For a similar recent conceptualization of Europe, from a sociological perspective, see Brunkhorst 2014. She depicts the history of Europe as a continuous suppression of its colonial past, arguing that the suppressed returns and refuses the offered appeasement.

2

For the term “anarchic traumatism,” see Levinas 1974: 194. He employs “anarchic” in the etymological sense of being without an identifiable cause.

3

For an elaboration on this point, see Das 2007: 18–39. She argues that the narrators of national trauma narratives, while using the suffering of particular social groups as the main instrument of the nation’s establishment, sentence the victims of the same suffering to anonymity and silence. For example, the figure of the violated woman was an important mobilizing point for the discourse of the Indian nation as a “pure” and masculine space in which the “right” kinds of men keep the “right” kinds of women under control. However, in creating such hegemonic discourse, the hegemons not only usurped the right of the woman to decide her future course of action, but also deprived her of her own language of pain. Under the pressure of such discourse, she experienced her body as a container of poisonous knowledge, which was unutterable in the public space and thus forced into the form of “gesturing” or fiction. This is how the technique of indicating one’s pain was set in motion.

4

For the most recent reiteration of this perspective, see Brunner 2014. According to him, the ultimate target of such denaturalization of trauma is the violence and injustice inherent in any representation of it. I will be arguing in the same direction.

5

According to Brunner (2014: 12–13) the agents of this complex and multiple mediation comprised in the concept of the politics of trauma are, for example, cultural values, conventions and habits, mental dispositions, political convictions, the state, government, parliament, political parties, scientific and media discourses, etc. In the final analysis, such an extensive political mediation also underlies the idea of the Holocaust, raised some time ago to be the standard for judging all traumas. For its critical reexamination from this perspective see, for example, Rothberg 2000: 179–186, or Alexander 2012: 31–96.

6

For a further elaboration on this concept, see Biti 2014b. For the engagement of Benjamin’s (and Freud’s) opposition between Erlebnis and Erfahrung in the context of trauma, see LaCapra 2004: 54–55. Berlant’s re-description of trauma goes in the same direction when she speaks of the “convergence of many histories,” “an ongoing activity of precariousness in the present” or “systemic crisis” built into ordinary situations which can, but need not, coagulate into a traumatic event and induce trauma (10). The outcome of such situations depends on the reaction of the involved. She defines situation as a state of things in which “something in the present that may become an event” is emerging, “an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate,” (5) which is a definition that disaggregates and dynamizes the concept of trauma in a similar way to that which I am trying to do with “constellation.”

7

Recent theory insists that cosmopolitanism is of a similarly plural and protean character as nationalism. “Like nations,” states Bruce Robbins (1998: 2) for example, “cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular.” Kwame Anthony Appiah was the first to attentively elaborate the thesis of the social, historical and geopolitical rootedness of cosmopolitanism against the habitual thesis of its universal character (2005: 213–272, 2006). However, he connects cosmopolitan projects with belonging to particular communities and not with traumatic constellations; he does not introduce an irresolvable gap into them as I am trying to do. The same holds for other prominent U.S.-American theorists of cosmopolitanism such as Martha Nussbaum, Will Kimlicka, or Seyla Benhabib. An exception is Bonnie Honig whose concept of cosmopolitanism draws on Jacques Derrida’s “hostipitality” (as developed in Derrida 2000b, 2001b, 2005) and is closer tomine. See, for example, Honnig 2006.

8

Advocating a social theory of trauma along the same performative lines, Alexander states: “Which narrative wins out is a matter of performative power. The emotional experience of suffering, while critical, is not primordial.” (2012: 2) Trauma is thus relegated from the private psychic into the public political space. Brunner (2014: 24) has recently endorsed this view, stating that trauma discourse cannot speak “by itself” but only via social carriers and mediators who are in possession of necessary resources to put it into circulation. For him, trauma equally emerges from the knotting of heterogeneous discourses that underpin, question and defy each other (2014: 41–45).

9

Not long ago, in a significant move to the theory of trauma continued by Lauren Berlant, Michael Rothberg subjected trauma to an ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing by placing it in the intercultural dynamic of interaction, entanglement and intersection (2009: 3–4).

10

By “(self-)imposed,” I mean that “hospitable” cosmopolitanism was not only imposed by colonial and imperial nations but also enthusiastically embraced by the native “carrier groups” that governed the process of respective national liberations. By adopting the Western teleological pattern of history, these groups rejected on their part the alternative (literary) representations of the past within their own cultures (Guha 2002: 49). By producing “historical accounts in which the nationalism of the colonized competes with metropolitan imperialism in its bid to uphold the primacy of the state (74),” they emulated the statism of their European mentors, i.e. silenced the creativity of domestic subjects involved in the complex and volatile “prose of the world.” The colonized peoples thus fell apart into the representative agencies and represented enablers, offering another example of the non-homogeneous corpus of victims.

11

Safranski (2009: 26) points out in his book on German Romanticism that Herder was surrounded in Riga by a colourful mix of peoples consisting of Russians, Livonians and Poles. This holds even more for Kant as the inhabitant of multiethnic and multicultural Königsberg, who, in addition, regularly visited its port to collect stories about “exotic” human races from sailors, overseas enterpreneurs and adventurers.

12

For the naturalness of this association at that time, see Apter 2006: 32.

13

Safranski (2009: 17) aptly compares him with Rousseau, meaning that his ideas announced Romanticism rather than really representing it. Considering the variety of German Romanticism, one in any case ought to be cautious with the “Romanticist label.” However, as Lucy (1997: 28) rightly puts it, “‘romanticism’ is a signifier. As with any signifier, there is no natural or predetermined signified attached to it. Whatever ‘romanticism’ signifies, then, is always going to have to be textual …”

14

As Michael Rothberg (2009: 1–22) has argued, trauma narratives offer unpredictable encouragement, support and enforcement to each other across social, cultural, and historical boundaries.

Here and in the following I am deliberately skipping “his or her” for “man” taking the habitual point of view of Enlighteners.

16

See for this argument Aristotle’s Politics, Book III, 1285a 6–7 and Book VII, 1327b 24–33.

17

Voltaire officially introduced this linear conception of human history based on the bourgeois principle of man’s self-overcoming – in contradistinction to a futile circuit of natural history – in the booklet Philosophie de l'Histoire, published in Amsterdam 1765 under the pseudonym of Abbé Bazin, actually a kind of “retroactive” introduction to his Essai sur les moeurs (1756). In the article on history written at the same time for Diderot’s and D'Alembert’s Encyclopédie (Voltaire 1765: 220–221) he resolutely relegates natural history to physics, disconnecting it from human history. The historical pattern of self-overcoming was obviously already established.

18

In the fourth chapter, we will see Hegel repeating this derogatory thesis on the Asian political regimes.

19

Roberto Dainotto (2007: 93) interprets the same phrase in a more neutral way, as if having had referred to the English scientific revolution.

20

Luhmann (1990a: 46, trans. mine) traces the genealogy of this “observation of latency” in the following way: “The technique is some two centuries old. It was probably first practiced in the novel, then in the counter-Enlightenment, then in the critique of ideology, that is, in the first place always with the better-knowing attitude. The first-order observer was in such a way removed into the zone of the harmless, the naïve, or he was treated as someone who, without knowing it, has something to hide. The better-knowing nurtured itself by a suspicion and the generalization of the suspicion principle enabled whole disciplines – from psycho analysis to sociology – to establish themselves with additional competences in a world in which everyone knows or believes to know for what purpose and in which situation he acts.” Luhmann’s thesis that the investigation of latency beyond the familiar reality was started by literature and thereupon continued by various scientific disciplines was recently endorsed, within another theoretical frame, by Jacques Rancière (2007). Rancière interprets modern literature as the promoter of democracy, because it introduced equality into the hierarchy of the everyday distribution of the sensible. The realist novel, being the paradigmatic agent of such democratic revolution, transfers its original hermeneutic impulse thereupon onto the sociological, psychoanalytic, or Marxist theories that are, on their part, trying to explain the novel. Both Luhmann and Rancière therefore, important differences between their arguments notwithstanding, insist on the democratic effect of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” mobilized by the modern “joint venture” of literature and science; but neither of them considers the consequences of such democratization. See chapters seven and twelve.

21

As is well known, “event” is an important concept in Foucault’s vocabulary but, in this peculiar form, he nonetheless asks his audience to pardon l'horreur du mot.

As regards French self-sufficient and German other-related cosmopolitanism, which is a distinction that neatly corresponds to Balibar’s distinction between dominating and dominated nationalism, self-sufficiency would be the cosmopolitan perspective of dominant agencies completely unsuitable for the dominated ones: “One can grasp French cosmopolitanism of this time without entering into the German one, but not vice versa …” (Fink 1993: 24, trans. mine). Accordingly, Wieland was once called the German Voltaire but “nobody, alas, ever called [Voltaire] the French Wieland” (Appiah 2006: 15). In opposing such self-sufficiency, the dominated “have especially great need to band together in order to be effective” (Calhoun 2007: 295).

23

However justified this critique undoubtedly is it does not spare Kristeva herself from reproducing another sort of Francophone cosmopolitanism. She asserts that “[t]he French national idea … can make up the optimal rendition of the nation in the contemporary world” because it is “achieved in the legal and political pact between free and equal individuals” (Kristeva 1993: 39–40). Deriving her cosmopolitanism from the liberal individualism that was notoriously available only to elite classes and elected nations, she exposes herself, however, to the same criticism she makes regarding stoic cosmopolitanism when she states that it was “separated from the remain der of humanity that was incapable of the same effort of reason and wisdom […] this produced a new strangeness – the strangeness of those who do not share in our reason” (1993: 20–21). She also heartily endorses Kant’s cosmopolitan vision of humankind as a progressing unity in diversity (Kristeva 1991: 171–173) forgetting that it relies on the concept of person, which seriously restricts its inclusiveness. “The fact that the ‘person’ is Kant’s beginning and reference point is already indicative of the presuppositions implied in the universal neutral imaginary that for him constitutes the person. Kant obviously was not thinking about the Amerindians, the Africans, or the Hindus as paradigmatic examples of his characterization.” (Mignolo 2000: 734)

24

All translations from German in the following are mine unless otherwise indicated.

25

This was encapsulated in Goethe’s famous letter to Carlyle of July 20, 1827: “Whoever understands and studies the German language now finds himself in a market where all the nations of the world are offering their wares for sale …” (Goethe 1987: 266, trans. mine) One commentator observes: “People have ridiculed this notion of German as the linguistic pivot for Weltliteratur, but one should recall that circa 1800 there was indeed a singular plethora of German translations of foreign literature and that in the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century German remained the language for many educated Central and Eastern Europeans, for it was thanks to German that they had access to world literature.” (Meyer-Kalkus 2010: 107)

26

Rousseau’s stance is surely controversial as regards the true “human substance” or “nature,” which makes the reconstruction of his argument a tricky undertaking. For example, he states in the Discourse on Inequality (1965: 175–176) that his idea of the “natural state of man” is a pure hypothesis or invention as it cannot be empirically investigated or checked, but just several pages earlier (170) he calls himself a natural historian who sticks to “nature which never lies” instead of relying on treacherous books. In his Essay on the Origin of Language he advocates language as a means of transition from l'homme naturel to l'homme de l'homme which gives rise to morality, law, and history, but on the other hand despises civilization because it tortures, disfigures and corrupts man’s true nature. See more regarding this important ambiguity of Rousseau’s thought in Eze 1995.

27

For the pioneering sociological argument in terms of cultural confrontation between two nations see the first chapter of Elias (1978),which was originally published in 1936 and was therefore probably, though not explicitly, linked to the distinction between civilization and culture introduced by Alfred Weber’s Kulturgeschichte und Kultursoziologie (1935). Roughly speaking, civilisation would cover a wide range of social manifestations engendered in the process of human everyday behavior and intercourse, whereas Kultur would pertain only to the highest human achievements in the arts, science and philosophy brought about in individual and “splendid isolation.” Because German intellectuals in the pre-war atmosphere of the second half of the 1930s obviously side with the latter, they are trying to suppress the incriminating ethnic and political background of their nationalism for the benefit of its apparently pure esthetic character.

28

It deserves attention in this context that Goethe, who in 1773 edited a collection of Alsatian folk songs together with Herder, was the first to become aware of the disconcerting implications of the national idea this collection has catalyzed. As Meyer-Kalkus (2010: 101) spells out, his late idea of the Weltliteratur was a vehement reaction to the German religious-patriotic art his early work gave rise to.

29

However, Kristeva (1993: 15, 32–33, 37) for her part also wholeheartedly agrees with Montesquieu’s “differentiated cosmopolitanism” in order to liberate herself not just from Herder’s “mystifying nationalism” but from French abstract cosmopolitanism as well. She celebrates his idea of the nation as a “lay aggregate” of absorbed differences subordinated to permanent transition in favor of a “general interest” (41), praises this “polyvalent community” (35) and “coordinated diversity” on the way to confederation (1991: 133), completely forgetting about the violent exclusionism of such putatively all-embracing inclusion based on the idea of individual free choice. Regarding the questioning of her enthusiastic reading of Kant and Montesquieu from the perspective of Derrida’s alternative reading of hospitality limited by hostility, see Leonard (2005: 89–91). That is to say, in the various traumatic constellations of French political and intellectual history Montesquieu re-emerges as a multi-profiled ally always ready to assist but not without, as it were, invoicing his services.

30

For the connection between Rousseau, Mme de Staël and Novalis in this context see Dainotto (2007: 99–150). Inan elaborate and convincing argument, Dainotto also adds to these well-known figures the lesser-known Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés, who was institutionally affiliated to the Italian academy.

31

“This happened to Hungarians in the fifteenth century and would surely happen to us Germans in the eighteenth if the great king of the age, who like Matthias respected and knew only the foreign spiritual formation, had reigned equally unconstrained over all of Germany as did Corvin in Hungary” (So ging es den Ungarn im fünfzehnten Jahrhundert, wie es auch wohl uns Deutschen im achtzehnten ergangen sein würde, wenn ein großer König dieser Zeit, der wie Matthias auch nur ausländische Geistesbildung ehrte und kannte, eben so unumschränkt über das gesamte Deutschland geherrscht hätte, wie Corvin in Ungarn (Schlegel 1961: 237)).

32

An attentive and inspiring investigation of this subject, on which I am drawing here, was performed by Neubauer (2004).

For two excellent discussions of the Freudian distinction between desire (libidinal bond to the other-as-object whom the self wishes to possess) and identification (emotional tie to the other as-model on whom the self bases him- or herself) see Borch-Jakobsen (1988: 164–72) and Fuss (1995: 11–16). Both of them claim that “to have” the other (which is a relation) and “to be” the other (which is a non-relation since it is preconscious) cannot be clearly distinguished from one another because they constantly reappear within each other. As I will try to demonstrate, the same holds for the distinction between the Enlightenment “difference between” and Romanticist “difference within.” Despite all the efforts made to keep its items separate, this distinction is equally untenable in the final analysis. Literature has resisted all the appropriation, inclusion or “narrative accommodation” (by literary history) to which it has been exposed. Because “literary experience negates determinate space and time” (Saussy 2011: 292), it cannot be located or “mapped.” This literary negation of any coverage is, however, a permanent source of frustration that continuously invites attempts to come to grips with it.

34

This and the following translations from German are mine unless otherwise indicated.

35

According to Amselle (2003: 8–31), Herder is the founder of the Western ethnologic tradition that celebrates the diversity of the world’s population. However, this praise amounts to a significant polarization, as Herder assigns the representatives of this diversity to a “class” of either privilege or disability. As regards the latter “class,” the outcome “is a very close network that […] endows each person with a specific weight depending on his or her place in a real or virtual group (deaf mutes, paraplegics, etc.). The result of this proliferation of identities is that individuals can no longer be compared to one another on an equal basis and that they lose personal responsibility for themselves (12–13).” Taken to be in need of assistance, and stigmatized as such, they underlie protection and custody. Yet this protection is, for its part, only a technology of governance or a strategy to contain social and political change (Mamdani 2012: 28).

36

As we will come to see, Hegel will follow him in depriving, for instance, Africa of history. As Mamdani (2012: 53) puts it, the basic premise of colonial historiography is that history only came to Africa with the advent of its colonizers.

Mignolo (2000: 765) distinguishes between globalization from above and globalization from below or “diversality”: “If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each other, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. […] A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the large circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from above …” I will return to that important suggestion in the Epilogue.

38

In the following argument I will be selectively drawing on the theses presented in Biti 2011. I will deliberately use “mankind,” “man” and “he” to draw attention to Kant’s unconcernedly masculine reasoning (much more understandable at that time of course, considering the political and ideological circumstances, although significant for precisely that reason) which explicitly excludes women from the realm of self-governed citizens who enjoy the vote. We should be aware that Schiller’s inaugural lecture at the University of Jena (1789) was delivered for an exclusively male audience, as females were strictly forbidden to participate in higher education.

39

In his influential reading of Kant’s closely related essay What is Enlightenment? composed in the same year (1784), Michel Foucault downplays the moment of pressure in order to promote his own “revolutionary” argument. By highlighting in the freedom to disobey put forth by Kant in this essay, the (French) revolutionary attitude of “voluntary inservitude” (1996: 386), Foucault neglects the key presupposition of this freedom, namely the acceptance of bondage to the master instance of universal history.

40

See Kant 1956: 65, where Probierstein is translated as “criterion,” and Kant 2006b: 17, 113, etc.

41

In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt (1992: 43) connects the dialogic extension of one’s judgment with the faculty of imagination by pointing to § 40 of the Critique of Judgment. In it Kant states the obligation of every enlightened man to compare his judgments not only with the actual, but also merely possible judgments of other people by putting himself in the place of any other man. She also points out the division between the impartial observer and the interested agents of history which results from the insistence on this obligation (44, 52).

42

“La raisonà la fois comme despotisme et commelumière,” reads the sentence in La vie which is actually Foucault’s last authorized paper. But this sentence in the Introduction, composed in1978, is more compressed: “La raison, comme lumière despotique.” (2001c: 435) One should bear in mind, of course, that in the French tradition established by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Boulanger, Oriental despotism is considered to be the chief enemy of Western Enlightenment. By coupling them in such an inextricable way, Foucault clearly opposes this powerful tradition too.

43

For a more elaborate critique of Foucault’s rendering of governmentality, see ch. 12.

44

In a significant footnote to the Preface of his Anthropology (2006b: 4) Kant states that Königsberg, “a city which by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even travelling.”

45

The American translation of his treatise On the Common Saying considerably softens his contention that the “natural qualification” of the citizen consists in “not being a child, a woman”, dass es kein Kind, kein Weib sei (1985: 143), rendering it as “apart, of course, from being an adult male” (2006a: 78). As an admirer of Rousseau, Kant was rather close to his predominantly masculine worldview (Eze 1995).

46

In The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy, Husserl (1954: 318–319) says for example about the Roma that they “incessantly rove around Europe […] while we, if we understand each other correctly, will for example never become Indians (die dauernd in Europa herumvagabundieren […] während wir, wenn wir uns recht verstehen, uns zum Beispiel nie indianisieren werden).”

47

The third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1788–97), which is roughly contemporary with Kant’s treatises in question, values American Indians higher than the Negroes. As Sebastiani (2000: 220) puts it: “The ‘black race’ […] remained branded with superstition and immorality, while the American Indians were re-evaluated as free, generous and wise.”

48

Herder actually opposes the absolute lawgiving character of mankind, insisting on a freedom of choice of human agents who must not be coercively centrally determined instances but rather act as freely and autonomously determining agencies (Barnard 2003: 93–94).

49

All translations from the German editions of Herder’s works are mine.

50

In his article “Histoire” prepared for the 8. Volume of Encyclopédie, Voltaire explicated the pattern on the very structure of the encyclopedia: “Une article doit corriger l'autre; et s'il se trouve ici quelque erreur, elle doit être relevée par un homme plus éclairé.” (1765: 224)

51

Herder developed his vision during so-called Weimar Aesthetic Humanism (1775–1795) after accepting the invitation of the young Thuringian duke Carl August to join Wieland and Goethe in the capital of his duchy Weimar, less “une petite ville” than “un grand château” (Mme de Staël) numbering at that time some 6, 000 inhabitants. The duchy, consisting of around 106, 000 inhabitants, was an accurate reflection of the German Kleinstaaterei of the age. It made “an unremarkable patchwork of territories ruled vaguely from a capital city”, each of whose four portions “maintained separate administrations and tax systems” (Chytry 1989: 40).

52

Hegel (1997: 112) will thereupon provide a further specification and refinement stating that “the northern part of the temperate regions is particularly suited to that purpose [i.e. to become the theatre of world history], because at this point the earth has a broad breast and in the South it separates into many distinct points.” Such compartmentalization is an enduring feature of barbarity.

53

Slavic nations’ intellectual elites embraced Herder’s humiliating “protective attitude” that raised them to an object of domestication and grooming with the same enthusiasm, and at approximately the same time, as the elites in African colonies embraced the shift in colonial rule toward the enforcing of “native” traditions. They perceived this reorientation as the affirmation of their genuine substance by misapprehending what it had really been. “Enforcing tradition became a way of entrenching colonial power. The fact is that colonial powers were the first political fundamentalists of the modern period. They were the first to advance and put into practice two propositions: one, that every colonized group has an original and pure tradition, whether religious or ethnic; and two, that every colonized group must be made to return to that original condition, and that the return must be enforced by law. Put together, these two propositions constitute the basic platform of every political fundamentalism in the colonial and the postcolonial world.” (Mamdani 2012: 50)

I would like to express my gratitude to Galin Tihanov for suggestions that helped me improve and strengthen my argument in this chapter. He is of course in no way responsible for the deficits that remain.

55

My translation of this passage from Conversations with Eckermann slightly differs from both the American translation by John Oxenford (San Francisco, 1984: 132) used by Damrosch 2003 and Moretti’s own translation. All following translations from German will be mine if not otherwise indicated.

56

If I am here siding with Spivak’s critique of Moretti, this does not mean that I endorse her own revision of comparative literature. With its opposite privileging of native informants and comparatists (2003: 14, 22), it overemphasizes the particularity of languages and cultures in a typically liberalist, multiculturalist spirit.

57

I will be quoting, in the following, various critical editions of Goethe’s works (Weimarer, Berliner, Frankfurter Ausgabe) according to the following principle: division (here IV), volume (here 39), page number (here 216).

58

This might be one possible answer to the “rarely asked” but fundamental question from Thomas Beebee’s illuminating discussion of Nietzsche’s skeptical stance to world literature: “[W]hat kind of consolation can the teaching and propagation of world literature provide?” or, even more specifically, “[W]hom is world literature consoling, and in what way?” (Beebee 2011: 367, 376) Goethe himself found in Weltliteratur a consolation for his traumatic situation at home in the same way as, to take up Beebee’s examples, the students in Kathleen Komar’s class in Los Angeles or Roberto Bolaño’s character Urrutia did. Yet if Goethe’s specific traumatic experience effectuates world literature’s ability to console, then Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009) might be an apt instrument for specifying this ability. Weltliteratur is always responding to a nationally situated traumatic experience but possesses the ability to work through the remote affiliate traumatic experiences as well. Such elective affinities among the injured are however always established at someone’s cost and it is precisely this “side effect” of world literature’s “therapy” that must not be forgotten. Its politics must not degenerate into policing.

59

I thank Galin Tihanov for this reminder.

60

An American philosopher, having researched the German intellectual corpus around 1800, had this impression: “There is, so to speak, quite a promiscuous theoretical as well as stylistic dependence of one writer on another. […] In this climate of in- and cross-breeding of citations and cross-references, one writer being quite dependent upon others in the trading of ideas and authorities …” (Eze 1997: 6–7)

61

As regards Goethe’s overarching creative consciousness, it strikes his attentive readers as “'what we Germans call spirit [Geist], which is predominant in an upper leader (das Vorwaltende des oberen Leitenden)’ (FA III 1: 181), a weightless, on-hand intelligence that ‘especially belongs to a man of age or an aging epoch’ and qualifies itself through a ‘worldwide overview, irony’ and ‘free use of talents'” (Koch 2002: 201).

62

I deliberately deploy this famous concept of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary and linguistic theory to indicate the importance of his in-depth reading of Goethe for its shaping. However, unlike Pizer, who enthusiastically endorses Bakhtin’s empathic understanding of Goethe, I interpret the dialogic principle – in both cases – as an operation of imperial self-empowerment that aims at the establishment of a supreme authority or what we, using Bakhtin’s own terms, could dub the “authorial self.” See ch. 9.

63

My point is that the world literature’s community is not a precondition but effect of its institution, in the sense in which Derrida for example, in his critique of Rousseau’s theory of the social contract in Of Grammatology or in his reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo in Préjugés, derives social consensus from the political authority of its inaugurators. Because of this, the process of the institution of the common sense necessarily rests on the repression and exclusion of those who subscribe to it. Being based on such constitutive violence, common sense established by world literature turns out to be not that common as it usually claims to be.

64

According to Niklas Luhmann (1984), who coined the term and extensively elaborated upon it, autopoietic systems are systems that maintain, differentiate and propel themselves by relentlessly reintroducing the fundamental difference between them and their environment into the systemic operations themselves. Unlike the structuralist system concept applied by Wallerstein, Moretti or Casanova, these poststructuralist systems are caught in the process of incessant becoming, i.e. the devouring, reworking and rearranging of their environment. By back-projecting this contemporary concept onto Goethe’s understanding of Weltliteratur I intend not just to uncover the historical sources of Luhmann’s “super-theory,” which attempts to embrace all particular disciplines in the same way as Weltliteratur attempts to embrace all particular literatures. My intention is also to point out that the fundamental difference between system and environment (Umwelt) that sets in motion the systemic differentiation and propulsion is rooted in constitutive asymmetry and exclusion. This is why the ceaselessly improving system’s connectability (Anschlussfähigkeit) on the one hand – like the tireless expansion of Goethe’s Weltliteratur – is like a shadow followed by an extension of the disabled, because disconnected environment on the other. The same point holds of course for Damrosch’s system of world literature even though it presents itself, deliberately or not, in an under referenced and under-theorized form. Applying to this conception of world literature Luhmann’s over-referenced and overtheorized conception of autopoietic systems I wanted, in a sense, to fully articulate what Damrosch prefers to leave in the state of a “dotted line,” or to dismantle a theory behind this conception’s less than theoretical appearance. For more on Luhmann see chapter seven.

65

Foucault (1986: 24) uses the concept of heterotopias to indicate a steady proliferation of “counter-sites” that “simultaneously represent, contest and invert” the system that for its part tries to isolate or exclude them. His important point is that a system affirms its norm precisely through a reiterative delimitation of the unruly energy of deflections. Initially destined to lock these unaccountable systemic forces into a sort of “inner colony” or “inside pocket of outsideness,” these “foreign bodies,” however, incessantly grow until they finally “undermine language because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter and tangle common names.” They “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (Foucault 1971: 18).

66

Koch refers neither to Bakhtin nor Luhmann but analogies can be drawn with Bakhtin’s contention that from the point of view of the constitutively external “third consciousness” every identity appears to be depersonalized and exchangeable and every meaning interminable, groundless and limitless (Bakhtin 1979: 305–307, 371). As for Luhmann’s superior observer, the social world strikes him as an interminable bifurcation and its dissent is resumed with every observation. The identification of the fundamental difference is thus replaced by a relentless differentiation (Luhmann 1995b: VI) which is, significantly, hard to follow as it “requires considerable intellectual effort” (1986a: 181). It is therefore not to be expected from inert and asleep observers but only from those equipped with a better-knowing ambition, readiness and ability to enter into vertiginous self-reflection. As in Goethe’s vision of Weltliteratur, differentiation implies discrimination.

67

The same “impartiality” and “unselfishness” holds for the observer position in Luhmann’s super-theory, which strives to add nothing to the existing state of facts other than to bring itself into complete accordance with the structure of this state, providing nothing but a report on the process of its self-production. All observers that appropriately decipher the calculus inherent to it will, the astounding thesis goes, ultimately derive from it the same sense (Gleichsinn; Luhmann 1996).

68

Damrosch (2006: 45) postulates that world literature is by nature a systemic construct continually remaking itself diachronically and dialectically.

69

This rendering of world literature’s generously liberating mission strongly recalls Pascale Casanova’s statement that world literature “as the common value of the entire space, is also an instrument which, if re-appropriated, can enable writers – and especially those with the fewest resources – to attain a type of freedom, recognition and existence within it” (2004: 90). It is also in line with Jonathan Israel’s conviction, quoted in the first chapter, that French Enlightenment, “especially in many Asian and African countries, as well as in contemporary Russia” has become “the chief hope and inspiration of numerous besieged and harassed humanists, egalitarians and defenders of human rights, who, often against the great odds, heroically champion basic human free domand dignity” (Israel 2010: 11). In short, despite the differences between Damrosch’s and Casanova’s pattern of world literature, they seem to agree that the Western “global” intellectual achievements help newcomers from “subordinated regions” to come to grips with the nationalist “forces of darkness” in their own countries.

70

Considering the manual character of his book, Damrosch is sparing with references but his reading of lyrics as a staged or quoted speech event strongly reminds us of Barbara Herrnstein Smith(1978) and FélixMartínez-Bonati (1981),whereas his two-level-interpretation of the reading of lyrics recalls Riffaterre (1978). These conceptualizations of lyrics characterized by the methodology of their time have been meanwhile, however, exposed to critique and revision.

The early Habermas of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1966) subjected Arendt’s philosophy, to an influential hermeneutic appropriation, translating it eventually into the consensual frame of his later theory of communicative action. Comparing Arendt’s and Heidegger’s philosophy, Jacques Taminiaux takes up his thesis of the neo-Aristotelian revival of the category of praxis in Arendt. Though not completely unfounded, this thesis suppresses the dissent-oriented moment of the new beginning, and with it, the discontinuity of the public sphere in Arendt’s political thought. For the critique of the consensual appropriation of her thought, the reduction of its complexity and the suppression of its antagonistic character, see Disch 1997: 149 and Villa 1995: 204–205.

The respective part of Menninghaus’s book Unendliche Verdopplung (1987) is available in American translation and concludes with the following sentence: “Within this line of argument, the general exposition of the Romantic theory of reflection – which is the essential innovation of Benjamin’s study – relates to its ‘application’ in a seemingly paradoxical fashion, in that the general philosophical grounding of his arguments does not hinder him from undertaking a largely valid ‘derivation’ of the cardinal concepts of Romantic poetology from the theory of reflection as their centre.” (2002: 50)

73

All translations from German here and in the following are mine, if not otherwise indicated.

74

For the second-order observation as the gradual discloser of the world’s complexity, see Luhmann 1990b: 25.

75

Habermas (2011: 39, n. 47) celebrates the discussion of international lawin constitutional terms as a prominent accomplishment of German jurisprudence.

The first Western European nation-states, such as France, England and Holland, were knowingly established by means of the gradual expulsion, dislocation and various forms of cleansing of their minority populations. However, as these operations were undertaken during the Middle Ages and early modernity, they were pushed into oblivion. Forgetting the terror and massacres committed in the name of nation is, according to Renan (2006: 45), constitutive of the French (and every other) sovereign national consciousness. According to Todorova (1997: 175): “Ever since the fifteenth century (and in the case of England much earlier), Western Europe has embarked on a huge homogenization drive with various degrees of success (the Spanish reconquista, England’s expulsion of the Jews in the twelfth century, the religiouswars in France and Germany), which, in conjunction with the strong dynastic states, had laid the foundations of the future nation-states. […] In fact, democracy as a political form became an attribute of the West European nation-states only in the twentieth century (and for Germany only after World War II), after they had achieved in the previous centuries a remarkable, although not absolute, degree of ethnic and religious homogeneity and disciplined society, at an often questionable human and moral price. “So the establishment of the East Central European nation-states, which was a sort of ultimate Europeanization of this area, was for the Western European nation-states a traumatic “return of the repressed,” a painful reminder of the deeply problematic identification of nations with states. The harsh critique of East Central European ethnonationalisms was intended to suppress this disquieting reminder.

77

As the Soviet Union was constituted as a multinational state, Russian Formalists cannot be smoothly subsumed under Tihanov’s category of East Central European literary theorists put under the pressure of their new nation-states. Yet Soviet socialist internationalism was nonetheless structured along national lines both internally and externally (Brubaker 1996: 23–54). This internationalism, following the “welcoming” cosmopolitan pattern, did not erase but preserve the boundaries between nations. Strategically responding to numerous national movements across the former Russianempire, Lenin advocated a federation of equal nations from the very establishment of the Soviet Union (Martin 2001: 1–3). This is why the Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia (November 1917) proclaims the right of self-determination for all Soviet peoples. Yet by the mid-1920s, after socialism failed to affect the Western nation-states, which was considered by Lenin to be the prerogative of its survival, Stalin mobilized the process of Soviet nation-building under Russian control and leadership. This turn toward national homogenization was expected to accelerate the so-called socialist modernization determined to beat the capitalist West (Berend 1998: 213–214). Yet, with the consolidation of the nation-building by the mid-1930s, people bereft of national belonging were stigmatized and endangered. For example, being deprived of their own language and land, Jews could in no way qualify as a nation (and the most prominent Formalists, like Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Brik and Jakobson, were of Jewish origin). Stalin, in his ill-reputed anti-Semitic campaign after World War II, reinforced by the reawakened mythology of Russian uniqueness and other Soviet nations’ accelerated process of korenizatsiia (rooting or indigenization), associated the Jews with a “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Being non-indigenous, they were deprived of electoral rights at their dispersed locations (lishentsy) and forced into separate agricultural communities in order to create national territorial units. “This policy deepened the feeling among national minorities that they did not belong and so should move to a territory where they formed the national minority. Most importantly, it reinforced the belief of national majorities that minorities did not belong and should be expelled.” (Martin 2001: 44) As Arendt (1979: 269) summarizes, after Word War I “denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” followed by the expulsion and extermination. In addition to that, in the Soviet Union it was backed by tradition: unlike the assimilated West European Jews, Russian Jews lived in ghettoes exposed to regular pogroms throughout the nineteenth century. Before the 1890s they did not even begin to enter Russian literature and the doors of Russian universities were only thrown open to them after 1917 (Deutscher 1968: 55, 64–69). By adhering to the Revolution’s early “cosmopolitanism without a polis” (Tihanov 2011) – after all, Revolution was their “entrance ticket” to the culture that for centuries had kept them at distance – Russian Formalists attempted to prevent the consequences of Soviet nationalization.

78

For the important role of ideology in unstable post-imperial democracies, see Hanson 2010.

79

Tihanov (2004: 424) rightly associates the Formalist with the Romanticist conception of literature but does not develop this thesis further.

80

For the conservative deployment of the oppositional Formalist concept of estrangement, as well as its constitutive ambiguity, see Tihanov (2005: 686).

81

In Kant (2007: 65), Probierstein is translated as “criterion.”

82

Translation slightly modified: Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen muss (Kant 1969: 12n).

83

As Arendt (1992: 44–45) reminds us, not only Heine and Marx called Kant the philosopher of the French Revolution, but also the prominent representatives of French revolutionaries themselves. Yet what truly affiliates him to the French Revolution are less his scattered remarks on the topic in The Conflict of the Faculties, Perpetual Peace or The Metaphysics of Morals, but rather the genuinely self-revolutionizing obligation assigned to every individual to systematically evacuate, by way of reflective judgment, his or her experientially generated communal prejudgments. For the connection between Kant’s unprecedented aesthetic judgment and the inapplicable legal norm of the French Revolution, see Agamben (2005a: 37).

84

Nietzsche is, to recall, the last “link” in Agamben’s genealogy of what I have interpreted as the cosmopolitan operation (Agamben 2005b: 95–112).

85

Tomention just two “classical works,”Aage Hansen-Löve in his voluminous Der russische Formalism us refers to Nietzsche only three times and Peter Steiner in Russian Formalism for his part not at all. In his genealogy of Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement, Ginzburg (1996) also completely omits Nietzsche, as does Tihanov (2005). A modest exception to this rule is James M. Curtis, who briefly touches on the question in the conclusion of his Mikhail Bakhtin. A more notable exception, however, is Dragan Kujundžiæ’s book-length investigation of Russian Nietzscheans after modernity. He refers to one of Groy’s unpublished manuscripts in which the “Formalist interpretation of the history of culture as a battle of various artistic wills” (Kujundžiæ 1997: 12) is firstly derived from the Nietzschean understanding of the world as a power struggle and secondly from Nietzsche’s philosophy of vitalism. But Kujundžiæ focuses in the first place on the concept of history, whereas my tertium comparation is is the “cosmopolitan” creativity of the “plebeian spirit.”

86

Inasmuch as the surplus of people, as the epitome of that which is wrong in democracy, is rendered negotiable rather than irredeemable by Rancière (1999), his vision of democracy, in my opinion, belongs to the same redemption narrative. For more on this, see chapter twelve. However, he remains ambiguous on this question and can also be interpreted in the way as I have done in previous chapters.

87

As is well known, the “event” is an important concept in Foucault’s vocabulary, but as regards “eventialization,” he nevertheless asks his audience to pardon l'horreur du mot.

In the Introduction he calls it “strange or out of the way” (2007: 26).

89

Kant does not speak here of the transcendental principle because the latter must be taken from an “other quarter” (2007: 15).

90

For the overlap of Bakhtin’s ideas with those of Friedrich Schlegel (whom Bakhtin mentions in several instances), especially in the Athenäum-Fragments and the Letter on the Novel in the Dialogue on Poetry, see Tihanov 2000: 58–59, 145, and 250.

For these two types of the plot that refer, via Barthes’s narratological résumé (1966), to the relationship between Benveniste’s axes of distribution and integration, see Chatman 1978: 48.

92

All of them, in one way or another, were associated with decolonized Algeria (Young 2001: 413), as was Barthes’s “literary hero” Camus after all.

93

Foucault states of these heterotopias that they “dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source […] dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (1971: 18).

94

In rendering Herr as lord and Knecht as bondsman, I am following A. V. Miller’s translation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. I find these terms more appropriate than master and slave.

95

It is worth noting here that the French term vicieux (Blanchot 1986b: 23) better invokes the circulus vitiosus, i.e. desperate circling between the empirical and transcendental forever prevented from completing itself than does the English “flawed.”

96

The French le neutre (1969: 297) is misleadingly rendered as “the neutral” in the American translation (1993: 199).

97

The parenthesized section (“travailleur sans qualification, donc un je ne sais quoi ou un je ne sais qui” (Blanchot 1986b: 17)) is astonishingly dropped from the American translation.

98

To be more accurate, Derrida avoids the concept of ethics (because he criticized its use by Levinas), choosing instead “sanctity” in order to align with it his concept of justice. However, as Levinas himself explains (Poirié 1987: 95), he replaced the Greek term ethics with sainteté only in order to avoid the connoted subordination of ethics to ontology and not to change its basic meaning. Accordingly, there is no substantial difference between his use of the terms ethics and sanctity.

99

As for the “other ways,” Derrida explicitly warns that pure face-to-face communication with the Other (i.e. without the mediation of the “small [political] other”) might result in perilous consequences, i.e. the impossibility of distinguishing between good and evil, love and hate, giving and taking etc. (1997: 66).

100

Published as a separate book a posteriori, the French original contains an addition that is even more explicit in this regard: “Abandonnée à elle seule, l'idée incalculable et donatrice de la justice est toujours au plus près dumal, voire du pire car elle peut toujours être réappropriée par le calcul le plus pervers. C'est toujours possible et cela fait partie de la folie dont nous parlions à l'instant. Une assurance absolue contre ce risque ne peut que saturer ou suturer l'ouverture de l'appel à la justice, un appel toujours blessé.” (Derrida 1994c: 61)

101

Derrida blends each other with the Altogether Other in the same way: “Tout autre est tout autre (Each other is Altogether Other)” (1992e: 68, 76–77, 1995b: 68, 78).

For a similarly Manichean confrontation of American fundamentalism and conservative ideology with European democracy and tolerance, see Said 2002. Inasmuch as the global order of today’s world still clearly displays national infrastructure, suchanti-Americanism “which divides good and evil by polluting the United States and purifying any collectivity, ideology or region that comes to represent the other side,” “elides the systemic processes at play” in it, i.e. the inevitable power asymmetry between the nation-states (Alexander 2012: 162).

103

For the association between the non-European colonized and the European working populace see the following comment: “[A] colonial metaphor of missionary appropriation, which was first tested on the Indian subcontinent, was subsequently applied to the English working class […]” (Steele 1997: 4). The English working class was blamed for the same deficits as Moslems or Hindus: immorality, sensuality, self-indulgence, corruption, and depravity (57). In such a way, Cultural Studies unveils the operations of Agamben’s “anthropological machine” continuously producing exceptions at the same time outside and inside the political realm. The state of exception becomes the normal state of modern Western culture. However, unlike Agamben, Cultural Studies offers a cosmopolitan solution for this injustice.

104

Levinas acknowledges only maternal femininity as a form of responsible existence, not the feminine caress and voluptuosity. “Eroticism is a loss of perspective. It does not aspire to the infinite transcendence required for desire, which is reserved for the absolute alterity of the divine. As an evasion of significance, the feminine can never take on the aspect of divine for Levinas. The dimension of the intimacy in the midst of existence is opened by the feminine, not the dimension of transcendence.” (Vasseleu 1998: 106) For further discussion of this question, see also Irigaray (1993: 185–207) and Chanter (2001: 170–224).

105

Levinas’s insistence on the irreducible singularity of events and his resistance to their assimilation in the historical narrative is a peculiar reversal of Foucault’s demand for the “eventialization” (1996: 393; événementialisation (1990: 47–48)) of history, i.e. a persistent disengagement of constituencies from the historical whole as well as incessant separation of the present from the past. In Foucault’s idea, instead of being determined by history, each present event assumes a potentially determining, that is to say critical position with regard to the past. In Levinas’s idea, the resistance to the closing-up of historical narrative comes from the past rather than present events. The unresolved past, and not the present, “perforates” the historical flow.

The authors do not explicitly mention Levinas but, considering their vocabulary, the association is unavoidable.

107

For a similarly ambiguous character of the Levinasian face whose “eye speaks,” see 1961: 38, 66, 1976: 8 and 1991: 123–124as well as Gürtler 2001: 106. According to Butler 2004b: 135, Levinas introduces a face that announces its suffering in an inhuman voice.

108

The use of his is done on purpose to indicate the German Romanticist perspective.

109

Rancière states in the first of his Ten Theses on Politics (2001: 1) that “politics is not the exercise of power” but “the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject,” a distinctive kind of subject who takes part in “the fact of ruling and the fact of being ruled.”

110

For the whole elaboration of the idea of literary misunderstanding, see the second chapter of The Politics of Literature (2011b: 31–45).

For Rancière’s understanding of the “police” (as against the “political”) see 1995: 11–20, 1999: 21–42, 61–65, 2001.

112

According to Vardoulakis (2010), Jean Paul coined this term to question the metaphysical autonomy of the Enlightenment self-sufficient subject. In the place of self-sufficiency he introduced an essential relationality located in an agonistic political space, to which decisions and judgment are germane.

113

In the following, I am indebted to the illuminating reading of Benjamin offered by Butler 2012: 69–113.

114

See also Butler 2013: 122–123. To be sure, a number of scholars dealing with Arendt’s work recently followed the same “agonistic” reading of her philosophy. See for example Disch 1997; Machart 2005; or Meints-Stender 2007.

115

In opposing law, however, Arendt admittedly vacillates between “liberal” (Kantian) recourse to an extralegal sovereignty, which brings her close to Carl Schmitt, and “radical” recourse to the field of irreducible plurality, which brings her close to Benjamin. See Butler 2012: 173–175.