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Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.

With the “arrival” of the so-called era of the Anthropocene, certain contemporary theoretical approaches have led us to think that we are only now properly beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, as well as confronting our fears and anxieties around ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. Reflections on apocalypse and disaster, however, were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, but in Last Things, Jacques Khalip begins with the “end of things” differently, treating lastness otherwise than either a privation or a conclusion. He emphasizes quieter and non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of the world of thought itself. Without fear, foreshadowing, or catastrophe, Khalip explores lastness as a form, structure, or unit that marks the limits of our life and world, and he reads the fate of romanticism (and romantic studies) within the key of the last. Although this is a reading one could never wish for, it is one, Khalip argues, that we urgently have to make today. The book is not an elegy to the human, or to romanticism; rather, it polemically argues that we should read romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability.

The volume offers an extended meditation on different senses of bird mimicry in literature: the way birds mimic humans, the way humans mimic birds, and the way mimicry of any kind involves technologies of mimicry that extend across as well as beyond languages and species. The essays examine the historical, poetic, and semiotic problem of mimesis exemplified both by the imitative behavior of parrots, starlings, and other mocking birds, and by the poetic trope of such birds in a range of literary and philological traditions. Drawing from a cross-section of traditional periods and fields in literary studies (eighteenth-century studies, romantic studies, early American studies, twentieth-century studies, and postcolonial studies), the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture. The volume presents thirteen ways of looking at mocking bird technologies: nine critical essays, a dialogic meditation, an afterword, and a coda. The look of the academic essay is complemented by the look of accompanying specimens of bird mimicry.

Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. Nowhere, however, has this transformation unfolded more influentially than in the domain of language science, where the terminology of synchrony and diachrony first explicitly emerges. The Writing of Spirit sets out to demonstrate, via a new history of language science, that we do not know what we think we know about this pivotal juncture in our intellectual past. Twentieth century linguistic structuralism, it argues, does not replace the historicist approach of the 19^th century with a more modern, more systematic perspective, as has long been assumed, because the relationship between history and system is the point. The real revolution consists, not in a turn away from language time, but in a turn toward time’s absolutely minimal conditions, and thus also: toward a theory of diachrony, boiled down and distilled. The book arrives at this surprising and powerful conclusion via the analysis of language scientific theories over the course of two centuries, associated with thinkers from Jacob Grimm to the Russian Futurists and from Richard Wagner to Roman Jakobson, in domains as disparate as historical linguistics, phonology, acoustics, opera theory, philosophy, poetics, and psychology. The result is a novel contribution to one of the most pressing questions of our current intellectual moment, namely: the question of what role the study of history should play in the interpretation of present-tense states.

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the rise of the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading a set of important Romantic novels—Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities—alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, this book argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book retraces the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to the literature and philosophy of Romanticism, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophecy, in other words, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, and prophecy means, first of all, speaking in more than one voice—and more than one tongue—at once, unpredictably. This book argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called “Age of Translation.” Instead of taking as its point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, this book suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? Through careful readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin, this book proposes a version of philology that does not take language as a given but rather attends to language as it pushes against the limits of what can be said.

No longer able to read community in terms colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness and sameness, or the myth of rational choice, we nevertheless face an imperative to think the common. The prominent scholars assembled here come together to articulate community while thinking seriously about the tropes, myths, narratives, metaphors, conceits, and shared cultural texts on which any such articulation depends. The result is a major contribution to literary theory, postcolonialism, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.

“Who speaks?” Core ideas of modern literary theory—the author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—were pioneered in the reflection on oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, their understanding was greatly perturbed. This book retraces the history of the hypothesis of oral composition, focusing particularly on the period when ethnographic collection of contemporary oral texts came together with sound recording and new styles of literary analysis to cast a different light on canonical works. The genealogy of the concept, closely studied, shows when and how orality came to be polemically opposed to writing. In response, oral tradition is here shown to be a means of inscription in its own right, rather than as the natural forerunner made obsolete by all media and data-storage devices. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By excavating the links among Paulhan, Jousse, Parry, Jakobson, Bogatyrev, MacLuhan, and a host of others, it makes possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing.”

This book mounts a critique of persistently romantic assumptions in contemporary literary criticism in order to develop an original theory of literary production. Beginning with a study of German romanticism in its philosophical context, it argues that a model of the literary work emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century that tasked literature with the burden of solving the thorniest of philosophical problems: the problem of reconciling the demand for systematicity with the freedom and newness of the creative act. The book follows this romantic impasse into the twentieth century, examining the way it resurfaces in treatments of intention and possibility in key texts by Cleanth Brooks and Maurice Blanchot. A central chapter draws on Gilles Deleuze’s work for a critique of the metaphysics of identity at stake in this ongoing romanticism; and it proposes an exit by developing an alternative account of literary production, one in which the work is grasped as individuating, self-differing, and problem-solving. This account is put to the test through close readings of major modernist novels—Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Focusing in particular on the system-building potential of rhetorical figures, these readings characterize the modernist work as an open, self-organizing system.