Literary Theory in Reverse: The Literariness of Theory

Abstract

Beginning with Faust’s translation of the first line of the Gospel of John in Goethe’s drama, as well as Friedrich Kittler’s interpretation of Faust’s interpretative act in Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900), this chapter reflects on both the status of the literary studies scholar and the contested place of literary theory today. Especially poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinkers (like Kittler) have been accused of endangering the seriousness of the academic project: by phrasing their propositions in vague and obscure ways, by employing dark metaphors, and even by deconstructing their own presumptions, those professing ‘theory’ seem to deliberately abandon the long-established consensus in the human sciences on objectivity, including clarity of style, and install a deceitful pseudoscience instead. However, as the chapter proposes, precisely the fact that theory often appears to be ‘literary’ rather than ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ might be an advantage rather than a shortcoming.

In order to fathom some of the semantic scope of literariness in this respect, it proves fruitful to consider Derek Attridge’s claims regarding the impossibility of clearly separating literary from non-literary language. His assumption that literary theory depends on the theorist’s experiencing of literature—an experiencing constituted by an excess of ‘rationality’—is combined in the chapter with Paul de Man’s advocating of a subversively political, because self-confidently ‘rhetorical’, kind of theory. Importantly, a heeding of de Man’s line of argument helps to strengthen the chapter’s historical trajectory, precisely because, for him, the demand for objectivity in literary studies is far from self-evident; rather, it is the consequence of past knowledge formations. In his essay ‘The Resistance to Theory‘, he has therefore attempted to unsettle the priority of logic—a priority that has been the effect of a naturalizing of the hierarchies embedded within the medieval grouping of the liberal arts in the trivium and the quadrivium. According to de Man, knowledge of the world by way of language—including the language of literary studies—has customarily been channelled by the unconditional and non-contingent necessity of mathematical soundness. To provoke rhetorical excesses, hence, may be a way of disrupting such habitual channelling.

The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to questioning—or at least putting in perspective—its own previous assumptions. Again, this is done by historicizing them. Firstly, attention is drawn to the fact that the most elementary tenets of contemporary theory may have their origins in the philosophical and poetological assumptions of the Romantic movement, within which they thus may be ‘trapped’. Secondly, it is suggested that the coming into being of academic literary scholarship in the period at about 1800 was dependent on its inescapable locatedness within the institution of the university, and therefore its confinement within the university’s ideological strictures. Consequently, in the conclusion, a consideration of Jacques Derrida’s conception of a ‘university without conditions’ is proposed as a viable notion with regard to a possible rethinking of the common ground occupied by literature and literary theory.