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Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville (review)

Philosophers love Herman Melville. Recent decades have seen readings of his works by Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. Much of this attention has been focused on “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the resultant interpretations provide dazzling examples of the kind of philosophical insight available from a literary text. Thanks, in part, to these interventions, we now have a Melville who rivals, and often outshines, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in his epistemological, ethical, and political sophistication. (For other relevant philosophical readings of Melville, see Arsić and Evans.) The translation of Peter Szendy’s 2004 volume, Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville, adds an important new voice to the chorus of philosophical admiration. But rather than focusing on “Bartleby,” Szendy looks to the temporality of reading that Melville models in Moby-Dick, lingering suggestively with the overlapping pasts, presents, and futures that come to the surface in a book he celebrates as the “Leviathan-text” (Prophecies 50). To listen to Szendy is to participate in a rigorous examination of the terrain shared by philosophy, music, literature, and history. Szendy’s previous work investigates aural experience—assumptions and standards associated with the act(s) of listening, the existences of aural phantoms, and the distortions created by beliefs about technology and the body—and these interests echo throughout Prophecies of Leviathan, most notably in the correlation of prophecy and prosthesis. But it is not just in terms of subject that Szendy’s rich engagement with the world of sound is evident. The volume can be likened to a symphony, as various themes are introduced, developed, and reworked across its pages; the tantalizing short chapters that constitute Prophecies of Leviathan offer suggestive or provocative readings, not exhaustive analysis. Many present bold juxtapositions and fresh interpretations, although a handful recapitulate well-trod territory for Melville scholars. The chapters are structured to challenge the reader to an active engagement with both the text and her own assumptions about reading in various ways: the frequency with which Szendy addresses her directly (“I listen to you now. It is your turn” [Prophecies