ca˘ rt¸i ale Forma˘ rii din Genul ‘Kinderbildungsroman,’” in Studii s¸i Cerceta˘ ri din Domeniul S¸tiint¸elor Socio-Umane [Cluj-Napoca: Limes & Argonaut. 2015], 229). 15 The understanding of the explicit of a text. 16 The understanding of the implicit of a text.

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thora of alternatives and understandings, in order to attain the desired educational ideal. Both Mircea Breaz and George F. Kneller consider that the main purpose of literature is to “develop a program of cultivating their students’ moral and aesthetic values, namely, the development of an appreciation of life and literature through the study of a number of literary works.”17 Similar to Goethe, they connect the reading of great novels with personal transformation and becoming. As Breaz notices, “The great books of formation involve fundamental paths of existential becoming, becoming great epic themes, through the artistic transfiguration of reality.”18 By investigating different approaches to teaching fictional texts, one can establish correspondences and stimulate future professional dialogues. I would argue that there is the need to develop intercultural models of work that transcend national boundaries and that defamiliarize students of their preconceptions. There is also the need to reframe the spectrum of what one is teaching.19 The intercultural role of literature is unquestionable. Steiner, for instance, considers novels as the “most coherent and inclusive … renditions of experience that literature attempts.”20 Similar to Matthew Arnold, Steiner looks at literature as a matter of “high seriousness.” Similarly, Spariosu stresses the importance of literature for the global age. As stated in his book, Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age (2006), “What we need to learn or relearn in the first place is how to relate to 17 My translation for : “antrenarea unui program de cultivare a valorilor morale s¸ i estetice ale elevilor, respectiv ‘dezvoltarea aprecierilor lui asupra viet¸ii s¸ i a literaturii prin studiul unui mare numa˘ r de opere literare’” (G. F. Kneller. Logica s¸i Limbajul Educat¸iei. [Bucharest: Editura Didactica˘ s¸ i Pedagogica˘ , 1973], 87). 18 My translation for : “Marile ca˘ rt¸i ale forma˘ rii implica˘ parcursuri fundamentale ale devenirii existent¸iale, devenite mari teme epice, prin transfigurarea artistica˘ a realita˘¸tii” (Breaz, “Valori Educative %n Literatura pentru Copii,” 230). 19 In his book titled Introduction of the Theory of Reading (1998), Cornea cites Jansen, the Danish writer who divides reading competences in 4 phases, from rebus reading to a linear and selective reading starting with the 16th year of age (Paul Cornea, Introducere %n Teoria Lecturii, [Ias‚ i: Polirom, 1998], 139). Cornea offers a detailed description of approaching texts through differentiating types of reading and by inviting readers to carefully choose the method they intend to utilize in class, depending on the reading competencies they intend to acquire. The recognized set of reading strategies comprises: monitoring comprehension, metacognition, graphic and semantic organizers, answering questions (QAR questionanswer relationship strategy), generating questions, recognizing story structure, and summarizing (C. Ralph Adler, ed., Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read [National Institute for Literacy, 2001], 49–54). Among these strategies, there are not enough explicit techniques that go beyond the immediate understanding of the text. Many times, teachers are satisfied with working on the text by following the seven popular strategies, without going further into the results of such activities. 20 Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 20.

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each other and to our environment in mutually beneficial and enriching ways… The humanities could play a major role in this global learning process.”21 He emphasizes the downfalls of utilitarian educational systems that only focus on “expertise” and “professional competence,” and reinforces the role of humanities that consolidate students’ training and help them become free citizens. He proposes a curriculum based on a series of interdisciplinary courses that can lead to what he calls the emergent ethics of global intelligence, alternative mode of being and acting in the world. He enthusiastically promotes literature as “an indispensable anthropological tool of self-exploration and self-fashioning that should, alongside other artistic productions, regain a prominent place in our future global communities.”22 Also, “by its very nature, literature is antidisciplinary, or rather, transdisciplinary, and hence can have a leading role in proposing new cognitive models for our academic and nonacademic communities.”23 He suggests that “we should cease looking upon literature as a traditional canon of literary texts and regard it, instead, as a form of liminal activity that generates new cognitive associations and interactions.”24 Evidently, for such an approach to be possible, we need professors who can bring students closer to texts and help them properly explore their liminal enriching potential. In Becoming Readers in a Complex Society (1984), representatives of the National Society of the Study of Education point out: While students learn to read a wide range of material, they develop very few skills for examining the nature of the ideas that they take away from their reading. Though most have learned to make simple inferences about such things as a character’s behavior and motivation, for example, and can express their own judgments of a work as “good” or “bad,” they cannot return to the passage to explain the interpretations they have made.25

Literature professors can aid students to learn to combine reading strategies with clear pre-established outcomes that are well aligned to general and specific objectives. The teacher’s purpose should not stop at the passive transmission of information, but it can go deeper into observing and guiding the student’s encounter with the text. In contrast to Freire’s banking model where students are seen as containers for educators to drop knowledge into their heads, teachers have the potential to direct students’ consciousness toward the responsibility of an appropriate encounter.

21 Mihai I. Spariosu, Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 115. 22 Ibid, 61. 23 Ibid, 66. 24 Ibid, 66. 25 Purves and Niles, “The Challenge to Education to Produce Literate Citizens,” 2.

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Some might argue that a mediated encounter might lead to a biased understanding of the Other. In other words, if teachers translate the Other to the students, the Other might be misunderstood and relegated to a predefined box. In order to avoid such limitations, teachers need to moderate their intervention so that they provide students only with the essential lenses for searching for beauty, goodness, and truth in texts. Guidance from a teacher does not mean theorizing understanding, but presenting texts on a liminal platform that provides good examples, and selecting from texts those parts that might offer students moral support. Teachers should look for universal truths in texts, and use differences as enriching rather than divisive. They should teach students first to perceive the perennial values/feelings that bring people together, but also introduce them to the common humanity that unites us all. They should then focus on presenting differences in a positive light, as sources for expanding one’s understanding of the intercultural world in which we all live. Students are very capable of recognizing when difference is presented for its own sake or in response to some bureaucratic mandate. They do not appreciate being patronized. Such extreme pedagogical agendas run the risk of trapping students in a mentality of power that has little to do with the educational experience. Pedagogical methods do not limit themselves to definitions of the Other. Teachers are enjoined to present texts with some awareness of the various pedagogies of recognition. From here on, there are two options: they can (1) either offer a limitless area of interpretation for students, showing them unmediated access to texts, by considering the need for a direct/clear encounter of the self of the student/reader with the Other in/of the text, or they can (2) actualize a couple of core values in order to guide student’s interaction with the text. (1) In the case of the first approach, the Indian comparatist, Ipshita Chanda, considers that “[…] the role of the teacher is to communicate possible ways of searching for answers to questions not only of literature, but of life itself, in particular contexts of the present.”26 I could not agree more with her. However, five years later, during a conference at the University of Georgia, on “Multicultural and Migrant Fictions,” Chanda changed her mind and claimed that “One cannot teach alterity.”27 26 Ipshita Chanda, “The Comparatist as Teacher : Teaching Indian Literatures through a Comparative Methodology,” in Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature, ed. Rizio Yohannan Raj (New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2012), 14. 27 Ipshita Chanda, round table discussion with graduate students at the Migrant Fictions Conference held at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, on April 27, 2017, 10:00 am–2:00 pm. The discussion was held over Skype and hosted in the Comparative Literature department’s room 220 in Joe Brown Hall.

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In order to better understand her position in relation to the role of literature teachers, I went back to her 2012 article, The Comparatist as Teacher : Teaching Indian Literature through a Comparative Methodology, where she offered a list of pedagogical practices “that provide the horizon for understanding the cultural dynamics that produce texts.”28 She described Comparative Literature as both a discipline and methodology, mentioning that the task of comparative methodology is to clarify “the critical processes of texts rather than focusing on our own critical positions.”29 The problem with this position is that regardless of the methodological framework, students often miss recognizing the effect the text has on their worldviews. Despite the fact that, “Comparative methodology enables us thus, to hear and see the text while it is being produced, and while it is being ‘read,’”30 what is the purpose of such endeavor if not the transmission of value? Should not teachers be aware of this ultimate goal? Should not they try to see the forest for the trees of blind unprocessed methodology? Understanding a text’s horizons is essential for the understanding of the text, but if we ignore adding the moral horizon to the many hermeneutical layers in approaching a literary text, we miss the opportunity to introduce good practices that have the potential to change mentalities. As teachers, we cannot take for granted our students’ intuition in searching for values in literary texts.31 They are always there, between the lines, but one needs to practice finding them. Chanda acknowledges the responsibility of teachers to help students hear the message of the text, “[t]o indicate that way32 is the task of 28 Chanda, “The Comparatist as Teacher,” 14. 29 Ibid, 19. See also Sheldon Pollock, Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley : U California P, 2003), 12. Professor Chanda refers to the literary study as a tool used by any comparatist “that will enable her to trace the movement of both theme and form across time, space and culture” (Chanda, “The Comparatist as Teacher,” 19). See Amiya Dev, “Literary History from Below” in Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice, ed. Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1989). 30 Chanda, “The Comparatist as Teacher,” 26. 31 It is not enough for teachers to be aware of these values if they ignore sharing them with students. Professor Chanda acknowledges the importance of the horizon of expectation, but fails in underlining the teachers’ responsibility to transmit it to their students as well: “Even while the comparatist herself is reading it, she tries to understand through the use of her tools the structure of feeling which produced it, and the horizon of expectation that enabled it to be received or rejected, in its own time and in later times” (Ibid, 26–27). 32 “the ability to hear and coexist with what we very casually call ‘difference,’ is the way towards survival. This is possible only if we appreciate that texts are not fixed entities, neither are they totally objective nor completely subjectively crafted. They are neither cut off from a literary tradition, structure of feeling or conjuncture, nor completely determined by these. In short, the dynamics of textual production and reception will help us to find a way of understanding the realities within and outside the textual world, realities that are always interacting to produce ‘readings.’ If we are able to ‘read’ the differences and the similarities in their dynamic

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the teacher of Comparative Literature in India.” She thus shares the comparatist methodology : The comparatist’s reading is dictated by what she “hears” in the text…. The task of Comparative Literature pedagogy in India is to prepare the student to “hear” the text before a reading is formed…. And that is where Comparative Literature differs in practice and/or theory from Cultural Studies: there is no theory that Comparative Literature proposes, but a method predicated on a particular understanding of “text” and “culture” and their interactive presence in a cultural product. A repertoire of conceptual tools rather than critical theory is deployed in the “reading” of the text. The reader brings no fixed assumptions to demonstrate: some assumptions may be formed and some revised in the process of reading. No theory is at stake for Comparative Literature to defend, since it proposes a method and not an overarching theory. And, that is its ideological position as well.33

Acknowledging the fact that the repertoire of conceptual tools only provides students with a formal understanding of texts, teachers have another option. They can guide students toward the core values that they want to instill through reading. Reading, the reception of reading, and the teacher’s role in emphasizing the core values of goodness, beauty, truth, tolerance, and empathy can be taught as element in a relationship of interdependence. Once the role of the teacher as guide is endorsed, he/she can deal objectively with theoretical frames and can handle comparative methodological tools as a means to a different end: training our students to become free citizens. As Spariosu notes, It has also become imperative that all of us academics get involved at the level of our local communities and do not abdicate our responsibilities as intellectuals and educators in the face of the occasionally overwhelming onslaught of utilitarian and reductionist attitudes and practices that prevail both inside and outside our current learning establishments.34

Knowing the details about a text’s historical context or an author’s biography, the style and motivation in writing serve no definite purpose, unless such ideas become materialized, unless the word becomes flesh and the lessons that one finds in books can be applied in real-life situations. In my view, this should be the aim of any literature professors, to lead students/readers to a better understanding of themselves and of others. Literature provides the necessary examples for such a metamorphosis, but readers need to learn how to grasp meaning and eventually be able to apply it to their real-life scenarios. and contextualized forms, we shall have found a way to ‘hear’ the realities of lived and living difference” (Ibid, 27). Can teachers take for granted that students with no experience in the comparative literature methodology might find the way? 33 Ibid, 27. 34 Spariosu, Remapping Knowledge, xvi.

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Instead of complaining about the shrinking number of students in the humanities, literature teachers need to cultivate their own professional garden35 and identify new methods in leading discussions about texts, so as to generate in the students a fresh interest for reading36, nurture intercultural awareness and clearly disseminate values. Literature classes ideally should be based on models of encounter and their applicability in real life situations. They should encourage students to work with texts and create new stories, role play or engage in roundtable discussions. It is essential for literature teachers to be familiar with literary theories that foster encounter,37 such as those of Levinas (who saw literature or the third element as in-betweenness, trace of God, hospitality, exile), Gadamer (tradition, culture, prejudice, education, horizon), Certeau (history, heterology, place, literature), Ricoeur (goodness, reciprocity, love, justice, narrative, hospitality, God, forgiveness, language), Buber (I-thou relationship), Nussbaum’s suggestion for cultivating humanity, Figueira’s theories on pedagogies of recognition, or Spariosu’s ideas about a ludic-irenic mentality. All these theorists and philosophers encourage literary scholars to renounce disciplinary barriers in their teaching and practice their craft at an intercultural dimension, based on openness, cooperation, receptivity and mutual understanding, and thus address the “needs of the community.” The role of the university, then, would be not only to generate new knowledge, to debate and to exchange ideas, but also to facilitate their free flow both inside and outside the

35 Il faut cultiver son jardin (Voltaire, Candide). 36 “What [Mundoli Narayanan] describes as the special quality of theatre is its distancing quality : ‘it is only the distancing of man from himself, and thus the fundamental performative condition, which allows him to cultivate and understand his identity in any way.’ Yet is not this a common quality of most literary production? (David Damrosch, “Afterword: Comparative? Literature?” in Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature, ed. Rizio Yohannan Raj [New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2012], 286). If teachers show students the limitless possibilities of thought that a reading liminal experience might provide them with, and if they go back to the ancient educational ideal of paidea, or building up the free citizen, they will have greater chances to transform their literature classes into tempting invitations to a continuous new becoming. Literary studies cannot be replaced by Performative Studies because “[e]ven as we open out our studies toward the full diversity of verbal, visual, and musical representation today, older narrative modes will surely continue to have an important place in our studies. Virgil, Kalidasa, and Proust give us unique pleasures […]” (Ibid, 289). Thus, let us restate the major responsibility of teachers to transmit moral values to their students, by guiding their reading in such a way to touch upon core values, at the same time with offering each student/reader the opportunity to assimilate knowledge and apply it for improving his/her own approach to the self/the other/the world in general. 37 See Corina-Mihaela Beleaua, “Literature as the Third Element” East-West Cultural Passage 17.2 (December 2017): 7–28.

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academic communities throughout the world . . . its main purpose should be to pursue cooperative learning and research in the service of human self-development.38

It has become commonplace in academia to complain about the evils of racism, discrimination, and xenophobia. How many of us have sincerely look at the connection between what/how we teach and such divisive social phenomena? One might argue that literature proves inefficient in solving the aforementioned problems. It is for this reason that I advocate for a new defense of literature, a fresh, well argued, and strong consideration of the positive outcomes of reading. By allowing literature to gain its well-deserved place on the level of dialogue, and by teaching it with the clear purpose of opening readers’ minds toward an irenic mentality, students will hopefully see the need to restructure their relationship with the Other. Literature should and can nurture intercultural awareness. The American and European systems of education can learn from each other and adopt intercultural practices in teaching literature, and become providers of empathetic behavior and ultimately serve as valuable players in the shaping of an irenic mentality, where the Other becomes a subject identifiable with the Self. By actualizing classical values, by facilitating classroom discussions, and by offering examples of intercultural practices as core aims in the teaching of literature, teachers can effect change. Empathy functions at the level of interactions and dialogue.39 Literature teachers need to develop empathy as a core objective of their teaching, since we are, after all, “hardwired for compassion.”40 Through literature, readers imaginatively step into other worlds and the other’s world. Familiarity confers comfort and by re-actualizing one’s sorrows, one can activate empathy toward others. Eventually, fictional texts make people treat each other better because the ego is set aside. All these models are meant to frame an intercultural approach that has the potential to strengthen the educational process. We must constantly ask ourselves: Why do we teach what we teach? What are the expected effects of our teaching? We do not teach because we need to fulfill university requirements, but in order to design a culture of empathy, build an irenic mentality, and cultivate intercultural practices that will bring people together.

38 Mihai I. Spariosu, Global Intelligence and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004), 188, 195. 39 See Lindsey B. Cummings, Empathy as Dialogue in Theater and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 40 See Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (Toronto: Knopf Doubleday, 2010).

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Bibliography Adler, C. Ralph, ed. Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read. National Institute for Literacy, 2001. Ansel, Yves. Albert Camus, totem et tabou. Politique de la post8rit8. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012. Armstrong, Karen. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Toronto: Knopf Doubleday, 2010. Bauby, Jean Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1997. Beleaua, Corina-Mihaela. “Literature as the Third Element.” East-West Cultural Passage 17.2 (December 2017): 7–28. Blackmur, R. P. The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955. Bloom, Benjamin, S. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 1956. Breaz, Mircea. “Valori Educative %n Literatura pentru Copii. Ca˘ rt¸i ale Forma˘ rii din Genul ‘Kinderbildungsroman’.” In Studii s¸i Cerceta˘ ri din Domeniul S¸tiint¸elor Socio-Umane. Cluj-Napoca: Limes & Argonaut, 2015. Bulgakov, Mikhail. A Country Doctor’s Notebook. New York: Vintage Classics, 2010. Ca˘linescu, Matei. Matthew’s Enigma: A Father’s Portrait of His Autistic Son. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Chanda, Ipshita. “The Comparatist as Teacher : Teaching Indian Literatures through a Comparative Methodology.” In Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature, edited by Rizio Yohannan Raj, 13–28. New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2012. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. Chekhov’s Doctors: A Collection of Chekhov’s Medical Tales. Translated by John L. Coulehan. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2003. Cornea, Paul. Introducere %n Teoria Lecturii. Ias‚ i: Polirom, 1998. Cristea, Sorin. “Educat¸ie prin s¸i pentru Valori.” Didactica Pro. Revista˘ de Teorie s¸i Practica˘ Educat¸ionala˘ 35.1 (2006). Cucos¸ , Constantin. “Schit¸a˘ pentru o Deontologie a Cadrelor Didactice.” In Pedagogie. 2nd ed., revised. Bucharest: Polirom, 2002. Cummings, Lindsey B. Empathy as Dialogue in Theater and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dale, Edgar. Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching. New York: Dryden P, 1946. Damrosch, David. “Afterword: Comparative? Literature?” In Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature, edited by Rizio Yohannan Raj, 280–89. New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2012. Dev, Amiya. “Literary History from Below.” In Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice, edited by Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1989. Edmundson, Mark. Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, 2nd ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Edson, Margaret. Wit: A Play. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Figueira, M. Dorothy. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Cross-Cultural Encounters with India. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

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Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1977. Kneller, G. F. Logica s¸i Limbajul Educat¸iei. Bucharest: Editura Didactica˘ s¸ i Pedagogica˘ , 1973. Kolb, David A. Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development. Vol. 1. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1984. MoliHre, Jean-Baptiste. The Imaginary Invalid. Translated by Henri van Laun. New York: Dover, 2004. Pira˘ u, T. Maria. Introducere iˆn Pedagogie. 2nd ed., revised. Cluj-Napoca: Risoprint, 2008. Plato. Phaedo. Translated by David Gallop. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Pollock, Sheldon. Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley : U California P, 2003. Purves, Alan. C. and Olive Niles. “The Challenge to Education to Produce Literate Citizens.” In Becoming Readers in a Complex Society, edited by Alan C. Purves and Olive Niles, 1–15. Illinois: U Chicago P, 1984. Selzer, Richard. “What I Saw at the Abortion.” Esquire (January 1, 1976): 66–67. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Spariosu, I. Mihai. Global Intelligence and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning. (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004) –. Remapping Knowledge: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky : An Essay in the Old Criticism. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Tolstoy, Lev. The Death of Ivan Ilych. New York: Bantam Classic, 1981. Voltaire. Candide, or Optimism. Translated by Robert M. Adams, edited by Nicholas Cronk. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.

Florin Berindeanu

Chapter 9: Mihai I. Spariosu Between Theory and Philosophy

Mihai I. Spariosu represents a rare type of comparatist. With a discipline that in the past decades has lost its universal nature based on profound philosophical forays into philosophy and literature, Spariosu has unwaveringly remained faithful to its foundational goals. When founded, Comparative Literature voiced its purpose to examine literature as a complex phenomenon that would situate it at the intersection of interdisciplinarity. Linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and literary theory would assemble together into what was meant to create the ultimate weapon in the scientific explanation of literature. Various schools of thought refined angles of research and exhaustive perspectives to make the study of literature ever better and global. Spariosu’s contribution to the field embraces these two cardinal aims: a thorough search among the meanders of literary works combined with a global perspective that, now at the dawn of the twenty-first century, bring together the “classical” view on comparatism and its most recent integration into globalism. But globalism and global studies are a more recent expansion of his scholarly work stemming from his wide interests in comparative studies. For a long period of time, Professor Spariosu has showed a strong inclination toward the classics, and especially Greek culture and philosophy. In many ways he has very recently returned to his true violon d’Ingres. Two of his most original studies, God of Many Names and The Wreath of Wild Olive investigate Ancient Greek philosophy through theory of play. As an inventive articulation of phenomenology, Spariosu’s theory of play involves some of the most fundamental domains of knowledge, such as anthropology, myth, history of religions, semiotics, and philosophy. Spariosu belongs to a long list of illustrious scholars, most notably Johan Huizinga, who have defined and expanded this discipline. Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser also stand among the most original thinkers of the concept of play and Spariosu is without doubt part of the company. It all starts with his first major theoretical study, God of Many Names, where the author reformulates Nietzschean ideas in the defense of the Platonic thought. Bearing a less enigmatic

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subtitle (“Play, Poetry, and Power in Hellenic Thought from Homer to Aristotle”), the study is inspired by Schopenhauerian/Nietzschean philosophical ideology filtered through the Oriental influence that permeated Greek philosophy and culture. In the chapter “Plato and the Birth of Philosophy from the Spirit of Poetry,” apart from the obvious paraphrasing of Nietzsche, what strikes the reader of Spariosu’s work is his fascination with Platonic philosophy as modus vivendi and rhetorical awareness. We read at some point in the chapter, “for Socrates philosophy, in contradiction to (some) poetry, is the discourse that promotes pretty lies for the sake of the community.” The hermeneutical attempt here goes beyond the necessity to respond to Nietzsche’s criticism of Platonic philosophy. We see here the premonitory sign beyond pure interpretation. In the end, Plato’s life gravitates around the aesthetic imperative. Life as invention or creation beyond life is what must have stirred Spariosu beyond the realm of theory into the playfulness of poetic function (here as an intentional reference to Jakobson’s theory of communication). The signs of such journey from interpretation to narrative creation is clearly identifiable in his theoretical studies. The idea of a “Greek trilogy” gradually matured in the process of writing books such as God of Many Names. The Seventh Letter : A Philosophical Mystery at Plato’s Academy provides a synthesis of all Spariosu’s interdisciplinary journeys. There is the never faded passion for examining the thinking of the ancient world of the Greeks, for philosophy and for weaving things together in order to find a way out of the maze of human intricacies. The Seventh Letter is the narrative of an existential mystery that should be read also as detective fiction set in a library. It is not simply a fresco of life at Plato’s Academy, but also the attempt to formulate the fictional hypothesis to an exceptional life that has subsequently marked all our lives. Did Plato write by his own hand the famous Seventh Letter? Scholarly opinions are divided while Spariosu “imagines a situation where someone slips the letter into Plato’s bedroom as the aging philosopher lies dangerously ill.” Such is the premise to the novel advanced by its author in the Foreword. *** The atmosphere of the novel and along with an intellectual self-portrait being thus sketched, the plot unwinds around the competition for power within the Academy under Plato’s increasingly suspicious eyes. However, the narrative includes also the famous moment of Plato’s mystical dream that adds an element of oneiric flight to the all too human strife for succession played out within the Academy. Among the names that come to mind as adopting a similar narrative formula are Umberto Eco and A. S. Byatt. Toward the end of the novel, the fast

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paced exchange that marks the almost entire narrative switches to a lyric tone that signals the entrance into the realm of the oneiric. In the dream, the philosopher’s soul changes into a swan and experiences the liminal threshold preceding any metamorphosis. The choice of recounting the dream, which also announces the end of the novel, is a fitting way to harmonize theory and praxis, the world of phenomena and the world of eternals. Moreover it also encapsulates too dichotomy of Spariosu’s personality, both academic and existential: reality/physis and theory/ poetry are the two faces of the poet-philosopher. Like Plato, Spariosu has always dreamed of changing the world of phenomena with the tools of the poet.

Victor Neumann

Chapter 10: The Romanian Anti-Totalitarian Revolt of 1989: The Role of Timis‚ oara and the Beginnings of Political Change in Romania

The spark that lit the great demonstration of December 1989 in Timis‚ oara is related to the multicultural and multi-confessional profile of the city. A political idea had been shaped by the destruction of Transylvanian villages, an idea that quickly became known in the international media. The same idea would play a major role in triggering the anti-Communist demonstrations in Timis‚ oara. Pastor L#szlj To˝k8s, a chaplain of the Reformed Church in the city, protested against the destruction of Transylvanian villages—he himself was of Hungarian extraction and had previously been pastor in the Transylvanian town of Dej. This destruction formed part of the policy of “systematization” promoted by the National Communist government in Romania and involved restructuring towns and villages within the country, marking some for destruction and enforcing relocation of their populations. There were many German and Hungarian nationals living in these Transylvanian villages and the governments of West Germany and Hungary were concerned for their well-being. To˝k8s’s opposition was taken up by the members of the Reformed Church, by the international political media, by the Hungarian and German press,1 and also by the local population.2 The pastor’s dissidence had started in 1981–82 in the clandestine publication Ellentpontok (Counterpoints) and continued in speeches held during religious services at the different parishes to which he was forced to move. At the end of the 1980s, To˝k8s was chaplain of the Reformed Church of Timis‚ oara, where he was supported by the circles of believers and the Hungarian in-

1 Dennis Deletant, Rom.nia sub regimul comunist [Romania under Communist Rule] (Bucharest: Fundat¸ia Academia Civica˘, 1997). 2 Miodrag Milin, Timis¸oara 15–21 decembrie ‘89 (Timis¸oara: M. Milin, 1990), 1135. Cf. Milin, “Azi %n Timis¸oara, m%ine-n toata˘ ¸tara (Cr%mpeie din revolut¸ia tra˘ita˘)” (“Today in Timis‚ oara, Tomorrow in the Whole Country [Pieces of Experienced Revolution],” in Timis¸oara 16–22 decembrie 1989 (a collection of texts about the events of December 1989 in Timis‚ oara), ed. Ion Anghel (Timis¸oara: Editura Facla, 1990), 45–78.

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telligentsia in the city and the wider region.3 Under house arrest between 1 and 15 December 1989, he was due to be evicted by the repressive apparatus of the National Communist regime. On 15 December, the Reformed Church of Timis‚ oara was the tensest location in the city, and in all of Romania. The next day over 1,000 citizens gathered round To˝k8s’s house, forming a human chain to prevent the authorities from entering. This was the trigger for the great revolt against Ceaus‚ escu’s regime. The protest of the Reformed faith group was taken up by an important segment of the city’s population who understood that the suffering of the minority group was no different from that of the “majority.” In Piata Maria, in the immediate proximity of the Reformed Church, people chanted “Down with Ceaus¸escu!” and “Freedom!” The number of protesters reached 2,000. The descriptions of the revolts in the city show that, at the moment when Pastor To˝k8s’s eviction was due to take place, the citizens of Timis‚ oara showed unconditional solidarity with him. Initially represented by a Hungarianspeaking group, the demonstration of solidarity outside the pastor’s house had quickly engaged several thousands of citizens. As someone who had campaigned for the rights of the Hungarian minority in Romania, To˝k8s was impressed by the support of so many citizens for his cause. The Securitate’s plans to create a Romanian–Hungarian conflict were frustrated by the demonstrators who bore the marks of a societas civilis, animated by the idea of liberation from the oppressive Communist regime and not by the endorsement of an obsolete historical misunderstanding. On 17 December 1989, the forces of order opened fire on the civilians, killing 112 people and injuring 373. The anti-Ceausescu and anti-Communist demonstrations had escalated to an unprecedented extent, running beyond the control of the central authorities in Bucharest. This was confirmed by reports in the foreign press. Radio Budapest announced that the army had dispersed the demonstration in support of To˝k8s, but that “it had instead been transformed into a revolt against Ceaus‚ escu.”4 The well-known German newspaper Die Welt informed its readers on 18 December that about 4,000 demonstrators had gathered in Timis‚ oara in front of the Reformed Calvinist church to stop To˝k8s’s eviction, that violent clashes between the people and the army had taken place, and that the demonstrations, which initially had a “Hungarian ethnic character,” 3 Mandics György, “La vest de Doja” (“West from Doja”), in Timis¸oara 16–22 decembrie 1989, ed. Ion Anghel (Timis¸oara: Editura Facla, 1990), 79–84. Regarding the impressive solidarity of Timis‚ oara’s citizens, see also Tök8s’s testimony in Titus Suciu, Reportaj cu sufletul la gura˘ (Out of Breath Report) (Timis¸oara: Editura Facla, 1990), 10–17. 4 See Miodrag Milin, ed., Timis¸oara %n Arhivele “Europei Libere”: 17–20 decembrie 1989 (Timis‚ oara in the Archives of Radio Free Europe: 17–20 December 1989) (Bucharest: Fundat¸ia Academia Civica˘ , 1999), 55–56. Reuter’s Agency telegram sent from Budapest.

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“later turned into rallies against Ceaus‚ escu,” involving the whole population of the city.5 On the same day, the USA condemned the brutal repression, intending to consult NATO and the European Community with a view to adopting joint action against the authorities’ violence towards Timis‚ oara’s peaceful population.6 In Brussels, the foreign affairs ministers of the European Community strongly condemned the supression of Timis‚ oara’s anti-totalitarian demonstrations. The European and American press extensively covered the revolts, signalling L#szlj To˝k8s’s relentless attitude in defence of the rights of Hungarian population of Romania, and the ill treatment to which he was subjected by the repressive institutions of the National Communist regime. The Western media highlighted Romanian–Hungarian cooperation when the demonstrations started to intensify, underlining the fact that the spark of the revolt had been lit by To˝k8s. Western diplomats, especially the British and the Americans, were very concerned about the situation of the minorities. This explains their interest in To˝k8s’s fate and their visit to Timis‚ oara.7 They knew very well that Nicolae Ceaus‚ escu’s regime was based on nationalist policy and that this was his ultimate justification for retaining power. In fact, the uprising in Timis‚ oara did not have an ethnic character. On 19 December, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung drew attention to the fact that Nicolae Ceaus‚ escu’s dictatorship had upset all Romanians, not only the representatives of minorities.8 L#szlj To˝k8s’s virtues at that moment were the following: (1) he gathered the faithful around the idea of freedom of conscience; (2) he openly revealed the distress of the Hungarian minority ; (3) in letters to the political media and the international press, he formulated the claims of his parishioners in credible terms; (4) he drew attention towards Timis‚ oara as a city whose population was determined to overthrow the dictatorial regime and renounce Communist ideology. The secret service’s policy of maintaining tense relations with Romania’s neighbours, especially Hungary, had blocked the idea of forming an opposition political body. The news agencies announced that during those days the Romanian–Hungarian border was closed, as were the borders with Yugoslavia and USSR. This action showed that the revolt in Timis‚ oara was spontaneous and could not be controlled by the authorities. The invocation of a foreign presence, especially nationals from Hungary coming across the border to Timis‚ oara to stir 5 Ibid, “Human Chain Protecting Clergyman Turns into Mass Protest,” 60–61. 6 Ibid, Introduction (News from Romania), 151–52; “White House Condemns Romanian Use of Force,” 154–55. 7 Ibid, 151–52. 8 Andrei Ples¸u, preface to Ascesa e declino degli intellettuali in Europa (The Ascent and Decline of Intellectuals in Europe), by Wolf Lepenies (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1992), 10.

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up its population, was part of the diversion strategy of the secret service. The citizens of Timis‚ oara did not react to these instigations, showing understanding of L#szlj To˝k8s’s protest, as well as the necessity to transform it into an argument for anti-totalitarian revolt. The vigil on 15 December in front of the pastor’s house was transformed, between 17 and 20 December, into an impressive demonstration against Ceaus‚ escu and Communism. The attempt to compromise the peaceful cohabitation of the Romanian majority with the German, Hungarian, Serbian and Jewish minorities in Timis‚ oara had been perfidious. Fragmentarily preserved, the civil society of this old urban city, built on the Central European model, did not react to the nationalist instigations of the regime.

The Intellectuals and the Masses during the 1989 Revolt Unlike cities such as Prague, Budapest and Warsaw, Timis‚ oara had not developed a political project capable of overthrowing the Communist dictatorship. Like other Romanian cities, Timis‚ oara was absent from the great debate of ideas and the anti-totalitarian attitudes manifested in some other Communist countries. There were no dissident literary circles, no samizdat media, no personalities capable of crystallising civil society around them, of informing and directing it politically. Even if the involvement of some intellectuals was more courageous than in other Romanian cities, the cultural and university institutions in Timis‚ oara and the Banat did not generate political criticism or a programme for change. The universities were monitored by the repressive Party apparatus, and the teaching staff were often selected according to their loyalty to the Communist Party. Professors in the humanities—those who could have contributed to a change of attitude among the students—lived far removed from Romania’s social realities and European cultural and political practices. With some notable exceptions, they represented another link in the Party’s ideological propaganda. Professors of philosophy, history and sociology were employed in the departments of scientific socialism that functioned within Timis‚ oara’s Polytechnic Institute. Founded after the Second World War, the University of Timis‚ oara did not have, at that time, faculties of sociology, philosophy, psychology or political science. A modest faculty of history-geography had been suppressed in the 1980s. Though there were personalities in the fields of technical professions, medicine, philology and the arts with inclinations and results that could be admired, the idea of political change was alien to the political thought of the vast majority. Relatively insensible to the suffering of their peers, the professors received some privileges from the state: decent salaries, free houses or spacious apartments, grants, trips to foreign countries, quality medical assistance and

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good pensions. The new intellectual class of post-war Timis‚ oara had borrowed something from the behavioural model of co-nationals living in poorer regions of the country. Cooperation between intellectuals and workers, which occurred during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or during the union battles in Poland in the 1980s, did not function in Romania. Things were similar throughout the whole country in terms of the evolution of cultural elites. One contemporary Romanian writer explained the motivation behind this ignorance on the part of the intellectuals: Many of the difficulties of the transition in Romania are the result—in the absence of a richer Western brother—of the inability of our intelligentsia to anticipate and prepare for change during the dictatorship. A certain excess of accommodation, a form of vague aged wisdom, and the self-satisfying rhetoric of “resistance through culture” made us face the changes of 1989 with bare hands. We lived under a ridiculous decisional pressure and now we suffer the consequences.9

It is a convincing point of view. It is good to understand, though, that, no matter how many Western brothers Romania might have had, the answer to its problems had to be based on internal debates and intellectual directions. Ivan Evseev, one of the well-known professors from the University of Timis‚ oara, admits that he was shocked by the change that occurred in December 1989. It was very hard for him to believe and retrace events. He witnessed the terrible battle of the crowd with the tanks and water cannons, in open confrontation with the forces of repression in one of Timis‚ oara’s central squares. His recollection is emblematic of the social category to which he belongs: Starting from the evening of 16 December until 22 December, for the first and maybe last time in my life, I lived the experience of another time and reality, different from the profane, common space, capable of rational modelling.10

The professor tried to understand the rupture that took place in his own perception of the world by the “deep gap in time before and after the events.” However, he did not notice the absence of intellectual participation during the events. In 1989, the role of the cultural elites was minor.11 The uprisings were due 9 Ibid. 10 Ivan Evseev, “Revolut¸ia din Timis¸oara ca depa˘s¸ire a sinelui” (“The Revolution of Timis‚ oara as Overcoming Self”), in Timis¸oara: 16–22 decembrie 1989, ed. Ion Anghel (Timis¸oara: Editura Facla, 1990), 26–44. 11 This is one of the possible explanations of the fact that the role of ruling and administering the post-Communist state was given to the second tier of the Communist political class. During Bucharest’s confused transition that followed Timis‚ oara’s spontaneous revolt, the reformed Communists seemed to be the only ones capable of ruling the country. For the political context of the time and for the interpretation of the 1989 revolts, see Silviu Brucan, De la capitalism la socialism ¸si retur : O biografi e %ntre doua˘ revolut¸ii (From Capitalism to Socialism and Back: A Biography between Two Revolutions) (Bucharest, Editura Nemira,

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to Timis‚ oaran society—particularly the workers (which recorded the largest number of victims)—a society that had inherited or assimilated the old cultural model. Reduced to a level that could be understood and kept alive by the actions of the avant-garde groups (which deserve a special mention for their courage), this model inspired the crowd in December 1989. Even if psychological pressure was strong and made visible in the surveillance of all social groups, a lack of lucidity, allied to convenience and cowardice, had taken over a large proportion of the writers, artists, journalists, priests or professors from all backgrounds—in other words, the intelligentsia that could have planned the anti-Communist revolts and Romania’s peaceful transition from totalitarianism to democracy. The idea of sacrifice did not characterize the thought and actions of local and national elites. The veiled opposition to the regime of the 1960s–80s in Timis‚ oara, such as the actions of the group coordinated by Eduard Pamfil, those represented by the Marxist German-speaking writers of Aktionsgruppe Banat, the band Phoenix, the Forum Student‚esc magazine or the solitary gestures of poet Petru Ilies‚ u, could not transform the city into a pole of anti-Communism dissidence.12 The representatives of the intelligentsia were unable to propose a political alternative. The student manifestations of 1956 against Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej’s Communist regime—an echo of the Hungarian Revolution—were not replicated in the years that followed. The creeping paralysis of the educational institutions that had taken hold over many decades was significant. No matter how much evidence there had been of civic culture in Timis‚ oara during the Communist period, it remains clear that at the time of the 1989 revolt, democratic opposition was not organized. There was nothing similar to the Czechoslovakian Charter 77, the Polish Solidarnosc, or Hungarian dissident intellectual circles. That is why instead of political action prepared long before the event, what took place in December 1989 was a spontaneous revolt of Timis‚ oara’s citizens against the totalitarian regime. It did not have the benefit of well-known leaders, prepared to coordinate political change. Without either a programme or a well-defined ideal, the great mass of citizens in Timis‚ oara confronted Nicolae Ceaus‚ escu’s totalitarian regime. Their great protest of December 1989 transformed the city into the main symbol of change in

1998). A former editor of the main Communist newspaper, Sc%nteia (The Spark) and the former Romanian ambassador of socialist Romania in the US, Silviu Brucan was directly involved in changing Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s regime and a member of the reformed Communist group that took over power. After 1990, he was one of the most important political analysts of the Romanian scene, hosting a weekly show on the ProTV channel. 12 Victor Neumann, “Die bürgerliche Kultur in Siebenbürgen und im Banat: Die Rolle Temeswars in den politischen Umgestaltungsprozessen vom Dezember 1989,” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik 1 (1999): 38–51.

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Romania. In several cities of the region, including Lugoj and Arad, citizens showed solidarity with Timis‚ oara’s protest movement. It is important to remember that Timis‚ oara was the first city in Romania in which civil society had become aware of the necessity for change. During the demonstrations, some transition leaders emerged. For a few days, they created and animated the events: they led the crowds of protesters, drafted strategies, opposed the use of weapons, and gave political speeches from the balcony of the Opera. They also tried to negotiate with the opposing side: for example, the meeting at the headquarters of the Communist Party County Council between the protesters’ representatives led by Ioan Savu and the head of the government, Constantin Da˘sca˘lescu. There is a memorable remark relating to this meeting from one of the main actors, Savu, which is symptomatic of the events unfolding in Timis‚ oara and later in Bucharest and other Romanian urban centres: Only there, in front of them [Da˘sca˘lescu and his men], I realized we were not ready to talk with them. We had organized ourselves in a committee, or whatever you want to call it … purely by chance—those who happened to be in front went into the hall—and then we woke up to the fact that we had no ideas, we did not know what we could do, what we had to demand as representatives of the crowd outside13.

In reality, there was no distribution of roles, and an essential link in constructing events was missing: that of the intelligentsia. The confusion that followed and Romania’s lengthy transition towards democracy are explained by this unpardonable absence. In that watershed moment, there was only the force of the crowd, accompanied by the idea of human solidarity, the spirit of sacrifice and the belief in liberation from Communist dictatorship. It was the masses that proclaimed Timis‚ oara as Romania’s first free city. Through their spontaneous revolt and their victory, they confirm one of the most important arguments of the historian Fernand Braudel according to which the masses are sometimes able to write history. The great anti-Communist revolt of December 1989 in Timis‚ oara was an event of the masses. As at the beginning of the twentieth century, Timis‚ oara in 1989 did not encourage a visible difference between the citizen and the worker, which probably explains why the social segment of the workers, which the Communist regime regarded as faithful and in whose name the dictatorship had been founded, became the most discontented and the largest presence during the anti-Communist street demonstrations in 1989.

13 Suciu, Reportaj cu sufletul la gura˘, 216. For the political context, see also Brucan, De la capitalism la socialism ¸si retur.

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The Banat of Timis‚ oara during the Transition Years Despite their major contribution to changing the political regime, the merits of Timis‚ oara and the region were not acknowledged by the new government. Those who opened fire upon Timis‚ oara’s population in December 1989, killing numerous people, remained largely unknown and unpunished. Presented briefly and publically debated once a year during the commemoration of the events of December, the revolt of Timis‚ oara is mostly imprinted on the memory of the people who accomplished it. Remembrance of recent history is marked by partisans and centres around two revolts, in Timis‚ oara and Bucharest. Even the asynchronous evolution of the revolts created different perspectives on them and their outcomes. The speculative or provocative manner in which the events were covered by the media or in some of the books on the revolts of 1989 (over 600 titles in twenty-seven years), has not helped to overcome the crisis of conscience visible across the whole population. The corruption of the central political and administrative system is acutely experienced by a majority of the inhabitants of Timis‚ oara. There is nervousness due to centralism and the difficulties faced by the local administration. The frustrations of the population, and also of mayors and other regional leaders, have come up against the contrary interests of politicians sent from Bucharest. State institutions that survived the old regime have opposed real reform. Even the view on social issues shows that the two cultural models—those of the capital and the main regional cities—do not support a convergent perspective. The polarization of Romanian society upon material criteria, mostly visible in Bucharest, makes interpersonal and group communication more and more difficult. Books that offer more objective and clear information on the events of December 1989 in Timis‚ oara include documents,14 usually testimonies, of oral history. However, they are not able to reconstruct a full picture of events. For this reason, the way in which events unfolded in Timis‚ oara and Bucharest, the late entry onto the stage of Bucharest (21 December) compared with Timis‚ oara (where the revolt broke out six days earlier), and the way in which Ceaus¸escu was deposed, have created divergences in the minds of Romanians. The main actors in Timis‚ oara do not look like the main actors in Bucharest. The aspirations of the people of Timis‚ oara included revolutionary ideas that were intended to lead to the replacement of the Communist administration. This did not and could not 14 According to Timis¸oara: 16–22 decembrie 1989; Mariana Conovici, E un %nceput %n tot sf%rs¸itul… (The Beginning of the End), Selective collection of radio programmes aired between 17 and 25 December 1989, The Romanian Radio Society, Oral History Section, Bucharest, 1998; Milin, ed., Timis¸oara %n Arhivele Europei; Procesul de la Timis¸oara (The Timis‚ oara Trial) Miodrag Milin edition, vols. 1–3 (Timis¸oara, 2004–2005).

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happen throughout Romania, as the population had not been prepared. Most of those who revolted in Timis‚ oara refused to see this, while the political class of the new Romanian state did not give the expected explanations. This partially explains the lack of social cohesion, the suspicions, the invectives, the excessive zeal in claiming revolutionary merits, and the personal attacks through the media in the absence of legal proof. A certain degree of radicalism and countless differences of opinions have also been felt in local and regional contexts, leading to contradictory political orientations. More than two and a half decades after the 1989 revolts, political leaders still cannot agree upon essential issues of economic strategy, social and environmental policies, rebuilding the infrastructure, and the restoration of architectural and historical heritage. The new local political class has not been able to impose itself in the eyes of the electorate or at national level. Instead, it often accepted politicians from Bucharest to represent its interests. These politicians had sporadic contacts with the city and the region, were (and are) unfamiliar with local social, cultural and economic realities, and ignored the problems of Timis‚ oara and the Banat. Like other Romanian cities or regions, Timis‚ oara and the Banat are facing difficult moments in adapting to a market economy and to pluralist-democratic politics. It would have been natural, three decades after the events of 1989, for the city to have gained a larger share of the country’s economic, administrative and cultural life; to have earned a position equal to that of the capital; and to have imposed itself more firmly in an international context. Why did this not happen? First of all, because administrative centralism has been perpetuated; because the role of Timis‚ oara and the Banat could have played in western Romania in the development of international relations has been neglected, knowingly or out of ignorance. The refusal to take political decisions on structural reform, and the lack of attention towards the most enterprising middle class in Romania, have contributed to the dissatisfaction of the local population with the national leaders. What the government of Bucharest did not understand was that modernization of a state always starts from its most advanced marginal region, which is from the west in Romania’s case. Openness to Europe could have been ensured from Timis‚ oara and its neighbouring cities in the Banat. The functioning of the Euro-regions implied the implementation of the model of the cross-border economy, i. e. the provision of legislation necessary for the faster and more efficient development of trade and service companies. All this has been ignored. The revival of the policy promoted a century ago by the political parties of the Old Kingdom, or that of the interwar period according to which control was exercised by officials from Bucharest, has proved counterproductive. The continued resistance of the people of Timis‚ oara and the Banat to central government is motivated by the fact that reform of the political class and central admin-

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istrative structures, of regional decentralization and pro-European direction has been delayed. Expressed in many forms, discontent has been directed at the former Communists and their institutions. One of the fundamental documents of civil society was entitled The Proclamation of Timis‚ oara. Publicly presented in March 1990, the Proclamation was the first act of legitimization of the postCommunist Romanian opposition.15 Timis‚ oara today is searching for a new social and cultural identity. Many of the old families who conferred a unique identity on Timis‚ oara have gone. They were engineers, construction workers, mechanics, craftsmen, along with a portion of the intellectual elite. Most of the German-speaking population from all social classes has left. The emigration of the German community, along with the Romanian population that spoke German, together with the dissolution of the Jewish community and the movement of an important segment of the Hungarian-speaking cultural and artistic elite to Budapest, has generated a sudden change in cultural and behavioural patterns. Up to 1989, the inhabitants represented par excellence the urban category of those who had been assimilated by the city, an educated, tolerant preserver of the multicultural traditions of Timis‚ oara and the Banat. The reasons for mass emigration were not only economic but also political. In spite of some notable renewals, the laws for private initiatives and for the regaining of private property were issued rather late. The void left after the mass migration of the old inhabitants has been suddenly occupied by a population coming from the regions of Moldavia, Oltenia, and Maramures‚ . What is certain is that the creative potential of the multi- and intercultural society of Timis‚ oara and the Banat was ignored. Sociological studies show that after 1989 Timis‚ oara didn’t have the necessary resources to assimilate the newcomers, as it did in the interwar period or in the post-war decades. The set of values professed by the average population, which gave personality and social cohesion to the city and region, dissolved under the pressure of very fast demographic changes. The attraction of Timis‚ oara in recent decades is owed partly to the fact that it was here that the first step in the overthrow of the dictatorship took place, and partly because inhabitants of Romania have always felt that life is better here than in the rest of the country. It is also true that there has been political pressure to change the city’s social structure.

15 Victor Neumann, “Schimba˘rile politice din Rom.nia anului 1989: Aspirat¸ii contradictorii pe fondul interferent¸ei valorilor central, sud-est s¸i est europene” (“The Romanian Political Changes in 1989: Contradictory Aspirations on the Background of the Central, South-East and East European Intersection of Values”), in Ideologie ¸si fantasmagorie: Perspective comparative asupra istoriei g%ndirii politice %n Europa est-centrala˘ (Ideology and Phantasmagory : Comparative Perspectives upon the History of Political Thought in Central-East Europe) (Ias¸i: Polirom, 2001); 175–97.

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The population of contemporary Timis‚ oara is different from the population that initiated the revolts of December 1989. The settlement of new inhabitants coming from different regions of the country and, thus, a new demographic structure, did not create major cultural conflicts, although local administrations face certain types of behaviour that betray a lack of sensitivity to the civic pride of the city and can sometimes border on aggression. The newcomers are often ignorant of the history, architecture and common good of the city ; they live on the periphery and show no curiosity about either the historical and architectural references of the region or the cultural diversity inherited from its former inhabitants. The discontinuities are identifiable by the disregard of cohabitation rules, by aggressive language and, more rarely, chauvinist slogans. Economic and financial competition is tough and often unreliable. What still ensures a certain social balance is the fact that the new elites coming from the Banat (or from Transylvanian localities close to the Banat) have some influence on the life of the city. Hence, the illusion of some that no major changes have occurred, that the basic elements of the city still survive, and that centralism alone is responsible for social disagreements, institutional inefficacity, organizational disorder, and the absence of projects regarding the restoration and repositioning of the city on the European map. Regardless of the changes, the natural resources, the geographical position, and some markers of multi- and interculturalism and multi-confessionalism of the Banat of Timis‚ oara still survive and are essential. Numerous private initiatives; German, French, Austrian, Hungarian, and Spanish investments; and the preference of some significant Italian groups to be a part of the industrial and commercial life of the city and the region show that the dialogue regarding administrative decentralization and European integration is still fundamental. For Timis‚ oara to become a possible model for Romania and for other regions of East-Central Europe, its policies must avoid any form of radical discourse or behaviour. The genesis of an alternative way of thinking in the Banat of today depends on new cultural products, debates on ideas, and knowledge-based cooperation. Timis‚ oara’s opportunity to play an administrative and cultural role complementary to the attributions of Bucharest, Szeged or Novi-Sad is linked to the formulation of a political ideal that is able to include the different segments of the society and the professional elites. Otherwise, Timis‚ oara and the Banat will no longer be able to gain from their fruitful inheritance, the multiple cultural codes of previous centuries, as they did during the civic and political revolts of 1989.16

16 See also Victor Neumann, “Timis¸oara %n memoria colectiva˘ contemporana˘ : Perspective fragmentare” (“Timis‚ oara in the European Collective Memory : Fragmentary Perspectives”),

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Conclusions The European Community today needs not only cultural conventions,17 but also a willingness to understand its regional histories. It needs knowledge of its Euroregional heritage. This is to do with identifying similar values for Europeans, rather than social or economic differences. Such an understanding of the facts can ensure “a common destiny strategy.” A historical model like that of the Banat of Timis‚ oara offers the advantage of including the Continent’s multi- and intercultural realities. Relearning the history of such a Euro-region goes deeper than a simple knowledge of the facts: it involves replacing a partisan way of thinking with an open, liberal one; acquiring a way of life based on traditions built on diversity and tolerance. Knowing the history of the everyday relationships between individuals and between different linguistic communities, and also the major role transnational communication plays today, can be a reference on the map of future European projects. In the context of modernising society, the evaluation of sociocultural and political intersections that took place during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries will contribute to the modernising of the population’s reflexes. The past of the Banat of Timis‚ oara can inspire more flexible educational models, with ramifications in the family environment, schools and universities. The contemporary population of the region is only partially heir to the historic and architectural heritage, which is why the recovery of the past and the understanding of the present from a multi- and intercultural perspective becomes a sine qua non for future projects. The history of the Banat of Timis‚ oara offers examples useful for a balanced intellectual formation. The Habsburg experiments and the Central European local and regional demographic harmony were possible due to Vienna’s mercantile policies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Banat was the region in which these policies were clearly adopted by the whole population.18 The understanding of this Euro-regional history in a Continental context proves that is possible to overcome the crises of conscience and identity in a former Communist state. in Revolut¸ia Rom.na˘ din Decembrie 1989: Istorie ¸si Memorie (The Romanian Revolution of December 1989: History and Memory), ed. Bogdan Murgescu (Ias¸i: Polirom, 2007), 21–44. 17 See Carolina Brossat, “Kulturpolitischer kompetenzkonflikt Europarat und Europäische Union,” Dokumente, Zeitschrift für den deutsch-französischen Dialog 4 (1995): 306–13. 18 See Virgil Nemoianu, “Cazul etosului central-european” (“The Case of the Central European Ethos”), in Europa centrala˘ : Nevroze, Dileme, Utopii (Central Europe: Neurosis, Dilemmas, Utopias), anthology by Adriana Babet¸i and Cornel Ungureanu (Ias‚ i: Polirom, 1997), 168–94; Victor Neumann, Istoria evreilor din Banat: O ma˘rturie a multi-s‚ i interculturalita˘¸tii Europei Central-Orientale (The History of the Jews of the Banat: ATestimony of Central-East European Multi- and Interculturality) (Timis‚ oara: Atlas, 1997), 97–131.

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The Banat of Timis‚ oara is a space that deserves to be known whose modern features have been formed under the influence of the Enlightenment and Austrian reforms of the eighteenth century, which need to be reinvented and reclaimed for the benefit of contemporary Europe. The fact that Timis‚ oara has been named the 2021 European Capital of Culture demonstrates that the city has enormous potential. Its inhabitants wish to prepare for this and to reinvent themselves based on the inherited models and the convergent local, regional, and European cultures.

Rjbert G#frik

Chapter 11: Imagining the Orient in Central Europe: An Intercultural Studies Project

Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978) reveals the essentialization of the “Orient” in the Western imagination as a dialectical opposite of the West and highlights its role in the hegemonic claims of Western imperial powers in the East. Said focused on Great Britain, France, and marginally on Germany and in his later writings on the United States. Other critics have discussed Orientalism in relation to smaller Western European imperial powers such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Norway.1 However, with the exception of the Habsburg Empire,2 the cultural area comprising Central Europe has hardly ever been considered in the discussions of Orientalism. If at all, it has been seen as the object of West European Orientalist discourses. In the following, I will try to examine Said’s observations with respect to the region of Central Europe and propose the research into imagining of the Orient in Central Europe as a meaningful project for comparative literary studies conceived as intercultural studies. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the question of the region’s identity was reopened in political discourse. The idea of Central Europe has gained significance in many branches of the humanities, including literary studies. It has emerged as a convenient concept to strengthen the already existing collaboration between scholars from neighbouring countries. Alongside the traditional models of literary scholarship, which focus on purely literary phenomena, scholars also have begun freely engaging with ideas developed in literary studies in American and British academia. Most remark-

1 See Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke, and Lars Jensen, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008); Jurrien van Goor and Foskelien van Goor, Prelude to Colonialism: the Dutch in Asia (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004); Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800–1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2005). 2 See Robert Lemon, Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-critique in the Habsburg Fin de SiHcle (Rochester : Camden House, 2011).

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ably, Polish literary scholars have used Postcolonial Studies to interpret their region as postcolonial in relation to Russia and subaltern in relation to the West.3 There is a difference of opinion regarding the countries which form the region of Central Europe. It is a dynamical historical concept and its definition often varies depending on the historical, cultural, or political perspective. It can comprise countries from Germany in the West, and Italy in the South, to the Baltic states in the North and the Ukraine in the East. There is, however, no disagreement that the present-day Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, i. e. the countries forming the Visegr#d Group, belong to Central Europe. I will focus on these four countries because they are not only close geographically but also have a lot in common historically, culturally and politically. Although the proposed ideas may apply to the wider region of Central and Eastern Europe, I will limit my analysis to the above-mentioned region also for a practical reason; it may otherwise be beyond the competence of a single person to present a survey of the research of such a linguistically and disciplinary diverse body of literature. The relationship between the countries of Central Europe and Europe is itself ambiguous. Central Europe is “a Europe on the margins, on the verge of Europe.”4 It is a part of Europe, yet at the same time outside of it. In the imagination of many, Western Europe is the “true” Europe, whereas Central Europe, which is very often considered Eastern Europe, is seen as lacking this “authenticity.” In the terminology of the world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, it belongs to the semi-periphery and is essentially destined to look up to the core (i. e., Western Europe).5 Similarly, the geographical delimitation of the Orient is problematic. It may differ from one cultural area or period to another. For example, at present, in German the word “Orient” refers only to the Middle East, but in nineteenthcentury Germany it designated also India. In Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia, it often retains a very broad meaning and may also include regions nowadays referred to as South Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia, as is very often evidenced by the structure of research institutions and study programmes devoted to Oriental studies in the region.

3 Emilia Kledzik, “Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication,” in Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, eds. Doborta Pucherov# and Rjbert G#frik (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015). 4 Tomasz Zarycki, Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2014), 4. 5 Salvatore Babones and Philipp Babcicky, “Russia and East-Central Europe in the Modern World-System: A Structuralist Perspective,” in Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies, ed. Kirill Nourzhanov (Canberra: Australian National University, 2011).

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Several scholars6 argue that Germany developed its own form, or rather forms, of Orientalism. In the same fashion, one can claim that countries such as Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia have also developed their own forms of Orientalism. In fact several scholars have recently started talking about “national” Orientalisms in Central Europe. For example, Izabela Kalinowska speaks of Polish Orientalism7 and Hana Navr#tilov# of Czech Orientalism.8 I will try to offer a summary of some of the studies and show how the socio-political development of the region contributed to the formation of some unique forms of Orientalism. I will concentrate on identifying some problems that need to be addressed in the research of this topic and certain features which make imagining the Orient in this region different. For Said, the relationship of the Occident to the Orient, of the West to the East, is a power relation, a relation of domination, of hegemony. However, this relationship does not have to exist only in the form of raw political power. Orientalism is not, according to Said, a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values),

6 See Dorothy M. Figueira, Translating the Orient: The Reception of S´akuntala¯ in NineteenthCentury Europe (New York: SUNY P, 1991); Dorothy M. Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (New York: SUNY P, 1994); Andrea Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutschmorgendländischer Imagination im neuzehneten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005). 7 Izabela Kalinowska, Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-century Travel to the Orient (Rochester : U Rochester P, 2004). ˇ eskoslovensˇt& veˇdci v 8 Hana Navr#tilov#, “Hranice skoum#n& cestopisny´ch reprezentac&,” in C Orientu, II. D&l, by Adela Ju˚nov# Mackov#, Hana Navr#tilov#, Libor Ju˚n, Hana Havlu˚jov#, Lucie Storchov#, and Wolf B. Oerter (Doln& Brˇezany : Scriptorium, 2013).

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power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do).9

In the past, this Orientalist knowledge has helped Western European powers conquer and dominate the subjugated regions. Said argued that even in so-called postcolonial times, experts from various fields as well as from government and business are heirs of this knowledge and use it in their interactions with the socalled Third World. Said’s transhistorical and universalizing concept of the relationship between the Orient and the Occident through the concept of Oriental discourse has been heavily criticized. Said’s model of Orientalism requires a united European, Western identity at the beginning of history, which assumes an integral relationship between Ancient Greece and modern Western Europe, since Said sees modern imperialist Eurocentrism even in the oldest European texts.10 The Romantic imagining of the Orient represents an alternative to the hegemonic view theorized by Said. Wilhelm Halbfass describes its origins: The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by a very distinct association between a general interest in non-European traditions and the motif of criticizing contemporary Christianity and Europe. One shape which the criticism of Christianity took was the attempt to trace it back to older, more original traditions, or the view that a more pristine, religious consciousness could be found in Asia, and specifically in India. Both this motivation towards self-criticism and the theme of origins were assimilated into the Romantic awareness of India and the Orient.11

The Romantic view, which offers a more positive appreciation of the Orient, has been subject to criticism by the upholders of the hegemonic view. However, both views are based on the view of the Orient as some kind of “Other.” Central and East European countries have never had any significant power interests in the Middle East, Asia or Africa; on the contrary, they were often dominated by others. One can therefore ask the question of whether, and if so, how they partake of the Orientalist project, and if not, how they imagine countries associated with the Orient. This puts the Central European region in a peculiar, if not paradoxical, position: it is a victim as well as a producer (or a reproducer) of Orientalization. The study of the Orient in the countries of Central Europe is a well-developed field. Central European countries have a fairly long and rich tradition of Oriental studies. Slovakia, where the discipline started developing only after the Second World War, is here rather an exception, although not without outstanding 9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 12. 10 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 11 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 69.

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scholars such as the expert on Mandaean and Samaritan languages Rudolf Macfflch (1919–1993) and Sinologist Mari#n G#lik (b. 1933). Many well-known representatives of the discipline are associated with the region. A number of Hungarians, Poles and Czechs significantly contributed to the development of Oriental studies. For example, Csoma Korösi S#ndor (1784–1842), who hoped to find the place of origin of the Magyars in Asia, became the founder of the Tibetan studies. Eduard Rehatsek (1819–1891), Ign#c Goldz&her (1850–1921) and Aurel Stein (1862–1943) made also important contributions to Oriental studies. Andrzej Gawron´ski (1885–1927) was a remarkable Polish Indologist and polyglot. The Czech scholar Bedrˇich Hrozny´ (1879–1952) contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite. Another Czech scholar, Jaroslav Pru˚sˇek (1906–1980), was considered one of the greatest Sinologists of his time. Kamil Zvelebil (1927–2009), who fled Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, belonged to the most respected twentieth-century experts in Dravidian Studies. The reception of Oriental cultures in the countries of Central Europe is a topic in national Orientalist disciplines and national philologies. Scholars throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have focused on the multifaceted connections between the countries associated with the Orient and the countries of Central Europe. However, the research has mostly tried to identify the connections between the distant cultures and has seldom been theoretically focused on the problem of Orientalization. Nevertheless, the critique of Orientalism initiated by Edward Said found ample response from scholars of the Orient in Central Europe. Said’s monumental book was translated into Polish in 1991 and again in 2005. The Hungarian translation appeared in 2000 and the Czech rendition in 2008. The number of studies critically engaging with Said’s critique has been on the rise in recent years, although some scholars are sceptical about the application of Said’s concept to the region of Central Europe. For example, the Slovak Turkologist Gabriel Piricky´ denies its usefulness not only in the Central European context12 but in general. The Czech Indologist Martin Hrˇ&bek offers a more elaborate rejection of the applicability of Said’s notion of Orientalism to the region of Central Europe.13 He sees three main reason why this kind of reflection has come late to Central Europe, where the research of the Orient, to a considerable degree, continued within the modernist paradigm even in the second half of the twentieth century : 1) these countries do not have any colonial past, and therefore 12 See Dusˇan De#k, “Locating the Oriental in Central Europe (Interview with Dr. Gabriel Piricky´),” Slovensky´ n#rodopis, 5.60 (2012). 13 Martin Hrˇ&bek, “Czech Indology and the Concept of Orientalism,” in Understanding India: Indology and Beyond, eds. J. Vacek and Harbans Mukhia (Prague: Carolinum P, 2011).

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there was no “hangover over the loss of Empire,” no influx of migrants from former colonies, nothing comparable to the Maghrebian literature in French; 2) social sciences were hit hard by the constrains of Marxism-Leninism during the Communist era; and 3) the nature of political discourse of the past twenty-five years which sees the imaginary Other in the Communist regime. Hrˇ&bek argues that Czech representations of India are akin to those of German scholars “who construed an imaginary affinity of Germans and old India in order to craft a splendid noble role for resurgent Germany in European history”14 and concludes that Czech revivalists struggled firstly, to prove that the Indo-Czech (Indo-Slav) affinity is much closer than the Indo-German affinity, and secondly, to establish that the Indian movement for self-determination and later for independent statehood is essentially a coeval and parallel cause to the Czech case of an oppressed people fighting an external domination. […] the British discourse constructed India as both other and inferior, the German discourse as showing affinity yet inferior by virtue of displacement on the timeline, and the Czech one as showing affinity and coeval, hence equal.15

It is extremely difficult to get a full picture of the development of research in the imagining of the Orient in Central Europe because it requires knowledge of the state of research in several Orientalist disciplines and national philologies. The literature is quite scanty especially in English. However, several collective volumes have recently appeared which investigate various aspects of Orientalist discourse in Central European literatures. James Hodkinson and John Walker together with Shaswati Mazumdar and Johannes Feichtinger edited a volume entitled Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History : From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe (2013). However, their collection has a strong Germanic focus. Only a few of the studies included in the volume deal with other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. A volume edited by Robert Born and Sarah Lemmen entitled Orientalismen in Ostmitteleuropa: Diskurse, Akteure und Disziplinen vom 19: Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (2014) is, to my knowledge, so far the most comprehensive attempt at mapping the various forms of Orientalism in Central Europe. Their focus is on the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, i. e. mostly on Austria-Hungary. However, they also work with the German notion of the Orient, which limits the region to the countries of the Near East and North Africa. The images of the Orient in Central Europe can be roughly divided into five groups, corresponding to significant breaks in the region’s history : 1) the premodern perceptions of the Orient which probably do not differ much from those one can find in the rest of Europe; 2) mostly Romantic images connected to the 14 Ibid, 49. 15 Ibid, 54–55.

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image of one’s own nation in the wake of the national revival movement; 3) modernist images in the inter-war period; 4) Marxist-Leninist images in the second half of the twentieth century ; and 5) contemporary images, a field with only a few studies so far. The period from the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century brought the interesting phenomenon of self-Orientalization. The nations of Central Europe saw their origins connected to the great nations of the Orient. In the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, the world was believed to have been divided into three major races which descended from the sons of Noah: the Japhetic peoples who resided in Europe, the Semitic peoples living in Asia, and the Hamitic peoples of Africa. The Slavs were classified as Japhetic, or as descendants of Japheth’s son Mosoch or grandson Riphath. In Hungary, the debate has been dominated by political and ideological interests until well into the present. The traditional account of Hungarian origins, which was replaced by the Finno-Ugrian theory in the middle of the nineteenth century, states that the Magyars and the Huns were identical and traces their roots back to ancient Sumerians. Similarly, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the szlachta or the nobility of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth saw themselves as the descendants from the ancient Sarmatians. In the first half of the nineteenth century, drawing inspiration from nascent comparative philology, Slavic scholars in Central Europe tended to see Slavic origins in India. Probably the most representative is in this regard the long poem Sl#vy dcera (“The Daughter of Sl#va,” 1832) by the ideologist of Pan-Slavism, J#n Koll#r (1793–1852). Koll#r glorified the Goddess Sl#va whom he presented as a symbol of the Slavic race. This goddess probably never existed as a worshipped deity and is only a product of Koll#r’s imagination. In the now almost forgotten treatise Sl#wa Bohyneˇ a pu˚wod gm8na Slawu˚w ˇcili Slawjanu˚v (“The Goddess Sl#va and the Origin of the Name of the Slavs or Slavyans,” 1839), he claimed that Sl#va was actually the old Indian Goddess Sva¯ha¯ and the name of the Slavs derived from her. Koll#r saw a mythological name for the nation as evidence of its antiquity. He was aware that the concept of nation was a new one and that it had begun to take shape only in his time. He saw the nationality of the ancient people as based on their religion: they distinguished themselves according to the gods and goddesses they worshipped. Their religions were national, i. e. the gods and goddesses were there only for the sake of their nation. The name of the ancestors of the neighbouring Germans were also proof that the nation’s names derived from the names of gods. Koll#r referred to Germania by Tacitus (first century AD), in which it is said that the Germans worshipped a god by the name of Tuisto; hence the name of the Teutons. However, Koll#r went so far as to see the Scandinavians as worshippers of the Indian god Skanda. He tried to prove connections between Slavic and Indian languages and myths by giving full swing to

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his imagination. Drawing on the racial theories of Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), he also claimed that not every European nation had the same right to look for their origin in India, especially not the Germans, whom he saw in a negative light in general. In the first half of the nineteenth century, India was considered the cradle of mankind in academic circles. However, with the advent of British rule in India a new theory emerged according to which Indians were not the original inhabitants of India. They were supposed to come to India from outside.16 Sanskrit lost its position as the mother of all Indian and European languages. New theories emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, which radically changed the view about the origins of Europeans as well as of those of the socalled Oriental nations. Interestingly, these early nineteenth-century theories of origins still survive in some marginal communities (e. g., in some nationalist groups in Hungary and in some Slavic pagan groups and pseudo-scientific publications on the origins of the Slavs). Consequently, the idea of the “Oriental” origins of the Central European nations fell into oblivion for its unscientific nature. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting twist to the formation of national identities in the nineteenth century and reveals the interplay of early scholarship the various national images at work during this time. The Muslim world has a special place in the Central European imagination of the Orient because of a series of military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and various European states dating from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. With the victory at Moh#cs in 1526, the Ottoman Empire gained control over one third of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Battle of Vienna in 1683, in which the combined forces of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the command of King of Poland John III Sobieski defeated the Ottoman army, not only represented a turning point in the 300-year long struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, but it is often seen as a decisive battle which saved Christian Europe from Muslim invasion. The anthropologist Andre Gingrich developed the notion of “frontier Orientalism” to describe the perceptions of the Orient by peoples of Central and Eastern Europe who did not have contact with the Muslim world through colonies but through encounters with Ottoman invaders.17

16 See Edwin F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). 17 Andre Gingrich, “Frontier Myths of Orientalism: The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe,” in MESS: Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School, vol. 2, Piran/Pirano, Slovenia 1996, eds. Bojan Baskar and Borut Brumen (Ljubljana: Insˇtitut za multikulturne raziskave, 1998).

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In his book Mit ve Tarih arasinda: Orta Avrupa Edebiyat Tarihinde Türk Imgesi (“Between Myth and History : The Turkish Image in Central European Literature,” 2014) Charles D. Sabatos drew on Gingrich and examined images of the Ottoman Turks in Central European literatures from the sixteenth century to the present. He argues that representations of the Turks across the region combine elements of the historical legacy of the Habsburg-Ottoman conflict with more mythical images of Orientalist fantasy. The image of the Turks was not associated with colonial ambitions but served as a means of preserving cultural identity when the homeland was threatened and occupied. Sabatos remarks that his research illustrates “how cultural antipathies have endured through the profound social changes that these nations have experienced in the past century, and how the Turkish image evolved from a historical menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evokes humor as often as fear.”18 Sabatos and G#frik attempted to open up the concept of frontier Orientalism to a broader array of literary scholars in one of the thematic issues of the World Literature Studies.19 The contributors to the issue examined a range of Central and Eastern Europe literatures, from Czech and Latvian to Bosnian and Georgian. They discussed Gingrich’s concept from various perspectives and tested its applicability in a variety of contexts. Some acknowledged its usefulness, but at the same time demonstrated that it does not exhaust all possible forms of experience with the “Oriental Other” captured in the literature of the region. An interesting phenomenon during the inter-war period was the establishment of the Oriental Institute in Prague, which was of the most important institution for Oriental studies in the Central European region. The establishment of the Institute was supported by the first Czechoslovak President Tom#sˇ Garrigue Masaryk. In 1952, the Oriental Institute was incorporated into the newly formed Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Sarah Lemmen describes the institute as a “colonial institute without colonial ambitions.”20 She argues that the aim of the institute was to find the Czechoslovak relationship to the Orient that would be in opposition to that of the European colonial powers. The institute sought to foster a relationship in which both sides would be on a par with each 18 Charles D. Sabatos, Mit ve Tarih Arasında: Orta Avrupa edebiyat tarihinde Türk imgesi (I˙stanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2014), 256. 19 Charles Sabatos and Rjbert G#frik, eds., “Frontier Orientalism in Central and East European literatures,” World Literature Studies 10.1 (2018). 20 Sarah Lemmen, “Unsere Aufgaben in der Orientalistik und im Orient. Die Gründung und die erste Dekade des Prager Orientalistischen Instituts in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Orientalismen in Ostmitteleuropa. Diskurse, Akteure und Disziplinen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, eds. Robert Born and Sarah Lemmen (Bielefeld: unpublished manuscript, 2014).

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other. Moreover, it was supposed to represent “the good European” who is superior to the Orient economically and to Western Europe morally. This approach to the Orient was continued and modified during the Communist regime. The examination and revaluation of the image of the Orient during the Communist regime is a topic that deserves more attention. Currently there are very few studies that focus on the reception of the Orient in the literature, especially in the creative writing of this period. It is a well-known fact that Oriental studies and writing about the Orient were forced to concentrate on national independence and revolutionary movements in the countries of the socalled Third World. It was a difficult period when some Oriental scholars left their home countries to continue their work in the West or were simply silenced. According to the three-world model, which originated during the Cold War, Central Europe belonged to the Second World, led by the Soviet Union, the archenemy of the US, and many countries of the so-called Orient to the Third World. The First World and the Second World were constantly at odds with one another. The Third World was the part of the world that both the First and the Second World tried to bring under their influence. It was described as backward, underdeveloped, or developing and became the new frontier over which both the First as well as the Second Worlds sought to exert the influence. The Soviet Union regarded the policy of non-alignment, to which most of the countries of the Third World subscribed, as an integral component of the competitive struggle between East and West. The Marxist-Leninist ideology believed in the gradual victory of socialism over the world. The social revolution this ideology envisioned was not an accidental but rather a natural phenomenon that resulted from the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. According to socialist ideology, the Third World was bound to become socialist sooner or later. In this transitional period, the Second World countries were merely aiding them in this effort. This change, or rather a kind of passive colonization, was thus believed to be an inevitable outcome of social and historical processes. One can observe this point of view also in the creative writing of the period; for example, in the travelogues of the well-known Czech Indologist Dusˇan Zbavitel (Indie zbl&zka, 1960; Jedno hork8 indick8 l8to, 1981) or even in a more pronounced way in a book by the Slovak journalist Dusˇan Kerny´, India nie je dˇaleko (India Isn’t Far Away, 1974).21 Even this very general and fragmented analysis shows how the images of the Orient in Central Europe can not be grasped by a single notion as, for instance, that of Orientalism, especially Orientalism understood as a form of domination. 21 See Rjbert G#frik, “Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989),” in Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, eds. Doborta Pucherov# and Rjbert G#frik (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015).

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Some of these intercultural interactions lack—what we can call, using Mihai Spariosu’s term—“the mentality of power.”22 The prism of Orientalism can also blind us to encounters with a humanistic message, which may lie completely outside of the psychology of othering informed by the Saidian discourse. My own research into the images of India in Slovak literature has led me to identify several such texts. For example, the short stories of Alfonz Bedn#r (1914–1989) from the 1950s depict the author’s encounter with poverty in India. One of the stories narrates how the author bought shells for a rupee from one of two boys on a beach in Bombay. When the other boy saw it, he immediately started fighting with his friend and took the rupee. The confused author returned the shells to him and gave him one more rupee. A moment later he saw how the little boy was looking for more shells in the waves of the ocean. Afterwards, the author asked the taxi driver to take him to another beach. There, he found only bored white people and noticed that they used shells as ashtrays.23 The study of the images of the Orient in Central European cultures is a topic which gains importance especially in the light of the geopolitical shift of power from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asian region. Many analysts predict that the twenty-first century will belong to China and India. Apart from that belief, the European immigration crisis in the present day has brought the Muslims to the increased attention of the media. The presence of the so-called Oriental is thus more and more visible in Central European cultures. Although literature has lost its dominant position in the variegated world of contemporary media and the topic may seem belated from the perspective of Anglophone comparative literary studies, a critique of the images of the Orient in Central European literature, the awareness of the existence of certain prejudices, both negative and positive, that derive from Orientalist scholarship or are manifested in creative writing, seems to be a desideratum in the present planetary situation.

Bibliography Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. Babones, Salvatore and Philipp Babcicky. “Russia and East-Central Europe in the Modern World-System: A Structuralist Perspective.” In Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies, edited by Kirill Nourzhanov. Canberra: Australian National University, 2011. http:// cais.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/Babones_Russia%20and%20EC%20Europe.pdf. 22 Mihai I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive. Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature (Albany : SUNY P, 1997). 23 Rjbert G#frik, Zobrazovanie Indie v slovenskej literatfflre (Bratislava: VEDA, Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akad8mie vied, 2018), 93–94.

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Bryant, Edwin F. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. De#k, Dusˇan. “Locating the Oriental in Central Europe (Interview with Dr. Gabriel Piricky´),” Slovensky´ n#rodopis 60.5 (2012): 570–75. Figueira, Dorothy M. The Exotic: A Decadent Quest. New York: SUNY P, 1994. –. Translating the Orient: The Reception of S´akuntala¯ in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York: SUNY P, 1991. G#frik, Rjbert. “Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989).” In Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, edited by Doborta Pucherov# and Rjbert G#frik, 283–98. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015. –. Zobrazovanie Indie v slovenskej literatfflre. Bratislava: VEDA, Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akad8mie vied, 2018. Gingrich, Andre. “Frontier Myths of Orientalism: The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe.” In MESS: Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School, vol. 2, Piran/Pirano Slovenia 1996, edited by Bojan Baskar and Borut Brumen, 99–127. Ljubljana: Insˇtitut za multikulturne raziskave, 1998. van Goor, Jurrien and Foskelien van Goor. Prelude to Colonialism: the Dutch in Asia. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004. Halbfass, Wilhelm. India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990. Hodkinson, James and John Walker and Shaswati Mazumdar and Johannes Feichtinger, eds. Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe. Rochester : Camden House, 2013. Hrˇ&bek, Martin. “Czech Indology and the Concept of Orientalism.” In Understanding India: Indology and Beyond, edited by J. Vacek and Harbans Mukhia, 45–56. Prague: Carolinum Press, 2011. Kalinowska, Izabela. Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-century Travel to the Orient. Rochester : U Rochester P, 2004. Kledzik, Emilia. “Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication.” In Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, edited by Doborta Pucherov# and Rjbert G#frik, 85–103. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015. Koll#r, Jan. Sl#wa Bohyneˇ a pu˚vod gm8na Slawu˚w ˇcili Slawjanu˚v. Pesˇˇt : Tiskem J.M. Trattner-K#rolyoho, 1839. Lemmen, Sarah. “Unsere Aufgaben in der Orientalistik und im Orient. Die Gründung und die erste Dekade des Prager Orientalistischen Instituts in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Orientalismen in Ostmitteleuropa. Diskurse, Akteure und Disziplinen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, edited by Robert Born and Sarah Lemmen. Bielefeld: unpublished manuscript, 2014. Lemon, Robert. Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-critique in the Habsburg Fin de SiHcle. Rochester : Camden House, 2011. ˇ eskoslovensˇt& veˇdci Navr#tilov#, Hana. “Hranice skoum#n& cestopisny´ch reprezentac&.” In C v Orientu, II. D&l by Adela Ju˚nov# Mackov#, Hana Navr#tilov#, Libor Ju˚n, Hana Havlu˚jov#, Lucie Storchov#, and Wolf B. Oerter, 459–72. Doln& Brˇezany : Scriptorium, 2013. Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800–1900. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2005.

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Poddar, Prem, Rajeev Patke, and Lars Jensen. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Polaschegg, Andrea. Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgendländischer Imagination im neuzehneten Jahrhundert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Sabatos, Charles D. Mit ve Tarih Arasında: Orta Avrupa edebiyat tarihinde Türk imgesi. I˙stanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2014. Sabatos, Charles and Rjbert G#frik, eds. “Frontier Orientalism in Central and East European literatures.” World Literature Studies 10.1 (2018). Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Spariosu, Mihai I. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. Albany : SUNY P, 1997. Zarycki, Tomasz. Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, 2014.

Part III The Divine, Animism, and Mimesis

Mikhail Epstein

Chapter 12: Theses on Poor Faith

In 2005 the American priest and theologian Matthew Fox attached a list of ninety-five theses he had composed to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, theses proclaiming a renewal of Christianity in the twenty-first century. In doing this, he re-enacted what Martin Luther had done, pinning his theses to the very same church door in the year 1517 and, thereby, setting in motion the Reformation. I resort to the same form of theses for the very reason that they provide the most succinct means of setting out ideas which belong to a worldview still in the process of formation. These theses bring together much that I have already written on the subject of minimal religion since the beginning of the 1980s, at which time signs of its emergence became evident in the spiritual life of lateSoviet, post-atheist society.1 On 21 December 2014, I pinned these Theses to the internal side of the “door of theses” in All–Saints Church in Wittenberg.

What is Poor Faith? 1. Poor faith is faith without religion, without any temples, dogma or rites. It is a direct orientation towards God, here and now, and one-to-one. This is a faith as integrally standing before God as God Himself is integral and undivided. 2. There is a need for faith that stirs inside the human being who hears the voice of God within his or her soul. People search for faith, but encounter only a range of particular religions. Poor faith arises precisely in the space between faith and religions. Simply faith. Simply faith in God. 3. One ought to distinguish between faith and religion. When faith becomes surrounded by institutions, dogma and traditions, it becomes religion. There1 A more detailed treatment of this whole problematic is set out in my book Religion after Atheism: New Possibilities for Theology (Moscow: AST-P, 2013).

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fore ‘poor religion’ or ‘minimal religion’ is simply faith in God without any admixture of ‘confessional’ definitions. 4. Hence we get such a critical stance towards ‘religion’ as distinct from ‘faith,’ even on the part of theologians such as Karl Barth: “Religion forgets that it has a right to exist only when it continually refutes itself. Instead of doing that, it rejoices at its own existence and regards itself as irreplaceable.” Such a complacent religion, seeking its own triumph within the world, is the very opposite of the essence of faith, which, by its very nature, is ‘not of this world.’ 5. According to the results of the largest sociological survey of opinions involving 56,900 respondents and carried out by the ‘Sreda’ research centre in Russia, one in four people fall into the category of ‘poor religion’—that is to say, a simple belief in God without any affiliation to a belief system or denomination. This proportion, 25 %, comes second only to Orthodox Christian believers (41 %) and exceeds Muslims (6.5 %).2 6. The growth of supra-confessional awareness is a worldwide tendency. According to data from the Pew Research Center (USA, 2012), the ‘extra-confessional’ (religiously non-aligned) population of the world makes up 1.1 billion people (or 16 % of the total world population.). In China that is 52 % of its population, or 700 million, and in the USA 20 %, or 46 million. These figures include atheists and agnostics. However, the proportion of believers among these ‘religious nones’ is very considerable: 7 % in China, 30 % in France, and 68 % in the USA affirm that they do believe in God (and 10 % of those pray every day).3 7. The concept of ‘poor faith,’ or ‘minimal religion,’ first arose at the beginning of the 1980s in Moscow. It can be compared to the notion of ‘poor theatre’ developed by the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. His theatre was completely devoid of scenery, adornment and costumes. 8. In the religious context the word ‘poor’ has a strong positive connotation, as in ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ The adherents to ‘poor faith’ do not possess any symbolic ‘capital’ in the form of generally recognised and specific denominational traditions, church buildings, socially recognised prestige or ‘image.’ Poverty is a Christian virtue, which one could use as a measure for judging Christianity itself and its dogmatic wealth.

2 See http://sreda.org/arena. 3 “Religiously Unaffiliated” in “The Global Religious Landscape” (report), Pew Research Center, December 18, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-unaffiliated; “’Nones’ on the Rise” (report), Pew Research Center, October 9, 2012, http:// www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise; Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, “American Religious Identification Survey [ARIS 2008]: Summary Report,” March 2009, https://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2011/08/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf.

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9. Poor faith is rooted right in the world, in our need to link life with absolute meaning. Any person with poor faith converses directly with God within the depth of his or her own soul. It is impossible to root out such poor faith, for its temple exists in every home and in every soul. 10. When applied to the realm of faith, the word ‘poor’ has the following synonyms: free, direct, living, open, creative. 11. Poor faith corresponds to apophatic theology that denies the possibility of knowing God or conceiving of Him in positive forms, symbols or definitions. This faith lives beyond the boundary of all faith systems. Atheism and the Barriers between Religions 12. In Russia poor faith was the consequence of seven decades of atheism. By rejecting all religious confessions at a single stroke, militant atheism created a favourable setting for the emergence of ‘religion in general.’ It was precisely the faithlessness of the Soviet years that formed the kind of person who could only be defined as a ‘believer.’ 13. The first instances of ‘poor faith’ within the Soviet Union were to be found in the 1960s when the religion of Communism was becoming desiccated and when a period of political hopelessness was approaching. This was a faith and a hope that arose from nowhere: “From the depth do I cry out unto Thee, O Lord.” 14. In the course of the decades such a desert took hold of the spiritual life of the country that the borderlines separating the various denominations were in effect obliterated. “A voice of one calling: In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord” (Isaiah 40, 3–5). Soviet atheism extended the space for the gathering of various faiths so that “all flesh” and humankind could discern the breath of divine spirit. 15. An important feature of faith is the dialectical relationship between induction into the life of the Church and disengagement from the Church, between entry into the historical and denominational body of religion and distancing from it. 16. The ‘trans-religious’ is not only a ‘going out’ beyond the boundaries of historically formed religions, but also beyond religion as such. The ‘trans-religious’ is Christ prior to Christianity, i. e. the stage of faith before religion, or Christ after Christianity, Christ in apocalyptic times, the stage of faith after religion. Thus, faith constantly brings forth a crisis in religion and then supersedes it, in the form of an instant impoverishment, an ‘emptying out’ of the wealth accrued in the long course of history. 17. If we consider just Russian instances of the phenomenon, then Lev Tolstoy, Daniil Andreyev, and Grigoriy Pomerants all represent various versions and stages of this movement towards the ‘trans-religious.’ Tolstoy represents the discovery of ‘trans-religious’ space in its pure form, as critique of the Church. Andreyev sees the trans-religious as a means of gathering together all the his-

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torical forms of religion in a supra-historical unity, “the Rose of the World.” For Pomerants, the ‘trans-religious’ amounts to the individual’s existential experience of contact with various religions. 18. There is another, fourth, path, which is that of poor faith. It is a minimalist, not a maximalist, extension of religious openness. Poor faith is not only a postatheistic but also trans-religious consciousness. 19. Poor faith does not criticise specific beliefs and belief systems, but rather, from the position of a complete toleration of faiths, it signifies openness towards their revelations, their spiritual beauty, their historical meaning and searching, not indifference towards these. 20. Poor faith is an entirely immanent life that has just one transcendent ‘signified’—the person of God. This constitutes the maximum degree of ‘the immanent’ and the minimum degree of ‘the transcendent.’

God as Person 21. Poor faith is a faith in God as Person. Human personhood is the most complex, deep and creative reality that we can know with true certainty as it is open to us from within. Therefore it is reasonable to presuppose that at the very core of the world there exists not only an impersonal law or an abstract formula, but certain personhood and creativity, by virtue of which we ourselves are not merely objects of a physical world, but also subjects of a world that is psychic and moral. 22. A typical argument put forward by Positivists goes something like this: “I acknowledge the passing of an electrical current because that can be picked up by instruments. But how can one pick up God and his emanations?” Listen and look within. Love, hope, fear, compassion, repentance, inner work on ourselves—all of these are His passing through us, no less certain or reliable than is electricity passing along wires.

23. One property of Reason is to generalise, to discern regular laws underpinning the varied array of phenomena. The world of objects has its own foundation, in the form of objective laws observed and investigated by science. In exactly the same way our reason, upon discovering a multiplicity of human persons, cannot fail to reach the conclusion that there is a source of subjectivity that is common to all of them. Being the source of internal life and of any subjectivity whatsoever, this source itself cannot not be Subject. It acts from within us, just as the law of universal gravity operates externally to us. 24. The Kingdom of God cannot be found outside us, for it is within us. God is this Universal I, which internally unites all persons capable of self-reflection.

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Experiencing our own ‘I’ as ‘I,’ at the same time we enter a reciprocal relationship with the ‘I’ of this Universal Being. 25. Our most reliable personal experience of being ourselves, together with the generalizing activity of reason, leads us to a concept of God as All-Person, to which each conscious creature relates through its own ‘I,’ through the activity of its own conscience, feeling and will. 26. Faith in the Universal I accords as much with reason, as does a physicist’s faith in the existence of elementary particles, waves and fields, or a biologist’s faith in the existence of cells and organisms. In essence, religion and science do not mutually exclude one another. At the heart of each of them lies the work of reason, the ability to discern the general in the particular. Science cannot refuse religion the right to make generalizations on the basis of internal states of being experienced by various persons and to link them to the existence of Person. 27. In response to Moses’s question about His name, God answers: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3, 14). The being of God should be conceived in the first, not in the third person. It is expressed similarly in other religious traditions too. In Hinduism, the Atman is depicted as the boundless and non-transient ‘I’ of all beings. Within the Sufi tradition, the poet Rumi has written: “I long sought God among the Christians, but He was not on the Cross; when in a Hindu temple and in a Buddhist monastery, I did not find even traces of Him there; then I looked into my own heart, and there I discerned God, who was nowhere other than there.” 28. “I” is a pronoun that is common to God and humans. The person’s ‘I’ is greater than their self, for it is supra-personal. As Fichte puts it: “Such is each of us who can say to himself ‘I am a person.’ Must not he experience a feeling of sacred piety in the presence of his I?” This is not an egocentric sense of grandeur on man’s part, but the greatness of that very ‘I’ which he shares with God. 29. With his call to a new Reformation within Christianity, Matthew Fox begins his ninety-five Theses with the following affirmations: “1. God is both Mother and Father. 2. At this time in history, God is more Mother than Father because the feminine is most missing and it is important to bring back gender balance.” These assertions of feminist theology are not true, just as assertions of the masculine principle are untrue. With God gender does not pertain. God is not ‘he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it.’ God is ‘I,’ for all subjects, for all feeling and thinking beings which have an ‘I.’ ‘I’ does not possess the morphological properties of gender.

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Science 30. Science is called to bring about the intellectual unity of humankind and, consequently, to enhance the role of poor faith that transcends the boundaries of religions. 31. Contemporary science is steadily liberating itself from Positivism and reductionism, and its present discoveries are consonant with fundamental features of a religious picture of the world. The universe does have limits in terms of time and space (as affirmed by the ‘Big Bang’ theory); at the heart of all living existence there is Logos (information); observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it (the anthropic principle in cosmology). 32. From the perspective of atheism, the more powerful humankind is, the less it will be disposed to belief in a Creator. From the perspective of theism, the spread of human knowledge and power over nature can indeed strengthen our belief in God. Our very ability to create more and more refined artificial (virtual, computer-based) worlds presupposes an increasing probability that the natural world too has a creator. 33. Humankind’s direction of travel is not from belief to unbelief, but from belief to knowledge. The time has already come to speak of religious knowledge, not merely of the religiousness of faith. The time of cognitive religion has arrived, a time when cognitivism will play the very same role as fideism used to play in the past. 34. The scientific thesis according to which a Big Bang led to the creation of the universe is not just the basis of a physical theory, but also of religious knowledge. The anthropic principle, according to which the universe was specifically designed for human habitation, is a matter of religious knowledge. Faith draws on many arguments in modern science; it no longer places itself in contradistinction to science, but assimilates or incorporates it.

Theology of Resurrection 35. Faith remains as faith only when it loses its doctrinal and institutional guarantees and enters the dimension of limitless risk and free creativity. Atheism is a rejection of religion, partly necessary for the sake of faith itself, as a way of its renovation and purification. 36. After ‘the death of God,’ proclaimed by Nietzsche, and also by Marx and Freud, and after the mass movements of Communism and atheism in the twentieth century, we get ‘the resurrection of God as a post-atheistic appre-

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hension of life. In 1917, Russia was the first to embark on mass atheism and, in the 1970s, the first to enter the post-atheistic era. 37. The ‘theology of the death of God’ represents a profound paradox, assigning a new significance to death as a constructive and life-affirming experience. To assign theological significance to the death of God means to respond to His Crucifixion as to something offering the possibility of defying death. 38. Distinct in its nature from the Protestant theology of ‘the death of God,’ poor faith makes a next step and presupposes a theology not of death and not simply of life, but of resurrection, a dual life, whose intensity is strengthened by suffering and sacrifice. Life after resurrection differs from life before death; it is enhanced by the personal death of Christ on the Cross, and by the historical death of Christianity in the twentieth century. This is an abundance of new being which follows death and resurrection. 39. ‘That which has resurrected’ differs from ‘that which has not died.’ This is not simply a restoration of a previous form of life, but an entry into a new life, a superior life. The post-atheistic theology of resurrection is a theology of the new life of God beyond the limits of His historical and ecclesiastical body. The ‘zero degrees’ point of faithlessness and godlessness has passed, and a new growth of faith is beginning, a theological ‘making sense of ’ and overcoming of atheism itself. 40. The theology of resurrection reveals God as being concealed. Isaiah’s prophecy about the Messiah: “There is in Him no form or majesty” (Isa. 53: 2–3). From the very beginning, the atheistic stage: “We turned our faces away from Him”—paves the way for poor faith that is directed towards the poverty of divine manifestations, towards the absence of form and majesty. 41. Poor faith relates to traditional religions much as avant-garde art relates to Realism. Faith attaches to the very collapse of realistic representation that vanishes beyond the limit of what can be observed. The resurrected Christ becomes invisible precisely at the point when He has become known to His apostles. 42. The history of the life, death, and resurrection of God is the history of each soul that passes through its own Garden of Gethsemane, its own anguish and exhaustion—and through its own Golgotha. 43. Inasmuch as we can experience within ourselves the life of God, it consists of cycles of dying and resurrection. There is no life as such that is self-identical and self-sufficient; there is a sequence of deaths and resurrections.

Paths of God and Theodicy 44. The God of poor faith is not all-powerful, for He represents effort, which continues to create the world. Just as our Universe broadens out in observable space, so God broadens out His action in the internal space to be found within

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individuals and in humankind, finding an ever-new extension of His own powers. It is said: “Let the will of God be accomplished in all” (1 Cor. 15: 28). God acts in the world and in us as an infinitely growing effort that has not reached the limit of ‘the all.’ 45. If the process of creation is still under way, the Creator is also changing along with it, like a writer, as he creates his various works, discovers something new within himself and is at times surprised by the actions of the characters which he creates .“What a trick Leonardo played there!” Or Newton played, or Darwin or Freud. 46. The path of man to God and the path of God to man—these are different paths which do not always come together at one point, nor even meet each other, as, for instance, the hand of God and the hand of man in Michelangelo’s fresco. Job had established a path of righteousness and piety, yet God awaited him in a wholly different place. 47. The labour of the Creator and the freedom of His creations—right here is a dual presupposition for the existence of evil in this world. 48. The God of poor faith is a poor God, suffering and dying together with all that is alive. The problem of theodicy, the justification of God in the face of the suffering that He permits, is resolved in the context of the mutual suffering of Creator and His creation. 49. Che suffering of innocent people is not a retribution, but an indispensable condition of the life which humankind shares with God and which God shares with humankind. If a child is born sickly, the suffering of the parents is even stronger, because they see in him their own image distorted by illness, and they understand that the child is destined for a life full of torments. The suffering of God is even stronger than that of man.

The Theology and Ethics of Singularity 50. Poor faith does not lead to pantheism. God is not in everything, but in each thing, in the each-ness of all things, in their distinction from one another. Each thing is unique only because God Himself is unique, and each thing is akin to God (theomorphic) precisely by virtue of its uniqueness. 51. Theology is concerned with that which is singular—this is its specific subject matter. Theology is charged to speak about the whole infinite variety of phenomena in their uniqueness, that is to say, in their likeness to God. 52. The distinguishing mark of the Kingdom of God is its smallness: “The Kingdom of God is like unto a mustard seed, which a man takes and sows in his field, Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants” (Matt. 13: 31–32)

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53. Every one of us has our own mustard seed, and it grows into the biggest. If my crying child calls on me, I must go and console him. If some thought comes to maturity in the philosopher, or if some image, picture or symbol takes shape within the artist, then he must articulate it, embody it and share it with others, and then the Kingdom will grow from his mustard seed. Just as, at its deepest level, the physical universe consists of the most minute particles, so the Kingdom of God grows out of the very smallest seeds, from particles of love, goodness, service to others, and giving-of-self. 54. Poor faith focuses on the unique-and-very-smallest element as a point of break-through to the Creator. Precisely by refraining from a focus on rites and specific manifestations of religion, the entire world perception of the ‘poor believer’ becomes ‘theologised.’ Intensification of religious feeling takes him beyond confessional frameworks. 55. Theomorphism is the variety of hidden manifestations of the Creator in His creations and in our way of apprehending them. There is no being at all, not a single thing, which is not, in some aspect or relation an image of God and, consequently, which could not be the subject of a veiled love of God. 56. God can be loved through action or inaction, beauty and ugliness, food and hunger. For the poor believer everything becomes a sign of His presence, of His directedness towards me. This is not simply a case of theocentrism, but, rather, of theomorphism: the art of discerning God in every thing that is not Him. 57. Theology speaks using the language of subjects and objects, whereas it needs to master the language of predicates. To verbify the language of theology is to activate the being of God. The essence of God remains hidden, but His energy becomes apparent to us and acts upon us. Thus, it is more appropriate to convey this active element in God by using a verb rather than a noun: to render god-wise, to “godwise,” to act in the manner of God. Whatever he sees: a tree, a lake, a human being—“godwises” in the eyes of a poor believer. Verbs convey the energy of divine action while maintaining a discreet and knowing silence regarding the Originator of this action. 58. The ethics of poor faith consist of ‘neighbour-feeling’ and ‘neighbourthought.’ That is to say, first and foremost a person “godwises” the reality immediately surrounding him or her, gradually extending that sphere of spiritual action. This stands and acts counter to that ‘love for the distant one,’ which operated in the ethical framework promoted by atheism and totalitarianism. 59. The prophetic tradition became extinguished a long time ago, and there are no longer any human lips that could be the means whereby God announces Himself. The lengthy silence of God—during the whole period of Auschwitz and the Gulag—has led people to the thought that He simply doesn’t exist. Yet, having ceased hearing the word of God, people have ended up standing within the

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hearing of God. It prepares people for the last judgment, when they will speak and respond, while the Judge will listen and decide.

The Theology of Creativity 60. The principal commandments of the Bible were given to man immediately after his creation and prior to the Fall: 1/ ‘Go forth and multiply and fill the earth’; 2/ ‘Such as man names every living creature, so let it be named.’ To endow life and to endow names –these are humankind’s two principal callings, the first of these applied in the realm of nature and the second, in the realm of culture. These affirmative commandments are superior to the ten predominantly negative or prohibitive commandments given to ‘fallen’ man through Moses. 61. The goal of life and, consequently, the means of justifying man before God is the multiplying of the talents given to him. Man acquits himself before God not only by what he has refrained from doing (not sinning, not killing, not stealing, not fornicating), but also by what he has done—creating, building, embodying, discovering and inventing. That which is common to all gifts is that, when they are given to man, they are incomplete and they need to be multiplied or completed. 62. There is no religion and no Church that actually goes so far as to ask its adherents how much they have multiplied the talents which God gave them. Writers are not asked how well they write, nor are doctors asked how effectively they cure people. This range of questions belongs, rather, to the very place where the person, the creator, stands directly before the Creator. The Parable of the Talents may be considered as a key to poor faith.

Pop-Religion and Theocracy 63. Substitution of God is much more blasphemous than hostility towards Him. On the subject of the Antichrist, the New Testament has this to say : “He shall sit in the temple of God, like God, presenting himself as God.” At that time they will not reject religion, nor struggle with it, but will force it to bless all human affairs, placing priests on councils of industrialists and speculators. In this way, no enterprise can be embarked on without God, not even swindling, stealing or killing. 64. A distinctive kind of popular religion (or pop–religion) is arising, a response to mass demand, religion as a means of ideological pressure on society and of commercial gain. Observing the religious renaissance of atheistic society, we will ask ourselves: Won’t straightforward godlessness be replaced by a cun-

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ning form of piety which already has no reason or cause to struggle with faith for it is easier and more advantageous to imitate it? 65. The atheism of the twentieth century transmutes into a theocracy of the twenty-first century. Any theocracy, any ecclesiastical power ‘bestowed by God’s name and according to His decree’ is dangerous inasmuch as it contains within it a more refined version of atheism than is shown by the person who takes a direct stand against religion. If God is unable to deal with His own tasks, then it becomes necessary to put Him right: the Grand Inquisitor’s ‘project.’ Atheism and theocracy turn out to be two sides of the same coin. 66. The danger of such substitutions can be well understood by people, whose religious feelings in part become offended by clericalism and fundamentalism. For them poor faith becomes an attractive alternative to any ‘organised’ and ‘organising’ religion. 67. Affiliation to a specific denomination may create an illusion of spiritual well-being or an apparent guarantee of salvation by going along the well-trodden path. But that itself increases the danger of Phariseeism. 68. If religion or religious hierarchs stir up aggression in society and malice and intolerance—such a faith is close to obscurantism, or sacromania. Devoutly believing people may be ready to imprison and punish others in the interests of defending what they conceive to be ‘sacred.’ Aggression needs to be poured out, and it finds an advantageous-seeming pretext in ‘the sacred.’ “Why do you so hate Americans, Europeans, Jews, Catholics, liberals, volunteers, oppositionists, sexual minorities?”—“It is not for our own part or sake, but for God!” In this way, a hysterically worked-up faith becomes an instrument of hatred. 69. In the contemporary world, two tendencies can be observed: 1/ a strengthening of militant forms of confessionalism, of clerical and fundamentalist movements, and 2/ a growth in poor faith and other forms of trans–religious and supra-confessional awareness, forms that are able to unite people above the level of all ethnic and religious barriers. A distinguishing feature of this post-secular age is the polarization of these two tendencies. Religion is acquiring a new significance, both as an instrument for political struggle and also as the path of a new spiritual unification of the world. Therefore, we find the growing significance of ‘poor faith’ as a path towards inter-confessional understanding and unity. 70. The struggle between faith and religion constitutes the spiritual tension and the inner conflict of our time experienced by many believers. Disillusionment with the symbiosis of Church and corrupt power structures (“religarchy”) may push society yet further and closer towards ‘poor faith.’ 71. If we experience disillusion with the politically conformist, morally doubtful and commercially greedy manifestations of ‘pop-religion,’ then it is all

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the more natural to transfer our faith to the Creator Himself rather than to renounce faith altogether. 72. The majority of our contemporaries are not really confronted with the question ‘To believe or not to believe?’ Rather, the question is framed this way : ‘Is your faith church-based or not-church-based?,’ or ‘Is your faith based on rites or not based on rites?’ There is a time for gathering stones and a time for taking stones apart, including the stones of the temple within your own soul. The history of humankind, as well as the history of each soul, is not only a struggle of faith with faithlessness, but also a struggle of faith with religion.

The Dynamics of Poor Faith 73. Henri Bergson distinguishes between static religions and dynamic religions, identifying those which reproduce stable stereotypes for behaviour and support stability in society and those which are based on man’s experience of direct communication with God. 74. Poor faith is not a constant and self-identical spiritual condition. It has many levels and many stages. It moves from a state of naivety to a state of reflexion, from a pre-confessional stage to a supra-confessional stage. Preconfessional faith lacks any knowledge and experience of specific religious confessions or denominations, whereas supra-confessional faith attempts to reach beyond their boundaries. 75. The initial stage of poor faith is a non-reflective “I believe in Something” / “I believe in Someone,” which constitutes the first step in distinguishing oneself from non-believers. 76. The second stage comes in the form of an attraction to mystical yearnings, esotericism as popularly understood: spiritualism, theosophy, yoga and folk superstitions. 77. The third stage consists of a parallel or subsequent affiliation to one or several confessions, an experience of interaction between them, participation in their mysteries, and a full or partial induction into church life. 78. The fourth stage is that of disillusionment in organised and ritual forms of religion and their dogmatic nature, commercialization, politicization, and their confluence with state power. This is the stage of dis-engagement from church, and of the individual person’s aspiration to find support in a direct standing before God. 79. The fifth stage is that of a conscious faith outside the confines of religious confession, a faith enriched by varied spiritual experience and encounters with various belief systems, holy scriptures, teachings and traditions.

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80. Poor faith is a path of spiritual becoming which can pass by and through other stages and in a different order from that outlined above. 81. Poor faith can arise within specific religious confessions as an aspiration to feel the living spirit beyond the outwardly petrified forms. The fire of faith is common to all religions; national and historical forms vary in the ways that this fire of the spirit becomes cold. 82. Is poor faith compatible with participation in the mysteries and rites of the various religions? This question does not have one identical answer for all. It is for each person to gauge for herself or himself the extent to which their own faith is poor. 83. Poor faith does not adhere to old dogmas, nor creates new ones. Rather, it takes the traditions of various religions as raw material for constructing its own personal experience. It is work and effort expended on the creation of one’s own soul in collaboration with God. Just as an artist creates her or his own canvas, using a plethora of lines and colours, so the poor believer creates his own faith, employing those forms and meanings that are accessible through the whole legacy received from previous testimonies and revelations of faith. 84. Poor faith can go through crises, through ‘dark nights of the soul,’ and lack all forms of support other than its own efforts to further set down its path towards God. 85. Just as various paths lead to poor faith, so also various paths lead away from it. These include: a weakening of, or a break in, communication with God, together with a drying up or withering of the inner life; a move away into atheism, a loss of faith; joining one of the non-traditional religious cults which claim to possess a ‘non-confessional’ nature; mono-confessionalism, that is, returning to a former confession or attaching to a new one; multi-confessionalism, that is, the experience of belonging to two or several confessions; a synthesis of various confessions and the construction of a universal religion. 86. Thus, poor faith can be a primary, naive impulse of faith, but it can also absorb a multi-faceted spiritual experience. It is able to assimilate the values of various mysteries and rites, but it remains the person’s inner work, a communication of the unique individual with the One, which takes place completely outside the framework of any religious cult. However well-endowed poor faith might be, it remains poor to the extent that it is not identical to any confession at all, and it does not permit confessions to take a hold and to form within itself.

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Poor Messianism 87. Poor faith remains poor precisely because it is not organised. As soon as anyone begins to form something like a ‘community of adherents to poor faith’ with its own customs and core teaching, it is no longer poor faith, but yet another Church, albeit a radically protestant and non-conformist one. 88. ‘Poor faith’ does not exclude communication among believers. In the New Testament it is said: “Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of the Lord, there the Lord is also.” This is always communication that operates horizontally, without hierarchs or people taking charge. 89. Karl Jaspers wrote: “In our days the person who wants to live in an unenclosed, non-organised community of authentic people…, this person lives as a single person, connected with other single persons … in a union which survives any catastrophe, in a relationship of trust, which is not fixed or sealed in agreements, nor guaranteed by the fulfillment of any specific requirements.” It is possible to call poor faith a ‘universal invisible church’—it neither gains, nor loses, by being called such. 90. At some particular time in ancient Israel monotheism was established, which then gave the impetus for the formation of other forms of monotheism, namely Christianity and Islam. These religions each recognise one God, but they enter into jealous conflict with one another, which manifests dogmatically, ethnically, politically and militarily. Is it possible to love God without relating jealously towards those who love Him in a different way? All these religions are like spokes of a wheel going towards one and the same centre. And the closer they come to that centre, the closer they come to one another. 91. The beginnings of all religious traditions are various, but the end can only be a commonly shared end. Monotheism turns into theomonism, a coming together of all forms of monotheism in the unity of faith itself. The historical significance of the post-secular age may lie precisely in this transition. 92. The messianism that is an inherent feature of all faith systems in the Abrahamic tradition is the expectation of a Messiah and a constant state of readiness for His coming. “Take heart, for you do not know the hour, nor indeed the day, when the Son of Man shall come” (Matt. 25; 13). Poor messianism, or ‘messianicity’ (a term coined by Jacques Derrida) is a broader not-knowing: of the very possibility of the coming of the Messiah. 93. Such messianicity, as a projection of poor faith into the absolute future, does not guarantee the appearance of a real Messiah. Rather, it consciously attributes to any ‘claimant’ the possibility of personifying false messiahship, and remains a vanishing horizon for our looking and striving.

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94. At the same time, the open structure of expectation is preserved, akin to the structure of hospitality, of ‘inviting-in.’ Absolute hospitality does not know in advance who the guest is who will appear on one’s threshold. The same holds true for poor messianism: it is elevated into the absolute and at the same time reduced to a minimum. It is an expectation that is open to any unexpected happenings or events, including the non-appearance of the Messiah. It is faith in its initial source, a precondition for any other faith, a pre-faith for all faiths. 95. That same Godot whom the other characters in Beckett’s play of the absurd are waiting for, does not arrive either. It is he who is the true God (God O!), as he is defined in the relationship between the maximum and minimum of faith. This is the general condition for all other forms of expectation: the expectation of good, of justice, of perfection. This ‘supra-expectation’ is transforming the world by the power of its openness, although it does not promise fulfillment, but only allows of such a possibility. Translated by Jonathan Sutton

Gabriele Schwab

Chapter 13: Experimental Animisms: Humans and their Others

From the theoretical point of view, plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc. form part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art; they are his [sic] intellectual inorganic nature, his intellectual means of subsistence, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and assimilate them. —Karl Marx1 Art perhaps begins with the animal, with the animal at least who carves a territory. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari2

The porousness of human consciousness and its capacity to assimilate objects is central to Marx’s conceptualization of humans and their others. On the side of objects, this human mental porousness finds its complementary counterpoint in the ability of objects to assume an agency, if not to say consciousness of their own. In “The Fetishism of Commodities,” Marx describes the process through which a table is becoming a commodity : The form of wood […] is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.3

We know such animation of objects, as well as fusions of humans and objects, from dreams, the Arts, and, of course, animism. Belonging to the most central operations of the primary processes, such boundary crossings seem firmly embedded in the human mind. Moreover, they have over centuries been used in ritual and religion, spiritual practices and the Arts. In Mimetismo (1960), a painting by surrealist painter Remedios Varo, a woman is “becoming chair,” her skin merging with the upholstery and her hands becoming wooden armrests. 1 David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 81. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 183f. 3 Ibid, 435.

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While the woman mimics the inanimate object she uses, the wooden furniture around her is “becoming animate”: the leg of her armchair turns into animal pincers to capture the leg of a nearby stool, while another chair uses a leg to lift a silken cloth out of a drawer. Simultaneously, a piece of fabric rises out of the sowing basket like a cobra. Read through the lens of Marx’s Fetishism of Commodities, Varo’s surrealist animation of commodities in a bourgeois interior transforms them into something transcendent. We could almost see them as material manifestations of the grotesque ideas that evolve out of their wooden brains. Unlike in Marx, this change, however, does not happen in relation to other commodities, but in a mimetic exchange between human and nonhuman agents during which the human is becoming furniture and the furniture is becoming human. In Specters of Marx, Derrida analyzes the implicit animism in Marx’s image of the wooden table: “here then is the apparition of a strange creature: at the same time Life, Thing, Beast, Object, Commodity, Automaton—in a word, specter.”4 Marx’s imaginary animation of the table can indeed be seen as a spectral apparition because the animation becomes manifest in a transitional space between life and death. In a male-gendered process of production and procreation—a “bachelor’s birth”5 of sorts—the table “gives birth through its head”6 to “a whole lineage of fantastic or prodigious creatures.”7 Derrida acknowledges the temptation to describe this “procreation” as “the Projection of an animism or a spiritism. The wood comes alive and is peopled with spirits.”8 More significantly, however, he identifies this animist imaginary as the “capital contradiction,” a “ghost dance” at the very origin of capital that prefigures the “spectral effect of the commodity” and the animism inherent in commodity fetishism.9 Derrida seems to agree with Marx “no use value can in itself produce this mysticality or this spectral effect of the commodity.”10 But if commodities are figured as specters, then we must ask as specters of what exactly? Marx’s reflections on “fictional capital” lead Derrida to the notion of a “spectral commerce” or a “phantasmagoria of commerce.”11 The fact that commodities actually have “commerce among themselves,” as Marx insists, is according to 4 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 190. (Original: Spectres de Marx [Paris: Editions Galilee, 1993]). 5 See Michel Carrouges, Les machines celibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954). 6 Specters of Marx, 191. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 See Ibid, 191f. 10 Ibid, 193. 11 Ibid, 196.

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Derrida an “anthropomorphic projection” that inspires the phantasmatic commerce among commodities. It is in relation to this animation of commodities that Marx aptly coins the term “Warenseele.” Derrida takes Marx’s reflections on fictional capital and spectral commerce to be the basic premise of the Marxist discourse on commodity fetishism that lead to a “phantomalization” of the social bond.12 It is Marx’s notion of the “mysterious” character (das Geheimnisvolle) of the commodity-form that introduces the concept of fetishism. But we must also recall here that the problem of the fetish appeared, as William Pietz has pointed out, at the point of exchange between different societies.13 We could say, then, that the capitalist imaginary under consideration in Marx’s analysis draws on a colonial imaginary that mobilizes the role of the fetish in the “exchange” between colonial societies and indigenous peoples. Fetishism thus also appears as the colonial unconscious of the capitalist imaginary. Pointing to the fact that Marx himself links the ability of mental objects to assume a life of their own to religion, Derrida concludes: “If the objective relation between things […] is indeed a phantasmagoric form of the social relation between men, then we must have recourse to the only analogy possible, that of religion.”14 What Derrida calls Marx’s “choreography of the wooden table” is then linked to the phantomatic residual product of labor, its “phantomatic spectrality” (Derrida) or, as Marx calls it, “gespenstische Gegenständlichkeit.” Derrida translates the latter as “phantomatic objectivity,” but Gegenständlichkeit also invokes the notion of a “phantomatic concreteness,” thus suggesting the mental operation of concretizing a mental image and turning it into an autonomous object outside the mind. For Marx, this phantomatic spectrality becomes indeed the ground for ideology and false consciousness. It is based on the epistemological error of rendering a representation (Vorstellung) autonomous by forgetting its real ground (reale Grundlage) and taking it for the concrete thing itself. According to Derrida, “the critique of the ghost or of spirits would thus be the critique of a subjective representation and an abstraction, of what happens in the head […] and survives outside the head.”15 I have opened with these reflections on the animist underpinnings in Marx’s political economy because they, together with those in Freud’s psychic economy (to which I will turn later), continue to inform much of the new animisms that 12 See Ibid, 199. 13 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish,” Res 16 (1988): 105–23. See also: Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, eds., Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 16. 14 Specters of Marx, 208. 15 Ibid, 215f.

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emerge in today’s philosophical, literary, and artistic production. Moreover, the examples of an animist imaginary in Marx and Varo may suffice to highlight two central aspects of the “new animisms,” namely animation and mimeticism. While Marx establishes a linkage between commodity and animation, Varo visualizes a more general process of ‘mimetic becoming’ across the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, or the human and its objects or Others. In both cases, animation is linked to the capacity to affect and become affected. As the epigraph for this essay suggests, Marx was deeply interested in the capacity of objects to affect human consciousness and, more generally, in the entanglement between human consciousness and the material world: “From the theoretical point of view, plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc. form part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art; they are his [sic.] intellectual inorganic nature, his intellectual means of subsistence, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and assimilate them.”16 With these examples in mind, I propose a heuristic conceptual orientation that foregrounds four different types of animism in the contemporary cultural imaginary : the fetishistic animism, the artistic or surrealist animism, the animism of the schizo, and the ecopolitical animism.

The Fetishistic Animism In the arts as well as in philosophy and critical theory we can observe a resurgence of a new kind of animism and a concomitant interest in and use of the fetish that emerge mainly within the genealogies of Marx and Freud. But the roots of these genealogies reach back to indigenous animism and the role of the fetish in indigenous cultures. Freud draws on these roots in Totem and Taboo17 and Marx in his thoughts on “fictional capital” and on “primitive accumulation.” In the ontologies of many indigenous peoples, the entire natural world is animate. The spirits that animate humans, animals, plants and other worldly objects are endowed with immense spatiotemporal mobility. A spirit can move from a human to an animal or plant and vice versa, and it is this mobility that creates the deeper connections between humans and nonhumans. While we may be tempted to conceive animism with Freud as a system of belief that externalizes psychic life 16 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 81. 17 Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu, in: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 9 (London: Imago, 1940/ Frankfurt: 1986). English version: Totem and Taboo, edited and translated by James Stratchey (Norton, 1950). Freud defines animism in the narrower sense of the term as a concept of psychic being (geistiges Wesen) while he uses the more specific term “animatism” as the concept that defines the seemingly inanimate nature as animate.

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and thereby animate the nonhuman world with anthropomorphic qualities, we must take into account that from within an indigenous epistemology, this animation does not appear as a human projection but as the ontological condition of the planetary world and indeed the cosmos. Marx transfers the concept of animism to the relationship between humans and commodities, insisting that the animation of commodities in the form of commodity fetishism imbues the entire world of economic exchange to the point that commodities accrue agency and indeed a life of their own. For Marx, commodities become truly animated, so to speak, and, as they acquire a life of their own, humans no longer relate to them on the basis of their sheer use value but fetishize them in a complex psycho-economic game of exchange and surplus value. This process affects the boundaries between humans and their commodities, since the fetishized commodities become part of human subjectivity, relationality and personhood. Marx’s economic theory is thus inseparable from a psychological theory that takes into account the profound impact of the economy on the human psyche, both in individuals and collectives. Linking this animated economy to fetishism, Marx foregrounds how economic forces are able to mobilize very archaic psychic mechanisms. This psycho-economic dimension, often neglected in Marxist debates, is crucial for a political economy that focuses on the interactions between humans and commodities or the movements of capital more generally. It is even more crucial, as we shall see later, for what Bruno Latour calls a “political ecology.”

The Artistic or Surrealist Animism Partly under the impact of psychoanalysis, modernist and in particular surrealist artists and writers became deeply engaged with animism as well as indigenous and esoteric philosophies in which the entire world is animated and the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world assume a dreamlike fluidity. In his second manifesto, for example, Andre Breton develops the concept of the “supreme point,” that is, “a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past, present and future … cease to be perceived as contradictions.”18 In a similar vein, surrealists study alchemy, Kabbalah, tarot, Buddhism and Sufism as well as indigenous cultures in order to develop imaginary artistic ethnographies of worlds in which animals and plants are part of an extended community. Even though the surrealists often place their emphasis on 18 Gloria Feman Orenstein, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” in Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, hg., In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Prestel USA: 2012), 173.

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dream, madness and the psychic world, surrealist art and writing also invites the imagination of alternative non-anthropocentric epistemologies. The deepest impact of surrealist art and writing on modernist and postmodern writers lies precisely in the engagement with an imaginary that tries to reach beyond the boundaries of the human. Italo Calvino’s science fiction story “All at One Point,” for example, directly lends itself to being read as a literary figuration and concretization of Breton’s surrealist concept of the “supreme point.” We encounter a transhuman narrator named Qfwfq whose being encompasses all imaginable space and time, who freely travels through universes and galaxies, and who tells the story of life at a time when all matter and creation used to exist in a single point.19 In a different vein, Kafka’s mouse and dog people, for example, can be read as early figurations of an animism that is based, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, on the deterritorialization of the human psyche.20 It was, in fact, Kafka’s work that inspired Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal,” which remains one of the most challenging philosophies rooted in a theorization of new animisms. Finally, Ojibwa author Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices21 refigures traditional Ojibwa stories from a contemporary postmodern perspective in the mode of writing in the oral tradition or, as Ngugi Wa Thiongo calls it, “orature.” The main character Bagese is a mixed-blood urban indigenous woman and a shaman transformed into a bear who uses cards to induce shapeshifting in the other characters. We encounter these native urban characters from the perspective of the animals they incorporate as shapeshifters: they are becoming crow, beaver and squirrel, or even flea. Drawing on traditional creation stories in which shapeshifting appears as a common practice, Vizenor retells the centuries of his country’s bloody history of colonization and genocide and its continued effects on contemporary lives from within an urban setting in Oakland, California, in which “becoming animal” is a trickster strategy of survival. At the same time, these refashioned creation stories reflect—not unlike Calvino’s stories—the quintessential forces of the entire universe. Like Calvino, Vizenor uses humor to acknowledge the ironies of an anthropomorphic imaginary that transfers not only the shamanic practice of shapeshifting and time travel but also the transgenerational legacies of colonialism into stories of urban “survivance.”22

19 Italo Calvino, “All at One Point,” in Cosmicomics, translated from Italian by William Weaver (Harcourt Brace, 1968). 20 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature, translated by D. Polan, Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986. 21 Gerald Vizenor, Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (Oklahoma: U Oklahoma P, 1994). 22 Vizenor’s term.

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The Animism of the Schizo In many of its aspects, Deleuze and Guattari’s epistemology can be understood as a monumental attempt theoretically to de-anthropomorphize the way we conceive the world, if not the human psyche. According to Deleuze and Guattari, humans partake in a fluid process of continual exchange with the non-human world. Desire flows freely across the boundaries of species and “identities” are but temporary and fleeting territorializations. In their attempt to develop a concept of the human stripped of anthropomorphic presuppositions, Deleuze and Guattari see schizophrenia in its contemporary manifestations as expressing the ultimate logic of late capitalism. Like Marx, they rely on a psycho-economic theory in which the forces of capitalism not only assume an agency and life of their own, but also become inseparable from the very psychic formation of humans and the flow of their desires. Deleuze and Guattari theorize the figure of the schizo as an anti-imperial counter-figure to the classical Freudian figure of Oedipus. Forming a socioeconomic unconscious, so to speak, the flows and productions of desire manifest a particular logic of social production. While the concept of “becoming animal” is directly related to the new philosophical animisms, it cannot be understood within the logic of dream or fantasy. “What is real is the becoming itself,” the authors assert, “even if that something other it becomes is not.”23 Rather than a hereditary genealogical evolution, becoming concerns alliances and “unnatural participations”24 that manifest as a creative involution.25 “Becoming animal” then exceeds the animism or totemism of indigenous cultures because becomings are no longer anchored in totemic or symbolic correspondence.26 Rather, they manifest in elementary cellular, molecular and imperceptible flows of energy and desire, generating irreducible symbiotic multiplicities that resist fixation into discrete bounded entities and perceptive space-time coordinates: “Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. […] In short, between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.”27 23 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, translate by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum Inter. Publ., 2004), 240. 24 Ibid. 25 See Ibid, 238. 26 See Ibid, 248. 27 Ibid, 250–53.

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If we are trying concretely to imagine such molecular flows of energy and desire, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics28 once again provides a wonderful example of an experimental literary figuration of such symbiotic becomings through the voice of cells and molecules who figure as main characters in a plot that extends from microscopic worlds to intergalactic time travel. Using the voice of Qfwfq, an immortal being unconstrained by time and space that has been around since life before matter began condensing and freely travels to galaxies 100,000,000 light years away, Cosmicomics tells the story of evolution, including a literary-philosophical reflection on the long term evolution of the human species. However, while Deleuze and Guattari attempt to de-anthropomorphize the ways in which we conceive the world, Calvino moves in the opposite direction. He tries to imagine non-human agents such as a first trace of life before matter, a cellular being, a mollusk or an unbounded being that is able freely to move across spaces and times immemorial. In order to tell the stories of these transhuman beings, however, Calvino needs to rely on an anthropomorphic imagination. In a sense, Cosmicomics can also be read as a literary-philosophical reflection on the incapacity of humans truly to move beyond an anthropomorphic imaginary. This is, of course, a well-known quandary of Science Fiction more generally. Calvino uses humor to address our limitations in imagining and, more importantly, in relating to what is radically other. At the same time, however, in his stories, most prominently perhaps in “The Spiral” which tries to imagine life as a mollusk, he also acknowledges our need, if not insatiable desire to do so. Calvino’s “new animisms” push readers to imagine the vast expanses of non-human life across galaxies and light years, cells and species, matter and mind. When it comes to imagining the mind, Calvino suggests, we seem to be incapable of preventing ourselves from falling back into an anthropomorphic imaginary. We “animate” the alien beings we encounter by imagining them with desires and minds that can be compared to those of humans, such as, for example, the being in “A Sign in Space” who is desperate to leave behind a unique and visible trace of its existence. Perhaps Calvino challenges us to acknowledge the difference between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. While being thoroughly anthropomorphized, his characters are never anthropocentric. In this respect, Calvino’s new animism, in fact, resembles the animisms of indigenous people that are decidedly non-anthropocentric. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are identical with the free flow of affects. They generate a mode of individuation different from that of a thing or a subject. At stake is the “capacity to affect and be affected.”29 Calvino imagines characters 28 Italo Calvino, Le Cosmicomiche Julio Einaudi, 1965. English translation by William Weaver, Cosmicomics (Harcourt Brace, 1968). 29 A Thousand Plateaus, 261.

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whose affects flow freely across time and space. For better or worse, however, in Cosmicomics the “capacity to affect and be affected” remains bound to an anthropomorphic imaginary. Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, push precisely those limits, trying to induce us to imagine not only non-human species in a nonanthropomorphic way, but also humans as capable of transcending the boundaries of the human in a free flow of affect and desire. For them, the most radical figure in this respect is the schizo and the most crucial psychic operation is “becoming animal.” As they write in Anti-Oedipus, to “become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape […] where all forms come undone, as do all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.”30 The twentieth century fascination with schizophrenia and the figure of the schizophrenic—in literature, art, antipsychiatry and critical theory—can certainly be linked with the attraction of witnessing free flows of affects and wildly imaginative worldings across the boundaries of the human and the nonhuman, of species, and even planets and galaxies. The most creative among the schizophrenics create cosmological visions that tap into a deeply rooted desire for and fascination with becomings. A prominent case in point is Freud’s patient Schreber who develops a phantasmatic language of nerves (Nervensprache) and an electromagnetic discourse full of technical phantasms. Martin Burckhardt points out significant resonances between Schreber’s language of nerves and Freud’s concept of the psychic apparatus as an electromagnetic, neural apparatus that refers not only to psychic life but also to the evolution of the nervous system.31 Schreber’s world is animistic, populated by spirits, phantoms, human simulacra, and electromagnetic forces. Occupying the center of the world, his body merges with the surrounding landscape as well as the planetary system and the astral world. His vision is at the same time apocalyptic and redemptive. For Schreber, the world continues to radiate even after its end (“die Welt strahlt weiter, über das Ende hinaus”).32 Attributing to Schreber’s technical phantasms a prophetic dimension, Burckhardt argues that they reveal a secret history of modernity in which the logos is re-coding itself in a new electromagnetic way and conjures a “real” that manifests itself in the form of magnetic tapes, codes and computers: “Seen in this way, Schreber becomes the prophet of the medium, the first electromagnetic ghost.”33 In a similar vein, Elias Canetti argues that 30 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986), 13. 31 See “Nachwort von Martin Burckhardt,” in Daniel Paul Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 1995), 271. 32 Ibid, 265. 33 Ibid, 273 (my translation).

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Schreber’s imaginary world enfolds a tacit inscription of the main delusion of the twentieth century, namely the madness of power and the masses.34 In an earlier essay published in Animisms I, I wrote about another schizo, Estamira, a sixty-three year old Brazilian woman who collaborated with documentary filmmaker Marcos Prado on a “schizo-documentary” that portrays her life among the community of catadores (trash-pickers) in Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest trash mountain. Yet, rather than being about Estamira’s life, the film is about the prophetic qualities of Estamira’s cosmological vision, which presupposes the co–construction of humans and non-humans, animals and astrobodies, maritime beings and invisible children. Just as Canetti describes Schreber’s imaginary world as enfolding a tacit inscription of the delusion of the twentieth century, we could read Estamira’s cosmology of astrobodies and punster gods as a tacit inscription of the delusions of the twenty-first century with its economic and ecological devastations and its creation of ever more populations of disposable people and human wastelands. And yet, like Schreber’s, Estamira’s visionary cosmology with its performative enactment of becomings transcend these material conditions. We cannot reduce the documentary to an allegorical reading. Estamira, in fact, generates the “schizodocumentary”35 as a new genre, that is, a documentary that is not Prado’s work about Estamira as a schizophrenic woman, but a collaborative work made together with her. Rather than being a documentary about Estamira’s animist cosmology, it is a schizo-documentary whose very form is inspired by her animism. In other words, Prado tries to break with the hierarchical perspective of studying a schizophrenic subject from the outside by trying to give voice to Estamira and her others—her astrobodies, Punsters, invisible children or maritime daughters. The film gives voice to a truth Estamira inhabits but cannot tell, a truth toward which she can only gesture by recycling animist discourses in order to refashion them according to her own inner world with figurations of astro-bodies and alien worlds “beyond of the beyond.” We are compelled to respond to her delusional visions because her delusions, like Schreber’s, echo the covert delusions of her society.

34 See Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Fischer, 2011); English version: Crowds and Power, translated by Carol Stewart (Weidenfeld & Nicolson History, 2000). 35 I owe the term “schizo-documentary” to Ackbar Abbas. My discussions with him about my earlier essay on Estamira (in Animisms II) have deepened my insight in the radicality of Prado’s experimental collaboration with Estamira.

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The New Animisms of Polytemporal Pluriverses Largely based on Bruno Latour’s The Politics of Nature,36 my fourth category is concerned with the emergence of new animisms in debates about ecology and sustainability. “By accusing other cultures of animism, the epistemology police carefully dissimulated the bizarre character of its own inanimism: a politicization of the life of the pluriverse so complete that everything always had to come back to a ‘unanimism’ that was not subject to debate,”37 writes Latour in his profound critique of the anthropocentrism of science. The neologism “inanimism” refers to “the anthropocentrism of a metaphysics that presupposes objects that are ‘indifferent’ to the fate of humans.”38 In a sense, Latour’s critique of inanimism attempts to inaugurate a new turn in the sciences complementary to that of relativity theory. While the latter demonstrates that a scientist inevitably alters the object under investigation, Latour argues that in their encounter with humans, objects impact and thereby alter humans. We may even detect a certain affinity to Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism here, even though Latour pushes the agency of objects and the relationality between humans and nonhumans further. Latour’s reflections on animism and inanimism offer a challenging framework to rethink the epistemological reach of the concept of a co–construction, assemblage or co–constitution of humans and nonhumans. His most intriguing claim is “the right for nonhumans to speak” as requirement for a democratic constitution.39 The question of how we can grant nonhumans a voice and legal standing in court has long preoccupied ecologists, environmental theorists and philosophers. How would granting a voice and legal standing to nonhumans work in practical terms. How would we learn to listen to nonhuman voices? How would we integrate them in legal, political, and scientific practices based on discourses of rights? I think this is the most difficult question raised in Latour’s political ecology. In his conceptual move radically to deanthropomorphize speech and to think in terms of an association of humans and nonhumans or a “human-nonhuman pair” (rather than conceiving them as separate entities), Latour himself affirms the necessity to take the risk of a new metaphysics.40 “Nothing is more anthropocentric than the inanimism of nature,” he argues and concludes: “It is to the topos, the oikos, that political ecology

36 Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004). 37 Ibid, 87. 38 Ibid, 242. 39 Ibid, 69. 40 See Ibid, 73 and 77.

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invites us to return. We come back home to inhabit the common dwelling without claiming to be radically different from the others.”41 In light of our earlier discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, one may ask what happens to affect, desire and indeed “subjectivity” in this search for what makes up the common world. Latour’s concept of an “experimental metaphysics”42 no longer allows subjectivity to be thought of as the sole property of humans. While Deleuze and Guattari have opted to give up the very term subjectivity because of its entanglement with a molar politics of differentiation and individualization, Latour rather seems to endow nonhumans with a subjectivity of their own, thereby conceptually animating the world of nonhumans, including inanimate objects. But if we take his challenge to think in terms of a “human-nonhuman pair” seriously, it seems to me that we would need to theorize the processes of transference that happen in constituting such a pair. These transferential processes happen, in Deleuzian terms, in the play of intensities, events and accidents that occur in the intermediate space between the two constituents of the pair. Another question regarding Latour’s dense, if not somewhat elusive theory of political ecology concerns the affinities and differences to indigenous epistemologies. We know that he draws heavily on Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro’s work, which is deeply indebted to de Castro’s own fieldwork with indigenous people. Wasn’t the “old animism,” that is, the traditional animism we find in indigenous societies, precisely a cosmological system that endowed nonhumans with subjectivity, agency and a voice? Finally, I am wondering what would happen if we brought Latour’s The Politics of Nature into conversation with Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract, especially since, unlike Latour, Serres is not willing to give up the notion of nature, but replaces the traditional agonistic relationship between humans and nature with that of a symbiosis that also requires one to think, like Latour, in terms of a collective of humans and nonhumans? The most profound challenge presented by the new animisms—be it in Marx, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari or Latour, or in the surrealist and experimental modernist artists and writers—lies in the imperative to rethink the boundaries between humans and their others. In envisioning a sustainable and less destructive relationship between them, we may indeed learn from the long history of animist imaginaries. Yet, we also need an “ecology of mind” (Bateson) that reconfigures these imaginaries in light of today’s precarious and destructive conditions of life in our late capitalist societies under the forces of globalization and their increasing expulsion of peoples, not to speak of other species, from civil society and the social contract.

41 Ibid, 224. 42 Ibid, 242.

Monica Spiridon

Chapter 14: Reversed Mimesis: Real Life and the Rules of the Literary Game

“the subject appropriated and reconstituted the object in a sort of reversed mimesis and Oscar Wilde later described the inversion in one of his famous paradoxes: “Art does not imitate nature, but on the contrary Nature imitates Art.”1

1.

Rules of Literature—Rules of Life

In well-timed cultural contexts, some of the strongest models and norms of literature manage to impose on real life oppressive patterns of behavior. The following discussion will look mainly but not exclusively at the rules of literary genre, striving to stress their strong normative impact on everyday life and their latent extensions in social behavior. This was particularly the case for what is regarded as popular genres, such as medieval romances or melodramas, which engendered peculiar types of confusion between literature and life, labeled as quixotism or bovarism. We will point to one of the pervasive generic paradigms of nineteenth-century literature, illustrated by a series of top novelists: the British rural genre. Some scholars rather see this genre as a subdivision of the so-called regional literature: Let me begin with a word about the tradition of the English regional novel, contends Jacqueline Anne Ariail. The term is generally applied to the novels of George Eliot, located in the scenes of her youth, and to those of Thomas Hardy, whose fictional Wessex mirrors the Dorsetshire landscape. One can stretch the term to encompass Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, set in Yorkshire moors and Lawrence’s English novels, all of which occur in the Nottingham countryside. While these novels are generally set in England’s rural past there is always a tension between country and town that manifest itself.2 1 Mihai Spariosu, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory : An Interdisciplinary Approach, vol.1. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), ii. 2 Jacqueline Anne Ariail, “Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 9.3 (1978): 63–64.

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Other critics also imply that the British Rural genre is a particular kind of regional novel.3 As literary historians often pointed out, during the nineteenth century this genre had a formative impact on British everyday life. The context of the actual syndrome of rural novel is worth noticing. According to K. D. M. Snell, the growth of regional fiction was closely entrenched in the expansion of the reading public in the late nineteenth century.4 This growth fostered what Snell calls “the management of regional fiction,”5 meaning the endeavor of some rural counties— Dorsetshire , Shropshire, Yorkshire—to capitalize on the reputation given them by certain novelists and fostering the rewriting of local history as the history of an author.6 The starting point for our analysis is Stella Gibbons’s famous 1932 masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm, an astute fictitious x-ray of the rural literary pattern.7 It emphasizes what only a few scholars have noticed since its publication; this book endeavors to reevaluate and unravel the codes of a literary genre. The book also illustrates a both an intricate and insightful instance of reversed mimesis, as Mihai Spariosu puts it (see the motto to this study).8

2.

The Real World and the Templates of Literature

Gibbons’s main character, Flora Poste, is both a representation of the author and an exemplar of the contemporary reader community. Despite her initial apprehensions, she travels from London to temporarily live with relatives on a Sussex farm which, on close inspection, turns out to be an appalling fortress of compelling generic codes and literary behavior patterns. The farm seems to be a catchall of rural themes and images, motives, characterizations, allusions and prose styles—”all stood on their heads, turned inside out, or blown out of proportion.9

3 In this respect, see the title of W. J. Keith’s book: Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1988). 4 K. D. M. Snell, “The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research,” in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800–1990, ed. K. D. M. Snell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 23. 5 Ibid, 39. 6 Ibid, 37–39. 7 Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (London: Penguin, 2006). 8 Spariosu, Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, ii. 9 Ariail, “Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons,” 65.

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In Foucauldian terms, the farm as conceived by Gibbons is a heterotopia: a “real-invented” world, a rural universe as perceived and represented by a particular literary genre.10 In a real Sussex, Gibbons sets up a Hardy-like-universe and makes it clear for us that it has been crafted by literature: “She reminded herself that Sussex, when all was said and done, was not quite like other counties and that when one observed that these people lived on a farm in Sussex, the address was no longer remarkable.”11 For Flora, an advised and sarcastic connoisseur and commentator of the literary rural novel, the structure of this heterotopia, its behavior codes and its stereotype characters—whose names she is able to anticipate—are utterly predictable: I think if I find any third cousins living at Cold Comfort Farm (young ones, you know, children of Cousin Judith) who are named Seth or Reuben, I shall decide not to go. Why? Oh, because highly-sexed young men living on farms are always called Seth or Reuben, and it would be such a nuisance. And my cousin name, remember, is Judith. That in itself is most ominous. Her husband is almost certain to be called Amos; and if he is it will be a typical farm, and you know how they are like.12

The aptly named old aunt, Ada Doom, the pivotal figure of the book, represents both the fatality of this literarily crafted world and the master theme of its generic discourses: So that was what it was. Mrs. Starkadder was the curse of Cold Comfort. Mrs. Starkadder was the Dominant Grandmother Theme, which was found in all typical novels of agricultural life. It was, of course, right and proper that Mrs. Starkadder should be in possession at Cold Comfort; Flora should have suspected her existence from the beginning.13

Ever since her childhood, when she allegedly had seen “something nasty in the woodshed,” Aunt Ada has grown deliberately mad. Hence all her family, including some rather remote relatives, is doomed to be forever prisoners in her claustrophobic farm: “Saw something nasty in the woodshed!!!” sudden shrilled Aunt Ada, smiting at Judith with the “Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cow keepers’ guide,” “something nasty! You are all wicked and cruel. You want to go away and leave me alone in the woodshed.

10 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 333–34. 11 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 21. 12 Ibid, 22. 13 Ibid, 17 (my emphasis).

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But you never shall. None of you. Never! There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort. You must all stay here with me.”14

As literary critics put it “I saw something nasty in the woodshed,” is the book’s most famous line and has “become a catchphrase.”15 An antipode of the real world, the Woodshed epitomizes the literary realm of the rural genre, where Aunt Ada had assumed the capital role. Flora swiftly identifies her behavior as a conventional theatrical part: So that was it. Aunt Ada Doom was mad. (…) It struck her that Aunt Ada Dooms’ madness had taken the most convenient form possible. If anybody who went mad could arrange in what way it was to take them, she felt pretty sure they would all choose to be mad like Ada Doom.16

Such is the case with Mr. Neck, a Hollywood producer, who immediately tags “the woodshed line” as an obsolete movie pattern: Gee, ma’am, I know it is raw, shouted Mr. Neck, craning out of the window of the car and peering up at Aunt Ada. But, gee, that’s life, girl. You are living now, sweet heart. All that woodshed line … that was years ago. Young Woodley stuff.17

Flora Poste, just an occasional visitor of the farm, is assigned the part of an “anthropological observer”18 who keeps drawing comparisons: “it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.”19 In a certain way, Flora fears its compelling norms of behavior that she, as an astute reader of the genre, is too familiar : “Worst fears realized darling Seth and Reuben too send gumboots,” reads the telegram hastily sent to her Londonian friend, Mrs. Smiles.20 Overall Gibbons’s Sussex farm conspicuously puts on display some of the key aspects and stereotypes of the rural world as outlined by the genre, in reference to setting, themes, characters, patterns of behavior, values, discourses, scenery, and style. Cold Comfort is a gloomy and pathetic universe of isolation and boiling misery, run by unhappiness. It is a mess in all possible respects, a realm of eccentric and ridiculous attire, of abundant and superfluous tears and of enraged discourses: Persons of Aunt Ada’s temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white 14 Ibid, 171. 15 Faye Hammill, “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars,” Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (Winter 2001): 831. 16 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 119. 17 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 187 (my emphasis). 18 Snell, “The regional novel,” 40. 19 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 87. 20 Ibid, 50.

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with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowing and parting forever, and misunderstanding and interfering, and spying, and above all managing and intriguing. Oh! They did enjoy themselves!21

The humanity of Cold Comfort also seems to hold a primeval relation with nature, presented as opposite to both spirit and civilization. The dark, grotesque version of this humanity is Meriam, the coarse hired girl. The poetic one is Flora’s untamed cousin Elfine, who wanders day and night on Sussex’s dawns, like Mary Webb’s characters, and dreams of emulating St. Francis of Assisi’s attire and life style. The particular ways Gibbon refers to nature—sometimes in paragraphs tagged by herself as “the finer passages with one, two or three stars”22—are meant to vaguely hint to the literary codes of landscape representation, more precisely, to Hardy’s representation of nature, admired and followed by Lawrence, as confessed by the latter in his Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays.23 Also following the Hardy-and-Lawrence-recipe, the novelist oversexualizes the nature of Sussex County.24 So does one of her characters, a histrionic fictional writer called Mr. Mybug, not part of the farm’s family tribe, who indulges in a ridiculous literary style of life: Mr. Mybug, however did ask Renett to marry him. He said that, by God, D. H. Lawrence was right when he said that there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of a marriage?25

3.

Literature versus Literature

A literary genre presents a reader-oriented pattern, since it is the readership that assesses the fictional verisimilitude of a fictional universe. Carefully reading the novel, we come to understand that Gibbons assigns to Flora a double mission: to read and at the same time to (re)write the generic rural material. The main character of the novel is the fictional counterpart of Gibbons herself, perceiving

21 Ibid, 56. 22 Ibid, 6. 23 See D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 50–52. 24 Robert Langbaum, “Lawrence and Hardy,” in D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Athlon P, 1985), 71.As Robert Langbaum noticed, Hardy and Lawrence themselves in turn sexualized Wordsworth’s living landscapes. 25 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 206.

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the Sussex experience mainly as a raw literary “material.” Before leaving London, Flora unveils her plans to collect material for a forthcoming novel: Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If one asks me what I work at, I shall say : Collecting material.26

She is also able to detect models and to pinpoint them as literary, especially when they emerge as sources of discomfort for her, in other words, almost all the time: It was true that in novels dealing with agricultural life no one ever did anything so courteous as to meet a train, unless it was with the object of cutting-in under the noses of the other members fo the family with some sordid or passionate end in view.27

Eventually the main character prevails over this peculiar narrative universe where people have been cast in scary literary roles by convenient cultural circumstances. Her robust campaign for normalization seeks to dismantle genre patterns and replace them with the rules of what she calls “ordinary life.” What is on offer in this alternative respect? The love marriage, to Elfine; the Hollywood movie industry and hyper reality to Seth, who is fascinated by the striking hyper-reality of the “talkies”; domestic happiness, to Urk and Meriam as well as to Renett and Mr. Mybug; a pleasant mood and future cultural trips across Europe to Judith; a maybe too reasonable economic prosperity, to Reuben; public preaching around the world, to Amos. Aunt Ada herself eventually leaves the farm, tempted by the prospect of a life of leisure and merriment in Paris, as per Flora’s carefully chosen model. By the end of the story, one of the characters is struck by the idea that, oddly, plane after plane keeps taking off from the farm’s lawn, towards more or less remote destinations. As Greenfield notices: “In the closing pages, Flora Poste herself leaves the ordinary world which she has created on the Winds of Romance, in her lover’s airplane.”28 In short, Flora’s strategy is to swing open the doors of the farm and to urge characters—and all the living beings of the farm including the bull confined to its shed—to escape to a so-called Normal Life. In fact, in the epigraph of the novel, Gibbon contends that: “The action of the story takes part in the near future” (my emphasis). Actually, in the book, apparently tiny details of civilization constantly keep reminding us about this: the rural coin telephone provided with a TV dial; the numbers of ordinary people flying back and forth between British cities and seeing the railways as already obsolete; the vanguard glass building of the New 26 Ibid, 19. 27 Ibid, 26. 28 Johnathan Greenberg, Modernism, Satire and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 204.

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River Club on the Thames; air mail lightning speed deliveries to farms in the most remote corners of the country, etc. This is how the author is warning us that her fictional universe belongs to a Europe of the 1940s–1950s which—as we can only see now—did not live through a Second World War and which is therefore now an “Alternative Europe.” It is also worth noting that Flora does not actually see the Starkkaders as real “real” people. She treats them as fictional characters that she sets free, but only into alternative lives which she has modeled on alternative stories. In other words, the Starkkaders are merely given new roles to play. They are cast by Flora not in real life but in scripts she has created, based on her reading experiences. In Flora’s worldview the so called Normal Life is also ruled by severe codes, as displayed by her bedside reading of The Higher Common Sense and its abridged version Les Pensees, by Abb8 Fausse-Maigre. The ordinary life that Flora dreams of for the Starkkaders is a made up world, governed by the codes of the so-called higher common sense. In this ideal universe, the ordinary people are bound to live by the book, strictly following the rules of Abb8 Fausse-Maigre’s Pensees or his Higher Common Sense, in the same way as Flora herself does, day after day : Flora thought of “The Higher Common Sense.” In spite of its impersonal theme, “The Higher Common Sense” provided a guide for civilized persons when confronted with a dilemma of the Aunt Ada type… Without actually laying down rules of conduct, The Higher Common Sense outlined a philosophy for the civilized being, and the rules of conduct followed automatically.29

In Gibbons’s novel, the escape from literature eventually ends up in literature too. Initially received by its contemporaries as a wicked parody, Cold Comfort Farm is in fact a staged interpretative scenario. Gibbons cunningly builds a sophisticated storytelling process through which an outsider gradually pushes open the doors of a daunting literary dungeon and sets free a full cast of frightened people. Until now, literary scholars have vacillated when trying to describe Flora’s valiant campaign. Jonathan Greenberg, for example, described it as a “parody,”30 pointing to the genre. He then offered the designation of “pastoral” as a second generic reference.31 But, then again, Greenberg contends at a certain point that the book deals with a literary “mode” based on a specific type of attitude and sensibility, as well as on an excessively emotional type of discourse: “My discussion focuses on the satiric mode in narrative fiction.”32 29 30 31 32

Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 58. Greenberg, Modernism, Satire and the Novel, 216. Ibid, 92. Ibid, 185 (my emphasis).

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I tend to follow Faye Hammill, who sees the promotion of Jane Austen’s paradigmatic world as the main target of Flora’s campaign: Flora is clearly marked as belonging to the fictional world of Jane Austen. We are alerted to this early in the narrative when she mentions her ambition to write a novel as good as Persuasion and ads: “I think I have much in common with Miss Austen.”33 Flora often reads Mansfield Park to sustain her amid the chaos of Cold Comfort, and it is the progress from disorder to order in Austen’s books that appeals to her.34 Nicola Humble also maintains that this book stages a surreptitious literary polemic: “A conflict between Austen and Bronte world view is played out in which ultimately the Bronte plot is consigned to the past: the modern world requires the open rationalism of an Austen.”35 Can one venture to suspect that Jane Austen’s literary universe embodied Flora’s ideal world governed by the higher common sense? In the second chapter of the novel, we note that Persuasion provides the model for her, as she longs to head into an Austen-like world “but with a modern setting.”36 If Flora is an Austen fan, or maybe even a “soft” Janeite? In 1894, the British literary critic George Sainsbury coined this term for Jane Austen fans, and it has been used ever since, sometimes affectionately, sometimes derisively.37 If the answer is yes, then we know that such Austen readers usually live their lives in emulation of Jane Austen’s novels.38 Indeed, Flora behaves like Emma in many ways, who entertains herself by trying to shape the lives and marital prospects of her circle. Her closest friend, Mary Smiley, is perturbed and even offended to hear Flora praise the model of rationally arranging marriages: I have definite ideas about marriage, as you know. I have always liked the sound of the phrase “a marriage has been arranged.” My marriage, Mary, will be arranged into Heaven.39 As in the Austen world, several weddings are planned and occur in Gibbons’s novel; they are mostly “arranged” by Flora: the marriages of Elfine—Richard Hawk-Monitor, Mr. Mybug—Renette, Meriam—Urk and finally Flora herself 33 Hammill, “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars,” 840. 34 Ibid, 831. 35 Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2001), 179–80. 36 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 18. 37 Deborah Yaffe, Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), xiv. 38 The thoroughly documented and comprehensive book of Deborah Yaffe points both to the history and to the multiple faces of Austen’s fandom. 39 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 14.

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and her cousin Charles. Her romance with Charles Fairfax is very similar to an Austen marriage plot: a union between cousins, carefully managed in advance by both parties, ruled by the norms of rationality, tidiness, ceremony, protocol and sexual appropriateness.

4.

Conclusions

Upon close inspection, Gibbon’s novel is definitely not a parody, has as frequently alleged. The novelist does not comply with the usual norm of a parodic contract between author and readership, which stipulates that the latter successfully recognize the literary model in question.40 Rather than unraveling her literary sources, Gibbons does her best to blur and merge patterns, to intermingle possible references to other authors in an attempt to outdo them. Her rural fictitious world does not care to explicitly point to a particular author or literary text, except for a handful of references to D. H. Lawrence’s novels or to the Bronte family. But these references can be found in Flora’s elaborate arguments with Mr. Mybug, a would-be-writer who is not part of the farm’s world. What Stella Gibbons does, in fact, is draw our attention to the creative potential of literary models: their patterns of traditions, types of discourse, modes and especially their genres: We can remind ourselves of how fiction on rural society, and the development of more varied forms of rural novel were lampooned in a clever, caricatured fashion by Stella Gibbons, maintains H. D. M. Snell. This is a book that reminds us of the problem of an over-historical approach to regional fiction, in that it highlights the importance of literary form and convention in determining the content of a genre.41 As Tzvetan Todorov puts it: “In a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalized, and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by this codification.”42 By the same token, Todorov concludes that genres are situated in-between general poetics and literary history.43 We have to admit that the fictional world of Cold Comfort Farm is obviously placed at such a juncture. Gibbons is very keen on unraveling the conventionalinstitutional rules of rural novels as a genre or, in Gerard Genette’s terms, the 40 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 50–69. 41 Snell, “The regional novel,” 22. 42 Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 198. 43 Ibid, 201.

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trans-textual architexte that governs its framework.44 Alternatively, she is fully aware of the fact that this particular genre has been a milestone in the history of the British novel. It was closely linked to the advent of a particular type of common reader, brought about by the changes in the book trade and by the rise of mass literacy in the nineteenth century.45 This newly arrived implied reader had staunch expectations of which the authors of the time were well aware and with which they strived to comply. Among the outcomes of nineteenth century shift in readership was the emergence of a type of novel that was hyperconscious of its codes, their ability to intercede between author and reader and their ability to shape the socio-cultural behavior of the latter.46 On a different but not totally separate level, Gibbon employs the character of Flora to identify a complementary hard literary pattern, a model who can exert influence on the real life of Jane Austen’s fictional universe. A twentieth-century novelist such as Gibbons is fully aware of the rich latent potential that Austen’s literary patterns have to create personal role models and aspirational life stories: I was beginning to see that for all of us Austen fans, the enterprise of Austen interpretation involved us in the narration of our lives. My Jane Austen saw a coolly objective observer with high standards and a sharp edge, a plausible version of my own ideal self.47

To a certain extent, the early twentieth century British novelist anticipates the mimetic pressure of literature on life as it is enhanced by recent means of communication. The impact of literary models on daily life as staged in Cold Comfort Farm anticipates our present situation when the commodities of advanced technologies (TV series, movies, computer games, on line popular products etc.) have managed to impose a hyper-reality and shape real life, thanks to their strong transmedia “convergence.”48 In Gibbon’s novel, almost everything points to something else and that something else does not belong to real life. Whenever Flora has to deal with a new reality, she starts looking for a model to help her understand it. She then seeks to mold it into a form that suits her needs, be it the British rural genre, Austen’s 44 Gerard Genette, The Architexte: An Introduction, trans. J. E. Lewin (Berkeley : U California P, 1992), 1–87. 45 Arlene Buckland and Beth Palmer, eds., A Return to the Common Reader : Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 1–5; Raymond Williams, “Region and Class in the Novel,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1984): 30. 46 Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader : A Preface to a History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53.1 (1992): 70. 47 Yaffe, Among the Janeites, 158. 48 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York UP, 2006), 5–20; Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Knowledge in a Networked World (New York: New York UP, 2013), 2–13.

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novels, or the imaginary books of L’Abb8 Fausse-Maigre. In Stella Gibbon’s case, Mimesis should be read as Mimicry. It amounts to the quest for a textual alternative universe to shape the real world.

Bibliography Alcorn, John. The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence. London: Macmillan, 1982. Ariail, Jacqueline Anne. “Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 9.3 (1978): 63–77. Buckland, Arlene and Beth Palmer, eds. A Return to the Common Reader : Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900. London: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Edited by Neil Leach, 330–36. New York: Routledge, 1997. Genette, Gerard. The Architexte: An Introduction. Translated by J. E. Lewin. Berkeley : U California P, 1992. Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Greenberg, Johnathan. Modernism, Satire and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Knowledge in a Networked World. New York: New York UP, 2013. Hammill, Faye. “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars.” Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (Winter 2001): 831–54. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. The Teaching of Twentieth Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Keith, W. J. Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1988. Langbaum, Robert. “Lawrence and Hardy.” In D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, 69–91. London: Athlon P, 1985. Lawrence, D. H. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Edited by Bruce Steele. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Rose, Jonathan. “Rereading the English Common Reader : A Preface to a History of Audiences.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53.1 (1992): 47–70. Snell, K. D. M. “The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research.” In The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800–1990, edited by K. D. M. Snell, 1–54. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Spariosu, Mihai I. Mimesis in Contemporary Theory : An Interdisciplinary Approach. Vol.1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

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Williams, Raymond. “Region and Class in the Novel.” In Writing in Society, 229–39. London: Verso, 1984. Yaffe, Deborah. Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Dragan Kujundzˇic´

Chapter 15: Beyond Comparison: Auerbach’s Comparative Literature as a Diasporic Experience

At the end of his essay “Philology and Weltliteratur,” written in 1952,1 Erich Auerbach quoted a twelfth-century monk, Hugo of St. Victor. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner ; he to whom every soil is as his native is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

Recent interpretations of the work of Erich Auerbach, by Aamir Mufti, Emily Apter, Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Edward Said, all point out to the exilic character of Auerbach’s writing, most notably of his Mimesis, the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.2 The description of the conditions under which this book was written has been often quoted and reproduced, situating Auerbach’s work at the margins of Europe and at a time when European culture may have seemed to be living its last moments. Thus, the work of Erich Auerbach may be seen as an attempt at survival, living on, his own survival and the survival of the culture that is living its last moments. In this short attempt at an homage to one of the great philologists of the twentieth century, I will venture along three paths. The first will be related to the epochal conditions in which Mimesis was written, the historic moment marked by the war and the Holocaust; analyze briefly a seemingly unlikely affinity between Auerbach and the thinker and critic of Orientalism, Edward Said; and conclude with saying a few words about Auerbach and a tradition which is rarely associated with the Abrahamic, that of Russia. The discussion at the end will lead us back to the beginning, to the question of Exile, Europe, and Abraham. The magisterial project that inspires my essay is Mimesis. The colossal achievement of this book is in discerning the patterns of its representation of reality 1 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Marie and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1–17. 2 See also the landmark volume on mimesis in contemporary theory, edited by Mihai I. Spariosu, Mimesis in Contemporary Literary Theory : An Interdisciplinary Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984).

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in Western literature. This is a work of immense erudition and scope. It is well known and often quoted that Auerbach did not have access to the secondary material and therefore had to write directly about the texts. (But, if he had the access, he would probably never stop reading the secondary material and would have never written the book). The book, Mimesis, is an attempt to discern the stylistic patterns that correspond to the modes of reality from the early Homeric period and Abrahamic biblical texts, to the late nineteenth-century literature. Every aspect of this title would need an elaborate discussion and analysis, the West, reality, representation, and figure and figurality. I venture a telegraphic conclusion before any analysis. If we were to read Auerbach only literally, on the promise of the title, his work would probably come short today. The teleology of its historicism, the correspondence of representation and reality, the notion of the West, and above all of literature, have all undergone radical contestations in the last several decades, for such concepts to be taken naively, literally or at face value. And I rush a proposition. It is in the exilic, diasporic aspect of Auerbach’s writing, in what maybe even goes un-thought in the performance of this event titled Mimesis, that the lasting impact of this book is still felt, and will be probably for some time to come. In a word, I read the thinker of figura in his rhetorical disfiguration and “dissemiNation,” in the moment when the meaning engendered by the text of Mimesis enters into a dehiscence and disjunction with its own exilic rhetoric, displaying the “duplicity of a figure that cries out for the differentiation that it conceals.”3 Incidentally, the previous citation is written by the scholar who succeeded Auerbach as the Sterling Professor at Yale, Paul de Man (whose mentions of Auerbach in Allegories of Reading and Blindness and Insight are always those of high praise, even in disagreement). I had not previously noticed and analyzed that the beginning chapter of Mimesis is an allegory of the historical situation in which Auerbach wrote his book, during World War II in Istanbul. First, there is the allegorical intervention: Odysseus’s scar is the scar of war inflicted upon the body and by the body of the returning king. The modes of representation pertaining to the Greek reality, that of clarity of representation, the “uniformly objective present”4 constitute the founding moment of the ways by which the West, Europe, proceeded with in their own history in the epoch of metaphysics of presence, from Homer, all the way to Heidegger. In 1947, at the same time as Auerbach, Martin Heidegger, in his seminal and infinitely abyssal “Anaximander Fragment,” analyzes the crucial metaphysical 3 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 12. 4 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willar R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 7 (my emphasis).

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concept of being, by having recourse to the Homeric verse. It is, Heidegger says, “the fate of the West that hangs on the translation of the word eon, assuming that the translation consists in crossing over to the truth of what comes to the language of eon.”5 (Just as a reminder, the fragment in question is the oldest philosophical text, and it runs like this: “along the lines of usage; for they [beings, ta eonta] let order and thereby also belong to one another in the surmounting of disorder [injustice].”) In order to explain the meaning of ta eonta, Heidegger quotes from Homer, the lines in The Iliad, when Kalhas stands up and tells the future after the war with the Trojans will have been over. He is the seer, the interpreter, the best one, aristos, and can tell the future. By means of this literary example Heidegger comes to the true meaning that one can accord to the word eon, and, “Consequently eon means becoming present in unconcealement.”6 We should remember, that the fate of the West hangs on the way of translating eon, onta, beings, what is. Then, Heidegger asks, “In what language is the land of evening translated? We shall now try to translate the Anaximander fragment.”7 In a word, it is translated into German. The history of the West returns, after the war, to Germany, where the being finds its true destination. The scar of war in Heidegger goes unanalyzed. This is, of course, no place and time to analyze this fascinating but troubling text. But for the purposes of the context: it is 1947, the same year when Auerbach finishes and publishes his analysis of representation in the West, and defines the Homeric, that is European pertaining to Greek, mode of representation, as that which engages “the uniformly objective present.” (It would be very tempting, in turn, to draw out the unthought of the literary allegory that Heidegger seemingly seamlessly engages in his philosophical analysis, to orient the entire destiny of being towards post-war Germany. Here, as is often the case in Heidegger, the unsaid speaks volumes.) The West returns to itself in the mode of a metaphysics of presence, and celebrates its sameness. The ecstasy, that of sameness, the jouissance of identity is, of course, the war. The scar, which confirms the return of the king, is a prelude to what has been called “the first great revenge massacre in Western literature,” whereby Odysseus slaughters the suitors. (I can only refer here to the lucid analysis accorded to this episode in the Odyssey by Sam Weber, in his Targets of Opportunity.) In the same beginning chapter of Mimesis, there is the story of Abraham, and the sacrifice of Isaac, sealing the covenant of the Jews with God, the secret bond, a mysterium tremendum, the singular relation of the Jewish people to their God. 5 Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), 33. 6 Ibid, 35 (my emphasis). 7 Ibid, 57.

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The style here is that of contrast, “high relief and others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed.”8 It is in the infinite responsibility to the wholly other, that the secret of the Jewish covenant with God is sealed. Indeed, again in 1947, Emannuel Levinas will find that Sacred history, the ethical time and significance of sociality is not the voyage of Odysseus, who ventures out courageously but only in order to return in order to finally return home, where he begun his voyage; but the journey of Abraham, who leaves his ancestral home for good, who never returns and never arrives at his destination, who encounters and is subject to the absolute alterity of God…. Thus, Levinas’ works become “consecrated,” as he says of the Rabbi Hayyim’s great work, to a God who claims to be dependent on humans, on the persons who, since they are infinitely responsible, support the universe.9

It is the relationship to God, to the Other and the wholly other, that constitutes the horizon of time and temporality. One time, the time of being, here crosses and confronts another, the time of the other. One time presupposes the presencing of beings, the other the non-phenomenal injunction of responsibility to the other, of “keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior” in the memorable words of Jacques Derrida in his The Gift of Death, dedicated to the sacrifice of Isaac.10 That secret in which the absolute responsibility to the other is kept, may indeed be named “tyrannical.” Auerback does note that the Bible’s “claim to truth … is tyrannical.”11 Of this clash between two types of temporality, Mimesis says little except in reference to its own political situation: Let the reader think of the history we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, … will know how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general…. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.12

One can claim that Auerbach does so. In its historicist aspect, Mimesis has little to say about its immediate historical condition, and makes too smooth a transition between the Elohistic and Homeric modes of representation. However, in its exilic, diasporic aspect, in its ascent to allegory, it unearths the central tension between the completion of metaphysics in modernity exemplified by the War,

8 Auerbach, Mimesis, 23. 9 Richard A. Cohen, introduction to Time and the Other, by Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1994), 24. 10 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1995), 108. 11 Auerbach, Mimesis, 14. 12 Ibid, 20.

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and the relation of the West and Germany to its other, whose secret has to be at all costs open, violated, or eliminated. In The Nazi Myth, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean Luc-Nancy assert that “the mimetic will to identity and self fulfillment of form [think of the return, the self-sameness of German language to itself, etc], belongs profoundly to the mood or character of the West in general, and more precisely, to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word.” “Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represents its necessary finality. But neither it is possible to simply push it aside as an aberration, still less as a past aberration.”13 Here is a second detour in the company of an unlikely fellow traveler. Throughout his career, Edward Said made Auerbach one of the pivotal figures of his admiration, and Said considered Auerbach an ally. I term him unlikely since common sense would require that the author of Orientalism, who has done more than probably anyone else to alert us to the colonial and repressive dimensions of the Western canon, would find little affinity with the critic who probably more than any other, seemingly celebrated that canon and its modes of representation. But, again, it is only seemingly, if the diasporic aspect of Auerbach’s writing is not taken into account. It is in the hospitable soil of Turkey that Auerbach, the German-Jewish emigrant, found the welcoming space for his reflection on representation in the West. The Oriental, the other, and not just any other, but the one on whose repression for centuries the West based its own supremacist identity, the Ottoman, the Muslim, the Turk, gave a welcoming space to the foreigner who in turn offered a reflection, a survival for that culture that excluded them both. Mimesis, “owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-Occidental exile and homelessness. And if this is so, then Mimesis itself is not, as it has so frequently taken to be, only a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critically important alienation to it, a work whose conditions and circumstances of existence are not immediately derived from the culture it describes with such an extraordinary insight and brilliance but built rather on an agonizing distance from it.”14 What Said finds in Auerbach is nothing else than a text (or the text) which analyses a non-self sameness of European culture, its ontological rupture, the excess of a literary text that is relevant only insofar as it is itself an exilic event which surpasses the boundaries of its language and cultural context. Auerbach has famously privileged French literature over German, finding the latter provincial, solipsist and turned towards and speaking to itself. Even though he himself admits that he at times prefers reading German literature, Auerbach 13 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy “The Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990): 291–312. 14 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 7–8.

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finds that French literature, most notably Zola, exceeds its own boundaries and creates its own exilic afterlife, “intent upon the analysis of the emerging destiny of European society,” rather than, like the Germans, “provincial, old fashioned, immersed in the traditional attitudes of the particular corner of the land in which they were rooted.”15 I here find Auerbach to be eminently Nietzschean, if comparatively subdued in his assessment of the German culture, but his generalization should not be understood as condemning German literature and culture in toto, but only as an exilic political allegory, a genealogical reading of the reigning catastrophe brought onto Europe by German nationalism. There is no life of culture, therefore, if it is not touched or marked by venturing beyond its own boundaries. The self-sameness of a language or a culture is a Nazi myth. In his essay “Auerbach in Istanbul,” Aamir Mufti will conclude that “Said most often opposes the term secular not to religion per se but to nationalism…. An ideology of hearth and home, of collective Gemuetlichkeit; a critique of ‘assurance and confidence,’ and ‘majority sense,’ the claims on behalf of national culture always imply.”16 “Said’s insistence on the critical imperative of the secular can appear elitist and hence paradoxical only if we forget the haunting figure of Auerbach in Turkish exile that he repeatedly evokes. It is in this sense that we must read Said when he himself speaks of exile not as ‘privilege’ but as a permanent critique of ‘mass institutions that dominate modern life. Saidian secular criticism points insistently to the dilemmas and the terrors, but also, above all, to the ethical possibilities, of minority existence in modernity.”17 Mufti goes on to conclude that Said’s critique of nationalism is made not out of empty cosmopolitanism but in the name and from the perspective of all those who would be minoritized in the name of a uniform “national” culture,—“the homeless in short.”18 I now introduce a third figure. If indeed the Old Testament prefigures the New, and that prefiguration caries on into literature, then no other literary tradition has been more immersed in the Messianic and is the “fulfillment” of this teleology, than that of Russia. That genealogy has been captured by Nietzsche in his Antichrist:

15 Auerbach, Mimesis, 516. 16 Amir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25.1 (Autumn 1998): 107. 17 Ibid. 18 Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” 112.

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The queer and sick world into which the Gospels introduce us—as in the Russian novel, a world in which the scum of society, nervous disorders, and ‘childlike’ idiocy seem to be having a rendezvous…. a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.19

So much for the “representation of reality.” Mikhail Bakhtin famously concluded in his book on Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—submitted as a doctoral dissertation and turned down precisely in 1947, yet another book written in exile!—that paschal laughter resonates in Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin’s book, as well as his other one on Dostoevsky, both champion a non-finality of a literary text, the excess, graft and hybridic boundary and border crossing of textuality, as well as a text that resonates with the laugher of the other (for Bakhtin, Rabelais in Dostoevsky, for example). Auerbach is saying something similar when he finds in the Russian nineteenthcentury novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy “the Christian and patriarchal world from which they manage to break away only through painful violence.”20 “Observing as it is reflected in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky we clearly grasp the savage, tempestuous, and uncompromising nature of Russian acceptance or rejection of European culture.”21 But it is precisely in this mis-encounter and misunderstanding between Russia and the West exemplified most of all by Dostoevsky, Auerbach finds, that is discerned “something like a premonition of the impending catastrophe.”22 At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, in the far-reaches of Siberia, in the penitentiary camp, is found pondering the Messianic future opened to him in the desert and in the “seven years, only seven years” of his incarceration that will pass just like “seven days.” In the distance “the time itself seemed to stand still as though the age of Abraham and his flock had not passed.” It is there in the desert that the “impending catastrophe” is “yet to come.” Russia’s own modernism will yet meet the mechanical extermination of human flesh in its concentration camps by means of the reverse Holocaust, the massive refrigeration, but for now the Christic Russian Messiah Raskolnikov is only eying the sacrificial “Abraham and his flock.” But “that might be a subject of another story—our present story is told.”23

19 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 603. 20 Auerbach, Mimesis, 522. 21 Ibid, 524. 22 Ibid. 23 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. David Magarshak (New York: Penguin, 1951), 559.

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Bibliography Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Translated by Willar R. Trask. New Jersey : Princeton UP, 2003. –. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Translated by Marie and Edward Said. Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1–17. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovlia i renessansa [Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1965. Cohen, Richard A. Introduction to Time and the Other, by Emmanuel Levinas, 1–27. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1994. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1995. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by David Magarshak. New York: Penguin, 1951. Heidegger, Martin. Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper, 1975. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Nazi Myth.” Critical Inquiry 16.2 (Winter 1990): 291–312. Mufti, Amir R., “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry 25.1 (Autumn 1998): 95–125. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. In The Portable Nietzsche, 565–656. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Weber, Samuel. Targets of Opportunity. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.

Frederick Turner

Tribute: An Olive Wreath for Mihai

My gentle friend gives all his mind to play, Always at fifty-five degrees to fashion; Cunning to power and generous to passion, His mad eye twinkles when we lose our way. Games are the way to deal with death, he’d say. Lords of the underworld give their permission Only if mortals join the competition And Hector’s funeral transforms to play. This art is both to bind and to release; Its knowledge is imaginal and deictic, And every game has a nonzero sum; Magister Spariosu finds that peace Is less like concord than like dialectic: Too drunk to fight, we dance symposium.

Further Volumes: Volume 9: Hardy F. Schloer

Volume 5: Marius Turda (ed.)

The Quantum Relations Principle

Crafting Humans

Managing our Future in the Age of Intelligent Machines

2013. 197 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0059-1

2016. 219 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0662-3

Volume 4: Christoph Antweiler

Volume 8: Christian Høgel

The Human and the Humane Humanity as Argument from Cicero to Erasmus 2015. 130 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0441-4

Volume 7: Oliver Kozlarek (ed.)

Multiple Experiences of Modernity Toward a Humanist Critique of Modernity

From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond

Inclusive Humanism Anthropological Basics for a Realistic Cosmopolitanism 2012. 262 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0022-5

Volume 3: Mihai Spariosu / Jörn Rüsen (eds.)

Exploring Humanity Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism 2012. 295 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0016-4

2014. 228 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0229-8

Volume 2: Stefan Reichmuth / Jörn Rüsen / Aladdin Sarhan (eds.)

Volume 6: Jörn Rüsen (ed.)

Humanism and Muslim Culture

Approaching Humankind Towards an Intercultural Humanism

Historical Heritage and Contemporary Challenges

2013. 300 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-8471-0058-4

2012. 188 pages, hardcover ISBN 978-3-89971-937-6