The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman
10.13125/2039-6597/2032
Even in an era of the false populism of youth techno-cultures where intellectual dialogue seems dead on arrival, a political riposte of sorts is possible. It will find its resources in the apparently belated idea of "philology" – not understood as the old hoary science of the 19th century paleographic text, but a generalist, sociological quest for meanings as intentions. And in fact, philology has found a new popularity recently for just that reason. To speak of Vico at a conference of Italian comparatists may seem superfluous perhaps, and yet his contemporaneity in internet culture is not appreciated. Vico, not Spinoza, is the first Marxist before Marx; he anticipated anticolonial liberation theory, and he spoke directly to – while giving us weapons against – the posthumanism of internet culture. 
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Timothy Brennan
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Timothy Brennan
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The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman
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        The Legacies of Vico:
Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman
                           Timothy Brennan


      I am here not as a scholar of Italian studies, obviously, and not
only as a student of comparative literature, but as an American
intellectual who for various occasional reasons – completely unrelated
ones, it turns out – has been compelled to think and write about the
influences of Italian thinking on the current intellectual and political
scene. It seems to me that in a furiously Americanizing environment in
which Italian youth, like much of the world’s youth, has been
hypnotically transfixed by the digital invasion of their consciousness,
and where mobile devices have turned communication itself into a
one-way street where actual dialogue is impossible, and where critical
analysis is arrested, that invoking “philology” might seem a losing
proposition from the very start. The rich traditions of philological
thought and practice, above all in Italy, over the last several centuries,
is bound in this context to be even less prized in this setting for being
so overfamiliar to many of you – an archaic and haplessly “square”
allusion to the outmoded methods drummed into Italian
schoolchildren for far too long. So why bring these coals to Newcastle,
as it were, especially when coal is itself passé, and we look instead to
solar options?
      To answer these questions would mean to recall – again, with the
risk of seeming belated – the still relevant work of Antonio Gramsci, or
the new Italian political thinkers who grew out of the counterculture
movements of the far Left in Italy during the 1970s – Negri and
autonomia, that is; and, finally to Edward Said’s career, which was
largely about creating a counter-tradition based on the great early



Between, vol. V, n. 10 (Novembre/November 2015)
Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



eighteenth-century humanist, Giambattista Vico. For all of these are the
“Italian” figures that for various reasons have loomed large in my own
intellectual formation, and that I have addressed (in Negri’s case, very
critically), and to which I would like to refer as an opening gambit as I
address all of you here in the context of the annual meeting of the
Italian comparative literature association.
      Vico, as you all know only too well, was an antagonist in his own
time to the philosophy of Descartes (from which so much French
theory of the 1970s and 1980s circuitously derived) and also of
Descartes’ like-minded contemporary, Spinoza, who is the current
talisman of the new Italian thinkers – their philosophical point of
departure from that great Vichian thinker, Hegel, the philosopher they
set out to displace. Suffice it to say that the claims of Italian thinking in
these very diverse, and even incompatible forms, are fairly extravagant
right now, despite the internet-driven anti-intellectualism to which I
just referred – and this is the setting for my comments below.
      Given our conference theme of “l’immaginario politico,” I wanted
to make a case for reacquainting ourselves with the social theory of the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries insofar as that theory (on
rare occasions) anticipated the anticolonial thought of the early
twentieth century. And that would be the next phase of my gambit: to
argue that the biggest issue facing intellectuals today, and the
framework within which all of our work on political language and
literature is found (including the saturation of youth cultures by
electronic narcissism and visual and aural distractions) is the imperial
imaginary. Whatever allows us better to diagnose the mental hold of
empire in this stipulated period of imperial obsolescence is vital and
pressing – that absurd postcolonialism that announces itself
suspiciously at the very moment of new grand American strategies for
redrawing the map of the Middle East, eviscerating all secular forms of
Arabic and Persian statehood, and reassembling the former European
colonial powers to invade oil-rich African state like Libya. What, in
other words, in all our theories is the evidence not in theory, but in
intellectual history, of the resistance within our own traditions to this
imperial imaginary. That is the question that I would like to pose, and


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it is the one that I have tried to pursue in my own writing. I am trying
to establish, in other words, a prehistory to anticolonial thought that
can be found in eighteenth-century Italy, although it is arguably a way
of thinking borrowed by Vico from fourteenth-century Tunis, in the
work of ibn Khaldun: a precursor he almost certainly read and learned
from. The contemporary relevance of this strand of intellectual history
can be brought home, perhaps, by recognizing that it produced
political and aesthetic forms in the early twentieth century in the
movements of international communism.
       A historically new anticolonial spirit found in the Third
International of the interwar years in Europe descends from a tradition
of thought around a figure who is generally, if vaguely, known today,
but who in his own day was quite obscure: the Neapolitan rhetorician,
Giambattista Vico. Again, for all the overfamiliarity of the name “Vico”
in this setting here in Bologna – and I am painfully aware of it – I trust
that this particular take on the figure is, for what it’s worth, novel. The
contemporaneity of this no doubt roundabout set of associations is
found in the fact that the interwar moment, in my argument, is one
whose debates we are largely echoing today. It was the time when
challenges to European control first reached global dimensions and
when resistance to the old order had for the first time the strategic and
military means to threaten European hegemony rather than simply
shame it. It was utterly unique in this sense, and we are still living off
of its energies, and unable to transcend its agendas, which remain
unrealized. The anticolonial common sense that most of us hold today
was, in other words, a hallmark of the early twentieth century –
especially the interwar period (not, as is often maintained, a result of
the postcolonial turn of the 1980s and 1990s). The sense of a global
common cause backed by sophisticated organizational networks and,
as I try to show here, an already developed conceptual framework, was
fully realized only between 1905 and 1940, when a new culture arose in
the aftershock of revolution on Europe’s semideveloped Eastern
periphery, with immediate reverberations throughout Asia. These
events profoundly affected intellectuals on both the Right and Left, and
continue to do so.


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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



      Despite the voluminous scholarship on his work, there is virtually
nothing that addresses the degree to which Vico’s The New Science
contains original propositions about vernacular modes of expression
and civic values that speak to our contemporary focus on aesthetic
forms of dependency, uneven development, and cultural
incommensurability. Vico’s speculative theses on poetic speech and the
origins of language, together with the role of collective authorship in
epic, as well as his elevation of secular reading over Biblical textual
models, provide the basis not only for a nonparochial conception of
world literature but also for a dissident model of international
citizenship. This view, in turn, is enriched by Hegel, who in terms of
intellectual history must be seen as a Vichian thinker, and this point,
once established, has profound effects on the way we view twentieth-
century Marxism (not to mention judge its future prospects). Hegel,
like Vico his predecessor, shows at some length that Western
conceptual forms relied on those from the East, and would have been
unthinkable without them – a basically Khaldunian point.
      It is precisely in a moment of the apparent postmodern
dissolution of canons, the cheapening of the integrity of inherited
artistic forms, and the everyday amnesia and indifference that media
saturation itself generates, that we find resources in a Vichian civic
hermeneutics – an aesthetic and a style that conforms more closely to
the actual modes of non-Western or postcolonial literatures and the
arts than do prevailing forms of European and American modernism.
This hermeneutic may be said to dwell on the vulgate rather than the
classical; on secular and corporeal solidarities rather than sacred
textual encounters; and on the circulation of demotic and experimental
forms rather than their containment within notions of aesthetic
autonomy. If one is to understand, much less appreciate and promote,
the actual writing going on in the so-called global periphery – and
what could be of more interest to a gathering of comparatists like
ourselves? – one must begin to appreciate that “socialist realism” is not
a Soviet or Chinese phase of policy art but a sensibility that can be
applied, by other names, to a civic tradition of letters with a long
prehistory. A different story of the emergence of anticolonial thought


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like this one may provide a new point of access and a potentially new
set of projects and directions for comparative literature and
postcolonial studies. A closer reading of Vico and the tradition he
launched not only shifts our focus to different sources and inspirations
but questions how we currently argue and read.
      The unexpected attractions of Vico for anticolonial theory are
obvious from three defining features of his work. First, his story of
civilization’s origins gives no priority to any one people, thereby
refuting the principle of European centrality by way of Greece. If
certain cultures were responsible for specific inventions such as
navigation, the quadrant, the first alphabet, laws of the first free
commonwealth, and so on, for him the drama of civic institutions is the
work of everyone equally and separately (Vico 1968: 36): «By
uniformity of ideas the orientals, Egyptians, Greeks and Latins, each in
ignorance of the others, raised the gods to the planets» (4). Along the
same lines, he notes that the “law of nations” is not an invidious
natural law based on race or lineage but on the making of institutions
(cose). His understanding of civic or national belonging depends on
uprooting pedigree and natality as its main emphasis and replacing
them with sociality1.
       Vico locates civilization (as opposed to barbarism) at the center
of human activity, but not in the sense of a technological imperative.
He refers, rather, to a civic breakthrough common to all humans in
prehistory: the inventions of religion, marriage, and burial 2. The very


     1 In current anthropology, the reigning position seems to invert Vico’s
antidiffusion thesis. Recent genetic research strongly suggests that human
beings have a uniquely African origin, a finding that challenges views
popular as recently as the 1980s based on a multiregional model of human
origins as proposed by Franz Weidenreich in the 1930s. The African origins
model arguably supports Vico’s theory, however, since he emphasizes
culture rather than physical characteristics; a single biological origin is its
necessary precondition.
     2 See James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1976: 599): «sullemn fulminance,

sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining.»


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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



conceptions of barbarism and backwardness are in his portrayal
displaced from their imperial deployment, and he reminds us that the
organization of human faculties by means of which the propensity
toward murder, rape, and ignorance was overcome only later turned
into a device for distinguishing between the civilized and the barbaric.
By the same token, Vico does not reject the idea of law or civilization
(as is common today) because these have at times been oppressive; nor
does disappointment with civilization provide the grounds for
heroizing an earlier nomadism3. On the contrary the past sets the terms
for a different outcome in the future. Every ricorso is a new possibility.
       Second, Vico’s theory of independent cultural creation
anticipates the antidiffusion thesis prominent only later in the mid-
twentieth century – one that was instrumental in countering the
prejudices of the discredited “European miracle” thesis4. Vico
proleptically displaces this still-mainstream twentieth-century variant
on nineteenth-century notions of European supremacy. Proponents of
the “miracle” held that instead of genetic inheritance, it was accident
and opportunity that allowed Europe to surpass its global rivals: its
favorable climate, the traditions of scientific inquiry made possible by
the Reformation, the individualist ethos that arose from Christianity
and encouraged innovation. Vico contests the view that Europe is the
font of government, technology, or culture in ways that leave little
doubt about his views on the equality of cultures, saying, for instance,
that «the American Indians would now be following this course of


      3 For the addictively anti-Vichian momentum of current theory, in
particular the rejection of all law qua law, see Giorgio Agamben’s The Time
That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005); and
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999); see also Jacques Derrida,
The Beast and the Sovereign (2009); and his “Force de loi: Le ‘fondement
mystique de l’autorité,’” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1989/90).
      4 Excellent critiques of the diffusion thesis and the “European miracle”

can be found in James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic
Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (1993) (esp. chap. 1); and Jack Goody, The
Theft of History (2006).


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human institutions if they had not been discovered by the Europeans»
(414).
        The third and final feature of Vico’s aptness for anticolonial
understanding can be discerned in his condemnation of conquest.
Equating robbery and foreign domination, he says: «As in the first
barbarian times, the heroes considered it a title of honor to be called
robbers, so in the returned barbarian times [of the Middle Ages] the
powerful rejoiced to be called pirates» (19). Similarly, he chastises the
celebration of colonies in the ancient world, and his text is replete with
asides that rebuke imperial attitudes – pointing out, for example, that
Telemachus in the Odyssey calls non-Achaians the «other people,»
«which is to say a subject people» (235). And above all, his seminal
insight (as elaborated below) is to associate the inequality of classes
with the invention of the culturally foreign. In an analysis later picked
up by Hegel, Vico believed that colonial domination was originally the
work of victims who had come to the city’s protections too late, who
were eventually driven from home, and who ended up plundering
other lands. Colonies are formed «in order to avoid oppression and to
find escape»; people risk «the hazards of the sea […] in search of
occupied lands along the shores of the Mediterranean, toward the
West» (13). One of the principal causes of the great migrations of
peoples was to establish «heroic overseas colonies» (14) – certainly a
strange reversal of the patterns of colonization in the modern era. But
even as he makes this statement, its purpose has less to do with the
distant lessons of antiquity than with confronting the colonial realities
of his own time.
      Is Vico current? The prejudices of the hyper-reality of the great
media sleepwalk demand that we ask. The linguistic implications of his
work, for one thing, dramatically reorient the story of the turn to
language in twentieth-century philosophy. But even more, despite the
fact that Spinoza has been the philosophical source for an influential
school of contemporary neo-Marxism, Vico is by far the more likely
precursor to Marx. This is so not only because he defends history and
historiography against their detractors (a move popularized by
Althusser’s rejection of historicism) or because he so elaborately


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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



portrays class struggle and the centrality of labor, but because Vico
invents the idea that specific ideas, linguistic innovations, and forms of
art correspond to a period’s conditions of social organization. He
inaugurates, in other words, a nonpresentist form of historicism that is
the genesis of Marx’s historical materialism. Vico’s importance for
Marxism may lie even more clearly, though, in his ricorsi. Against the
backdrop of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence again, after great
effort, of that which had been roundly defeated earlier is not simply
possible but wholly logical in his particular mapping of human time.
Because history as he imagines it is never exactly repeated, we can be
sure that it will reappear in forms we cannot yet imagine.
       The troubled sense of the term “philology” today (in the
aftermath of Said’s Orientalism, in part, but also in a number of recent
essays and books chastened by the apparent cob-webbiness of careful,
historical, textual work in an age of disposable verbiage and
evanescent visualization) is clarified in Vico along the lines of a
generalist intellectual program that, in later centuries, would be vital to
the Left Hegelian tradition. By “generalism” I mean deliberate non-
specialization in an area of knowledge roughly equivalent to today’s
academic disciplines; I mean the auto-didactical, but also the
improvisationally dissident, refusal to conform to specialization in
order to study adequately the whole picture, across disciplines, or
what in an earlier lexicon was known as the social totality. By
generalism one also means a rejection on epistemological grounds
(which are also political ones) of atomistic theories evident in the auto-
poeisis of Italian autonomia, or in the deeply conservative monadism of
systems theory in Niklas Luhmann and others, who deny that
communication across constituencies takes place in society, or that
there is any real contact of value, knowledge, or force among the
isolated elements composing the social whole.
      In Vico, finally, we find the early instruments for a de-centering of
European culture and a respect for foreign peoples that is the basis of
what would come to be known, further down the line, as world
literature. My purpose here is to explore the reasons for the disjunction
between Vico’s appearance and reality. How, in other words, can he


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today appear so out-dated and yet be at the head of a lineage from
which many of our most contemporary ideas and frameworks are
derived? My aim is to show the links between Marxism and philology
in the ways in which they take shape in Vico’s reception and in the
form in which Vico’s early eighteenth-century text contains them,
however implicitly.
      Despite Vico’s perceived irrelevance in many circles, the shock of
what The New Science proposes bears stating baldly to get a full sense of
its insult to prevailing norms5. He is saying, after all, that civilization
was the invention of brutes; that instinct, feeling, intuition, and
figurative language are forms of reason; and that the first philosophical
thought was based on poetic characters. Moreover, in a devoutly
Catholic milieu, he builds his case on mostly pagan and Protestant
sources6. With respect to the word “radical,” his postulates had the
capacity to scandalize followers of Descartes just as much as they did
emissaries of the pope or, more to the point, the monks and priests
who were his friends and whose goodwill he counted on in Naples,
with his growing alienation from Cartesian freethinkers7. Vico’s riposte
to Cartesianism was a methodological coup. Humanistic studies have
as their goal vero (the true), the sciences certo (the certain). It is in the
fancies and rough verbal utterances of the vulgate, in other words, that
Vico finds relief from the fictions of math. The scientist’s arbitrary
postulates (let x be 1) offer up a merely deduced, and therefore sterile,
certitude.

     5
        Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity 1650–1750 (2001), for example, places Spinoza at the very center of
the founding of modernity (not even Leibniz is given similar space),
relegating Vico to a small entry where he is cast, quite inaccurately, as a
reformulator of Spinozan motifs.
      6 See Max Harold Fisch, “Introduction” to the Autobiography of

Giambattista Vico, 1944: 43.
      7 For example, while he was still growing up, these would have

included such people as «Giacomo Lubrano, a Jesuit of infinite erudition»
and «Monsignor Geronimo Rocca, Bishop of Ischia and a distinguished
jurist,» whose nephews he tutored (Vico 1944: 118).


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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



      These contributions to a literary science of “imperial form” are a
way, also, of treating the whole vexed (and tired) history of the
socialist past more ethnographically and hermeneutically, reimagining
them again, since there is literally nowhere else to go. To put this
another way, Marxism and philology belong together, and the interwar
era’s central figures, moreover, consciously understood this to be the
case. Marxism’s importance to peripheral aesthetics might be traced by
way of three developments descending from this lineage: 1) the
socialist “republic of letters” – a worldly network of vernacular forms
that continues to reflect the actual writing from the global periphery; 2)
“Moscow philology”: the neglected role of communist intellectuals in
preserving, editing, and giving form to the endangered manuscripts of
global dissidents; 3) the persistent critique, and even mockery, of
literary modernism and the avant-gardes, both as a style and social
outlook, across the global spectrum of left anticolonial thought – a
critique that spans César Vallejo’s parodies of surrealism to Bakhtin’s
introduction to Rabelais and his World. What arises is a literature
opposed to irony itself – the inheritance of Vico’s and Hegel’s little
known philosophical assault on irony.
      Marxist literary theory is not captured adequately by the familiar
concepts of reflection theory, base and superstructure, agitprop, or
ideology critique. They never have been. That criticism requires, rather,
a new set of categories drawn, as it always was, from anticolonial
terrain: montage, unevenness, vulgarity, sacrifice, and polemic. I am
suggesting that the radical position today in theory – the truly
subterranean, oppositional or antinomian one -- is not to be for the
posthuman, or to critique humanism, but to articulate the human as
collective agent. I am saying, also, that there is a historical link between
the posthumanism that informs so many of our ostensible radical
theories today and the decentering of the human in the natural sciences
in the name of the objectivity of nature: that is, there is a linkage
between radical theory and the mainstream corporate/ government
complex regarding the supremacy of science over the humanities.
      Posthumanism is generally seen as a criticism of the Eurocentric
and by the humanist mainstream of contemporary state power; but I


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would suggest just the opposite – that capitalism is inherently
posthumanist, as symbolized by the military drone, by its addiction to
science fiction, by its matrix-like imagined and now partly realized
worlds of “managed” life, patented life, domesticated life, and
invented life. The very concept of collateral damage in bombing
campaigns, or the way that companies give names to consumers that
suggests their characteristics as “its” rather than his or hers: We know
something of the history of this from the link between cybernetics as
formulated in the Macy conferences of the immediate postwar period
and the attempt to create a man-machine matrix for the maximization
of labor in the factory. Government-corporate theory has extensively
promoted not an untrammeled humanist sublime – as much of our
theory in the humanities suggests – but just the opposite: a view of the
human separable from his or her minds, interchangeable parts,
managed “wet-ware.” It is the theories of early cybernetics that
posthumanist theory has enthusiastically drawn on in its effort to
demote the human as the creature that has created ecological
devastation and deserves to be cut back.
      Arguably, it can be shown that this frightening utilitarianism
finds comfort in, and was anticipated by, political ontology, with its
Heideggerian residues, which later joins the dispassionate mechanical
materialism of scientific method. The “revolutionary” postures of
Silicon Valley, and the technological mesmerizing of the post-
philological world of Facebook and Twitter is a more or less
comfortable continuation of a Heideggerian ontological politics taken,
with little change, from familiar interwar debates. This in part explains
the relentless popularity of Heideggerian postures on the purported
“left” of humanities theory, as I have argued elsewhere8. These
postures, although tirelessly exposed by the Frankfurt School, have




     8
        I explore this at greater length in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics
of Left and Right (2006).


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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



also and more recently been thoroughly discussed by Domenico
Losurdo, to draw on still another Italian source9.
     The obsolescence of the philological, in short, is belied by this
discussion. A concession on our part that our theoretical debates are
meaningless is misplaced as we reflect on our own fear that we have all
been outmaneuvered by internet culture – which, after all, does not so
much pose a different argument about virtue, politics, or taste as
obliterate the conversation over shared meaning. Such a judgment
would be misplaced, or at least precipitous, because the thought-
structures underlying this apparently new departure – the brave new
world of global citizens, stateless power, and universal authorship
upon which internet euphoria depends – has a prehistory that
authorized it, and that was given an earlier form subject to
hermeneutic skepticism. The philological – seen here, in principle, as
the idea that meanings depend on intentions, that texts can be
interpreted in better or worse ways, that meanings are historically
situated, and that reading entails responsibility -- is rejected because
that hermeneutic operation was never attempted, and the intellectual
history never studied or learned from, not because the knowledge has
been acquired and a different conclusion simply drawn.
     In this sense, the very idea of the historical “rupture” should give
way to thinking about continuities: that there is, paradoxically, a
subversive potential to the idea of continuity (not least in regard to
combatting and outwitting the claims, today, to the End of History;
which means, seeing the socialist past as giving us many of our most
important social democratic traditions – and certainly our anticolonial
ones as opposed to postcolonial – and in regard to our own “ricorsi”
(return or recourse) to get socialism right next time by experimenting
with our own earlier failures.



      9
        For the exposure of interwar political ontology, see for example,
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1994: 61-134). See also Domenico
Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West,
(2001).


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      The relative advantages to an anticolonial comparative literature
of historical continuities rather than ruptures can be expressed in the
image of “borrowed light.”10 In that image we find the lack of novelty
at the core of our incessantly modernist language of rupture,
Copernican revolution, paradigm shifts, “turns” of various sorts,
epistemic breaks, and so on. I am wondering whether it isn’t time to
take stock of the inherited terms of this modernist gesture. Many of us
see the only authority for one’s position to be its radical break from the
past whereas it is demonstrable that almost all of our debates (their
terms, themes, and problems) are lifted more or less wholesale from
the early twentieth century: in my view, above all the interwar period
of Europe and its colonies. There is something clarifying, and even
liberating, about being freed from this pseudo-radical pretense of the
“never before seen” or the “year zero of the now” by recognizing that
knowledge and discovery are largely about finding our way back to,
and reinventing for ourselves, what others before knew and made; but
also that this rediscovery and reinvention, at the heart of Vico’s
enterprise, is never exactly the same, and so the recurrence that this
seems to suggest is not circular but spiral. It makes us at any rate more
modest, more sober, and more respectful of the past upon which we
depend and on which we build.
     We also borrow without knowing we borrow, since history now
has been demoted, and is seen by many to be no longer necessary, and
since, in any case, we have supposedly superseded that earlier self, and
need not be worried about what we have become on the basis of the
past, but what we simply are, our being, which is itself considered in
the current rhetoric “productive” – another version of the interwar
political ontology that I referred to above. But there is also a more
deliberate and disingenuous borrowing, most especially from the vast
reservoirs of Marxism, since in a period of empire resurgent like our
own, of historic defeats and disorientation, it is the one edifice of


     10
        I take up this image at greater length in Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and
the Colonies (2014).



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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



indisputable radical authority. And here the borrowing, when grafted
on to the notion of rupture above, is injurious, often malicious,
insouciant but in any case freely inventive, and does violence to its
source, if not fatally. Repeatedly, in other words, new left political
innovations hostile to historical Marxism nevertheless find themselves
compulsively returning to it in order to cancel it out by an unfriendly
appropriation, but at any rate wishing to thrive off of its inherited
energies.
      “Borrowed light,” then, as a paradigm for a contemporary
comparatism. One that casts light on the present European crisis which
is at once the peripheralization of Europe at a time that its imperial past
returns in the form of waves of desperate immigration from abroad,
and, at the same time, the residual reassertion of an older imperial role,
a nostalgic attempt to put on the clothes again of a pre-social
democratic exploitation of foreigners. The past in the present, although
a present whose past has been altered and so is unique to this
configuration. The need to learn that past outside the tyrannical, and
basically bourgeois, bluff of the “new.” The internet not as a paradigm
shift, but a dumb prosthetics whose raw material is the assembled
wisdom and writing of conventional books, papers, and archives. The
parasitic relationship of Google search engines to the manual and
mental labor of scholars, writers, and conventional librarians. The
historical subject choosing, arguing, persuading, and making.
Philology.




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Timothy Brennan, The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the Posthuman



Vico, Giambattista, Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, Ed. and Trans.
     Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, Ithaca, NY,
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     1968.



                                       The author
Timothy Brennan

       Timothy Brennan is the Samuel Russell Chair of the Humanities
at the University of Minnesota, and a professor in the departments of
Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, and English. His essays on
literature, cultural politics, music, and American intellectuals have
appeared in a variety of publications including The Nation, New Left
Review, Transition, The Christian Science Monitor, The Times Literary
Supplement, and the London Review of Books. Among his recent books
are Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008),
Empire in Other Colors (Revolver, 2007), Wars of Position: The Cultural
Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006), and, mostly recently,
Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford, 2014). Volume II
of that work, Borrowed Light: The Interwar Moment and Imperial Form, is
forthcoming (Stanford UP, 2015).



                                       The paper
Date sent: 15/05/2015
Date accepted: 30/09/2015
Date published: 30/11/2015




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                                  Between, vol. V, n. 10 (Novembre/November 2015)




                     How to quote this paper
Brennan, Timothy, “The Legacies of Vico: Philology, the Internet, the
Posthuman”, L'immaginario politico. Impegno, resistenza, ideologia, Eds. S.
Albertazzi, F. Bertoni, E. Piga, L. Raimondi, G. Tinelli, Between, V.10
(2015), http://www.Betweenjournal.it/




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