James I. Porter

The Cynics With and Without Foucault

James I. Porter
2023

In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the ancient Cynics. In lectures from 1982 to 1984, and most notably in his final Collège de France lectures from 1984 (The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II), he sought to recover from the Cynics a potential for critique, militant revolution, and a courageous means of speaking truth to power. Foucault's engaged scholarship is inspiring, but in many respects, it is indistinguishable from conventional scholarly approaches to ancient Cynicism. In both cases,...

Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

James I. Porter
2024

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern...

Was ist ‘jüdische Philologie’?

James I. Porter
2024

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) gilt als eine der Gründungsfiguren einer Kulturwissenschaft, der es um die Verbindung von Kultur und sozialer Wirklichkeit geht. Dabei berücksichtigt der Romanist stets das philologische Detail: Statt das Allgemeine im Begrifflichen festzustellen, soll es in seiner unterschiedlichen figurativen Dynamik beschrieben und jeweils im konkreten historischen Einzelnen, Körperlich-Materiellen, Alltäglichen aufgesucht werden. Aus diesem »Leib der Zeit« gewinnt Auerbach seine Konzepte wie Mimesis, Figura, Stil und Weltliteratur. Der Sammelband, der aus einer...

Life Cycles beyond the Human: Biomass and Biorhythms in Heraclitus

James I. Porter
2024

All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of...

Nietzsche and Literary Studies

James I. Porter
2024

Cambridge University Press, April 2024

Nietzsche and Literary Studies tackles the literary implications of Nietzsche's philosophy and the philosophical implications of his approaches to style and expression. The book offers a complete guide to Nietzsche's writings, which in turn draw on two and a half millennia of literary and philosophical history, reaching back to Heraclitus, Plato, and the Cynics and from there to Diderot, the Schlegels, Stendahl, and Stifter, and have inspired a further century of responses from literary writers and philosophers, from Proust, Gide, and...