8 The Oppositional Literary Transcendental: The Russian Formalist Rewriting of Early Romanticist Cosmopolitanism

8.1 The post-imperial hyphenation and early Romanticist legacy

Although the East Central European nation-states acquired their political autonomy in the aftermath of World War I, their literatures remained historically, linguistically and culturally entangled with the literatures of their neighbors due to their long coexistence within their respective imperial frames. Such intranational hyphenation of East Central European literatures explains the resistance of some of their representatives to the international dialogue between sovereign national literatures. The latter was promoted and fostered by prominent Western European national philologies but also enthusiastically embraced by East Central European national elites. According to Galin Tihanov (2004: 419–420), it is precisely this internal resistance to the Western European model of national literary history that marks the cosmopolitan beginning of modern European literary theory. As the prescribed national terms of the envisaged international cooperation between established literary nations were hardly applicable to entangled post-imperial legacies, the resistance to their application by a select group of literary critics steeped in more languages, literatures and cultures generated an intranational kind of literary cosmopolitanism amidst the newly established nation-states.

In the terms introduced and developed in several previous chapters, we can describe this as the old conflict between the Roman international and Greek intranational cosmopolitanism, however now taking place for the first time on the new, i.e. East Central European, ground. Herder who, as I have spelled out at length in chapter four, had (re)invented the hospitable, affirmative type of cosmopolitanism against the exclusive, assimilating type of his professor Kant, had already left an indelible impression on the regional national “engineers” through his acknowledgment of cultural distinctions. However, in accordance with the original Roman concept, there lurked a carefully elaborated social and cultural hierarchy which recruited the Slavs to lower positions and assigned the Germans to the highest ones behind Herder’s generous idea of common humanitas. This did not prevent the Slav intellectual elites from embracing his paternal protection of their cultural distinction enthusiastically, as they trusted that this would help them acquire their much-desired national sovereignty. Their enthusiasm only in creased in the aftermath of World War I, after Western nation-state powers, in the Versailles Treaty, translated the principle of self-determination from Herder’s cultural terms into nation-state, opening the geopolitical dismemberment of the region. Carried by triumphant national elites, national revolutions were ushered in, without uprisings, through the terms of peace treatise (Berend 1998:154).

Contrary to the opinion of such nationally inflamed compatriots, the literary historians who wanted their literatures to be acknowledged based on national sovereignty, the East Central European literary theorists were convinced such international cosmopolitanism betrays the genuinely hybrid identity profile of their new nation-states. Their hyphenated, intersected and intermingled histories as well as their hybrid and perplexed present, lacking a continuous and stable national identity, could hardly have been pressed into the sovereign national terms of the Western European nation-states, which had meanwhile become completely oblivious to the erstwhile brutal establishment of their national identities.76 On that basis, following the model of Greek elite cosmopolitanism, these regional states’ literary theorists took a clear distance from a compatriot literary history longing for national recognition. However, behind these domestic “benighted souls” they actually targeted the dominant Western European national-philological paradigm by challenging it to reexamine its premise of sovereign national literatures. Deficient in the national-historical continuity established by the Western European national philologies, the East Central European literatures were shaped by principles deeply inimical to smooth national evolution. If Western nations had already forgotten or suppressed their nationally entangled past, the new nations still vividly remembered it. To pick up just two illustrations of this from the region, at that time Czechoslovakia consisted of 6.5 million Czechs, 2.2 million Slovaks and 0.5 million Ruthenians, with large German, Hungarian and Polish minorities. Yugoslavia for its part consisted of 43 % Serbs and Montenegrins, 23% Croats, 9% Slovenes, 6% Bosnians, 5% Macedonians and also embraced a further 0.5 million Germans, Hungarians, Albanians and “others”; its Orthodox population amounted to 5.6 million, Catholic to 4.7, Muslim to 1.3, and Protestant to 0.3 million (Berend 1998:170–174). What is most important, though, is that these extremely heterogeneous constuents were, due to the long imperial past, inextricably entangled with one another. Feeling obliged to this specific post-imperial situation, the East Central European literary theorists acted in the name of hyphenated identities which were marginalized, derogated and excluded by the imposition of national homogeneity. They generated their intranational cosmopolitanism from the traumatic experience of these identities put under the imperative of disentangling. From their perspective, in order for a national literary history to establish the difference of its own literature from other national literatures, it tends to suppress the internal national difference of its own literature from itself, from its stubborn intrinsic alterity. Literary theorists wanted to break out of such violently constructed national-spiritual continuity by introducing a cosmopolitan quality that disengages its allegedly decisive national substance into literature.

This is why, while the Western European literary-historical perspective, based on national philology, envisaged the gradual unification of all national literatures into a higher international unity, the East Central European literary-theoretical perspective aimed at a gradual deactivation of national literatures. It searched for a genuinely literary quality in order to subvert the “familiar” national terms. Such a consistently “defamiliarizing” operation, as resolutely mobilized by early Russian Formalists, followed the self-exempting logic of “neither this national nor that national but instead a specifically literary identity,” diametrically opposed to the assimilating logic that “this as well as that national literature constitute the international literary community” as advocated by Western European national philologies.77

However, having been directed against literature’s “familiar” perception acquired in the environment one was born into, Formalist “literariness” was conceived in purely negative, oppositional terms. Following the Greek elitist “cosmopolitanism against,” it looked for the “sublime” literary truth by distancing itself from the deluded “ordinary” truth of compatriots. Shklovsky’s imperative of seeing reality afresh from a “strange” perspective, proposed in his path-breaking essay The Resurrection of the Word (1914) (Shklovsky 1973), strove to exempt literature from such “natural,” self-evident terms. As this “empty objective” was genuinely revolutionary in its spirit – “cosmopolitanism without a polis” in Tihanov’s apt phrasing (Tihanov 2011) – it is no wonder it came under heavy attack at a time when Soviet state bureaucracy had suppressed such spirit. The Russification of the Soviet Union started by the mid-1920s. As the Hungarian exile Ervin Sinkó bitterly noticed in Moscow by the mid-1930s, “[i]t is not easy to be a revolutionary in the country where the revolution had triumphed” (Sinkó 1962, 116; quoted after Tihanov 2011:131), i.e. established a fixed political abode. The rise of the nationstate logic explains the Soviet suspicion toward, pressure upon and policing of Formalist literary theory. With the rise of Stalin’s state bureaucracy, the feverish ideology of “true believers” – still genuine to Formalist revolutionary literary theory – was replaced by the cynical Realpolitik of cold pragmatic calculations.78

Paradoxically enough, it was precisely this relegation of Formalist ideas from the official to the apocryphal political space that opened the door for the emergence of a transnational community of their adherents. This calls to remembrance the constitution of Voltaire’s Republic of Letters on the same Greek elitist model. Thrown out from the embattled political scene, both were freed from the obligation to pragmatically sacrifice their long-term ideological convictions for their short-term positional interests. If the uncompromising revolutionary ideology (including that of Russian Formalism) celebrated its heyday in the turbulent environment of the Soviet post-October society, then with the development of the bureaucratic Soviet state it was forced into an oppositional ideological enclave. The permanently resurging conditions of the political, social and economic instability of the Soviet as well as other East Central European regimes induced the reemergence and proliferation of such enclaves, enabling the wide resonance, numerous intellectual attachments and ultimate success of Formalist learning. Their counterfactual literary truth, promising long-term potential benefits in the manner which all cosmopolitan projects do, turned into a prospect worthy of the sustained sacrifice of more pragmatic (i.e. national) individual choices.

All that said, Russian Formalists were far from being as revolutionary as they believed they were. By claiming for literature a character that constitutively contested the national-philological thesis of literature’s affirmation of the Volksgeist, they resumed the hierarchy between the two ideas of literature established by early German Romanticist theory, i.e., the primacy of the cosmopolitan disengaging over the nationally engaged idea of literature.79 Along with this enlightening attitude to their nationally “benighted opponents,” they reaffirmed the early Romanticist commitment to the contingent world of free possibilities beyond the narrow-minded national reality. If literature catapults its readers out of their comfortable consuming attitude, as Formalists insisted it does, this is because it deviates from the familiar norm, crosses the boundary of the habitual, and enters free “foreign alliances” in the way early German Romanticists claimed it does. Yet Formalists pushed this project even further. In their rushed evolution through several developmental phases (Hansen-Löve 1978: 175–464), they repeatedly redescribed literary quality, from (1) the exemption of the “strange” form from the “familiar” material, over (2) the disengagement of the one form from the vantage point of the other, up to (3) the parenthesizing of past literary constellations by means of the present one. In this manner literature’s truth, bereft of any stable identity, was ultimately drawn into a vertiginous process of self-negations. Each consecutive Formalist truth of literature, by accumulating all the former detachments from its forerunners, turned out to be more contingent than the previous one. Having extended its identity into a network of mobile relations broader than the previous one, it was interpretable in a greater variety of ways. This growing dependence on the interpretive context, once again, remained perfectly loyal to the early German Romanticist advocacy of the fundamental arbitrariness of life.

Antoine Compagnon (13) therefore hits the nail on the head when he describes modern literary theory as “a lesson in relativism, not pluralism.” Its reactions, “instead of adding up to a total and more complete vision […] are mutually exclusive […]”A modern literary theorist “is the eternal devil’s advocate, or the devil himself” (11). Nevertheless, this ruthless exclusionary logic of neither-nor, if we are to distinguish it from the early German Romanticist nation-consolidating cosmopolitan terms, must be put into the perspective of a nation-opposing cosmopolitanism. Early German Romanticists and Russian Formalists acted out of two diametrically opposed frustrations, which is a specification that fails to materialize in Compagnon’s – as well as Gasché’s and Rabaté’s – rather linear genealogies of modern literary theory (Compagnon 2004; Rabaté 2002; Gasché 2007). Resuming the early Romanticist legacy engendered in the pre-statist Germany in the Russian postimperial circumstances of Soviet statist pressure, the Formalists redistributed its emphases, adapting them to their continually self-exempting task. Considering that, this was not a simple transmission but rather a profoundly transformative, rewriting encounter. The estrangement of the benighted observer, as a cosmopolitan transgression genuine to theory from its ancient Greek beginnings (Rausch 1982; Blumenberg 1987), contains both a liberating and an appropriating potential, which is why it easily slips from politics into police and vice versa. By directing their “politics of estrangement” (Tihanov 2005) against the predominating national orientation of their compatriots, the Russian Formalists turned the early Romanticist model of supervising other nations upside down. They transformed the imperial into the elitist cosmopolitan model.

With this important move, the re-articulation of theory’s cosmopolitanism was by no means exhausted. Being constitutively equivocal, cosmopolitanism caries the seed of its re-signification. In the same way that the early German Romanticist cosmopolitanism’s ambitions of supremacy were translated by Russian Formalists into an emancipating mission, their theory’s later geopolitical and cultural relocations spawned an exact reversal. Through the gradual international expansion of modern literary theory, the intranational oppositional truth of literature was converted into international self-asserting terms. The early Formalist revolutionary spirit underwent an institutionalization comparable to that of the October Revolution, albeit, fortunately, without the same consequences. Because of this intrinsic convertibility, cosmopolitanism ought to be be uncoupled from the intentions of its particular carriers. Its patterns are transferable, modifyable and variously implementable. If its attribution to its carriers’ specific objectives is almost unavoidable in terms of everyday practice, theoretical analysis must consider unforeseen co-articulations of cosmopolitan patterns along various social and political axes, which outmaneuver the original investments of their particular carriers. As Rogers Brubaker (2004: 7–27) recently warned with regard to the closely affiliated concept of nationalism, its carriers are just naturalized variables rather than “moral” or “immoral” constants. Detaching our analytical perspective from such moralizing attributions, however, amounts to the detaching of modern literary theory from the generous plot of emancipation, which is a wishful projection inherent to Compagnon’s, Rabaté’s and Gasché’s genealogy.80 As a genuinely cosmopolitan operation, theory cannot but couple the effects of liberation with those of supremacy.

To reiterate, as enforced intranational remnants of the linguistically and culturally entangled imperial past, the East Central European theorists were subjected to the accelerated identity pressure of their new state authorities. As opposed to them, the German Romanticist theorists, supported by a rising atmosphere of domestic “cosmopolitan patriotism,” deployed cosmopolitanism for the therapeutic consolidation of their politically frustrated national soul. For them, cosmopolitanism was a matter not of castrated remembrances to be rescued from their present renunciation by the deluded compatriots, but of a prosperous future to be taken up and implemented for the benefit of one’s own nation. The German Romanticists acted in the name of their political nation-to-come and not against the violence of its present political establishment, as did their Formalist inheritors. While early German Romanticist international cosmopolitanism mobilized the process of a nation’s self-finding in foreign literatures, against its narrow-minded affirmation merely in national literature, East Central European intranational cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century implemented the affirmation of literature’s innate strangeness against its national domestication. With modern literary theory, as established at the beginning of the twentieth century, literature entered a process of relentless self-exemption from given terms. It returned to Greek cosmopolitan tradition behind the early German Romanticist Roman cosmopolitanism. Instead of assimilating particular national literatures one after another into an international “dialogic transcendental,” it unworked national literatures one after another in favor of literature’s aesthetic autonomy.

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 ability of the proper work of art to deactivate its familiar reception by exempting itself from communal rules that supervise its creation (Kant 2007:134–137). In his account, the self-exemption from communal rules by both the artistic producer and the philosophical recipient closely correspond. Both aim for a superior attitude of disinterested benevolence and, in order to achieve it, are obliged to first subject their spontaneous observation to a meticulous dialogic interrogation. In following the philosophical recipient’s self-exemption, any enlightened scholar is expected to test the value of his judgments within the pluralism of the world arena as an indispensible criterium veritatis externum (Kant 1956: 65, 2006a: 249, 2006b: 17, 113).81 There is no other way of achieving sovereignty over the benighted judgments that blindly adhere to the locally inhabited criteria.

The producer’s aesthetic quality, on the other hand, is defined as the ability to achieve absolute self-exemption, which implies coming to terms with all inadequate judgments encountered along the way. Kant’s statement in the Critique of Judgment (§ 40, 123) that the duty of every enlightened man is to weigh his judgment not so much against actual, but rather the merely possible, judgments of others by putting himself in the position of everyone else (dass man sein Urteil an anderer, nicht sowohl wirkliche, als vielmehr bloß mögliche Urteile hält, und sich in die Stelle jedes andern versetzt) occurs with reference to the faculty of imagination. Kant thus, via the intuitions provided by cosmopolitan imagination rather than familiar surrounding, clearly associates production with the reception of works of art. As Arendt (1992: 43) and Lyotard (1991: 224) cautioned in their readings, both the artist and the enlightened man, in order to accomplish the impartial observation of life or work of art, systematically exempt their judgment from all pre-ordained communal rules, deactivating them dialogically in the space of an imagined world arena. “Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection.” (Arendt 1992:43) This is the only way to pull oneself out of “common sense” understood as common (vulgar) understanding (Verstand) and reach “common sense” understood as a public sense or the collective reason (Vernunft) of humankind (Kant 2007: §40, 123, 125). Favoring a never passive, unprejudiced and broadened thought, Kant clearly privileges the sensus communis aestheticus over the sensus communis logicus (124–125).

In line with the self-evacuation from restricted sensations, Kant states in the Critique of Judgment (§ 46, 136–137) that a work of beautiful or fine art (as opposed to both “mechanical” and “agreeable” art (§ 44, 134)) cannot be determined by given communal law (i.e., habitual practices of judging works of art) because it emerges as a product of genius that sets its own law through this work. Such exemplary art mobilizes the reason of those who enjoy it through the disengagement of their form of perceiving art, operating under the spell of habit. The paradoxical effect of an exemplary work of art could be described accordingly as the mobilization of a recipient’s reason through the deactivation of its automatic application. The Russian Formalists, to my knowledge, never directly refer to this paragraph celebrating the victory of reflective judgment (guided by an unrestrained world community) over determining judgment (guided by restricted communal rules) in the sense these two concepts are given in the Introduction (§ 4, 15–16). Nevertheless, the associations with the de-automatizing operation placed by them within the very foundation of modern literature are blatant and irresistible. Through its consistent self-exemption from the application of any of the established rules of reception, the work of fine art, according to this paragraph in the Critique of Judgment, reveals its own law as something that exists exclusively in its inapplicability. Inasmuch as this unprecedented law cannot serve as a precept, because no artist who engages it is capable of formulating it, it cannot be identified and imitated by recipients. It can be only indirectly gathered from its execution, through its series of deactivating effects (§ 47, 138–139). It systematically escapes both the producer and recipient of an exemplary work of art – both the artist and theorist – since it disengages all rules of identification applied by them. Through such avoidance of all attempts to locate it cognitively, fine art develops its distinctive worlddisclosing capacity (unlike “mechanical” or “agreeable” art that just affirms the established reality). Only by implementing this interminable self-finding operation can a literary work of fine art, conceived of as a purely negative force, obtain its unbeatable law-giving status.

Although the delineated operation initially lacks the recipient’s immediate recognition, it claims validity from the forthcoming course of judgment in which it is reflected (§ 4, 15–16; § 49, 144–145). It proceeds as if it is valid for everybody, i.e. as if recipients of fine art thereby perform a collectively verified logical (i.e. determining) judgment even though, as a matter of fact, aesthetic (i.e. reflective) judgment is at stake, dialogically searching for its verification (§4, 6, 7). This quasi-logical character pending between the bounded communal and the free individual reason, and disengaging the one through the other, is absolutely genuine to reflective aesthetic judgment. Kant points out that such reflection requires a considerable effort, as it involves a higher kind of reasoning that consistently disengages ordinary reason (§46, 136–137). Yet as human beings earn their generic distinction exactly through such reasoning on reasoning, any human is, as far as Kant is concerned, urged to reflect immediate experiential engagements of his or her reason critically from the cosmopolitan viewpoint.

Thus, from the outburst of modernity, according to Agamben (2005a: 24), everybody – and not only sovereigns, as in pre-modern times – was expected to exempt him- or herself from the communal experiential rules. Since such rules untiringly resurface, self-exemption turns out to be an interminable task for human individuals. In his later political treatises, Kant regarded the operation of this consistent evacuation of one’s own prejudgments as the sign of human maturity. Instead of being rare and exceptional as before, this unremittingly self-finding life trajectory slowly instituted itself as the universal human obligation, which everybody was pressed to follow irrespective of his or her existential premises. Whoever adhered to the communally restricted determining judgments was stigmatized as immature. Kant states in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Our age is the genuine age of critique to which everything must submit” (1998: 100–101).82 This universal imperative, evenly imposed upon very unevenly prepared, positioned and/or entitled individuals and collectives, has induced with its consistent daily pressure immeasurable “collateral damage.”

To return to the Russian Formalists, without directly referring to this risky superimposition of reflective upon determining judgment (Ferrara 1999: 6–7), let alone pondering its dangerous consequences, they reintroduced it in a curiously reversed form. By adopting it, they translated Kant’s assimilating into their emancipating cosmopolitanism. Their perilously explosive idea of “literariness,” revoked in the atmosphere of the October Revolution in the same way that its covert inspiration – Kant’s aesthetic quality – was engendered in the atmosphere of the French Revolution,83 transformed literature from an instrument of national affirmation into its mirror opposite. Literature became an inducer of individual selfexemption from national constraints. In the same way that revolutions, each in their own way, introduce the “state of exception” (Agamben) in the realm of law, Kant and the Formalists introduced it in the realm of art. However, if the early German Romanticist theory employed reflective judgment as an instrument of the national spirit’s expansion then the Formalist theory employed literariness to disempower national (familiar) reception habits. The Formalist theorist does not deliberately transpose himself in the place of others in order to assimilate them into his expanded world but compulsively subjects his socially inhabited literary disposition to literature’s deactivating aesthetic operation. He thus renounces sovereignty in favor of the freedom from any attributed identity. The literary work of art inscribes its revolutionary quality into his reception habits acquired in the familiar community, inducing their unworking. In that process, the empirical patterns that effectuated his immediate recognition of represented literary subjects gradually dematerialize into abstract techniques (priëm) devoid of the “flesh” that was keeping them together.

8.3 The resurgence of the disempowered law

Yet, as was the case already in Kant’s argument, determining logical judgment stubbornly resurfaces amidst the consecutive disengagements of its law-giving character. One should recall that, according to Kant (2007: 15–16), even if determining judgment inadmissibly departs from the pre-given rule by subsuming the particular under it, neither is reflective judgment (which departs vice versa from the particular) capable of operating without the overarching principle of the purposeness of nature. Kant therefore does not reserve transcendentalism for determining judgment alone, as is often mistakenly assumed, by completely detaching reflective judgment from it. He merely privileges the mobile “transcendental principle” (or what he calls the regulative idea (15)) of reflective judgment over the fixed transcendental principle of determining judgment, because such mobility putatively outmaneuvers the empirically restricted reception of art genuine to the latter. Nonetheless, reflective judgment repeatedly turns out to be laying down the law, i.e. performing the same determining activity Kant wanted to dispose with.

To illustrate to what extent this surreptitious entanglement of two Kantian types of judgment influenced the development of modern literary theory let us recall that early Formalists, in the first phase, raised the technique of estrangement (ostranenie) to be a distinctive feature of the literary work. Such estrangement, it was said, hampers, slows down, distorts – in a word, contests – the work’s determining reception based on transcendental artistic rules. Yet once this contestation has been recognized by recipients, it was established as the new transcendental rule that, unfortunately, prevents any further estrangement. This is why Formalists in the second phase refused to reduce estrangement to a poet’s intentional device, drawing it instead from the dynamic and competitive field of functions. The latter, superseding the poet’s control, effectuates its negating shift (sdvig). Unlike technique (priëm), which is conceived as the sovereign action of an artistic form on the passive life material, the shift results from a provisional constellation of conflicting forces that is unstable and permutable. As soon as the development of the conflict entails the transformation of the constellation, the now subordinate functions can become the dominant ones. This makes the aesthetic deactivation performed by literary work a reflex of antagonisms induced first between the functions within a given work, second between the series within a given literary system and third between the literary and non-literary series within the broader system of a given culture. Whatever the case, the historical condition of the system becomes the new focus of Formalist attention – which is, despite all the invested theoretical reflection, again a transcendental rendering of literature. Such consecutive retroactive disengagements of introduced definitions of literature, each of which proved to be inadmissibly saturated with the empirical content, triggered the incredible rhythm of modern literary theory’s development.

In an early but the “most extended and scholarly critique of OPOIAZ ever undertaken by a Marxist” (Erlich 1965:114), whose essentials, despite its publication in 1928, “retain the most vital significance” (Kozhinov 1972:100; Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978: 25), Bakhtin and Medvedev (61) unmistakably address exactly this “subtraction and elimination” of “essential aspects.” The Formalists, in other words, eliminate the all-uniting ideological meaning from “the elements of the artistic work.” In Bakhtin and Medvedev’s opinion, the systematic emptying of these elements from their “whole intrinsic meaning” results in “the naked device.” Following this thread, they point to “polemical emphasis” as “the main and only concern” of Formalism. It “penetrates every Formalist term,” tying it “tightly and inseparably” “to that which it negates and rejects.” On that basis, they ultimately interpret Formalism as an abstract, “nihilistic” negation of semantic significance, a “simple opposite” of the rejected ideological fullness and, as a consequence, “a purely reactive formation” (62 [emphasis mine]). The Formalist insistence on the deautomatization, defamiliarization and denudation inherent in the artistic word stems from their tendency “not so much [to] find something new in the word as [to] expose and do away with the old” (60). “The novelty and strangeness of the word and the object it designates originates here, in the loss of its previous meaning.” (60)

This abstraction of the ideological meaning of the elements of literary works, which for Bakhtin and Medvedev (65) is pushed too far to be acceptable for a serious literary scholar, appears to be from the Formalist perspective never radical enough. The Formalists cannot reach their envisioned transcendental literary quality because the empirical remnants of the ideological meaning stemming from the prejudices of the theorist’s “ordinary reason” stubbornly adhere to it. Such irritating remnants point to the previously addressed resurgence of the determining in the reflective judgment, which must be immediately deactivated if literariness is to become a true “regulative idea.” An idea can become law-giving only if it is elusive, undeterminable. How unreservedly the Russian Formalists’ “permanent revolution” surrenders to the compulsive logics of judgment-in-the-making, comes to the fore in a quotation from Boris Eikhenbaum’s outline, “The Theory of the Formal Method” (1926). It epitomizes the same resilience of modern literary theory to any kind of dogmatic “isms,” i.e. the application of determining logical judgments, which a good half-century later culminated in Derrida’s famous defense of deconstruction from American “deconstructionism” (Derrida 1989):

That is to say, because the literary transcendental is from the very beginning established by opposition, its identity remains dependent on that empirical particularity which it negates. Such a constitutive relation to an “elsewhere” spoils its transcendental quality by a particular empirical character, its open reflection by determining activity, its abstractness by materiality, its absoluteness by relativity, and its inclusiveness by exclusivity. The theorist’s supposedly limitless individual freedom ultimately amounts to an empirically limited community. Such a recurrent empirical collapse of the literary transcendental does not diminish but on the contrary stokes its opposition to the empirical. As the delineated reintroduction of the empirical into the heart of the transcendental becomes increasingly irritating, the temptation to expel this internal otherness from the self becomes increasingly fierce and aggressive. This couples Formalist cosmopolitanism, originally envisaged as emancipation, with discrimination.

The Formalist theorist, by way of literariness, strives to exempt his individuality from the ideological constraints of his community in order to meet individuals from other communities in the space of freedom attained through such exemption. Yet he at the same time, in the name of the envisioned “imagined community,” wages a war against the readers who, instead of following him, adhere to their constraints. In Eikhenbaum’s quotation above, these frustratingly “benighted” readers are labeled as “eclectics,” “epigones,” or literary “critics” reliant on “convictions.” They are disparaged as dogmatists whose restricted reception of literature must be theoretically disengaged. Eikhenbaum blames them for sticking to the polis in the same way Stalin will thereafter blame the Formalists for lacking it (which was, to be sure, an accusation with the incomparably harsher corollaries). This Formalist exclusionist attitude is strongly reminiscent of Greek “detached,” i.e. elitist cosmopolitanism. In the subsequent structuralist revision of Formalist theory, epitomized in Chatman’s hierarchical model of narrative communication in which the higher levels supervise the lower ones (Chatman 1978: 151), this enlightening subjection of lower to higher agencies acquires a more systematic form. The theorist is expectedly positioned at the top of this “panoptical” of mutual observations, to ensure the ultimate disengagement of all inappropriate empirical identifications taking place on lower levels (Gibson 1996: 214–215). In one of the manifests of French narratology, Gérard Genette (1969: 68–69) declared that the reading of literary works within the representational modality is “a thing of the past,” and whoever applies it – and here Genette seems to be implying not just the worldwide dilettante readership but so-called literary hermeneutics as well – belongs to the antiquated past. Such readers must be exposed and derogated, subjected to continuous enlightenment. As they nonetheless proliferate unceasingly, theory multiplies its enemies and accelerates its tempo of exclusions.

8.4 Unleashing the force of self-exemption

In the form it takes with Russian Formalism, such systematic opposition to any positive identification of a work of art represents an extension of the technique of oppositional thinking as we find it in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.84 This is an “elective affinity” hitherto barely noticed,85 although, considering the underlying operation of self-exemption delineated above, not really unexpected. The German philosopher worked out the idea of permanent revaluation (Umwertung) or reversion (Umkehrung) of perspectives primarily in his late writings, The Joyful Wisdom (1882/1887) and especially On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which is significantly subtitled “A Polemic” (Eine Streitschrift). As such a switch of perspectives is a logical follow-up of Friedrich Schlegel’s antinomy principle of self-formation (Behler 1997:112), Nietzsche can be interpreted as a relay in the reconfiguration of the “cosmopolitan operation” that took place between the early German Romanticists and the Russian Formalists.

To open the discussion of the link between Nietzsche’s technique of oppositional thinking and the Formalist oppositional theorizing of art, let us begin with The Joyful Wisdom. In paragraphs 354 and 355 Nietzsche, typically paradoxically, interprets consciousness as the site of the herd’s most efficient appropriation of the individual. If we want to exempt ourselves as individuals from such a deceptive communal mentality, we are advised to dismantle our familiar perceptions of reality as something problematic, foreign and remote. However, directly opposed to Bakhtin and Medvedev’s blaming of the Formalist de-familiarization for the lack of creativity, Nietzsche resolutely states in § 58: We can destroy only by creating! (Nur als Schaffende können wir vernichten!)

This is a provocative thesis, considering that Nietzsche links his philosophical technique with the histrionic operations of the “plebeian spirit” prevalent in the age of a declining culture in which whimsical masses determine the course of human history. Even if the Formalists never established such an explicit association of their oppositional theorizing with the unpredictable “plebeian spirit,” their theory was developed in the atmosphere of the October Revolution, which exemplified Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the human masses’ takeover of the scene of history. This is why Nietzsche’s attempt to authorize his own thought by the creativity of the “plebeian spirit” deserves closer inspection. Deepening this association of his explosive philosophy with the revolutionary spirit of human masses, in The Joyful Wisdom (2010: § 377) he rejects the idea of any “reality” by stating that “we, the people without homeland” are “an agency” that breaks with all “realities.” “The people without homeland (Heimatlose)” is to be understood here in the broader sense of numerous humans and collectivities devoid of possession and therefore, in their identity formation, constitutively dependent on their “owners.” Bereft of their own form of identification, they borrow it from their “owners” by adapting themselves to the idea their “owners” have of them, yet not without simultaneously disfiguring and distorting it.

Following Nietzsche’s example of a woman who spontaneously impersonates herself (gibt sich aus) – i.e., acts by assuming but never really appropriating various roles attributed to her by men – Derrida (1979: 46–50) has meticulously analyzed this creative deformation inherent in the everyday revaluation operation of the “people without homeland.” With regard to the latter, Nietzsche, along with women, Jews or publicists addresses the mob as the case in point. As far as the mob is concerned, due to the contempt and humiliation with which it is confronted and forced to live on a daily basis, it pollutes, poisons and draws into failure whatever values it adopts (Nietzsche addresses values such as intellect, culture, possession and/or even solitude (§359)). However individual and subtle such a value, due to the strenuous efforts of the “owner” over many years, may have become, the mob disparages and bereaves it of its distinctiveness through inappropriate exchanges and mixtures with lower values. Accordingly, contrary to the incessant differentiating activity of the owners, the disowned conceive happiness as “narcotic, anesthetic, calm, peace, ‘sabbath’,” a pure passivity (Nietzsche 1996: 23–24).

In short, in lieu of responsibility that characterizes the sovereign masters, “slave morality” is characterized by the responsiveness of the dependants. Let us recall that Bakhtin and Medvedev describe Formalism as a polemical and “purely reactive formation” most closely related to the values that it negates and rejects. In a kind of secret revenge of the passive “slaves” on their active “masters,” the latter’s dominant values are pulled into a peculiar economy of repudiation that empties out, decomposes, and redeploys everything it adopts.

In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche represents ressentiment as an inventive literary author that searches for new figures to enact the imaginary scenarios of his meanness (Bernstein 1989: 206). In such a way, s/he turns his or her mortal destructiveness into a regenerative creation. According to Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, this profound re-description of master values follows from their inscription into the deformed slave bodies involved in the accelerated process of aging, disease, malformation and mutilation (Foucault 1984d: 82–83). In an interview conducted in 1977 by Jacques Rancière, Foucault (2001b) speaks not so much of an identifiable plebs as of something “plebeian” that, as a kind of reverse or reverberation, sets the boundaries of the power relations among the entitled agencies in a given society. By thereafter developing his political theory, Rancière (1999: 8) transformed this destitute plebeian element into the undifferentiated mass of those who, being the necessary surplus of society, have no positive qualification whatsoever. They figure as the “part of those who have no part” (11) in the partition of what is common in the democratic community.

What links the ressentiment generated inthis“part of those whohave no part” with Nietzsche’s subversive philosophical thought and, via it, essentially unhomely, persistently disquieting Formalist literary theory? In order to provide an answer, let us depart from Nietzsche’s opposition of consciousness (Bewusstsein) and knowledge (Erkenntnis), as developed in The Joyful Wisdom (§ 354, 355). Techniques like understanding and comprehension, rooted in the collectively trained consciousness, are therein discarded as ruthless falsifiers of reality and replaced by the analytical techniques of knowledge. But even knowledge, to prevent its inadmissible domestication of unfamiliar appearances, is transferred by Nietzsche from conscious into bodily terms. Because of the body’s ceaseless physiological and chemical processes, its mechanisms of fragmentation, dissolution, binding, mixing and blending, its openness for life’s incessant becoming, Nietzsche represents it as the only proper medium of knowledge. The same exposed, vulnerable and infective body is, significantly, the birthplace of ressentiment. Yet in the case of ressentiment bodily operations are supervised by the body’s external “owner” and in the case of knowledge they are mobilized by the body’s bearer him- or herself.

Consequently, Nietzsche claims that, in attentively implementing the chemically disfiguring bodily techniques, knowledge transforms ressentiment from a defensive adaptation technique of the disowned masses into the free subversive technique of disowned individuals. This is obviously how Nietzsche’s genealogical method itself comes into being. It operates with a disconcerting surplus of adaptabilities, refusing to be satisfied with immediate benefits (§361). Unlike the masses physically deprived of the homeland, the unhomely individuals successfully disengage their immediate bodily reactions. From the peculiar recapitulation of the history of ressentiment offered by Nietzsche in the same paragraph, one can infer that his philosophical technique has to be understood as the culmination of a long development. It began with the “denigrated and humiliated” mob; continued with the actor who has learned to command his instincts with other instincts; then the “artist” (the buffoon, the Pantaloon, the Jack-Pudding, the fool, the clown, the classical type of servant, Gil Blas); thereupon, the proper artist; until the process was finally crowned with the “genius.” Nietzsche’s genealogical method, it follows, results from the reorientation of negation from an external target (the “owner”) to the bearer of this operation himself or herself, or negation’s transformation into self-negation. Thus with Nietzsche the opposition becomes interiorized and turned against itself. Consecutively deactivating the deactivation just performed, opposing the opposition – in the same manner that Kant expected the reason of his artistic genius or “transcendental philosopher” to engage reflective judgment by continuously disengaging the automatic application of reason’s habits – Nietzsche’s unhomely thought transforms the popular ressentiment directed against the “owner” into an interminable series of self-revolutions. Arriving at the peak of a centuries-long process, and harvesting its fruits, his genealogy triumphantly turns desperate communal passivity into the frenetic individual activity of self-reconfiguration.

According to the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morals (§8), this process of the profound revaluation of homelessness took no less than two millennia to display its life-affirming side:

Nietzsche liked to present himself as a tree with roots poisoned by material life and branches reaching the heights of the spiritual unknown. Such a magical overturning of the contagious seed of the old into a rejuvenating new substance stimulated Derrida to present him as the thinker of pregnancy (Derrida 1979:64). He takes this metaphor from § 72 of The Joyful Wisdom, in which Nietzsche compares the artist’s creation with a woman’s pregnancy; the single concern of both these solitary undertakings is to produce affirmation out of the negation of life. In the same magical vein, Nietzsche produces his remedial genealogical method from the poisonous ressentiment. Rather than being violently enforced, as is the homelessness of the masses, his unhomeliness is strategically chosen and thus supposedly translated into positive energy. In sum, in Nietzsche’s (and Foucault’s) radically oppositional thought, we witness a kind of “success story” that claims to be redeeming the repudiated surplus of society without producing any new “social garbage.”86

To return now finally to the analogy with the Russian Formalists, they almost spontaneously followed Nietzsche in his interiorization of the oppositional thought and directing it against itself. They coerced the national-philological reading of literature to disengage its habitual patterns in the same way Nietzsche forced philosophy, according to Foucault’s reading (Foucault 1984d: 90, 93), to deactivate the serious application of its categories and “joyfully” liberate their hidden revolutionary potential. With Russian Formalists, literary theory became a persistently self-defamiliarizing instrument. As one of the prominent inheritors of the Formalist accelerated unworkings of unworkings, Foucault regarded such “eventialization” (or événementialisation, i.e. the persistent exemption of the present from the past) (1996: 393, 1990: 47–48)87 as the distinctive feature of modernity. Instead of being determined by history, each present event contains the potential for disengagement and is summoned to activate it. According to Foucault, this continuous reassessment of one’s limits and capabilities (les pouvoirs), epitomized in Kant’s reflective judgment, is the only Enlightenment legacy worth taking up after two centuries (2001a: 1587).

In accordance with the logic of persistent self-re-description thus appropriated, in a series of works from the 1970s Foucault even reapplied Nietzsche’s rhetoric of counter-violence by insistently defying memory with counter-memory, knowledge with counter-knowledge, and history with counter-history. As if echoing the Russian Formalists’ politics of estrangement as well as the early German Romanticist and Nietzschean “narrative of permanent displacement” in its background, Foucault makes all that is close and familiar the distant and strange (redoublement, an echo of Romanticist Verdopplung), forcing the theorist to start its history always wholly anew (recommencement). There is indeed a remarkable continuity in Foucault’s untiring insistence to break free from the delusions of the past. Thus, archeology “deprives us of our continuities […] dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves […] bursts open the other, and the outside […] establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks” (1972: 131). On the way from early German Romanticism, through Nietzsche and the Russian Formalists up to Foucault, the cosmopolitan legacy of Kant’s reflective judgment adopted pressing, offensive, and imperative traits.

Via this route, naive confidence in the emancipating power of slavish negation, as Hannah Arendt (1970: 56) has cautioned, reaffirmed and enhanced in its turn the master’s violence in place of suspending it. Unleashing “destructive creativity,” revolutions degenerate into the tyrannies they have dethroned. The weapon of abstraction employed by “adversarial thinkers” (Nehamas 1989: 183) ultimately displays more extensive violence than the particular instance negated by it was capable of. Precisely by the act of opposing, the abstraction restages its opponent’s operations in the same way as, according to Bakhtin and Medvedev, the artistic negation reintroduces the exclusion performed by the particular form disempowered by it. Nietzsche’s method of switching perspectives, therefore, neither does break out of the vicious circle of the metaphysical thinking it defies (Hanssen 2000: 282) nor does it absolve the plebeian revolutionary tradition it believes to have translated into the positive. Despite his conviction to have disengaged the violent legacy of popular ressentiment in his allegedly life-affirming genealogy, he inadvertently reengaged its perilously discriminating operations. The same equivocal heritage burdens the oppositional thought of modern literary theory.