Week 5 Reading Response

Goethe alludes to the nation-state conflicts that are hindering the building and consolidation of a unified world literature (277). Is this turn toward world literature a way to shore up a universal cosmopolitan humanism that we talked about in our discussion of Kant or is this just another colonizing move by a Western intellectual to elevate European epistemologies and categorize them as representative of the world, while silencing other forms of meaning-making that occur alternatively occur within the Western as marginalized knowledges and in other parts of the world as subjugated knowledges by white Western male scholars? Who is this secret silent congregation of like-minded intellectuals that Goethe speaks of (227)?

I was trying to make loose connections between Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's conceptualization of the multitude of transnational “networked citizens” that possess the potential to shore up global democracy and the society of control in their book Empire and the multitude that for Goethe seems to be consolidated around universal world literature and humanism. I still have to think through the connections and contentions though.