On Literature, Differently

Abstract

The article begins by opening a post-secular perspective on literary criticism as one of the humanities of the modern age. Viewed from this perspective, literary criticism proves to be a bearer of secularization in the field of literature insofar as it tried to establish pure literature as its object. Secularization, in turn, is seen as a consistent implementation of the split between religion, philosophy, and poetry (or literature) that took place as early as in ancient Greece. As secularization’s executioner, literary criticism is consequently recognized as a primal heresy, whereas the logos on literature, which the article brings to the fore, is considered a heresy on heresy, that is, a literary heresiology. Its task, however, is not only to turn back and develop the hermeneutics of pre-split texts as well as later ones that somehow remained untouched by the split, but also to think literature outside the allegedly neutral space of pure literature. Thus, the question is raised: how is literature related to religion and philosophy in its own interior? – In answering this question, literature is defined in its poietic aspect as a written experience, the experience of humanness in the first place and – through it – also of thingness and divineness. Belonging to the creator, not to the receptor, the experience of literature in question is shown not to be identical with perception: passing across the border of the everyday world, it opens itself to the real, whatever that may be – beyond objectivity or actuality. With regard to the “ontology of everyday life”, it is therefore always the experience of the other-being. It is precisely in this experience that literature in its innermost is met by religion and philosophy. Namely, the experience of literature consists of faith/belief and thinking. In creative thinking, the real realizes itself beyond actuality in the may-be, but the point from which creative thinking itself reaches out to the real that is to be revealed and put into words is always faith/belief. Despite appearances to the contrary, some belief – some initial assent given to the real that is certainly no declaration of faith – is also present in modern literature.