5.8 Translating the “iron law of kinship” into the “free competition of values”: The U.S.-American trauma narrative

This spontaneous authorization of world literature by the most heterogeneous participants who self-sacrificially consent to join it undermines the enthusiastic reading of Goethe’s Weltliteratur proposed by the Moroccan Germanist Fawzi Boubia (1985, 1988). Unreservedly endorsed by Pizer (2006: 27–28), he refutes the charges against its Eurocentric character. Goethe respects the particularity of non-European “others,” the argument goes, advocating the movement toward the non-European Other and not a dominion over it or its leveling to European dimensions. This thesis finds a supporter in David Damrosch (2003: 13). Damrosch, quoting a passage from Eckermann in which Goethe dismisses medieval Germanic and Serbian poetry by treating both as “barbaric popular poetry” of only provisional interest for the serious writer, regards this to be “not, or not primarily, Eurocentrism,” since elitism and Eurocentrism strike him as partly “competing values.” The problem is, unfortunately, that in Goethe’s argument they go strictly hand in hand, making a quite inseparable couple. The incessant normative activity of passing judgments and correcting aberrations – disciplining the most diverse participants to comply with the set rules of participation by abandoning their “inherited identity garbage” – transforms Weltliteratur tacitly from an emancipating agency into one which is oppressive. Being constitutively dependent on verification by its manifold adherents, the cosmopolitan operation of trauma narratives cannot avoid perversion into an instrument of their colonization. The same “democratic malformation” happened, after all, to Herder’s Weltpoesie based on Naturdichtung as well as to August Schlegel’s universal poetry (canon of masterpieces, A. Schlegel 1965:14) and Goethe’s Weltliteratur proves, albeit long after his death, unable to escape it, – all the advertent or inadvertent “makeup” applied by his domestic and international interpreters notwithstanding. Yet Goethe himself, being a well-trained pupil of Plato, was terrified by this sinister prospect of an idea, which was forged to circumvent it. This is why he tirelessly, albeit ultimately vainly, reaffirms its elitism.

In the famous conversation of January 31, 1827 (1987: 249–250), for example, he firstly shares with Eckermann the democratic thought that poetry is a common good of humankind in which some are a little bit better, swim a little bit longer at the top than the others, and that’s all. As poetry is a universal human matter, nobody should delude himself he is a great poet just because he has written a good poem. Yet he was at that time already frightened by the consequences of this initially Herderian literary doctrine to which he subscribed in 1773, when he edited a collection of Alsatian folk songs together with Herder. In the meantime, this early democratic initiative of hugely expanding the idea of literature gave rise to the neo-German religio-patriotic art (neu-deutsche religiös-patriotische Kunst) which he now abhorred (Meyer-Kalkus 2010:101). What was once intended to be broadly democratic was thus turned into the self-enclosed national-conservative opposite. With his Weltliteratur, Goethe pretended to obviate this destiny of Naturdichtung, which is why he could not permit everybody to usurp it. It had to be saved from such vulgarization by its uncultivated consumers in the same way as the restriction of the Greek nomos to a small circle of domestic agencies tended to prevent the (forthcoming Roman) evaporation of the political in an incalculable system of imperial expansion (Arendt 2010:119).

He therefore immediately, in the continuation of the same conversation, returns to the Greek elitist cosmopolitan position: Such universal poetry certainly concerns Chinese, Serbian poetry or the Nibelungenlied, which are exclusively of a transitory historical interest, but not Greek Antiquity, which is of an immortal aesthetic interest. In the slightly later notes from the Makariens Archiv (1829, 1987: 284) he is even more unambiguous: “Chinese, Indian, Egyptian antiquities are always just curiosities; it is recommendable to make oneself and the world acquainted with them; but they would be not especially fruitful for our moral and aesthetic education/formation (Bildung).” This is the reason why “Orientals” can never stand comparison with the Greeks and Romans or the Nibelungen with the Iliad for that matter (174); they simply belong to different categories, since the first represent false or transient values and the second those that are true or deep. Because of the “Oriental predilection” to lump together what is most remote, contradictory and incommensurable (169), Goethe also rejects the literary work of his younger contemporary Jean Paul (175–177). Instead of trying to distill from the world’s diversity its underlying true equivalent (wahres Äquivalent) patterned according to the Ancient Greek model, Jean Paul uses this diversity as a coin for momentary rhetorical effects. Such “Oriental” literary rhetoric only degrades poetry, bereaving it of its true substance (178). Poetry is therefore no longer a universal human matter: all Oriental literatures, the Serbian and the old Germanic epic as well as Romantic mannerists like Jean Paul are expelled from its blessing.

They are not completely inapplicable, admittedly, but of restricted use in the envisioned world literary community of elective affiliates. Oriental culture can be used just as a “refreshing source” to “strengthen the peculiarity of our spirit,” but certainly not as its law-giving pattern (FA II 6: 642). “Goethe has never abandoned Shakespeare in favor of Nizâmî.” (Birus 1995:19) The same holds for Naturdichtung: original but primitive, it can be reasonably exploited only as a raw material. Even if Goethe urges his compatriots to apply the Herderian Einfühlungsvermögen (empathic ability) in their approach to Serbian folk poetry, when he accordingly advises them to pay the Serbs a “personal visit” he describes the Serbian “rough land” as if it lay somewhere far behind, “several centuries ago” (FA I 22: 686). And when he was indeed once invited, during his journey through Italy, by the Prince of Waldeck to cross the Adriatic Sea and pay the “Morlacks” a “personal visit,” he declined with uneasiness, “distinctly not interested in travelling across the Adriatic” (Wolff 2001: 192). The imagined geography, pleasing by its self-complimenting operations, refuses to be embarrassed by the real one. Even if he recommended “to read every poet in his own language and the peculiar district of his time and habits” (FA I 3: 270) and “to strive to approach the foreign as closely as possible” (FA I 3: 293), he himself read the Chinese novel of manners Yü-chao-li – a “marginal Chinese literary work of minor importance” (Wang 2011, 296) – in a free French translation and adaptation (Les deux cousines, 1826). In the same way, he retranslated the Serbian epic from the poor Italian translation. Recalling this episode fifty years later, he even claims he translated it from the accompanying French in Countess Rosenberg’s Morlackische Notizen, which were not published until 1788, i.e. too late to be used for his translation (Wolff 2001: 192) – a neat example of how unconcerned he was about translations of “barbaric” literary products. It seems he did not exactly expect the translation of such marginal literary works to be of the highest sort – according to his typology (1987: 181–185) – that gives up its own language in order to closely stick to the original; an informative, plainly prosaic translation, which is the lowest sort in his hierarchy, completely suffices. The “heightened attentiveness” that protects one from “easy familiarizing projections” practiced by the ignorant mob is not exactly necessary here. Oriental non-European or indeed European literatures all serve merely for rude orientation. From the Western perspective, they make up “the rest” which “we must look at only historically; appropriating for ourselves what is good, so far as we can” (250). The non-European or less-than-European literatures and cultures, in a way, remain up for arbitrary grabs for their prominent European counterparts; what counts are their motives, certainly not language, discourse or style.

The great West European literatures, on the contrary, serve Goethe as highly important refracting mirrors that, unlike the Oriental ones, fully deserve the attentiveness of Kantian Hineinversetzen or Herderian Einfühlungsvermögen. If one wants to truly understand them, meticulous and patient translation of their genuine otherness has to penetrate what is untranslatable in them (Beim Übersetzen muß man bis ans Unübersetzliche herangehen, 308). Goethe does not fear to be crushed by them like his modest compatriots, since the French, British and Italians were the first to acknowledge and invite him into their international company and not vice versa. His almost imperially self-confident Weltliteratur therefore does not emerge from German literary and cultural inferiority as Damrosch claims. At stake is an initiative not merely richly prepared by numerous domestic translations, as indicated above, but also powerfully corroborated from abroad. Nobody comes upon the idea of forging global designs without such accreditations. Because of outlined interferences between these cultures, Damrosch’s clear-cut opposition between French cosmopolitanism “from above” and German cosmopolitanism “from below” has to be substantially revised, i.e., reintroduced within each of these respective corpuses. They are far from being as robust as Damrosch (along with many others) portrays them for the polemical purpose of defending his own argument. As cosmopolitanism splits into agencies and enablers, those who speak for it and those in the name of whom it speaks – and this not only along national but also economic, social and gender lines, – it necessarily contains an internal redoubling. Underneath its “elitist” face, the “democratic” element is submerged, underneath its “mind” its “body.” No external opposition or “blaming of the ignorant” can cancel out this constitutive gap. No “subject of” exists without a “subject to” that persistently undermines its sovereignty. Rather than being consistent and continuous, cosmopolitanism is a split and discontinuous undertaking.

As the Goethe specialist Anne Bohnenkamp was the first to notice, his idea of world literature was “directly connected with his perception of the international reception of his own works” (2000: 187 [emphasis mine]). It was not that he initially and anxiously looked after the foreign mirrors but instead, in a creatively sovereign reaction, reflected on their mirroring, mirrored their refractions back, retransferred their transfers, received their reception, retranslated their translations. In sum, he creatively enhanced and propelled the process of literary exchange, and precisely this is how his equivocal narrative of world literature came into being. In the final analysis, all this consolatory acceptance, praising, translating, staging, reviewing and censoring of his work (Goethe 1987: 243, who here again “modestly” speaks of “us”) enormously contributed to Goethe’s imperial self-understanding (Meyer-Kalkus 2010: 105–106). As the refractions “from one mirror to another do not fade but ignite each other” (FA I, 17: 371) the wide world suddenly became an “expanded fatherland,” i.e. a substantially improved version of what he was desperately missing at home. After all, a number of his distinguished contemporaries such as Novalis, the brothers Schlegel, Fichte, Jean Paul, and Mme de Staël were also firmly convinced that the moment had come for Germans to take command of the world partition of symbolic values. They were expected “to unite all the advantages of the most varied nationalities” in order “to create a cosmopolitan midpoint for the human spirit” (A. Schlegel 1965: 36). To reiterate “[…] cosmopolitanism starts as a moral universalism but often degenerates into imperial globalism. […] The continuous slide of cosmopolitan ideas towards empire is one of the dominant motifs of modernity.” (Douzinas 2007:159)

Thus the conclusion would be that, opposite to Damrosch’s consistently onedimensional reading in favor of the “free competition” of cultural values, Goethe’s Weltliteratur nonetheless amounts to an imperial “system of self-securing” of his and the German shaken self in the sense defined by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (quoted by Damrosch, 8). This imperial self-securing system of world literature, “in enlarging its view ‘from China to Peru,’ may become all the more imperialistic, seeing in every horizon of difference new peripheries of its own centrality, new pathologies through which its own normativity may be defined and must be asserted” (Smith 1988:54). Smith’s characterization neatly harmonizes with Arendt’s description ofRoman “cosmopolitanism toward the inferior others,” which regards the other as a mere extension of the noble Roman breed (Arendt 2010:120). In Roman imperial terms, the other was saved from annihilation not “out of mercy, but for the sake of the expansion of the polis, which from now on was expected to include even the most foreign members in a new alliance of comrades” (116). Far from being a firm and enclosed canon (as was the contemporary Romantic Universalpoesie), Goethe’s adaptable and steadily contextually fed movement of world literature that swallows up ever-new participants thus gradually, despite his reluctance, acquired the Roman profile. Goethe as the engineer of world literature and the Germans as its collective beneficiaries systematically capitalized the “reiterated mirroring” and “mutual illuminations” (Bohnenkamp 2000: 202–203) provided by its numerous adherents. According to a lucid early remark by Ernst Robert Curtius, world literature was from the very beginning meant as a “meeting point of many references, a center of diverging perspectives: formulated as a mission” (ein Aufgegebenes; Curtius 1954: 46; Bohnenkamp 2000: 202), it accumulated profit as capital does by its very definition. Being shaped as steadily agglomerating symbolic capital – and note that without exception recent German interpreters also avoid this point – it was meant exclusively for agencies in the globalizing operations of circulation. The remaining unfit candidates (like the non-European, less-than-European, pre-modern or indeed Romanticist mannerist literatures for that matter) were expelled in advance from the international circulation, transformation and translation that enables the symbolic enrichment of its participants – as Damrosch (2003: 4–5) significantly circumscribes the essence of world literature. Being rejected by a fine-tuned “garbage disposal” that hideously supervised its normative procedure, they were relegated to the category of enablers, the “working and producing” residue of all compensatory trauma narratives. This amorphous surplus follows the triumphant rise of world literature like an uncanny shadow.

Systematically stamped, marginalized, and excommunicated by the relentless normative work of this global autopoetic system,64 these enablers were captured in the immobile, restricted and benighted realm of national literatures (Damrosch 2003: 6). Locked in such a way, they were prevented from gaining and benefitting from cultural exchanges and concomitantly bereft of any chance to function as the prestigious exchange value for all the others. Destined to be deployed at best selectively, partially and occasionally as raw material, rather than permanently exchanged, differentiated and refined in the ongoing globalizing operations, they were condemned to the status of local and anonymous use values devoid of global identity, relevance and acknowledgement. To put their condition in the famous terms of Arendt, they were bereft of the right to bear rights. “Certainly some works are so culture-bound that they can be meaningful to a home-grown audience and specialists in the area,” Damrosch points out in his recent book on How to Read World Literature in a sentence that strongly reminds us of Moretti. “[T]hose texts remain within the realm of their original national or regional culture.” (Damrosch 2003: 2)

Yet who is authorized, and by whom, to ultimately determine which texts have deserved confinement within their village fence? And is such “systemic judgment” not necessarily biased and culture-bound itself, i.e., induced by the ignorance or fear of the disqualified “exotic” language, literature and culture? Besides, if the production and proliferation of such telluric, indistinctive, nonexchangeable and untranslatable “pockets of disability” is an unavoidable corollary of the self-propelling autopoietic system of world literature, then the habitual attitude of the inhabitants of these pockets to world literature has to be reexamined. The enthusiastic endorsement of its operations, feverishly trying to scratch and crawl the enabler’s way into their “blessed realm” at the cost of thereby being denigrated to the status of a temporally anterior and spatially exterior object with regard to the systemic mainstream (Shih 2004:17), risks the elimination of these “systemic outputs” from the field of political attention. Are we therefore not better advised to raise the question as to who in the last analysis is authorizing, promoting, and canonizing this imperial system, and with what motivation, purpose and benefit? “To world and to globalize, then, would have to be parsed in light of their subject agencies and their object predicates. World and globalization, thus, would be imputable actions, rather than anonymous phenomena.” (Kadir 2004: 2)

If we are about if not to stop, then at least ameliorate the devastating national compartmentalization of literature which, as a number of scholars indicated, turns out to be the direct consequence of the much-trumpeted and triumphant integration under the banner of world literature, are we not obliged to reopen and explore this question again and again? If the conflict between proper citizens or persons and the ignorant and amorphous mob is inherent in the cosmopolitan project of democracy since the Greeks, then, in order to proceed democratically we should not permit its obliteration, but reiterate it. Democracy pertains to the many, the contradictory in-between created by these many; no single model of Proper Man conceived as imago Dei can erase this contradiction (Arendt 2010:119). Therefore, in order for democracy to remain a permanent litigation between the many, the relation of global domination based on the imposition of common law, as represented in the existing projects of world literature, must confront continuous disagreement rather than be smoothly perpetuated. If world literature does indeed want to be democratic, then it has the task of highlighting the irresolvable conflict that underlies its cosmopolitanism rather than the task of persistent suppression of this conflict for the benefit of a supposed “unity-to-come.” In lieu of being an “unfinished project” that has to be brought to its harmonic completion, world literature is a project never to be finished because of the split inherent to it. Maintenance of its democratic character, not its celebrated “dialogue of equals” but its neglected constitutive disagreement between agencies and enablers has to be consistently practiced. What this unflagging practice is intended to foreground is that world literature is not so much a generous project of reconciling the divided parties, as it is regularly presented to be, but rather a compensatory project designed to come to terms with the underlying trauma of division. While systematically healing one traumatic experience, however, it cannot but inflict others.

World literature can treat these daily multiplying and “heterotopic”65 systemic outputs in two principal ways. The one well-established approach devoted to the maintenance and expansion of the system at all costs is to hideously clean them up and channel them away, using, to put it metaphorically, the technique of toilet paper, water closet and septic holes. In the consensual circles of agencies, this is dubbed “decent behavior” and is understood. This approach amounts to the state conception of democracy. The other approach is to explore how it comes that, due to such habitual self-maintaining operations of the autopoietic system of world literature, numerous literatures are doomed to suffocate in “the pockets of poverty” relegated to marginal zones envisioned for the “garbage disposal.” This approach does not acknowledge the taken-for-granted assumption that such a proliferation of “outcasts” is necessary if we are to have world literature but focuses instead both on the restricted character of the worldness of such literature as well as the limited nature of this we. This is an attitude that amounts to the conception of democracy as practice. However, as we have seen, the two delineated conceptions of democracy do not only oppose, but also imply each other.

David Damrosch enlists the following core attributes of world literature: (1) the profitable overlapping of different groupings of works, (2) the establishment of highly intriguing family resemblances between them (2003: 281–288), (3) the concomitant work’s abstraction from its origins (300), as well as (4) the detached engagement that this requires on the part of the researcher (297). In a stunning passage, which clearly anticipates this list, Manfred Koch, in his informed, attentive and well-documented study on Weimar’s Inhabitants of the World, states:

For Koch, Goethe undertakes a systematic dissolution of the historical boundary drawn by the moderns with the aim of securing the global transnational character of their literary achievements. To such a feverish novelty addiction, he opposes the deep quietude and steadiness of collective memory (154). This is how Roman imperial cosmopolitanism oriented toward the assimilation of others reemerges in “Greek clothing.” That is to say, in the same move in which Goethe denies the imperial global sovereignty of the new he establishes the elitist global sovereignty of the old, vastly extending its area of responsibility. With this global restaging of the ancient, the departed legacy renews its claim to sovereignty. Goethe thus subjects the form of the systemic interpretation of the world to harsh critique whenever the moderns as its carriers are concerned, but it powerfully resurfaces in relation to the ancients (156). This means that Goethe, surreptitiously as it were, takes up the idea of sovereignty from the French revolutionaries with whom he otherwise waged a war on all levels. It is not the systemic ambition itself that changes, but merely its terms. Instead of being immediately given, the systemic whole of the world shaped by the lost Greeks has to be earned through mediation. If modern artistic revolutionaries namely claim they have forever broken with self-enclosed domestic tradition in the name of universality, he, as if quieting the disquietude provoked by their “revolution,” discovers in this supposedly discarded tradition a continuity of analogous breaks. “The sovereignty of Goethe the observer stems from his ad hoc exhibition of the structure of the new and modern experience of time which enables him, through a retreat from it, to escape into the ancient and perpetual.” (157) Perpetuation guarantees continuity, which for its part levels all conflicts and controversies.

Yet this disclosure of the deep-seated ancient structure of the new, if it wants to make itself convincing, is by no means an easy operation, as the latter is an immensely mobile, diverse and multifaceted phenomenon. “In Notes and Essays on the West-Eastern Divan the poet is clearly presented as a bazaar trader who picks up the goods of the most diverse cultural provenances and composes from them new collections, which makes him a governor and mixer of traditional stocks rather than an autochthonous creator.” (Koch 2002:161) Goethe is aware that the consciousness of the modern reader is overloaded with stories of various origins and imageries, differing narrative techniques and levels. Therefore he, to attract this reader’s attention, includes in Conversations of German Expatriates (1795), like a good tradesman in the warehouse, a colorful mass of catchy stories, anecdotes and news next to the high literature. That is to say, the unity of scattered expatriates must be achieved not through a declaratory imposition from above but rather through an integrating examination of their discordances from below, which makes Goethe prefer the polyphonic stream of an open-ended conversation (168). His entire hope is that thereby “the whirl of modern dispersed memory could be transferred, by means of the reiterated mirroring evoked by his text, into a slow rhythm of foundational memory” (175). The compromise with the bazaar and the warehouse, conceived as the epitomes of despised vulgar cosmopolitanism, is evidently transitory. There is a carefully organized system behind them.

A systemic integration of a huge stockpile of the mutually historically, linguistically and culturally very remote literary works, introduced by Goethe two centuries ago as a sovereignty-warranting method and reestablished by Damrosch today, is therefore a foundational work that distills from their very specific use values their basic and profitable exchange value. It performs this (symbolic) capitalization, to reiterate Damrosch’s list of world literature’s core attributes, through (1) the careful detachment of the project’s “carier group,” (2) abstraction of literary works from their origins, (3) their concomitant intersection, translation and overlapping which ultimately force them into (4) new family resemblances. Literary works give up their old families not in favor of a different type of their commonbeing but in favor of a new family grouped around the absent, i.e. obliterated father. Reintroducing via His self-appointed representatives the passion for unity, the systemic project of world literature opens the door for the renewed terror of the One over the Many. As Arendt noticed, structuring human species on the model of family kinship brutally erases its political plurality and irreducible diversity (2010: 10–11), paving the way for the terrorism of all those who do not fit it.

This is exactly what Goethe’s Weltliteratur does. Published for the first time almost a quarter of century after the Conversations, the West-Eastern Divan, an exemplary work of world literature avant la lettre, intensifies unification of the most disparate elements via the mutual mirroring and splitting of opposites. In order to force an overarching family unity into the potentially broad diversity, Goethe pushes such dissolution and volatilization of identities to a hitherto unimaginable limit which eventually effectuates a melting of national individualities into what appeared to him to be universally human (Koch 2002:195). God is, after all, presented in the Divan as a liberal old man whose indifferent command of the world does not allow for beginnings and ends, boundaries and restrictions. To his “neutrality” comparable to the one of Bakhtin’s “Third in the dialogue” (Bakhtin 1979: 305–306, 371) everything appears to be provisional and contingent, caught in the dissolving movement of becoming.66 Yet how truly indifferent and detached can an instance be that eventually capitalizes the whole process, forcing its participants to comply with its terms? In a significant self-apostrophe in the poem “Unlimited” (Unbegrenzt), written just four years before the Divan, and omitted by Koch, Goethe, as the forthcoming engineer of world literature, seems to have come as close as possible to the highest commanding position bereft of all other interests except the steady accumulation of (symbolic) profit:

Tirelessly switching between the registers of perception, imagination and remembrance as well as the multiple roles in which he alternately presents his “I” (emigrant, traveler, merchant and poet), in the Divan Goethe is at constant pains to integrate the dispersed and heterogeneous readership aesthetically. He thereby creates “an alliance of those who understand what is at stake in these texts – and who are united without the statute, without knowing each other, but through the bond of common aesthetic experience” (Koch 2002:218). Building an abstract network of mutual understanding and social intercourse, the Divan is a standing invitation to those readers willing to participate to firstly drop their inherited cultural baggage, intellectual affiliations and alliances, to disregard the goal-oriented performances of their everyday lives in order to join the “grand family of the initiated” “scattered all over Germany and the world” (218). Through such an extension of the bonds of human affection toward a cosmopolitan family of like-minded individuals securely severed from the ignorant masses of their anonymous fellow creatures, Goethe trusted, as Bakhtin (1986: 23) once enthusiastically observed, that he could enable the becoming of his self to be realized parallel to that of the world. After all, Kant, especially in his political philosophy, tended to observe the world from the same imperial and apparently impartial cosmopolitan perspective and with the same supposedly selfless participation (uneigennütziger Teilnehmung) that in the Critique of Judgment he required for the judging of a work of art (Arendt 1992:73).67 But how many people could afford the same dissolution of a local identity refuge, the need for which was keenly felt, in the systematically postponing, relaxed creative and divinely sovereign manner of these “world family” engineers? As Ken Hirschkop (1999: 238) caustically noticed, “what Goethe saw [around himself] was not the evidence of a generalized human creativity.” “Only some of the subjects of Goethe’s time laboured ‘creatively’; most of them worked technically, to satisfy immediate needs and the commands of their superiors.” This is why very few of these “local enablers” could recognize his invitation to join the prosperous “world literature community,” let alone accept and follow it systematically. It was after all, in its elitist self-exemption, from the very start structured to maintain itself against those who could not recognize the same invitation. Behind the Roman cosmopolitan assimilation of others lurks the Greek cosmopolitan separation from them. The two thus continually intersect.

As Goethe takes care to permeate the Divan’s consistent “rustle of inter textuality” and “arabesque combinatory” with a clear authorial will organically linked to the exemplary antique legacy, an arrogant aristocratic gesture is directed against the deluded “Oriental crowd” because of its inability to establish a clear connection with it. In fact, the vertiginous presumptuousness of this work is engaged with the aim of fencing off such “Orientals” (identified with the “moderns”) lacking insight into the magnificent past that shimmers through the work of art (Koch 2002: 225). For what is truly universal in literature, its final truth, cannot possibly be expressed in a direct way, but only through the most diverse effects, refractions and mirroring (Bohnenkamp 2000: 203). Nonetheless, an attentive reader (Aufmerkende) will know how to penetrate to it beyond the distracting appearance (Goethe WA IV 43: 83). “That which is truthful is godlike, it does not appear immediately; we must divine it from its manifestations.” (FA I 10: 746) This holds for the true writer’s approach to nature, in whose confusing abundance s/he must capture the all-uniting essence, as well as the true reader’s approach to a literary work, in whose dense particularity s/he must discover the shine of universality. Yet befallen by the myriad of diverse manifestations, how many readers can carry out such complex derivation in an appropriate way? And who is in the final instance authorized to determine which one of the manifold ways is appropriate? Who can claim to be in possession of the truth? Complaining that in Goethe’s magnificent whirl “everything invokes everything, which makes one’s mind quite dizzy,” none other than Hugo von Hofmannsthal was to be one of its innumerous perplexed victims among German contemporaries (Hofmannstahl 1979:442; Koch 2002:188). “The society of readers with aesthetic feeling is in principle endlessly extendable; the only entrance ticket is the sense of ‘excellence’ and the will to affirm it in the face of the changing fashion of the zeitgeist.” (Koch 2002:225) Whoever lacks this sense and the will to accomplish ‘excellence,’ from the systemic perspective that sells the entrance tickets for it of course, inevitably finds that the door to the world community is locked. “The West-Eastern Divan is an invocation of memory and the eternal legacy of the past and its founding books.” (227)

In establishing an instructive genealogy of Goethe’s idea of world literature, Manfred Koch emphasizes, contrary to the usual “generously democratic” interpretations, the concept’s covert elitist, classicist and discriminating structure. Surreptitiously suppressing its initially emancipating historical character of a literary-political alliance with the affiliate foreign writers against the domestic strictures and pressures, world literature gradually acquires an oppressive aesthetic profile of a detached community of the like-minded. They systematically disconnect themselves, freely and playfully exchanging their symbolic values, from all obligations toward their cultural origin and associated fellow creatures. Their exchange values ultimately come to be inapplicable and strange for these creatures. Yet the established “world literature community” with its strong inclination toward the exemption from, parenthesizing and abstraction of the inherited identity constraints does not just disqualify and discriminate innumerous writers, works and readers that existentially depend on them and are therefore doomed to the existence of this community’s systemic outputs. Beyond this expulsion, it substantially impoverishes the systemic constituents themselves. In order to participate in the established equivalence value and to profit from the intellectual trade set in motion by it, they must be relegated to the suitable series, mode and category, which forces them to abandon everything unfitting to these identity marks and in so doing to give up their resilience to the imposed terms of trade.

David Damrosch in How to Read World Literature (2009: 5) stresses that “discussions here are by no means intended as full-scale readings, but are given as examples of general issues and as portals into extended readings.” Yet the whole argument developed above guides us to the inference that the very methodology of the system theory of world literature68 – whether this system is autopoietic or, as in the case of Moretti and Casanova, self-enclosed – necessarily transforms literary works into “examples” and “portals” of systemic operations. Close reading of literary works is equally remote to Damrosch as it is to Moretti or Casanova for that matter: they are systemic thinkers dealing with arbitrary, abstract items compelled to dispose with their immobilizing social and cultural inheritance in order to prepare themselves for the mobile process of their capitalization. Without respect for the foreignness of the foreign, Damrosch accordingly bereaves literary works of their specific memory. Freeing them in such a way from their cultural resilience to or historical ignorance of the new “world family,” he transfers them into its abstract terms with regard to which they, despite their deeply unequal and hardly reconcilable starting positions, must prove equally responsible. Contrary to Goethe’s Greek elitism, such a powerful assimilation of the foreign obviously draws on the tradition of Roman cosmopolitanism, limitlessly ready to integrate others upon the condition that they comply with the terms set by the heir. In the process of the Romanization of the provinces, Roman components, although interactive and adaptable rather than given and static, dominated at the expense of the indigeneous ones. Their dissemination assured historical progress. Roman rule was presented as providing the conditions for human beings to fully realize their potential by becoming civilized and so truly human. This is why Roman civilizing “might be compared to the demolition of street upon street of old houses, materials from which were used to create a towerblock to house the former inhabitants in a new style” (Wolf 1998:47). The same kind of restructuring holds for the Americanization of world literature.

Damrosch eliminates Goethe’s German-centered elitism from his interpretation of the idea of Weltliteratur exactly in order to obliterate his world literature’s culturally impregnated profile. As we have seen, he states that a “provincial writer,” being “free from the bonds of an inherited tradition,” “can engage all the more fully, and by mature choice, with a broader literary world,” “to seek out a variety of networks of transmission and reception” (2003: 13) for his or her literature.69 Goethe’s pre-national approach from below becomes a mobile systemic perspective that is, it would seem, taken up by Damrosch in order to circumvent the delineated perils of the static systemic designs from above rooted in given national identities. Like Goethe, Damrosch interprets the latter as being inappropriate usurpers of that which has to remain universal. He launches an alternative project of world literature in comparison with the national, i.e. French and American appropriations of Casanova and Moretti. What is germane to it is not a fundamental difference between the proper (national) and the improper (non-national), but merely a relentless differentiation.

Nevertheless, obliterating the huge asymmetry between the German prenational and his U.S.-American postnational point of departure, Damrosch misuses Goethe’s elitist idea for the sake of imperial globalization. Like Greek elitist cosmopolitanism, Goethe’s structuring of world literature, being directed against the provincial national self-enclosure, eventually aims at an international affirmation and consolidation of the national self. As opposed to it, being established in exile, on foreign soil, the U.S.-American democratic cosmopolitanism belongs to the Roman type:

Developed from an irrevocably hyphenated or grafted identity, this cosmopolitanism is oriented toward establishing the in-between areas between the opponents; it dissolves oppositions in favor of the mutual implication of the parties. Because Aeneas is a newcomer among the Latin settlers, he must rely on his contract with them. Inasmuch as the Romans owe their historical existence to this contract, they are oriented towards protecting the inferior foreigners by means of ever-new contracts, until the entire globe is finally clamped down in a system of contracts (114–115). Their imperial slogan reads: Do not destroy, expand! As Greg Wolf, the specialist in ancient Rome, puts it, Romans understood their expansion as “the means by which the potential of the world and the entire human race might be fulfilled” (Wolf 1998: 57). Being of the same hyphenated, postnational character, U.S.-American cosmopolitanism displays the same patronizing attitude. Yet we should recall that this tireless creation of bonds and alliances on the pre-given contractual basis ultimately pushed the Romans “very much against their will and without any lordliness on their part, into domination of the entire globe” (Arendt 2010: 119). Their generous democratic cosmopolitanism relied on the utter ignorance of the otherness of the other. The Romans simply could not imagine that there existed something equal to them in terms of greatness and yet different from them (121). Precisely this appropriation of the space between peoples, Arendt claims, “created the Western world as a world in the first place” (121), pushing it, we could add today, into its recent globalized form.

Deriving this imperial Roman type of U.S.-American postnational cosmopolitanism from Goethe’s prenational cosmopolitanism putatively developed from below, Damrosch not only purifies it from all national claims but also tacitly and subtly uncouples ill-reputed globalization from selfish and profitable U.S.-American “engineering.” Considering the huge collateral damages inflicted upon globalization’s innumerous “enablers,” and especially the devastating terrorism leveled to globalization’s leading “agency” as a kind of retribution of these damages, one can detect the traumatic experience of the shaken U.S.-American identity as the birthplace of Damrosch’s idea of world literature. His leading question, rescued from its hiddenness, reads: Why does the U.S.-American identity suddenly act in national fashion if it is genuinely postnational? Unlike the official U.S.-American politics that, blindly denying national trauma, all the more fiercely acts it out, Damrosch’s elaboration of the idea of world literature invests considerable effort in working through it. His somewhat apocryphal thesis, when seen in the light of day, is that the engineers of violent globalization are, by necessity, of the provincial national kind. He therefore clearly rejects the U.S.-American narrow-minded nationalism just as Goethe was opposed to its German forebear. The fundament of his reconciling idea of world literature instead becomes the postnational U.S.-American identity, which cannot but be a product of the relentless differentiation, crisscrossing and overlapping the most diverse national literatures.

Yet what if the U.S.-American postnationalism is equally nationally oriented as Goethe’s German prenationalism? What if postnational mobility, as Haun Saussy (2006: 20–21) pertinently cautions, is not so much a “common substrate” distilled from compared literary works, i.e., from below, but, on the contrary, projected onto them by the “act of comparing itself,” i.e., from above? What if this act, departing from what comes naturally to an U.S.-American researcher, reifies their identity? “[T] he internationalism of our academic life is a direct consequence of our economic, cultural, and political hegemony, our position at the center of a de facto empire,” warns Katie Trumpener (2006: 191). She points to the counterexample of Central and Eastern European countries where the nation-state was to develop incomparably later than in the West and therefore against the Western postnationalism. There are many more such countries in the world of course. It is precisely because Damrosch’s conception of world literature is decisively postnational that it forgets that one important part of the world is still prenational (like Goethe’s Germany was some two centuries ago) and that world literature should not advance at the expense of this part of the world.

In accordance with this basic suppression, Damrosch’s theory of “profitable translatability” seems to also cancel out the geopolitical power differential between the great and minor languages and literatures that does not allow for equal mobility and concomitantly equal profit of world literature’s participants. More than being just provisionally unequal, the immobility of the minor literatures is the condition of im/possibility for the mobility of the great ones (Biti 2002). “[T]he intercultural relations in which translation figures are, in any historical moment, not just asymmetrical but hierarchical.” (Venuti 2012: 180) If the “translational gain” is, according to Damrosch, the royal road to the much-desired status of world literature, and if translation is, for the reasons delineated above, not exactly the coequal mutual traffic, then it is clear whose symbolic status mostly benefits from it. Is the status of world literature reserved just for great literatures and those “minor writers” who readily consent to their preferences and predilections? In the same way that Goethe concealed the fact that the German prenational search for identity forms the basis of his idea of world literature, Damrosch conceals how the American postnational search for identity forms the basis of his idea of world literature. However, despite this obliteration, or precisely because of it, neither of these ideas can eliminate discrimination from its operations.

However, even beyond this structural discrimination inherent in Damrosch’s interpretation of world literature, the postulated ideal of translatability bereaves literary works of everything that, from the systemic perspective, impedes their exchangeability. The result is

In the outcome, this autopoietic system of world literature, while largely outmaneuvering the otherness of the other in order to carry out its sweeping comparisons as well as to establish its new family resemblances, transforms literary works into the exemplars of the supremacy of the signified over the signifier. To provide an illustration, in the chapter “What is ‘Literature'” in his book How to Read World Literature, Damrosch juxtaposes three examples of love poetry. He analyzes an Indian short lyric from around the year 800, a lyric of an anonymous sixteenth-century English poet, and a poem by the Chilean poet Alejandra Pizarnik from 1965, instantiating a kind of experiential exchange between their “speakers” across languages, cultures and centuries. Hence even though the focus of the chapter is the question “what is ‘literature’,” instead of concentrating on the establishment of the literary quality of these examples Damrosch introduces their common denominator on the level of the experiences presented. He speaks of the strong focus on the speaker’s or lover’s “interior state of mind” (or the “interior drama” “inside the speaker’s head”) induced by an almost strategic concealment of the setting of the speech act (9–10). What connects three otherwise very remote literary examples would be roughly the following: The reader is driven into the position of “overhearing a single speaker” (10), which channels his hermeneutic effort toward the reconstruction of the missing parameters of the speaker’s communicational and overall situation. This is especially demanding in the case of the old Indian poem with a different set of social and cultural assumptions. Damrosch (13) therefore advises the reader to linger upon moments that seem puzzling or absurd on first reading and, by “learning enough about the tradition” and clearing up these moments “with some detailed specialized knowledge that we lack,” to use them in the second reading as “windows into the writer’s distinctive methods and assumptions.” Yet how can the reconstruction of the represented (i.e. the speaker’s) communicational situation tell us something about the specific literary quality of the poem? Would not the reconstruction of the representing (i.e. the writer’s) communicational situation be more appropriate?70 And the latter situation can hardly be invoked by the reader’s stumbling over “illogical, overdone, or oddly flat” moments of the poem, as it requires prior knowledge of the historically, socially and culturally specific literary conventions that precede and frame the very act of writing. Love is after all not just a socially coded relationship but one coded in literature too (Luhmann 1982). Such knowledge would, for instance, advise us against talking about the “individual thinking aloud” and the “interior state of mind” in a sixteenth-century poem since the silent thinking linked to the interior state of mind, as the distinctive feature of individuality, does not enter Western literature until the late nineteenth century. In view of such knowledge, we would probably also hesitate to apply the same category of the “speaker” (which implies a clear distance from the author) to all three examples indiscriminately. And finally, the very division of the question “What is ‘literature'” into “The World of the Text” (8), “The Author’s Role” (13) and “Modes of Reading” (16) would, as a historically much later tripartition of literary studies, probably also have to be questioned.

Such unreflected supremacy of the signified over the signifier follows, it would seem, from the tacit relinquishment of differential theory that marks the transition from comparative to world literature as well as the accelerated canonization and institutionalization of the latter. Denuded of their otherness and consequently devoid of any chance to resist the “sacred imperative” of systemic circulation, these works, their huge historical, social, cultural and linguistic diversity notwithstanding, function as a sort of merchandize in the systemic operations of transfers, combinations, translations, orderings and mappings or, in the final analysis, gains and losses. We thus testify to the glorious revival of the basic principle of Goethe’s Weltliteratur – The greater your diversity, participants of world literature, the more magnificent grows my unity – with the important caveat, however, that new world literature, reintroduced in all its splendor after centuries of apocryphal existence, turns the very spirit of this principle upside down. As the unity of world literature now progresses through the suspension instead of affirmation of its national diversity, everything is put down to the common denominator of mobility, exchangeability and translatability. This is why new world literature – exactly opposite to what Goethe envisaged for the old one – celebrates the triumph of what is globally habitual (Weltläufige) and therefore indifferently valuable over what is capable for the world (Weltfähige), and therefore irreducibly individual. Nietzsche’s sinister diagnosis that world literature is tantamount to an assemblage and compilation of items uncoupled from any creative potential, an indiscriminate mixture of the most diverse arts and senses produced by the metropolitan, deracinated and adaptable man “without qualities” (Beebee 2011: 373–374) – this diagnosis was surely unjustified with regard to Goethe’s Weltliteratur. However, it wonderfully fits the new worlding of literature. We are advised therefore, instead of taking its putatively democratic character at face value, to insist like Nietzsche on the necessity of pinning down such transnational visions of literature to their historical, geographical, national, social and cultural, almost “physiological” location. Despite its detached global appearance, this “world literature” is firmly located within a recognizable, i.e., U.S.-American part of the world. It is precisely the indifferent detachment from the irreducible otherness of its participants and its works that announces this part’s global imperial ambitions.