Textual Practice 21(2), 2007, 335358

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory: idealism and the organization of knowledge

The Enlightenment is often described as the age of the encyclopedia,1 a term meaning circle of learning, which is involved in questions of how we construct disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. As such, encyclopedias share something with universities, which also try to accommodate a multiplicity of knowledges, while organising them into disciplines and faculties that raise questions of what qualies as knowledge, and where it is centred. Encyclopedias are proto-universities which at certain points in history connect with conceptions of the university. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the encyclopedias archive fever, its multiplication of areas of knowledge and thus fragmentation of Knowledge (with a capital K) was held in check by the trope of the book as mirror of creation. The long eighteenth century, however, witnessed several new encyclopedic enterprises connected with the constitution of modernity, which Gianni Vattimo denes as the epoch in which simply being modern becomes a decisive die modelled value in itself.2 In France Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclope knowledge as being up-to-date, with a bias towards politics and a Baconian die, which to be sure included bias towards the pragmatic. The Encyclope entries on aesthetic forms, also had entries on taxation and the jury system, and more particularly the mechanical arts. It also consolidated, even if it did not invent, the form of the encyclopedia as alphabetized dictionary. In the long term this form reduced the encyclopedia to a secondary reference system that stored rather than synthesized knowledge, and thus inscribed a conception of knowledge as information or technology rather than philosophy. The Scottish Encyclopedia Britannica was different, but no less a form of epistemic management connected with the instituting of a certain modernity. Its early editions retained as their goal to organize rather than simply to provide an inventory of knowledge. Thus the Encyclopedia Britannica presented systems of several individual sciences to which short entries on terms were attached or cross-referenced. Considered alongside the production of dictionaries of individual sciences, and the role
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360701264519

Textual Practice

that Scottish as distinct from English universities were assuming in the modernising of knowledge, the EB took on three related tasks: the consolidation of new elds that would be sciences rather than arts (thus chemistry instead of alchemy), the professionalization of these elds; and the specialization and disaggregation of disciplines, leading eventually to what Bourdieu calls an autonomization of elds that goes against the very concept of a circle of learning.3 Despite their different formats one alphabetic, the other systematic though it abandons the notion of a single system for multiple separate systems the French and Scottish encyclopedias also share one further thing: namely a promotion of the concept of science that places knowledge on a newly positivistic basis. Again, in a larger history which leads through St. Simon and his erstwhile disciple Auguste Comte, this elevation of science inaugurates a shift in the position of the humanities. For after Comte, the consolidation of the social sciences will drive a wedge into an older organization of knowledge wherein arts and sciences were together, with signicant consequences for both the arts and the sciences. Hereafter the humanities are either reduced to arts, belles lettres occupying an increasingly marginal position of gentlemanly indolence, or seek to merge with the social sciences as human sciences: a eld constituted by its mimetic desire for the signier science. But in roughly the same period Friedrich Schlegel criticized the French encyclopedia, suggesting Idealism as a better basis for knowledge. Schlegels encyclopedistics as Ernst Behler calls it, borrowing Novalis term, resists systematic structure,4 and is not in any bibliographic sense an encyclopedia, but rather consists in the encyclopedic range of his fragments. In this paper, I will not take up Schlegel or Novalis, whom I note only to place them in a broader Romantic encyclopedism, which I will follow through the different but related path it takes in the work of Hegel. The philosophical Encyclopedia of Hegel seeks in Idealism a basis for maintaining the connectedness of knowledge in an environment no longer guaranteed by the totality of the book as a mirror of creation. Importantly, however, I will approach this Idealist Encyclopedia as a sub-set of a broader Romantic encyclopedism by which it is inltrated to the point of effectively deconstructing such Ideals as absolute knowledge. This Romantic encyclopedism, also ist cliche exemplied by Coleridges Notebooks, is not a compilation of knowledge but an encyclopedic thinking: a perception about the disseminative interconnectedness and incompleteness of knowledge.5 Encyclopedistics, in the Romantic sense developed by Novalis, is precisely not governed by what Bataille calls the restricted economy of elds as particular operations with limited ends, but is a general economy wherein a particular phenomenon or discipline cannot be studied as an isolatable system of operation.6 Thus as Novalis explains it, the encyclopedization of a

336

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

science occurs when one employ[s] all other sciences in the development of a particular science, and, conversely, thinks its relevance to all other sciences.7 To be sure, the encyclopedia as what Roger Caillois calls diagonal science8 is not strictly Hegels plan. Hegels work has a totalizing sweep that profoundly distinguishes it from the Notebooks of Coleridge who also irted with editing an encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, and had schemes for organizing disciplines like those of Hegel. Yet Idealism is an idea in Kants sense,9 a desire for total knowledge that develops as a project within a Romanticism that unravels these goals. For as an impulse within Romanticism (paralleled by Blakes system, or Wordsworths imagining of The Prelude within the architectonic of The Recluse), the Idealist encyclopedia ends by rethinking the very nature of absolute as innite knowledge.10 Indeed for Schelling, in On University Studies, absolute knowledge means not total knowledge but simply the opposite of historical knowledge, which is knowledge prejudicially institutionalized within the discourses of the time.11 Hegels Encyclopedia consists of three parts: Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind, initially in one volume and then extended to three, as he found it necessary to go into more and more detail.12 The Encyclopedia was begun just before and continued through the years of Hegels professorship at Berlin, though its origins go back to his days in Jena before his break with Schelling. Berlin was the university designed to take the place of Jena, which had been destroyed in the Napoleonic wars. J.G. Fichte, Wilhelm Von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher all wrote plans for the new university, and Hegels work can similarly be connected with these plans and seen as his reection on what constitutes knowledge in the university. The Hegelian encyclopedia is of particular interest in a genealogy of the European university, because on the one hand Hegel makes education a way of thinking rather than a content of positive knowledge, like Schlegel, who distinguishes method, as the spirit and inner life force of philosophy, from system, as its letter and external organization.13 But on the other hand, unlike Schlegels work, Hegels also has the form of a system, not the least because he wants to pose his claim for the centrality of philosophy against the assumptions of the new French and Scottish encyclopedias and their constitution of a utilitarian university, dominated either by the sciences or by ethics, civics and history. Scottish universities, to be sure, claimed to emphasize philosophy, but meant by this moral and natural philosophy, later called natural science. Hence Hegels complaint that in England Newton [is] celebrated as the greatest philosopher, and that the recent science of Political Economy, known in Germany as Rational Economy of the State... has in England appropriated the name of philosophy.14

337

Textual Practice

Hegel discusses encyclopedias and their construction around an axial discipline in his Introduction to the rst recension of his Encyclopedia, where he criticizes compilations that are mere assemblages of information and that include pseudosciences such as heraldry. These pseudosciences die are the technologies (in a Heideggerian sense) covered in the Encyclope and other post-Baconian encyclopedias. Hegel does not exclude sciences that have a positive content and exist for themselves outside of philosophy in general, but he wants to think them philosophically.15 His encyclopedia is to comprise philosophical and not empirical or practical sciences. For science and system are as important to Hegel as to the Scottish encyclopedists, but have very different meanings.16 They are not to be associated with any kind of positivism, a notion which, contrary to common understanding, existed before Comte, and which connotes a securing of knowledge as what can be positively known, or positively instituted, in William Godwins sense of that term in Political Justice. Thus for Schelling, who uses the term in his lectures On the Method of University Studies, positive sciences are those that attain to objectivity within the state and in function of it, thus becoming a power and becoming organized into so-called faculties.17 Positive sciences, as Derrida says in commenting on Schelling, are those that enjoy an institutional existence... and public legitimacy.18 For Hegel, who takes up the term epistemologically rather than institutionally, positive sciences are limited by the circumstantial nature of their content. More important, they are limited by an assumption of their self-sufciency and refusal to accept their nitude19 a notion later taken up by Foucault, who makes the analytic of nitude one of the central deconstructive gures in the epistemology of disciplines.20 For positive sciences constitute each sphere of knowledge as self-contained, whereas the encyclopedia, as a circle of circles,21 subsumes each sphere into another and (I will argue) unravels one through the other. Encyclopedias are conventionally divided by historians of the form into two kinds: the alphabetic and the thematic, which may become the systematic, as in Hegels case. Though motivated alike by a need for epistemic management provoked by the burgeoning of the archive, the alphabetic and systematic differ and (in the case of the early editions of the EB, to which I will return) also overlap. The alphabetic has now become a secondary reference system within the eld of information: an instrument designed to store facts outside the mind. The thematic and systematic are attempts to organize areas of study into knowledge, which is housed in the mind, having gone through a process of Erinnerung that protects it from the entropy to which information is subject. I assume here a distinction between information and knowledge. While the alphabetic makes information available for selective retrieval, the systematic is to be read in its (im)possible entirety. As an early example of the alphabetic, the

338

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

die is still partly thematic, projecting a proto-university oriented Encyclope to technology, science and politics. In the longer term, however, its parcelling of knowledge into alphabetized entries done by separate hands lays the grounds for an instrumentalizing and contracting out of knowledge, and for current (social) scientic models of collaborative research. The resulting diffusion of knowledge and of the responsibility for knowledge, the reduction of knowledge to sound bites of information, may well be at the root of German Idealisms hostility to the new encyclopedias. It would be easy to see the alphabetic encyclopedia as mobilized by a radical empiricism, and the thematic by a desire for synthesis intensied in the systematic. However, the thematic encyclopedias quasi-systematized in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through the gure of the world as book often fell back into arrays of subjects that were proto-alphabetic in their openness.22 Moreover, under the rubric of the mirror of creation, subcategories of knowledge could be endlessly added on, with the result that the order they constructed was only loosely systematic. Furthermore, the empiricism of the alphabet was not entirely an Enlightenment invention. Thematic encyclopedias such as that of Bartolomeus Anglicus contained some alphabetized sections.23 On the other side, the EB attempted to reintroduce the systematic within the alphabetic. The editors of the fth edition complain that in previous encyclopedias the alphabet, instead of being a mere index, had been made supreme arbiter of the whole arrangement. Thus the different sciences, rather than being the subject of distinct and connected discussion, were cut down into detached parts, so that the alphabet became an instrument of disorder, and an alibi for avoiding a more Philosophical arrangement.24 The EB, from its rst edition onwards, therefore digested each discipline into a treatise or system, providing an alphabetic arrangement of the subordinate terms which are referred to their respective disciplines.25 Thus the encyclopedia in general is mobilized by competing impulses towards particularity and systematicity. This tension places an almost unmanageable strain on a project which, in German Idealism (though not Romanticism more generally), takes the arrangement of areas of study beyond the thematic to the systematic. Coleridge denes a system as a total whose integral parts or members...are interdependent and reducible to one and the same law,26 and Idealism seeks to integrate knowledge under the law of philosophy. The promotion of philosophy as the central discipline had begun with Kant, but tentatively, and with a certain fudging of the term philosophy. For in Kants essays on the organization of the university, entitled The Conict of Faculties, philosophy had wavered between being a dened subject and a more general faculty that contained subjects we would now consider empirical rather than philosophical, such as history and natural history.27 And as a faculty it had been merely the

339

Textual Practice

fourth, lower faculty after the professional faculties of medicine, law and theology. Kant inherited this institutional organization from the Middle Ages, where philosophy or the facultas artium was also a lower faculty, debarred from granting doctorates. Kant himself, who held only a teaching license, began the covert revaluation of the lower as the higher which kept a place for speculative thinking and thus for what Schelling will later call freedom. But in the years after Kant philosophy claimed a new authority as the systemizing principle of (inter)disciplinarity and the central faculty of the German university. Indeed for Hegel philosophy takes in the elds of medicine (in The Philosophy of Nature) and law (in Elements of the Philosophy of Right), thus ambitiously sublating (or more dangerously, internalizing) Kants conict of faculties. Fichte in his writings on the university, constantly refers to the encyclopedia as a central part of the course of knowledge. The encyclopedics sketched by Schlegel, Novalis and Hegel project different, yet-to-be realized ideas of a Romantic university that would always exceed any institutionalism, any hypostasis. Coming after Kant, the Idealist encyclopedia on which I will focus for the rest of this paper greatly expands the role of philosophy in knowledge. To take one example, the incorporation of medicine into the philosophic encyclopedia is part of what Schelling calls the project of introducing [Idealism]... into all the sciences,28 which continues into the attempts of Sartre and Ludwig Binswanger to move from empirical psychology to existential psychoanalysis in the 1930s. Idealizing the sciences means grasping the universal and conceptual possibilities within the particular and specic, as Hegel says of the Germans reworking of John Browns empiricist medical theory.29 Existential psychoanalysis is, we could say, an idealization of psychology. To see pathology phenomenologically, as a showing in Heideggers sense, an appearing of something with cognitive value, is to idealize the science of psychology. And, on the other hand, in Sartres Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, we see the other side of this transection of the philosophical by the empirical: namely a use of empirical psychology as a thought from the outside that uncannily disrupts the potential positivism of a purely idealist psychoanalysis.30 Idealization and Idealism are of course not quite the same thing. Idealism at the end may be left with nothing but the method of idealization as distinct from positivism. In what follows I suggest that the hegemony Idealism grants philosophy is unravelled by its very comprehensiveness. For Hegels Encyclopedia31 is not just the three volumes so titled, but includes elaborations of its parts like the Aesthetics that complicate the system, and that force the cogito of Philosophy up against its unthought, nonphilosophy. Moreover, this encyclopedia is not just Hegels, but is the work that travels between Hegel and Schelling. It is in this secret

340

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

errancy that cracks emerge which are Idealisms legacy to the future. On the one hand, if Hegel imagines the encylopedia as systemizing all knowledge, Schelling in his middle work, becomes his dark interpreter for whom the circle persists only in its ruins. On the other hand, even in those ruins, Schelling, and those who follow him evince a Hegelian desire to see the failure or nomadism of the part encyclopedically as reconguring the whole. Though this is a larger subject, the ruin of the encyclopedia or its persistence as a deliberately broken circle, can be seen in the work of Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Georg Simmel and others. These post-Hegelian thinkers microcosmically develop only parts of Hegels encyclopedia, as in the case of Lukacs who develops his theory of the novel as the loss of epic totality out of the sections on Romanticism in Hegels Aesthetics. Or Simmel, who develops the sciences of Objective Spirit as cultural sciences, but with a profound sense of the loss entailed. The encyclopedia as broken circle persists even more radically in the encyclopedic bricolage of deconstruction, best summed up by Michel Foucaults The Order of Things, which is an encyclopedia of the different kinds of encyclopedisms from the Renaissance to the present. It will be clear that the genealogy I am sketching connects the Idealist encyclopedia with a more contemporary Theory as encyclopedic interdiscipline. As Hegels Berlin Encyclopedia imagined a university where philosophy was absolute knowledge, so the encyclopedia in ruins explores the margins of philosophy to intimate a university equally different from the modern technical university:32 one based, as Derridas work on the university brings out, in the humanities rather than the human or social sciences. To be sure, Hegels Encyclopedia gures a university of Spirit: the University of Bildung that Bill Readings critiques in Humboldt from the perspective of a university of dissensus.33 For although Humboldt wrote the plans for the University of Berlin, it was Hegels Encyclopedia project, which Readings overlooks, that implemented Culture as the synthesis of Subjective and Objective Spirit. But Hegel also dened Spirit in the Phenomenology as dissension rather than synthesis, producing encyclopedias of particular subjects that sometimes dissent from the Encyclopedia. This is to say the Encyclopedia in its very exhaustiveness is the site of a certain autoimmunity, in Derridas terms, whereby an organism or system tends to destroy... some organ or other, one or another of its own immunitary protections.34 Schelling never actually published an encyclopedia, though he saw his lectures on University Studies as an ur-version thereof,35 and it was his early work across the disciplines that may have led Hegel in his Jena period beyond the restricted study of religion. Hegel, on the other hand, seemingly constructs a multicomponent system to contain all his more detailed sub-systems, organizing all knowledge through a dialectical

341

Textual Practice

thematic of the development from nature to Spirit. Yet the archeological shifts he introduces make system in Coleridges sense impossible, in ways Hegel never quite confronts, but that Schelling explores in his concept of asystasy as the inner conict that generates knowledge. Schellings rst stab at something like an encyclopedia is The Philosophy of Art: a microcosm of the aporia in his larger system between absolute identity and particularity.36 Schelling solves this disparity at the heart of encyclopedism by arranging art into ideal and real series that he claims are synchronic. Although this system collapses in on itself, it provides the model for a larger organization of knowledge, begun in Schellings various works on the philosophy of nature, that will similarly align real disciplines like physics and chemistry with ideal ones like philosophy by introducing Idealism into all the sciences. Culminating in organics, Schellings work was supposed to provide a system of nature as the unconscious alphabet of spirit. For Hegel, who completed this circle, biology as it advanced to physiology and unravelled into pathology, jeopardized the idealist synthesis in ways paradoxically disavowed by Hegel but acknowledged by Schelling in the Freedom essay.37 But the early Schelling avoids tarrying with the negative by never getting to organics. He leaves off the bookends of the Hegelian series of real disciplines: mechanics or the resistance of matter to Spirit, and organics as its problematic nitude. Instead he elaborates a visionary physics that deals only with the atemporal energies of electricity and magnetism, thus claiming that what is different in appearing or temporalized Nature exists in true Nature... all at once and in an eternal fashion.38 Schelling knew he must ground this faith in experience by dealing with the life sciences. But his later Ages of the World, with its focus on the difculty of beginning, can be seen as the autobiography of this rst decade, in which he recommences his work as Ideas for, First Outline of, and then Introduction to a philosophy of nature, without ever getting beyond these prolegomena. Eventually he abandons the project, without writing the scientic physiology which he says could alone complete the project of developing the circle of natural science so as to t it into the larger circle of learning.39 In the same period Hegel began what later became the Encyclopedia. Hegel would accuse Schelling of too much idealism, and inattention to dialectic as the working through of concepts in experience. While the early Schelling synchronizes them, Hegel traces an evolution from nature to Spirit, having brought historical and biological models into the heart of knowledge. The circle of learning is thus temporalized: we must remember, repeat and work through the philosophy of nature before reaching the disciplines of subjective and objective Spirit. Before nishing with natural science, we must struggle up from mechanics, through physics and geology to organics, culminating in the emergence of man. This scale

342

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

of disciplines is based on the Great Chain of Being which, however, Hegel tropes as an order of learning in the form of a psychic history. For Hegel projects Spirits enlightenment, as it comes to know itself through the disciplines that study nature, as natures own Bildung from matter to form. Spirit must therefore perpetually struggle with its nature, taking account of contingencies that lead to natural science being not one teleologically unied discipline, but several sub-systems each of which has a different history to tell Spirit. If Hegels shift to the diachronic is his rst break with the early Schelling, his second is his conception of the system as a subject, which ties the concept of system in to the very Romantic notion of process: to education, Bildung, but as process. For if the Encyclopedia is a monument to education as Absolute Knowledge, Hegels Absolute Subject is the Absolute as Subject, which means it is a movement of becoming other to itself. As Slavoj Zizek argues, system too is caught in this movement. As such, it must pass through the shapes of knowledge over the long passage of time, tarry[ing] with the negative40 such that any moment of the Absolute can posit itself as its own Centre.41 Such accident[s], in which a part departs from what circumscribes it to acquire a separate freedom, are, Hegel says in 1807, two years before Schellings Freedom essay, the very energy of thought.42 Thought as absolute knowledge, in Schellings sense, is unconditional knowledge, as Derrida will describe it in arguing for a university without condition where one has the right to say everything even if it be as ction and the experimentation of knowledge.43 Hegel builds this thought into his encyclopedia through the doubling of levels as spheres. Thus a domain of knowledge that is a level in an ascending totality (as nature is a level subsumed into spirit) can become a sphere in its own right, sub-divisible into further subaltern spheres. Mechanics and organics are levels in the sphere of natural science, which is a level leading to the sciences of Spirit. But organics is also subdivided into geology, botany and physiology, which contains the sphere of pathology. The logic is that of Leibnizs Monadology, where individual monads with their own entelechies exist in a pre-established harmony because they are all part of the supreme monad who is God, but where each monad (including God) is innitely deconstructible into further differences.44 Similarly as Hegel compounds his tripartite divisions of knowledge into larger unities, he trisects the original disciplines into rard Genette describes, in Romantic genrefurther sub-disciplines. Ge theory, this madness of the system that takes in difference by reintroducing the whole triad into the very parts established to divide and disaggregate kinds of knowledge.45 This is precisely the embedding of triads within triads that governs Hegels own procedures, for instance in the The Philos lderlins ophy of Nature. 46 Genette links this embedding to Friedrich Ho

343

Textual Practice

theory of the three genres as an endless chain, with each genre alternately leading and following. Tragedy is thus supplemented by lyric, lyric by epic and so on.47 Genette suggests in the end, citing Goethes description of the three genres as a circle that loops back on itself, that the circle can be closed.48 But though it may be closed mathematically, according to a logic in which the three genres yield no more than nine recombinations, the principle of mixing in the Romantic encyclopedia is also chemical. And as Michel Chaouli has argued with reference to Friedrich Schlegels use of chemistry as the underlying principle for his poetics and, we might add, encyclopedics, chemical combinations are at once more contingent, unpredictable, and multiple than mathematical ones.49 In Goethes circle, instead of a hierarchical, though ramied arrangement in the branching structure of the traditional encyclopedias arbor scientiae, we have a chain of supplements that loops back or returns into itself. This circle of supplements means both that knowledge is constituted through transference or metaphor, and that it is fundamentally recursive in structure. Arkady Plotnitsky, linking Hegel to Leibniz, describes the architecture of Hegelian conceptuality as a baroque superfold:50 a gure one can extend to the very structure of the encyclopedia. Though the encyclopedia as a progress from nature to Spirit echoes medieval encyclopedias that are mirrors of creation with theology as their summit, the baroque superfold cannot culminate in an anagogic level. Rather it is a structure in which one domain of knowledge metaphorically folds into another, as philosophy is rethought through art in Hegels Aesthetics, or ontology through geology in Schellings Ages of the World.51 Thus the superfold as the Aufhebung of all these folds, results in an innitely transferential process in which the self-certainty of an individual domain is unbalanced by its translation, its reection, through other domains. An example of this autoimmunity is the last section of Hegels The Philosophy of Nature, The Disease of the Individual. Medicine was often included in medieval and Renaissance organizations of knowledge, but as a practical art. For Bacon it was part of applied science, which included printing and navigation; in the early nineteenth century it was still a trade, as surgeons belonged to the guild of barbers. It is thus signicant that Hegel integrates it into his philosophical encyclopedia, which distinguishes itself from ordinary encyclopedias by excluding positive sciences that bring the concept into contact with the contingency of empirical facts and the phenomena of experience.52 Hegel wanted to think medicine theoretically, as he had said in the Preface to the Phenomenology.53 Yet the translation of philosophy into pathology would seem to radically jeopardise the philosophical narrative of a development from nature to Spirit.54 What Hegel had in mind in so strangely ending his transition to Spirit with illness can be seen if we turn to a parallel epistemic organization

344

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

projected by British Idealism from Erasmus Darwin onwards. In this arrangement, which founders in Coleridge but is completed by his friend J.H. Green,55 pathology, as the traumatic kernel within nature, is reintegrated into a circle of learning that is also a ladder proceeding from the physical to the life sciences, and onwards to the human sciences. Pathology is no more than a level in normal physiology, which goes beyond zoology to study higher life forms. Physiology in turn is a level in the study of man, hence its development as part of anthropology by J.F. Blumenbach, and the Idealist division of anthropology into physiological and pragmatic by Kant.56 To be scientic, as Schelling implies, physiology must include pathology.57 But the aim of studying illness is to understand health, vitality and eventually the workings of life itself as Spirit. Hegel too sought to integrate pathology into a whole complicated by the chemistry of its parts. That he elaborated the parts in such detail marked his response to developments in France and Scotland, for the Encyclopedia Britannica was having experts write systems of specic subjects, thus legitimating new sciences. But the EB was part of an emergent modernity of specialization that is the opposite of encyclopedics. Its relinquishment of totality is implicit in its omission of the traditional diagram of an Arbor Scientiae or map of knowledge to visually simulate the unity of knowledge, in its multiple authorship after the early editions, and in its evolution into a reference tool for the retrieval of information by several readers. The EBs differencing and particularization of knowledge is also implicit in the Hegelian structure of sections within sections. Yet as the work of a single subject, to be read by a single subject, the philosophical encyclopedia resists the autonomization of elds implicit in the EB. Rather it retains totality as at least a negative category, such that when a part asserts its separate freedom, this departure retro-acts on the whole of knowledge. We could also see in the Hegelian structure a parallel dies use of the renvoi or cross reference, which Srinivas with the Encyclope Aravamudan has seen as giving readers the power to link topics using personal priorities and motivations.58 Yet the renvoi is tactical and pragmatic, whereas the transferences that occur in the Hegelian encyclopedia react back on the very onto-epistemology of philosophy. Thinking medicine philosophically, Hegel must let philosophy too be affected by medicine. Or perhaps, because The Philosophy of Nature is structured by an anthropomorphism that reads nature as pathologized spirit, he must let philosophy become its own psychoanalysis. For the metaphoric transfers that operate in encyclopedism are not just the site of a radical deconstructibility. They are also the condition of possibility for yet unnamed inter-disciplines, for example, psychoanalysis (as Andre Green recognizes in connecting Hegel to Freud).59 In his work on the university, Derrida refers to these as intersciences, meaning any thematic,

345

Textual Practice

any eld... that the map of institutions at a given moment does not yet grant stable, accredited form.60 Briey, Hegel builds his system of normal physiology around the well-known tripartite scheme of sensibility, irritability and reproduction that Idealism adapted from Albrecht von Haller and John Brown.61 He further uses this scheme to describe the stages of self-consciousness. The scheme is also the background for the analysis of abnormal physiology or disease, as the usurpation of the normal process by its middle stage of irritability. Thus, given the metaphoric transfers set up between physiology and philosophy, illness also generates a set of problems for self-consciousness. More specically, irritability becomes a way of thinking through the crucial philosophical category of negativity and its economization within the Hegelian system. In irritability a part of the body separates itself from the whole and becomes for the self, but as the negative of itself, impeding the health of the whole.62 If the irritability of illness cannot be worked through, then there are obvious consequences for the productive use of negativity, which we see for example, in Hegels discussions of barbarism and war. Following his larger system, Hegel wants to make irritability the prelude to reintegration. He therefore narrativizes his three-part schema as a dialectic, and ends with reproduction as the return to a productive moment. He valorizes acute over chronic illness, because in the former the morbid matter is worked through in fever, while in chronic illness the body hangs on to its negativity.63 But the discussion of illness aficts the dialectic in ways it cannot wholly contain. First, chronic illness resurfaces in the inborn germ of death64 that we carry throughout life. Then there is the climactic position of this material in Hegels corpus, at the transition from nature to spirit. Coming at the very end of The Philosophy of Nature, at the threshold of Spirit, illness stands as an unassimilable confession that thwarts Idealisms alchemizing of nature into Spirit. Moreover, because illness makes a place for negativity as selfhood, it also has implications for other sub-systems of the Encyclopedia. For instance, by way of the physiological-cum-political notion of constitution as the inherence of parts in a whole,65 illness affects how we think about the irritability of subjective spirit in relation to the demands of family and state. Medicine, in other words, is integrated with the political, as a psychoanalysis of the political, on the grounds of a difference between them which it is the task of philosophy, as encyclopedism, to unravel. Hegel may not foreground these ramications, which Simmel later describes as the tragedy of culture: the sacricial logic of Objective Spirit.66 But the interference of areas of knowledge with each other is implicit in the very concept of the encyclopedia, particularly when the system itself is conceived as an organism. For the body, like the tree, is a

346

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

common gure for the organization of knowledge, used by Chambers encyclopedia, which describes itself as so many distinct Parts of Knowledge or as constituting a Body thereof.67 The body is no more than a metaphor for Chambers. But for Hegel it has a dangerously different integrity from the plant. The plant differentiates itself into distinct parts, and is the basis for a number of individuals leaves, buds etc. , whereas the body is a subjective unity of members. The plant, ramifying into a number of individuals, is not yet liberated out of individuality into subjectivity.68 The plant keeps its individual parts separate, whereas subjectivity is the interconnectedness of these parts. Interestingly, Hegels gure for this interconnectedness is not the building or even the anatomical system, as in Kants Architectonic. Rather it is uidity, a term associated with process rather than with structure. The body, as the ground of subjectivity, has a uidity that overrides the separateness of its parts: in health, all organs are uid in the universal.69 But disease also involves the whole, and can be worked through only when the illness or asystematicity of a part is no longer concentrated in that part but released into the larger conceptuality of the system.70 The ordinary encylopedia would be at best like a plant: such assemblages, which are gathered extrinsically, involve no more than an ordering.71 But the philosophical encyclopedia risks being like a body, with all the attendant dangers. To be sure, Hegel does not extend uidity from physiological to epistemic systems.72 But this profoundly deconstructive interdisciplinarity, is the terrain of Schellings middle work, which does not so much abandon the earlier work as disclose its aporias. As we have seen, Schelling never wrote the book on the life sciences that would prove the identity of the ideal and real, though he pursued medical work that remained unintegrated into his Identity philosophy. Abandoning the real disciplines after 1805, he proceeds in the Freedom essay to what he calls the ideal portion of his system.73 To be sure, he still wants to integrate nature and Spirit, but differently. For now, it is God who is a life, subject to suffering and becoming.74 In Ages of the World Schelling further continues the ideal portion of philosophy by approaching Spirit through its history, and yet a history that is profoundly transcendental in being its own psychoanalysis rather than a production of events or contents. In writing the history of Spirit as human nature, Schelling also returns, as his title suggests, to geology, as a way of thinking ontology within a return and retreat of origins. In effect Schelling now releases the work on the life sciences that had been a source of blockage in his early system, into a larger uidity, so as to explore its implications for history, ethics, and Spirit. The middle work is an instance of the deconstructive potential of Romantic encyclopedism, bearing in mind that, as Derrida says, deconstruction always concerns systems, with a view not to bringing them down but of opening onto

347

Textual Practice

other possibilities of arrangement.75 Thus Habermas and Zizek have both read Schellings grafting together of ontology and natural science as inventing dialectical materialism,76 or more precisely (and rather differently, given the philosophical force of materiality as an inhibition of phenomenality), negative dialectics. And as Zizeks sometimes awkward reading of Schelling alongside Lacan indicates, Schelling could also be seen as inventing a kind of psychoanalysis in the margins of philosophy. Yet the fact that this psychoanalysis is invented in the margins of philosophy, and not as psychoanalysis per se but as a psychoanalysis of history, makes this psychoanalysis not a science but an inter-science, or in Foucaults terms a counter-science that constitutes a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction with the consolidation of any science.77 This is to say that if Schelling invents psychoanalysis, what he invents is not a positive, instituted form of knowledge, but a knowledge constituted as the deconstruction of its own potential positivity.78 What makes possible this uidity in which one form of knowledge is deconstructed by the trace of another, thereby also creating a space for the emergence of a further inter-science that exists transferentially rather than positively, is a new concept of system. For system no longer involves the unity Kant assumed by his term architectonic, yet it is precisely some kind of system that allows new connections to emerge from the deconstruction of existing systems. Thus system in the sense Schelling intends in continuing insistently to use the word, means something closer to connection than to structure: not a whole that is consistent throughout, but an organism in which the waywardness of parts has effects throughout the whole. In On The Nature of Philosophy as Science, Schelling reects on the life of systems, by recognising asystasy as their condition of possibility.79 Asystasy means inner conict, a kind of asystematicity, or resistance to system. Picking up a key gure from encylopedias, Schelling uses the body to theorize this asystatic relation between parts of knowledge. He had already used this gure in the Freedom essay, where he had discussed the part-whole relationship in the body in terms of freedom: The individual member, such as the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism but it has a life for itself, a kind of freedom, the proof of which is disease.80 In the later essay, he extends the gure to knowledge so as to introduce asystasy into the heart of system. Whereas the vocabulary of health judges this aystsasy negatively, that of freedom makes a case for disease itself as innovation. As the body is a system made up of subsystems nervous, digestive etc. so the body of knowledge also harbours parts that depart from the whole.81 At the same time, if thinking of system organically allows parts to bear a diremptive relation to the whole, remembering that the body is an organism reminds us that differences are still always to be thought beyond their particularity. For though a body has

348

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

different parts, it is one subject who inhabits them, and similarly one subject who proceeds through different areas of knowledge as it traverses the circle of learning.82 Yet to speak of one subject is not to postulate any kind of unied subject. For if the subjects of thought are different, the subject too must be self-different: indeed if she were to remain in one form of knowledge, life and evolution would be inhibited.83 The Romantic encyclopedia, then, can be seen as a horizon opening onto contemporary Theory, and eventually what Derrida calls the university without condition. In the essay so titled, Derrida argues for a renewed Humanities based on Theory as an articulation of multiple interdisciplines: a deconstructive rather than humanistic Humanities. The Hegelian encyclopedia, as one prong of a broader Romantic project, attempts an early version of this reorganization of the university around the humanities, in contrast to the universities projected by the French and Scottish encyclopedias. The university of Theory, as I suggest elsewhere,84 nds its most suggestive presentation at the end of The Order of Things, where Foucault outlines, albeit silently to avoid any hypostasis, what Derrida will later call a university without condition.85 Here Foucault divides the eld of knowledge into sciences, human sciences, and countersciences, so as to deconstruct the human sciences through various countersciences. I will not elaborate on The Order of Things here, except to note its spectrally Hegelian structure: there are three forms of encyclopedism that precede Foucaults own analysis of the human sciences, which in turn divides the eld of knowledge into three kinds of sciences in which a triad of sciences each has its corresponding human science. Displacing earlier organizations of knowledge from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century with his own experimental encyclopedia, Foucault constructs his self-reection on the nature of disciplinarity around a post-Kantian deconstructive reason articulated through the four analytic gures that he names the empirical and transcendental, the cogito and its unthought, the analytic of nitude, and the return and retreat of the origin. This last section of The Order of Things, then, can be seen as a kind of schematic container and set of onto-epistemological protocols for what I am calling the University of Theory. And, as with Hegels Encyclopedia, much subsequent thought including Nancys work on community or Lyotards on technology, will emerge in the cracks opened up by Foucaults architectonic. But why return to Theory or Idealism now, when many see them as outdated? One answer is provided by the implicit dialogue between Derrida and Foucault from the 1960s to Derridas later work on the university. In Of Grammatology Derrida had described himself as concerned with writing, the history of metaphysics, and science,86 in other words with the organization of knowledge; but it had been Foucault in The Order of Things who explicitly took up these concerns in terms of disciplinarity

349

Textual Practice

and thus the contest of faculties. In the aftermath of 1968, Foucault abandoned his attempt to rethink knowledge, turning instead to the realities of governmentality and power. Thus it was Derrida, in the 1980s and thereafter, who returned to the project of a university to come, refocusing the broader eld outlined in Of Grammatology through the question of the university that Foucault had never explicitly engaged, and thereby also rethinking deconstruction and the role Derrida gives in it to philosophy in its relation to institutionality as at heart a project that pertains to the university. In taking up questions of the organization of knowledge at the site of the university, Derrida has sought not only to place deconstruction within a larger history of knowledge going back to Kant, but also to bring it into ffentlichkeit, as Kant calls it, and relation with the sphere of publicity, O thus to afliate the new Humanities of Theory to the age of Enlightenment.87 He has further tried, especially through his work on Kant, to think the Idea of the university in relation to the fact of institution or discursive power. For arguably it was Foucaults failure to do this that led Foucault to abandon the idealism of a university of dissensus for a stubborn attachment to the realities of power. The new Humanities as a resumption of the post-Kantian encyclopedia can be posed against two other organizations of knowledge whose origins, like those of deconstruction, can also be traced back to the period of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The rst is the human sciences. The human sciences as distinct from the humanities or arts, are part of a technologization of the university to which Lyotard rst pointed in The Postmodern Condition,88 and are thus part of what Derrida calls the end-orientation of research.89 Arguably they have never really taken root in the North American curriculum, even if they did exist in France when Foucault wrote The Order of Things, especially in the theoretically updated form of structuralism, and even if they thus continue to exist as a governmental fantasy. But the bureaucratic ction of the human sciences is matched by another discourse or institution in Godwins terms, internal to the university and indeed to faculties of humanities, namely Cultural Studies, which can also be posed against the university without condition whose origins Derrida traces back to Kant and Schelling, if not Hegel. If the human sciences, a term introduced by Dilthey, are the hard version of the humanities captivation by the charisma of science, Cultural Studies is a softened version of this corporatization. Cultural Studies, as I have argued elsewhere,90 can be seen as a two-tier organization of multiple disciplines and themes, and in this sense an encyclopedia of, rather than, like the human sciences, an organization of knowledge. On the one hand there are studies that theorize the human as a function of economics or technology, or ones that apply this theorization to literature and culture; these could be called pseudo-scientic in their accommodation to the reality principle. On the other hand there is the

350

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

array of thematic elds referred to by David Simpson as the academic postmodern91 postcolonialism, gender studies, and so on which function as the interpellatory apparatus by which humanists, trying to domesticate the social sciences as the arts and crafts of everyday life, are drawn into accepting the hegemony of the social as the only ground of thought. Insofar as it thereby fulls certain agendas of representative democracy, Cultural Studies is an oblique outgrowth of state power. This is to say, in Derridas terms adapted from Schelling, that Cultural Studies, like the human sciences, is a collection of positive sciences and arts that have attained to objectivity, not within the state per se, but within the states liberal surrogate of civil society. As a modern formation, though one that goes back to the Enlightenment public sphere as theorized by Habermas,92 Cultural Studies shares the characteristic of modernity identied by Vattimo: namely that it sees simply being modern as a decisive value in itself.93 As against this presentism, I would like to return in conclusion to the encyclopedia and its further declension in theory, as a history or perhaps chemistry of ideas. To be sure the history of ideas, which Jochen Schulte-Sasse traces back to Hegel,94 can be seen as a humanistic discipline in the old sense. By contrast the deconstructive humanities emerge in Derrida and Foucault through the Nietzschean gesture of declaring the end of man, which is to say the end of a European anthropos predicated on an end of history that had rendered this anthropos absolute. Yet Derrida no more believes that we can live without history than does Nietzsche, least of all in his more recent work. Rather the end of man and the end of the book are forms of asystasy, strategic moves designed to bracket the European tradition in its systematicity or standing-together, so as to allow for new possibilities of arrangement. Habermas refers to Foucaults work as an erudite-positivistic historiography in the appearance of an antiscience.95 As anti-science, the encyclopedia that is the history of ideas has the form of a positivity to be sure, but one that, to adapt Foucault, is incomplete and thus also promises that very innity it refuses.96 It is this innity of the past which is to come that Foucault addresses in The Order of Things, where he too proclaims the end of man like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.97 Just as Derrida introduces the issue of anthropology in Of Grammatology through the Nambikwara, Foucault begins with the Chinese encyclopedia, as the outside of various European attempts to organize knowledge. For Derrida the encyclopedia is a specically Western, Hegelian protection against the disruption of writing.98 But The Order of Things, as a history of encyclopedisms, returns the concept of the encyclopedia itself to the space of writing. For Foucault strategically ends his text with the end of man, rather than beginning, as Derrida does in Of Grammatology, with the end of the book. Ending

351

Textual Practice

with the end of man, Foucault allows for no further movement except into the past. This is to say that The Order of Things, rather than being a programmatic text, becomes what Foucault describes in Fantasia of the Library: an archival text whose space is the library.99 The library is a tropological space, no more than the visible surface of an archive that contains much more: everything that has been thought as well as what remains yet unthought. And the encyclopedisms that Foucault describes, released by the end of man from the fantasy of a universal ...tabulated order,100 are also libraries, their organizations of knowledge existing in relation to this unthought, by which they are drawn into the space of writing. This space yields a new concept of the materials that Hegel sought to organize in his Encyclopedia as Geisteswissenschaften. For the Encyclopedia is predicated on the conagration of the archive: only by repressing the murmuring prose of the archive, Foucault writes, can one achieve any clarity.101 But the encyclopedia as library, which is what Foucaults text is, opens onto the archive as its very condition of possibility. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault reects on the resulting two forms taken by the history of ideas, as a connectivity within the archive that crosses the boundaries of existing disciplines. On the one hand there is the familiar form of the history of ideas as a human science, a discipline of beginnings and ends, which, even if it describe[s] obscure continuities and returns, does so in the linear form of history. On the other hand there is the history of ideas as counter-science, not the history of the sciences but of transient writing . . . [and] sub-literatures.102 From this perspective, Hegels Encyclopedia may have begun by wanting to institute the Idea of a European university through a science of science. But its very structure as an encyclopedia that tries to take in all the folds of knowledge has made it an archive of possibilities for other thinkers such as Benjamin, Lukacs, and Foucault himself, who have retrieved ideas as a site of writing so as to constitute a New Humanities. Or as Foucault says, even as we try to escape him, there remains, and precisely in that which permits us to think against Hegel, something profoundly Hegelian.103 The University of Western Ontario

Notes

1 Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientic Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 277. 2 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 1.

352

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

3 For Bourdieu elds are characteristic of highly differentiated societies and thus of modernity. The social cosmos is made up of a number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, each with its own logic and network... of objective relations between positions, its rules of competency, and each possessing a species of capital... that is efcacious in the given eld. A eld is not static, but is governed by certain regularities that preserve its capital: As a space of potential and active forces, the eld is also a eld of struggles aimed at preserving or transforming the conguration of these forces (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reexive Sociology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], pp. 97 101). 4 Ernst Behler, Language, hermeneutics, and encyclopaedistics, in German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 260 98. See p. 284, p. 282. 5 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. and J.R.deJ. Jackson. 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 1922. 7 Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (The Universal Brouillon), trans. David Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming). On Novalis, see David S. Ferris, The Question of a Science: Encyclopedistic Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle 35.1 (2004), pp. 2 6. 8 Roger Caillois, A New Plea for Diagonal Science, in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 34347. 9 Concepts are denite notions produced by the understanding while ideas such as freedom or justice are produced by reason and are not necessarily grounded in experience, hence can only be regulative and not constitutive. As Karl Jaspers comments, reason makes things too big for the understanding while the understanding make[s] them too little for reason (Kant, trans. Ralph Manheim [New York: Harcourt, 1957], p. 46). Jean-Franc ois Lyotard and baud dene the idea as a maximization of concepts outside Jean-Loup The of any knowledge of reality. The Idea is an almost unlimited use of the concept: one has concepts and then one maximizes them (Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], p. 75). 10 Idealism can be dened as a specically philosophical movement committed to dialectical totalization, identity, and system. However, Romanticism is the larger literary-cum-philosophical context within which Idealism emerges as an idea that is continually put under erasure. For as the author of The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (thought to be Hegel, Schel lderlin) says: The philosophy of the Spirit is an aesthetic philosling, or Ho ophy in which ideas are made aesthetic, i.e., mythological (in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler [New York: Continuum, 1987], p. 162). For further discussion of Idealism versus Romanticism see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester

353

Textual Practice

11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 39 40, pp. 12223; Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 8 12, pp. 18 19. F.W.J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E.S. Morgan (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1966), p. 81. On absolute knowledge as an innite research programme see my First Outline of a System of Theory: Schelling and the Margins of Philosophy, 17991815, in Derrida and the Legacies of Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism (forthcoming, Spring 2007). See G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, trans. Stephen A. Taubeneck, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990) pp. 45 263; Logic (the Encyclopedia Logic), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); also Preface to the System of Philosophy, trans. A.V. Miller, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, pp. 143. Friedrich Schlegel, Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy, in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et.al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 255. Hegel, Logic, p. 11. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 53. On system as understood in Britain see Clifford Siskin, The Year of the System, in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 9 31; also Yeo, pp. 17576. Schelling, On University Studies, p. 78. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 71. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, pp. 53 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 31218. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 51. Thus Comenius Ianua has a section on games (see Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer [Cambridge University Press, 1988], p.114), while Bandini includes heresies and famous women in his encyclopedia (see Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages [New York: Hafner, 1966], pp. 70 1). In Vincent of Beauvais Speculum Maius the circle of learning includes subjects such as crafts (see Collison, pp. 60 1). The De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartolomeus Anglicus, which follows the model of the mirror of creation, uses an alphabetic arrangement in its section on birds (See M.C. Seymour and Colleagues, Bartholomeus Anglicus and his Encyclopaedia [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992], p. 136). Indeed, though alphabetic encyclopedias became the dominant form in the Enlightenment, they actually go back a long way: for instance Johann Jacob Hoffmanns Lexicon universale (167783) is arranged alphabetically (see Collison, p. 89).

354

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

24 Encyclopedia Britannica: or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature; Enlarged and Improved, fth edition, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Constable and Company, 1817), p. v. 25 Ibid., p. vii. 26 Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, II. 1109. 27 Immanuel Kant, The Conict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). 28 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797/1803), trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 272n. 29 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 437. 30 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1962). 31 I use the word without italics to refer to a larger project not entirely contained in the three volumes of the Encyclopedia. delbach, Philosophy in Germany 18311933 (Cambridge: 32 See Herbert Schna Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. 23, for a discussion of three forms of the university: the medieval guild university still in existence at Oxbridge in the nineteenth century, the utilitarian university of the enlightenment, and the research university founded by Humboldt at Berlin. The modern techno-bureaucratic university critiqued by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins as well as by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition is an attempt to graft the second onto the third model. 33 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 6269. 34 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Psacale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 124. 35 Schelling, On University Studies, p. 41. 36 Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (180004/1859), trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 37 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Matters, trans. Priscilla Hayden-Roy, in Philosophy of German Idealism, Ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 21784. 38 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 272. 39 Ibid., p. 272n. 40 Hegel, Preface to the System of Philosophy, p. 16, p. 18. 41 Slavoj Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom, in Slavoj Zizek and F.W.J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/ Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 1104. See p. 13. 42 Hegel, Preface to the System of Philosophy, p. 18. 43 Derrida, The University Without Condition, in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 20337 See p. 203. 44 G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, in Nicholas Reschers G.W. Leibniz Monadology: An Edition for Students (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), pp. 17 29. rard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: 45 Ge University of California Press, 1992), pp. 50 51.

355

Textual Practice

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). Genette, The Architext, p. 41. Ibid. p. 51. Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 82, p. 104, pp. 12425. Arkady Plotnitsky, Curvatures: Hegel and the Baroque, in Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy And Romantic Culture, eds Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 12328. Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 54. Hegel, Preface to the System of Philosophy, p. 29. For a fuller discussion of this section of The Philosophy of Nature, see my essay (In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegels Philosophy of Nature, in Eating Romanticism: Cultures of Taste, Theories of Appetite, ed. Timothy Morton (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 21736. Joseph Henry Green, Vital Dynamics: The Hunterian Oration Before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, 17th February 1840 (London: William Pickering, 1840). Kant distinguishes physiological anthropology, or what Nature makes of man, from a pragmatic anthropology concerned with what man makes, can, or should make of himself as a freely acting being (Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978], p. 3). The distinction is analogous to that between nature and Spirit. Schelling, Preface to On The World Soul (1810), quoted in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 272n. Schellings reference to the incompleteness of his earlier Ideas presumably alludes to his work on medicine, which draws on the ideas of the Scottish medical theorist John Brown. Schelling attempts to bring medicine into his early systematic work in his 1799 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 158 72. However, he can only do so in the form of an appendix (p. 159). Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 16881804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 29798. Green, Hegel and Freud: Elements for an Improbable Comparison, in Andre The Work of the Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1999), pp. 26 49. Derrida, Eyes of the University, pp. 205 6. Brown does not actually use the terms mentioned, instead using only the term excitability. Schelling, however, sees irritability and sensibility as forms of Brownian excitability in the Appendix on disease in his First Outline. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 429. Ibid., p. 43435. Ibid., p. 441.

356

Tilottama Rajan The encyclopedia and the university of theory

65 The notion, which is implicit in Hegels and Schellings analyses of the partwhole relationship in illness, is elaborated by Coleridge (Shorter Works and Fragments II.1027); John Abernethy, Introductory Lectures, Exhibiting Some of Mr. Hunters Opinions Regarding Diseases (London: Longman, Hurst and Rees, 1823), pp. 10102, p. 269; and J.H.Green, Vital Dynamics, p. 82. 66 Georg Simmel, The Concept and Tragedy of Culture, in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 55 74. 67 Quoted in Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, p. 128. 68 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, p. 336, p. 311. 69 Ibid., p. 428. 70 Ibid., p. 432, p. 435. 71 Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, p. 53. 72 For further discussion of uidity and of the physiological as distinct from anatomical body as a model for knowledge in Schellings work, see my First Outline of a System of Theory. 73 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Matters, p. 218. 74 Ibid., p. 274. 75 Jacques Derrida, Points... Interviews 19741994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 83, p. 212. 76 Habermas, Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schellings Idea of a Contraction of God and its Consequences for a Philosophy of History, in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 4389; Zizek, The indivisible remainder: an essay on Schelling and related matters (London: Verso, 1996). 77 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 373. 78 I discuss Schellings deployment of a proto-psychoanalysis further in Spirits Psychoanalysis: Natural History, The History of Nature, and Romantic Historiography, European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 18796; and The Abyss of the Past: Psychoanalysis in Schellings Ages of the World (1815), Romantic Praxis (forthcoming). 79 Schelling, On the Nature of Philosophy as Science (1823), trans. Marcus Bullock, German Idealist Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 21043. 80 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Matters, p. 228. 81 Schelling, On the Nature of Philosophy as Science, p. 213. 82 Ibid., p. 215. 83 Ibid. 84 See my Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 19098. 85 See also my Derrida, Foucault, and the University, Mosaic (forthcoming). 86 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 3.

357

Textual Practice

87 Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 203. 88 Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 89 Derrida, Eyes of the University, p. 167. 90 See my essay, In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the University, Diacritics 31.3 (2001), pp. 6788. 91 David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 92 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 57 116. 93 See Vattimos The Transparent Society. 94 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Mediality in Hegel: From Work to Text in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 72 92. 95 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 248. 96 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 314. 97 Ibid., p. 387. 98 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 18. 99 Foucault, Fantasia of the Library, in Language, counter-memory, practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 9192. 100 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 247. 101 Foucault, Fantasia, pp. 87 8. 102 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1969, 1971), trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 13637. 103 Foucault, The Discourse on Language, in The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, p. 235.

358