between formalism and social critique, between deconstruction and new historicism. Admittedly, comparative literature has not yet capitalized on this possibility; on the contrary, just like philosophy in general, philosophy of history itself has come to be regarded as some kind of vague methodological awareness, an associate of interdisciplinarity.
My suggestion is that, by acknowledging the problem of the alienation of literary studies while rejecting interdisciplinarity as a viable solution to that problem, literary studies, and especially comparative literature, could still work to internalize the philosophy of history in a more consistent way. The study of literature could then reclaim literature as its subject, not necessarily as a subject of literary analysis, which usually serves as a code-name for some specific and usually sectarian methodology, but as a field open to any possible approach within the a-disciplinary borders of literary studies. Such a shift could establish comparative literature not as a thematically or methodologically distinct or novel enterprise within the Humanities, but rather as an attempt to re-unify the knowledge now dispersed among the various disciplines of the Human and Social Sciences.
This re-unification of dispersed knowledge, the maintenance of the comprehensive unity of knowledge in the face of disciplinary specialization, was traditionally one of philosophy’s functions. Not only is the hierarchical understanding of knowledge lurking behind this notion of philosophy no longer acceptable, however, but philosophy itself, with the rise and success of logical positivism, has finally cast off the burden of being general and a-disciplinary. This success was largely due to the neo-positivist war against pseudo-scientific knowledge. But it is important to remember that behind this program of developing demarcation criteria there was another, more concrete target, as became manifest in the more explicitly political work of Popper: the real enemy was the philosophy of history.
Popper’s critique was not new. A few decades before the logical positivists, philosophy of history already appeared to Jacob Burckhardt, that untimely Stoic of the nineteenth century, as a centaur, a contradiction in terms, “for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.”8 His critique contained everything that critics of philosophy of history, from the logical positivists to Hannah Arendt, would later say: the monstrous enterprise was criticized for its logical impossibility and its political dangerousness; its dismissal led to the unseen triumph of a philosophical program.
Hegel would have been surprised to hear that these critics rallied against him by using an argument that he himself addressed at the very beginning of the Phenomenology.9 There is one particular criticism, however, that calls for discussion in this context. From Popper to Arthur Danto, logically-minded critics raised the same objection against Hegel – the objection that, in Danto’s work, is called the argument of the ideal chronicler, a chronicler who is omnipresent in history and takes notes of whatever happens and who is privy to what seems to be the totality of history. But historical meaning, Danto argued, is narrative meaning; it is based on co-ordination, not subordination. The total meaning of a narrative can only be defined, theoretically, if the narrative is concluded. This might be the case in a novel, Danto said, but in the case of history, what the historian is trying to describe is a per definitionem unfinished continuum whose absolute meaning therefore cannot be determined.
Or at least it cannot be determined without recourse to prophesy, which was in fact the model or the precursor of philosophy of history, Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history. The name is unfair, as it suggests that there is a commonality between, say, Gioacchimo de Fiore’s work and Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, while the reality is that these differ from each other just as much as either of them would differ from a nineteenth-century historical work. Yet this difference, Danto and Popper would suggest, is only a superficial one. In their view, Hegel fell back into Heilsgeschichte in that he tried to bridge the gap between philosophy and history using prophesy – at least in the structural sense of including the future in his theory of history.
Calculated or accidental, this is a bold misreading of Hegel. Even if one does not consider the entire theory of teleology that is behind his philosophy of history, it is obvious that Hegel consistently refrains from saying anything about the future. On the rare occasions that he does say something concerning the future, he makes it clear that the epistemological status of his statement is entirely different from the rest of the work; it is neither historical, nor philosophical. In fact, the entire philosophy of history is based on the insight that neither beginnings nor the future can be the subject of the historian’s inquiry; the only history that can be the subject of history or philosophy of history is the history that is always already past; it is a complete history precisely because it is disconnected – epistemologically and, therefore, ontologically also – from the future.
But this is precisely the point where comparative literature could redeem the potential of philosophy of history, not by returning to Hegel but by diverging from his epistemology. Burckhardt’s centaur may or may not be a fair figure for philosophy of history, but it is surely one applicable to literature itself. Literature is precisely at the intersection of philosophy and history, or to be more concrete, literature is this very intersection. There is, surely, an “ontological gap” between the historical circumstances of the birth of a literary work and the work itself. But even more important is the way the work itself bridges this ontological gap; time and again, a given literary work reconnects with history.
This dialectic of disengaging and reconnecting is, in terms of the structure of the process, always coincidental: the way in which the abstract universality of language regains referentiality is a matter of coincidence. But coincidence does not equal blind chance; in between the two, there is literature’s own periphery, the periphery of meaning where the abstract universality of language reconfigures in ways that make the ontological structure of language accessible. This peripheral reconfiguration is the basis of literature’s coincidental reconnecting with historical referentiality. The future is the periphery of the present; it appears on the margins of the literary work in indecipherable forms, ready to take up a particular meaning in the actual time that follows.
CONCLUSION: COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
The question is, if literature really is Burckhardt’s centaur, how is one to engage with such a monstrous creature in a scholarly fashion, that is, how can comparative literature redeem the aborted project of philosophy of history in its analyses of literature.
I think this is a much easier question than it may seem at first sight: coordination and subordination, history and philosophy, or history and aesthetics are indeed impossible to practice, if, that is, one wants to practice all of them at the same time. Instead, however, they can be played out against each other. Philosophy and aesthetics can and should be practiced autonomously; but when they would seem to be stuck in their own pathos, history can be invoked to help find a path out of the muddy ground of concepts and introduce co-ordination, examples, things. And vice versa: as soon as the material of history pushes the project to the precipice of meaningless relativism, philosophy and aesthetics might help. This movement of systole/ diastole can cut across the borders not just of disciplines but of ideologies and ontologies as well, and can thus inform a comparative literature that, rather than relying on either interpretation or deconstruction, operates by constellation, by placing works and their aesthetics or history side by side, repeating the same oscillating movement from one to another over and over again, until the coincidental structures of the works analyzed reconstitute themselves in the analysis.
Such an a-disciplinary model based on a philosophy of history could point toward a comparative approach to literature that is able to ask questions in which history, ontology, and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually supportive notions. Leaving behind disciplinary axioms (“historical reality as such,” “fiction as such,” etc.), a more comprehensive approach could evolve. And finally, comparative literature could in this way achieve a different kind of self-awareness
