Prophecies of Leviathan
Peter Szendy
Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.
With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.
Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.
In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."
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About Peter Szendy
Reviews for Prophecies of Leviathan
-Jean-Michel Rabate University of Pennsylvania "Prophecies of Leviathan enacts and performs, within the movement of its language, what it seeks to convey: that any reading worthy of the name "reading" must undergo the storms of reading, must move without compass or anchor, must come to understand that reading means "learning to die." In this, Szendy proves himself to be-like Melville himself-one of the great meteorologists of reading in general. Indeed, in reading "reading," in reading the act of reading, this wildly wonderful book traces the whirlwinds and tempests, the stammering and staccato iterations, that are the signature of Melville's whale of a book and, in so doing, not only invites future readings but also comprehends and anticipates them. I therefore prophesize that by reading backwards in order to read ahead this book will continue to tell us how and why we read at all, regardless of whether we are reading a book, a document, or, in Melville's case, an archive of the world."
-Eduardo Cadava Princeton University "Prophecies of Leviathan is an extraordinary reading of Melville's fictions as sustained meditations on the nature of reading. If Moby Dick is a prophetic text, this is because-as Peter Szendy shows us-the event of (its) reading is prophetic. Taking his bearings from Blanchot and Derrida while also reading in ways all his own, Szendy will have changed not only how we read Moby Dick but how it reads us."
-Andrew Parker Amherst College