literary living (through a glass lightly)
revised and expanded August 25, 2017
My reflectively exploratory interest isn’t exactly psychoanalytic, but that’s pertinent, in a generic sense (not a therapeutic sense) that’s as philological or literary (writerly) as psychological. My psychological interests are generally drawn by appeals of self expansiveness (not egoistic self possession) for the sake of self enrichment.
Calling a venture psychoenhancive might be apt for much that goes on in academic rhetoric, e.g., Kaja Silverman, World Spectators, which allegedly pursues “a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround [...and] demonstrates the inseparability of philosophy and psychoanalysis” in terms of “visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies.” She was a professor in the Department of Rhetoric, UC at Berkeley, when she wrote her book. The idea captures a good sense of “literary” engagement beyond “Literature” (or “English”), which I want from a notion of “literary” studies.
But I’ll choose a traditional term and signal aspiration to understand it in a 21st century way: philology21 or just capitalize the term emphatically: Philology. (“PhilologyP” would be easier.)
The notion of Philology that I’ll develop tropes an engagement with creative process and fascination with a standard domain being regarded as an “-ology” as such.
What draws me doesn’t fit well into academic philosophy (which easily seems to be philology of conceptual inquiry). I’m seeking to express a kind of work which seems to be beyond the history of philosophy (not to pretentiously be Beyond; rather, finding a constitutive historicality in “philosophy” which echoes its metaphysicalist motives)—seeking a kind of work which is clearly beyond traditional philology, which is all inquiries “…relevant to literature or to language as used in literature : literary or classical learning” (Merriam-Webster Unabridged online). At least one recent scholar seems to believe that traditional philology deserves to regain prominence (inversely correlative, maybe, with the disappearance of academic rhetoric departments).
Anyway, I don’t have an essentialist sense of Logos to offer, but I gladly note (obscurely, for sure) that “the” Logos I prospect may be well troped by a notion I like to call “evolutionarity of conceptual prospecting” (always with the quote marks). But ‘philology21’ seems to be a good emblem for that.
