The Institute for

World Literature
Summer 2021

Seminar by:
Thomas Claviez

Conceptualizing Cosmopolitanism and World Literature

 Table of Contents
3

Guiding Questions............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Session 1: The History of Cosmopolitanism

"Cosmopolitanism" ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace" ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 16
Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" ....................................................................................................................... 22

Session 2: The Birth of Nationalism

Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind ...................................................................................................................................... 27
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 33

Session 3: Liberal Interpretations of Cosmopolitanism: The Problem of Universalism

Martha C. Nussbaum, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" ....................................................................................................................................................................54

Judith Butler, "Universality in Culture" .....................................................................................................................................................................................................62

Martha C. Nussbaum, "Reply" .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................67

Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision............................................................................................................................................................................................................77

Session 4: Whose Cosmopolitanism? Cosmopolitanism and the Other

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being........................................................................................................................................................................................................89

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity...........................................................................................................................................................................................................102
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness....................................................................................................................................................................................106
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Session 5: Alternative Communities -- Alternative Stories?

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 118
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 156

Session 6: Origins of World Literature: Goethe to Auerbach

Erich Auerbach, "The Philology of World Literature" ........................................................................................................................................................................... 171
Pheng Cheah, "What is a World? On World Literature as World-making Activity" .......................................................................................................................... 178

Session 7: World Literature or the World of Literature? Hegemonic and Modernist Approaches

Franco Morreti, "Conjectures on World Literature" ...............................................................................................................................................................................185

Franco Morreti, "More Conjectures" ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 193
Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community ...................................................................................................................................198

Session 8: Travellin' Books

David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? .............................................................................................................................................................................................. .216
David Damrosch, "Scriptworlds"................................................................................................................................................................................................................. .235
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Guiding Questions
General questions:
How do sameness and difference fare in ALL of the texts?
How do space and time relate in ALL of the texts?
What concept of community is presupposed in the texts?

Session 1:
What is the decisive challenge that a cosmopolitan ethics faces compared to a “traditional” one?
What room do concepts of “time” (history) and “space” (place) play in Kant’s essays, and where do they clash?Do
Kant and Marx share certain concepts? If so, which ones?

Session 2:
How do nations come about in Herder and Anderson?
What role do stories, literature and culture play in this process?
How do they relate to sameness and difference?
What role does/can myth play for a nation?

Session 3:
What do you think about a) the political implications and b) the scientific claims that Nussbaum’s approach makes?
What is the status of the concept of community in the four texts?
How does Beck solve the problem of sameness vs. difference?
Are there good and bad differences or samenesses to be distinguished? How?

Session 4:
If to define cosmopolitanism is in itself “uncosmopolitan,” should we abstain from using the concept?
What is the status of otherness in Levinas’ texts? In what way do otherness, sameness and universality interact?

Session 5:
In what way do Nancy’s and Agamben’s approach differ as regards “community”?
How could such communities be told, or what stories could they tell about themselves?
What alternative concepts of otherness do Nancy and Agamben offer?
6

Session 6:
What are the main problems that Auerbach identifies for “doing” World Literature? And what solutions does he offer?
What is the difference between “global” and “World”?

Session 7:
How does Moretti respond to the problems that Auerbach diagnoses?
How does the problem of otherness vs. sameness fare in those solutions?
What is the “law of the land” as regards WL?
In how far does Berman’s modernism differ from Moretti’s?

Session 8:
In how far do “travelling scripts” avoid or reflect the problems identified in Moretti? What role does time play?
Is there a certain form of Modernism implicit in Damrosch’s approach?
Does community play any role?
""Cosmopolitanism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. 1 Jul 2013. Web. 17 Jan 2015.
Cosmopolitanism
First published Sat Feb 23, 2002; substantive revision Tue Nov 28, 2006
The word 'cosmopolitan', which derives from the Greek word kosmopolites ('citizen ofthe
world'), has been used to describe a wide variety ofimportant views in moral and socio-
political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all
human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do ( or at least can) belang to a single
community, and that this community should be cultivated. Different versions of
cosmopolitanism envision this community in different ways, some focusing on political
institutions, others on moral norms or relationships, and still others focusing on shared
markets or forms of cultural expression. The philosophical interest in cosmopolitanism lies in
its challenge to commonly recognized attachments to fellow-citizens, the local state,
parochially shared cultures, and the like.
1. History of Cosmopolitanisms
1.1 Greek and Roman Cosmopolitanism
The political culture idealized in the writings of Plato and Aristotle is not cosmopolitan. In
this culture, a man identifies himself first and foremost as a citizen of a particular polis or city,
and in doing so, he signals which institutions and which body of people hold his allegiance.
He would then be counted on for help in defending the city from attacks, sustaining its
institutions of justice, and contributing to its common good. In this way, his own pursuit of a
good life is inextricably bound to the fate ofthe city and to the similar pursuit canied out by
other inhabitants ofthe city. By contrast, the good person would not be expected to share with
or serve any foreigners who live outside the city. Any cosmopolitan expectations on a good
Athenian extended only to concem for those foreigners who happen to reside in Athens.
lt would, however, be wrang to assume that Classical Greek thought was uniformly anti-
cosmopolitan. Actively excluding foreigners from any ethical consideration or actively
targeting foreigners for mistreatment goes one step beyond focusing one's service and concern
on compatriots, andin fact, the targeting of 'barbarians' is historically linked with the rise of
panhellenism and not with the more narrow emphasis on the polis. It would be more accurate
to call the Classical emphasis on the polis uncosmopolitan.
Y et even as Plato and Aristotle were writing, other Greeks were issuing cosmopolitan
challenges. Perhaps the most obvious challenges came from the traveling intellectuals who
insisted on the contrast between the conventional ties ofpolitics and the natural ties of
humanity. Notice, for example, the way Plato has the Sophist Hippias address the motley crew
of Athenians and foreigners present at Callias' hause in Plato's Protagoras (337c7-d3):
Gentlemen present ... I regard you all as kinsmen, familiars, and fellow-citizens - by nature
and not by convention; for like is by nature akin to like, while convention, which is a tyrant
over human beings, forces many things contrary to nature.
Socrates, too, it can be argued, was sensitive to this more cosmopolitan identification with
human beings as such. At least as Plato characterizes him, Socrates avoids traditional political
engagement as much as he can, in favor of an extraordinary career of examining himself and
others, and he insists that these examinations are both genuinely political ( Gorg 521 d6-8) and
27
extended to all, Athenians and foreigners alike (Apol 23b4-6). Of course, Socrates chose not
to travel widely, but this decision could weil have been consistent with cosmopolitan ideals,
for he may have thought that his best bet for serving human beings generally lay in staying at
harne, on account, ironically, of Athens' superior freedom of speech (Gorg 46lel-3; cf. Apo!
37c5-e2 and Meno 80b4-7). Whether Socrates was self-consciously cosmopolitan in this way
or not, there is no doubt that his ideas accelerated the development of cosmopolitanism and
that he was in later antiquity embraced as a citizen of the world. In fact, the first philosopher
in the West to give perfectly explicit expression to cosmopolitanism was the Socratically
inspired Cynic Diogenes in the fourth century bce. It is said that "when he was asked where
he came from, he replied, 'I am a citizen ofthe world [kosmopolites]"' (Diogenes Laertius VI
63 ). By identifying himself not as a citizen of Sinope but as a citizen of the world, Diogenes
apparently refused to agree that he owed special service to Sinope and the Sinopeans. So
understood, 'l am a citizen ofthe cosmos' is a negative claim, and we might wonder ifthere is
any positive content to the Cynic's world-citizenship. The most natural suggestion would be
that a world-citizen should serve the world-state, helping to bring it about in order to enable
the later work of sustaining its institutions and contributing to its common good. But the
historical record does not suggest that Diogenes the Cynic favored the introduction of a
world-state. In fact, the historical record does not unambiguously provide Diogenes any
positive commitments that we can readily understand as cosmopolitan. The best we can do to
find positive cosmopolitanism in Diogenes is to insist that the whole Cynic way of life is
supposed to be cosmopolitan: by living in accordance with nature and rejecting what is
conventional, the Cynic sets an example ofhigh-minded virtue for all other human beings.
A fuller exploration of positively committed philosophical cosmopolitanism anives only with
the Socratizing and Cynic-influenced Stoies ofthe third century CE. These Stoies are fond of
saying that the cosmos is, as it were, a polis, because the cosmos is put in perfect order by
law, which is right reason. They also embrace the negative implication oftheir high standards:
conventional poleis do not, strictly speaking, deserve the name. But the Stoies do not believe
that living in agreement with the cosmos - as a citizen ofthe cosmos - requires maintaining
critical distance from conventional poleis. Rather, as the traces of Chrysippus' On Lives make
clear, the Stoies believe that goodness requires serving other human beings as best one can,
that serving all human beings equally weil is impossible, and that the best service one can
give typically requires political engagement. Of course, the Stoies recognize that political
engagement will not be possible for everyone, and that some people will best be able to help
other human beings as private teachers ofvirtue rather than as politicians. But in no case, the
Stoies insist, is consideration ofpolitical engagement tobe limited to one's own polis. The
motivating idea is, after all, to help human beings as such, and sometimes the best way to do
that is to serve as a teacher or as a political advisor in some foreign place. In this fashion, the
Stoies introduce clear, practical content to their metaphor ofthe cosmopolis: a cosmopolitan
considers moving away in order to serve, whereas a non-cosmopolitan does not.
This content admits of a strict and a more moderate interpretation. On the strict view, when
one considers whether to emigrate, one recognizes prima facie no special or stronger reason to
serve compatriots than to serve a set ofhuman beings abroad. On the moderate view, one does
introduce into one's deliberations extra reason to serve compatriots, although one might still,
all things considered, make the best choice by emigrating. The evidence does not permit a
decisive attribution of one or the other ofthese interpretations to any ofthe earliest Stoies. But
ifwe think that Chrysippus was deeply attracted to the Cynics' rejection ofwhat is merely
conventional, then we will find it easy to think ofhim as a strict cosmopolitan.
8 3 4

Things are a bit different for at least some ofthe Stoies at Rome. On the one hand, the For hundreds ofyears to come, debates in political philosophy would surround the relation
cosmopolis becomes less demanding. Whereas Chrysippus limits citizenship in the cosmos to between 'temporal' political authority and the 'eternal Church.' But emphasis on the
those who in fact live in agreement with the cosmos and its law, Roman Stoies extend cosmopolitan aspect of the Church waned, despite its ideal of a religious cornmunity
citizenship to all human beings by virtue oftheir rationality. On the other hand, local comprising all humans. In a nutshell, the debate now opposed the secular and the religious,
citizenship becomes more demanding. There is no doubt that the Stoicism of Cicero's De and not the local and the cosmopolitan. Tobe sure, this debate often had cosmopolitan
Officiis or of Seneca's varied corpus explicitly acknowledges obligations to Rome. This is a ramifications, which are clear enough in Dante Alighieri's plea for a universal monarchy in
moderate Stoic cosmopolitanism, and empire made the doctrine very easy for many Romans De Monarchia (ca. 1314). But his case draws from Aristotle and Roman history, not explicitly
by identifying the Roman patria with the cosmopolis itself. But neither imperialism nor a from the ideal of a cosmopolis or of world-citizenship, and he remains deeply concerned to
literal interpretation ofworld-citizenship is required for the philosophical point. The adjudicate between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.
maximally committed cosmopolitan looks around to determine whom he can best help and
how, knowing füll weil that he cannot help all people in just the same way, and his decision to
1.2 Early Modern and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism
help some people far more than others is justified by cosmopolitan lights if it is the best he
can do to help human beings as such.
Cosmopolitanism slowly began to come to the fore again with the renewed study ofmore
ancient texts, but during the humanist era cosmopolitanism still remained the exception.
Stoic cosmopolitanism in its various guises was enormously persuasive throughout the Greco-
Despite the fact that ancient cosmopolitan sources were well-known and that many humanists
Roman world. In part, this success can be explained by noting how cosmopolitan the world at
emphasized the essential unity of all religions, they did not develop this idea in cosmopolitan
that time was. Alexander the Great's conquests and the subsequent division ofhis empire into
terms. A few authors, however, most notably Erasmus ofRotterdam, explicitly drew on
successor kingdoms sapped local cities of much of their traditional authority and fostered
ancient cosmopolitanism to advocate the ideal of a world-wide peace. Emphasizing the unity
increased contacts between cities, and later, the rise ofthe Roman Empire united the whole of
of humankind over its division into different states and peoples, by arguing that humans are
the Mediterranean under one political power. But it is wrong to say what has frequently been
destined by Nature tobe sociable and live in harmony, Erasmus pleaded for national and
said, that cosmopolitanism arose as a response to the fall of the polis or to the rise of the
religious tolerance and regarded like-minded people as his compatriots (Querela Pacis).
Roman empire. First, the polis' fall has been greatly exaggerated. Under the successor
kingdoms and even - though to a lesser degree - under Rome, there remained substantial
Early modern natural law theory might seem a likely candidate for spawning philosophical
room for important political engagement locally. Second, and more decisively, the
cosmopolitanism. Its secularizing tendencies and the widespread individualist view among its
cosmopolitanism that was so persuasive during the so-called Hellenistic Age and under the
defenders that all humans share certain fundamental characteristics would seem to suggest a
Roman Empire was in fact rooted in intellectual developments that predate Alexander's
point of unification for humankind as a whole. However, according to many early modern
conquests. Still, there is no doubting that the empires under which Stoicism developed and
theorists, what all individuals share is a fundamental striving for self-preservation, and the
flourished made many people more receptive to the cosmopolitan ideal and thus contributed
universality ofthis striving does not amount to a fundamental bond that unites (or should
greatly to the widespread influenc'e of Stoic cosmopolitanism.
unite) all humans in a universal community.
Nowhere was Stoic cosmopolitanism itselfmore influential than in early Christianity. Early
Still, there are two factors that do sometimes push modern natural law theory in a
Christians took the later Stoic recognition oftwo cities as independent sources of obligation
cosmopolitan direction. First, some natural law theorists assume that nature implanted in
and added a twist. For the Stoies, the citizens ofthe polis and the citizens ofthe cosmopolis
humans, in addition to the tendency to self-preservation, also a fellow-feeling, a form of
do the same work: both aim to improve the lives ofthe citizens. The Christians respond to a
sociability that unites all humans at a fundamental level into a kind ofworld community. The
different call: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the
appeal to such a shared human bond was very thin, however, and by no means does it
things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21). On this view, the local city may have divine authority
necessarily lead to cosmopolitanism. In fact, the very notion of a natural sociability was
(John 19:11; cf. Romans 13:1,4,7), but the most important work for human goodness is
sometimes used instead to legitimate war against peoples elsewhere in the world who were
removed from traditional politics, set aside in a sphere in which people of all nations can
said to have violated this common band in an 'unnatural' way, or who were easily said to
become "fellow-citizens with the saints" (Ephesians 2:20).
have placed themselves outside ofthe domain of common human morality by their 'barbaric'
customs. Second, early modern natural law theory was often connected with social contract
This development has two important and long-lasting consequences, which are canonized by
theory, and although most social contract theorists worked out their views mostly, if not
Augustine. First, the cosmopolis again becomes a community for certain people only.
solely, for the level ofthe state and not for that ofinternational relations, the very idea behind
Augustine makes this point most explicitly by limiting the citizenship in the city of God to
social contract theory lends itself for application to this second level. Grotius, Pufendorf, and
those who love God. All others are relegated to the inferior - though still universal -
others did draw out these implications and thereby laid the foundation for international law.
earthly city by their love of seif. These two cities ofthe world, which are doomed to coexist
Grotius envisioned a "great society of states" that is bound by a "law ofnations" that holds
intertwined until the Final Judgment, divide the world's inhabitants. Second, the work of
"between all states" (De Jure Belli ac Paci, 1625, Prolegomena par. 17; Pufendorf, De Jure
politics is severed from the task ofbuilding good human Jives, lives ofrighteousness and
Na!urae et Gentium, 1672).
justice. While Augustine can stress that this allows citizens in the city of God to obey local
laws concerning "the necessaries for the maintenance of life," he must also acknowledge that
The historical context ofthe philosophical resurgence of cosmopolitanism during the
it sets up a potential conflict over the laws of religion and the concerns of righteousness and
Enlightenment is made up of many factors: The increasing rise of capitalism and world-wide
justice (e.g„ Civitas Dei XIX 17).
trade and its theoretical reflections; the reality of ever expanding empires whose reach
 5 6
extended across the globe; the voyages around the world and the anthropological so-called
'discoveries' facilitated through these; the renewed interest in Hellenistic philosophy; and the
emergence of a notion of human rights and a philosophical focus on human reason. Many
intellectuals ofthe time regarded their membership in the transnational 'republic of!etters' as
rnore significant than their membership in the particular political states they found themselves
in, all the more so because their relationship with their government was often strained because
of censorship issues. This prepared them to think in terms other than those of states and
peoples and adopt a cosmopolitan perspective. Under the influence ofthe American
Revolution, and especially during the first years ofthe French Revolution, cosmopolitanism
received its strongest impulse. The 1789 declaration of 'human' rights had grown out of
cosrnopolitan modes ofthinking and reinforced them in turn.
In the eighteenth century, the terms 'cosmopolitanism' and 'world citizenship' were often
used not as labels for determinate philosophical theories, but rather to indicate an attitude of
open-mindedness and impartiality. A cosmopolitan was someone who was not subservient to
a particular religious or political authority, someone who was not biased by particular
loyalties or cultural prejudice. Furthermore, the term was sometimes used to indicate a person
who led an urbane life-style, or who was fond oftraveling, cherished a network of
international contacts, or feit at home everywhere. In this sense the Encyclopedie mentioned
that 'cosmopolitan' was often used to signify a "man ofno fixed abode, or a man who is
nowhere a stranger." Though philosophical authors such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot,
Addison, Hume, and Jefferson identified themselves as cosmopolitans in one or more ofthese
senses, these usages are not of much philosophical interest.
Especially in the second half ofthe century, however, the term was increasingly also used to
indicate particular philosophical convictions. Some authors revived the Cynic tradition.
Fougeret de Montbron in his 1753 autobiographical report, Le Cosrnopolite, calls himself a
cosmopolitan, describes how he travels everywhere without being committed to anywhere,
declaring "All the countries are the same to me" and "[I am] changing my places ofresidence
according to my whim" (p. 130).
Despite the fact that only a few authors committed themselves to this kind of
cosrnopolitanism, this was the version that critics of cosmopolitanism took as their target. For
example, Rousseau complains that cosmopolitans "boast that they Iove everyone [taut le
monde, which also means 'the whole world'], to have the right to love no one" (Geneva
Manuscript version of The Socia/ Contract, 158). Johann Georg Schlosser, in the critical
poem 'Der Kosmopolit' writes, "lt is better to be proud of one's nation than to have none,"
obviously assuming that cosmopolitanism implies the latter.
Yet most eighteenth-century defenders of cosmopolitanism did not recognize their own view
in these critical descriptions. They understood cosmopolitanism not as a form ofultra-
individualism, but rather, drawing on the Stoic tradition, as implying the positive moral ideal
of a universal human community, and they did not regard this ideal as inimical to more
particular attachments such as patriotism. Some, Iike the German author Christoph Martin
Wieland, stayed quite close to Stoic views. Others developed a cosmopolitan moral theory
that was distinctively new. According to Kant, all rational beings are members in a single
rnoral community. They are analogous to citizens in the political (republican) sense in that
they share the characteristics of freedom, equality, and independence, and that they give
themselves the law. Their common Iaws, however, are the laws ofmorality, grounded in
reason. Early utilitarian cosmopolitans Iike Jeremy Bentham, by contrast, defended their
cosrnopolitanism by pointing to the "common and equal utility of all nations." Moral
9
cosmopolitanism could be grounded in human reason, or in some other characteristic
universally shared among humans (andin some cases other kinds ofbeings) such as the
capacity to experience pleasure or pain, a moral sense, or the aesthetic imagination. Moral
cosmopolitans regarded all humans as 'brothers' (though with obvious gender bias)- an
analogy with which they aimed to indicate the fundamental equality of rank of all humans,
which precluded slavery, colonial exploitation, feudal hierarchy, and tutelage ofvarious sorts.
Some cosmopolitans developed their view into a political theory about international relations.
The most radical of eighteenth-century political cosmopolitans was no doubt Anacharsis
Cloots (Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grace, baron de Cloots, 1755-1794). Cloots advocated the
abolition of all existing states and the establishment of a single world state under which all
human individuals would be directly subsumed. His arguments drew first of all on the general
structure of social contract theory. !fit is in the general interest for everyone to submit to the
authority of a state that enforces Iaws that provide security, then this argument applies world-
wide and justifies the establishment of a world-wide "republic of united individuals," not a
plurality ofstates that find themselves in the state ofnature vis-a-vis each other. Second, he
argues that sovereignty should reside with the people, and that the concept of sovereignty
itself, because it involves indivisibility, implies that there can be but one sovereign body in
the world, namely, the human race as a whole (La republique universelle ou adresse aux
tyrannicides, 1792; Bases constitutionelles de la republique du genre hurnain, 1793).
Most other political cosmopolitans did not go as far as Cloots. Immanuel Kant, most
famously, advocated a much weaker form of international legal order, namely, that of a
'league ofnations.' In Perpetual Peace (1795) Kant argues that true and world-wide peace is
possible only when states are organized internally according to 'republican' principles, when
they are organized externally in a voluntary league for the sake ofkeeping peace, and when
they respect the human rights not only of their citizens but also of foreigners. He argues that
the league of states should not have coercive military powers because that would violate the
internal sovereignty of states, constitute a potential <langer to individual freedoms already
established within those states (if the federal authority were Iess respectful of human rights
than some ofthe member states) and reduce the chances that states would actually join.
Some critics argued in response that Kant's position was inconsistent, on the grounds that the
only way to fully overcome the state of nature among states was for them to enter into a
federative unity of states with coercive powers. They transformed the concept of sovereignty
in the process, by conceiving it as layered, and this enabled them to argue that states ought to
transfer part of their sovereignty to the federal level, but only that part that concerns their
external relations to other states, while retaining the sovereignty of the states concerning their
internal affairs (the early Fichte). Romantic authors, on the other hand, feit that the ideal state
should not have to involve coercion at all, and hence also that the cosmopolitan ideal should
be that of a world-wide republic of 'fraternal' non-authoritarian republics (the young
Friedrich Schlegel).
Kant also introduced the concept of"cosmopolitan law," suggesting a third sphere ofpublic
law - in addition to constitutional law and international law - in which both states and
individuals have rights, and where individuals have these rights as "citizens ofthe earth"
rather than as citizens of particular states.
In addition to moral and political forms of cosmopolitanism, there emerged an economic form
of cosmopolitan theory. The freer trade advocated by eighteenth-century anti-mercantilists
like Adam Smith and Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch took greater and greater hold. They
10
sought to diminish the role of politics in the economic realm. Their ideal was a world in
which tariffs and other restrictions on foreign Irade are abolished, a world in which the
market, not the government, takes care ofthe needs ofthe people. Against mercantilism, they
argue that it is more advantageous for everyone involved if a nation imports those goods
which are more expensive to produce domestically, and that the assumption that one's own
state will profit if other states are unable to export their goods is false. They argue that the
situation is quite the contrary: the abolition ofprotectionism would benefit everyone, because
other states would gain from their exports, reach a higher standard of living and then become
even better trading partners, because they could then import more, too. On their view, after
trade will have been liberalized world-wide, the importance of national governments will
diminish dramatically. As national governments currently focus on the national economy and
defense, their future role will be at most auxiliary. In the ideal global market, war is in no
one's interest. The freer the global market becomes, the more the role ofthe states will
become negligible.
1.3 Cosmopolitanism in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has continued to be a source of debate in the subsequent two
centuries. First, in the nineteenth century, economic globalization provoked fierce reactions.
Marx and Engels tagged cosmopolitanism as an ideological reflection of capitalism. They
regard market capitalism as inherently expansive, breaking the bounds ofthe nation-state
system, as evidenced by the fact that production and consumption had become attuned to
faraway lands. In their hands, the word 'cosmopolitan' is tied to the effects of capitalist
globalization, including especially the bourgeois ideology which legitimatizes 'free' trade in
terms ofthe freedom ofindividuals and mutual benefit, although this very capitalist order is
the cause of the misery of millions, indeed the cause of the very existence of the proletariat.
At the same time, however, Marx and Engels also hold that the proletariat in every country
shares essential features and has common interests, and the Communist movement aims to
convince proletarians everywhere ofthese common interests. Most famously, the Communist
Manifesto ends with the call, "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" This, combined with the
ideal ofthe class-less society and the expected withering away ofthe state after the
revolution, implies a form of cosmopolitanism of its own.
Debates about global capitalism and about an international workers' movement have persisted.
Frequently economic cosmopolitanism can be found in the advocacy of open markets, in the
tradition from Adam Smith to Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Communist
versions of cosmopolitanism also developed further, although the Leninist-Stalinist tradition
kept using 'cosmopolitan' itself as a derogatory term.
The second inheritance from eighteenth century cosmopolitanism is found in the two
centuries' worth of attempts to create peace. lt has often been noted that there are parallels
between Kant's peace proposal in Perpetual Peace and the structure ofthe League ofNations
as it existed in the early part of the 20th century as weil as the structure of the current United
Nations, although it should also be pointed out that essential features ofKant's plan were not
implemented, such as the abolition of standing armies. Now, after the end ofthe cold war,
there is again a resurgence of the discussion about the most appropriate world order to
promote peace, just as there was after the first and second world wars.
The International Criminal Court should be mentioned here as an innovative form of
cosmopolitanism, going much beyond Kant's conception of 'cosmopolitan law.' The ICC
7 8
itselfrepresents an extension ofthe long trend, in international law, to do away with the
principle ofthe absolute subjection ofindividuals to the state and develop the status of
individuals under international law. Individuals are now the bearers of certain rights under
international law, and they can be held responsible for crimes under international law in ways
that cut through the shield of state sovereignty.
Third, moral philosophers and moralists in the wake of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanisms
have insisted that we human beings have a duty to aid fellow humans in need, regardless of
their citizenship status. There is a history of international relief efforts (International Red
Cross and Red Crescent Societies, famine relief organizations, and the like) in the name ofthe
reduction ofhuman suffering and without regard to the nationality ofthose affected.
In addition, because cosmopolitan duty is not restricted to duties of beneficence but also
requires justice and respect, cosmopolitan morality has often been invoked as a motivation to
oppose slavery and apartheid, and to defend the emancipation ofwomen, or, in the utilitarian
tradition, to demand better treatment of animals.
Most past cosmopolitan authors did not fully live up to the literal interpretation of their
cosmopolitan theories, and one can find misogynist, racist, nationalist, religious, or class-
based biases and inconsistencies in their accounts. These shortcomings have often been used
as arguments against cosmopolitanism, but they are not as easily used for that purpose as it
may seem. Because the universalist potential in the discourse of 'world citizenship' can itself
be used as a basis for exposing these shortcomings as problematic, one should say that they
stem from too little, rather than too much, cosmopolitanism.
2. Taxonomy of Contemporary Cosmopolitanisms
Even this brief glance backwards reveals a wide variety ofviews that can be called
cosmopolitan. Every cosmopolitan argues for some community among all human beings,
regardless of social and political affiliation. For some, what should be shared is simply moral
community, which means only that living a good human life requires serving the universal
community by helping human beings as such, perhaps by promoting the realization ofjustice
and the guarantee ofhuman rights. Others conceptualize the universal community in terms of
political institutions to be shared by all, in terms of cultural expressions to be appreciated by
all, or in terms of economic markets that should be open to all.
The most common cosmopolitanism - moral cosmopolitanism - does not always call itself
such. Butjust as ancient cosmopolitanism was fundamentally a 'moral' commitment to
helping human beings as such, much contemporary moral philosophy insists on the duty to
aid foreigners who are starving or otherwise suffering, or at least on the duty to respect and
promote basic human rights and justice. One can here distinguish between strict and
moderate forms of cosmopolitanism. The strict cosmopolitans in this sphere operate
sometimes from utilitarian assumptions (e.g„ Singer, Unger), sometimes from Kantian
assumptions (e.g„ O'Neill), and sometimes from more ancient assumptions (e.g„ Nussbaum),
but always with the claim that the duty to provide aid neither gets weighed against any extra
duty to help locals or compatriots nor increases in strength when locals or compatriots are in
question. Among these strict cosmopolitans some will say that it is permissible, at least in
some situations, to concentrate one's charitable efforts on one's compatriots, while others deny
this - their position will depend on the details oftheir moral theory. Other philosophers
whom we may call moderate cosmopolitans (including, e.g„ Scheffler) acknowledge the
cosmopolitan scope of a duty to provide aid, but insist that we also have special duties to
 9 10
compatriots. Among the moderate cosmopolitans, many further distinctions can be drawn,
depending on the reasons that are admitted for recognizing special responsibilities to
compatriots and depending on how the special responsibilities are balanced with the
cosmopolitan duties to human beings generally. Anti-cosmopolitanism in the moral sphere
best describes the position ofthose communitarians (e.g„ Maclntyre) who believe either that
our obligations to compatriots and more local people crowd out any obligations to benefit
human beings as such or that there are no obligations except where there are close, communal
relationships.
Moral cosmopolitanism has sometimes led to political cosmopolitanism. Again, we can draw
useful distinctions among the political cosmopolitans. Some advocate a centralized world
state, some favor a federal system with a comprehensive global body oflimited power, some
would prefer more limited international political institutions that focus on particular concems
(e.g„ war crimes, environmental preservation), and some defend a different alternative
altogether. Prominent philosophical discussions ofinternational political arrangements have
recently clustered around the heirs ofKant (e.g„ Habermas, Rawls, Beitz, and Pogge) and
around advocates of 'cosmopolitan democracy' (e.g„ Held) or 'republican cosmopolitanism'.
Again, there are anti-cosmopolitans, who are skeptical of all international political
entanglements.
Perhaps the most common invocations ofthe labe! 'cosmopolitan' in recent philosophical
literature have been in the disputes over cultural cosmopolitanism. Especially with disputes
over multiculturalism in educational curricula and with resurgent nationalisms, cultural claims
and counter-claims have received much attention. The cosmopolitan position in both ofthese
kinds of disputes rejects exclusive attachments to parochial culture. So on the one hand, the
cosmopolitan encourages cultural diversity and appreciates a multicultural melange, and on
the other hand, the cosmopolitan rejects a strong nationalism. In staking out these claims, the
cosmopolitan must be wary about very strong 'rights to culture,' respecting the rights of
minority cultures while rebuffing the right to unconditional national self-determination.
Hence, recent advocates of 'liberal nationalism' (e.g„ Margalit and Raz, Tamir) or ofthe
rights ofminority cultures (e.g„ Kymlicka) generally seem tobe anti-cosmopolitan. But the
cosrnopolitan's wariness towards very strong rights to culture and towards national self-
determination need not be grounded in a wholesale skepticism about the importance of
parochial cultural attachments. Cosmopolitanism can acknowledge the importance of (at least
some kinds of) cultural attachments for the good human life (at least within certain limits),
while denying that this implies that a person's cultural identity should be defined by any
bounded or homogeneous subset ofthe cultural resources available in the world (e.g„
Waldron).
Economic cosmopolitanism is perhaps less often defended among philosophers and more
orten among economists (e.g„ Hayek, Friedman) and certain politicians, especially in the
richer countries ofthis world. lt is the view that one ought to cultivate a single global
econornic market with free trade and minimal political involvernent. lt tends to be criticized
rather than advanced by philosophical cosmopolitans, as many ofthem regard it as at least a
partial cause ofthe problem ofvast international economic inequality. These debates about
the desirability of a fully globalized market have intensified in recent years, as a result of the
end ofthe Cold War and the increasing reach ofthe market economy.
11
3. Objections to Cosmopolitanism
One of the most common objections to cosmopolitanism attacks a position that is in fact made
of straw. Often it is said that cosmopolitanism is meaningless without the context of a world-
state or that cosmopolitanism necessarily involves the commitment to a world state. These
claims are historically uninformed, because cosmopolitanism as a concept arose in the first
instance as a metaphor for a way oflife and not in literal guise. Ever since, there have been
cosmopolitans who do not tauch on the issue of international political organization, and of
those who do, very few defend the ideal of a world-state. Furthermore, even those
cosmopolitans who do favor a world-state tend to support something more sophisticated that
cannot be dismissed out ofhand: a thin conception ofworld government with layered
sovereignty.
The rnore serious and philosophically interesting challenges to cosmopolitanism come in two
rnain forms. The first calls into question the possibility of realizing the cosmopolitan ideal,
while the second queries its desirability. We discuss these two challenges to the different
forms of cosmopolitanism in turn.
3.1 Political cosmopolitanism
lt is often argued that it is impossible to change the current system of states and to forma
world-state or a global federation of states. This claim is hard to maintain, however, in the
face ofthe existence ofthe United Nations, the existence of states with more than a billion
people ofheterogeneous backgrounds, and the experience with the United States and the
European Union. So in order to be tal<en seriously, the objection must instead be that it is
impossible to forma good state or federation ofthat magnitude, i.e„ that it is impossible to
realize or even approximate the cosmopolitan ideal in a way that mal<es it worth pursuing and
that does not carry prohibitive risks. Here political cosmopolitans disagree among themselves.
On one end of the spectrum we find those who argue in favor of a strong world-state, on the
other end we find the defenders of a loose and voluntary federation, or a different system
altogether.
The defenders ofthe loose, voluntary and noncoercive federation warn that a world-state
easily becomes despotic without there being any competing power left to break the hold of
despotism (Rawls). Defenders ofthe world-state reply that a stronger form offederation, or
even merger, is the only way to truly exit the state of nature between states, or the only way to
bring about international distributive justice. Other authors have argued that the focus among
rnany political cosmopolitans on only these two alternatives overlooks a third, and that a
concern for human rights should lead one to focus instead on institutional reform that
disperses sovereignty vertically, rather than concentrating it in all-encompassing international
institutions. On this view, peace, democracy, prosperity, and the environment would be better
served by a system in which the political allegiance and loyalties ofpersons are widely
dispersed over a number ofpolitical units ofvarious sizes, without any one unit being
dominant and thus occupying the traditional role ofthe state (Pogge).
Ofthe objections brought up by non- or anti-cosmopolitans, two deserve special mention.
First, some authors argue that the (partial or whole) surrender of state sovereignty required by
the cosmopolitan scheme is an undue violation of the principle of the autonomy of states or
the principle of democratic self-determination oftheir citizens. Second, so-called 'realists'
argue that states are in a Hobbesian state ofnature as far as the relations among them are
concerned, and that it is as inappropriate as it is futile to subject states to normative
12 11
constraints. To these objections cosmopolitans have various kinds ofresponse, ranging from
developing their alternative normative theory (e.g., by arguing that global democracy
increases rather than diminishes the democratic control of individual world citizens) to
pointing out, as has been done at least since Grotius, that states have good reasons even on
Hobbesian grounds to submit to certain forms ofinternational legal arrangements.
3.2 Economic cosmopolitanism
Various arguments have been used to show that economic cosmopolitanism is not a viable
option. Marx and !ater Marxists have argued that capitalism is self-destructive in the long run,
because the exploitation, alienation, and poverty that it inflicts on the proletariat will provoke
a world-wide revo!ution that will bring about the end of capitalism. In the twentieth century,
when nationalist tendencies proved tobe stronger (or in any case more easily mobilized) than
international solidarity, and when the position ofworkers was strengthened to the point of
making them unwilling to risk a revolution, this forced the left to reconsider this view.
Critics of the economic cosmopolitan ideal have also started to emphasize another way in
which capitalism bears the seeds ofits own destruction within itself, namely, insofar as it is
said to lead to a global environmental disaster that might spell the end ofthe human species,
or in any event the end of capitalism as we know it. The effects of excessive consumption (in
some parts ofthe world) and the exploitation ofnature would make the earth inhospitable to
future human generations.
Even if one does not think that these first two problems are so serious as to make economic
cosmopolitanism unviable, they can still make it seem undesirable in the eyes ofthose who
are concerned with poverty and environmental destruction.
Moreover, there are several other concems that lead critics to regard economic
cosmopolitanism as undesirable. First among these is the lack of effective democratic control
by the vast majority ofthe world's population, as !arge multinationals are able to impose
demands on states that are in a weak economic position and their populations, demands that
they cannot reasonably refuse to meet, although this does not mean that they meet them fully
voluntarily. This concems, for example, labor conditions or the use of raw materials in so-
called Third World countries.
Second, economic cosmopolitans are accused offailing to pay attention to a number of
probable side-effects of a global free market. In particular, they are criticized for neglecting or
downplaying issues such as (a) the presupposition oflarge-scale migration or re-schooling
whenjobs disappear in one area (the loss ofties to friends and family, language, culture, etc.,
and the monetary costs of moving or re-tooling), (b) the Jack of a guarantee that there will be
a sufficient supply of living-wage jobs for all world citizens (especially given increasing
automation), and (c) the problem ofthe detrimental effects ofincome disparities. They are
similarly accused of failing to take seriously the fact that there might be circumstances under
which it would be profitable for some states tobe protectionist or wage war, such as wars
about markets or raw materials and energy (e.g., oil).
3.3 Moral cosmopolitanism
Another version ofthe criticism that cosmopolitanism is impossible targets the psychological
assumptions of moral cosmopolitanism. Here it is said that human beings must have strenger
attachments toward members oftheir own state or nation, and that attempts to disperse
12
attachments to fellow-citizens in order to honor a moral community with human beings as
such will cripple our sensibilities. Ifthis is a viability claim and not simply a desirability
claim, then it must be supposed that moral cosmopolitanism would literally leave !arge
numbers ofpeople unable to function. So it is claimed that people need a particular sense of
national identity in order to be agents, and that a particular sense of national identity requires
attachment to particular others perceived to have a similar identity. This argument seems
plausible ifit is assumed that cosmopolitanism requires the same attitudes towards all other
human beings, but moderate cosmopolitanism does not make that assumption. Rather, the
moderate cosmopolitan has to insist only that there is some favorable, motivating attitude
toward all human beings as such; this leaves room for some special attitudes towards fellow-
citizens. Of course, the strict moral cosmopolitan will go further and will deny that fellow-
citizens deserve any special attitudes, and it might be thought that this denial is what flouts the
limits ofhuman psychology. But this does not seem tobe true as an empirical generalization.
The cosmopolitan does not need to deny that some people do happen to have the need for
national allegiance, so long as it is true that not all people do; and insofar as some people do,
the strict cosmopolitan will say that perhaps it does not need to be that way and that
cosmopolitan education might lead to a different result. The historical record gives even the
strict cosmopolitan some cause for cheer, as human psychology and the forms ofpolitical
organization have proven to be quite plastic.
In fact, some cosmopolitans have adopted a developmental psychology according to which
patriotism is a step on the way to cosmopolitanism: as human individua!s mature they develop
ever wider loyalties and allegiances, starting with attachments to their caregivers and ending
with allegiance to humanity at !arge. These different attachments are not necessarily in
competition with each other. Just as little as loyalty to one's family is generally seen as a
problematic feature of citizens, so the argument goes, loyalty to one's state is not a necessarily
problematic feature in the eyes of cosmopolitans. Thus, cosmopolitanism is regarded as an
extension of a developmental process that also includes the development of patriotism. This
claim is just as much in need of empirical support, however, as the opposite claim discussed
in the previous paragraph.
Often, though, the critic's arguments about psychological possibility are actually run together
with desirability claims. The critic says that the elimination of a special motivating
attachment to fellow-citizens is not possible, but the critic means that the elimination of
special motivating attachments to fellow-citizens will make a certain desirable form of
political life impossible. To respond to this sort of argument, the cosmopolitan has two routes
open. First, she can deny the claim itself. Perhaps the viability of politics as usual depends not
upon certain beliefs that fellow-citizens deserve more of one's service, but upon commitments
to the polity itself. If strictly cosmopolitan patriotism is a possibility, it lives in a commitment
to a universal set of principles embodied in a particular political constitution and a particular
set ofpolitical institutions. If such commitment is enough for desirable politics, then the anti-
cosmopolitan is disarmed. But second, the cosmopolitan can of course also deny the value of
the form ofpolitical life that is posited as desirable. At this point, moral commitments run
over into a discussion of political theory.
Occasionally it is said that cosmopolitans are treasonous or at least unreliable citizens. But
many recognizably cosmopolitan theses (that is, the moderate ones) are consistent with
loyalty to fellow-citizens, and even the strictest cosmopolitan canjustify some forms of
service to fellow-citizens when they are an optimal way to do good for human beings (who
happen to be fellow-citizens, and not because they are fellow-citizens).
 13
This last criticism can be developed further, however, and tailored specifically to target the
strict cosmopolitan. If the strict cosmopolitan can justify only some forms of service to
fellow-citizens, under some conditions, it might be said that she is blind to other morally
required forms or conditions of service to fellow-citizens. At this point, the critic offers
reasons why a person has special obligations to compatriots, which are missed by the strict
cosmopolitan. Many critics who introduce these reasons are themselves moderate
cosmopolitans, wishing to demonstrate that there are special obligations to fellow-citizens in
addition to general duties to the community of all human beings. But if these reasons are
demanding enough, then there may be no room left for any community with all human beings,
and so these objections to strict cosmopolitanism can also provide some impetus toward an
anti-cosmopolitan stance. Because there are several such reasons that are frequently proposed,
there are, in effect, several objections to the strictly cosmopolitan position, and they should be
considered one-by-one.
The first narrow objection to strict cosmopolitanism is that it neglects the obligations of
reciprocity. According to this argument, we have obligations to give benefits in return for
benefits received, and we receive benefits from our fellow-citizens. The best strictly
cosmopolitan response to this argument will insist on a distinction between the state and
fellow-citizens and will question exactly who provides which benefits and what is owed in
return. On grounds ofreciprocity the state may be owed certain things - cooperative
obedience - and these things may in fact generally benefit fellow-citizens. But the state is
not owed these things because one owes the fellow-citizens benefits. One does not
appropriately signal gratitude for benefits received from the state by, say, giving more to local
charities than to charities abroad because charity like this does not address the füll agent
responsible for the benefits one has received, and does not even seem to be the sort of thing
that is commensurate with the benefits received. In assessing this exchange of arguments,
there are some significantly difficult questions to answer conceming exactly how the receipt
of benefits obliges one to make a retum and concerning how the benefits one receives from
one's state affect the acceptability of emigration.
A second objection to strict moral cosmopolitanism gives contractarian grounds for our
obligations to fellow-citizens. Because actual agreements to prioritize fellow-citizens as
beneficiaries are difficult to find, the contractarians generally rely upon an implicit agreement
that expresses the interests or values ofthe fellow-citizens themselves. So the contractarian
argument turns on identifying interests or values that obligate fellow-citizens to benefit each
other. Perhaps, then, it will be argued that citizens have deep interests in what a successful
civil society and state can offer them, and that these interests commit the citizens to an
implicit agreement to benefit fellow-citizens. The strict cosmopolitan will reply to such an
argument with skepticism about what is required for the civil society. Why is more than
cooperative obedience required by our interests in what a successful state and civil society can
provide? Surely some citizens have to dedicate themselves to working on behalf ofthis
particular society, but why can they not do so on the grounds that this is the best way to
benefit human beings as such? Perhaps an intermediate position here is the (Kantian) view
that it is morally necessary to establish just democratic states and that just democratic states
need some special commitment on the part oftheir citizens in order to function as
democracies, a special commitment that goes beyond mere cooperative obedience but that can
still be defended in universalist cosmopolitan terms. The acceptability ofthis type ofview,
however, will depend on whether one finds convincing the underlying Kantian political
theory.
14 13
The final argument for recognizing obligations to benefit fellow-citizens appeals to what
David Miller has called 'relational facts.' Here the general thought is that certain relationships
are constituted by reciprocal obligations: one cannot be a friend or a brother without having
certain friendship-obligations or sibling-obligations, respectively. If fellow-citizenship is like
these other relations, then we would seem to have special obligations to fellow-citizens. But
this argument, which can be found in Cicero's De Officiis, depends upon our intuitions that
fellow-citizenship is like friendship or brotherhood and that friendship and brotherhood do
come with special obligations, and both intuitions require more argument. Frequently, these
arguments appeal to alleged facts about human nature or about human psychology, but these
appeals generally raise still further questions.
In sum, a range of interesting and difficult philosophical issues is raised by the disputes
between cosmopolitans ofvarious stripes and their critics. As the world becomes a smaller
place tlu-ough increased social, political, and economic contacts, these disputes and the issues
they raise will only become more pressing.
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16
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 17 18 15
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McKim, Robert, and JeffMcMahan, eds. The Morality ofNationa/ism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
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Public Affairs 27 (1998): 202-224.
Moellendorf, Darre!. Cosmopolitan Justice. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002.
Nathanson, Stephen. Patriotism, Morality, and Peace. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1993.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers ofJustice: Disability, Nationality, Species
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Pogge, Thomas W. "Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty." Ethics 103 (1992): 48-75
-----. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
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16 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Immanuel Kant. Resources for the Study of International
Relations and Foreign Policy. Vincent Ferraro. Mount Holyoke College. Web. 17 Jan 2015.
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)
by Immanuel Kant
PERPETUAL PEACE
Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was
painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are
insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who drearn this sweet dream, it is not for us to
decide. But one condition the author ofthis essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician
assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a
pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security ofthe state, inasmuch as the state
must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without
interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician-
-and this is the condition I make--should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and
not suspect some <langer to the state in the political theorist's opinions which are ventured and
publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires
formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might
be placed on his words.
SECTIONI
CONTAINING THE PRELIMINARY ARTICLES FOR PERPETUAL PEACE AMONG
STATES
1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Js Tacitly Reserved Matterfor a
Furure War"
Otherwise a treaty would be only a truce, a suspension of hostilities but not peace, which
means the end of all hostilities--so much so that even to attach the word "perpetual" to it is a
clubious pleonasm. The causes for making future wars (which are perhaps unknown to the
contracting parties) are without exception annihilated by the treaty of peace, even if they
should be dug out of clusty documents by acute sleuthing. When one or both parties to a treaty
of peace, being too exhausted to continue warring with each other, make a tacit reservation
(reservatio mentalis) in regard to old claims to be elaborated only at some more favorable
opportunity in the future, the treaty is made in bad faith, and we have an artifice worthy ofthe
casuistry of a Jesuit. Considered by itself, it is beneath the dignity of a sovereign, just as the
readiness to indulge in this kind ofreasoning is unworthy ofthe dignity ofhis minister.
But if, in consequence of enlightened concepts of statecraft, the glory ofthe state is placed in
its continual aggrandizement by whatever means, my conclusion will appear merely academic
and pedantic.
2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion ofAnother State
by lnheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation"
Astate is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece ofproperty (patrimonium). It is a
society of men whom no one eise has any right to command or to dispose except the state
2
itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to
destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus
contradicts the idea ofthe original contract without which no right over a people can be
conceived.l
Everyone knows to what dangers Europe, the only part ofthe world where this manner of
acquisition is lmown, has been brought, even down to the most recent times, by the
presumption that states could espouse one another; it is in part a new kind of industry for
gaining ascendancy by means offamily alliances and without expenditure offorces, andin
part a way of extending one's domain. Also the hiring-out of troops by one state to another, so
that they can be used against an enemy not common to both, is to be counted under this
principle; for in this manner the subjects, as though they were things tobe manipulated at
pleasure, are used and also used up.
3. "Standing Armies (miles perpetuus) Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished"
For they incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for
war; they incite them to compete with each other in the number of armed men, and there is no
limit to this. For this reason, the cost ofpeace finally becomes more oppressive than that of a
short war, and consequently a standing army is itself a cause of offensive war waged in order
to relieve the state of this burden. Add to this that to pay men to kill or to be killed seems to
entail using them as mere machines and tools in the hand of another (the state), and this is
hardly compatible with the rights of mankind in our own person. But the periodic and
voluntary military exercises of citizens who thereby secure themselves and their country
against foreign aggression are entirely different.
The accumulation oftreasure would have the sarne effect, for, ofthe three powers--the power
of armies, of alliances, and of money--the third is perhaps the most dependable weapon. Such
accumulation of treasure is regarded by other states as a threat of war, and if it were not for
the difficulties in learning the amount, it would force the other state to make an early attack.
4. "National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction ofStates"
This expedient of seeking aid within or without the state is above suspicion when the purpose
is domestic economy (e.g„ the improvement ofroads, new settlements, establishment of
stores against unfruitful years, etc.). But as an opposing machine in the antagonism ofpowers,
a credit system which grows beyond sight and which is yet a safe debt for the present
requirements--because all the creditors do not require payment at one time--constitutes a
dangerous money power. This ingenious invention of a commercial people (England] in this
century is dangerous because it is a war treasure which exceeds the treasures of all other
states; it cannot be exhausted except by default oftaxes (which is inevitable), though it can be
long delayed by the stimulus to trade which occurs through the reaction of credit on industry
and commerce. This facility in making war, together with the inclination to do so on the part
of rulers--an inclination which seems inbom in human nature--is thus a great hindrance to
perpetual peace. Therefore, to forbid this credit system must be a preliminary article of
perpetual peace all the more because it must eventually entangle many innocent states in the
inevitable banlauptcy and openly hann them. They are therefore justified in allying
themselves against such a state and its measures.
5. "No State Shall by Force Inte1fere with the Constitution or Government ofAnother State"
 3 4
For what is there to authorize it to do so? The offense, perhaps, which a state gives to the
subjects of another state? Rather the example ofthe evil into which a state has fallen because
ofits lawlessness should serve as a waming. Moreover, the bad example which one free
person affords another as a scandalum acceptum is not an infringement ofhis rights. But it
would be quite different if a state, by intemal rebellion, should fall into two parts, each of
which pretended to be a separate state making claim to the whole. To !end assistance to one of
these cannot be considered an interference in the constitution of the other state (for it is then
in a state of anarchy) . But so long as the intemal dissension has not come to this critical
point, such interference by foreign powers would infringe on the rights of an independent
people struggling with its internal disease; hence it would itselfbe an offense and would
render the autonomy of all states insecure.
6. "No Srate Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual
Co11fidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment ofAssassins
(percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Jncitement to Treason
(perduellio) in the Opposing State"
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character ofthe enemy must
remain even in the midst ofwar, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities
would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only
the sad recourse in the state ofnature (where there is no tribunal which couldjudge with the
force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can
be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision,
the issue ofthe conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment ofGod") decides on which side
justice lies. But between states no punitive war (bellum punitivum) is conceivable, because
there is no relation between them of master and servant.
lt follows that a war of extermination, in which the destruction ofboth parties and of all
justice can result, would permit perpetual peace only in the vast burial ground ofthe human
race. Therefore, such a war and the use of all means leading to it must be absolutely
forbidden. But that the means cited do inevitably lead to it is clear from the fact that these
infernal arts, vile in themselves, when once used would not long be confined to the sphere of
war. Take, for instance, the use of spies (uti exploratoribus). In this, one employs the infamy
of others (which can never be entirely eradicated) only to encourage its persistence even into
the state of peace, to the undoing of the very spirit of peace.
Although the laws stated are objectively, i.e., in so far as they express the intention ofrulers,
mere prohibitions (leges prohibitivae), some ofthem are ofthat strict kind which hold
regardless of circumstances (leges strictae) and which demand prompt execution. Suchare
Nos. !, 5, and 6. Others, like Nos. 2, 3, and 4, while not exceptions from the rule oflaw,
nevertheless are sub- jectively broader (leges latae) in respect to their observation, containing
permission to delay their execution without, however, losing sight ofthe end. This permission
does not authorize, under No. 2, for example, delaying until doomsday (or, as Augustus used
to say, ad calendas Graecas) the re-establishment of the freedom of states which have been
cleprived of it--i.e., it does not permit us to fail to do it, but it allows a delay to prevent
precipitation which might injure the goal striven for. For the prohibition concems only the
manner of acquisition which is no longer permitted, but not the possession, which, though not
bearing a requisite title of right, has nevertheless been held lawful in all states by the public
opinion ofthe time (the time ofthe putative acquisition).b_
SECTION II
17
CONTAINING THE DEFINITIVE ARTICLES
FOR PERPETUAL PEACE AMONG STATES
The state ofpeace among men living side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis); the
natural state is one ofwar. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an
unceasing threat ofwar. Astate ofpeace, therefore, must be established, for in order tobe
secured against hostility it is not sufficient that hostilities simply be not committed; and,
unless this security is pledged to each by his neighbor (a thing that can occur only in a civil
state), each may treat his neighbor, from whom he demands this security, as an enemy.;2.
FIRST DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FOR PERPETUAL PEACE
"The Civil Constitution ofEvery State Should Be Republican"
The only constitution which derives from the idea ofthe original compact, and on which all
juridical legislation of a people must be based, is the republican. :!: This constitution is
established, firstly, by principles ofthe freedom ofthe members of a society (as men);
secondly, by principles of dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects);
and, thirdly, by the law oftheir equality (as citizens). The republican constitution, therefore,
is, with respect to law, the one which is the original basis of every form of civil constitution.
The only question now is: Is it also the one which can lead to perpetual peace?
The republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin (having sprung from the pure
source of the concept of law), also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence,
i.e„ perpetual peace. The reason is this: ifthe consent ofthe citizens is required in order to
decide that war should be declared (andin this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing
is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game,
decreeing for themselves all the calamities ofwar. Among the latter would be: having to fight,
having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the
devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a
heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on
account of constant wars in the future. But, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not
republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration ofwar is the easiest
thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require ofthe ruler, who is the
proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the
chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war
as on a pleasure paiiy for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the
justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.
In order not to confuse the republican constitution with the democratic (as is commonly
done), the following should be noted. The forms of a state (civitas) can be divided either
according to the persons who possess the sovereign power or according to the mode of
administration exercised over the people by the chief, whoever he may be. The first is
properly called the form of sovereignty (forma imperii), and there are only three possible
forms of it: autocracy, in which one, aristocracy, in which some associated together, or
democracy, in which all those who constitute society, possess sovereign power. They may be
characterized, respectively, as the power of a monarch, ofthe nobility, or ofthe people. The
second division is that by the form of government (forma regiminis) and is based on the way
in which the state makes use of its power; this way is based on the constitution, which is the
act ofthe general will through which the many persons become one nation. In this respect
government is either republican or despotic. Republicanism is the political principle ofthe
18
separation of the executive power (the administration) from the legislative; despotism is that
of the autonomous execution by the state of laws which it has itself decreed. Thus in a
despotism the public will is administered by the ruler as his own will. Ofthe three forms of
the state, that of democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it
establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not
agree; that is, "all," who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will
with itself and with freedom.
Every form of government which is not representative is, properly speaking, without form.
The legislator can unite in one and the same person his function as legislative and as executor
of his will just as little as the universal of the major premise in a syllogism can also be the
subsumption ofthe particular under the universal in the minor. And even though the other two
constitutions are always defective to the extent that they do leave room for this mode of
administration, it is at least possible for them to assume a mode of government conforming to
the spirit of a representative system (as when Frederick II at least said he was merely the first
servant ofthe state).2_ On the other hand, the democratic mode of government makes this
impossible, since everyone wishes to be master. Therefore, we can say: the smaller the
personnel ofthe govemment (the smaller the number ofrulers), the greater is their
representation and the more nearly the constitution approaches to the possibility of
republicanism; thus the constitution may be expected by gradual reform finally to raise itself
to republicanism. For these reasons it is more difficult for an aristocracy than for a monarchy
to achieve the one completely juridical constitution, and it is impossible for a democracy to do
so except by violent revolution.
The mode of governments, Qhowever, is incomparably more important to the people than the
form of sovereignty, although much depends on the greater or lesser suitability ofthe latter to
the end of [good] government. To conform to the concept of law, however, government must
have a representative form, andin this system only a republican mode of government is
possible; without it, government is despotic and arbitrary, whatever the constitution may be.
None of the ancient so-called "republics" knew this system, and they all finally and inevitably
degenerated into despotism under the sovereignty of one, which is the most bearable of all
forms of despotism.
SECOND DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FORA PERPETUAL PEACE
"The Law ofNations Shal/ be Founded on a Federation of Free States"
Peoples, as states, like individuals, may be judged to injure one another merely by their
coexistence in the state ofnature (i.e„ while independent of extemal laws). Each ofthen, may
and should for the sake of its own security demand that the others enter with it into a
constitution sirnilar to the civil constitution, for under such a constitution each can be secure
in his right. This would be a league of nations, but it would not have to be a state consisting of
nations. That would be contradictory, since a state implies the relation of a superior
(legislating) to an inferior (obeying), i.e„ the people, and many nations in one state would
then constitute only one nation. This contradicts the presupposition, for here we have to weigh
the rights of nations against each other so far as they are distinct states and not amalgamated
into one.
When we see the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom, preferring ceaseless combat
to subjection to a lawful constraint which they might establish, and thus preferring senseless
freedom to rational freedom, we regard it with deep contempt as barbarity, rudeness, and a
5 6
brutish degradation ofhumanity. Accordingly, one would think that civilized people (each
united in a state) would hasten all the more to escape, the sooner the better, from such a
depraved condition. But, instead, each state places its majesty (for it is absurd to speak ofthe
majesty ofthe people) in being subject to no extemaljuridical restraint, and the splendor ofits
sovereign consists in the fact that many thousands stand at his command to sacrifice
themselves for something that does not concem them and without his needing to place himself
in the least danger.Z The chief difference between European and American savages lies in the
fact that many tribes ofthe latter have been eaten by their enemies, while the former know
how to make better use oftheir conquered enemies than to dine offthem; they lmow better
how to use them to increase the number oftheir subjects and thus the quantity ofinstruments
for even more extensive wars.
When we consider the perverseness ofhuman nature which is nakedly revealed in the
uncontrolled relations between nations (this perverseness being veiled in the state of civil law
by the constraint exercised by government), we may weil be astonished that the word "law"
has not yet been banished from war politics as pedantic, and that no state has yet been bold
enough to advocate this point ofview. Up to the present, Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and
many other irritating comforters have been cited in justification of war, though their code,
philosophically or diplomatically formulated, has not and cannot have the least legal force,
because states as such do not stand under a common external power. There is no instance on
record that a state has ever been moved to desist from its purpose because of arguments
backed up by the testimony of such great men. But the homage which each state pays (at least
in words) to the concept of law proves that there is slumbering in man an even greater moral
disposition to become master ofthe evil principle in himself (which he cannot disclaim) and
to hope for the same from others. Otherwise the word "law" would never be pronounced by
states which wish to war upon one another; it would be used only ironically, as a Gallic prince
interpreted it when he said, "It is the prerogative which nature has given the stronger that the
weaker should obey him."
States do not plead their cause before a tribunal; war alone is their way ofbringing suit. But
by war and its favorable issue, in victory, right is not decided, and though by a treaty ofpeace
this particular war is brought to an end, the state of war, of always finding a new pretext to
hostilities, is not terminated. Nor can this be declared wrong, considering the fact that in this
state each is the judge ofhis own case. Notwithstanding, the obligation which men in a
lawless condition have under the natural law, and which requires them to abandon the state of
nature, does not quite apply to states under the law of nations, for as states they already have
an internal juridical constitution and have thus outgrown compulsion from others to submit to
a rnore extended lawful constitution according to their ideas of right. This is true in spite of
the fact that reason, from its throne of suprerne moral legislating authority, absolutely
condernns war as a legal recourse and makes a state ofpeace a direct duty, even though peace
cannot be established or secured except by a compact among nations.
For these reasons there must be a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of
peace (foedus pacijicum ), and which would be distinguished from a treaty of peace (pactum
pacis) by the fact that the latter terminales only one war, while the former seeks to make an
end of all wars forever. This league does not tend to any dominion over the power of the state
but only to the maintenance and security ofthe freedom ofthe state itself and of other states
in league with it, without there being any need for them to submit to civil laws and their
cornpulsion, as men in a state of nature rnust submit.
 7 8
The practicability (objective reality) ofthis idea offederation, which should gradually spread
to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace, can be proved. For if fortune directs that a
powerful and enlightened people can make itself a republic, which by its nature must be
inclined to perpetual peace, this gives a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they
may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and
more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.
We may readily conceive that a people should say, "There ought tobe no war among us, for
we want to make ourselves into a state; that is, we want to establish a supreme legislative,
executive, and judiciary power which will reconcile our differences peaceably." But when this
state says, "There ought to be no war between myself and other states, even though I
acknowledge no supreme legislative power by which our rights are mutually guaranteed," it is
not at all clear on what I can base my confidence in my own rights unless it is the free
federation, the surrogate ofthe civil social order, which reason necessarily associates with the
concept of the law of nations--assuming that something is really meant by the latter.
The concept of a law of nations as a right to make war does not really mean anything, because
it is then a law of deciding what is right by unilateral maxims through force and not by
universally valid public laws which restrict the freedom of each one. The only conceivable
meaning of such a law of nations might be that it serves men right who are so inclined that
they should destroy each other and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows
both the atrocities and their perpetrators. For states in their relation to each other, there cannot
be any reasonable way out ofthe Jawless condition which entails only war except that they,
like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the
constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of
various nations (civitas gentium), which will ultimately include all the nations ofthe world.
But tmder the idea ofthe law ofnations they do not wish this, and reject in practice what is
correct in theory. If all is not tobe lost, there can be, then, in place ofthe positive idea of a
world republic, only the negative surrogate of an alliance which averts war, endures, spreads,
and holds back the stream ofthose hostile passions which fear the law, though such an
alliance is in constant peril oftheir breaking loose again ..ll_ Furor impius intus ... fremit
horrid11s ore cruento (Virgil).
THIRD DEFINITIVE ARTICLE FORA PERPETUAL PEACE
"The Lmv of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality"
Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but ofright. Hospitality
means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of
another. One rnay refuse to receive hirn when this can be done without causing his
destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with
hostility. lt is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special
beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow
inhabitant for a certain length oftime. It is only a right oftemporary sojourn, a right to
associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue oftheir common possession ofthe
surface ofthe earth, where, as a globe, they carmot infinitely disperse and hence must finally
tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a
pai1icular part of the earth.
Uninhabitable parts ofthe earth--the sea and the deserts--divide this community of all men,
but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these
19
unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face ofthe
earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality ofthe inhabitants of coasts
(for instance, ofthe Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded
travelers, or the inhospitality ofthe inhabitants ofthe deserts (for instance, the Bedouin
Arabs) who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus
opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right ofhospitality, i.e., the privilege of
foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions ofthe possibility of seeking to communicate
with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts ofthe world can come into peaceable
relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human
race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world
citizenship.
But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions ofthe civilized and especially ofthe
commercial states of our part ofthe world. The injustice which they show to Jands and
peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying
lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spiee Islands, the Cape, etc„ were at
the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for
they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), under the pretense of
establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress
the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion,
perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.
China 2 and Japan (Nippon), who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused
them entry, the former permitting their approach to their shores but not their entry, while the
latter permit this approach to only one European people, the Dutch, but treat them like
prisoners, not allowing them any communication with the inhabitants. The warst ofthis (or, to
speak with the moralist, the best) is that all these outrages profit them nothing, since all these
commercial ventures stand on the verge of collapse, and the Sugar Islands, that place of the
rnost refined and cruel slavery, produces no real revenue except indirectly, only serving a not
very praiseworthy purpose offurnishing sailors for war fleets and thus for the conduct ofwar
in Europe. This service is rendered to powers which make a great show oftheir piety, and,
while they drink injustice like water, they regard themselves as the elect in point of
orthodoxy.
Since the narrower or wider community ofthe peoples ofthe earth has developed so far that a
violation of rights in one place is feit throughout the world, the idea of a law ofworld
citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a supplement to the unwritten code of
the civil and international law, indispensable for the maintenance ofthe public human rights
and hence also of perpetual peace. One cannot flatter oneself into believing one can approach
this peace except under the condition outlined here.
Footnotes
1. A hereditary kingdom is not a state which can be inherited by another state, but the right to
govern it can be inherited by another physical person. The state thereby acquires a ruler, but
he, as a ruler (i.e„ as one already possessing another realm), does not acquire the state.
2. lt has not without cause hitherto been doubted whether besides the commands (leges
praeceptivae) and prohibitions (leges prohibitivae) there could also be permissive laws (leges
20
permissivae) of pure reason. For laws as such contain a principle of objective practical
necessity, while permission implies a principle ofthe practical contingency of certain actions.
Hence a law ofpermission would imply constraint to an action to do that to which no one can
be constrained. Ifthe object ofthe law has the same meaning in both cases, this is a
contradiction. But in permissive law, which is in question here, the prohibition refers only to
the füture mode of acquisition of a right (e.g„ by succession), while the permission annuls this
prohibition only with reference to the present possession. This possession, though only
putative, may be held tobe just (possessio putative) in the transition from the state of nature
to a civil state, by virtue of a permissive law included under natural law, even though it is
[strictly] illegal. But, as soon as it is recognized as illegal in the state ofnature, a similar mode
of acquisition in the subsequent civil state (after this transition has occurred) is forbidden, and
this right to continuing possession would not hold if such a presumptive acquisition had taken
place in the civil state. For in this case it would be an infringement which would have to cease
as soon as its illegality was discovered.
1 have wished only to call the attention ofthe teachers ofnatural law to the concept of a !ex
permissive, which systematic reason affords, particularly since in civil (statute) law use is
often made of it. But in the ordinary use of it, there is this difference: prohibitive law stands
alone, while permission is not introduced into it as a limiting condition (as it should be) but
counted among the exceptions to it. Then it is said, "This or that is forbidden, except Nos. 1,
2, 3," and so on indefinitely. These exceptions are added to the law only as an afterthought
required by our groping around among cases as they arise, and not by any principle.
Otherwise the conditions would have had tobe introduced into the formula ofthe prohibition,
andin this way it would itselfhave become a permissive law. lt is, therefore, unfortunate that
the subtle question proposed by the wise and acute Count von Windischgrätz was never
answered and soon consigned to oblivion, because it insisted on the point here discussed. For
the possibility of a formula similar to those of mathematics is the only legitimate criterion of a
consistent legislation, and without it the so-called ius certum must always remain a pious
wish. Otherwise we shall have merely general laws (which apply to a great number of cases),
but no universal laws (which apply to all cases) as the concept oflaw seems to requires.
3. We ordinarily assume that no one may act inimically toward another except when he has
been actively injured by the other. This is quite correct ifboth are under civil law, for, by
entering into such a state, they afford each other the requisite security through the sovereign
which has power over both. Man (or the people) in the state of nature deprives me of this
security and injures me, ifhe is near me, by this mere status ofhis, even though he does not
injure me actively (facto); he does so by the lawlessness ofhis condition (stati1 iniusto) which
constantly threatens me. Therefore, I can campe! him either to enter with me into a state of
civil law or to remove himselffrom my neighborhood. The postulate which is basic to all the
following articles is: All men who can reciprocally influence each other must stand under
some civil constitution.
Every juridical constitution which concerns the person who stands under it is one ofthe
following:
( 1) The constitution conforrning to the civil law of men in a nation (ius civitatis).
(2) The constitution conforming to the law of nations in their relation to one another (ius
gentium).
9 10
(3) The constitution conforming to the law ofworld citizenship, so far as men and states are
considered as citizens of a universal state of men, in their external mutual relationships (ius
cosmopoliticum).
This division is not arbitrary, being necessary in relation to the idea ofperpetual peace. For if
only one state were related to another by physical influence and were yet in a state of nature,
war would necessarily follow, and our purpose here is precisely to free ourselves ofwar.
4. Juridical (and hence) external freedom cannot be defined, as is usual, by the privilege of
doing anything one wills so long as he does not injure another. For what is a privilege? lt is
the possibility of an action so far as one does not injure anyone by it. Then the definition
would read: Freedom is the possibility ofthose actions by which one does no one an injury.
One does another no injury (he may do as he pleases) only ifhe does another no injury--an
empty tautology. Rather, my external Guridical) freedom is tobe defined as follows: lt is the
privilege to !end obedience to no external laws except those to which I could have given
consent. Similarly, external Guridical) equality in a state is that relationship among the
citizens in which no one can lawfully bind another without at the same time subjecting
himselfto the law by which he also can be bound. No definition ofjuridical dependence is
needed, as this already lies in the concept of a state's constitution as such.
The validity ofthese inborn rights, which are inalienable and belong necessarily to humanity,
is raised to an even higher level by the principle of the juridical relation of man to higher
beings, for, ifhe believes in them, he regards himselfby the same principles as a citizen of a
supersensuous world. For in what concerns my freedom, I have no obligation with respect to
divine law, which can be acknowledged by my reason alone, except in so far as I could have
given my consent to it. Indeed, it is only through the law offreedom ofmy own reason that I
frame a concept ofthe divine will. With regard to the most sublime reason in the world that I
can think of, with the exception of God--say, the great Aeon--when I do my duty in my post
as he does in his, there is no reason under the law of equality why obedience to duty should
fall only to me and the right to command only to him. The reason why this principle of
equality does not pe11ain to our relation to God (as the principle offreedom does) is that this
Being is the only one to which the concept of duty does not apply.
But with respect to the right of equality of all citizens as subjects, the question ofwhether a
hereditary nobility may be tolerated turns upon the answer to the question as to whether the
pre-eminent rank granted by the state to one citizen over another ought to precede merit or
follow it. Now it is obvious that, ifrank is associated with birth, it is uncertain whether merit
(political skill and integrity) will also follow; hence it would be as if a favorite without any
rnerit were given command. The general will ofthe people would never agree to this in the
original contract, which is the principle of all law, for a nobleman is not necessarily a noble
man. With regard to the nobility of office (as we might call the rank ofthe higher magistracy)
which one must earn by merit, this rank does not belang to the person as his property; it
belongs to his post, and equality is not thereby infringed, because when a man quits his office
he renounces the rank it confers and re-enters into the class ofhis fellows.
5. The lofty epithets of "the Lord's anointed„ .... the executor ofthe divine will on earth," and
"the vicar of God," which have been lavished on sovereigns, have been frequently censured as
crude and intoxicating flatteries. But this seems to me without good reason. Far from inspiring
a monarch with pride, they should rather render him humble, providing he possesses some
intelligence (which we must assume). They should make him reflect that he has taken an
office too great for man, an office which is the holiest God has ordained on earth, to be the
 II
trustee ofthe rights ofmen, and that he must always stand in dread ofhaving in some way
injured this "apple of God's eye."
6. Mallet du Pan, in his pompous but empty and hollow language, pretends to have become
convinced, after lang experience, ofthe truth of Pope's well-known saying:
"For forms of government !et fools contest:
Whate'er is best administered, is best."
If that means that the best-administered state is the state that is best administered, he has, to
rnake use ofSwift's expression, "cracked a nut to come at a maggot." But ifit means that the
best-administered state also has the best mode of government, i.e., the best constitution, then
it is thoroughly wrang, for examples of good governments prove nothing about the form of
government. Whoever reigned better than a Titus and a Marcus Aurelius? Yet one was
succeeded by a Domitian and the other by a Commodus. This could never have happened
under a good constitution, for their unworthiness for this post was known early enough and
also the power ofthe ruler was sufficient to have excluded them.
12 21
mysteries, as we learn from Hysichius (cf. Travels of the Young Anacharsis, Part V, p. 447
ff.). For, according to Georgi, op. cit., the word Concoia means God, which has a striking
resemblance to Konx. Pah-cio (ibid., 520), which the Greeks may weil have pronounced pax,
means the promulgator legis, divinity pervading the whole ofnature (also called Cencresi, p.
177). Om, however, which La Croze translates as benedictus ("blessed"), when applied to
divinity perhaps means "the beatified" (p. 507). P. Franz Orazio often asked the Lamas of
Tibet what they understood by "God" (Concoia) and always got the answer, "It is the
assembly of saints" (i.e., the assembly ofthe blessed ones who, according to the doctrine of
rebirth, finally, after many wanderings through bodies ofall kinds, have returned to God, or
Burchane; that is to say, they are transmigrated souls, beings tobe worshiped, p. 223). That
mysterious expression Konx Ompax may weil mean "the holy" (Konx), the blessed (Om), the
wise (Pax), the supreme being pervading the world (nature personified). Its use in the Greek
mysteries may indicate monotheism among the epopts in contrast to the polytheism ofthe
people (though Orazio scented atheism there). How that mysterious word came to the Greeks
via Tibet can perhaps be explained in this way; and the early traffic ofEurope with China,
also through Tibet, and perhaps earlier than communication with Hindustan, is made
probable.

7. A Bulgarian prince gave the following answer to the Greek emperor who good-naturedly
suggested that they settle their difference by a duel: "A smith who has tongs won't pluck the
glowing iron from the fire with his bare hands."

8. lt would not ill become a people that has just terminated a war to decree, besides a day of
thanksgiving, a day offasting in order to ask heaven, in the name ofthe state, for forgiveness
for the great iniquity which the human race still goes on to perpetuate in refusing to submit to
a lawful constitution in their relation to other peoples, preferring, from pride in their
independence, to make use ofthe barbarous means ofwar even though they are not able to
attain what is sought, namely, the rights of a single state. The thanksgiving for victory won
during the war, the hymns which are sung to the God ofHosts (in good Israelitic manner),
stand in equally sharp contrast to the moral idea ofthe Father ofMen. For they not only show
a sad enough indifference to the way in which nations seek their rights, but in addition express
a joy in having annihilated a multitude of men or their happiness.

9.To call this great empire by the name it gives itself, namely "China" and not "Sina" or
anything like that, we have only to refer to (A.] Georgi, Alphabetum Tibetanum, pp. 651-54,
especially note b. According to the note of Professor [Johann Eberhard] Fischer of Petersburg,
there is no definite ward used in that country as its name; the most usual ward is "Kin," i.e.,
gold (which the Tibetans call "Ser"). Accordingly, the emperor is called "the king of gold,"
that is, king ofthe most splendid country in the world. In the empire itself, this word may be
pronounced Chin, while because ofthe 'guttural sound the Italian missionaries may have
called it Kin.--It is clear that what the Romans called the "Land of Seres" was China; the silk,
however, was sent to Europe across Greater Tibet (through Lesser Tibet, Bukhara, Persia, and
then on).

This suggests many reflections conceming the antiquity ofthis wonderful state, in comparison
with that ofHindustan at the time ofits union with Tibet and thence with Japan. We see, on
the contrary, that the name "Sina" or "Tshina," said to have been used by the neighbors ofthe
country, suggests nothing.

Perhaps we can also explain the very ancient but never well-known intercourse ofEurope
with Tibet by considering the shout, ('Konx Ompax'), ofthe hierophants in the Eleusinian
22 Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. Immanuel Kant. Ehtics Reference Archive. Encyclopedia
of Marxism. Web. 17 Jan 2015.
ldea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
(1784)
by Immanuel Kantill
Introduction
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point ofview, concerning the freedom
ofthe will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event
are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned
with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that ifwe artend to the play offreedom
of the human will in the !arge, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that
what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of
the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original
endowment. Since the free will ofman has obvious influence upon marriages, births, and
deaths, they seem tobe subject to no rule by which the number ofthem could be reckoned in
advance. Yet the annual tables ofthem in the major countries prove that they occur according
to laws as stable as [those of] the unstable weather, which we likewise cannot determine in
advance, but which, in the !arge, maintain the growth of plants the flow ofrivers, and other
natural events in an unbroken uniform course. Individuals and even whole peoples think little
on this. Each, according to his own inclination, follows his own purpose, often in opposition
to others; yet each individual and people, as iffollowing some guiding thread, go toward a
natural but to each ofthem unlmown goal; all work toward furthering it, even ifthey would
set little store by it ifthey did know it.
Since men in their endeavors behave, on the whole, not just instinctively, like the brntes, nor
yet like rational citizens of the world according to some agreed-on plan, no history of man
conceived according to a plan seems tobe possible, as it might be possible to have such a
history ofbees or beavers. One cannot suppress a certain indignation when one sees men's
actions on the great world-stage and finds, beside the wisdom that appears here and there
among individuals, everything in the !arge woven together from folly, childish vanity, even
from childish malice and destructiveness. In the end, one does not know what to think ofthe
human race, so conceited in its gifts. Since the philosopher cannot presuppose any [conscious]
individual purpose among men in their great drama, there is no other expedient for him except
to try to see ifhe can discover a natural purpose in this idiotic course ofthings human. In
keeping with this purpose, it might be possible to have a history with a definite natural plan
for creatures who have no plan oftheir own.
We wish to see ifwe can succeed in finding a clue to such a history; we leave it to Nature to
produce the man capable of composing it. Thus Nature produced Kepler, who subjected, in an
unexpected way, the eccentric paths ofthe planets to definite laws; and she produced Newton,
who explained these laws by a universal natural cause.
2
FIRST THESIS
All natural capacilies of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.
Observation of both the outward form and inward structure of all animals confirms this of
them. An organ that is of no use, an arrangement that does not achieve its purpose, are
contradictions in the teleological theory ofnature. Ifwe give up this fundamental principle,
we no longer have a lawful but an aimless course of nature, and blind chance takes the place
of the guiding thread of reason.
SECOND THESIS
In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to
1he use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.
Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers
far beyond natural instinct; it aclmowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not
work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress
from one level of insight to another. Therefore a single man would have to live excessively
long in order to learn to make füll use of all his natural capacities. Since Nature hasset only a
short period for his life, she needs a perhaps unreckonable series of generations, each of
which passes its own enlightenment to its successor in order finally to bring the seeds of
enlightenment to that degree of development in our race which is completely suitable to
Nature's purpose. This point oftime must be, at least as an ideal, the goal ofman's efforts, for
otherwise his natural capacities would have to be counted as for the most part vain and
aimless. This would destroy all practical principles, and Nature, whose wisdom must serve as
the fundamental principle in judging all her other offspring, would thereby make man alone a
contemptible plaything.
THIRD THESIS
Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the
mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and !hat he should partake of no other
happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by
his own reason.
Nature does nothing in vain, andin the use ofmeans to her goals she is not prodigal. Her
giving to man reason and the freedom ofthe will which depends upon it is clear indication of
her purpose. Man accordingly was not tobe guided by instinct, not nurtured and instrncted
with ready-made lmowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out ofhis own
resources. Securing his own food, shelter, safety and defense (for which Nature gave him
neither the horns ofthe bull, nor the claws ofthe lion, nor the fangs ofthe dog, but hands
only), all amusement which can make life pleasant, insight and intelligence, finally even
goodness ofheart-all this should be wholly his own work. In this, Nature seems to have
moved with the strictest parsimony, and to have measured her animal gifts precisely to the
most stringent needs of a beginning existence, just as if she had willed that, if man ever did
advance from the lowest barbarity to the highest skill and mental perfection and thereby
worked himself up to happiness (so far as it is possible on earth), he alone should have the
credit and should have only himselfto thank-exactly as if she aimed more at his rational self-
esteem than at his well-being. For along this march ofhuman affairs, there was a host of
troubles awaiting him. But it seems not to have concerned Nature that he should live well, but
 3 4
only that he should work himselfupward so as to make himself, through his own actions,
worthy of life and of well-being.
lt remains strange that the earlier generations appear to carry through their toilsome labor only
for the sake of the later, to prepare for them a foundation on which the later generations could
erect the higher edifice which was Nature's goal, and yet that only the latest ofthe generations
should have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a longline oftheir ancestors
had (unintentionally) labored without being permitted to partake ofthe fortune they had
prepared. However puzzling this may be, it is necessary if one assumes that a species of
animals should have reason, and, as a class of rational beings each of whom dies while the
species is immortal, should develop their capacities to perfection.
FOURTH THESIS
The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is
their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among
men.
By "antagonism" I mean the unsocial sociability ofmen, i.e., their propensity to enter into
society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the
society. Man has an inclination to associate with others, because in society he feels himselfto
be more than man, i.e., as more than the developed form ofhis natural capacities. But he also
has a strong propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in himself at the same
time the unsocial characteristic ofwishing to have everything go according to his own wish.
Thus he expects opposition on all sides because, in knowing himself, he knows that he, on his
own part, is inclined to oppose others. This opposition it is which awakens all his powers,
brings him to conquer his inclination to Jaziness and, propelled by vainglory, Just for power,
and avarice, to achieve a rank among his fellows whom he cannot tolerate but from whom he
cannot withdraw. Thus are taken the first true steps from barbarism to culture, which consists
in the social worth of man; thence gradually develop all talents, and taste is refined; through
continued enlightemnent the beginnings are Jaid for a way ofthought which can in time
convert the coarse, natural disposition for moral discrimination into definite practical
principles, and thereby change a society of men driven together by their natural feelings into a
moral whole. Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics ofunsociability from
whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-
all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd's life, with all its concord,
contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly
reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by
achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the
incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to
rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities ofhumanity would forever sleep,
undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she
wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be
plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find
means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of
unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new
exertions oftheir forces and thus to the manifold development oftheir capacities. They
thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who
bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy.
23
FIFTH THESIS
The greatest problemfor the human race, to the solution ofwhich Nature drives man, is the
achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.
The highest purpose ofNature, which is the development of all the capacities which can be
achieved by mankind, is attainable only in society, and more specifically in the society with
the greatest freedom. Such a society is one in which there is mutual opposition among the
members, together with the most exact definition of freedom and fixing of its limits so that it
may be consistent with the freedom of others. Nature demands that humankind should itself
achieve this goal like all its other destined goals. Thus a society in which freedom under
external laws is associated in the highest degree with irresistible power, i.e., a perfectly just
civic constitution, is the highest problem Nature assigns to the human race; for Nature can
achieve her other purposes for mankind only upon the solution and completion ofthis
assignment. Need forces men, so enamored otherwise oftheir boundless freedom, into this
state of constraint. They are forced to it by the greatest of all needs, a need they themselves
occasion inasmuch as their passions keep them from living long together in wild freedom.
Once in such a preserve as a civic union, these same passions subsequently do the most good.
It is just the same with trees in a forest: each needs the others, since each in seeking to take
the air and sunlight from others must strive upward, and thereby each realizes a beautiful,
straight stature, while those that live in isolated freedom put out branches at random and grow
stunted, crooked, and twisted. All culture, art which adorns mankind, and the finest social
order are fruits of unsociableness, which forces itself to discipline itself and so, by a contrived
art, to develop the natural seeds to perfection.
SIXTH THESIS
This problem is the most difficult and the last tobe solved by mankind.
The difficulty which the mere thought ofthis problem puts before our eyes is this. Man is an
animal which, if it Jives among others of its kind, requires a master. For he certainly abuses
his freedom with respect to other men, and although as, a reasonable being he wishes to have
a law which limits the freedom of all, his selfish animal impulses tempt him, where possible,
to exempt himselffrom them. He thus requires a master, who will break his will and force
him to obey a will that is universally valid, under which each can be free. But whence does he
get this master? Only from the human race. But then the master is himself an animal, and
needs a master. Let him begin it as he will, it is not to be seen how he can procure a
magistracy which can maintain public justice and which is itself just, whether it be a single
person or a group of several elected persons. For each ofthem will always abuse his freedom
ifhe has none above him to exercise force in accord with the laws. The highest master should
be just in himself, and yet a man. This task is therefore the hardest of all; indeed, its complete
solution is impossible, for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly
straight can be built. ill That it is the last problem to be solved follows also from this: it
requires that there be a correct conception of a possible constitution, great experience gained
in many paths of life, and - far beyond these-a good will ready to accept such a constitution.
Three such things are very hard, and ifthey are ever tobe found together, it will be very late
and after many vain attempts.
24 5 6
SEVENTH THESIS
The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a
lawfiil external re/ation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter
problem.
What is the use of working toward a lawful civic constitution among individuals, i.e„ toward
the creation of a commonwealth? The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any
single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently,
each ofthem must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and
forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable
antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by
Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security. Through war, through the
taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even
in peacetime, must suffer intemally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and
tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she
brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad
experience, to wit, to step from the Jawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a
league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own
power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations (Foedus
AmphictyonunP1), from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws
oftheir united will. However fantastical this idea may seem-and it was laughed at as
fantastical by the Abbe de St. Pierre[i] and by Rousseauill, perhaps because they believed it
was too near to realization - the necessary outcome of the destitution to which each man is
brought by his fellows is to force the states to the same decision (hard though it be for them)
that savage man also was reluctantly forced to take, namely, to give up their brutish freedom
and to seek quiet and security under a lawful constitution.
All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not in the intention ofman, but in the intention of
Nature) to establish new relations among states, and through the destruction or at least the
disrnemberment of all of them to create new political bodies, which, again, either internally or
externally, cannot maintain themselves and which must thus suffer like revolutions; until
finally, through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in
external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself
autornatically.
[There are three questions here, which really come to one.] Would it be expected from an
Epicurean concourse of efficient causes that states, like minute particles of matter in their
chance contacts, should form all sorts ofunions which in their turn are destroyed by new
irnpacts, until once, finally, by chance a structure should arise which could maintain its
existence - a fortunate accident that could hardly occur? Or are we not rather to suppose that
Nature here follows a lawful course in gradually lifting our race from the lower levels of
anirnality to the highest level ofhumanity, doing this by her own secret art, and developing in
accord with her law all the original gifts ofman in this apparently chaotic disorder? Or
perhaps we should prefer to conclude that, from all these actions and counteractions ofmen in
the !arge, absolutely nothing, at least nothing wise, is to issue? That everything should remain
as it always was, that we cannot therefore teil but that discord, natural to our race, may not
prepare for us a hell of evils, however civilized we may now be, by annihilating civilization
and all cultural progress through barbarous devastation? (This is the fate we may weil have to
suffer under the rule ofblind chance - which is in fact identical with lawless freedom - if
there is no secret wise guidance in Nature.) These three questions, I say, mean about the same
as this: Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to
the whole?
Purposeless savagery held back the development ofthe capacities of our race; but finally,
through the evil into which it plunged mankind, it forced our race to renounce this condition
and to enter into a civic order in which those capacities could be developed. The same is done
by the barbaric freedom of established states. Through wasting the powers of the
comrnonwealths in armaments to be used against each other, through devastation brought on
by war, and even more by the necessity ofholding themselves in constant readiness for war,
they stunt the füll development ofhuman nature. But because ofthe evils which thus arise,
our race is forced to find, above the (in itself healthy) opposition of states which is a
consequence of their freedom, a law of equilibrium and a united power to give it effect. Thus
it is forced to institute a cosmopolitan condition to secure the external safety of each state.
Such a condition is not unattended by the <langer that the vitality of mankind may fall asleep;
but it is at least not without a principle ofbalance among men's actions and counteractions,
without which they might be altogether destroyed. Until this last step to a union of states is
taken, which is the halfway marle in the development of mankind, human nature must suffer
the cruelest hardships under the guise of external well-being; and Rousseau was not far wrang
in preferring the state of savages, so long, that is, as the last stage to which the human race
rnust climb is not attained.
To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized- perhaps too
rnuch for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves
as having reached morality- for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to
culture; its use for some simulacrum ofmorality in the love ofhonor and outward decorum
constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-
expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds oftheir
citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to
be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the
education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good
disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the
human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of
the chaotic conditions of its international relations.
EIGHTH THESIS
The history of mankind can be seen, in the /arge, as the realization of Nature 's secret plan to
bringforth a pe1fectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of
mankind can be fidly deve/oped, and also bringforth that external relation among states
which is pe1fectly adequate to this end.
This is a corollary to the preceding. Everyone can see that philosophy can have her belief in a
rnillennium, but her millennarianism is not Utopian, since the Idea can help, though only from
afar, to bring the millennium to pass. The only question is: Does Nature reveal anything ofa
path to this end? And I say: She reveals something, but very little. This great revolution seems
to require so long for its completion that the short period during which humanity has been
following this course permits us to determine its path and the relation of the parts to the whole
with as little certainty as we can determine, from all previous astronomical observation, the
path of the sun and his host of satellites among the fixed stars. Yet, on the fundamental
 7 8
premise ofthe systematic structure ofthe cosmos and from the little that has been observed,
we can confidently infer the reality of such a revolution.
Moreover, human nature is so constituted that we cannot be indifferent to the most remote
epoch our race may come to, if only we may expect it with certainty. Such indifference is
even less possible for us, since it seems that our own intelligent action may hasten this happy
time for our posterity. For that reason, even faint indications of approach to it are very
important to us. At present, states are in such an artificial relation to each other that none of
them can neglect its internal cultural development without losing power and influence among
the others. Therefore the preservation ofthis natural end [culture], ifnot progress in it, is
fairly well assured by the ambitions of states. Furthermore, civic freedom can hardly be
infringed without the evil consequences being felt in all walks of life, especially in commerce,
where the effect is loss ofpower ofthe state in its foreign relations. But this freedom spreads
by degrees. When the citizen is hindered in seeking his own welfare in his own way, so long
as it is consistent with the freedom of others, the vitality of the entire enterprise is sapped, and
therewith the powers ofthe whole are diminished. Therefore limitations on personal actions
are step by step removed, and general religious freedom is permitted. Enlightenment comes
gradually, with intermittent folly and caprice, as a great good which must finally save men
from the selfish aggrandizement oftheir masters, always assuming that the latter know their
own interest. This enlightenment, and with it a certain commitment ofheart which the
enlightened man cannot fail to make to the good he clearly understands, must step by step
ascend the tlu·one and influence the principles of government.
Although, for instance, our world rulers at present have no money left over for public
education and for anything that concerns what is best in the world, since all they have is
already committed to future wars, they will still find it to their own interest at least not to
hinder the weak and slow, independent efforts oftheir peoples in this work. In the end, war
itselfwill be seen as not only so artificial, in outcome so uncertain for both sides, in after-
effects so painful in the form of an ever-growing war debt (a new invention) that cannot be
met, that it will be regarded as a most dubious undertaking. The impact of any revolution on
all states on our continent, so closely !mit together through commerce, will be so obvious that
the other states, driven by their own danger but without any legal basis, will offer themselves
as arbiters, and thus they will prepare the way for a distant international government for
which there is no precedent in world history. Although this government at present exists only
as a rough outline, nevertheless in all the members there is rising a feeling which each has for
the preservation ofthe whole. This gives hope finally that after many reformative revolutions,
a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose, will come into
being as the womb wherein all the original capacities ofthe human race can develop.
NINTH THESIS
A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed
to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as
contributing to this end ofNature.
lt is strange and apparently silly to wish to write a history in accordance with an Idealfil of
how the course of the world must be if it is to lead to certain rational ends. lt seems that with
such an Idea only a romance could be written. Nevertheless, if one may assume that Nature,
even in the play ofhuman freedom, works not without plan or purpose, this Idea could still be
of use. Even if we are too blind to see the secret mechanism of its workings, this Idea may
still serve as a guiding thread for presenting as a system, at least in broad outlines, what would
25
otherwise be a planless conglomeration ofhuman actions. For if one starts with Greek history,
through which every older or contemporaneous history has been handed down or at least
certifiedw; if one follows the influence of Greek history on the construction and
misconstruction ofthe Roman state which swallowed up the Greek, then the Roman influence
on the barbarians who in turn destroyed it, and so on down to our times; if one adds episodes
from the national histories of other peoples insofar as they are known from the history of the
enlightened nations, one will discover a regular progress in the constitution of states on our
continent (which will probably give law, eventually, to all the others). If, further, one
concentrates on the civic constitutions and their laws and on the relations among states,
insofar as through the good they contained they served over lang periods of time to elevate
and adorn nations and their arts and sciences, while through the evil they contained they
destroyed them, if only a germ of enlightenment was left to be further developed by tlüs
overthrow and a higher level was thus prepared - if, I say, one carries through this study, a
guiding tlu·ead will be revealed. lt can serve not only for clarifying the confused play of things
human, and not only for the art of prophesying later political changes (a use which has already
been made ofhistory even when seen as the disconnected effect oflawless freedom), but for
giving a consoling view ofthe future (which could not be reasonably hoped for without the
presupposition of a natural plan) in which there will be exhibited in the distance how the
human race finally achieves the condition in which all the seeds planted in it by Nature can
fully develop andin which the destiny ofthe race can be fulfilled here on earth.
Such ajustification ofNature - or, better, of Providence - is no unimportant reason for
choosing a standpoint toward world history. For what is the good of esteeming the majesty
and wisdom of Creation in the realm ofbrute nature and ofrecommending that we
contem plate it, if that part of the great stage of supreme wisdom which contains the purpose
of all the others - the history of mankind - must remain an unceasing reproach to it? If we are
forced to turn our eyes from it in disgust, doubting that we can ever find a perfectly rational
purpose in it and hoping for that only in another world?
That I would want to displace the work of practicing empirical historians with this Idea of
world history, which is to some extent based upon an a priori principle, would be a
misinterpretation ofmy intention. lt is only a suggestion ofwhat a philosophical mind (which
would have tobe weil versed in history) could essay from another point of view. Otherwise
the notorious complexity of a history of our time must naturally lead to serious doubt as to
how our descendants will begin to grasp the burden ofthe history we shall leave to them after
a few centuries. They will naturally value the history of earlier times, from which the
documents may long since have disappeared, only from the point ofview ofwhat interests
them, i.e„ in answer to the question ofwhat the various nations and governments have
contributed to the goal ofworld citizenship, and what they have done to damage it. To
consider this, so as to direct the ambitions of sovereigns and their agents to the only means by
which their fame can be spread to later ages: this can be a minor motive for attempting such a
philosophical history.
Notes
1. A statement in the "Short Notices" or the twelfth number ofthe Gothaische Gelehrte
Zeitung of this year [1784], which no doubt was based on my conversation with a scholar who
was traveling through, occasions this essay, without which that statement could not be
understood.
26 9

[The notice said: "A favorite idea of Professor Kant's is that the ultimate purpose ofthe
human race is to achieve the most perfect civic constitution, and he wishes that a
philosophical historian might undertake to give us a history ofhumanity from this point of
view, and to show to what extent humanity in various ages has approached or drawn away
from this final purpose and what remains tobe done in order to reach it."]

2. The role of man is very artificial. How it may be with the dwellers on other planets and
their nature we do not know. If, however, we carry out well the mandate given us by Nature,
we can perhaps flatter ourselves that we may claim among our neighbors in the cosmos no
mean rank. Maybe among them each individual can perfectly attain his destiny in his own life.
Among us, it is different; only the race can hope to attain it.

3. An allusion to the Amphictyonic League, a league ofGreek tribes originally for the
protection of a religious shrine, which later gained considerable political power.

4. Charles-Irenee Castel, Abbe de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), in his Projet de paix perpetuelle
(Utrecht, 1713). Trans. H. H. Bellot (London, 1927).

5. In his Extrait du projet de paix perpetuelle de M l 'Abbe de St. Pierre (1760). Trans. C. E.
Vaughn, A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe (London, 1917).

6. For the Kantian sense of"Idea," see Introduction, p. xix and note 15.

7. Only a learned public, which has lasted from its beginning to our own day, can certify
ancient history. Outside it, everything eise is terra incognita; and the history ofpeoples
outside it can only be begun when they come into contact with it. This happened with the
Jews in the time ofthe Ptolemies through the translation ofthe Bible into Greek, without
which we would give little credence to their isolated narratives. From this point, when once
properly fixed, we can retrace their history. And so with all other peoples. The first page of
Thucydides, says Hume, ["Ofthe Populousness of Ancient Nations" in Essays Moral,
Political, and Literary, eds. Green and Grose, Vol. I, p. 414.] is the only beginning ofall real
history.
 27

from Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of

Mankind. Johann Gottfried Herder. Ed. Frank
E. Manuel. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970.

~ CHAPTER 1
t Notwithstanding the Varieties of the human Form, there is but
one and the same Species of Man throughout the Whole of
our Earth
No two leaves of any one tree in nature are to be found
perfectly alike; and still less do two human faces, or human
frames, resemble each other. Of what endless variety is our
artful structure susceptiblel Our solids are decomposable into
such minute and multifariously interwoven fibres, as no eye can
trace; and these are connected by a gluten of such a delicate
composition, as the utmost skill is insufficient to analyse. Yet
these constitute the least part of us: they are nothing more than
the containing vessels and conduits of the variously com-
pounded, highly animated fluid, existing in much greater quan-
tity, by means of which we live and enjoy life. "No man," says
Haller, "is exactly similar to another in his intemal structure:
the courses of the nerves and blood vessels differ in millions
and millions of cases, so that amid the variations of these
3
28
NATIONAL GENIUS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
delicate parts, we are scarcely able to discover in what they
1
agree." But if the eye of the anatomist can perceive this
infinite variety, how much greater must that be, which dwells in
the invisible powers of such an artful organization! So that
every man is ultimately a world, in extemal appearance indeed
similar to öthers, but intemally an individual being, with whom
no other coincides.
And since man is no independent substance, but is connected
with all the elements of nature; living by inspiration of the air,
and deriving nutriment from the most opposite productions of
the Earth, in his meats and drinks; consuming fire, while he
absorbs light, and contaminates the air he breathes; awake or
asleep, in motion or at rest, contributing to the change of the
universe; shall not he also be changed by it? lt is far too little,
to compare him to the absorbing sponge, the sparkling tinder:
he_ is a multitudinous hannony, a living self, on whom the
hannony of all the powers that surround him operates.
Tue whole course of a man's life is change: the different
periods of his life are tales of transfonnation, and the whole
species is one continued metamorphosis. Flowers drop and
wither; others sprout out and bud: the vast tree bears at once
all the seasons on its head. If, from a calculation of the insensi-
ble perspiration alone, a man of eighty have renovated his
whole body at least four and twenty times; 2 who can trace the
variations of matter and its fonns through all the race of man-
kind upon the Earth, amid all the causes of change; when not
one point on our complicated Globe, not one wave in the
current of time, resembles another? A few centuries only have
elapsed since the inhabitants of Germany were Patagonians:
but they are so no longer, and the inhabitants of its future
climates will not equal us. If now we go back to those times,
when every thing upon Earth was apparently so different; the
times for instance, when elephants lived in Siberia and North
America, and those !arge animals existed, the bones of which
are to be found on the Ohio; if men then lived in those regions,
1
Preface to Buffon's Nat. Hist., Vol. III.
2
According to Bernoulli: see Haller's Physiolog., Vol. VIII, l. SO, where
will be found a multitude of observations on the changes of human life.
4
National Genius and the Environment
how different must they have been from those, who now inhabit
them! Thus the history of man is ultimately a ~eatre of trans-
formations which He alone can review, who ammates all these
figures au'd feels and enjoys in them all. He builds up and
destro;s improves and alters forms, while he changes the
W orld ;round them. The wanderer upon Earth, the transient
ephemeron, can only admire the wonders of this gre~t s~irit in
a narrow circle, enjoy the form that belongs to}1rm lll ~e
general choir, adore, and disappear with this for1:1 .. I too .was ~
Arcadia": is the monumental inscription of all livlllg belllgs lll
the ever-changing, ever-renewing creation. . .
As the human intellect, however, seeks unity lll every kind of
variety, and the divine mind, its prototype, has .stamp.ed the
most innumerable multiplicity upon the Earth w1th umty, we
may venture from the vast realm of change to revert to the
simplest position: all mankind are only one and the same spe- (
. --____,
~ How many ancient fahles of human monsters an d pro digies
..
have already disappeared before the light of history! and ~here
tradition still repeats remnants of these, I am fully convlll~ed,
more accurate inquiry will explain them into more beautiful
truths. We are now acquainted with the ourang-ou:ang, and
know that he has no claim to speech, or to be cons1dered as
man:' and when we have a more exact account of the ouran?-
kubub and ourang-guhu, the tailed savages of the woods lll
Borne~, Sumatra, and the Nicobar islands will vanish. 3 Th~ men
with reverted feet in Malacca,4 the probably ricke~ natio~ of
dwarfs in Madagascar, the men habited like warnen lll Flonda,
s Even Marsden mentions these in his history of Sumatra, but only from
hearsay Monboddo in his work on the Origin and Progress of La_nguage,
V l 1 p 219 and f~Ilowing has collected all the traditions respectmg me~
w~th 'tails he could find.' Professor Blumenbach, De generis humani
varietate (On the varieties of the human species), has shown fr_om what
sources the delineations of tailed men of the woods have bee? denved.
4 Sonnerat also, in his Voyage aux Indes (Voyage to India), V~l. ~\f
103 s eaks of these but from report merely. Commerson has rev1ve e
story ~f dwarfs in Madagascar after Flaucourt; but lat~r tr_a:eIIers ha;e
· ted it On the hermaphrodites of Florida see Heyne s cntical e~say 11;
;h~ecCom~ent. Societ. Reg. Götting. ( Memoirs of the Royal Soc1ety o
Göttingen), for the year 1778, p. 993.
5

NATIONAL GENIUS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
and some others, deserve such an investigation as has already
been bestowed on the albinoes, the dondoes, the Patagonians,
and the aprons of the Hottentot females. 5 Men, who succeed in
removing wants from the creation, falsehoods from our mem-
ory, and disgraces from our nature, are to the realms of truth,
what the heroes of mythology were to the primitive world; they
lessen the number of monsters on the Earth.
1 could wish, too, that the affinity of man to the ape had
never been urged so far, as to overlook, while seeking a scale of
Being, the actual steps and intervals, without which no scale
can exist. What for example can the rickety ourang-outang
explain in the figure of the Kamtschadale, the little pigmy in
the_size of the Greenlander, or the pongo in the Patagonian? for
all these forms would have arisen from the nature of man, had
there been no such thing as an ape upon the Earth. And if men
proceed still farther, and deduce certain deformities of our
species from an intermixuture with apes, the conjecture, in my
opinion, is not less improbable than degrading. Most of these
apparent resemblances of the ape exist in countries where no
apes are to be found; as the reclining skulls of the Calmucs and
Mallicollese, the prominent ears of the Pevas and Amicuans, the
small hands of some savages in Carolina, and other instances,
testify. Even these appearances, as soon as we have surmounted
the illusion of the first view, have so little of the ape, that the
Calmuc and the Negro remain completely men, even in the
form of the head, and the Mallicollese displays capacities, that
many other nations do not possess. In fact, apes and men never
were one and the same genus, and 1 wished to rectify the slight
remains of the old fable, that in some place or other upon the
Earth t~ey lived in community, and enjoyed no barren inter-
course.6 1For each genus Nature has done enough, and to each
has given its proper progeny. The ape she has divided into as
many species and varieties as possible, and extended these as
5 See Sparmann's Voyage, p. 177.
6 In the Auszügen aus dem Tagebuch eines neuen Reisenden nach Asien
(Extracts from the journal of a late traveller in Asia), Leipsic, 1784, p.
256, this is asserted anew, still only from report.
6
29
National Genius and the Environment
far as she could: but thou, 0 man, honour thyself: neither the
pongo nor the gibbon is thy brother: the American and the
Negro are: these therefore thou shouldst not oppress, or mur-
der, or steal; for they are men, like thee: with the ape thou
canst not enter into fratemity.
Lastly, I could wish the distinctions between the human
species, that have been made from a laudable zeal for discrimi-
nating science, not carried beyond due bounds. Some for in-
stance have thought fit, to employ the term of races for four or
five divisions, originally made in consequence of country or
complexion: but I see no reason for this appellation. Race refers
to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist,
or in each of these countries, and under each of these complex-
ions, comprises the most different races. For every nation is one
people, having its own national form, as well as its own lan-
guage: the climate, it is true, stamps on each its mark, or
spreads over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the
original national character. This originality of character extends
even to families, and its transitions are as variable as impercep-
tible. In short, there are neither four or five races, nor exclusive
varieties, on this Earth. Complexions run into each other: forms
follow the genetic character: and upon the whole, all are at last
but shades of the same great picture, extending through all
ages, and over all parts of the Earth. They belong not, there-
fore, so properly to systematic natural history, as to the physi-
co-geographical history of man.
30

Now as mankind, both taken as a whole, andin its particular

individuals, societies, and nations, is a permanent natural sys-
tem of the most multifarious living powers; let us examine,
97

HUMANITY THE END OF HUMAN NATURE
wherein its stability consists; in what point its highest beauty,
truth, and goodness, unite; and what course it takes, in order to
reapproach its permanent condition, on every aberration from
it, of which many are exhibited to us by history and experi-
ence.
1. The human species is such a copious scheme qf energies
and capacities, that, as every thing in nature rests on the most
determinate individuality, its great and numerous capacities
could not appear on our planet otherwise than divided among
millions. Every thing has been bom, that could be bom upon it;
and every thing has maintained itself, that could acquire a state
of permanence according to the laws of Nature. Thus every
indiVidual bears within himself that symmetry, for which he is
made, and to which he must mould himself, both in his bodily
figurej and mental capacities. Human existence appears in
every shape and kind, from the most sickly deformity, that can
scarcely support life, to the superhuman form of a Crecian
demigod; from the passionate ardour of the Negro brain, to the
capacity for consummate wisdom. Through faults and errours,
through education, necessity, and exercise, every mortal seeks
the symmetry of his powers; as in this alone the most complete
enjoyment of his existence lies: yet few are sufficiently fortu-
nate, to attain it in the purest, happiest manner.
2. As an individual man can subsist of himself but very
imperfectly, a superiour maximum of cooperating powers is
formed with every society. These powers contend together in
wild confusion, till, agreeably to the unfailing laws of nature,
opposing regulations limit each other, and a kind of equilib-
rium and harmony of movement takes place. Thus nations
modify themselves, according to time, place, and their internal
character: each bears in itself the standard . of its perfection,
totally independent of all comparison with that of others. Now
the more pure and fine the maximum on which a people hit, the
more useful the objects to which it applied the exertions of its
nobler powers, and, lastly, the more firm and exact the bond of
union, which most intimately connected all the members of the
state, and guided them to this good end; the more stable was
the nation itself, and the more brilliant the figure it made in
98
31
Humanity the End of Human Nature
history. The course that we have hitherto taken through certain
nations shows how different, according to place, time, and
circumstances, was the object for which they strove. With the
Chinese it was refined political morality; with the Hindoos, a
kind of retired purity, quiet assiduity in labour, and endurance;
with the Phenicians, the spirit of navigation, and commercial
industry. The culture of the Creeks, particularly at Athens,
proceeded on the maximum of sensible beauty, both in arts and
manners, in science and in political institutions. In Sparta, and
in Rome, men emulated the virtues of the patriot and hero; in
each, however, in a very different mode. Now as in all these
most depended on time and place, the ancients will scarcely
admit of being compared with each other in the most distin-
guished features of national fame.
3. In all, however, we see the operation of one principle,
namely human reason, which endeavours to produce unity out
of multiplicity, order out of disorder, and out of variety of
powers and designs one symmetrical and durably beautiful
whole. From the shapeless artificial rocks, with which the
Chinese omaments his garden, to the Egyptian pyramid, or the
ideal beauty of Creece, the plan and design of a reflecting
understanding is every where observable, though in very dif-
ferent degrees. The more refined the reflections of this under-
standing were, and the nearer it came to the point, which is the
highest in its kind, and admits no deviation to the right or to
the left; the more were its performances to be considered as
models, for they contain etemal rules for the human under-
standing in all ages. Thus nothing of the kind can be conceived
superiour to an Egyptian pyramid, or to several Creek and
Roman works of art. They are simple solutions of certain prob-
lems of the understanding, which admit no arbitrary supposi-
tion, that the problems are perhaps not yet solved, or might be
solved in a better way; for in them the simple idea of what they
ought to be is displayed in the easiest, fullest, and most beauti-
ful manner. Every deviation from them would be a fault; and
were they to be repeated and diversi:fied in a thousand modes,
we must still return to that single point, which is the highest of
its kind.
99
1

32
HUMANITY THE END OF HUMAN NATURE

4. Thus through all the polished nations, that we have hith-

erto considered, or shall hereafter consider, a chain of cultiva-
tion may be drawn, :8.ying off in extremely divergent curves. In
each it designates increasing and decreasing greatness, and has
maximums of every kind. Many of these exclude or limit one
another, till at length a certain symmetry takes place in the
whole; so that were we to reason from one perfection of any
nation conceming another, we should form very treacherous
conclusions. Thus, because Athens had exquisite orators, it does
not follow, that its form of govemment must Iikewise have
been the best possible; or that, because the Chinese moralize so
excellently, their state must be a pattem for all others. Forms of
govemment refer to a very different ·maximum, from that of
beautiful morals, or a pathetic oration; notwithstanding, at
bottom, all things in any nation have a certain connexion, if it
be only that of exclusion and limitation. No other maximum,
but that of the most perfect bond of union, produces the most
happy states; even supposing the people are in consequence
obliged to dispense with many shining qualities.
5. But in one and the same nation every maximum of its
commendable endeavours ought not and cannot endure for
ever; since it is but one point in the progress of time. This
incessantly moves on; and the more numerous the circum-
stances, on which the beautiful effect depends, the sooner is it
liable to pass away. Happy if its master pieces remain as rules
for future ages; since those that immediately succeed approach
them too near, and will probably obliterate by attempting to
excel them. Even the most active people frequently sink most
speedily from the boiling to the freezing point.
 33
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006. 9-27,187-206.
2

Cultural Roots

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism

exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public
ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because
they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside
them, has no true precedents in earlier times. 1 To feel the force of
this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the
busy-body who 'discovered' the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted
on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange,
contemporary kind[ Y et void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal
remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly
national imaginings. 2 (This is why so many different nations have such

1. The aneient Greeks had eenotaphs, but for speeifie, known individuals whose
bodies, for one reason or another, eould not be retrieved for regular burial. I owe this
information to my Byzantinist eolleague Judith Herrin.
2. Consider, for example, these remarkable tropes: 1. 'The long grey line has never
failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and
grey, would rise from their white erosses, thundering those magie words: Duty, honour,
eountry.' 2. 'My estimate of(the Ameriean man-at-arms] was formed on the battlefield
many, many years ago, and has never ehanged. I regarded him then, as I regard him
now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military
eharaeters, but also as one of the most stainless (sie] . . . . He belongs to history as
furnishing one of the greatest examples of sueeessful patriotism (sie]. He belongs to
posterity as the instruetor offuture generations in the prineiples ofliberry and freedom.

9
 34
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their
absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans,
. .
Argent1n1ans ....?)
The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if
one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a
cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason
is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death
and irnrnortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this
suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. As this affinity is
by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a consideration of the
cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last of a whole gamut of
fatalities.
If the manner of a man's dying usually seems arbitrary, his
mortality is inescapable. Human lives are füll of such combinations
j:
1
of necessity and chance. W e are all aware of the contingency and
i ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our life-
era, our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth. The
great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must
be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems
of dornination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-in-
the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life. The
extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Chris-
tianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their
imaginative response to the overwhelrning burden of human suffer-
ing - disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death. Why was I bom
) blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter
'·· retarded? The religions attempt to explain. The great weakness of
all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marx-
3
ism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence. At
He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and his achievements.' Douglas
MacArthur, 'Duty, Honour, Country,' Address to the U.S. Military Academy, West
Point, May 12, 1962, in his A Soldier Speaks, pp. 354 and 357.
3. Cf. Regis Debray, 'Marxism and the National Question,' New Left Review, 105
(September-October 1977), p. 29. In the course of doing fieldwork in Indonesia in the
1960s I was struck by the calm refusal of many Muslims to accept the ideas ofDarwin. At
first I interpreted this refusal as obscurantism. Subsequently I came to see it as an
honourable attempt to be consistent: the doctrine of evolution was simply not
compatible with the teachings oflslam. What are we to make of a scientific materialism
10
CULTURAL ROOTS
the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to
obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforrning fatality
into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concems
itself with the links between the dead and the yet unbom, the
mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child's conception
and birth without dirnly apprehending a combined connectedness,
fortuity, and fatality in a language of 'continuity'? (Again, the
disadvantage of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Her-
aclitean hostility to any idea of continuity.)
I bring up these perhaps simplerninded observations primarily
because in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only
the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of
thought. The century of the Enlightenrnent, of rationalist secularism,
brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of
religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did
not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more
arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of
continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular
transformation of fatality int~(;~"tiffiiify; C:Öntl.ngeiicy !J:lto ·rn:ea~ing.
As :We shali se~, „fe~ i:hings were (ar~) bett~r suited to this -e~c:l than -an ·--·
idea of nation. If'nation:..states are wl.dely- concededt~be ~new' a~d
~hi~torical,'
.„. „ .... .-
.„„.„
n~~i;;;.;~;--~hi'~h
the,„„.-„.-
„, •. ••. -„ - .„ .. „„„„.„„„ .. ·-··
'r:h~y g!ve-„ .••.
.„„ ·-4- .. .
„ ••
politicai exp··i:~;~r~~ ·;1~ays
„,„._•- .„„„„„ .• ----,,.„.„ ...„.„_„„„„„.„„.„
loom out „of an iffiII1emopal past~ and, still _m,?r~ important, f?lide
which formally accepts the findings of physics about matter, yet makes so little effort to
link these findings with the dass struggle, revolution, or whatever. Does not the abyss
between protons and the proletariat conceal an unacknowledged metaphysical con-
ception of man? But see the refreshing texts of Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism
and The Freudian Slip, and Raymond Williams' thoughtful response to them in
'Timpanaro's Materialist Challenge,' New Lefl Review, 109 (May-June 1978), pp. 3-17.
4. The late President Sukarno always spoke with complete sincerity of the 350
years of colonialism that his 'Indonesia' had endured, although the very concept
'Indonesia' is a twentieth-century invention, and most of today's Indonesia was only
conquered by the Dutch between 1850 and 1910. Preeminent among contemporary
Indonesia's national heroes is the early nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro,
although the Prince's own memoirs show that he intended to 'conquer [not liberate!]
Java,' rather than expel 'the Dutch.' Indeed, he clearly had no concept of'the Dutch' as
a collectivity. See Harry J. Benda andJohn A. Larkin, eds., The vVorld <?.f Soillheast Asia,
p. 158; and Ann Kumar, 'Diponegoro (1778?-1855),' Indonesia, 13 (April 1972), p. 103.
11

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
'/ in!() __a_Ji.w.itlc:~s.. :filtµJ<::. lt is the magic of nationalism to turn chance
·· ·1;_to destiny. With Debray we rni.ght say, 'Yes, it is quite accidental
that I am born French; but after all, France is etemal.'
Needless to say, I am not clairni.ng that the appearance of nation-
alism towards the end of the eighteenth century was 'produced' by the
erosion of religious certainties, or that this erosion does not itself
require a complex explanation. Nor am I suggesting that somehow
nationalism historically 'supersedes' religion. What I am proposing is
that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-
consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural
systems that preceded it, out of which - as weil as against which
- it came into being.
For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious
community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays,
were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is
today. lt is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural
systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline
certain key elements in their decomposition.
-iiiifq~~- .sacredness ~f . thei~ languages, and thus their . ideas . ~bout . .?·
--~dn:lissi~r=i. t:(;-~embe~~hip~ chi~e~e ma!ld;rins .looked with approval
THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
Few things are more impressive than the vast territorial stretch of the
Ummah Islam from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago, of Christen-
dom from Paraguay to Japan, and of the Buddhist world from Sri
Lanka to the Korean peninsula. The great sacral cultures (and for our
purposes here it may be permissible to include 'Confucianism')
incorporated conceptions ofimmense communities. But Christendom,
the Islarni.c Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom - which, though
we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as
Emphasis added. Similarly, Kemal Atatürk named one ofhis state banks the Eti Banka
(Hittite Bank) and another the Sumerian Bank. (Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p.
259). These banks flourish today, and there is no reason to doubt that many Turks,
possibly not excluding Kemal himself, seriously saw, and see, in the Hittites and
Sumerians their Turkish forebears. Before laughing too hard, we should remaind
ourselves of Arthur and Boadicea, and ponder the commercial success of Tolkien's
mythographies.
12
35
CULTURAL ROOTS
central - were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred
language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if
Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other's
languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless under-
stood each other's ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared
existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned
like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.
(So today mathematical language continues an old tradition. Of what
the Thai call + Rumanians have no idea, and vice versa, but both
comprehend the symbol.) All the great classical communities con-
ceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a
sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power. Accord-
ingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in
theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language - the
farther it was from speech - the better: in principle everyone has access
to a pure world of signs.)
Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a
character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations.
One crucial difference was the older communities' confidence in the
oii oai:barians -who pa~nfully learned to paint Middle Kingdom
5
ideograrns. These barbarians were already halfVvay to füll absorption.
Half-civilized was vastly better than barbarian. Such an attitude was
certainly not peculiar to the Chinese, nor con:fined to antiquity.
Consider, for example, the following 'policy on barbarians' formulated
by the early-nineteenth-century Colombian liberal Pedro Ferrnin de
Vargas:
To expand our agriculture it would be necessary to hispanicize our
Indians. Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference towards normal
endeavours causes one to think that they come from a degenerate race
which deteriorates in proportion to the distance from its origin ... it
would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by miscegenation with
5. Hence the equanimity with which Sinicized Mongols and Manchus were
accepted as Sons of Heaven.
13
 36
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
1!
[i the whites, declaring them Jree of tribute and other charges, and giving them
1, 6
private property in land.
.. 1
1,,1
'1
; 1 How striking it is that this liberal still proposes to 'extinguish' his
i i
1,1 Indians in part by 'declaring them free of tribute' and 'giving them
i
1
:i private property in land', rather than exterminating them by gun and
rnicrobe as his heirs in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States began to
do soon afterwards. Note also, alongside the condescending cruelty, a
cosrnic optirnism: the Indian is ultimately redeemable - by impreg-
nation with white, 'civilized' semen, and the acquisition of private
property, like everyone else. (How different Fermin's attitude is from the
later European imperialist's preference for 'genuine' Malays, Gurkhas,
and Hausas over 'half-breeds,' 'serni-educated natives,' 'wogs', and the
like.)
;i
Y et if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the
great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of
such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the
contemporary W estem rnind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The
ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality,
not randornly fabricated representations of it. W e are farniliar with
the long dispute over the appropriate language (Latin or vemacular)
for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur'an
was literally untranslatable (and therefore untranslated), because
Allah's truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true
signs of written Arabic. There is no idea here of a world so separated
from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus inter-
changeable) signs for it. In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible
only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth-
language of Church Latin, Qur'anic Arabic, or Exarnination Chinese. 7
And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to
6. John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826, p. 260. Emphasis
added.
7. Church Creek seems not to have achieved the status of a truth-language. The
reasons for this 'failure' are various, but one key factor was certainly the fact that Creek
remained a living demotic speech (unlike Latin) in much of the Eastern Empire. This
insight I owe to Judith Herrin.
14
CULTURAL ROOTS
nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. By conversion, I mean
not so much the acceptance of particular religious tenets, but alchernic
absorption. The barbarian becomes 'Middle Kingdom', the Rif
Muslim, the Ilongo Christian. The whole nature of man's being is
I'
11 sacrally malleable. (Contrast thus the prestige of these old world-
~
languages, towering high over all vemaculars, with Esperanto or
!i'
Volapük, which lie ignored between them.) lt was, after all, this
t:
f~ possibility of conversion through the sacred language that made it
~1
possible for an 'Englishman' to become Pope 8 and a 'Manchu' Son of
f.
~- Heaven.
~ But even though the sacred languages made such commurnt1es as
tl
;<
G·-. Christendom imaginable, the actual scope and plausibility of these
t communities can not be explained by sacred script alone: their readers
' were, after all, tiny literate ree:fS on top of vast illiterate oceans. 9 A fuller
explanation requires a glance at the relationship between the literati and
their societies. lt would be a rnistake to view the former as a kind of
theological technocracy. The languages they sustained, if abstruse, had
none of the self-arranged abstruseness of lawyers' or econornists'
jargons, on the margin of society's idea of reality. Rather, the literati
were adepts, Strategie strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the
10
apex was divine. The fundamental conceptions about 'social groups'
were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and
horizontal. The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only
comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a
conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual
intelligentsia, by mediating between vemacular and Latin, mediated
8. Nicholas Brakespear held the offi.ce of pontiffbetween 1154 and 1159 under
the name Adrian IV.
9. Marc Bloch reminds us that 'the majority oflords and many great barons [iri
mediaeval times] were administrators incapable of studying personally a report or an
account.' Feudal Society, I, p. 81.
10. This is not to say that the illiterate did not read. What they read, however, was
not words but the visible world. 'In the eyes of all who were capable of reflection the
material world was scarcely more than a sort of rnask, behind which took place all the
really irnportant things; it seerned to thern also a language, intended to express by signs a
rnore profound reality.' Ibid. p. 83.
15

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
':
between earth and heaven. (The awesomeness of excomrnunication
: i
refl.ects this cosmology.)
Y et for all the grandeur and power of the great religiously imagined
communities, their unselfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late
Middle Ages. Among the reasons for this decline, I wish here to
emphasize only the two which are directly related to these comrnu-
nities' unique sacredness.
First was the effect of the explorations of the non-European world,
which mainly but by no means exclusively in Europe 'abruptly widened
the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men's conception of
possible forms of human life.' 11 The process is already apparent in the
greatest of all European travel-books. Consider the following awed
description ofKublai Khan by the good V enetian Christian Marco Polo
at the end of the thirteenth century: 12
The grand khan, having obtained this signal victory, retumed with
great pomp and triumph to the capital city of Kanbalu. This took
place in the rnonth ofNovember, and he continued to reside there
during the months of February and March, in which latter was our
festival of Easter. Being aware that this was one of our principal
solernnities, he co=anded all the Christians to attend hirn, and to
bring with them their Book, which contains the four Gospels of the
Evangelists. After causing it to be repeatedly perfumed with incense,
in a cerernonious rnanner, he devoutly kissed it, and directed that the
sarne should be clone by all his nobles who were present. This was his
usual practice upon each of the principal Christian festivals, such as
Easter and Christrnas; and he observed the sarne at the festivals of the
Saracens, Jews, and idolaters. Upon being asked his motive for this
conduct, he said: 'There are four great Prophets who are reverenced
and worshipped by the different classes of mankind. The Christians
regard] esus Christ as their divinity; the Saracens, Mahomet; the] ews,
Moses; and the idolaters, Sogomombar-kan, the most eminent
among their idols. I do honour and show respect to all the four,
11. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 282.
12. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, pp. 158-59. Emphases added. Notice
that, though k.issed, the Evangel is not read.
16
37
CULTURAL ROOTS
and invoke to my aid whichever amongst them is in truth supreme in
heaven.' But from the manner in which his majesty acted towards
them, it is evident that he regarded the faith of the Christians as the
truest and the best . .
What is so remarkable about this passage is not so much the great
Mongol dynast's calm religious relativism (it is still a religious relativism),
as Marco Polo's attitude and language. lt never occurs to him, even
though he is writing for fellow-European Christians, to term Kublai a
hypocrite or an idolater. (No doubt in part because 'in respect to
number of subjects, extent of territory, and amount of revenue, he
surpasses every sovereign that has heretofore been or that now is in the
And in the unselfconscious use of 'our' (~hich becomes
13
world.')
'their'), and the description of the faith of the Christians as 'truest,'
rather than 'true,' we can detect the seeds of a territorialization of faiths
which foreshadows the language of many nationalists ('our' nation is
'the best' - in a competitive, comparative field').
What a revealing contrast is provided by the opening of the letter
written by the Persian traveller 'Rica' to his friend 'Ibben' from Paris in
'1712': 14
The Pope is the chief of the Christians; he is an ancient idol,
worshipped now from habit. Once he was formidable even to
princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent
sultans depose the kings oflremetia or Georgia. But nobody fears hirn
any langer. He claims to be the successor of one of the earliest
Christians, called Saint Peter, and it is certainly a rich succession, for
his treasure is immense and he has a great country under his control.
The deliberate, sophisticated fabrications of the eighteenth century
Catholic rnirror the naive realism of his thirteenth-century predecessor,
but by now the 'relativization' and 'territorialization' are utterly self-
conscious, and political in intent. Is it unreasonable to see a paradoxical
13. The Travels of Marco Polo, p. 152.
14. Henri de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p. 81. The Lettres Persanes first appeared
in 1721.
17
 38
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
elaboration ofthis evolving tradition in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomei-
ni's identifi.cation of The Great Satan, not as a heresy, nor even as a
demonic personage (dim little Carter scarcely :6.tted the bill), but as a nation?
Second was a gradual demotion ofthe sacred language itsel( Writing of
mediaeval W estem Europe, Bloch noted that 'Latin was not only the
15
language in which teaching was done, it was the only language taught.'
(This second 'only' shows quite clearly the sacredness ofLatin - no other
language was thought worth the teaching.) But by the sixteenth century
all this was changing fast. The reasons for the change need not detain us
1 ! here: the central importance of print-capitalism will be discussed below. I t
is su:fficient to rernind ourselves of its scale and pace. Febvre and Martin
i :.
estimate that 77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin
16
(meaning nonetheless that 23% were akeady in vemaculars). If of the 88
editions printed in Paris in 1501 all but 8 were in Latin, afrer 1575 a
majority were always in French. 17 Despite a temporary come-back
during the Counter-Reformation, Latin's hegemony was doomed.
Nor are we speaking simply of a general popularity. Somewhat later,
but at no less dizzying speed, Latin ceased to be the language of a pan-
European high intelligentsia. In the seventeenth century Hobbes (1588-
1678) was a :6.gure of continental renown because he wrote in the truth-
language. Shakespeare (1564-1616), on the other hand, composing in the
18
vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel. And had
English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-erninent world-
imperial language, rnight he not largely have retained his original insular
obscurity? Meanwhile, these men's cross-Channel near-contemporaries,
Descartes (1596-1650) and Pascal (1623-1662), conducted most
of their correspondence in Latin; but virtually all of Voltaire' s (1694-
1778) was in the vemacular. 19 'After 1640, with fewer and fewer
books corning out in Latin, and more and more in the vema-
cular languages, publishing was ceasing to be an international [sie)
15. Bloch, Feudal Society, l, p. 77. Emphasis added.
16. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 248-49.
17. Ibid., p. 321.
18. Ibid., p. 330.
19. lbid., pp. 331-32.
! 1
18
CULTURAL ROOTS
20
enterprise.' In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in
which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were
gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.
THE DYNASTIC REALM
These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a
world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most me.n as the only
imaginable 'political' system. For in fundamental ways 'serious' mon-
archy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life.
Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy
derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are
subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty
is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a
legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states
were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and
sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. 21 Hence, para-
doxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and
kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heteroge-
neous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of
. 22
tJ.me.
One must also remember that these antique monarchical states
20. Ibid., pp. 232-33. The original French is more modest and historically exact:
'Tandis que l'on edite de moins en moins d'ouvrages en latin, et une proportion
toujours plus grande de textes en langue nationale, le commerce du livre se morcelle en
Europe.' L'Apparition du Livre, p. 356.
21. Notice the displacement in rulers' nomenclature that corresponds to this
transformation. Schoolchildren remember monarchs by their first names (what was
William the Conqueror's surname?), presidents by their last (what was Ebert's
Christian name?). In a world of citizens, all of whom are theoretically eligible for
the presidency, the lirnited pool of 'Christian' names makes them inadequate as
specifying designators. In monarchies, however, where rule is reserved for a single
surname, it is necessarily 'Christian' names, with numbers, or sobriquets, that supply
f the requisite distinctions.
r
!
22. We may here note in passing that Nairn is certainly correct in describing the
1707 Act ofUnion between England and Scotland as a 'patrician bargain,' in the sense
that the union's architects were aristocratic politicians. (See his lucid discussion in The
Break-up of Britain, pp. 136f). Still, it is difficult to imagine such a bargain being
19
f
;.:

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
expanded not only by warfare but by sexual politics - of a k.ind very
different from that practised today. Through the general principle of
verticality, dynastic marriages brought together diverse populations
under new apices. Paradigmatic in this respect was the House of
Habsburg. As the tag went, Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube! Here,
in somewhat abbreviated form, is the later dynasts' titulature. 23
Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohernia, of Dalmatia,
Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King ofJerusalem,
etc; Archduke of Austria [sie]; Grand Duke ofTuscany and Cracow;
Duke of Loth [a] ringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and
Bukovina; Grand Duke ofTransylvania, Margrave ofMoravia; Duke
of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and
Guastella, of Ausschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa,
and Zara; Princely Count ofHabsburg and Tyrol, ofKyburg, Görz,
and Gradiska; Duke of Trient and Brizen; Margrave of Upper and
Lower Lausitz and in Istria; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch,
Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and above
the Windisch Mark; Great Voyvod of the V oyvodina, Servia ....
etc.
This, Jaszijustly observes, was, 'not without a certain cornic aspect.
the record of the innumerable marriages, hucksterings and captures of
the Habsburgs.'
In realms where polygyny was religiously sanctioned, complex
systems of tiered concubinage were essential to the integration of
the realm. In fact, royal lineages often derived their prestige, aside
from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, rniscegenation? 24 For such
stmck between the aristocracies of two republics. The conception of a United Kingdom
was surely the cmcial mediating element that made the deal possible.
23. Oscar Jaszi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 34.
24. Most notably in pre-modem Asia. But the same principle was at work in
monogamous Christian Europe. In 1910, one Otto Forstput out his Ahnentcifel Seiner
Kaiserlichen und Königlichen Hoheit des durchlauchtigsten Hern Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand,
listing 2,047 of the soon-to-be-assassinated Archduke's ancestors. They included
1,486 Germans, 124 French, 196 Italians, 89 Spaniards, 52 Poles, 47 Danes, 20
Englishmen/women, as weil as four other nationalities. This 'curious document' is
cited in ibid., p. 136, no. 1. I can not resist quoting here Franz Joseph's wonderful
20
39
CULTURAL ROOTS
rnixtures were signs of a superordinate status. lt is characteristic that
there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the
eleventh century (ifthen); and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the
Bourbons ?25
During the seventeenth century, however - for reasons that need
not detain us here - the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy
began its slow decline in Western Europe. In 1649, Charles Stuart was
beheaded in the first of the modern world's revolutions, and during
the 1650s one of the more important European states was ruled by a
plebeian Protector rather than a king. Yet even in the age of Pope and
Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of
royal hands, eures comrnitted also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and
XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien regime. 26 But after
1789 the principle ofLegitimacy had tobe loudly and self-consciously
defended, and, in the process, 'monarchy' became a serni-standardized
model. Tennö and Son ofHeaven became 'Emperors.' In far-off Siam
Rama V (Chulalongkorn) sent his sons and nephews to the courts of
St. Petersburg, London and Berlin to learn the intricacies of the world-
model. In 1887, he instituted the requisite principle of succession-by-
legal-primogeniture, thus bringing Siam 'into line with the "civilized"
27
monarchies of Europe.' The new system brought to the throne in
1910 an erratic homosexual who would certainly have been passed
over in an earlier age. However, inter-monarchic approval of his
ascension as Rama VI was sealed by the attendance at his coronation of
princelings from Britain, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Denmark - and
28
Japan!
reaction to the news ofhis erratic heir-apparent's murder: 'In this manner a superior
power has restored that order which I unfortunately was unable to maintain' (ibid., p.
125).
25. Gellner stresses the typical foreignness of dynasties, but interprets the phe-
nomenon too narrowly: local aristocrats prefer an alien monarch because he will not
take sides in their internal rivalries. Thought and Change, p. 136.
26. Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges, pp. 390 and 398-99.
27. Noel A. Battye, 'The Military, Government and Society in Siam, 1868-1910,'
PhD thesis, Comell 1974, p. 270.
28. Stephen Greene, 'Thai Government and Administration in the Reign of
Rama VI (1910-1925),' PhD thesis, University ofLondon 1971, p. 92.
21
 40
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
!
As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the
membership of the world political system, but, as we shall be noting
in detail below, many dynasts had for some time been reaching for a
'national' cachet as the old principle of Legitimacy withered silently
away. While the armies of Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786) were
heavily staffed by 'foreigners', those of his great-nephew Friedrich
Wilhelm III (r. 1797-1840) were, as a result of Scharnhorst's, Gnei-
senau's and Clausewitz's spectacular reforms, exclusively 'national-
Prussian. ' 29
APPREHENSIONS OF TIME
lt would be short-sighted, however, to think of the imagined com-
munities of nations as simply growing out of and replacing religious
communities and dynastic realms. Beneath the decline of sacred com-
munities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place
in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else,
made it possible to 'think' the nation.
To get a feeling for this change, one can profitably turn to the
visual representations of the sacred communities, such as the reliefs
and stained-glass windows of mediaeval churches, or the paintings of
early Italian and Flernish masters. A characteristic feature of such
representations is something misleadingly analogous to 'modern
dress'. The shepherds who have followed the star to the manger
where Christ is born bear the features of Burgundian peasants. The
Virgin Mary is figured as a Tuscan merchant's daughter. In many
paintings the comrnissioning patron, in füll burgher or noble cos-
tume, appears kneeling in adoration alongside the shepherds. What
seems incongruous today o bviously appeared wholly natural to the
eyes of mediaeval worshippers. W e are faced with a world in which
29. More than 1,000 ofthe 7,000-8,000 men on the Prussian Army's officer list in
1806 were foreigners. 'Middle-class Prussians were outnumbered by foreigners in their
own army; this lent colour to the saying that Prussia was not a country that had an army,
but an army that had a country.' In 1798, Prussian reformers had demanded a 'reduction
by one half of the number of foreigners, who still amounted to about 50% of the
privates . . . .' Alfred Vagts, A Histor}' of Militan'sm, pp. 64 and 85.
22
CULTURAL ROOTS
~
~·
~ the :figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural.
~
Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specifi.-
cities and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that
1~ tale, this morality play, that relic. While the trans-European Latin-
reading clerisy was one essential element in the structuring of the
~1·; Christian imagination, the mediation of its conceptions to the
r
't:· illiterate masses, by visual and aural creations, always personal and
11
1 particular, was no less vital. The humble parish priest, whose fore-
f bears and frailties everyone who heard his celebrations knew, was still
~:
t the direct intermediary between his parishioners and the divine. This
!i
!..
juxtaposition of the cosrnic-universal and the mundane-particular
c meant that however vast Christendom rnight be, and was sensed to
f
ii, be, it manifested itself variously to particular Swabian or Andalusian
Li communities as replications of themselves. Figuring the Virgin Mary
with 'Sernitic' features or 'fi.rst-century' costumes in the restoring
spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the med-
iaeval Christian mind had no conception ofhistory as an endless chain
of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and
30
present. Bloch observes that people thought they must be near
the end of time, in the sense that Christ's second corning could occur
at any moment: St. Paul had said that 'the day of the Lord cometh
like a thief in the night.' lt was thus natural for the great twelfth-
century chronicler Bishop Otto of Freising to refer repeatedly to 'we
who have been placed at the end of time.' Bloch concludes that as
soon as mediaeval men 'gave themselves up to meditation, nothing
was farther from their thoughts than the prospect of a long future for
.
a young an d v1gorous h uman race. ,31
Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of conscious-
ness:32
30. For us, the idea of 'modern dress,' a metaphorical equivalencing of past with
present, is a backhanded recognition of their fatal separation.
[. 31. Bloch, Feudal Society, l, pp. 84-86.
1 32. Auerbach, !VIimesis, p. 64. Emphasis added. Compare St. Augustine's descrip-
!1 tion of the Old Testament as 'the shadow of [i.e. cast backwards by] the future.' Cited in
Bloch, Feudal Society, 1, p. 90.
[
1; 23
~·
!·~
,,
1
i' IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
1:
If an occurrence like the sacrifice oflsaac is interpreted as prefiguring
the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were
announced and promised and the latter 'fulfills' ... the former, then a
connection is established between two events which are linked neither
temporally nor causally - a connection which it is impossible to
establish by reason in the horizontal dimension ... It can be established
1
only ifboth occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence,
1
which alone is able to devise such a plan ofhistory and supply the key to
! its understanding . . . the here and now is no longer a mere link in an
earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always
been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes ofGod, it
is something etemal, something omnitemporal, something already
consu=ated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.
He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our
own. lt views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic
33
time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. In
such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real
significance.
Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the
making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet
to be weil studied, with the development of the secular sciences. But it is
a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it
fully into account, we will find it di:fficult to probe the obscure genesis
of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval
conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Ben-
jamin, an idea of'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is,
as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and
fulfilrnent, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and
34
calendar.
Why this transformation should be so important for the birth of the
imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the
basic structure of two forrns of imagining which fi.rst :flowered in
33. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 265.
34. Ibid., p. 263. So deep-lying is this new idea that one could argue that every
essential modern conception is based on a conception of 'meanwhile'.
24
41
CULTURAL ROOTS
Europein the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper. 35 For
these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of
imagined community that is the nation.
Consider first the structure of the old-fashioned novel, a structure
typical not only of the masterpieces of Balzac but also of any con-
temporary dollar-dreadful. lt is clearly a device for the presentation of
simultaneity in 'homogeneous, empty time,' or a complex gloss upon
the word 'meanwhile'. Take, for illustrative purposes, a segment of a
simple novel-plot, in which a man (A) has a wife (B) and a rnistress (C),
who in turn has a lover (D). We rnight imagine a sort oftime-chart for
this segment as follows:
Time: I II III
Events: A quarrels with B A telephones C . D gets drunk in a bar
C and D make love B shops A dines at home with B
D plays pool C has an ominous dream
Notice that during this sequence A and D never meet, indeed may not
even be aware of each other's existence if C has played her cards
right. 36 What then actually links A to D? Two complementary
conceptions: First, that they are embedded in 'societies' (\J! essex,
Lübeck, Los Angeles). These societies are sociological entities of such
firm and stable reality that their members (A and D) can even be
described as passing each other on the street, without ever becorning
acquainted, and still be connected. 37 Second, that A and D are
35. While the Princesse de Cleves bad already appeared in 1678, the era of
Richardson, Defoe and Fielding is the early eighteenth century. The origins of the
modern newspaper lie in the Dutch gazettes of the late seventeenth century; but the
newspaper only became a general category of printed matter after 1700. Febvre and
Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 197.
36. Indeed, the plot's grip may depend at Times I, II, and III on A, B, C and D not
knowing what the others are up to.
37. This polyphony decisively marks offthe modern novel even from so brilliant a
forerunner as Petronius's Satyricon. Its narrative proceeds single file. IfEncolpius bewails
his young lover's faithlessness, we are not simultaneously shown Gito in bed with
Ascyltus.
25
 42
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES CULTURAL ROOTS

i:
!
embedded in the minds of the omniscient readers. Only they, like God,
watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once.
That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time,
but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the
novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his
readers' rninds. 38
The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through
homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the
nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily
i contrary to his usual practice, he had announced it only that after-
noon, it was already the subject of every conversation in Binondo, in
other quarters of the city, and even in [the walled inner city of]
Intramuros. In those days Capitan Tiago had the reputation of a lavish
host. lt was known that his house, like his country, closed its doors to
nothing, except to co=erce and to any new or daring idea.
So the news coursed like an electric shock through the co=unity
f.' of parasites, spongers, and gatecrashers whom God, in His infinite
~ goodness, created, and so tenderly multiplies in Manila. Some hunted

~. polish for their boots, others looked for collar-buttons and cravats.
39
down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know
the names of more than a handfol of his 240,000,000-odd fellow- But one and all were preoccupied with the problem ofhow to greet
Americans. He has no idea ofwhat they are up to at any one time. But r- their host with the farniliarity required to create the appearance of
he has complete con:fidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous tt longstanding friendship, or, if need be, to excuse themselves for not
activity. ~;. having arrived earlier.
I•
~,

The perspective I am suggesting will perhaps seem less abstract if we The dinner was being given at a house on Anloague Street. Since
l
['.
we do not recall the street number, we shall describe it in such a way
turn to inspect briefly four :fictions from different cultures and different /.

epochs, all but one of which, nonetheless, are inextricably bound to !i:
nationalist movements. In 1887, the 'Father of Filipino Nationalism', f;
Jose Rizal, wrote the novel Noli Me Tangere, which today is regarded as
the greatest achievement of modern Filipino literature. lt was also
40
almost the :first novel written by an 'Indio.' Here is how it marvel-
lously begins: 41 1t:
Towards the end ofOctober, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly
known as Capitan Tiago, was giving a dinner party. Although,
38. In this context it is rewarding to compare any historical novel with documents
or narratives from the period fictionalized.
39. N othing better shows the immersion of the novel in homogeneous, empty
time than the absence of those prefatory genealogies, often ascending to the origin of
man, which are so characteristic a feature of ancient chronicles, legends, and holy
books.
40. Rizal wrote this novel in the colonial language (Spanish), which was then the
lingua franca of the ethnically diverse Eurasian and native elites. Alongside the novel
appeared also for the first time a 'nationalist' press, not only in Spanish but in such
'ethnic' languages as Tagalog and Ilocano. See Leopoldo Y. Yabes, 'The Modem
Literature of the Philippines,' pp. 287-302, in Pierre-Bemard Lafont and Denys
Lombard (eds), Litteratures Contemporaines de l'Asie du Sud-Est.
41. Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Manila: Institute Nacional de Historia, 1978), p.
1. My translation. At the time of the original publication of Imagined Communities, I
that it may still be recognized - that is, if earthquakes have not yet
destroyed it. W e do not believe that its owner will have had it tom
down, since such work is usually left to God or to Nature, which,
besides, holds many contracts with our Govemment.
l·.
Extensive comment is surely unnecessary. lt should suffice to note that
right from the start the image (wholly new to Filipino writing) ofa dinner-
f.
i party being discussed by hundreds of unnamed people, who do not know
t each other, in quite different parts of Manila, in a particular month of a
1
l1: particular decade, immediately conjures up the imagined community. And
~· in the phrase 'a house on Anloague S treet' which 'we shall describe in such a
i.
way that it may still be recognized,' the would-be recognizers are we-
•!i
r
Filipino-readers. The casual progression of this house from the 'interior'
.~ time ofthe novel to the 'exterior' time ofthe [Manila] reader' s everyday life
gives a hypnotic con:firmation of the solidity of a single community,
[(
1'·. embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through
t· 42
I" calendrical time. Notice too the tone. While Rizal has not the faintest
i'.
t
had no command of Spanish, and was thus unwittingly led to rely on the instructively
~
corrupt translation of Leon Maria Guerrero.
f 42. Notice, for example, Rizal's subtle shift, in the same sentence, from the past
'
~ tense of 'created' (cri6) to the all-of-us-together present tense of 'multiplies' (miiltiplica).

r! 27
26
1
~
 43

================11================
Memory and Forgetting

SP ACE NEW AND OLD

New York, Nueva Leon, Nouvelle Orleans, Nova Lisboa, Nieuw

Amsterdam. Already in the sixteenth century Europeans had begun the
Strange habit of narning remote places, first in the Americas and Africa,
later in Asia, Australia, and Oceania, as 'new' versions of (thereby) 'old'
toponyms in their lands of origin. Moreover, they retained the tradition
even when such places passed to different imperial masters, so the
Nouvelle Orleans calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland
New Zealand.
lt was not that, in general, the narning of political or religious sites as
'new' was in itself so new. In Southeast Asia, for example, one finds
towns of reasonable antiquity whose names also include a term for
novelty: Chiangmai (New City), Kota Bahru (New Town), Pekanbaru
(New Market). But in these names 'new' invariably has the meaning of
'successor' to, or 'inheritor' of, something vanished. 'New' and 'old' are
aligned diachronically, and the former appears always to invoke an
ambiguous blessing from the dead. What is startling in the American
narnings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is that 'new' and 'old'
were understood synchronically, coexisting within homogeneous,
empty time. Vizcaya is there alongside Nueva Vizcaya, New London
alongside London: an idiom of sibling competition rather than of
inheritance.

187
44
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
This new synchronic novelty could arise historically only when
substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as
living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people - if
neve~t~~&__y~t:__certainly proceeding alo~:S_ ~lte same _trajec_!2.'.L:=-
X less than its overwhelming military, economic and technological
~een 1500 and 18ÖÖ-änicci.imi.ifat1Üi;.-ürt~chnoiogicaf1;;:-n:'O-;;_tions --
in the fields of shipbuilding, navigation, horology and cartography,
mediated through print-capitalism, was making this type of imagining
1
possible. lt became conceivable to dwell on the Peruvian altiplano, on
the pampas of Argentina, or by the harbours of'New' England, and yet
feel connected to certain regions or communities, thousands of rniles
away, in England or the Iberian peninsula. One could be fully aware of
sharing a language and a religious faith (to varyin:g~d.e~;.esI,-- ~µs·tc;~; -
:iQ<l-traclltioris, --witlioiit ·äny great -~~pectation of ever meeting one's
-·-········2··-„ ... --· ... ·-.. -„„„.•. -.··· '"· „„ . . „. . . . _„.
part~_er:s:
___,,_For this sense of parallelism or simultaneity not merely to arise, but
also to have vast political consequences, it was necessary that the
distance between the parallel groups be large, and that the newer of
them be substantial in size and permanently settled, as weil as firrnly
subordinated to the older. These conditions were met in the
Americas as they had never been before. In the first place, the vast
expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and the utterly different geographical
conditions existing on each side of it, made impossible the sort of
gradual absorption of populations into larger politico-cultural units
that transformed Las Espaiias into Espaiia and submerged Scotland
into the United Kingdom. Secondly, as noted in Chapter 4, Eur-
opean migration to the Americas took place on an astonishing scale.
1. The accumulation reached a frantic zenith in the 'international' (i.e., European)
search for an accurate measure oflongitude, amusingly recounted in Landes, Revolution
in Time, chapter 9. In 1776, as the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence, the
Gentleman's Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: 'He was a most
ingenious mechanic, and received the 20,000 pounds reward (from Westminster] for
the discovery of the longitude (sie].'
2. The late spreading of this consciousness to Asia is defi:ly alluded to in the
opening pages of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's great historical novel Bumi Manusia [Barth
ofMankind]. The young nationalist hero muses that he was bom on the same date as the
future Queen Wilhelmina - 31August1880. 'But while my island was wrapped in the
darkness of night, her country was bathed in sun; and if her country was embraced by
night's blackness, my island glittered in the equatorial noon.' p. 4.
188
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
By the end of the eighteenth century there were no less than
3,200,000 'whites' (including no more than 150,000 peninsulares)
within the 16,900,000 population of the Western empire of the
Spanish Bourbons. 3 The sheer size of this immigrant community, no
power vis-a-vis the indigenous populations, ensured that it main-
4
tained its own cultural coherence and local political ascendancy.
Thirdly, the imperial metropole disposed of formidable bureaucratic
and ideological apparatuses, which permitted them for many centuries
to impose their will on the creoles. (When one thinks of the sheer
logistical problerns involved, the ability of London and Madrid to
carry on long counter-revolutionary wars against rebel American
colonists is quite impressive.)
The novelty of all these conditions is suggested by the contrast
they afford with the great (and roughly contemporaneous) Chinese
and Arab migrations into Southeast Asia and East Africa. These
migrations were rarely 'planned' by any metropole, and even more
rarely produced stable relations of subordination. In the Chinese
case, the only dim parallel is the extraordinary series of voyages far
across the Indian ocean which were led, early in the fifteenth
century, by the brilliant eunuch admiral Cheng-ho. These daring
enterprises, carried out at t~e orders of the Yung-lo Emperor, were
intended to enforce a court monopoly of external trade with
3. Needless to say, 'whiteness' was a legal category which had a distinctly
tangential relationship to complex social realities. As the Liberator himself put it, 'We
are the vile offipring of the predatory Spaniards who came to America to bleed her
white and to breed with their victims. Later the illegitimate offipring of these unions
joined with the offspring of slaves transported from Africa.' Italics added. Lynch, The
Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 249. One should beware of assuming anything
'etemally European' in this criollismo. Remembering all those devoutly Buddhist-
Singhalese Da Souzas, those piously Catholic-Florinese Da Silvas, and those cynically
Catholic-Manileno Sorianos who play unproblematic social, economic, and political
roles in contemporary Ceylon, Indonesia, and the Philippines, helps one to recognize
that, under the right circumstances, Europeans could be gently absorbed into non-
European cultures.
4. Compare the fate of the huge African immigrant population. The brutal
mechanisms of slavery ensured not merely its political-cultural fragmentation, but also
very rapidly removed the possibility of imagining black communities in Venezuela and
West Africa moving in parallel trajectory.
189
 -:;'.···
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Southeast Asia and the regions further west, against the depredations
of private Chinese merchants. 5 By mid-century the failure of the
policy was clear; whereupon the Ming abandoned overseas adven-
tures and did everything they could to prevent emigration from the
Middle Kingdom. The fall of southern China to the Manchus in
1645 produced a substantial wave of refugees into Southeast Asia for
whom any political ties with the new dynasty were unthinkable.
Subsequent Ch'ing policy did not differ substantially from that of the
later Ming. In 1712, for example, an edict of the K'ang-hsi Bmperor
prohibited all trade with Southeast Asia and declared that his
government would 'request foreign governments to have those
Chinese who have been abroad repatriated so that they may be
executed. ' 6 The last great wave of overseas migration took place in
the nineteenth century as the dynasty disintegrated and a huge
demand for unskilled Chinese labour opened up in colonial South-
east Asia and Siam. Since virtually all migrants were politically cut off
from Peking, and were also illiterate people speaking mutually
unintelligible languages, they were either more or less absorbed
into local cultures or were decisively subordinated to the advancing
7 although these wars caused a great deal of suffering and were marked
Buropeans.
As for the Arabs, most of their migrations originated from the
Hadramaut, never a real metropole in the era of the Ottoman and
Mughal empires. Bnterprising individuals might find ways to establish
local principalities, such as the merchant who founded the kingdom
of Pontianak in western Borneo in 1 772; but he married locally,
soon lost his 'Arabness' if not his Islam, and remained subordinated
to the rising Dutch and Bnglish empires in Southeast Asia, not to any
power in the Near Bast. In 1832 Sayyid Sa'id, lord of Muscat,
established a powerful base on the Bast African coast and settled on
the island of Zanzibar, which he made the centre of a flourishing
clove-growing economy. But the British used military means to
5. See O.W. Wolters, Tiie Fall ef Srivijaya in Malay History, Appendix C.
6. Cited in G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, pp. 15-16.
7. Overseas Chinese communities loomed large enough to stimulate deep Eur-
opean paranoia up to the rnid eighteenth century, when vicious anti-Chinese pogroms
by Westerners finally ceased. Thereafter, this unlovely tradition was passed on to
indigenous populations.
190
45
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
compel him to sever his ties with Muscat. 8 Thus neither Arabs nor
Chinese, though they ventured overseas in very large numbers
during more or less the same centuries as the Western Buropeans,
successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously creole
communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core. Hence,
the world never saw the rise of New Basras or New Wuhans.
The doubleness of the Americas and the reasons for it, sketched
out above, help to explain why nationalism emerged first in the New
World, not the Old. 9 They also illuminate two peculiar features of
the revolutionary wars that raged in the New W orld between 177 6
and 1825. On the one hand, none of the creole revolutionaries
dreamed of keeping the empire intact but rearranging its internal
distribution of power, reversing the previous relationship of subjection
by transferring the metropole from a Buropean to an American site. 10
In other words, the aim was not to have New London succeed,
overthrow, or destroy Old London, but rather to safeguard their
continuing parallelism. (How new this style of thought was can be
inferred :from the history of earlier empires in decline, where there
was often a dream of replacing the old centre.) On the other hand,
by much barbarity, in an odd way the stakes were rather low. Neither
in North nor in South America did the creoles have to fear physical
extermination or reduction to servitude, as did so many other peoples
who got in the way of the juggernaut of Buropean imperialism. They
were after all 'whites,' Christians, and Spanish- or Bnglish-speakers;
they were also the intermediaries necessary to the metropoles if the
economic wealth of the Western empires was to continue under
Burope's control. Hence, they were the one signi:ficant extra-
8. See Marshall G. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam; Vol. 3, pp. 233-5.
9. It is an astonishing sign of the depth of Eurocentrism that so many European
scholars persist, in the face of all the evidence, in regarding nationalism as a European
invention.
10. But note the ironic case ofBrazil. In 1808, KingJoäo VI fled to Rio de Janeiro
to escape Napoleon's arrnies. Though Wellington had expelled the French by 1811, the
ernigrant monarch, fearing republican unrest at home, stayed on in South America until
1822, so that between 1808 and 1822 Rio was the centre of a world empire stretching to
Angola, Mozambique, Macao, and East Timor. But this empire was ruled by a
European, not an American.
191

46
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
European group, subjected to Europe, that at the same time had no
need to be desperately afraid of Europe. The revolutionary wars,
bitter as they were, were still reassuring in that they were wars
between kinsmen. 11 This family link ensured that, after a certain
period of acrimony had passed, close cultural, and sometimes political
and economic, ties could be reknit between the former metropoles
and the new nations.
TIME NEW AND OLD
If for __t.he .cr.e.oles_ Qf the New W orld the strange toponyms disc.ussed
~-·- -·-.------ - , ..-
·-···~·--··-· ..
-····--··--·„-----·-------·-·-····~·-·~
above represented figuratively theii:- . emerging capacity . to i~agine
-th~~~l;~;-~;··~~~~nities parallel a_nd cornp~rable--i~·th~~e in Europe,
'f- e'Xiraorcllnary e~;;~t~· in the. la~t quarter of the eigh!._e~11t11 s:~n,tury g;i.V'~.
0
this novelty, quite suddegJy, a completely new me<J,rling. The :first of
.these e~e!lt;; ~as ceitaicly the Declaration of (the Thirteen Colonies')
Independence in 177 6, and the successful military defence of that
declaration in the years following. This independence, and the fact
that it was a republican independence, was felt to be something
absolutely unprecedented, yet at the same time, once in existence,
absolutely reasonable. Hence, when history made it possible, in 1811,
for Venezuelan revolutionaries to draw up a constitution for the First
V enezuelan Republic, they saw nothing slavish in borrowing verba-
12
tim :from the Constitution of the United States of America. For
what the men in Philadelphia had written was in the Venezuelans'
eyes not something North American, but rather something of
universal truth and value. Shortly thereafter, in 1789, the explosion
in the New World was paralleled in the Old by the volcanic outbreak
of the French Revolution. 13
11. Doubtless this was what perrnitted the Liberator to exclairn at one point that a
Negro, i.e. slave, revolt would be 'a thousand tirnes worse than a Spanish invasion.' (See
above, p. 49). A slave jacquerie, if successful, rnight rnean the physical exterrnination of
the creoles.
12. See Masur, BoUvar, p. 131.
13. The French Revolution was in turn paralleled in the New World by the
outbreak ofToussaint L'Ouverture's insurrection in 1791, which by 1806 had resulted
192
.....
1-1\:,
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
lt is difficult today to recreate in the imagination a condition of life in ·\:
whi~h-~h~ ~~tio;·:;;;~felt.to . be soiriei:hl.ng-utt~;1y-~~-;~13--;:{t_5c;··it·wa-5'{~
ili_at~p~si~fl. f°he beclaratl.ori of Inclepe~denc~~ti776·~~;-;;b;·~l~t~ly
no reference to Christopher Columbus, Roanoke, or the Pilgrim
Fathers, nor are the grounds put forward to justify independence in
any way 'historical,' in the sense of highlighting the antiquity of the
American people. Indeed, marvellously, __the Am.eric:~T11l.a,ti:.9_I?, i_s_ ..rsi~-
. even II}e..!}.,tio:nc::_q, }\ profound feeling that a radical break with the past
~,........ .....
„.~~..._ ~,_.
·was occurring - a 'blasting open of the continuum ofhistory'? - spread
rapidly. Nothing exempli:fies this intuition better than the decision,
taken by the Convention Nationale on 5 October 1793, to scrap the
centuries-old Christian calendar and to inaugurate a new world-era
,„..... -·--
with the Y ear One, starting :from the abolition of the ancien regime and
14
the proclamation of the Republic on 22 September 1792. (No
subsequent revolution has had quite this sublime con:fidence of novelty,
not least because the French Revolution has always been seen as an
ancestor.)
Out of this profound sense of newness came also nuestra santa
revoluci6n, the beautiful neologism created by ] ose Maria Morelos y
Pav6n (proclaimer in 1813 ofthe Republic ofMexico), not lang before
his execution by the Spaniards. 15 Out of it too came San Martin's 1821
decree that 'in the ftiture the aborigines shall not be called Indians or
natives; they are children and citizens ofPeru and they shall be known as
Peruvians.' 16 This sentence does for 'Indians' and/ or 'natives' what the
Convention in Paris had clone for the Christian calendar -: it abolished
the old time-dishonoured naming and inaugurated a completely new
epoch. 'Peruvians' and 'Year One' thus mark rhetorically a profound
rupture with the existing world.
in Haiti's forrner slaves creating the second independent republic of the Western
hernisphere.
14. The young Wordsworth was in France in 1791-1792, and later, in The Prelude,
wrote these farnous rerniniscent lines:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Italics added.
15. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revol<itions, pp. 314-15.
16. As cited above in chapter 4.
193

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Y et things could not long remain this way - for precisely the same
reasons that had precipitated the sense of rupture in the first place. In
the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Britain alone was man-
ufacturing between 150,000 and 200,000 watches a year, many of
them for export. Total European manufacture is likely to have then
been close to 500,000 items annually. 17 Serially published newspapers
were by then a familiar part of urban civilization. So was the novel,
with its spectacular possibilities for the representation of simultaneous
actions in homogeneous empty time. 18 The cosmic clocking which
had made intelligible our synchronic transoceanic pairings was in-
creasingly felt to entail a wholly intramundane, serial view of social
causality; and this sense of the world was now speedily deepening its
grip on Western imaginations. lt is thus understandable that less than
two decades after the Proclamation of Y ear One came the establish-
ment of the first academic chairs in History - in 1810 at the
University of Berlin, and in 1812 at Napoleon's Sorbonne. By the
second quarter of the nineteenth century History had become
formally constituted as a 'discipline,' with its own elaborate array
19
of professional journals. Very quickly the Year One made way for
1792 A.D., and the revolutionary ruptures of 1776 and 1789 came to
be figured as embedded in the historical series and thus as historical
precedents and models. 20
Hence, for the members of what we might call 'second-
generation' nationalist movements, those which developed in Europe
17. Landes, Revolution in Time, pp. 230-31, 442-43.
18. See above, Chapter 2.
19. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Centuiy
Europe, pp. 135-43, for a sophisticated discussion of this transformation.
20. But it was an A.D. with a difference. Before the rupture it still retained,
however fragilely in enlightened quarters, a theological aura glowing from within its
medieval Latin. Anno Domini recalled that irruption of eternity into mundane time
which took place in Bethlehem. After the rupture, reduced monogrammatically to
A.D., it joined an (English) vernacular B.C., Before Christ, that encompassed a serial
cosmological history (to which the new science of geology was making signal
contributions). We may judge how deep an abyss yawned between Anno Domini
and A.D./B.C. by noting that neither the Buddhist nor the Islamic world, even today,
imagines any epoch marked as 'Before the Gautama Buddha' or 'Before the Hegira.'
Both make uneasy do with the alien monogram B.C.
194
47
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
between about 1815 to 1850, and also for the generation that
inherited the independent national states of the Americas, it was
no longer possible to 'recapture/The first fine careless rapture' of
their revolutionary predecessors. --~,2,r,,"'."~!iffS.J:~~-~,.„,J:~.~~.<:~S......~:9-SL.~~-:li
different consequenc~~?.. th.<:: .r:yo gr()ups thus began the process o~
-
;~;<l1r1· riat:lonäli.s'ill ·- enealo i~azz ·· ·~5·
~,„,,,_.,_,_., g
„„ . "
·= th'e 'ex· i:ess"i"on 'üCan llisto.ric;J.
,„ .. -. &.„ •. ,,.,_,„,., ig „,.X., •--------•rn"•.·o.•·-·-···P-----·-·•,·-·•"~""""-•""•
. .• O·' ;·o,_,_,„.„,,•eo'"""·•·,
„„.. „
;:"'
'"·!~a<:litiQI1_.of ~-~P-~l ~.<?-n.hn~irx-„„ ..
In Europe, the new nationalisms almost immediately began to
imagine themselves as 'awakening from sleep,' a trope wholly foreign
to the Americas. Already in 1803 (as we have seen in Chapter 5) the
young Greek nationalist Adamantios Koraes was telling a sympathetic
Parisian audience: 'For the first time the [Greek] nation surveys the
hideous spectacle ofits ignorance and trembles in measuring with the eye
the distance separating it from its ancestors' glory.' Here is perfectly
exemplified the transition from New Time to Old. 'For the first time'
still echoes the ruptures of 177 6 and 1789, but Koraes's sweet eyes are
turned, not ahead to San Martin's future, but back, in trembling, to
ancestral glories. lt would not take lang for this exhilarating doubleness
to fade, replaced by a modular, 'continuous' awakening from a
chronologically gauged, A.D .-style slumber: a guaranteed return to
an aboriginal essence.
Undoubtedly, many different elements contributed to the astonishing
21
popularity of this trope. For present purposes, I would mention only
two. In the first place, the trope took into account the sense of
parallelism out of which the Arnerican nationalisms had been born
and which the success of the American nationalist revolutions had
greatly reinforced in Europe. lt seemed to explain why nationalist
movements had bizarrely croppeci ~.-;p··rn.-·the _dvill:_ied--()l(I·w;;rr~r~~- ;''
-· ,, . ' „ • „ 22 . . . . ... ' .
obviously later than in the barbarous New. Read as late awakening, even
·--iJan awakening stifuufateci &;m:~:fa~: it ~pened up an immense antiquity
21. As late as 1951, the intelligent Indonesian socialist Lintong Mulia Sitorus
could still write that: 'Till the end of the nineteenth century, the coloured peoples
still slept soundly, while the whites were busily at work in every :field.' Sedjarah
Pergerakan Kebangsaari Indonesia [History of the Indonesian Nationalist Movement], p.
5.
22. One could perhaps say that these revolutions were, in European eyes, the first
really important political events that had ever occurred across the Atlantic.
195
 48
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
behind the epochal sleep. In the second place, the trope provided a
crucial metaphorical link between the new European nationalisms and
language. As observed earlier,the rnajor state.s of niries~~I1th-century
Europe ~e~~ vast polyglot politi~s, ."af which the boundari~s air:n:;~t-···­
never coincided With language-communities. Most o( their literate
members had inherited from mediaeval times the habit of thi~kif?-g-~f
certain languages - if no langer Latin, the_n French, English, Spanis]l or
f.
Gerrrian - as languages of civilization. Rich eighteenth-century Dutch
burghers were proud to speak only French at harne; German was the
language of cultivation in much of the Western Czarist empire, no less
than in 'Czech' Bohernia. Until late in the eighteenth century no one
thought of these languages as belonging to any territorially defined
group. But soon thereafter, for reasons sketched out in Chapter 3,
'uncivilized' vernaculars began to function politically in the same way as
the Atlantic Ocean had earlier clone: i.e. to 'separate' subjected national
communities off from ancient dynastic realms. And since in the
vanguard of most European popular nationalist movements were literate
people often unaccustomed to using these vernaculars, this anomaly
needed explanation. None seemed better than 'sleep,' for it perrnitted
those intelligentsias ;nd-bour:-geo{s{es ~ho were b~~o~~g-~~~~~i~;;s of
-th"emselve·s as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure thefr-'~shidy of
v·
Czedi;-Magyar, cir Finnish languages,. folklores, and musics as .'re.di:s- .
~·\
. covei-ing' something deep-down always known. (Furth~rmo;e, ~~c~
-~c~_,„. öne·srariS ·tluiiking about nationality in terms of continuity, few" tbings
·,„
see~ as hlst;rically cieep-rooted as languages, for which no datec:lorigiris.
,;,;-
:>;f·"•.'ii~Z.
cari he"
ever ~ven.) 23
,f.l"~
..„I"ii "i:he Americas the problem was differently posed. On the one
hand, national independence had almest everywhere been interna-
tionally acknowledged by the 1830s. It had thus become an in-
heritance, and, as an inheritance, it was compelled to enter a
genealogical series. Y et the developing European instrumentalities
were not readily available. Language had never been an issue in the
23. Still, historical depth is not infinite. At some point English vanishes into
Norman French and Anglo-Saxon; French into Latin and 'German' Frankish; and so
on. W e shall see below how additional depth of field came to be achieved.
196
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
American nationalist movements. As we have seen, it was precisely
the sharing with the metropole of a common language (and common
religion and common culture) that had made the :first national
imaginings possible. To be sure, there are some interesting cases
where one detects a sort of 'European' thinking early at work. For
example, Noah Webster's 1828 (i.e., 'second-generation') American
Dictionary of the English Language was intended to give an o:fficial
imprimatur to an American language whose lineage was distinct from
that ofEnglish. In Paraguay, the eighteenth-century Jesuit tradition of
using Guarani made it possible for a radically non-Spanish 'native'
language to become a national language, under the long, xenophobic
dictatorship of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1814-1840). But,
on the w~,-~~-~m.p_U9_gi~~-N.~!_ürjc_a1_..de:p_rj:i __to nationality _via
linguistic-means faced insuperable obstacle~~ .Y.i.~_tually ali.th~· creoles
were--iilS11fufionally "co~tted. (:;i-~--~~h~ols, print media, adminis-
trative habits, and so on) to European rather than indigenous
American tongues. Any excessive emphasis on linguistic lineages
threatened to blur precisely that 'memory of independence' which
it was essential to retain.
The solution, eventually applicable in both New and Old Worlds,
was f;up~jii 'History~·;r rather }Iist~ry- e~plotted in particulär ·ways.
·w~-h~~e observed th~ speed with.which Chairs in.History s"u~~eeded
the Year One. As Hayden White remarks, it is no less striking that
the :five presiding geniuses of European historiography were all born
within the quarter century following the Convention's rupturing of
time: Ranke in 1795, Michelet in 1798, Tocqueville in 1805, and
Marx and Burckhardt in 1818. 24 Ofthe :6.ve, it is perhaps natural that
Michelet, self-appointed historian of the Revolution, most clearly
exempli:fies the national imagining being born, for he was the first
25
selfconsciously to write on behalf of the dead. The following passage
is characteristic:
24. Metahistory, p. 140. Hegel, bom in 1770, was already in his late teens when the
Revolution broke out, but his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte were only
published in 1837, six years after his death.
25. White, Metahistory, p. 159.
197
 49
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
MEMORY AND FORGETTING

Oui; chaque mort laisse un petit bien, sa memoire, et demande qu'on

the edge: Mexicans speaking in Spanish 'for' pre-Columbian 'Indian'
la soigne. Pour celui qui n'a pas d'amis, il faut que le magistrat y
civilizations whose languages they do not und erstand. 28 How revolu-
supplee. Car la loi, la justice, est plus sure que toutes nos tendresses
tionary this kind of exhumation was appears most clearly if we
oublieuses, nos larmes si vite sechees. Cette magistrature, c'est
contrast it with the formulation ofFermin de Vargas, citecl in chapter
l'Histoire. Et les morts sont, pour dire comme le Droit romain,
2. For where Fermin still thought cheerfully of 'extinguishing' living
ces miserabiles personae clont le magistrat doit se preoccuper. Jamais
Indians, many of his political grandchildren became obsessed with
dans ma carriere je n'ai pas perdu de vue ce clevoir de l'historien. J'ai
'remembering,' indeed 'speaking for' them, perhaps precisely because
donne a beaucoup de morts trop oublies l'assistance clont moi-meme
they had, by then, so often been extinguished.
j'aurai besoin. Je les ai exhumes pour une seconcle vie ... Ils vivent
maintenant avec nous qui nous sentons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi
26
se fait une famille, une cite commune entre les vivants et les morts.
THE REASSURANCE OF FRATRICIDE
!.„.:_) '{:<-·; L '--;A ;·--~:-,:„ ;„,,,,,„,. ,;-_:;l\,,~ .;;.;· ,p.-,. . . ., , ,„,
Here and elsewhere Michelet made it clear that those whom he was
lt is striking that in Michelet's 'second generation' formulations the
exhuming were by no means a random assemblage of forgotten,
focus of attention is always the exhumation of people and events which
anonymous dead. They were those whose sacri:fices, throughout His- 29
stand in danger of oblivion. He sees no need to think about 'for-
tory, made possible the rupture of 1789 and the selfconscious appear-
getting.' But when, in 1882 - more than a century after the Declaration
ance of the French nation, even when these sacrifices were not understood as
of Independence in Philadelphia, and eight years after the death of
such by the victims. In 1842, he noted of these dead: 'Il leur faut un
Michelet himself - Renan published his Qu 'est-ce qu 'une nation?, it was
Oedipe qui leur explique leur propre enigme clont ils n'ont pas eu le
precisely the need for forgetting that preoccupied him. Reconsider, for
sens, qui leur apprenne ce que voulaient dire leurs paroles, leurs actes,
example, the formulation cited earlier in chapter 1:30
qu 'ils n ' ont pas compns. . ,27
This formulation is probably unprecedented. Michelet not only
Or, l'essence cl'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup
claimed to speak on behalf of large numbers of anonymous dead
de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses. ,ir ,, .
;.

people, but insisted, with poignant authority, that he could say what
they 'really' meant and 'really' wanted, since they themselves 'did not
... Taut citoyen fran~ais doit avoir oublie la Saint-Barthelemy, les
massacres du Midi au XIIIe siede.
.ä l
unclerstand.' From then on, the silence of the dead was no obstacle to '\.

the exhumation of their deepest desires.

In this vein, more and more 'second-generation' nationalists, in the
Americas and elsewhere, learned to speak 'for' dead people with
whom it was impossible or undesirable to establish a linguistic
connection. This reversed ventriloquism helped to open the way
for " selfconscious indigenismo, especially in the southem Americas. At
26. Jules Michelet, Oeuvres Completes, XXI, p. 268, in the preface to volume 2
(Jusqu'au 18c Brumaire') ofhis uncompleted Histoire du XIXe Siede. I owe the reference
to Metahistory, but the translation White uses is unsatisfactory.
27. Cited in Roland Barthes, ed., Michelet par lui-meme, p. 92. The volume ofthe
Oeuvres Completes containing this quotation has not yet been published.
,.
'·
198
28. Conversely, in all Mexico there is only one statue of Heman Cortes. This
monument, tucked discreetly away in a niche of Mexico City, was only put up at the
end of the 1970s, by the odious regime of Jose L6pez Portillo.
29. Doutbless because for much of his life he suffered under restored or ersatz
legitimacies. His comrnitment to 1789 and to France is movingly shown by his
refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to Louis Napoleon. Abruptly disrnissed from his
post as National Archivist, he lived in near-poverty till his death in 1874 - long
enough, however, to witness the mountebank's fall and the restoration of republican
institutions.
30. Renan was bom in 1823, a quarter of a century after Michelet, and passed
much of his youth under the cynically official-nationalist regime of Michelet's
persecutor.
199
50
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
31
At first sight these two sentences may seem straightforward. Yet a few
moments reflection reveals how bizarre they actually are. One notices,
for example, that Renan saw no reason to explain for his readers what
either 'la Saint-Barthelemy' or 'les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siede'
meant. Yet who but 'Frenchmen,' as it were, would have at once
understood that 'la Saint-Barthelemy' referred to the ferocious anti-
Huguenot pogrom launched on 24 August 1572 by the Valois dynast
Charles IX and his Florentine mother; or that 'les massacres du Midi'
alluded to the extermination of the Albigensians across the broad zone
between the Pyrenees and the Southern Alps, instigated by Innocent III,
one of the guiltier in a longline of guilty popes? Nor did Renan find
anything queer about assuming 'memories' in his readers' minds even
though the events themselves occurred 300 and 600 years previously.
One is also struck by the peremptory syntax of doit avoir oublie (not doit
oublier) - 'obliged already to have forgotten' - which suggests, in the
ominous tone of revenue-codes and military conscription laws, that
'already having forgotten' ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary
civic duty. In effect, Renan's readers.were heing tqld to_ 'haye ~~~9'Y.-~
forgotten' 'what B:e"IJ.~n's · own words assumed that t:.hey naturally
"'f-. reme~beredi
How a~~ we to make sense of this paradox? We may start by
observing that the singular French noun 'la Saint-Barthelemy' occludes
killers and killed - i.e., those Catholics and Protestants who played
one local part in the vast unholy Holy War that raged across central
and northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and who certainly did
not think of themselves cosily together as 'Frenchmen.' Similarly,
'thirteenth-century massacres of the Midi' blurs unnamed victims and
assassins behind the pure Frenchness of 'Midi.' No need to remind his
readers that most of the murdered Albigensians spoke Provern;:al or
Catalan, and that their murderers came from many parts of Western
Europe. The effect of this tropology is to figure episodes in the
colossal religious conflicts of mediaeval and early modern Europe as
reassuringly fratricidal wars between - who else? - fellow Frenchmen.
Since we can be confident that, left to themselves, the overwhelming
majority of Renan's French contemporaries would never have heard
31. I understood them so in 1983, alas.
200
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
of 'la Saint-Barthelemy' or 'les massacres du Midi,' we hecome aware
of a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state
mainly through the state's school system, to 'remind' every young
Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which
are now inscribed as 'family history.' Having to 'have already
forgotten' tragedies of which one needs u~~;;i~giy--to-b~-'~ri11c1~c:l'
türns-o~t to-be- ;-~h~~~~t~ri~ti~-d~~ic~ i~ th~-iater const~ction of
-;;tiün:ai ß~;~;i;ifes:···cfr is l.ilsi:rucüve tha:t Reüäil d.öes ~;i -~~Y:-t:h:~t-
~~C:h CF~ench. 'cit:i~e~-'Is. obÜged to 'have already forgotten' the Paris
Commune. In 1882 its memory was still real rather than mythic, and
sufficiently painful to make it difficult to read under the sign of
'reassuring fratricide.')
Needless to say, in all this there was, and is, nothing especiilly
French. A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young
Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-65 as a great
'civil' war between 'brothers' rather than between - as they briefly
were - two sovereign nation-states. (We can be sure, however, that if
the Confederacy had succeeded in maintaining its independence, this
'civil war' would have been replaced in memory by something quite
..
unbrotherly.) English history textbooks offer the diverting spectacle
of a great Founding Father whom every schoolchild is taught to cill
William the Conqueror. The same child is not informed that William
spoke no English, indeed could not have clone so, since the English
language did not exist in his epoch; nor is he or she told 'Conqueror
of what?'. For the only intelligible modern answer would have to be
'Conquerot of the English,' which would turn the old Norman
predator into a more successful precursor of Napoleon and Hitler.
Hence 'the Conqueror' operates as the same kind of ellipsis as 'la
Saint-Barthelemy,' to remind one of something which it is imme-
diately obligatory to forget. Norman William and Saxon Harold thus
meet on the battlefield of Hastings, if not as dancing partners, at least
as brothers.
But it is surely too easy to attribute these reassuring ancient
fratricides simply to the icy calculations of state functionaries. At
another level they reflect a deep reshaping of the imagination of
which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still
has, only exiguous control. In the 1930s people of many nationa:lities
201

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
went to fight in the Iberian peninsula because they viewed it as the
arena in which global historical forces and causes were at stake. When
the long-lived Franco regime constructed the V alley of the Fallen, it
restricted membership in the gloomy necropolis to those who, in its
eyes, had died in the world-struggle against Bolshevism and atheism.
But, at the state's margins, a 'memory' was already emerging of a
'Spanish' Civil War. Only after the crafty tyrant's death, and the
subsequent, startlingly smooth transition to bourgeois democracy - in
which it played a crucial role - did this 'memory' become official. In
much the same way, the colossal dass war that, from 1918 to 1920,
raged between the Parnirs and the Vistula came to be remembered/
forgotten in Soviet film and fiction as 'our' civil war, while the Soviet
state, on the whole, held to an orthodox Marxist reading of the
struggle.
In this regard the creole nationalisms of the Americas are especially
instructive. For on the one hand, the American states were for many
decades weak, effectively decentralized, and rather modest in their
educational ambitions. On the other hand, the American societies, in
which 'white' settlers were counterposed to 'black' slaves and half-
exterminated 'natives,' were internally riven to a degree quite un-
matched in Europe. Y et the imagining of that fraternity, without which
the reassurance of fratricide can not be born, shows up remarkably early,
and not without a curious authentic popularity. In the United States of
America this paradox is particularly weil exemplified.
In 1840, in the rnidst of a brutal eight-year war against the Serninoles
of Florida (and as Michelet was summoning his Oedipus), James
Fenimore Cooper published The Patlifinder, the fourth of his five,
hugely popular, Leatherstocking Tales. Central to this novel (and to
all but the first of its companions) is what Leslie Fiedler called the
'austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love' binding the 'white'
woodsman Natty Bumppo and the noble Delaware chieftain
Chingachgook ('Chicago'!). 32 Yet the Renanesque setting for their
32. See his Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 192. Fiedler read this
relationship psychologically, and ahistorically, as an instance of American fiction's
failure to deal with adult heterosexual love and its obsession with death, incest, and
innocent homoeroticism. Rather than a national eroticism, it is, I suspect, an
202
51
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
bloodbrotherhood is not the murderous 1830s but the last forgotten/
remembered years of British imperial rule. Both men are figured as
'Americans,' fighting for survival - against the French, their 'native'
allies (the 'devilish Mingos'), and treacherous agents of George III.
When, in 1851, Herman Melville depicted Ishmael and Queequeg
cosily in bed together at the Spouter Inn ('there, then, in our hearts'
honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg'), the noble Polynesian savage was
sardonically Americanized as follows: 33
.... certain it was that his head was phrenologically an excellent
one. lt may seem ridiculous, but it rerninded me of George
Washington's head, as seen in popular busts ofhim. lt had the same
long regularly graded retreating slope above the brows, which were
likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded
on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically devel-
oped.
It remained for Mark Twain to create in 1881, weil after the 'Civil War'
and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the first indelible image of
black and white as American 'brothers': Jim and Huck companionably
34
adrift on the wide Mississippi. But the setting is a remembered/
forgotten antebellum in which the black is still a slave.
~~ _~.triking _nin~te_~mh~c:entll;rz _imagiri,~:g.gs,_ gf)rat_c::r:~ity_,_ ~mer~
ging 'naturally' in a society fractured by the most violent racial, dass
ancr-·regional antago~isn:l~:- sh9vi- ~~ ~le:~rly ~s anythlng -else - that
·naffonalism in the age of Michelet and !<:-~~;~~ r-epreseni:ed ä ·r;_·ew •·'
Torrn-of cÖnsciousness - a -consdou~~ess that arose when i1: :.Vas no
fOD:g~~ possible to exp~ri-~nce the natio.p as ne"w, at the"wave.:.-top
J:TI";n:le~-~ of rupture. - - --
eroticized nationalism that is at work. Male-male bondings in a Protestant society
which from the statt rigidly prohibited miscegenation are paralleled by male-female
'holy loves' in the nationalist fiction of Latin America, where Catholicism permitted
the growth of a large mestizo population. (lt is telling that English has had to borrow
'mestizo' from Spanish.)
33. Hennan Melville, Moby Dick, p. 71. How the author must have savoured the
malignant final phrase!
34. It is agreeable to note that the publication of.Huckleberry Finn preceded by only
a few months Renan's evocation of 'la Saint-Barthelemy.'
203
 t.:
52
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
THE BIOGRAPHY OF NATIONS
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with
them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical
circumstances, spring narratives. After experiencing the physiological
and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to
'remember' the consciousness of childhood. How many thousands
of days passed between infan:::y and early adulthood vanish beyond
direct recall! How strange it is to need another's help to learn that this
naked baby in the yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot,
is you. The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduc-
tion, is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of
documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters,
medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain
apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss :from memory. Out of this
estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and
that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be 'remem-
bered,' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every
.'~
single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of
autobiography and biography :flood print-capitalism's markets year by
year.
These narratives, like the novels and newspapers discussed in
Chapter 2, are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their
frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so
many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and
grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circum-
stantial, textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to
record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which
his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day.
Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative's modernity
than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the
Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively
begetting one another, :from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus
Christ. (Only once is a woman mentioned, not because she is a
begetter, but because she is a non-Jewish Moabite). No dates are
given for any of J esus's forebears, let alone sociological, cultural,
physiological or political information about them. This narrative
204
MEMORY AND FORGETTING
style (which also re:flects the rupture-in-Bethlehem become mem-
ory) was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he
did not conceive of Christ as an historical 'personality,' but only as
the true Son of God.
As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness ofbeing
eriibedoed.Tii"~~~l~r, serial time, with all its implications of continuity,
yet Öf 'forgetttl::'.g; the experience of this continuity - product of the
rÜptures of the late eigh~eenth century - engenders the need for a
~ai::iai:ive of 'ide~tit;y,'. The task is set for Michelet's magistrate. Yet
between narratives of person and nation there is a central difference of
emplotment. In the secular story of the 'person' there is a beginning and
an end. She emerges :from parental genes and social circumstances onto a
brief historical stage, there to play a role until her death. After that,
nothing but the penumbra oflingering fame or influence. (Imagine how
strange it would be, today, to end a life ofHitler by observing that on 30
April 1945 he proceeded straight to Hell). ---···-··-··. Nations, however, have no
clearly
........•..-.„identifiable
...... ,·.·······35·· ....births,
,.
and their deaths, if they ever happen, are
never na.ru.raj. Because there is no Originator, the nation's biography
~~~,n~t· be::..vntten evangelically, 'down time,' through a long pro-
creative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it 'up
time' - towards Peking Man, Java Man, King Arthur, wherever the
lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam. This fashioning, however, is
marked by deaths, which, in a curious inversion of conventional
genealogy, start from an originary present. World War II begets World
War I; out of Sedan comes Austerlitz; the ancestor of the Warsaw
Uprising is the state of Israel.
Yet the deaths that structure the nation's biography are of a special
kind. In all the 1,200 pages of his awesome La Mediterranee et le
Monde Mediterraneen a
l'Epoque de Philippe II Fernand Braudel men-
tions Renan's 'la Saint-Barthelemy' only in passing, though it
occurred exactly nel mezzo del camino of the Habsburg dynast's reign.
'Les evenements,' writes the Master (vol. 2, p. 223) 'sont poussiere;
ils traversent l'histoire comme des lueurs breves; a peine naissent-ils
qu'ils retournent deja a la nuit et souvent a l'oubli.' For Braudel, the
deaths . that matter are those myriad anonymous events, which,
35. For such apocalypses the neologism 'genocide' was quite recently coined.
205
 53
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

aggregated and averaged into secular mortality rates, permit him to

chart the slow-changing conditions of life for millions of anonymous
human beings of whom the last question asked is their nationality.
Travel and Traffic: On the Geo-
From Braudel's remorselessly accumulating cemeteries, however, the biography of Imagined Communities*
nation's biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary
suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and
holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must
be remembered/forgotten as 'our own.'

Now that almost a quarter ofa century has passed since the fust publication
of Imagined Communities, it seems possible to sketch out its subsequent
;:, travel-history in the light of some of the book's own central themes: print-
l'

capitalism, piracy in the positive, metaphorical sense, vernacularization,

and nationalism's undivorcible marriage to internationalism.
More generally, studies on the transnational diffusion ofbooks are still
fairly rare, except in the :field of literary history where Franco Moretti
has set an extraordinary example. The material for some prelirninary
comparative reflections is to hand. By the end of 2007, the book
(henceforward to be referred to as IC) will have been published in
thirty-three countries and in twenty-nine languages. 1 This spread has
much less to do with its qualities than with its original publication in
London, in the English language, which now serves as a kind of global-
hegemonic, post-clerical Latin. (Had IC originally appeared in Tirana,
in Albanian, or in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnamese, or even in
Melbourne, in Australian, it is unlikely to have travelled very far). On

* Writing this Afterword would not have been possible without the selfless help
of, above all, my brother Perry, but in addition, Choi Sung-eun, Y ana Genova, Pothiti
Hantzaroula,Joel Kuortti, Antonis Liakos, Silva Meznaric, Göran Therborn, and Tony
W ood, to all of whom I would like to express my deepest thanks.
1. Aside from the advantages ofbrevity, IC restfully occludes a pair ofwords frorn
which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.

206 207
 54

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” in Martha C.

Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country? Joshua Cohen (ed.). Boston: Beacon Press,
2002. 3-17
Martha C. Nussbaum
. lli Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

lVhen anyone asked him where he came from, he said, In Rahindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World, the
c'I am a citizen of the world." young wife Bimala, entranced by the patriotic rhetoric ofher hus-
band's friend Sandip, becomes an eager devotee of the Swadeshi
Diogenes Laertius, Lift ofDiogenes the Cynic
movement, which has organized a boycott of foreign goods. The
slogan of the movement is Bande Mataram (Hail Motherland). Bi-
mala complains that her husband, the cosmopolitan Hindu land-
lord Nikhil, is cool in his devotion to the cause:
!:'1·

!:,„. And yet it was not that my husband refused to support Swadeshi, or
i11l was in any way against the Cause. Only he had not been able whole-
heartedly to accept the spirit of Bande Mataram.
111
"I am willing," he said, "to serve my country; hut my worship Ire-
1.'1.1 serve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my
!il country as a god is to bring a curse upon it."
:1
Americans have frequently supported the principle of Bande
j Mataram, giving the fact of being American a special salience in
moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specifically Ameri-
1
can identity and a specifically American citizenship a special
lt
:j:
li

-
l_
 ,„
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism · 5 55
'~
!111
4 · MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
.

. ··111i'
power among the motivations to political action. I believe, as do
! .1il
, i11:'I Tagore and his character Nikhil, that this emphasis on patriotic
dl pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of
'1
:11
some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve-for example,
II the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals ofjus-
11
11
1
tice and equality. These goals, I shall argue, would be better served
!·'! by an ideal that is in any case more adequate to our situation in the
contemporary world, namely the very old ideal of the cosmopoli-
tan, the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of
human beings.
My articulation of these issues is motivated, in part, by my expe-
rience working on international quality-of-life issues in an institute
for development economics connected with the United Nations. lt
is also motivated by the renewal of appeals to the nation, and na-
1
tional pride, in some recent discussions of American character and
American education. In a well-known op-ed piece in the New York
Times (13 February 1994), philosopher Richard Rorty urges
Americans, especially the American left, not to disdain patriotism
y
as a value, and indeed to give central importance to "the emotion
/' \
1 '
of national pride" and "a sense of shared national identity." Rorty
argues that we cannot even criticize ourselves well unless we also
"rejoice" in our American identity and define ourselves funda-
mentally in terms of that identity. Rorty seems to hold that the pri-
mary alternative to a politics based on patriotism and national
identity is what he calls a "politics of difference," one based on in-
ternal divisions among America's ethnic, racial, religious, and
other subgroups. He nowhere considers the possibility of a more
international basis for political emotion and concern.
This is no isolated case. Rorty's piece responds to and defends
Sheldon Hackney's recent call for a "national conversation" to dis-
cuss American identity. 1 As a participant in its early phase, I was
made vividly aware that the project, as initially conceived,2 pro-
posed an inward-looking task, bounded by the borders of the na-
tion, rather than considering ties of obligation and commitment
that join America to the rest of the world. As with Rorty's piece,
the primary contrast drawn in the project was between a politics
based on ethnic and racial and religious difference and a politics
based on a shared national identity. What we share as both rational
and mutually dependent human beings was simply not on the
agenda.
One might wonder, however, how far the politics of nationalism
really is from the politics of difference. The Home and the World
(better known, perhaps, in Satyajit Ray's haunting film of the same
title) is a tragic story of the defeat of a reasonable and principled
cosmopolitanism by the forces of nationalism and ethnocentrism.
I believe that Tagore sees deeply when he observes that, at bottom,
nationalism and ethnocentric particularism are p.ot alien to one an-
other, but akin-that to give support to nationalist sentiments sub-
verts, ultimately, even the values that hold a nation together, be-
cause it substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal \,<
values o~ti~~--~~lright:··0-;;~~~;;~~o~~h~~-„;~<l,T;~;~·„1;;·di;~ ·.
fir;t,'~-~iti~-~~-~:fth~·;~;i~i'~econd, once he or she has made that
morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrele- :"'
,!':1:~LS.h!!,!:e~!~rj~s-~~,;".!hen what, indeed, will stop ~iron{-' ~ .
saying, as Tagore's characters so quickly learn to say, I am a Hindu
first, and an Indian second, or I am an upper-caste landlord first,
and a Hindu second? Only:..fu.U2-~.!!1:2E.?lit~-~ ..~!~P:f„~_9fjhejfil!_Q­
}9Ed NißJ:iü~sq boringty,.flat.in..the ey:~.~-„Qf.h~s„yp:u.n~~foJ~im.~a .<
.c.in9. his. p.assio.n~te, ~(lti9p._<!JistJiiend.Sandip.::-::bas the promise of
transcending these divisions„ because only this stance asks us to
give our first allegiance to what is morally good-and that which,
being good, I can commend as such to all human beings.
Proponents of nationalism in politics and in education fre-
quently make a weak concession to cosmopolitanism. They may
argue, for example, that although nations should in general base
education and political deliberation on shared national values, a

~
.J_
'
'
'
 56 6 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism 7
conventional Greek male; instead, he defined himself in terms of
commitment to basic human rights should be part of any national
more universal aspirations and concerns. The Stoies, who fol-
education system, and that this commitment will in a sense hold
lowed his lead, further developed his image of the kosmou polites
many nations together. 3 This seems to be a fair comment on practi-
(world citizen) arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two com-
cal reality; and the emphasis on human rights is certainly neces-
munities-the local community of our hirth, and the community
sary for a world in which nations interact all the time on terms (let
of human argument and aspiration that "is truly great and truly
us hope) ofjustice and mutual respect.
common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but
But is it sufficient? As students here grow up, is it sufficient for 'Zl'.V,-~,';.-,-.-._..., •

measurc:. the _bounda,ries of our nation by the sun" (Seneca, De bi(

them to learn that they are above all citizens of the United States
Öti~j:it i~ -thi~ -~~~~~~i~ th~t-i~,fu;;_d~;~~~illy; th;~ource of our
but that they ought to respect the basic human rights of citizens of
moral obligations. With respect to the most basic moral values,
India, Bolivia, Nigeria, and Norway? Or should they-as I think-
such as justice, "We should regard all human beings as our fellow
in addition to giving special attention to the history and current
citizens and neighbors" (Plutarch, On the Fortunes of Alexander).
situation of their own nation, learn a good deal more than they fre-
We should regarsl,Q.µr d~!!Q~r_;~Jiou~..<!§.,_ fi~st~~~~]..2.1::~1.Ilost, deliber-
quently do about the rest of the world in which they live, about
India and Bolivia and Nigeria and N orway and their histories, ations ~_?~t !i;i:~a.11.: PE.?E!~~~ _qfpe9ple iµ p<ir:tic-ql~ ~~E-~~i~t:!- sit11- ".„.
'"'äfiöll;, not problems g!<:>':Vi.P.og g_~tC>f a national id~n~~ty that is alto- -·
problems, and comparative successes? Should they learn only that
citizens oflndia have equal basic human rights, or should they also
,g~~~ii:~~~~jh~i-~;j,9th.~!~;Diogenes knew that the invitati~n t~ )c
think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation tobe an exile ;~--:::.i<"'--
learn ab out the problems of hunger and pollution in India, and the
from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our ,!7--~-'"';t~--:
implications of these problems for the larger issues of global hun-
own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good. t_.- ~), .
ger and global ecology? Most important, should they be taught ,:1. ·- (.„•'("-

The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any hu- ·~ ' ~ i
that they are, above all, citizens of the United States, or should ~~~~"·~ '(,,

man being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, "' „
they instead be taught that they are, above all, citizens of a world of
his Stoic successors held, we shq1:!!4„no,t ~Q~.sli[~_rn,gf~~-""C>f.n.a::•..,..
human beings, and that, while they happen to be situated in the
United States, they have to share this world with the citizens of tionality__p~.<:~a.s~ _P~ .. ~!??~~::m~~-ersbip-.~-~- ~Y~ß.$~114~.r:..Ji:u~r~.st.„.. Y
\11 'n·arners hetween us and our fellow hum(ln l?!=ings. We should rec-
i other countries? I suggest four arguments for the second concept
o~i~e" h{i:;~city- ~h~;~~er. it occurs, and gi~e i-t; fundamental
of education, which I call cosmopolitan education. But first I intro-
ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and
duce a historical digression, which traces cosmopolitanism to its
respect.
origins, and in the process recover some excellent arguments that
This clearly did not mean that the Stoies were proposing the ab-
have traditionally supported it.
olition oflocal and national forms of political organization and the
II creation of a world state. Their point was even more radical: that
we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government,
When Diogenes the Cynic replied, "l am a citizen of the world,"
no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the
he meant, apparently, that he refused to be defined by his local
humanity of all human beings. The idea of the world citizen is in
origins and group memberships, so central to the self-image of the

L
 8 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
this way the ancestor and the source of Kant's idea of the "king-
dom of ends," and has a similar function in inspiring and regulat-
ing moral and political conduct. One should always hehave so as
to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice
in every human heing. lt is this concept that also inspires Tagore's
novel, as the cosmopolitan landlord struggles to stem the tide of
nationalism and factionalism hy appeals to universal moral norms.
Many of the speeches of the character Nikhil were drawn from Ta-
gore's own cosmopolitan political writings.
Stoies who hold that good civic education is education for
world citizenship recommend this attitude on three grounds.
First, they hold that the study of humanity as it is realized in the
whole world is valuahle for self-knowledge: we see ourselves more
clearly when we see our ways in relation to those of other reason-
ahle people.
Second, they argue, as does Tagore, that we will he hetter ahle
to solve our prohlems if we face them in this way. No theme is
deeper in Stoicism than t~eßamage clone hy f~S~~on and locaJ. a!l.~~
.-.
,)
gianc:~s to the political ff[~ -~'f''~·g;;-~p~-:Püifti~al d~iili;;~ti;"~~-they
,,
~'-~
ar~e, is sahotaged again and again hy .E.iH1!fü~nJ9y.eJti~§_, whether
to one's team at the Circus or to one's nation. Only hy ma~r.ig our
fundamental allegiance to the world_communi"ty=;;f}~;ti~e ~nd rea-
!l'i' A ·
;~~-cro-·weivoid. 'th~se'"Jä:ii:i~;;:··~·-··--"'"' ·~„···-·"·-· · · ·· ·„ ··
'l'
1 ,,
,111/1 :.
· .· · ·Fid~üy, th~y i~s!sf tliatTllitshi.nce of the kosmou polites is intrin-
1 :1 sically valuahle, for it recognizes in people what is especially fun-
l'. !1 damental ahout them, most worthy of respect and acknowledg-
::i'I' ment: their aspirations to justice and goodness and their capacit~es
for rea;;;~Iiigfö'füis~eönffeeticfü:-Tliese q{i~ffti~'s may. b-~-i~~s ·~~'f~~­
l1i :~~
.!1 fu( th~~ l~~ai";~""~;ty~-;;:~riradi'ti;~~-;;;:r l<lentifies~ff 1s"ü'i1'tb:is
1
'"I;~;i~th.~t;h~young"Wire"illT~g~;~;s ~ovel spu~~~-th~m in favor of
qualities in the nationalist orator Sandip that she later comes to
see as superficial-hut they are, the Stoies argue, hoth lasting and
deep.
11::
il
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism 9 57
The Stoies stress that to he a citizen of the world one does not
need to give up local identifications, which can he a source of great
richness in life. They suggest that we think of ourselves not as de-
void of local affiliations, hut as surrounded hy a series of concen-
tric circles. The first one encircles the self, the next takes in the im-
mediate family, then follows the extended family, then, in order,
neighhors or local groups, fellow city-dwellers, and fellow coun-
trymen-and we can easily add to this list groupings based on eth-
nic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender, or sexual identities.
Outside all these circles is the largest one, humanity as a whole.
Our task as citizens of the world will he to "draw the circles some-
how toward the center" (Stoic ~opher ~ierocles, ist-2nd CE),
making all human ~~~i~~?~.-frll~~Y:.:~well~~L~.P-E )< !1\({
l
).f.!,,,,.,<?E.-,..:,We need not give up our special affections and identifica- !
tions, whether ethnic or gender-based or religious. We need not
think of them as superficial, and we may think of our identity as
constituted partly by them. We may and should devote special at-
tention to them in education. But we should also work to make all
human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern,
hase our political deliherations on that interlocking commonality,
and give the circle that defines our humanity special attention and
respect.
In educational terms, this means that students in the United
States, for example, may continue to regard themselves as defined
partly by their particular loves-their families, their religious, eth-
nic, or racial communities, or even their country.J-3.~t,,t~:X„,~~~!-
,„~:J~!;tt:~~a~i;-H~:~:~f~~1~~::;::~1W!!~tir:~~~~~i~·~~~-·
)<
-„~-~D:'.'. . -~""""'"'"''''"''''"""~""'"""~-\~".::k'"'"''"""''•·'""''""'''·'"'''
' .. """·' •. „ .._.,_ '
.„.~~~„~~„.N~8.~r.~~~~,g~~~aj.txw.·~$\,,,~~~~~~~p~~~~~~~ü.T..h~.~~~~ .
lea,,_:~,.~I),~,ffil~~~!t~e..ßiifäE-~EJ,,~,,?c1E,,2~tJ:1~~1!i~~~;j~i:„„.
ratiqg$,, ~rr<;Ly,;:i.lues,..and··enough„ahQ.Vtfth~se common ends ·tcl"'s~i
-~~~..::<t!:.~?B~h~..th~y„a~e;„in~t~~t-~.~t~~.i?:·.:tj;:·;~~r5:~~~~~·~~,,~~~!~
~~~y),:r:ies .. Stoic ~it~_g;jn§i&.t.thfilJ:~„YÜ'.i~~'°~~"'~~i~Jl-.,g;~ö~!,~~~?i~:= '~'."
..-

58 10 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
"'· I
ent is ~Il. e_~senti~.~f ~'·•-'-"··';,
~~~.~~
ec!m.~ation,.~---;;ipd that it1.,,_,.,_,~">--::.•r·,;-.-.,.„-~
. -"···
r~quires,
..., .. _„r-:-„;,-.,.,
7
-~El~g~!Y.9f,rila!:lyf~~~s.a!?pJ:tt .the diffe~~.nt~M~E..cus Aurelius gives
himself the following advice, whi~h ~ight.be -~~ed_ th~basis for
._,_ ·--------·---.. .....,,....,,_....,,...,,........ ---,~_,.
cosmopolitan education:. ''Ac~~~t.Q.!9:..Y.~l!rself not to he inattentive
._:~~~!f~.:~rr9lli~r~P-~:i.iüP-".i~Y:~·:. ·~gJ_31_s. fä~.i~~e~~!~E~~~I:~. ~-~}~
person's mind" _(VL. 53)'. "(;-enerally," _ he adds, "()ne _must first
··r~~;~--~-;~y-thi~g~-1~ro~~ ·~~;- ~~;;·.J~<li~an~ili~~,~--~~~i~~";iili-~-
-
---~·a- ·~·„··--er···-·--.-„ . . . „......· .„ •.„„„„ „„„ ····'-··· .. „ „.„ ••...•..• „ ....•._... „ ....-
_.,....~r.:~!~!LJng,__ ... -.
A favored exercise in this process of world think.ing is to con-
ceive of the entire world of human beings as a single body, its many
people as so many limbs. Referring to the fact that it takes only
changing a single letter in Creek to convert the word "limb"
(melos) into the word "part" (meros), Marcus says: "If, changing
the word, you call yourself merely a [detached] part rather than a
limb, you do not yet love your fellow men from the heart, nor de-
rive complete joy from doing good; you will do it merely as a duty,
not as doing good to yourself" (VII. i3).plti~Limp.ortanLto-reeall
J!i.at,.as . er11p_~J:QE~l.1~ _g~ve . ~-~~-~-~l[,~hat.~cJ.yi~~jg,,C:9P:l1.ecti.~m„1Y.i.ili.
~!!!h: ... duties.,that.xequir.~4.c()m~p.g __t~grips _ vyith,.thec;µJ.PJ:r~.~„ . ~E,___"'
X remote and, initially, s_tragg~, civilizations, such as Parthia and
· -sa.imatia. · .„.. ... ··-. .. · ,, •
~----·. ·····--
1 would like to see education adopt this cosmopolitan Stoic
stance. The organic model could, of course, be abused-if, for ex-
ample, ~t",Y.\'.':.~_s__ t(lken to dc=.ny the fun~ament(ll i:r;nportaI1<::e <?f _tl_ie
~-r, ,~~P."~~<1:~~~~.ss."Qf ;~~-pr;:·~~~i qf fii~da,m~~~.J.i>.~r.s9n.~tti!>.~~~~-~„:-~t~- ·
11,.„
ics were not always sufficiently attentive to these values and to their
political salience; in that sense, their thought is not always a good
basis for a scheme of democratic deliberation and education. But
as the image is primarily intended-as a reminder of the interde-
pendence of all human beings and communities-it has fundamen-
tal significance. Thete is clearly a huge amount to be said about
how such ideas might be realized in curricula at ~any levels. ln-
stead ofbeginning that more concrete task, however, 1 focus on the
1
-------
in turn,
~·~:.:...;.-,;.;,.._,,_,„~,._.
. •. ·.. ·. .•,· ··"' ...
_.~
.··•·
1,.
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
11
t
,·f,
t
...
i~ present day and offer four arguments for mak.ing ~<lciti~
~1..9.!.~~E th~p.__9~g!9crcg_ü;;_or national citizenship, the focus for
civic edU:~ation. ~,1•'" ~>
...""" ~·~""""'-
m
1.Through cosmopolitan education, we learn more
about ourselves.
„ .. ·-~·~··,··"·"·······,„-„~--
One of the greatest barriers to rational deliberation in politics is
the unexamined feeling that one's own preferences and ways are
neutral and.natural. An education that takes national boundaries
as morally salient too often reinforces this k.ind of irrationality, by
lending to what is an accident of history a false air of moral weight
and glory. ~.Y.J~<?-~-~~--~~~~-~~::~~„~E!:2!!g}Lfü~. l~!;l.~Qf!h~-9.ili~!.,'"v,Y.$;_
-~-?~~--~?..!~:_~~~-~j!l,.?,~~ .J?E-3:~~-~~-~- ~ _l_o,c::aj. a,ri<l :p,qn.<;ssenJi~,-~h<!U~. ><~
rnore proadly or c}eeply sha,red. Our nation isappalliJ:lgly ig;no~a11t
ofmos~~f"the ~~st of the worlcl.ithi~k tli!~·;;~~~th~tit'i~ al~~;·i~--r( f(l
:ciiei,si~s~~L~ii~~::~i~?.~;;i,~~:€:~~;;t~:·,·.::-~·----.---, . „ .•••.•••..• - •. ··-~"··-·„--~., .. o. ·· · , ,.
To give just one example of this: If we want to und erstand our
own history and our choices about child-rearing and the structure
of the family, we are helped immeasurably by look.ing around the
world to see in what configurations families exist, and through
what strategies children are in fact being cared for. (This would in-
clude a study of the history of the family, both in our own and
other traditions.) Such a study can show us, for example, that the
two-parent nuclear family, in which the mother is the primary
homemaker and the father the primary breadwinner, is by no
means a pervasive style of child-rearing in today's world. The ex-
tended family, clusters of families, the village, women's associa-
tions-all these groups, and others, in various places in the world
have major child-rearing responsibilities. Seeing this, we can be-
gin to ask questions-for example, about how much child abuse
there is in a family that involves grandparents and other relatives in
child-rearing, as compared with the relatively isolated Western-
 J
~
12 • MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
~ Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism · 13
i-"
style nuclear family; or ahout how the different structures of child
care support women's work. 4 If we do not undertake this kind of
;:
1
educational project, we risk assuming that the options familiar to
1 us are the only ones there are, and that they are somehow "nor-
!'
mal" and "natural" for all humans. Much the same can be said
:·· ahout conceptions of gender and sexuality, ahout conceptions of
work and its division, ahout schemes of property holding, or about
the treatment of children and the aged.
2. We make headway solving problems that require
international cooperation.
The air does not obey national boundaries. This simple fact can
be, for children, the beginning of the recognition that, like it or
not, we live in a world in which the destinies of nations are closely
intertwined with respect to basic goods and survival itself. The
pollution of third-world nations that are attempting to attain our
high standard of living will, in some cases, end up in our air. No
matter what account of these matters we will finally adopt, any in-
telligent deliheration ahout ecology-as, also, ahout the food sup-
ply and population-requires global planning, global knowledg_,e,
and the recognition of a shared future.
To conduct this sort of global dialogue, we need knowledge not
·l··! only of the geography and ecology of other nations-something
!i
that would already entail much revision in our curricula-but also
· .. ,,,
a great deal about their people, so that in talking with them we may
be capahle of respecting their traditions and commitments. Cos-
mopolitan education would supply the background necessary for
this type of deliheration.
3. We recognize moral obligations to the rest of the world that
are real and that otherwise would go unrecognized.
What are Americans to make of the fact that the high living stan-
r
il
dard we eajoy is one that very likely cannot be universalized, at
11
--
L.'
59
least given the present costs of pollution controls and the present
economic situation of developing nations, without ecological di-
saster? Ifwe take Kantian morality at all seriously, as we should, we
need to educate our children to be trouhled by this fact. Otherwise
we are educating a nation of moral hypocrites who talk the lan-
guage of universalizahility but whose universe has a self-serving,
narrow scope.
This point may appear to presuppose universalism, rather than
being an argument in its favor. But here one may note that the val-
ues on which Americans may most justly prid"e themselves are, in a
deep sense, Stoic values: respect for human dignity and the oppor-
tunity for each person to pursue happiness. If we really do believe
that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain
inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that
conception requir~s us to do with and for the rest of the world.
'
Once again, that does not mean that one may not permissihly
give one's own sphere a special degree of concern. Politics, like
child care, will be poorly clone if each thinks herself equally re-
sponsihle for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings
special attention and care. To give one's own sphere special care is
justifiahle in universalist terms, and 1 think this is its most compel-
lingjustification. To take one example, we do not really think our
own children are morally more important than other people's chil-
dren, even though almost all of us who have children would give
our own children far more love and care than we give others'. lt is
good for children, on the whole, that things work this way, and
that is why our special care is good, rather than selfish. Education
may and should reflect those special concerns-for example, in a
given nation, spending more time on that nation's history and poli-
tics. But my argument does entail the idea that we should not con-
fine our thinking to our own sphere, that in making choices in
both political and economic matters we should most seriously con-
sider the right of other human beings to life, liherty, and the pur-
 60 14 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism 15
suit of happiness, and that we should work to acquire the knowl-
tain basic features of human personhood that obviously also tran-
edge that will enable us to deliberate well about those rights. I
scend national boundaries. So if we fail to educate children to
believe this sort of thinking will have large-scale economic and po-
; cross those boundaries in their minds and imaginations, we are
litical consequences. tacitly giving them the message that we don't really mean what we
say. We say that respect should be accorded to humanity as such,
4. We make a consistent and coherent arg;ument based on
but we really mean that Americans as such are worthy of special re-
distinctions we are prepared to defend.
spect. And that, I think, is a story that Americans have told for far
In Richard Rorty's and Sheldon Hackney's eloquent appeals to
too long.
shared values, there is something that makes me very uneasy. They
seem to argue effectively when they insist on the centrality to dem- IV
ocratic deliberation of certain values that bind all citizens together.
Beco~i-~g.CJ:. S!~zen of the world is often a lon.ely busin:ess. lt is, as
But why should these values, which instruct us to join hands
Di~genes said, ~--kiiid -.·.oreJdie::..:'..from
.• -_„ __._.,, •"•".•····· -. ··· -'· .·-. ·
the__,_..,„.,,c~~fo-rt ~{lo~.J t~ths,
across boundaries of ethnicity, dass, gender, and race, lose steam <ti;-~~;~1·-.:.~.,· ..,_.;„.:n:t"'""'~--. ..• ,.,,,., -······· ,.· . ·.~ ···--·-~-,-; .o.·: ..-... ~·-,„.... ~~ /

f:i-om the vvarm, nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing '"'.
when they get to the borders of the nation? By conceding that a
·-d~~~f p~i4~~i~,o~-e~~if~_~cf9i~'~-9~:!~~i~·~·;;iti~g~-~{.M~"i=cli~
morally arbitrary boundary such as the bound~rv ~f the n~ti~~·hci:;'
~---„-....._,„ ,.,•.:.~"' -~•·' '••"••'"~""-."•'•";,•~-.·.-
·-t:O..;,j-',..,,•,c•- -·.>o - . .. -,•.• ::,l„·~,„ . . ;•/,.,•~•,-·•_..,.'••'""~--\~ .. :,_•;, ;..~:~""•'• •·-'>-·
•'• ,•, •"•-••" „.,•„._,,,•,
'·Au.reli;s (as in those ofhis Arnerican follower;E;:;~;~ö;:;·~~;rTJ:lo~
• ~cl~~p,,a_nCf fonp_<,l:tiv:e_r9le_in ourdeliberatio11s,,~e.s..~~_mJo.. dep;rive. .::!~~~).:.a, ,~~~de~-~~~-~~;~~i;~s·;;~se --i ~2-~~~-~~;l~g~~;~~-~~-if ·
,,,1 . ol1rselves·~fa~yprincipled ~aY.'?rJ;~~~~~;ji~gc~!iz~ns.they s.h2.~d
the removal of the props ofhabit and local boundaries had left life
i; ,. in-factjoinhands acrossth<:'.~~ oth~r barriers.
bereft of any warmth or security. lf one begins life as a child who
i:i For one thing, the very sarn:~ gföups exist both outside and in-
[;i loves and trusts his or her parents, it is tempting to want to recon-
1:1
side. Why should we think of people from China as our fellows the
:1 struct citizenship along the same lines, finding in an idealized im-
: 1 minute they dwell in a certain place, namely the United States, but
age of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one's thinking for
1,,/. not when they dwell in a certain other place, namely China? What
one~r:iopo.~~-~11~9-!fo.:rn._nQ.AIJ~h_r._~füg~; Ü.9.[t:rn.9~Y..!.~eo~.9~
i1 isit about the national boundary t_hat magically ~c::mverts peopt;·t~-
11 and... the love of humanity, 'Yhich :i:uay seem at time~ !~~s col~~- J,(
il , ward -VVhom Vv~ are. b~th i~c.u~ic:ms and indifferent irl.t~. p~opl~. t~ - . •.-„•.
''~..::!", „~------·-··· . - -·--·~,.--··
-··· ..• - .- .,_••. .•· .,.. ·-' ..· . .. .· ···········' ,,,,.•: „ ~ ,„, \ .\. f . .......~·-·«·-·--.,...-,..

'1d(lj' .„.„ than other sources of belongi:rig.

· whoni ~<". haveduties. ofmutual respect? I think, in short, that we ··"-·Tn'Tagore's n'o~el, ·th~,,~ppearfo· world citizenship fails,J_t__f~ils
i/
Li.~d~r~ut the very case for multicultural respect within a nation by
because patriotism is full of color . arid intensity , and .passi~~'.
failing to make central to education a broader world respect. Rich-
ard Rorty's patriotism may be a way of bringing all Americans to-
/\vhere:~~ _<?,()_Srn9R.9li~~ni~~.~;~~~-i9}~v~--a ~iifii@~:,g~ipgI~ii~~
Tmaginaüo.n, An~ yet in fts ~ery failure, Tagore sli_o:vy~, it succeeds._._.,., •"·
~''-"""' •l<:f°".''?'l'"'~:r•--o::-•~",,,_ ••.~ -·;:.•'''•'•"r:fi .. c,...>;~·1·-'"•,.....;:::'.';J.o."::~;0 ,;:_-,...,._.,:;..<,,.,., ..;..-o.:, ,,.,.~_,-..,.•. ~ t~··"-.~
1 ,...,....,„,_..... r- -'I>·„~·. ...,_._.; ,...,, ..;.-„„,~·\-_.
gether; but patriotism is very close to jingoism, and l'm afraid I "'-

For the novel is a story of education for world citizenship, since the
don't see in Rorty's argument any proposal for coping with this
entire tragic story is told by the widowed Bimala, who under-
very obvious <langer.
stands, if too late, that Nikhil's morality was vastly superior to San-
Furthermore, the defense of shared national values in both
1 dip's empty symbol-mongering, that what looked like passion in
Rorty and Hackney, as I understand it, requires appealing to cer-
Sandip was egocentric self-exaltation, and that what looked like

'II,1

,~I',,
1

1:i i ':
' 1 i
k:ii
~
 16 • MARTHA C . NU S SB AU M Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism · 17 61
lack of passion in Nikhil contained a truly loving perception of told her parents that she would kill herself if she were not married off
her as a person. If one goes today to Santiniketan, a town several to him. So Crates was called on by her parents to talk their daughter
hours by train from Calcutta where Tagore founded his cosmopol- out of it; he did all he could, but in the end he didn't persuade her. So
itan university, Vishvabharati (which means "all the world")-one he stood up and threw offhis clothes in front ofher and said, "Here
feels the tragedy once more. For all-the-world university has not is your hridegroom; these are his possessions; make your decision ac-
achieved the anticipated influence or distinction within India, and cordingly-for you cannot he my companion unless you undertake
the same way oflife." The girl chose him. Adopting the same clothing
the ideals of the cosmopolitan community of Santiniketan are in-
and style oflife she went around with her hushand and they copulated
creasingly under siege from militant forces of ethnocentric particu-
in public and they went off together to dinner parties. And once she
larism and Hindu-fundamentalist nationalism. And yet, in the
went to a dinner party at the house of Lysimachus and there refuted
very decline of Tagore's ideal, which now threatens the very exis- Theodorus the Atheist, with a sophism like this: "If it wouldn't he
tence of the secular and tolerant Indian state, the observer sees its judged wrong for Theodorus to do something, then it wouldn't be
worth. To worship one's country as if it were a god is indeed to judged wrong for Hipparchia to do it either; hut Theodorus does no
bring a curse upon it. Recent electoral reactions against Hindu na- wrong if he beats himself; so Hipparchia too does no wrong if she
tionalism give some grounds for optimism that this recognition of . heats Theodorus." And when Theodorus could not reply to her argu-
worth is widespread and may prove efficacious, averting a tragic ment, he ripped off her cloak. But Hipparchia was not upset or dis-
ending of the sort that Tagore describes. traught as a woman would normally he. (DL 6.96-8) 5
And since I am in fact optimistic that Tagore's ideal can be suc-
I am not exactly recommending Crates and Hipparchia as the
cessfully realized in schools and universities in democracies
marital ideal for students in my hypothetical cosmopolitan schools
around the world, and in the formation of public policy, let me
(or Theodorus the Atheist as their logic teacher). 6 But the story
conclude with a story of cosmopolitanism that has a happy ending.
does reveal this: that ~h~J~(tu~L~h~.~S?.S.!!lQP-<?.fü<!Ib~Who-puts..right
lt is told by Diogenes Laertius about the courtship and marriage of
~or~J;2.~~-~1Y~!J:P.,g„ggiye.rsalreasonhefore.. the.symhols..ofn.:tti9:naj.
the Cynic cosmopolitan philosophers Crates and Hipparchia (one >(
of the most eminent female philosophers of antiquity), in order, ~'~"~~,1:~:i:g 1__~~~~~?t })~ "~?..riI1~.: -~at,_ ~r lacJ-iµg i:nJqy~,
:q''•, presumably, to show that casting off the symhols of status and na-
tion can sometimes be a way to succeed in love. The background
is that Hipparchia is from a good family, attached, as most Creek
families were, to social status and pedigree. They resent the cos-
mopolitan philosopher Crates, with his strange ideas of world citi-
zenship and his strange disdain for rank and boundaries.
[Hipparchia] feil in love with Crates' arguments and his way of life
and paid no attention to any ofher suitors nor to wealth or high birth
or good looks. Crates, though, was everything to her. Moreover, she

""'-'._
 62 44 · SISSELA BOK

nourishment children draw from culture, inheritance, and tradi-

tion should be offered to them freely and thus free them to look be-
1 fJoshua
rom: For Love of Country? Martha C. Nussbaum et al. Ed.
Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. 45-52
yond their immediate world, not constrain them through rote
learning and indoctrination:
~
Judith Butler
lt is only through the fullest development of all his capacities that man
~
is likely to achieve his real freedom. He must be so equipped as no Universality in Culture
longer to be an.xious about his own self-preservation; only through his
capacity to understand and to sympathize with his neighbour can he
!
function as a decent member of human society and as a responsible
citizen. 4
l
~
From such a point of view, there is nothing wrong with encour-
~
aging children fully to explore their most local existence in order
to reach beyond it by degrees. Nor need there be anything wrong
CONSIDER THAT IT MAY BEA MISTAKE TO DE-
with lasting pride in, love for, or identification through particular r:
r clare one's affiliation by stating an order of priorities: I
bonds, communities, and cultures. Acknowledging these need not
blind one to problems within any of the circles of allegiance nor t:~ am X first and then Y. lt may be that the ordering of
involve exceptionalism or disparagement or dismissal of others. such identifications is precisely the problem produced
by a discourse on multiculturalism which does not yet
,,1,:
Without learning to understand the uniqueness of cultures, begin-
ning with one's own, it may weil be impossible to honor both hu-
1
r, know how to .relate the terms that it enumerates. lt
.:: f
man distinctiveness and the shared humanity central to the cosmo- i would be a great consolation, I suppose, to retum to a
f
politan ideal. l' ready-made universal perspective, and to compel every-
i~
one to identify with a universal moral attitude before
they take on their various specific and parochial con-
cerns. The problem emerges, however, when the mean-
1 ing of "the universal" proves to be culturally variable,
i!, and the specific cultural articulations of the universal
work against its claim to a transcultural status.
t
f This is not to say that there ought to be no reference
~
t to the universal or that it has become, for us, an impos-

~
f
sibility. On the contrary. All it means is that there are
cultural conditions for its articulation that are not al-
~ ways the same, and that the term gains its meaning for
us precisely through these decidedly less than universal

i.
[
 46 · J UD IT H BUTLER
conditions. This is a paradox that any injunction td adopt a uni-
versal attitude will encounter. For it may be that in one culture a set
of rights are considered to be universally endowed, and that in an-
other those very rights mark the limit to universalizability, i.e., "If
we grant those people those rights we will be undercutting. the
foundations of the universal as we know it." This has become espe-
cially clear to me in the field of lesbian and gay human rights,
where the universal is a contest~d term, and where various cultures
i)
and various mainstream human rights groups voice doubt over
1
'! whether lesbian and gay people ought properly to be included in
"the human" and whether their putative rights fit within the ex-
::1
i isting conventions governing the scope of rights considered uni-
:i versal.
Consider that to claim that there are existing conventions gov-
erning the scope of rights described as universal is not to claim
that that scope has been decided once and for all. In fact, it may be
that the universal is only partially articulated, and that we do not
yet know what forms it may take. The contingent and cultural
character of the existing conventions governing the scope of uni-
versality does not deny the usefulness or importance of the term
universal. lt simply means that the claim of universality has not
been fully or finally made and that it remains to be seen whether
and how it will be further articulated. lndeed, it may well be politi-
cally important to claim that a given set of rights are universal even
when existing conventions governing the scope of universality pre-
clude precisely such a claim. Such a claim runs the good risk of
provoking a radical rearticulation of universality itself. Whether
the claim is preposterous, provocative, or efficacious depends on
the collective strength with which it is asserted, the institutional
conditions of its assertion and reception, and the unpredictable
political forces at work. But the uncertainty of success is not
enough of a reason to refrain from making the claim.
Mari Matsuda has recently argued that hate speech-in particu-
Universality in Culture · 47 63
1
; lar, racially degrading speech-ought not to qualify as protected
speech precisely because it sends a message of racial inferiority,
and that message has heen refuted by universally accepted codes of
1
law. Setting aside foi; the moment whether or not hate speech
1 ought to be unprotected for that reason, the argument raises other
;
f,
kinds of questions. Is Matsuda's view one which only isolates
kinds of speech that ought not to be part of public discourse, or is
it also a normative position concerning what ought to be the posi-
1 tive boundaries of legitimate speech-namely, speech that is con-
~
strained hy existing notions of universality? 2 How would we rec-
~(
f oncile such a view with that ofEtienne Balibar, for instance, who
!
i[ .'1-r.Kt.I~~. !~Cl:~..~~~i~~j~fa.rrg§_ ,9µi.·.,g~~!.~?~::~~H:iP.i'.91ii!RY.~ii~Hfxr" . /;.:::~
How might we continue to insist upon more expansive reformula-
[ tions of universality, if we commit ourselves to honoring only the
[,
.~ provisional and parochial versions of universality currently en-
i[
coded in international law? Clearly, such precedents are enor-
mously useful for political arguments in international contexts, but
it would be a mistake to think that such conventional formulations
[ exhaust the possibilities of what might be meant by "the univer-
sal." Are we to expect that we will know in advance the meaning to
l- be assigned to the utterance of universality, or is this utterance the
occasion for a meaning that is not to be fully or concretely antic-
t
k ipated?
! If standards of universality are historically articulated, then it
! would seem that exposing the parochial and exclusionary charac-
!
p ter of a given historical articulation of universality is part of the
f project of extending and rendering substantive the notion of uni-
r
versality itself. "Speech that contests current standards governing
1 the universal reach of political enfranchisement" characterizes rac-
ist speech, to be sure. But there are other sorts of speech that con-
stitute valuable contestations crucial to the continuing elaboration
of the universal itself, and which it would be a mistake to foreclose.
An example of the latter would be a situation in which subjects
L
 64 48 JUDITH BUTLER
who have been excluded from enfranchisement by existing con-
ventions (including racist conventions) governing the exclusionary
definition of the universal seize the language of enfranchisement
and set into motion a "performative contradiction": claiming to be
covered by that universal, they thereby expose the contradictory
character of previous conventional formulations of the universal.
This kind of speech appears at first to be impossible or contra-
dictory, but it constitutes one way to expose the limits of current
notions of universality, and to constitute a challenge to those ex-
isting standards to revise themselves in more expansive and inclu-
sive ways. In this sense, being able to utter the performative contra-
diction is hardly a self-defeating enterprise; on the contrary, it is
crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of historical
standards of universality proper to the futural movement of de-
1.'1 mocracy itself. :r~,-elairn.t4e.tfü~~~t::':~E~~!J.i.~~-E?~Yt:.th.~~Il.-'!E!i.~~=-
, lated is to insist that the "not yet" is _p_r_<?,P.~.EJ9)!11~P..nd.~r.~t'!.!!9-JEg"2.f.
~
the
................
'iill!vers-aITts~lfth~t-~hi-~h-~~~-.;_{~~
·
"unrealized" by.„„..,,„-._,,.,„..._
the univer-
~,„.i ,.,_.,.~,·-·••·•0,1.,, •t„.,_.,,..,..„,•. ,.., •. '•''""""-'"·''-'n""n~--.·.~.; <-••:.•-h"~··-·.
•••.·.;-"''
~~-~--c.C>nstitutes it_~~~-~-gt.!e)Jy,__Th~ :YU~Y~t,:~ajf.:>~g~!1:~,"t2.. 't>_~.S~1!.1~.~rti!>­
ul~t~~fp;~~{;~iJ-through chaU~gg~s.t.o _i~~-~~!~~g formulation, and
.. ;·~
e~_~ig~t>J~.q~_-t}ig~e w,h9.~r~ _ng_t_~Qxi!iiirit:~ho
cfialienge
'..}
)'•,, __ this
jlave no e1J.titl~merit. to O<;cupy_ t?e pla_ce of_the"who," bu7;ho
n:everthele;~· ci~.~~!ld.that.theuniversaLas .such.:.olii~t~~,9··be i~a~­
sive of them. The excluded in this sense constitutes th~ cont~~
•. , . , ,,;.. ;•. · ... ··' '<"'''-'··:..c.-. .. '· ·~-··' . . ·
g~!lt limit of uni~~;s~Ü~~t~~~: AJdd th~ '~I1i~ersal, far from being
-commensu~ai:e '\\'r~th' ''{ts' ~~~~~:;;:tional formulation, emerges as a
postulated and open-ended ideal that has not been adequately en-
coded by any given set of legal conventions. 4 If existing and ac-
cepted conventions of universality constrain the domain of the
speakable, this constraint produces the speakable, marking a bor-
der of demarcation between the speakable and the unspeakable.
The border that produces the speakable through the exclusion
of certain forms of speech beco~es an operation of censorship ·ex-
ercised through the very postulation of the universal. Does every
,i'f'~ "".::: ~!·)~ . . ;:. ~. ; l.-·~·„,.~.._-:r"-:{ 5;.
t\
Universality in Culture 49
postulation of the universal as an existent, as a given, not codify the
exclusions by which that postulation of universality proceeds? In
this instance and through this strategy of relying on established
conventions of universality, do we unwittingly stall the process of
universalization within the bounds of established convention, nat-
uralizing its exclusions, and preempting the possibility of its radi-
calization? The universal can be articulated only in response to a
challenge from (its own) outside. What constitutes the community
that might qualify as a. legitimate community that might debate
and agree upon this universality? If that very community is consti-
tuted through racist exclusions, how shall we trust it to deliberate
on the question of racist speech?
The above definition of universality is distinct from an idealiz-
ing presupposition of consensus, one that is in some ways already
there. A universality that is yet tobe articulated might well defy or
confound the existing conventions that govern our anticipatory
,,,,.,.,.„,-,. , ,,
,•.;.;i.· ,,;,'-,.~ .• ·-~''"·"~"·! '·'·f;~"•··"-'""" '''"''...-.:1,-,.·,·.-,-:1.'-;' „. imaginings. This last is something other than a pre- or postcon-
ventional idealization (Habermas) conceived as always already
there, or as one already encoded in given international law (Mat-
suda), a position that equates present and ultimate accomplish-
ments. lt is the futural anticipation of a universality that has not yet
arrived, one for which we have no ready concept, one whose artic-
. ' , , . '·.·: .--·,,.•. ,. „--~··-·"-·~~-•~•c7„.~~~•r1,i...,_ .. ,_·.~„.~1><~"'• ulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of univer-
sality at its already imagined borders.
The notion of '"consensus" presupposed by either of the first
two views proves to be a prelapsarian contention, one which short-
circuits the necessarily difficult task of forging a universal consen-
sus from various locations of culture, to borrow Homi Bhabha's ti-
tle and phrase, and the difficult practice of translation among the
various languages in which universality makes its varied and con-
tending appearances. 5 The task of cultural translation is one that is
necessitated precisely by the performative contradiction that takes
place when one with no authorization to speak within and as the
·."~1 ,.J ·~\ ~·t. ~'I:.
50 JUDITH BUTLER
universal nevertheless lays claims to the terms. Or, perhaps more
appropriately phrased, the extension of universality through the
act of translation takes place when one who is excluded from the
universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split sit-
uation ofbeing at once authorized and deauthorized (so much for
delineating a neatly spatialized "site of enunciation"). That trans-
lation is not the simple entry of the deauthorized into the autho-
rized, whereby the former term simply alters its status and the lat-
ter domain simply makes room for what it has unwittingly failed to
accomrnodate. If the norm is itself predicated on the exclusion of
the one who speaks, one whose speech calls into question the
foundation of the universal itself, then translation on such occa-
sions is to be something more and different than an assimilation to
an existing norm. The kind of translation that exposes the alterity
within the norrn (an alterity without which the norrn would not as-
sume its borders and "know" its limits) exposes the failure of the
norm to effect the universal reach for which it stands, exposes what
we might underscore as the promising ambivalence of the norm.
The failure of the norm is exposed by the performative contra-
diction enacted by one who speaks in its name even as the name is
not yet said to designate the one who nevertheless insinuates his or
her way into the narne enough to speak "in" it all the same. Such
double-speaking is precisely the temporalized map of universal-
ity's future, the task of a postlapsarian translation the future of
which remains unpredictable. The conternporary scene of cultural
translation emerges with the presupposition that the utterance
does not have the same meaning everywhere, indeed that the utter-
ance has become a scene of conflict ( to such a degree, in fact, that
we seek to prosecute the utterance in order, finally, to "fix" its
meaning and quell the conflicts to which it gives rise). The transla-
tion that takes place at this scene of conflict is one in which the
meaning intended is no more determinative of a "final" reading
than the one that is received, and no final adjudication of conflict-
Universality in Culture 51 65
ing positions can emerge. Witho~!_.!l:_i_s fi?~j~~~~!l:!,=~!1-LI?:~~!P..:.~-
..~~. .di!<?~~a E~~~.~~~! . ~.~4~·.frii:th~tfri.~~~P-~ÜY~ dÜt<lll,m,~JQ'}Ü'!_.~.!:t~ __ „k_'
.
dyi:ia~i.~,Jna,du:>f ~-~.ew.~i::ging,democ:r'!~js.E~'!Sg~~'..„.... ~
,„ Th~s it rnakes little sense to imagine the scene of cclture as one
0
••
that one might enter to find bits and pieces of evidence that show
an abiding faith in an already established notion of universality. If
one were to enter various domains of culture in order to find exam-
ples of world citizens, one would invariably cull from those various
examples the selfsame lesson, the selfsame universal bearing. But
is the relation between culture and the universal appropriately con-
1
t strued as that between an example and the moral dictum it is said
" to support? In such cases, the examples are subordinate to the uni-
versal, and they all indicate the universal in the same way. The fu-
tural articulation of the universal, however, can happen only if we
1 find ways to effect cultural translations between those various cul-
tural examples in order to see which versions of the universal are
proposed, on what exclusions they are based, and how the entry
1 of the excluded into the domain of the universal requires a radical
~
transformation in our thinking of universality. When competing
t claims to the universal are made, it seems imperative not to pre-
[ sume that the cultural moments at issue exemplify a ready-made
&
universal. The claim is part of the ongoing cultural articulation of
~ universality, and the complex process oflearning how to read that
claim is not something any of us can do outside of the difficult pro-
cess of cultural translation. This translation will not be an easy one
in which we reduce every cultural instance to a presupposed uni-
1 versality, nor will it be the enumeration of radical particularisms
between which no communication is possible.
The risks will be that translation will become an imposition of a
1
f.
universal claim on a culture that resists it, or that those who defend
the universal will domesticate the challenge posed by alterity by
1 invoking that very cultural claim as an example of its own nascent
universality, one which confirms that such a universality is already
~
~[
 52
66
JUDITH BUTLER
achieved. What kind of cultural imposition is it to claim that a
Kantian may be found in every culture? For whereas there may be
something like a world reference in moral thinking or even a re-
course to a version of universality, it would sidestep the specific
cultural work to be clone to claim that we have in Kant everything
we might want to know about how moral reasoning works in vari-
ous cultural contexts.
Importantly, then, the task that cultural difference sets for us is
the articulation of universality through a difficult labor of transla-
tion. That labor seeks to transform the very terms that are made to
stand for one another, and the movement of that unanticipated
transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be
achieved and which, in order to resist domestication, may never be
fully or finally achievable.
Richard F alk
Revisioning Cosmopolitanism
~
i MARTHA NuSSBAUM's POWERFULLY ARGUED
and artfully constructed cosmopolitan initiative chal-
lenges the political imagination at a historically relevant
moment to transcend the blinkered realism of modern
patriotic conceptions ofloyal citizen and sovereign state
that associate political duty and identity with territorial
boundaries. One recent nationalist response to criticism
about its narrowness of outlook is for adherents to the
1
~·
patriotic side of the debate to extend their ethical con-
sciousness to the larger reality of humanity by incorpo-
rating "human rights" into their ethical convictions.
Cosmopolitan adherents welcome this outreach beyond
the exclusivities of nationalism and statism but find
such an expression of solidarity with humanity as a
whole too peripheral to achieve an appropriate reloca-
tion of ethical orientation.
Despite sharing Nussbaum's essential vision, I am
disturbed by its implicit encouragement of a polarized
either/or view of the tension between national and cos-
mopolitan consciousness. In so doing, it engenders a
 67
from For Love of Country? Martha C. Nussbaum et al. Ed. Joshua
Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. 131-144

Martha C. Nussbaum
Reply

;I I

As A VISITOR WALKS INTO Y AD V ASHEM, THE

Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, she comes upon a
long avenue of trees. Each of these trees bears a number,
a name or names, and a place. As of December 1995,
there are, I believe, 1172 such trees. Each tree honors a
person (or couple or family) who risked death to save a
Jew or Jews. These people were goyim-French or Bel­
gian or Polish or Scandinavian or Japanese or German,
and atheist or Christian or members of some other reli­
1:

gion. They had their own local identities and nationali­

ties and, often, religions. They had friends and, in many
I.
cases, families. Sometimes some of these loyalties sup­
ported their actions; religion was frequently among
., their sources of support. Sometimes these loyalties op­
posed their choices-local politics always opposed
them. These "righteous goyim," however, risked the loss
of all that was near and dear to them to save a stranger.
They did not need to do so. Everything pointed the
other way. But somehow, against all odds, their imagina­
tions had acquired a certain capacity to recognize and
!l'i
68 132 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
respond to the human, above and beyond the claims of nation, reli-
gion, and even family.
The sight of this avenue of trees can strike the visitor with a pe-
culiarly stark terror, made all the more searing by the peaceful
leafiness of the young trees, in such contrast to the monumental ar-
chitecture that surrounds them. The terror, which persists, is the
terror of the question they pose: Would one, in similar circum-
stances, have the moral courage to risk one's life to save a human
.i,
being, simply because he or she is human? More generally, would
one, in similar circumstances, have the moral courage to recognize
humanity and respond to its claim, even if the powers that he de-
nied its presence? That recognition, wherever it is made, is the ba-
:ii
sic act of world citizenship.
We have so many devious ways of refusing the claim of human-
ity. Rousseau speaks of the imagination's tendency to engage itself
sympath~tically o:nlyvvith those who resemble us, whose pos1,ibili-
ties we see as real possibilities for ourselves. Kings don't pity sub-
jects because they think they never will he subjects. But this is a
1 personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason
fragile strategem, both false and self-deceptive. We are all horn
naked and poor; we are all subject to disease and misery of all
kinds; finally, we are all condemned to death. The sight of these
common miseries can, therefore, carry our hearts to humanity-if
we live in a society that encourages us to m~;k.e;_ ~he illlaginative le_ap ...
into the life of the other. ·· · .. ·· · · ucation is that we should cultivate the factual and imaginative
·we al;~ ·ea~ily s~ppose, Rousseau adds, that people who are not
like us do not really suffer as we suffer, do not really mind their
pain. These obstacles in the mind were powerfully manipulated by
Nazi antisemitism, which situated Jews at a distance from other
citizens, constructed their possibilities as different from those of
others, and encouraged citizens to imagine them as vermin or in-
sects, who would really not suffer the way human beings suffer.
And of course they let people know that to recognize human
suffering would bring heavy penalties. Despite these obstacles, the
Reply 133
people represented by the 1,172 trees recognized the human, and
made this recognition the benchmark of their conduct.
My essay in defense of cosmopolitanism argues, in essence, that
we should follow them and try as hard as we can to construct soci-
eties in which that norm will he realized in as many minds and
hearts as possible and promoted by legal and institutional arrange-
ments. Whatever else we are hound by and pursue, we should rec-
ognize, at whatever personal or social cost, that each human being
is human and counts as the moral equal of every other. To use the
words of John Rawls, "Each person possesses an inviolability
·founded onjustice." 2
To count people as moral equals is to treat nationality, ethnicity,
religion, class, race, and gender as "morally irrelevant"-as irrele-
vant to that equal standing. Of course, these factors properly enter
into our deliberations in many contexts. But the accident of being
born a Sri Lankan, or a Jew, or a female, or an African-American,
or a poor person, is just that-an accident of birth. It is not and
should not be taken to he a determinant of moral worth. Human
and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth,
and this worth is equal. To recognize these facts is a powerful con-
straint on what one may choose and on the way in which one at-
tempts to comport oneself as a citizen. What I am saying about ed-
prerequisites for recognizing humanity in the stranger and the
.other. Rousseau is correct when he says that ignorance and dis-
tance cramp the consciousness.What I am saying about politics is
that we should view the equal worth of all human beings as a regu-
lative constraint on our political actions and aspirations.
WHAT CAN THIS MEAN, WHEN THERE IS NO WORLD
state? This question seems a little odd to me, given the fact that a
very long tradition in concrete political thinking, beginning with
 ·""~f::
134 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Cicero's De Officiis and extending through Grotius to Kant and
Adam Smith and straight on to modern international law, has ap-
pealed to Stoic norms to justify certain maxims of both domestic
and international political conduct. 3 Some of these include: the re-
nunciation of wars of aggression, constraints on the use of lies in
wartime, an absolute ban on wars of extermination, and the hu-
mane treatment of prisoners and of the vanquished. In peacetime,
both Cicero and Kant recognize duties of hospitality to aliens
working on their soil; Kant insists on a strict denunciation of all
i projects of colonial conquest. 4 For the entire tradition, individuals
r
I: bore duties of benevolence that were loosely defined, in most
I
d
·11
cases, hut understood to he extremely important and relatively de-
manding. Giving one's money is a major way in which, in the ab-
ii
sence of a world state, individuals can promote the good of those
Ii who are distant from them. To say "I cannot act as a world citizen,
i to poorer nations. The fact that the nation-state is the fundamental
i/
since there is no world state" would have been seen by this tradi-
I!
.,1
tion as a cowardly way of avoiding thinking about how high a price
i one will pay to help others who are in need. For one can always
•I
I,'i find ways to help, if one thinks as a member of that virtual com-
monwealth, which Kant called "the kingdom of ends." To quote
John Rawls again, "Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be
to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from that
point of view." 5
In our own world, moreover, there are many practical opportu-
nities for world citizenship that were simply not available to the
Stoics, or even to Kant and his contemporaries. As Richard Falk
points out, nongovernmental organizations of many kinds are
mobilizing to influence government action on issues ranging from
ecology to domestic violence; one may support or join such or-
ganizations. Through such groups one may pressure national gov-
ernments to take action toward certain global aims. The delibera-
tions of governments, moreover, are becoming ever more inter-
twined and international: the population conference in Cairo and
Reply 135 69
the women's· meeting in Beijing are just two examples in which
governments recognized the existence of problems that cross na-
tional lines. The information revolution is rapidly multiplying the
possibilities for action as a world citizen. My morning newspaper
today brings information about the deaths of thousands of (mainly
female) orphans in China from malnutrition. 6 The very existence
of such news. opens possibilities of action for the world citizen,
possibilities ranging from financial support for Human Rights
Watch to thinking and writing to (where it is open to individuals)
more direct participation in deliberations about the welfare of chil-
dren and women. One can do all these things, and the fact that
there is no world state is no excuse for not doing them. Increas-
ingly, too, we are all going to have to do some tough thinking about
the luck of birth and the morality of transfers of wealth from richer
political unit does not prevent one from discovering to what an as-
tonishing degree the luck of being born in a particular country in-
fluences life chances. To take just a single example, life expectancy
at birth ranges from 78.6 years in Hong Kong and 78.2 years in Ice-
land and Sweden to 39.0 years in Sierra Leone. 7 This is notjust,
and we had better think about it. Not just think, do.
The absence of a world state does not thwart cosmopolitan con-
duct, then, for those who are genuinely committed to it. But cos-
mopolitanism does not require, in any case, that we should give
equal attention to all parts of the world. None of the major thinkers
in the cosmopolitan tradition denied that we can and should give
special attention to our own families and to our own ties of reli-
gious and national belonging. In obvious ways, we must do so,
since the nation-state sets up the basic terms for most of our daily
conduct, and since we are all born into a family of some sort. Cos-
mopolitans hold, moreover, that it is right to give the local an addi-
tional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan
should have for this is not that the local is better per se, but rather

70 136 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
that this is the only sensible way to do good. Appiah's moving ac-
count of his father's career makes this point wonderfully. Had Joe
Appiah tried to do a little good for all the people of the world, he
would have contributed far less to the world than he did by his in-
tense commitment to Ghana. The same holds true of parenthood:
if I tried to help all the world's children a little bit, rather than to
devote an immense amount oflove and care to Rachel Nussbaum,
I would be no good at all as a parent (as Dickens's portrait of Mrs.
Jellyby mordantly showed). But that should not mean that we be-
lieve our own country or family is really worth more than the chil-
dren or families of other people-all are still equally human, of
equal moral worth.
A useful analogy is one's own native language. I love the English
language. And although I have some knowledge of some other lan-
guages, whatever I express of myself in the world I express in En-
glish. If I were to try to equalize my command of even five or six
languages, and to do a little writing in each, I would write poorly.
But this doesn't mean that I think English is intrinsically superior
to other languages. I recognize that all human beings have an in-
nate linguistic capacity, and that any person might have learned
any language; which language one learns is in that sense morally ir-
relevant, an accident of birth that does not determine one's worth.
That recognition of equal worth has practical consequences for the
ways in which I react to and speak about others. Si:rnilarly, in the
moral case, I may focus disproportionately on the local. But my
recognition of equal humanity does supply constraints on my con-
duct toward others. What are these constraints? May I give my
daughter an expensive college education, while children all over
the world are starving and effective relief agencies exist? May
Americans enjoy their currently high standard of living, when
there are reasons to think the globe as a whole could not sustain
that }evel of consumption? These are hard questionsi and there
\
r
Reply 137
will and should be much debate about the proper answers. My
point is that we must ask the questions, and we must know enough
and imagine enough to give sensible answers.
As WE POSE THESE QUESTIONS, WE SHOULD VALUE HU-
man diversity. As. Appiah says, the cosmopolitan ideal includes a
positive delight in the diversity of human cultures, languages, and
forms of life. This pluralism prompts cosmopolitan liberals to in-
sist on what is called "the priority of the right to the good," that is,
on giving first priority to structures-prominently including struc-
tures of equal liberty-that will protect the ability of people to
choose a form of life in accordance with their own lights, whether
cultural or religious or personal. The very principles of a world cit-
izenship in this way value the diversity of persons; they value it so
much that they make liberty of choice the benchmark of any just
constitutional order, and refuse to compromise this principle in fa-
vor of any particular tradition or religion. McConnell and I differ
deeply on the issue of public funding for religious education. We
do not differ, however, about the profound importance of religion,
and respect for religious difference, in a just society. Our difference
concerns the right way for a liberal regime to value diversity. In my
view, valuing diversity entails strong support for a shared public
cultu:re that makes the right prior to the good. I believe that this
goal would be subverted by public funding of religious schools,
and I therefore oppose such funding. In his view, valuing diversity
entails giving parents the chance to use public funds to choose a
religious education for their children; to give the public schools an
advantage is not fair to those who prefer religious schools. But
these are differences within a larger agreement about the impor-
tance of strong protections for religious liberty. Of course, in say-
ing this I am doing what Putnam rightly advises, valuing what is
best in U.S. constitutional traditions, as well as what is best in the
 138 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
traditions oflndia8 and, no doubt, many other places; in general, a
world citizen will always try to find the seeds of the commendable
universal in the local, but he or she also will be prepared to dis-
cover that some of them are missing.
The crucial question for a world citizen is how to promote di-
versity without hierarchy. Liberals are committed to diversity, but
~so to eq~ality: They ~iew'~q~.tlitiy:;~ ·~ ~o~~traint on the fo~ms of
diversity that may reasonably be fostered. Some forms of difference
have historically been inseparable from hierarchical ordering: for
example, racial differences in America, gender differences almost
everywhere, differences of dialect or of literary and musical taste in
many parts of the world. Some forms of diversity are clearly sepa-
rable from hierarchy: most religious and ethnic differences, and
many cultural differences. The challenge of world citizenship, it
seems to me, is to work toward a stat~ of things in which all oft.he
· differences will be nonhierarchically understood. We have no way
of knowing what some of them will look like under true equality.
Were gender differences to become more like the differences
among ethnic groups in America or the differences between bas-
ketball fans and lovers ofjazz, what would be left of them? We sim-
ply do not yet know. But that is the ideal to which the world citizen
aspires. It is, of course, much better to be in a world that has both
Dennis Rodman and Wynton Marsalis than in a world that has
only one or the other. Both are great, and no doubt they would be
less uniquely great were they more similar. We should value diver-
sity in that way. But we should not value that part of it that is de-
,_and ou~ tr~gic and c~~ic refusals of that claim .. · . .
fined in terms of dominance and subordination. (This does not
mean that the world citizen cannot believe that the Bulls are better
than all other teams. World citizens never deny what is self-
evidently true. )9
World citizenship, then, places exacting demands on the imagi-
nations of each of us. To be sure, the imagination is not enough. As
Adam Smith noted, compassion for others is a fragile and incon-
i
Reply 139 71
stant device. If we left our world citizenship to the vagaries of our
own daily reflections, we would act less well than if we were to in-
stitutionalize our best ideas. I agree with Elaine Scarry, therefore,
that the imagination needs laws-especially constitutional arrange-
ments-that do as much as possible to institutionalize the equal
worth of persons. But these laws must take their impetus from the
imagination, and they will prove unstable to the extent that people
become obtuse. We must, therefore, cultivate world citizenship in
our hearts and minds as well as our codes of law. I agree with
Scarry, for the reasons she gave and a few others, that works of
imaginativeliterature play a pivotal role in that ~ultivation. 10 ·
WE HAVE MANY WAYS OF AVOIDING THE CLAIM OF COM-
mon humanity. One way, I think, is to say that the universal is bor-
ing and could not be expected to claim our love. I am astonished
that so many distinguished writers should make this suggestion,
connecting the idea of world citizenship with a "black-and-white"
world, a world lacking in poetry..The world of the cosmopolitan
can seem boring-to those hooked on the romantic symbols of lo-
,cal belonging. But many fine things can seem boring to those not
brought up to appreciate them. What my critics charge, however,
'
is that it is right to find the love ~f h~~;nity. boring, that p,oV\Terful
·····-·-···-···--··
art cannot be made about it, that it is bloodless and characterless
somewhat the way fast food is characterless. It ,.see~s to me, by
cpntrast, that it would be difficult to find a powerful work of art
that is not, at some level, concerned with the claim of the common
.
Ancient Athenian tragedy was not about a peculiarly Greek eth-
nicity-though of course, it derived from indigenous literary and
musical traditions and could best be understood by people steeped
in those traditions. It dramatized its aspiration to recognition of
humanity by situating itself in mythic times, or on the Trojan side
of the Trojan War-or on a desert island, home to an outcast whose
 72 140 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
foot oozes pus, whom all good Greeks shun with a properly Greek
disgust. Shakespeare's deviously fictive places ("a seacoast in Bo-
hemia") indicate a similar desire to lure the imagination away from
its most complacent moorings in the local, causing it to venture
outward to some strange land, be it medieval Denmark or ancient
Rome, where human beings, not without poetry and not without
passion, attempt to love one another, often tragically. Even the
most apparently local ofliterary landscapes-say,Joyce's Dublin or
Walt Whitman's America-are landscapes of the imagination in
which the human body and its zestful surprising irregularities have
a more than local home. Consider, too, how much not-black-and-
white poetry and prose concerns, in fact, the situation of the exile
and outsider-Philoctetes, Hamlet, Leopold Bloom, Molly
Bloom-people who, by virtue of their outsider status, can tell
truths about the political community, its justice and injustice, its
embracings and its failures to embrace.,,Jn engaging with such
;]
'Yorks-and indeed with any works that depict a world of h1.1man
beings beyond the narrow one we know-in permitting these
~trangers to inhabit our minds and our hearts, we are enacting the
love of humanity. This does not seem boring.
In Walter Scott's famous poem, on which I was raised, the non-
patriot is a man "with soul so dead" that he never could be the
subject of "minstrel raptures." 11 The poem suggests that all true
poetry is patriotic in inspiration and in theme. Several of my crit-
ics would appear to be followers of Scott, and I am cast as that per-
son whose empty humanism is destined to go to its grave "unwept,
unhonored, and unsung." I suggest, instead, that largc:-souled and
compelling art is generally concerned with the recognition of the
,._~ommon in the strange and the strange in the common-and that
"narrowly patriotic art, by contrast, is frequently little more than
'\/
r:'_.:.::,. kitsch, idolatry. Scott's poem is kitsch. Much of Rudyard Kipling's
·poetry is kitsch. Most of the products of most poet laureates in
Reply 141
office are kitsch. What tragic drama could there be if one exalts
one's own people above others, refusing the moral claim of a com-
mon humanity, with its common needs, failures, fears, and refus-
als? What lyric poetry of any depth? Tagore's point in The Home
and the World was that Sandip only seemed more interesting. As
both a sexual being and a rhetorical artist, he was utterly banal.
This of course does not require us to deny that all profound hu-
man matters are differently realized in different societies, or that
the full understanding of any artwork involves, therefore, engage-
ment with history, society, and the specificities of a local way of
life, as well as knowledge of a literary tradition. Nor does it require
denying that even the inner world of emotion, desire, and thought
is differently realized in different societies, or that any real-life hu-
man being is some concrete instantiation of some specific set of hu-
man potentialities. But that we can recognize one another across
these divisions-that we can even form the project of investigating
them-is also true, and fundamental. Dante was a poet of his time,
and we cannot read him well without learning a great deal about
his time. But ifhe were only a poet of his time, Pinsky would not
be producing his magnificent poem translating him, nor would any
of us care to read his works. In such generous engagements with a
stranger, we enact a duty of the moral imagination that we all too
frequently shun in real life. We never do meet a bare abstract "hu-
man being." But we meet the common in the concrete, as well as
the concrete in the common.
SEVERAL OF MY CRITICS SUGGEST AN ACCOUNT OF
moral development that makes a mystery out of familiar experi-
ences of commonality. It goes like this: When a child is little, it rec-
ognizes and loves only its own particular parents; then, after a
while, it comes to know and love its other relatives, then its region
or local group, then its nation-and finally, if at-.all, we get to hu-
 142 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
manity on the outside. But we come to the larger only through the
smaller, and it is the moral emotions connected with the smaller
that can be expected to have the most force.
Consider an alternative account. At birth, all an infant is is a hu-
man being. Its needs are the universal needs for food and comfort
and light. Infants respond, innately, to the sight of a human face. A
smile from a human being elicits a reactive smile, and there is rea-
son to think this an innate capacity of recognition. At the same
time, in the first few months of life an infant is also getting close
experience of one or more particular people, whom it soon learns
to tell apart from others, roughly at the time that it is also learning
to demarcate itself from them. These people have a culture, so all
the child's interactions with them are mediated by cultural speci-
:i
>I
ficity; but they are also mediated by needs that are in some form
common, and that form the basis for later recognition of the
common.
At some point, the child understands that these givers of food
and comfort are also separate people, people who can go and come
at will. She is learning something about her parents' particularity,
but at the same time discovering a common feature of human life:
that bodies are separate from other bodies, wills from other wills.
This discovery leads, it would seem, to fear and anger-experi-
ences that are always concretely shaped, but which also display
much crosscultural commonality. The extreme physical help-
lessness of the human infant, combined with its early cognitive
maturity, give human infancy a specific life course that creates a
poignant combination of deep need with the awareness of the un-
governability of the sources of need-making the ambivalence of
love a likely part of all human concern. A plausible view about the
origin of moral thinking is that it is, at least in part, an effort to
atone for and regulate the painful ambivalence of one's love, the
evil wishes one has directed toward the giver of care. In atonement
for having made the overweening demand to be the center of the
a,,-k
Reply 143 73
universe, the young child agrees to limit and regulate her demands
by the needs of others. Again, this learning will be concretely
shaped in each different society-but the powerful motivations of
a child to overcome hatred of loved ones derive from features of a
common humanity. They also take the child back to that human-
ity, by asking her to consider herself as one person among others,
not the entire world. Although this learning is about a specific
mother or father, its content carries the heart to humanity.
As the child grows older and begins to hear and tell stories, she
investigates further the shape of the shared form of human life.
Most children's stories do not bind the mind to the local. Good
fairy tales are rarely about Cambridge, Massachusetts. They in-
spire wonder and curiosity by exploring the contours of things
both strange and surprisingly familiar. They ask children to con-
cern themselves with the insides of animals and trees, as well as
hum~ns of many places and times. While inhabiting a particular
local world, they are already learning about a far larger world.
(Children frequently have more intense moral concern for animals
than for the adults around them. 12 And anyone who has traveled
with a child in a place of great poverty will know that the impulse
of sympathy is simple and powerful in the child, devious and im-
perfect in oneself.) The imaginations of children are flexible and
subtle instruments of acknowledgment, carrying them to the dis-
tant in the local and the familiar in the distant. All circles develop
simultaneously, in a complex and interlacing movement. But surely
the outer circle is not the last to form. Long before children have
any acquaintance with the idea of nation, or even of one specific re-
ligion, they know hunger and loneliness. Long before they en-
counter patriotism, they have probably encountered death. Long
before ideology interferes, they know something of humanity.
This brings me back to the avenue of trees. These people were
able to function as world citizens because they had not permitted
the original awareness of common needs and vulnerabilities to be
74 144 MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

eclipsed by the local. I imagine them retaining from childhood a

sense of the human face, and also of their own needy hungry
manity. I imagine them retaining a vivid determination that ill
wishes would not triumph over good, that their desire to subordi-
nate their parents to their own needs would not triumph over the
claims of the separate other. Because they had not allowed them-
selves to become encrusted over by the demands oflocal ideology,
they were able to respond to a human face and form. In that sense,
it seems to me most just to represent them as young green trees,
bearers of a certain freshness, a living human thought-the
thoughts of adult children, rather than of the shriveled adults we
often, all too tragically, become.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

1. See Hackney's speech to the National Press Club, which was
circulated to all participants in the planning meeting.
2. This is an important qualification. A short essay of mine on in-
ternational issues was eventually included in the Scholar's Pam-
phlet issued by the project: "A National Conversation on American
Pluralism and Identity: Scholar's Essays," MacArthur Founda-
tion.
3. A recent example of this argument is in Amy Gutmann's
"Multiculturalism and Democratic Education," presented at a con-
ference on "Equality and Its Critics" held at Brown University in
March 1994. My article originated as a comment on Gutmann's pa-
per. For Gutmann's reply, see "Democratic Citizenship," this vol-
ume, pp. 66-69.
4. For some related questions about women and work, see the arti-
cles in Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Women,
Culture, and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
5. I am grateful to Brad Inwood for permission to use his unpub-
lished translation of this section.
6. I exempt Hipparchia from criticism, since she was clearly try-
ing to show him up and she did not endorse the fallacious infer-
ence seriously.
 NOTES TO PAGES 21-47
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitan Patriots
1. Joseph Appiah, Antiochus Lives Again (Political Essays of Joe Appiah), ed.
Ivor Agyeman-Duah (Kumasi, Ghana: I. Agyeman-Duah, 1992).
2. Gertrude Stein, An American and France (1936) in What Are Masterpieces'?
(Los Angeles: Conference Press, 1940), p. 61.
3· We don't all agree on where the rights come from. I favor a view in which
human rights are embodied in legal arrangements within and between states,
rather than one in which they somehow antecedently exist or are grounded in
human nature.
4. E.W. Blyden in Howard Brotz, Negro Social and Political Thought (New
York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 197.
5. The tendency in the anglophone world to sentimentalize the state by calling
it the nation is so consistent that if I had earlier referred to the "state team" or
the "state anthem," they would have seemed cold, hard, and alien.
6. The expression "imagined community" was given currency by Benedict
Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNa-
tionalism (London: Verso, 1983).
7. For a discussion of Herder's views, see chapter 1 of my In My Father's House:
Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Sissela Bok, From Part to Whole
1. Henry Sidgwick, "Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies," Mind, o.s. 14,
1889, pp. 473-487.
2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1907) (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1966), p. 246.
3. Rabindranath Tagore, "A Poet's School," in Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer
in Education. Essays and Exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L. K.
Elmhirst (London: John Murray, 1961), pp. 63-64.
4. Rabindranath Tagore, "Siksha-Satra," in Rabindranath Tagore, p. 82.
Judith Butler, UniverHlity in Culture
1. Mari]. Matsuda, "Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Vic-
tim's Story," in Words that Wound, eds. Mari]. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence
Richard Delgado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1993), pp. 26-31.
2. The following discussion on universality is taken in revised form from a
forthcoming essay, "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Ut-
terance," Critical Inquiry.
to 47-93 75
3. Etienne Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," in Classes, and Ideas,
trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994).
4. See the comparable views of ideals and idealization in Drucilla Cornell and
OwenFiss.
5. Much of this discussion is indebted to Homi Bhabha's use of Walter Ben-
jamin's notion of "translation" for thinking about the problem of exclusion in
cultural politics. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1993).
Hilary Putnam, Must We Choose Between Patriotism
and Universal Reason?
1. I include loyalties to an ethnic group (even if it is not a national group) under
the term patriotism, because Martha Nussbaum's argument applies to these.
2. Although this is not relevant to Martha Nussbaum's paper, since I have dis-
cussed an argument against religion that parallels her argument against patrio-
tism, let me remark that the variant of the former argument that claims that all
passionately held convictions are really "religions" simply changes the claim
that religion is responsible for human intolerance and violence to the very
different claim that passionately held convictions are. own view-like Wil-
liamJames's in The Will to Believe-is that what we want is not a world without
any passionately held convictions, but rather a world in which people recognize
that their right to their own passionately held convictions does not give them the
right to force those convictions on others.
3. It is, of course, true that Stalin also appealed to nationalism, but this was pri-
marily after the Nazi invasion of the country, and not to justify his purges, but
rather for the-presumably laudable!-purpose of mobilizing the Russians for
self-defense. The great purges were carried out in the name of defending "so-
cialist revolution," not nationalism.
4. The Vietnam War, in which we dropped more bombs on Vietnam-a coun-
try of 17 million people-than were dropped in all of World War II, is a case in
point. We never appealed to American nationalism (nor, of course, to religion)
to justify our actions, but rather to "democracy," "saving the Vietnamese from
communism" (by poisoning their land and napalming their children!), etc. A
very popular, but completely false, claim is that "democracies do not go to war
with other democracies." In fact, the United States' interventions in Chile
(against Allende) and later in Costa Rica (which almost everyone seems to have
forgotten) were, in reality, acts of war against democratic regimes. Similarly, the
invasion of Egypt (the Suez Canal affair) by England, France, and Israel had
76 150 NOTES TO PAGES 113-138 to Pages 139-143

Amartya Sen, Humanity and Citizenship
1. Adam Smith, The Theory ofMoral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L.
Madie (1790; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 140.
2. Smith, Theory ofMoral Sentiments, pp. 136-137.
3. I have, however, discussed that issue in "Evaluator Relativity and Conse-
quential Evaluation," Philosophy and Public Affairs (1993), and in "Well-being,
Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82
(April 1985).
10. See my Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston,
Mass.: Beacon Press, 1996).
11. Scott, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."
12. I am surprised that none of my critics have asked why I focus on the moral
claim of the human species, and they appear to neglect the claims of other forms
of life. From this direction one could imagine a serious challenge to my posi-
tion, one that I have not yet answered.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Reply

1. SeeJ.-J. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 4.
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971), p. 3.
3. See my discussion of some of these issues in "Kant and Stoic Cosmopoli-
tanism," in Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming 1996). On Grotius, see
Christopher Ford, "Preaching Propriety to Princes: Grotius, Lipsius, and Neo-
Stoic International Law," in Case Western Reserve Law Journal of International
Law (forthcoming Spring 1996).
4. Himmelfarb (or rather, her history professor) seems wrong in asserting that
"the Enlightenment itself had given birth to an aggressive nationalism." The fact
that some people living at the time of the Enlightenment were aggressive nation-
alists hardly makes it right to blame their conduct on thinkers who energetically
denounced such projects.
5. Theory ofJustice, p. 587.
6. Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Rights Group Asserts China Lets Thousands of Or-
phans Die," New York Times, 6 January 1996, pp. 1, 4.
7. See Human Development Report 1995 (New York: United Nations Develop-
ment Program, 1995), p. 155. For those interested in the local, the figure for the
United States is 76.0, lower than all other countries in the top fifteen in the gen-
eral ranking, with the exception of Finland, at 75.7, and Germany, at 76.0.
8. On the tradition of religious toleration in India, see Amartya Sen, "Is Coer-
cion a Part of Asian Values?" (forthcoming). Sen establishes that the Indian tra-
dition of toleration is as old as the comparable "Western tradition."
9. Marcus Aurelius did say that Stoicism required one not to be a partisan of
the Green or Blue teams at the games-but he was speaking of a Roman context
in which such rivalries gave rise to delight in the murder of human beings.
Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. 48-71.
··"'.·.r
2
The Truth of Others:
On the Cosmopolitan Treatment
of Diff erence - Distinctions,
Misunderstandings, Paradoxes
The cosmopolitanization of reality, as I argued in the previous chapter, is not
the result of a cunning conspiracy on the part of 'global capitalists' or an
'American play for world domination', but an unforeseen social effect of
actions directed to other ends performed by human beings operating within
a network of global interdependence risks. This often coerced, and generally
unseen and unwanted, cosmopolitanism of side effect cancels the equation of
the nation-state with national society and gives rise to transnational forms of
life and communication, allocations of responsibility, and internal and exter-
nal representations of individual and collective identities. The nation-state is
increasingly besieged and permeated by a planetary network of interdepen-
dencies, by ecological, economic and terrorist risks, which connect the sepa-
rate worlds of developed and underdeveloped countries. To the extent that
this historical situation is reflected in a global public sphere, a new historical
reality arises, a cosmopolitan outlook in which people view themselves simul-
taneously as part of a threatened world and as part of their local situations and
histories.
This provides the starting point for a realistic cosmopolitanism, a cosmo-
politan realism. But what distinguishes the cosmopolitan outlook from a
universalistic, relativistic or multicultural outlook? And what makes the
cosmopolitan outlook at the beginning of the twenty-first century 'realistic',
in contrast to cosmopolitan idealism? These are the questions that will be
addressed in this chapter.
Simplifying somewhat, 'realistic' (in the sense of the foregoing argument)
is synonymous with 'social scientific'. Realistic cosmopolitanism, abstracted
from the history of philosophy, should be understood in terms of a funda-
mental problem of the second modernity: how do 'societies' deal with
'difference' and 'borders' under conditions of global interdependence crises?
I will develop two arguments in response to this question.
First, I distinguish between different social modalities of dealing with dif-
ference - universalism, relativism, ethnicism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism,
. '
~
The Truth of Others 49
multiculturalism, etc. - which are in turn correlated with historical social for-
77
1t mations - first modernity, second modernity, postmodernity. What thereby
l emerges is, among other things, that universalistic practices, for example (but
also relativism, etc.), involve conflicting impulses. Universalism obliges us to
!
1
respect others as equals in principle, yet for that very reason it does not involve
any requirement that would inspire curiosity or respect for what makes others
different. On the contrary, the particularity of others is sacrificed to
an assumed universal equality which denies its own origins and interests.
l Universalism thereby becomes two-faced: respect and hegemony, rationality
and terror. Similarly, the emphasis on context and on the relativiry of stand-
points springs from an impulse to acknowledge the diff erence of others; but
1 when it is absolutized in thought and practice it flips over into an incommen-
surability of perspectives which results in pre-established ignorance.
t Second, realistic cosmopolitanism - this is the conclusion - should be con-
[ ceived, elaborated and practised not in an exclusive manner but in an inclusive
l,. relation to universalism, contextualism, nationalism, transnationalism, etc. lt
is this particular combination of semantic elements which the cosmopolitan
1
outlook shares with the universalistic, relativistic and national outlooks and
which by the same token distinguishes it from these other approaches.
Realistic cosmopolitanism presupposes a universalistic minimum. This
includes substantive norms which must be upheld at all costs: that women and
children should not be sold or enslaved, that people should be able to express
their views about God or their government freely without being tortured or
fearing for their lives - these norms are so self-evident that no violation of
them could meet with cosmopolitan tolerance. We can speak of 'cosmopoli-
tan common sense' when we have good reasons to believe that a majority of
human beings would be willing to def end these minimum universalist norms
wherever they have force, if called upon to do so.
On the other hand, realistic cosmopolitanism includes universal procedural
norms, for they alone make it possible to regulate the treatment of diff erence
in a cross-cultural manner. Accordingly, realistic cosmopolitanism must
also confront the painful question of its own limits: should recognition of
the freedom of others apply equally to despots and democrats, to anti-
cosmopolitan predators as well as to those they prey upon? In other words,
realistic cosmopolitans must come to terms with the idea - especially alien to
cosmopolitan thought - that, in making recognition of others central to its
conception of society and politics, cosmopolitanism makes enemies who can
only be checked by force. Hence it must embrace the contradiction that, in
order to uphold its basic principles of defending individual liberties and safe-
guarding difference, it may be necessary to violate them.
Cosmopolitan realism does not negate nationalism but presupposes it and
transforms it into a cosmopolitan nationalism. Without the stabilizing factors
that nationalism provides in dealing with difference, cosmopolitanism is in
danger of losing itself in a philosophical never-never land.
78
50 Cosmopolitan Realism
1 On the social treatment of difference
1.1 The two faces of universalism
If we consider from a historical perspective how the Western world addresses
questions of difference at the beginning of the twenty-first century, taking
our orientation from such influential books as Samuel Huntington's The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and Francis
Fukuyama's The End of History (1989), we discover to our astonishment how
closely the debates at the legendary conference of Valladolid in 1550 - which
concerned the extent to which the Amerindians were different from, and infe-
rior to, Europeans - resemble contemporary debates.
Huntington's thesis is that, whereas the main lines of conflict during the
Cold War were openly political and derived their urgency from imperatives
of national and international security, today the lines of conflict track major
cultural antagonisms in which clashes of values between civilizations f eature
prominently. Culture, identity and religious faith, which used to be subordi-
nate to strategic political and military imperatives, now set the priorities on
the international political agenda. We are witnessing an invasion of politics by
culture. Dividing lines between civilizations are mutating into threats to inter-
national stability and global order. The democratic values of the West and the
premodern values of the Islamic world are confronting and colliding with one
another in ever more menacing and hostile ways, both within nation-states
and between different global regions.
As for Fukuyama, his answer to the question of the future of the Western
model of liberal democracy, simplifying somewhat, runs as follows: with the
collapse of Soviet communism there is no longer any alternative to a liberal
market economy a la americaine. 'Democratic capitalism' is the only true
vision of modernity and, in virtue of its inner logic, it is destined to pervade
and refashion the whole world. In this way, a universal civilization will arise
that brings history to an end.
These two ways of dealing with diff erence had already confronted
each other at the Valladolid conference more than four centuries ago. The
Aristotelian philosopher Juan Gines de Sepulveda and the Dominican priest
Bartolome de Las Casas represented, respectively, the universalism of differ-
ence and the universalism of sameness. Sepulveda argued, like the political the-
orist Huntington today, that human beings are characterized by a hierarchy
of values, whereas Las Casas, like the political scientist Fukuyama, main-
tained that similarity of civilizations is the norm among human beings.
Accordingly, the philosopher Sepulveda emphasized the differences between
Europeans and Amerindians. The decisive facts for him were that the latter
went naked, sacrificed human victims, did not make use of horses or donkeys,
and were ignorant of money and the Christian religion. He divided the human
species into contemporaneous peoples at different levels of culture. For him,
The Truth of Others 51
difference was synonymous with inferiority, from which he concluded, first,
that viewing barbaric America through the lens of civilized Spain revealed
that some men were the gods of others, and it followed, second, that to sub-
jugate and exploit them was a pedagogical duty.
Similarly, Huntington conceives the current relationship between the West
and its cultural other, Islamic civilization, as one of vertical difference involv-
ing two moments: 'others' are denied the status of sameness and equality, and
consequently are accorded a subordinate and inferior status within a hierar-
chical ordering. From here it is but a short step to denigrating members of
other cultures as 'barbarians' and treating them accordingly, whether the goal
is to convert them to the true values of Christianity or democratic capitalism
or to counter the threat they represent with appropriate military means. What
is striking is that, whereas the sixteenth-century Aristotelian philosopher was
almost bursting with self-confident superiority, Huntington's alarmist diag-
nosis is proclaimed with an apocalyptic undertone. We risk a new 'decline of
the West' unless we join the crusade against the 'Islamic threat' in defence of
Western values.
The Dominican father Las Casas eloquently def ended the rights of the
Amerindians who, he argued, were remarkably similar to Europeans. They
fulfilled the ideals of the Christian religion, which recognizes no differences
in skin colour or ethnic or racial origin. They were exceedingly friendly and
modest, they respected norms of sociability, the values of family and their
own traditions, and were thus better prepared than many other nations on
earth to receive the word of God and bear witness to its truth. In the name of
Christian universalism, this priest vehemently opposed the worldview of
hierarchical differentiation. The contrary principle to the hierarchical subor-
dination and inferiority of others affirms the dissolution of differences,
whether as an anthropological fact or as the result of the progress of civiliza-
tion (modernization).
How difference is treated, therefore, reveals the thoroughly Janus-faced
character of universalism which is already evident in the position of the
Dominican: our relations with others should not be governed by their differ-
ence but by their sameness. From the universalizing point of view, all human
forms of life are situated within a single order of civilization, with the result
that cultural differences are either overcome or excluded. Accordingly, the
universalistic project is hegemonic: the voice of others is granted a hearing
only as the voice of sameness, as self-confirmation, self-reflection and mono-
logue. If this were translated into the terms of an African universalism, it
would imply that the true white man has a black soul.
Even the United States, which is home to all ethnicities, peoples and reli-
gions, has an ambivalent relation to diff erence. To be an American means to
live in immediate proximity with difference, which often means living with
the 'Huntingtonian fear' that emphasizing ethnic differences would spell the
decline of the West, that ethnic differences can never be bridged and that,
 -.-s· ")'
·c;J;;··r•X
52 Cosmopolitan Realism
unless difference is overcome through national assimilation, the chaos roiling
just beneath the surface could explode at any moment. Precisely because
i The Truth of Others
ethnic difference is an integral part of American national consciousness,
America is continually gripped by the fear that it is a nation of peoples who
cannot be combined in the 'melting pot', and this leads to demands for same-
ness and conformism. This is what underlies the dialectic of difference and
conformity that nationalism opposes to the threat of ethnic dissolution: the
more divisive and the more unbridgeable ethnic differences appear and are
publicly represented as being, the louder the calls for the conformism of a
national ethos (communitarianism). 1
From St Paul through Kant and Popper to Lyotard and Rorty, we can
discern different variants of the same dialectic which involves limiting the
<langer of ethnic difference by stressing a universally binding humanity - in
other words, by recourse to Western universalism. From this perspective,
really existing ethnic diversity does not have the intrinsic value that univer-
salism claims for itself almost as a matter of course. The obligation to respect
diff erence is not affirmed; rather, what is affirmed is that we are all in the end
equally human beings with a claim to equal rights. In cases of conflict when
ethnic diversity places universal human values in question we must defend
universalism against particularism.
To clarify this let us again take the example of Christian universalism with
its opposition between 'Christians and heathens'. This universalism draws
its power from the fact that it liberates all human beings from the con-
straints of skin colour, ethnic origin, gender, age, nationality and social dass,
and addresses them as equals before God in the existential community of
Christian believers. In this way the duality denies the asymmetry that it
posits: 'The contrast between all of humanity and the baptized is no longer
!
f
t
quantifiable as were the previous categorical terms, but instead involves a
duplication of the reference group. Every person should become a Christian
if he wishes to escape eternal damnation' (Koselleck 1985: 175, translation
amended).
In this way, imperial Christian universalism set free emancipatory impulses
which can be traced back to the movements for the emancipation of slaves.
Feminist movements have also appealed to St Paul. But here, too, the J anus face
of universalism is evident: the blackness of blacks, the J ewishness of J ews, and
the womanhood of women are for the first time stigmatized as morally infe-
rior 'particularisms' in the boundary-negating universalism of Christianity
and the Enlightenment. To reject sameness is, on this view, to exclude or efface
difference. Those who affirm anything other than universalism exclude them-
selves, whereas the prophets of universal truth and morality always scent chaos
and disorder - the divisiveness of ethnic particularisms - whenever universal-
ism is questioned. Those who reject universalism fail to acknowledge its dis-
tinctive higher morality, and thereby expose themselves to the charge of
amoral or anti-moral particularism.
79
In this way the particular that each individual represents becomes transfig-
ured and suppressed in the universal. With the same move, the majority elevate
53
their own ethnicity and proclaim their own norms as universal. In societies
where whites are dominant, being white means having the privilege of not
noticing that one is white. The postulate of abstract identity translates into pres-
sure on those of different ethnicities to yield to this particular claim to equality
and renounce the position of difference. In the national framework all attempts
to connect universalism and particularism end in the unreasonable demand that
the true black person is not black, the true J ew is not J ewish, or the true wo man
is the non-female woman. If blacks, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and women still
call themselves black, J ewish, Chinese, J apanese or female, they lack theoreti-
cal and philosophical sanction, they are not up-to-date, they are conservative
and prisoners of an 'antiquated' self-image. The self-understanding of the 'par-
ticular' is only 'ethnically correct', hence not ethnically human, when it eman-
cipates itself from its ethnicity and submits to the official model of the
non-black black, the non-JewishJew, and the non-female woman.
To formulate the point in the terminology of mainstream sociology: differ-
ence is a relic that advancing modernization ultimately reduces to irrelevance.
Both Las Casas and Fukuyama conceive of the disappearance of diversity
in terms of a civilizing process - in the one case, through conversion to
Christianity and baptism, in the other, through the contagious superiority of
Western values (free markets, democracy). Then as now, the imperative is to
exclude alternatives. The only way forward is Christian/Western universal-
ism. Seen in this light, the 'end of history', somewhat ironically, had already
begun more than four hundred years ago.
However, it belongs to the Janus-faced character of Western universalism
that it alone demands respect for principles of liberty and equality on a global
scale. lt is not possible to proclaim global human rights on the one band, and
to have a Muslim, African, J ewish, Christian or Asian charter of human rights
on the other. Respecting others in their difference and their history means
acknowledging them as members of the same humanity, not of some other,
second-class humanity. Human rights invalidate the right to wall off cultures
from 'external assault'. Respect for traditions that violate human rights would
be tantamount to disrespect for their victims.
This creates a dilemma that is not easily resolved. Those who raise ques-
tions of global responsibility must today once again face the temptations and
dangers of 'colonialism'. What used to be called colonialism is now called
'humanitarian intervention'. The problem is whether, in a world of global
interdependence risks, the affairs of others can be regarded as simply their
own business and their own responsibility. Or is there no other option than
to interfere in the 'internal affairs of all' if we don't want to betray 'our own'
values and to jeopardize 'our own' security?
This dilemma can be illustrated by the example of the Western military
involvement in Africa, specifically in Liberia, which was being debated in the
 '}!,. '"'
',„.1
80
54 Cosmopolitan Realism
summer of 2003. For the people of Liberia, who for two decades had to
endure war, banditry and a succession of criminal regimes, such an interven-
tion can't come soon enough. They are even clamouring for a military inter-
vention of the West under United States leadership to restore order. Can we
resist this call without, confronted with a wave of cosmopolitan pity, appear-
ing as cold-hearted ignoramuses who could bring themselves to invade Iraq
because of oil interests but stand accused of double Standards in Liberia where
there is nothing more tobe gained than a bloody nose? Is Hegel's verdict still
valid: 'here we leave Africa, never to mention it again'? Is it still possible to
assume that the 'African barbarians' who are up to all sorts of shadowy mis-
chief 'down there' must live with the consequences of their self-generated dis-
asters? Or does not precisely universalism in the end compel us to practise a
hybrid 'human rights colonialism' in the shape of 'UN protectorates' in more
and more parts of the world, first Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, then
Afghanistan and Iraq, and now perhaps Liberia?
1.2 The two faces of relativism
To oppose universalism is to support relativism- or so it appears to those who
think in terms of either/or alternatives. Whereas universalism transcends the
boundaries of cultural difference, relativism permits, constructs and imposes
new boundaries. Where and how these boundaries are drawn depends on
whether relativism allies itself with nationalism (national relativism), the
unity of the local (local relativism) or culturalism (cultural relativism). If uni-
versalism seeks to transcend differences, relativism seeks to emphasize them.
Accordingly, it emphatically rejects what universalism affirms: that it is
possible to develop and gain recognition for universal norms. The validity of
universal norms presupposes Nietzsche's will to power. Hence, from the rel-
ativist's perspective, universalism and hegemony are merely two sides of the
same co1n.
Relativism, like universalism, is Janus-faced. Universalism, as we have
seen, has the drawback that it forces its standpoint on others, but the advan-
tage that it takes the fate of others as seriously as its own. The Janus face of
relativism can be understood in analogous terms. On the one hand, a dose of
relativism can serve as an antidote to universalistic hubris. Relativism and
contextual thinking sharpen our respect for cultural difference and can make
taking the perspective of members of other cultures both attractive and nec-
essary. However, if relativism and contextualism are absolutized, this atten-
tiveness to others turns into its opposite: any exchange of perspectives is
rejected on the grounds that it is simply impossible. The instrument we use
to close ourselves off from others and to reject any outsider's perspective on
'our own' culture is the principle of incommensurability. If everything is rel-
ative, then the conquerors have their perspective, the conquered theirs, and
The Truth of Others 55
the observing public still others. Between them all yawn more or less insur-
mountable chasms. The result is a world in which everyone is who or what
they are and a disorienting relativism arises for which worldviews are so
much navel-gazing.
The unintentional irony of the relativist incommensurability thesis is that
it is almost indistinguishable from an essentialistic worldview. lt (mis )leads us
into a postmodern quasi-essentialism which agrees with straightforward
essentialism that we must accept things as they are.
Relativism universalized is a polite term for non-interference. Here the per-
petual (non-)peace of perpetual relativism holds sway. The desire for a quiet
life is justified with the argument that the chasms between cultures are too
wide to be bridged. This may be tendentious and false as regards the motiva-
tion for relativism. But the incommensurability assumption amounts to a
non-intervention pact between cultures that can easily degenerate into vio-
lence in a world in which non-intervention is impossible because intervention
has always been the norm.
What is more, strict relativism is historically and empirically false. On
the one band, it misunderstands or distorts the facts of interwoven histories;
on the other, it is blind to the fact that drawing boundaries between cul-
tural spaces, something presupposed and reified by relativism, is a European
project and a product of the first modernity, the national modernity of the
nineteenth century (McNeill 1985; Said 1978; McGrane 1989; Gilroy 2000).
Contextualist universalism, by contrast, takes the contrary fact as its point
of departure, namely, that cultural intermingling is a historical reality (in
fact, the historical norm) and that non-intervention is an impossibility. For
this is precisely what is meant by the assertion that we are living in an era of
global interdependence crises. All attempts to take refuge in a fantasy of sep-
arate worlds are grotesque and unintentionally comical. The world has
mutated irreversibly into a caricature of a (non-)conversation whose partic-
ipants are speaking at once with, at and past one another. We must avoid
invoking false alternatives here. The opposite of the incommensurability
thesis is not that intercultural dialogue is actually taking place. The counter-
thesis is that there are no separate worlds. In view of the motley global
'context without connection', non-dialogue and non-intervention can seem
positively idyllic.
Cosmopolitan realism supersedes the non-intervention pact predicated on
the impossibility of intervention. lt asserts that the dubious pleasures of incom-
mensurability are illusory escape routes from the dangers of our involuntarily
shared intercultural destiny which is the product of a self-endangering civiliza-
tion. Accordingly, the only live issue is not the whether but the how of inter-
vemion and mutual interference - do we play along with it or try to resist it?
We cannot remain uninvolved in the suffering on the African continent because
there is no Africa 'down there' beyond the range of the West's security and
responsibility. That the truth is not absolute but relative does not mean that

56 Cosmopolitan Realism
there is no truth. lt means that the truth has to be continually redefined in
accordance with changing events and circumstances.
1.3 The two faces of nationalism
The ways in which nationalism strategically manages the social treatment of
diff erence can be understood as a combination of the strategies already
mentioned, namely, hierarchical difference, sameness universalism and rela-
tivism. Hierarchical difference prevails in external relations and sameness uni-
versalism in internal affairs, whereas relativism is a territorial relativism that
coincides with national borders. Nationalism denies difference internally,
while affirming, producing and stabilizing it externally. There is a politically
effective solidarity with those like us, hence the duty to pay taxes and the enti-
tlement to social welfare, educational opportunities and political participa-
tion; but this comes to an end at the national garden f ence and may even
function in such a way as to deny other nations equal rights, to stigmatize
them as barbarian, and thereby itself become barbaric.
This territorially restricted historical 'compromise' between universalism,
hierarchical difference and relativism is the standard way of dealing with dif-
ference in the first modernity. The Janus face of nationalism appears not only
in the familiar way in which the opposition between 'us' and 'the barbarians'
is used to promote national equality and integration, but also in the relation
between - to use the terminology of the national outlook- the 'majority' and
the 'minority'.
1.4 The two faces of ethnicism
One argument recently employed to avert the threat of global interdepend-
ence comes, interestingly enough, from the arsenal of anti-colonialism: South
America for South Americans, Cuba for Cubans, Algeria for Algerians,
Africa for Africans. Paradoxically, this appeal to ethnic territorial autonomy
is also being taken up by Europeans to mobilize against an imminent
invasion of 'the Turks' or 'the Russians', etc., with the slogan 'Europe for
Europeans'.
However, the Janus-faced character of the new ethnicism is all too evident.
More and more commonalities are being declared invalid. When the con-
sciousness of freedom inculcated by modernity, which has become an integral
part of personal identity, is combined with extreme poverty and discrimina-
tion, the excluded turn the argument around and close themselves off in turn.
This intersection of the consciousness of freedom with systematic violations
of human dignity is the historical birthplace of the 'ugly citizen', a figure not
foreseen by standard genealogies of the citizen, who is always represented in
81
The Truth of Others 57
political philosophy as the 'good' citizen. But in many parts of the world there
is the <langer that autistic ethnicism, charged with the modern consciousness
0 f freedom, will deliberately wreck the national compromise, which at least
had the merit of recognizing minority rights.
Non-violent coexistence with those who are culturally different can be
legitimately demanded of everyone in a civilized society. Anyone who thinks
that he has a human right to declare neighbours to be aliens and expel them
on the grounds that he has suffered historical injustices cannot expect to enjoy
the tolerance he denies to others by his actions. N either violence nor system-
atic violations of our dignity can justify us in suddenly treating our neigh-
bours as aliens on some pretext and using violence against them.
!. If a Palestinian woman blows herself up in a cafe filled with Israeli women
and children, then we must - according to the understanding, though surely
1
f. not excusing, argument one sometimes hears - also take into account that here
we are dealing with 'unfortunate wretches' whose actions reflect their own
r history of repression; and you cannot expect people who have suffered such
~ humiliations to grasp the fact that blowing up children is not, strictly speak-
l' ing, permissible. But in this way the demarcation and exclusion that result
from highlighting ethnicity set in train a dynamic of violence in which even
minimum standards of civilization count for nothing.
2 What is 'realistic' about realistic cosmopolitanism? Whereas
! universalism, relativism and nationalism are based on the either/or
principle, cosmopolitanism rests on the both/and principle
Cosmopolitanism, as we have seen, basically means the recognition of differ-
ence, both internally and externally. Cultural differences are neither arranged
in a hierarchy of diff erence nor subsumed into a universalism, but are accepted
for what they are. What this means in particular must now be shown against
1 the background of the modes of dealing socially with difference already iden-
1 tified. The initial thesis is that debates concerning universalism versus rela-
1,
tivism, sameness versus diff erence, and so forth, generally follow the either/ or
principle. Viewed from the standpoint of cosmopolitan realism, 'either uni-
versalism or relativism', 'either difference or sameness', etc., prove tobe dead-
end debates between false alternatives. They can be overcome by rethinking
the various social strategies for dealing with difference in accordance with the
f both/and principle, andin the process drawing new boundaries and establish-
ing new connections between them. Realistic cosmopolitanism should not be
understood and developed in opposition to universalism, relativism, national-
ism and ethnicism, but as their summation or synthesis. Contrary to how their
proponents generally understand them, these social strategies for dealing with
difference do not exclude, but actually mutually presuppose, correct, limit and
support each other. lt is impossible to imagine a practically tenable, realistic
1
l
82
58 Cosmopolitan Realism
cosmopolitanism without universalism and relativism and nationalism and
ethnicism - provided that each is understood in a specific way! What is 'real-
istic' ab out this new cosmopolitan realism follows in part from the mutual cor-
rection of these semantic elements, in part from the fact that their combination
is greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, universalism does not
remain universalism, contextualism, contextualism, etc.; rather, they acquire a
new meaning when they are combined in cosmopolitan realism. This must
now be shown, at least in outline.
2.1 Neither Huntington nor Fukuyama: cosmopolitanism means what is
excluded by both positions: the affirmation of the other as both different and
the same
Since cosmopolitanism recognizes difference, it must diff erentiate itself from
universalism and its totalizing impulses, yet also look for ways to make
diff erence universally acceptable. In itself, universalism is as ignorant as it
is indispensable. Let us return to the controversy at Valladolid, in which
the either/ or between the universalism of diff erence - advocated by the
Aristotelian philosopher - and the universalism of sameness - advocated by
the Dominican father - found exemplary expression. Las Casas's progres-
siveness has often been underlined, whereas Sepulveda's incipient racism has
been widely criticized. But from a cosmopolitan perspective what both
thinkers shared is no less interesting, and for two reasons. Neither of the
opposed positions could allow that the Amerindians were both different and
the same. Moreover, both positions presupposed a universal criterion of value
that logically transformed differences into superiority and inferiority. Even
the benign Christian Las Casas accepted the sameness and equality of the
Amerindians only because in his eyes they were willing and able to acknowl-
edge the universal truth of Christianity. The duality- here all human beings,
there those redeemed through Christ - can only be overcome if the
dichotomy between Christians and heathens is not permanent, but can be
thought of and actually be made superable in time. The barbarian can be bap-
tized and partake in the universal truth of Christianity. Or, to put it in
Fukuyama's terms, non-Western civilizations can be 'modernized' and
achieve the salvation of Western universalism through baptism in democracy
and the market economy.
Cosmopolitanism, realistically understood, means what is excluded by both
of these positions: the affirmation of the other as both different and the same.
In this way the falseness of the alternative between hierarchical difference and
universal equality is revealed, for both racism and apodictic universalism are
thereby overcome. Cosmopolitanism means challenging the future viability of
an apparently timeless racism. But that also means representing the ethnocen-
tric universalism of the West as an anachronism that can be overcome.
T 2.2 Postmodern particularism
The Truth of Others 59
Realistic cosmopolitanism cannot remain content with demarcating itself
1
F
from the totalitarian features of universalism. It also needs universalism if it
is to avoid falling into the opposite trap of postmodern particularism. The
latter refers to a strategy of tolerating difference by absolutizing it without
any supporting framework of binding norms. This approach combines the
principle of sameness with the relativistic principle of the iricommensurabil-
ity of perspectives, and hence ultimately affirms the impossibility of order-
ing criteria. Simplifying drastically, one could call this the postmodern
1 project. Cosmopolitanism without universalism - this much is clear - is in
danger of slipping into this kind of multicultural randomness. But how can
we devise a limited, relativistic or contextual universalism that successfully
1 squares the circle of affirming universal norms while neutralizing their impe-
rialistic sting?
1
1 2.3 The reality test of cosmopolitanism consists in the common defence
1
against evils
!
One answer to this question consists in defining cosmopolitan norms nega-
1 tively rather than positively; a second appeals to a procedural universalism; and
a third explores the possibilities and ambivalences of a contextual universalism.
[ The realism of realistic cosmopolitanism is perhaps best grasped if one
attempts to characterize it not by what it aims at but by what it seeks to avoid
\ at all costs, namely, fascistic conformism [Gleichschaltung], systematic viola-
tion of human dignity, genocide and crimes against humanity. Since cos-
mopolitanism respects diversity, the key political question for cosmopolitans
l
is: Are they even capable of decision and action? What are their actions? What
kind of connection can be made between the recognition of diversity and the
compulsion to act? The answer is that the reality or practical test of cos-
mopolitanism is the common defence against evils. To what extent does this
negative characteristic found a commonality reaching across borders, one
which does not ask, for example, whether it is permissible to attack a sover-
eign member of the UN which is conducting a total war against its own
minorities but simply takes the appropriate actions (as in the case of the war
in Kosovo)?
The most diverse kinds of cosmopolitanism can find a place under the
umbrella of this negative cosmopolitanism, assuming they all accept a second
basic norm, that of procedural universalism. This holds that specific proce-
dures and institutions are required for regulating transnational conflicts. That
violent disputes can at most be pacified in this way, but never consensually
resolved, highlights the ambivalences and dilemmas of the second modernity
as diagnosed by realistic cosmopolitanism. Thus cosmopolitanism is another

60 Cosmopolitan Realism
word for conflict, not for consensus. In this sense we would have to give the
'ideal speech situation' Qürgen Habermas) a realistic twist and develop a con-
flict theory of the truth of others in a self-destructive civilization.
Negative and procedural universalism allows room for a variety of 'comex-
tual universalisms' (Beck 2000b: 81). This signi:fies relations between what are
generally regarded as exclusive oppositions. On a cosmopolitan construction,
by contrast, they can enter into mutually con:firming and correcting relations.
Thus contextualism serves as an antidote to the suppression of diff erence
propagated by universalism, and universalism as an antidote to the incom-
mensurability of perspectives though which contextualism traps itself in the
false idyll of autonomous relative worlds. Law serves as a good example for
contextual universalism and the associated conflicts. Although Western in
origin, human rights and their universalistic validity claim are neither alien nor „
irrelevant to non-Western cultures. Rather, local groups connect and affirm
local and national sources of power though contextual interpretations of
human rights that draw on their own cultural and political traditions and reli-
gions. New national-cosmopolitan and local-cosmopolitan identities arise out
of the contextualization of universal law; indeed, such translations are exam-
ples of an active internal cosmopolitanization of national and local domains.
An understanding of contextual universalism may lead to a 'cosmopoli-
tanism of humility' (Scott L. Malcomson) and responsiveness, in contrast
to what might be called a pedagogical 'cosmopolitanism of impatience'
more in tune with Western impulses. In the debates and activities of non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), non-Western cultural relativists and
Western universalists often :find themselves on opposite sides. Such oppo-
sition was challenged and overcome in an exemplary manner at the 1993
human r~ghts conference i~ Vienna ~y 'cont~xtual unive~salists' in the form · f
of an alhance between Afncan, Latm Amencan and As1an NGOs. Under f
discussion were extremely controversial issues, such as violence against ~
women, including marital violence and incest, the extent to which respect- !.
ing human rights can be a task for UN peace missions, and so forth. 1
The synthesis of contextualism and universalism worked out by the ·f
NGO alliance for combating domestic violence was especially noteworthy
because it was directed against both Western arrogance and the expectations
of their own home governments. Women from the Islamic world associated 1
the concept of universal human rights, such as the right to Western-style
education, with the claim that they were :first of all Muslims and wanted to f
continue thinking and acting as Muslims. Many women, even those who
described themselves as secular, defended women who have chosen to wear
headscarves and embrace a conservative theology. This both/and form of
cosmopolitanism brings to light the political and cultural creative resources
that contextualist variants of universalism can tap. lt may even be able to
prevent the new cosmopolitanism from degenerating into a 'Eurocentric,
"rationalist'', secular-democratic jihad' (Malcomson 1998: 237).
83
The Truth of Others 61
Malcomson reports that on one hot afternoon in Dakar he happened to be in
the US embassy where a diverse group had assembled to discuss questions
concerning human rights. Experts flown in for the occasion spoke about
democracy and freedom of opinion and made thoroughly predictable speeches.
The assembled Senegalese listened politely but, when their turn came to speak,
a man in military uniform began by praising the unique character of Senegalese
culture, citing polygamy as an example. But he undercut his position by chuck-
ling continually as he spoke, showing that he did not really believe what he was
saying. Everyone else, both men and women, laughed as well. The remainder
0 f the Senegalese contributions focused on the simple question of whether
every human being has a right not to die of starvation. The American experts
had seen the question coming but in the end had little to say in reply except
'no'. The Senegalese continued to press the question until it was clear to all
f present what was going on and they erupted in laughter. The joke which every-
l one suddenly got was, of course, that the important issue of human rights
i was being discussed without even mentioning the central right not to die of
1 starvation. From a Senegalese perspective this revealed a serious defect typical
[ of the white ethnic group, a defect which made them feel sorry for the Western
f tribe. They did not attack the American experts but tried to help them with
1 a generosity and humour that can only be described as 'cosmopolitan'
, (cf. Malcomson 1998: 242).
1
·. 2.4 Is ethnic cosmopolitanism possible? The historicization of difference
•
1
f Cosmopolitanism and ethnicity, which also appear tobe mutually exclusive,
can nevertheless enter into relations with one another. The resulting cosmo-
politan ethnicity or ethnic cosmopolitanism is opposed to the universalist
dissolution of difference; but it is also opposed to the ontological emphasis
on ethnicity and it facilitates the historical and contextual recognition of
difference.
As Stuart Hall has shown in some detail (Hall 1991 ), there has been a 'cultural
self-empowerment of the marginal and the local'. Marginalized groups have
t rediscovered their hidden and suppressed histories. Difference is no langer uni-
versalized out of existence or viewed as an ontological given, but historicized.
Thus cosmopolitan realism rests on a twofold negation: it negates both the uni-
versalist negation of and the essentialist insistence on ethnic difference.
2.5 Realistic cosmopolitanism presupposes nationalism, nationalism
presupposes cosmopolitanism
lt is ultimately a mistake to accord too much prominence to the opposition
between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. For the opposite is also true:
84 ..
·.··.·'·1···'.
62 Cosmopolitan Realism
'1"''"' :'
'Cosmopolitanism also requires a certain degree of nationalism, because this
is the best and most reliable mechanism for the institutional production
and stabilization of collective difference. Where such stabilizers of difference
are lacking, there is a danger that cosmopolitanism will veer off into sub-
stantive universalism' (Grande 2003: 5). Johann Gottlieb Fichte remarked
that seeing cannot see itself and proposed equipping seeing with 'an eye' so
that it might become reflexive. Analogously, if the national outlook is
equipped with a 'cosmopolitan eye', the always threatening inversion of the
national outlook into the stigmatization of others as barbarians can be
averted by opening oneself externally to other nations, but also internally
towards minorities.
Isn't one of the outstanding achievements of nationalism that for every
problem it finds a scapegoat instead of a solution? Only a nationalism
modified in a cosmopolitan direction can exploit the political potential for
cooperation between states, and thereby regain the ability to solve national
problems under conditions of interdependence. A fusion of national and
international strategies is necessary to check the potential for ethnic violence
created by globalization both internally and externally, but without dismiss-
ing difference as a 'premodern prejudice'.
Cosmopolitanism acquires its realism and its historical specificity, its
ability to persuade and to seduce, from the way in which the different social
strategies for dealing with difference interpenetrate and become so fused that
their cosmopolitan impulses are reinforced and their anti-cosmopolitan
impulses are weakened and held in check. 2
2.6 The category of 'transnationality' is the contrary of all concepts of social
order, and therein lies its political, but also its analytical, provocation
If the strategies of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the social treatment of
difference do not just contradict but also mutually complement and correct
each other, then we must ask how 'transnationality' relates to the social treat-
ment of diff erence. Is there a contradiction between the ordering schema
nation/international and the ordering schema transnational/ cosmopolitan?
As we have seen, the principle of the nation presupposes the principle of
internationality. A single nation whose borders and sovereignty are not rec-
ognized by other na.tions is as unthinkable as a single world people or world
state. Nations only exist in the plural. Internationality makes nationality
possible. The field formed by the two concepts - nationality and internation-
ality - forms an exclusive, total unity. The national-international exclusion-
ary order is opposed to the conceptual order transnational and cosmopolitan.
Transnationality signifies forms of life and practice that replace the national
either/or with a eo-national both/and. Co-national (hence non-national)
forms of life, thought and practice which do not respect the boundaries
~i-
The Truth of Others 63
between states are transnational. Among innumerable examples are the
f{mong, who endeavour to forge and preserve their transnational unity across
1 rnany countries in the world.
The anthropologist Louisa Schein made an ethnographic study of a
'Brnong symposium' in St Paul, Minnesota, in the USA, with the aim of
analysing the scope for constituting a transnational Hmong identity in the
force-field of international rivalry between the USA and China.
There are an estimated 25 million Hmong scattered across diverse coun-
rries throughout the world, and accordingly this congress was decorated
with four flags on one side - USA, China, Vietnam, Canada - and five on the
other - Argentina, Australia, France, Thailand and Laos. The motto of the
conference was: 'In search of a shared future in questions of culture, eco-
nomics and education'.
The surprising result of this study is that the expected opposition between
national and transnational was not only not confirmed; rather, the USA
and China are using the transnationality of this Asian diaspora culture to
redefine their own nationalities. 'I want to draw attention to a pernicious
zero-sum logic that portrays transnationality and the "nation-state" as
mutually exclusive and as locked in competition for pragmatic primacy.
Why, instead, can these debates not work towards imagining nation-state
and transnational as interlocked, enmeshed, mutually constituting?' (Schein
1998: 169f.).
If we follow this line of thought further, there is room for two develop-
ments. First, we can imagine a world of transnational nationalism in which, if
all goes well, a historicized ethnic identity may be opened up simultaneously
in national, transnational and cosmopolitan ways through participation in
l national, political and public spaces that define themselves in exclusive terms.
f Second, the uncoupling of state and nation prompts the question of what con-
stitutes 'statehood' and how the concept of the state can be opened up to
global interdependence and its crises. What alternatives to the mystique of the
nation-state does cosmopolitan realism reveal? And how can such concepts
as the 'transnational' or 'cosmopolitan state' be developed systematically
(Beck 2002a)?
That there are impulses in transnationalization that temper and·overcome the
sharp differentiation between us and them, and even transnationalize the sphere
of state action, is shown by the Schein study. Both China and the USA gave
considerable financial support to the Hmong conference. Although there were
problems on both sides, Chinese officials viewed their contribution as part of
a strategy of opening to the world market, whereas the USA was celebrating its
own internal globalization in a double sense: on the one hand, in line with their
imputed Americanization, that of consolidating its sphere of influence in global
space; on the other - and here the boundaries of the concept 'America' begin to
blur - the dream of the American nation is both transnationalized and
'Asianized'. A beautiful example of this is provided by the Hmong Boy Scouts.

64 Cosmopolitan Realism
One speaker at the symposium stressed the exotic accomplishments of
these boys:
I work with a Hmong troop and an American troop. Parents of the American troop
want to know what the Hmong secret is. They want to know how you raise such
children, how you get them to work hard, be serious at school, listen tO adults, be so
polite. Hmong Scouting builds on what parents teach. The last thing I've learned about
Hmong Scouting is that you must teach Hmong traditions. Many of the boys in the
troop have grown up with Power Rangers, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Mortal
Kombat. They want to learn about Hmong traditions. We invite their fathers down to
teach about music and stories. We've changed from teaching refugee kids about
America tO teaching American kids about Hmong tradition. (Schein 1998: 183f.)
Who is importing what here, and from whom? Moreover, bearing in mind
that Latinos already represent a much larger proportion of the US popula-
tion than blacks, if we speak of an Americanization of Asia, Europe and
Latin America must we not also speak of an Asianization and Latin
Americanization of the United States? Perhaps 'transnational Asia' and
'transnational Latin America' have already destabilized and denationalized
the national-territorial self-definition of a white, Anglo-Saxon United States
to its core. New categories of fusion and interdependence are taking shape,
hybrid forms for which the either/or logic of the national has no name,
whereas the both/and logic of the transnational and cosmopolitan is still
insufficiently conceptually developed. It would be a grave error to construe
the national!transnational distinction in accordance with the either/ or logic.
Schein's study clearly demonstrates that, although the national and trans-
national ordering paradigms appear contradictory, they also complement
and combine with each other in a variety of ways. Behind the fac;:ade of
enduring nationality, processes of transnationalization are everywhere
taking place. And it is precisely the extension of power into the transnational
domain that makes possible a redefinition of the national cores behind the
fac;:ade of nation-state continuity. This all unfolds in a topic-specific way and
includes rather than excludes the possibility that a politics of neonational
closure is simultaneously declared and put into practice.
For instance, both India and Singapore are attempting to bind 'their'
transnationals to their respective national projects by increasingly uncoupling
citizenship from residence in the mother country. The Indian diaspora,
stretching from Sydney to Silicon Valley, is involved in political and religious
debates both in their countries of residence andin the Indian nation-state. The
Indian government has devised the legal category of 'non-resident Indians' for
these 'foreign Indians' and, in order to encourage 'foreign Indians' to invest in
India, accords them special property rights, tax benefits and travel freedoms.
Something similar applies in the case of Mexico, Singapore, and Malaysia,
among others. Yet such practices go hand in hand with strategies of political
closure and renationalization. In Singapore, for example, the financing of local
85
The Truth of Others 65
NGOs by international NGOs and other organizations is forbidden, as is
foreign participation in the national mass media. The opening up of the
national economy to transnational forces, including the embedding of nations
in transnational networks, is accompanied by the closing off of political
participation and the media within the nation-state from outside involvement.
Cosmopolitan realism must develop a keen eye for this calibrated, selective
transnationalization, for simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, transnational-
ization, denationalization and renationaliz-ation.
It is often asked to what extent deterritorialized ethnicity leads to a nation-
alism beyond frontiers. But the question rests on a false alternative. For
transnationalization means a balancing act among political loyalties, which
implies an existence involving multiple affiliations and plural nationalisms.
The expansion of power associated with transnationalization makes both
denationalization and renationalization possible, for the success of the posi-
tive-sum game of national-transnational opening leads to contradictions. If
the state uncouples citizenship status from residence even in part, it under-
mines the principle of territorial sovereignty. The national framework is
thereby replaced with a transnational one through which a reciprocal relation
between rival states (for example, the USA and China) develops. Accordingly,
a new arena of conflict arises in which the various national projects overlap
and transnational identities and loyalties have to develop and assert them-
selves in contradictory relations between selective opening and selective
closure, denationalization and renationalization (see Schiller 1989; Schiller
1997; Aksoy and Robins 2003; Riccio 2000; Salih 2000; Soysal 2002).
This by no means excludes the essential fact that transnational or cosmo-
politan domains of experience undermine the 'naturalness' of ethnic absolutes,
both at the national level and at the level of cultural identities. How can this be
more precisely theorized? Reinhard Koselleck defends a distinction between
symmetrical and asymmetrical oppositions in the field of political history and
practice. With the former he associates such general oppositions as that
between friend and foe, with the latter, conceptual oppositions such as those
between Greek and barbarian, Christian and heathen, superhuman and sub-
human. Characteristic of the latter is that the opposed concept is a contrary
but an unequal one. Here we must ask how the opposed position - barbarian,
heathen, subhuman - is negated in each case. The category of the transna-
tional can be specified more precisely against this background: it eludes just
these kinds of conceptual dualities. The category 'transnational' gains its dis-
ruptive power from the fact that it negates the either/ or logic of all kinds
of ordering concepts. Transnationals are not conceptually opposed to natives.
Transnationals are natives (neighbours), though in some other respects they
are not natives (whether from their own perspective or from the alien per-
spective of natives). Generalizing, the category of the transnational is the
counter-concept to, or cuts across, all concepts of social order, and therein lies
its political, and its analytic, disruptive power.
86 66 Cosmopolitan Realism
In this sense, the category of the transnational transcends the distinctions
between aliens and nations, friends and foes, foreigners and natives. lt
concerns neither foreigners nor enemies, neither natives nor aliens, and simul-
taneously both natives and foreigners, both aliens and nationals. The category
of the transnational points accordingly to the 'third term' which remains
hidden in the distinction between nationals and aliens, between us and the
others. In a word, even enemies are in a certain sense less threatening than
transnationals, because enemies conform to the established 'us' and 'them'
stereotypes. Because they contradict the established order, transnationals
continually remind us that the world could also be different. Anyone who
wants to clarify and demystify the category of the 'transnational' must in any
case reject the current equation of transnationals with foreigners, and hence
also the expectations of 'assimilation' and 'integration' and the denigratory
evaluations they imply. Transnationality is a form of integration of what is
foreign as one's own, which is both alarming and enticing.
By the same token, the national space is opened up to an immigration
policy that is no longer tied to a conception of integration as an all-or-nothing
process. Wasn't it Groucho Marx who said 'I don't want to belong to any club
that will accept me as a member'? To put it ironically, a cosmopolitan immi-
gration policy would follow the motto 'Any foreigner who wants to become
like me or like us will be expelled'!
Two conclusions can be drawn from the reflections developed in this
chapter. First, multiculturalism is incapable of coping with the complexity
and ambivalence I have been describing. It is not surprising that the multi-
cultural project fails - it lacks a sense of cosmopolitan realism (2.7). Second,
cosmopolitanism is an age-old concept and the phenomena of (forced) min-
gling of boundaries are age-old phenomena. What is 'new' about cosmopoli-
tan realism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Its reflexivity (2.8)!
2.7 Critique of multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is a strategy for dealing with difference in society that situ-
ates respect for cultural differences, both theoretically and politically, in the
national space. From this follows, on the one hand, the contradiction that
national homogeneity is presupposed and at the same time theoretically and
politically challenged (Hedetoft 2003: 159ff.). On the other hand, multicul-
turalism remains trapped in the epistemology of the national outlook, with
its either/ or categories and its susceptibility to essentialist definitions of iden-
tity. Briefly, multiculturalism rapturously celebrates the social accommoda-
tion of diversity, but it lacks a sense of cosmopolitan realism. It accepts the
distinction between the national and the international, and consequently it is
blind to the contingencies and ambivalences of ways of dealing with differ-
ence that go beyond assimilation and integration. It still resists the national
The Truth of Others 67
and global potential for violence that results from the new experience of
boundarylessness and the questions this poses: who guarantees, and how do
they guarantee, that the planet will become or remain inhabitable and a place
in which all, without exception, are obligated to respect minimum require-
ments of civilization, if necessary by force? How should we respond to the
transnationalization of realms of experience and to transnational conflicts
concerning the interpretation of norms of international law? What does a
nationally oriented multiculturalism mean for conflicts resulting from
opposing assessments of global dangers, whether of terrorism, climate
change or global poverty?
Among the choicest paradoxes of multiculturalism is that it emphatically
rejects the essentialism of national homogeneity when defending minority
rights, yet itself easily falls into the trap of essentialism. Someone said that mul-
ticulturalism amounts to the fanciful idea of cats, mice and dogs eating from the
same bowl. And in fact multiculturalism postulates an essentialist identity and
rivalry among cultures, though in a very diluted form. The strategy of multi-
culturalism presupposes collective notions of difference and takes its orient-
ation from more or less homogeneous groups conceived as either similar to or
different, but in any case clearly demarcated, from one another and as binding
for individual members. Multiculturalism is in danger of succumbing not just
to the contradiction that national homogeneity should be replaced by multi-
national homogeneity. Multiculturalist moralism shuts its eyes to the potential
for violence which has long since been shown to result from giving free rein to
ethnic identities. Cosmopolitan empathy, the pity aroused by the mass media
which unites the most diverse groups across borders in a negative consensus
and declares, 'that must not be allowed to happen!', can itself provoke military
conflicts. Well-meaning multiculturalists can easily ally themselves with cul-
tural relativists, thereby giving a free hand to despots who invoke the right to
difference.
Because multiculturalism in a sense multiplies nationalism internally, and
hence affirms a contradictory national multinationalism, it is opposed to
individualization. According to multiculturalism, there is no such thing as
the individual. Individuals are merely epiphenomena of their cultures. Hence
there is a direct line leading from the duality between Europe and its barbar-
ian others, through imperialism, colonialism and Eurocentric universalism,
to multiculturalism and 'global dialogue'. In each case individuals are con-
ceived as members of territorial-hierarchical and ethnic-political units,
which then engage in a 'dialogue' with one another 'across frontiers'. The
social predetermination of the individual that marks classical sociology to
this day is broken open and superseded only by cosmopolitanism. The
respective claims of different identities do not determine individuals but
set them free in a conflictual sense, because they are compelled to build
bridges in order to survive. For which there are, no doubt, radically unequal
resources.
-!
68 Cosmopolitan Realism
2.8 From cosmopolitanization to the cosmopolitan outlook: how does
awareness of really existing cosmopolitanism become possible?
'lt is apparent', argues Edgar Grande,
that cosmopolitanism must not only incorporate different substantive norms and prin-
ciples; it must also imegrate and balance different modalities and principles of dealing
with difference. lt cannot simply replace other principles of modernity; it must recog-
nize and preserve them. Therefore I would maintain that, if cosmopolitanism is to have
lasting effects, it must become reflexive and incorporate an awareness of its own
conditions of possibility. Consequently, cosmopolitanism must achieve a meta imegra-
tion of principles of modernity. I proposed to call this reflexive cosmopolitanism.
Accordingly, reflexive cosmopolitanism would ultimately be the 'regulative principle'
by means of which the combined action of universalist, nationalist and cosmopolitan
norms must be regulated in the second modernity. Whether and under what conditions
this can succeed is one of the key questions that must be posed. (Grande 2003: Sf.)
Reality is becoming cosmopolitan - this is the historical fact that this book
seeks to explain and corroborate. But how does the cosmopolitanization of
reality become conscious? What conditions hinder or favour a collective
awareness of really existing cosmopolitanism, and how can the present book
and its author constitute a moment in this process?
To discuss these questions properly, it is essential to recognize that in world
history the intermingling of boundaries and cultures is the rule rather than the
exception (McN eill 1985; Gruen 2002). The separate worlds and spaces main-
tained by territorial nationalism and ethnicism are historically false. If we
trace the great migrations of peoples back far enough, it becomes evident that,
exaggerating somewhat, there are no indigenous peoples. Every native began
as a foreigner who drove out the previous natives, before claiming the natives'
right to protect themselves against intruders as their natural right. The inter-
penetration of the Arab, J ewish and Christian cultures and religions was the
rule already in the ancient world, so that it is hard to distinguish what, viewed
retrospectively from the national era, appear to be clearly demarcated, essen-
tialistic 'cultures' and 'religions'. The perspective must be inverted and the
following questions asked: First, how is it possible that the global historical
norm of the permeation and intermingling of cultures has been falsely por-
trayed as the exception, or has even been completely erased from our con-
sciousness, whereas the exception to the rule - namely, the ideal of national
homogeneity - has been elevated to the status of an eternal truth? Second,
what conditions contributed to the renunciation of the eternal verities of
national orthodoxy in the second half of the twentieth century? What condi-
tions favour the growing awareness of the largely unconscious and unnoticed
cosmopolitanization of reality?
The first question takes aim at the history and historiography of national-
ism and the national outlook with a cosmopolitan intent (thereby breaking
87
The Truth of Others 69
out of the circle of nationalism and national historiography); I cannot explore
this question further here. The second question, by contrast, concerns the dis-
tinction between the first and the second modernity, and I would like to
address this briefly in conclusion.
(1) The rise of a realistic, politically effective cosmopolitanism (dis-
cernible in a whole series of key institutions such as the United Nations, the
European Union, the International Court, the World Bank, NATO, the
OECD, etc.) should be understood as a genuinely unintended side effect of
Hitler and National Socialism - in other words, of the insane German pursuit
of racial purity and all of the moral, political and psychological ravages it
wreaked. Auschwitz was not an isolated event, but one of the most traumatic
experiences of Western civilization. 'Never again Auschwitz!' has not only
become a basic moral principle of the new Europe; the orientation to inalien-
able human rights also represents an essential political impulse of national and
European domestic and world domestic politics (cf. Beck, Levy and Sznaider
2004; see also chapter 6 below, 'Cosmopolitan Europe'). This new orientation
has discredited three key ideas in the axiomatics of the nation-state. First, any
attempt to propagate and practise the ideal of ethnic unity within existing
states conjures up memories of the Nazihorror. Second, the idea of the assim-
ilation of ethnic minorities has become for ever politically suspect. It was the
Jews who thought of themselves as German who were methodically slaugh-
tered in the gas chambers. The question for all minorities is: isn't it necessary
to affirm their difference and reinforce it internally and externally through
transnational networks and identities? Finally, the reflexive political impact
of the negative experience of the Holocaust is also shown by how it is being
transformed into positive action. A cosmopolitan common sense is emerging
that not only authorizes but demands that we break with the hallowed prin-
ciple of national sovereignty. Genocide is not an internal affair of nation-
states but a crime against humanity, whose deterrence or prevention is for that
very reason no longer the sole responsibility of nation-states.
(2) Another factor in the rise of cosmopolitanism in the final third of the
twentieth century was the postcolonial moment (as highlighted by Stuart Hall,
Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, et al.). First tobe discarded was the
myth that the internal, unintended, coerced cosmopolitanization of Western
societies and cities in the second half of the twentieth century was a histori-
cal novelty. The experience of colonized peoples was one of forced transcul-
turation, which is never simply external but was part of the internal history
of the European states and societies whose colonial and national projects
developed in parallel.
Hybridity, syncretism, mu!tidimensional temporalities, the double inscriptions of colo-
nial and metropolitan times, the two-way cultural traffic characteristic of the contact
88
70 Cosmopolitan Realism The Truth of Others 71

zones of the cities of the 'colonised' long before they have become the characteristic
tropes of the cities of the 'colonising', the forms of translation and transculturation
which have characterized the 'colonial relation' from its earliest stages, the disavowals
and in-betweenness, the here-and-theres, mark the aporias and re-doublings whose
interstices colonial discourses have always negotiated. (Hall 1996: 251)
The discourse of postcolonialism has succeeded in disrupting our forgetful-
ness both politically and culturally. This is reflected in the trajectories and
impacts of the most diverse transnational political movements, in which
so-called marginalized minorities have developed a political and cultural self-
understanding of their own. In this way they have blocked every route back
to ethnically closed and centred, originary 'histories of origins'. Strictly
speaking, no one can make a special claim to understand how cultural prac-
tices are constituted any longer, not even within a given locality. N either side,
neither 'us' nor 'them' in their imagined autonoi;ny and indifference, can
develop without incorporating the significant and/ or excluded others in their
self-understanding.
If the 'European self' is so interwoven with the 'excluded others' of the
colonized world, then posrcolonial discourse transforms the European self-
understanding and contributes essentially to opening and expanding the
national into a cosmopolitan Europe.
'diaspora' includes social ways of accommodating difference which resist
either/or oppositions, and therefore do not have to suppress or conceal the
cultural differences within a 'deracinated' group in order to maxirnize the dif-
ferences between an 'essentialized' community and its others. Flirting with
what counts as 'uprooted' or 'alienated' in the national either/or, the diaspora
concept has fostered a cherished unease concerning the unreflectedly and
thoughtlessly over-integrated concepts of culture and society. lt combines a
diffuse interest in safeguarding particularity with the knowledge that this will
succeed only if a strategic universalism of human rights, beyond all provincial
concerns, makes the planet liveable for all.
The concept 'diaspora' shows that the question 'Who am I?' is irrevocably
1 barred from falling back on origins and essences, but that it nevertheless admits
l of more or less authentic answers. Seen in this light, the inflated use of the word
'diaspora' in cultural studies, and in how minorities everywhere understand
1 themselves and their practices, reveals not only the (long suspected) analytic
hollowing out of the concept but also the extent to which a quasi-collective
both/and consciousness is taking shape in the self-understanding of move-
1\ ments, groups, individuals and publics.

(3) A transvaluation of values and words is taking place, symbolized by a

veritable flood of words such as 'diaspora', 'cultural mhissage' and 'hybrid-
ity'. These terms are shaking off their pejorative connotations and spreading
like an infectious truth which announces a positive valuation of the human
condition. The experiences of alienation or living in between, the loss of onto-
logical security [Weltvertrauen], social isolation and existential exclusion, talk
of ambivalence and ambiguity, even the reproach of 'rootlessness', have lost
much of their apocalyptic meaning. The question mark has become a posi-
tively connoted form of existence, though admittedly not for the majority of
settled groups, but in the dimension of collective, identity-constituting
symbols.
Even the most popular of personal pronouns, the mystical and menacing
'we', has lost much of its global public appeal. Indeed, one could say that the
dissolution of the national idiom is shown not least by the disenchantment of
rhe 'we': which 'we' do we mean when we speak of the 'we'? The revaluation
and inversion of the obviousness of 'we' -assertions in the national axiomatics
into ever more clearly unanswerable 'we' -questions shows how fundamen-
tally the nature of the 'we' has been problematized.
That the multiplicity of meanings and uses of a word such as 'diaspora' has
literally exploded not only reveals the lack of analytic precision of the corres-
ponding concept; it also points to the fact that this terminology contributes to
transforming our understanding of 'equality' and 'solidarity'. For the concept
from: Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981. 113-129, 157-162.
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102

from: Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985. 95-101.

Ph.N.: In your last great book published, Other-

wise than Being or Beyond Essence, you speak of moral
responsibility. Husserl had already spoken of respon-
sibility, but of a responsibility for the truth; Heideg-
ger had spoken of authenticity; as for yourself, what
do you understand by responsibility?

E.L.: In this book I speak of responsibility as

the essential, primary and fundamental structure of
subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical
terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding
existential base; the very node of the subjective is
knotted in ethics ;.mderstood as responsibility.
I understand responsibility as responsibility for
the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my
deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which
precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face.

-95-

ETHICS AND INFINITY
Ph.N.: How, having discovered the Other in
his face, does one discover him as he to whom one is
responsible?
E.L.: describing the face positively, and not
merely ~egatively. You recall what we said: meeting
t~e face 1s not of the order of pure and simple percep-
t~on, oft~~ intentionality which goes toward adequa-
tlon. Positively, we will say that since the Other looks
at me, I am responsible for him, without even having
:ake~ on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibil-
ity zs incumbent on me. It is responsibility that goes
beyond what I do. Usually, one is responsible for
what one does oneself. I say, in Otherwise than Being,
that responsibility is initially a for the Other. This means
that I am responsible for his very responsibility.
Ph.N.: What in this responsibility for the Other
defines the structure of subjectivity?
. E.L.: Responsibility in fact is not a simple
att~1b~te of subjectivity, as if the latter already exist-
~d 1~ itself, before the ethical relationship. Subjectiv-
ity 1s not for itself; it is, once again, initially for
another. In the book, the proximity of the Other is
presented as_ the fact that the Other is not simply
close to me m space, or close like a parent, but he
~pproaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself-
msofar as I am - responsible for him. It is a struc-
ture that in nowise resembles the intentional relation
-96-
103
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OTHER
which in knowledge attaches us to the object - to no
matter what object, be it a human object. Proximity
does not revert to this intentionality; in particular it
does not revert to the fact that the O~her is known to me.
Ph.N.: I can know someone to perfection, but
this knowledge will never by itself be a proximity?
E.L.: No. The tie with the Other is knotted
only as responsibility, this moreover, whether ac-
cepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing
how to assume it, whether able or unable to do
something concrete for the Other. To say: here I am
[me voici]. 1 To do something for the Other. To give.
To be human spirit, that's it. The incarnation of
human subjectivity guarantees its spirituality (I do
not see what angels could give one another or how
they could help one another). Dia-chrony before all
dialogue: I analyze the inter-human relationship as
if, in proximity with the Other~ beyond the image I
myself make of the other man - his face, the ex-
pressive in the Other (and the whole human body is
in this sense more or less face), were what ordains me
to serve him. I employ this extreme formulation. The
face orders and ordains me. I ts signification is an
l. Cf., Genesis 22, lines 1, 7 and 11, and Isaiah 6, line 8, for Hineni.
Also, cf., Emmanuel Levinas, "God and Philosophy," in Philo-
sophy Today, Vol. XXII,no. 2, Summer 1978,pp.127-145. [Tr.
note]
-97-
104
ETHICS AND INFINITY
order signified. To be precise, if the face signifies an
order in my regard, this is not in the manner in which
an ordinary sign signifies its signified; this order is
the very signifyingness of the face.
Ph.N.: You say at once "it orders me" and "it
ordains me." Is this not a contradiction?
E.L.: It orders me as one orders someone one com-
mands, as when one says: "Someone's asking for you."
Ph.N.: But is not the Other also responsible in
my regard?
E.L.: Perhaps, but that is his affair. One of the
fundamental themes of Totality and Infinity about which
we have not yet spoken is that the intersubjective
relation is a non-symmetrical relation. In this sense, I
am responsible for the Other without waiting for
reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his
affair. It is precisely insofar as the relationship be-
tween the Other and me is not reciprocal that I am
subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essen-
tially in this sense. It is I who support all. You know
that sentence in Dostoyevsky: "We are all guilty of all
1
and for all men before all, and I more than the others." This
2. Cf., Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, transl. by
Constance Garnett (New York: New American Library,
1957), p. 264.
-98-
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OTHER
is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really
mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but
because I am responsible for a total responsibility,
which answers for all the others and for all in the
others, even for their responsibility. The I always has
one responsibility more than all the others.
Ph.N.: That means that if the others do not do
what they ought to do, it is owing to me?
E.L.: I have previously said elsewhere - I do
not like mentioning it for it should be completed by
other considerations - that I am responsible for the
persecutions that I undergo. But only me! My "close
relations" or "my people" are already the others and,
for them, I demand justice.
Ph.N.: You go that far!
E.L.: Since I am responsible even for the Oth-
er's responsibility. These are extreme formulas which
must not be detached from their context. In the
concrete, many other considerations intervene and
require justice even for me. Practically, the laws set
certain consequences out of the way. But justice only
has meaning if it retains the spirit of dis-inter-
estedness which animates the idea of responsibility
for the other man. In principle the I does not pull
itself out of its "first person"; it supports the world.
-99-
 105

ETHICS AND INFINITY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OTHER

Constituting itself the very movement wherein matter of saying the very identity of the human I
being responsible for other devolves on it, subjec- starting from responsibility, that is, starting from this
tivity goes to the point of substitution for the Other. position or deposition of the sovereign I in self
assumes the condition - or the uncondition - of consciousness, a deposition which is precisely its
hostage. Subjectivity as such is initially hostage; it responsibility for the Other. Responsibility is what is
answers to the point of expiating for others. incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I
One can appear scandalized by this utopian cannot refuse. This charge is a supreme dignity of the
and, for an I, inhuman conception. But the humanity unique. I am I in the sole measure that I am respon-
of the human - the true life - is absent. The sible, a non-interchangeable I. I can substitute my-
humanity in historical and objective being, the very self for everyone, but no one can substitute himself
breakthrough of the subjective, of the human psy- for me. Such is my inalienable identity of subject.
chism in its original vigilance or sobering up, is be- is in this precise sense that Dostoyevsky said: "We are
ing which undoes its condition of being: dis-inter- all responsible for all for all men before all, and I more than
estedness. This is what is meant by the title of the book: all the others."
Otherwise than Being. The ontological condition un-
does itself, or is undone, in the human condition or
uncondition. To be human means to live as if one
were not a being among beings. As if, through human
spirituality, the categories of being inverted into an
"otherwise than being." Not only into a "being other-
wise"; being otherwise is still being. The "otherwise
than being," in truth, has no verb which would desig-
nate the event of its un-rest, its dis-inter-estedness, its
putting-into-question of this being-or this estedness-
of the being.
It is I who support the Other and am responsi-
ble for him. One thus sees that in the human subject,
at the same time as a total subjection, my primo-
geniture manifests itself. My responsibility is un-
transferable, no one could replace me. In fact, it is a

-100- -101-
 106
from: Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2002. 3-24.
On
1
Cosmopolitanism

Where have we received the image of cosmopolitanism

from? And what is happening to it? As for this citizen of the
lf)
world, we do not know what the future holds in store for lf)
QJ
c:
it. One must ask today whether we can still make a legiti- QJ
.;:::
mate distinction between the two forms of the metropolis - =
'-
0
LL
the City and the State. Moreover, one is seeking to inquire -0
c:
CU
if an International Parliament of Writers can still, as its E
lf)
name seems to suggest, find inspiration in what has been c:
2
called, for more than twenty centuries now, cosmopolit- 0
0...
anism. For is it not the case that cosmopolitanism has some- 0
E
lf)
thing to do either with all the cities or with all the states 0
(..)

of the world? At a time when the 'end of the city' resonates 0

c::.

as though it were a verdict, at a time when this diagnosis (V)

or prognosis is held by many, how can we still dream

of a novel status for the city, and thus for the 'cities of
refuge', through a renewal of international law? Let us not
anticipate a simple response to such a question. It will be
necessary therefore to proceed otherwise, particularly if one
is tempted to think, as I do, that 'The Charter for the Cities of
Refuge' and 'The International Agency for Cities of Refuge'

'On Cosrnopolitanisrn'. translated by Mark Dooley

1 !
 107
which appear on our programme must open themselves up longer be the ultimate horizon for cities of refuge. Is this
to something more and other than merely banal articles in possible?
the literature on international law. They must, if they are to In committing ourselves thus, in asking that metropolises
succeed in so doing, make an audacious call for a genuine and modest cities commit themselves in this way, in choosing
innovation in the history of the right to asylum or the duty for them the name of 'cities of refuge', we have doubtless
to hospitality. meant more than one thing, as was the case for the name
The name 'cities of refuge' appears tobe inscribed in gold 'parliament'. In reviving the traditional meaning of an expres-
letters at the very heart of the constitution of the International sion and in restoring a memorable heritage to its former
Parliament of Writers. Ever since our first meeting, we have dignity, we have been eager to propose simultaneously,
been calling for the opening of such refuge cities across the beyond the old word, an original concept of hospitality, of
lI'l
lI'l
a;
c: world. That, in e:ffect, very much resembles a new cosmo- the duty (devoir) of hospitality, and of the right (droit) to
a;
.2:
CTl
politics. We have undertaken to bring about the proclamation hospitality. What then would such a concept be? How might
'-
0
LL and institution of numerous and, above all, autonomous 'cities it be adapted to the pressing urgencies which summon
-0
c:
m
of refuge', each as independent from the other and from the and overwhelm us? How might it respond to unprecedented
E
E state as possible, but, nevertheless, allied to each other accord- tragedies and injunctions which serve to constrain and .!!2

-
lI'l
c:
c: hinder it? ro
2 ing to forms of solidarity yet to be invented. This invention is ~

0
0
0... our task; the theoretical or critical refl.ection it involves is I regret not having been present at the inauguration of this 0..
0
0
E indissociable from the practical initiatives we have already, solemn meeting, but permit me, by way of saluting those here E
l/l
lI'l 0
0
u out of a sense of urgency, initiated and implemented. present, to evoke at least a vague outline of this new charter of (...)

c: c:
0
0 Whether it be the foreigner in general, the immigrant, the hospitality and to sketch, albeit in an overly schematic way, its
LO
--::t
exiled, the deported, the stateless or the displaced person (the principal features. What in e:ffect is the context in which we
task being as much to distinguish prudently between these have proposed this new ethic or this new cosmopolitics of the
categories as is possible), we would ask these new cities of cities of refuge? Is it necessary to call to mind the violence
refuge to reorient the politics of the state. We would ask them which rages on a worldwide scale? Is it still necessary to
to transform and reform the modalities of membership by highlight the fact that such crimes sometimes bear the signa-
which the city (cite) belongs to the state, as in a developing ture of state organisations or of non-state organisations? Is it
Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated possible to enumerate the multiplicity of menaces, of acts of
by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty - an intangible rule, censorship (censure) or of terrorism, of persecutions and of
or one at least supposed such, which is becoming increas- enslavements in all their forms? The victims of these are
ingly precarious and problematic nonetheless. This should no innumerable and nearly always anonymous, but increasingly
 II ._„_, ...
I1!' 108
![ ·.~

,~~
'

!11
!j<
11· they are what one refers to as intellectuals, scholars, jöurnal-
li
ists, and writers - men and women capable of speaking out
(porter une parole) - in a public domain that the new powers
of telecommunication render increasingly formidable - to
the police forces of all countries, to the religious, political,
economic, and social forces of censorship and repression,
whether they be state-sponsored or not. Let us not proffer an
example, for there are too many; and to cite the best known
would risk sending the anonymous others back into the dark-
Ul
ness (mal) from which they find it hard to escape, a darkness
Ul
Q.J
c which is truly the worst and the condition of all others_7}f we
Q.J
.2:: look to the city, rather_than to the state, it.is because we have
01
L.
:F
f,=. figured as a symbol of Human Rights in the domain of inter-
national relations'. Arendt recalls that this right has a 'sacred
\:
~: history', and that it remains 'the only modern vestige of the
!:
medieval principle of quid est in territorio est de territorio' (p. 280).
'But', continues Arendt, 'although the right to asylum had
continued to exist in a world organised into nation states,
and though it had even, in some individual cases, survived
two world wars, it is still felt to be an anachronism and a
principle incompatible with the international laws of the
State.' At the time when Arendt was writing this, circa 1950,
she identified the absence in international charters of the
right to asylum (for example in the Charter of the League of

tf giveriuE ~op~_t1tC1..t ~1te state_ mtgfit create. a fä~VI[ image for fhe Nations). Things have doubtless evolved a little since then, as
-0
c <:~ty.
This should be elaborated and inscribed in our Statutes we shall see in a moment, but further transformations are still
ro
E one day. Whenever the State is neither the foremost author of, necessary. E
tl1 .!!:!
2
c

D
0...
0
nor the foremost guarantor against the violence which forces
refugees or exiles to fiee, it is often powerless to ensure the
2 The second upheaval ( choc) in Europe was to follow a
massive infiux (arrivee) of refugees, which necessitated aban-
-
~
c:
ltl

E protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist
Ul
0 0
u menace, whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibi.
c:
0 0
This is a phenomenon with a long historical sequence, one
--0
which Hannah Arendt has called, in a text which we should
closely scrutinise, 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the
End of the Rights of Man' .2 Arendt proposes here, in particu-
lar, an analysis of the modern history of minorities, of those
'without a State', the Heimatlosen, of the stateless and homeless,
and of deported and 'displaced persons'. She identifies two
great upheavals, most notably between the two wars:
1 First, the progressive abolition, upon the arrival of
hundreds of thousands of stateless people (l'apatrides), of
a right to asylum which was 'the only right that had ever
0
c..
0
doning the classic recourse to repatriation or naturalisation. E
III
Indeed, we have still to create a satisfactory substitute for it. In u
c:
describing at length the effects of these traumas, Arendt has
t--
perhaps identified one of our tasks and, at the very least, the
background to our Charter and of our Statutes (Statuts). She
does not speak of the city, but in the shadow of the two
upheavals (l'onde du double choc) she describes and which she
situates between the two wars, we must today pose new
questions concerning the destiny of cities and the role which
they might play in these unprecedented circumstances.
How can the right to asylum be redefined and developed
without repatriation and without naturalisation? _Could the
.~·· ..
City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open

:'
1

1
 109
up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the
- .~ - ~-. '~

international state law? For let us not hesitate to declare our establishment of a 'world government'. 3
ultimate ambition, what gives meaning to our project: our
lt would be necessary to expand upon and refine what she
plea is for what we have decided to call the 'city of refuge'.
says of groups and individuals who, between the two wars,
This is not to sugges~ tJ:iat _vv_e ought to restore an essentially
lost all status - not only their citizenship but even the title of
~~i~~~i~~i-~~~~ept of the city by giving i~ ne~ att;ib~~~~'"~~d
'stateless people'. We would also have to re-evaluate, in this
-·powers; neither would it be simply a matter of endo'\\Ti;;_g- th'e
regard, in Europe and elsewhere, the respective roles of States,
'··
v'
old subject we call 'the city' with new predicates. No, we are
Unions, Federations or State Confederations on the one hand,
dreaming of another concept, of another set of rights for the
and of cities on the other. If the name and the identity of
l.f)
city, of another politics of the city. I am aware that this might
l.f)
something like the city still has a meaning, could it, when
QJ
c appear utopian for a thousand reasons, but at the same time,
QJ
. 2: dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge,
CTl as modest as it is, what we have already begun to do proves
L-
0 elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from
LL that something of this sort can, from now on, function - and
'"O
c them (s'affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in a
m this disjointed process cannot be dissociated from the turbu-
E new and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)? Under the
l.f) lence which a:ffects, over the lengthy duration of a process, E
lll
c exemption itself ( en genernl), the statutes of immunity or c:
2 the axioms of international law. ro
exemption occasionally had attached to them, as in the case of .......
0
0.. Is there thus any hope for cities exercising hospitality if ~

0
0
the right to asylum, certain places (diplomatic or religious) to c.
E we recognise with Arendt, as 1 feel we must, that nowadays 0
l.f) E
u
0 which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of l/l
international law is limited by treaties between sovereign u
0

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c:
states, and that not even a 'government of the world' would
CX)
be capable of sorting things out? Arendt was writing of
something the veracity of which still holds today:
contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to
obtain new declarations of human rights from international
organisations, it should be understood that this idea
transcends the present sphere of international law which still
operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties
between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere
that is above the nations does not exist. Furthermore, this
injustice. c:
0
Such might be the magnitude of our task, a theoretical task
0-
indissociable from its political implementation (mise en ceuvre)
- a task which is all the more imperative given that the situ-
ation is becoming ever more bleak with each passing day. As
the figures show, the right to political asylum is less and less
respected both in France andin Europe. Lately, there has been
talk of a 'dark year for asylum seekers in France'. 4 Because of
such understandable despondency, the number of applica-
tions for political asylum has been regularly diminishing.
In fact, OFPRA (The French Office for the Protection of

110
Refugees and the Stateless) toughened its criteria and spec-
tacularly reduced the number of refugees afforded asylum
status. The number of those whose application for asylum
has, I might add, continued to rise throughout the l 980s and
since the beginning of the l 990s.
Since the Revolution, France has had a certain tendency to
portray itself as being more open to political refugees in cbntra-
distinction to other European countries, but the motives
behind such a policy of opening up to the foreigner have,
(})
(})
however, never been 'ethical' stricto sensu - in the sense of the
Q)
c: moral law or the law of the land (sejour) - (ethos), or, indeed,
Q)
.2::
CTl
'- the law of hospitality. The comparative drop in the birth
0
LL
-0
rate in France since the middle of the eighteenth cer~tury
c:
ro has generally permitted her to be more liberal in matters
E E
(})
of immigration for obvious economic reasons: when the
c:
.~ economy is doing weil, and workers are needed, one tends
0o_
0 not to be overly particular when trying to sort out political
E E
(})
0
and economic motivations. This was especially true in the
u (..)
c: 19 60s, when an economic boom resulted in a greater need
0 0
for immigrant workers. lt is also worth noting that the right
0
to asylum has only recently become a specifically juridica~
concept (definitionelle) and a positive juridical concept,
despite the fact that its spirit was already present in the French
Constitution. The Constitution of 1946 granted the right to
asylum only to those characterised as persons persecuted
because of their 'action in the name ofliberty' _Even though it
subscribed to the Geneva Convention in 19 51, it is only in
19 54 that France was forced to broaden its definition of a
political refugee to encompass all persons forced into exile
because 'their lives or their liberties are found to be under
~!: .'
„ .•. 1.·.
;: -: t
.
.:~.w:
rhreat by reason of their race, religion, or political opinions' _
~
~i
:;",
Considerably broadened, it is true, but very recent neverthe-
less. Even the Geneva Convention was itself very limited in the
~! rnanner in which it could be applied, and even at that we are
g
1:
still a long way from the idea of cosmopolitanism as defined
_;'
1;' in Kant's famous text on the right to (droit de) universal hospi-
i:
,.r„ tality, the limits and restrictions of which I shall recall in just a
~
rnoment. The Geneva Convention of 1951, which obliged
France to improve its asylum laws, could only direct itself to
(
'events in Europe prior to 19 5 1 '_ Much later, at the end of the
l 960s, precisely at the time when there were signs of the
beginning of a process which has dramatically deteriorated
today, the area, place, and dates specified by the Geneva
Convention (that is, the events in Europe prior to 1951) were
t/l
enhanced by a particular protocol added to this convention
-
c:
rc
in New York in 1 9 6 7, and eventually extended to cover
0
Cl..
events occurring beyond Europe after 195 1 . (These are the 0
developments which Hannah Arendt could neither have t/l
0
known about nor evoked when she was writing her text c:
sometime around 1 9 5 0.)
There is still a considerable gap separating the great and
generous principles of the right to asylum inherited from the
Enlightenment thinkers and from the French Revolution and,
on the other hand, the historical reality or the effective
implementation (mise en ceuvre) of these principles_ lt is con-
trolled, curbed, and monitored by implacable juridical restric-
tions; it is overseen by what the preface of a book on The Crisis
of the Right to Asylum in France refers to as a 'mean-minded'
juridical tradition. 5 In truth, if the juridical tradition remains
'mean-minded' and restrictive, it is because it is under the
1
i\,,

r 111
:11.lj
I"
}·
:\:
1: control of the demographico-economic interest - that is, the sense, to apply the law, for in its implementation it would
!: ,r
:!j interest of the nation-state that regulates asylum. Refugee ~ depend entirely on opportunistic considerations, occasionally
11 i~
ii
11
·I
status ought not tobe conflated with the status of an immi- ~ electoral and political, which, in the last analysis, become
il grant, not even of a political immigrant. It has happened that a ~ a matter for the police, of real or imaginary security issues,
'i t
1i· recognition of refugee status, be it political or economic, has 1: of demography, and of the market. The discourse on the
t:
1
' !' only come into effect long after entry into France. We shall r refugee, asylum or hospitality, thus risks becoming nothing
' 1'
~ have to maintain a close eye on these sometimes subtle dis- ~ but pure rhetorical alibis. As Legoux notes, 'what tends to
i: tinctions between types of status, especially since the differ-
rt render the asylum laws in France ineffectual for the people of
,,r:
;, ence between the economic and the political now appears f•f: poor countries is the result of a particular conception of
":
'
~
~
more problematic than ever. asylum, one with a long and complex history, and one which
ru
c
ru Both to the right and to the left, French politicians speak is becoming ever more stringent'. 6
-~
01
L
0
of 'the control of immigration'. This forms part of the This tendency to obstruct is extremely common, not to
LL
-0 compulsory rhetoric of electoral programmes. Now, as Luc Europein general (supposing that one had ever been able to
c
ro Legoux notes, the expression 'immigration control' means speak of 'Europe' in general), but to the countries of the
E E
-~ that asylum will be granted only to those who cannot expect European Union; ·it is a price that is oftentimes paid as a .!!!
c c
.;; ~
0
the slightest economic benefit upon immigration. The consequence of the Sehengen Agreement - the accords of ~0
' 1
0..
absurdity of this condition is manifestly apparent: how can a c..
0 which, Jacques Chirac declared, have not been, up to now at 0
E E
~
0 purely political refugee claim to have been truly welcomed least, implemented in full by France. At a time when we claim l/l
0
L) (..)
c into a new settlement without that entailing some form of tobe lifting internal borders, we proceed to bolt the external c
C> 0
C'J
economic gain? He will of course have to work, for each borders of the European Union tightly. Asylum-seekers knock ("')

individual seeking refuge cannot simply be placed in the care successively on each of the doors of the European Union
of the host country. This gives rise to an important con- states and end up being repelled at each one of them. Under
sideration which our conventions will have to address: how the pretext of combating economic immigrants purporting to
can the hosts (hötes) and guests of cities of refuge be helped be exiles from political persecution, the states reject applica-
to recreate, through work and creative activity, a living and tions for the right to asylum more often than ever. Even when
durable network in new places and occasionally in a new they do not do so in the form of an explicit and reasoned
language? This distinction between the economic and the (motivee) juridical response, they often leave it to their police
political is not, therefore, merely abstract or gratuitous: it to enforce the law; one could cite the case of a Kurd to whom
is truly hypocritical and perverse; it makes it virtually a French tribunal had officially granted the right to asylum,
impossible ever to grant political asylum and even, in a but who was nevertheless deported to Turkey by the police
ir
:i
u
11
1,,
:.1
11
 ..-.
.,;': ~f.··i
112
•
~

without a single protest. As in the case of many other [ throughout the course of an interminable struggle: it will be
examples, notably those to do with 'violations of hospitality', t necessary to restrict the legal powers and scope of the police

~
whereby those who had allegedly harboured political sus- by giving them a purely administrative role under the strict
pects were increasingly charged or indicted, one has to be f.
r, control and regulation of certain political authorities, who
f
mindful of the profound pro blem of the role and status of the
~. will see to it that human rights and a more broadly defi.ned
police, of, in the fi.rst instance, border police, but also of a right to asylum are respected.
f:
police without borders, without determinable limit, who 1;
-1. Hannah Arendt, in the spirit of Benjamin, had already
i:
from then on become all-pervasive and elusive, as Benjamin highlighted the new and increased powers afforded to the
noted in Critique of Violence just after the First World War. modern police to handle refugees. She did so after making
l.J)
l.J) The police become omnipresent and spectral in the so- a remark about anonymity and fame which we should,
Q)
c called civilised states once they undertake to make the law,
Q) particularly in an International Parliament of Writers, take
.~
CTl
L instead of simply contenting themselves with applying it and seriously:
0
LL
-0 seeing that it is observed. This fact becomes clearer than ever
c Only tarne will eventually answer the repeated complaint of
C1J
in an age of new teletechnologies. As Benjamin has already
E L
i
refugees of all social strata that ·nobody here knows who 1 E
l.J)

c
reminded us, in such an age police violence is both 'face- t!: l/l
am·; and it is true that the chances of the famous refugee c
2 less' and 'formless', and is thus beyond all accountability . te' 2
..:::0

!'
0
a... j: are improved just as a dog with a name has a better chance 0
0 Nowhere is this violence, as such, tobe found; in the civilised Cl.
0
E to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general.
l.J)
states, the spectre of its ghostly apparition extends itself E
0 l/l
'i u The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who 0
u
c limitlessly. lt must be understood, of course, that we are con- c
0 had lost the protection of anational government, transferred 0
i
cerned here with developing neither an unjust nor a utopian
--::t the whole matter to the police. This was the first time the LD
discourse of suspicion of the function of the police, especially
police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its
in their fi.ght against those crimes which do fall within their
own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it
jurisdiction (such as terrorism, drug-trafficking. and the
was no langer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law,
activities of mafi.as of all kinds). We are simply questioning
but had become a ruling authority independent of
the limits of police jurisdiction and the conditions in which it
governrnent and ministries.
operates, particularly as far as foreigners are concerned.
(p. 287]
With respect to new police powers (national or inter-
i national) . one is touching here on one of the most serious We know only too well that today this problem is more seri-
1:: questions of law that a future elaboration of our charter for ous than ever, and we could provide much evidence to this
the cities of refuge would have to develop and inscribe effect. A movement protesting against the charge of what has
i·
!).;)
, ..
1
:"'
,, i
I
li!(
 .. ,,.
113
„,.:···.

l
~.
I
been called for some time now 'violations of hospitality' has inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner-: in
been growing in France; certain organisations have taken ·which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our ~/
control of it, and, more widely, the press has become its own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly~\.
t
mouthpiece. A proposal of 'Toubon-law', in the spirit and coextensive with the experience of hospitality. But for this ·
beyond of the laws known as 'Pasqua', has now come on
to the agenda. Under examination in the parliamentary
! very reason, and because being at home with oneself (l'etre-soi
chez soi - l'ipseite meme - the other within oneself) supposes a
assemblies, in the National Assembly and in the Senate, is a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to
proposal to treat as acts of terrorism, or as 'participation in a appropriate, control, and master according to different
criminal conspiracy', all hospitality accorded to 'foreigners' modalities of violence, there is a history of hospitality, an
lfl
lfl whose 'papers are not in order', or those simply 'without always possible perversion of the law ofhospitality (which can
Q.J
c papers'. This project, in effect, makes even more draconian
Q.J appear unconditional), and of the laws which come to limit
.2:
0)
L.. article 21 of the famous edict of 2 November 1945, which and condition it in its inscription as a law. It is from within
0
LL
-0 had already cited as a 'criminal act' all help given to foreigners this history that I would like to select, in a very tentative and
c
ro whose papers were not in order. Hence, what was a criminal preliminary way, some reference points which are of great
E E
lfl
c
act is now in danger of becoming an 'act of terrorism'. significance to us here. U'l
c
2 Moreover, it appears that this plan is in direct contravention
<tl

0
First, what we have been calling the city of refuge, it seems :::;
0... 0
0 of the Sc;hengen accords (ratified by France) - which permit to me, bridges several traditions or several moments in West- Cl.
0
E E
lfl
0 a conviction of someone for giving help to a foreigner ern, European, or para-European traditions. We shall recog- U'l
0
u u
c 'without papers' only if it can be proved that this person nise in the Hebraic tradition, on the one hand, those cities c
0 0
derived financial profit from such assistance. which would welcome and protect those innocents who
--0 c--
We have doubtless chosen the term 'city ofrefuge' because, sought refuge from what the texts of that time call 'bloody
for quite specific historical reasons, it commands our respect, vengeance'. This urban right to immunity and to hospitality
and also out of respect for those who cultivate an 'ethic of was rigorously and juridically developed and the text in
hospitality'. 'To cultivate an ethic of hospitality' - is such an which it first emerged was, without doubt, the Book of
expressiori not tautologous? Despite all the tensions or con- Numbers: 7 God ordered Moses to institute citi~s which
tradictions which distinguish it, and despite all the perver- would be, according to the very letter of the Bible itself, 'cities
sions that can befall it, one cannot speak of cultivating an ethic of refuge' or 'asylum', and to begin with there would be 'six
of hospitality. -~°-spitality i~. ~µlpir~ g~~lf.anc1_~-°--~--~mp_ly--9_I1e cities of refuge', in particular for the 'resident alien, or tem-
)
1
!
Q.'\./
,·
,. .ethic among~~ others. Ins~far as it has to do with the ethos, that porary settler'. Two beautiful texts in French have been
is, the residence, one's home, the familiar place of dwelling, devoted to this Hebraic tradition of the city of refuge, and I

114
would like to recall here that, from one generation to the
other, both authors of these essays are philosophers associated
with Strasbourg, with this generous border city, this emi-
nently European city, the capital city of Europe, and the first
of our refuge cities. I am speaking here of the meditations by
Emmanuel Levinas in 'The Cities of Refuge' ['Les Villes-
refuges', in L'Au-delil. du verset (Minuit, 1982), p. 51], and
by Daniel Payot in Refuge Cities [Des villes-refuges, Temoignage et
espacement (Ed. de l' Au be, 1 9 9 2) , especially pp. 6 5 ff J.
lfl
lfl
In the medieval tradition, on the other hand, one can iden-
Q)
c tify a certain sovereignty of the city: the city itself could
Q)
.::::O'l
'-
LI:
-0
determine the laws of hospitality, the articles of predeter-
mined law, both plural· and restrictive, with which they meant
c
C1J
to condition the Great Law of Hospitality - an unconditional
E t
lfl
Law, both singular and universal, which ordered that the
c
2 f
borders be open to each and every one, to every other, to all
0
0..
0 who might come, without question or without their even
E E
lfl
0 having to identify who they are or whence they came. (It
u u
c: would be necessary to study what was called sanctuary, which
0 0
was provided by the churches so as to secure immunity or
CO
survival for refugees, and by virtue of which they risked
becoming enclaves; and also auctoritas, which allowed kings or
lords to shield their guests (hötes) from all those in pursuit; or,
what occurred between the warring Italian cities when one
became a place of refuge for the exiled, the refugee, and those
banished from another city; and we who are reminded of
writers in this context can call to mind a certain story about
Dante, banished from Florence and then welcomed, it would
seem, at Ravenna.)
Finally, at this juncture, we could identify the cosmo-
.:.<;;
··.·.'.·.'"··.·1·
<
politan (cosmopolitique) tradition common to a certain Greek
~ stoicism and a Pauline Christianity, of which the inheritors
were the figures of the Enlightenment, and to which Kant will
doubtlessly have given the most rigorous philosophical
formulation in his famous Definitive Article in View of Perpetual
r
~
Peace: 'The law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the
1 conditions of universal hospitality.' This is not the place to
~~ analyse this remarkable Article, or its immense historical con-
~f
text, which has been excised from this text without trace. It
l was Cicero who was to bequeath a certain Stoic cosmo-
politanism. Pauline Christianity revived, radicalised and liter-
~
(
t
ally 'politicised' the primary injunctions of all the Abrahamic
religions, since, for example, the 'Opening of the Gates of
"
t Israel' - which had, however, specified the restrictive condi-
E
tions of hospitality so as to ensure the 'safety' or 'security' of -~
c:
rc
the 'strong city' (2 6, 2). Saint Paul gives to these appeals or to
~ these dictats their modern names. These are also theologico- ==c..
0
0
f political names, since they explicitly designate citizenship or Lll
0
t world co-citizenship: 'no longer foreigners nor metic in a c:
~
foreign land, but fellow-citizens with God's people, members
0-
t
~ of God's household' (Ephesians II. 19-20). In this sentence,
~
r 'foreigners' (xenoi) is also translated by guests (hospites); and
li
i
'metic' - but see also 'immigrants', for 'paroikoi' - designates
as much the neighbour, from a point of view which is
important to us here, as the foreigner without political rights
in another city or country. I am modifying and mixing several
translations, including that of Chouraqui, but it will be neces-
sary to analyse closely the political stakes and the theological
implications of these questions of semantics; Grosjean-
Leturmy's translation, in the Plfaade Library, for example,
 „.~.·r···
·;'.:,:.'
::~
,. '
'
115
cauld literally annaunce the space afwhat we are interpreting
. f
~
remains impossible; but it is above all to expel from it what is
as the 'city afrefuge'. But that is precisely what I wauld like ta erected, constructed, or what sets itself up above the soil: habitat, cul-
begin putting into questian here - i.e., the secularised versian ture, institution, State, etc. All this, even the soil upon which it
of such Pauline cosmopolitanism: 'And so therefore, you lies, is no longer soil pure and simple, and, even if founded on
are no langer foreigners abroad (xenoi, hospites), you are
f[ the earth, must not be unconditionally accessible to all
fellaw-citizens af the Saints, you belang to the Hause of Gad' comers. Thanks to this strictly delimited conditian (which is
(sympolitai tön hagiön kai oikeioi tou theou; cives sanctorum, et domestici l nothing ather than the institution aflimit as a barder, nation,
Dei). 1 State, public ar palitical space), Kant can deduce two can-
When, in the spirit af the Enlightenment thinkers fram sequences and. inscribe two other paradigms upon which it
lfl
lfl
whom we are drawing inspiration, Kant was formulating the 1 would be in our interest to refl.ect tomorrow.
(1)
c '
(1) law af casmopolitanism, he does not restrict it 'ta the candi- 1 First of all he excluded hospitality as a right of residence
. 2:
....
01
tions of universal haspitality' only. He places an it two limits (Gastrecht); he limits it to the right of visitation (Besuchsrecht). The
0
LL
-0
which doubtless situate a place of reflection and perhaps of right of residence must be made the abject of a particular
c
(Q
transformation or of progress. What are these two limits? treaty between states. Kant defines thus the conditions that we
E E
lfl
c
Kant seems at first to extend the cosmopolitan law to would have to interpret carefully in order to know how we .!!.!
2 c:
encompass universal hospitaJity without limit. Such is the condi- should proceed: .~
0
0... 0
0 tion of perpetual peace between all men. He expressly deter- a.
E We are speaking here. as in the previous articles. not of
0
lfl
0
mines it as a natural law (droit). Being of natural or original E
Ul
(_)
c: derivation, this law wauld be, therefore, both imprescriptible philanthropy, but of right; andin this sphere hospitality 0
(..)
0 c:
and inalienable. In the case of natural law, one can recognise signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to 0
0
N
within it features af a secularised theolagical heritage. All be treated by its owner without hostility. The Latter may send N

human creatures, all finite beings endowed with reason, have him away again, if this can be done without causing his

received, in equal proportion, 'cammon possession of the death; but, so lang as he conducts himself peaceably, he

surface of the earth'. No one can in principle, therefore, legit- must not be treated as an enemy. lt is not a right tobe treated

imately appropriate for himself the aforementianed surface as a guest to which the stranger can Lay claim - a special

( as such, as a surfoce-area) and withhold access to another man. friendly compact on his behalf would be required to make

If Kant takes great care to specify that this good or common him for a given time an actual inmate - but he has a right of

place covers 'the surface of the earth', it is doubtless so as not visitation. This right to present themselves to society belongs

to exclude any point of the world or of a spherical and finite to all mankind in virtue of our common right of possession on

glabe (globalisation), fram which an infinite dispersion the surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot
 ;,;. :

116 · .·.··.·····'.·r„.;·.
<.

be infinitely scattered, and must in the end reconcile
ourselves to existence side by side: at the same time,
originally no one individual had more right than another to
live in any one particular spot. 8
lt is this limitation on the right of residence, as that which is
to be made dependent on treaties between states, that per-
haps, amongst other things, is what remains for us debatable.
2 By the same token, in defining hospitality in all its rigour
as a law (which counts in this respect as progress), Kant
<1l
<1l
QJ assigns to it conditions which make it dependent on state
c
QJ
.2: sovereignty, especially when it is a question of the right of
2'
0 residence. Hospitality signifies here the public nature (publicite) of
LL
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c public space, as is always the case for the juridical in the
ro
E Kantian sense; hospitality, whether public or private, is
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c dependent on and controlled by the law and the state police.
2 2
0 This is of great consequence, particularly for the 'violations of
0..
0 - ... then, one has perhaps not yet recognised it.
E hospitality' about which we have spoken considerably, but
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just as much for the sovereignty of cities on which we have
c NOT ES
0 been refl.ecting, whose concept is at least as problematic today
N as in the time of Kant.
N M
All these questions remain obscure and difficult and we
must neither conceal them from ourselves nor, for a moment,
imagine ourselves to have mastered them. lt is a question of
knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of
knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical
space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional
would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible
1 desire, without form and without potency, and of even being
f perverted at any moment.
Experience and experimentation thus. Our experience of cities of
refuge then will not only be that which cannot wait, but
something which calls for an urgent response, a just response,
more just in any case than the existing law. An immediate
response to crime, to violence, and to pe:i;secution. I also
imagine the experience of cities of refuge as giving rise to a
place (lieu) for refl.ection - for refl.ection on the questions of
asylum and hospitality - and for a new order of law and
a democracy to come to be put to the test (expfrimentation).
Being on the threshold of these cities, of these new cities that
would be something other than 'new cities', a certain idea of
E
cosmopolitanism, an other, has not yet arrived, perhaps. -~
c
- If it has (indeed) arrived ...
0
c.
0
E
Ul
0
(..)
c
0
I would like to acknowledge the assistance ofMark Raftery-Skehan with
this translation. N
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen and
t Unwin Ltd, 1967). pp. 267-302.
t 3 Ibid., p. 285. J.D.'s italics.
tt 4 See Le Monde, 27 February 1996. See also Luc Legoux, La Crise d'asile
r politique en France (Centre frarn;:ais sur la population et le developpernent
~ (CEPED) ).

hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, l 5 Ibid., p. xvi.

1 6 Ibid .. p. xviii.
whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospi-
tality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality ,.f 7 Nurnbers XXXV. 9-32. Cf. I Chronicles 6. 42, 52, where the expression
~ 'Cities ofrefuge' reappears, and also Joshua 20. 1-9: 'ifthey adrnit hirn
~
[~
r
p
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 117
into the city, they will gram him a place where he may live as.one of
themselves'. Revised English Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford and Cambridge,
1989), p. 199.
8 In Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. rrans. M. Camp bell
Smith (New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc„ 1972),
pp. 1 3 7-1 3 8.

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Part Two
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On Forgiveness
C'J
118
From: Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008.1-36, 43-70. Chapter 1
The Inoperative Community

The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that
possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (by
virtue of some unknown decree or necessity, for we bear witness also to
the exhaustion of thinking through History), is the testimony of the dis­
solution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. Communism,
as Sartre said, is "the unsurpassable horizon of our time," and it is so in
many senses-political, ideological, and strategic. But not least important
among these senses is the following consideration, quite foreign to Sartre's
intentions: the word "communism" stands as an emblem of the desire to
discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions
and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond
such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes
about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of priva­
tization; and finally, more simply and even more decisively, a place from
which to surmount the unraveling that occurs with the death of each
one of us-that death that, when no longer anything more than the death
of the individual, carries an unbearable burden and collapses into
insignificance.
More or less consciously, more or less deliberately, and more or less
politically, the word "communism" has constituted such an emblem-which
no doubt amounted to something other than a concept, and even something
other than the meaning of a word. This emblem is no longer in circulation,
except in a belated way for a few; for still others, though very rare nowadays,
 I l~
I c:
2 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
I .f
it is an emblem capable of inferring a fierce but impotent resistance to the
visible collapse of what it promised. If it is no longer in circulation, this
is not only because the States that acclaimed it have appeared, for some
time now, as the agents of its betrayal. (Bataille in 1933: "The Revolution's
minimal hope has been described as the decline of the State: but it is in
fact the revolutionary forces that the present world is seeing perish and, at
the same time, every vital force today has assumed the form of the total-
itarian State.")' The schema of betrayal, aimed at preserving an originary
communist purity of doctrine or intention, has come to be seen as less and
less tenable. Not that totalitarianism was already present, as such, in Marx:
this would be a crude proposition, one that remains ignorant of the strident
protest against the destruction of community that in Marx continuously
parallels the Hegelian attempt to bring about a totality, and that thwarts
or displaces this attempt.
But the schema of betrayal is seen to be untenable in that it was the
very basis of the communist ideal that ended up appearing most problem-
atic: namely, human beings defined as producers (one might even add:
human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their
own essence in the form of their labor or their work.
That the justice and freedom-and the equality-included in the com-
munist idea or ideal have in effect been betrayed in so-called real com-
munism is something at once laden with the burden of an intolerable
suffering (along with other, no less intolerable forms of suffering inflicted
by our liberal societies) and at the same time politically decisive (not only
in that a political strategy must favor resistance to this betrayal, but because
this strategy, as well as our thought in general, must reckon with the
possibility that an entire society has been forged, docilely and despite more
than one forum of revolt, in the mold of this betrayal-or more plainly,
at the mercy of this abandonment: this would be Zinoviev's question, rather
than Solzhenitsyn's). But these burdens are still perhaps only relative com-
pared with the absolute weight that crushes or blocks all our "horizons":
there is, namely, no form of communist opposition-or let us say rather
"communitarian" opposition, in order to emphasize that the word should
not be restricted in this context to strictly political references-that has not
been or is not still profoundly subjugated to the goal of a human community,
that is, to the goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence
their own essence as their work, and furthermore producing precisely this
essence as community. An absolute immanence of man to man-a human-
ism-and of community to community-a communism-obstinately sub-
tends, whatever be their merits or strengths, all forms of oppositional
communism, all leftist and ultraleftist models, and all models based on
the workers' council.2 In a sense, all ventures adopting a communitarian
119
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 3
opposition to "real communism" have by now run their course or been
abandoned, but everything continues along its way as though, beyond these
ventures, it were no longer even a question of thinking about community.
Yet it is precisely the immanence of man to man, or it is man, taken
absolutely, considered as the immanent being par excellence, that constitutes
the stumbling block to a thinking of community. A community presupposed
as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that it
must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the
accomplishment of the essence of humanness. ("What can be fashioned by
man? Everything. Nature, human society, humanity," wrote Herder. We
are stubbornly bound to this regulative idea, even when we consider that
this "fashioning" is itself only a "regulative idea.") Consequently, economic
ties, technological operations, and political fusion (into a body or under a
leader) represent or rather present, expose, and realize this essence neces-
sarily in themselves. Essence is set to work in them; through them, it
becomes its own work. This is what we have called "totalitarianism," but
it might be better named "immanentism," as long as we do not restrict
the term to designating certain types of societies or regimes but rather see
in it the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democracies and
their fragile juridical parapets.
***
Is it really necessary to say something about the individual here? Some see
in its invention and in the culture, if not in the cult built around the
individual, Europe's incontrovertible merit of having shown the world the
sole path to emancipation from tyranny, and the norm by which to measure
all our collective or communitarian undertakings. But the individual is I
merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community. By ·
its nature-as its name indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible-the indi-
vidual reveals that it is the abstract result of a decomposition. It is another,
and symmetrical, figure of immanence: the absolutely detached for-itself,
taken as origin and as certainty.
But the experience through which this individual has passed, since Hegel
at least, (and through which he passes, it must be confessed, with staggering
opinionatedness) is simply the experience of this: that the individual can
be the origin and the certainty of nothing but its own death. And once
immortality has passed into its works, an operative immortality remains
its own alienation and renders its death still more strange than the irre-
mediable strangeness that it already "is."
Still, one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a
clinamen. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward
the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other. Community is at
 120
4 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
least the clinamen of the "individual." Yet there is no theory, ethics, politics,
or metaphysics of the individual that is capable of envisaging this clinamen,
this declination or decline of the individual within community. Neither
"Personalism" nor Sartre ever managed to do anything more than coat
the most classical individual-subject with a moral or sociological paste: they
never inclined it, outside itself, over that edge that opens up its being-in-
common.
An inconsequential atomism, individualism tends to forget that the atom
is a world. This is why the question of community is so markedly absent
from the metaphysics of the subject, that is to say, from the metaphysics
of the absolute for-itself-be it in the form of the individual or the total
State-which means also the metaphysics of the absolute in general, of
being as ab-solute, as perfectly detached, distinct, and closed: being without
relation. This ab-solute can appear in the form of the Idea, History, the
Individual, the State, Science, the Work of Art, and so on. Its logic will
always be the same inasmuch as it is without relation. A simple and redoubt-
able logic will always imply that within its very separation the absolutely
sep_arate encloses, if we can say this, more than what is simply separated.
Which is to say that the separation itself must be enclosed, that the closure
must not only close around a territory (while still remaining exposed, at
its outer edge, to another territory, with which it thereby communicates),
but also, in order to complete the absoluteness of its separation, around
the enclosure itself. The absolute must be the absolute of its own abso-
luteness, or not be at all. In other words: to be absolutely alone, it is not
enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone-and this of course
is contradictory. The logic of the absolute violates the absolute. It implicates
it in a relation that it refuses and precludes by its essence. This relation
tears and forces open, from within and from without at the same time,
and from an outside that is nothing other than the rejection of an impossible
interiority, the "without relation" from which the absolute would constitute
itself.
Excluded by the logic of the absolute-subject of metaphysics (Self, Will,
Life, Spirit, etc.), community comes perforce to cut into this subject by
virtue of this same logic. The logic of the absolute sets it in relation: but
this, obviously, cannot make for a relation between two or several absolutes,
no more than it can make an absolute of the relation. It undoes the abso-
luteness of the absolute. The relation (the community) is, if it is, nothing
other than what undoes, in its very principle-and at its closure or on its
limit-the autarchy of absolute immanence.
I Bataille constantly experienced this violent logic of being-separated. For
r
;/ i
example:
ill
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 5
But if the ensemble of men-or more simply their integral
existence-WAS INCARNATED in a single being-obviously just as
solitary and as abandoned as the ensemble-the head of the
INCARNATED one would be the place of an unappeasable combat-
and one so violent that sooner or later it would shatter into pieces.
For it is difficult to see what degree of storming and unleashing
the visions of the one incarnated would attain since it ought to see
God but in the same instant kill him, then become God himself
but only to rush straightway into nothingness: what would come
about then would be a man just as deprived of meaning as the
first passerby, but deprived of all possibility of rest. (0. C. 1:547)
Such an incarnation of humanity, aggregating its absolute being beyond
relation and community, depicts the destiny willed by modern thought. We
shall never escape the "unappeasable combat" as long as we remain unable
to protect community from this destiny.
Carrying this logic into the sphere of knowledge, Bataille, in another
text, asserts:
If I "mimic" absolute knowledge, I am at once, of necessity, God
myself (in the system, there can be no knowledge, not even in
God, which goes beyond absolute knowledge). The thought of this
self-of ipse-could only make itself absolute by becoming
everything. The Phenomenology of Spirit comprises two essential
movements completing a circle: it is the completion by degrees of
the consciousness of the self (of human ipse) and the becoming
everything (the becoming God) of this ipse completing knowledge
(and by this means destroying the particularity within it, thus
completing the negation of oneself, becoming absolute knowledge).
But if in this way, as if by contagion and by mime, I accomplish
in myself Hegel's circular movement, I define-beyond the limits
attained-no longer an unknown, but an unknowable. Unknowable
not on account of the insufficiency of reason, but by its nature
(and even, for Hegel, one could only have concern for this beyond
for lack of possessing absolute knowledge ... ). Supposing then that
I were to be God, that I were to have in the world the assurance
of Hegel (suppressing shadow and doubt)-knowing everything and
even why fulfilled knowledge required that man, the innumerable
particularities of selves, and history produce themselves-at
precisely that moment, the question is formulated which allows
human, divine existence to enter ... the deepest foray into darkness
without return; why must there be what I know? Why is it a
necessity? In this question is hidden-it doesn't appear at first-an
extreme rupture, so deep that only the silence of ecstasy answers
it. 3
0
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6 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
:I
The rupture (dechirure) hidden in the question is occasioned by the
question itself, which breaks up the totality of things that are-considered
I in terms of the absolute, that is to say, separate from every other "thing" -
11 and Being (which is not a "thing"), through which or in the name of which
[' these things, in their totality, are. This rupture (analagous, if not identical,
to Heidegger's distinction between the ontical and the ontological) defines
a relation to the absolute, imposing on the absolute a relation to its own
Being instead of making this Being immanent to the absolute totality of
beings. And so, Being "itself" comes to be defined as relational, as non-
X absoluteness, and, if you will-in any case this is what I am trying to
argue-as community.
Ecstasy answers-if it is properly speaking an "answer"-to the impos-
sibility of the absoluteness of the absolute, or to the "absolute" impossibility
of complete immanence. Ecstasy, if we understand it according to a rigorous
strain of thinking that would pass, were we to trace its philosophical history
before Bataille and during his time, by way of Schelling and Heidegger,
implies no effusion, and even less some form of effervescent illumination.
Strictly speaking, it defines the impossibility, both ontological and gno-
sological, of absolute immanence (or of the absolute, and therefore of
immanence) and consequently the impossibility either of an individuality,
in the precise sense of the term, or of a pure collective totality. The theme
of the individual and that of communism are closely bound up with (and
f, bound together in) the general problematic of immanence. 4 They are bound
together in their denial of ecstasy. And for us the question of the community
is henceforth inseparable from a question of ecstasy-which is to say, as
we are beginning to understand, from the question of Being considered as
something other than the absoluteness of the totality of beings.
Community, or the being-ecstatic of Being itself? That would be the
question.
* * *
I would like to introduce a qualification, to which I will return later: behind
the theme of the individual, but beyond it, lurks the question of singularity.
What is a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing-not indivisible, but
singular? What is their singular necessity in the sharing that divides and
that puts in communication bodies, voices, and writings in general and in
totality? In sum, this question would be exactly the reverse of the question
of the absolute. In this respect, it is constitutive of the question of com-
munity, and it is in this context that it will have to be taken into account
later on. But_singularity never has the nature or the struct11re_of_j11divid-
uality. Si~ularity ne.:e~ takes. plac,i_.aLth~ level q[ atoms;· th~se-ideD.tifiab.re."-
,/ -if n·ot1denficafidenthTes; rather it takes place at the level'of the c!inamen_.
121
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 7
which is unidentifiable. It is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say
"i:hatthe's1ngulatb~ing is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no "sub-
ject"-but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular
being.
* * *
The solidarity of the individual with communism at the heart of a thinking
of immanence, while neglecting ecstasy, does not however entail a simple
symmetry. Communism-as, for example, in the generous exuberance that
will not let Marx conclude without pointing to a reign of freedom, one
beyond the collective regulation of necessity, in which surplus work would
no longer be an exploitive work, but rather art and invention-commu-
nicates with an extremity of play, of sovereignty, even of ecstasy from which
the individual as such remains definitively removed. But this link has
remained distant, secret, and most often unknown to communism itself
(let us say, to lend concreteness, unknown to Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky),
except in the fulgurating bursts of poetry, painting, and cinema at the very
beginning of the Soviet revolution, or the motifs that Benjamin allowed as
reasons for calling oneself a Marxist, or what Blanchet tried to bring across
or propose (rather than signify) with the word "communism" ("Com-
munism: that which excludes [and excludes itself from] every community
already constituted"). 5 But again even this proposal in the final analysis
went unrecognized, not only by "real" communism, but also, on close
inspection, by those singular "communists" themselves, who were perhaps
never able to recognize (until now at least) either where the metaphor (or
the hyperbole) began and ended in the usage they made of the word, or,
especially, what other trope-supposing it were necessary to change words-
or what effacement of tropes might have been appropriate to reveal what
haunted their use of the word "communism."
By the usage to which this word was put, they were able to communicate
with a thinking of art, of literature, and of thought itself-other figures
or other exigencies of ecstasy-but they were not truly able to communicate,
explicitly and thematically (even if "explicit" and "thematic" are only very
fragile categories here), with a thinking of community. Or rather, their
communication with such a thinking has remained secret, or suspended.
The ethics, the politics, the philosophies of community, when there were
any (and there always are, even if they are reduced to chatter about fraternity
or to laborious constructions around "intersubjectivity"), have pursued
their paths or their humanist deadends without suspecting for an instant
that these singular voices were speaking about community and were perhaps
speaking about nothing else, without suspecting that what was taken for
a "literary" or "aesthetic" experience was entrenched in the ordeal of
 122
8 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
community, was at grips with it. (Do we need to be reminded, to take a
further example, what Barthes's first writings were about, and some of the
later ones as well?)
Subsequently, these same voices that were unable to communicate what,
perhaps without knowing it, they were saying, were exploited-and covered
up again-by clamorous declarations brandishing the flag of the "cultural
revolutions" and by all kinds of "communist writing" or "proletarian
inscriptions." The professionals of society saw in them (and not without
reason, even if their view was shortsighted) nothing more than a bourgeois
Parisian (or Berliner) form of Proletkult, or else merely the unconscious
return of a "republic of artists," the concept of which had been inaugurated
two hundred years earlier by the Jena romantics. In one way or another,
it was a matter of a simple, classical, and dogmatic system of truth: an
art (or a thought) adequate to politics (to the form or the description of
community), a politics adequate to art. The basic presupposition remained
that of a community effectuating itself in the absolute of the work, or
effectuating itself as work. For this reason, and whatever it may have
claimed for itself, this "modernity" remained in its principle a humanism.
We will have to return to the question of what brought about-albeit
at the cost of a certain naivete or misconception-the exigency of a literary6
experience of community or communism. This is even, in a sense, the only
question. But the terms of this question all need to be transformed, to be
put back into play in a space that would be distributed quite differently
from one composed of all-too-facile relations (for example, solitude of the
writer/ collectivity, or culture/ society, or elite/masses-whether these rela-
tions be proposed as oppositions, or, in the spirit of the "cultural revo-
lutions," as equations). And for this to happen, the question of community
must first of all be put back into play, for the necessary redistribution of
space depends upon it. Before getting to this, and without rescinding any
of the resistant generosity or the active restlessness of the word "com-
munism" and without denying anything of the excesses to which it can
lead, but also without forgetting either the burdensome mortgage that comes
along with it or the usury it has (not accidentally) suffered, we must allow
Ii
I that communism can no longer be the unsurpassable horizon of our time.
And if in fact it no longer is such a horizon, this is not because we have
I
I its organic communion with its own essence. It is constituted not only by
I passed beyond any horizon. Rather, everything is inflected by resignation,
as if the new unsurpassable horizon took form around the disappearance,
'i':i i the impossibility, or the condemnation of communism. Such reversals are
I customary; they have never altered anything. It is the horizons themselv~s
that must be challenged. The ultimate limit of community, or the limit that
I\
i'I is formed by community, as such, traces an entirely different line. This is
why, even as we establish that communism is no longer our unsurpassable
'fii:
I11.,1•
.. I
(
) THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 9
horizon, we must also establish, just as forcefully, that a communist exi-
gency or demand communicates with the gesture by means of which we
must go farther than all possible horizons.
* * *
The first task in understanding what is at stake here consists in focusing
on the horizon behind us. This means questioning the breakdown in com-
munity that supposedly engendered the modern era. The consciousness of
this ordeal belongs to Rousseau, who figured a society that experienced or
acknowledged the loss or degradation of a communitarian (and commu-
nicative) intimacy-a society producing, of necessity, the solitary figure,
but one whose desire and intention was to produce the citizen of a free
sovereign community. Whereas political theoreticians preceding him had
thought mainly in terms of the institution of a State, or the regulation of
a society, Rousseau, although he borrowed a great deal from them, was
perhaps the first thinker of community, or more exactly, the first to exper-
ience the question of society as an uneasiness directed toward the com-
munity, and as the consciousness of a (perhaps irreparable) rupture in this
community. This consciousness would subsequently be inherited by the
Romantics, and by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit: the last figure
of spirit, before the assumption of all the figures and of history into absolute
knowledge, is that which cleaves community (which for Hegel figures the
split in religion). Until this day history has been thought on the basis of
a lost community-one to be regained or reconstituted.
The lost, or broken, c_gggnunity can be exemplified in all kinds p(waJs,
by all kmds ofi>ir¥cTJggi.s:Jh~·~-a~Y.I.:i(f§!_tEm';~!fi.~~~~~~i~n-dfr, -tt.e _Rqma_n
Republic, the first Christian community,s;orp,0rc1.1ipns.,...communes, or brqt.h-
~Thoocls=alW:ays"ifTs~ama1fer·oY·a1~~t age in which community was woven
of tight, harmonious, and infrangible'f,onds and iii'which'above aififpl~y.e_g: /
13acitTo."'ffsel( through its institutions;· its rituaJs,: c1.nct its symbols, -the
~Ei~iinfotJ9n, indeed the 11ving ·offering, or i_ts own immanent unity, inti-
macy, _and_ autonomy. Distinct from society' (which is a simple association
and division of forces and needs) and opposed to emprise (which dissolves
community by submitting its peoples to its arms and to its glory), com-
munity is not only intimate communication between its members, but also
a fair distribution of tasks and goods, or by a happy equilibrium of forces
and authorities: it is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or
impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies
himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with
the living body of the community. In the motto of the Rep_u_!Jlic~f~f:!_gn1ity.. Y
designates community: the model rurtre-fa-miJy--a-nd-ofTove. .
 )•P. , •
(·l
10 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
) ~
But it is here that we should become suspicious of the retrospective
consciousness of the lost community and its identity (whether this con-
sciousness conceives of itself as effectively retrospective or whether, _dis-
regarding the realities of the past, it constructs images of this past for the
sake of an ideal or a prospective vision). We should be suspicious of this
consciousness first of all because it seems to have accompanied the Western
world from its very beginnings: at every moment in its history, the Occident
has given itself over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that
has disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and
conviviality. Our history begins with the departure of Ulysses and with the
onset of rivalry, dissension, and conspiracy in his palace. Around Penelope,
who reweaves the fabric of intimacy without ever managing to complete it,
pretenders set up the warring and political scene of society-pure exteriority.
But the true consciousnesss of the loss of community is Christian:
the community desired or pined for by Rousseau, Schlegel, Hegel, then
Bak-ouine, Marx, Wagner, or Mallarme is understood as communion, and
communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the
mystical body of Christ. At the same time as it is the most ancient myth
of the Western world, community might well be the altogether modern
thought of humanity's partaking of divine life: the thought of a human
being penetrating into pure immanence. (Christianity has had only two
dimensions, antinomical to one another: that of the deus absconditus, in
which the Western disappearance of the divine is still engulfed, and that
of the god-man, deus communis, brother of humankind, invention of a
familial immanence of humanity, then of history as the immanence of
salvation.)
Thus, the thought of community or the desire for it might well be nothing
other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of
modern experience: namely, that divinity was withdrawing infinitely from
immanence, that the god-brother was at bottom himself the deus abscon-
ditus (this was Holderlin's insight), and that the divine essence of com-
munity-or community as the existence of a divine essence-was the
impossible itself. One name for this has been the death of God: this expres-
sion remains pregnant with the possibility if not the necessity of a resur-
rection that restores both man and God to a common immanence. (Not
only Hegel, but also Nietzsche himself, at least in part, bear witness to
this.) The discourse of the "death of God" also misses the point that the
"divine" is what it is (if it "is") only inasmuch as it is removed from
immanence, or withdrawn from it-within it, one might say, yet withdrawn
from it. And this, moreover, occurs in the very precise sense that it is not
because there is a "divine" that its share would be subtracted from imma-
nence, but on the contrary, it is only to the extent that immanence itself,
123
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 11
here or there (but is it localizable? Is it not rather this that localizes, that
spaces?), is subtracted from immanence that there can be something like
the "divine." (And perhaps, in the end, it will no longer be necessary to
speak of the "divine." Perhaps we will come to see that community, death,
love, freedom, singularity are names for the "divine" not just because they
substitute for it-and neither sublate nor resuscitate it under another form-
but equally because this substitution is in no way anthropomorphic or
anthropocentric and gives way to no becoming-human of the "divine."
Community henceforth constitutes the limit of the human as well as of the
divine. Through God or the gods communion-as substance and act, the
act of communicated immanent substance-has been definitively withdrawn
from community.) 7
The modern, humanist Christian consciousness of the loss of community
therefore gives every apearance of recuperating the transcendental illusion
of reason when reason exceeds the bounds of all possible experience, which
is basically the experience of concealed immanence. Community has not
taken place, or rather, if it is indeed certain that humanity has known (or
still knows, outside of the industrial world) social ties quite different from
those familiar to us, community has never taken place along the lines of
our projections of it according to these different social forms. It did not
take place for the Guayaqui Indians, it did not take place in an age of
huts; nor did it take place in the Hegelian "spirit of a people" or in the
Christian agape. No Gesellschaft has ~1!1:e.<:J.l@gJ_o b!!h2 the State,i~0"Y,.. ,,,.~
and capital. dissolve a priqr'7:Jemei,nschajt. It would undoubtedly be more - '.,
accurate to say:·bypassi~g all the twists and turns taken by ethnological
interpretation and all the mirages of an origin or of "bygone days," that
Gesellschaft-"society," the dissociating association of forces, needs, and
signs-has taken the place of something for which we have no name or
concept, something that issued at once from a much more extensive com-
munication than that of a mere social bond (a communication with the
gods, the cosmos, animals, the dead, the unknown) and from much more
piercing and dispersed segmentation of this same bond, often involving
much harsher effects (solitude, rejection, admonition, helplessness) than
what we expect from a communitarian minimum in the social bond. Society
was not built on the_.r:uins ofa ..com.munity,_.It emerged frnm ..J)Je _shsap-
pearance· or-the~~~servation.
....----- --· - - . -
of
.
something-tril:,es_
. ··~· .. -.- -·· -· ... -·-· ...
- .. -· .. or
.
eIIJ,pin:s-:-__p_er~aps-'
. . . . .. ·;...-"'
JUSt as unrelated to what we call "community" as to what we call "society." ,
~ommiiniti,}ar. from.being whats9c:it!ty ..h<1s ~r~sfied_..9r·r~st,}s.w.hai
happen§_J()_g~_ --::-:--@r;.stion, waiting, evt::riJ, imperative-:-in the wake of societf
~hing, therefore, has been lost, and for this reason 'notfiing in-ost:-'
We alone are lost, we upon whom the "social bond" (relations, commu-
nication), our own invention, now descends heavily Eke the net of an
 124
12 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
economic, technical, political, and cultural snare. Entangled in its meshes,
we have wrung for ourselves the phantasms of the lost community.
***
What this community has "lost" -the immanence and the intimacy of a
communion-is lost only in the sense that such a "loss" is constitutive of
"community" itself.
It is not a loss: on the contrary, immanence, if it were to come about,
would instantly suppress community, or communication, as such. Death is
not only the example of this, it is its truth. In death, at least if one considers
in it what brings about immanence (decomposition leading back to nature-
"everything returns to the ground and becomes part of the cycle"-or else
the paradisal versions of the same "cycle") and if one forgets what makes
it always irreducibly singular, there is no longer any community or com-
munication: there is only the continuous identity of atoms.
This is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to
absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence,
communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the
community that is governed by it. Thus the logic of Nazi Germany was
not only that of the extermination of the other, of the subhuman deemed
exterior to the communion of blood and soil, but also, effectively, the logic
of sacrifice aimed at all those in the "Aryan" community who did not
satisfy the criteria of pure immanence, so much so that-it being obviously
impossible to set a limit on such criteria-the suicide of the German nation
itself might have represented a plausible extrapolation of the process: more-
over, it would not be false to say that this really took place, with regard
to certain aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation.
The joint suicide or death of lovers is one of the mythico-literary figures
of this logic of communion in immanence. Faced with this figure, one
cannot tell which-the communion or the love-serves as a model for the
other in death. In reality, with the immanence of the two lovers, death
accomplishes the infinite reciprocity of two agencies: impassioned love con-
ceived on the basis of Christian communion, and community thought
according to the principle of love. The Hegelian State in its turn bears
witness to this, for although it certainly is not established on the basis of
love-for it belongs to the sphere of so-called objective spirit-it nonetheless
has as its principle the reality of love, that is to say the fact "of having in
another the moment of one's own subsistence." In this State, each member
has his truth in the other, which is the State itself, whose reality is never
Ii more present than when its members give their lives in a war that the
monarch-the effective presence-to-self of the Subject-State-has alone and
lj freely decided to wage. 8
,,j,
:,i
j(/:
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 13
Doubtless such immolation for the sake of community-and by it, there-
fore-could and can be full of meaning, on the condition that this "mean-
ing" be that of a community, and on _the further condition that this
community not be a 'community of death' (as has been the case since at
least the First World War, thereby justifying all refusals to "die for one's
country"). Now the community of human immanence, man made equal to
himself or to God, to nature, and to his own works, is one such community
of death-or of the dead. The fully realized person of individualistic or
communistic hum~i§m..js_tne_ctead pei:130~-~-1~ other words, death, 1;.- such ---Y..
a communrty,is~'ot the unmasterable excess of finitude, but the infinite
fulfillment of an immanent life: it is death itself consigned to immanence;
it is in the end that resorption of death that the Christian civilization, as
though devouring its own transcendance, has come to minister to itself in
the guise of a supreme work. Since Leibnitz there has been no death in
our universe: in one way or another an absolute circulation of meaning (of
values, of ends, of History) fills or reabsorbs all finite negativity, draws
from each finite singular destiny a surplus value of humanity or an infinite
superhumanity. But this presupposes, precisely, the death· of each and all
in the life of the infinite.
Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the
States have imagined their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community,
yet to come, that would attain immanence. But by now we have nothing
more than the bitter consciousness of the increasing remoteness of such a
community, be it the people, the nation, or the society of producers. How-
ever, this consciousness, like that of the "loss" of community, is superficial.
In truth, death is not sublated. The communion to come does not grow
distant, it is not deferred: it was never to come; it would be incapable of
coming about or forming a future. What forms a future, and consequently
what truly comes about, is always the singular death-which does not mean
that death does not come about in the community: on the contrary, I shall
come to this. But communion is not what comes of death, no more than
death is the simple perpetual past of community.
Millions of deaths, of course, are justified by the revolt of those who
die: they are justified as a rejoinder to the intolerable, as insurrections
against social, political, technical, military, religious oppression. But these
deaths are not sublated: no dialectic, no salvation leads these deaths to any
other immanence than that of ... death (cessation, or decomposition, which
forms only the parody or reverse of immanence). Yet the modern age has
conceived the justification of death only in the guise of salvation or the
dialectical sublation of history. The modern age has struggled to close the
circle of the time of men and their communities in an immortal communion

14 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
in which death, finally, loses the senseless meaning that it ought to have-
and that it has, obstinately.
We are condemned, or rather reduced, to search for this meaning beyond
meaning of death elsewhere than in community. But the enterprise is absurd
(it is the absurdity of a thought derived from the individual). Death is
indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community
reveals itself-and reciprocally. It is not by chance that this motif of a
reciprocal revelation has preoccupied thought informed by ethnology as well
as the thinking of Freud and Heidegger, and at the same time Bataille, that
is to say in the time leading from the First to the Second World War.
The motif of the revelation, through death, of being-together or being-
with, and of the crystallization of the community around the death of its
members, that is to say around the "loss" (the impossibility) of their
immanence and not around their fusional assumption in some collective
hypostasis, leads to a space of thinking incommensurable with the prob-
lematics of sociality or intersubjectivity (including the Husserlian problem-
atic of the alter ego) within which philosophy, despite its resistance, has
remained captive. Death irremediably exceeds the resources of a metaphysics
of the subject. The phantasm of this metaphysics, the phantasm that Des-
cartes (almost) did not dare have but that was already proposed in Christian
theology, is the phantasm of a dead man who says, like Villiers' Monsieur
Waldemar, "I am dead"-ego sum ... mortuus. If the J cannot say that it
is dead, if the I disappears in effect in its death, in that death that is
precisely what is most proper to it and most inalienably its own, it is
because the I is something other than a subject. All of Heidegger's research
into "being-for (or toward)-death" was nothing other than an attempt to
state this: I is not-am not-a subject. (Although, when it came to the
question of community as such, the same Heidegger also went astray with
his vision of a people and a destiny conceived at least in part as a subject,9
which proves no doubt that Dasein's "being-toward-death" was never rad-
ically implicated in its being-with-in Mitsein-and that it is this implication
that remains to be thought.)
That which is not a subject opens up and opens onto a community whose
conception, in turn, exceeds the resources of a metaphysics of the subject.
Community does not weave a superior, immortal, or transmortal life
between subjects (no more than it is itself woven of the inferior bonds of
a consubstantiality of blood or of an association of needs), but it is con-,
stitutively, to the extent that it is a matter of a "constitution" here, cali-
brated on the death of those whom we call, perhaps wrongly, its "members"
(inasmuch as it is not a question of an organism). But it does not make a
work of this calibration. Community no more makes a work out of death
than it is itself a work. The death upon which community is calibrated
'-l
··-·----
125
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY D 15
does not operate the dead being's passage into some communal intimacy,
nor does commumty,. fg_r its part _Qpf!rq{?_ __t,i\e tran§figuration ·. of'Ttsaeaa
substa;{~e-c;;
-into-seine - subject-be these ho~eianct:··native···soiCorofooa/~,,,.,
or
mffion;··a"-deiivered .. fulfill~ci h;manity:·abs-oiutephalansfery; family;··or--··-
riiystkal-b(Jdy." Community ls ca'libratea·on aeaili"afo"ii-that of wliich ff Ts
precise!YimpossibTe to make a work (other than a work of death, as soon
as one tries to make a work of it). Community occurs in order to acknowl-
edge this impossibility, or more exactly-for there is neither function nor
finality here-the impossibility of making a work out of death is inscribed
and acknowledged as "community."
Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed
to others. Community is what takes place always through others and for
others. It is not the space of the egos-subjects and substances that are at
bottom immortal-but of the J's, who are always others (or else are
nothing). If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death
itself is the true community of J's that are not egos. It is not a communion
that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We. It is the community of
others. The genuine community of mortal beings, or death as community,
establishes their impossible communion. Community therefore occupies a
singular place: it assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the
impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a subject. In a
certain sense comm!!!1!!Y..ackno1Ykfigei?_ ?.Q9 inscribes-thi§ is its pecuhar -- .,
gesture-the impossibility of community. A ~ommu-nity is- n-;;t·a-·pro]ec·t oT ···<
Tusion,-or1ii"-some generaCway a producti~e or operative project-nor is
it a project at all (once again, this is its radical difference from "the spirit
of a people," which from Hegel to Heidegger has figured the collectivity
as project, and figured the project, reciprocally, as collective-which does
not mean that we can ignore the question of the singularity of a "people").
A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth
(which amounts to saying that there is no community of immortal beings:
one can imagine either a society or a communion of immortal beings, but
not a community). It is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable
excess that make up finite being: its death, but also its birth, and only the
community can present me my birth, and along with it the impossibility
of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my
death.
If it sees its fellow-being die, a living being can subsist only
outside itself. ...
Each one of us is then driven out of the confines of his person
and loses himself as much as possible in the community of his
fellow creatures. It is for this reason that it is necessary for
communal life to maintain itself at a level equal to death. The lot
 126
16 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
of a great number of private lives is pettiness. But a community
cannot last except at the level of intensity of death-it decomposes
as soon as it falls shy of danger's peculiar grandeur. It must take
upon it what is "unappeasable" and "unappeased," and maintain
a need that thirsts for glory. A man among thousands can have an
intensity of life that is practically zero throughout the day: he
behaves as though death did not exist and holds himself, without
harm, beneath its level. ( 0. C. 7 :245-46)
* **
No doubt Bataille has gone farthest into the crucial experience of the modern
destiny of community. Whatever the interest accorded his thought (and this
remains, despite everything, a meagre and all too often frivolous interest),
what has not yet been sufficiently remarked 10 is the extent to which his
thinking emerged out of a political exigency and uneasiness-or from an
exigency and an uneasiness concerning the political that was itself guided
by the thought of community.
Bataille first of all went through the ordeal of seeing communism
"betrayed." He discovered later that this betrayal was not to be corrected
or made up for, but that communism, having taken man as its end, meaning
the production of man and man as producer, was linked in its principle to
a negation of the sovereignty of man, that is to say to a negation of what
in man is irreducible to human immanence, or to a negation of the sovereign
excess of finitude:
For a Marxist, value beyond the useful is conceivable, even
inevitable; but it is immanent to man, or else it does not exist.
What transcends man (living man, of course, here-below), or in the
same way what goes beyond common humanity (humanity without
privilege) is without question inadmissible. The sovereign value is
man: production is not the only value, it is merely the means of
responding to man's needs-it serves him, man does not serve
it. ...
But it remains to be determined whether man, to whom
communism refers as the producer, has not taken on this sovereign
value on one primary condition: namely, having renounced for
himself everything that is truly sovereign .... For the irreducible
desire that man is, passionately and capriciously, communism has
substituted those needs that can be brought into harmony with a
life entirely devoted to producing. (0.C. 8:352-53)
Meanwhile, in the thirties, two directions had converged in Bataille's
I ,
thought: a revolutionary impulse that sought to give back to the revolt the
incandescence that the Bolshevik State had stolen from it and a fascination
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 17
with fascism inasmuch as it seemed to indicate the direction, if not the
reality, of an intense community, devoted to excess. (This fascination is not
to be taken lightly, no more in Bataille's case than in the case of several
others. Ignoble fascism, and fascism as one of the recourses of capitalism,
this despicable fascism was also an attempt to respond-despicably and
ignobly-to the already established, already stifling reign of society. Fascism
was the grotesque or abject resurgence of an obsession with communion;
it crystallized the motif of its supposed loss and the nostalgia for its images
of fusion. In this respect, it was the convulsion of Christianity, and it
ended up fascinating modern Christianity in its entirety. No political-moral
critique of this fascination holds good if the critic is not at the same time
capable of deconstructing the system of communion.) 11
But aside from the scorn immediately aroused in him by the foulness of
the fascist ringleaders and their methods, Bataille went through the exper-
ience of realizing that the nostalgia for a communal being was at the same
time the desire for a work of death. He was haunted, as we know, by the
idea that a human sacrifice should seal the destiny of the secret community
of Acephale. He no doubt understood at the time, as he was later to write, 12
that the truth of sacrifice required in the last analysis the suicide of the
sacrificer. In dying, the latter would be able to rejoin the being of the
victim plunged into the bloody secret of common life. And thus he under-
stood that this properly divine truth-the operative and resurrectional truth
of death-was not the truth of the community of finite beings but that,
on the contrary, it rushed headlong into the infinity of immanence. This
is not merely horror, it is beyond horror, it is the total absurdity-or
disastrous puerility, so to speak-of the death work, of death considered
as the work of common life. And it is this absurdity, which is at bottom
an excess of meaning, an absolute concentration of the will to meaning,
that must have dictated Bataille's withdrawal from communitarian
enterprises.
Thus he came to understand the ridiculous nature of all nostalgia for
communion, he who for a long time-in a kind of exacerbated consciousness
of the "loss" of community, which he shared with a whole epoch-had
represented archaic societies, their sacred structures, the glory of military
and royal societies, the nobility of feudalism, as bygone and fascinating
forms of a successful intimacy of being-in-common with itself.
In opposition to this modern, feverish kind of "Rousseauism" (which,
nonetheless, he perhaps never completely overcame-I shall come back to
this), Bataille made two observations: on the one hand, sacrifice, glory,
and expenditure remain simulations as long as they stop short of the work
of death, so nonsimulation is the impossible itself; but, on the other hand,
in the simulation itself (that is to say, in the simulation of immanent being),

18 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
the work of death is nevertheless still accomplished, at least to a relative
degree, in the form of the domination, oppression, extermination, and
exploitation to which all socio-political systems finally lead, all those in
which the excess of a transcendence is, as such, willed, presented (simulated)
and instituted in immanence. It was not only the Sun King who mixed the
i ' enslavement of the State with radiant bursts of sacred glory; this is true
I of all royalty that has always already distorted the sovereignty it exhibits
into a means of domination and extortion:
The truth is that we can suffer from something we lack, but even
if we have a paradoxical nostalgia for it, we cannot, except by
some aberration, long for the religious and royal edifice of the
past. The effort to which this edifice corresponded was nothing but
an immense failure, and if it is true that something essential is
missing from the world in which it collapsed, then we can only go
farther ahead, without imagining even for a moment the possibility
of turning back. ( 0. C. 8:275)
The reversal of the nostalgia for a lost community into the consciousness
of an "immense failure" of the history of communities was linked for
Bataille to the "inner experience," whose content, truth, or ultimate lesson
is articulated thus: "Sovereignty is NOTHING." Which is to say that sover-
eignty is the sovereign exposure to an excess (to a transcendence) that does
not present itself and does not let itself be appropriated (or simulated),
that does not even give itself-but rather to which being is abandoned. The
excess to which sovereignty is exposed and exposes us is not, in a sense
quite close to the sense in which Heideggerian Being "is not," that is, in
the sense in which the Being of the finite being is less what makes it be
than what leaves it abandoned to such an ex-position. The Being of .the
finite being exposes it to the end of Being.
Thus, exposure to the NOTHING of sovereignty is the opposite of the
movement of a subject who would reach the limit of nothingness (and this
constitutes, at bottom, the permanent movement of the Subject, indefinitely
devouring in itself the nothingness represented by everything that is not for
''
, I
itself; in the end, this is the autophagy of truth). "In" the "NOTHING" or
in nothing-in sovereignty-being is "outside itself'; it is in an exteriority
i
that is impossible to recapture, or perhaps we should say that it is of this
I, exteriority, that it is of an outside that it cannot relate to itself, but with
I'
Ii
which it entertains an essential and incommensurable relation. This relation
prescribes the place of the singular being. This is why the "inner experience"
/ii ' of which Bataille speaks is in no way "interior" or "subjective," but is
1,[ ,:
indissociable from the experience of this relation to an incommensurable
f
1:1
outside. Only community furnishes this relation its spacing, its rhythm.
/ii:·,1
:!i•1:
127
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 19
In this sense, Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first,
or most acutely, the modern experience of community as neither a work
to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space itself, and the
spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self. The crucial
point of this experience was the exigency, reversing all nostalgia and all
communal metaphysics, of a "clear consciousness" of separation-that is
to say of a "clear consciousness" (in fact the Hegelian self-consciousness
itself, but suspended on the limit of its access to self) of the fact that
immanence or intimacy cannot, nor are they ever to be, regained.
For this very reason, however, the exigency of "clear consciousness" is
everything but that abandonment of community that would favor, for exam-
ple, a reversion to the positions of the individual. The individual as such
is only a thing, 13 and the thing, for Bataille, can be defined as the being
without communication and without community. Clear consciousness of
the communal night-this consciousness at the extremity of consciousness
that is also the suspension of Hegelian desire (of consciousness's desire for
recognition), the finite interruption of infinite desire, and the infinite syn-
cope of finite desire (sovereignty itself: desire outside desire and mastery
outside itself)-this "clear" consciousness, then, cannot take place else-
where than in community, or rather it can only take place as the com-
munication of community: both as what communicates within community,
and as what community communicates. 14
This consciousness-or this communication-is ecstasy: which is to say
that such a consciousness is never mine, but to the contrary, I only have
it in and through the community. This resembles, almost to the point that
one might confuse it with, what in other contexts one might call a "collective
unconscious"-a consciousness that perhaps more closely resembles what
can be located throughout Freud as the ultimately collective essence of what
he calls the unconscious. But it is not an unconscious-that is to say it is
not the reverse side of a subject, nor its splitting. It has nothing to do with
the subject's structure as self: it is clear consciousness at the extremity of
its clarity, where consciousness of self turns out to be outside the self of
consciousness.
Community, which is not a subject, and even less a subject (conscious
or unconscious) greater than "myself," does not have or possess this
consciousness: community is the ecstatic copsciousness qf the__}}jght of ,
immanence, insofar - ...as-such
, . . . a·corrsciotisnes·s
. --is ... ,the
,. inter:i:µ_ption
·- of self- Y
__________
consciousness:--
........-"' ..
'. -- .
***
Bataille knew better than anyone-he alone pioneered the pathways of such
a knowledge-what exceeds the formation of a simple connection between
1r1:
:H•··
11'
:1;J
128
20 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
ecstasy and community, what makes each one the locus of the other, or
again, according to an atopical topology, why the circumscription of a
community, or better its areality (its nature as area, as formed space), is
not a territory, but the areality of an ecstasy, 15 just as, reciprocally, the
form of an ecstasy is that of a community.
However, Bataille himself remained suspended, so to speak, between the
two poles of ecstasy and community. The reciprocity of these two poles
consists in the fact that, even as they give rise to one another-by arealizing
one another-each limits the other, and this produces another "arealiza-
tion," a suspension of the immanence that their connection nonetheless
implies. This double arealization institutes the resistance to fusion, to the
work of death, and this resistance is the fact of being-in-common as such:
without this resistance, we would never be in common very long, we would
very quickly be "realized" in a unique and total being. For Bataille the
pole of ecstasy remained linked to the fascist orgy, however, or at least to
the festival (whose element of ambiguous nostalgia returned, after him, in
1968) to the extent that it represented ecstasy in terms of the group and
the political order.
The pole of community was, for Bataille, bound up with the idea of
communism. This included, in spite of everything, themes of justice and
equality; without these themes, regardless of the way one chooses to tran-
scribe them, the communitarian enterprise can only be a farce. In this
respect at least, communism remained an unsurpassable exigency, or, as
Bataille wrote, "In our times the moral effect of communism is predom-
inant" (O.C. 8:367). Nor did he ever stop saying, even as he was analyzing
communism's negating relation to sovereignty, "It is without doubt desirable
that differences be effaced; it is desirable that a genuine equality, a genuine
indifferentiation be established," and he added right away, "But if it is
possible that in the future men will be less and less interested in their
difference from others, this does not mean that they will stop being inter-
ested in what is sovereign" (0.C. 8:323).
Now, other than by way of a clause of this kind, it was impossible for
him to link the forms of sovereignty-or ecstasy-to the egalitarian com-
munity, indeed to community in general. These forms-essentially the sov-
ereignty of lovers and that of the artist, the one and the other and the one
in the other set apart from the orgiastics of fascism, but also from com-
munist equality-could not but appear to him as ecstasies, and if not
properly speaking "private" (what could such a thing mean?), then at least
isolated, without any hold-any noticeable or articulable hold in any case-
on the community into which they nonetheless had to be woven, arealized,
or inscribed, lest they lose, fundamentally, their sovereign value.
l
r[ THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY D 21
\
l Community refusing itself ecstasy, ecstasy withdrawing from community,
and both in the very gesture through which each effects its own commu-
nication: one might suppose that this decisive difficulty explains the fact
that La Souverainete remained unfinished and that The Theory of Religion
went unpublished. In both cases, the enterprise ended up falling short of
the ecstatic community it had set out to think. Of course, to not reach an
end was one of the exigencies of Bataille's endeavor, and this went hand
in hand with the refusal of project to which a thinking of community seems
inexorably linked. But he hims.elf knew that there is no pure nonproject
("One cannot say outright: this is play, this is a project, but only: the play,
the project dominates in a given activity" [0. C. 7 :220]). And in La Sou-
verainete, even if play strives for dominance, Bataille indeed sets himself
a project, one that never gets formulated as such. As for the share of play,
it tends inevitably away from the project and in general from the very
thinking of community. Although the latter was Bataille's sole concern, in
accordance with his experience (with that terminal experience of the modern
age, which marks its limit, and which might be summarized as follows:
outside of community, there is no experience), he was in the end, in the
face of the "immense failure" of political, .religious, and military history,
able to oppose only a subjective sovereignty of lovers and of the artist-
and with this, also the exception of darting "heterogenous" flashes cleanly
split from the "homogenous" order of society, with which they do not
communicate. In parallel fashion, without wanting to and without the-
matizing it, he arrived at an almost pure opposition between "desirable"
equality and an imperious and capricious freedom quite like sovereignty,
with which in fact it could be confused. 16 It could never really be a question,
for example, of freedom desiring desirable equality. That is, it was not a
question of a community that would open up, in and of itself, at the heart
of being-in-common, the areality of an ecstasy.
Bataille had nonetheless written, much earlier (before 1945 in any case):
I can imagine a community with as loose a form as you will-even
formless: the only condition is that an experience of moral freedom
be shared in common, and not reduced to the flat, self-cancelling,
self-denying meaning of particular freedom. (O.C. 6:252)
He also wrote:
There can be no knowledge without a community of researchers,
nor any inner experience without the community of those who live
it. ... Communication is a fact that is not in any way added onto
human reality, but rather constitutes it. (0.C. 5:37)
ll!if!!'.,
1
1: 1
,1":.
·i".
22 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
(These lines follow a quotation from Heidegger, and the term
"human reality" repeats Corbin's translation of Dasein as "realite
humaine.'')
And yet, in a paradoxical but apparently ineluctable way, the theme of
community grows indistinct in his writings from the period of La Souver-
ainete. At a profound level, the problematic no doubt remains the same as
in the earlier texts. But it is as though the communication of each being
with NOTHING were beginning to prevail over the communication between
beings, or as if it were necessary to give up trying to show that in both
cases it was a question of the same thing.
It is as though Bataille, despite the constancy of his concern and inten-
tions, was led nonetheless to endure the extremity of the distressed world
in which he lived-this world at war, torn apart by .an atrocious negation
of community and a mortal conflagration of ecstasy. In this severe affliction
he no longer saw any face, any schema, or even any simple point of reference
for community, now that the figures of religious or mystical communities
belonged to the past and the too human face of communism had crumbled.
In a certain way, this world is still our world, and the hasty variations,
often rough drafts, always heavily humanistic, that have been sketched out
around the theme of community since the war have not changed the essential
givens, and may in fact have aggravated them. The emergence and our
increasing consciousness of decolonized communities has not profoundly
modified this state of affairs, nor has today's growth of unprecedented
forms of being-in-common-through channels of information as well as
through what is called the "multiracial society" -triggered any genuine
renewal of the question of community.
But if this world, even though it has changed (and Bataille, among
others, was no stranger to the change), proposes no new figure of com-
munity, perhaps this in itself teaches us something. We stand perh_::tp~_ t?.
learn from this that it can no longer l::J_e .c:1..matter of figi,iring or. modeling ___
·a:toi:nmunitarian essence in order to presi;:p.t it to ourselves and to celebrate
a
ir,-buCiiiatffis' 'iiia.1te'traffie"i·ofihfnking com~unity, that is, of thinking
v its Iti1Tstent and possibly still unheard demand, beyond communitarian .
' models or.. remodelings~
.. . - . -·- -· ·-
~
- ideologies of communication. What is more, the equivalence between this
Moreover, this world no longer even refers back to the closure of com-
i: munist humanism that Bataille was analyzing. It refers to a "totalitari-
anism" that Bataille could never have suspected as such, limited as he was
by the conditions of the cold war and haunted as he was by the obscure
but persistent idea that in spite of everything the promise of community
lay in the direction of communism. But for us, by now beyond even the
"totalitarianism" that was to be the monstrous realization of this promise,
129
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 23
there remains only the play of imperialisms against the background of still
another empire, or another techno-economical imperative, and the social
forms that such an imperative creates. It is no longer even a question of
community. _13ut this is also because the techno-economic::al organizatiEm.-or
"making operaf10naJ?L. o:f- our- w0rld-has....taken .-·ove{,. even inheriJ~d, __the...
,.,...,.
plans-for··a·commi.mitarian organizatfon: ffis still"e·ssentially a matter of t} ,......._
work:.,ot.:-op.eratio:ri or operativity. . . ... ·-·· ----·
It is in this sense that the exigency of community is still unheard and
remains to be discovered and thought. We know at least that the very terms
of the promise of communitarian work already, in themselves, missed the
unheard "meaning" of "community," 17 and that in sum the communitarian
project as such participates in the "immense failure."
We know this in part thanks to Bataille-but we must henceforth also
know it in part against him. But this time it is not a question of measuring
our experience against the different experience of Bataille's time, but rather
against a limit we must ultimately acknowledge, a limit that prescribed the
difficulty and the paradox at which his thinking came to a halt. This limit
is itself the paradox: namely, the paradox of a thinking magnetically
attracted toward community and yet governed by the theme of the sover-
eignty of a subject. For Bataille, as for us. all, a thin!<ing of the. subjecL .:~
.........
thwarts a thinking of community.. .
- ·or course, the. ;~rd-;;s~bj~~t;, i~ Bataille's text might be no more than
a word. And, no doubt, the concept he had of it was neither the ordinary
notion of "subjectivity" nor the metaphysical concept of a self-presence
as the subjectum of representation. In Inner Experience, indeed, he defines
it thus: "Oneself is not the subject isolating itself from the world, but a
place of communication, of fusion of the subject and the object" (O.C.
5:21). This will not prevent him, in La Souverainete, from speaking, for
example, of "that instantaneous jouissance from which proceeds the sub-
ject's presence of itself" (0.C. 8:395). The first of these sentences does not
suffice to correct or complicate the second in a way that is commensurate
with what is at stake. The "place of communication" can in the last analysis
still be determined as presence-to-self: for example, as the presence-to-self
of communication itself, something that would find an echo in certain
place and a "fusion of the subject and the object"-as if there were never
communication between subject and object-leads Bataille back to the core
of a constant thematic in speculative idealism. With "object" and "fusion,"
with "the object of consciousness" becoming "the object of self con-
sciousness, that is to say an object also suppressed as object, as concept," 18
what disappears, or rather what cannot appear is both the other and com-
munication. For the other of a communication becomes the object of a
 130
24 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
subject-even and perhaps especially as "suppressed object or concept"-
as in the Hegelian relation between consciousnesses (unless one undertakes,
with Bataille and beyond him, a reading that strains the text). This other
is no longer an other, but an object of a subject's representation (or, in a
more complicated way, the representative object of another subject for the
subject's representation). Communication and the alterity that is its. con-
i dition can, in principle,_1ta:~=-c:,r1Ty_an·Tnstriimental ·a:nct··n:oflin ontological
. ' role and status "h1 ,i3hinking that~ ~ie\VS~ the s~bTect as. the--neiatlv:c~,}ut
·· specular identity of the object,_Jhat is, as an ~r:iority without alterity'.-
The subject cannot be"·outsid~ itself: this is even ;_;h~t ;ltirriateiy-c:i"ei'lnes' '
"or
··If:..:that its outside a.rid airits ''alienations·,, "'exfraneousiiess" slioufrfin
the_e_iia be suppressed by and subtated in it, 11: is alioiefher"dffferent-with
the being of communication. The being-c~mmuni~"ating (and not the sub-
ject-representing), or if one wants to risk saying it, communication as the
predicament of being, as "transcendental," is above all being-outside-itself.
19
The "Hegelianism without reserve" that Derrida finds in Bataille can-
not not be subject, in the end, to the Hegelian law of a reserve always
more powerful than any abandonment of reserve; a reserve that is in fact
the sublation of the Subject reappropriating itself in presence-this is its
jouissance, and its instant-until it attains to sovereignty, NOTHING, and
community.
Properly speaking, Bataille had no concept of the subject. But, at least
up to a certain point, he allowed the communication exceeding the subject
to relate back to a subject, or to institute itself as subject (for example-
at least this is a hypothesis that will have to be examined as contradicting
the one that I will treat later in regard to Bataille's writing-as subject of
the literary production and communication of Bataille's own texts).
The historical and the theoretical limits are intertwined. It is not sur-
prising that at this limit the only thing to respond to the communal obsession
was an accursed isolation of lovers and of the artist. The sole answer, in
a tragic mode, to the haunting experience of a communality that had just
proven to lead directly to works of death. Bataille's lovers are also, at the
limit, a subject and an object-where the subject, moreover, is always the
!' man, and the object always the woman, due no doubt to a very classical
manipulation of sexual difference into an appropriation of self by self.
(However, on another register and in another reading of Bataille's text, it
is not certain that love and jouissance do not pertain essentially to the
woman-and to the woman in man. To discuss this it would be necessary
to consider Bataille's writing [ecriture]2°, something I cannot do here, inas-
much as I am for the moment considering only its "themes.") Community
could only obey an analogous model, and consequently, albeit simplifying
a little, though barely, either a fascist or a communist model. Bataille must
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY D 25
have sensed this, and having sensed it he secretly, discretely, and even
without knowing it himself, gave up the task of thinking community in
the proper sense.
That is to say he gave up thinking the sharing [partage] of community
and the sovereignty in the sharing or shared sovereignty, shared between
Daseins, between singular existences that are not subjects and whose rela-
tion-the sharing itself-is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an
object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is under-
stood to exist between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves
constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced,
by the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, >--
-infinitely ·olner-T6r-1lie--Sul:i)ect -of their fusion, which is engulfed in the
sharing, in the ecstasy of the sharing: "communicating" by not "com-
muning." These "places of communication" are no longer places of fusion,
even though in them one passes from one to the other; they are defined
and exposed by their dislocation. Thus, the communication of sharing would
be this very dis-location.
***
In what would appear to be a dialectical move, I might say the following:
Bataille thought nothing else but this very thing he gave up thinking. Which
would mean that in the end he thought it to the limit-at and to its limit,
and at the limit of his thought (and one never thinks anywhere else). And
what he thus had to think at his limit is what he leaves for us to think in
our turn.
In reality, my observations constitute neither a critique of nor a reser-
vation about Bataille, but an attempt to communicate with his experience
rather than simply draw from the stock of his knowledge or from his theses.
This involved simply moving along a limit that is our own: his, mine, that
of our time, that of our community. At the place where Bataille assigned
the subject, at this place of the subject-or on its reverse side-in place of
communication and in the "place of communication," there is indeed some-
thing, and not nothing: our limit lies in not really having a name for this
"something" or for this "someone." Is it even a question of having a true
name for this singular being? This is a matter that can be raised only much
later on. For the moment, let us say that in lieu of a name it is necessary
to mobilize words, so as to set the limit of our thinking back in motion.
What "there is" in place of communication is neither the subject nor
communal being, but community and sharing.
But this still says nothing. Perhaps, in truth, there is nothing to say.
Perhaps we should not seek a word or a concept for it, but rather recognize
in thellic5ugnCof"Community-a _ theoreti_c~l e:x~e?s. J<?-r: _. n.!(?£_(?_:p;~c:_isc:_ly,,_~~...

26 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
excess in relation to the theoretical) that would oblige IJ.S._.to_adgp.t-.anot.her
praxis of discourse an_d communit~h-ou~~~-~s_t_~x.. to sax.J.his,
because ''lang_t1_a,gt!_aJ9-1:1,ejndicates_,__au_heJ1@LJ!!~~-2':'~~~?..1!.rn~t wh~
it is no longer -~l~!E~I!!.:'..'..:.!._Which means here that only a discourse of
community, exhausting itself, can indicate to the community the sovereignty
of its sharing (that is to say neither present to it nor signify to it its
communion). An ethics and a politics of discourse and writing are evidently
implied here. What such a discourse should or can be, how and by whom
in society it should and can be held, indeed what holding such a discourse
would call for in terms of the transformation, revolution, or resolution of
that society (for example, who is writing here? where? for whom? a "phi-
losopher," a "book," a "publishing house," "readers"-are these suited,
as such, to communication?): this is what we will have occasion to look
into. This is nothing other than the question of literary communism, or at
least of what I am trying to designate with this clumsy expression: something
that would be the sharing of community in and by its writing, its literature.
I shall come to this in the second part of the book.
From here on, our aim will be to approach this question with Bataille,
because of Bataille-as well as others; but as you will have understood, it
is not a question of producing a commentary on Bataille, nor a commentary
'-./ on anyone: for community has still not been thought. Nor am I claiming,
on the contrary, t6 forge· akirie the new discourse ·of community. Neither
discourse nor isolation is what is at stake here. I am trying to indicate, at
its limit, an experience-not, perhaps, an expe~i;~ci'iiiafwe-·havii, b~t a;~
experience ·that makes us be. To say that community has not yet been
thought is to say that it tries our thinking, and that it is not an object for
it. And perhaps it does not have to become one.
In any case, what resists commentary in Bataille's thought is what
exceeded his thought and exceeds ours-and what for this reason demands
our thought: the sharing of community, the mortal truth that we share and
that shares us. Thus, what Bataille wrote of our relation to "the religious
and royal edifice of the past" is valid of our relation to Bataille himself:
"We can only go farther." 22 Nothing has yet been said: we must expose
ourselves to what has gone unheard in community.
* **
Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting
to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself. Which does
not mean my existence reinvested in or by community, as if community
were another subject that would sublate me, in a dialectical or communal
mode. Community does not sub/ate the finitude it exposes. Community
itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the community of finite
131
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 27
beings, and as such it is itself a finite community. In other words, not a
limited community as opposed to an infinite or absolute community, but
a community ojfinitude!J:i~~aus~finit1:1:de "is" C()mmunitarian, and b~<:c1.;1,se
finitude alone is communit.arian.
-refng:.:fri=common does not mean a higher form of substance or subject
taking charge of the limits of separate individualities. As an individual, I
am closed off from all community, and it would not be an exaggeration
to say that the individual-if an absolutely individual being could ever
exist-is infinite. The limit of the individual, fundamentally, does not con-
cern it, it simply surrounds it (and escapes the logic of the limit I was
describing above: but since one cannot escape this logic, because it resists
and because it makes community resist, there is no individual).
Howevt!r.,_tl:!.t;! singular being, which. is not tne iridividffaT, -is the finite ;~ ··
~ a t thethematic..of individ~-atio~ lacked," as it passed· f~on:i a certain-
Romanticism to Schopenhauer and to Nietzsche, 23 was a consideration of
singularity, to which it nonetheless came quite close. Individuation detaches
closed off entities from a formless ground-whereas only communication,
contagion, or communion constitute the being of individuals. But singu-
larity does not proceed from such a detaching of clear forms or figures
(nor from what is linked to this operation: the scene of form and ground,
appearing [l'apparaftre] linked to appearance [l'apparence] and the slippage
of appearance into the aesthetizing nihilism in which individualism always
culminates). Singularity perhaps does not proceed from anything. It is not
a work resulting from an operation. There is no process of "singulariza-
tion," and singularity is neither extracted, nor produced, nor derived. Its
birth does not take place from out of or as an effect of" on the contrary,
it provides the measure according to which birth, as such, is neither a
production nor a self-positioning, the measure according to which the infi-
nite birth of finitude is not a process that emerges from a ground (fond)
or from a fund (fonds) of some kind. The "ground" is itself, through itself
and as such, already the finitude of singularities.
It is a groundless "ground," less in the sense that it opens up the gaping
chasm of an abyss than that it is made up only of the network, the inter-
weaving, and the sharing of singularities: Ungrund rather than Abgrund,
but no less vertiginous. There is nothing behind singularity-but there is,
outside it and in it, the immaterial and material space that distributes it
and shares it out as singularity, distributes and shares the confines of other
singularities, or even more exactly distributes and shares the confines of
singularity-which is to say of alterity-between it and itself.
A singular being does not emerge or rise up against the background of
a chaotic, undifferentiated identity of beings, or against the background
of their unitary assumption, or that of a becoming, or that of a will. A
 132
28 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning),
with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at
the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always
shared, always exposed. This appearing (apparaftre) is not an appearance
ii (apparence); it is on the contrary the at once glorious and destitute appear-
I,'I ing (paraftre) of being-finite itself. (The "ground" is the finitude of Being:
1,
'I it is what Bataille was not entirely in a position to understand in Heidegger-
11,
L]: and it is why Heidegger, with or without a reading of Bataille, was never
;[!
quite in a position to be troubled by "communication.") The essence of
I
I Being as being-finite is inscribed by finitude a priori as the sharing of
i
singularities.
Community means, consequently, that there is no singular being without
another singular being, and that there is, therefore, what might be called,
in a rather inappropriate idiom, an originary or ontological "sociality"
that in its principle extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social
' being (the zoon politikon is secondary to this community). For, on the one
hand, it is not obvious that the community of singularities is limited to
' "man" and excludes, for example, the "animal" (even in the case of "man"
it is not a fortiori certain that this community concerns only "man" and
not also the "inhuman" or the "superhuman," or, for example, if I may
say so with and without a certain Witz, "woman": after all, the difference
between the sexes is itself a singularity in the difference of singularities).
On the other hand, if social being is always posited as a predicate of man,
community would signify on the contrary the basis for thinking only some-
thing like "man." But this thinking would at the same time remain depen-
dent upon a principial determination of community, namely, that there is
no communion of singularities in a totality superior to them and immanent
to their common being.
In place of such a communion, there is communication. Which is to
say, in very precise terms, that finitude itself is nothing; it is neither a
ground, nor an essence, nor a substance. But it appears, it presents itself,
it exposes itself, and thus it exists as communication. In order to designate
this singular mode of appearing, this specific phenomenality, which is no
doubt more originary than any other (for it could be that the world appears
to the community, not to the individual), we would need to be able to say
that finitude co-appears or compears (com-paraft) and can only compear:
in this formulation we would need to hear that finite being always presents
itself "together," hence severally; for finitude always presents itself in being-
in-common and as this being itself, and it always presents itself at a hearing
and before the judgment of the law of community, or, more originarily,
before the judgment of community as law.
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 29
Communication consists before all else in this sharing and in this com-
pearance (com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the
interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-in-com-
mon-precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common being. The
finite-being exists first of all according to a division of sites, according to
an extension-partes extra partes-such that each singularity is extended
(in the sense that Freud says: "The psyche is extended"). It is not enclosed
in a form-although its whole being touches against its singular limit-but
it is what it is, singular being (singularity of being), only through its
extension, through the areality that above all extroverts it in its very being-
whatever the degree or the desire of its "egoism"-and that makes it exist
only by exposing it to an outside. This outside is in its turn nothing other
than the exposition of another areality, of another singularity-the same
other. This exposure, or this exposing-sharing, gives rise, from the outset,
to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language
(though it gives to this latter its first condition of possibility). 24 Finitude
compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community.
Under these conditions, communication is not a bond. The metaphor of
the "social bond" unhappily superimposes upon "subjects" (that is to say,
objects) a hypothetical reality (that of the "bond") upon which some have
attempted to confer a dubious "intersubjective" nature that would have the
virtue of attaching these objects to one another. This would be the economic
link or the bond of recognition. But compearance is of a more originary
order than that of the bond. It does not set itself up, it does not establish
itself, it does not emerge among already given subjects (objects). It consists
in the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us )-a formula
in which the and does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition. y\:'liat Js __
exposed in compearance is the following, and we must learn to read it in
1![Its._p9_,5sible· co~binatj_ons: "you. (are/and/is) (entirely other than) I~'.. \,,
( "toi [e(s)t] [tout autre quej rnoi"). Or again, more simply: you shares me
(''toipartagemoF\ .. .
· -Only in this communication are singular beings given-without a bond
amTwiiliout communion, equally distant from any notio~ of connection
or joining from the outside and from any notion of a common and fusional
interiority. Communication is the constitutive fact of an exposition to the
outside that defines singularity. In its being, as its very being, singularity
is exposed to the outside. By virtue of this position or this primordial
structure, it is at once detached, distinguished, and communitarian. Com-
munity is the presentation of the detachment (or retrenchment) of this
distinction that is not individuation, but finitude compearing.
(Rousseau was the first to conceive of this: in his thinking, society comes
about as the bond and as the separation between those who, in "the state

30 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
of nature," being without any bond, are nonetheless not separated or iso-
lated. The "societal" state exposes them to separation, but this is how it
exposes "man," and how it exposes him to the judgment of his fellows.
Rousseau is indeed in every sense the thinker par excellence of compearance:
it may be that a paranoiac obsession is merely the reverse side-morbid
because detained in subjectivity-of the communitarian assignation.)
What makes singularities communicate is not to be confused with what
Bataille calls their lacerations. True, what tears apart is the presentation
of finitude in and by community-the presentation of the triple mourning
I must go through: that of the death of the other, that of my birth, and
that of my death. Community is the carrying out of this triple mourning
(I would not go so far as to say that it is the "work" of this triple mourning,
or in any case it is not simply this: there is something broader and less
productive to the carrying through of mourning). What is lacerated in this
way is not the singular being: on the contrary, this is where the singular
being compears. Rather, it is the communal fabric, it is immanence that
is lacerated. And yet this laceration does not happen to anything, for this
fabric does not exist. There is no tissue, no flesh, no subject or substance
of common being, and consequently there is no laceration of this being.
But there is sharing out.
Properly speaking, there is no laceration of the singular being: there is
no open cut in which the inside would get lost in the outside (which would
presuppose an initial "inside," an interiority). The laceration that, for
Bataille, is exemplary, the woman's "breach," is ultimately not a laceration.
It remains, obstinately, and in its most intimate folds, the surface exposed
to the outside. (While the obsession with the breach in Bataille's text indeed
indicates something of the unbearable extremity at which communication
comes into play, it also betrays an involuntarily metaphysical reference to
an order of interiority and immanence, and to a condition involving the
passage of one being into an other, rather than the passage of one through
the exposed limit of the other.)
"Laceration" consists only in exposure: the entire "inside" of the sin-
gular being is exposed to the "outside" (and it is thus that the woman
serves as an example, or limit-which is the same thing here-of com-
munity). There is laceration of nothing, with nothing; there is rather com-
pearance before NOTHING (and, before NOTHING, one can only compear).
Once again, neither being nor community is lacerated: the being of _c::om-
,-J munity is the exposure of singularities. · ·······-
. a
The open mouth isno'i' lac~ration .. either. It exposes to the "outside"
an "inside" that, without this exposition, would not exist. Words do not
"come out" of the throat (nor from the "mind" "in" the head): they are
formed in the mouth's articulation. This is why speech-including silence-
133
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 31
is not a means of communication but communication itself, an exposure
(similar to the way the Inuit Eskimos sing by making their own cries resonate
in the open mouth of a partner). The speaking mouth does not transmit,
does not inform, does not effect any bond; it is-perhaps, though taken
at its limit, as with the kiss-the beating of a singular site against other
singular sites: "I speak, and from then on I am-the being in me is-
outside myself and in myself." ( 0. C. 8: 197)
No doubt the Hegelian desire for recognition is already operative here.
Nevertheless, before recognition, there is knowing: knowing without knowl-
edge, and without "consciousness," that I am first of all exposed to the
other, and exposed to the exposure of the other. Ego sum expositus: on
closer inspection one might discern here a paradox, namely that behind
Cartesian evidence-that evidence so certain that the subject cannot not
have it and that it need not be proven in any way-there must lie not some
nocturnal bedazzlement of the ego, not some existential immanence of a
self-affection, but solely community-the community about which Des-
cartes seems to know so little, or nothing at all. In this respect the Cartesian
subject would form the inverse figure of the experience of community and
of singularity. The Cartesian subject knows himself to be exposed, and he
knows himself because he is exposed (does not Descartes present himself
as his own portrait?). 25
* * *
This is why community cannot arise from the domain of work. One does
not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience
of finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would
presuppose that the common being, as such, be objectifiable and producible
(in sites, persons, buildings, discourses, institutions, symbols: in short, in
subjects). Products derived from operations of this kind, however grandiose
they might seek to be and sometimes manage to be, have no more com-
munitarian existence than the plaster busts of Marianne.
Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchet has called "unwork-
ing," referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from
the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or
with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Com-
munity is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension
that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings,
nor can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work
or even an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their
being-their being suspended upon its limit. Communication is the unwork-
ing of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional. 26
134
32 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
The unworking of community takes place around what Bataille for a
very long time called the sacred. Yet he came around to saying, "What I
earlier called the sacred, a name that is perhaps purely pedantic ... is fun-
damentally nothing other than the unleashing of passions" ( 0. C. 7: 371 ).
If this "unleashing of passions" is only partially represented by the
violent and unbridled movement of a free subjectivity disposed toward the
sovereign destruction of all things as toward its consumption in NOTHING,
and even though as a characterization of the sacred it fails to illuminate
the community through which passion is unleashed, it nevertheless remains
the direction always privileged by Bataille. It furnishes, as Erotism puts it,
the "awful sign" by which our impossible truth might be recognized, at
least from afar. But it is not at all sure that this privilege is not itself
submitted to an ultimate reserve (or sublation) of the Subject: the sovereignly
subjective annihilation of subjectivity itself. A kind of incandescent nihilism
carries the subject to its point of fusion. This still recalls Hegel, and yet
it is no longer Hegel. It is no longer the State, but it is still a work of
death. Bataille sees its fascinating aspect in Sade, who proposed community
as the republic of crime. But the republic of crime must also be the republic
of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them-the sacrifice
of the sacrificers unleashed in passion. Thus, even though Bataille very
often affirmed a community founded in sacred separation, separation rep-
resenting the rupture of passion, he was nonetheless led (because he felt
all too strongly the at once liberating and overwhelming exigency of com-
munication) to recognize in community, to the contrary, Sade's limit: the
phrase "I speak, and from then on I am ... outside myself and in myself"
is the phrase that decides irrevocably and fundamentally Bataille's refutation
of Sade's "crude error," which he states as follows: "The world is not, as
Sade ultimately represented it, composed of himself and things" (O.C.
8:297).
Hence, if the inoperative community is to be found in the vicinity of
the "sacred," it is only inasmuch as the "unleashing of passions" is not
the free doing of a subjectivity and freedom is not self-sufficiency. (Up to
a certain point, Bataille failed to recognize to what extent a very classical
and very subjective concept of freedom weighed on his thought.) But the
"unleashing of passions" is of the order of what Bataille himself often
designated as "contagion," another name for "communication." What is
communicated, what is contagious, and what, in this manner-and only
in this manner-is "unleashed," is the passion of singularity as such. The
singular being, because it is singular, is in the passion-the passivity, the
suffering, and the excess-of sharing its singularity. The presence of the
other does not constitute a boundary that would limit the unleashing of
"my" passions: on the contrary, only exposition to the other unleashes my
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 33
passions. Whereas the individual can know another individual, juxtaposed
to him both as identical to him and as a thing-as the identity of a thing-
the singular being does not know, but rather experiences his like (son
semblable): '~,I.ieing i~ never me alone, it is. always me and those like__me"
(0. C. 8:297). This i_s_ it~ passion. Singularity i~-- the pc15,sion of being. · ,.,
-The like-being bears the revelation of sharing: he or she does not resemble
me as a portrait resembles an original. It was this type of resemblance that
constituted the initial given of the classic and tortuous problematic (or
impasse) of the "recognition of the other" (supposedly opposed to the
"knowledge of the thing"). And one has to ask whether, above and beyond
the Husserlian alter ego, one might not still pick up traces of this prob-
lematic and this impasse in Freud, Heidegger, and Bataille, restraining
thought, as it were, at the threshhold of community, in a certain specularity
of the recognition of the other through death. However, it is in the death
of the other, as I have said, that community enjoins me to its ownmost
register, but this does not occur through the mediation of specular rec-
ognition. For I do not recognize myself in the death of the other-whose
limit nonetheless exposes me irreversibly.
Heidegger leads us farthest here: "The dying of Others is not something
that we experience in an authentic sense; at most we are always just "there-
alongside." ... By its very essence, death is in every case mine." 27 Here, the
specular arrangement (of recognition of the self in the other, which pre-
supposes the recognition of the other in oneself, and, consequently, the
agency of the subject) is-if I may say so-turned inside out like a glove:
I recognize that in the death of the other there is nothing recognizable.
And this is how sharing-and finitude-can be inscribed: "The ending
implied in death does not signify a Dasein's Being-at-an-end, but a Being-
toward-the-end of this entity." 28 The similitude of the like-being is made
in the encounter of "beings toward the end" that this end, their end, in
each case "mine" (or "yours"), assimilates and separates in the same limit,
at which or on which they compear.
A like-being resembles me in that I myself "resemble" him: we "resem-
ble~_togi::.ther,if you .'Yill._Jllat is to say, there is no origin~! :i:>r origin_of
'identity. What holds the place of an "origin" is._the sparing of singularities .. _
This means that this "origin"-the origin of community or the originary
community-is nothing other than the limit: the origin is the tracing of
the borders upon which or along which singular beings are exposed. We
are alike because each one of us is exposed to the outside that we are for
ourselves. The like is not the same (le semblable n'est pas le parei[). I do
not rediscover myself, nor do I recognize myself in the other: I experience
the other's c:tJ_terity, or 'f experience-alterity in the other together with the >.,·'"
alteration that "in me" sets my singularity outside me and infinitely.deljmits

34 D THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
.,,x .. Jh. Community is that singular ontological order in which the other and
the same are alike (sont le semblable): that is to say, in the sharing of
identity.
The passion that is unleashed is nothing other than the passion of and
for community, and this passion emerges as the desubjectivization of the
passion for death-that is, as its reversal: for it does not seek jouissance,
being neither the Hegelian desire for recognition, nor the calculated oper-
ation of mastery. 29 It does not seek the self-appropriation of subjective
immanence. Rather, it is what is designated by the doublet of the word
"jouissance," namely joy Uoie). The practice of "joy before death" that
Bataille tried to describe is a ravishing of the singular being that does not
cross over into death (it is not the joy of resurrection, which is the subject's
most inward mediation; it is not a triumph; it is a splendor-this is the
etymological meaning of the word "joy"-though it is a nocturnal
splendor), but rather attains, to the point of touching but without appro-
priating it to itself, the extreme point of its singularity, the end of its
finitude; that is to say the confines upon which compearance with and
before the other occurs, without respite. Joy is possible, it has meaning
and existence, only through community and as its communication.
***
! What is currently in the air-if one is speaking of collective
existence-is the poorest thing one can imagine, and no
representation can be more disconcerting than one that presents
I·
death as the fundamental object of the communal activity of men,
death and not food or the production of the means of
production .... What is tragically religious in the existence of a
community, in formal embrace with death, has become the thing
the most alien to man. No one thinks any longer that the reality of
a common life-which is to say, human existence-depends on the
sharing of nocturnal terrors and the kind of ecstatic spasms that
are spread by death ....
THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT WHICH GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO
COMMUNAL EXISTENCE IS DEATH. 30
***
Yet just as we must not think that community is "lost"-just as Bataille
himself had to tear himself away from this mode of thinking-so it would
be foolish to comment upon and to deplore the "loss" of the sacred only
then to advocate its return as a remedy for the evils of our society (something
Bataille never did, following in this Nietzsche's most profound exigency-
nor did Benjamin, nor Heidegger nor Blanchot, in spite of certain appear-
ances to the contrary here and there). What has disappeared from the
135
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY D 35
sacred-and this means finally all of the sacred, engulfed in the "immense
failure"-reveals rather that community itself now occupies the place of
the sacred. Community is the sacred, if you will: but the sacred stripped
of the sacred. For the sacred-the separated, the set apart-no longer proves
to be the haunting idea of an unattainable communion, but is rather made
up of nothing other than the sharing of community. There is neither an
entity nor a sacred hypostasis of community-there is the "unleashing of
passions," the sharing of singular beings, and the communication of fin-
itude. In passing to its limit, finitude passes "from" the one "to" the
other: this passage makes up the sharing.
Moreover, there is no entity or hypostasis of -community because this
sharing, this passage cannot be completed. Incompletion is its "principle,"
taking the term "incompletion" in an active sense, however, as designating
not insufficiency or lack, but the activity of sharing, the dynamic, if you
will, of an uninterrupted passage through singular ruptures. That is to say,
once again, a workless and inoperative activity. It is not a matter of making,
producing, or instituting a community; nor is it a matter of venerating or
fearing within it a sacred power-it is a matter of incompleting its sharing.
Sharing is always incomplete, or it is beyond completion and incompletion.
For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared. ,1...,
Community is given to us with being and as being, well in advance of
all our projects, desires, and undertakings. At bottom, it is impossible for
us to lose community. A society may be as little communitarian as possible;
it could not happen that in the social desert there would not be, however
slight, even inaccessible, some community. We cannot not compear. Only
the fascist masses tend to annihilate community in the delirium of an
incarnated communion. Symmetrically, the concentration camp-and the
extermination camp, the camp of exterminating concentration-is in essence
the will to destroy community. But even in the camp itself, undoubtedly,
community never entirely ceases to resist this will. Community is, in a
sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence. Consequently,
tcnnmunity-is transcendence: but "t~anscendence," which. no longer .h.as
any '°'sacr~d" meaning, signifying precisely a resistance to immanence (resis-
~./
tance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or
several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity). 31
Community is given to us-or we are given and abandoned to the com-
munity: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be
done or produced. But it is a task, which is different-an infinite task at
the heart of finitude. 32 (A task and a struggle, one that Marx grasped and
Bataille understood. The imperative of the struggle, not to be confused
with a "communist" teleology, intervenes at the level of communication,
as when Lyotard, for example, speaks of the "absolute wrong" done to
 136
36 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY
the one who is exploited and who does not even have the language to
express the wrong done to him, 33 but also-and fundamentally the stakes
are no doubt the same-the imperative emerges at the level of the incom-
mensurable "literary" communication of which I will be speaking.)
***
For Bataille, community was first and finally the community of lovers. 34
Joy is the joy of lovers. This conclusion, if it is one, is ambiguous. As I
have already said, in the face of society, Bataille's lovers present in many
respects the figure of a communion, or of a subject that, if not precisely
Sadian, nonetheless ends up being engulfed alone in its own ecstasy. To
this extent, Bataille's celebration of lovers, or what one might call his
passion for lovers, reveals the inaccessible character both of their own
community and of another community, one shared not by one couple, but
by all couples and all the love in a society. As either one of__these figures,
lovers in Bataille thus represent, aside from themselves and their joy, the
despair of "the" community and of the political.35 Ultimately, it is possible
that these lovers remain trapped in the opposition of the "private" and
the "public" -in principle so foreign to Bataille, and yet perhaps insidiously
recurrent in his texts precisely insofar as love seems to expose, in the end,
the whole truth of community, but only by opposing it to every other
plural, social, or collective relation-unless, and this comes down to the
same thing, love is opposed fundamentally to itself, its own communion
being inaccessible to it (according to a tragic dialectic of love conceived on
'( the ground of immanence and visibly connected to the thinking of the
political that works from the same ground). Thus, love would seem to
expose what "real" communism renounced, and that for the sake of which
this communism had to be renounced, but it would thereby leave social
community with only the exteriority of things, of production, and of
exploitation.
In spite of Bataille, and yet with him, we should try to say the following:
love does not expose the entire community, it does not capture or effect
its essence purely and simply-not even as the impossible itself (this model
would still be Christian and Hegelian, although minus the assumption of
love into the objectivity of the State). The kiss, in spite of everything, is
not speech. Of course, lovers speak. But their speech is ultimately impotent,
excessive in that it is excessively poor, a speech in which love is already
mired: "Lovers speak, and their overwhelmed words deflate and inflate at
the same time the sentiment that moves them. For they transfer into duration
something whose truth holds for the instant of a flash" (O.C. 8:500). In
the City, on the other hand, men do not embrace. The religious or political
symbolism of the kiss of peace and of the accolade indeed indicates some-
THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY O 37
thing, but merely a limit, and most often a comical one. (Nevertheless,
social speech-cultural, political, and the like-seems as impoverished as
that of lovers. It is at this point that we should revive the question of
"literature.")
Lovers form neither a society, nor its negative, nor_ its assumption, and
it is indeed in their distance from society in general that Bataille conceives
them: "I can conceive of man as open since the most ancient times to the
possibility of individual love. I need only imagine the subtle relaxing of
the social bond" (0.C. 8:496). Nevertheless, he also represented them as
a society, as another society, one that harbors the impossible and communal
truth that simple society despairs of attaining: "Love unites lovers only in
order to expend, to go from pleasure to pleasure, from delight to delight:
their society is one of consumption, the inverse of the State's, which is one
of acquisition" (0. C. 8: 140). The word "society" here is not-not only, in
any case-a metaphor. It sounds a belated echo (1951), as if stifled or
resigned, of the motif of a society of festival, of expenditure, one of sacrifice
and glory. As if the lovers had preserved this motif, rescuing it in extremis
from the immense failure of the politico-religious, and thus offering love
as a refuge or substitute for lost community.
Now, just as community is not "lost," so there is doubtless no "society
of consumption." There are not two societies, nor is there a more or less
sacred ideal of sociP-ty in community. In society, on the other hand, in
every society and a1 every moment, "community" is in fact nothing other
than a consumption of the social bond or fabric-but a consumption that
occurs in this bond, and in accordance with the sharing of the finitude of
singular beings. Thus lovers are neither a society, nor the community
effected through fusional communion. If lovers harbor a truth of the social
relation, it is neither at a distance from nor above society, but rather in
that, as lovers, they are exposed in the community. They are not the com-
munion that is refused to or purloined from society; on the contrary, they·
expose the fact that communication is not communion.
And yet in the Bataillean representation of lovers, indebted as it is in
this respect to a long tradition-perhaps the entire Western tradition of
amorous passion, but since Romanticism at least clearly in confrontation
with and opposition to the collapse of the· politico-religious-communion
remains a muted but obsessive theme. The sovereignty of lovers is no doubt
nothing other than the ecstasy of the instant; it does not produce a union,
it is NOTHING-but this nothing itself is also, in its "consummation," a
communion.
Bataille knew, however, the limit of love-opposing it, at least at certain
moments, and by a paradoxical reversal, to the sovereign capacity of the
City:
 137
42 0 THE INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY

Bailly's minimal text, stating the title for the issue: "the community, the Chapter 2
number." Already a text, already an act of writing, increasing in number,
summoning writing. Myth Interrupted
At the end of the same year Maurice Blanchot's La communaute ina-
vouable appeared. The first part of this book engaged "La communaute
desoeuvree," in order to "take up a reflection never in fact interrupted
concerning the communist exigency" and "the flaw in language such words
as communism or community seem to contain, if we sense that they carry
something completely other than what could be common to those who
would belong to a whole, to a group."
Nothing is more common to the members of a community, in principle,
than a myth, or·a gr~11p of myths. Myth and community are defined by
·each other, at least in part-but perhaps in totality-and this motivates a
reflection on community accordfog to myth.
A little later, from Berlin, Werner Hamacher asked me to contribute to
a series of works devoted to the question of myth. This resulted in the first
version of "Myth Interrupted." It soon became evident that this was simply
another way of returning to Bataille's "communitarian" exigency, and of
:ri: further prolonging Blanchot's "uninterrupted reflection."
I11·• This reflection cannot be interrupted-indeed, in this it is unlike myth. We know the scene: there is a gathering, and someone is telling a story.
l:i Reflection is the resistance and the insistence of community. Many other We do not yet know whether these people gathered together form an assem-
names should be added to those just mentioned. Their presence must be bly, if they are a horde or a tribe. But we call them brothers and sisters
1:, inferred, or rather what has been written under their names, intercalated because they are gathered together and because they are listening to the
here-a community unavowable because too numerous but also because it same story.
does not even know itself, and does not need to know itself-intercalated, We do not yet know whether the one speaking is from among them or
alternating, shared texts, like all texts, offering what belongs to no one and if he is an outsider. We say that he is one of them, but different from them
returns to everyone: the community of writing, the writing of community. because he has the gift, or simply the right-or else it is his duty-to tell
Including-one day I will try to articulate this, I must-those who neither the story.
write nor read and those who have nothing in common. For in reality, there They were not assembled like this before the story; the recitation has
is no such person. gathered them together. Before, they were dispersed (at least this is what
the story tells us at times), shoulder to shoulder, working with and con-
Translated by Peter Connor
fronting one another without recognizing one another. But one day, one
of them stood still, or perhaps he turned up, as though returning from a
long absence or a mysterious exile. He stopped at a particular place, to
the side of but in view of the others, on a hillock or by a tree that had
been struck by lightning, and he started the narrative that brought together
the others.
He recounts to them their history, or his own, a story that they all know,
but that he alone has the gift, the right, or the duty to tell. It is the story
of their origin, of where they come from, or of how they come from the
Origin itself-them, or their mates, or their names, or the authority figure
among them. And so at the same time it is also the story of the beginning

43
138
44 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
of the world, of the beginning of their assembling together, or of the
beginning of the narrative itself (and the narrative also recounts, on occa-
sion, who taught the story to the teller, and how he came to have the gift,
the right, or the duty to tell it).
He speaks, he recites, sometimes he sings, or he mimes. He is his own
hero, and they, by turns, are the heroes of the tale and the ones who have
the right to hear it and the duty to learn it. In the speech of the narrator,
their language for the first time serves no other purpose than that of
presenting the narrative and of keeping it going. It is no longer the language
of their exchanges, but of their reunion-the sacred language of a foun-
dation and an oath. The teller shares it with them and among them.
***
It is an ancient, immemorial scene, and it does not take place just once,
but repeats itself indefinitely, with regularity, at every gathering of the
hordes, who come to learn of their tribal origins, of their origins in broth-
erhoods, in peoples, or in cities-gathered around fires burning everywhere
in the mists of time. And we do not yet know if the fires are lit to warm
the people, to keep away wild beasts, to cook food, or to light up the face
of the narrator so that he can be seen as he speaks, sings, or mimes the
story (perhaps wearing a mask), or else to burn a sacrifice (perhaps with
his own flesh) in honor of the ancestors, gods, beasts, or men and women
celebrated in the story.
j The story often seems confused; it is not always coherent; it speaks of
'f \ strange powers and numerous metamorphoses; it is also cruel, savage, and
,
1
pitiless, but at times it also provokes laughter. It names things unknown,
'Se,..\- )beings never seen. But those who have gathered together understand ev-
\l.01; \,'c'u. erything, in liste~ing they understand themselves and the world, and the_Y
\ Jr,,. ... ,, understand why 1t w~s necessary for them to come together, and why 1t
-- ·''' was necessary that this be recounted to them.
;),•.{/7·'
***
We know this scene well. More than one storyteller has told it to us, 1 having
gathered us together in learned fraternities intent on knowing what our
origins were. Our societies, they have told us, derive from these assemblies
themselves, and our beliefs, our knowledge, our discourses, and our poems
derive from these narratives.
They have called these narratives myths. The scene that we know so well
is the scene of myth, the scene of its invention, of its recital and its
transmission.
It is not just any scene: it is perhaps the essential scene of all scenes,
of all scenography or all staging; it is perhaps the stage upon which we
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 45
represent everything to ourselves or whereupon we make appear all our
representations, if myth, as Levi-Strauss would have it, is primarily defined
as that with which or in which time turns into space. 2 With myth, the
passing of time takes shape, its ceaseless passing is fixed in an exemplary
place of showing and revealing.
***
And so we also know that this scene is itself mythic.
And much more evidently so, it seems, when it is the scene of the very
birth of myth, for this birth is identical with nothing less than the origin
of human consciousness and speech-Freud himself, whom one might single
out as the last inventor, or rather the last dramatist of this scene, declares
it to be mythic. 3 But the scene is equally mythic when it is simply the
apparently less speculative, more positive scene of the transmission of myth,
or when it is what one might call the ethnologico-metaphysical scene of a
humanity structured in relation to its myths: for what is in question is
always, definitively, the original or principial function of myth. i'.'Iytl:1 is
of and fromJhe origin, it relates back to a mythic foundation, and through
this relation it founds Itself (a consciousness, -a people, a narrative).
-:----- _
It is this foundation
.... --· .. that we know
. .
to be mythic.
..
We
.. . now
. --
know
. . .... that not
only is ani "reconstitution" of the initial surging forth of mythic l)Ower ).(
itserr--'Tnzytli'," \iut also that mythology is our invention, .and that myth
as-siicnTs . an "unlocatable genre." 4 We know-at least up to a certain
point~what the contents of the myths are, but what we do not know is
what the following might mean: that they are myths. Or rather, we know
that although we did not invent the stories (here again, up to a certain
point), we did on the other hand invent the function of the myths that
these stories recount. Humanity represented on the stage of myth, humanity
being born to itself in producing myth-a truly mything humanity becoming
truly human in this mythation: this forms a scene just as fantastical as any
primal scene. All myths are primal scenes, all primal scenes are myths (it
is still Freud playing the role of inventor here). And we also know that the
idea of a "new mythology," the idea of moving on to a new, poetico-
religious foundation, is contemporaneous with the invention or the modern
reinvention of mythology in the romantic epoch. Romanticism itself could
be defined as the invention of the scene of the founding ~ as the·
-simulta,neous awareness of the loss of.the po~er~f this ~yth, ..and"astne )(.
'desire or the will to regain this living p~wer-of'i:Iie"'or1gfo"aricf, at the same-·
time; the origin of this power. Fo_r Nietzsche, who is at 'ieast in part heir.
fo thIS- romantic desire for a ''new mythology," the freely creative power
he likes to credit to the Greeks more than to anyone else stems from the
"mythic feeling of lying freely" :5 the desire for myth is expressly directed
~~; 1 ~ i7
."!.,:·.................., ~,·,.._..,., t7 ~,, ~.~~ :I~ '-•.._.•__ "-·~ ,, v-~·,
 ·"""-f_'•'"
,~
46 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
toward the mythic (fictive) nature of (creative) myth-romanticism, or the
will to (the) power of myth.
This formulation in fact defines, beyond romanticism and even beyond
romanticism in its Nietzschean form, a whole modernity: the whole of that
very broad modernity embracing, in a strange, grimacing alliance, both the
poetico-ethnological nostalgiafor_;minitii:tLmyth(ng humanity gnd the wish--
-to regenerate the old European humanity by resurrecting mosf Its ancient
myths, including ·the relentless staging of these myths: I am referririg;·qf
.~;;>·'
·cou-~se·, to Nazi Illy~tt, 6 _ · · ·
We know all this: it is a knowledge that takes our breath away, leaving
us speechless, as we always are when faced with humanity at such a point
of extremity. We shall never return to the mythic humanity of the primal
scene, no more than we shall ever recover what was signified by the word
""\: .d'
-
"humanity" before the fire of the Aryan myth. We know, moreover, that
these two extremities are bound up with one another, that the invention of
_ ..... ---
myth is b.9.lln,d up with the use of its power. This does not mearilhat from
the-nh1eteenth century onward thinie~s ofiriyth are responsible for Nazism,
but it means that the thinking of myth, of mythic scenography, belongs
of
>(a
with the sta,gi_11g and setting to work (mise en oeuvrefofa. "Volk" a:nd
,,-~~Tub;:jii:i~~~ense that Nazism gave to these terms. MY.th, in. fact, is
always --~'PQ21:!_l~C.ctnd .'..'.millenary'.'-at_ least" according to our version,
acco~ding to the version that our mythic thought gives of the thing caiied
"myth" (for it mi/be.that for others: for "primitives," for example, this
same thing is 'quit~ i;tristqcratic and ephemeral).
In this sense, we no longer have anything to do with myth. I would be
tempted to say we no longer even have the right to speak about it, to be
interested in it. Comprised within the very idea of myth is what one might
call the entire hallucination, or the entire imposture, of the self-conscious-
ness of a modern world that has exhausted itself in the fabulous represen-
tation of its own power. Concentrated within the idea of myth is perhaps
the entire prete~sion on the.pari:-6f the West to appropriate its own origin,
or to take away its secret, so that it can at last identify itself, absolutely,
around its own pronouncement and its own birth. The idea of myth alone
perhaps presents the very Idea of the West, with its perpetual representation
-"' ··ot-thecompillsion to i:'eturn to its own sources in order to re-engender itself
·from them as the. very destiny of humanity. In this sense, I repeat, we no.
longer have anything to do with myth.
***
Unless this is, as often happens, the surest way to let that which we wanted
to be done with proliferate and become even more threatening. It is perhaps
not enough to know that myth is mythic. This knowledge is perhaps too
139
MYTH INTERRUPTED D 47
scant, and is perhaps even-this will have to be verified-strictly speaking
already contained in myth. Perhaps this logic of myth still needs to be
demonstrated in order to understand how it can lead to that extremity of
myth's knowledge of itself and in order to try to conceive what we might
still have to do not with myth, but rather with_ the_ end to which.myth. ___ _ 'y'· ~
inexorably se~gt_§. to_ lead_._ For whether one laments that mythic power is
exhausted or that the will to this power ends in crimes against humanity,
everything leads us to a world in which mythic resources are profoundly
lacking. To think our world in terms of this "lack" might well be an
indispensable task.
Bataille named this state, to which we are doomed, the absence of myth.
For reasons that I shall explain later, I will substitute for this the expression
the. interruption of myth. It is nonetheless true that "the absence of myth"
,!
t
i
[
(the "interruption" of which will designate rather its provenance and its
modality) defines what it is we have arrived at, and what we are confronted
with. But what is at stake in this confrontation is not simply an alternative
between the absence of myth and its presence. If we suppose that "myth"
c:!_esignates, beyond lb!:UP.Yths _themsel ve~_i:-:_y~n beYQ.nd myth, something _
tf
I -----
that cannot simply disa_p11~1;r.,_the .stake.s...w.oµlc;!Jhen consist in myth's pas-
sage to a limit-and
. .
o~to a limit__.w.l:ier:e_my.tlL.itseii.:;o:u[i;[fiejioi
·- ........ ----- ... ...
sorrnicfi-
-·- ---....................
-/
__ _ '' '
l S,!1.£?r~.~~:~r~:~~-~~ji'~ijci~'ct.or_intf!.[r_llp~e:~:.I!1iS hypothesis perhaps says noth-
ing more than what Bataille had in mind when he proposed considering
the absence of myth itself as a myth. Before examining this statement more
closely, one might say at least that it defines, on a formal level, an extremity,
II
an interrupted myth, or a myth in the process of being interrupted.
** *
We must try to proceed to the outermost bounds of this extremity; hence-
forth, we must try to perceive this interruption of myth. Once we have
touched the blinding spot-Blut und Boden, Nacht und Nebel-of myth
set to work (mis en oeuvre), all that remains is to move on to the interrup-
tion of myth. This is not the same thing as what has been called "demy-
thologizing," an activity that distinguishes between "myth" and "faith"
and that depends, moreover, on the possibility of positing something like
"faith," while leaving untouched the essence of myth itself. 7 The notion
of interruption proceeds quite differently.
But before getting to this notion, and in order to get to it, we must first
map out the terrain that leads to the extremity at which it is interrupted.
What needs to be asked, then, is not wh::rt..myth is (and who knows the
·an:swer_t() this qu-estion? My{holog:f~t.5-..c;llli<;_l!SS ite-;dlessly), 8 but ratlier W!rar--- ;a-'
. is involved in what we have been calling "myth" and in what we have·'
·invested, with or without the support ~f positive, histo:ricai, philofo'giCal,
140
48 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
or ethnological mythologies, in what must be called, once again, a myth
_ot' myth, in wh.atever sense we take _the~ ~Q_ri (M-;;~~c)Ver, tlie- formation-or·
:><
an abyssal myth-myth of myth, myth of its absence, and so on-is no
doubt inevitable and inherent in myth itself in that myth, as we have come
to think of it, perhaps says nothing, but says that it says this: myth says
that it says, and says that this is what it says, and in this way organizes
and distributes the world of humanity with its speech.)
We might begin with what myth ended up becoming. After being stripped
simultaneously of its mystery and its absurdity, of its magic and its savagery,
by means of a formidable structural synthesis-which cannot be said to
have "emptied myth of its meaning" unless we add straight away that this
"emptiness of meaning" surely belongs to myth itself-the totality of the
mythic system of humanity then instantly regained, through a kind of
paradoxical reinstitution in the form of a systematic, organizational, com-
binative, and articulative totality, a position or a function that one could
rightfully call "of mythic status." No doubt the langauge of this system
of myths is of another order (as is the language of each myth inasmuch
as a myth is "the totality of its versions"),9 but it is still a primordial
language: the element of an inaugural communication in which exchange
and sharing in general are founded or inscribed. 10
It may be that we have not yet grasped the full extent of the extremity
to which this structural myth of myth has brought us: in the manifold
ambiguity of this appellation lurks at least the suggestion of an ultimate
stage where myth touches its limit and can do away with itself. But if we
have not grasped this it is because the event has remained in some way
hidden within itself, disguised by the "mythic status" that the structural
myth persisted in giving to myth (or else to structure).
What is "mythic status?" What privileges has a tradition of thinking
about myth attached to myth-privileges that the structural analyses of
myth reintroduced, intact or pretty nearly so?
Myth is above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times
founding the intimate being of a community. The Greek muthos-Homer's
muthos, that is, speech, spoken expression-becomes "myth" when it takes
on a whole series of values that amplify, fill, and ennoble this speech, giving
it the dimensions of a narrative of origins and an explanation of destinies
(in the post-Homeric, and then modern, definition of "myth," it matters
little whether one believes in the myth or not, whether one views it dis-
\
trustingly or not). This speech is not a discourse that would come in response
to the inquisitive mind: it comes in response to a waiting rather than to a
question, and to a waiting on the part of the world itself. In myth the
world makes itself known, and it makes itself known through declaration
or through a complete and decisive revelation.
MYTH INTERRUPTED D 49
The greatness of the Greeks-according to the modern age of mythol-
J ogy-is to have lived in intimacy with such speech and to have founded
I
their logos in it: they are the ones for whom muthos and logos are "the
same." 11 This sameness is the revelation, the hatching or blossoming of the
world, of the thing, of being, of man in speech. Such speech presupposes
1
panta plere theon, "all things filled with gods," as Thales is supposed to
l have said. It presupposes an uninterrupted world of presences or an unin-
t terrupted world of truths, or else, for this is already saying too much, it
~f presupposes neither "presence" nor "truth," nor at times even "gods," but
rather a way of binding the world and attaching oneself to it, a religio
whose utterances would be "great speech" (grand parler). 12
I The enunciation of this mythic "great speech"-the "anonymous great
I voice"-belongs in turn to a space in which "exchange, the symbolic func-
i
tion ... play the part of a second nature." 13 There may be no better way
! of defining myth in brief than by saying that it constitutes the second nature
of a great speech. As Schelling put it, myth is "tautegorical" (borrowing
I the word from Coleridge) and not "allegorical": that is, it says nothing
other than itself and is produced in consciousness by the same process that,
in nature, produces the forces that myth represents. Thus, it does not need
I to be interpreted, since it explains itself: "die sich selbst erkliirende Mythol-
ogie, " 14 the mythology that explains or interprets itself. Myth is nature
II communicating itself to man, both immediately-because it communicates
itself---a;d hi-a ~ediated way-because it communicates (it speaks). It is,
insum,-the opposite of a dialectic, or rather its completion; it is b'eyond
t.
thediafectic element. Dialectics, in gen~-ral, is a process that arises from
some given:· The same could be said of its twin, dialogics. And the given
is always in some way the logos or a logos (a logic, a language, any kind
of structure). But myth, being immediate and mediated, is itself the ren-
dition of the logos that it mediates, it is the emergence of its own organ-
ization. One might even say-thereby doing justice to the structual analysis
of myth:=that from its birth (whetfier one locates -this birth in Plato, in
-vrco;inScii:Jegel, or elsewhere) myth has been the name for logos structuring t.,J
itse!J,-or, and this comes down to the same thing, the name for the cosmos
structuring itself in logos.
Even before entering into narrative, myth is made up of an emergence,
it is inaugural. "It is," wrote Maurice Leenhardt, "the speech, the figure,
the act that circumscribes the event at the heart of man, emotive like an "·
infant, before it is a fixed narrative." 15 Thus its initial act (but myth is ' .'
always initial, always about the_ initial) is to represent or rather to present
the living heart of logos. Myth~logy, understood as the invention and the
recitation of myths (though the recitation cannot be distinguished from its
invention), is "lived and living"; in it "are heard words springing from the

50 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
mouth of a humanity present to the world." 16 It is speech live from the
origin, live because it is original and original because it is live. In its first
declamation there arises the dawn, simultaneously, of the world, of gods,
and of men. Myth is therefore much more than a kind of first culture.
Because it is the "original culture,'' it is infinitely more than a culture: it
is transcendence (of gods, of man, of speech, of the cosmos, and so on)
presented immediately, immediately immanent to the very thing it tran-
scends and that it illuminates or consigns to its destiny. Myth is the opening
of a mouth immediately adequate to the closure of a universe.
Thus myth is not composed of just any speech, and it does not speak
just any language. It is the speech and the language of the very things that
manifest themselves, it is the communication of these things: it does not
speak of the appearance or the aspect of things; rather, in myth, their
rhythm speaks and their music sounds. It has been written that "myth and
Sprachgesang (the song of language) are fundamentally one and the same
thing." 17 Myth is very precisely the incantation that gives rise to a world
and brings forth a language, that gives rise to a world in the advent of a
language. It is therefore indissociable from a rite or a cult. Indeed, its
enunciation or recital is itself already a ritual. Mythic ritual is the com-
\) munitarian articulation of mythic speech. -----·· ·- - ·
I' '-···••·-•----····
***
This articulation is not something added on to myth: mythic speech is
communitarian in its essence. A private myth is as rare as a strictly idiomatic
language. Myth arises only from a community and for it: they engender
one another, infinitely and immediately. 18 Nothing is more common, nothing
is more absolutely common than myth. Dialogics can only occur between
those who are situated in the space of exchange or the symbolic function
or both. It is myth that arranges the spaces, and/or symbolizes. Myth
works out the shares and divisions that distribute a community and dis-
tinguish it for itself, articulating it within itself. Neither dialogue nor mon-
ologue, myth is the unique speech of the many, who come thereby to
recognize one another, who communicate and commune in myth.
This is because myth necessarily contains a pact, namely, the pact of
its own recognition: in ::i._single gesture, in _a_s.ingle.sentence,_~m, myth
says what is and say; that we agree tQ sayt_hat thisjs (it also_§.13,ys_,J~fof.~;
what saying is). It does not communicate a knowledge that can be verified
from elsewhere: it is self-communicating (in this respect it is again taute-
gorica[). In other words, along with knowledge, about whatever object it
might be, it communicates also the communication of this knowledge.
Myth communicates the common, the being-common of what it reveals
or what it recites. Consequently, at the same time as each one of its reve-
141
MYTH INTERRUPTED D 51
lations, it also reveals the community to itself and founds it. Myth is always
the myth of community, that is to say, it is always the myth of a com-
munion-the unique voice of the many-capable of inventing and sharing
the myth. There is no myth that does not at least presuppose (when it does
not in fact state it) the myth of the communitarian (or popular) revelation
of myths.
The community of myth is thus properly speaking mything humanity,
humanity acceding to itself. The myth of communion, like communism-
"as the real appropriation of human essence by man and for man, man's
total return to himself as social man" 19-is myth, absolutely and rigorously,
in a total reciprocity of myth and community at the heart of mythic thought
or the mythic world.
(This does not contradict, indeed the contrary is the case, the fact that
myths are at the same time most often about an isolated hero. In one way
or another, this hero makes the community commune-and ultimately he
always makes it commune in the communication that he himself effects
between existence and meaning, between the individual and the people:
"The canonical form of mythic life is precisely that of the hero. In it the
pragmatic is at the same time symbolic.") 20
Thus there can be no humanity that does not incessantly renew its act
of mythation. The notion of a "new mythology," which appeared in Jena
around 1798, 21 contains both the idea of a necessary innovation in order
to create a new human world on the ground of the finished world of ancient
mythology, and at the same time the idea that mythology is always the
obligatory form-and perhaps the essence-of innovation. A new humanity
must arise from/in its new myth, and this myth itself must be (according
to Schlegel) nothing less than the totalization of modern literature and
philosophy, as well as ancient mythology, revived and united with the
mythologies of the other peoples of the world. The totalization of myths
goes hand in hand with the myth of totalization, and the "new" mythology
essentially consists in the production of a speech that would unite, totalize,
and thereby put (back) into the world the totality of the words, discourses,
and songs of a humanity in the process of reaching its fulfillment (or
reaching its end).
***
It can therefore be said that romanticism, communism, and structuralism,
through their secret but very precise community, constitute the last tradition
of myth, the last way for myth to invent itself and to transmit itself (which,
for myth, is one and the same thing). This is the tradition of the mythation
of myth itself: myth becomes (wants to become, through the will to its
own power) its own enunciation, its own tautegory, equivalent to its own
 142
52 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
truth and its own realization, its own suppression and entirely new inau-
guration, and hence the final inauguration of the inaugural itself that myth
has always been. Myth realizes itself dialectically; it exceeds all its "mythic"
figures to announce the pure mytho-logy of an absolutely foundational,
symbolizing, or distributive speech. 22
** *
It is here that things are interrupted.
The tradition is suspended at the very moment it fulfills itself. It is
~~~err.11pted at that precise and familiar point where we know that it is all
a myth.
It is true -that we do not know very much about what mythic truth was
or is for men living in the midst of what we call. "myths." But we know
that we-our community, if it is one, our modern and postmodern human-
ity-have no relation to the myth of which we are speaking, even as we
fulfill it or try to fulfill it. In a sense, for us all that remains of myth is
its fulfillment or its will. We no longer _live in mythic life, nor in a time
of mythic inve11!ion or_sp.e.ech .. When we speak of "myth" or of "mythol-
'ogy" we mean"" the negation of something at least as much as the affirmation
of something. This is why our scene of myth, our discourse of myth, and
all our mythological thinking make up a myth: to speak of myth has only
ever been to speak of its absence. And the word "myth" itself designates
the absence of what it names.
This·i~--~hat constitute~ the interruption: "myth" is cut off from its
own meaning, on its own meaning, by its own meaning. If it even still has
a proper meaning.
In order to say that myth is a myth (that myth is a myth, or that "myth"
is a myth), it has been necessary to play on two quite distinct and opposite
meanings of the word "myth." The phrase "myth is a myth" means in
t:_ffect that myth, as inauguration or as foundation, is a myth, in ·other
1
.1'1', .yprds, a fiction, a simple invention. This disparity between the possible
meanings of "myth" is in a sense as ancient as Plato and Aristotle. However,
it is not by chance that its modern usage in this phrase that underlies our
knowledge of myth-that myth is a myth-produces, in a play on words,
the structure of the abyss. For this sentence contains, as well as two het-
erogeneous meanings for a single vocable, one mythic reality, one single
idea of myth whose two meanings and whose infinitely ironic relation are
engendered by a kind of internal disunion. This is the same myth that the
tradition of myth conceived as foundation and as fiction. The phrase that
plays on the disunion puts to work the resources of a former union, a secret
and profound union at the heart of myth itself.
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 53
Mythic th<2_~t=operating in a certain way through the dialectical sub-
laiion ot'"the two meanings of myth 23 -is. -· in...... ~ffect
- --. .. nothing
.. other .than . .
the ;,.-
thought of af9.undi!l.Kfic.tlon,_or..11J.Qun_dation qyjiction. Far from being ·
m0})1)0Sffion to one another, the two concepts are conjoined in the mythic
thought of myth. When Schlegel calls for a "new mythology," he appeals
expressly to art, to poetry, and to the creative imagination. It is the imag-
ination, in fact, that holds the secret of an original force of nature, alone
capable of genuine inauguration. Poetic fiction is the true-if not truthful-
origin of a world. And when Schelling takes objection, in a sense, to Schlegel
and everyone he reproaches for considering mythology as a fiction, when
he declares that the forces at work in myth "were not simply imaginary
forces, but were the true theogonic powers themselves," 24 his critique none-
theless tends to privilege what one would have to call an autoimagining or
an autofictioning of nature.
Schelling's analysis of mythology is undoubtedly the most powerful to
be produced before structual analysis. One might even think that these
constitute two versions-the "idealist" and the "positivist"-of the same
myth of mythology, and of the same mythology of myth. 25
According to this myth, or according to this logic, mythology cannot
be denounced as a fiction, for the fiction that it is is an operation: an
operation of engenderment for Schelling, of distribution and exchange for
the structuralists. Myth is not "a myth" if it has, qua myth, this operative
power and if this operative power is fundamentally not heterogeneous but
homogeneous with the different but similar operations realized, for Schelling
by consciousness, for the structuralists by science. In this sense, myth Js
~ot susceptible to analysis on the basis -~f-~_g_u.:tl;LQ.tll_<;!:..l-ti~ll...i.~--9:".'!l..1~[1_d _,,
~~ITY a]Q.Y£.J1.Jl.ng_Un_.t~.illi§]I:':Ji~!.i~1?-.:~~--B.ather, it must be analyzed ~
according to the truth that its fiction confers upon it, or more precisely
according to the truth that mything fictioning confers upon mythic tales
and narratives. This is what Schelling demands with his "tautegory." Myth
signifies itself, and thereby converts its own fiction into foundation or into
the inauguration of meaning itself.
Myth is therefore not only made up of a proper truth, sui generis, but
it perhaps tends to become truth itself, that truth that for Spinoza, as well
as for essential philosophical thought in general, se ipsam patefacit. But
again it is this "patefaction" of myth, and precisely this, that confers upon
myth its fictive character-in an auto-fictioning. As Schelling admits, "It
is true in a certain way" that "the expressions of mythology are figurative":
but "for the mythological consciousness" this is the same thing as the
impropriety of the majority of our "figurative expressions." Which is to
say that, just as this figuration is appropriate in language, so within mythol-
ogy impropriety is quite proper, appropriate to the truth and the fiction of

54 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
myth. Mythology is therefore figuration proper. Such is its secret, and the
secret of its myth-of its truth-for the whole of Western consciousness. 26
To be figuration proper, to be the proper figuration of the proper, is to
realize properly-improperly-properly, as a supplement of propriety27 -the
proper itself. Nature with all its "powers" would never attain to its truth
without the double process of natural and figurative "theogony," effective
and represented in consciousness, presenting itself, uttering itself in its
;i mythos.
For Schelling this is not a matter of a secondary representation, of an
interpretation of nature by a primitive consciousness. It concerns rather
much more the fact that nature, in its origin, engenders the gods by affecting
immediate consciousness (which becomes thereby, and only thereby, true
consciousness). It affects it from the outside, it strikes it with stupor, as
Schelling says (stupefacta quasi et attonita). 28 It is in this stupor, which is
anterior to all representation, that representation itself is born. It marks
the representative rupture itself, the "initial break effected by mythic
thought" of which Levi-Strauss speaks, and more exactly the rupture
brought about by "the primary schematism of mythic thought." 29
Here, as in Kant, "schematism" designates the essential operation of
transcendental imagination, which in Kant produces the "non-sensible
images" that furnish a "rule for the production of empirical images,"
whereas for Levi-Strauss, in an inverse but symmetrical movement, myth
"subsumes individualities under the paradigm, enlarging and at the same
time impoverishing the concrete givens by forcing them one after the other
to cross over the discontinuous threshholds that separate the empirical order
from the symbolic order, from the imaginary order, and finally from sche-
matism." Myth, in short, is the transcendental autofiguration of nature
and of humanity, or more exactly the autofiguration-or the autoimagi-
nation-of nature as humanity and of humanity as nature.__Mythic speech_
~ms-t-M--humanizatiQn of nature (and/or its divi~ation) and the
_naturalization of man (and/or his divinization)_Etmdamentaliy, mythos is
the act of language par ex~ll~n.c.e.._.the.per.fo.r:miQg of the paradigm, as the
)( logos..fictio_ns this paract,~~.T-!2..i!~~l_UI1. .Ql.Q..~U9..P.f.2Jl~~p~n 1t the essence
··and the goweriruelieves __ to be_its __ own~
In this respect, the romantic goal of a new mythology, one that would
be fictioning, imaginary, playful, poetic, and performative, merely brings
to light the thinking from which the myth of myth arises: it consists in the
thought of a poetico-fictioning ontology, an ontology presented in the figure
of an ontogeny where being engenders itself by figuring itself, by giving
itself the proper image of its own essence and the self-representation of its
presence and its present. Die sich selbst erkli:irende Mythologie is the cor-
relative of an essentially mything being or of a mything essence of being.
143
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 55
And the myth of myth, its truth, is that fiction is in effect, in this ontogony,
inaugural. In sum, fictioning is the subject of being. Mimesis is the poesis
of the world as true world of gods,. of men, and of nature. The myth of
myth is in no way an ontological fiction; it is nothing other than an ontology
of fiction or representation: it is therefore a particularly fulfilled and ful-
filling form of the ontology of subjectivity in general.
But this is also what provokes the interruption. From Schelling to Levi-
Strauss, from the first to the last version of mythic thought, we pass from
one interruption to another. In the beginning, the power of myth strikes
consciousness with stupor and puts it "outside of itself" {that is, it makes
it conscious). In the end, this consciousness become consciousness of self
and of the totality qua myth suspends itself on (or as) the consciousness
of the mythic (or subjective) essence of the "self" of all things. Levi-Strauss
in fact writes:
~
My analysis ... has brought out the mythic character of objects: the
universe, nature and man which, over thousands, millions or
l billions of years, will, when all is said and done, have simply
demonstrated the resources of their combinatory systems, in the
manner of some great mythology, before collapsing in on
themselves and vanishing, through the self-evidence of their own
decay. 30
Or again:
Wisdom consists for man in seeing himself live his provisional
historical internality, while at the same time knowing (but on a
different register) that what he lives so completely and intensely is
a myth-and which will appear as such to men of a future
century. 31
The disunion of the meanings of "myth" is therefore once again at work
at the heart of the very thinking meant to dismiss any denunciation of
myth on the basis of its being fiction, at the heart of a thinking of the
communion of foundation and fiction (of foundation by fiction). In fact,
the same Levi-Strauss, in a tone all in all very close to Schelling's, contended
that myths, "far from being the works of man's 'myth-making faculty'
turning its back on reality," preserve "modes of observation and reflection"
whose results "were secured ten thousand years" before those of the modern
sciences, and which "still remain at the basis of our civilization." 32
The phrase "myth is a myth" harbors simultaneously and in the same
thought a disabused irony ("foundation is a fiction") and an onto-poetico-
logical affirmation ("fiction is a foundation").
This is why myth is interrupted. It is interrupted by its myth.
144
56 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
This is why the idea of a "new mythology" is not only dangerous, it is
futile, for a new mythology would presuppose, as its condition of possibility,
a myth of myth that would not be subject to the rigorous logic whose
course extends from Schelling to Levi-Strauss 33 -or else, from Plato to us-
and that is composed essentially of this nihilist or annihilating logic (or
this mythics): the being that myth engenders implodes in its own fiction.
* **
The power of myth has spanned two interruptions: the interruption of pure
nature and the interruption of myth itself. The appeal to the power of myth
(whether this appeal be poetical or political, and it can only be, necessarily,
both at the same time: this is what myth is, it is the poeticity of the political
,-,.t. and the politicality of the poetic-foundation and fiction-inasmuch as tne
poetical and the political are included in the space of myth's thinking), this
appeal, then, or this desire for the power of myth, has sustained itself
through these two interruptions-between the nature opened up by an
autofiguration of its natural power and the culture closed by an auto-
resolution of its illusory figures.
'-/ Essentially, myth's will to power was totalitarian. It may perhaps even
d~fine totalitarianism (or what I have called immanentism), which is there-
fore strictly speaking also interrupted.
Using a rather poor distinction for the sake of clarity, one might say
that myth's will (to power) is doubly totalitarian or immanentist: in its
form and in its content.
In its form, because myth's will, which is manifest more exactly as the
will to mythation, is perhaps nothing other than the will to will. 34 We must
turn to Kant for the definition of will: will, which is nothing but the faculty
of desiring determined according to reason, is the faculty enabling the
cause of representations to coincide with the reality of these same repre-
sentations. Schelling's mything nature is a will: it is even, anticipating
Schopenhauer, the will of the world and the world as will. Myth is not
simple representation, it is representation at work, producing itself-in an
autopoetic mimesis-as effect: it is fiction that founds. And what it founds
is not a fictive world (which is what Schelling and Levi-Strauss challenged),
but fictioning as the fashioning of a world, or the becoming-world of
fictioning. In other words, the fashioning of a world for the subject, the
becoming-world of subjectivity.
As theogony, cosmogony, mythogony, and mythology, myth's will is
myth's will to will. As I have already said, essentially, myth communicates
itself, and not something else. Communicating itself, it brings into being
what it says, it founds its fiction. This efficacious self-communication is
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 57
will-and will is subjectivity presented (representing itself) as a remain-
derless totality.
Mythic will is totalitarian in its content, for its content is always a
communion, or rather all communions: of man with nature, of man with
God, of man with himself, of men among themselves. Myth communicates
itself necessarily as a myth belonging to the community, and it commu-
nicates a myth of community: communion, communism, communitarian-
.... ,., ism, communication, community itself taken simply and absolutely,
absolute community. For Pierre Clastres, the community of the Guarani
Indians provides an exemplary figure (or myth) of this:
Their great god Namandu emerged from the darkness and invented
the world. He first of all made Speech come, the substance
common to divinities and humans .... Society is the enjoyment of
the common good that is Speech. Instituted as equal by divine
decision-by nature!-society gathered itself together into a single,
that is, undivided whole .... The men of this society are all one. 35
I
Absolute communi~y-myth-is not so much. the.totaLf1.J.SiQJ1._QLirn;lJ:-__ ->~
viduals, butth.e will of c9mmunity: the desire to operate, through the power ·
of myth, the communion that myth represents and that it represents as a
communion or communication of wills. Fusion ensues: myth represents
multiple existences as immanent to its own unique fiction, which gathers
them together and gives them their common figure in its speech and as
this speech.
This does not mean only that community is a myth, that communitarian
communion is a myth. It means that myth and myth's force and foundation
are essential to community and that there can be, therefore, no community
outside of myth. Wherever there has been myth, assuming there has been
something of the sort and that we can know what this means, there has
been, necessarily, community, and vice versa. The interruption of myth is 'y
therefore also, necessarily, the interruption ofcommunify:· . - . ... ~.
-----·-------.--···--·--'---···-·~---·--------- --··---.~-- . . -- ' -~·--····· -- --· --···
***
Just as there is no new mythology, so there is no new community either,
nor will there be. If myth is a myth, community is reabsorbed into this
abyss along with it or is dissolved in this irony. This is why lamenting the
"loss of community" is usually accompanied by lamenting the "loss" of
the power of myths.
And yet the pure and simple effacement of community, without remain-
der, is a misfortune. Not a sentimental misfortune, not even an ethical one,
but an ontological misfortune-or disaster. For beings who are essentially,
and more than essentially, beings in common, it is a privation of being.

58 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
Being in common means that singular beings are, present themselves, and
appear only to the extent that they compear (comparaissent), to the extent
that they are exposed, presented, or offered to one another. This com-
pearance (comparution) is not something added on to their being; rather,
their being comes into being in it.
Hence community does not disappear. It never disappears. The com-
munity resists: in a sense, as I have said, it is resistance itself. Without the
compearance of being-or of singular beings-there would be nothing, or
rather nothing but being appearing to itself, not even in common with
itself, just immanent Being immersed in a dense pearance (parence). The
community resists this infinite immanence. The compearance of singular
beings-or of the singularity of being-keeps open a space, a spacing within
immanence.
Is there a myth for this community of compeatance? If myth is always
a myth of the reunion and the communion of community, there is not. On
the contrary, it is the interruption of myth that reveals the disjunctive or
hidden nature of community. In myth, community was proclaimed: in the
interrupted myth, community turns out to be what Blanchot has named
"the unavowable community."
Does the unavowable have a myth? By definition, it does not. The
absence of avowal produces neither speech nor narrative. But if community
is inseparable from myth, must there not be, according to a paradoxical
law, a myth of the unavowable community? But this is impossible. Let me
repeat: the unavowable community, the withdrawal of communion or com-
munitarian ecstasy, are revealed in the interruption of myth. And the inter-
ruption is not a myth: "It is impossible to contest the absence of myth,"
wrote Bataille.
We are thus abandoned to this "absence of myth." Bataille defined it
thus:
If we say quite simply and in all lucidity that present day man is
defined by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he is also
defined by the awareness of not being able to accede to the
possibility of creating a veritable myth, we have defined a kind of
myth that is the absence of myth. 36
Bataille arrived at this definition after having considered the proposal,
which came from surrealism (that is, from an avatar of romanticism), to
create new myths. He goes on to say that "neither these myths nor these
rituals will be true myths or rituals since they will not receive the endorse-
ment of the community." This endorsement cannot be obtained if the myth
does not already exist in the community-be it in the mouth of a sole being
who lends it his singular voice. The very idea of inventing a myth, in this
145
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 59
sense, is a contradiction in terms. Neither the community nor, consequently,
the individual (the poet, the priest, or one of their listeners) invents the
myth: to the contrary, it is they who are invented or who invent themselves
in the myth. And it is to the extent that he defines himself through the
loss of community that modern man defines himself through the absence
of myth.
At the same time, Bataille defines the absence of myth as "a kind of
myth" in itself. He explains this as follows:
If we define ourselves as incapable of arriving at myth and as
though awaiting its delivery, we define the ground of present-day
humanity as an absence of myth. And he finds himself before this
absence of myth as one who lives it, and lives it, let us
understand, with the passion that in former times animated those
t who wanted to live not in tern reality but in mythic reality
f [Bataille therefore also defines myth as a myth]; this absence of
myth before him can be infinitely more exalting than had been, in
f former times, those myths linked to everyday life.
t
What makes the absence of myth a myth is no longer, or not directly,
in any case, its communitarian character. On the contrary, the mythic
relation to the "absence of myth" is here presented, in appearance, as an
individual relation. If the absence of myth marks the common condition
of present-day man, this condition, rather than constituting the community,
undoes it. What assures the functioning of a life led according to myth,
here, is the passion and the exaltation with which the content of myth-
f here the "absence of myth"-can be shared. What Bataille understands by
I
t, "passion" is nothing other than a movement that carries to the limit-to
t
f the limit of being. If being is defined in the singularity of beings (this is
t at bottom the way Bataille, consciously or not, transcribes the Heideggerian
thought of the finitude of being), that is to say if being is not Being
f communing in itself with itself, if it is not its own immanence, but if it is
I
l the singular aspect of beings (this is how I would transcribe Heidegger and
I1 Bataille, one by the other), if it shares the singularities and is itself shared
[ out by them, then passion carries to the limit of singularity: logically, this
limit is the place of community.
This place, or point, might be one of fusion, of consumption and com-
munion in an immanence regained, willed anew, staged once more: it might
be a new myth, that is to say the renewal of the old myth, still identical
to itself. But at this point-at the point of community-there is, precisely,
no community: nor, therefore, is there any myth. The absence of myth is
accompanied, as Bataille says a moment later, by the absence of community.
The passion for the absence of myth touches upon the absence of com-
146
60 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
munity. And it is in this respect that it can be a passion (something other
than a will to power).
This point is not the inverse or negative image of a community gathered
together in and by its myth, for what Bataille calls the absence of community
is not the pure and simple dissolution of community. The absence of com-
munity appears with the recognition of the fact that no community, in the
fusion that it is essentially seeking, for example in "the ancient festival,"
can fail "to create a new individual, that one might call the collective
individual." The fusion of community, instead of propagating its movement,
reconstitutes its separation: community against community. Thus the ful-
fillment of community is its suppression. To attain to immanence is to be
cut off from another immanence: to attain immanence is to cut off imma-
nence itself.
Absence of community represents that which does not fulfill community,
or community itself inasmuch as it cannot be fulfilled or engendered as a
new individual. In this sense, "the appurtenance of every possible com-
munity to what I call ... absence of community must be the ground of any
possible community." In the absence of community neither the work of
community, nor the community as work, nor communism can fulfill itself;
rather, the passion of and for community propagates itself, unworked,
appealing, demanding to pass beyond every limit and every fulfillment
enclosed in the form of an individual. It is thus not an absence, but a
movement, it is unworking in its singular "activity," it is the propagation,
even the contagion, or again the communication of community itself that
propagates itself or communicates its contagion by its very interruption.
This contagion interrupts fusion and suspends communion, and this
arrest or rupture once again leads back to the communication of community.
Instead of closing it in, this interruption once again exposes singularity to
its limit, which is to say, to other singularities. Instead of fulfilling itself
in a work of death and in the immanence of a subject, community com-
municates itself through the repetition and the contagion of births: each
birth exposes another singularity, .a supplementary limit, and therefore
another communication. This is not the opposite of death, for the death
of this singular being who has just been born is also inscribed and com-
municated by its limit. It is already exposed to its death, and it exposes
us to it as well. Which means, essentially, that this death as well as this
birth are removed from us, are neither our work nor the work of the
collectivity.
On all sides the interruption turns community toward the outside instead
of gathering it in toward a center-or its center is the geographical locus
of an indefinitely multiple exposition. Singular beings compear: their com-
pearance constitutes their being, puts them in communication with one
!
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 61
another. But the interruption of community, the interruption of the totality
that would fulfill it, is the very law of compearance. The singular being
appears to other singular beings; it is communicated to them in the singular.
It is a contact, it is a contagion: a touching, the transmission of a trembling
at the edge of being, the communication of a passion that makes us fellows,
or the communication of the passion to be fellows, to be in common.
The inte~~pt~c:l community does not flee from itself:_ but iLdoes not Y
belonilo--1tself, it- does -not congregate, it communicates. itself from one_ · ··.
~ l a r 11lace to another. "The basis of communication," writes Blanchot,
'«[s-;~t necessarily speech, nor even the silence that is its foundation and
punctuation, but exposure to death, and no longer my death, but someone
else's, whose living and closest presence is already an eternal and unbearable
absence." 37
Thus "the myth of the absence of myth"-which corresponds to the
interrupted community-is itself neither another myth, nor a negative myth
(nor the negative of a myth), but is a myth only inasmuch as it consists
in the interruption of myth. It is not a myth: there is no myth of the
interruption of myth. But the interruption of myth defines the possibility
of a "passion" equal to mythic passion-and yet unleashed by the sus-
pension of mythic passion: a "conscious," "lucid" passion, as Bataille calls
it, a passion opened up by compearance and for it. It is not the passion
for dissolution, but the passion to be exposed, and to know that community
itself does not limit community, that community is always beyond, that is,
on the outside, offered outside of each singularity, and on this account
always interrupted on the edge of the least one of these singularities.
Interruption occurs at the edge, or rather it constitutes the edge where
beings touch each other, expose themselves to each other and separate from
one another, thus communicating and propagating their community. On
this edge, destined to this edge and called forth by it, born of interruption,
there is a passion. This is, if you will, what remains of myth, or rather, it
is itself the interruption of myth.
***
The interruption of myth-and the interruption of myth as the passion of
and for community-disjoins myth from itself, or withdraws it from itself.
It is not enough to say, "Myth is a myth," since the formula for irony, as
I have already said, is fundamentally the same as the formula for the identity
of myth (and for its mythic identity).
In the interruption there is no longer anything to be done with myth,
inasmuch as myth is always a completion, a fulfillment. But the interruption
is not a silence-which itself can have a myth, or can be myth itself in
one of its fulfillments. In the interruption of myth something makes itself

62 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
heard, namely, what remains of myth when it is interrupted-and which is
nothing if not the very voice of interruption, if we can say this.
This voice is the voice of community, or of the community's passion.
If it must be affirmed that myth is essential to community-but only in
the sense that it completes it and gives it the closure and the destiny of an
individual, of a completed totality-it is equally necessary to affirm that
in the interruption of myth is heard the voice of the interrupted community,
the voice of the incomplete, exposed community speaking as myth without
being in any respect mythic speech.
--;Gia-yet';""Tf the-name- ''literature" is always i~ ~ state of not being suited
This voice seems to play back the declarations of myth, for in the
interruption there is nothing new to be heard, there is no new myth breaking
through; it is the old story one seems to hear. When a voice, or music, is
suddenly interrupted, one hears just at that instant something else, a mixture
of various silences and noises that had been covered over by the sound,
but in this something else one hears again the voice or the music that has
become in a way the voice or the music of its own interruption: a kind of
echo, but one that does not repeat that of which it is the reverberation.
In itself, in its presence and in its fulfillment, the voice or the music is
played out, it has dissolved. The mythological prestation is ended, it no
longer holds good and no longer works (if it ever worked in the way we
thought it was supposed to work, in our functional, structural and com-
munal mythology). But in some way the interrupted voice or music imprints
the schema of its retreat in the murmur or the rustling to which the inter-
ruption gives rise. It is no longer the sermon-or the performance, as the
linguists or artists say-though it is neither without voice nor without music.
J.bejnJ(!rruption has ;i voice, and its schema imprints itself iIJ._!he ...nlstling
of the co:rp.muI1~tY.ex.Rosed_ to its_ own dispersion. When myth stops playing,
the community that resists completion and fusion, the community that
propagates and exposes itself, makes itself heard in a certain way. It does
not speak, of course, nor does it make music. As I have said, it is itself
the interruption, for it is upon this exposure of singular beings that myth
is interrupted. But the interruption itself has a singular voice, a voice or
a retiring music that is taken up, held, and at the same time exposed in
an echo that is not a repetition-it is the voice of community, which in its
way perhaps avows, without saying it, the unavowable, or states without
declaring it the secret of community, or more precisely presents, without
enunciating it, the mythless truth of endless being-in-common, of this being
in common that is not a "common being" and that the community itself
therefore does not limit and that myth is incapable of founding or con-
taining. There is a voice of community articulated in the interruption, and
even out of the interruption itself.
147
MYTH INTERRUPTED D 63
A n~~~en_given to this voice of interrup_tig!!;Jitg,e.rnr.~Jgr. writingL- ,,,1
if ;;adQR!J.DJ! acceptation of thisworci.thats:OiI]:C_i_q_~_s__):Yitltliter.atg.r_e),_J'his .. ,
~no doubt unsuitable. But no name is suitable here. The place or
the moment of interruption is without suitability. As Blanchot puts it, "The
only communication that henceforth suits it [the community] ... passes
through literary unsuitability." 38 What is unsuitable about literature is th_at
it is not suited to the myth of community, nor to-tli:~~community~of..myJh.____ " ...
tnssuftec:Ciieli-iier to communion nor: to com~u~ica,Ug11. ....
to "literary unsuitability" itself, is this not because literature is so closely
related to myth? Is not myth the origin of literature, the origin of all
literature and perhaps in a sense its sole content, its sole narrative, or else
its sole posture (that of the recitalist, who is his own hero)? Is there any
literary scene not taken from the mythological scene? (And is not this true
also, in this respect, of the philosophic scene or scenes, which, in one way
or another, belong to the "genre" of literature?)
Not only is literature the beneficiary (or the echo) of myth, literature
has -
~ itselL.in......1:1,__sense-been
- -.. .
a:nd-no-d~~bt-
thouiiii"" ·------
sh;;uld be- thought
------------- .
as ---.,,
--
""'
myth-as the myth _Qf .the myth of mythless society. 39 In an early text by
"Blaricfiot, one'ev~~ reads that in literature "everything. should end in a
mythic invention: only where the source of revealing images opens up is
there a work." 40 It is not certain that Blanchot would settle for such a
sentence today. Certainly, there is a work only if there is "revelation" (you
might interrupt me here: What are we to make of this word "revelation"?
Does it not go along with "myth," as it does moreover with "image"? But
this is the space of absolute unsuitability: each one of these words also
bespeaks its own interruption). _:J3ut literature's revelation, unlike_ myt!Ls.,.---
does not reveal a completed reality, nor the reality of a completion. It does
noCreve""al;-f!la gerieralway, some thing-it re~eals ratherthe-unrevejJal:,le~ -
;;:amely~that_fr_}~}!~eff, -as a 'York -that reveals and giy(!s_ access t.O.. iU'.!§!..Q!!__ ><
~:i-ic:CtoJhe_~Qillffillili_()Il of.a vision, essentially interrupted .
. 'i"n the work, there isa share of myth and a share-"ofliterature or writing.
The latter interrupts the former, it "reveals" precisely through its inter-
ruption of the myth (through the incompletion of the story or the narra-
tive)-and what literature or writing reveals is above all else its interruption,
and it is in this respect that it can be called, if it still can be-and it no
longer can be-a "mythic invention."
But the share of myth and the share of literature are not two separable
and opposable parts at the heart of the work. Rather, they are shares in
the sense that community divides up or shares out works in different ways:
now by way of myth, now by way of literature. The second is the inter-
ruption of the first. "Literature" (or "writing") is what, in literature-in
 148
64 D MYTH INTERRUPTED
the sharing or the communication of works-interrupts myth by g1vmg
voice to being-in-common, which has no myth and cannot have one. Or,
since being-in-common is nowhere, and does not subsist in a mythic space
that could be revealed to us, literature does not give it a voice: ratherijt
is being in, common ,.that is ~~~erary <?r__ ~_cr~tll<l~y). ______ _
** *
I
I What does this mean? Does it mean anything? I have said that the sole
question is the question of "literary communism," or of a "literary exper-
! ience of community." Blanchot has insisted that "community, in its very
i::. I failure, remains linked in some way to writing," and has referred to the
"ideal community of literary communication." 41 This can always make for
one more myth, a new myth, and one not even as new as some would
believe: the myth of the literary community was outlined for the first time
(although in reality it was perhaps not the first time) by the Jena romantics,
and it has filtered down to us in various different ways through everything
resembling the idea of a "republic of artists" or, again, the idea of com-
I'
I munism (of a certain kind of Maoism, for example) and revolution inherent,
'1i;:
,,,1,, tels quels, in writing itself.
I' But because the interruption of myth does not make up. a myth, the
i,'·:I· being-in-common of which I am speaking-and that many of us are trying
i''
to speak about, that is to say, to write-has nothing to do with the myth
I' of communion through literature, nor with the myth of literary creation
by the community. But if we can say, or if we can at least try to say, while
remaining fully conscious of its unsuitability, that being-in-common is lit-
erary, that is, if we can attempt to say that it has its very being in "literature"
(in writing, in a certain voice, in a singular music, but also in a painting,
in a dance, and in the exercise of thought), then what "literature" will
have to designate is this being itself ... in itself. In other words,.•....it--·--::--
, would
designate that singular ontological quality that gives being in common, that
does- not hold it in reserv;,·~or after community, as an essence of
man, oCGoa-;-or of. the State achiev_ing i.ts f11lfillment.in _c:01:pmunion, but
)< that raTher m~ke~:}oi~ii:j;efni::ifiit.is.o~Y w.he.!L~har:ed:t~=common, or
,-;.;ct3"~-"· ...., .,. __,,____, ' .., ..,. ' . .
"- rather whose quality of being, who~e J1ature.ancLstructure.ar:e__shared (or
It is as difficult to describe the structure of sharing as it is to assign an
essence to it. Sharing divides and shares itself: this is what it is to be in
common. One cannot tell its story, nor determine its essence: there is no
myth of it, nor is there a philosophy of it. But it is "literature" that does
the sharing. It does it, or is it, precisely to the extent that it interrupts
myth. Myth is interrupted by literature precisely to the extent that literature
does not come to an end.
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 65
If literature does not come to an end, this is not in the mythic sense of
an "infinite poetry," such as the romantics desired. Nor is it in the sense
in which, for Blanchot, "unworking" would be attained and presented by
works, 42 nor in the sense that .this "unworking" would be purely exterior
to the work. Literature does not come to an end at the very place where
it comes to an end: on its border, right on the dividing line-a line sometimes
straight (the edge, the border of the book), sometimes incredibly twisted
and broken (the writing, reading). It does not come to an end at the place
where the work passes from an author to a reader, and from this reader
to another reader or to another author. It does not come to an end at the
place where the work passes on to another work by the same author or at
the place where it passes into other works of other authors. It does not
come to an end where its narrative passes into other narratives, its poem
into other poems, its thought into other thoughts, or into the inevitable
suspension of the thought or the poem. It is unended and unending-in
the active sense-in that it is literature. And it is literature if it is speech
(a language, an idiom, a writing)-whatever kind of speech it may be,
written or not, fictive or discursive, literature or not-that puts into play
nothing other than being in common.
"Literature," thought as the interruption of myth, merely communi-
cates-in the sense that what it puts into play, sets to work, and destines
to unworking, is nothing but communication itself, the passage from one
to another, the sharing of one by the other. What is at stake in literature
is not just literature: in this, it is unlike myth, which communicates only
itself, communicating its communion. It is true that the profound texture
of the literary work seems at times similar in its intention: it is indeed true
that the text represents nothing other than itself and that its story is always
its own story, its discourse the discourse of itself. And it is precisely to
this extent that there can be a myth of the text. 43
But the text that recounts its own story recounts an unfinished story; it
recounts it interrupted and it essentially interrupts its own recitation. The
text interrupts itself at the point where it shares itself out-at every moment,
to you, from him or her to you, to me, to them. In a sense, it is the sharing
of myth. It is community exchanging and distributing its myth. Nothing
could resemble more closely our myth of the foundation and communion
of a tribe, or a people, indeed of humanity. And yet, this is not what it
is. It is not the original scene of our communion. This does not mean that
there is no theater-as though there could be literature without theater. But
theater, here, no longer means the scene of representation: it means the
extreme edge of this scene, the dividing line where singular beings are
exposed to one another.

66 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
What is shared on this extreme and difficult limit is not communion
not the completed identity of all in one, nor any kind of completed identity'.
What is shared therefore is not the annulment of sharing, but s h a r i ~
and consequently everyOJ:!~'s nom.dentity, each one's nonid~tity_to himself
, . _ind. to o_thers, ~nd th~__11m:ij:c;!entity~h~orJU:o_itsel(,_and_ff~
X --=-·--;---;-·---·-------····---
nomdent1ty of literature to hterat.!JL~L-
.
Thus, when the text recounts its own story, when it recounts it unfinished,
and when it interrupts itself-and when it goes on to recount this inter-
ruption, but in the end interrupts itself again-it is because it has a stake,
an end, and a principle beyond itself. In one sense, literature only ever
comes from literature, and returns to it. But in another sense-which con-
tinually interferes with the first in such a way that, with each interference,
it is myth that is interrupted-the text, or the writing, stems only from the
singular relationship between singular beings (they are called, or we have
, ~alled them _ _ up to this point, men, g<?_ds,.. andalso anim~: b ~
)'-- .!!Lt:se are mytholpgical narne~LThe text stems from, or is this relationship;
( it renders its ontological vein: being as being in common is (the) being (of)
1---""7~ e literature. This does not imply a being of literature: it is neither a narrative
0
1 nor a theoretical fiction~the contrary, what this m~ans_j§__that literature,
~ ~g1,J_Jrnrr.1-J.he momen_~~under~_J.hiLlYQid...M.. the interrnption of
J
~; ,.u . • 1
, myth :-!1~~---~~--bei~-<:~~~~C.:.!.....~f._y_~~-;-~mi._~..!. . ~g2.L~J-~r:_g__:gscendental
c:· · const1tut1on) the common exposure of smgular bemgs, the!f compearance.
Lo.t:. ,;. ~ T-h-e-~;.;~t sol1taryoTw~itei;;·wiffes·oniy-forthe-o-ther~-(Anyo:;;_-e who writ~
for the same, for himself, or for the anonymity of the crowd is not a writer.)
It is not because there is literature that there is community. One could
even say, no doubt, that it is because there is literature that there is the
myth of communion and by extension the myth of literary communion. In
this respect, the literature corresponding to the great modern interruption
of myth immediately engendered its own myth. But now this myth in turn
is interrupting itself. And the interruption reveals that it is because there
is community that there is literature: literature inscribes being-in-common,
being for others and through others. 44 It inscribes us as exposed to one
another and to our respective deaths in which we reach one another-in
passing to the limit-mutually. To reach one another-in passing to the
limit-is not to commune, which is to accede to another total body where
everyone melts together. But to reach one another, to touch one another,
is to touch the limit where being itself, wh~f~ beinitl~\;.QJnmon conceals
I us one fromtfieotner, ana,iii""conce·arrriiiis,..in-v,dthdt.aw.ing_Yllrom the
't- other before--th_e_o-the~o-s-e-su_s_t_o_him or her.
. It is a birth: w~verstopoeing born into c;mmunity. It is death-
_!
but if one is permitted to say so, it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is
more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed
149
MYTH INTERRUPTED D 67
by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss: it is death
as sharing and as exposure. It is not murder-it is not death as extermi-
nation-and it is not death as work, no more than it is the nay-saying
embellishment of death; rather, it is death as the unworking that unites us
because it interrupts our communication and our communion.
* **
It is because there is this, this unworking that shares out our being-in-
common, that there is "literature." That is to say, the indefinitely repeated
and indefinitely suspended gesture of touching the limit, of indicating it
and inscribing it, but without crossing it, without abolishing it in the fiction
of a common body. To write for others means in reality to write because
of others. The writer neither gives nor addresses anything to the others;
he does not envisage his project as one that involves communicating some-
thing to them, be it a message or himself. Of course, there are always
messages, and there are always persons, and it is important that both of
these-if I may for a moment treat them as identical-be communicated.
But writing is the act that obeys the sole necessity of exposing the limit:
not the limit of communication, but the limit upon which communication
takes place.
Communication, in truth, is without limits, and the being that is in
common communicates itself to the infinity of singularities. Instead of
getting upset over the gigantic (or so they say) growth in our means of
communication, and fearing through this the weakening of the message,
we should rather rejoice over it, serenely: communication "itself" is infinite
between finite beings. Provided these beings do not try to communicate to
one another myths about their own infinity, for in such a case they instantly
disconnect the communication. But communication takes place on the limit,
or on the common limits where we are exposed and where it exposes us.
What takes place on this limit requires the interruption of myth. It
requires that it no longer be said that a word, a discourse, or a fable gathers
us together beyond (or on the near side) of the limit. But it requires equally
that the interruption itself make itself heard, with its singular voice. This
voice is like the cut or the imprint, left by the interruption, of the voice
of myth.
It is each time the voice of one alone, and to the side, who speaks, who
recites, who sometimes sings. He speaks of an origin and an end-the end
of the origin, in truth-he stages them and puts himself on stage along
with them. But he comes to the edge of the stage, to its outer edge, and
he speaks at the softest limit of his voice. Or rather, it is we who stand at
the furthermost extreme and who barely hear him from this limit. Ev-
erything is a matter of one's practical, ethical, political-and why not add
150
68 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED
spiritual?-positioning around this singular eruption of a voice. You can
always make a myth out of it again. But this voice, or another, will always
begin interrupting the myth again-sending us back to the limit.
On this limit, the one who exposes himself and to whom-if we listen,
if we read, if our ethical and political condition is one of listening or
reading-we expose ourselves, does not deliver a founding speech. On the
contrary, he suspends this speech, he interrupts it and he says that he is
interrupting it.
And yet even this, his speech, has something inaugural about it. Each
writer, each work inaugurates a community. There is therefore an unim-
peachable and irrepressible literary communism, to which belongs anyone
who writes (or reads), or tries to write (or read) by exposing himself-not
by imposing himself (and anyone who imposes himself without in any way
exposing himself is no longer writing, no longer reading, no longer thinking,
no longer communicating). But the communism here is inaugural, not final.
It is not finished; on the contrary, it is made up of the interruption of
mythic communion and communal myth. This does not mean that it would
be, attenuating a little the strong meaning of myth, simply "an idea." The
communism of being-in-common and of writing (of the writing of being-
in-common) is neither an idea nor an image, neither a message nor a fable,
neither a foundation nor a fiction. It consists, in its entirety-it is total in
this respect, not totalitarian-in the inaugural act that each work takes up
and that each text retraces: in coming to the limit, in letting the limit appear
as such, in interrupting the myth.
What is inaugural is this forward movement, moving forward here along
the dividing line-from you to me, from silence to speech, from the many
to the singular, from myth to writing. And there is no sequel to it: this
inaugural act founds nothing, entails no establishing, governs no exchange;
no history of community is engendered by it. In _g_~nse,._thf:_interruRtimL
of myth, just like its birth, according to Sch~g, takes place in stupor,
( loritrepresents alsu--rrr~::::i.!1te.IT11I1tioiL0£;::;;e~taJ.n-.d1sco11rsLo.Li'i1e:=-c.o.m~
, 'I- ~pi'"o"ject,"fiTstory, and _cl~s.ti_n>,:,__But at the same time, the inter-
'ruptionacie·s··,enfail"somefhfrig":-Tt entails not annulling its gesture-in fact
it entails recommencing it. In this sense there is once again a history; t ~
is another story1 another history going on, one that has been going on ~inc.e__}
)(_ ~e interruption of myt!i:__
Fronrirere-orr;if w1I!no longer be a question of a literature that espouses
or discloses the form of History, nor will it be a question of communism
bringing this History to a close. It will be a question, and in truth it already
is a question, of a history that comes about within a literary communism.
It is almost nothing, this communism-it is not even "a communism," in
whatever sense one takes this word. (It must be said, however, that if this
--·-~-----------.----------·--·---------
MYTH INTERRUPTED O 69
word had not had a meaning in ·other connections, if it had not had so
many mythic and practical meanings, the history of which I am speaking
would not be happening to us.) For the moment, it offers us only this
rather poor truth: we would not write if our being were not shared. And
consequently this truth also: if we write (which might also be a way of
speaking), we share being-in-common, or else we are shared, and exposed,
by it.
Thus, once myth is interrupted, writing recounts our history to us again.
But it is no longer a narrative-neither grand nor small-but rather an
offering: a history is offered to us. Which is to say that an event-and an
advent-is proposed to us, without its unfolding being imposed upon us.
What is offered to us is that community is coming about, 45 or rather, that \·--
·soniefliriii" fs-h~ppeni?2g to _us in common. Neither "an origin nor an end:
something in common. Only speech, a writing-shared, sharing us.
In a sense, we understand ourselves and the world by sharing this writing,
just as the group understood itself by listening to the myth. Nonetheless,
we understand only that there is no common understanding of community,
that sharing does not constitute an understanding_{ora concept, __ or an
Triliiltion, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowled.fil:., _and that ):""-. /
it gives no one, irn;.ludir1g_co~~~1!~ty itself, mastery over being_-in~cmnm<:m.~
***
Of course, the writer is always in some way the teller of the myth, its
narrator or fabulator, and he is also always the hero of his own myth. Or
rather, writing itself, or literature, is its own recital; it stages itself in such
a way that once again the mythic scene is reconstituted. In spite of this,
at the heart of this inevitable repetition, something has happened to the
writ s ...tru: nterru 10n o myt . or also interrupted is the myth of -'"'.:--..
the writer-a myth perhaps as old as myths in general, and yet as recent
;:::.....
as the modern notion of the writer, but above all a myth through whose )
mediation (among others) the modern myth of myth has been elaborated: II
the primitive teller is imagined from out of the writer, and referred back I
to him as his originary model. (In a word, this represents the subject of
literature, of speech or of writing, a subject that can take all forms, from
the pure recitalist-announcer to the self-engendering of the text, passing
through the inspired genius.)
The myth of the writer is interrupted: a certain scene, an attitude, and
a creativity pertaining to the writer are no longer possible. The task of
what has been designated as ecriture (writing) and the thinking of ecriture
has been, precisely, to render them impossible-and consequently to render
impossible a certain type of foundation, utterance, and literary and com-
munitarian fulfillment: in short, a politics.
------··--·-·---··-~-----·........ ,~-·-. -----····I
 151
70 0 MYTH INTERRUPTED

The gift or the right to speak (and to speak of gifts or rights) is no Chapter 3
longer the same gift or the same right, and it is perhaps no longer either
a gift or a right. No more is there the mythic legitimacy that myth conferred "Literary Communism"
upon its own narrator. Writing is seen rather as illegitimate, never author-
ized, risked, exposed to the limit. But this is not a complacent anarchy.
For it is in this way that writing obeys the law-the law of community.
The interruption of the myth of the writer is not the disappearance of
the writer. It is certainly not "the death of the last writer," as Blanchot
has represented it to be. On the contrary, the writer is once again there,
he is if you will more properly (and therefore in a more unsuitable way)
there whenever his myth is interrupted. He is what the withdrawal of his
myth imprints through the interruption: he is not the author, nor is he the
hero, and perhaps he is no longer what has been called the poet or what
has been called the thinker; rather, he is a singular voice (a writing: which
might also be a way of speaking). He is this singular voice, this resolutely
and irreducibly singular (mortal) voice, in common: just as one can never Literature cannot assume the task of
be "a voice" ("a writing") but in common. In singularity takes place the directing collective necessity.
literary experience of community-that is to say, the "communist" exper- -Georges Bataille
ience of writing, of the voice, of a speech given, played, sworn, offered,
shared, abandoned. Speech is communitarian in proportion to its singu- The community of interrupted myth, which is community that in a sense
larity, and singular in proportion to its communitarian truth. This property, is without community, or communism without community, is our desti-
in the form of a chiasmus, belongs only to what I have called here speech, nation. In other wore:!. ~ ,f9ITI!Uunity_ Jo~.communism) is what we are being ,,,
voice, writing, or literature-and literature in this sense has no other final called towara:~-or"se~t to, as -to o~~ o~;;-~ost fiit~r~:--Butit3s:~not.:a~.''to
_____.-:: ' ......._..... -~~,-1:.~---,-~--·~-----.-·· _, .·,· ----·.. ·---·--~----·-,...__ _,_._,,·»-·•-, . <-·-·· --.
. •.
essence than this property. ..,,._..c..."'t'T';

· gi_me.~-it-is ..noL.aJ!:!_ture or final reality on the verge of _fulfillment, pending

•. ,.......,,~,--,. - -~-·-

Translated by Peter Connor

only_t~~l_ay imposedtijt'an'approach, a maturation, or a conque~t.f<::>r
jf this wer~-t.~_-case, frs. reality wo'iild'l:i·e mythic-as would be the feasibility' C
c;if its ~~.'.!=---"-·
t
Community without community is to come, in the sense that it is always ::'
comzng:eii~iz~.-a~·t-~~-~:~ar("~-ev~r,y E2!l~stiyity --~f:~a~s_e -~I~e-v:r.stops ~ :;':.~
coming, it ceaselessly resists coUectivity itself. as much. as it resists ·the
--------------· ---- ~-rs 'iio mo"i-e..t-han this: to Co~e t~ the limit of compearance,
individuai\''it:
to that limit to which we are in effect convoked, called, and sent-and
whence we are convoked, called, and sent. The call that convokes us, as
well as the one we address to one another at this limit (this call from one
~ e other is_iio_d~e same call, ancLy~t not th~aj_can be namec;L, X
for want of a better term, wri!!Qg_, or literature. But above all, its essence
-is not to be "la chose litteraire" however one might understand this (as
art or style, as the production of texts, as commerce or communication
between thought and the imaginary, etc.), nor does it consist in what the
vocabulary of the "call" understands in terms of invocation, proclamation,
or declaration, nor in the effusion of a solemn subjectivity. Its essence is Y.
71
 152
156 [] NOTES TO PREEi\CE
immer,/unweit von dir." In Pierre loris's translation: "Unmouthed lip, announce,/that some-
thing's happening, still,/not far from you."
Preface
1. As every translator of Blanchot knows, the French desoeuvrement does not have any
adequate translation in English. The use of the word in this book is explained on page 31.
There-and throughout the whole chapter-the word is translated by "unworking," as in
Pierre loris's translation of Blanchot's La communaute inavouab{e (The Unavowab{e Com-
munity, Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988). Pierre Joris thanks Christopher Fynsk
for suggesting "unworking," and we too would like to express our gratitude to him for his
helpful and amicable guidance in the present translation.
Another possible translation, by Ann Smock in The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1982), is "uneventfulness," which emphasizes the fact that the work doesn't
happen as such without its own withdrawal, a notion also helpful for the understanding of
the thinking of "community" here. However, neither one of these "translations" or substitutes
was deemed suitable for the title of the book, since a title ought not to inflict upon the reader
an unrecognizable word. Therefore we decided for the title to shift the emphasis of the meaning
a little by choosing The Inoperative Community.
2. As well as other texts, written after these. See especially £'experience de la liberte
(Paris: Galilee, 1988}, forthcoming in English from Harvard University Press; "Finite History,"
in The States of Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and "Abrege philo-
sophique de la revolution frarn;aise," in Po&sie, no. 48 (1989).
1. The
I. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. l (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 332. Sub-
sequent references to this work are indicated in the text as 0. C., volume and page number.
2. Considered in detail, taking into account the precise historical conjuncture of each
instance, this is not rigorously exact as regards, for example, the Hungarian Council of '56,
and even more so the left of Solidarity in Poland. Nor is it absolutely exact as regards all of
the discourses held today: one might, in this respect alone, juxtapose the situationists of not
so long ago with certain aspects of Hannah Arendt's thought and also, as strange or provocative
as the mixture might appear, certain propositions advanced by Lyotard, Badiou, Ellul, Deleuze,
Pasolini, and Ranciere. These thoughts occur, although each one engages it in its own particular
way (and sometimes whether they know it or not), in the wake of a Marxist event that I will
try to characterize below and that signifies for us the bringing into question of communist
or communitarian humanism (quite different from the questioning once undertaken by Althus-
ser in the name of a Marxist science). This is also why such propositions communicate with
what I shall name, tentatively and in spite of everything, "literary communism."
3. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1988), pp. 108-9.
4. Michel Henry's reading of Marx, which is oriented around the conceptual reciprocity
of the "individual" and "immanent life," bears witness to this. In this regard, "by principle
the individual ecsapes the power of the dialectic" (Michel Henry, Marx [Paris: Gallimard,
1976], vol. 2, p. 46). This might permit me to preface everything I have to say with the
following general remark: there are two ways of escaping the dialectic (that is to say mediation
in a totality)-either by slipping away from it into immanence or by opening up its negativity
to the point of rendering it "unworked" (desoeuvre), as Bataille puts it. In this latter case,
NOTES TO CHAPTER I 157
there is no immanence of negativity: "there is" ecstasy, ecstasy of knowledge as well as of
history and community.
5. "Le communisme sans heritage," revue Comite, 1968, in Gramma no. 3/4 (1976),
p. 32.
6. For the moment, Jet us retain simply that "literature," here, must above all not be
taken in the sense Bataille gave to the word when he wrote, for example (in his critique of
Inner Experience and Gui{ty): "I have come to realize through experience that these books
lead those who read them into complacency. They please most often those vague and impotent
minds who want to flee and sleep and satisfy the escape provided by literature"
(0.C. 8:583). He also spoke of the "sliding thought that turns to litPrM11rP
(ibid.).
7. See chapter 5, "Of Divine Places."
8. See J.-L. Nancy, "La juridiction du monarque hegelien," in Rejouer le politique (Paris:
Galilee, 1981). Translation forthcoming in The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University
Press).
9. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Transcendence Ends in Politics," trans. P. Caws, in
Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. C. Fynsk, Harvard University Press, 1989,
pp. 267-300, and G. Granel, "Pourquoi avoir publie cela?" in De l'universite (Toulouse:
T.E.R., 1982).
IO. Except for Denis Hollier, already in La prise de la Concorde (Paris: Gallimard, 1974)
and in particular with the publication of College de sociologie (Paris: Ga!limard, 1979), English
translation by Betsy Wing, The College of Sociology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988). More recently, Francis Marmande has published a systematic examination of
Bataille's political preoccupations. See Georges Batail/e politique (Paris: Parentheses, 1985).
11. But it is unfortunately in the name of the most conventional political or moral attitudes
that the most haughty-and the most vain-critiques of fascism itself and of those who had
to confront its fascination are undertaken.
12. See, for example, O.C. 7:257.
13. See, for example, O.C. 7:312.
14. I employ the term "communication" in the manner of Bataille, that is to say, following
the pattern of a permanent violence done to the word's meaning, both because it implies
subjectivity or intersubjectivity and because it denotes the transmission of a message and a
meaning. Rigorously, this word is untenable. I retain it because it resonates with "community,"
but l would superimpose upon it (which sometimes means substitute for it) the word "sharing."
Bataille was aware that the violence he had inflicted upon the concept of "communication"
was insufficient: "To be isolated, communication, have only one reality. Nowhere do there
exist 'isolated beings' who do not communicate, nor is there a 'communication' independent
of points of isolation. Let us be careful to set aside two poorly made concepts, the residue
of puerile beliefs; by this means we will cut through the most poorly constructed problem"
(0.C. 7:553). What this calls for, in short, is the deconstruction of the concept, such as
Jacques Derrida has undertaken in "Signature, Event, Context," in Margins of Philosophy,
trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and such as it has been pursued,
in another manner, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ("Postulates of Linguistics," in A
Thousand Plateaux, trans. B. Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]).
These operations necessarily entail a general reevaluation of communication in and of the
community (of speech, of literature, of exchange, of the image, etc.), in respect to which the
current use of the term "communication" can only be provisional and preliminary.
15. Although all the questions concerning territory, frontiers, local divisions of all kinds-
urban distribution for example-would have to be rethought in accordance with this.

158 D NOTES TO CHAPTER I
16. This is not unrelated to the opposition drawn by Hannah Arendt between revolutions
of freedom and revolutions of equality. And in Arendt, also, the fruitfulness of the opposition
remains limited after a certain point and not entirely congruent with other elements in her
thinking.
17. On the other hand, in the bourgeois world, whose "confusion" and "helplessness"
Bataille recognized perfectly well, the uneasiness over community has made itself felt in many
ways since 1968, but most often in a naive, indeed puerile way, caught up in the same
"confusion" that reigns over ideologies of communion or conviviality.
18. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
19. Jacques Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy," in Writing and Difference,
trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251-77.
20. Cf. Bernard Sichere's remarks in "L'erotisme souverain de Georges Bataille," Tel Que!,
no. 93.
21. Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1986).
22. Concerning more specifically the exhaustion of religion, see Marcel Gauchet, Le desen-
chantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
23. And as it lives on, in one sense, in the Deleuzian theme of haeceity, which, however,
in another sense, turns upon the theme of "singularity."
24. In this sense, the compearance of singular beings is anterior even to the preliminary
condition of language that Heidegger understands as prelinguistic "interpretation" (Aus-
legung), to which I referred the singularity of voices in "Sharing Voices," in Transforming
the Hermeneutic Context, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press,
1989). Contrary to what this essay might lead one to think, the sharing of voices does not
lead to community; on the contrary, it depends on this originary sharing that community
"is." Or rather, this "originary" sharing itself is nothing other than a "sharing of voices,"
but the "voice" should be understood not as linguistic or even prelinguistic, but as
communitarian.
25. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979).
26. I do not include the political here. In the form of the State, or the Party (if not the
State-Party), it indeed seems to be of the order of a work. But it is perhaps at the heart of
the political that communitarian unworking resists. I will come back to this.
27. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), paragraph 47.
28. Ibid., paragraphs 47 and 48.
29. It is no doubt also anterior to Girard's "mimetic desire." Both Hegel and Girard
presuppose at bottom a subject who knows all about recognition or jouissance. Such a
"knowledge" presupposes in turn the passional communication of singularities, the experience
of the "fellow creature."
30. 0. C. I :486, 489; and Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-
1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 208, 210. (Translation modified.)
31. There is perhaps no better testimony to this essential, archi-essential resistance of the
community-whose affirmation does not stem from any "optimism," but from truth, and
whose truth stems from the experience of limits-than Robert Antelme's account of his
captivity in a Nazi concentration camp. Let me recall these lines, among others: "The more
the SS believes us to be reduced to indistinction and irresponsibility, an appearance we
undoubtedly give, the more our community in fact contains distinctions, and the more strict
these distinctions are. The man of the camps is not the abolition of his differences. On the
153
NOTES TO CHAPTER I D 159
contrary, he is their effective realization." And the resistance of community has to do with
the fact that singular death imposes its limit. It is death that makes the unworking: "The
dead man is stronger than the SS. The SS cannot pursue one's friend into death .... He touches
a limit. There are moments when one could kill oneself, if only to force the SS to run up
against the limit of the dead object one will have become, the dead body that turns its back,
that has no regard for the law." See L'espece humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
32. On the notion of task, see Jean-Luc Nancy, "Dies irae" in La faculte de juger (Paris:
Minuit, 1985).
33. See Jean-Frarn;:ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van
Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
34. I am leaving aside here community according to the artist, or rather according to "the
sovereign man of art." Bataille's affront to society and the State comes most expressly and
continously from the community of lovers. But the communication or the contagion it rep-
resents are at bottom those of the community in the "sovereign abandon of art"-removed
from any aestheticism and even from any aesthetic "abandon." This will be taken up later
in a discussion of "literature."
35. Faced with the impossibility of referring sociality solely to the erotic or libidinal relation,
even in a sublimated form, Freud introduced that other "affective" relation, which he named
"identification." The question of community involves all the problems of identification. See
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "La panique politique" in Cahiers confron-
tations, no. 2 (1979), and "The Jewish People Do Not Dream," trans. B. Holmes, Part 1 of
"The Unconscious ls Destructured like an Affect," in Stanford Literature Review, Fall 1989,
pp. 191-209.
36. But Hegel knew this: This unity [the child], however, is only a point, a seed; the lovers
cannot contribute anything to it. ... Everything which gives the newly begotten child a manifold
life and a specific existence, it must draw from itself." In a similar vein, he writes: "Since
love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct from one another only insofar as
they are mortal" ("The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate," in On Christianity: Early The-
ological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948], pp. 307,
305).
2. Myth Interrupted
I. One would have to name far too many of them, if one wanted to be complete. Let
us say that the complete version of this scene has been elaborated from Herder to Otto,
passing through Schlegel, Schelling, Gi:irres, Bachofen, Wagner, ethnology, Freud, Kerenyi,
Jolles, Cassirer. ... Nor should we forget, in the beginning, Goethe, whose mytho-logico-
symbolic narrative The Tale is in sum the archetype of the modern myth of myth. Recently,
a German theoretician has gathered and reactivated all the grand traits of this scene, picking
up again the romantic appeal to a "new mythology" (and he, too, mixes into it, as one might
expect, the motif of an end of mythology or, more exactly, its self-surpassing): Manfred Frank,
Der kommende Gott (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982). But the strains of the mythological motif
are to be heard pretty much everywhere these last years.
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe
Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 219.
3. See Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, app. B, in The
Standard Edition, vol. 18.
4. Marcel Detienne, L'invention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). In another,
more recent article ("Le mythe, en plus ou en mains," in L'infini, no. 6, Spring 1984),
Detienne, speaking of "the fleeting, ungraspable essence of myth," seems to me to contribute
154
160 D NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
even more factual and theoretical elements to the reflection I am proposing here. As to the
invention, the avatars, and the aporia of the discourse on myth, see several of the contributions
and the discussions in Terror und Spiel: Probleme der Mythenrezeption (Munich: Fink Verlag,
1971).
5. Fragment from 1872, quoted in Terror und Spiel, p. 25.
6. See Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, trans. E. Howard (New York: Basic Books,
1974); Robert Cecil, The Myth and the Master Race: A. Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (New
York: Dodd, 1972); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Nazi Myth," trans.
B. Holmes, in Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990), pp. 291-312. But it would be necessary
to study more extensively myth's entry into modern political thinking, for example in Sorel,
and before him in Wagner-and also more generally the relationship between myth and ideology
as Hannah Arendt understands it, as well as the ideology of myth. I will limit myself here
to a marginal and elliptical reference: Thomas Mann wrote to Kerenyi in 1941, "Myth must
be taken away from intellectual fascism, and its function diverted in a human direction."
This, it seems to me, is exactly what must not be done: the function of myth, as such, cannot
be inversed. It must be interrupted. (This does not mean that Mann, the author moreover of
the famous phrase "life in myth," did not think or sense something other than what these
words say explicitly.)
7. lt remains nonetheless eloquent, and memorable, that one of the most acute thinkers
of "demythologization," Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was killed by the Nazis. Furthermore, what
remains intact of myth even within the thinking of demythologization is brought to light
perfectly in the opposition drawn by Paul Ricoeur between "demythologization" and "demy-
thification." On these problems in general, see the analyses and references in Pierre Barthel,
Interpretation du langage mythique et theo/ogie biblique (Leiden: Brill, 1963).
8. In addition to the works already cited, see the acts of the Collogue de Chantilly,
Problemes du mythe et de son interpretation (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1978). In a highly significant
way, Jean-Pierre Vernant ends his Mythe et societe en Grece ancienne (Paris: Maspero, 1982)
by calling for "a logic other than that of the logos" in order to arrive at an understanding
of the specific functioning of myths.
9. As Levi-Strauss says. And if we must see, in Levi-Strauss, "the myth of man without
myth," to borrow a phrase from Blanchot's L'amitie, this myth is then made up of the totality
of the myths of humanity.
10. Levi-Strauss again: "That great anonymous voice uttering a discourse from the depths
of the ages, issuing from the extreme depths of the mind" (The Naked Man, trans. John and
Doreen Weightman [New York: Harper and Row, 1981]).
11. The traits of this characterization are borrowed from several of the writers quoted at
the beginning of this essay. I would add here a trait from Heidegger. In what he says about
myth, Heidegger is in many respects heir to the Romantic tradition and "scene" of myth.
Yet his discretion, indeed his reserve, in regard to the theme of myth is quite remarkable in
itself. He wrote, "Myth is what most merits being thought," but also, "Philosophy did not
develop out of myth. It is born only of thinking, and in thinking. But thinking is the thinking
of Being. Thinking is not born." Rather than a thinking of myth, it is a question here of a
thinking at the extremity of myth, which in this respect is, moreover, indebted to Holderlin.
12. See Pierre Clastres, Le Grand Parler (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1984), p. 124.
14. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1857), Seventh Lecture.
15. See Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, trans.
B. M. Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 D 161
16. Marcel Detienne, L'invention de la mytho/ogie, p. 230.
17. W. F. Otto, "Die Sprache als Mythos," in Mythos und Welt (Stuttgart: Klett, 1962),
p. 285. With the invented word Sprachgesang (similar to Schonberg's Sprechgesang), Otto is
trying to designate bmh the rhythm and the melody present together in language, which
according to him make up "the supreme, close to divine being of things themselves."
18. As the Wagnerian definition puts it, "Myth unleashes the common poetic force of a
people" (in Manfred Frank, Der Kommende Gott, p. 229). And Levi-Strauss: "All individual
works are potential myths, but only if they are adopted by the collectivity as a whole do they
achieve mythic status" (The Naked Man, p. 627).
19. See Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in The Marx-Engels
Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), esp. pp. J20ff.
20. Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," in Gesammelte Schriften (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp, 1972-80), vol. 1.
21. This was the myth of an ephemeral community where Schelling, Holderlin, Hegel,
and the Schlegels crossed paths. Among other texts, see Le plus ancien programme de
l'idea/isme al/emand and the Discours sur la mythologie by Friedrich Schlegel. (Cf. P. Lacoue-
Labarthe and J .-L. Nancy, L'abso/u /itteraire, Paris: Seuil, 1980.)
22. But this tradition is as old as the concept or as the myth of myth: Plato is the first
to have evoked a new mythology, which would be the mythology of the City, and which was
to assure its well-being by protecting it against the seductiveness of the ancient myths. Cf.
M. Detienne, L'invention de la mythologie, chap. 5.
23. This is a simplification, of course. What distinguished and constituted these two
meanings was already the operation of mythic thinking, that is to say, of philosophical thinking,
which could alone determine the two concepts of "foundation" and "fiction." (On the Platonic
elaboration of the meaning of mythos, see Luc Brisson, P/aton, /es mots et /es mythes (Paris:
Maspero, 1982). The true thinking of myth is philosophy, which has always-in its very
foundation-wanted to tell the truth (I) of myth and (2) in relation to (as opposed to) myth.
The two truths together constitute the philosophical myth of the logical/ dialectical sublation
of myth. In this sublation, the "fiction" is converted integrally into "foundation." Thus
Fran~ois Fedier, for example, can write that for Holderlin myth does not have "today's current
meaning, roughly that of fiction." It is on the contrary "pure speech, averring speech" (in
Qu'est-ce que Dieu? Philosophie/Theologie. Hommage a /'abbe Daniel Coppieters de Gibson
[1929-1983}, [Brussels: Publications des Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1985] p. 133). The
sublation-profoundly tributary of a metaphysics of the speaking subject, or of speech as
subject-consists therefore in founding truth in a truthfulness, in the "averment" of a speaking,
that is, in the finest of determinations, the one most unlinked to a fiction-that of diction.
The whole philosophical problem of Dichtung hangs on this.
24. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung (Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1858), p. 379.
25. Cf., limiting ourselves to a striking similarity, this sentence from Levi-Strauss at the
end of The Naked Man: "Myths ... were simply making a general application of the processes
according to which thought finds itself to be operating, these processes being the same in
both areas, since thought, and the world which encompasses it, are two correlative manifes-
tations of the same reality" (p. 678).
26. Schelling, Philosophie der Mytho/ogie, p. 139. For an analysis of the poetico-mytho-
logical configuration of philosophy-in which philosophy sublates-see P. Lacoue-Labarthe,
Le sujet de la phi/osophie (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), especially the chapter entitled "Nietzsche
apocryphe."
27. According to the logic of the "proper," whose metaphysical constraints Jacques Derrida
has analyzed in Of Grammato/ogy, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns

162 D NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
Hopkins University Press, 1974), and in "White Mythology," in Margins of Philosophy, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207-71.
28. Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), p. 193.
29. Levi Strauss, The Naked Man, pp. 679 and 675.
30. Ibid., p. 694.
31. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),
p. 225.
32. Ibid, p. 16.
33. Moreover, it is not only the idea of a "new mythology" that is at stake here, but the
whole idea of a directive or regulative fiction. In this respect, the Kantian model of a "regulative
Idea" is up to a point only a modern variation on the function of myth: it knows itself to
be the fiction of a myth that will not come about but that gives a rule for thinking and acting.
Hence there is an entire philosophy of the "as if"-which does not belong solely to Hans
Vaihinger, whose Die Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of "As If," trans. C. K. Ogden
[New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968]) is well known, but also to Nietzsche, to Freud, and to
a whole modern style of thinking-which is not to be confused with a mythology but which
nonetheless bears comparable markings. It is still a question of the foundation of fiction.
Even Lyotard's recent use of the regulative Idea (in The Differend), where it is explicitly
distinguished from myth and set in opposition to it, does not seem to me to be determined
precisely enough to escape this function completely. It is necessary to go so far as to think
an interruption or a suspension of the Idea as such: what its fiction reveals has to be suspended,
its figure incompleted.
34. In which Heidegger resolves Nietzsche's will to power, and circumscribes the ultimate
essence of subjectivity.
35. Pierre Clastres, Recherches d'anthropo!ogie politique (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 125.
36. Georges Bataille, "L'absence du mythe" in Le surrealisme en 1947 (Paris: Maeght,
1947), and his lecture "La religion surrealiste" in Oeuvres completes, vol. 7 (Paris: Gallimard,
1972), p.381ff.
37. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowab/e Community, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station
Hill Press, 1988), p. 25.
38. Ibid., p. 20.
39. From Romanticism to our times; even outside the Schlegelian context of the "new
mythology," one can trace an uninterrupted sequence of instances of this mythological, or
rather mythopoietic, vision of literature. A recent example would be Marc Eigeldinger's
Lumieres du mythe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983).
40. Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 222. Shortly before this
passage, Blanchot had defined the mythic dimension, opposed to psychology, as "the sign of
great realities that one attains by means of a tragic effort against oneself." Only after the
composition of my own text did I become aware of Blanchot's article "Les intellectuals en
question" in the May 1984 issue of Le debat, where he writes: "The Jews incarnate ... the
refusal of myths, the abandonment of idols, the recognition of an ethical order that manifests
itself in respect for the law. What Hitler wants to annihilate in the Jew, in the 'myth of the
Jew,' is precisely man freed from myth." This is another way of showing where and when
myth was definitively interrupted. I would add this: "man freed from myth" belongs henceforth
to a community that it is incumbent upon us to let come, to let write itself.
41. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, p. 21.
42. "The unworking that haunts [works], even if they cannot reach it" (ibid).
43. Just as there is, moreover, a text of myth that interrupts it at the same time as it
shares it and reinscribes it in "literature": literature is perhaps only ever nourished on myths,
but is only ever written from their interruption.
155
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 D 163
44. In this respect, it is not love, indeed it even excludes it. In a sense, the community of
lovers exceeds the sharing and will not let itself be written. But love as the assumption of
community is precisely a myth, even myth itself. Literature inscribes its interruption. In this
interruption a voice that is no longer the derisory voice of the lovers, but a voice that comes
from their love, makes itself heard to the community.
45. The theme of the offering is set out fully in "L'offrande sublime," Po&sie, no. 30
(1984).
3. Literary Communism
1. In a general sense, the interruption, the suspension, and the "difference" of meaning
at the very origin of meaning, or even the being-trace (always already traced) of the "living
present" in its most proper structure (which is never a structure of propriety) constitute the
fundamental traits of what Jacques Derrida has thought through under the names of "writing"
and "archi-writing."
2. Only when we manage to comprehend this will we be liberated from the sociological
concept of "culture."
3. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ryazanskaya,
ed. Maurice Dobb (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), pp. 33-34.
4. Ibid.
5. The requestioning of communism mentioned above depends upon this (cf. chap. I,
n. 1).
6. But we should not forget to recall that the universality and generality that govern
capitalism have as their corollary the atomization of tasks in the industrial division of labor-
as distinct from its social division-and the solitary dispersion of individuals that results from
this and that continues to result from it. And from this stems a possible confusion of singularity
and the individual, of differential articulation and "private" partitioning, a confusion leading
to the collapse of the dreams, the ideals, or the myths of communitarian, communist, or
communal society-including, of course, the ones that Marx shared or brought to life. To
get beyond this confusion, to interrupt the myth, is to make oneself available for a relation
to one's fellows.
7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), "Pre-Capitalist Property and
Production."
8. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Vintage, 1977), "Conclusion."
9. Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," in Gesammelte Schriften (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp, 1972-80), vol. l.
10. The constitutive function of exemplarity in literature is analyzed and deconstructed-
in the strict sense of the word-by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in particular in "Typography,"
trans. E. Cadava in Typography, pp. 43-138.
4. Shattered Love
Note: The title of the French text is "L'amour en eclats." The word eclat should be read in
all its outbursts. The word can mean, and appears here as, shatter, piece, splinter, glimmer,
flash, spark, burst, outburst, explosion, brilliance, dazzle, and splendor.-Trans.
1. The distinction that Nancy makes here is very easy to render in French, where abstract
nouns may or may not be preceded by the definite article, depending upon the context. Hence,
Nancy is able to distinguish between "la pensee est amour" and "la pensee est !'amour." In
the first instance, Jove qualifies or describes thinking; in the second, it is offered more as a
definition of thinking: thinking is love; it is identical with love.-Trans.
156 Whatever

from: Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009

THE COMING being is whatever 1 being. In the Scholastic enumeration of

transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu peifectum-what-
ever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining un-
thought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective
quodlibet. The common translation of this term as "whatever" in the sense
of "it does not matter which, indifferently" is certainly correct, but in its
form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not "being, it does
not matter which," but rather "being such that it always matters." The
Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). What-
ever being has an original relation to desire.
The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not
in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for
example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such
as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowl-
edge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligi-
bility of the universal. The intelligible, according to a beautiful expression
of Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides), is neither a universal nor an individual
included in a series, but rather "singularity insofar as it is whatever singu-
larity." In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its hav-
ing this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set,
to this or that dass (the reds, the French, the Muslims)-and it is reclaimed
 157

not for another dass nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging,
but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains
constantly hidden in the condition of belonging ("there is an x such that it
belongs to y") and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself:
The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable.
Love is never directed toward this or that property of the
loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither
does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal
love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such
as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such-this is the lover's
particular fetishism. Thus, whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the
intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the
intelligence of an intelligibility. The movement Plato describes as erotic
anamnesis is the movement that transports the object not toward another
thing or another place, but toward its own taking-place-toward the Idea.
158
Example

THE ANTINOMY of the individual and the universal has its origin in lan-
gnage. The word "tree" designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits
the proper universal significance in place of singular ineffable trees (termi-
nus supponit significatum pro re). In other words, it transforms singnlarities
into members of a dass, whose meaning is defined by a common property
(the condition of belonging c). The fortune of set theory in modern logic is
1 1 1
born of the fact that the definition of the set is simply the definition of lin-
gnistic meaning. The comprehension of singnlar distinct objects m in a whole
M is nothing but the name. Hence the inextricable paradoxes of dasses,
which no "beastly theory of types" can pretend to solve. The paradoxes, in
effect, define the place of lingnistic being. Lingnistic being is a dass that
both belongs and does not belong to itself, and the dass of all dasses that
do not belong to themselves is langnage. Lingnistic being (being-called) is
a set (the tree) that is at the same time a singnlarity (the tree, a tree, this
tree); and the mediation of meaning, expressed by the symbol c, cannot in
any way fi.11 the gap in which only the artide succeeds in moving about
freely.
One concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal
and the particular has long been familiar to us: the example. In any context
where it exerts its force, the examp.le is characterized by the fact that it
 159
0:
0

:i:

communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tie~ by
holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included ~······~-.--·~-------·-· .„. _,_. .

~.~Y-~.?m~_?r_:.J>E?P.~.1:o/,__ '[)y ~y ide11t!1Y: .They are e}{propriated of all iden-

- · - · · - - · - · · -· • • •, ···--- _____ .,.„_. ___ , -· - - -- • . . - •

among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for
tity, so as to app!opriate belonging itself, the sign c. Tricksters or fakes,
each of them and serves for all. On one hand, every example is treated. in
assista!J.,!~. or. 't()OI1_s, they are the exemplars of the coming community.
..._.,..>;.oS , .• „. - - ,•

effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that ,,.,._y„.... ~.- .......

it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the

example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singu-
larity. Hence the pregnancy of the Greek tenn, for example: para-deigma,
that which is shown alongside (like the Gennan Bei-spiel, that which plays
alongside). Hence the proper place of the example is always beside itself, in
the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds.
This life is purely linguistic life. Only life in the word is undefinable and
unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is
what is not defined by any property, except by being-called. Not being-red,
but being-called-red; not being-]akob, but being-called-]akob defines the
example. Hence its ambiguity, just when one has decided to take it really
seriously. Being-called-the property that establishes all possible belong-
ings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist)-is also what can bring them
all back radically into question. lt is the Most Common that cut:; off any
real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. lt is
neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities
-·---·-------
160
Taking Place

--
THE MEANING of ethics becomes clear only when one understands that the
·--·~· ··--··--· ·-'

good is not, and. cannot be, a good thi11g_ or possibility beside or above
-;~ry-~~~-~~~~ ~r. p-oss,i~i!~o/,-~t~~e __au!he!lti~ ~~~ __the .true a~e n9t real . '/
p_:-ed.ic~tes of_ an object_ p~rfectly analogous (even if opposed) to the false
and the inauthentic.
--"-·--··-····-····
Ethics begins only when the good is revealed to consist in
1 V
nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the pro-
per have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper. This is
the meaning of the ancient philosophical adage according to which "veritas
patefacit se ipsam et falsum." Truth cannot be shown except by showing the
false, which is not, however, cut off and cast aside somewhere else. On the
contrary, according to the etymology of the verb patefacere, which means
"to open" and is linked to spatium, truth is revealed only by giving space or
giving a place to non-truth-that is, as a taking-place of the false, as an·
exposure of its own innermost impropriety.
As lang as the authentic and the good had a separate place
among humans (they took part), life on earth was certainly infinitely more
beautiful (still today we know people who took part in the authentic); and
yet the appropriation of the improper, of that which does not belang, was in
itself impossible, because every affirmation of the authentic had the effect of
pushing the inauthentic to another place, where morality would once again
 0

1-
161
:::l
0

)-

"'0
UJ
:i::

raise its barriers. The conquest of the good thus necessarily irnplied a
fore, is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendentis_ X
growth of the evil that had been repelled; every consolidation of the walls the taking-place
~---
of every. thin_g'.--··
... ____ ..--.----·----·--· ..... __ _,_,-
God or the good or the place does not take place, but is
of paradise was matched by a deepening of the infernal abyss. -~--·----·--- ____ „ __ ··- -- ,. ' -
the taking-place of the entitie~, their innennost exteriority. The being-
For us, who have been allotted not the slightest part of ___,___,~.,__, . .--"·-,„·-·· ········· ···•'-'"•·-·-·;·-·· ~J····. „. .. -- .•..• ~ -·· " - . . . .•. • ...

worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world
properness (or to whom, in the best of cases, only tiny fragments of the
is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and
good have been imparted), there opens instead, perhaps for the first time,
non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the
the possibility of an appropriation of impropriety as such, one that leaves
good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends
no residue of Gehenna outside itself.
r and exposes every worldly entity. Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction
This is how one should understand the free-spirit and )( ~
of the taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the tran-
Gnostic doctrine of the impeccability of the perfect. This does not mean, as
scendence inherent in the very taking-place of things. With respect to
the crude falsi:fications of the polemicists and inquisitors would have it, that
these things, however, the good is not somewhere else; it is simply the point
the perfect person can lay claim to comrnitting the most repugnant crimes
at which they grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch
without sinning (this is rather the perverse fantasy of moralists of all ages);
it means, on the contrary, that the perfect has appropriated all the possibili- their own non-transcendent matter.
·-·· -· - . ------ In this sense-and only in this sense-the good must be
y ties of evil and impropriety and therefore cannot comrnit evil.
de:fined as a self-grasping of evil, and salvation as the coming of the place to
This, and nothing else, was the doctrinal content of the
heresy that on November 12, 1210, sent the followers of Arnalric ofBena to itself.
burn at the stake. Arnalric interpreted the Apostle's claim that "God is all in
all" as a radical theological development of the Platonic doctrine of the
chora. God is in every thing as the place in which every thing is, or rather as
the determination and the "topia" of every entity. The transcendent, there-
162 Principium indivuationis

WHATEVER rs the matheme of singularity, without which it is impossible to

conceive either being or the individuation of singularity. How the Scho-
lastics posed the problem of the principium individuationis is well known.
Against Saint Thomas, who sought the place of individuation in matter,
Duns Scotus conceived individuation as an addition to nature or common
form (for example, humanity)-an addition not of another form or essence
V
or property, but of an ultima realitas, of an "utmostness" of the form itself.
Singularity adds nothing to the common form, if not a "haecceity" (as Eti-
enne Gilson says: here we do not have individuation in virtue of the form,
but individuation of the form). But for this reason, according to Duns Sco-
tus, common form or nature must be indifferent to whatever singularity,
must in itself be neither particular nor universal, neither one nor multiple,
but such that it "does not scorn being posed with a whatever singular
unity."
The lirhit of Duns Scotus is that he seems to conceive
common nature as an anterior reality, .which has the property of being
indifferent to whatever singularity, and to which singularity adds only haec-
ceity. Accordingly, he leaves unthought precisely that quodlibet that is insep-
arable from singularity and, without recognizing it, makes indifference the
real root of individuation. But "quodlibetality" is not indifference; nor is it
a predicate of singularity that expresses its dependence on common nature.
 163

"What then is the relationship between quodlibetality and indifference?

,filL~J~l:_?:ce. Ta.~i'f!:.g-:P}fl.f.e.,__.1he .cammunication-of.sing;ularities in the .. attribute of
How can we understand the indifference of the common human form with
extension, does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence. ><
respect to singular humans? And what is the haecceity that constitutes the ~-~-~-··--..

being of the singular? Whatever is constituted not by the indifference of com-

mon nature with respect to singularities, but by the indifference of the
We know that Guillaume de Champeaux, Peter Abelard's
common and the proper, of the genus and the species, of the essential and
teacher, af:firmed that "the idea is present in single individuals non essen-
the accidental. Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which,
tialiter, sed indifferenter." And Duns Scotus added that there is no difference
however, constitutes difference. _In-difference wit:h respect to properties is
of essence between common nature and haecceity. This means that the idea
what individuates _and . djs.se@.µa.t~!L sj:p.gulariti!'.!s, makes them lovable
... -~---------~---
><
and common nature do not constitute the essence of singularity, that singu- ' ' . -- . -·

(quodlibetablü-_Jµst as the right human word is neither the appropriation

larity is, in this sense, absolutely inessential, and that, consequently, the cri- .. --------
of what is common (language) nor the communication of what is proper, so
terion of its difference should be sought elsewhere than in an essence or a
too the human face is neither the individuation of a generic facies nor the
concept. The relationship between the common and the singular can thus
universalization of singular traits: lt is whatever face, in which what belongs
no langer be conceived as the persistence of an identical essence in single
to common nature and what is proper are absolutely indifferent.
individuals, and therefore the very problem of individuation risks appearing
as a pseudoproblem. This is how we must read the theory of those medieval
philosophers who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from com-
N othing is more instructive in this regard than the way
mon form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but
Spinoza conceives of the common. All bodies, he says, have it in common
an infinite series of modal oscillations. The individuation of a singular exis-
to express the divine attribute of extension (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 13,
tence is not a punctual fact, but a linea generationis substantiae that varies in
Lemma 2). And yet what is common cannot in any case constitute the
every direction according to a continual gradation of growth and remission,
essence of the single case (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 3 7). Decisive here i?_
of appropriation and impropriation. The image of the line is not gratuitous.
X the idea of an inessential
--~------·---··----·---
COl!_llll,Onality,
-·-- -···-· -----··
a solidarity that in no way concerns
. ---------· -- ------------ -------------„ ____________ _
In a line of writing the ductus of the hand passes continually from the com-

Principium indivuationis
164

mon form of the letters to the particular marks that identify its singular
presence, and no one, even using the scrupulous rigor of graphology, could
ever trace the real division between these two spheres. So too in a face,
human nature continually passes into existence, and it is precisely this
incessant emergence that constitutes its expressivity. But it would be
equally plausible to say the opposite: lt is from the hundred idiosyncracies
that characterize my way of writing the letter p or of pronouncing its
phoneme that its common form is engendered. Common and proper, genus
and individual are only the two slopes dropping down from either side of the
watershed of whatever. As with Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's Idiot, who
can effortlessly imitate anyone's handwriting and sign any signature ("the
humble Pafnutius signed here"), the particular and the generic become in-
different, and precisely this is the "idiocy," in other words, the particularity
of the whatever. The passage from potentiality to act, from language to the
word, from the common to the proper, comes about every time as a shut-
tling in both directions along a line of sparkling alternation on which com-
mon nature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpen-
etrate. The being that is engendered on this line is whatever being, and the
manner in which it pass-~from-th;~;~~11. to th~--p"i=~p~;-~~d fr~~-th_;-
___ ---- -- ·- ···-·· --·· ---- ···-- ---- ···~" --·~···- - ···-- ·-·····-----------
,/ proper to the common is called usage-or rather, ejho~,.
r . -
 1
Eas_e__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ 165

ACCORDING TO the Talmud, two places are reserved for each person, one
in Eden and the other in Gehenna. The just person, after being found in-
nocent, receives a place in Eden plus that of a neighbor who was damned.
The unjust person, after being judged guilty, receives a place in hell plus
that of a neighbor who was saved. Thus the Bible says of the just, "In their
land they receive double," and of the unjust, "Destroy them with a double
V 1
destruction."
In the topology of this Haggadah of the Talmud, the es-
sential element is not so much the cartographic distinction between Eden and
Gehenna, but rather the adjacent place that each person inevitably receives.
At the point when one reaches one's final state and fulfills one's own des-
tiny, one finds oneself for that very reason in the place of the neighbor.
What is most proper to every creature is thus its substitutability, its being
in any case in the place of the other.
Toward the end of his life the great Arabist Louis Mas-
signon, who in his youth had daringly converted to Catholicism in the land
of Islam, founded a community called Badaliya, a name deriving from the
Arabic term for "substitution." The members took a vow to live substituting
themselves for someone eise, that is, to be Christians in the place of others.
This substitution can be understood in two ways. The first
conceives of the fall or sin of the other only as the opportunity for one's
 ,_
166 ::>
0

own salvation: A loss is compensated for by an election, a fall by an ascent, tutability, without either_repr~~-ent?:tion or_p()ssible description-an abso-
___ ... -·· ·-·- - ·--------·-· .. - .„„.. . " --- ··-

according to an economy of compensation that is hardly edifying. (In this
sense, Badaliya would be nothing but a belated ransom paid for Massig-
non's homosexual friend who committed suicide in prison in Valencia in
1921, and from whom he had had to distance himself at the time of his con-
version.)
But there is also another interpretation of Badaliya. Ac-
cording to Massignon, in fact, substituting oneself for another does not
mean compensating for what the other Jacks, nor correcting his or her
errors, but exiling oneself to the other as he or she is in order to offer Christ
hospitality in the other's own soul, in the other's own taking-place. This
substitution no longer knows a place of its own, but the taking-place of
every single being is always already common --:~?- ~~p_ty sp;ic~ offer_e~!~
;< the one, irrevocable hospitality.
~---.-·-------~--·- ·-·--·--·-·---· ·-·-----· . --··-------- ..
The destruction of the wall dividing Eden from Gehenna
is thus the secret intention that animates Badaliya. In this community there
is no place that is not vicarious, and Eden and Gehenna are only the names
of this reciprocal substitution. Against the hypocritical fiction of the unsub-
~--- - • - - ' - - . -•
lutely unrepresentable community.
In this way, the multiple common place, which the Tal-
mud presents as the place of the neighbor that each person inevitably re-
ceives, is nothing but the coming to itself of each singularity, its being
whatever-in other words, such as it is.
Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space.
The term "ease" in fact designates, according to its etymology, the space
adjacent (ad--jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each can move freely,
in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune
time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct rela-
tion. The Provenc;:al poets (whose songs first introduce the term into
Romance languages in the form aizi, aizimen) make ease a terminus techni-
cus in their poetics, designating the very place of love. Or better, it desig-
nates not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of
taking-place in a whatever singularity. In this sense, ease names perfectly
that "free use of the proper" that, according to an expression of Friedrich
Hölderlin's, is "the most difficult task." "Maut mi semblatz de bel aizin."
••• •••• •' ••• ' "• L-·~·-··• ••L•,• • '"""'••• ..........

stitutability of the individual, which in ·-·our culture serves only to guarantee This is the greeting that, in Jaufre Rudel's song, the lovers exchange when
„.. . --·· - ······---------------·--. --- ------ --- .... ·-·' .,
its universal representability, Badaliya p_re.s.eIJJ:s__ an ur.iconditioned substi- theymeet.

E ase
 167
Irreparable

Q UESTIO 91 of the supplement to Saint Thomas's Summa Theologica is titled

De qualitate mundi post iudicium. This section investigates the condition of
nature after the universal judgment: Will there be a renovatio of the uni-
verse? Will the movement of celestial bodies cease? Will the splendor of
the elements increase? What will happen to the animals and plants? The
logical difficulty that these questions run up against is that, if the sensible
X
world was ordered to fit the dignity and the habitation of imperfect hu-
mans, then what sense can that world have when those humans arrive at
their supernatural destination? How can nature survive the accomplishment
of its final cause? To these questions Robert Walser's promenade on the
"good and faithful earth" admits only one response: The "wonderful
fields," the "grass wet with dew,'' the "gentle roar of the water,'' the "recre-
ational club decorated with bright banners,'' the girls, the hairdresser's
salon, Mrs. Wilke's room, all will be just as it is, irreparably, but precisely
this will be its novelty. The Irreparable is the monogram that Walser's ·writ-
ing engraves into things. Irreparable means that these things are consigned
without remedy to their being-thus, that they are precisely and only their
thus (nothing is more foreign to Walser than the pretense of being other
than what one is); but irreparable also means that for them there is Iiterally

------
absolutely aban92P.:e<l,.
---------·
- - - - - - - - · - - · - · - -· ·--·-----·-·------·------·--····---

no shelte~ü~.l~'-·~!.)n their being-thus they are absolutely exposed,

. . . . .. .. - . '-··-- - .. ··--···
. , •. ··--·· --~-~· „.„_

~
 4 u. J.

>-
168 0:
0
w
:I:
1-

This implies
-~··~· .
that hoth
..
,.
necessity and ~ontingenc::y
... ··•·· 1..
those
~-o„_crosses of We.stern thought have disappeared from the :gost iudicium
1

world. The world is now and forever necessarily contingent or contingently

\ · .necessaty. Between the not being able to not-be that sanctions the decree of
necessity and the being able to not-be that defines ftuctuating contingency 1

the finite world suggests a contingency to the second power that does not
found any freedom: It is capable of not not-being1 it is capable of the irre-
parable.
This is why the ancient dictum that says "If nature could
1

speak it would lament" makes no sense here. After the judgment1 animals 1
plants things all the elements and creatures of the world having com-
1 1 1

pleted their theological task would then enjoy an incorruptible fallen-

1

ness-above them floats something like a profane halo. Therefore nothing

could define the statute of the coming singularity better than these lines
that close one of the late poems of Hölderlin-Scardanelli:

(lt) appears with a day ofgold

and the fulfillment is without lament.
 169
Eth~ic~s..__~~~~~~~~~~~~~-

T.f1:E .fACT that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on
ethics ....is---·- that there is no _ess_ence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no bio-
.,..,..,.....----- -- '"

logical destiny that humans must ~nact or rt'.!~Jize. :[!~~-~-1:!1:e__()_~!y_ :_:~~~-!!

why something like an ethics can e:xist, because it is _clear that ifhu~a,ns
-------------·--·----------·-··------· --- -- - ---- - - . . . .. .. - - -
were or had to be this or that subs_taJ!_C~,_WiS Qr that destiny, no ethical ex-
----„·-·----- ----·-·····--- - --„-·--·-·· ----- ···- - , ....... --
X 1
perience would b~ possi_~le-there would be onlytasks tobe clone:,
~---- This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and
do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothing-
ness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or
not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this
point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but
this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: lt is the simple fact
of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality. But precisely because of
this things become complicated; precisely because of this ethics becomes
effective.
Since the being most proper to humankind is being one's
own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason (that is, insofar
as humankind's most proper being-being potential-is in a certain sense
lacking, insofar as it can not-be, it is therefore devoid of foundation and
humankind is not always already in possession of it), humans have and feel a
debt. Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other words,
 44. 5

170 0
,___
::>
0

>
"'0
:r
,___

always already in <lebt; they always already have a bad conscience without
having to commit any blameworthy act.
This is all that is meant by the old theological doc;gi!le Qf
()!-:~gin_'.l_l_~in,_Morality, on the other hand, refers this doctrine to a blame-
worthy act humans have committed and, in this way, shackles their poten-
tiality, turning it back toward the past. The recognition of evil is older and
more original than any blameworthy act, and it rests solely o_~_th<:_fact t!"i~~'
being and having_~Q~_Q!]Jyj_~~-P._()_S~i-~i_l~o/ _or potentiafüy__,__h.1:1~_3.:!lkin<i fa!_l_s
itself in _~-~~-rtainse!lse and has to appropria~e _0is fa_i~i..C:g_::=iE ~s_t9_!~S!-~~
'/ ~li_ty.___Like Perceval in the novel by Chretien de Troyes, humans are
guilty for what they lack, for an act they have not committed.
This is why ethics has no room for repentance; this is
why the only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a sub-
jective decision) is the experience of being (one's own) potentiality, of being
(one's own) possibility-exposing, that is, in every form one's own amor-
phousness and in every act one's own inactuality.
The only evil consists instead in the decision to remain in
a deficit of existence, to appropriate the power to not-be as a substance and
a foundation beyond existence; or rather (and this is the destiny of moral-
ity), to regard potentiality itself, which is the most proper mode of human
existence. as a fault that must always be repressed.
 252 / Erich.Auerb~ch
from: Auerbach, Erich. “The Philology of World Literature.” in James I. Porter (ed.). Time, History, and 171
Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014. 253-265.
creativity emerged time and again, Christians who found in the very crisis of
Christianity the impetus for their own creative growth. They were the ones 20
who finally burst the bonds of the una sancta [the one Holy Church]. C
forth countless schisms, they nevertheless also always provided for the
new wave of Christian religiosity. That a man of their kind, born in E
imbued with humility, alienated from the world, and possessed of a d · The Philology of World Literature
do penance and then be saved, could no longer find a place in any Ch
church and also failed to found a new one, and wrote not a single wor:d
the sufferings of Christ, the Fall, or the Last Judgment, even in the nf
all ofhis outbursts ofboth hope and despair-this seems to me tobe de Nonnulla pars inventionis est nasse quid quaeras.
for the changes that Europe underwent in the second half of the eighte~ [lt is no small part of discovery to know what you are looking for.]
century.
-Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, Prooemium.

Tue time has come to ask what meaning the phrase "world literature" can still
have if we take it, as Goethe did, to refer both to the present and to what we
can expect in thefuture. Ourplanet, theEarth-which is the "world" ofworld
literature-is growing smaller and becoming less diverse. But world litera-
ture does not refer merely to what we share or what is common to all human-
ity. Rath er, it concerns how what we share and the great diversity of what we
do not share can be mutually enriching. Tue felix culpa of the division of the
human race into a profusion of cultures is the precondition ofworld litera-
ture. But what is happening now? What ought we to be bracing ourselves for?
Todaywe are witnessing a homogenization ofhuman life the world over. This
is occurring for an untold number of reasons, which everyone knows. Tue
eclipsing of local traditions, a process that originated in Europe and which
persists today, is leading to their universal erosion. Of course, the calls for na-
tional self-determination are also now stronger and louder than ever before.
Yet, in each and every case, everyone who defends the national will is in fact
focused on reaching exactly the same goal, namely: modern forms of life. lt
is thus clear that everywhere-as any impartial observer can tell-the under-
lying spiritual foundations of individual national identity are in the process
of fading away. Tue civilizations of Europe, or the civilizations founded by
Europeans, continue tobe the most successful in maintaining their indepen-
dence from one another; first, because they have been accustomed to fruit-
ful interaction for so long, and then because each of them is of course also
sustained by a conscious belief in its own modernity and prestige. Even here,
however, the leveling process is advancing more rapidly than before. Every-
where else, standardization is spreading, regardless of whether it follows the
Euro-American or the Soviet-Bolshevist pattern. Moreover, no matter how
different from each other these two patterns may be, the distinctions between
172
254 1 Erich Auerbach
them are relatively minor when they are compared, in their current forms,
with the patterns that underlie the Muslim, South Asian, or Chinese tradi~'
tions. Should the human race in the end succeed in surviving the shock
so violent, enormously rapid, and poorly conceived a process of contractio.
then we will have to accustom ourselves to the thought that only a sing!
literary culture may survive in this homogenized world. lt may even happe
that, within a comparatively short period of time, only a limited number
literary languages will continue to exist, soon perhaps only one. If this wi
to come to pass, the idea of world literature would simultaneously be realiz
and destroyed.
If l am correct in my assessment that this situation is both inevitable an<f
the result of large-scale movements, it is clearly not what Goethe intended.
He was only too happy to avoid these sorts of ideas. And even ifhis thoughts
did occasionally tend a bit in this direction, it was only for a moment, for
he could not have anticipated how quickly and radically what was most dis~
agreeable to him would become reality-well beyond everything he had ex:-...
pected. How brief was the age to which he belonged! Those of us who are .a
bit older can still tell the story of its demise, for we experienced it first hand.
lt has only been some five hundred years since the European national litera-
tures overtook Latin culture and acquired a sense of themselves, and scarcely •
two hundred years since the sense of historical perspective awoke which al- :
lowed a concept like world literature to take shape. Goethe, who died only
120 years ago, contributed in crucial ways to the formation of this sense of
historical perspective and to the philological scholarship that issued from it.
And yet, we can already now observe the dawn of a world in which there will
no longer be any practical significance in possessing this kind of sensibility.
Tue period of humanism associated with Goethe was brief, but it had a
great impact, setting in motion much that continues to be feit today as it
branches out into ever broader and more diverse contexts. Tue knowledge of
the literatures of the world, both past and present, that Goethe had available
to him at the end of his life was considerable compared to what was known
at the beginning of his life. But even this knowledge was small compared to
the knowledge we possess today. We owe our current assets, as it were, to
the impetus that the historicist humanism of Goethe's age gave us, which
helped us to both locate the material and develop ways of studying it. But
quite beyond this, we owe a <lebt to that age for our ability to penetrate and
evaluate this new material in such a way that it can contribute to the history
of the intellectual and spiritual development ofhumanity in general, and thus
to the realization of a unified vision of the human race in all its variety. This
was the actual purpose of philology, beginning with Vico and Herder, and it
was thanks to it that philology became the leading method in the humanities,
pulling into its orbit the history of the other arts as well as the history of reli-
gion, law, and politics; in the process, it frequently became intertwined with
Tue Philology ofWorld Literature 1 255
these other fields in the development of shared conceptual systems and goals.
There is no need to recall how much was accomplished in terms ofboth pri-
mary research and secondary synthesis as a result of this collaboration.
How reasonable is it to continue to pursue this kind of activity in light
of what are now significantly changed circumstances and prospects for the
future? Tue mere fact that philology continues to be practiced and is even
expanding into new areas and traditions does not say very much. Something
can continue for quite a long time after it has become institutionalized and
part of a routine. This is particularly the case even when people have noticed
that something has changed profoundly in the general conditions of their
lives and also recognize the füll implications of these changes, but, for all
that, are not yet in any way prepared to-or even capable of-drawing prac-
tical conclusions from what they see. Nevertheless, now as before, there is a
small number of intensely committed young people, distinguished by their
talent and originality, and interested in pursuing philology and intellectual
history, who give grounds for hope, the hope, that is, that they are not being
betrayed by their instincts, and that there is both a reason and a future for
this kind of work.
These days, scientific research into the realities of the world crowds in on
and controls our lives. This kind of research is our myth, orie might say; we
have no other myth that might be so widely accepted. Of all of these realities,
history is the one that concerns us most directly, moves us most deeply, and
makes us aware of who we are in the most intimate way. For only in history
do human beings appear before us in the fullness of their lives. When I refer
to the field ofhistory here, I do not mean merely the past, but rather the prog-
ress of events in general, including, in any given case, the present-day. Tue
intellectual and spiritual history of the last several millennia is the history of
the human race as it has achieved self-expression. It is with this history that
philology concerns itself as a historical discipline. Its archive contains the
records of the grand and adventurous leap forward that human beings made
to becoming aware of their condition as humans and thus to realizing their
inner potential. For a long time, humanity had almost no sense of the goal
toward which it was being propelled-even in the certainly very fragmented
form this goal takes today. And yet, in spite of the intricacy of its twists and
tums, this movement nevertheless seems to have proceeded as if according
to a plan. Tue wealth of conflicts that human beings are capable of is part of
this joumey. Along the way, a kind of drama unfolds whose richness and
profundity excite all the faculties of those who look on. At the same time, the
spectacle allows its viewers to make peace with their lot by being enriched
by what they have seen. Tue loss of a purchase from which to observe this
drama-a drama that must of course be staged and interpreted if it is tobe-
come visible-would be a loss beyond repair. Of course, only those who have
not yet fully suffered such a loss would be able to experience it as such. This
256 1 Erich Auerbach
thought ought not to prevent us, however, from doing everything we can to
prevent the loss from taking place.
If the thoughts about the future with which I began are at all justified;
the task at hand-which is, first, to collect the evidence and then to preSJ
it in a unified and effective way-is an urgent one because we are the'
ones, at least in principle, still capable of accomplishing it. This is true
simply because we have so much material at our disposal, but also
above all-because we have inherited the sense ofhistorical perspective
the task requires, and also because we still live in the midst of and con
to experience historical diversity. Without this experience of diversity, I
our sense of historical perspective might rapidly lose its vitality and concr•
ness. We appear to be living, then, at a decisive moment in the evolutio
hermeneutical history writing. How many more generations will belo
this moment is uncertain. We are already threatened, for example, by the
poverishment of understanding associated with a concept of education
has no sense of the past. lt is not just that this impoverishment already.exis
it actually threatens to become hegemonic. What we are we have become
the course of our history, and it is only in history that we can remain wl
we are, and develop. At this-our-moment in time, it is thus the task
the philologists of the world to demonstrate this truth in such a way tha·
penetrates deeply into people's minds and becomes impossible to forget.
ward the end of the chapter, "Die Annäherung" [Becoming More Intimaf,
in his novel, Nachsommer [Indian Summer], Adalbert Stifter has one of
characters say: "lt would fulfill my highest desire if after we leave this mo.tt,
sphere our spirit could survey and embrace the entire artistic expressioD.'qj
the human race from its beginnings to its end:' [Wendell Frye, trans. (Ne~
York: P. Lang, 1985) 255]. Stifter is thinking here only of the fine arts, and1i
do not believe that we can speak yet of the "end" of the "human race:' But ·
do seem to have reached an end point that is also a turning point, one fro
which we will nevertheless also be permitted an overview that has never bee:p;
possible before.
This idea of world literature and of the philology appropriate to it see;lll#
less active, less practical, and less political than its precursor. lt no longer in~
cludes any talk of intellectual exchange or of the refinement of custom or of:
reconciliation between nations. This is so partly because it has been imposc;
sible to achieve these goals and partly because historical events have alreac),.j
rendered them superfluous. lt may weil be true that certain distinguished
individuals and small groups of highly learned people have enjoyed cultural
exchanges of this sort. Indeed, they were-and even still are in our owi:l:.
times-sought on a grand scale. But they have little impact on culture or rec.'.{
onciliation among peoples in general. In the face of the storm of competing
interests and of the propaganda that is the result, whatever such encounters
may have actually accomplished has faded away in an instant. Dialogue is .
Tue Philology ofWorld Literature 1 257 173
effective when it takes place after political developments have already led to
rapprochement; it then hastens the creation of solidarity and understanding
within the group in ways that serve a common cause. In general, however,
as I stated at the outset, different cultures have begun to resemble one an-
other much more rapidly and completely these days than a humanist of the
Goethean persuasion might want to endorse. And there appears to be no rea-
sonable likelihood that any such differences as remain between the cultures
will be able to be settled by any means other than force. Tue idea of world
literature that I am proposing here, which conceives of world literature as a
diverse backdrop to a common human fate, no longer seeks, then, to achieve
what is in any case already underway (even if it is happening entirely differ-
ently than one might have hoped). I accept as inevitable that world culture is
in the process ofbecoming standardized. But I do hope that my understand-
ing of world literature will allow those nations that are in the midst of this
fateful convergence to focus with greater precision on what is happening to
them in these, their last productive moments of variety and difference, so
that they can remain mindful of the process and make it part of their own
mythologies. If they do so, their awareness of the abundance and depth of in-
tellectual and spiritual developments over the past millennia will not wither
and die. lt would be fruitless even to speculate about what long-term impact
such an effort might have; the task at hand is only to create the possibility that
it might have one. This much may in any case be said, that during a transi-
tional age such as ours the impact I am describing can be very significant. lt
might even help us accept what is happening to us with greater composure,
and allow us to not despise our enemies all too blindly, even when it is our
mission to fight them. In this sense, my idea of world literature and its cor-
responding philology is no less human and no less humanistic than its pre-
decessor. Tue idea of history on which it is based is also not the same as the
earlier idea of history-even though it has its roots in it and is inconceivable
without it.
I have argued that we are in principle still capable of meeting the challenge
that the creation of a philology of world literature presents. This is possible,
first, because we have an infinite amount of material at our disposal (this
material is in fact always increasing) and, second, because we still possess the
sense of historical perspective that was bequeathed to us by the historicism
of the age of Goethe. Regardless of how promising such a project might ap-
pear overall, the individual, practical challenges that face us in realizing it are
considerable. For instance, in order to complete the task of gaining intimate
access to and giving shape to world literature, there must be at least a few
scholars who command the material in its entirety-or at least large portions
of it-as the result of their own experience and research. Yet, it has become
virtually impossible to attain this degree of mastery because of the glut of ma-
terial, methods, and approaches that we face. We possess texts ranging over
174 258 1 Erich Auerbach
six millennia, from all parts of the globe, and in some fifty different literaty
languages. Many of the cultures with which we are now familiar were still
undiscovered one hundred years ago; others were known, but only piecemea1
when compared with what we have now. Moreover, even for those e
that we have been studying for hundreds of years, we have now dis
so much that is new that our conception of them is utterly differ1
what it was before. As a result, we confront entirely new problems:
it has become clear that we cannot study the literature of any partic
of a civilization in isolation. We must also attend to the factors th
ditioned that literature as it developed, to the religious, philosophi
litical, and economic circumstances of the time, and to its fine arts
course its music as well. We must, moreover, stay current in the seht
in all of these individual fields as that scholarship continues to be pr,
Tue sheer quantity of material leads to the need for an ever more spe
focus; special methods emerge, with the result that each sub-discipline~
each of the many ways it can be understood-develops its own secret
But that is not all. Interloper concepts and methods, with their origi
the non-philological disciplines and trends, begin to invade philologys
main. They come from sociology and psychology as well as from
philosophical tendencies and from the sphere of contemporary literary:
cism too. All these must be worked through, if only so that we can in
conscience dismiss one or the other of the methods that has been pro
as useless for our philological ends. Scholarship that does not limit it
a disciplined fashion, to a narrow and specialized field and to a conce
frame shared by a small number of expert colleagues will find itself a,
a welter of impressions and demands to which it is nearly impossible
justice. Yet, it is also becoming increasingly frustrating to restrict one
work in a single, specialized field. For example, someone who wants
days to become an authority in Proven\:al poetry, but commands no
more than the relevant knowledge in linguistics, paleography, and the
of the time, will hardly be considered even an adequate scholar in the
At the same time, there are other areas of specialization that have develo
so many sub-fields that to become expert in them all would take an e.
lifetime. Here the study of Dante is an example-even though one can h
say that Dante is a field of specialization, since studying him takes on
every possible direction. Tue same is true for courtly romance, with its th
areas of concern: courtly love, Celtic lore, and the story of the Grail.
many scholars can there be who have mastered the entire scope of even
this one field in all of its intricacies and research specialties? Under t
circumstances, how can we really conceive of a truly synthetic and system "
philology ofworld literature?
There are still some individuals who have a magisterial overview of ....
entirety of a tradition, at least in the case ofEurope. But as far as I know, they-'
Tue Philology ofWorld Literature 1 259
belong to the generation that came of age before the First and the Second
World Wars, and they will be difficult to replace. Since then, there has been a
nearly universal collapse oflate-bourgeois humanist culture, for which learn-
ing Greek and Latin and being familiar with Scripture were still the norm in
the schools. And, if I may surmise the following on the basis of my experi-
.ences in Turkey, similar developments have occurred in other countries with
ancient cultural traditions. As a result, what could formerly be assumed at
the level of university study (or in "graduate studies" in English-speaking
<;ultures) must now be acquired only at that point, and this is often too late
for it to be satisfactorily learned. Moreover, the center of gravity has shifted
within the universities and graduate schools. Modem literature and criticism
are much more the norm; of the older periods, preference is given to those
that have just recently been rediscovered or are familiar to us from modern
literary parlance, as in the case of the Baroque. There is no question that we
must learn to understand the whole of history from within the mentality
and circumstances of our own times if that history is to become relevant for
us. But talented students already have a command of the spirit of their own
times. In my opinion, they do not need academic instruction to make Rilke,
Gide, or Yeats their own. But they do require help if they want to understand
the linguistic forms and material circumstances of life in the ancient world,
the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, for example, and to ·become familiar
with the research methods and resources necessary for exploring these fields.
While the questions and categories of contemporary literary criticism are
always meaningful as an expressiori of the spirit of one's own time, and are
also often ingenious and illuminating in their own right, only a very few of
them are ever really useful in any direct way for historical and philological
research-not to speak ofbeing substitutes for traditional concepts. They are
mostly too abstract and ambiguous, often also -result in an all too exaggerated
private jargon, and thus intensify the temptation to which many beginners-
and often not just beginners-are inclined to fall prey, namely the desire to
master a great wealth of material by introducing abstract organizational cat-
egories in a hypostasizing way. This can lead only to the effacement of the
object of study, to the discussion of issues that are illusory, and ultimately to
absolutely nothing at all.
And yet, as irritating as these phenomena may occasionally be, they do
not seem to me to be the real threat, at least not for truly talented students
who are genuinely devoted to their task. Some have already managed to ac-
quire the skills that are generally indispensable for historical philological
work and to find the proper balance between openness to and independence
from fashionable trends. In many respects, they also have an advantage over
their predecessors from earlier decades. Tue events of the past forty years
have broadened our horizons, revealed world-historical perspectives to
us, and revived and enriched our ways of viewing the structures of inter-
260 1 Erich Auerbach
subjective interactions in concrete ways. We have been and continue tobe
participants in a practical seminar in world history, which has allowed us tQ: •
develop greater insight into historical phenomena than we had before, an
greater ability to imagine them. Indeed, even some of the most outstan1
products of historical philology from the late-bourgeois era now s
artificial and narrow in terms of the problems they address. In thiss
do have it easier these days.
Still, how are we to solve the challenge that synthesis involves? A..
seems too short to accomplish even the preliminaries. Although e
useful in other contexts, organized collaboration is not the solution:
spite of the fact that the historical synthesis of which I am thinking
meaningful only when it is based on a scientific encounter with the m:
it is, finally, a product of personal intuition. Thus, only the individual
expected to achieve it. Complete success in such an endeavor would ·
be at once a scholarly achievement and a work of art. Even determin·
place from which one should approach the material (Ansatzpunkt), a
which I will have more to say below, is a matter of intuition. Executi.:n
project in turn entails giving it a form that must be unified and evocatt
is to reach what is being expected of it here. Surely it is intuition's capa
produce new combinations that we have to thank if anything signific
actually been achieved in this respect. But, in terms of historical syn
there is the additional requirement that, if what it produces is to achie
füllest effect, this product must also appear to the reader to be a work o
Tue traditional objection that the literary work of art must be free in o
to gain access to its proper matter-and thus cannot be bound by seien
rules-can scarcely still be raised. For the historical objects of today offer
imagination abundant freedom in terms of the kinds of problems it can
dress and the ways in which these problems can be formulated, combin.
and shaped. Indeed we might say that scientific integrity provides a good
of setting limits. That is, since both trivializing reductionism and grotesqi1
distortion often tempt one to deviate from the object or reality at hand
scientific approach can help preserve and guarantee something that is a,_ -,,-·
ally probable in the realm of the real-since the real is the measure of th~
probable. Moreover, when we demand that an intellectually synthesizing wa)"~
ofhistory writing resemble a literary genre, we are well within the European
tradition. Ancient historiography was a literary genre, and the philosophi~:
cally and historically oriented criticism established by German Classicism: f
and Romanticism strove to develop its own version of artistic expression .as
well.
We must thus return to the question of the individual. How can one per-
son alone produce this kind of synthesis? Not in any case by encyclopedic
collecting, it seems to me. A broad frame of reference is a prerequisite; of this
there can be no doubt. But this frame must be achieved before the fact, as
Tue Philology ofWorld Literature 1 261
175
were, without being limited by any external purpose, and it must be guided
by the instinct of personal interest alone. As we have seen in the last several
decades, however, it is diffi.cult to perform the work of synthesis simply by
striving to collect all of the materials pertinent to even just one field in com-
plete and exhaustive detail-as is usually clone in the grand handbooks on a
national literature, a period, or a literary genre, for example. Tue diffi.culty
lies not only in the sheer abundance of material, which no one person can
truly master (in such cases, working in groups is to be recommended), but,
rather, in the very structure of the material itself. Tue traditional categories,
e.g., chronology, geography, and genre, are indispensable for the preparatory
steps. But they are not-or are no longer-conducive to a procedure that is
dynamic and unifying. Such categories do not cover the areas with which
the synthetic approach is concerned. I have even begun to doubt whether
monographs on individual important figures, ofwhich we possess many ex-
cellent examples, are still suitable as a point of departure (Ausgangspunkt) for
the kind of synthesis that I am advocating here. To be sure, the figure of the
single author provides a concrete and integral life that is fully realized and
complete; this object of study is always better as a focal point than anything
that has been entirely made up. At the same time, the single author provides
this coherence only at the price ofbeing at once too imprecise and too handi-
capped by the fruitless ahistoricity to which the very fact of the individual as
individual ultimately leads.
Tue most impressive of the recent publications that consider literature
from a synthetic point of view is Ernst Robert Curtius's book, European Lit-
erature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948). In myview, this book owes its suc-
cess to the fact that, in spite of its title, it does_not begin with a comprehens!ve
or generalizing idea. Rather, its point of departure fs a single phenomenon
that is precisely, and even narrowly, defined-namely, the survival ofthe tra-
dition of rhetorical education. Regardless of the huge amount of material
that it assembles, the best parts of the book are thus not based on amass-
ing details. Rather, they address everything that radiates out from something
that is very limited. At the most general level, the book takes as its object of
study the survival of antiquity up through the Latin Middle Ages and the
impact that these medieval forms of antiquity had on modern European lit-
erature. At first sight, there is very little one might be able to do with such a
broadly conceived project. Anyone who undertakes it intending to do more
than merely describe the subject matter faces an incalculably large mass of
disparate materials that would be nearly impossible to organize. Even find-
ing the form that such a project might take by arranging these materials in
mechanical fashion according to predictable categories-such as the influ-
ence of a single author, or the survival (in sequence) of the entire tradition
over the centuries of the Middle Ages-would be stymied by the sheer mag-
nitude of the material on hand. Only by designating as the starting point

176
a phenomenon that is at once firmly circumscribed, comprehensible, and
foundational enough-here, the rhetorical tradition and especially the topoi,
or "commonplaces" -does it become possible to carry out such a plan. To
discuss whether the choice of this speci:fic starting point is entirely satisfac-
tory, or even the best one we might imagine for the purpose, is not the is
here. Indeed, anyone who finds Curtius's starting point inadequate
compared with his intention has to admire what he achieved all the
That he was able to do what he did was thanks to this methodological
ciple, namely: In order to conduct a large synthetic project, it is necess
find a starting point, a tangible hook, as it were, that allows one to lay
of one's object of study. This point must single out a dearly circumscri
and easily surveyed set of phenomena. And the interpretation of these
nomena must possess an illuminating power that is sufficient to org;
and interpret a far broader range of phenomena than the point from whi!
it started.
This method has existed for a long time. For example, the study of s
listics has long made use of it to describe the specificity of a given style
the basis of certain fixed characteristics. Yet, it seems to me essential to
phasize the critical importance of this method in general as the only
available at this point in time that allows us to describe important proces
of intellectual history against a broader background in a synthetic and evoc
tive way. lt also allows younger, even novice, scholars to do this. In fact,
soon as one has intuitively located an auspicious point at which to begin,
even a comparatively modest general knowledge-helped along by a bitl:lf~1
advisement-can be enough. As one proceeds to work out the project, one'~S
horizons will expand in a natural and appropriate way, since the selectioJ,l,'
of relevant materials is already indicated by where one starts. In the e:qd~
the elaboration is so concrete, its elements so intimately and necessarily ofa,'
piece, that one does not easily forget what one has learned. Tue achievement'
is marked, finally, by unity and universality precisely because of its locatiori"
at the intersection of many layers and paths.
Naturally, it is not always the case in practice that a general project, prob.::
lern, or interest preexists the concrete approach one will then take. From time
to time, it happens that we first find a specific phenomenon from which to
proceed (Ansatzphänomen) and are then prompted to recognize and formu-
late the general problem. This can of course only happen when we are open
to that problem in advance. lt is essential to understand that a general, syn-
thetically framed interest, project, or problem is not enough. lt is much more
important to locate a partial phenomenon that is as focused and concrete as
possible and that can be described with technical philological terms. For it is
only out of the phenomenon that further questions will emerge, so to speak,
on their own. Only as a result oflocating such a phenomenon do the formu-
lation and execution of the project become possible. Occasionally one such
Tue Philology ofWorld Literature 1 263
initial phenomenon alone will not suffice; several will be required. But once
the first one is in place, the rest will come more easily-particularly if they
are (as they must be) not only joined together serially, one after another, but
all converging on a common goal. This is of course a kind of specialization.
But it is not the specialization that relies on inherited ways of classifying one's
material. Rather it is always matched to the specific object at hand. As such,
it must itself always be invented anew.
Tue starting points can be very heterogeneous. lt would not be feasible
to enumerate all of the possibilities here. What distinguishes a good place
to start is, on the one hand, its concreteness and inherent richness, and, on
the other, its potential power to shed light in a radiating fashion. Tue mean -
ing of a word, a rhetorical form, a syntactical expression, the interpretation
of a sentence, or a series of remarks made at some moment in time and in
some particular place-any of these will do. But the possibility of illuminat-
ing areas further afield must also exist, such that one could ultimately study
the history of the entire world on the basis of wherever it is that one starts.
Tue scholar who wants to work on the position of the writer in the nineteenth
century, whether in one specific country or in Europe in general, may well
produce a useful reference work by bringing together all there is to know
about the topic, and we ought to be grateful for the production of such a
helpful book. But the act of synthesis of which I am thinking is more likely to
occur if one begins with just a limited number of remarks that very specific
writers made about, say, their readers. Tue same may be said for such topics
as the afterlife and fame (la fortuna) of poets. Tue comprehensive studies of
Dante reception in individual countries as they currently exist are certainly
indispensible. But something much more interesting might emerge-and I
am indebted to Erwin Panofsky for the suggestion-if we were to trace how
individual passages of the Divine Comedy have been interpreted over the
years, beginning with the very first commentaries and then proceeding up
through the sixteenth century, and then again since the Romantics. This is
how to do intellectual history in a precise way.
A good starting point must thus be focused and have an objective qual-
ity Abstract classificatory categories and notions of what is "typical" are not
appropriate. "Tue Baroque" and "the Romantic;' "Drama'' and "the Idea of
Fate;' "Intensity;' "Myth;' the "Period Concept;' and "Perspectivism" -all
of these terms are dangerous. They can perhaps be used when the context
makes it clear what they mean. But they are much too ambiguous to be used
as starting points to designate something specific that can be grasped and
kept firmly in hand. Also, the starting point should not be some generaliza-
tion that is then imposed on the object of study from the outside. Rather
it should grow out of it organically, like a part of the whole. Tue things
themselves should be allowed to speak. If where one begins is neither con-
crete nor clearly delineated, this will never happen. And even if one has the
 177
264 / Erich Auerbach The Philology ofWorld Literature 1 265

very best starting point, it takes a great deal of skill to stay focused on the entire world is as a foreign land] [1he Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A
object. Everywhere, conceptual cliches lie in wait. Although seldom exactly Medieval Guide to the Arts, translated by Jeremy Taylor (New York: Columbia
appropriate, their fashionableness and the way they sound can be seductive; University Press, 1961) 101]. Hugh's intended audience consisted of those
in any case, they are ever ready to interject themselves into our writing as individuals whose goal it was to free themselves from their love of this world.
soon as we drift away from the energy that the tangible exerts. lt is thus th But it is also a good path to follow for anyone who desires to secure a proper
the occasional writer-and many readers-are led to mistake an appeali love for the world.
cliche for the thing itself. Far too many readers are prone to such substitu'.}~
tions. We must do all that we can to prevent them at every turn from strayingt
away from what is actually meant. Tue phenomena which lend themselve~!
to synthetic philology have an objective existence of their own. This quaf
ity must not be lost sight of in the synthesis, however difficult this may b
Tue point here is not to enjoy individual details in a quietly contemplativ~;
manner. Rather, the goal is tobe caught up in the dynamic movement ofthe
whole. This movement can be witnessed in pure form, however, only wheri:
the individual elements are grasped in all of their substantive reality.
As far as I know, there have been no attempts to engage in a philology of
world literature of this synthesizing kind. Only a few initial approaches have
been made by those concerned with Western culture. But the more that the.
globe contracts, the greater the imperative will be to expand our efforts to
engage in synthetic and perspectival work. lt is an enormous task to make
people conscious of themselves within their own history. And yet, it is actu:;
ally also a limited undertaking-indeed, even a kind of renunciation-if we
consider that we live not just on the earth, but in the world, in the universe.
We no longer dare to determine the place mankind ought to take in that uni-
verse as earlier ages did. All of that seems quite alien to us now.
Yet, our philological home is the earth. lt can no longer be the nation.
Tue most precious and necessary thing that philologists inherit may be their
national language and culture. But it is only in losing-or overcoming-this
inheritance that it can have this effect. We must now return-albeit under
different conditions-to what the pre-nation-state culture of the Middle
Ages already possessed, to the knowledge that the human spirit itself is not
national. Paupertas [humble circumstances] and terra aliena [foreign soll]:
These are the words we find in one form or another in the works of Bernard
of Chartres, John of Salisbury, Jean de Meun, and many others. Magnum vir-
tutis principium est, writes Hugh of Saint Victor in his Didascalicon (3.20), ut
discat paulatim exercitatus animus visibilia haec et transitoria primum com-
mutare, ut postmodum possit etiam derelinquere. Delicatus ille est adhuc cui
patria dulcis est, fortis autem cui omne solum patria est, perfectus vero cui
mundus totus exilium est [lt is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the prac-
ticed mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory
things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. Tue
man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom
every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the
 178
PhengCheah
What is a world? On world literature
as world-making activity
Modem cosmopolitanism is largely
an affair of philosophy and the social
sciences. Whether one thinks of the
ideal ethical projects of worldwide soli-
darity of the eighteenth-century French
philosophes or Kant, or of more recently
emerging discourses of new cosmopoli-
tanism in our era of economic globaliza-
tion, transnational migration, and global
cornmunications, literature seems to
have little pertinence to the construction
of normative cosmopolitan principles
for the regulation of institutional actors
on the global stage, or to the study of the
proliferating associations and networks
that envelop the entire globe. Cosmopol-
itanism is primarily about viewing one-
self as part of a world, a circle of belong-
ing that transcends the limited ties of
kinship and country to embrace the
Ph eng Cheah is professor of rhetoric at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley. He is the author
of "Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism
and Human Rights" (2006) and "Spectral Na·
tionality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Post-
colonial Literatures of Liberation" (2003), and
has recently edited the forthcoming "Derrida and
the Time of the Political" (with Suwnne Guerlac;
Duke University Press, 2008).
© 2008 by Pheng Cheah
26 Dredalus Summer 2008
Daedalus 137:3 (Summer 2008). 26-38.
whole of humanity. However, since one
cannot see the universe, the world, or
humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not
one of perceptual experience but of the
imagination. World literature is an im-
portant aspect of cosmopolitanism be-
cause it is a type of world-making activi-
ty that enables us to imagine a world.
At first glance, cosmopolitanist dis-
course seems only to refer to literature
in disparagement. Kant frets that his
teleological account of world history,
with its goal of establishing a world fed-
eration of states, will be taken for a fan-
ciful fiction: "lt is admittedly a strange
and at first sight absurd proposition to
write a history according to an idea of
how world events must develop if they
are to conform to certain rational ends;
it would seem that only a novel could re-
sult from such a perspective [Absicht)." 1
However, he also points out that cosmo-
politanism is a pluralism, the imagining
l Immanuel Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen
Gescltichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, in Schriften
zur Antliropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik
und Pädagogik!, ed, Wilhelm Weischedel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 47-
48; "Idea of a Universal History with a Cos-
mopolitan Purpose," in Political Writings, ed.
Hans Reiss and tr:rns. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51-52,
translation modified.
of a !arger community ( the world) such
that one' s self-importance diminishes
as a result of considering other perspec-
tives beyond immediate self-interest:
"the opposite of egoism can only be plu-
ralism, that is, the way of thinking in
which one is not concerned with oneself
as the whole world, but rather regards
and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of
the world [Weltbürger). " 2 In this imagi-
native process that generates cosmopoli-
tan feeling, we can discern three mo-
ments. First, one must sunder the iden-
tification of oneself with the world and
breach and transcend the limits of this
particularistic perspective. Second, one
must imagine a universal community
that includes all existing human beings.
Third, one must place oneself within
this imagined world as a mere member
of it, subordinating one's egoistic inter-
ests to that of the whole.
Literature creates the world and cos-
mopolitan bonds not only because it en-
ables us to imagine a world through its
powers of figuration, but also, more im-
portantly, because it arouses in us pleas-
ure and a desire to share this pleasure
through universal communication. Lit-
erature enhances our sense of (being a
part of) humanity, indeed even brings
humanity into being because it leads to
sociability. For humanity (Humanität),
as Kant argues in the Third Critique,
"means on the one hand the universal
Jeding of partidpation [das allgemeine Teil·
nehmungsgefühl) and on the other hand
the capacity for being able to communi-
cate one's inmost seif universally [sich
2 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatisclt-
er Hinsicht, in Kant, Schriften zur Anthropologie,
Gesc11icbtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik 2,
ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1968), 411; Anthropology Jrom a Prag-
matic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 18.
innigst und allgemein mitteilen), which
properties taken together constitute
Wltatis
aworld?
the sociability [Geselligkeit J that is appro-
priate to humankind [Menschheit). by
means of which it distinguishes itself
from the limitation of animals. "3
Goethe conceived of world literature
as a dynamic process of literary ex-
change, intercourse, or traffic, exem-
plified by the international character of
his own relations with foreign authors
and intellectuals and by the revitalizing
movement of mirroring (Spiegelung)
brought about by the reception, transla-
tion, review, and criticism ofliterary
works in other languages. 4 He writes:
There is being formed [bilde] a universal
world literature, in which an honorable
role is reserved for us Germans. All the
nations review our work; they praise, cen-
sure, accept, and reject, imitate and dis-
tort us, understand or misunderstand us,
open or close their hearts to us. All this
we must accept with equanimity, since
this attitude, taken as a whole, is of great
value [Werth J to us.S
3 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed.
Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am M:ün:
Suhrkamp, 1968), section 60, 300; Critique of
the Power of ]udgment, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 229.
4 See Gerhart Hoffmeister, "Reception in Ger-
many and Abroad," in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Fritz
Strich, Goethe and World Literature, trans. C.A M.
Sym (New York: Hafner, 1949).
5 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, "Le Tasse, drame
historique en cinq actes, par Monsieur Alexan-
dre Duval," Über Kunst und Altertum, VI (1)
(1827), in Sämtliche Werke, I. Abteilung, Bd. 22,
Äst/Jetisc/Je Sc11rifte111824 -1832, Ober Kunst und
Altertum V- VI, ed. Anne Bohnenkamp (Frank-
furt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1999),
Dredalus Summer 2008 27
Phe11g For Goethe, world literature is an ac-
Cheah _tive space_of t~;;;,-;i~tJ9~ ~-;;,Ü~te~~~ia­
011
cosmopoli- tion. The content of the ideas that are
tanism exCf\anged maÜers\itÜe; Whi!tlS_of.
/ tends to this [that is, the universal] and
gr~atest worth is the e_thos.gerterat.~dJ:>y
!he transaction ..,The world is only to be
found and arises in these intervals or
mediating processes. It is constituted
by and, indeed, is nothing but exchange
and transaction.
The ethical end of this intercourse is
not uniformity, Goethe argues, but mu-
tual understanding and tolerance be-
tween nations, through the revelation
of universal humanity across particular
differences even as such differences are
valued: "The idea is not that nations
shall think alike, but that they shall learn
how to understand each other [sondern
sie sollen nur einander gewahr werden, sich
begreifen], and, if they do not care to love
one another, at least that they will learn
to tolerate one another."6 World litera-
ture is an ongoing work of negotiation
between a range of particulars in order
to arrive at the universal. This negotia-
tion is properly worldly because it cre-
ates the world itself as intercourse in
which there is appreciation and toler-
ance of the particular. Goethe further
brings out the mediatory character of
world literature by comparing it to
356- 357. "Some Passages Pertaining to the
Concept ofWorld Literature," in Compara-
tive Literature: The Early Years. An Anthology of
Essays, ed. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H.
Rhein (Chapel Hili: University of North Car-
olina Press, 1973), 5, translation modified.
Subsequent references will be to this edition
with the translation following the German
text.
6 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, "Edinburgh Re-
views," Über Kunst und Altertum, VI (2) (1828),
in Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 22, Ästhetische Schriften
1824 -1832, Über Kunst und Altertum l' - VI, 491;
"Some Passages," 8,
28 Dredalus Summer 2008
translation between languages and the
exchange of currency:
Whatever in the poetry of any nation
contributes to it, the others should en-
deavor to appropriate. The particulari-
ties [die Besonderheiten] of each nation
must be learned, and allowance made
for them, in order by these very means
to hold intercourse with it; for the special
characteristics/properties [die Eigenheiten]
of a nation are like its language and its
currency: they facilitate intercourse, nay
they first make it completely possible.7
The particularities of national literatures
must be respected because without such
differences, there would be no need for
the intercourse that is necessary to bring
out the universal kerne!.
Translation, for Goethe, best exempli-
fies tolerance of particularities because it
does notremove, but attempts to bridge
differences:
A genuine universal tolerance is most
surely attained, if we da not quarrel with
the particular characteristics of individ-
ual men and peoples, but only hold fast
to the conviction~ty..;h~Ll_s ~~~ exce_!:
~1'.t_is distinguished
by its belonging to
_the wh.Oleofiiumanlty: T'o suchexchange
[Vennittlung] and mutual recognition, the
Germ an people have long contributed. 8
Because it furthers intercourse between
peoples, translation enacts a dynamic
7 Letter to Carlyle, July 20, 1827, in Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, II.
Abteilung, Bd. 10 (37), Die Letzten Jahre. Briefe,
Tagebücher und Gespräche von 1823 bis :zu Goethes
Tod, Teil I, Von 1823 bis zum Tode Carl Au-
gusts 1828, ed. Horst Fleig (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker, 1993), 497; Correspondence
Between Goethe and Carfyle, ed. Charles Eliot
Norton (London: Macmillan, 1887), 24-25,
8 This and the following quote are from ibid.,
498; 25- 26.
universality, which Goethe elucidates
through metaphors of mercantile and
evangelical activity:
And thus every translator is tobe regard-
ed as a middle-man [Vennittler] in this
universal spiritual commerce [allgemein
geistigen Handels], and as making it his
business [Geschäfft] to promote/further
this exchange [Wechseltausch J : for say
what we may of the insufficiency of trans-
lation, yet the werk is and will always be
one of the weightiest and worthiest mat-
ters [Geschäffte J in the general concerns
oftheworld.
The Koran says: ''God has given to each
people a prophet in its own tongue !"
Thus each translator is a prophet to his
people. Luther' s translation of the Bible
has produced the greatest results, though
criticism gives it qualified praise, and
picks faults in it, even to the present day.
What indeed is the whole enormous busi-
ness [Geschäfft] of the Bible Society, but
the evangelization to all people in their
own tongue?
Like a merchant who neither owns nor
produces the original object, the trans-
lator profits from the fact that his activi-
ty gives others access to something. Al-
though he only acts as a comprador who
brings the original object to another,
this work of mediation is nevertheless
inherently creative because, without it,
the universal human values expressed
in an original work would never have
been shared by different peoples. In-
deed, it can be said that a translaTIOrl
u-;:;i;,;:sarr:Zesthe origir{a!- by exposing it
;.' -to-;i wider gaze. Accordingly, Goethe
'Ük~ns'tlie merchant-translator to a holy
prophet who mediates between the di-
vine and the mundane and spreads the
word of God to his people because he
conveys to the masses what is eternally
human in foreign literatures.
The normative dimension of world lit- Whatis
erature as a world-making activity, how- a world?
179
ever, cannot be reduced to the greater fa-
cility of global communications. "In-
creasing communication between na-
tions" or "the increasing speed of in-
tercourse [vermehrenden Schnelligkeit des
Verkehrs]" are undoubtedly means of
bringing about world literature.9 But
world literature is a special form of med-
iation with the higher end of explicating
humanity. Indeed, Goethe himself sug-
gests that the world transcends the
merely geographical. He distinguishes
between two different senses of world:
the world as an object of great physical
extensiveness (that is, the expansion of
the mundane or the diffusion of what is
pleasing to the crowd [der Menge]), and
the world as a normative phenomenon,
a higher intellectual community that
opens up a new universal horizon. He
writes:
The wide world, extensive as it is, is
only an expanded fatherland, and will,
if looked at correctly, be able to give us
no more than what our harne soil can
endow us with also. What pleases the
crowd spreads itself over a limitless field,
and, as we already see, meets approval
in all countries and regions. The serious
and the intellectual meet with less suc-
cess, but those who are devoted to high-
er and more productive things will learn
to know each other more quickly and
more intimately. For there are every·
where in the world such men, to whom
9 The quotes are respectively from Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, "Bezüge nach Aussen,"
Über Kunst und Altertum, VI (2) (1828), in
Sämtliche Werke, I. Abteilung, Bd. 22, VI (1)
(1827): 427-428, and "Aus dem Faszikel zu
Carlyles Leben Schillers," in Sämtliche Werke,
Bd. 22, 866-867, Translations from "Some
Passages," 7-8; 10.
Dredalus Summer 2008 29
Phe11g the true progress of humanity are of in-
Clieah terest and concern. 10
an
cosmopoli-
Despite its extensiveness, the physical
ta11ism
world remains as spiritually limited and
particularistic as the nation. The higher
180 world of cultivated intellectuals, who
point to the spiritual unity of humanity,
will have greater power over time, but
this world coexists uncomfortably with
the everyday world. Its members are a
vanguard so ahead of the times that they
must hide from the light of day and
withdraw from phenomenality. Yet this
almost invisible community possesses a
vital power with an enduring effectivity:
The serious-minded must therefore form
a quiet, almostsecret, Church [eine stille,
fast gedrückte Kirche bilden], since it would
be futile toset themselves against the cur-
rent of the day; rather must they manful-
ly strive to maintain their position till the
flood has passed. Their principal consola-
tion, and indeed encouragement, such
men must find in the fact that truth is use-
ful. If they can discover this connection,
and exhibit its meaning and influence in
a vital way, they will not fail to produce a
powerful effect [den Einfluß lebendig
vorzeigen und aufiveisen können, so wird es
ihnen nichtfehlen kräftig einzuwirken], in-
deed one that will extend over a range of
years. 11
Goethe's distinction between two
senses of the world is significant for us
today because it cautions us from ob-
scuring the normativedfuiensionof
·-worl~h;;;d-by conflating wor!c)lilles-s
y wi_tl! globalization.The world in the
higher sense is spiritual intercourse,
transaction, and exchange aimed at
10 "Aus dem Faszikel zu Carlyles Leben Schi/-
lers," 866; 10.
11 Ibid., 867; 10, translation modified.
30 Dcedalus Summer 2008
bringing out universal humanity. lt
does not abolish national differences
but takes place and is tobe found in
the intervals, mediations, passages,
and crossings between national bor-
ders. The world is a form of relating or
being-with. The globe, on the other
hand, the totality produced by process-
es of globalization, is a bounded object
or entity in Mercatorian space. When
we say "map of the world," we really
mean "map of the globe." lt is assumed
that the spatial diffusion and extensive-
ness achieved through global media and
markets give rise to a sense ofbelonging
to a shared world, when one might argue
that such developments lead instead to
greater polarization and division of na-
tions and regions. ~glgbe is_!l_ot the_
world. This isa ne~ry premise if_the _
CoSffio_eofitari_y~~tL()ll:.Qf_V,;_;;ri<ffit~ra-
"(
- !ure can-be me~ingful today.12
If we collapse the world into a geo-
graphical entity, we deny world litera-
ture autonomy by reducing it to a su-
perstructure of an economic base. We
assume that the literary reflects and is
conditioned by political and economic
forces and relations in a straightforward
manner, such that a global economy
gives rise to a global culture and a world
literature. Following Goethe, I suggest
we conceive of the world as an ongoing,
dynamic process of becoming, some-
12 Recent studies that reconceptualize world
literature in a global era such as David Dam-
rasch, What is World Literature 7 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), and Pascale
Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans.
M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2004), have failed to grasp
the normative aspects of worldhood. They
have taken the world for granted and merely
attached „world" as an adjective to qualify the
neun "literature," most often in order to con·
trast "world literature" with merely national
literature.
thing continually made and remade ra-
ther than a spatial-geographical entity.
Only then can world literature be under-
stood as literature that is of the world, a
fundamental force in the ongoing car-
tography and creation of the world in-
stead of a body of timeless aesthetic ob-
jects.
Here, another question arises: what
kind of world does world literature let
us imagine? Goethe's vision of world lit-
erature is patently hierarchical and Euro-
centric. For him the normative dimen-
sion of world poetry is epitomized by
classical Greece. Literatures other than
that of Greek antiquity have a merely
historical and particular status, where-
as the archetypal beauty of humanity is
embodied in Greek archetypes:
We should not think that the truth is in
Chinese or Serbian literature, in Calde-
ron or the Nibelungen. Instead, in our
need/search for models, we should al-
ways return to the Greeks of antiquity
in whose works beautiful man is exhib-
ited [dargestellt]. The rest we contem-
plate historically and appropriate from
it what is good as far as we can. 1 3
Within this hierarchical framework, the
tolerance of differences between peoples
can only be repressive. But more impor-
tantly, without a critique of capitalism,
Goethe is blind to the way literary pro-
cesses of world formation are imbricat-
ed in power relations. Indeed, he uses
commercial activity as a metaphor for
understanding world literary intercourse
without underscoring the self-interest
13 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit
Goetlie in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Berlin
and Weimar: Aufbau, 1982), 198; Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckerma1111
1823 -1832, trans. John Oxenford (San Francis·
eo: Northpoint Press, 1984), 133, translation
rnodified.
and exploitation inherent to commer- Whatis
cial mediation, even as he repeatedly a world?
notes that the translator profi.ts as a mid-
dleman. He does, however, make clear
that world literature always involves re-
lations of power and inequality. Goethe
figures literary worth as power or force
(Kraft) and thinks of it as analogous to
the military strength of a cohesive na-
tion: "As the miitary a11d_E!1.Ysic_aLpo_"'.-
.er [Kra)!Tofilnation developsffom its.
internal uniiy and cohesion, so must its
ethiCai-aesthetic power grow gradually __ X .U
from a similar unanimity [ Uebereinstim-
l!.'~ngr'.;'~)ie;:;ce, s;,,,n;, natio;,s ~Ger-
many, for example - will benefi.t more
from world literary relations because
they have accumulated more literary
worth.
Marx' s materialist understanding
of the world radically problematizes
the concept of world literature. But it
also enables its productive reinvention.
Marx's brief comments on world litera-
ture in the Manifesto for the Communist
Party point to its inscription in concrete
relations of exploitation:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploi-
tation of the world market given a cosmo-
politan character to production and con-
sumption in every country. Ta the great
chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn
from under the feet of industry the na-
tional ground on which it stood. All old-
established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being de-
stroyed .... In place of the old Jocal and
national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction
[allseitiger Verkehr]. universal interdepen-
dence [allseitiger Abhängigkeit] of nations.
And as in material, so also in spiritual
[geistigen] production. The spiritual cre-
14 Goethe, "LeTasse," 357; 5,
Dcedalus Summer 2008 31
Pheng ations of individual nations become com-
Cheah man property. National one-sidedness
on
cosmopoli- and narrow-mindedness [Beschränktheit]
tanism
become more and more impossible, and
from numerous national and local litera-
tures, there arises a world literature.l5
Like Kant and Goethe, Marx uses the
word world to describe the transcen-
dence of particular local and national
barriers and limitations. Bur Marx lo-
cates this transcendence not in literary
exchange but in a material objective
structure that operates at the surface
of every aspect of concrete existence,
namely the development of productive
forces by world trade and global pro-
duction. For Marx, world history is the
history of the world as a material or ac-
tual form of relationality, and world lit-
erature, a spiritual formation, is merely
the epiphenomenon of this material
world. 16
Marx called this material connect-
edness society. The material activity
of production aims to satisfy human
needs, and society is the complex orga-
nization of production that arises with
the cooperation of individuals. Because
human needs are universal, society is
necessarily cosmopolitan and tran-
15 Karl Marx, Manifest der Kommunistischen
Partei (February l848), in Marx/Engels Gesam-
tausgabe. Vol. 1 (6), ed. V. Adoratskij (Berlin:
Marx-Engels Verlag, 1932), 529: "Manifeste of
the Cornmunist Party," in Marx, Tlle Revolutions
of i848 -Political Writings Volume i (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, i973), 71, emphasis added.
l6 On the rise of the world market and the
emergence of world history from industriali-
zation, see Die Deutsche Ideologie, Marx/Engels
Gesamtausgabe, Vol. l (5), ed. V. Adoratskij
(Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag, 1932), 24- 29,
46 - 50; The German Idcology, ed. C. J. Arthur
(New York: International Publishers, i970),
55 - 60, 74-78; translations modified where
appropriate.
32 Dredalus Summer 2008
scends the borders of the nation and
territorial state. Marx writes:
Civil society [Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft]
embraces the whole material intercourse
of individuals within a determinate stage
of the development of productive forces.
ft embraces the whole commercial and
industrial life of a given stage and, inso-
far, transcends the State and the nation,
though on the other hand again, it must
assert itself in its foreign relations as na-
tionality, and inwardly must organize it-
self as State. 17
Marx's immanent critique of world lit-
erature inverts Goethe' s trade metaphor.
Whereas Goethe mistook the real refer-
ent for a metaphor of world literary rela-
tions, Marx sees the material world, a
world created in the image of the bour-
geoisie, whose economic activity breaks
down parochial barriers and national
exclusiveness, as the concrete basis of
world literary relations, which are mere-
ly the autonomized products of alien-
ation.
However, bourgeois civil society, the
world created from the erosion of na-
tional borders by the industrial develop-
ment of productive forces, is still in a
natural shape because, under capitalism,
production is separated from the human
beings who are the genuine producers.
Marx thus distinguishes the world of the
capitalist mode of production not only
from the globe as a geographical entity
but also from an alternative world that is
characterized by genuine universality.
The world can be changed precisely be-
cause it is an ongoing process that is cre-
ated by material activity. This deficient
world made in the image of the bour-
geoisie contains the seeds of its own de-
struction. The interconnectedness capi-
17 lbid„ 25-26; 57.
tal brings about also unites all workers
into another world tobe actualized:
[T]his development of productive forces
[Produktivkräfte] (which itselfimplies the world-historical character in two senses.
actual [varhandne] empirical existence of
men in their world-historical, instead of
local, being) is an absolutely necessary
practical premise because without it want
is merely made general, and with destitu-
tion the struggle for necessities and the
entire old shit would necessarily be re-
produced; and furthermore, because only
with the universal development of pro-
ductive forces is a universal intercourse
between men established, which produces
in all nations simultaneously the phenom-
enon of the "propertyless" mass (uni ver-
sal competition), makes each nation de-
pendent on the revolutions of the others,
and finally has put world-historical, em-
pirically universal individuals in place of
local ones. 18
Our degraded world can be transformed
if productive forces and relations are re-
appropriated by a world society of pro-
ducers- the proletariat as world-histori-
cal subject, as subject of world history
(double genitive), a subject that is pro-
duced by even as it actively produces the
history of the world:
All-round dependence, this natural form
of the world-historical cooperation
[Z11Sammenwirkens] of individuals, will
be transformed by the communist revolu-
tion into the control and conscious mas-
tery of those powers. 19
The proletariat can thus only exist world-
historically, just as communism, its activi-
_by depriving it of its normative force.
ty [Aktion]. can only have a 'world-histori-
cal' existence. World-historical existence
of individuals means, existence of individ-
18 Ibid„ 24; 56.
19 Ibid., 26; 55.
uals which is immediately linked up with Wlwtis
a world?
world history. 20
181
We should understand the proletariat' s
The proletariat and the communist revo-
lution are world-historical phenomena
because their genesis depends on the ex-
istence of a material world history. But
more importantly, the proletariat is also
a world-historical subject because it is
capable of the direct, immediate making
of world history.
Marx's understanding of the world sit-
uates world literary relations in a field
of forces that includes productive forces
and direct struggles against exploitation.
This gesture is important today because
the current revitalization of world liter-
ature is bound to a globalized print cul-
ture industry. This means that world lit-
erature is necessarily vulnerable to the
negative cultural consequences of what
David Harvey calls space-time compres-
sion: the manipulative constitution of
taste, desire, and opinion by the global
commodity circuits of image produc-
tion. 21 Post-industrial techniques of
marketing, advertising, and value-adju-
dication form a seamless web in the pro-
duction, reception, interpretation, and
criticism (academic or otherwise) of a
given object of world literature, and
these techniques in turn shape the form
and ideational content of any work of
world literature as well as the kind of
world it enables us to imagine.
The materialist conception of.the
wcllii:fffierefore undermines the cos-
mopoÜtan project ofworicriiteräture-
\.-.
Marx certainly gives human activity
20 lbid„ 25; 56.
21 See David Harvey, The Condition of Post-
modernity (Cambridge: Bbckwell, 1990 ).
Dredalus Summer 2008 33
Pheng an unprecedented capacity for direct ing a world. Any cosmopolitan action tinue to exist, this persistence in time through which we are given and receive Whatis
Cheah material creativity: communism as a - and this is how Marx regarded the pro- is a gift that cannot be calculated by hu- any determinable reality. The issue of aworld?
0'1
cosmopoli- world-historical movement does not letarian revolution- must first open up man reason. In other words, any given receptibility is fundamental here. lt
tanism project a world that is a mere utopian a world and envision itself as being part or present world, any world that we does not refer to the reception of a piece
have received and that has been histori-
182
ideal; rather, it is a movement stirring in of this world that is in the making. But ofliterature but to the structure of open-
the current world and its actuality (Wirk- what is the force that enables us to imag- cally changed and that we self-con- ing through which one receives a world
Iichkeit) comes directly from the prole- ine a world in the first place? In Marx' s sciously seek to transform through hu- and through which another world can
tariat' s effectivity as a material agent. view, only labor in its various historical man activity, is riven by a force that we appear. This structure is prior to and
But he denies world literature the ability forms has the power of remaking the cannot anticipate but that enables the subtends any social forms of mediation
to remake the world because he views it world because the world as it really is is constitution of reality and any progres- as weil as any sense of public space
as a mere ideological reflection of eco- the material world of production. Spiri- sive transformation of the present world (Öffentlichkeit) because it is nothing oth-
nomic forces with almost no efficacy in tual products are the alienated reflec- by human action. Jacques Derrida de- er than the force of giving and receiving
relation to the world. tions of labor as living effectivity, seif- scribes this force as analogous to birth a world. lt is the "perhaps" or "other-
Indeed, if the global unity created to- activity, and the actualization of materi- but also fundamentally irreducible to it: wise" that cannot be erased because this
day is one of mass cultural homogeniza- al life. Hence, ideational forms cannot equivocation constitutes reality. Litera-
Birth itself, which is similar to what 1
tion through sign systems and chains be a positive force in relation to reality. ture can play an active role in the world' s
am trying to describe, is perhaps un-
of images that are not of literature, then They can only represent reality faithful- ongoing creation because, through the
equal to this absolute "arrivance." Fami-
why is the study of literature still rele- ly, that is, as science, or function as ide- receptibility it enacts, it is an inexhaust-
lies prepare for a birth; it is scheduled,
vant in an age of global mass culture? If ology to mystify or justify the existing ible resource for contesting the world
forenamed, caught up in a symbolic
literature still possesses normative pow- world. As a result, Marxist aesthetic the- given to us through commercial inter-
space that dulls the arrivance. Neverthe-
er, we would have to speak of the end ory, as epitomized by the writings of the course, monetary transactions, and the
less, in spite of these anticipations and
ofliterature in the same way that Hegel Frankfurt School, could only affirm the space-time compression of the global
prenominations, the uncertaintywill
spoke of the end of art: a sensuous form revolutionary vocation of the aesthetic culture industry.
not !et itselfbe reduced: the child that
of absolute spirit that is no longer im- in terms of its ability to negate the exist- I have argued that the first step of re-
arrives remains unpredictable; it speaks
mediately connected to our daily Jives ing world and its ideology. As Herbert envisioning the vocation of world liter-
of itself as from the origin of another
because it no langer moves us in its sen- Marcuse puts it, "Art contains the ra- ature is to see the world as a dynamic
world, or from an-other origin of this
suous immediacy but only appeals to tionality of negation. In its advanced po- process with a practical-actional dimen-
world. 23
the intellect and powers of reflection. sitions, it is the Great Refusal -the pro- sion instead of a spatio-geographical
lt is true that more and more books of test against that which is. "22 Literature communicates directly category or only in terms of global flows,
world literature are being published to- But what is a world, really? What con- with this force because of its peculiar even if the latter constitutes an impor-
day. But what hold do they have on us? stitutes its reality? I wish to suggest that ontological status. As something that tant material condition of a world. Goe-
The problem is not going away by insist- a non-negative force that is intimately is structurally detached from its puta- the's distinction between the world as
ing that global literary processes and linked to literature constitutes the mate- tive origin and that permits and even spatial extension and a higher spiritual
flows are distinct from and unaffected rial world. Assuming that human activi- solicits an infinite number of interpre- realm conjured up by literary exchange,
by global economic processes. This is ty alone can transform material reality tations, literature is an exemplary mo- and Marx' s distinction between the
to repeat the ideological formation of begs the question ofhow material reali- dality of the undecidability that opens world market and the world society of
world literature Marx diagnosed in Goe- ty is constituted as a form of presence, a world. lt is not merely a product of producers as the natural and self-con-
the - the autonomy of the literary as a that is, as a form that persists in time. the human imagination or something scious forms of world-historical cooper-
symptom of autonomization under This persistence allows a world to ap- that is derived from, represents, or ation, point to this distinction between
global capital. pear and enables us to receive a world. duplicates material reality. Literature an immediate geographical entity and
Under conditions of radical finitude, in is the force of a passage, an experience, an ongoing work. But world literature's
Economic globalization is undoubtedly which we cannot explain why we con- world-making power does not consist
an important material condition of any merely in the spiritual activity of depict-
23 Jacques Derrida, "The Deconstruction of
form of the world today. Nevertheless, Actuality," in Negotiations: Interventio11s and
ing an ideal world as a transcendent
22 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man:
world literature can be a world-making Studies in the Jdeology of Advanced llldustrial Interviews, 1971 - 2001, ed. and Lrans. Elizabeth norm from which to criticize the exist-
activity if we reaffirm the importance, Society, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, Rottenberg (Palo Alto: Stanford University ingworld; it is primarily a process that
for any cosmopolitan project, of imagin- i991), 63. Press, 1002), 95. keeps alive the force that opens up an-

34 Dcedalus Summer 2008 Dccdalus Summer 2008 35

Ph eng other world, a force that is immanent
Cheah to the existing world.
Oll
cosmopali- For world literature to negotiate and
tanism resist the flows that serve global capi-
tal, several other criteria must be met.
First, to track the processes of globali-
zation that make the world, and to con-
test this world by offering the image
and timing of another world, the litera-
ture in question must self-consciously
take the world and worldhood as one
of its main themes at the same time that
it also exemplifies the process of world-
making. Second, we must ask, "What
world does a given piece of world litera-
ture !et us imagine?" Experiences of
globalization in the postcolonial South
are largely ignored by contemporary
discussions of cosmopolitanism, where
the mesmerizing focus remains the
North Atlantic, sometimes reconfig-
ured to accommodate multicultural mi-
grancy. If these experiences are taken
into account, then the relation of nation- as the literature of the world (double
alism to cosmopolitanism must be re-
considered beyond one of antagonistic
opposition. Since the world, as Goethe
emphasizes, exists in the relations and
intercourse be'tween natfo11s, a world
'!iterai:Uredoes not necessarily mark the
decline of the national. lndeed, one can
argue that since the nation is continual-
/ !y ieproduced in contemporaiy globali-
_zation, the world that is coming into be- of the postcolonial South with the hope
ing is in some way mediated through
the nation.
· Third, the sanctioned ignorance of
the experiences of peoples in the post-
colonial South in the full complexity of
their religions, socio-cultural norms,
and geopolitical locations in cosmopol-
itan discourse is underwritten by a hier-
archical Eurocentric view of the world
that leads to developmentalism. We can
arrive at a more complex conception of
the world if it is not referred back to an
overarching teleological end of univer-
36 Dcedalus Summer 2008
sal progress, but is seen as the effect of
dynamic contestation from different
sub-national, national, and regional
sites. ~-oug~tto view the world_asa
_ Jimitless field of conflicting forces that
are broughfinforefation arid iliatover-
lap and flow into each.other without
return, b.ecause each force, as part of.a
world, is necessarily opened up to what
lies outside.
The idea of world literature should,
paradoxically, be conceived more nar-
rowly as the literature of the world
- imaginings and stories of what it
means tobe part of a world that track
and account for contemporary global-
ization as weil as older historical narra-
tives of worldhood. lt is also a litera-
ture that seeks tobe disseminated, read,
and received around the world so as to
change that world and the life of a given
people within it. One can then speak of
world literature in a more precise sense
genitive) •. a literature that is an active ''.,·'
process of the world.
The world literature that I am interest-
ed in is a particular type of postcolonial
literature that explores the various nego-
tiations between commercial and finan-
cial flows and humane social develop-
ment ( or Jack thereof) in different parts
of crafting new figurations and stories
of world-belonging for a given postcolo-
nial people. This type ofliterature seems
to me to have a special place because the
devastating impact of globalization for
the lower strata of these societies makes
opening onto anotherworld especially
urgent in these spaces.
I end by briefly discussing one exam-
ple, Nuruddin Farah's Gifts (1992). Set
in a Mogadiscio "of galloping inflation,
famines, foreign currency restrictions,
and corrupt market transactions," Gifts
provides a critical cognitive mapping
of 198os famine-stricken Somalia by
insertingwithin its narrative (fictive)
international media reports of drought,
famine, and government campaigns for
foreign aid, and the various donations
y - "gifts" -from Northern states andin-
ternational NGOs that have made Soma-
lia a chronically dependent country. 2 4
The citational nature of these reports in-
dicates that the world, too, is in (narra-
tive) time. By citing the reports within a
different frame or context, their factici-
ty is deformed, and they are received dif-
ferently, thereby denaturing the world
they create and allowing another world
to come in its place.
The novel comments critically on the
negative impact of foreign aid on Soma-
lia. This aid often has strings attached,
is a way for economically wealthy coun-
tries to <lump surplus or contaminated
agricultural products ( Chernobyl-con-
taminated European milk), and can be a
way of manufacturing famine through
the turn to cash-crop farming for an in-
ternational commodity market. Such aid
makes the economy of a recipient coun-
try totally dependent on economically
developed countries, and foreign food
donations can even create a buffer zone
between corrupt leaderships and the
starving masses, thereby preventing
their overthrow. But worse still, foreign
aid can "sabotage the African's ability to
survive with dignity. "2 5 lt leads to a
structural form of expropriation where
a people cannot refuse to accept a do-
nation, or return a donation that is un-
wanted.
Farah' s central theme is that a people
needs to own itselfbefore it can be re-
24 Nuruddin Farah, Gifts (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2000), 160.
25 Ibid., 197.
sponsible for its actions and its place in Whatis
the world. The permanent receipt of for- a world?
eign aid obstructs that self-possession.
183
Farah links the logic of chronic depend-
ency within the capitalist world-system
to the restricted economy of the Abra-
hamic religions, in which one works
hard in this world and trusts that an ul-
tramundane God who gives and takes
away life will reward us in another
world. He associates a more salutary
vision of the world wi th a Somalian
communal form of giving that is unre-
stricted:
There is a tradition, in Somalia, of pas-
sing round the hat for collections....
When you are in dire need ofhelp, you
invite your friends, relatives and in-laws
to come to your place ... where a mat has
been spread.... Here discretion is of the
utmost significance. Donors don't men-
tion the sums they offer, and the recipient
doesn't know who has given what. lt is the
whole community from which the person
receives a presentation and to which he is
gratefuL lt is not permitted that such a
person thereafter applies for more, not
soon at any rate. If there is one lesson to
be learned from this, it is that emergen-
cies are one-off affairs, not a yearly ex-
cuse for asking for more. 2 6
This form of giving is characterized by
anonymity and incalculability. lt is not a
continually recurring process but a sin-
gular event that occurs in response to
an unexpected emergency. lt gives rise to
a cooperative communal inter-depen-
dence that is immanent to the world.
Such a gift economy does not place one
in permanent <lebt that can only then be
discharged once and for all in the eternal
world, because it is based on an ad hoc
negotiation with the unanticipatable
26 Jbid„ 196,
Dcedalus Summer 2008 37
Pheng eruption of human finitude in the regu- ing attributes of enlightened humanity.
Cl1eah lar rhythms of social life. What is human about men and women
an
casmopoli· Gifts not only makes the world creat- !DJ:lelrii.nitude, even ifthi_s_l)~i~tsJO.
tanism ed by globalization its subject, but it also E!i_e non:hu~an ()tE"LiP .us. ~t iüs in .
/
resp_()_~jo this.Jlulnerab.i.li.t}i::thatthe
184
tries to intervene from the standpoint
of a given people in order to !et another world survivesJhrough.riarrative arn:L
world come. More importantly, this pos- storytelling._ Duniya is Arabic for world,
sibility of another world is not only the- ärul'Sothe world is given and receives its
matized but performatively enacted in, own story again and again. This sense
and as, storytelling. The macrocosmic of the infinite opening onto a world is
scene of giving and receiving is played the unique contribution of world litera-
out microcosmically in the daily life of ture as cosmopolitanism. It tells us that
Duniya, the female protagonist who de- we can belong in many ways, and that
cides to break out of the relations of de- quivering beneath the surface of the ex-
pendency that have always governed her isting world are other worlds to come.
life. Duniya' s decision is catalyzed by
her discovery of a foundling child. The
storytelling that arises in response to
the child's mysterious origins creates a
community. Ultimately the child dies,
but his death gives life; he leaves behind
a world that survives and transforms it-
self through memory and storytelling:
Duniya thought that at the center of ev-
ery myth is another: that of the people
who created it. Everybody had turned
the foundling into what they thought
they wanted, or lacked. In that case, she
said to herself, the Nameless One has
not died. He is still living on, in Bosaaso
andme. 2 7

The novel ends appropriately with a

sense of the world' s unfinished nature.
"'All stories,' concluded Abshir, 'cele-
brate, in elegiac terms, the untapped
source of energy, of the humanness of
women and men.' ... The world was an
audience, ready tobe given Duniya's
story from the beginning.'' 28 This un-
tapped source of energy is not the cal-
culative power ofhuman reason or any
of its capabilities for action, the edify-

27 Ibid., 130.

28 Ibid„ 246.

38 Dredalus Summer 2008

Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” in Christopher Prendergast (ed.). Debating World Literature. London: Verso, 2004.148-162.
6=======
Conjectures on World Literature
Franco Moretti
_'Nowadays, national literature. doesn't mean much: the age of
world literature is beginning, and,everybody should contribute to
·hasten its advent.: This was Goethe, of course„. talking to Ecker-
mann in 1827; and these.are Marx and Engels,,twenty-one years
later, in 1848: 'National one-sidedness and 'IIarrow-mindedness
become more and more impossible, and-from-. the many national
and local literatures,. a world literature arises.' Weltliteratur. this is
what Goethe and Marx have in mind.· Not what later became
'cornparative' literature,. but world literature: the Chinese novel
that Goethe was reading at the time of that exchange, or the
bourgeoisie of the Manifesto, that has 'given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country'. Well,
let me put it very simply, we have not lived up to these beginnings:
the study of comparative or international literature has been a
much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited
to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine
(German philologists working on French literature). Not much
more.
This is also my own intellectual formation, and scientific work
always has limits. But limits change, and I think it's time we return
to that old ambition of Weltliteratur. after all, the literature around
us is now unmistakably a planetary system. The question is not
really what we should do - the question is how; What does it mean,
studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on West
European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LlTERATURE 149
185
a charlatan outside of Britain or France. World literature? Many
people have read more and better than l have, of course, but still,
we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here.
Reading 'more' seems hardly to be the solution. Especially
because we've just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen
l
calls the 'great unread': l work on West European narrative, etc.,
1 etc. . .. not really, l work on its canonical fraction, which is not
r even one per cent ofpublished literature. And again, some people
f
t) have read more, but the point is that there are thirty thousand
nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thou-
!
sand - no-one really knows, no-one has read them, no one ever
~
f will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian,
American ... Reading 'more' is always a good thing, but not the
1
solution. 1
1 And perhaps it's too much, tackling the world and the unread
1 at the same time. But I actually think that it's our greatest chance,
il
because the sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world
! literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing,
just more of it. lt has to be different. The categories have to be
! different. 'lt is not the "actual" interconnection of "things'',' Max
Weber wrote, 'but the conceptual interconnection of problems which
! define the scope of the various sciences. A new "science" emerges
where a new problem is pursued by a new method.' 2 That's the
!t point: world literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a
1 problem that asks for a new critical method; and no-one has ever
1 found a method by just reading more texts. That's not how
theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager - a hypothesis
- to get started.
1 I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-system
school of economic history, for which international capitalism is
a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and
a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a
relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one litera-
ture (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or, perhaps
better, one world literary system ( of inter-related literatures); but
1. I address the problern of the great unread in a cornpanion piece to this essay,
'The Slaughterhouse of Literature', lvlodern Language Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1,
March 2000. (Special issue on 'Formalisrn and Literary History').
2. Max Weber, 'Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy' (1904), in The
Methodology ofthe Social Sciences, New York: Free Press, 1949, p. 68.
186
150 FRANCO MORETTI
a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had
hoped for, because it's profoundly unequal. 'Foreign <lebt is as
inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field,' writes Roberta
Schwarz in a splendid essay on 'The Importing of the Novel to
Brazil': 'it's not simply an easily dispensable part of the work in
which it appears, but a complex feature of it;' 3 and Itamar Even-
Zohar, reflecting on Hebrew literature:
Interference [is] a relationship between literatures, whereby a ...
source literature may become a source of direct or indirect loans
[Importing of the novel, direct and indirect loans, foreign debt see how
economic metaphors have been subterraneously at work in literary
history] - a source of loans for ... a target literature .... There is no
symmetry in literary interference. A target literature is, more ojten than not,
4 reading, so I don't expect this idea tobe particularly popular. But
interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.
This is what one and unequal means: the destiny of a culture
(usually a culture of the periphery, as Montserrat Iglesias Santos
has specified5 ) is intersected and altered by another culture (from
the core) that 'completely ignores it'. A familiar scenario, this
asymmetry in international power - and later I will say more about
Schwarz's 'foreign <lebt' as a complex literary feature. Right now,
let me spell out the consequences of taking an explanatory matrix
from social history and applying it to literary history.
Writing about comparative social history, Marc Bloch once
coined a lovely 'slogan', as he himself called it: 'years of analysis
for a day of synthesis'; 6 and if you read Braudel or Wallerstein
you immediately see what Bloch had in mind, the text which is
strictly Wallerstein's, his 'day of synthesis', occupies one third of a
page, one quarter, maybe half; the rest are quotations (fourteen
hundred, in the first volume of The Modem World-System). Years of
3. Roberto Schwarz, 'The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions
in the Work ofRoberto Alencar' (1977), in Misplaced Jdeas, London: Verso, 1992,
p. 50.
4. Itamar Even-Zohar, 'Laws ofLiterary Interference', Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 1,
1990, PP· 54, 62.
5. Montserrat Iglesias Santos, 'El sistema literario: Teoria empfrica y teoria de
los polisistemas', in Dario Villanueva, ed., Avances en teoria de la literatura, Universi-
tad de Santiago de Compostela, 1994, p. 339: 'lt is important to emphasize that
interferences occur most often at the periphery of the system.'
6. Marc Bloch, 'Pour une histoire comparee des societes europeennes', Revue de
synthese historique, 1928.
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 151
analysis; other people's analysis, which Wallerstein's page synthe-
sizes into a system.
Now, if we take this model seriously, the study of world
literature will somehow have to reproduce this 'page' - which is
to say: this relationship between analysis and synthesis - for the
literary field. But in that case, literary history will quickly become
very different from what it is now: it will become 'secondhand': a
patchwork of other people's research, without a'single direct textual
reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before
(world literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional
to the distance from the text the more ambitious the project, the
greater must the distance be.
The United States (where I write this) is the country of close
the trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the
new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on
an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious
and invisible premise by now, but is an iron one nonetheless: you
invest so much in individual texts only ifyou think that very few of
them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. And if you
want to look beyond the canon (and of course world literature
will do so: it would be absurd if it didn't!) close reading will not
do it. lt's not designed to do it, it's designed to do the opposite.
At bottom, it's a theological exercise - very solemn treatment of
very few texts taken very seriously - whereas what we really need
is a little pact with the devil; we know how to read texts, now let's
learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let
me repeat it, is a condition oj knowledge:. it allows you to focus on
units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices,
themes, tropes - or genres and systems. And if, between the very
small and the very large, the text itself dlSapp-ears; well, it is .one
·oc those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we
want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept to
lose something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge:
reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it's
precisely this 'poverty' that makes it possible to handle them, and
therefore to know. This is why less is actually more. 7
7. Or to quote Weber again: 'concepts are primarily analytical instruments for
the intellectual mastery of empirical data'. ('Objectivity in Social Science and
 FRANCO MORETTI
152
Let me give you an example of the conjunction of distant
reading and world literature. An example, not a model; and of
course my example, based on the field 1 know ( elsewhere, things
may be very different). A few years ago, introducing Kojin Kara-
tani's Origins of Modernjapanese Literature, Fredricjameson noticed
that in the take-off of the modern Japanese novel, 'the raw
material of Japanese social experience and the abstract formal
patterns of Western novel construction cannot always be welded
together seamlessly'; and he referred in this respect to Masao
Miyoshi's Accomplices of Silence, and Meenakshi Mukherjee's Realism
and Reality (a study of the early Indian novel) .8 And it's true, these
books return quite often to the complicated 'problems' (Mukher-
jee's term) arising from the encounter of Western form and
Japanese or Indian reality.
Now, that the same configuration should occur in such differ-
ent cultures as India and Japan - this was curious; and it became
even more curious when I realized that Roberto Schwarz had
independently discovered very much the same pattern in Brazil.
So, eventually, I started using these pieces of evidence to reflect
on the relationship between markets and forms, and then, without
really knowing what 1 was doing, begun to treatjameson's insight
as if it were - one should always be cautious with these claims, but
there is really no other way to say it - as if it were a law of literary
evolution: in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary
system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside
Europe), the modern novel :first arises not as an autonomous
development, but as a compromise between a Western formal
influence (usually French or English) and local materials.
This first idea expanded into a little duster of laws, which 1
can't discuss here, 9 and it was all very interesting, but ... it was
Social Policy', p. 106). Inevitably, the larger the field one wants to study, the
greater the need for abstract 'instruments' capable of mastering empirical reality.
8. Fredric Jameson, 'In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities', in Karatani Kojin,
Origins oj Modem japanese Literature, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993, p. xiii.
9. I have begun to sketch them out in the last chapter of the Atlas of the European
Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), and this is more or less how they sound:
second, the formal compromise is usually prepared by a massive wave of West
European translations; third, the compromise itself is generally unstable (Miyoshi
has a great image for this: the 'impossible programme' of Japanese novels); but
fourth, in those rare instances when the impossible programme succeeds, we have
genuine formal revolutions.
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 153 187
still just an idea; a conjecture that had to be tested, possibly on a
large scale, and so I decided to follow the wave of diffusion of the
modern novel (roughly: from 1750 to 1950) in the pages of
literary history. Gasperetti and Goscilo on late eighteenth-century
Eastern Europe; 10 Toschi and Mart1-L6pez on early nineteenth-
century Southern Europe; 11 Franco and Sommer on mid-century
Latin America; 12 Frieden on the Yiddish novels of the 1860s; 13
Moosa, Said and Allen on the Arabic novels of the 1870s; 14 Evin
10. 'Given the history of its formative stage, it is no surprise that the early
Russian novel contains a host of conventions popularized in French and British
literature,' writes David Gasperetti in The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1998, p. 5). And Helena Goscilo, in her 'Intro-
duction' to Krasicki's Adventures oj Mr. Nicholas Wisdom: 'The Adventures is read most
fruitfully in the context of the West European Iiterature on which it drew heavily
for inspiration'. (Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wzsdom ( 1776),
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. xv).
11. 'There was a demand for foreign products, and production bad to comply,'
explains Luca Toschi speaking of the Italian narrative market around 1800 ('Alle
origini della narrativa di romanzo in Italia', in Massimo Saltafuso, ed., Il viaggio del
narrare, Florence: La Giuntina, 1989, p. 19). A generation later, in Spain, 'readers
are not interested in the originality of the Spanish novel; their only desire is that
it would adhere to those foreign models with which they have become familiar';
and so, concludes Elisa Marti-L6pez, one may well say that between 1800 and 1850
'the Spanish novel is being written in France' (Elisa Marti-L6pez, 'La orfandad de
Ia novela espaii.ola: Politica editorial y creacion literaria a mediados de! siglo XIX',
BuUetin Hispanique, 1997).
12. 'Obviously, lofty ambitions were not enough. All too often the 19th-century
Spanish-Arnerican novel is clumsy and inept, with a plot derived at second band
from the contemporary European Romantic novel' Qean Franco, Spanish-American
Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 56). 'If heroes and
heroines in mid-nineteenth-century Latin Arnerican novels were passionately desir-
ing one another across traditional lines ... those passions might not have pros-
pered a generation earlier. In fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream
their erotic fantasies by reading the European romances they hoped to realize'
(Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 31-2).
13. 'Yiddish writers parodied - appropriated, incorporated, and modified -
diverse elements from European novels and stories' (Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish
Fiction, Albany: State University ofNewYork, 1995, p. x).
14. Matti Moosa quotes the novelist Yahya Haqqi: 'there is no harrn in admitting
that the modern story carne to us from the West. Those who laid down its
foundations were persons influenced by European Iiterature, particularly French
literature. Although masterpieces of English literature were translated into Arabic,
French literature was the fountain of our story' (Matti Moosa, The Origins ofModem
Arabic Fiction (1970), 2nd edn, 1997, p. 93). For Edward Said, 'at some point
writers in Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like
them' (Edward Said, Beginnings (1975), New York: Columbia University Press,
1985, p. 81). And Roger Allen: 'In more literary terms, increasing contacts with
Western literatures led to translations of works of European fiction into Arabic,
followed by their adaptation and imitation, and culminating in the appearance of
188 FRANCO MORETTI
154
and Parla on the Turkish novels of the same years; 15 Anderson on
the Filipino Noli Me Tangere, of 1887; Zhao and Wang on turn-of-
the-century Qing fiction; 16 Obiechina, Irele and Quayson on West
African novels between the 1920s and the 1950s 17 (plus of course
Karatani, Miyoshi, Mukherjee and Schwarz). Four continents, two
hundred years, over twenty independent critical studies, and they
all agreed: when a culture starts moving towards the modern
novel, it's always as a compromise between foreign form and local
materials. Jameson's 'law' 18 had passed the test - the first test,
an indigenous tradition of modern fiction in Arabic' (Roger Allen, The Arabic
Novel, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995, p. 12).
15. 'The first novels in Turkey were written by members of the new intelligentsia,
trained in government service and well-exposed to French literature,' writes Ahmet
0. Evin ( Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis: Bibliotheca
Islamica, 1983, p. 10); and Jale Parla: 'the early Turkish novelists combined the
traditional narrative forms with the examples of the western novel' ('Desiring
Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul',
forthcoming).
16. 'The narrative dislocation of the sequential order of events is perhaps the
most outstanding impression late Qing writers received when they read or trans-
lated Western fiction. At first, they tried to tidy up the sequence of the events back
into their pre-narrated order. When such tidying was not feasible during transla-
tion, an apologetic note would be inserted .... Paradoxically, when he alters rather
than follows the original, the translator does not feel it necessary to add an
apologetic note' (Henry Y. H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the
Traditional to the Modem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 150). 'Late
Qing writers enthusiastically renewed their heritage with the help of foreign
models,' writes David Der-wei Wang: 'I see the late Qing as the beginning of the
Chinese literary "modern" because writers' pursuit of novelty was no longer
contained within indigenously defined barriers but was inextricably defined by the
multilingual, crosscultural trafficking of ideas, technologies, and powers in the
wake of nineteenth-century Western expansionism' (Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed
Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997, pp. 5, 19).
17. 'One essential factor shaping West African novels by indigenous writers was
the fact that they appeared after the novels on Africa written by non-Africans ....
the foreign novels embody elements which indigenous writers had to react against
when they set out to write' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in
the West African Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 17). '[The
first Dahomean novel,] Doguicimi ... is interesting as an experiment in recasting
the oral literature of Africa within the form of a French novel' (Abiola Irele, The
African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990, p. 147). 'lt was the rationality of realism that seemed adequate to the task of
forging anational identity at the conjuncture of global realities ... the rationalism
of realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers, Onitsha market literature,
and in the earliest titles of the African Writers Series that dominated the discourses
of the period' (Ato Quayson, Strategie Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 162).
18. In the seminar where I first presented this 'second-hand' criticism, Sarah
Goldstein asked a very good, Candide-like question: You decide to rely on another
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 155
anyway. 19 And actually more than that: it had completely reversed
the received historical explanation of these matters: because if
the compromise between the foreign and the local is so ubiqui-
tous, then those independent paths that are usually taken to be
the rule of the rise of the novel ( the Spanish, the French and
especially the British case) - well, they're not the rule at all, they're the
exception. They come first, yes, but they're not at all typical. The
'typical' rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran - not
Defoe.
See the beauty of distant reading plus world literature: they go
against the grain of national historiography. And they do s9 in
the form of an experiment. You define a unit of analysis (like here
the formal compromise) ,20 and then follow its metamorphoses in
a variety of environments 21 - until, ideally, all of literary history
becomes a long chain ofrelated experiments: a 'dialogue between
fact and fancy', as Peter Medawar calls it: 'between what could be
true, and what is in fact the case'. 22 Apt words for this research,
in the course of which, as I was reading my fellow historians, it
cnuc. Fine. But what if he's wrong? If he's wrong, you are wrong too, and you
soon know, because you don't find any corroboration - you don't find Goscilo,
Marti-L6pez, Sommer, Evin, Zhao, Irele ... And it's not just that you don't find
positive corroboration; sooner or later you find all sorts of facts you cannot
explain, and your hypothesis is falsified, in Popper's famous formulation, and you
must throw it away. Fortunately, this hasn't been the case so far, and Jameson's
insight still stands
19. OK, I confess, in order to test the coajecture I actually did read some of
these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wzsdom,
Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, Rene
Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi'J. This kind of 'reading', however, no
longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of
the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the
text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task
is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
20. For practical purposes, the larger the geographical space one wants to study,
the smaller should the unit of analysis be: a concept (in our case), a device, a
trope, a limited narrative unit - something like this. In a follow-up paper, I hope
to sketch out the diffusion ofstylistic 'seriousness' (Auerbach's keywordin Mimesis)
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels.
21. How to set up a reliable sample - that is to say, what series of national
literatures and individual novels provide a satisfactory test of a theory's predictions
\ - is of course quite a complex issue. In this preliminary sketch, my sample (and its
justification) leave much to be desired.
22. Scientific research 'begins as a story about a Possible World', Medawar goes
on, 'and ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life'. His
words are quoted by James Bird in The Changing World of Geography, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1993, p. 5. Bird himself offers a very elegant version of the experimen-
tal model.
156 FRANCO MORETTI
became clear that the encounter of Western forms and local
reality did indeed produce everywhere a structural compromise -
as the law predicted - but also that the compromise itself was
taking rather different forms. At times, especially in the second
half of the nineteenth century and in Asia, it tended to be very
unstable: 23 an 'impossible programme', as Miyoshi says ofjapan. 24
23. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India) and
Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal
compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and
Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin po,ints out how 'the
merger of the two themes, one based on. the traditional family-l.ife and the other
on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt· in Turkish fiction to
achieve a type of psychological .dimension observed in European novels within a
thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of
the themes and to the dif.ference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the
novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the dijferences between .
the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those oj
the European novel on the other' (Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel,.
p. 68, emphasis mine). Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds. a
similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and
dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mold fit for the
Ottoman society. The mold, however, was supposed to hold two different episte-
mologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. lt was inevitable that this mold would
crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive
Tales', emphasis mine). In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn
Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee: 'it is all too easy to point to the
problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with
Western works on liberty andjustice such as those ofjohn Stuart Mill and Herbert
Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage .in Egyptian society on such
a lofty plane with his parents, who have always . lived deep in the Egyptian
countryside' (The Arabic Nove~ p. 34, emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes
from his very title (The Uneasy Narrator: a.nd see the splendid discussion of
uneasiness that opens the book) the complications generated by the encounter of
Western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he
writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period
of Chinese vernacular fiction .... The huge amount of directions trying to explain
the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instabil-
ity of his status.... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ....
moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivo-
cal', and at tim es the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a
writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' ( The
Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
24. In some ca.ses, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of
incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchi's translation of The Bride of
Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring Breeze Love Story], and
Tsubouchi himself 'was not beyond excising the original text when the material
proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scott's imagery into
expressions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese
literature' (Marleigh Grayer Ryan, 'Commentary' to Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1967, pp. 41-2). In the Arabic world, writes
:tviatti Moosa, 'in many instances the translators of Western fiction took extensive
189
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 157
At other times it was not so: at the beginning and at the end of
the wave, for instance (Poland, Italy and Spain at one extreme;
and West Africa on the other), historians described novels that
had certainly their own problems - but not problems arising from
the clash of irreconcilable elements. 25
I hadn't expected such a spectrum of outcomes, so at first I
was taken aback, and only later realized that this was probably the
most valuable finding of them all, because it showed that world
literature was indeed a system - but a system of variations. The
system was one, not uniform. The pressure from the Anglo-French
core tried to make it uniform, but it could never fully erase the
and sometimes unwarranted liberties with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf
not only changed the title of Scott's Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The
Lion Heart and Saladin), but also a.dmitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting,
adding, and changing parts of this romance to suit what he believed to be his
audience's taste .... Other translators changed the titles and the names of the
characters and the contents, in order, they claimed, to make the translated work
more acceptable to their readers and more consistent with the native literary
tradition' (The Origins oj Modem Arabic Fiction, p. 106). The same general pattern
holds for late Qing literature, where 'transla.tions were a.lmost without exception
tampered with .... the most serious way of tarnpering was to paraphrase the whole
novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and Chinese background ....
Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment. ... Western novels
became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese traditional fiction'
(Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229).
25. Why this difference? Probably, because in Southern Europe the wave of
French translations encountered a local reality (a.nd local narrative traditions) that
wasn't that different a.fter all, and, as a consequence, the composition of foreign
form and local material proved easy. In West Africa, the opposite situation:
although the novelists themselves had been influenced by Western literature, the
wave of translations had been much weaker than elsewhere, and local narrative
conventions were for their part extremely different from European ones Uust
think of orality); as the desire for the 'foreign technology' was relatively bland -
and further discouraged, of course, by the anti-colonial politics of the l 950s - local
conventions could play their role relatively undisturbed.
Obiechina and Quayson emphasize the polemical relationship of early West
African novels vis-a-vis European narrative: 'The most noticeable difference
between novels by native West Africans and those by non-native using the West
African setting, is the important position which the representation of oral tradition
is given by the first, and its almost total absence in the second' (Obiechina, Culture,
Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, p. 25). 'Continuity in the literary
strategic formation we have identi:fied is best defined in terms of the continuing
a.ffirmation of mythopeia rather than of realism for the definition of identity....
That this derives from a conceptual opposition to what is perceived a.s a Western
form of realism is difficult to doubt. lt is even pertinent to note in this regard that
in the work of major African writers such as Achebe, Armah, and Ngii.gi, the
movement of their work has been from protocols of realist representation to those
of mythopeic experimentation' (Quayson, Strategie Transformations in Nigerian
Writing, p. 164).
190 FRANCO MORETTI
158
reality of difference. (See here, by the way, how the study ofworld
literature is - inevitably - a study of the struggle for syrgbolic
hegemony across the world.) The system was one, not uniform.
And, retrospectively, of course it had to be like this: if after 1750
the novel arises just about everywhere as a compromise between
West European patterns and local reality - well, local reality was
different in the various places, just as Western influence was also
very uneven: much stronger in Southern Europe around 1800, to
return to my example, than in West Africa around 1940. The
forces in play kept changing, and so did the compromise that
resulted from their interaction. And this, incidentally, opens a
fantastic :field of inquiry for comparative morphology (the system-
atic study of how forms vary in space and time, which is also the
only reason to keep the adjective 'comparative' in comparative
literature); but comparative morphology is a complex issue that
deserves its own paper.
Let me now add a few words on that term 'compromise' - by
which 1 mean something a little different from whatJameson had
in mind in his introduction to Karatani. For him, the relationship
is fundamentally a binary one: 'the abstract formal patterns of
Western novel construction' and 'the raw material of Japanese
social experience': form and content, basically. 26 Forme, it's more
of a triangle: foreign form, local material - and local form. Simpli-
fying somewhat: foreign plot, local characters and then local narra-
tive voice, and it's precisely in this third dimension that these
novels seem to be most unstable - most uneasy, as Zhao says of
the late Qing narrator. Which makes sense: the narrator is the
pole of comment, of explanation, of evaluation, and when foreign
'formal patterns' (or actual foreign presence, for that matter)
make characters behave in strange ways (like Bunzo, or lbarra, or
Bras Cubas), then of course comment becomes uneasy - garru-
lous, erratic, rudderless.
26. The same point is made in a great article by Antonio Cändido: 'We [Latin
American literatures] never create original expressive forms or basic expressive
techniques, in the sense that we mean by romanticism, on the level of literary
movements; the psychological novel, on the level of genres; free indirect style, on
that of writing.... the various nativisms never rejected the use of the imported
literary Jorms ... what was demanded was the choice of new themes, of different
sentiments' ('Literature and Underdevelopment', in Cesar Fernändez Moreno,Julio
Ortega and Ivan A. Shulman, eds, Latin America in Its Literature, New York: Holmes
& Meier, 1980, pp. 272-3).
CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 159
'Interferences', Even-Zohar calls them: powerful literatures
making life hard for the others - making structure hard. And
Schwarz: 'a part of the original historical conditions reappears as
a sociological form .... In this sense, forms are the abstract of
speci:fic social relationships.' 27 Yes, and in our case the historical
conditions reappear as a sort of 'crack' in the form; as a faultline
running between story and discourse, world and worldview: the
world goes in the strange direction dictated by an outside power;
the worldview tries to make sense of it, and is thrown off balance
all the time. Like Rizal's voice (oscillating between Catholic
melodrama and Enlightenment sarcasm), 28 or Futabatei's (caught
between Bunzo's 'Russian' behaviour, and the Japanese audience
inscribed in the text), or Zhao's hypertrophic narrator (who has
completely lost control of the plot, but still tries to dominate it at
all costs). This is what Schwarz meant with that 'foreign debt' that
becomes a 'complex feature' of the text: the foreign presence
'interferes' with the very utterance of the novel. 29 The one-and-
unequal literary system is not just an external network here; it
doesn't remain outside the text: it's embedded well into its form.
Forms are the abstract of social relationships; so, formal analy-
sis is in its own modest way an analysis of power. (That's why
comparative morphology is such a fascinating :field: studying how
forms vary, you discover how symbolic power varies from place to
place.) And indeed, sociological formalism has always been my
interpretive method, and 1 think that it's particularly appropriate
27. 'The Importing of the Novel To Brazil', p. 53.
28. Rizal's solution, or lack thereof, is probably also related to his extraordinarily
wide social spectrum (Noli Me Tangere, among other things, is the text that inspired
Benedict Anderson to link the novel and the nation-state): in a nation with no
independence, an ill-defined ruling dass, no common language and hundreds of
disparate characters, it's hard to speak 'for the whole', and the narrator's voice
cracks under the e:ffort.
29. In a few lucky cases, the structural weakness may turn into a strength, as in
Schwarz's interpretation of Machado, where the 'volatility' of the narrator becomes
'the stylization of the behavior of the Brazilian ruling dass': not a flaw any longer,
but the very point of the novel: 'Everything in Machado de Assis's novels is colored
; by the volatility - used and abused in different degrees - of their narrators. The
critics usually look at it from the point of view of literary technique or of the
1 author's humor. There are great advantages in seeing it as the stylization of the
behavior of the Brazilian ruling dass. Instead of seeking disinterestedness, and the
confidence provided by impartiality, Machado's narrator shows offhis impudence,
in a gamut which runs from cheap gibes, to literary exhibitionism, and even to
1 critica! acts' (Roberto Schwarz, 'The Poor Old Woman and Her Portraitist' [1983],
in Misplaced Ideas, p. 94).
l 1
f
160 FRANCO MORETTI
for world literature ... but unfortunately at this point I must stop,
because my competence stops. Once it became clear that the key
variable of the experiment was the narrator's voice, well, a genu-
ine formal analysis was off-limits for me, because it required a
linguistic competence that I couldn't even dream of (French,
English, Spanish, Russian,Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese,just
for the core of the argument). And probably, no matter what the
object of analysis is, there will always be a point where the study
of world literature must yield to the specialist of the national
literature, in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of labour.
Inevitable not just for practical reasons, but for theoretical ones.
This is a large issue, but let me at least sketch its outline.
When historians have analysed culture on a world scale ( or on
a large scale anyway), they have tended to use two basic cognitive
metaphors: the tree and the wave. The tree, the phylogenetic tree
derived from Darwin, was the tool of comparative philology:
language families branching off from each other - Slavo-Ger-
manic from Aryan-Greco-Italo-Celtic, then Balto-Slavic from Ger-
manic, then Lithuanian from Slavic. And this kind of tree allowed
comparative philology to solve that great puzzle which was also
perhaps the first world-system of culture: Indo-European: a family
of languages spreading from India to Ireland (and perhaps not
just languages, a common cultural repertoire, too~ but here the
evidence is notoriously shakier). The other metaphor, the wave,
was also used in historical linguistics (as in Schmidt's 'wave
hypothesis', which explained certain overlaps among languages),
but it played a role in many other :fields as well: the study of
technological diffusion, for instance, or the fantastic interdiscipli-
nary theory of the 'wave of advance' by Cavalli-Sforza and Ammer-
man (a geneticist and an archaeologist), which explains how
agriculture spread from the fertile crescent in the Middle East
towards the North-West and then throughout Europe.
Now, trees and waves are both metaphors - but except for this,
they have absolutely nothing in common. The tree describes the
passage from unity to diversity: one tree, with many branches:
from Indo-European, to dozens of different languages. The wave
is the opposite: it observes uniformity engulfing an initial diver-
sity: Hollywood films conquering one market after another ( or
English swallowing language after language). Trees need geo-
graphical discontinuity (in order to brauch off from each other,
T CONJECTURES ON WORLD LITERATURE 161 191
~ languages must first be separated in space, just like animal
species); waves dislike barriers, and thrive on geographical conti-
nuity (from the viewpoint of a wave, the ideal world is a pond).
Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what
1 markets do. And so on. Nothing in common between the two
metaphors. But - they both work. Cultural history is made of trees
f
and waves - the wave of agricultural advance supporting the tree
of Indo-European languages, which is then swept by new waves of
linguistic and cultural contact ... And as world culture oscillates
\ between the two mechanisms, its products are inevitably compos-
ite ones. Compromises, as in Jameson's law. That's why the law
works: because it intuitively captures the intersection of the two
mechanisms. Think of the modern novel: certainly a wave (and
I've. actually called it a wave a few times) - but a wave that runs
into the branches of local traditions, 30 and is always significantly
transformed by them.
This, then, is the basis for the division of labour between
national and world literature: national literature, for people who
see trees; world literature, for people who see waves. Division of
labour ... and challenge; because both metaphors work, yes, but
that doesn't mean that they work equally well. The products of
cultural history are always composite ones; but which is the
t . dominant mechanism in their composition? The internal, or the
r external one? The nation or the world? The tree or the wave?
rr. There is no way to settle this controversy once and for all -
' fortunately: because comparatists need controversy. They have
1 always been too shy in the presence of. national literatures, too
[ . diplomatic: as if one· had English, American, German literature -
i and then, next door, a sort of little parallel universe where
comparatists studied a second set of literatures, trying not to
! ~
disturb the first set. No; the univers.e is the same, the literatures
are the same, wejust look at them from a different viewpoint; and
you become a comparatist for a very simple reason: because you are
! convinced that that viewpoint is better. lt has greater explanatory
f power; it's conceptually more elegant; it avoids that ugly 'one-
\ sidedness ·and narrow-mindedness'; whatever. The point is that
30. 'Grafting prooesses', Miyoshi calls thern; Schwarz speaks of 'the implantation
1f of the novel, and of its realist strand in particular', and Wang of 'transplanting
~ Western narrative typologies'. And indeed, Belinsky had already described Russian
literature as 'a transplanted rather than indigenous growth' in 1843.
192
162 FRANCO MORETTI

there is no other justification for the study of world literature but

7
this: tobe a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge
to national literatures - especially the local literature. lfwe cannot
do this, we achieve nothing. 'Don't delude yourself", writes Sten-
The Politics of Genre
dhal of his favourite character: 'for you, there is no middle road.'
The same is true for us.
Stephen Heath

Literature exists as so.many kinds ofwriting: for instance, poetry as

opposed to drama, lyric as opposed to narrative poetry. We read
novels, sonnets, essays, thrillers, parodies, Jables, satires, and so on; with
such groupings both responding to actual literature and organiz-
ing its production and reception. To write or read at a given time
in a given society is to engage with the current conventions of
writing, with the expectations of what forms it can take. lndeed,
'literature' itself, which once referred to the whole body of
printed matter in a language, is now most often a term for just
such an expectation, serving to identify a particular area ofwriting
and drawing the line between it and everything else (science,
journalism, history - all the 'non-literary' areas). What is at stake
is the differentiation of writing into writings, the availability of a
set of identifying types. The most singular text is never simply in
a dass of its own but is written and read in relation to such types:
there is no genreless text.
lt is dassification into genres that has provided the most
powerful identification of kinds of literary writing. As a critical
term, 'genre' dates from the nineteenth century (earlier periods
had talked precisely of 'kinds') and derives via French from the
Latin genus meaning 'dass' or 'sort', a derivation it shares with
'gender'; in Romance languages, one word covers both, with
gender thereby inscribed as prime category, fundamental genre
(some non-Western languages have adopted the term: Japanese
janru, for example). The major source for Western genre thinking

FRANCO MORETTI New Left Review 20 (Mar-Apr 2003). 73-81.
MORE CONJECTURES
N THE PAST YEAR or so, several articles have addressed the
1 issues raised in 'Conjectures on World Literature': Christopher
Prendergast, Francesca Orsini, Efrain Kristal and Jonathan Arac
in New Left Review, Emily Apter and jale Paria elsewhere.' My
thanks to all cf them; and as 1 obviously cannot respond to every point in
detail, 1 will focus here on the three main areas cf disagreement among
us: the (questionable) paradigmatic status cf the novel; the relationship
between core and periphery, and its consequences for literary form; and
the nature of comparative analysis.
One must begin somewhere, and 'Conjectures' tried to sketch how the
literary world-system works by focusing on the rise of the modern novel:
a phenomenon which is easy to isolate, has been studied all the world
over, and thus lends itself well to comparative werk. 1 also added that the
novel was 'an example, not a model; and of course my example, based
on the field I know (elsewhere, things may be very different)'. Elsewhere
things are different indeed: 'If the novel can be seen as heavily freighted
with the political, this is not patently the case for other literary genres.
Drama seems to travel less anxiously ... How might the ... construct werk
with lyric poetry?', asks Prendergast; and Kristal: 'Why doesn't poetry
follow the laws of the novel?'.'
lt doesn't? 1 wonder. What about Petrarchism? Propelled by its formal-
ized lyrical conventions, Petrarchism spread to (at least) Spain, Portugal,
France, England, Wales, the Low Countries, the German territories,
Poland, Scandinavia, Dalmatia (and, according to Roland Greene, the
New World). As for its depth and duration, 1 am sceptical about the
NEW LEFT REVIEW 20 MAR APR 2003 73
74 NLR20
old Italian claim that by the end cf the sixteenth century over two
193
hundred thousand sonnets had been written in Europe in imitation of
Petrarch; still. the main disagreement seems to be, not on the enormity
of the facts, but on the enormity cf their enormity-ranging from a
century (Navarrete, Fucilla), to two (Manero Sorolla, Kennedy), three
(Hoffmeister, Kristal himself), or five (Greene). Compared to the wave-
like diffusion cf this 'lingua Jranca for love poets', as Hoffmeister calls it,
westem novelistic 'realism' looks like a rather ephemeral vogue.'
Other things being equal, anyway, 1 would imagine literary movements
to depend on three broad variables-a genre's potential market, its over-
all formalization and its use oflanguage-and to range from the rapid
wave-like diffusion cf forms with a ]arge market, rigid formulas and
simplified style (say, adventure novels), to the relative stasis of those
characterized by a small market, deliberate singularity and linguistic
density (say, experimental poetry). Within this matrix, novels would be
representative, not of the cntire system, but of its most mobile strata, and
by concentrating only on them we would probably overstate the mobility
' 'Conjectures on World Llterature', NLR r; Christopher Prendergast, 'Negotiating
World Literature', NLR 8; Francesca Orsini, 'Maps of Indian Writing', NLR 13;
Efrain Kristal, '"Considering Colclly ... ": A Response to Franco Moretti', NLR r5;
Jonathan Arac, 'Anglo-Globalism?' NLR 16; Emily Apter, 'Global Translatio: The
"Invention" of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933', Critical Inquiry, 29, 2003;
Jale Parla's essay ('The object of comparison') will be published in a special issue of
Comparative Literaturc Studies edited by Djelal Kadir in January 2004.
• 'Conjectures', p. 58; 'Negotiating World Literature', pp. 120-1; '"Considering Coldly
... "', p. 62. Orsini makes a similar point for Indian literature: 'Moretti's novel~based
theses would seem to have little application to the Subcontinent, where the major
nineteenth and twentieth·century forms have been poetry, drama and the short
story, whose evolution may show quite different pattems of change': 'Maps'. p. 79.
1 See Antero Meozzi, Il petrarchismo europeo (secolo xvi), Pisa 1934; Leonard
Forster, The Icy Fire: Five studies in European Petrarchism, Cambridge 1969; Joseph
Fucilla, Estudios sobre el petrarquismo en Espaiia, Madrid 1960; Ignacio Navarrete,
Orphans of Petrarch, Califomia 1994; William Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch,
Ithaca 1994; Maria Pilar Manero Sorolla, Jntroducci6n al estudio del petrarquismo
en Espaiia, Barcelona 1987; Gerhart Hoffmeister, Petrarkistische Lyrik, Stuttgart
1973; Roland Greene, Post·Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations ofthe Western Lyric
Sequence, Princeton 199r. Kristars implicit acknowledgement ofthe hegemony of
Petrarchism over European and Latin American poetry comes where he writes that
'the lyrical conventions of modern Spanish poetry were developed in the 16th cent·
ury by Bosdn and Garcilaso de la Vega ... The first signs of a reaction against the
strictest conventions of Spanish prosody did not take place in Spain but in Spanish
America in the 183os': '"Considering Coldly ..."', p. 64.
 194 MORETII: More Conjectures 75
of world literature. If 'Conjectures' erred in that direction it was a mis-
take, easily corrected as we learn more about the international diffusion
of drama, poetry and so on (here, Donald Sassoon's current work on
cultural markets will be invaluable).' Truth be told, I would be very dis-
appointed if all of literature turned out to 'follow the laws of the novel':
that a single explanation may work everywhere is both very implausible
and extraordinarily boring. But before indulging in speculations at a
more abstract level, we must learn to share the significant facts ofliter-
ary history across our specialized niches. Withou.t rnllective werk, wo.rld
literature will always remain a mirage. - - . ·
II
ls world-system theory, with its strong emphasis on a rigid international
division of labour, a good model for the study of world literature? On
this, the strongest objection comes from Kristal: '! am arguing, how-
ever, in favour of a view of world Jiterature', he writes, 'in which the ,
West does not have a monopoly over the creation of forms that count;
in which themes and forms can move in several directions-from the
centre to the periphery, from the periphery to the centre, from one
periphery to another, while some original forms of consequence may not
move much at all'.'
Yes, forms. Cfl>:':_~~e__fils.~~fil c!ir~ction~.~1::!_.~<Uh.~Y.? _This is the
point, and a theory of literary history should reflect on the constraints
on their movements, and the reasons behind them. What l know about
European novels, for instance, suggests that hardly any forms 'of conse-
quence' don't move at all; that movement from one periphery to another
(without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of; 6 that move-
ment from the periphery to the centre is less rare, but still quite unusual,
~ See, for a preliminary account, 'On Cultural Markets', NLR 17.
s "'Considering Coldly ... "', pp. 73-4.
6
1 mean here the movement between peripheral cultures which do not belong to
the same 'region': from, say, Norway to Portugal (or vice versa), not from Norway to
Iceland or Sweden, or from Colombia to Guatemala and Peru. Sub-systems made
relatively homogeneous by language, religion or politics-of which Latin America
is the most interesting and powerful instance-are a great field for comparative
study, and may add interesting complications to the !arger picture (like Dario's
modernism, evoked by Krista1).
76 NLR 20
while that from the centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent.'
Do these facts imply that the West has 'a monopoly over the creation
of the forms that count'? Of course not. 8 Cultures from the centre have
more resources to pour into innovation (literary and otherwise). and are
thus more likely to produce it: but a monopoly over creation is a theo-
logical attribute, not an historical judgment.9 The model proposed in
' Tue reason why literary products flow from the centre to the periphery is spelt
v· out by Even-Zohar in bis work on polysystems, extensively quoted at the begin-
ning of 'Conjectures': peripheral (or, as he calls them, 'weak') literatures 'often do
not develop the same füll range of literary activities ... observable in adjacent
larger literatures (which in consequence may create a feeling that they are indis-
pensable)'; 'a weak ... system is unable to function by confining itself to its home
repertoire only', and the ensuing Jack 'may be filled, wholly or partly, by translated
literature'. llterary weakness, Even-Zohar goes on, 'does not necessarily resul~.from.
P.?.~~.~~-~-~n~m1~ wealäleSS,älthCiUg&raihet OfteTI-~t Seem~·~o~~t7 C9rr~lated with
~a~erial c_c.m~tions':. as a _consequence, 'since peripheral literatures in the Western
helli.iSphere- tend more often than not to be identical with literatures of smaller
nation:s, as uriPalatable as this idea may seem to us, we have no choice but to ///
)< ./.'
a
adinit that within group of relatable national literatures, such as the literatures
Öf Elli-oi)e,. hierarchical relations have been established since the very begi~nings
> '(;(fhes·i,-· Jiteratllre·s: Within this (macro-)polysystem some literatures have taken
E''JE!:eral positions, which is o"'!)Y.}.9 ~:JY_th<ltth~y_were oftel1_Il1odege_d.to .a !arge
ext~nt ~n~e'O?ilit~~~~~.-~ ~~rp.ar ~ven-Zohar, 'Polysystem Studies', in
l>_qpficsToifäy, spring 19.90, pp. 47. 81, So, 48.
5
Nor does it have a monopoly over criticism that counts. Of the twenty critics an
whose werk the argument of 'Conjectures' rests, writes Arac, 'one is quoted in
x.r.1 Spanish, one in Italian, and eighteen in English'; so, 'the impressive diversity of
surveying some twenty national literatures diminishes into little more than one
single means by which they may be known. English in culture, like the dollar in
economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated
from the local to the global': 'Anglo-Globalism?', p. 40. True, eighteen critics are
quoted in English. But as far as 1 know only four or five are from the country of the
dollar, while the others belong to a dozen different cultures. Is this less significant
than the language they use? l doubt it. Sure, global English may end up impov-
erishing our thinking, as American films do. But for now, the rapid wide public
exchanges it makes possible far exceed its potential dangers. Parla puts it weil: 'To
unmask the hegemony [of imperialism] is an intellectual task. lt does not harm to
know English as one sets out for the task.'
9 After all, my last two books end on the formal revolutions of Russian and Latin
American narrative-a point also made (not 'conceded', as Kristal puts it, suggest·
ing reluctance on my part) in an article on European literature {'an importer of
those formal novelties that it is no longer capable of producing'), another one on
Hollywood exports ('a counter-force at work within the world literary system') andin
'Conjectures' itself. See 'Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch', NLR
l/206, )uly-August1994, p. 109; 'Planet Hollywood', NLR 9,May-)une 2001, p. IOI.
 MORETII: More Conjectures 77
'Conjectures' does not reserve invention to a few cultures and deny it to
the others: it specifies the conditions under which it is more likely to occur,
and the forms it may take. :rheories will n~ver abolish ineq11~lity: th~Y.
.~~;1.?i;ly}i()peto_explain~t .. G-J;":·:·'ji·J·:~~::::; ' -
As .·~ 0':::;_,„ -~T~ws_ ~ ?
,;-._
III
Kristal also objects to what he calls the 'postulate of a general homology
between the inequalities of the world economic and literary systems': in
other words, 'the assumption that literary and economic relationships
run parallel may work in some cases, but not in others'.' Even-Zohar's
0
argument is a partial response to the objection; but there is another
sense in which Kristal is right, and the simplifying euphoria of an arti-
cle originally conceived as a 30-minute talk is seriously misleading. By
reducing the literary world-system to core and periphery, 1 erased from
the picture the transitional area (the semi-periphery) where cultures
move in and out of the core; as a consequence, 1 also understated the
fact that in many (and perhaps most) instances, material and intellectual
hegemony are indeed very close, but not quite identical.
Let me give some examples. In the i8th and 19th centuries, the lang
struggle for hegemony between Britain and France ended with Britain's
victory on all fronts-except one: in the world of narrative, the verdict
was reversed, and French novels were both more successful and formally
more significant than British ones. Elsewhere I have tried to explain the
reasons for the morphological supremacy of German tragedy from the
mid-eighteenth century on; or the key role of semi-peripheral realities
in the production of modern epic forms. Petrarchism, which reached
its international zenith when its wealthy area of origin had already cata-
strophically declined (like those stars which are still shining lang after
their death), is a particularly spooky instance of this state of affairs.
All these examples (and more) have two features in common. First,
they arise from cultures which are close to, or inside the core of the
'Conjectures' pointed out that 'in those rare instances when the impossible pro-
gramme succeeds, we have genuine formal revolutions' (p. 59, footnote 9), and
that 'in a few lucky cases, the structural weakness may turn into a strength, as in
Schwarz's interpretation ofMachado' (p. 66, footnote 29).
' „'Considering Coldly ... "', pp. 69, 73·
0
78 NLR 20
195
/;:;.=--c.·<·-. __ system-but are not hegemonic in the economic sphere. France may
be the paradigm here, as if being an eternal second in the political and
~l!() - economic arena encouraged investrnent in culture (as in its feverish
post-Napoleonic creativity, compared to th:_postprandial somnolen~--2f ;... \\
the victorious Victoria11~): A-limited-discrepancy between material
and literary h~ge~~ny does therefore exist: wider in the case of innova-
tion per se (which does not require a powerful apparatus of production
and distribution), and narrower, or absent, in the case of diffusion
(which does)." Yet, and this is the second feature in common, all these
examples con.firm the inequality of the world literary system: an inequality
which does not coincide with economic inequality, true, and allows
some mobility-but a mobility internal to the unequal system, not alter-
native to it. At times, even the dialectic between semi-periphery and
core may actually widen the overall gap (as in the instances mentioned
in footnote n, or when Hollywood quickly 'remakes' successful foreign
films, effectively strengthening its own position). At any rate, this is
clearly another field where progress will only be possible through the
good coordination of specific local knowledge.
IV
The central morphological point of 'Conjectures' was the contrast
between the rise of the novel in the core as an 'autonomous devel-
opment', and the rise in the periphery as a 'compromise' between a
"Tue fact that innovations may arise in the semi-periphery, but then be captured
and diffused by the core of the core, emerges from several studies on the early
history of the novel (by Armstrong, Resina, Trumpener and others: all written in
total independence from world-system theory), which have pointed out how often
the culture industry of London and Paris discovers a foreign form, introduces a
few improvements, and then retails it as its own throughout Europe (ending in
the masterstroke of the 'English' novelist Walter Scott). As the picaresque declines
in its native country, Gil Blas and Moll Flanders and Marianne and Tom Jones
spread it all over Europe; epistolary novels, fi.rst written in Spain and Italy, become
a continental craze thanks to Montesquieu and Richardson (and then Goethe);
American 'captivity narratives' acquire international currency through Clarissa and
the Gothic; the Italian 'melodramatic imagination' conquers the world through
Parisianfouilletons; the German Bildungsroman is intercepted by Stendhal, Balzac,
Dickens, Bronte, Flaubert, Eliot ... This is of course not the only path ofliterary
innovation, perhaps not even the main one; but the mechanism is certainly there-
half swindle, half international division oflabour-and has an interesting similarity
to !arger cconomic constraints.
 196 MORETTI: More Conjectures 79
Western influence and local materials. As Parla and Arac point out, how-
ever, early English novels were written, in Fielding's words, 'after the
manner of Cervantes' (or of someone eise), thus making clear that a
compromise between local and foreign forms occurred there as weil."
And if this was the case, then there was no 'autonomous development'
in western Europe, and the idea that forms have, so to speak, a different
history at the core and at the periphery crumbles. The world-system
model may be useful at other levels, but has no explanatory power at
the level of form.
Here things are easy: Parla and Arac are right-and I should have
known better. After all, the thesis that literary form is always a compro-
mise between opposite forces has been a Leitmotiv of my intellectual
formation, from Francesco Orlando's Freudian aesthetics to Gould's
'Panda principle', or Lukacs' conception of realism. How on earth could
1 'forget' all this? In all likelihood, because the core/periphery opposition
made me look (orwish ... ) for a parallel morphological pattem, which 1
then couched in the wrang conceptual terms.''
So !et me try again. 'Probably all systems known to us have emerged
and developed with interference playing a prominent role', writes Even-
Zohar: 'there is not one single literature which did not emerge through
interference with a more established literature: and no literature could
manage without interference at one time or another during its history'.' 4
No literature without interference ... hence, also, no literature without
compromises between the Iocal and th<l(;;eign. But aoes this ~ean tJ:iat . ,v
all _types_.()f interference and compromise are the same? _Of course not: the
·plcaresque, captivity narratives, even the Bildungsroman could not exert
the same pressure over French or British novelists that the historical
novel or the mysteres exerted over European and Latin American writers:
and we should find a way to express this difference. To recognize when a
" Anglo·Globalism?·. p. J8.
0
•1 This seems a good illustration of the 'Kuhnian' point that theoretical expectations
will shape facts according to your wishes-and an even better illustration of the
'Popperian' point that facts (usually gathered by those who disagree with you) will
be finally strenger.
" 'Polysystem Studies', p. 59. A page later, in a footnote, Even·Zohar adds: 'This is
true of almest all literatures of the Western hemisphere. As for the Eastern hemi·
sphere, admittedly, Chinese is still a riddle as regards its emergence and early
development.'
80 NLR 20
compromise occurs as it were under duress, and is thus likely to produce
more unstable and dissonant results-what Zhao calls the 'uneasiness'
of the late Qing narrator.
\. The key point, here, is this: if there is a strong, systematic constraint
exerted by some literatures over the others (and we all seem to agree
that there is),'' then we should be able to recognize its effects within
literary fonn itself because forms are indeed, in Schwarz's words, 'the
abstract of specific social relationships'. In 'Conjectures', the diagram
of forces was embodied in the sharp qualitative opposition of 'autono-
mous developments' and 'compromises'; but as that solution has been
falsified, we must try something eise. And, yes, 'measuring' the extent
i• of foreign pressure on a text, or its structural instability, or a narrator's
l 1: uneasiness, will be complicated, at times even unfeasible. But a diagram
i
of symbolic power is an ambitious goal, and it makes sense that it would
be hard to achieve.
V
Two areas for future discussion emerge from all this. The first concems
the type of knowledge literary history should pursue. 'No science, no
laws' is Arac's crisp description of Auerbach's project-;-;~d-th~~e--~~e ~
-~imilar hiri!S-iri oiher- articfes ioo: This is of course the old question of
~~-;: the proper object dhi~-to"ri~al disciplines are individual cases or
abstract models; and as 1 will argue at extravagant length for the latter in
a series of forthcoming articles, here 1 will simply say that we have a Jot
to leam from the methods of the social and of the natural sciences. Will
we then find ourselves, in Apter's words, 'in a city ofbits, where micro
and macro literary units are awash in a global system with no obvious
sorting device'? 1 hope so ... it would be a very interesting universe.
'5 Except Orsini: 'Impli~t in [Ca~anova's] view-expli~~t)n .~or~~·s-:-:is the tradi~
~o_n_:l_~!P:RtiOil.Of a· .~Source~ J3:;ig;;;g~~--~r-~~~.~ii:i;~!}~ ~)y~-~.~i~g- an aurä. ,„_
i ~,../ <?f ~Lltherifü:ity.;'.~nd.
a ~_target" one, seen as in some way il"l1itative„ In place of
th.iS~LYdfa"' Llu much more usefully proposed the concept of "guest" and "hast"
languages, to focus attention an the translingual practice through which the hosts
may appropriate concepts and forms ... Cultural influence becomes a study of
appropriation, rather than of centres and peripheries': 'Maps', pp. 81-2. Tue culture r X' (//
industry as a 'guest' invited by a 'hast' who 'appropriates' its forms ... Are these [ '
concepts--or daydreams?
 197
MORETII: More Conjectures 81

So, let's start looking for good sorting devices. 'Formalism without close
reading~_ Arac calls the project of 'Conjectures', and (can'tllimJ<öfa·
bett~~ definition. Hopefully, ii WiiiäJso be a formäJismwherethe 'd~t~il~'
so dear to him _and to ~rendergast w:lll Dehighlighted, not er~;~ci by
x
modcls. and 'schemas' .' 6

Finally, politics. Several articles mention the political pressure behind

Auerbach's Mimesis, or Casanovas Republique mondiale des lettres. To
them 1 would add Lukacs's two versions of comparative literature: the
one which crystallized around World War !, when The Theory of the
Novel, and its (never completed) companion study on Dostoevsky mused
on whether a world beyond capitalism could even still be imagined;
and the one which took shape in the Thirties, as a long meditation
on the opposite political significance of German and French literature
(with Russia again in the background). Lukäcs' spatio-temporal horizon
was narrow (the nineteenth century, and three European literatures,
plus Cervantes in The Theory of the Novel and Scott in The Historical
Novel); his answers were often opaque, scholastic, philistine--or worse.
But his lesson lies in how the articulation of his comparative scenario
(western Europe or Russia; Germany or France) is simultaneously an
attempt to understand the great political dilemmas of his day. Or in
other words: the way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how
we see the world. 'Conjectures' tried to do so against the background
of the unprecedented possibility that the entire world may be subject
to a single centre of power-and a centre which has long exerted an
equally unprecedented symbolic hegemony. In charting an aspect of the
pre-history of our present, and sketching some possible outcomes, the
article may weil have overstated its case, or taken some wrong turns
altogether. But the relationship between project and background stands,
and 1 believe it will give significance and seriousness to our work in the
future. Early March 2003, when these pages are being written, is in this
respect „a wonderfully paradoxical moment, _when, "after twenty years of
unchallenched.American hegemony, millions of people everywhere in --'f" !),,,_ 1,.; ~ i._;)r_v.-,,,'
the world have expressed their enormous distance from American poli- !
tks. As human beings, this is cause to rejoice. As cultural historians, .-~, '
:-(
it is cause to reflect.

6
' 'Anglo-Globalism?', pp. 4x. 38; 'Global translatio', p. 255.
 from: Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge
198 University Press, 2001. 1-27. Acknowledgments
X
Benjamin and Ellyn Schifs Berman. To Emma and Aaron and, always
and forever, Michael, I am profoundly grateful.
My thanks also go to Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press for
believing in this project and to Rachel De Wachter, Leigh Mueller, and
Hazel Barnes for seeing it through.
Portions of this book have appeared previously in print. An earlier
version of part of Chapter 2 appeared as "Feminizing the Nation:
Woman as Cultural Icon in Late James," Henry James Review 17 (1996):
58-76. An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 appeared as "Reading
Beyond the Subject: Virginia Woolf's Constructions of Community," in
Helen Wussow, ed., New Essays on Virginia Woolf(Dallas: Contemporary
Research Press, 1995), 50-82. I am grateful to the publisher for per-
mission to reprint "Of Oceans and Opposition: The Action of The
Waves," from Merry Pawlowski, ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism (London:
Palgrave, 2001). For permission to reprint selections from the novels,
diaries, and essays of Virginia Woolf, I thank The Society of Authors.
Excerpts from The Waves, copyright 1931 by Harcourt, Inc., and
renewed 1959 by Leonard Woolf, and from Orlando, copyright 1928 by
Virginia Woolf and renewed 1956 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by
permission of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpt from The Essays ef Virginia Woolf,
Volume II by Andrew McNellie, copyright© 1987 by Quentin Bell and
Angelica Garnett, and from The Letters ef Virginia Woolf, volume rv:
1929-1931, copyright © 1978 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett,
reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
CHAPTER l
Cosmopolitan Communities
Most novels are in some sense knowable communities.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the Ciry, 165
Is there a poetics of the "interstitial" community?
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location ef Culture, 231
The political is the place where community as such is brought into
play.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Communiry, xxxviii\ ..
Walter Beajamin tells us in his celebrated essay, "The Storyteller," that,
in the period after the First World War, "a process that had been going
on for a long time" began to become apparent. "It is as if something
inalienable to us . . . were taken from us," he writes, "the ability to
exchange experiences." This ability to exchange experiences is the
storyteller's art. It is, for Benjamin, an art that is based not only on the
possibility of imagining a community of listeners but also on the rel-
evance of experiences of the past. In the First World War, "A generation
that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the
open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds." 2 None of the past experiences of that generation prepared them
to stand in that changed countryside; none helped them translate it into
a story they could tell.
Speaking of a much earlier stage in this same process, Raymond
Williams writes: "The growth of towns and especially of cities and a
metropolis; the increasing division and complexity oflabour; the altered
and critical relations between and within social classes: in changes like
these any assumption of a knowable community- a whole community,
wholly knowable - became harder and harder to sustain." The ques-
tion of the knowable community here, for Williams, is not simply a
question of the object of scrutiny, of the complexity of the community-
present as compared with the seemingly simpler community of the past.

2 A1odemistfiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef community
Rather, it is a matter of shared perspective, "of what is desired and what
needs to be known." 3 In the nineteenth century, for Williams, it is "a
matter of consciousness" and of "continuing as well as day-to-day
experience." 4 In the twentieth century, however, the connection of
these two realms is seen to disappear. Social experience becomes frag-
mentary; the only community available seems to be the "community of
speech." 5
Both Benjamin and Williams imagine community as the crucial link
between speaker and listener and thus as the underlying condition of
storytelling. Both Benjamin and Williams also imagine community as
the realm in which narrative and history coincide, the realm in which
past experiences in common make possible a shared linguistic meaning.
And both see, in twentieth-century Europe, the problem of the loss of
this realm of the knowable, a loss which becomes for them a key
experience of the narratives of modernism.
Fragmentation seems inevitable and intrinsic to modernist narrative.
VVe recognize fragmented voices and fragmented identities as hallmarks
of what has been called "high modernist" writing, whether we speak of
their resolution into alternate patterns of meaning or dissolution in the
crisis of the subject. 6 The transition from social to narrative form is often
made to hinge upon this very issue. As Michael Levenson sees it, for
example, "The dislocation of the self within society is recapitulated
within modernist forms" which nonetheless present "the nostalgic long-
ing for a whole self" In this model the community is either fully absent,
or significantly present as a looming, oppressive force. The effort of
modernist fiction then becomes the "effort to wrest an image of an
autonomous subjectivity from intractable communal norms." 7
In Williams's late essay, "VVhen Was Modernism?" modernist fiction
becomes associated with the institutionalization and restriction of its
texts, a hurdle to be overcome on the way to a future community. Once
again community as a possible subject of concern within the canon of
European modernist fiction disappears. It becomes for Williams a
problem of the post-modern and its potential, a problem of finding a
new way back to the question of community: "We must search out and
counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left
in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself
... to a modernfature in which community may be imagined again." 8
On the other hand, this book begins with the premise that in much
high modernist fiction we can already see community being imagined
over and over again. The demise of the knowable community, the
199
Cosmopolitan Communities 3
explosion of shared experiences of the past, the disruption of the mean-
ing of old stories and of the possibility of new communicable experience,
become not only reflected but contested in the works of writers such as
Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein.
These writers engage directly with early twentieth-century historical
and political transformations of community, transformations that occa-
sioned on the one hand an almost desperate effort to recoup community
in the form of nationalism and fascism, and on the other hand an
insistence on deepening cosmopolitanism. Although James, Proust,
Woolf, and Stein develop radically different models for social organiz-
ation, their narratives consistently place the notion of community at
their core. Their writings return again and again to issues of commonal-
ity, shared voice, and exchange of experience, especially in relation to
dominant discourses of gender and nationality.
Yet the threat of totalitarian models of national community, whether
in the form of nativism, anti-Semitism, immigration restriction, proto-
fascism, or unmodified patriarchal dominance, looms large in the first
three decades of the century. It is in response to this threat that, I will
claim, community becomes linked to a cosmopolitan perspective in a
manner that revises and enriches both terms. The often-remarked
cosmopolitanism of these writers, then, seems less and less like personal
pique and more and more like creative opposition that leaves an
instructive social legacy in its wake. VVhile these writers were not all
radical or even progressive, especially in their real-world politics, the
writings of James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein not only inscribe early
twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, and gender, but con-
front them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of commu-
nity.
This book thus takes on a dual project: first, to revise the theory of
community in order to insist that it respond to the narrative construc-
tion of that term, and in particular to the ways that modernist fiction can
provide meaningful alternative models of community. Homi Bhabha
and others have claimed that nationality must be seen as a narrative
process. So then, I argue, must community. Communities come into
being to a large extent in the kinds of stories of connection we have been
told or are able to tell about ourselves, the stories that Benjamin insists
are transformed by modernity. Before beginning the adjudication of
rights and responsibilities, or the espousal of shared public values, we
move in a realm of being-in-common that rests upon the border be-
tween "I" and "we," a border that may not necessarily coincide with the
200
4 Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef community
political boundaries that surround us. In imagining this liminal zone as
something other than simple statehood, the story of community comes
into being. It is precisely this connection between narrative and the
reconstruction of community that has not been addressed by either
theoreticians of community or literary critics, and which I see as force-
fully emerging within the modernist fiction in question.
Second, this book seeks to revise our reading of modernist fiction in
order to expand our understanding of what is still too often derogatively
termed "international modernism," and to demonstrate modernism's
historical and political engagement with the dual question of commu-
nity and cosmopolitanism. 9 This revisionary work has already been well
begun on writers like Joyce, who lend themselves especially well to the
concerns of post-colonial critics, but it has yet to be sufficiently under-
taken with regard to writers who are less obviously enmeshed in the
problems of empire - those in question here. 10 To that end, after this
introduction each chapter begins with a section devoted to an historical
field where questions of nationality and affiliation emerge. Rather than
attempt to demonstrate the historical "cause" of the texts in question,
this material highlights the broader discursive terrain in which they
arise, and serves as a vehicle for what Susan Stanford Friedman has
recently termed "cultural parataxis," the use of key juxtapositions in
order to highlight the cultural ramifications of modernist texts. 11
Chapter 2 first explores the development of the notion of the cosmo-
politan within the American popular press at the end of the nineteenth
century, especially as it comes to be connected to ideas about femininity
in such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazar. From this vantage
point, Henry James's late international fiction and his late commenta-
ries on feminine voice and manners come to exemplify the paradoxical
relationship among cosmopolitanism, nativism, and notions of the ideal
woman within modernist discourse about America.
Chapter 3 begins by examining Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in
light of the radical French Zionist thought of Bernard Lazare, which has
been so crucial to the political theory of Hannah Arendt. Lazare's
category of "conscious pariahdom" speaks not only to political ques-
tions ofJewish identity but also to narrative questions about identity and
community. By reading A la recherche du temps perdu against Lazare's
thought, this chapter demonstrates how Proust's seemingly idiosyncratic
fascinations with both parvenu and pariah, with hidden perversion and
open voyeurism, may be seen as key terms in a coherent politics of
marginality.
Cosmopolitan Communities 5
Chapter 4 first examines the connection between the model of com-
munity embodied in the British Women's Co-operative Guild and that
found in Virginia Woolf's writing. This sense of relation she calls a
"mosaic," implying by her use of that term not only a version of the
psychologically decentered self as we commonly read it in modernist
fiction, but also a model of a fractured yet coherent political life, one
directly engaged with many of the same concerns as the Guild women.
By reading Orlando and The Waves within the terms of this model and
within the context of the British political crisis of 1929-31, Chapter 4
further demonstrates the anti-fascist, feminist model of community that
arises in those novels. The Waves ultimately presents us with an alterna-
tive model of both community and action, one which serves as a
countercurrent, marking and resisting the gathering of political force.
Finally, Chapter 5 begins by reading Gertrude Stein's narratives The
lvf.aking ef Americans and Ida within the context of American cultural
geography at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Stein's
writings ask us to read her focus on wandering literally, as expressions of
the importance of geography, (dis)placement, and movement within the
construction of subjectivity. The second half of this chapter connects
this topographical model of identity to the grammatical reworkings of
subjectivity in Stein's later prose. Stein's radical narratives may be seen
not only to reconstruct the subject as nomadic and polyvocal, but also to
challenge the dichotomy between community and cosmopolitanism
implied by nationalism. It is in this sense that Stein's narratives become
important to the contemporary discussion of social affiliation, especially
in their constant return to the question of America. It is also in this sense
that they raise the question of feminist nomadism as Rosi Braidotti
describes it, and of feminist ethics as elaborated in the writings of Luce
Irigaray and Tina Chanter.
This book is an interdisciplinary effort that seeks to bring politics,
history, and geography to bear on the narrative construction of commu-
nity. It seeks to further the discussion of the social contexts of modernist
fiction in such books as Michael Tratner's Modernism and Mass Politics
and James English's Comic Transactions not only through its attention to
extra-literary discourse, but also through its emphasis on gender poli-
tics. 12 Far too frequently the issue of gender seems to slip out of sight,
disappearing in an attempt to reach a more universal model of commu-
nity. On the contrary, this book claims, the question of gender often
becomes the pole around which spheres of community spin and collide,
governing both their possibility and their politics.

6 Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef community
Current political theory on community seems caught between the effort
to argue universally and the recognition that real-world communities
emerge primarily through local and specific commonalities. While
aware of the difficulty of legislating for any particular common good,
such as the golden rule, current new communitarian writings still
promote specific liberal maxims (such as "strong rights presume strong
responsibilities" and "the pursuit of self-interest can be balanced by a
commitment to the community") and place them within the context of
contemporary (usually North American) politics. 13 Meant to be an
intervention in the multicultural drift away from the common values of
a liberal democracy, communitarian thought clings to the political
notion of the autonomous self that engages in communicative action
and consensus-building as a second-order function of its consent to live
in society. 14 Communitarians thus often consider gender and ethnic
differences as part of a social experience appended to a core identity and
privilege the public realm as the locus of political community. There is
no recognition that community might grow even within the private
sphere, as a part of identity-building itself, emerging from an imagined
set of contingent relations between subjects who always already exist
both in common and separately. Nor does communitarian theory fully
account for the fluctuation of community belonging, where one day a
community of women may command allegiance while the next day the
conflicting demands of an ethnic or neighborhood group may be most
compelling.
In much the same way, discourse-based theories of community, like
Habermas's, present a utopian version of affiliation in the public sphere,
where moments of communication serve to represent a clear set of
shared values, rather than acting as crucial but contingent performances
of the community itself. 15 It is in this sense, as this book will argue, that
the modernist narratives in question here becomeins-tructive, highlight-
ing not only the variety of responses that may be described as "commu-
nity" but also the range of discursive versions of those communities that
are distinctly not predicated on direct communicative speech or the
transparency of the intention of the speaker. In fact, the common
presumption within the modernist fiction in question here, that dis-
course is fraught not only with difficulty but also with the constant
making and un-malcing of human inter-connections, provides the
means by which these narratives will construct radically modern ver-
sions of community. It is in their transposition of this question of
community from the domain of public citizenship and the state to a
201
Cosmopolitan Communities 7
liminal zone where community is both intimate and political, both local
and worldly, that these narratives will prompt a reassessment of the
relationship between community and cosmopolitanism. As Edward
Said suggests, "the formal dislocations and displacements of modernist
culture" as well as its encyclopedic forms, its juxtapositions, and its
ironic modes, emerge in part as a consequence of empire and thus from
the pressure of the world on previously self-enclosed communities. 16
The response, I would argue, will be neither a simple retreat, nor an
attempt to shore up the traditional community (or its presumptive heir,
the imperial nation-state), but a re-engagement with the very relation-
ship between community and world.
The relationship bet\,veen community and world, however, enters
very little into the current discussion about community, particularly in
North America, which turns on the possibility of constructing public
versions of affiliation within a specific rights 7based social system. The
liberal thought ofJohn Rawls 17 remains the focus of debate for a wide
group of thinkers such as Michael Sandel, Amy Gutmann, and Iris
Marion Young, and thus limits their ability to see community as a
challenge to the punctual self at the center of Rawls's system and to the
nation state at its periphery. 18 Those more focused on sociological
critique, such as Amitai Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian
Network and editor of the journal Responsive Community,. confine
themselves instead to American current affairs. 19 But current affairs
in Etzioni's version seem to have no relation to either a concrete
past or an intellectual history. Com.munity for Etzioni seems to exist
primarily in the realm of the debate about the so-called "welfare
state" of the 1960s, and has little to say about its conceptual under-
p111IDilgs.
But community as a term of debate within sociologic;al and political
theory has a history far longer than the welfare state. Community has
often been seen as the mediating link between the subject and its
possibility for socially significant action as well as, for theoreticians from
J. S. Mill and Ernst Renan to Benedict Anderson, the key precursor to
national identity. yet, in the nineteenth century, community was not
easily equated with the state; rather, Gemeinschaftwas often seen to be in
conflict with Gesellschaft politics, its forms of affiliation an antidote to
alienating social organizations. For Marx, in The German Ideology and The
Grundrisse, ancient and medieval communities represent the historical
locus of the conflict between co-operative and antagonistic social forms,
already tainted by the family, its division of labor, and its claims of
ownership. 20 The emerging disjunction between civil society and the
202
8 Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef communiry
state is already present in his early analysis of these forms of community,
as is the estrangement of the people from the social power that ought to
inhere in their affiliation. Still, in rescuing the possibility of community
from the family or from the debilitating conditions of the division of
labor, Marx will remain able to see community as the means by which
the worker becomes world-historical, outside of the bounds of the state.
As he puts it in The Civil War in France, the "commune, which breaks the
modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the
mediaeval Communes," but is instead a "new historical creation," one
which is itself both the new realm of social relations and its first act. 21
This transformative power is absent from much of the social scientific
writing on community at the end of the nineteenth century. Writing in
the 1880s Ferdinand Tennies draws a nostalgic distinction between the
small, rural community of the past, as characterized by inherent solidar-
ity and unity of purpose, and contemporary society, which lacks all
potential to create true bonds among its members. Tonnies's Gemein-
scheft draws from a model of the family where bonds are indissoluble and
relationships natural, and is firmly based in what we might call a
"community of proximity," one which grows out of shared territory,
blood ties, and constant interaction among its members, rather than
shared values or interests. Even friendship, which for Tonnies is inde-
pendent of kinship and neighborhood, relies on the face-to-face. "Spiri-
tual friendship," he writes, "forms a kind of invisible scene or meeting
which has to be kept alive by artistic intuition and creative will." 22
However, according to Tennies, in the modern period of Gesellscheft;
when no face-to-face community exists, even art becomes incapable of
creating community.
On the other hand, Durkheim rejects this assumption that there can
be no real solidarity or Gemeinscheft in modern industrial society. In. the
preface to the second (1902) edition of The Division efLabor in Sociery, he
describes the secondary groups or corporations that will replace the
communities of proximity as still to come, waiting in the vvings much like
Marx's commune of the future. For Durkheim they will constitute "the
well-spring of all moral activity." 23 This is, however, still to come -
Durkheim considers his contemporary world to be without "a whole
system of organs necessary to social life ~a vie commune)." 24 And, in Le
Suicide, 25 Durkheim further retreats from his optimism about modern,
"organic" society, calling for new communal relationships to counteract
its tendency towards debilitating anomie.
For most twentieth-century social scientists, community remains the
Cosmopolitan Communities 9
term for pre-industrial and not modern forms of affiliation, and thus for
them is only obliquely relevant to twentieth-century social life or the
modern nation-state. From Max Weber to Robert Redfield, whose
influential study, The Little Community, appropriates the term for anthro-
pological use, the same kind of nostalgia that pervades Tennies's work is
distinctly evident. Redfield, for example, defines the kind of "small
community" he studies among the Mayan Indians of the Yucatan, as
characterized by four qualities: "distinctiveness, smallness, homogene-
ity, and all-providing self-sufficiency." Although new versions of small
communities may still be found within the modern city, Redfield argues
that these qualities diminish as societies move towards urbanization. He
describes urban societies in a distinctly negative light, calling them not
only heterogeneous but also based in "impersonal institutions [and]
what has been called atomization of the external world." 26 For Redfield,
community is certainly not recuperated by the modern nation-state.
Thus it is somewhat anomalous for Benedict Anderson to depict the
nation-as-imagined-community in terms of a continuous rise in the
period from the beginnings of "print-capitalism" to the twentieth cen-
tury. 27 Or, what becomes clear is that Anderson relies on a political
tradition in many ways distinct from theoretical elaborations of commu-
nity per se. While community may be necessary to late nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European ideas of nationality, nationality is not
necessary to ideas of community and it is a failure of Anderson's work to
see it as such. 28 However, what Anderson makes clear is the historical
conjunction of these terms within European discourse of nationality
from Mill and Renan on, and the degree to which modern notions of the
nation-state depend upon these conjunctions. Thus in the late nine-
teenth century the idea of community becomes appropriated by the
need to imagine the nation as "the clearly expressed desire to continue a
common life" rather than some more concrete combination of lan-
guage, race, and history. 29
Yet, within the American pragmatic thought of George Herbert
Mead andJ ohn Dewey we find a means of imagining community and its
relationship to public structures ofbelonging as both potentially modern
and transformative, one which Anderson notably avoids. For both
Mead and Dewey, community is reconceived as a central category of
experience, one which cannot be relegated to a pre-industrial past,
completely distinguished from any conception of the (social) self, or
appropriated by the national idea. Their pragmatic thought thus imag-
ines the self as always implicated within circles of affiliation while those

IO Modernist.fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef community
circles are conceived as contingent and overlapping. In this manner,
Mead and Dewey may be said to present, in the early to mid years of the
twentieth century, what is often mis-understood to be a post-modern
condition, that of incomplete and relational selves seen in fluctuating
political association. In fact, it will be the argument of this book that, in
much the same manner and in response to many of the same historical
pressures, modernist fiction will also often pre-figure this dimension of
what we too easily term "post-modern thought." Thus, in this sense,
both the pragmatic inscription of a relational self and the modernist
narration of community serve to challenge the absolute division be-
tween modern and post-modern culture, especially as it concerns
models of social organization and political life.
Writing in 1913, Mead argues that the self cannot exist in conscious-
ness as a subject but only as an object of memory and observation - a
claim that resonates deeply with the narrative construction of self in
Proust and Woolf, among others. The individual only comes to perceive
his/her existence in a social context, as that "me" who is acted upon by
others and is remembered to have interacted with the social world:
"The self which consciously stands over against other selves thus be-
comes an object, an other to himself, through the very fact that he hears
himself talk, and replies." 3 ° For l\!Iead, the subject is constituted by its
experience within society, and is inconceivable, both metaphysically
and politically speaking, without it. The most glaring error, he claims, in
liberal political theory is the idea of the individual in a state of nature, or
"the common assumption . . . that we can conceive of the individual
citizen existing before the community." 31
Dewey makes this paradox of a socially constituted self more politi-
cal, conceiving of the public realm as a "Great Community," itself
comprised of an infinity of overlapping smaller communities or associ-
ations. 32 For Dewey, there can be no meaningful discussion of individ-
uals and their relation to society, because neither term exists without the
other. When we say "I think" we "accept and affirm a responsibility"
that is always already social and political. We make clear that "the self as
a centered organization of energy identifies itself ... with a belief or
sentiment of independent and external origination. " 33 When in later
political writings Dewey emphasizes the development of the individual
within community as a focus of education, therefore, he in no way
conceives of the former as taking priority over the latter.
But in Dewey's critique of American democracy, national structures
ultimately command more attention than the "domestic, economic,
203
Cosmopolitan Communities II
religious, . . . art1st1c or educational" assoc1at1ons which he claims
structure the moral life of citizens. 34 The private sphere of association
never fully emerges as political and the Great Community comes to
resemble national models of imagined community. It is in its indebted-
ness to this pragmatic tradition that the current communitarian thought
of Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, for example, derives both its
assumptions about the social embeddedness of the liberal citizen and its
focus on the national public sphere.::5 Walzer's Spheres ef]ustice addresses
the question of group membership by referring constantly to the nation-
al community as "the community," as though there can be no other
with significant claims on citizenship or the construction of justice. 36
The possibility of inscribing differences, or of accounting for citizens'
overlapping loyalties or contingent affiliations, recedes. Equally inac-
cessible is the means by which we might begin to instantiate any
recognition of group identities or rights within this system, if the com-
munity that is the basis for justice is always already the national commu-
nity.
On the other hand, Charles Taylor's "politics of recognition" is
grounded in a dialogic notion of identity whereby self-understanding is
constructed and perpetuated in common with others. It thus incorpor-
ates the private community into its attempt at the universal. "My
discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation,
but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal,
with others ... My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical
relations with others. " 37 Yet, despite his insistence that this dialogical
construction of identity is ongoing throughout life (and ·therefore pro-
vides both the basis and the need for a politics of recognition of and by
others), Taylor seems to want to limit our community identities to those
that may be expressed as externally coherent and stable wholes. This is
apparent in his discussion of our embedded identities: "Consider what
we mean by identity. It is who we are, 'where we're coming from.' As such
it is the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions
and aspirations make sense. " 38 Of course some aspects of this back-
ground will shift over time -yet, for Taylor background is static enough
to be given a name, to be assumed worthy and accorded respect as an
entity in its own right. In this sense when Taylor writes of the politics of
recognition it is mainly for established cultural groups already active
within the public sphere and seemingly unified in perspective, needs,
and "worth," such as the French speakers in Quebec.
It might be said that Taylor's cultural groups are as much a myth as
204 Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics qf communi01
I2
the notion of the monologic, "punctual" self of the Enlightenment that
he himself debunks. 39 His "politics of recognition," while admirable,
thus falls short of reimagining community as a mediating link between
the dialogic self and the nation, or as the entrance into politics within
both public and private spheres. 40 Surely the model of the politics of
recognition falters when it does not account for differences within public-
ly recognized groupings or for the provisional quality of those group-
ings, whether in terms of their relationship to self-identity or simply as
social entities in their own right. Because of this mode of identifying
groups in need of public recognition, Taylor also seems unable to
account for the myriad of differences within the so-called dominant
culture.41 Instead, Taylor's focus on cultural groupings as coherent
political players in the public sphere demonstrates that he conceives of
the state as a "social union of social unions," 42 as Rawls puts it, only one
where recognition of this fact is conceived of as a good rather than just a
means.
This restriction of the political community to the question of the
public sphere, and to a potential consensus among competing group
claims, rests upon what we might call a utopian bent within pragmatic
thought. For Dewey, for Walzer, even for Richard Rorty, the consensus
of opinion will expand with the expansion of the democratic conversa-
tion; the liberal community can hope, through reform, to mediate its
differences and internal contradictions. As Chantal Mouffe puts it, "like
his hero John Dewey, Rorty's understanding of social conflict is limited
because he is unable to come to terms with the implications of value
pluralism and accept that the conflict between fundamental values can
never be resolved." 43 Thus Rorty's faith in the American national
project rests on his assumption of a public conversation good enough to
extend social justice to all, without needing to raise questions about the
metaphysics of the self, the nature of difference, the possibility of
communication or the inter-relation of the public and private spheres.
In this last sense particularly he shares Habermas's utopian view of the
capaciousness of public conversation and the autonomy of an idealized
public sphere. This idealized public sphere, both for Habermas and for
Rorty, must presume, as its starting point, the possibility of a shared
conception of "we," yet neither thinker accounts for the metaphysics
that makes that "we" possible. 44
On the other hand, feminist thought, like other marginalized dis-
course, cannot afford to idealize the public sphere or its construction of
belonging, even when it still wants to posit its possibility. The internal
fissures within a seemingly stable political "we," the hazards of the
Cosmopolitan Communities
13
universal, and the importance of politics outside of the public sphere are
all key assumptions across a wide range of contemporary feminist
theory. When, for example, Iris Marion Young or Seyla Benhabib
attempt a re-working of the problem of community along feminist lines,
the self and its wealth of connections is seen not only to limit social
consensus but also to do so in a positive fashion. Thus Young critiques
the "ideal of community" as represented within universalized com-
munitarian theory as expressing a "desire for the fusion of subjects with
one another which in practice operates to exclude those with whom the
group does not identify ... [while it] denies and represses ... the fact
that the polity cannot be thought of as a unity in which all participants
share a common experience and common values." 45 Fusion is precisely
what is refused by Young's model of the city as social paradigm or
Benhabib's version of a narratively constructed, embedded democratic
citizen. 46 Even when these feminist theorists aspire to universalizable
paradigms of justice, therefore, they predicate them on the assumption
of an infinite variety of private sphere affiliations that are themselves
always political.
Benhabib revises the Habermasian notion of the communicative
function of the public sphere in order to distinguish between the search
for substantive consensus and the process of demonstrating willingness
to seek understanding with the other. In other words, for Benhabib, the
public sphere is the place where we demonstrate our cultivation of what
Hannah Arendt terms "enlarged thinking" - our ability to reverse
perspectives and reason from the other's point of view. This is a
processual morality. As she puts it, "it is less significant that 'we' discover
'the' general interest, but more significant that collective decisions be
reached through procedures which are radically open and fair to all. " 47
In fact it is in the everyday "ethical relationships in which we are always
already immersed" that Benhabib finds the source for public ethics. 48
Yet she insists nonetheless on public conversation as the crucial compo-
nent in what she considers a revised "interactive universalism." She thus
recapitulates the failing of the Habermasian model to account for a self
as not only narratively constructed but always already social, even prior
to entrance into conversation. She therefore also ignores the extent to
which the narratives of self are implicated in the conversations of
community-in other words to which the "web of stories" (to borrow an
Arendtian phrase which Benhabib employs) that makes up our shared
world always overlaps, bonows from, and revises the web of stories we
call our selves.
It is in this arena that Jean-Luc Nancy's theory of community has
 Modernist.fiction) cosmopolitanism) and the politics ef community
14
much to offer, both to the contemporary political discussion of justice
and to our understanding of the variety of possible modes of construing
community in the early years of the twentieth century during the height
of what we call "high modernism." Drawing from the Heideggerian
notion of being-in-the-world, Nancy describes community as an essen-
tial condition of being, one which engages radically separate subjects in
what he calls the process of "compearance." There is no doubt, in
Nancy's work, about the possibility of being-together - but the blind
faith that distinctly separate citizens will "somehow" discover their
interactive potential that we see in both liberal consensus theory, and
even the most revised ofHabermasian models, is gone. At the same time
by positing what he calls an "inoperative community" ("la communaute
desoeuvree"), Nancy also avoids the problem of substantive consensus
about particular political ends that pervades so much new communitar-
ian writing. He claims that "thinking of community as essence - is in
effect the closure of the political. Such a thinking constitutes closure
because it assigns to community a common being, whereas community is
a matter of something quite different, namely, of existence inasmuch as
it is in common, but without letting itself be absorbed into a common
substance." 49 Community thus becomes not only processual in Ben-
habib's sense but integral to the experience of being itself. In the
recognition of oneself as both embedded in a realm of association and
bodily finite at the same time one comes to know both community and
its limit.
Of course, as we have seen, this sense of an embedded or relational
self was also present in pragmatic thought in the first half of the
twentieth century. Yet what is different here is that Nancy positions
community within a realm of play that not only supplants the categories
of self and other, but never resolves into an entity that has an identity or
performs tasks. 5° Community for Nancy is precisely the opposite, that
which resists, that which undoes these kinds of groups because they
falsely present community as an entity secondary to existence which is
predicated on the free joining of separate subjects. The nation can never
qualify as a community in this model; Dewey's notion of the "Great
Community" is seen to be limited precisely because it consolidates into a
separate entity what is by definition a condition of being.
It is for this reason that Nancy Fraser and others have taken Nancy's
theory to be a retreat from the practical domain of politics. 51 Yet by
refusing the community as such - whether in the form of the nation or
the party - Nancy also extends its range far beyond the consensual
Cosmopolitan Communities 15
205
public sphere. Political community thus becomes open to the varieties of
"being-in-common" that are often relegated to the margins of the
national discussion and to the kinds of voices, such as those often present
within fictional narratives, that seem to speak outside of politics in
general. Political community may thus also be seen to apply to narrative
performances of community that never seek to enter mainstream politi-
cal life or engage in legislative action - in other words, to the kind of
political communities that are created by the modernist fiction in
question in this book.
Further, Chantal Mouffe makes clear how this abstract exploration of
community is immediately relevant to real world politics. Though
community may not exist to perform a work, or reach a consensus, it
nonetheless can articulate shared political perspectives when they arise,
and insist upon the need for common (though contingent and fluctuat-
ing) political identities. This in no way implies a return to an established
consensus, which must always resist the infinite plurality of social voices
and the many spheres of affiliation within which Mouffe understands
human subjects to move. "In order to impede the closure of the
democratic space, it is vital," she claims, "to abandon any reference to
the possibility of consensus that, because it would be grounded on justice
or on rationality, could not be destabilized. To believe in the possibility
of such a consensus, even when it is conceived as an 'infinite task' is to
postulate that harmony and reconciliation should be the goal of a
democratic society. " 52 Such harmony and reconciliation is precisely that
which is impossible and that which silences the very plural voices which
it is supposed to protect. It is the version of community that leads
towards uniformity and totalitarian nationalism. It is the kind of com-
munity that in a variety of ways the narratives in question in this book
will contest.
This kind of consensus also raises for Mouffe the question of social
and political borders and the concern that any "we" also always an-
nounces a "they," an enemy. 53 Though she does not say so, Mouffe thus
also connects the radical democratic perspective to the possibility of a
new cosmopolitanism, one that relies on the contingency of borders to
open the community to a wider network of differences. The gap widens
between the theory of community and that of nationality, between a
politics of connection and that of the modern nation-state. Radical
community begins to figure as an antidote to the consolidation of social
identity rather than its reason for being, and comes to demand a
cosmopolitan perspective as a function of its very refusal of universality.
 ;
·t
206
16 Mo demist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef communiry
This notion of cosmopolitanism as a function or outgrowth of a
radical deconstructive community looks distinctly different from tradi-
tional Kantian versions. 54 Martha Nussbaum's revised Kantian cosmo-
politanism is important in that, as will this book, it recognizes the ethical
and political claims of literature as formative of and inseparable from
real world relations. 55 Nussbaum places human identity within a series
of concentric circles, beginning from self, then moving out through
family to neighbors, local groups, fellow countrymen - to which she
adds the categories of "ethnic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender,
or sexual identities" - and finally humanity as a whole. Thus we are
both local and universal at once. 56 But a concentric set of circles still
presumes not only a core self at the center, but the coincidence of the
sets of affiliation that make up our social identities. Social divergences or
antagonisms, between cultural groups, or simply between past and
present versions of ourselves, are unilaterally swept away (where?).
Provisional communities, such as those created out oflimited perform-
ances of gender identities or life roles, disappear. Location becomes an
obstacle to the universal, at best only a coloring of one of the rings of our
existence - and never the kind of ubiquitous concern with geography
that we will find in such cosmopolitan writers as Gertrude Stein.
On the other hand cosmopolitanism as a corollary of the kind of
community both Nancy and 1\ifouffe posit retains space for the local
context of identity because it refuses the category of the universal. If the
community creates itself as a recognition ofboth affiliation and its limits
at once, and as both bordered and always subject to dispersal, then it
will not lend itself easily to the reified boundaries of the nation-state.
Rather than a series of concentric rings situated around the (universal)
human subject, what we might call a "cosmopolitan community" would
imagine, as the matrix ofboth self and community, overlappingwebs of
relation, some clearly woven out of local affiliations. Cosmopolitan
communities then might in a sense be rooted, 57 might arise out of what
Homi Bhabha refers to as the locations of culture and allow for what
Arjun Appadurai calls the crucial sense of the locality "as a structure of
feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated commu-
58
nity," while still in a very crucial sense remaining un-bordered. If, as
Bruce Robbins contends, "instead of an ideal of detachment, actually
existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attach-
ment, or attachment at a distance," 59 then the communities command-
ing such attachment may be described as cosmopolitan communities.
When Bhabha writes of the cosmopolitan condition, he alludes to a
Cosmopolitan Communities 17
process of motion, the traveling culture a la]ames Clifford, that enacts a
series of "interconnected cosmopolitanisms" in the "ways people leave
home and return." 60 The itinerant and iterative "I" ofBhabha's cosmo-
politan citizen is not simply a migrant remaking her /himself in the
movement between cultures or in the dissolution of the essential self into
"an endlessly fragmented subject in process." Rather it is a self that
comes into being in the moment between these two locations, in the
moment of translation that occupies the interstices: "In the process of
cultural translation there opens up a 'space-in-between,' an interstitial
temporality ... I want to try to occupy this hybrid, in between space ...
[with] the subject of a 'translational' rather than 'concentric' cosmo-
politanism."61 Thus translation functions as a metaphor for the liminal
zone between the punctual and the fragmented self, between the self
and its communities of affiliation, both past and present, as well as
between the loyalties and allegiances demanded by those communities,
both large and small.
Yet, the idea of translation also serves more directly to indicate the
discursive nature of the movement between community and cosmo-
politanism. Imagining the relationship between a radical deconstructive
community and an itinerant cosmopolitanism means imagining the
embedded self as engaged with writing her /himself into two stories at
once. The nation, as Bhabha elsewhere claims, is not simply created in
narration, but comes into being in the intersection of the performative
and the pedagogical in the ongoing discourses of nationality. 62 The
current performance of the national story requires (though is often
impeded by) the exigencies of the ongoing national narrative. At the
same time, we might add, this narrative mechanism itself must be seen
as conditioned by both the discourses of community which it might
contain and overlap and the other national narratives in circulation
around it.
At the same time as we recognize national, communal, and cosmo-
politan narratives as always already implicated in each other, we must
also see them as particular discourses, spoken from a particular location
at a specific moment in time. There can be no question of translation if
we do not first speak a particular language; there can be no question of
the intersection of current performance and past narratives of national-
ity, if we cannot tell the stories to begin with. The notion of the nomadic,
or the migrant, self implies one without ideal origins, or one unified
locus of social belonging.Yet each time that it begins again, the iterative
"I" created in the narrative of this migrancy still arises in a particular

·<
18 lv'Iodemistfiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics ef communiry
place at a particular time. 63 Precisely because they arise from the notion
of the self as always already embedded in social and discursive forma-
tions, these narratives of community, nation, and cosmos remain bound
to, if not limited by, questions oflocation and history.
This brings us once again to the question of post-modern theory and
its relationship to modernist texts. On the one hand we may be tempted
to echo Calinescu's claim that post-modernism is the most "quizzical"
of modernity's faces, "not a new name for a new 'reality,' or 'mental
structure,' or 'world view,' but a perspective from which one can ask
certain questions about modernity." 64 Increasingly persuasive claims
have been made about the many stylistic and thematic continuities
between the modern and the post-modern. 65 But it seems pointless to
wedge all varieties of contemporary thought and experience into the
category "modern" just as it seems illogical to claim that writers who
consciously called their work "modern" - as did Woolf in her essay
"Modern Fiction" - or who grouped themselves with others whom we
have long understood to have shared aims, were really just post-mod-
ernists in disguise. 66 More persuasive is Paul Gilroy's claim that "much
of what is identified as postmodern may have been foreshadowed, or
prefigured in the lineaments of modernity itself." 67 Thus, the use of
post-modern theoretical perspectives here is two-fold: to help illuminate
previously hidden "lineaments" in modernist writing and to demon-
strate the continuing relevance of some of its dimensions, even within
significantly changed and still changing cultural milieux.
The question of location and history also returns us to Benjamin, to
the parable of the storyteller with which this chapter began, and to the
double sense of distance that intervenes between us and the storytellers
of previous eras. Benjamin calls our attention to the scene of community
and its relationship to time. The opening paragraphs of "The Storytel-
ler" vacillate back and forth betvveen metaphors of time and place
weaving an intricate interconnection between them even as Benjamin
describes our increasing remoteness from that scene. The storyteller "is
by no means a present force," 68 meaning that he is not available to the
world after the First World War. Yet the problem is immediately one of
distance conceived physically ("Entfernung"). The alien landscape, in
which home is unrecognizable, is what silences him - the storyteller
must be able to combine "the lore of faraway places ... with the lore of
the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place," 69 and that is
impossible if the lore of the past no longer seems to have any connection
to the place of the present. 70 The result is that the storyteller has no
f
207
:;
C
t
r-;
Cosmopolitan Communities 19
f experiences that are communicable; he can imagine no community
1;
where the narrative juxtaposition of the familiar with the modern makes
t;; sense. A new modern means of imagining community as well as a new
means of communicating about the past and its relationship to the
present, both near and far, becomes necessary.
In other words, for Benjamin, the specific events of the First World
War irrevocably alter the place in which the story of community can be
narrated, thereby also altering the way that we, removed yet again from
the scene of face-to-face narration, tell that story. Community therefore
emerges not only as something that is both expressed and perpetuated in
narratives, but also something historically contingent, and concerned
with its contingency, subject to variation in material circumstances as
well as to reconceptualization in the minds of the people. In both its new
manifestations and its old, it is also something inherently linked to the
experience of geographical distance, for it operates in translating the
experience of the faraway into a story that can be told in the here and
now. What happens for Benjamin in the world after the First World
War is that the past is like the faraway present, equally in need of
translation.
This emphasis on the common situation ofboth the community's past
and the other of its present returns us again to the notion of the
cosmopolitan. The only way for the community to create itself anew is
to retell both its own stories and those of other places, and to recognize
in them their common relationship to their own past and to the lives of
others. At the same time, the process of translation for Benjamin clearly
demands more than recognition of commonality. For in translating one
seeks not to represent in one's own language the ideas of another but to
expand one's own language so as to be able to speak the other's
thoughts. 71 Bhabha's notion of cosmopolitanism as translation thus finds
its roots not only in the post-colonial situation of migrancy, but in the
earlier Benjaminian account of modernity and its relation to storytell-
ing. Modern narratives of community arise in the movement and
translation of foreign experience (whether of the past or of a geographi-
cally distant place) into common experience and the concomitant and
never-ending movement back towards the foreign experience that this
process entails.
In different ways, in the writings of Henry James, Marcel Proust,
Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, community is constantly created,
re-worked, and perpetuated in tension with historical discourses of
social identity and nationality and with the sound of other voices of
208
20 Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics of community
experience echoing around and within those discourses. Community, in
the writings this book will consider, is always seen as historically contin-
gent, a story that must be begun again because of the disruption in
shared experience that for these writers characterizes the opening dec-
ades of the century, but also because it must always be begun again, a
matter of writing being-in-common and its limit, of narrating its con-
stant interruption, and of inscribing the echo of other communities in
the discord of the familiar. The tensions between pedagogical models
and contemporary enunciations of community thus .emerge in these
texts as struggles with history, with the question of social identity, and
with the tendency of the twentieth-century state to equate all commu-
nity life with national life, and all allegiances as matters of the public
realm. 72 The tension also emerges in these texts in the willingness to
announce the community as both local and international, private and
public at once. Thus the different notions of community created by
James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein call into question many of the cultural
assumptions that privilege the public realm and society at large as the
one, unified locus of social belonging.
At the same time, within their experimental prose the texts in ques-
tion often push towards community as that which is enacted in the
interstices of narrative form, or in its grammar and figures. Whether in
the way that, in The }/faking of Americans, Stein's pronouns wander,
sometimes invoking a singular identity and sometimes a whole classifica-
tion of beings in the word "she," or in the way that, in The Waves,
Woolf's language dissolves boundaries, so that the very sentences run
rapidly in alliterative streams, deftly avoiding the intervening sounds,7
3 Yet in the rejection of narrative consensus there remain clear implica-
these novels insist on new forms of social interconnection. These formal
inscriptions rarely represent a community conceived of as a whole,
united under some banner or other, ready, as Nancy puts it, to perform
some sort of work. Instead what is important about the social construc-
tions in the texts in question is precisely the way in which the gathering
of identity always remains partial and fleeting, and the modernist style
employed by these writers serves constantly to endorse and to perform
this fact.
The formal emphasis on partial or incomplete perspectives may
indeed be what separates these modernist texts from their realist equiv-
alents - at least so far as the construction of community is concerned.
One of the characteristics of nineteenth-century realist fiction may be
described as its insistence that we have been presented with a coherent
and complete version of events from a perspective that we too are
Cosmopolitan Communities 2I
invited to share. As Elizabeth Ermarth puts it, "The genial consensus of
realistic narration implies a unity in human experience which assures us
that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are
available to everyone. Disagreement is only an accident ofposition." 74
There is a presumed (if perhaps "provisional" 75 ) wholeness to the
English community of a novel like Middlemarch and a presumed effort to
extend the sphere of its influence. If, as Benedict Anderson has made
clear, the nation as imagined community is "conceived in language," 76
and, as Timothy Brennan points out, "the rise of European nationalism
coincided especially with one form ofliterature - the novel," 77 then we
must consider realism's construction of narrative consensus as im-
plicated in the imagining of the imperial nation-state. 78
The modernist rejection of a communal moral perspective on a self-
complete and linguistically well-ordered world, on the other hand,
might be seen to imply a wholesale rejection of the politics linked to
realism and consensus. But this is an argument that is clearly difficult to
support across the broad spectrum of modernist writing. Presuming a
specific politics from a generic narrative form is suspect - somewhat like
presuming that free verse is always written about freedom. In this sense
those who want to draw broad connections from a large body of texts to
a specific political ideology often stray too far. 79 Forms lend themselves
to a variety of political purposes. As the varying political positions
among the authors in this study show, fragmented perspectives or
experimental styles do not always coincide with the shattering of real-
world political verities.
tions for reading the political engagement of modernist fiction as well as
for recasting the idea of the political community with which we began.
Without claiming that we can derive a specific political doctrine from a
i', certain textual mode, we can nonetheless recognize the possibilities it
f· makes available and the social assumptions that, in concert with other
f thematic and discursive elements, a particular text enables. 80 Thus if a
[ text insists on the partialness of perspective, as HenryJ ames's late novels
l1
II: increasingly do, we can understand its form to be undermining realistic
t consensus and to be questioning the self-complete communal perspec-
~ tive, thus making room for a mode of social organization outside of
those available within the realist paradigm. It need not necessarily,
~ however, insist on the opposite of consensus, that is, on the privacy of
f vision or the impossibility of establishing commonality. Rather, narra-
II
tive form in late] ames may be seen to enact another, different version of
~:
I f
 Nfodemist fiction) cosmopolitanism) and the politics qf community
, i
22
commonality, one where limited perspectives begin the very movement
towards community. In 77ze Ambassadors, for example, community is
partially constructed in the play between the several incomplete
perspectives evoked by the text and the common recognition of the
limitation of their interconnection, rather than in their (or our) shared
consensus. This formal construction of community not only challenges
dominant nineteenth-century versions of the term but also directly
contests the notion of community as a matter of the public realm, and as
constituted by an ideal form of communication, both transparent and
complete.
Thus modernist fiction enacts notions of community that may be seen
to undermine political versions of established consensus or the blind
universality that lurks behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. In that sense
it begins the unworking necessary for a less presumptive mode of
politics, one which decenters belonging and challenges commonplace
notions of the universal political subject. This challenge emerges most
clearly within the domain of gender, where these texts most clearly
present the masculine assumptions so often contained within the con-
struction of universal political citizenship and natural community.
When Woolf famously contends that as a woman she has no country,
she is not simply proclaiming her cosmopolitan sympathies but also
clearly remarking on her exclusion from the very idea of the citizen. 81
The universal citizen, no matter how theorized, remains tainted by its
historical gender and racial construction. And, I would argue, the
philosophical notion of the universal subject and therefore of universal
conceptions of rights, responsibilities, democracy, or community, can-
not be separated from this history. They are grounded in a white
masculinist version of consensus, one which may be seen to be tied to the
rise of the modern nation-state as well as to realism's narrative consen-
sus.
Yet the effort to re-create the universal position as a new basis for
political community continues. Feminists in the journal differences pro-
pose new versions of universalism, though now based in "interactive
universalism, a. universalism aimed at establishing some community of
values based on a notion of dialogue rather than consensus. " 82 As Seyla
Benhabib claims in Situating the Self, "a post-Enlightenment defense of
universalism, without metaphysical props and historical conceits, is still
viable. Such universalism would be interactive not legislative, cognizant
of gender difference not gender blind, contextually sensitive and not
situation indifferent." 83 While one must invoke notions of community
Cosmopolitan Communities
209
23
(as spheres of communication or as local spheres oflimited consensus) in
order to defend a post-modern universalism, this universalism still works
contrary to the idea of cosmopolitan narrative communities. It must
defend a stable notion of dialogue, as though the positions enunciated
could be separated and opposed, placed into common allegiance, or
simply enlisted in an ongoing conversation. In other words the notion of
public speech is here not sufficiently complicated, nor is the question of
interlocking discourses within the narratives in question sufficiently
addressed. These insufficiencies are precisely what modernist narratives
demonstrate to us, for it is immediately apparent how hard it would be
to discern the interactive component of "interactive universalism" if it
were to stem from a fragmented or self-undermining text. How the
public conversation might then proceed would be equally unclear.
Furthermore, despite the appeal of achieving consensus on some
small set of shared values, or even on the very notion of participating in
a common endeavor itself, such universalism belies the difficulty of
delimiting that shared domain. In this sense the difference of woman
raises the question of the differences that have been drawn between
public and private spheres, between public and private realms of ident-
ity and affiliation. Where public and private are clearly drawn, women
and unworking communities would both traditionally belong to the
private sphere, while interactive universalism clearly belongs in the
public arena, meant to be a means of bringing women into the conversa-
tion. Ifwe want to complicate those divisions between spheres, as Nancy
Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and Drucilla Cornell all want to do, then the
public conversation must also go private, which might mean, in a
discursive sense, hermetic, non-transparent, and often non-referential.
This kind of "private" discourse would lie outside Benhabib's scene of
interaction, though not necessarily outside the realm of community.
Here again, the question of modernist textuality becomes instructive.
Any attempt to situate Gertrude Stein's surrealist love lyrics within a
universal interactive politics, for example, seems immediately absurd.
Drucilla Cornell has recently approached this problem by appealing
to the process of translation - that very process evoked by Benjamin in
"The Storyteller" - in order to re-cast what she calls "the moral
reminder of the universal": 84
The task that cultural difference sets for us is the articulation of universality
through a difficult labor of translation; the terms made to stand for one another
are transformed in the process and the movement of that unanticipated
transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be achieved and

210
Modernist fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics efcommuni!J
24
which, in order to resist domestication, may never be fully or finally achiev-
able. 85
Her version of universality, therefore, becomes less a question of con-
sensus about the freedom, equality, and independence of human citi-
zens than the process of speaking about these ideals between cultures,
genders, and statuses. Yet, she makes clear that this process can only
begin after the hierarchy of these positions and the specific historical
construction of what it means to be "men" have been dismantled. Thus
while Cornell's model is appealing in its ability to circumvent the
question of difference and to make an appeal to universalism via a
"reciprocal relativism" 86 of genders and cultures, it is still utopian in its
vision. The difficulty of avoiding the historical construction of "men"
remains; the universal cannot escape so easily the use that has been
made ofit.
Thus I want to argue that the feminist question of difference immedi-
ately evokes the challenge that community poses to the very category of
the universal, and ought not be recuperated within it. 87 Benhabib's
dialogue as a new model for public speech inadequately addresses the
question of the position of the speakers and the problem of transparent
discourse. At the same time, Cornell presumes the possibility of translat-
ing conversations about freedom and equality without also translating
the limiting culh1ral histories lurking within those conversations. If
instead we presume, as does Chantal Mouffe, that even this level of
harmony implies an outside, an enemy left at its fringes, beyond the
rules of the conversation, then we risk recapitulating the failings of the
liberal communitarians. Community, as situated within a political world
predicated on the need for constant translation between and among
individual speakers and the discourses of provisional communities, and
on the impossibility not only of consensus but also of discursive har-
mony, might, on the other hand, open itself to a new cosmopolitanism.
It will be clear that in emphasizing the role of female difference in the
rewriting of community I am not advocating the kind of community that
has been called an "ethics of care," nor am I using the figure of the
"web" as a particularly feminine affiliative dynamic, however compell-
ing that figure may be. 88 For one, this would oppose community to
"masculinist" principles ofjustice in a manner that places justice beyond
the reach of the conversation, just where I do not want it to go. 89
Second, though valuable on many levels, these perspectives often re-
create gender as a universal category, as suspect as any other. It will be
clear from the writing in question that such universal gender categories
J
~
fa
~ Cosmopolitan Communities 25
t
\1i
are precisely what the authors I study often call into question, especially
~!!
when they broach the role of the homosexual.
~ Indeed, the constructions of community in these narratives often
~
r work to examine, critique or undermine the myth of Woman and its
~
I,
surrounding gendered categories, as well as the construction of the
homo/heterosexual opposition. 90 The question of what defines a
woman's voice will come to be identified in HenryJames's writings with
the feminized construction oflate nineteenth-century American cosmo-
politanism, whereas in Proust's writings the question more often hinges
on communities that belie heterosexual identities. In order to posit in
Proust's work a pariah community that is marked by Jewishness and/ or
homosexuality, I rely on a notion of community constructed out of the
shattering of the illusion of the exemplary, in several different social
domains. The pariah homosexuality that emerges in Proust is never a
community as such -yet it offers the most compelling scene of shared, if
often hidden, experience that is present in the novel.
Nor am I greatly concerned here with the many real-world communi-
ties which to a greater or lesser extent claim the loyalties of these writers.
Modernism, it must be clear, was a cultural mode especially given to
manifestos. 91 These manifestos seek to create, challenge or defend not
only particular modes or perspectives but also communities of artists
who share those perspectives. Thus when Woolf in "Character in
Fiction" divides writers into two camps - the Edwardians 0N ells, Ben-
nett, and Galsworthy) and the Georgians (Forster, Lawrence, Strachey,
Joyce) - she does so not only to combat the view of character seen in
novels by the Edwardians, but also to align herself with character as it
emerges in the work of the Georgians. Yet how many among Forster,
Lawrence, Strachey, andJoyce would create Mrs. Brown in the corner
of her railway carriage just as Woolf presents her to us, the source not
only of modern fiction but also of "life itself''? 92 Woolf's sense of
commonality with these writers, I would argue, is more about how we
should read her own work than about how we should read Lawrence.
The artistic community she creates for herself provides an imagined
context for readership, rather than a real-world bond in the creation of a
common project. Thus the manifesto may be thought of as another
version of the narrative enactment of community, which ought not be
bound by the real-world relationship (or lack thereof) among artists.
Further, because I argue that community is performed in its narra-
tives and is not derived from an originary position or outside source, I
restrict myself to those narratives. Thus while the James family, or
 Modernist.fiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics efcommuniry
26
Bloomsbury, or Stein's salon all make fascinating study, they rarely
concern me here. I include these "real-world" communities as part of
the conditions of authorship of these novels, but not as the benchmark
by which to judge them. In this sense too, I would claim, I avoid limiting
the possibilities of community enacted in these novels to the political
positions espoused by their authors.
But any study concerned with what I'm calling "high modernism"
must come to terms with the fact that these writers generally perceived
themselves and their art as part of "high culture." If we are to examine
these texts in relationship to each other and to their cultural situation,
we must accommodate this self-understanding. As Andreas Huyssen
long ago made clear, the divide, or at least the appearance of the divide,
between high and low culture is a key feature of "high modernism,"
both in the way it perceived itself and in the way that it was canonized in
the period after the Second World War. Yet as Huyssen claims, "mod-
ernism's insistence on the autonomy of the art work, its obsessive
hostility to mass culture, its radical separation from the culture of
everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic,
and social concerns was always challenged as soon as it arose." 93 It is this
challenge which I explore here, without negating the elitism that also
often permeates these texts. 94
Huyssen's discussion of the relationship between a masculinist ver-
sion of high modernism and an excluded, feminized mass culture,
however, points to another means of entering the debate. Seen through
the filter of gender, the authors in question here hardly seem such
unambiguous members of the club. In all the works examined in this
study, culture is either at risk of becoming, or has already become,
feminized. Huyssen claims that what is at issue in this exclusionary
dichotomy is not the subversive gender subtext of these works, but
rather the "universalizing account of modernism that has been able to
hold sway for so long." 95 Yet another reason for examining James,
Proust, Woolf, and Stein is to see how gender constructs in these
authors' works serve to undercut both that universalizing account and
the dichotomies (male/female; high culture/low culture; public/pri-
vate; individual/ community; nation/ cosmos) that help sustain it. In this
sense community serves here as a means not an end. Because it is both a
component of one of these dichotomies and a participant in all of them,
it provides a particularly good lens through which to re-examine our
assumptions about the categories of modernist fiction. 96
In another way Houston Baker's discussion of the alternative mod-
Cosmopolitan Communities
211
27
ernism of the Harlem Renaissance and Paul Gilroy's notion of the Black
Atlantic, among others, also challenge us to specify not only what
version of modernism we are discussing but also what social and cultural
perspective it elaborates. They require us to reject the blind universal-
ism often implied by our definitions of modernism as well as to challenge
the pretensions to universality often found within them. 97 Further, while
cosmopolitanism in these texts may often look like a gesture towards
simple universality, espoused by writers within the intellectual cadres of
Bloomsbury or the Left Bank who were privileged enough to feel
themselves to exist without boundaries, it frequently hides an intense
effort to specify the location and limitation of that cosmopolitanism. In
other words, the world does not simply occupy the outermost circle of a
concentric cosmopolitan perspective; the local community colors,
shapes, and constrains the ways the world can be imagined. The most
engaged of these modernist texts often espouse what K. Anthony Ap-
piah has called a "rooted cosmopolitanism," one which is as implicated
in the question of belonging as in universal detachment. As Stein
famously remarked, "there's no point of roots if you can't take them
with you. " 98 In the modernist texts here discussed, the question both of
roots and of where you take them is always at stake.
Thus modernist fiction becomes immersed in the politics of connec-
tion, in the performance of affiliation already on the brink of dispersal.
This performance often creates radically new forms of cosmopolitan
communities. It always engages with the inadequacies of dominant
categories of affiliation, especially regarding gender and nationality.
Seen in this context, modernist fiction challenges our ability to restrict
social identity to civic consensus or the public politics of recognition,
and becomes an instructive narrative model of how we can begin to
imagine community anew.
212 202 Modernistfiction, cosmopolitanism, and the politics efcommunity
incomplete communication or disagreement over shared values is the
norm, and where translation is always fraught with difficulty, or where
connection grows stronger precisely because of this lack of an ideal
public conversation. Yet this is precisely what we do see in many of the
narratives of modernism, whether because they emerge out of the
concerns of those, like women, homosexuals, and Jews, long considered
less-than-ideal participants within that public sphere, or because they
begin from a literary need to destabilize the narrative position of public
consensus. Community in these narratives can help us see the continu­
ing viability of partial, non-national affiliations within the history of
twentieth-century politics. Community in these narratives can demon­
strate the limitations of traditional theories of universality and the drive
towards ideal consensus, no matter how perspicacious. And community
in these narratives can show us how to account for the non-transparency
of language and the impossibility of direct translation within the ongo­
ing process of forging new cosmopolitan political bonds.
In asking, "what was modernism?" Raymond Williams questioned
the current situation of modernism, after having been tamed and
canonized in the middle years of the twentieth century and made
mainstream in the subsequent decades. He wondered what an alterna­
tive modernism might look like and what the value of its dislocations of
meaning might be, were they ever retrieved from the realm of advertis­
ing and mass media. In other words, he wondered, along with many
others, what is the future of modernism? While it does not propose to
answer the question of alternative or future modernisms, or to describe
how we might begin to wrest modernist techniques and perspectives
back from crass commercialism, this book has attempted to propose a
way of reading that addresses Williams' s question. The future of mod­
ernism, or at least one of modernism's futures, may very well be
community.
Notes
COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITIES
1 Raymond Williams, Ihe Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973); Homi Bhabha, Ihe Location ef Culture (New York: Routled?e'
1994);Jean-Luc Nancy, Ihe Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Mm­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
2 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 87, 83, 84.
3 Williams, Ihe Country and the City, 165.
4 Ibid., 166.
5 Ibid., 245. .
6 The number of stock definitions of modernism is endless, the debate over its
identity ongoing. Astradur Eysteinsson provides a concise overvi�w of some
of the history of the term in chapter one of Ihe Concept efModernism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
7 Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate efIndividuality: Character and .Novelis­
tic Form.from Conrad to Woolf, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
xii-xiii.
8 Collected in Ihe Politics qfModernism: Against the .New Conformists, (New York:
Verso, 1989), 35.
' . .
9 See, for example, Homi Bhabha s use of the term m "Unpacking My
Library ... Again," in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, Ihe Post­
Colonial Qyestion: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (New York: Routled?e'
1996), 208. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Bhabha discusses the efforts to posit a
"new internationalism" out of those practices that were obscured by the
old "international style" of modernism, as though modernism �ere a
monolithic, universalizing practice. It is this too easy concept10n of
modernism that I wish to contest. On the question of international mod­
ernism, see also Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the
Cultural Geographies efEncounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
n4-20. . . .
ro The re-reading ofJoyce along these lines has been immensely productive m
recent years. See Robert Spoo, James Jqyce and the La,nguage qfHistory 0Tew
York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Erner Nolan,James]qyce and.National-
203
 204 Notes to pages 4-8
ism \New. York: ~ou~edge, 19~5); Trevor Williams, Reading Joyce Politically
(Gamesville: Umvers1ty ofFlonda Press, 1997). For the concerns of commu-
nity and cosmopolitanism see, especially, Enda Duffy, Ihe Subaltern Ulysses
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), ch. 1; Joe Valente,
'James Joyce and the Cosmopolitan Sublime," in Mark Wollaeger, Victor
Luftig, and Robert Spoo, eds., Joyce and the Subject qf History (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996); Mark Wollaeger, "Posters, Modern-
ism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War One Recruiting Posters in
Ireland," Yale Journal q/Criticism 6.2 (1993): 87-13r.
II Susan Stanford Friedman, "Woolf, Cultural Parataxis, and Transnational
Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies," Plenary
Address, The Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf,June 8, 2000.
12 Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), andJames English, Comic Transactions (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1994).
13 Amitai Etzioni, Ihe Spirit qf Community (New York: Simon and Schuster,
Touchstone, 1993), 1-2.
14 Seyla Benhabib is a notable exception. See Situating the Se!f Gender, Commu-
nity, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992).
15 Jurgen Habermas, Iheory qf Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), and Ihe Structural Traniformation qf the Public
Sphere trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1989).
16 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 188-89.
17 John Rawls, A Iheory qf Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Pres~, 1971_); 'Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical," Philosoplry and
Publzc 4ffazrs 14.3 (Summer 1985): 223-51; "The Priority of Right and Ideas
of the Good," Philosophy and Public Affairs 17.4 (Fall 1988): 251-76.
18 See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits qfJustice (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1982); Amy Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of
Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14.3 (Summer 1985): 308-22; Iris
Young, Justice and the Politics qf Difference (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990).
19 In fact that is the "official" book store category ofEtzioni's 1993 book (seen.
13).
20 Karl Marx, Ihe German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International
Publishers, 1972); Ihe Grundrisse, trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper
and Row, 1971 ). See also Pre-Capitalist Economic Foimations, trans.] ack Cohen
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964).
21 Karl Marx, Ihe Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers,
1988), 59.
22 Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschqft und Gesellschqft, trans. Charles Loomis
(1957; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction, Inc., 1988), 43-44.
23 Emile Durkheim, Ihe Division qf Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New
York: The Free Press, 1983), xliii.
Notes to pages 8-I2 213
24 Ibid., lv.
25 Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
26 Robert Redfield, Ihe Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, Phoenix. Books, 1960), 4, 5.
27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread qf
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 44.
28 Partha Chatterjee also critiques the connection between nation and state in
Anderson's theory, arguing that the state is not necessary to the imagination
of the nation, as Anderson claims, epecially in colonial India: Ihe Nation and
its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, Princeton Studies in Cuiture/Power/History, 1993), 6-7,
29 Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and
Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19.
30 George Herbert Mead, "The Social Self," in Andrew J. Reck, ed., Selected
Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 146.
31 Mead, "Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institution," m
Reck, ed., Selected Writings, 159-6o.
32 John Dewey, Ihe Public and its Problems (Denver: Alan Swallow, 19_27): P.J'ter
1929 Dewey's thought on this subject becomes somewhat less opt=1st1c.
33 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958),
233.
34 John Dewey, "Individualism Old and New,'' inJo Ann Boydston, ed.,John
Dewry: Ihe Later Works, r925-r953, vol. v: r929-r930 (Carbondale: Southern
lliinois University Press, 1984), 80-1.
35 Michael Walzer, Spheres qf Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983) and
Charles Taylor, K. Antl10ny Appiah, Jurgen Habermas, Steven C.
Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf, Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics qf Recognition, ed. Amy Guttmann (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994).
36 Walzer, Spheres qf]ustice, 31-63.
37 Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Taylor et al., Afulticulturalism, 34.
38 Ibid., 33.
39 See his Sources qf the Se!f Ihe Making qf Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
40 I also see this as similar to the distinctionJudith Butler draws between the
situated and the constituted self. A situated self is precisely that notion of a
subject constrained in advance. See Judith Butler, "For a Careful Read-
ing," in Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions (New York: Routledge,
1995), 135.
41 See Susan Wolf's critique, in Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions, 85.
42 Rawls, Iheory, 527; Rawls revises this idea into that of"overlapping consen-
sus" in his later work (''.Justice as Fairness") yet the core understanding
remains essentially the same.
43 Chantal ]\,fouffe, "Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democ-
racy," in Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Progmatism (New York: Routledge,
214 :206 Notes to pages I2-I7
1996), 6.
44 I here allude to Rorty's use of the "we" in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), as well as to Simon
Critchley's critique of Rorty in "Deconstruction and Pragmatism - Is
Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal?" in Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction
and Pragmatism.
45 Young, Justice, 227.
46 Benhabib, Situating the Self, 6.
47 Ibid., 9.
48 Ibid., IO, 13.
49 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, xxxviii. This passage does not appear in
the French edition.
50 I resist calling what Woolf writes a "relational subject" for the very reason
that the term conjures up a totalizing image of the collectivity contrary to
this idea.
51 Nancy Fraser, Unru[y Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary
Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 86.
52 Mouffe, "Deconstruction, Pragmatism," rr.
53 Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,"
in Miami Theory Collective, ed., Communi-py at Loose Ends (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 78.
54 The history of these notions of cosmopolitanism will be discussed in the
chapter that follows.
55 See Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), preface.
56 Martha C. Nussbaum, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism," in Nussbaum
with Respondants, For Love ef Country: Debating the Limits ef Patriotism, ed.
Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 9.
57 In the sense that K. Anthony Appiah discusses in "Cosmopolitan Patriots,"
in Nussbaum et al., For Love cf Country, 21-9.
58 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions cf Globalization (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Public Worlds, r, 1996), 189.
59 Bruce Robbins, "Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,"
in Pheng Cheah and Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Bryand
the Nation (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, Cultural Politics, 14,
1998), 3.
60 James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nel-
son, Paula Treichler et al., eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992),
ro3.
6I Bhabha, "Unpacking," 204. For a critique of Bhabha's emphasis on per-
formance as disruption see Sangeeta Ray, "The Nation in Performance:
Bhabha, Mukherjee and Kureishi," in Monika Fludernik, ed., Hybridity and
Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature (Tubingen: Stauffenburg
Verlag, 1998).
62 Homi Bhabha, "DesemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Notes to pages IB-22 207
lvlodern Nation," in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 291-322.
63 Bhabha uses Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses as the example: "Unpacking,"
205.
64 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces ef Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1987), 279. .
65 See, for example, Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodermsm (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Brian Richardson, "Remapping the
Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost
Forms of Twentieth Century Fiction," Twentieth Century Literature 43.3 (Fall
1997): 291-309.
66 Many of these claims to the modern are collected in Vassiliki Kolocotroni,
Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou, eds., Modernism: An Anthology ef Sources and
Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
67 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.
68 Benjamin, Illuminations, 83.
69 Ibid., 85.
70 In a different way Homi Bhabha has also insisted upon the importance of
"restaging the past" in a specific location. See The Location ef Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1994), especially the introduction.
71 See Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations. Though
Bhabha does not make it explicit, he clearly draws on this essay.
72 As Appadurai puts it, "the steady increase in the efforts of the modern
nation-state to define all neighborhood under the sign of its forms of
allegiance and affiliation": lvlodemity at Large, 189. .
73 See Garrett Stewart, "Catching the Stylistic D/Rift: Sound Defects m
Woolf's The Waves," ELH 54.2 (Summer 1987): 421-46!.
74 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 65. It is interesting to note
that this idea of disagreement as a question of position is also key to liberal
political theory.
75 Ibid., 222.
76 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 133.
77 Timothy Brennan, "The National Longing for Form," in Bhabha, ed.
Nation and Narration, 49.
78 For an alternative model of nation and state, see Chatterjee, The Nation and
its Fragments.
79 Said's Culture and Imperialism sometimes commits this error, though its
readings of individual texts are often quite subtle.
So Susan Suleiman's Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre is
instructive on this point, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Sr Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company,
1938), 109.
82 The term is Benhabib's although the concept emerges in several different
writers' work. See for example Naomi Schor, "French Feminism is a
208 Notes to pages 22-27
Universal," in Differences 7.1 (1995): 15-47. The entire issue is devoted to
debate on this topic.
83 Benhabib, Situating the Seif, 3.
84 Drucilla Cornell, "Enlightening the Enlightenment: A Response to John
Brenkman," Critical Inquiry 26 (Autumn, 1999): 136.
85 Ibid., 137.
86 Ibid., 136.
87 As Susan Stanford Friedman describes it, this is the challenge of"locational
feminism": Mappings, 5.
88 See Sara Ruddick, A1aternal 1hinking: Toward a Politics qf Peace (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995), on the ethics of care, and Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring
Modernism, vol. r: 7he Women qf 1928 (Bloomington: University of Illinois
Press, 1995), for critical use of the figure of the web.
89 On this issue see the Kohlberg/ Gilligan debate, as well as many more
recent reflections on Gilligan's work (see Benhabib, Situating the SelJJ. See
also Habermas's espousal of Kohlberg's perspective on the ideal realm of
justice.
go Of course the dismantling of gendered discourses is predicated on the
dismantling of the unitary subject, another exemplary myth of modern
western culture.
91 The recent anthology edited by Kolocotroni et al., Modernism: An Anthology qf
Sources and Documents, makes this especially clear.
92 Woolf, "Character in Fiction," in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press,
1967).
93 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii.
94 On the question of cultural studies and the high/low culture divide, see
Michele Barrett, Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and 1hings (New
York: New York University Press, 1999), 5.
95 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 56. This is, of course, the same universalizing
account that prompts Raymond Williams to look for community at the
margins of modernism.
96 In using the term "modernist" or "high modernist" I restrict myself to the
varieties of literary modernism practiced between 1880 and the Second
World War. I am therefore not referring to the common use of the term
"modernism" in philosophy to designate the period dating variably from
the writings of Kant, Descartes, or Rousseau, and categorized by a particu-
lar sense of individual identity, among other dimensions. This is especially
important when considering Habermas whose use of "modern" is philo-
sophical.
97 When we define modernism as, for example, focused on the dislocation of
language from referentiality, the concern with images, symbols, and mythic
archetypes, and the pursuit of a reality and narrative structure true to inner
subjective or collective unconscious experience, as does David Lodge (1he
Modes qf Modern Writing: Metaphor, Meto11)!my, and the Iypology qf Modern
Notes to pages 27-32 215
Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977]), or even when we
speak in terms of its intellectual genealogy, as does Michael Levenson (1he
Genealogy qfModernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984]), we
do not speak of specific historical events or concerns, cultural identities, or
gendered discourse.
98 K. Anthony Appiah, "Against National Culture" (paper delivered at the
conference on Text and Nation, Georgetown University, Washington,
D.C., 21 April, 1995). Appiah uses the Stein remark as an example. It
appears in Nussbaum et al., For Love qf Country, 21-9.
2 HENRY JAMES
r Between 1885 and 1890 over 1,000 new magazines were launched: Frank
Luther Mott, A History qfAmerican Magazines, vol. rv: 1885-1905 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), rr.
2 SeeJohn Higham, "The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty," in Send
These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. edn. (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984).
3 "Topics of the Times - 'The Century' a National Magazine," Century
Magazine 42 (1891): 950.
4 In 1890 seven-eighths of magazine subscribers were female, quoted in Mott,
American Magazines, 353.
5 According to Mott, "By the end of 1892, the Cosmopolitan had reached a
place among the country's leading illustrated magazines" (Ibid., 484).
Schneirov claims that Cosmopolitan was one of the three most significant
magazines of the end of tl1e nineteenth century: Matthew Schneirov, The
Dream qf a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 13.
6 Ibid., 13.
7 See, for example, Edward Everett Hale, "Social Problems: Emigration and
Immigration," Cosmopolitan Vol 9 (1890): 254-5.
8 Eleanor Waddle, "Side Glances at American Beauty," Cosmopolitan 9 (1890):
193-202; F. Leslie Baker, "Transplanted American Beauty," Cosmopolitan 9
(1890): 517-32; Olive Shreiner, "The Woman Question," Cosmopolitan 28
(1899): 45-54,
g See Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn
qfthe Century (London: Verso, 1990).
IO DavidJ. Hill, "The Emancipation of Women," Cosmopolitan I (1886): 96.
II Ann Douglas, The Feminization qfAmerican Culture (New York: Avon, 1977).
12 Waddle, "Side Glances," 202.
13 Baker, "Transplanted," 517.
14 "The Making of An Illustrated Magazine," Cosmopolitan 14 (1893): 262.
15 Involving between IO and 100,000 people: Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J. A K.
Thompson (New York: Penguin, 1976), Book rx, x.
16 Ibid., Book vrn, i.
 '.jf
-w
216

Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 1-36.

Goethe Coins a Phrase

"I am more and more convinced;' Goethe remarked, "that poetry is the uni-
versal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in
hundreds and hundreds of men .... I therefore like to look about mein for-
eign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. Nationalliteratureis now
a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and
everyone must strive to hasten its approach." Speaking to his young disciple
Johann Peter Eckermann in January 1827, the seventy-seven-year-old
Goethe used his newly minted term Weltliteratur, which passed into com-
mon currency after Eckermann published his Gespräche mit Goethe in den
letzten fahren seines Lebens in 1835, three years after the poet's death. The
term crystallized both a literary perspective and a new cultural awareness, a
sense of an arising global modernity, whose epoch, as Goethe predicted, we
now inhabit. Yet the term has also been e:x:traordinarily elusive, from the mo-
ment of its formulation onward: What does it really mean to speak of a
"world literature"? Which literature, whose world? What relation to the na-
tional literatures whose production continued unabated even after Goethe
announced their obsolescence? What new relations between Western Eu-
rope and the rest of the globe, between antiquity and modernity, between
the nascent mass culture and elite productions?
If we look to Goethe for guidance, the perplexities only multiply,
fueled by his constantly shifting personality-his unstable mix of modesty
and megalomania, cosmopolitanism and jingoism, classicism and Roman-
ticism, wide-ranging curiosity and self-absorbed dogmatism. Eckermann's
account is both a portrait of the great man and the record of his inability to
grasp his subject; Goethe is a diamond, Eckermann teils us, that casts a dif-
ferent color in every direction. Eckermann, on the other hand, is a diamond
in the rough: of humble origins, largely self-taught, an aspiring poet and
dramatist, he seeks to model his life and work on Goethe, whom he knows

he can never measure up to. Both Bild and Bildungsroman-objective por-
trait of Goethe and subjective autobiography of Eckermann himself-the
Conversations with Goethe is a gallery of scenes of instruction, seduction, in-
fl.uence, and transmission, all of which have much to tell us about the world-
: ::
liness of literature. Looking <1t Goethe's Weltliteratur within the multiple
1,',,
.r·· frames Eckermann provides, we can alreadyfind all the major complexities,
tensions, and opportunities that we still encounter today as we try to grasp
our rapidly expanding world and its exfoliating literatures.
Indeed, for Eckermann Goethe is the living embodiment of world
literature, even of world culture as a whole. Late in his account, he records
Goethe's remark that "the daemons, to tease and make sport with men, have
placed among them single figures so alluring that everyone strives after
them, and so great that nobody reaches them"; Goethe names Raphael,
Mozart, Shakespeare, and Napoleon as examples. "I thought in silence;' Eck-
ermann adds, "that the daemons had intended something of the kind with
Goethe-he is a form too alluring not tobe striven after, and too great tobe
reached" (271).
Even to be as close to Goethe as he is, Eckermann has come a long
way. Raised in rural poverty, he had managed to find a clerk's job at the local
court. '':At this time I heard the name Goethe for the first time and first ac-
quired a volume ofhis poetry. I read his poems, and constantly reread them,
with a pleasure that no words can describe .... it seemed to me that in these
poems my own hitherto unknown essence was reflected back to me [zurück-
gespiegelt] . ... I lived for whole weeks and months in these poems .... I
thought and spoke of nothing but Goethe" (Gespräche, 21). 1 Friends at court
arranged a two-year scholarship for Eckermann to study law at Göttingen.
His fellowship ending, he could not bear to pursue a legal career. Living penu-
riously on the last remains of his fellowship, he wrote poems and composed
a work of literary criticism, Contributions to Poetry, with Particular Attention
to Goethe, and sent the manuscript to Goethe, hoping he would recommend
it to his publisher. Some weeks passed; hearing nothing, Eckermann decided
to risk everything and go see Goethe in person. lt took over a week to walk
to Weimar. '':Along the way, often made wearisome by hot weather, I kept
repeating to myself the comforting feeling that I was proceeding under the
special protection of benevolent spirits, and that this journey might have
important consequences for my later life" (Gespräche, 30).
This is an extreme understatement. Eckermann at this point had no
1 change" (Goethe and World Literature, 13). In 1847 Marx and Engels adopted
In general I will be quoting from the English translation ofEckermann's book, but
that translation is incomplete. Passages I've taken directly from the German will be labeled
Gespräche.
2 INTRODUCTION
217
resources whatever, no prospects; he could only hope that Goethe-one of
the most eminent writers in Europe and subject to an incessant stream of
visitors, pleas for assistance, requests for references and reviews-would
take a special interest in him and help him to some sort of literary career.
Cast in the fairy-tale role of donor figure, Goethe does all this and more: he
strides into the room, an impressive figure "in a blue frock-coat," Eckermann
says, oddly adding, "and with shoes." He sits Eckermann on a sofa and says
the magic words: "'I have just come from you,' said he; 'I have been reading
your writing all morning; it needs no recommendation-it recommends it-
self"' ( Conversations, 1). Not only does he arrange immediately for the
book's publication; at their next meeting, a few days later, he takes over Eck-
ermann's life. Speaking with "the impetuous and decided manner of a
youth" (2), Goethe enlists Eckermann to organize and assess an archive of
his early notes and manuscripts, and commands him to move to Jena, where
Goethe will be living in the fall.
Goethe's reaction was, in fact, a little less surprising than Ecker-
mann's account suggests. Discussing the book's genesis in an afterword to
her definitive edition of the Gespräche, Regine Otto notes that when he sent
Goethe his manuscript in May, Eckermann had written a cover letter de-
tailing his administrative abilities and indicating his availability for a post as
personal secretary, should Goethe have need of someone deeply acquainted
with his works and sympathetic to his views (Gespräche, 686). As Eckermann
reports it, though, Goethe's response is not only spontaneous but magically
swift: "I have already written about a lodging for you and other things nec-
essary to make your stay pleasant;' Goethe tells him, including letters of in-
.~- troduction to close friends of his in Jena. "'You will enjoy their circle; said
he; 'I have passed many delightful evenings there. Jean Paul, Tieck, the
Schlegels, and all the other distinguished men of Germany have visited
there, and always with delight; and even now it is the union-point of many
learned men, artists, and other persons of note" ( Conversations, 3). The fairy
tale is coming true.
Eckermann's admission to this charmed circle is his introduction to the
world of world literature as Goethe practices it: less a set of works than a net-
work. As Fritz Strich has observed, this network had a fundamentally eco-
nomic character, serving to promote "a traffic in ideas between peoples, a
~
literary market to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for ex-
~ Goethe's term precisely in the context of newly global trade relations: "The
M
'~\
?·;~
bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cqs-
~'.·
"'
·iL\
'~ 3 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
~

218
mopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To
the great chagrin of reactionaries it has drawn from under the feet of in -
dustry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed" ( Communist
Manifesto, 421). The paragraph that begins with these sentences ends with
the lines that form the first epigraph to this book: "National one-sidedness
and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the
numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature." For
Marx and Engels, as for Goethe, world literature is the quintessential litera-
ture of modern times.
The dramatic acceleration of globalization since their era, however,
has greatly complicated the idea of a world literature. Most immediately, the
sheer scope of the term today can breed a kind of scholarly panic. "What can
one make of such an idea?" Claudio Guillen has asked. "The sum total of all
national literatures? A wild idea, unattainable in practice, worthy not of an
actual reader but of a deluded keeper of archives who is also a multimil- _
lionaire. The most harebrained editor has never aspired to such a thing"
( The Challenge of Comparative Literature, 38). Though it has a certain sur-
face plausibility, Guillen's objection is hardly decisive; after all, no one de-
nies that the term "insect" is viable, even though there are so many billions
of insects in the world that no one person can ever be bitten by each of them.
Still, the sum total of the world's literatures can be sufficiently expressed by
the blanket term "literature." The idea of world literature can usefully con-
tinue to mean a subset of the plenum of literature. I take world literature to
encompass all literaryworks that circulate beyond their culture of origin, ei-
ther in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin
in Europe). In its most expansive sense, world literature could include any
work that has ever reached beyond its home base, but Guillen's cautionary
focus on actual readers makes good sense: a work only has an effective life as
world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a liter-
ary system beyond that of its original culture.
A viable concept when delimited in this way, world literature still
consists of a huge corpus of works. These works, moreover, stem from
widely disparate societies, with very different histories, frames of cultural
reference, and poetics. A specialist in classical Chinese poetry can gradually,
over years of labor, develop a close familiarity with the vast substratum be-
neath each briefT'ang Dynastypoem, but most ofthis context is lost to for-
eign readers when the poem travels abroad. Lacking specialized knowledge,
the foreign reader is likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign
work, and even careful scholarly attempts to read a foreign work in light of
4 INTRODUCTJON
J:.il
/;"
a Western critical theory are deeply problematic. As A. Owen Aldridge has
said, "it is difficult to point to remarkably successful examples of the prag-
matic application of critical systems in a comparative context. The various
theories cancel each other out" (The Reemergence ofWorld Literature, 33).
Or as the Indian scholar D. Prempati has pointedly remarked, "I do not
know whether the innumerable Western critical models which, like multi-
nationals, have taken over the Indian critical scene would meaningfully
serve any critical purpose at this juncture." 2
Some scholars have argued that literary works across cultures do ex-
hibit what Northrop Frye thought of as archetypes or what more recently the
French comparatist Etiemble has called "invariants." In his lively polemic Ou-
verture(s) sur un comparatisme planetaire, Etiemble argued that common liter-
'3-ry patterns_~ust provide the necessary basis for any truly global understand-
!ng Ef li~gtur~: Yet such universals quickly shade into vague generalities that -
hold less and less appeal today, at a time when ideals of melting-pot harmony X:::
have fäde<lTnfäm-r·sc~Iars ofWorld literature risk becoming little more than
the literary ecotourists described by Susan Lanser, people "who dwell mentally
in one or two (usually Western) countries, summer metaphorically in a third,
and visit other places for brief interludes" ("Compared to What?" 281).
A central argument of this book will be that, properly understood,
world literature is not at all fated to disintegrate into the conflicting multi-
plicity of separate national traditions; nor, on the other hand, need it be
swallowed up in the white noise that Janet Abu-Lughod has called "global
babble." M claim is that world literature is not an infinite, ungras able
~ of work~er a mode of circulatj_gn~nd 9Jr~~gin~~~-de ~
is as appligi.ble._to__in_djviaual works as to bodies of material, availaDfe for <
readin~ablished da~~ new discoveries alik~~Thl~~k-is intended
tü"~xrlore thl~~~d~-~i~ir~ulati~;·;~~it:;~~ri.fy-th~ ~ays in which works
ofworld literature can best be read. lt is irnportant from the outset to real-
ize that just as there never has been a single set canon of world literature, so
too no single way of reading can be appropriate to all texts, or even to any
one text at all times. The variability of a work of world literature is one of
its constitutive features-one of its greatest strengths when the work is well
presented and read well, and its greatest vulnerability when it is mishandled
or misappropriated by its newfound foreign friends.
2 "Why Comparative Literature in India?" 63. Both Aldridge and Prempati were
reacting against efforts, popular in the seventies, to "apply" structuralist and other Western
methods directly to foreign works. A cogent critique of this practice can be found in Pauline Yu,
"Alienation Effects: Comparative Literature and the Chinese Tradition," though Yu herself holds
out hope that more nuanced studies may still be productive.
5 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
 .
1.
.
A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by
being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world be-
yond its linguistic and cultural point of origin. A given work can enter into
world literature and then fall out of it again if it shifts beyond a threshold
point along either axis, the literary or the worldly. Over the centuries, an un-
usually shifty work can come in and out of the sphere of world literature
several different times; and at any given point, a work may function as world
. literature for some readers but not others, and for some kinds of reading but
not others. The shifts a work may undergo, moreover, do not reflect the un-
folding of some internal logic of the work in itselfbut come about through
often complex dynamics of cultural change and contestation. Very few
works secure a quick and permanent place in the limited company of peren-
nial World Masterpieces; most works shift around over time, even moving
into and out of the category of "the masterpiece," as we will see in the third
chapter below.
As it moves into the sphere of world literature, far from inevitably
suffering a loss of authenticity or essence, a work can gain in many ways. To
follow this process, it is necessary to look closely at the transformations a
work undergoes in particular circumstances, which is why this book high-
lights the issues of circulation and translation and focuses on detailed case
studies throughout ..Jo 11:1:cie..~stagg_th_~~9..J:"l.9::r!g~_qf~9.!.14füs:raturn,we-B.ged_
...more a t>hei::<?:ri:i:e~9lggy_Jhan ..lJ.!LOntofogy_gf_!h._e_.~o_r~-~;.~fü~r..a:c.y_w.Qr.!<
/ manifests diff'ere11JJy_~.bx..o.ad.than.iLdoe.s„~t hq~_
The rich variability of world literature is already fully evident in Goethe's
conversations with Eckermann. Goethe had a lively sense of the ways his
own books could benefi.t by translation, even as he himself read voraciously
in a surprisingly wide range of foreign literatures. Having found in Ecker-
mann the perfect middleman for his own literary trade, Goethe arranged for
his disciple to settle into lodgings near him, first in Jena and then perma-
nently in Weimar. There Eckermann met many of Goethe's visitors from all
over Europe and began to take part in the network's activity. He published
poems, collaborated on opera libretti, made translations from French, read
widely, at Goethe's request, so that he could bring significant new writers to
Goethe's attention, and kept a detailed journal recording his conversations
with Goethe, with an eye toward eventual publication.
Through these conversatiorts, we gain a nuanced picture of
Goethe's manifold encounters with foreign texts. He constantly recom-
mends to Eckermann books he has been reading, in English, French, Italian,
and Latin, and he reads translations as readily as originals, even in the case
6 INTRODUCTION
219
.
..
of his own works. "I do not like to read my Faust any more in German;' he
~~
remarks at one point, but in a new French translation he finds his master-
~· work "again fresh, new, and spirited" -even though the translation is
~·~~ mostly in prose (276). Eckermann's initial response to Goethe's poetry, of
t~ finding his own essence reflected back to him, thus parallels Goethe's ex-
~',
( perience of the international circulation of his work, which he regularly
describes in terms of "mirroring" (Spiegelung). Goethe reads English and
French commentaries on German literature with great avidity, finding the
foreign perspective sharper and clearer than German criticism can be. As he
wrote in an article for his journal Kunst und Alterthum, "Left to itself every
literature will exhaust its vitality, if it is not refreshed bythe interest and con-
tributions of a foreign one. What naturalist does not take pleasure in the
wonderful things that he sees produced by reflection in a mirror? N ow what
a mirror in the field of ideas and morals means, everyone has experienced
in himself, and once his attention is aroused, he will understand how much
ofhis education he owes to it" ("Some Passages," 8).
Goethe is particularly intrigued when the foreign press reflects his
own work back to him, and in his first published use of his new term
Weltliteratur he sees this process as less a matter of individual than of na-
tional pride. Late in January 182 7, Goethe wrote an essay on two French re-
views of a new play, Le Tasse: Drame historique en cinq actes, by the play-
wright Alexander Duval, a work closely based on Goethe's own play
Torquato Tasso. Goethe quotes at length from the two reviews, both of
which note Duval's dependence on Goethe's play (what one reviewer calls
"felicitous borrowings;' we would now call plagiarism). The two reviews
give diametrically opposed assessments of the two Tassos: one sees Duval
as a pale imitation of Goethe, in whose inspiring philosophical discussions
"we encounter a full and deep meditation which perhaps the masses have
not been able to grasp," whereas the other reviewer sees Duval's play as a
marked improvement on Goethe's ("the monotony of its dialogue seems
completely unbearable to us").
Quoting evenhandedly from both reviews, Goethe declines to re-
spond in his own defense, apart from an ironic aside at foreigners who show
their appreciation of German works "by borrowing from us without thanks,
and making use of us without acknowledgment:' His chief purpose is to
stimulate his countrymen to follow the international circulation of works,
and he encourages his readers by appealing to their-and his own-na-
tional pride: "there is being formed a universal world literature, in which an
honorable role is reserved for us Germans. All the nations review our work;
they praise, censure, accept, and reject, imitate and misrepresent us, open or
7 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
220
"~·
close their hearts to us. All this we must accept with equanimity, since this
'~~'"
attitude, taken as a whole, is of great value to us:' 3 From this point of view,
the world beyond is only a larger and better version of the world at home.
As he wrote elsewhere, in an essay on a German translation of Carlyle's life
of Schiller: "The wide world, extensive as it is, is only an expanded father-
land, and will, if looked at aright, be able to give us no more than what our
home soil can endow us with also" ("Some Passages;' 10).
To some extent, Goethe's views show the 'imperial self-projection
that Barbara Herrnstein Smith sees in Contingencies of Value as a <langer
lurkingwithin major-power cosmopolitanism: the imperial self's "system of
self-securing," she says, is not necessarily "'corrected' by cosmopolitanism.
Rath er, in enlarging its view 'from China to Peru; it 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" (54). Goethe, however, lacks the secure cul-
tural standpoint thai: could allow his imperial view to collapse into a self-
confirming narcissism. For all his pride in his own achievements and those
of friends like Schiller, Goethe has an uneasy sense that German culture is
provincial, lacking a great history, lacking political unity. He can't afford to
graut "national literature" too much meaning, since he doesn't even live in
a proper nation at all.
Despite the strategic sinceritywith which he appeals to German na-
tional pride in his article on the Tasso reviews, Goethe begins that very arti-
cle by noting that it is France whose stages command "a decisive supremacy"
(eine entschiedene Oberherrschaft) in the theatrical world. Paris is the cul-
tural crucible in which even German plays must strive for recognition and
in which their strengths and weaknesses will most clearly be revealed. lt is
far from certain, moreover, that the provincial work will manage to meet
French and English standards. Lacking a streng literary tradition at harne,
how can a German writer ever live up to the great models ofwealthier tra-
ditions? "Shakespeare gives us golden apples in silver dishes;' he tells Ecker-
3 The conclusion of Goethe's article is given in Hans-Joachim Schulz, "Johann W. von
Goethe: Same Passages Pertaining to the Concept ofWorld Literature;' 5. The füll article appears
in Goethe's Schriften zur Literatur 2:171-74, and its composition history is lovingly rehearsed in
the extensive apparatus-twice the size of the article itself-given in 5:237-43, where the
interested reader can trace the article's evolution from Goethe's first draft through its subsequent
emendations in pencil, black ink, red ink, and pencil again. This sumptuous edition, published in
1980 under the auspices of the Akademie der Wissenschaft der DDR, testifies to lasting national
pride in Goethe-a pride only heightened by the need of what was then East Germany to assert
its cultural identity over against West Gerrnany.
8 INTRODUCTION
i
mann, adding ruefully, "We get, indeed, the silver dishes by studying his
works; but, unfortunately, we have only potatoes to put into them" (99).
Goethe's stance is thus very different from the triumphalist cos-
mopolitanism with which a leading French critic, Philarete Euphemon
Chasles, introduced a new course, "The Comparison ofForeign Literature;'
in Paris in January 1835. Opening his lecture with the figures of Cervantes
and Shakespeare, poorly understood by their own contemporary country-
men, Chasles announces that his course will study the influence of great
minds beyond their own borders-and above all, in France. This focus, he
tells his students, simply reflects the fact that "France is the most sensitive of
all countries," receptive to the passionate advances of all nations. Contem-
plating his homeland's charms, Chasles falls into an extended erotic reverie:
She is a sleepless and restless country that vibrates with all
impressions and that palpitates and grows enthusiastic for the
maddest and the noblest ones; a countrywhich loves to seduce
and be seduced, to recel.ve and communicate sensation, to be
excited by what charms it, and to propagate the emotion it
receives .... She is the center, but the center of sensitivity; she
directs civilization, less perhaps by opening up the raute to the
people who border her than by going forward herself with a giddy
and contagious passion. \Nhat Europe is to the rest of the world,
France is to Europe; everything reverberates toward her,
everything ends with her. ("Foreign Literature Compared;'
21-22)
And so on. Infinitely receptive as Chasles's France is, however, she carefully
controls her own borders: she will go out for a mad fling when and where
she pleases, but foreigners should not expect to move in with her. A green
card is not in the cards, and her rejuvenating forays may open up no new
routes at all for the suitors ringing her borders.
The writer from a marginal culture is in a double bind. With little
to go on at harne, a young writer can only achieve great:qess by emulating
desirable foreign models- :~~E._f.o!:..<3._~.-~.!~~~.1::~'.:__::}th_~~e-. \ ~
cessors is the sure sign of a h!gher tal~L:Goethe says. "Study Moliere, study --'
·shäkespe;;~e" (150)--=.y~t-thes~odels can have a crushing weight. Within
their own cultural context, this weight may be bearable: working among
great contemporaries like Ben Jonson and Marlowe, Goethe remarks,
Shakespeare was like Mont Blanc, only the highest of a range of great Alps.
But if Mont Blanc were set down amid the flat fields of the Lüneberg Heath
in Lower Saxony, "you would be rendered speechless with astonishment at
9 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
 221
its immensity" (26). Looking at a set of engravings of scenes from Shake- which occupies me still and seems to me very remarkable."
speare's plays, Goethe cannot repress a shudder: "Chinese novel!" said l; "that must look strange enough."
"Not so much as you might think;' said Goethe; "the Chinese
"lt is even terrifying;' said Goethe, "to look through these little
think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that
pictures. Thus are we first made to feel the infinite wealth and
we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear,
grandeur of Shakespeare. There is no motifin human life which
pure, and decorous, than with us.
he has not exhibited and expressed. And all with what ease and
"With them all is orderly, citizen-like, without great passion or
freedom! ... He is even too rich and too powerful. A productive
poetic flight; and there is a strong resemblance to my Hermann
nature ought not to read more than one of his dramas in a year,
and Dorothea, as well as to the English novels of Richardson."
if it would not be wrecked entirely.... How many excellent
(132)
Germans have been ruined by him and Calderon!" (99)
Goethe-who himself is writing a novella at this time and struggling to find
If Goethe's provincial anxiety provides one counterbalance to his
an appropriate ending-sees in the Chinese novel a version of his own ideal,
imperial acquisitiveness, his extraordinary writerly receptivity provides an-
as much social as literary: "lt is by this severe moderation in everything that
other. He loves foreign works as much for their ineradicable difference from
the Chinese Empire has sustained itself for thousands of years, and will en-
his own practices as for their novel employment of themes and strategies
dure hereafter:' This elevated moderation, moreover, gives him a welcome
that he finds familiar. These two sides to his response can be seen in his
eo unter to the dissolute poetry of a leading contemporary French poet, Pierre-
shrewd appraisals of two foreign works, a Serbian poem and a Chinese
Jean de Beranger, whom he is also currently reading (brothels and bars are
novel, that he shows Eckermann in the very days he is formulating the term
Beranger's settings of choice): "I find a highly remarkable contrast to this Chi-
Weltliteratur. On 29 January 1827, Eckermann records a conversation that
nese novel in the Chansons de Beranger, which have, almost every one, some
includes discussion of contemporary French poetry, allusions to Horace and
immoral licentious subject for their foundation, and which would be ex-
to the Persian poet Hafiz, and discussion of Goethe's own just-completed
tremely odious to me if managed by a genius inferior to Beranger:'
drama Helena, a work that begins as a classical tragedy and ends as a mod-
Even as he takes heart from the kinship he senses with imperial Chi-
ern opera. Turning from the perusal of this hybrid, Goethe picks up a dif-
nese prose writers, Goethe acutely perceives a range of distinctive features of
ferent kind of work. "Here you have something new;-read it;' he says:
Chinese literary practice. Legends, he remarks, are constantly alluded to,
He handed to me a translation by Herr Gerhard of a Serbian forming a running commentary on the action; nature is not realistically pre-
poem. lt was very beautiful, and the translation was so simple and sented but is symbolic of human character ("There is much talk about the
clear that there was no disturbance in the contemplation of the moon, but it does not alter the landscape, its light is conceived to be as bright
object. lt was entitled The Prison-Key. l say nothing of the course as day itself"). Even furniture serves to illustrate character: "For instance, 'l
of the action, except that the conclusion seemed to me abrupt heard the lovely girls laughing, and when I got sight of them theywere sitting
and rather unsatisfactory. (131) on cane chairs: There you have, at once, the prettiest situation; for cane chairs
are necessarily associated with the greatest lightness and elegance" (132).
Eckermann is displeased with the poem's abruptness, its violation of neo-
These observations show a fascinating mix of elements. Goethe is
classical canons ofbalance and harmony, but Goethe disagrees: "That," said
partly responding to cultural difference (the weight given to exemplary leg-
Goethe, "is the beauty of it; for it thus leaves a sting in the heart .... that
ends), partly projecting his own values outward (he takes the cane chairs to
which is set forthin the poem is really new and beautiful; and the poet acted
signify what he would have used them to mean), and partly finding in the
very wisely in delineating this alone and leaving the rest to the reader" ( 131).
foreign text a middle quality, a distinctive novelty that is like-but-unlike
Two days later, Eckermann comes to see Goethe again, and now
practice at home (the intimate connection of character and landscape had
Goethe's reading has ranged still farther from Western Europe:
been a staple of intensely subjective Romantic poetry, but Goethe sees the
Dined with Goethe. "Within the last few days, since l saw you," connection in the Chinese novel as showing a more restrained and ordered
said he, "l have read many things; especially a Chinese novel, universe of correspondences). Any füll response to a foreign text is likely to

10 INTRODUCTION II GOETHE COINS A PHRASE


222
t
\ operate along all three of these dimensions: a sharp difference we enjoy for
its sheer novelty; a gratifying similarity that we find in the text or project
j
lx onto it; and a middle range of what is like-but-unlike-the sort of relation
most likely to malze a productive change in our own perceptions and
practices.
Eckermann seems resistant to finding so much of interest in so for-
eign a text. He interposes a skeptical question, apparently hoping that at least
he won't have to read too many Chinese novels: '"But then: I said, 'is this
Chinese novel perhaps one of their most superior ones?"' lt is in reply to
this reservation that Goethe shares with him the concept of Weltliteratur:
"By no means," said Goethe; "the Chinese have thousands of
them, and had when our forefathers were still living in the woods.
"I am more and more convinced," he continued, "that poetry is
the universal possession of mankind .... the epoch of world
literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its
approach:' (132)
Goethe is no multiculturalist, however: Western Europe remains the privi-
leged modern world of reference for him, and Greece and Rome provide the
crucial antiquity to which he always returns. No sooner does he tell Ecker-
mann to strive to hasten the epoch of world literature than he adds a limit-
ing, or delimiting, condition:
"But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind
ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We
must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Serbian, or
Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but, if we really want a pattern, we
must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the
> //I beauty of mankind is constantly represented. All the rest we must
look at only historically; appropriating to ourselves what is good,
\ so far as it goes." (132)
Thinking always as a practicing writer, Goethe responds most of all to what
he can appropriate in anything he reads, and he shares with many ofhis con-
temporaries a sense of classical antiquity as the ultimate treasury to plunder
for themes, formal models, and even language. Indeed, he actually prefers a
Latin translation of one of his own works to the original: "there it seems to
me nobler, and as ifit had returned to its original form" (67).
In the variability of Goethe's valuations of the foreign, we se~
::/ .cia!_f~~:i:i._i:_~QfJ:he system of world literature: on examination, it resolves al-
;:vays into a yarj_c:ty of:worlc!~,_Jhese different worlds vary by region, audi-
12 INTRODUCTION
J
";~~
t;
·~,f:!i ence, and cultural prestige. Moreover, the impact of a given world can
change for us over time, and it can be strongly affe.cted from the start by the
age at which we first encounter it. Goethe's devotion to classical antiquity
can be so heartfelt and unambiguous in large part because it developed once
he had reached a substantial maturity as a writer. This is a lesson he often
~: forgets when telling young admirers to "study the old Greeks, and only the
Greeks": he himself actually benefited, he now feels, by growing up amid the
relatively weal< culture of the Germany of his youth, which allowed him
more freedom to strike out on his own, only discovering Greek literature
once he was sure ofhimself as a writer. "Had I earlier known how many ex-
cellent things have been in existence for hundreds and thousands of years, I
should not have written a line" (104).
The provincial writer is thus at once cut off but also free from the
bonds of an inherited tradition, and in principle can engage all the more
fully, and by mature choice, with a broader literary world:Joyce and Walcott_ y
are far more cosmopolitan writers than Proust or Woolf. Whether of provin- ·-
-ci'ru o~ m-;tropolitan-~~t, a give~ writ~ or reader is likely both to
inherit and to seek out a variety of networks of transmission and reception,
engaging differently with works from each world. These worlds will be var-
iously delineated by different observers, and even by the same person in dif-
ferent moods. While in January of 1827 Goethe is praising the artistic re-
finement of Serbian poetry to a dubious Eckermann, a year later we find him
dismissing Serbian poetry out of hand, lumping it together with medieval
Germanic poetry as emblems ofbarbaric crudity: '"From these old-German
gloomy times: said Goethe, 'we can obtain as little as from the Serbian songs
and similar barbaric popular poetry. We can read it and be interested for a
while, but merely to cast it aside and to let it lie behind us'" (213).
This is not, or not primarily, Eurocentrism; here Goethe is dis-
cussing a modern French poet's unsatisfactory attempt to place a tale in Ger-
many during the days of the Minnesingers. An elegant Chinese novel can
find a more secure place within Goethe's gallery of world masterpieces than
the Nibelungenlied.. l::f_i.s_E.µ_i:<:>.i:_e~~z:-~s_ip is_h_ighly permeable, in part because X
__<:?.fa~-9.i:?:P~Y~g·~-~_l~e: his elitiffil,Jüs popular poetry, of whatever origin, "
that has only limited appeal for Goethe, and the world literature he prefers
is the production of a guiding elite whose international brotherhood com-
pensates for their small numbers and neglect by the masses. As he wrote on
Carlyle's life of Schiller:
What pleases the crowd spreads itself over a limitless field, and, as
we already see, meets with approval in all countries and regions.
13 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE

The serious and intellectual meets with less success, but ... there
are everywhere in the world such men, to whom the truth and the
progress of humanity are of interest and concern.... the serious-
minded must therefore form a quiet, almost secret, company,
X since it would be futile to set themselves against the current of the
day; rather must they manfully strive to maintain their position
till the flood has passed. ("Some Passages;' 10)
Goethe is uncomfortably aware that there is a form of world literature flood-
ing over "all countries and regions" that does not include his work or simi-
. classics,
larly elite productions, and that even threatens to submerge him altogether.
Goethe was far from alone in this concern: already in 1800, Wordsworth had
used similar flood imagery in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, warning darkly
that serious English poetry was being drowned in a rising tide of "frantic
novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies" -surely not Goethe's-"and
deluges of idle and extravagant stories inverse" (Preface, 449). The worlds
of world literature are often worlds in collision.
Goethe's conversations with Eckermann signal a major shift in the range of
what could be taken seriously as world literature. In this book, I will have
relatively little interest in attempting any firm definition of literature as
such, since this is a question that really only has meaning within a given lit-
erary system.~_global perspective on E:terature must acknowledg_e tht._
ti,-e.rn~ndous_variab.ility.itLwhaChas-c~ed-as-liter:a.1J.u:e.Jrom one place to
anothe.r:. @<:l fron:t g,ge, ~:r;:a..to .anuther; in-this.sense,.literat_ure <:;~n_]:,_e,st be de-
_fined praglllatic:ally <l,S _yv:hatever texts. agiven ,CQII}!I'l:IJ..Uit:y_()f readei:s-!q~e:S as.
literature. Even within the Euro-American tradition, there has always been
consider~bl~ väriety in what counts as literature, including that founda-
tionally canonical work the Bible. In 1862, troubled by his difficulties in
translating the Scriptures into Zulu, Bishop John William Colenso was
moved to write The Pentateuch and Book of ]oshua Critically Examined, in
which he shocked many readers by treating the Flood story as a literary leg~
end rather than as the unmediated word of God, a dispute that inspired
enormous public interest a few years later in the recovery of The Epic of Gil-
gamesh, as I will be discussing in my first chapter.
The Bible's status has not been questioned only in earlier eras: as
recently as 1982, Northrop Frye gave his book The Great Code the subtitle
The Bible and Literature, arguing in his preface that to work on "the Bible as
literature" is to make a category error. Less canonical works, of course, fig-
14 INTRODUCTION
223
ured prominently in the culture wars of the eighties and early nineties: in
1991 Dinesh D'Souza attacked I, Rigoberta Menchu as unworthy of inclu-
sion alongside European masterworks, while in Against Literature (1993)
John Beverley championed Burgos and Menchu's book precisely for its ex-
ploding of traditional definitions of the literary.
This sort of variability involves constantly competing ideas of lit-
erature, and our contemporary definitional debate can be seen as an episode
in the shifting relations among three general conceptions. World liter~1:':~
has often been seen in one Q.!:ffeOre of three ways: as an_.s;;>t_;i,blished.hod)L-Oi._
asan
evolving~a;;-~g_~fmg?:t?m~~~~-;,-·9·r~~~~m-~tiRJ~..t!:'i.ndows on th~-- ';/
:-v.c:>~I~IE~ "classic" is a work of transcendent, even foundation~i vJ~~;·~ft~~
identified particularly with Greek and Roman literature (still taught today
in departments of Classics) and often closely associated with imperial val-
ues, as Frank Kermode has shown in his book The Classic. The "master-
piece," on the other hand, can be an ancient or a modern work and need not
have had any foundational cultural force. Goethe clearly considers his own
best works, and those of his friends, to be modern masterpieces. The "mas-
terpiece;' indeed, came into prominence in the nineteenth century as liter-
ary studies began to deemphasize the dominant Greco-Roman classics,
elevating the modern masterpiece to a level of near equality with the long-
established classics. In this literary analog of a liberal democracy, the ( often
middle-class) masterworks could engage in a "great conversation"with their
aristocratic forebears, a conversation in which their culture and dass of ori-
gin mattered less than the great ideas they expressed anew. Finally, Goethe's
disquisitions on Chinese novels and Serbian poems show a nascent interest
in works that would serve as windows into foreign worlds, whether or not
these works could be construed as masterpieces and regardless of whether
these differing worlds had any visible links to each other at all.
These three conceptions are not mutually exclusive, though some-
times people of decided taste champion one or another and even attempt to
portray their favored mode as the one form of literature worth serious at-
tention. Goethe, however, holds all three conceptions together, as have many
readers since. There is really no good reason why we shouldn't allow all three
categories their ongoing value, particularly as a single work may effectively
be classified under two or even all three headings. Virgil's Aeneid is the very
type of a timeless classic, but it is also a masterpiece of its genre, registering
one stage of development in the long series of works from Gilgamesh and
the Iliad up to Joyce's Ulysses and Walcott's Omeros. Equally, the Aeneid is a
window on the world of imperial Rome; though it is set before Rome's
15 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
224
founding and treats legendary materials, in its underworld scenes and epic necessity of choosing between them has everything to do with the
similes it opens out with unconcealed directness toward Virgil's contempo- modernization of the curriculum, with the imperative of making
rary world. room for such later writers as Locke or Rousseau. ( Cultural
In the nineteenth century, devotees of the classics were distressed Capital, 32)
that modern European masterpieces were displacing Anacreon, Statius, and
Though this modernizing tendency has been widespread, it need not and
even Virgil. In recent decades, lovers of the European masterpieces have felt
should not entail the sheer overwhelming of the past by the present. All too
a comparable alarm in turn, as literary studies in an increasingly multicul-
often, students of imperialism, coloniaj!~m!._~~~ionaj}~}E.,i._~,gg__g!~~-~zation
tural N orth America have opened the canon to more and more works in the
ao inaeed define their topics in such a way as to restrict their investigatillns,____
third category: hence D'Souza's outrage-and Beverley's satisfaction-at
iü·j~~1-tlie-fäst:-n:ve·Eiiil<li:e<l~r;~r;=9f-hti~;;;·f;ii~~iY1„.gr:.tl-i~]~${:ng:~ar-ea··­
the widespread adoption of I, Rigoberta Menchu in many world literature
-Years, or even t_he l<tst_ few years'. If ~7, do ~~' h~wever, we r(:!p!SJ<:l:t:1.C::~..QP~~(:)f::
and "Western Civ" courses. In an influential 1993 report to the American
Comparative Literature Association on the state of the discipline, a com- the least appealing chara_~~:r!~!i~s of_i?()Cl~~#-~(:!~icaii,~: _a_~<:l glg!?_?L~9~.::... ';.,-.t

mittee chaired by Charles Bernheimer urged that comparatists should be
actively engaged in reconceiving the canon, paying particular attention to
"various contestatory, marginal, or subaltern perspectives" ( Comparative
Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 44). Introducing the report and a
set of responses to it, Bernheimer emphasized the contemporary relevance
of comparative study: "In the age of multiculturalism;' he concluded, "the
comparatist's anxiety has finally found a field adequate to the questions that
generated it" (16).
The Bernheimer report was intended as a call to expand rather than
abandon the older canon, and in the last decade there has been a growing
consensus that all three categories of world literature are still viable. Equally
important, but perhaps less widely recognized, is the fact that world litera-
. seventeenth-century Mexico. One of the most exciting features of contem-
ture is multitemporal as well as multicultural. Too often, shifts in focus from
classics to masterpieces to windows on the world have underwritten a con-
comitant shift from earlier to later periods. John Guillory has remarked that
the traditional European canon has been a white male affair in large part be-
cause, until fairly recently, few women and minority writers had access to
literacy, much less publication. He goes on to say that
obviously in order to "open" this canon, one would have to
modernize it, to displace the preponderance of works from earlier
to later. And there are of course many good reasons to do so. The
pressure to modernize the curriculum has succeeded again and
again despite the inertial conservatism of the educational
institution, and it is this presure which is largely responsible for
many historically significant exclusions: The fact that we read
Plato but not Xenophon, Virgil but not Statius, has nothing to do
with the social identities ofXenophon or Statius ... but the
_mercial-culture: the i11~i~t-~:n! Pt:~S.~1'..t!~'?! ~J-i„<i;~__ (:!E:,}~~s__tJ-i~J>_as,t _~~ ~-S.~!:~9~-­
factor, leaving at best a few nost;;tlgic po_stmodern references,1 _,!h~hi$J__Q;rjc:;aj __
equivalent of the "local color" tipped in i:o distirigWsh-'the lobby.oLthG
Jakarta Hilton from that ofits Cancun counterpart, -
Not onlydoes this presentism deprive us of the abilityto learn from
a much wider range of empires, colonies, polities, and migrations; it also
leaves out of account the dramatic ways in which the canons of the earlier
periods themselves are being reshaped through new attention to all sorts of
long-neglected but utterly fascinating texts. The following chapters will treat
materials written as far back as four thousand years ago and as recently
as the late l 990s, and will include discussions of the current reshaping of
our understanding of Hellenistic Egypt, thirteenth-century Europe, and
porary literary studies is the fact that all periods as well as all places are up
for fresh examination and open to new configurations.
This is not to deny that the contemporary world offers an extraor-
dinarily vibrant and varied literary landscape, and several of the following
chapters will focus on work written across the span of the twentieth century.
Yet the tremendous and ongoing expansion of the field of contemporary
world literature raises serious questions as well. lt is not only cultural con-
servatives like Dinesh D'Souza or William Bennett who have expressed
qualms about the opening of so manywindows onto such disparate parts of
the world: many scholars to their left are deeply ambivalent ab out this whole
process. Are these brave new texts a testimony to a wealth of cultural diver-
sity, or are they being sucked up in the Disneyfication of the globe? The
problem here is partly one of reception. Masao Miyoshi (in Off Center) and
Lawrence Venuti (in The Scandals ofTranslation) have shown how the post-
war reception of texts from Japan or from Italy often had more to do with

16 INTRODUCTION 17 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE


American interests and needs than with genuine openness to other cultures.
Even today, foreign works will rarely be translated at all in the United States,
much less widely distributed, unless they reflect American concerns and fit
comfortably with American images of the foreign culture in question.
The problern of reception is compounded today by questions of pro-
duction as well. In recent decades a growing proportion of works has been
produced primarily for foreign consumption-a process that will be the focus
of the final third of this book. This is a fundamentally new literary develop-
ment: for the first time in history, authors ofhighly successful works can hope
to ha.;e them translated into twenty or thirty languages within a few years of
publication, and foreign countries may even provide the primary readership
for writers who have small audiences at harne or who are censored by their
governments. In earlier centuries, writers like Dante rarely thought ofthem-
selves as writing anything resembling this kind of"world literature"; though
they might hope tobe read abroad, their patrons and niest immediate audi-
ence were at harne. Dante, indeed, wrote his Commedia in the vernacular pre-
cisely in order to be read by the widest possible audience in Italy, instead of
using Latin to reach a large European public.
Writing for publication abroad can be a heroic act of resistance
against censorship and an affirmation of global values against local paro-
chialism; yet it can also be only a further stage in the leveling process of a
spreading global consumerism. According to Tim Brennan:
Several younger writers have entered a genre of third-world
metropolitan fiction whose conventions have given their novels
the unfortunate feel of ready-mades. Less about an inauthenticity
of vision than the context of reception, such novels-typically
grouped together in the display cases of library foyers-unjustly
come off as a kind of writing by numbers .... Placed in the
company of other hybrid subjects, they take their part in a
collective lesson for American readers of a global pluralism.
(At Horne in the World, 203)
This is almest the opposite of the long-recognized problems of cultural dis-
tance and difficulty: these new globally directed works may be all too easy
to understand. Brennan places the blame chiefly on distributors and read-
ers, but others have criticized the writers themselves. According to Tariq Ali:
"From New York to Beijing, via Moscow and Vladivostok, you can eat the
same junk food, watch the same junk on television, and, increasingly, read
the same junk novels .... Instead of'socialist realism' we have 'market real-
ism"' ("Literature and Market Realism," 140-44). Non-Western works from
18 INTRODUCTION
225
earlier periods have often been excluded from world literature courses on
the grounds that they are too difficult to understand and absorb in the time
available. Now the converse fear is often expressed: that contemporaryworld
literature isn't worth the effort it doesn't require.
Brennan and Ali tactfully avoid mentioning any new-global-
economy writers by name, but others have been less discreet. The prominent
Sinologist Steven Owen provoked a severe reaction when he advanced a
comparable critique of contemporary Chinese poetry, in a 1990 review essay
significantly titled "What Is World Poetry?" Owen's occasion was the publi-
cation of The August Sleepwalker, the collected poetry of the prominent dis-
sident poet Bei Dao. Writing for nonspecialist readers in the New Republic,
Owen argued that third-world poets are increasingly running afoul of the
literary hegemony of the major Western powers, with the result that they
begin to write a "world poetry" that is little more than a watered-down West-
ern modernism:
Poets who write in the "wrang language" ( even exceedingly
populous languages like Chinese) not only must imagine
themselves being translated in order to reach an audience of a
satisfying magnitude, they must also engage in the peculiar act of
imagining a world poetry and placing themselves within it. And,
although it is supposedly free of all local history, this "world
poetry" turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a version of Anglo-
American modernism or French modernism, depending on
which wave of colonial culture first washed over the intellectuals
of the country in question. This situation is the quintessence of
cultural hegemony, when an essentially local tradition (Anglo-
European) is widely taken for granted as universal. (28)
In Owen's view, this surrender to Euro-American modernism-often in-
troduced into China in the form of mediocre translations several decades
ago-entails the erasure of local literary and cultural history, leaving the
writer with no vital tradition to work from. This new world poetry floats
free of context, merely decorated with a little local ethnic color. Though such
poems lack real literary power, Owen says, "it may be that the international
readers of poetry do not come in search of poetry at all, but rather in search
of windows upon other cultural phenomena. They may be looking for some
exotic religious tradition or political struggle. These Western fashions in ex-
otica and causes are ephemeral things. Who now reads Tagore? He is a bar-
gain that fills the shelves of poetry sections in used book stores" (29). Hav-
ing established this broad, depressing framework, Owen proceeds to discuss
19 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
226
Bei Dao's poetry as a secondhand American modernism, given momentary
currencythanks to its author's close involvement in dissident activities lead-
ing up to the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Owen sees Bei Dao's lyrics as
sporadically vivid but ultimately empty: "most of these poems translate
themselves. They could just as easily be translated from a Slovak or an Es-
tonian or a Philippine poet .... The poetry of The August Sleepwalker is a
poetrywritten to travel weil" (31).
Owen's position has been widely criticized, most notably by Rey
Chow, who opened her 1993 book Writing Diaspora with a wholesale attack
on his essay. Calling Owen's views orientalist and even "racist" (2 n. 2 ), Chow
argued that the problem is not with the poetry but with the Western critic's
loss of authority:
Basic to Owen's disdain for the new "world poetry" is a sense of
loss ·and, consequently, an anxiety over his own intellectual
position.... This is the anxiety that the Chinese past which he
has undertaken to penetrate is evaporating and that the Sinologist
himself is the abandoned subject.... Concluding his essay sourly
with the statement, "Welcome to the late twentieth century:'
Owen's real complaint is that he is the victim of a monstrous
world order in front of which a sulking impotence like his is the
only claim to truth. (3-4)
The problem for a nonspecialist reader-apart from the danger of the crit-
ical prose bursting into flames in your hands-is that Chow is so deeply
committed to her position that she doesn't see any need to combat Owen's
views by discussing a single line ofBei Dao's poetry. Owen's article does give
some brief quotations, but he spends little time on them. Further, having
taken the position that Bei Dao's poems "translate themselves:' he says little
about the work of the poems' actual translator, Bonnie McDougall. Readers
unable to consult Bei Dao in the original may wonder how we can possibly
assess these radically differing views.
We can make some headway by looking directly at The August
Sleepwalker, and if we do so, we can find verses that show Bei Dao's own
acute awareness of the difficulties his poetry faces abroad. Thus his poem
"Language" begins by saying that
. many languages
fly around the world
producing sparks when they collide
20 1NT R 0 D U C T 10 N
sometimes of hate
sometimes of love
(121)
Appropriately enough, I fi.rst encountered this poem in Jayana Clerk and
Ruth Siegel's 1995 anthology Modern Literature of the Non-Western World,
whose back-cover copy (no doubt written by the HarperCollins marketing
department rather than by the editors) positions the collection as just the
sort ofliterary jet-setting that Owen condemns: "Travel to 61 countries and
experience a vast selection of poetry, fiction, drama, and memoirs:' the cover
urges us; "make stops in Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin
America, and the Caribbean .... Your passport? Modern Literature of the
Non-Western World." Bei Dao's own poem, however, ends by deconstruct-
ing this very process of circulation:
many languages
fly around the world
the production oflanguages
can neither increase nor decrease
mankind's silent suffering
Bei Dao seems less confident of his work's value abroad than Chow her-
self is; at the same time, he may have a more thoughtful, ironic stance to-
ward home tradition and foreign audiences alike than Owen allows. To
pursue this question in detail, it would be necessary to look at a range of
issues: the ways in which Chinese poets in the generation before Bei Dao
translated American and French poets as a form of self-expression as they
sought new resources to revitalize the ancient classical repertoire; the ways
in which midcentury American and Chinese poets alike were influenced
by translations of earlier Spanish-language poets like Ruhen Dario and
Federico Garcia Lorca; the ways in which the surface simplicity of Bei
Dao's prosody may be subverting Maoist calls to abandon the complexi-
ties of aristocratic poetry and return to the purity of the old Shih Ching
(Book of Songs), that ancient folk classic marked, as Eugene Eoyang has
said, by simple diction and "intensely commonplace sentiments, with a
universality which the song does not try to hide" ("The Many 'Worlds' in
World Literature;' 249) .
Such investigations could take us deep into specialist territory, but
it is important to realize that we don't face a strict either / or choice between
total immersion and an airy vapidity. A füll appreciation of world literature
21 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE

requires us to see it as at once "locally inflected and translocally mobile;' as Vi-
lashini Cooppan has said ("World Literature and Global Theory;' 33). Our
reading ofBei Dao, or ofDante, will benefit from a leavening oflocal knowl-
edge, an amount that may vary from work to work and from reader to reader
but that will remain less than is needed for a füll contex:tual understanding of
a work within its home tradition. As such, world literature can be aligned with
the nuanced, localized cosmopolitanism championed by Bruce Robbins: "No
one 9-cti;iajly_i~--pr_i::ver.s~:r:i:_l>~ a cosmopolitan in thesense-of belonging
-~~~here ........ .Theinterestofth~term-c0smopÖiitäniSmfa]ocafed;-ilien-: not in
a
··~Jts fuii.theoretical ex:tension, wh~~~it~~~!?es par~~i.<lf:~t~~i-~T;i;·ig_~i!Y -
',./ and Qrnniscience,_b.ut rath(;:r (paradoxically) in its.local ~pplications~~ G''C::QIJJ.-
·' .parative CosmopoHtanis:rn..~~ 260f _Far. fro~ being a rootless cosmopolitan~­
Bei Dao is doubly or multiply linked to events and audiences at home and
abroad; indeed, as an exile since the early nineties, he has occupied an in-
creasingly multiple relation to the very terms "home" and "abroad."
To read Bei Dao's poems in English we should be alive to relevant
aspects of the context of their production, but we don't finally need the Chi-
nese contex:t in all its particularity. When all is said and clone, Bei Dao in
English isn't Bei Dao in Chinese, and Steven Owen is really describing the
life of any work of world literature when he asks, "Is this Chinese literature,
or literature that began in the Chinese language?" ("What Is World Poetry?"
31). Owen means to express the poet's limitations by this formulation, but
the criticism only partly holds, even if Bei Dao's poetry is in fact superficial
in the original. Not only is this something that those of us who don't read
Chinese cannot judge; it is actually irrelevant to the poem's existence abroad.
All works cease to be the exclusive products of their original culture once
they are translated; all become works that only "began" in their original
language.
The crucial issue for the foreign reader is how well the poems work
in the new language; such cultural information as may be practical to ac-
quire and relevant to apply must still make sense in the translation if it is to
be useful at all. Here we can gain in understanding by looking at different
translations of Bei Dao's work. Thanks to his global popularity, he has al-
ready been translated by a number of people, and even individual poems
can be found variously translated. Here, for example, are two versions of the
opening stanza of his most famous poem, "The Answer," which became a
rallying cry for the Tiananmen protestors:
Debasement is the password of the base.
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
22 1N T R 0 D U C T 10 N
227
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.
(McDougall tr.)
The scoundrel carries his baseness around like an ID card.
The honest man bears his honor like an epitaph.
Look-the gilded sky is swimming
with undulant reflections of the dead.
(Pinkel tr.) 4
McDougall's translation dearly tries to convey an underlying word play in
the original, but the result is stilted and unpoetic English; Pinkel's transla-
tion is freer but also more readable, and without the consfraint of making
the end of the opening lines echo the beginning, he is able to set up a more
effective contrast of identity card to epitaph. Purther, his version plays with
modernist shifts of verbal register: the stanza opens with prosaic, even
dunky, language to describe the bureaucratic "scoundrel," and then moves
to the poetic eloquence of the "undulant reflections of the dead."
As the poem continues, Pinkel also brings out uses of modernist
motifs that aren't visible in McDougall's version. Where McDougall has "I
don't believe in thunder's echoes," Pinkel has "I don't believe what the thun-
der says;' ironically recalling the heading in Eliot's "Waste Land" when the
speaker turns to the East for timeless wisdom to refresh his dried-up West-
ern roots. In Bei Dao's conduding stanza, a group of stars that McDougall
renders as "pictographs" becomes in Pinkel "that ancient ideogram," using
Ezra Pound's term of choice for Chinese characters. These echoes assortwell
with the <lebt to American modernism that Owen and others have identi-
fied in Bei Dao's work. Rather than connecting the poem to modernism in
this way, McDougall continues to do her best to suggest Chinese theories of
correspondence and history, as in her version of the concluding stanza:
A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now:
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.
Compare Pinkel:
The earth revolves. A glittering constellation
pricks the vast defenseless sky.
4 McDougall's version is from her translation of The August Sleepwalker, 33; Donald
Finkel's is from The Splintered Mirror, 9-10.
23 G 0 E T H E C 0 1N S A P H RA S E
228
Can you see it there? that ancient ideogram- Western writers are always particularly liable to be assimilated to the im-
the eye of the future, gazing back. mediate interests and agendas of those who edit, translate, and interpret
them. This book is written in the belief that we can do better justice to our
Compared to McDougall's cautious and literalistic renderings, Finkel's ver-
texts, whether perennial classics or contemporaryworks, ifwe really attend
sion is at once more eloquent and more creative in holding Chinese and
to what we are doing when we import them and introduce them into new
modernist contexts together in view. The prosaic prosody and lurking sen-
contexts.
timentality that Owen dislikes in Bei Dao's poetry are much more evident
In emphasizing the shaping force of local contexts, I mean to dis-
features ofMcDougall's translations than ofFinkel's, which actually gain in
tinguish world literature from a notional "global literature" that might be
poetic effect by emphasizing the modernist connections that Owen regrets
read solely in airline terminals, unaffected by any specific context whatever.
and McDougall plays down.
The world's literature is not yet sold by a Borders Books Without Borders.
The airport bookstore is stocked by buyers who operate first and foremost
This brief look at Bei Dao can suggest what I will be exploring in detail in
within a national context and its distribution system, and the bookstore's
the chapters to follow: works of world literature take on a new life as they
customers, mostly traveling to or from home, continue to read in ways pro-
move into the world at large, and to understand this new life we need to look
foundly shaped by home-country norms. For all the power of the Internet,
closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its
even Amazon.com has been setting up distinct subsidiaries abroad rather
new cultural contexts. Translation is always involved in what Fernando Ortiz
than relying on its American-based website to achieve a global reach.
described in 1940 as transculturaci6n, 5 and if we do want to see the work of
Modern literature can be studied in global terms within the "poly-
world literature as a window on different parts of the world, we have to take
systems" framework developed by translation theorists like Itamar Even-
into account the way its images have been multiply refracted in the process
Zohar, or the sociopolitical "world systems" approach based in the writ-
of transculturation. World literature can be described, to borrow a phrase
ings of Immanuel Wallerstein. A notable example of such work is Franco
from Vinay Dharwadker, as "a montage of overlapping maps in motion"
Moretti's ambitious mapping of the spread of the novel, beginning with his
( Cosmopolitan Geographies, 3), and this movement involves shifting rela-
Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. As he has carried his work beyond
tions both of literary history and of cultural power. Works rarely cross
Europe, Moretti has found that the global system ofliterary production and
borders on a basis of full equality; if the classics and masterpieces long dom-
reception is highly variable locally, and he has described the diffi.culty of
inant in world literature have typically enjoyed high prestige and authorita-
dealing directly with the masses of disparate material that a global approach
tive weight in their new homes, the power relations are often reversed when
should encompass. Moretti has gone so far as to recommend tlJ.at_ we abjl!_~~.
noncanonical works come into NorthAmerica today. Tim Brennan and oth-
clo_~~- r_t::~4i11:g_~-~~gether, analyzing broad patterns rather t~~g_j_p.diY.i.dual-.
ers have criticized the manipulations by which the political edge has often
·~orks. "Literary history:'.he -says~~'\ViiJ_Q.~fu_e.~~ li~5sL„~J?-P.t<:.h.w.ork~"'"··
been taken from works imported into the American context, but it is not
of other people;s ~esearch, ~ith9ut a s)ngk 4ii:ei:.!.!0!1:l~_f.[~q_4ing,_Still.ambi­
enough to have our politics in the right place. All works are subject to ma-
tious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!); but the am-
nipulation and even deformation in their foreign reception, but established
bition is now directly proportional to the di;t~~~~ fr;;· i:'fi;"'i:~;t ("Conjec-
classics usually gain a degree of protection by their cultural prestige: editors
tures on World Literature;' 57). Though his emphasis is political rather than
and publishers will be less likely, for example, to silently truncate a classic
archetypal, Moretti in this sense recalls Northrop Frye's method in Anatomy
text or reorganize it outright, a fate that is commonly experienced by non-
of Criticism, where Frye gave rapid surveys of patterns and motifs in a wide
canonical works even at the hands ofhighly sympathetic translators. As will
range of works. In his article, Moretti draws a sharp distinction between two
be seen below in examples from Mechthild von Magdeburg to Rigoberta
metaphoric approaches to change: trees and waves. Individual works can be
Menchu, works by non-Western authors or by provincial or subordinate
studied by specialists as offshoots of a family tree, an exfoliating national
5 Cited by Gustavo Perez-Firmat, who describes the space of transculturaci6n as "a system; global comparatism, on the other hand, should concentrate on wave
liminal zone or 'impassioned margin' where diverse cultures converge without merging" ( The patterns of transformations sweeping around the world.
Cuban Condition, 25). Are students of world literature really going to have to leave the

24 1NT R 0 D U C T 10 N 25 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE


analysis of actual works to specialists in national literatures, as Moretti pro-
poses? Those of us unable to tear ourselves so resolutely away from the plea-
sures of the text are likely to disagree. A world systems approach to litera-
ture has many of the virtues earlier found in structuralist approaches, but it
also shares some of the problems experienced by those who attempted to
applythe insights of structurallinguistics directlyto complexliteraryworks.
Deep structures could be elucidated, but literary effects are often achieved
by highly individual means, and generative grammars of narrative had dif-
ficulty providing much insight into works more elaborate than folktales or
detective stories. As with texts, so with cultures at large: individual cultures
only partly lend themselves to analysis of common global patterns. As
Wallerstein himself has said, "the history of the world has been the very op-
posite of a trend towards cultural homogenization; it has rather been a trend
towards cultural differentiation, or cultural elaboration, or cultural com-
plexity" ("The National and the Universal: Can There Be Such a Thing as
World Culture?'', 96). As a result, systemic approaches need tobe counter-
balanced with close attention to particular languages, specific texts: we need
to see both the forest and the trees.
This is a problem that Moretti acknowledges. Going beyond a sim-
ple form-and-content account of the spread of the novel (the Western form
imitatively adapted to convey local content), Moretti argues for the impor-
tance of a third term, narrative voice-a primary feature of indigenous tra-
dition that critically affects the interplay of content and form. As he says,
however, we can't study narrative voice at a linguistic remove in the way that
we can trace patterns of book sales or broad movements of motifs ("Con-
jectures;' 66). But how to mediate between broad, but often reductive,
overviews and intensive, but often atomistic, close readings?
One solution is to recognize that we don't face an either/or choice
between global systematicity and infinite textual multiplicity, for world lit-
erature itself is constituted very differently in different cultures. Much can
be learned from a close attention to the workings of a given cultural system,
at a scale of analysis that also allows for extended discussion of specific
works. A culture's norms and needs profoundly shape the selection of works
that enter into it as world literature, influencing the ways they are translated,
marketed, and read. In India, for example, world literature takes on a very
particular valence in the dual contexts of the multiplicity oflndia's disparate
languages and the ongoing presence of English in post-Raj India. English
can be seen in comparative terms as three distinct entities in India: as the
language of the British literature that featured so prominently in colonial
Indian education; as the worldwide phenomenon of contemporary global
26 1NT R 0 D U C T 10 N
229
English; and as Indo-English, with its ambiguous status somewhere between
a foreign and a native language.
Amiya Dev has pointed out that India's twenty-two principal liter-
ary languages themselves form a plenum comparable to that of European
literature, and the different Indian literatures are always strongly colored by
the other languages in use around them. As a result, Dev says, no Indian lit-
erature is ever itself alone: "Bengali will be Bengali +, Panjabi Panjabi +,
and Tamil Tamil +. In a multilingual situation there cannot be a true ap-
preciation of a single literature in absolute isolation" ( The Idea of Compar-
ative Literature in India, 14). "The very structure oflndian literature is com-
parative," as Sisir Kumar Das has said; "its framework is comparative and its
texts and contexts Indian" (quoted in Chandra Mohan, "Comparative In-
dian Literature," 97).
By contrast, world literature in Brazil has long been shaped by a
very different set of forces: by complex relations between people of indige-
nous, European,_ or mixed descent; by inter-American relations within Latin
America and vis-a-vis North America; and by lasting cultural ties to Portu-
gal, to Spain, and to France. In works like Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto
Antropofagico, "international modernism" helped forma specifically Brazil-
ian cultural identity, as Beatriz Resende has recently emphasized ("A For-
ma<;:äo de Identida:des Plurais no Brasil Moderno"). Relatedly, whereas Eu-
ropean scholars have often seen world literature as radiating outward from
metropolitan centers toward relatively passive provincial recipients, a num-
ber of contemporary Brazilian scholars are moving beyond the paradigm of
"Paris, cultural capital of Latin America" to emphasize a two-way process,
one that is grounded as much in Brazil's dynamic heterogeneity as in French
cultural authority. 6
For any given observer, even a genuinely global perspective remains
a perspective from somewhere, and global patterns of the circulation of
world literature take shape in their local manifestations. With this in mind,
in the following chapters I will be concentrating particularly (though not
exclusively) on world literature as it has been construed over the past cen-
tury in a specific cultural space, that of the formerly provincial and now
6
This is the subject of an illuminating article by Tania Carvalhal, "Culturas e
Contextos" (2001). In her balanced presentation of a two-way exchange, Carvalhal avoids the
implicit triumphalism seen in a work like Pascale Casanova's La Republique mondiale des lettres
(1999), which might better be titled La Republique parisienne des lettres. An unsatisfactory
account of world literature in general, Casanova's book is actually a good account of the
operation of world literature within the modern French context.
27 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
230
metropolitan United States. This focus gives time for detailed treatment of
exemplary works, allowing for an interplay of general issues and actual
cases. Further, while avoiding the hubris of supposing that we are the world,
an account of world literature in this setting may bring out patterns that can
be suggestive for accounts of world literature elsewhere.
A final look at Johann Peter Eckermann at home and abroad can suggest
some of the issues involved when a provincial author reaches a metropoli-
tan audience. Both in his encounters with Goethe and then in the subse-
quent reception ofhis Conversations in England andin America, Eckermann
gives us a vivid illustration of the problematic power relations between elite
and popular worlds. Whereas Goethe can praise Chinese novelists for al-
ready enjoying a highly refined level of culture "when our forefathers were
still living in the woods," Eckermann's own family, as his introduction in-
forms us, had only gotten a few hundred yards away from the woods, to
which he regularly returned to gather kindling. He begins his book with a
twenty-page story of his own life up to his arrival in Weimar, entitled "In-
troduction: The Author Gives an Account Concerning his Person and Ori-
gins and the Beginning of his Relation to Goethe:' This is a story whose el-
ements can all be found in Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale.
Eckermann is born in 1792 in a village in northern Germany, youngest child
of a second marriage. His family is very poor-"the chief source of our
small family's nourishment was a cow" (Gespräche, 11 )-and young Johann
spends his childhood gathering straw from the fields and firewood from the
forest, working the family's vegetable plot, and walking with his father from
village to village, wooden boxes on their backs, selling ribbons, thread, and
cloth. Fascinated one night by the picture of a horse on his father's tobacco
pouch, Johann devotes the evening to copying it, and his parents are
charmed by the result. All night, he can scarcely sleep, looking forward to
seeing his drawing again the next morning.
He obtains paper and charcoal, and draws incessantly. A well-to-do
villager takes an interest, offering to send him to Hamburg to learn paint-
ing. His parents refüse, pointing out that it is difficult and even dangerous
work, especially as the houses in Hamburg-house painting is the only
painting trade they know of-are so tall. Discouraged, Johann stays at
home, but his drawings do inspire some neighbors to pay his fees at the vil-
lage school. At sixteen, he gets a job as secretary to the local judge. He serves
briefly in the army as Napoleon's forces are driven out of Germany; sta-
tioned in Flanders, he sees actual paintings for the first time. ("Now that I
saw what it was tobe a painter, I could have wept that it had been forbidden
28 1NT R 0 D U C T 10 N
me to follow such a path" Gespräche, 16). The war ends, and he returns
home, to find his father deceased, his older sister and her family now shar-
':'.'.
ing his mother's cottage; he walks for days through snow-covered fields to
reach Hamburg, finds lodging with a friend from his village, and attempts
to become an artist.
Checked in this ambition by poverty and ill health, he finds a clerk's
job at the local royal court, and begins to read and to try his hand at poetry.
He is twenty-four. He studies privately, painfülly aware that he lacks the ed-
ucation enjoyed by the great writers whose biographies he constantly reads.
Still, his poems meet with approval, and he venfures printing a small vol-
ume of them. He sends a copy to Goethe, who writes him a kindly note. They
have no fürther contact until he concludes his fellowship at Göttingen,
writes his manuscript on poetry, and hazards his letter and visit.
Eckermann succeeds in leaving his childhood surroundings be-
hind, but his provincial roots are hard to sever entirely. Once he is installed
in Goethe's circle, the social differences continually reappear in his account,
often displaced into a difference of gender. Throughout the Conversations,
Eckermann plays the shy, admiring maiden to Goethe's heroic authority. At
their very first conversation on Goethe's sofa, Eckermann says: "We sat a long
while together, in a tranquil affectionate mood. I forgot to speak for look-
ing at him-I could not look enough. His face is powerful and brown-füll
of wrinkles, and each wrinkle füll of expression! [und jede Falte voller Aus-
druck!] ... With him I was indescribably happy" (2).
As can be seen, Eckermann's maidenly reserve entails a silence in
the face of Goethe's vast powers of expression, which extend even to his
wrinkles. A year later, Eckermann is still speaking in the tones of young love,
stimulated ever anew by Goethe's poetry as mediated by the poet's voice and
by his entire body: "He brought some manuscript poems, which he read
aloud to me. Not only did the original force and freshness of the poems ex-
cite me to a high degree; but also, by his manner of reading them, he showed
himself to mein a phase hitherto unknown but highly important. What va-
riety and force in his voice! What life and expression in the noble counte-
nance, so füll of wrinkles! And what eyes!" (45). Five years into their associ-
ation, Eckermann is still making a point of arriving early when invited to
dinner, so as to have his hero to himself: "I found him, as I wished, still alone,
expecting the company. He wore his black coat and star, with which I so
much like to see him" (219). They now have a discussion in which Goethe
confides that he will never be popular with the multitude; he writes only for
like-minded individuals. The other guests arrive and dinner begins, but Eck-
ermann is lost in thought:
29 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE

I could pay no attention to the conversation that was going on;
Goethe's words entirely occupied my mind.
Meanwhile, all around me were jesting and talking, and
partaking of the good fare. I spoke now and then a word, but
without exactly knowing what I said. A lady put a question to me;
to which, it seems, I did not render a very appropriate answer:
they all laughed at me.
"Leave Eckermann alone," said Goethe. "He is always absent,
except when he is at the theater."
Biscuits and some very fine grapes were brought for dessert.
The latter had been sent from a distance, and Goethe would not
say whence they came. He divided them, and handed me a very
ripe branch across the table.
I highly enjoyed the grapes from Goethe's hand, and was now
quite near him in both body and soul. (220-21)
This is as near as Eckermann will ever get, savoring the grapes sent to Goethe
by an unnamed admirer; he never succeeds in appropriating his hero's lit-
erary power as a poet. Goethe himself hardly helps matters by instructing
him, at the start of their acquaintance, to abandon a projected long poem
on the seasons: "I especially warn you against great inventions of your
own ... for that purpose youth [Eckermann is thirty!] is seldom ripe" (7).
Yet if Goethe, nearing the end of his life, feels his audience to be a declining
few, Eckermann can make a book out of their conversations and in this way
bring his image before a wider audience. This act of piety is at the same time
his most successful act of appropriation, as he shows in the opening words
of a preface that precedes his autobiographical introduction in the original
German edition: "This collection of conversations and discussions with
Goethe stems above all from the natural drive that dwells within me to ap-
propriate to myself, through writing, whatever lived experience seems wor-
thy or notable" (Gespräche, 7). Though the diamantine Goethe presents very
different facets to different people, Eckermann says, "this is my Goethe" (8;
Eckermann's emphasis).
Eckermann takes up the process of mirroring or Spiegelung that
Goethe associates with the network of world literature and applies it to his
portrait of Goethe himself: "This word ["my"] applies not only to the way
he presented himself to me, but more especially to the way I was able to grasp
him and represent him in turn. In such cases a mirroring occurs, and it very
rarely happens that in passing through another individual no specific char-
acteristics will be lost and nothing foreign will be mixed in" (8). Eckermann
30 INTRODUCTION
231
thus mixes some of his own foreign substance into the portrait, and in the
process the silent, maidenly hearer gets the last word.
Interestingly, in a further installment of the Conversations pub-
lished twelve years after the original, Eckermann ends his account by align-
ing himself with the Virgin Mary. His final entry centers on discussion of the
Bible. He has just bought a copy but is annoyed to find that it lacks the Apoc-
rypha. Goethe comments that the Church erred in closing the canon of
scripture, as God's creative work still continues, notably in the activity of
great spirits like Mozart, Raphael, and Shakespeare, "who can draw their
lesser contemporaries higher" (Gespräche, 667). Following these words-
the last words of Goethe's that Eckermann records-a one-line paragraph
appears: "Goethe fell silent. I, however, preserved his great and good words
in my heart" ( 667). This phrasing echoes Luke 2:51, in which the young Jesus
preaches in the temple; though his hearers don't understand him, "his
mother kept all these words in her heart."
The biblical ending to Eckermann's sequel mirrors the classical
ending to his original account. Eckermann has always experienced Goethe's
house as a sort of museum of classical art. The first thing he notices on his
first visit are "the casts from antique statues, placed upon the stairs" (1), and
Goethe himself is the cherished exhibit at the heart of the house: "This
evening, I went for the first time to a large tea-party at Goethe's. I arrived
first, and enjoyed the view of the brilliantly lighted apartments, which,
through open doors, led one into the other. In one of the farthest, I found
Goethe, dressed in black, and wearing his star-which became him so well.
We were for a while alone" (8). Now, at the end of the book, the Goethe
whom Eckermann wishes to monumentalize turns into a funerary monu-
ment. After recounting a last conversation on Greek tragedy and the role of
the artist, Eckermann passes over any mention of Goethe's final illness or
death. There is simply a gap, and then a haunting, and haunted, closing
paragraph:
The morning after Goethe's death, a deep desire seized me to
look once again upon his earthly garment. His faithful servant,
Frederick, opened for me the chamber in which he was laid out.
Stretched upon his back, he reposed as if asleep; profound peace
and security reigned in the features ofhis sublimely noble
countenance. The mighty brow seemed yet to harbour thoughts.
I wished for a lock of his hair; but reverence prevented me from
cutting it off. The body lay naked, only wrapped in a white sheet;
large pieces of ice had been placed near it, to keep it fresh as long
31 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
 232
as possible. Frederick drew aside the sheet, and I was astonished
at the divine magnificence of the limbs. The breast was powerful,
broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were füll, and softly
muscular; the feet were elegant, and of the most perfect shape;
i1· nowhere, on the whole body, was there a trace either of fat or of
11 leanness and decay. A perfect man lay in great beauty before me;
li
and the rapture the s!ght caused made me forget for a moment
1:
1! that the immortal spirit had left such an abode. I laid my hand on
i,i
[i his heart-there was a deep silence-and I tumed away to give
,,11 free vent to my suppressed tears. (344-45)
:1
The deep silence of the scene only heightens its stark visual power. Ecker-
mann has achieved a strange synthesis in prose of the pictures he once hoped
to paint and the dramatic poetry he continued to compose.
None of Eckermann's efforts at writing in "high" genres made any impact at
all, but in the more popular form of the journal he achieved a decisive entry
into world literature. His book was translated into "all the European lan-
i' guages;' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us, and even into "all the
languages of civilization," as Havelock Ellis put it in 1930 in an introduction
to the Conversations (a phrase that, though grandiose, at least allows for the
Japanese translation). He became through his book the widely traveled cos-
mopolite he could never be in life, even emerging in Spanish translation as
the dashing Juan Pedro Eckermann.
The book's rapid foreign success stands in sharp contrast to its early
reception at home. Though it was put out by a prominent publisher, Brock-
haus, it sold poorly and attracted only a handful of reviews. Goethe's work
was indeed falling into neglect in Germany, and his lofty, conservative per-
spective had little appeal for the German literati of the turbulent years lead-
ing up to 1848. Eckermann had considerable difficulty finding a publisher
for his sequel, which did even more poorly than the original version. The
Gespräche only began to gain a substantial audience in Germany twenty
years later, when Brockhaus took over the sequel and reissued it along with
the original version. Eckermann's book thus provides an interesting exam-
ple of a work that only achieves an effective presence in its country of ori-
gin after it has already entered world literature; in a movement that would
hardly have surprised Goethe, the book's reception abroad set the stage for
its subsequent revival at home.
The Conversations did particularly weil in English translation; both
1
1 i the first version and the sequel were rapidlytranslated and soon found many
1\
11
32 INTRODUCTION
i1
1 1
admirers. An abridged translation-made, interestingly, by the American
feminist Margaret Fuller-appeared as early as 1838, and only two years
after Eckermann published his 1848 sequel an English translator, John
Oxenford, expanded Fuller's translation, adding substantial entries from
the sequel. In translation, the book not only gained new readers but also
achieved new coherence, for Oxenford redid the entire series of conversa-
tions to produce an integrated sequence, whereas Eckermann himself had
had to issue his new material as an independent volume, having broken with
his original publisher after the first edition failed to attract the wide acclaim
he was sure it should have received.
The Conversations gained in this way in translation. Yet Eckermann
himself lost, for the book entitled Gespräche mit Goethe became Conversa-
tions with Eckermann: Oxenford gave Goethe, not Eckermann, as the book's
actual author. Eckermann's authority over his text diminished along with
his authorship: from Oxenford on, translators and editors have felt free to
rework his entries and even his prose, according füll respect only to the
text's quotations from Goethe-even though the quotations themselves are -
usually Eckermann's reconstructions, often years after the event, and are
shaped, like the framing narrative itself, by Eckermann's interpretation of
Goethe and his work. As Eckermann put it in a letter to a friend, his book
was not "merely the mechanical production of a good memory.... even
though I made nothing up and everything is completely true, it has nonethe-
less been selected" (Gespräche, 680). Or as he bitterly remarked in another
letter, "were I such a nonentity as many believe, how could Goethe's worth
and nobility have so fully preserved themselves in passing through my
spirit?" (Gespräche, 694). -
All too often, Eckermann's translators actually seem to have felt
that he wasn't insignificant enough. In his 1850 version, Oxenford systemat-
ically reduced Eckermann's presence throughout the book. He drastically
abridged Eckermann's autobiographical introduction, and in the body
of the text he silently omitted phrases that seemed too emotive or self-
conscious ("with him I was indescribably happy"; "I rejoiced greatly at these
words"). Further, he dropped whole entries, usually ones in which Ecker-
mann has as large a role as Goethe, such as the final entry from the sequel,
with its discussion of the Bible and Eckermann's implicit comparison of
himself to Mary.
Havelock Ellis deplored the nineteenth-century diminishment of
Eckermann's life and authorship. In his preface to the 1930 edition of Ox-
enford's translation in the Everyman Library, Bilis praised a recent biogra-
phy of Eckermann as long overdue and asserted that "Eckermann will not
33 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
 233
be forgotten again .... he has moulded the portrait by which we all best
know the greatest modern figure in the world of the spirit" (xviii). Yet in this
very edition, Havelock's praise for Eckermann is followed by a stern note
from one J. K. Moorhead, the Everyman edition's editor, who has actually
gone farther than Oxenford himself in reining Eckermann in: "Nearly one-
eighth ofthe original book," Moorhead tell us, "has been got rid ofby chas-
1
tening [!] Eckermann's extreme verbosity and what he himself might have
consented to call his subjectiveness" (xxi).
The situation is even worse in a recent reissue of Oxenford's trans- r
lation, in a quality paperback edition from the North Point Press ( 1984). Not .~
only is the book yet again titled Conversations with Eckermann, with Goethe !'
'•

given as the book's author, but Goethe himself is taken out of history. [
Whereas the Conversations begins with Goethe aged seventy-four and ends
with his death at eighty-three, the North Point edition's cover shows Goethe
~
at about forty years of age. The North Point edition goes even further in a f~
frontispiece, which gives a Roman-style bust of Goethe as a young man (fig- ~~
ure 1). Goethe has seen his dearest wish fulfilled: he has indeed become no-
bler, more Latin-and also decades younger-in translation.
#
~·

Crossing the English Channel, Goethe revives like Dracula from his f
bier and becomes the author of the book that records his own death. Ecker-
[
1
mann's life, meanwhile, dissolves along with his authorship: whereas earlier 1:
editions tended to abridge Eckermann's preface and autobiographical in- ~
troduction, the North Point reprint drops them entirely. This makes the k
book's beginning a little mysterious ("Weimar, June 10, 1823. I arrived here t
a few days ago, but did not see Goethe till today"), but the deletions preserve ~1:
}
Goethe's authorship from any challenge from the person who is now con- \
strued merely as his amanuensis. "JOHANN WOLFGANS VON GOETHE;' the
cover tells us, "was an intellectual giant .... Of all his works, Conversations 1
~·
with Eckermann perhaps best demonstrates the range ofhis interests and the
depth ofhis command of them." Eckermann, meanwhile, is simply"a young f
r
friend;' as a brief "Note on the Text" explains, who transcribed and pub- &
lished Goethe's remarks. Having given new life to his cosmopolitan hero, the r
provincial author fades into the obscurity cast by the lengthening shadow of 1
1.
the portrait he himself has painted. t
Figure 1. Roman Goethe
l
I will be centrally concerned, in the following chapters, with tracing what is f
lost and what is gained in translation, looking at the intertwined shifts of
r
1

language, era, region, religion, social status, and literary context that a work
i
can incur as it moves from its point of origin out into a new cultural sphere.
Today we are making more and more translations from and among an un- t
~.
34 1NT R 0 D U C T 10 N l'
t 35 GOETHE COINS A PHRASE
234
precedented range ofliterary worlds; clone weil, these multiple translations
can give us a unique purchase on the scope of the world's cultures, past and
present. All too often, though, things slip in the process, and we can gain a
work ofworld literature but lose the author's soul. Our sophisticated criti-
cal methods and refined cultural sensitivity have not yet suffi.ced to keep us
from falling into errors and abuses that were common a hundred and even
a thousand years ago. We ought to do better, but this will require a better
sense of what it is we do when we circulate works through the shifting
spheres of world literature. What follows is an essay in defi.nition, a celebra-
tion of new opportunities, and a gallery of cautionary tales.

Circulation

1
1
36 INTRODUCTION
1
f
Modern Language Quarterly 68.2 (2007) 196 MLQ June 2007
235
Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the the new alphabet, with Turkish flags prominently displayed behind his
open-air blackboard (fig. 1). Struggles over scripts continue today in
Formation of World Literature various borderland regions. Chechnya has changed its script twice dur-
ing the past century. Long written in Arabic characters, the Chechen
David Damrosch language shifted over to Cyrillic during the period of Soviet domina-
tion, then went to the Roman alphabet when Chechnya achieved inde-
pendence in 1997. The Berbers of Algeria and Morocco, never having
achieved an independent national status, have used Arabic and Roman
alphabets during different periods — when their languages were not
suppressed outright. Currently, there is a movement among Berber
nationalists to escape this either-or choice by reviving the long-dead
Tifinagh script, derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

T hrough most of recorded history, literature has not been written

within an integrated global system. “World literature” has meant
different things in different parts of the globe, and only a very few
Often important in cultural politics, scripts have had a particularly
far-reaching impact on the production and circulation of literature,
not only in today’s globalizing world but throughout literary history. My
writers have truly had a worldwide audience. At least through the eigh-
starting point for thinking about the issue of script has been The Epic
teenth century, most literary works have circulated within fairly dis-
of Gilgamesh, arguably the first true work of world literature. Gilgamesh
crete fields, whether framed in regional terms (the East Asian world),
is the earliest literary text that we know to have had a wide circulation,
in political terms (the Roman Empire), or in linguistic terms (the Ger-
well beyond its Babylonian origin, and it is also the earliest literary text
manic and Romance traditions). My purpose in this essay is to explore
for which we have recovered translations into several foreign languages:
a term missing from most discussions of regional and global literatures:
portions of translations of the Akkadian original have been found in
the crucial role of global scripts. Often thought of only in relation to
Hittite and in Hurrian, and this “original” is itself an expansive adapta-
their original language or language family, scripts that achieve a global
tion of an earlier Sumerian song cycle. Gilgamesh appears, in fact, to
reach extend far beyond their linguistic base, with profound conse-
have been the most popular literary work ever written in the ancient
quences for literature and for cultural in general. Alphabets and other
Near East; texts have been recovered from no fewer than fourteen sites,
scripts continue to this day to serve as key indices of cultural identity,
not only all over Mesopotamia but as far away as Hattusa, the Hittite
often as battlegrounds of independence or interdependence. A global
capital in what is now Turkey, and Megiddo, some fifty miles north of
script forms the basis of a broad literary system — what we might call a
Jerusalem.
“scriptworld” — in which works that use that script are composed.
What is striking is how fully the circulation of this most famous
An emblematic modern instance of the cultural-political role of
Mesopotamian text was bounded by the spread of cuneiform. Every ver-
scripts was Kamal Atatürk’s wrenching Turkish away from Arabic script
sion of Gilgamesh that we have, in four languages and several dialects,
to a Roman-derived script in 1928, part of his effort to realign Turkey
is in cuneiform. The fragment found at Megiddo had reached roughly
away from its Ottoman, Middle Eastern past and toward a European
the farthest point of cuneiform’s daily use south of the Syrian city-state
future. To dramatize this effort as a patriotic assertion of a newly cho-
of Ugarit, a meeting point of cultures where both Akkadian syllabic
sen identity, Atatürk had himself photographed giving instruction in
cuneiform and a local alphabetic cuneiform were employed. Despite
the epic’s immense popularity for more than a thousand years after it
Modern Language Quarterly 68:2 (June 2007)
DOI 10.1215/00267929-2006-036 © 2007 by University of Washington
was composed around 1600 BCE, there is no evidence that Gilgamesh
236 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 197 198 MLQ June 2007

was ever translated into any noncuneiform script. In this respect it is

typical of all literary texts written in cuneiform: they vanished when
cuneiform fell out of use.
Gilgamesh’s name continued to be known to some Hellenistic writ-
ers, and the Homeric poets most likely knew the epic at least in oral
form. The many striking similarities between Gilgamesh and the Iliad
and Odyssey indicate a direct familiarity, transmitted either through
Anatolia or else, as M. L. West argues, through bilingual traders, set-
tlers, or itinerant poets in Syria and Cyprus.1 Yet these very parallels
indicate that Gilgamesh enjoyed at best a shadowy half-life in Greek: the
illiterate Homeric poets may well have adapted elements from the story
of Gilgamesh after hearing it performed, yet no scene or even passage
in Homer can be called a direct translation of any scene or passage in
Gilgamesh. As A. R. George concludes, after examining evidence for the
epic’s transmission beyond cuneiform sources, “The epic that we know
died with the cuneiform writing system, along with the large portion
of the scribal literature that was of no practical, scientific, or religious
use in a world without cuneiform.”2
Political and economic affairs could be conducted in cuneiform
even beyond the regions where it was at home. A large cache of cunei-
form documents found at Amarna, in northern Egypt, shows that the
pharaohs had scribes trained to read and write Akkadian, Hittite, and
other languages in cuneiform. Yet no literary texts in cuneiform have
been discovered at Amarna. Throughout the ancient Near East, lyrics,
narrative poems, and prose stories seem to have found written form
largely within the script system in which they were first composed. If
so, it may be better to speak of Gilgamesh as circulating around “the
cuneiform world,” rather than in the smaller unit “the Mesopotamian
world” or the overly large unit “the ancient Near East.”
The Near East contained three principal literary systems, each
based in a different script or family of scripts. Apart from the cunei-
Figure 1. Kamal Atatürk teaching his new alphabet, 1928
form tradition, there was the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, and several

1 M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 626 – 27.

2 A. R. George, ed., The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition,

and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:70.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 199
societies along the eastern Mediterranean coast shared a West Semitic
alphabetic system, comprising Hebrew, Aramaic, alphabetic Ugaritic,
and Phoenician. The separations between these groups were hardly
watertight; scribes were often competent in more than one system,
and the alphabetic systems actually derived from a highly simplified
alphabetic version of cuneiform. Yet even fairly modest transformations
give writing a distinctly foreign cast and discourage the unpracticed
eye; tF@S>μπLHTRANSL>TERATEQI6FRhSE, an English speaker’s eye is it appears that each writing system constituted a significant boundary
likely to pass right over these words, even though the Roman alphabet
is directly derived from the Greek and I have simply transliterated the
phrase “if I simply transliterate this phrase.” A reader trained only in
the two dozen signs of alphabetic cuneiform would have no way at all
to read the six hundred signs of syllabic cuneiform, the standard script
used for Sumerian and Akkadian literatures.
The literatures of these groups tended to stay in their respective
scriptworlds. There are close relations among Hebrew, Aramaic, and
Ugaritic literatures (no Phoenician literature survives, so there is no way
to know about those links), but relations between these and cuneiform-
based literatures are much more distant. Egyptian literature remained
self-contained in hieroglyphic writing, and as a result no Egyptian
poems or tales survived the eclipse of hieroglyphics and the derivative
hieratic and demotic scripts, even though there were many opportuni-
ties for contact with other systems. The Song of Songs shows close simi-
larities to Egyptian love poetry, and the episode of Potiphar’s wife in
the Joseph story reworks an Egyptian narrative known as “The Tale of
the Two Brothers.” As with the Homeric epics and Gilgamesh, however,
what we find is an echoing of motifs rather than the translation and
preservation of integral foreign texts.
No doubt direct literary translations were sometimes made across
Near Eastern writing systems, but none survives that corresponds to the
translations we do find of political and economic documents. Some bib-
lical proverbs read like translations of proverbs known from Egyptian
wisdom texts, but no extended stretches of any of these texts survive in
the Bible. The book of Job has a clear antecedent in a Babylonian poem
known as “The Babylonian Theodicy,” in which a despondent sufferer
complains that the gods have treated him unjustly while rewarding
wicked men; his complaints alternate with replies from a friend who
tries to comfort him and justify divine ways. Yet this poem served only
200 MLQ June 2007 237
as a general inspiration for the author of the book of Job, which does
not translate or even directly paraphrase any of the poem’s passages
and which differs from it significantly in formal terms. Whereas the
Babylonian poem consists of twenty-seven orderly eleven-line stanzas,
neatly alternating between the sufferer and his friend, the book of
Job uses an old prose story as a frame tale and develops its argument
through long, free-form speeches by several speakers. All in all, then,
against literary circulation — no doubt often a permeable membrane,
but a boundary or even a barrier nonetheless.
Conversely, as Gilgamesh’s impressive distribution shows, a wide-
spread writing system could penetrate boundaries of other sorts, eas-
ing a work’s entry into a new region and even a new language. A script
also has subtle but far-reaching effects on what is written to begin with.
Scripts may illustrate the classic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis better than
language does: writing systems profoundly shape the thought world
of those who employ them, not for ontological reasons grounded in
the sign system as such but because scripts are never learned in a vac-
uum. Instead, a writing system is often the centerpiece of a program
of education and employment, and in learning a script one absorbs
key elements of a broad literary history: its terms of reference, habits
of style, and poetics, often transcending those of any one language or
country.
Here again, cuneiform provides an exemplary and well-documented
case. Developed by early Sumerian settlers in southern Mesopotamia, it
was soon taken up by their more numerous Akkadian-speaking neigh-
bors. By the time they began to record extensive texts beyond prayers,
financial memoranda, and short chronicles, the Sumerians had been
absorbed politically and socially into Akkadian culture. Yet the Sume-
rian language retained high prestige as a literary, religious, and philo-
sophical medium. During the second and first millennia BCE, students
were trained in both languages, whether they liked it or not. As one
student lamented, in Sumerian, in a Babylonian school text:
The door monitor said, “Why did you go out without my say-so?”
and he beat me.
The water monitor said, “Why did you help yourself to water with-
out my say-so?” and he beat me.
238 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 201
The Sumerian monitor said, “You spoke in Akkadian!” and he beat
me.
My teacher said, “Your handwriting is not at all good!” and he beat
me.3
The sheer difficulty of learning syllabic cuneiform, with its hundreds
of clusters of tiny wedge-shaped marks, no doubt increased a scribe’s
disinclination to read widely outside that script, and it certainly would
have discouraged outsiders — as it does still — from taking up cunei-
form studies for pleasure. Even the Egyptian hieroglyphic system,
largely phonetic in character and far easier on the eyes, was daunting to
learn. “Your heart is denser than an obelisk,” one Egyptian instructor
complained to his pupil; “though I beat you with every kind of stick, you
do not listen. . . . Though I spend the day telling you ‘Write,’ it seems
like a plague to you. Writing” — the teacher sternly concludes — “is very
pleasant!”4
Much as a nonnative speaker today may learn minimal “business”
English or Japanese for commercial purposes, many scribes would have
mastered enough cuneiform to get by with letters or bills of lading,
but they would never have had the skill to enter into the rich liter-
ary world of complex cuneiform or hieroglyphic texts. Those few who
had survived the long apprenticeship, however, possessed a rare and
prestigious knowledge and seem to have taken little interest in the lit-
eratures of the smaller and poorer societies that employed alphabetic
scripts. The very simplicity of the alphabetic scripts, foundation of their
eventual victory over cuneiform and hieroglyphics, probably seemed
to the cultivated Egyptian or Babylonian scribe to be a mark of lesser
refinement and weaker expressive power. Cuneiform had more than lit-
erary prestige: not unlike Latin in early modern Europe, it had political
value as an elite language, available only to people of substantial educa-
tion and social standing, its complexity shielding messages from com-
moners’ eyes. When a provincial governor asked Sargon II of Assyria
around 710 BCE if he could use the more convenient Aramaic, Sargon
3 Quoted in The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, trans. A. R. George (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1999), xviii.
4 Papyrus Lansing, in Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, trans. Miriam
Lichtheim, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 168 – 69.
202 MLQ June 2007
sharply reproved him: “[As to what you wrote]: . . . ‘if it is acceptable
to the king, let me write and send my messages to the king on Ara-
maic parchment sheets’ — why would you not write and send me mes-
sages in Akkadian? Really, your message must be drawn up in this very
manner — this is a fixed regulation!”5 Bilingual but monoscriptural,
Babylonian scribes freely translated back and forth between Sumerian
and Akkadian, and as Akkadian became the lingua franca across the
Fertile Crescent, scribes throughout the region developed multilingual
abilities based in a single script. The scribal culture grounded in cunei-
form created a strong bond across the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite
empires, whose leaders were often at each others’ throats. As a result,
even though Mesopotamia and the broader Fertile Crescent were politi-
cally fragmented under various regimes, it is appropriate to speak in
literary terms of a single “cuneiform world.”
It was a world that not everyone wanted to join. As cuneiform
extended its reach, some cultures chose to resist absorption by develop-
ing or maintaining a local script. This element of resistance to a threat-
ening or hegemonic power may help explain why we see little evidence
of direct translation from one scriptworld to another in Near Eastern
antiquity: writers were more likely to adapt, parody, or even deliber-
ately mistranslate material they were reading in the unwanted script.
In the Bible, for instance, writers adapted Babylonian texts in a mode
of polemical rewriting or mistranslation rather than in the modes of
translation and expansive adaptation that were more common in the
cuneiform world itself.
The biblical story of the Flood famously resembles the flood story
told to Gilgamesh by his ancestor Uta-napishtim in the eleventh tab-
let of Gilgamesh, and, given its wide distribution, it is entirely possible
that the Hebrew writers knew the epic. Alternatively, both stories may
derive from a common Babylonian source, The Atrahasis Epic. Yet like
the echoes of Gilgamesh in Homer, the relation to the Bible is one not
of translation but of a pointed retelling from a very different perspec-
tive. The Bible puts the moral burden on sinful humanity, whereas the
Babylonian works assign it to the fickle gods. Disturbed in their sleep by
5 Manfred Dietrich, ed., The Babylonian Correspondence of Sargon and Sennacherib
(Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2003), 5.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 203 204 MLQ June 2007 239
the noisy human race, the gods impulsively decide to wipe them off the
face of the earth and then are horrified when they realize what evil they
have unleashed. Belet-ili, the goddess who has brought on the flood,
cries out in bitter regret:
How could I speak evil in the gods’ assembly,
and declare a war to destroy my people?
It is I who gave birth, these people are mine!
And now, like fish, they fill the ocean!
(Epic of Gilgamesh, 92)

The Bible rejects the Babylonian conception of a polytheistic divine

court whose members are subject to all-too-human impulses and mis-
judgment, and so the Noah story can be told only from a radically dif-
ferent point of view. While they apparently picked up the outlines of the
Flood story and various details from the older texts, the biblical writ-
ers turned the story upside down — and they retold it in prose rather
than in verse, a change that further muted any resemblance to outright
translation.
The book of Job also has a Babylonian source, and we might expect
it to have a less polemical relation to it. After all, the book of Job is a
far less orthodox work than the book of Genesis: its characters are not
even identified as Hebrews, and it disturbingly questions the justice of
God. Yet it too departs dramatically from the terms of its source, “The
Babylonian Theodicy.” The Babylonian poem displays an orthodoxy of
its own, inscribed in the very form of the poem, an extended acrostic.
Within each of its twenty-seven stanzas, all eleven lines begin with the
same sign (fig. 2). Together, the twenty-seven signs spell out a ringing
endorsement of the religious and political order: a-na-ku sa-ag-gi-il-ki-
i-nam-ub-bi-ib, ma-aš-ma-šu, ka-ri-bu ša i-li ú ša-ar-ri, “I am Saggil-kinam-
ubbib, incantation-priest, adorer of the gods and the king.”6 Not a Figure 2. The first three stanzas of “The Babylonian Theodicy,” whose opening char-
translation at all, the book of Job explodes its source both formally and acters spell out anaku (“I”). As redrawn in Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature
conceptually; setting the texts side by side gives an effect not unlike a
juxtaposition of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with Milton’s “On His Blind-
ness,” so very different in its hard-won faith that “they also serve who
only stand and wait.”

6 See W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960),

64.
240 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 205 206 MLQ June 2007

The general relation of the Bible to Akkadian sources, then, is one How shall we sing the Lord’s song
of wary distance at best, resulting in fundamental transformations and in a foreign land? (Ps. 137:2 – 4)
deliberate mistranslation. In Genesis, for example, the Yahwistic writer
In that climactic line, eik nashir et-shir-Adonai al admath nekhar? the term
claims that Babylon took its name from Hebrew balal, “to mix up”
nekhar, “foreign,” is aptly chosen for its Babylonian setting: it is cog-
(11:9). This satirical jab at the Hebrews’ oppressive, polytheistic neigh-
nate with Akkadian nakarum, “enemy” or “rebel.” The psalmist ends
bors and periodic overlords ignores the obvious derivation of “Baby-
with a stark appeal for revenge against his hated hosts: “Happy shall
lon” from Akkadian bab-ilı̄ “gate of God,” meaning Babylon’s patron
he be who takes your little ones / and dashes them against the rock!”
god, Marduk, whose ziggurat dominated the city. Less flamboyant than
(Ps. 137:9). Though these lines apostrophize the Hebrews’ captors,
the Yahwists, the Priestly writers who composed Genesis 1 were equally
the psalmist certainly did not want any actual Babylonians to get this
insistent on avoiding a clear translational link between Hebrew and
message. Little wonder that the Hebrews sang nothing like this for the
Babylonian culture: when God creates the sun and the moon, the text
Babylonians — and little wonder that they clung to their uncouth script,
denies them their plain Hebrew names, shemesh and yareah, instead
a further shield from prying eyes.
speaking awkwardly of ma’or gadol and ma’or katin (big light, little light
In the book of Daniel, the foreign script baffles the evil king
[1:14 – 18]). In this way the Priestly writers avoided naming the Babylo-
Belshazzar when God writes his punishment on the wall. Admittedly,
nian sun god, Shamash, or the divine moon (Akkadian irihu, cognate
Belshazzar himself probably could not read (Near Eastern monarchs
of Hebrew yareah). The entire story of the Tower of Babel, seemingly a
rarely bothered to learn), but when he calls his wise men to interpret
tragic tale of linguistic loss and dispossession, may have conveyed an
the writing, none of them can understand it, either. This portion of
almost opposite valence: it is a story of resistance, an account of how
Daniel is written in Aramaic, a language commonly spoken throughout
Akkadian lost its claim to be spoken by everyone, thanks to the Baby-
Mesopotamia by Belshazzar’s time, and the Aramaic terms that God
lonians’ impious pride.
uses (mene, tekel, parsin) have cognates in Akkadian as well. But these
During their long exile in Babylon, and the much longer period of
common words mean nothing to the Babylonians, whom the biblical
cuneiform prestige across much of the Near East, the Hebrew scribes
writer portrays as incompetent outside the boundaries of their pre-
deliberately chose to nurture their own culture not only by preserv-
ferred script. Indeed, the wise men cannot even read the words: “Then
ing their language but also by refusing to shift into the cosmopolitan
all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or
script of the more powerful cultures to their north and east or the
make the interpretation known to the king. Then King Belshazzar was
magnificent hieroglyphics of imperial Egypt. When the psalmist sings
greatly alarmed, and his color changed; and his lords were perplexed”
of the Hebrews hanging their lyres in the willows al naharoth Bavel, “by
(Dan. 5:8 – 9). The king is forced to call for the young Hebrew captive
the waters of Babylon,” too sad to sing, the scene does not portray only
Daniel, who can read the words and explain the king’s fate to him.
sorrow, still less an inability to sing, conveyed as it is in some of the most
With divine irony, God makes Belshazzar an offer he can’t refuse in a
moving verses in the Bible. Rather, the scene describes the Hebrews’
script he can’t understand.
stubborn refusal to sing for their foreign masters:
On the willows there The early case of cuneiform and its Near Eastern rivals shows a pattern
we hung up our lyres. that can be found in the spread of more fully global languages since
For there our captors then: the leading edge of a global language is its globalizing script,
required of us songs,
which can far outrun the spread of the language itself. Once adopted,
and our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” a global script often functioned in two quite different ways at once.
On the one hand, the new technology for writing became a powerful
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 207
force for cultural cohesion in its adopted territory, for it gave a com-
mon literacy to groups that had had differing scripts or none at all. On
adopting the Roman alphabet in colonial New Spain, for instance, the
Mexica, Zapotecs, and Maya gained a common writing system far eas-
ier to learn and employ than their incompatible hieroglyphic systems.
They could more readily learn and read each others’ languages, and
over time literacy spread far beyond the elite circles that had mastered
the old hieroglyphics. On the other hand, more complex scripts had
advantages of their own. The early cultural and political consolidation
of China was fostered by the widespread adoption of the pictographic
writing developed by the Shang people along the Yellow River during
the second millennium BCE. Nonphonetic at base, the Chinese charac-
ters could be used by peoples of widely different languages or mutually
incomprehensible dialects, such as the Cantonese to the south and the
Muslim Hui to the west, far beyond the system’s Mandarin-speaking
base. Over many centuries China has had a national script rather than
a national language.
Sometimes local groups have welcomed a powerful foreign script,
but from Hellenistic times onward indigenous peoples have often had
good reason to beware of Greeks bearing Greek. Even when the gift
was only an alphabet and not the full-scale imposition of a foreign lan-
guage, it came with cultural strings attached. When Saint Cyril adapted
Greek letters to create the Cyrillic alphabet that became ubiquitous in
many Slavic countries, the new alphabet was certainly useful for local
purposes, but it also provided a powerful conduit for scripture — Cyril’s
direct concern — and fostered a broader connection to Greek Ortho-
dox culture. Cyrillic both gave visible form to the Slavic languages and
enclosed them within certain limits. “While the Slavs besieged Con-
stantinople in 860 A.D.,” writes the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić in
Dictionary of the Khazars, Cyril “was setting a trap for them in the quiet
of his monastic cell in Asia Minor’s Olympus — he was creating the
first letters of the Slavic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but
the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and
so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly
language within them like a bird.” To force the Slav’s language into
the cage of their script, Cyril and his brother Methodius “broke it in
pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril’s letters, and
208 MLQ June 2007 241
bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the
soles of their feet.”7 Thus the Slavic language is first caged and then
cemented with “Greek clay.”
Pavić was dead serious in describing Cyrillic as an embodiment of
violence. His novel was published in Cyrillic script during the waning
years of the Tito regime, in the language then known as Serbo-Croatian.
As Yugoslavia broke apart after Tito’s death, Serbia split away from
Croatia and the language was torn apart. Serbian and Croatian had
been virtually indistinguishable except in script (the former written
in Cyrillic, the latter typically in the Roman alphabet), but they were
now declared distinct languages, and Pavić took the opportunity to
have his book “translated” into the Roman alphabet. Though for most
books it would have been a simple transliteration, for the alphabetically
arranged Dictionary the new version acquired a new order of entries,
so the reading process changed. In this way Pavić’s Cyrillic °»Â»ËÌÅÃ
«ÀÒÈÃÅ became his Romanized Hazarski Rečnik, almost every word of it
identical to the original but almost every letter changed.
In and of themselves, scripts convey little cultural content, but they
are never simply learned “in themselves.” Often a new script is used to
convey first a scripture and then a whole complex of values, assump-
tions, and traditions. These soon include secular as well as religious
stories and poetry, and as a result even writing composed in the indig-
enous language finds itself in dialogue with the religious and literary
traditions that follow in the script’s wake.
It is insufficient, then, to speak only of language in thinking of “the
Latin Middle Ages” or of global Arabic. These languages exist in a pen-
umbra of the even more global scripts that come with them and extend
beyond them. Often an imported script’s “home” language is learned
and written by the same people who will use that script to compose
work in their native tongue, as when Akkadian speakers were trained
in Sumerian as part of their scribal education, or when medieval Japa-
nese poets composed Chinese as well as Japanese verse. The vernacular
works of such bilingual poets are likely to be infused with values taken
over from the foreign language that they also use. But even writers
7 Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, trans.
Christina Pribićević-Zorić (New York: Knopf, 1988), 63 – 64.
242 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 209
who use the new script only for their native vernacular frequently show
deep awareness of the culture that brought forth the script, sometimes
appropriating its stories, sometimes parodying or contesting them,
often doing both at once.
Good examples of this complex relation can be found in Iceland,
which produced one of the richest vernacular literatures in medieval
Europe. In converting to Christianity and making a parallel shift from
runes to the Latin alphabet, eleventh-century Icelanders set the stage
for prolific vernacular writing of sagas and skaldic poetry in the ensu-
ing three centuries. Sometimes Icelanders wrote in Latin, usually for
religious purposes; sometimes they translated French romances into
Icelandic; yet more often they composed their own poems and tales
in Icelandic, using a version of the Roman alphabet adapted to local
speech. The Norse sagas are not part of Latin literature, yet they are
very much part of the Latin scriptworld.
A subtle but far-reaching orientation of local lore toward Chris-
tian and classical traditions can be found in Norse texts where one
might least expect it, such as in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (ca. 1240).
Snorri says that he has assembled it, the fullest medieval compendium
of pagan Germanic myths, as a resource for poetic allusions and tropes.
He is anxious for young poets to know the stories behind the epithets
and metaphors traditionally used in skaldic poetry, lest the old poetic
language die out. Yet in his preface he does much more than present
the myths as a poetic repertory; instead, he boldly connects the north-
ern gods to classical history, treating them as legendary heroes who
were later taken for gods and even offering linguistic analyses to link
them to Troy:
Near the center of the world where what we call Turkey lies, was built
the most famous of all palaces and halls — Troy by name. . . . One of
the kings was called Múnón or Mennón. He married a daughter of
the chief king Priam who was called Tróán, and they had a son named
Trór — we call him Thór. . . . he traveled far and wide exploring all the
regions of the world and by himself overcoming all the berserks and
giants and an enormous dragon and many wild beasts.8
8 The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson: Tales from Norse Mythology, trans. Jean I. Young
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 25 – 26.
210 MLQ June 2007
Having given Priam a son named Tróán (perhaps derived from
Troas, the region of Troy), Snorri then gives Tróán a son whose name
he naturalizes by affixing to it the typical r-ending of a Norse noun.
Snorri then has only to substitute a þ for the initial tr to turn Tror into
the Norse god Thór. Snorri relates that Thór’s descendant Óðin jour-
neyed north with his family and began to rule in Germany and then
in Sweden: “There he appointed chieftains after the pattern of Troy.”
Snorri even claims that the collective name for the Norse gods, the
Æsir, derives from that of their homeland, Asia (27).
Iceland provides a fascinating case of a country choosing to enter
a new scriptworld as an independent nation, and the process was well
documented even at the time. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Icelandic scholars freely experimented with the alphabet, adapting it
to the sounds of Norse and theorizing the relation of speech to writ-
ing. Most of the surviving manuscripts of the Prose Edda, in fact, are
bound together with one or more grammatical treatises; the Codex
Wormianus includes no fewer than four of them, inventively known
today as the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Grammatical Treatises. The
writer of the Second Grammatical Treatise draws a musical analogy for his
script, inviting the reader to play the sounds on his chart as if it were
an instrument: “The mouth and the tongue are the playing-field of
words. On that field are raised those letters which make up the whole
language, and language plucks some of them like harp strings, or as
when the keys of a simphonie are pressed” (fig. 3).9 (Recently imported
from France, the simphonie was a kind of fiddle with strings that were
stopped with keys to sound a given note.) The grammarian presents his
chart of vowels and consonants as a sort of keyboard:
Here there are eleven vowels crosswise on the page and twenty conso-
nants lengthwise; the consonants are placed as keys in a simphonie,
and the vowels as strings. There are twelve consonants which have a
sound both when the key is pulled and when it is pushed; but the eight
which are written last have half a sound as compared with the former;
some make a sound if you pull towards you, some if you push away from
you. (Raschellà, 73)
9 Fabrizio D. Raschellà, The So-Called “Second Grammatical Treatise”: An Orthographic
Pattern of Late Thirteenth-Century Icelandic (Florence: Le Monnier, 1982), 55.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 211 212 MLQ June 2007 243
Writing around 1170, the author of the First Grammatical Treatise
shows a sovereign freedom in experimenting with the newly imported
alphabet. Though it may appear that the Icelanders are giving in to
foreign ways, he asserts that the Norse alphabet is no mere adaptation
but a new creation: “As languages are all unlike, ever since they parted
and branched off from one and the same language, it is now needful
to use different letters in writing them, and not the same for all, just as
the Greeks do not write Greek with Latin letters, and the Latin writers
do not write with Greek letters . . . but each nation writes its language
with letters of its own.”10
The First Grammarian then describes how he has accepted some
Latin letters, “rejected” others, and invented new letters as needed,
particularly for vowels, “since our language has the greatest number
of vowel sounds” (Haugen, 13). He also uses small capitals to indicate
lengthened consonants; otherwise, he notes, it is impossible to scan
skaldic poetry correctly, and “the skalds are our authorities in all prob-
lems touching the art of writing or speaking, just as craftsmen [in their
crafts] and lawyers in the laws” (20). Having set out an alphabet of fifty
letters (counting those formed with diacritics as new letters), the First
Grammarian ends with a note of encouragement — or a challenge — to
the reader: “Now any man who wishes to write . . . let him value my
efforts and excuse my ignorance, and let him use the alphabet which
has already been written here, until he gets one that he likes better”
(29 – 30).
Snorri, then, was writing in a world of sovereign grammatological
adaptation, guided by poetry and by analogy to musical instruments
imported from France. His treatment of classical and Christian liter-
ary material shows a similar freedom. Though he is a devout Christian
and insists that Thór and Óðin were mortal heroes, Snorri opens the
body of the Prose Edda with a virtual parody of the Christian Trinity. A
Swedish king, Gylfi, goes to see the Æsir, who have created such a stir
in the region, and is admitted to their castle by a juggler of knives who
keeps seven in the air at once. This ominous juggler leads him to the
throne room of the Æsir, where Gylfi finds “three high-seats one above
Figure 3. Codex Wormianus, “symphonie” diagram from the Second Grammatical Trea-
tise, late thirteenth century
10 Einar Haugen, “First Grammatical Treatise”: The Earliest Germanic Phonology (Bal-

timore: Linguistic Society of America, 1950), 12.

244 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 213
the other, and a man seated in each.” Their names are Hár, Jafnhár,
and Thriði — “High One,” “Just-as-High,” and “Third” (30 – 31). This
parodic Trinity then answers his questions about ancient times, retell-
ing the great Norse myths about creation, the ash tree Yggdrasil that
holds the world together despite the dragon gnawing at its root, and
the coming end of the world, Ragnarök, the twilight (or judgment)
of the gods. Finally, the Æsir tire of all the questions and end the ses-
sion — not by dismissing Gylfi but by vanishing, with a final word of
admonition from High One:
“And now, if you have anything more to ask, I can’t think how you can
manage it, for I’ve never heard anyone tell more of the story of the
world. Make what use of it you can.”
The next thing was that [Gylfi] heard a tremendous noise on all
sides and turned about; and when he had looked all round him, he
was standing in the open air on a level plain. He saw neither hall nor
stronghold. Then he went on his way and coming home to his kingdom
related the tidings he had seen and heard, and after him these stories
have been handed down from one man to another. (92 – 93)
Writing two and a half centuries after Iceland’s conversion in 1000,
Snorri was making what use he could of the pagan myths in a Chris-
tian world, so his strategic linking of the old material to the classical
tradition can be seen as a fairly late stage in the development of the
medieval Latin scriptworld. Yet in texts written closer to the time that
the Roman alphabet was adopted, we find equally noteworthy adapta-
tions, even by writers in settings where pagan practices were still very
much in use. Intriguing examples come from sixteenth-century Mexico
and Guatemala, where Mayan and Mexica writers within a generation
of the conquest began to use the Roman alphabet to write down their
old stories and poems in their native languages. The adoption of the
Roman alphabet had an enormous effect on the shaping of the poetry
we can now read.
First, the Roman alphabet gave native poets a far easier and more
nuanced technology for recording their words. The hieroglyphic sys-
tems of the Maya and the Mexica (the Aztecs and their neighbors) were
highly effective for conveying mathematical and astronomical data, in
which the Aztecs and particularly the Maya were world leaders. Other-
wise, these systems seem to have served mostly as prompts to memory,
214 MLQ June 2007
well suited for noting key facts about historical chronology and events
but not sufficiently developed to record a set of words to express those
events. Linguists are still deciphering the surviving hieroglyphic texts
(many inscriptions and books were burned by the conquistadores),
and so our knowledge of the preconquest corpus is limited. However, it
appears that the hieroglyphic systems did not lend themselves to full-
scale poetic or narrative expression.
The imported Roman alphabet gave native writers an opportunity
to record their literature in a form not dependent on the memory of
the text’s users. Yet this alphabet was imposed on the radically differ-
ent phonetic systems of Mesoamerican languages directly, without the
extensive additions and modifications that had made Cyrillic, for exam-
ple, almost unrecognizable to readers of Greek. Inevitably, what the
native writers could record was pervasively “normalized” toward Span-
ish and Latin phonetics. Variant spellings indicate that native words
were bent into the nearest approximations that the writer could achieve
within the limited resources of the new alphabet. The Nahuatl word
for “flower,” for instance, is usually spelled xochitl (with the x having the
sound sh as usual in sixteenth-century Spanish), yet some manuscripts
spell it suchitl. Quite possibly, the actual Nahuatl word began with some
distinct sound not fully captured either by xo or by su. At least ch is
common to both spellings, but there is really no telling how it should
have been pronounced. Over time some native words began to be
pronounced as though they were Spanish words; thus the Mexica city
of Cuauhnahuac, “where the eagle landed,” turned into Cuernavaca,
“cow’s horn.”
As recorded in the sixteenth century, hundreds of Nahuatl words
sound surprisingly similar to Spanish or Latin words: “god,” for exam-
ple, is teotl, a kissing cousin of deus (dative deo) or dios. Occasional com-
mentators over the years have therefore postulated some direct line
of transmission, as though an enterprising Aeneas had crossed the
Atlantic, dictionary in hand. Yet the similarity of teotl to deus is more
readily explained by the fact that most early colonial Nahuatl texts were
written by native informants trained in Mexico City at the Seminary
of the Holy Cross, established only a decade after the conquest, where
the language of instruction was Latin. The native writers were capable
of mixing Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish in a single sentence, as in a
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 215
marginal gloss to one Aztec poem: next to a reference to Moyocoyatzin
(“the one who creates himself,” an epithet of the god Tezcatlipoca), the
writer notes, “Yehuan ya dios glosa” — “This is to be read as ‘God.’ ”11
Even when they treat purely preconquest material, then, the earliest
colonial-era native texts are already profoundly shaped by their writers’
entry into the Latin scriptworld. This shaping extends beyond the lexi-
cal level, for few if any of these texts present “pure” preconquest mate-
rial, though commentators have often wished to read them as though
they did. The Mayan Popol Vuh, for example, has usually been taken as a
timeless mythic narrative. Although it is certainly “an invaluable source
of knowledge of ancient Mayan mythology and culture,” it is equally
a product of the colonial encounter.12 The Popol Vuh as we have it was
composed during the mid-1550s in the Quiché language but with the
Roman alphabet. The alphabetic Popol Vuh is based on a hieroglyphic
text now lost; written only thirty years after the conquest and focused
on ancient myths, it is already in dialogue with the biblical traditions
that were transmitted to the writers along with the alphabet.
From the start, the book’s authors openly allude to their present
setting:
Here we shall inscribe, here we shall implant the Ancient Word, the
potential and source for everything done in the citadel of Quiché, in
the nation of the Quiché people. . . . We shall write about this now
amid the preaching of God in Christendom now. We shall bring it out
because there is no longer a place to see it. . . . There is the original
book and ancient writing, but he who reads and ponders it hides his
face.13
The new technology of the Latin alphabet enables the Mayan authors to
give a new and probably much expanded version of their hieroglyphic
“Council Book,” which they claim to have already lost but which they
11 Angel María Garibay K., ed., Poesía Náhuatl, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Historia, Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl,
1964 – 68), 1:12.
12 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 30 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1976), Micropaedia, 8:120.
13 Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glo-
ries of Gods and Kings, ed. and trans. Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985), 71.
216 MLQ June 2007 245
appear to consult as they retell their stories. From their references to it,
it seems to have been basically an aid to divination, devoted largely to
charting the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, with brief nota-
tions of the stories of divine activities thought to underlie the astral
order. So the alphabetic Popol Vuh is a much fuller literary work than
its hieroglyphic predecessor would have been. At the same time, it is
deeply marked by its authors’ fear of the loss of cultural memory threat-
ened by the invasion that has brought the alphabet to them.
A comparable concern over memory pervades Snorri’s Prose Edda.
In his prologue Snorri describes the early growth of the human race in
terms of a material gain but also a memory loss:
As the population of the world increased . . . the great majority of man-
kind, loving the pursuit of money and power, left off paying homage
to God. This grew to such a pitch that they boycotted any reference to
God, and then how could anyone tell their sons about the marvels con-
nected with Him? In the end they lost the very name of God and there
was not to be found in all the world a man who knew his Maker. (23)
Snorri is nominally talking about the ancients who forgot the true god
and fell into paganism, yet his own book is devoted to telling young
poets about the marvels performed by the pagan gods whose names
are now boycotted under Christianity. The anxiety for cultural memory
is expressed in the Prose Edda by no less a figure than the chief god,
Óðin:
Two ravens sit on his shoulders and bring to his ears all the news that
they see or hear; they are called Hugin [Thought] and Munin [Mem-
ory]. He sends them out at daybreak to fly over the whole world, and
they come back at breakfast-time; by this means he comes to know a
great deal about what is going on, and on account of this men call him
the god-of-ravens. As it is said:
Over the world
every day
fly Hugin and Munin;
I fear that Hugin
will not come back,
though I’m more concerned about Munin.
(63 – 64)
246 Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 217
Óðin’s concern for memory’s return is found among the ancient Quiché
gods as well. The second half of the Popol Vuh centers on the migra-
tion of the divine or semidivine Quiché ancestors from Tulan, in east-
ern Yucatán, to their new home in Guatemala. As they head westward,
they bewail the loss of their homeland, which they describe as first and
foremost a linguistic loss: “ ‘Alas! We’ve left our language behind. How
did we do it? We’re lost! Where were we deceived? We had only one
language when we came to Tulan, and we had only one place of emer-
gence and origin. We haven’t done well,’ said all the tribes beneath the
trees and bushes” (173). A later expedition retrieves their sacred writ-
ings, and with them the Quiché ancestors can establish themselves in
their new land.
The ancestral journey not only is shaped by indigenous cultural
memories but also builds on biblical themes. For example, the Quiché
ancestors reach their new homeland by parting the waters of the sea: “It
isn’t clear how they crossed over the sea. They crossed over as if there
were no sea. They just crossed over on some stones, stones piled up in
the sand. And they gave it a name: Rock Rows, Furrowed Sands was
their name for the place where they crossed through the midst of the
sea. Where the waters divided, they crossed over” (177). This account
combines two modes of crossing the sea, by a rock bridge or by the part-
ing of the waters. Very likely the rock bridge was the original means, as
reflected in the name Rock Rows, while the second has been adapted
from the story of Moses parting the Red Sea.
This identification of a biblical source might seem random, even
far-fetched, were it not for an explicit reference to this very piece of
biblical history in a related text, the Title of the Lords of Totonicapán. This
work was written in 1554, at approximately the same time as the alpha-
betic Popol Vuh, and quite possibly by the same person or people. In
the Title the native nobility of Totonicapán record their history to jus-
tify their retention of their lands in the face of Spanish efforts to take
them. The crossing of the Caribbean from Tulan is said to have taken
place under the guidance of their culture hero, Balam-Quitzé, who
“when they arrived at the edge of the sea . . . touched it with his staff
and at once a path opened, which then closed up again, for thus the
great God wished it to be done, because they were sons of Abraham and
218 MLQ June 2007
Jacob.”14 Clearly aware of the Spaniards’ speculation that the civilized
peoples of Mesoamerica are the lost tribes of Israel, the lords of Totoni-
capán frame their history in biblical terms to assert that the title to
their land was given them by the Spaniards’ god himself.
Both in the ancient “cuneiform world” and in the farthest northern
and western expansions of the Roman alphabet, literary production was
shaped as much by the spread of scripts as by the spread of particular
languages. The vast increase in translation over the past two centuries
has spurred tremendous movement across scriptworlds, but even now,
as the example of Pavić suggests, local cultures make important deci-
sions when they position themselves in relation to global scripts — or
when they have scripts thrust on them — and so this paradigm retains
its relevance today.
Observing the interplay of language and script in earlier peri-
ods can also give us a better understanding of the origins of modern
national literatures. When he was formulating the concept of Weltlitera-
tur in the 1820s, during the heyday of European nationalism, Goethe
spoke of world literature naturally as based on the interactions of estab-
lished national literatures, after which world literature was a secondary
or even future formation. “The epoch of world literature is at hand,”
he announced to his young disciple Eckermann, “and everyone must
strive to hasten its approach.”15 The spread of scripts in earlier periods
shows instead that literatures tend to develop in just the opposite direc-
tion: within — and often against — an existing regional or global world
literature.
It is a rare country that creates its own script and its own literature
in fundamental independence from other societies; ancient Egypt is
more the exception than the rule. More typical are the Sumerians and
the Phoenicians, whose pioneering scripts were quickly taken up by
more powerful groups around them. Most literatures are formed within
broad systems grounded in the power of scripts to cross the boundaries
14 The Annals of the Cakchiquels; Title of the Lords of Totonicapán, trans. Adrián Reci-
nos, Dionisio José Chonay, and Delia Goetz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1953), 171.
15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1823 – 1832), trans.
John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 132.
Damrosch Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and World Literature 219 247
of time, space, and language itself. Arising in a transcultural context, a
local or national literature must negotiate a double bind: the new script
that can give form to a people’s traditions brings with it the threat of
the local culture’s absorption into a broader milieu.
Works as disparate as Dictionary of the Khazars, the Popol Vuh, and
the Prose Edda show that writers repeatedly find creative ways to negoti-
ate these tensions. Noah’s raven finds nothing to bring back to him, but
Óðin’s ravens are more successful: they bring back news from around
the world. God of wisdom, Óðin is blessed — and cursed — with fore-
knowledge, and he knows that he can use the ravens’ reports only for
a time, until the gods enter their fated twilight and fade from mem-
ory: one day Munin will fail to return. Óðin is also the god of poetry,
however, and perhaps he foresees the day when poets will adopt the
script brought by the dispensation that will displace him. Resisting
the oblivion threatened by the advancing culture, these poets will use
the foreign script to celebrate their former patron and his marvelous
deeds, and their poems will keep alive the memory of the raven named
Memory.

David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia

University and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Associa-
tion. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003) and The Buried Book: The
Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007). He is general editor
of The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004).