This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

Chapter 8 is dedicated to analyze the conceptual foundations of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. This provides an insight into the preconceptual constitution of the “ground of depositivities” on which theories hold. Then, it discusses the criticism to it and Foucault’s answer to his critics. This led him to elaborate on the difference between “structures” and “discursive formations” and develop the different strategies needed for the reconstruction of the latter. As this chapter shows, Foucault’s perspective combines the two opposite currents, structuralism and phenomenology, to elaborate a particularly fruitful approach to intellectual history. Finally, it addresses the crucial point of how to account for epistemic mutations and what he calls its événementiel character.

In Chapter 3, I consider several ways in which philosophical discourse has become allergic to the concept of revelation. While Catholic theology is largely dependent on scholastic and, more recently, modern philosophy as it tries to articulate understandings of faith, philosophy has been part of shaping a modern and postmodern culture that is frequently hostile or simply indifferent to religious faith and its notions of divine revelation. Various philosophical approaches seek to exclude theology from the realm of academic discourse, either because revealed religion is seen to be partial and therefore detrimental to the pursuit of universal wisdom, or because it seems to articulate merely its own will to power, using a metaphysics that is oblivious to having founded itself. Bound up in metaphysical systems, all discourse potentially becomes (onto-)theological. 'Religion' has recently returned in philosophy only by means of its transformation: used in Levinas’ sense as the ethical relation with the other, it effects a powerful critique. Yet, excluding the very particularity of religious traditions is a totalitarian and secularising act.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this chapter argues that we should think about democracy in a provisional key. Democracy is provisional because it puts itself into question. It does so when we take the question “what is democracy?” to be part of democracy, which means that we must ask “what is the demos?” and “what is rule?” We end up with a conception of democracy whereby the people is at once prior to and a result of the rule of the people, and so we never arrive at a final answer to the questions “who is the demos?” and “what is rule?” Treating democracy as provisional does not necessarily solve major challenges such as the environmental crisis and inequality, but it allows us to approach these challenges from a new and more fruitful angle. I discuss this with particular attention to current debates about the climate crisis.

In “The Nature of Literature,” Peter Remien and Scott Slovic examine nature’s role in the history of literary studies from Aristotle’s Poetics to the modern environmental humanities. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Sidney’s The Defense of English Poesy as an example of the premodern understanding of the parallel creative processes of art and nature. Not only does art imitate nature, as Aristotle asserts, but it furthers nature’s creative purposes. The chapter then constructs a genealogy of ecocriticism with attention to nature’s contested role as a central keyword. Attentive to nature’s ideological and metaphysical baggage, Remien and Slovic examine important critiques of the concept of nature by Derrida, Timothy Morton, and others, as well as claims of “the end of nature” in the Anthropocene. The final part of the introduction traces a broad history of nature in literary studies through an overview of the book’s three sections and twenty-one chapters.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

The author’s reflection takes off from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin. The chapter proceeds by assessing the hesitant answer given by Barbara Cassin in response to a question from the audience (can we ever learn a second language to the level of our first?) at the end of a lecture entitled ‘More Than One Language’. Her answer is negative on the whole, and she evokes Hannah Arendt’s attachment to her native German. From these two points of departure the chapter seeks to give an account of what we mean by a ‘Mother tongue’, starting with a diachronic account. The Mother tongue isn’t a unitary entity; its construction is the result of a continued process of linguistic interpellation of the speaker; it is therefore the product not so much of an individual as of a social relation. Two detours, through Lucien Sève’s Marxist anthropology and the ‘tetraglossic’ theory of Henri Gobard, help account for this individual-cum-social construction of a speaking subject. The acquisition of a second Mother tongue can then be envisaged, a process that duplicates the acquisition of the original Mother tongue, thus giving a positive answer to the question addressed to Cassin.

Since the Ogdoad, the Ennead, and the Source are described as beyond verbal description, how can written language convey anything at all about this ultimate experience of gnōsis? Discussion of oral transmission by means of logos, dissemination of written treatises, and the paradoxes of hermeneutics as understood in terms of Deconstruction (Derrida) and Hermeneutics (Gadamer).

Animal Figures examines the ways literature and psychoanalysis interact in their deployments of “animals,” while also suggesting how they might address the other-than-human. What might be required of both to think animal subjectivity non-anthropocentrically? In a close reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Name of a Dog, I demonstrate how the text reanimates animate being (specifically a dog) in linguistic figuration through the literary or the rhetorical and according to analytics resembling psychoanalysis more than philosophy. While thematically Levinas’s chapter addresses the ethical and religious as they pertain to the figure of the dog, the chapter, in its linguistic and rhetorical performance, enacts a relation between language and animal being – elsewhere neologized as animot or animetaphor – more akin to psychoanalysis than to philosophy.

This chapter considers the politics of the archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The manipulation of history and of the individual experience of time is a key way through which power maintains its dystopian and totalitarian hold on Oceania. I examine images of manipulated public and individual archives in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the memory holes to doublethink, arguing that the Party’s control of time is aimed at fashioning the present as the culmination of history and at ensuring the future as mere reproduction of the present. If the Party’s power works along temporal lines, the same is true of Winston’s rebellion, which begins in earnest with Winston writing a diary addressed to the future and the past. I examine images of archives that seek to fissure the Party’s totalitarian control of time, from Winston’s fragile memories to the diary itself. The volatility and violent erasures characteristic of Oceania’s archives entail that Winston’s challenge to the totalitarian closure of the Party’s endless present – a challenge encapsulated by his diary – is unsuccessful. Yet Winston’s testimony finds its hoped-for future readers: us. The chapter concludes by gesturing to how the trope of a diary counteracting power’s control of the archive returns in ensuing dystopian novels.