Theory is Like a Surging SeaThese pieces give me more to think about than most of the long theory books I read. ~Craig Dworkin, author of No MediumIn a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, "Theory is like a surging sea." This small book takes more than its title from that line-it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach's sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin's sentence: "Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave [...] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks." That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what's come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it's as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks.Table of Contents // I: Dichtung und Wahrheit - II: 'Without this nothing thinks': The Enigma of the Active Intellect - III: Nearer to You than the Sea - IV: Vertigo, Beatitudo: Spinoza and Philosophy - V: The Idea of Prose - Appendix A: Theses on Aesthetics as First Philosophy - Appendix B: On Exactitude in Non-Library Science - Coda: On The Riddle of History Solved |
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