Tracing Global Democracy by Vladimir Biti

Author:Vladimir Biti [Biti, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783110577822
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

8.2 Literature’s persistent self-exemption – modern literary theory’s cosmopolitan operation

This literature’s accelerated self-exemption from all external identifications, national or otherwise, explains why literary theory in the twentieth century led a “savage and rejuvenating struggle against received ideas in literary studies” (Compagnon 2004: 5). Ultimately, it was drawn into “the process of hystericization” of knowledge, a desire that can never be satisfied because it refuses satisfaction in advance (Rabaté2002: 100). Yet before this feverish self-re-description took place, and even before the operation of self-exemption from inherited terms was engaged by the early German Romanticist idea of literature, Kant already associated it with modern art in his Critique of Judgment. In the final analysis, the Russian Formalists creatively transferred modern art’s self-exemption from pre-given rules, as conceptualized by Kant and thereafter developed by the early German Romanticists, into modern literary theory. But there is an even longer tradition behind this “cosmopolitan operation” because Kant did not invent it out of nothing. He also reconfigured it, in the ecstatic atmosphere of the French Revolution, by applying it to modern art. Such operations are by definition established through a series of displacements, (mis)translations and transmutations. Being dependent on dissemination rather than original creation in order to become what they are, they unfold through consecutive “re-signifying transfers.” If their eventual use and meaning is often worlds apart from their origins, this is because their extension rests on such “conjunctive disjunctions” (Butler 2012:8–9). The convertibility of cosmopolitanism that I have reiteratedly called attention to follows from this constitutive co-articulation of its self-exempting operation with a spatial, temporal, social, cultural and/or political “elsewhere.”

Therefore, the establishment of literary theory at the beginning of the twentieth century was not a historically unique occurrence and/or a direct response to World War I (Tihanov 2005: 685), as it is usually interpreted. It resulted from the series of transformations of the operation of relating oneself to the others, genuine to European culture from its beginnings. Hannah Arendt was the first to call attention to the opposition between Greek self-emancipating and Roman other-assimilating cosmopolitanism (Arendt 2010: 37–121). They are obviously dependent on different departing positions, the subordinated and the superordinated one. However, relating oneself to the others à la Grecque and à la Romain are not only opposing, but also coextensive cosmopolitan operations. Giorgio Agamben (2005b: 95–112) derived this operation of re-signifying oneself by dis/joining the others from the Greek verb katargeín (meaning to deactivate, to disengage, or to unwork). Employed for the first time in St. Paul’s Letters, it was thereafter transferred from the religious into the philosophical realm and set in motion by Hegel’s dialectical engagement of Luther’s translation of the Greek verb as aufheben (to cancel on the lower level in order to maintain on the higher level). Nietzsche’s untiringly reevaluating philosophy crowns this philosophical redeployment. At stake is therefore an operation with a vibrant history of migrations and reinvestments.

Kant associated it with modern art by thus lending the latter a clearly cosmopolitan character. He defines aesthetic quality as the

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