Borrowed Light, or “Post-” in Light of the Past: Review Essay on Timothy Brennan, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies. Stanford UP, 2014. 280 pp.

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Notes

1. Brennan explains the notion of “signifying on” as follows: “In literary criticism, ‘signifying on’ is a practice performed by trickster figures (especially in African American culture). A dominant image or term is seized upon in order to deflate its status, mock its goals, or redirect its meanings. The idea is to share a joke with an audience of like thinkers who do not have the social capital to directly contest an entrenched value system” (263n76). See also the chapter on “Signifying on Hegel” (207–18).

2. In Orientalism, Said comments on the notion of “productive” as instrumental to the saturation of hegemonic cultural systems typical of imperial colonial projects. See Orientalism 14.

3. “Productive reading assigns meaning to a text on the basis of what is judged to be productive of a desired political effect. The criterion for a good reading, then, shifts from asking ‘Is it what the author wrote?’ to ‘Does it create an effect?’” (57–58).

4. Michel Foucault provided one of the most explicit accounts of such an analogy in The Archeology of Knowledge.

5. For an important and, unfortunately, forgotten early critical review of Foucault's notion of episteme in Les mots et les choses, see Melandri, “Nota.” The concept of the human along with the notions of hermeneutics, dialectics, and science as a political enterprise (that is, as human science) are reassessed in a manner that, since counterintuitive, might prove significant today.

6. See also the chapters “What Nietzsche Means by Genealogy” (184–95) and “Prophetic Suicide: Reading” (218–24).

7. Vico's concept of barbary and barbarism is complex as it characterizes different historical corsi and ricorsi. A negative concept according to the Greek-Roman tradition, in Vico it acquires evident positive connotations. In the context of his reflections on Dante's Comedy, he indeed claims that given that reflection, when used wrongly, “è madre della menzogna,” barbary, “per difetto di riflessione non sa fingere (ond'ella è naturalmente veritiera, aperta, fida, generosa e magnanima)” (742).

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Stefano Selenu

Stefano Selenu is Assistant Teaching Professor in Italian language, literature, and culture at Syracuse University. His research explores the links between Medieval-Renaissance and modern correlations of language and praxis, focusing particularly on the emergence of a vernacular consciousness that to this day animates our understanding about subjectivity vis-à-vis exilic writing, imperial sovereignty, and the representation of the vulgar. More specifically, he focuses on the figures of Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Giambattista Vico, and Antonio Gramsci, on whom he has published several essays. In 2005 he was awarded the Antonio Gramsci Prize.