2 July 2009

I’ve been picking through Leland de la Durantaye’s new book on Agamben, which looks really good. “Critical introductions” to continental figures have proliferated wildly of late, but it’s surprising how many of them fail precisely as introductions, because they try so hard to reproduce the author’s style that they also reproduce his or her obscurities and difficulties. (After dipping into secondary sources on Blanchot and Nancy lately, I found myself confused on exactly the same points as I had been after reading Blanchot and Nancy directly.) To see it done well, though—and de la Durantaye has done it well—is a marvelous thing. These “critical introductions” really are a new, very helpful kind of genre: systematic interpretations of a thinker’s corpus, sympathetic but not sycophantic, clarifying key concepts and major conversation partners.

I’d like to see the same idea extended to classical thinkers. Especially for the medievals, but so too with many of the fathers, the secondary literature that does exist tends to be smothered in a certain kind of late modern piety that obscures more than it reveals. Franciscans write on Franciscans, Dominicans write on Dominicans, Cistercians write on Cistercians (the seculars falling almost entirely by the wayside), and their work is invariably a blend of exposition and veneration. As a result, rigorous critical conversation with these figures only appears in those few contemporary thinkers bold, intelligent, and eccentric enough to dive into these old, obscure, often untranslated bodies of work and create their own critical purchase ex nihilo—like Agamben himself, or a few from the Radox crowd.

A few good critical introductions along these lines would go a long way, I think. They could situate the stray tidbits of information batted around in popular academic conversation within a much more careful account of a thinker’s whole body of work. John Duns Scotus: A Critical Introduction could lay to rest an enormous amount of more or less ignorant squabbling about ‘the univocity of being’; Peter Abelard: A Critical Introduction could, if Adam Kotsko is right, rein in the superficial readings he’s so often given in atonement conversation. I’ve thought for a while that I myself would enjoy taking up such a project on Bonaventure.

(Postscript. Besides being good introductions to the thinkers, these volumes would do an enormous service just by indicating where the hell to find their texts, in the original and, if they exist, in good modern language translation.)

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Tags: Medievals,Method