What I send you are subtitles of a video "Conversation between Pheng Cheah and David

Damrosch, IWL Tokyo", help me punctuate and paragraph them:

And today we are going to have a very exciting, very stimulating conversation between the author
of the book *What is World Literature?* and the author of the book *What is a World?*
Professor Pheng Cheah of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most outstanding
theorists in literary studies, nationalism, transnationalism, globalization, and so on.

In response to his book, Professor David Damrosch, a very well-known specialist in literary studies
and author of *What is World Literature?*, which has been translated into Japanese, will join us.
Perhaps some of you have a copy of the translation. He will engage in conversation with
Professor Pheng Cheah, making this one of the most exciting highlights of our month-long
marathon event.

I'd like to thank Professor Newman and also Vice President Haneda. At the end of my remarks, I
will say something that relates to what he said about the idea of the world and the globe, but
he's left the room.

It's a great pleasure. First of all, I'd like to thank David for inviting me to be in discussion with him.
It's a great pleasure for me because the title of my book clearly alludes to David's book *What is
World Literature?* I learned a great deal from David's book, which, if it hasn't inaugurated a new
field in literary studies, has certainly reinvigorated it and given it new life. I can say that I would
not have written my book if I had not read his.

The question I wanted to ask in my book is really a prolegomena to the question of David's book.
Namely, when we speak of world literature and related fields like world history, world cinema,
world religion, world art, and world music, what exactly do we mean by the term "world"?

As I said to David in an email when he graciously invited me to be in conversation with him, my

interest in worldliness is a long-standing one that predates my interest in world literature. Unlike
most others who have recently written on world literature, I don't teach in a literature
department; I teach in a rhetoric department. My interest in worldliness comes from an older
interest in cosmopolitanism, about which I have written extensively.

Because my PhD is in literary criticism, people in literary studies kept asking me about the
relation between cosmopolitanism and world literature. Initially, I wasn't interested in the topic
because my work on cosmopolitanism grew out of questions more germane to moral and
political philosophy, narrative social sciences, and even public international law. But I couldn't
very well tell people I wasn't interested, so I hemmed and hawed. Finally, I decided to write this
book partly in response to the writing on world literature in the late 1990s and early 2000s that
sought to link it to global dynamics and take it beyond the musty idea of the great books
constituting the literary heritage of humanity.

These works began with Franco Moretti's essays in the *New Left Review*, Pascal Casanova's
book *The World Republic of Letters*, which appeared in French when I was a graduate student,
and my teacher Benedict Anderson was very excited about, and of course David's book. What
struck me about these new theories of world literature is that their key defining term was under-
specified and unexamined, not rigorously defined. They defined world literature as something
opposed to national literature and linked it to globalization, implying global literature—literature
that circulated globally. But global literature is not a highbrow phrase, so "world literature," with
its allusion to Goethe's normative project of Weltliteratur, was used instead.

Then, in a kind of near-copper moment, I realized that if one looks at the literature on
cosmopolitanism, including my own work, there is a more elaborate understanding of the
concept of world compared to world literature. The world is seen as a normative term that
signifies some kind of project with an ideal horizon. At some point, the discourse about
cosmopolitanism became dogmatic because it took something for granted, namely the equation
of the world with human intersubjective intercourse. If the world is constituted through
circulation, as David's book suggests, then what puts things into circulation are human subjects.
Here, the reference points are classical Greek philosophy, French Enlightenment thought, Kant,
and Marx.

Now, if you leave out the complexity of the Greek term *kosmos*, which is not the same as the
Latin term *mundus*, and focus on the modern idea of the world, then the world is universal
human intercourse, whether you think about it as literary intercourse or as the material
intercourse of commerce. In the latter sense, Marx said world history and world literature only
come about once there is a world market. But why should one take for granted that the world is
constituted by human intercourse?

My interest in worldliness was not initially an ethical or political one. It was also not related to
post-colonial studies. Worldliness is, for me, to use an unfashionable word, an ontological issue.
What account of world literature would a fuller ontological account of the world lead to? The
recent theories of world literature see the world as constituted through circulatory movement.
Thus, the world is primarily a spatial category, an object of the greatest possible spatial extension
that serves as a container for all objects and subjects. What is worldly about literature is its
locomotion in market-oriented space, according to the mathematical coordinates of Euclidean
geometry. Accordingly, world literature is the exchange or circulation of literature between
subjects, its movement across spatial distances conceived spatially.

In its conventional definition, cosmopolitanism involves an outward movement that breaches and
transcends spatial territorial borders. Worldly intercourse transcends the boundaries of the
territorial state and the imagined community of the nation. It follows that world literature's
cosmopolitanism consists of the impact of such spatial movements on the production, reception,
and interpretation of literary texts. Literature's worldliness then refers to the global scale of the
production, circulation, consumption, and evaluation of literature, understood in analogy with
the reach of a global market.

However, there are two shortcomings to this spatial understanding of worldliness. First, it
seemed to me that the world is originally a temporal category, from which its normative
dimension derives. The mundane or the worldly refers to the temporal condition of finite
existence, as opposed to the infinity of the divine. The normative vocation of worldly humanity is
to transcend finite particularities, and this transcendence is the essence of Goethe's spiritualist
project of Weltliteratur, which aims to bring out universal humanity through its particular literary
expressions.

In the hands of someone like Eric Auerbach, world literature was necessarily connected to an
ideology of world history, as Professor Haneda mentioned earlier. In contrast, the recent equation
of worldliness with the global circulation of literary works disregarded the temporal dimension of
the world and flattened out its horizonal character. Consequently, in recent accounts of world
literature, only a minimal normativity remains: the overcoming of national territorial borders.
Indeed, if you look at the phenomenological understanding of worldliness, the specialization of
the world, as epitomized by globalization, is even a process of unworldliness. It destroys the
worldliness of the world by reducing it to a globe.

Second, understanding world literature in terms of global circulation implies that literary
processes reflect global processes. For someone like Casanova or Moretti, this means that
literature has, at best, a very weak causal or formative power in relation to the world. This echoes
Marx's characterization of spiritual formations as a superstructure to a second degree, the
superstructure of the legal and political superstructure of the bourgeois state. Accordingly, the
world-making power that normative theories attribute to world literature, as a means for
actualizing humanity and humanizing the existing world, becomes lost.

In contrast, I argued that if you view the world as a temporal category instead of a spatial object,
literature can have a fundamental connection with worldliness. For example, philosophers from
the phenomenological tradition—such as Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Derrida—gave
literature a privileged role in their accounts of the world. For Heidegger, poetry disclosed the
world. For Hannah Arendt, drama was the best example of the creation of the world as a
subjective in-between of words and deeds, speaking and action. For Derrida, narrative was tied
to the opening of the world by the gift of time.

In other words, literature does not merely map the specialized world and give it value and
meaning. Rather, the formal structures of literature enact the opening of a world by the giving
and coming of time. This, for me, is an antidote to the relegation of literature to a shadowy
infrastructure. We may therefore speak of the world as having a literary structure, something
more infrastructural to the material reality of economic production.

If we understand world literature in terms of literature's connection to worlding and the coming
of time, it points to imminent resources for resisting capitalist globalization. Capitalist
accumulation needs and takes time. Capital is augmented by rational technologies and
calculations that appropriate and manage time for the maximal extraction of surplus value. But
capital does not want to destroy time, because it grows by appropriating time. Indeed, even if it
wanted to, capital can neither give itself time nor destroy it. This means that an irreducible
principle of real messianic hope is always structural to capitalist globalization because the
persistence of time is infrastructural to capital and cannot be destroyed. As an enactment of the
opening of worlds by the coming of time, world literature points to something that will always
exceed and disrupt capital.

What I propose is a normative account of world literature, one that does not merely analyze how
literary works circulate around the world or are produced with a global market in mind but seeks
to understand the normative force that literature can exert in the world—the ethical and political
horizon it opens up for the existing world. In other words, a given work of world literature can be
an active power in the making of worlds.

It is the site where different processes of welding are played out in a historically specific field of
forces and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes. I'll move on and talk a
little bit about post-colonial literature.

Post-colonial literature is, for me, an exemplary case of world literature in this robust, normative
sense because it is concerned with the opening of worlds and seeks to participate in welding
processes. I think it's important to remember here that the cartographical view of the world is
directly related to the history of European imperialism and its management of time according to
the grid of Greenwich Mean Time.

This is an image that William Kentridge sent me that illustrates what I mean from his installation
"The Refusal of Time." He talks about how, in fact, if you think about the cartography of the world
in terms of longitudes and latitudes centered on Greenwich Mean Time, this is a way of
straightjacketing these kinds of subjects. The cartographical processes that created the modern
world system eradicated other cultures, their ways of life, and temporalities by their
incorporation into the modern world system. Especially temporalities where the relation of
humankind to non-human beings is not one of instrumental control and domination.

These technologies continue in a more intense fashion in capitalist globalization. The unworlding
they bring about in colonial dispossession, chattel slavery, various forms of capitalist exploitation,
and environmental degradation is precisely a project of rebuilding so that new subjects can
emerge in the existing world, transforming it through this emergence.

These are two stills from "The Refusal of Time" by William Kentridge. Wade talks about how, in
fact, you can understand decolonization as exploding the kinds of maps that are sketched out by
colonial cartography. This involves the initiation of new or alternative temporalities as part of the
ethical-political vocation.

The post-colonial novels that I study as part of world literature provide cognitive mappings of the
position of post-colonial societies in the grid of temporal management. For example, the
temporal regimes of sugar capital, international tourist flows, tourist money, humanitarian aid,
wildlife preservation funding, and funding for economic development. This is exemplified by the
Jamaica of Michelle Cliff's "Claire Savage" novels, the India of Amitav Ghosh's "The Hungry Tide,"
the Somalia of Nuruddin Farah's "Gifts," and the Philippines of Ninotchka Rosca's "State of War"
and Timothy Mo's "Halu Halu." They craft new stories of world belonging for peoples in the post-
colonial South by drawing on other temporalities that have persisted from pre-colonial non-
European traditions and foreground the tensions with global capitalist regimes of temporal
governance, pointing to the opening of worlds.

Now, just as a final remark before I look forward to David's response, a caveat. The modern
ontological concept of the world that I reconstruct in the book has a specific filiation to
Abrahamic religious traditions, especially Christianity. Despite his attempt to break with the
Greek and Christian concepts of cosmos and world, Heidegger's phenomenological account of
the world as welding ends up affirming a Eurocentric metaphysics of presence because he
privileges Greek and German as the only languages capable of expressing being. Ideally, what I
should have done in the book would have been to situate the modern capitalist world system and
contemporary globalization in terms of the complicity between Eurocentrism, colonialism, and
modernity, and then attempted to reconcile world literature by drawing on non-European
cultural and religious traditions. For example, the Chinese concept of Tianxia, or "all that is under
heaven," which is the title of Jia Zhangke's film, translated as "The World," or the distinctions in
Arabic, also found in Indonesian and Malay, between Alam, Dunia, and Bumi.

So that the modern capitalist world system could be radically transformed for the better in the
image of alternative non-Western modernities and the rhythm of different cultural temporalities.
In fact, there should be as many world concepts and, therefore, many ideas about world
literature as there are languages and cultures. This would be the only way to really ground world
literature. Unfortunately, one person can only do so much. This, I think, has to be collaborative
work among scholars of Europe, East Asia, the Arab world, Africa, and so on. I very much hope
that this kind of comparative work can actually begin between these different ideas of the world
and whether it will lead us to a fuller account of world literature.

Thank you, and I look forward to David's response. [Applause]

So, I do want to commend very strongly Pheng's book to your attention. Also, his previous book
"Spectral Nationality," which I think was published in 2003, the same year as my "What is World
Literature?" book. It's a very interesting application, and perhaps I'll mention that a bit. I really
wanted to think about a couple of general questions on the relation of post-colonial and world
literature studies.

I think Pheng's book seems to have some commonalities with a couple of other recent books:
Emily Apter's "Against World Literature" from 2013 and the new book "Combined and Uneven
Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature" by the Warwick Collective, published
in 2015.

There seem to be some big questions these books raise. Before I really give some illustrations,
there are four dichotomies it seems to me these books generally pose, or not fully work through.
One is that between temporality versus history, particularly literary history. One is space versus
time, as questioned in the cartographic. It's too straightforward to say, "Oh, there's one kind of
physical cartography that's just descriptive, whereas the temporal remapping is really changing
the world in a different way."
What I send you are subtitles of a video "Conversation between Pheng Cheah and David
Damrosch, IWL Tokyo", help me punctuate and paragraph them:

One is world versus nation, where, as you pose, world literature assumes no borders or the
withering away of nations, which I don't think has happened. There's a question of how far world
literary studies can, and perhaps already has, take account of that. Finally, on the political level,
there's revolution versus reform, or you could say radicalism versus liberalism or progressivism. I
think the progressive is a term that gets adopted by either branch.

I wanted to think about this temporality versus history. One thing that really struck me, having
read these three books relatively recently together, is that Emily Apter's book talks about the
need to rethink cartographies of time, that periodicity. She talks about the Eurochronology that
has to be given up. She's already broaching some of these issues, but in her book, as in these
other two books, virtually every example is from the 20th century. As important as it is to rethink
modernism, it's only the tip of the iceberg of periodization. Indeed, it's to some degree the least
problematic period compared to a term like medieval or classical or ancient, which don't line up
nearly as well worldwide as they do. Many of the examples in these books are from the last 50
years or so of literary production, which is the most recent 2 percent in the history of literature.

In the United States, there's the Occupy Wall Street movement on behalf of the 98 percent. I
think we need to occupy comparative literature on behalf of the 98 percent of the history of
literature, which is increasingly occluded.

What I want to ask Pheng about this is, and I think your last comments very much already begin
to answer my question, but what is the trade-off in the very strong concentration on the present
if you want to look at alternative temporalities while including most of the history of literature?
You say it's exemplary, but none of these books goes back before 1900.

I wonder, you know, is it necessary to foreshorten the temporal span in order to talk about
alternative temporalities? What's gained and what's the trade-off that you would see with that?

Oh, so do I... okay, so, um, I would say, first of all, that the way that world history is being defined,
say, for instance, by Professor Haneda, and certainly in Marx, world history is something that, in a
modern sense, is a phenomenon that only comes into being with this thing called the world
market. It's from then on that you can look back in history, including the classical past and
ancient history, and say that this is the trajectory that leads up to modernity. So it's a history, but
it's a history of modernity, so to speak.

You would include all these other worlds from these different periods as part of world literature,
but world literature is really a formation that is the past for modernity, so to speak.
In the examples I used, there was a very pragmatic reason. One of the questions that I was just
mentioning to David prior to this was because another comment that people always make about
my book is why, unlike David's book that deals with literature from different periods and different
languages, the primary texts I look at, other than the host of German philosophers, are novels
written in English. When my teacher Benedict Anderson was alive, he read everything I wrote,
and I sent him the manuscript of this book. The first thing he said was, "Why do you keep talking
about multiple temporalities, but all the texts are written in English?"

It's really for a pragmatic reason. I had been giving talks based on the book, and it seemed to me
that when I gave the talks, I would never get any questions about the novels; they would ask me
about the theories because they had never read the novels before. Even when I was writing
about well-known writers like Amitav Ghosh, they hadn't read them. Initially, I planned to write
on a couple of Indonesian novels and even the Chinese novelist Mo Yan, but then I thought, if it's
unlikely that people have read Amitav Ghosh, it's even more unlikely they would have read this
Indonesian novelist. For pragmatic reasons, I chose to write on texts that were more or less
accessible.

I guess that's also part of the world literature paradigm: something needs to circulate in order for
it to make some kind of impact.

Now, the other question that arose for me is, obviously, if you look at these novels that I'm
writing about, they are written in the present and they address present phenomena, but they do
try to resurrect temporalities from the past. For instance, in the Amitav Ghosh novel, he talks
about these kinds of mythic traditions in both the Islamic world and South Asia. Nuruddin Farah
also draws on these kinds of stories from the African tradition. They talk about these other kinds
of places, periods, and so on, but once again, it's about retrieving literature from the past for the
purposes of the present.

I guess the question is, if you think about the formation of world literature and ask a very simple
question: who is it for or what is it for? I think it's really for people now to make sense of what
the world is and what world literature, as part of the—to use an old-fashioned term—part of the
human heritage, is for the present.

So, of course, the worlds of classical antiquity—Aristotle, Euripides, and so on—would always be
included in world literature, but then there's always a distinction. For instance, let's say you work
on Indian classical literature. If you are writing about Indian classical literature as an area
specialist, that would be very different from someone who is writing about Indian classical
literature as part of world literature. For me, it seems you are doing it for people in the present to
understand the past, whereas you can be fully immersed. People try to be...

I think that accepting a kind of Hegelian teleology to a degree is something one doesn't
necessarily need to do. Even though any history is a history of the present, taking the past on its
own terms and not simply for how it's rewritten in the last 20 or 30 years is somewhat different.
One little example: the world's first known patron of literature was King Shulgi of Ur, who reigned
in the 21st century BCE. In one of his poems, he imagines becoming world literature. This was at
a time when no one in the world could write other than in Sumeria and Egypt. He says, "Now I
swear by the Sun God who Utu on this very day, and my younger brothers should be witnesses of
it, in foreign lands where the sons of Sumer are not known, where people do not have the use of
paved roads.

For example, Europe. For example, Japan. Anywhere else where they have no access to the
written word—that is, anywhere other than Egypt. I, the firstborn son in the fashion of words, a
composer of songs, the composer of words, they will recite my songs as heavenly writings, and
they will bow down before them.

The first known patron of literature is using literature to help bolster his empire. He's creating a
small empire in southern Mesopotamia. We have the Epic of Gilgamesh today because he
commissioned songs about Gilgamesh. He’s the third king of the third dynasty of Ur. Gilgamesh
was just up the road in Uruk, and Shulgi bolsters himself by making himself a kind of cousin of
Gilgamesh and commissions these poems that then become the epic.

Already, you have very much things that we're interested in today—the role of writing for empire,
the words of futurity. Here it is a future-oriented thing, but you'll notice he's not actually
interested in capitalism, which doesn't yet exist for some millennia. Part of my question about
this emphasis in yours and Emily's and Rick's book is that it seems as though the only kind of
world literature worth discussing is literature critiquing global capitalism. This means, a priori, it
is very recent literature. We may use earlier stuff, but it's only in this context. The only kind of
studies of world literature worth doing are those which critique global capitalism as represented
in these critiques.

There seems to be a dismissal sometimes of other approaches, which perhaps goes to some of
this cartography of space or just describing the world, whereas the ones of temporality are
changing the world.

Now, I wanted to suggest—I mean, these different versions exist everywhere, not just in the
United States. Just as you're saying at the end, we need to see different worlds in different places.
Here in Germany, two recent books—very, very different. You have the kind of idealistic
Enlightenment of Detlef Junker's "Milestones of World Literature," a handbook of little essays on
world writers from the Enlightenment to the present. You'll notice Goethe is flying up above the
clouds, really transcendent.

Then you have, just a couple of years later, Siegfried Lenz's "The New World Literature," where he
talks about great storytellers. Again, great books for great books. Now our immigrant novels are
all very contemporary. It's, you know, a bookseller on the street in Calcutta rather than up in the
air like that. These are two kinds of world literature that exist, and I'm going to say both have a
role today, not just one rather than the other. In fact, each is imbricated with elements of the
other.
Languages—so, no idea what cosmologically, so to speak, what "have a means" in relation to
what—whether it really does mean—depends. What I'm saying is that this does mean something
different, and we have a broader sense of world temporalities. If you imagine, as the Sumerians
did, that kingship comes down from heaven, it's a gift of the gods. The king represents the
meeting place between the heavenly and the earthly, and it'll spread around the actual earth.
There is the real world he's envisioning as a result.

Just to come back to this question of cartography, it seems to me, and this goes partly to the
issue of revolution versus reform or the radical versus the progressive. I think of the kind of
redoing cartography of the surrealists. Here, Annabel Patterson is an interesting figure. Her
family, Armenian émigrés, left Turkey after the genocide and washed up in the United States. In
college, she decided—she says naively and perhaps with the idealism of youth—"I thought of
comparative literature as an antidote to excessive nationalism, and surrealism was the one
literature that was reacting against national divisions and even overcoming the barriers between
the arts. I thought innocently that with the perspectives of comparative literature and the
dissemination of surrealism, we could change the world."

So she doesn't want to describe the world; she wants to change it. She made a small financial
investment that shaped the rest of her life, which was going to the second meeting of the
International Comparative Literature Association. One of the kind of things she's interested in—I
pick up this great map from Delio and Carana's book, "From Paris to Surrealism as World
Literature," and think in terms of Chris Bush's course of both scholarship and teaching. The avant-
garde world, the literature of Dada and surrealism—here we have Breton and his friends. They
see surrealism as world literature.

In Delio's book, the cartography of meridians and latitudes and longitudes traps the world in a
cage spatially. Surrealists are going to explode that graph. Instead of the equator, you have this
wavy line. Now the Pacific Ocean is the center, the Atlantic is minimized, and England almost
disappears. Ireland is the big island off to the left, tiny little England looking at Africa. You have
Paris, not much more of Europe at all. Russia and China are big. Sadly, no Japan, but you have the
Philippines, Indonesia, and the Indian Ocean. Easter Island looks almost like an animal there. The
old epic is there because Breton was collecting art from there. No United States other than
Alaska and Labrador. Then Mexico is there, and kind of a tiny South America.

This is a cartography that's very explicitly changing the world by a different cartographic
description. I wonder whether it's necessary to say the temporal thing is the thing that changes,
and thinking about circulation or mapping the world is somehow conservative or just status quo,
because I don't think that's what they thought or what I think we're doing.

Well, I mean, so you began with the temporality versus history. It seems to me that history is a
temporal category. History is not space versus time. There is a certain sense that even because
when I talk about it, it's realized...
The question is—but I think when the question is faced in earnest—it also comes from things
coming from Easter Island now, kinds of art we never saw before. Things are coming from Ireland.
Ireland now looks more important as a place for revolutionary art than England does to Britain
polemically, right? You could say also with Casanova, it's very pro-periphery. This is an engine of
literary development in regions within the contemporary world. It just seems to me it's not an
either/or. The spatial is as revolutionary or as progressive as the temporal can be.

Well, I guess the question is, I mean, yes, if you think about circulation, and I'm certainly not
discounting it because I think this is the major point of contention. What you're suggesting is that
my sense of circulation is... No, I know, but I mean, of course, that's not the case.

Now think about, say... He looks at how the novel has been used by African-American... The main
question is what for me, and once again, that's why I began by saying for me, what is it...

The other thing is, I guess, one thing I should have made clear. There seems to be... and partly
that's because of the circulation of commodities is always...

Of course, there are ways of understanding the circulation of commodities in a way that is
progressive. If you think about my teacher Benedict Anderson's book "Print Capitalism," it
produces something that is progressive—that is to say, for him, the nation. But for me, it seems
that the link to capitalism is always going to be there with commodity circulation.