The (Hard) Practice of Reading: On the Use and Misuse of Wittgenstein for Literature

Recent and influential work in literary theory has championed Wittgenstein and “ordinary language philosophy” more broadly as a resource for an ethically transformative and “post-critical” approach to literary studies. This chapter strikes a cautionary note about the turn to “ordinary language” in literary criticism, arguing that it risks taking for granted the Wittgensteinean ordinary as simply given. I offer an alternative account of how Wittgenstein may provide a model and resource for literary studies by looking closely at the philosopher’s extraordinary commitment to revision and recontextualization. Wittgenstein’s writing practice, as evidenced in the unpublished notebooks and manuscripts, demands a reading practice of heightened attention to the affective implications of small and subtle shifts in wording and context. The philosopher’s working through and working over the famous remark, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PPF iv §25) provides an exemplary case. On a first reading, the remark seems to propose that the “soul” of another is “always before one’s eyes,” always—and ordinarily—available to being seen. Attending to the genealogy of this remark as it is written and re-written in the context of reflections on pain language, privacy, first- and third-person ascriptions of thought and feeling, and the limits of physiological explanation discloses the interdependence of its conceptual implications, rhetorical form, and deployment of figurative language. While addressing the challenges of genuine interdisciplinary engagement with philosophy from the side of literary studies, this chapter also seeks to demonstrate how attention to the aesthetic resources of language that is central to literary critical practice may have something to contribute to efforts, on the side of philosophy, to revive substantive hermeneutic engagement with the texts comprising its own history.