Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references.

Dichtung und Wahrheit -- 'Without this nothing thinks' : the enigma of the active intellect -- Nearer to you than the sea -- Vertigo, beatitudo : Spinoza and philosophy -- The idea of prose -- Appendix A. Theses on aesthetics as first philosophy -- Appendix B. On exactitude in non-library science -- Coda : on the riddle of history solved.

Open Access Unrestricted online access star

In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, "Theory is like a surging sea." This small book takes more than its title from that line--it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach's sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin's sentence: "Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave [...] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks." That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what's come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it's as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks.

Description based on print version record.