Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville

by Peter Szendy, Gil Anidjar (Translator)

Overview

Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.

With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.

Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.

In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823231539
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	01/03/2010
Edition description:	2
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown Universityand musicological advisor for the concert programs at the Paris Philharmonie. His books include Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage; Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World; Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials; Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox; and Listen: A History of Our Ears..

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is currently completing a manuscript titled Sparta and Gaza: The Tradition of Destruction; sections of it have been published here and there.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations of Works Melville vii

Preface to the English-Language Edition: Reading and the Right to Death ix

Liminary Note xix

Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville

The Double Enclosure 3

"I" 6

The Event, or Reading Without Heading 10

The Aura of the Weather 14

Before Sight, the Voice 15

Outside-Inside 17

Naming and Meteoromancy 19

Prosthesis and Prophecy 23

Retroprospection 29

Deluge and Delirium 31

Leaks (Over and Beyond the Archive) 36

"Leviathan is the text," or Generalized Meteorism 40

The Fire, the Bonds 48

Lost at Sea [D?boussol?] 51

The Laws of Fishing and of Reading 53

In Detachment (Dis-Contraction) 56

Return to Sender (the Dead Postman) 61

Through the Tomb 67

Spectral Evidence 70

Backfire 75

Isolation, the Bubble, and the Future of the Text 79

Post-Scriptum: On Whiteness and Beheading 86

Afterword: Ipsology (Selves of Peter Szendy) Gil Anidjar 95

Notes 129

Editorial Reviews

Szendy uses a dialogical form of criticism to argue that Moby Dick should be read as a prophetic text; the prophecy of an unspeakable catastrophe turns into the experience of writing from the 'outside.' 
It is the proximity with such an 'outside' that frees Meville's text from its crust of ancient glosses and multiplies amazingly original close readings.

——Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Prophecies of Leviathan enacts and performs, within the movement of its language, what it seeks to convey: that any reading worthy of the name "reading" must undergo the storms of reading, must move without compass or anchor, must come to understand that reading means "learning to die." In this, Szendy proves himself to be-like Melville himself-one of the great meteorologists of reading in general. Indeed, in reading "reading," in reading the act of reading, this wildly wonderful book traces the whirlwinds and tempests, the stammering and staccato iterations, that are the signature of Melville's whale of a book and, in so doing, not only invites future readings but also comprehends and anticipates them. I therefore prophesize that by reading backwards in order to read ahead this book will continue to tell us how and why we read at all, regardless of whether we are reading a book, a document, or, in Melville's case, an archive of the world.——Eduardo Cadava, Princeton University

Prophecies of Leviathan is an extraordinary reading of Melville’s fictions as sustained meditations on the nature of reading. If Moby Dick is a prophetic text, this is because—as Peter Szendy shows us—the event of (its) reading is prophetic. Taking his bearings from Blanchot and Derrida while also reading in ways all his own, Szendy will have changed not only how we read Moby Dick but how it reads us.——Andrew Parker, Amherst College

From the Publisher

Szendy uses a dialogical form of criticism to argue that Moby Dick should be read as a prophetic text; the prophecy of an unspeakable catastrophe turns into the experience of writing from the 'outside.' 
It is the proximity with such an 'outside' that frees Meville's text from its crust of ancient glosses and multiplies amazingly original close readings.

University of Pennsylvania - Jean-Michel Rabaté

Prophecies of Leviathan enacts and performs, within the movement of its language, what it seeks to convey: that any reading worthy of the name "reading" must undergo the storms of reading, must move without compass or anchor, must come to understand that reading means "learning to die." In this, Szendy proves himself to be-like Melville himself-one of the great meteorologists of reading in general. Indeed, in reading "reading," in reading the act of reading, this wildly wonderful book traces the whirlwinds and tempests, the stammering and staccato iterations, that are the signature of Melville's whale of a book and, in so doing, not only invites future readings but also comprehends and anticipates them. I therefore prophesize that by reading backwards in order to read ahead this book will continue to tell us how and why we read at all, regardless of whether we are reading a book, a document, or, in Melville's case, an archive of the world.

Princeton University - Eduardo Cadava

Prophecies of Leviathan is an extraordinary reading of Melville’s fictions as sustained meditations on the nature of reading. If Moby Dick is a prophetic text, this is because—as Peter Szendy shows us—the event of (its) reading is prophetic. Taking his bearings from Blanchot and Derrida while also reading in ways all his own, Szendy will have changed not only how we read Moby Dick but how it reads us.

Amherst College - Andrew Parker