Edward Said by Ganguly Debjani; Curthoys Ned;

Author:Ganguly, Debjani; Curthoys, Ned;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2015-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion or Ansatzpunkt?

Auerbach’s rejoinder to Goethean withdrawal from the incipient forces of the present is his concept of a critical point of departure or Ansatzpunkt, elaborated with suggestive power in his late essay ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’.70 Auerbach essays that the middle twentieth century offers the scholar an unprecedented ‘experience of historical multiplicity’, a perspective on the course of history that illuminates ‘all the rich tensions of which our being is capable’.71 It is the ‘task of philologists’, whose province is the world of human history, to demonstrate our historical becoming, the diverse background of our common fate, so that it ‘penetrates our lives unforgettably’.72 The task of the synthesising philologist is to recompose our historical sense as a ‘drama’ and ‘spectacle’, whose ‘appearance is thoroughly dependent on presentation and interpretation’ in the present.73

An Ansatzpunkt is a critical initiative that is passionate about intervening in the present by asking resounding questions of the past, sustained by active and individual research that is not limited to one field of specialisation.74 It requires personal intuition and hence can only be expected from the singularity of an individual; it is the ‘discovery of a phenomenon at once firmly circumscribed, such as the interpretation of a single sentence, while comprehensible and central enough to be a point of departure’.75 It is the concrete interiority of a personal Bildung that is narrated, artistically expressed and given ‘radiating power’, so that ‘with it we can deal with world history’.76

Perhaps ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ is an example of Auerbach’s late style, a more equable coming to terms with aesthetic and intellectual currents that he had once angrily repudiated in a more partisan spirit. Overcoming his earlier mistrust of the counterrevolutionary Goethe, and implicitly acknowledging his unresolved feelings towards an earlier and unrealised age of German humanism, Auerbach admires the generous historicist spirit that informed the elderly Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur. Auerbach suggests that the underlying conception of Weltliteratur is not a distillation of great texts but the comprehension of history in its fruitful multiplicity. Goethe’s exemplary transcendence of the nation and ‘love of the world’ can now be acknowledged as a crucial aspect of critical philology’s cosmopolitan heritage.77 While the philologist’s indispensable heritage or filiation is his own nation and culture, only once separated from this heritage, then transcendent of it, can this heritage truly become effective.78 Perhaps we can say along with Said that Auerbach’s German origins are here preserved and reconfigured through the ‘formative’ power of philological questioning of a past mediated by ‘resistant’ and refractory texts.

In his final testament to Auerbach, his introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Mimesis, Said aligns Auerbach with such dynamic historicists as Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who wanted to reconstruct the history of their own time from the vantage point of a personal commitment to their field of research and, in so doing, rescuing sense and meaning from the fragments of modernity. The dynamic historicism of Arendt, Auerbach, Benjamin and Said—a translation of Vico into a post-national age—transforms the

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