Ottmar Ette PMLAKedits

Introduction: A Survival Kit for the Humanities?

In 2001, the offIcIal year of the lIfe scIences In Germany, ott

mar ette beGan pullInG toGether Ideas for what was to be come the programmatic essay excerpted and translated here. ette is known for different things in different places: in spain and hispanic america, he is renowned for his work on Jos mart, Jorge semprn, mario Vargas llosa, Gabriel Garca mrquez, and a host of other authors. In the francophone world, he is best known for his writings on roland barthes and, more recently, on amin maalouf, while his reputation in his native Germany rests on his voluminous work on alexander von humboldt and on the new literatures in German. that this polyglot professor of romance literatures is, at heart and in practice, a comparatist goes almost without saying. he is also, perhaps as inevitably, a literary theorist and a cultural critic, whose work has attracted attention throughout europe. In his 2004 book berLebenswissena title that might be rendered in en glish both as Knowledge for survival and as about life Knowledge1ette first began to reclaim for literary studies the dual concepts of lebenswissen and Lebenswissenschaft, which I have translated provisionally as knowledge for living and science for living to set them off from the biotechnological discourses of the life sciences. while ber Le bens wissen focuses on the disciplinary history and practices of the field of romance literatures,2 its companion volume from 2005, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Li tera tu ren ohne festen Wohnsitz (writing between worlds: literatures without a fixed abode), extends ettes inquiry to the global contexts of shoah, cuban, and arab american literatures. both volumes urge that literary studies be opened up, made accessible and relevant, to the larger society. doing so is, simply and plainly, a matter of survival (ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 270).

the issue of the survival of literary studies takes center stage in ettes contentious contribution to the year of the humanities in Germany in 2007. his emphasis on survival is hardly hyperbolic, as was clear from two events that made this purported celebration of the humanities look more like a dirge. the first one was the kick off event in bonn, Germanys former capital, of the seventh european union research framework program, which did not

criticism in translation

Literature as Knowledge for Living,

Literary Studies as Science for Living

ottmar ette

edited, translated, and with an introduction by

vera m. kutzinski

Vera m. KutzInsKI is the martha rivers

In gram professor of en glish and profes

sor of comparative literature at Vander

bilt university. Kutzinski has written the

award winning Against the American Grain:

Myth and History in William Carlos Williams,

Jay Wright, and Nicols Guilln (Johns hop

kins up, 1987) and Sugars Secrets: Race

and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (u of

Virginia p, 1993) and has translated nicols

Guil lns The Daily Daily (u of california p,

1989). she is completing a book to be titled

Lang ston Hughes in the Americas. with

ott mar ette, Kutzinski coedits the series

alexander von humboldt in en glish for

chi cago university press.

[ 2010 by the modern language association of america ] 1

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have a single panel or workshop dedicated to the humanities. the second was the announcement of the winners of the second round of Germanys exzellenzinitiative (Initiative for excellence), in which the humanities were again left holding the short end of the stick.

while the fate of the humanities and especially of literary studies is a global concern these days, the momentous shifts in europes academic landscape provide a telling context for ettes polemic. Germany in particular has undergone significant changes in the past two decades, resulting from the countrys reunification in 1989 and from the concurrent expansion of the european union. the university of potsdam, where ette holds the chair in romance literatures, is located in the state of brandenburg, near berlin, the reunified Germanys capital. brandenburg is part of the still marginalized eastwhat many, twenty years after the fall of the berlin wall, still call the new German states. In the early 1990s, the German government encouraged faculty members from universities in the west to move to the east to strengthen academic institutions there. many humanists did, ette among them, and they built up departments and research centers with international reputations, despite severely limited institutional resources and crumbling infrastructures. the proverbial slap in the face came in 2006 and 2007: virtually none of the universities in the east were deemed fit to be included in the excellence Initiative, an ambitious plan through which the German federal government, in a joint effort with individual states, hoped to create a small number of elite national institutions. the idea was (and is) to make German universities, which have lost ground since their heyday in the nineteenth century, more competitive and visible on the international scene.

according to the web site of Germanys bundesministerium fr bildung und forschung (ministry for education and research [bmbf]), the Initiative for excellence, which grew out of the european unions 2005 Joint Initiative for research and Innovation,3 takes a three pronged approach by providing: (1) support for graduate schools (around forty universities were to receive an av

2 literature as Knowledge for living, literary studies as science for living [ P M L Ac

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erage of 1 million each annually); (2) infrastructural support aimed at the creation of competitive excellence clusters with close ties to professional schools and to nonacademic research bodies (thirty clusters would receive about 6.5 million each per year); and (3) additional support for future research concepts and strategies with which to establish ten internationally recognized academic beacons (qualifying candidates would need at least one excellence cluster and one excellence graduate school and would stand to receive an average of 21 million per annum).4 on the surface, and from a distance, this all sounded wonderful, almost an embarrassment of riches even in the days before the current budget crunch at universities worldwide. besides, in 2006 few questioned the need for a nationwide reform of the German university system, which was long overdue: ratios of faculty members to students were dismal everywhere, especially in the popular humanities tracks; the academic and administrative responsibilities faculty members took on in addition to teaching bordered on the unworkable; there was close to no support for graduate students and junior faculty members research; and new professorships opened up only when those who occupied chairs either retired or passed away. (In Germany, unlike in the united states, mandatory retirement at age sixty five is tantamount to professional death). how could anyone not welcome the news of significant funds being made available for restructuring an outdated and overburdened academic system? among humanists, however, the initial enthusiasm waned quickly when it became apparent that the offerings were very unevenly distributed across academic institutions and fields. as it turned out, the news for the humanities, especially for literary studies, was far from good.

here are some of the ugly realities. when the first round of the Initiative for excellence was announced in 2006, seventy four universities submitted 319 preliminary applications to the selection committee, which ranked them according to academic quality, interdisciplinarity, international visibility, and ability to integrate regional research capacities. the committee invited thirty six of

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these institutions and ninety of their full project applications into the second round; not a single university from the eastern states was among them.5 this exclusion, which did not go without public protest, speaks volumes about the internal disposition of federally steered German university politics. more disturbing, the vast majority of institutions selected in this round were those with emphases on technology, engineering, and the natural sciences (including the so called life sciences). of the ninety invited and funded proposals, only two were from the humanities (two others arguably had humanities components); generously calculated, that would be between two and four percent. the percentage of proposals from the humanities rose to almost fifteen percent (seven out of forty seven) in the second round from 2007, which included two universities from the eastern states, but these increases do not change the picture substantially. what is more, only one of the new graduate schools (at the free university of berlin) focuses on literature. all rhetoric about interdisciplinarity notwithstanding, a strong preference for science and technology based fields is evident here.6 ettes wry quip that the humanities occupy the same position in Germanys academic scene that the east does in Germanys national political context seems more than justified (literaturwissenschaft 9). the analogy was especially palpable on the university of potsdams Golm campus: before the recent renovations, ettes office was in a building previously occupied by the stasi (the German democratic republics secret service)the telltale double doors added a peculiar historical touchand he still holds his large lecture courses in a refurbished hall once used to garage tanks.

such regional analogies do not have easy counterparts in united states academia. but the political bias in favor of biotechnological fields has an uncomfortably familiar ring in our academic settings, where the humanities have long been treated as poor cousins, especially when it comes to resource allocation. this situation is bound to worsen. It does not help matters that such unequal resource allocation may well be, as ette argues, one of the many symptoms of the per


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ception that humanists have withdrawn from the rest of society and that their fields are spiraling into ever greater social and political insignificance. this perception of humanists aloofnessand not all of it is mere perceptionis hardly limited to Germany or even to europe. If it were to continue unchecked, at least some of what we refer to as national literature departments, not to mention other humanities disciplines, may well go the way that many comparative literature departments and programs have already gone, as funds are getting ever scarcer. even in the united states, literary studiesespecially departments that are not regarded as service departmentsrisk becoming, to use an apt German idiom, Orchideenfcher, (orchid disciplines): beautiful to the eye but without any direct use value and hence eminently expendable in a fiscal crisis. the challenge, as ette rightly sees it, is not just to convince university administrators that our institutions need these disciplines but also to explain to broader audiences of skeptics why our societies cannot do without literary studies.

ettes well timed remarks, which he first delivered as a public lecture at the Ibero american Institute in berlin and subsequently published in the bilingual romanist journal Lendemains, prompted a flood of responses from universities across and beyond Germanyfar more than the journal could publish. Lendemains printed eleven of them in its 2007 and 2008 issues combined, and a collection of others was published by the Gnther narr press in the fall of 2009 (asholt and ette). replies to ettes call for academic collaboration under the umbrella term sciences for living and especially to his conception of literary studies as a science for living together came from many quarters in literary and cultural studies.7 several literary figures were also part of the debate, notably amin maalouf and Jorge semprn.

the critical responses to ette give the initial impression that he is preaching to the choir. hans ulrich Gumbrechts comments are a case in point. he calls ettes arguments self evident: after all, how could any institution, especially a science [Wissenschaft], refuse to be measured according to what it contributes to life (89)? but despite broad approval for the resocialization of the con


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cept of literature (messling 102), there are several interesting points of contention. Gumbrecht, for one, is adamant that neither literature nor literary studies be regarded as a source of normative models for living together (90). the best literary scholars, writes Gumbrecht, do not preach ethical principles (that is best left to philosophers) but think ex centrically in relation to the institutions of their times (his examples here are erich auerbach and harold bloom [91]). while some respondents are concerned about the potential loss of literatures aesthetic autonomy (and privilege) in ettes approach and encourage more confrontational approaches to the life sciences (tholen), others speak out in favor of a greater convergence of literary studies and the natural sciences. but, as Gumbrecht cautions, it would be a dangerous simplification to assume that natural scientists reflect less on what they do than humanists. and if critical self consciousness is not the exclusive province of the humanities, it remains to be seen which competences and experiences humanists might fruitfully contribute to dialogues with natural scientists (9192). not all, however, are favorably disposed toward a complementary alliance of these two realms. Klaus michael bogdal, professor of literature at the university of bielefeld, for instance, is concerned about a dilution of the critical potential, or usefulness, of the humanities ability to examine oppression, inequality, competition, ignorance, lies, deceptions, religious hatred, and their linguistic aesthetic representations (97). others worry about ettes terminology, particularly about the key concept of lebenswissenschaft, a term that was popular in nazi Germany, even if it did not originate there. similarly, some in the united states would worry if the phrase pro life, with all its ideological baggage, were adopted to render a humanities focus on life.

the question of what literary studies contributes to the world is also bound up in the tricky question of the disciplines object of study, which is not easy to answer on a good day. the issue of what we actually teach in literary studies, and in the humanities at large, has been widely debated in the united states academy for the past decade or so,


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more often than not in the context of comparative literature. the american comparative literature associations 2004 report of the state of the discipline, published in 2006 as Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, is but one example of discussions in which literary scholars address only one another (saussy). Is it surprising, then, that the broader public perceives the literary profession as detached from the world and resting comfortably behind the safe enclosures of its garden of knowledge? ette, for one, is unwilling to settle for a vision of humanists as victims of anti intellectual publics before whom they keep casting pearls of wisdom to little or no avail. a more immediate reality, at least in Germany (for now), is what toni tholen, professor of literature at the university of hildesheim, calls the rage for continual change, reorientation, competition, and control on the part of educational politics and administrations, which makes it nearly impossible for many humanists to pursue any research at all, no matter what its subject or direction (108). tholen refers to the fact that Germany seems intent not only on supporting research but also on establishing its own version of the two tier system that already exists at most universities in the united states. the plan is to create Lehrprofessuren (teaching professorships) in the humanities to staff examination committees in the new ba and ma tracks that are to make the German system more compatible with the system in the rest of europe and the world. for tholen, literary studies as science for living should involve literary scholars collective opposition to such policies. ettes argument is enabling, then, in that it calls on humanists to be public arbiters of their disciplines fate. for disciplines such as literary studies, which have either theoretically denied the existence of any form of subjective agency or overinvested in specific forms of collective agency (such as identity politics, according to Gumbrecht), it is high time to put their collective knowledge to work by assuming a more active responsibility for their institutional and societal survival.

ettes ideas about literature and life, then, are not just a backhanded way of returning the field of (comparative) literary studies to some loose con


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cept of world literature that flows from the purported universality of human experience. haun saussy has called this universality comparative literatures most obvious, and usually undertheorized, candidate for trunk status. situations, emotions, ideas, personalities seems to recur across any corpus of world literature, be it ever so diverse. If we will only take for granted that the topics of literature refer to the same things, comparison becomes possibleindeed, all too possible (13). but thematic or formal similarities are hardly the onlyor even most fruitfulgrounds for literary comparisons. ette himself finds it more productive to pinpoint areas of divergence and overlap in literary representations of human experiences across the planet. If we grant that the literatures of the world are complex repositories of such representations, ettes point that literary scholarship can uniquely address questions about cultural similarities and differencesand do so more fully than any natural or even social science canis not only plausible but compelling. It may seem self evident that, to survive, a society needs to know more than what it takes to keep humans breathing. but self evidence is dangerous, of course, because it seems to require from us neither thought nor action.

to focus on life, then, does not mean to build thematic gateways to universality but to chart sets of relations. at issue is the ability of literary scholars to adjust to multiple frames of reference and to attend to relations rather than givens (saussy 34)and life, in ettes essay, is never a simple given. the systematic study of relations (among humans and among other forms of life) can give rise to theoretical paradigms, such as ZusammenLebenswissen (knowledge of [and for] living together), that encapsulate conceptual and actual interconnections on regional and global scales.8 the affinities with douard Glissants potique de la relation are not coincidental for a specialist in romance literatures who is thoroughly familiar with the caribbean. through careful readingsand through collaborations among readers from different specialtiesliterary studies can supply the local specifics without which knowledge for living remains a vacuous abstraction.


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can the debate that ottmar ette has initiated be translated into other languages and into other cultural and academic settingsnotably, into en glish and into the context of the united states academy? neither berlebenswissen nor berlebenswissenschaft, key concepts in ettes intellectual universe, translates smoothly into en glish, which, its philological proximity to German notwithstanding, does not lend itself to long composites. ettes terms combine the idea of surviving (berleben) through knowledge, or knowledge for survival (berleben), with the concept of knowledge for and about (ber) living. translations into french (savoir vivre) and spanish (saber vivir) would be much easier. this need not, however, be disabling. the very difficulty of translating these concepts into en glish should challenge humanists in american academia not to remain at the margins of a critical debate that has so far been conducted mainly in languages other than en glish. this difficulty may provide an opportunity for humanists, on this side of the atlantic and in the rest of the en glish speaking world, to consider if and how we might reclaim life as a ground for our intellectual pursuits. doing so strikes me as particularly important in a society where the rhetoric of life has been lionized not only by the biosciences (this is true everywhere) but also, and even more aggressively, by conservative religious and other organizations. we might borrow a leaf here from african american and postcolonial literatures, which have shown how ideologically compromised terms can be revalidated and reappropriated. If it can be done in literature, why not in literary studies?

NotesAll unattributed translations are mine.

1. The books subtitle, Die Aufgabe der Philologie, continues this double entendre, which clearly leans on Walter Benjamin: it refers to the task of philology (or literary studies) and to its surrender.

2. The book has chapters on Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, Max Aub, Al-exander von Humboldt, and others. The difference of


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Ettes approach comes into view if one reads his chapter on Spitzer and Auerbach in concert with Emily Apters Global Translatio, also from 2004.

3. To make the European Union the most competitive and dynamic knowledge- based economic area by 2010, the European Council of Lisbon agreed in 2000 that member states should spend three percent of their gross national product on academic research and development.

4. Bundesministerium. The description of the initia-tive on the BMBF Web site is also available in En glish, but most of the links are not.

5. The BMBF Web site does not include a list of the pre-liminary proposals that were submitted for the first round.

6. Germany announced a third round of the Initia-tive for Excellence in March 2010. The announcement stresses interdisciplinarity. But interdisciplinarity means something different to natural scientists and engineers than it does to humanists. Because biology and physics, for instance, are considered distinct disciplines, natural scientists never have to look to the social sciences and the humanities to claim interdisciplinarity.

7. The fields from which replies to Ettes call came include Romance literatures (Wolfgang Asholt from the Univ. of Osnabrck), En glish and American literatures (Ans gar Nnning from the Graduate School for the Hu-manities at Justus Liebig Univ. in Giessen), philosophy (Christoph Menke from the Univ. of Potsdam), German studies (Wolfgang Adam from the Interdisciplinary Inst. of Early Modern Cultural History at the Univ. of Os na-brck), and, last but not least, comparative literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht from Stanford Univ.).

8. Walter Mignolos paradigms for coexistence point in a similar direction, but his focus is on Latin America.


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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

ottmar ette

From the Garden of Knowledge

Scholarship on literatures and languageswhat used to be called philology and still is in many quarters outside the United Stateshas long lost its momentum in public intellectual discourse. Its marginalization occurs at a point in history when we need the humanities to help solve one of the most urgent problems of the twenty- first century: how radically dif-ferent cultures might live together with mu-tual respect for each others differences. How, then, can we secure the existence of these dis-ciplines and assure their survival? We need to reorient the humanities in this changed en-vironment and to ask anew the question that Goethe posed in a different historical context: tell me, what is life to you?

When one examines the development of the humanities, especially during the sec-ond half of the past century, one notices that the term life has almost entirely disappeared from methodological and ideological debates. While this does not automatically entail a loss of these debates relevance for life, it does mean that the humanities have lost a space for reflection. Other academic fields have increas-ingly occupied this space and its potential for creating meaning and for connecting mean-ing with action. Through the term life sciences, a constellation of biotechnological disciplines has appropriated the term life in an effective, deceptively self- evident way, increasingly rob-bing the humanities of any authority to pro-duce knowledge about life. This narrowing of bios, a broadly conceived understanding of life that includes specifically cultural dimen-sions, to a bio- and natural- scientific concept is dangerous for the life of a society and for its cultural and intellectual development. Can humanists change this course?

For the humanities to survive in our pres ent and future societies, it is vital that

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they conceive of themselves as sciences for living [Lebenswissenschaften]. Literary scholars can take the lead by capitalizing on their dis-ciplines critical function to develop an open concept of life and of knowledge about and for living, systematically interrogating the uses and disadvantages literary scholarship has for life.a Such knowledge must serve lifethat is, it must be grounded in dialogue and theory rather than in ideology (Nietzsche 59). This trajectory might prevent literary schol-arship, along with the rest of the humanities, from comfortably settling down in a Nietz-schean garden of knowledge increasingly walled off from the concept and the practice of life. The reorientation toward the idea of life that I advocate here cannot be a superficial, short- lived tactic. Rather, it ought to be a sys-tematic and concerted effort to think through the obligations that the sciences humaines, the human sciences, have to our societies and to begin to realize their immense potential for improving how people live with one another. Any academic discipline that does not make its knowledge available to the society in which it exists shirks its responsibility toward that society and, in the end, has largely itself to blame for being pushed aside.b

Should the humanities confront the nat-ural sciences? No. Rather than attacking the semantic reductionism of the biosciences con-cept of life, humanists need to initiate a serious dialogue with the biosciences. This dialogue has to include literary and cultural knowledge, thus making possible a more complete under-standing of life and of the humanities as part of the sciences for living. Doing so would break down the imaginary border between Charles Percy Snows two cultures, whose hypotheti-cal existence many still take for granted on the discursive level and, even more so, on the level of academic politics and policies.c We need to create a contrastive and complementary web of knowledge and comprehensive scientific systems that include humanists as equal part-ners. In the long run, literary criticism and


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theory will likely survive only if they formu-late strategies and approaches that would in-clude them fully in a nonreductive conception of the sciences for living.

Life, the Life Sciences, and the Sciences for Living

In the early twenty- first century, systems of ordering knowledge production continue, as a rule, to prescribe clear distinctions between the natural sciences and the humanities and between the humanities and the social sci-ences.1 The strange career of the so- called life sciences is a case in point. Discussions of the human genome, stem cell research, the possibility for cloning animal or human life, and the engineering of genes or seeds have increasingly left the public with the impres-sion that a few, highly specialized academic fields actually covered the entire spectrum of knowledge about human life. At least before September 11, a search for the key to hu-man life dominated feature pages, television shows, and political debates. The mystery of life finally appeared to be decipherable: it was a code, a calculable and, in the end, predict-able chain.2 The popularization of fascinat-ing theories for comprehending life and of impressive natural- scientific research results changed how people conceived of everyday life and of a safe future. Both the mass media and sponsors of research invested the biosci-ences with extraordinary significance: the life sciences became the sciences of life.

But the genetic code of life is not the only thing we can read. Equally readable is the dis-cursive code that places the biosciences at the center of a societys attention. Against these sciences hegemonic claims to universality, Hans- Georg Gadamer offers a cautionary note about the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities:

One enjoys asking the humanities in which precise sense they want to be sciences, in the


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light of the fact that there are no criteria for comprehending texts or words. For the natu-ral sciences and various forms of technology, it is certainly true that a lack of ambiguity in their means of communication is guaranteed. But it is incontrovertible that even the appa-ratus of a civilization that is founded on sci-ence and technology does not nearly cover all aspects of living together. (202)

The phrase life sciences is as ambiguous as it is radiant and all- encompassing. It vastly re-duces the term life from the breadth of mean-ing it enjoyed in Western antiquity. Because of its possessive and repressive tendencies, and through the metaphors it borrows from literature and the humanities, the concept of life sciences attempts to bar other branches of knowledge from accessing life.

Philosophy has already reacted to the challenge of genetic technology. In the con-text of eugenics, for instance, philosophy has questioned what life would be like without, as Habermas puts it, the emotions roused by moral sentiments like obligation and guilt, reproach and forgiveness, without the lib-erating effect of moral respect, without the happiness felt through solidarity and without the depressing effect of moral failure, without the friendliness of a civilized way of deal-ing with conflict and opposition (73). Yet in a 2000 speech, Habermas also observes that philosophy is no longer confident enough to risk answers to questions regarding the per-sonal, or even the collective, conduct of life (1). Criticizing the field of ethics for having been reduced to what Adorno had called a melancholy science (15), Habermas tellingly resorts to a literary text to point to the poten-tial for disconcerting questionsand no less disconcerting answersthat literature has al-ways held in store for its readers. Max Frischs novel Stiller (1954) shows that literature never misses an opportunity to tell us about life and to show us the paradoxes and aporias of knowledge for living. Habermas uses Stiller to make this point: Frisch has Stiller, the public


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prosecutor, ask, What does a human being do with the time he has to live? I was hardly fully aware of the question; it was simply an irrita-tion (1). Literary scholars, unlike philoso-phers, barely react to such questions; they do not even register them anymore. In the end, is it not literary scholarship that has turned from a joyful, or at least pleasurable, pursuit into a melancholy one?

The swift dissemination of the term life sciences has provoked many reactions and complaints but, it seems to me, has not re-sulted in any new strategies in the fields that focus on literature. Literary scholars have hardly begun to consider the impact of the biosciences recourse to the life metaphor and all the confusion and perplexity that follow in the wake of this impact. Above all, liter-ary scholars should know better than to risk relinquishing the term life and allowing it to function in such a limited way.

The publics ready embrace of the term life sciences indicates that people have an enor-mous interest in the systematic study of life, and this interest should open our eyes to the opportunities for the humanities if they were to conceive of themselves as part of the sci-ences for living. After all, life is not the loot of a single cluster of disciplines; it does not obey the logic of a simple code. Indeed, work in the natural sciences has gained much clarity from its varied encounterswith, for instance, moral economies and cognitive passions (Daston 157). While it might be comforting to think that the life sciences participate in life more than their proponents would either know or care, this does not excuse humanists from the responsibility to protect life from the bioscientific claim to represent it com-pletely and exclusively.3 Especially in times of heated debates about preimplantation diag-nostics and stem cell research, literary schol-arship stands a better chance than philosophy to propose models for life without arousing the suspicion of proffering, or even prescrib-ing, normative concepts. This is particularly


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important because models for the right (way of) life, both in literature and in philosophy, have an ever- shorter half- life in multi-, inter-, and transcultural contexts where life- forms and situations rapidly pluralize.

If we perceive the life sciences merely as a network of largely applied sciences while at the same time considering them as an experimen-tal ensemble of biochemical, biophysical, bio-technological, and medical fields of research, we inevitably run the risk of losing the broad cultural diversity inherent in bios. A cultur-ally sound concept of life, one that is also ori-ented toward literature, can counteract such a potential danger by reclaiming the differen-tiation between zo, the simple fact of living common to all living beings, and bios, which denotes the form or way of living proper to an individual or group (Agamben 1). Giorgio Agamben places this distinction at the center of his Homor Sacer from the start. The Italian philosopher is in the tradition of great intel-lectuals whose thinking revolved, to a con-siderable degree, around the epistemological relevance of forms as well as concepts of life.

In an essay for the programmatic journal Die Wandlung [The Transformation], Leo Spitzer defined literary scholarship as the science [Wissenschaft] that seeks to compre-hend the human being to the extent to which he expresses himself in words (speech) and linguistic creations (179). For this science, following Auerbachs line of thought about a philology of Weltliteratur, to dare again what earlier periods dared to doto designate mans place in the universe (Philology 17), it has to conceive of itself as a science for liv-ing and, as such, a part of the life sciences in the broadest sense. That such an idea is hardly foreign, at least to scholarship in Romance languages, is evident from the notable yet un-noticed frequency with which the lexeme life appears at the end of Auerbachs foundational work, Mimesis. Here, Auerbach grapples with a new orientation and a new conception of philology against the background of the ca-


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tastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and in the midst of an acutely felt linguistic and cultural homogenization. It is no coinci-dence that the final chapter of Mimesis, in the German original, ends with the verb erleben [to experience or to live through]:

The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Mrime for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today, the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Bucks Chi-nese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural level-ing process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most con-cretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the ran-dom moment in the lives of different people. So the complicated process of dissolution, which led to fragmentation of the exterior action, to reflection of consciousness, and to stratifica-tion of time, seems to be tending toward a very simple solution. Perhaps it will be too simple to please those who, despite all its dangers and ca-tastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its abundance of life and the incompa-rable historical vantage point which it affords. But they are few in number, and probably they will not live to see much more than the first forewarnings of the approaching unification and simplification. (55253; Ettes emphases)

Today, we have a broader view than Auerbach did in the immediate postWorld War II pe-riod of the cultural homogenization that he sketched and of the simultaneous cultural (re) differentiation that was then underway. Yet his insistence on a concept of life stands for an awareness of the need for literary scholars to care about and for life in the fullest sense.

Knowledge for Living

I want to use the concept of knowledge for living to suggest new perspectives on the rel-


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evance of literature and literary scholarship to human societies and their histories. Ter-minologically, knowledge for living opens our view onto the complex relation between the semantic poles of the compound phrase. This relation is multilayered or multidimensional. To combine living with knowledge implies knowledge about or of life. It also implies knowledge for the purpose or benefit of liv-ing. Further, these different aspects of knowl-edge exist in life and are inseparable for a living (and knowing) subject. Knowledge is a fundamental characteristic of life processes and the practice of living. From this vantage, knowledge for living appears as a specific way of living ones life, which includes reflecting on how one lives. Knowledge for living can be gained through concrete experiences in im-mediate life contexts and through the produc-tion and reception of symbolic goods. In this way, knowledge for living can also be under-stood as an imagined form of living and as a process of imagining life (and lives), in which self- referentiality and self- reflexivity are criti-cally important. In other words, knowledge for living is bound up in life experiences but never tied to a single logic. Rather, the term implies the ability to think and act simultane-ously according to different sets of logic.

Against this background, one may un-derstand literature as an ever- changing and interactive storehouse of knowledge for liv-ing. In contrast to philosophy, which seeks to construct internally coherent systems of meaning, literature focuses on artistically enriching coherence with incoherence, a pro-cess that quantum theory knows as superpo-sition. As a mutable and dynamic storehouse of knowledge for living, literature devises and aesthetically shapes blueprints for how to live. For this purpose, it draws on, and draws in, many partial knowledges, including academic discourses. Literature specializes in not being specialized, with respect to disciplines and to lived realities and cultural differences. Be-cause literature neither negates nor cements


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the division between the humanities and the biosciences and has access to a multitude of codes from radically different traditions of thinking and writing, the most diverse frag-ments of knowledge circulate through it. Lit-erature is therefore singularly able to store a wide range of knowledge for living and to keep it at its readers disposal. It also shapes forms of life artistically, in Juri Lotmans sense of a secondary modeling system, enabling readers to experience them aesthetically. In the biosciences and biotechnologies, life and knowledge cannot be thought of together in specific forms, practices, and models the way they can in the realm of literature, where life is not forced into disciplinary systems.3 For literary criticism and critical theory, knowl-edge for living is intrinsic to the very process of knowing; it is part of the object of study and of the subjects (the scholars) individual life contexts.

Intra- and Extratextual Dimensions of Knowledge for Living

Knowledge for living has behind it a long tra-dition in Western European literary histories, in which, starting with Aristotles concept of catharsis, the question of literatures perfor-mance of knowledge for living has been as central as the question of how to acquire such knowledge. In an essay on the act of reading from a phenomenological point of view, origi-nally published in En glish in 1972, Wolfgang Iser identifies three major aspects of the re-lation between text and reader: the process of anticipation and retrospection, the conse-quent unfolding of the text as a living event, and the resultant impression of lifelikeness (Reading Process 142). Compelling the reader to seek continually for consistency causes the reader to be entangled in the text gestalt that he himself has produced; this creates the impression of experiencing as a form of imaginative living through (14243). Insofar as the act of reading includes an ele-


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ment of our being of which we are not directly conscious, literature offers us the chance to formulate the unformulated (145). Follow-ing Iser, we may say that fictionality creates a space of experimentation in which readers, in serious playfulness, can test out different life situations, with which they can engage to collect experiences that they could not have in real life.

Isers observation that fictional texts [are] always ahead of our practice of life, of the way in which we live our lives touches on a problem that the field of reception aesthet-ics has introduced but never fully engaged (Apell struk tur 250):d the interconnected-ness of literature and life practice, which is implicit in the idea of knowledge for living. The extent to which literature integrates frag-ments of knowledge for living and sets them in motion enables it to produce knowledge for living as knowledge of having imaginatively lived through an event or situation. In this way, literature translates into narrative mod-els the discursive structures of what one might call, with a wink in Barthess direction, frag-ments of a living discourse. Unlike philoso-phy, literature can translate life knowledge into experiential knowledge that is unfettered from the discipline- bound rules of academic discourse, allowing it to come into view more clearly. Along with being able to integrate multiple sets of logic simultaneously, this abil-ity is one of literatures greatest trump cards.

My brief recourse to the promise that Isers reader- response theories has not yet fulfilled helps explain how the concept of knowledge for living applies to and functions in literary texts in at least two ways: intratex-tually (e.g., in the narrative modeling of char-acters) and extratextually (e.g., in how people experience art in a given society).

On the intratextual level, the challenge is to understand the dynamic modeling of liter-ary characters as complex choreographies of individuals who possess different kinds of life knowledge. For example, in Miguel de Cer-


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vantess Don Quixote, the cradle of the mod-ern European novel, there are two characters with vastly divergent knowledges for living. The novel juxtaposes their knowledges in ever- new twists and turns of the plot and ex-perimentally tests, reflects, and modifies them in its fictional laboratory. Sancho Panza, on the one hand, inhabits the world of Spanish sayings, relying on knowledge that has been accumulated in the proverbs of Iberian popu-lar culture, which Werner Krauss presented in such novel and entertaining ways (30833). Don Quixote, on the other hand, possesses a knowledge for living that represents the splendor and the peril, the creativity and the collapse, of a fictional world that unexpect-edly, and fatally, encroaches on the practice of real life. The novel sets in motion these antithetical fragments of knowledge for living and charts the consequences of their move-ments and clashes.

For certain characters, the literary exper-iment can turn out to be painful, as it does for Flauberts Emma Bovary in the intratextual constellations that connect her with the coun-try doctor Bovary, the pharmacist Homais, the merchant Lheureux, and the estate owner Rodolphe. Emmas life project is wrecked through her contact with the differently lo-cated sociocultural discourses of mediocrity embodied in these characters and with their ides reues which so fascinated Flaubert.

The world of the novel may thus be un-derstood as a microcosm of different types of knowledge for living, to the extent at least that the heteroglossia on which Bakhtin in-sisted so emphatically can mark the existence of an open dialogue in the feedback- linked multiparameter systems of which knowledge for living consists (Cramer 168). If literature is an interactive medium for storing knowl-edge for living, Bakhtins cosmos of polyvo-cality, in its turn, constitutes forms, norms, and ways of life that are as different as they are differently acquired. The self- referentiality and self- reflexivity of all processes of knowl-


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edge for living are embedded in the multi-, inter-, and transcultural contexts of litera-ture as a whole, especially in the translingual literary forms that I call literatures without a fixed abode. Literature offers forms of local knowledge for living (what Clifford Geertz has termed local knowledge from the per-spective of anthropology) as well as forms of a worldwide circulation of knowledge, which, on the intratextual level, represent delocal-ized or translocalized life practices.

On the extratextual level, attention to specific cultural and sociohistorical ways of acquiring literary knowledge for living takes center stage. Where closeness to life and the testing of a life practice through fic-tion is concerned, the question arises of how to translate the literary experiment into ones own ways of living, perhaps even into certain groups practices of everyday life. Whatever the cultural specifics of such a translation, it never literally carries over from one situation to another. Literatures problematic power to shape ideas of a good life and to corrupt presumably innocent, yet receptive, readers registered in the nineteenth- century French immoralism trials against novels and poetry (Heitmann), the court proceedings against Lady Chatterleys Lover, the ostracism of de-viant authors in Cuba, and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, among many examples. In the foreground of this long tradition always stood reflections of how intratextual knowl-edge for living might be transformed into extratextual life practice or else of how this transformation, this acquisition of knowl-edge, might be prevented or at least slowed. Whether it wants to or not, literature taps into readers knowledge for living and threat-ens to upend existing norms.

The reciprocal imbrications of intra- and extratextual levels are particularly important for a literary works paratextual apparatus: prefaces and afterwards, titles and subtitles, illustrations and interviews with authors. The literatures of the world bridge immense


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distances in time and place to facilitate transtemporal and translocal acquisitions of life knowledge. Far from a rare occurrence, this diversity of culturally inflected patterns of interpretations and practices of knowl-edge acquisition fascinates contemporary authors and their worldwide audiences. As Amin Maalouf pointed out in a 2001 inter-view, The fact that human beings from the most different cultures read the same stories, react to them, smile about the same texts or get excited by them, presents an opportunity to create passageways between vastly differ-ent cultures. This is arts function . . . (Bab-ouin and Maalouf 101). Following Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon, lives in Paris, and whose novels, written in French, are available in many languages, we might say that read-ing literature in different cultural surrounds can create new connections between cultures, which can influence the behavior, even the life practices, of groups of readers anywhere in the world. At the same time, it is safe to assume that national and monolingual nar-ratives continue to dominate the scene. The one- hundred- year- old reception history of the writings of the Cuban poet, essayist, and revolutionary Jos Mart illustrates the de-gree to which discursive forms or political ideas remain accessible to later generations of readers (Ette, Jos Mart). This accessibility holds equally true for norms and forms of life and even extends to readers adopting certain patterns of action and ways of life.

Knowledge for Living Together

Taken together, the intra- and extratextual dimensions of the knowledge for living that literature stores constitute fundamental as-pects of what I would like to call knowledge for living together [Zusammenlebenswissen]. Literary scholarship ought to devote special attention to the ways in which novels, drama, and poetry render explicit literary characters knowledge for living. Of vital significance


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in this context are artistic representations of living spaces: a city, a house, and a room are fractal patterns that may function like a mo dle rduit (Claude Lvi- Strauss) or a mise en abyme (Andr Gide) to offer paradigms of knowledge for living and confer knowledge for how to live together in a given society. Examining representations of such spaces af-fords us the opportunity to tease out forms of living together as they manifest themselves in literary texts and to situate these forms cul-turally, historically, or societally. We can de-duce from such studies highly dynamic forms of knowledgehighly dynamic because they are, by necessity, highly adaptablethat are most accurately described as knowledge for living together.

At its core, knowledge for living together is knowledge of the conditions, possibilities, and limits of living together as the literatures of the world have shaped it aesthetically and have tested it experimentally from radically different cultural perspectives. The concept has not only social, political, and economic dimensions but also cultural and ethical ones. Although the literatures of the world have al-ways been concerned with knowledge for liv-ing together, literary scholars have yet to mine this resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have they contributed any of this knowledge to recent public debates on the sub-ject of life. But literary criticism and critical theory should be at the forefront of such dis-cussions as we face the most important, and at the same time riskiest, challenge of the twenty- first century: the search for paradigms of co-existence that would suggest ways in which humans might live together in peace and with mutual respect for one anothers differences.

Literary scholarship, as part of the sci-ences for living, is always acutely aware of itself, because it wants to produce knowledge for living together. This self- ref lexivity is perhaps the legacy of Roland Barthess post-humously published lecture Comment vivre ensemble. In this lecture, part of a seminar


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held at the Collge de France in 197677, Barthes focuses his intellectual attention and theoretical curiosity on the question of how people might live together in difference. He notes under the keyword closure that leaving the protective mothers womb might itself stand for life and its definition: to leave is to be exposed: life itself (96). Unsurprisingly, Barthes, as semiologist and sign theorist, con-cerns himself with the question of distance to the other and to material objects, in the novel-istic sphere and in actual life. Barthes also ad-dresses the significance of touching the other slightly (what he called frlage [112]), which shows performatively that the others body is not taboo, no matter the reason for touching it. He focuses as well on the significance of an immediate environment for living together, a proxmie, a concept the author of The Pleasure of the Text had taken from Edward Twitchell. Proxmie refers to a culturally shaped space that surrounds the subject at arms length, so to speak, and whose perhaps most important objectsas crateurs de proxmieare the lamp and the bed (15556). Barthes also took important cues from Gaston Bachelards The Poetics of Space (1958) and developed Bachelards spatial analysis as he addressed the question of living together.

Probing the different forms and rhythms of cloistral and anchoretic coexistences, for instance, would bring to light a broad spec-trum of historically accumulated knowledge of vivre ensemble, of which only parts have been passed on to later generations. Analy-ses of texts by Thomas Mann, mile Zola, Daniel Defoe, or Andr Gide, in addition to the numerous autobiographemes of scholars themselves, can broaden this spectrum even further. Much like Iser, in the writings of his that I have quoted above, Barthes starts from the premise that literature is always ahead of everything else: toujours en avance sur tout (167). In other words, literature has available for its readers areas of knowledge and ques-tions that academic scholarship, notably psy-


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chology, would have to labor long and hard to bring to life.

In many ways, Barthess question in Comment vivre ensemble is intertwined with his Lovers Discourse, but it stretches the former text toward a new horizon. His inquiry into the topic of living together illustrates initial possibilities for how literary analysis might connect literature and life without collapsing one into the other. The realization of litera-tures meaning and entelechy must not lead to a continued exiling of life from literary schol-arship. The bracketing of one of the central questions that literature poses has inhibited literary theorys development, particularly since the second half of the twentieth cen-tury. We continue to feel this trends negative repercussions today, when societies should instead recognize literature as an indispens-able source of knowledge for living and for living together. While this function should not replace other functions of literature, lit-erary theory should finally accept it and take it seriously as a genuine research subject.4

In thousands of years, the literatures of the world have accumulated a body of knowl-edge that has tremendous relevance for the knowledge for living together. Literary schol-arship would do well to devote much more, and more systematic, attention to analyzing exactly how literature stores such knowledge. Exploring this storage function in detail is a foundation for reorienting literary theory and for precise and dynamic accounts of specific forms and ways of life. The different genres and subgenres of the literatures of the world can provide us with knowledge of how to live (in the novel), of how people have lived (in biography), and of how to try to transform ones own performed life into knowledge for living (in autobiography). The varieties of au-tobiographical writings for and about life and survival [berLebenSchreiben], in particular, produce a knowledge whose analysis is indis-pensable for a comprehensive understand-ing of life. This knowledge will help inform


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the further development of our societies, challenging their historically grown self- conceptions and guiding meaningful agendas for the future.

The issue of how to live together better includes the question of how to approach knowledges for living that have completely different cultural origins and inf lections. Any knowledge for living together will con-sequently have to reflect on the limits and the validity of its own ideas in the lived contexts of multicultural side- by- side- ness, intercul-tural togetherness, and transcultural mixed- upness. Paradigms for producing knowledge for living together will also have to combine respect for others with an awareness of gen-der, social, and other cultural differences. Do-ing so is crucial for the peaceful coexistence of a humanity that, since the midtwentieth century, has possessed nuclear and other means of its own destruction.

Literary Scholarship as a Science for Living Together

To determine anew the place of humans in the universe, literary scholarship needs to re-flect anew on its place in a changed system of knowledge production. A concept of knowledge for living, understood as one of literary studies tasks, would be able to deliver an important impetus for creating an academic landscape better and more productively at-tuned to the cultural diversity of human life. The conception of biosciences as life sciences, in its turn, would greatly benefit from reclaiming the idea of life in a cultural and literary- theoretically grounded way that would return to the very idea of life science its indispensable cultural dimension. I see it as inevitable that literary scholarship will de-velop in the direction of a science for living together [Zusammenlebenswissenschaft] and that the humanities will become incorporated into a broader conception of the sciences for living. Nevertheless, we should not fool our-


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selves: art and literature will not provide us with some higher form of knowledge about life. But literature is capable of simulating many forms of life practice, making them ac-cessible performatively and offering readers ways to re- live them and to understand the limits of their own cultural knowledge(s).

The time is right to understand literary scholarship as a science for living together and to embark on research collaborations that in-clude literary studies as much as they do bio-scientific research. Such collaborations might contribute to elaborating what Auerbach, in the passage above, from the final chapter of Mimesis, called the abundance of life. Liter-ary scholars need to rise to the challenge of using their analytic frameworks to emphasize the abundance of life that literature holds in store for its readers, to augment it, and to carry the results of their critical analyses out into our various societies.

Complementary approaches and methods from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, joined in a broad- based understanding of the life sciences as part of the sciences for living, can open up new per-spectives for the systematic exploration of art and literature as experiential knowledge, as survival knowledge, and as knowledge for living together. A decisive and enlivening application of literary scholarships unique potential offers a timely response to increas-ingly pressing questions about the uses that the study of literature has for life. To invoke Nietzsche one last time, if the humanities succeed in organiz[ing] the chaos within themselves, they may recognize their real needs (123).

Notes1. But actual developments in academic scholarly

practice over the last twenty years (see Frhwald et al.) have been quite different: the crossing of disciplinary lines has increasingly blurred these divisional distinc-


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tions. One need not be clairvoyant to predict that this ten-dency will gain momentum as transdisciplinary concepts of knowledge production mature and, in the process, de-velop in ways parallel and complementary to other forms of academic specialization. The goal of a transdisciplinary structure is not the interdisciplinary exchange among conversation partners firmly anchored in a discipline but a continual crisscrossing of diverse disciplines. It goes without saying that the development and the results of this nomadic practice, which is transdisciplinary in the true sense, must be tested and solidified through ongoing disciplinary and interdisciplinary contacts. In this way, it becomes possible to render dynamic radically differ-ent areas of knowledge and to bind them together more strongly and flexibly. For additional details on transdisci-plinarity, see Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 20.

2. For the genetic codes tantalizing history of meta-phorizing and readability, see Blumenberg 372409.

3. It remains to be seen to what extent genetics and stem cell research will develop new models of knowledge that can put into perspective, or even undermine, the supposed externality of knowledge to life processes that have no consciousness of themselves.

4. Literature has often overlooked this prospective dimension, one that can be of great use to critical theory. Literary scholarship can convert the fragments of knowl-edge for living, which it brings to the surface through its analytic methods, into its own forms of knowledge for living, thus keeping them, too, in store for the future.

traNslators NotesThis translation is an edited composite of excerpts from two overlapping texts by Ottmar Ette: his programmatic article Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft: Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der Gei stes wis sen schaf-ten (2007), from the journal Lendemains, and Literatur als Lebenswissen, Literaturwissenschaft als Le bens wis-sen schaft?, the introduction to his book berLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (2004). We use the more resonant title, of the introduction, without the question mark. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the quotations Ette uses are mine. I thank F. David T. Arens for his indefatigable editorial counsel, Daniel Spoth and Anja Becker for their assistance with references and re-lated matters, and Ottmar Ette for reviewing my drafts.

a. The beginning of this excerpt omits Ettes com-ments on Nietzsches On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874).

b. For further details, see Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 269.

c. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolu-tion, the first of Snows 1959 Rede lectures at Cambridge University, Snow pronounced that the intellectual life of the whole of western society [was] increasingly split


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into two polar groups (2): literary intellectuals and scientists. While Snow did criticize the degree of in-comprehension on both sides, he was quick to blame the lack of communication between the two cultures on the anti- scientific and generally backward- looking attitudes of the presumed guardians of traditional cul-ture (11): literary intellectuals. While some, most no-tably F. R. Leavis, promptly returned Snows volley, many others sided with Snow to proclaim a widespread crisis of confidence in the humanities (Plumb).

d. Isers article Indeterminacy and the Readers Re-sponse in Prose Fiction articulates aspects of this idea, as does his book The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.

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