the way in which the new philosophy created a new space for this old way of thinking. In the seventeenth century, America had begun to see itself as a community that was potentially outside the history of other nations. It must have been exciting to see, then, that the post-war, a-historicist and often anti-historicist aesthetic thinking that structuralism and most versions of post-structuralism embraced was grounded not in a position outside history, but in a position after history. Unlike a variety of former generations of immigrants from the puritans to Auerbach, all of whom had fled from within history, French philosophy claimed to be coming from a Europe that had outlived its history.5
The so-called French storm marked the arrival of post-histoire in the country that had traditionally regarded itself as outside European history – the perfect match, one might say. The consequences soon became visible in almost all the human and social disciplines, and particularly in comparative literature, which was becoming increasingly associated with so-called “continental” philosophy. But ironically, the main impact of French philosophy was not philosophical, but ideological and methodological. Armed with its new philosophical aspirations, comparative literature hastened to join the grand post-war project of transforming academia in the United States. The price of this project was significant: a strong and ever increasing alienation from the public, the consequences of which became particularly apparent in the early 1990s. The university was both asylum and quarantine for revolutionary scholars, to the great chagrin of their more conservative colleagues with whom they were now incarcerated, safely isolated from the public.
Meanwhile, in disciplinary terms, “interdisciplinarity” became the new catch-word of the humanities. Such interdisciplinarity was most visible in comparative literature’s consistent reliance on theories that originated in other disciplines: most eminently in philosophy and in particular hermeneutics and phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and to a certain extent even analytical and post-analytical philosophies of language. But, as Richard Rorty argues in “Looking Back at Literary Theory,” this interdisciplinarity usually had the effect that philosophies, upon their arrival in the territory of comparative literature, underwent an uncanny metamorphosis: what was originally philosophy now became “theory.” Philosophies, that is, complex and self-containing cosmogonies and cosmologies,6 were distilled into methodological tools to deal with literature and, when even this became too tiresome, with themselves.7
The Bernheimer report grew out of this situation, and, still displaying some of the enthusiasm of the 1960s and ‘70s, promoted a “new” comparative literature, one that appeared as the representative of multiculturalism, both in its ideology and methodology, and defined itself in sharp contrast to both the 1965 Levin and the 1975 Greene reports’ Eurocentric, aesthetic cosmopolitanism. It was a vision that sought to justify itself by taking a critical stance towards the history of the discipline, just as post-histoire was a defining element of deconstruction.
The Saussy report, by contrast, is redolent with disappointment over the project of multiculturalism. Not surprisingly, then, the book is characterized by a sometimes more, sometimes less explicit ambition to re-anchor comparative literature in the past and to return from the post-historical, alienated position to the materiality of history. Meltzl becomes an emblem of this return, albeit in different ways, representing now the charming amateur literate of the emerging Monarchy, now the prophetic advocate of anti-globalization. It is ironic that Meltzl emerges as this emblematic character precisely when the United States is increasingly facing debates about its own identity about sovereignty, nationhood, and empire building. For with this, the back and forth movement between history and philosophy, a movement whose abstract generality always willingly yields to the particular political and ideological circumstances of the day, seems to continue into our own times.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: THE CENTAUR
To illustrate my point, let me now turn to a half-forgotten discipline, philosophy of history, which played a not atypical role in the post-war history of comparative literature. Throughout its development from Christian Heilsgeschichte to Voltaire, to German Idealism and even beyond, until its subsequent decline, this tradition, which would later be called “substantive philosophy of history,” marked an unprecedented attempt to come to terms with the temporal dimension of life without relying on religion, or at least without explicitly relying on it.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a discipline emerged that again claimed the name “philosophy of history” for itself. Initially, this new philosophy of history was a subdiscipline of the philosophy of science, and as such, it aimed at understanding and describing “historical explanation” as a particular case of what the neo-positivists called “scientific explanation.” When this ambitious goal was frustrated, it gave way to a post-Wittgensteinian attempt to analyze the historian’s language instead. Although this latter trend still evolved in that same spirit of neo-positivism, it also contributed to the rise of another take on history, one motivated by completely different concerns. The new philosophy of history placed a growing emphasis on the imaginative language of the historian, and history was increasingly understood not so much as a science governed by logical rules, but rather as a text that was organized along rhetorical and dialectical lines and that followed principles of representation and persuasion. As a consequence, in disciplinary terms, the philosophy of history, or what survived of it, was often subsumed by comparative literature.
This seemingly accidental occurrence provided comparative literature with the possibility of escaping the limbo between philosophy and history, 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