Editor’s Column: This Comparative Literature Which Is Not One

This issue focuses on excess. The topic touches on comparative literature’s very identity. Excess is arguably constitutive of our hermeneutic practices; indeed, plurality (of subject matter, languages, interpretive perspectives and so on) marks us as comparatists. Taking my inspiration from Luce Irigaray’s seminal work, This Sex Which Is Not One, which grounds her ethics of sexual difference on the feminine’s “disruptive excess” (Irigaray 78), this volume considers comparative literature as an unruly discipline of its own, as a discipline “in crisis”—whence its incessant redefinition of its boundaries and its ethos. A comparative literature which is not one, we might say, refers both to the discipline’s lack (the absence of a specific methodology, of unanimity or consensus about what defines us, about what determines our protocols of reading and interpretive habitus) and to its doubleness (its hermeneutic injunction to compare foregrounds a precarious relationality between the “objects” of comparison). Comparative literature is multiple and hybrid; it is that language, that perspective, that period, that theory—and more. It is, to paraphrase Irigaray, neither one nor two (Irigaray 26). In this respect, a comparative approach seems most hospitable to the problematic of excess, attentive to its elusiveness and perplexities: What constitutes excess today? What does it name? Who defines it? How do literature and art manage or register excess? How is excess connected to the task of interpretation? Is excess still synonymous with transgression and subversion? Have its connotations changed under the sway of neoliberalism? A comparatist response to these questions, as we shall see, yields many, and often divergent, answers.

The issue opens with Jordan A. Yamaji Smith’s “Translating (as) Excess: Toward Communitas in the Hermeneutics of a Saturated Phenomenon.” In his essay, Yamaji Smith addresses the ethical exigencies and hermeneutic pitfalls of translation: how does one translate the original without simultaneously betraying it by adding an unnecessary surplus of meaning? Yamaji Smith’s intervention in translation studies seeks to boldly reformulate the ethical demands of translation by imagining translation as a “mode of invitation” which acknowledges (rather than denying or becoming paralyzed by) the excessive demands of literary translation. Recognizing the essential incompleteness of any translation undergoes something of a trans-valuation; incompleteness is no longer a sign of failure of betrayal, but points to future translations. The translation that sees itself as incomplete conceives of itself as contributing to an ongoing dialogue, to communities of translators. Next, Kelly Oliver discusses Kant’s complex understanding of “earth,” and its problematic relation to his theory of property. “The Excesses of Earth in Kant’s Philosophy of Property” shows how Kant’s conception of “earth”—along with the type of rational human beings it assumes—and of the demands of private property, presuppose but exceed one another. Private property is at odds with, or in excess of, the cosmopolitan ideal of a shared belonging to the earth, while human relationships to earth depend on yet exceed the theory of property that grounds it. Staying with the Enlightenment, Fayçal Falaky, in “Out of Desire’s Excess, a Lover: Rousseau between Narcissus and Pygmalion,” explores the problematics of sexuality, desire, lack and excess in Rousseau’s works. Creatively drawing on psychoanalytic theories from Freud, Lacan and Deleuze, Falaky makes a strong case for the function of the image (the “spectral imago”) in Rousseau’s accounts of the constitution of the individual subject, sexuality and desire, in both his autobiographical writings and his fiction. In “Excess as Ek-stasis: Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and Giving Offense,” Anthony Uhlmann juxtaposes J. M. Coetzee his 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg with ideas that the novelist articulates in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Both texts foreground the writing process as a kind of thinking beyond rational discourse, a thinking that lies in excess of reason. Connecting excess to the notions of “offense,” “refraction” and “perversion,” Uhlmann shows how these disruptive terms function as a dynamic locus for singular meanings and new accounts of the “true.” Holly E. Schreiber similarly explores the unsettling and innovative potential of excess in “Cannibalized Evidence: The Problem of Over-incorporation...