Modernity as Exception and Miracle

Eduardo Sabrovsky, Javier Burdman

Description

Translated from the Spanish De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities functions as a paradoxical paradigm of the extraordinary, and he extends the theoretical insights drawn from Musil's magisterial work through a series of inquiries into cardinal elements of modern literature, material culture, historiography, physical science, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Sabrovsky demonstrates how the extraordinary condition of modernity emerges from the debates conducted by the last representatives of medieval scholasticism in which nominalism defeated realism, and he resituates the results of this triumph of nominalism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille, among others.
Preface to the English Edition

Preface to the Spanish Edition

Introduction: From the Transcendental, through the Extraordinary, to "Perpetual Peace"
Peter Fenves

1. Musil's Death

2. The Extraordinary, History

3. The Extraordinary, Myth

4. The Works of Science

5. Nietzsche: The Incombustible in Reason

6. The Truth Is That There Is No Truth

7. The Endless Sacrifice: Art and the Production of the Extraordinary

8. Outline for an Ethics of Immortality

9. Politics of Space and of the Gaze

10. Notes on the Spectrality of Objects

11. Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Comparative literature
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479170
• Langue: English

Extrait

MODERNITY AS EXCEPTION AND MIRACLE
SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Rodolphe Gasché, editor
MODERNITY AS EXCEPTION AND MIRACLE
Eduardo Sabrovsky
Translated by
Javier Burdman
With an Introduction by
Peter Fenves
English translation of De Lo Extraordinario: Nominalismo Y Modernidad , 2nd rev. ed. (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2013).
Translation and indexing (provided by Tristan Bradshaw) were supported through funds the Mellon-Foundation program, Critical Theory in the Global South at Northwestern University.
Cover photo: Thomas Ledl, The Austrian Postal Savings Bank building (cropped).
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eduardo Sabrovsky | Javier Burdman, translator. Peter Fenves, Introduction.
Title: Modernity as Exception and Miracle / Eduardo Sabrovksy, translated by Javier Burdman. With an Introduction by Peter Fenves.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479156 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479170 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937135
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Preface to the Spanish Edition
Introduction: From the Transcendental, through the Extraordinary, to “Perpetual Peace”
Peter Fenves
1 Musil’s Death
2 The Extraordinary, History
3 The Extraordinary, Myth
4 The Works of Science
5 Nietzsche: The Incombustible in Reason
6 The Truth Is That There Is No Truth
7 The Endless Sacrifice: Art and the Production of the Extraordinary
8 Outline for an Ethics of Immortality
9 Politics of Space and of the Gaze
10 Notes on the Spectrality of Objects
11 Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface to the English Edition
For the third time now, I am writing a preface to this book—a book that was initially published in Spanish in Chile in 2001 under the title De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y modernidad . The Pinochet dictatorship was already a decade back in time; nonetheless, the local publishing industry was still undergoing its aftereffects. So was I, and so were many of my fellow philosophers and friends. We were scholars without a fixed academic address: while I wrote this book, I was still laboring as a part-time university professor, hopping between universities in Santiago and Valparaíso, a hundred kilometers away, just to make ends meet; relief, in the form of a full-time academic position, would only come almost at the same time this book was being published in its initial form.
The translation I am presenting now is based on the book’s second revised and expanded edition, published in 2013 by Universidad Diego Portales, the university in which, after those difficult and interesting years, I have been teaching for almost two decades now. This second and definitive edition includes an introduction that, as well as containing introductory remarks regarding each of the book’s chapters, gives a global perspective on it, organized around four keywords: decision, exception, miracle, and “ lo extraordinario ,” the nominalized form of the Spanish adjective “ extraordinario ” (“extraordinary”), a form that does not translate well into English and that for that reason was dropped from this book’s title, with “exception” and “miracle” taking its place. 1
There is another word I would now add to that list of keywords: “event.” Exceptions, miracles, fundamental historical discontinuities (“decisions,” if we follow this word’s Latin etymology, “caedere,” hence “cut”) are not part of a historical world’s normal states of affairs but are extraordinary historical-metaphysical events that, in the way of a big bang, constitute the very origin of a world’s normalcy. Besides this complement, there is nothing I would add to my introductory remarks of the 2013 Spanish edition. Nonetheless, and anticipating certain quite plausible reactions, I deem it necessary to explain why, in a book written by a Chilean intellectual and philosopher, almost no mention is made of Chilean or Latin American realities and issues; almost no attempt to engage in a critical and philosophical reflection with those realities and issues as its visible subject.
In my defense, I might point out that, in fact, one chapter does engage with the work of an important Chilean conceptual artist: Gonzalo Díaz, who was awarded with the Chilean National Visual Arts Prize in 2003. This engagement is intertwined with a reflection on modern art as such, and on the practice of sacrifice as a negative path to secular glory (see chapter 7 ). I would also call to the reader’s attention chapter 8 , which dives deep into “The Immortal,” a fiction by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. However, in this fiction, Borges deals with ancient manuscripts, with death and immortality and repetition in life and literature, and not at all—alas!—with gauchos, tangos, or the disputable legacy of Juan Domingo Perón. And so do I, distilling from it the notion of an avant-la-lettre poststructuralist literary aesthetics.
These, however, are only feeble excuses. The actual contested issue, the frequently and occasionally fiercely contested issue, is the one Borges himself faced in the Argentina of the 1950s, under the fire of right-wing and left-wing nationalism unified under the leadership and legacy of Juan Domingo Perón. Was Borges, as his nationalist critics claimed, less of a Latin American writer, essayist, intellectual, for his preference for so-called European and cosmopolitan literary topics? And where does all this leave me, and my fellow Europhylic Latin American philosophers? 2
In an essay published at the beginning of the 1950s (“The Argentinian Writer and Tradition”) Jorge Luis Borges offered a solid argument against what he understood as a false dilemma. Analyzing the devotion of nationalist writers towards “gauchesca,” a literary gender allegedly deep-rooted in firsthand experience of life in the Argentinian lowlands (“ la pampa ”) and in the language of its inhabitants, gauchos , Borges wrote:
The nationalists tell us that Don Segundo Sombra is the model of a national book; but if we compare it with the works of the gauchesque tradition, the first thing we note are differences. Don Segundo Sombra abounds in metaphors of a kind having nothing to do with country speech but a great deal to do with the metaphors of the then current literary circles of Montmartre. As for the fable, the story, it is easy to find in it the influence of Kipling’s Kim , whose action is set in India and which was, in turn, written under the influence of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , the epic of the Mississippi. When I make this observation, I do not wish to lessen the value of Don Segundo Sombra ; on the contrary, I want to emphasize the fact that, in order that we might have this book, it was necessary for Güiraldes to recall the poetic technique of the French circles of his time and the work of Kipling which he had read many years before; in other words, Kipling and Mark Twain and the metaphors of French poets were necessary for this Argentine book, for this book which, I repeat, is no less Argentine for having accepted such influences. 3
For Borges, each and every item in the library of the literary tradition shares the fate of Güiraldes’: under close scrutiny, it is revealed to be a hybrid, a biblical coat of many colors. And the condition of the Latin American writer, neither settled in the pampas nor in Europe, but on the edge, as “a writer on the edge,” 4 is understood by him as the nutritious ground, the privileged observation point from which such deconstructive conception of literary and cultural productions may arise. In fact, he assimilates this condition to the position of Irish writers towards British culture and of Jews towards the whole Western culture. In relation to the latter, he writes:
What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have. I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this pre-eminence allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews, and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion. 5
According to Borges’s sweeping argument, nationalism would be nothing but a European artefact. Of course, that might be just a ruse for getting even—of turning the indictment back to the indicter and deviously rejoicing in our shared d