Abstract
In the preface to the English edition of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova focuses on the existence of a literary world/universe, which maintains a relative autonomy from the world and its political disparities and restrictions. This suggested ideal of a literary space is an attempt to posit world literature as an alternative chronotope in which literary production can survive and multiply transnationally. My paper will offer a reconsideration of this global literary space, read via a philosophical perspective, shaped by the famous discussion of the common and community as conducted by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, among others. Within the above theoretical frame, my attempt will be to reread Casanova’s contribution to World Literature as a desired community of literature(s), formed by the coming together of qualunque singularities which co-exist and co-belong without “any representable condition of belonging” (Agamben). Furthermore, the idea of qualunque (whatever) will constitute the starting point for the ethico-political reconsideration and reconceptualisation of the global literary space offered by Casanova, not only without borders but also without hierarchies.
Highlights
The Problem of the NameWhat crisis? Was it foreseeable or unforeseeable? And what if the crisis even concerned the very concept of crisis or of critique? (Jacques Derrida, On the Name)In Tradition of the Immemorial, Agamben discusses the problem of presupposition, which is inherent within language, claiming that “discourse cannot say what is named by the name” (Agamben 1999, 107)
This paper focuses on the problem of nomination in the field of world literature, by reconsidering the name with its constructive and formative power
All these epistemological approaches within the project have contributed to this noble intention. Both translation studies and World Literature extended the promise of worldly criticism, politicized cosmopolitanism, comparability aesthetics galvanized by a deprovincialized Europe, an academically redistributed area studies and a redrawn map of language geopolitics (Apter 25)
Summary
What crisis? Was it foreseeable or unforeseeable? And what if the crisis even concerned the very concept of crisis or of critique? (Jacques Derrida, On the Name). In Potentialities, Agamben’s approach to language is constructed primarily upon his readings of Plato’s Seventh Letter and Aristotle’s On Interpretation, together with the writings of Benjamin, Kommerell, Milner, and Derrida It is beyond the scope of the present study to elaborate on these arguments, yet it is necessary to explain that Agamben’s commentary points towards a sort of “original position” within language with its attempt to deconstruct presuppositions, namely names: “The name already belongs to a paradoxical term since the name cannot name itself: to name the name, I will no longer be able to distinguish between word and thing, concept and object, the term and its reference” (Agamben 1996, 213). It is there as potentiality, to take place and to expose itself in action, similar to Blanchot’s description of the community: “It is what exposes by exposing itself” (Blanchot 12)
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