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Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville (review)
- Leviathan
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 14, Issue 3, October 2012
- pp. 65-69
- Review
- Additional Information
PETER SZENDY Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville Translated, with an afterword, by Gil Anidjar New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Paper $26.00. 152 pp. P hilosophers love Herman Melville. Recent decades have seen readings of his works by Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. Much of this attention has been focused on “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the resultant interpretations provide dazzling examples of the kind of philosophical insight available from a literary text. Thanks, in part, to these interventions, we now have a Melville who rivals, and often outshines, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in his epistemological, ethical, and political sophistication. (For other relevant philosophical readings of Melville, see Arsić and Evans.) The translation of Peter Szendy’s 2004 volume, Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville, adds an important new voice to the chorus of philosophical admiration. But rather than focusing on “Bartleby,” Szendy looks to the temporality of reading that Melville models in Moby-Dick, lingering suggestively with the overlapping pasts, presents, and futures that come to the surface in a book he celebrates as the “Leviathan-text” (Prophecies 50). To listen to Szendy is to participate in a rigorous examination of the terrain shared by philosophy, music, literature, and history. Szendy’s previous work investigates aural experience—assumptions and standards associated with the act(s) of listening, the existences of aural phantoms, and the distortions created by beliefs about technology and the body—and these interests echo throughout Prophecies of Leviathan, most notably in the correlation of prophecy and prosthesis. But it is not just in terms of subject that Szendy’s rich engagement with the world of sound is evident. The volume can be likened to a symphony, as various themes are introduced, developed, and reworked across its pages; the tantalizing short chapters that constitute Prophecies of Leviathan offer suggestive or provocative readings, not exhaustive analysis. Many present bold juxtapositions and fresh interpretations, although a handful recapitulate well-trod territory for Melville scholars. The chapters are structured to challenge the reader to an active engagement with both the text and her own assumptions about reading in various ways: the frequency with which Szendy addresses her directly (“I listen to you now. It is your turn” [Prophecies c 2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 65 R E V I E W 85]); deploys, like Melville, the imperative mood (“Here is a tale. Listen” [3]); or relies on questions, especially to frame chapters. While his style might frustrate a reader who prefers the argumentative organization of the scholarly monograph, the illumination Szendy provides in this reading storm rewards the effort of working through this sometimes obscure, but more frequently brilliant, volume. The central claim of Prophecies of Leviathan concerns the complexities and temporalities of reading. According to Szendy, reading is always prophetic in that it projects the subject into a future that has been scripted both absolutely and contingently by a past it can neither escape nor conclude; the future constantly writes the past, and we must attend to the moving or shifting processes of time if we are to develop a reading practice fluid enough to approach Melville. “Prophetic reading,” Szendy explains, “presupposes that traces have been left, in one way or another, that these traces have been subjected to a stratified burial in a kind of crypt where broad daylight has suddenly penetrated” (Prophecies 37). Because “the unexpected” must be allowed to “surge over and out of the crypt” if we are to appreciate a writer like Melville, Szendy proposes that readers “need a kind of storm. .. in the act of their reading” (37). Once in the grips of this “thunderstorm,” “hurricane,” or “cyclone,” the prophetic reader is carried away “by a flow coming from the future” (37). Here, as elsewhere, Szendy’s figure is no mere ornament. The surging waves of the storm unites his reading of Melville to his earlier interest in sound waves, while also foregrounding the importance of the reader...