意義遲後：文學的當代位置

After-thoughts Placing Literature in the Contemporary

文學研究近年面臨的危機感，除了肇因學院在政策面受控於新自由主義機制，亦來自數位科技、新媒體對文學研究典範的衝擊。新自由主義與新媒體的運行邏輯皆可說是某種的立即性：前者強調其經濟操作模式可被順暢轉繹為社會中其他層次，後者則標榜不見媒介的直接體驗。本文的主張是，若要正面回應此種即時性生命政治，我們應重新省思文學特有的時間性。本文將援引阿岡本（Giorgio Agamben）的「同時性」概念及班雅明（Walter Benjamin）的「可引述性」說法，試論一種等待意義遲後發生的倫理姿態，更以此做為吾人反思文學研究當代性的視角。為落實討論的有效性，論文除了將先評析上述即時性脈理對人文學產生的影響，並將鎖定過去十餘年由世界文學論述在西方比較文學界掀起的論辯，檢視其中當道的實證空間思維的侷限。論文後段則以阿岡本、班雅明為靈感，此外借助當代媒介理論及兩個視覺作品，申論跳脫立即性時間邏輯的另種時間性。

What many of us consider to be the contemporary crisis of literary studies is to a significant extent precipitated by the prevailing managerial mechanism in academia undergirded by neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the sweeping impacts of digital technologies, on the other hand. These two in effect operate via a similar logic: the logic of immediacy. We may even argue that underlying popular propositions about literary studies today, such as world literature, is in a sense this obsession with immediacy: obsession with gaining an effective grasp of what is far away and unfamiliar. Premised on this observation, this article suggests that to ponder the exigency of literary scholarship today is to think a temporality that works differently from the regime of immediacy. Specifically the article proposes to draw on the Agambenian conception of contemporaneity and the Benjaminian notion of citability, both in the sense of allowing meaning of the contemporary to arrive later, a delay that can nevertheless mediate our self-reflection and self-critique in the face of the lure of immediacy. Whereas propositions like world literature are predicated on positivistic parameters, an ethos of delayed after-thought, the article contends, stands as a more progressive register by which to ponder the valence of literary studies in our times-an ethos the article would like to regard as the thrust of comparative literature.