Philopoesis: A Theoretico-Methodological Manifesto

Method is a digression.

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

1. The Question

What is literary criticism? I begin by posing this exhausted and exhausting question as if it had never been asked before. Indeed, I find that no less than a hubristic ruse of tabula rasa is needed in order to revive this question at all (and the reasons for wanting to revive it and to think it anew will hopefully become clear below). This question could have been posed differently. As if inquiring after the health of a loved one who has been ill for a long time, and who has been absent from one's daily life, as well as all the more present because of it, in one's daily thoughts, one could have asked, How is literary criticism? Or, one could have asked, When and where was literary criticism? And in this latter avatar of that question, literary criticism would have been marked as the name of a spatio-temporal locus that no longer exists as such and that has been long since evacuated of its autochthonous populations and colonized by more properly postmodern settlers and usurpers, such as, for example, theory, cultural studies, or area studies. For the time being, however, I will proceed as if this question had nothing to do with love and history, only so as to come to love and history in the end via an arduous detour. For the time being, I will pose this question in the most banal possible way, only so as to reveal in the end the Trojan horse it had been all along. In the end, it will be a question of witnessing whether one's first love—which has remained one's true love all along—can rise from its own ashes not as the eternal return of the identical love or as the eternal return of a different love, but rather as the eternal return of the love of the same, that is, as the eternal return of ever different ways of loving the very same thing and of loving that thing such as it is. And here the thing itself will bear the paleonymic name of literature. And the love of the thing, that is, the love of literature, will bear the untimely and neologistic name of philopoesis.

And now the question can be posed differently: What is philopoesis? In my forthcoming Modernity at Sea; Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis, I attempt implicitly to formulate this question by articulating an argument regarding the nineteenth-century sea narrative understood as a crucial chapter in the history of the representational forms of modernity—an argument that is, in effect, a heuristic postulate for a series of literary-philosophical investigations whose ultimate concern is that which is not narrative in sea narratives, that which is not representational in representational forms, and that which is not modern in modernity. Here, however, I wish to pose the question of philopoesis explicitly, and I find that a way as effectual as any to begin to explicate such a question is to assert that in this book, I read literary texts as if I were a philosopher who is trying to read as if he were a literary critic (but who cannot help himself also to read as if he were a philosopher), and I read philosophical texts as if I were a literary critic who is trying to read as if he were a philosopher (but who cannot help himself also to read as if he were a literary critic). Clearly, what is most crucial in such a characterological merry-go-round of reading is the nature of the "as if"—an "as if" that I would characterize in terms of interference. Philopoesis names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between philosophy and literature.

2. Interferential Ontology

In order to pose the question of philopoesis and to articulate the modalities of being of such an interference, I will turn first...