To bring into focus a chapter such as the one entitled “Cetology” in Herman Melville’sMoby-Dickpresupposes a certain approach to the novel that calls for clarification. The narrator, Ishmael, suggests that “at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the [. . .] leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow” (116).¹ The beginning in question, however, is an origin caught in the network of the text, for the reader is already, in Ishmael’s words, “boldly launched upon the deep.”² Consequently, the chapter “Cetology”...

According to Condillac, poetry at its origin or during its childhood is characterized by an essential practice of omitting words. The style of the very first poems involved an omitted word, a word to be inferred, literally, to be understood (sous-entendu). Since, at its origin, the language of articulated sounds remained intimately connected to the language of action, the omitted word, which used to be a new word, a word formerly unknown or unheard of, had to be made up by tone and gestures, which, in fact, expressed even better, and with greater force what this word stood for, than...

Impeded at the very outset from becoming a source of origination and development, a beginning will nonetheless generate the range of its implications, provided that it is repeated. Lautréamont’sChants de Maldororrepresents the map of the semantic space engendered by the deliberate display of a subverted beginning. My task, hereafter, is to draw the outlines of the “theoretical” configuration of such a space by centering on the violent succession of repeated blows dealt out against the very emergence of any possible authoring or generating beginning in Lautréamont’s work.

A beginning requires a model to serve as a pattern for...

Chemistry, or rather chemism, simultaneously the art of separating and mixing, became the scientific model for the burgeoning romanticism of Jena, that is, the first phase of Romanticism in German literature. It provided the model for its double project: to work out, or rather complete, a theory of literary genres and to conceive of their intermixing in a work where universality would proceed from its organic individuality.¹ Claiming that the two Schlegel brothers shared this task may be somewhat arbitrary. Roughly speaking, however, August Wilhelm Schlegel, who as a historian and literary critic was more interested in analyzing and dissecting...

In a letter dated October 17, 1846, Flaubert advised Louise Colet against reading criticism: “I would just like to know,” he wrote, “what poets throughout history have had in common, as far as their work is concerned, with those who analyzed it.” Naming Aristotle, Boileau, and A. W. Schlegel to prove his contention that there is an unbridgeable gap between the act of criticism and creative force, Flaubert added: “And when the translation of Hegel is finished, Lord knows where we will end up!”¹ Flaubert wrote these lines thirteen years before the appearance of the first French translation of a...

It happened overnight. Suddenly, without advance notice or undergoing incubation, the old tongue was found in total decay. Yet, this complete and instantaneous decomposition of language is not singular merely because it occurred without any preparatory transition in nineteenth-century Paris. This “phenomenon unique in literary history,” as des Esseintes, the hero ofAgainst Nature, calls it, is also exceptional because he believes this total deliquescence of language is analogous to another, past event (183).¹ Des Esseintes compares it to the dissolution that the Latin tongue underwent during the waning phase of the Roman Empire. Indeed, when describing Petronius’s literary principles...

InMeaning in History, published in 1949, Karl Löwith argues that modern historical consciousness—that is, modern philosophy of history as the history of open-ended progress—originates in modernity’s self-delusion of having radically emancipated itself from Christian faith, and, in particular, from its conception of sacred history as a history of salvation.¹ The philosophy of history, Löwith contends, is a secular replacement for eschatological theology. The history of the remarkable influence that this book has exercised on the secularization debate, which arose in Germany in the sixties along with the intellectual movement of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), still needs to be...

As innocent as the prefixpost- in front ofstructuralismmay sound, it is burdened with the formidable task of blaming and overcoming structuralism’s alleged ahistoricity. The mere linguistic event of a formation such as ‘post-structuralism’ alone suggests that history-in-person has come to belie the theoretical ambitions of the previous ahistorical doctrine. Under the banner of diachrony and the factual, empiricism, now disguised as post-structuralism, pretends to have come to grips with pure synchrony, and through it to have overcome nothing less than the ideology of Platonism. Yet, in spite of all these claims, it is, in practice, not very...

Undoubtedly, the early romantics’ fascination with the Orient was in some respects biased. However, their prejudices cannot simply be retraced to crude national and colonial interests, since, as Said remarks inOrientalism, this would mean “to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact” (39).¹ Nor can the romantics’ image of the Orient be derived from their submission of the object Orient to a discourse of knowledge which Said, in the aftermath of Foucault, characterizes, rather indiscriminately, as a discourse of power. Such an assertion would ignore the extent to...

Exiled for twenty-five years off the Brazilian coast on a tropical island in the estuary of the Orinoco, Robinson Crusoe suffered an ordeal that can be read as the artificial realization in an experimental setting of what Hans-Georg Gadamer, in a passing reference to Defoe’s novel, calls “the alleged primacy of the phenomenon of thesolus ipse.”¹ Indeed, what the reader is made to witness is an experiment of sorts, not unlike those many other famous, and not exclusively literary, experiments of the eighteenth century that sought to observe the natural acquisition of specific human skills free of all interference...

Alexander Pushkin’s story on Potemkin, as retold by Walter Benjamin in “Franz Kafka,” is said to storm like a herald two hundred years ahead of Kafka’s work. Not only is Potemkin characterized as an “ancestor” of the somnolent and unkempt holders of power in Kafka’s work, but the world of offices and registries in the story is held to be no different from that of Kafka’s world, and Pushkin’s character Shuvalkin is considered the same as K. More precisely, what makes Pushkin’s story the forerunner of Kafka’s world and work for Benjamin, is that “the enigma which beclouds this story...

In spite of his continuous interest in film, Benjamin did not do for film what he did for photography, that is, compose a “little history” of the new medium. Perhaps he thought that, after writing the ‘“Little History of Photography” essay of 1931, the principles for such a history had been outlined, and that it would have been redundant to do such an analysis of film. In any case, one can assume that the mist covering the beginning of photography is denser than the one that obscures the origins of film. Then again, as Benjamin writes at the outset of...

In the position of a descriptive heading, a title accompanies a text by dominating its entire body. It should do so by stating what the text is about, exhibiting its subject matter, its theme, or essence. In that sense, however, a title is not a text’s companion. It does not “break bread” with the text as with its equal as one might expect of a companion according to the formation of the word by way of the presuppositioncumandpanisin popular Latin. The title remains offshore and does not touch the land of the text. But the title...

To engage with a philosophical question already at work in a narrative, or rather, arécit, such as Maurice Blanchot’sthe one who was standing apart from me, or to engage with one that may illuminate it, does this not require a prior philosophical reading to first locate such a question, or to establish the narrative’s philosophical credentials so that a specific philosophical question can shed light on it?¹ However, if such a reading implies the search for a thematic content that is philosophically significant, or that takes place in view of principles underpinning Blanchot’s writings and thought, then his...

As demonstrated by his correspondence, Gustave Flaubert thought ofSalammboas an archaeological novel. To Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, he writes in 1857: “I busy myself . . . with archaeological work about one of the least known periods of antiquity, and which work is a preparation for another one. I will write a novel whose action is set three centuries before Jesus Christ.”² And to Ernest Feydeau, whom at one point he asked for help in his research, he speaks of the preparatory work for his Carthaginian novel as “formidable archaeological work.”³ Undoubtedly, with the termarchaeology, Flaubert refers...