Leo Spitzer and the Poetics of Monotheism

Leo Spitzer and the Poetics of Monotheism

In her recent book The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Emily Apter argues that Leo Spitzer's practice of Romance philology can serve as a model of a literary criticism that maintains theoretical distance from the text without effacing the linguistic heterogeneity that only close reading reveals.¹ According to Apter, therefore, Spitzer's philology can answer "the need for a full-throttle globalism that would valorize textual closeness while refusing to sacrifice distance" ("Global Translatio," 256; TZ, 43). I agree with Apter, but I will argue that Apter's appropriation of Spitzer's philology draws from only one side of his methodology—namely, his attention to microlinguistic phenomena that he describes under several related rubrics: "chaotic enumeration," "polyonomasia," or "polyetymologia." Spitzer's examination of these linguistic phenomena is part of his close reading of the heterogeneities—the chaotic proliferation of words, the multiplication of different names for the same thing, multiple and conflicting genealogies for a single term—within the language of the text. These phenomena reveal language's centrifugal impulse, a tendency toward the arbitrariness of sound outrunning meaning. This is the "nihilist moment" in language, to use a phrase from an essay of Paul de Man's on Walter Benjamin that largely guides Apter's approach to Spitzer. Apter in effect does to Spitzer what de Man does to Benjamin by stripping all traces of the messianic from his language philosophy. De Man's Benjamin and Apter's Spitzer are turned into representatives of a radically detheologized secularity. This detheologization misses the tension within their language theories between nihilism and hope, a tension that cannot be evaded without silencing the human voice itself, reducing it to a biomechanical automatism. To live within the tension between nihilism and hope, I will argue, is the critic's primary task according to Spitzer. It requires a willingness to descend into chaos and the "end of language" as the expression of a human voice to allow the messianic promise of the oneness of human language to break forth once again.

Before I can turn to Spitzer, I must first detail Apter's appropriation of his philological practice as a form of what she calls "global translatio." I will argue that Apter's detheologization of Spitzer seeks to place him in line not only with Paul de Man but also with a detheologized reading of Derrida's "monolingualism." I will offer a different reading of Derrida that underscores his concern with the monotheistic-messianic horizon of language in general and poetic language more specifically. I will turn to Spitzer's own theological poetics first as it is revealed in his essay "Speech and Language in Inferno XIII" and then as it shapes the readings of modern poetry that he offers in his monograph La enumeración caótica in la poesía moderna, his most important statement of the poetics of monotheism. I will show how Spitzer's poetics of monotheism and Derrida's monolingualism are mutually illuminating meditations on the conditions of the possibility of human speech as other than machinal automatism. In the conclusion of the essay, I will offer some reflections—growing out of his interpretation of Walt Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"—about Spitzer's philology as offering a vision of democracy as a community of translators.

Apter's Recuperation of an Anti-Exilic Spitzer

Apter attempts to show that the current quest among many scholars of literature for "a full-throttle globalism that would valorize closeness while refusing to sacrifice distance" was shared by Leo Spitzer when he was challenged with forging a philological curriculum for the University of Istanbul in 1933. Although the resulting curriculum was admittedly Eurocentric, the philological practice it promoted was nonetheless valuable. Apter calls this practice "a staged cacophony of multilingual encounters" ("Global Translatio," 256; TZ, 44). Apter's essay seeks to contrast Spitzer to Erich Auerbach...