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A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein
Is the point of philosophy to transmit beliefs about the world, or can it sometimes have higher ambitions? In this bold study, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, revealing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a complex, mock-theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic self-clarification Wittgenstein saw as the true work of philosophy. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein resembles his modernist contemporaries more than might first appear. Like the literary innovators of his time, Wittgenstein believed in the productive power of difficulty, in varieties of spiritual experience, in the importance of age-old questions about life’s meaning, and in the possibility of transfigurative shifts toward the right way of seeing the world. In a series of absorbing chapters, Zumhagen-Yekplé shows how Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee set their readers on a path toward a new way of being. Offering a new perspective on Wittgenstein as philosophical modernist, and on the lives and afterlives of his indirect teaching, A Different Order of Difficulty is a compelling addition to studies in both literature and philosophy.
350 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 31, 2024
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About the author
Karen Zumhagen-Yekple
3 books3 followersKaren Zumhagen-Yekplé is assistant professor of English and an affiliated faculty member in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Programs for Gender Studies and Film Studies at Tulane University.
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April 2, 2021
This is a new or another review...
Two companions, neither alike in dignity
In timeless Crab Midge where we set this review:
"A Different Order of Difficulty, Literature after Wittgenstein"
By Karen Zumhagen-Yekple written and by Grendel reviewed.
Grendel, the once Lord of Blows, Shocks and fatal indignities
Turns now to Philosophy's redemptive humilities;
Here reports he of Karen's set-to with modern literature's difficulty
And obscurity and the reader's quest for life transforming clarity.
It is, she insists as many do, that such clarity is literature's task to do.
And, thus, she deflates the ancient feud, the quarrel,
Where the blood of poets
Makes unclean the hands of philosophers.
Hogimous Higimous
Alone, Grendel watched from the aspect of 'sub specie aeternitatis' for anyone or anything that might bare an answer to his existential question: How come death did not resolve the riddle of my existence? He yearned for an answer, for wholeness, for that totalizing synchronic "moment of being": that moment of "enough-ness" that would connect him with the "it" ... with the 'All'- or just with another "splendid mind". "When, O, when...," he howled to no one or thing in particular, but then, "Do words of time have meaning in eternity?" Now, he searched the obits on his laptop. Hosanna! He's dead! Finally! That means that that "splendid mind" I seek arrives on the next train... here. Ah, I'll meet, no, pick him up at the station. And so, Grendel went to Eternity's Arrivals Gate to pick up Wittgenstein.
Predictably, Wittgenstein refused/rejected Grendel's want to study with him; so, Grendel picked him up and licked his face until Ludwig [Grendel, prone to Big Bird type slippages, would accidentally call him Luddite] in a flash accepted his new pupil...happily.
Grendel's DED Talks, [Distracting Existential Difficulties] sponsored by GUOCH [ (the) Goading Urgency Of Contingent Happenings -from A.N. Whitehead] is a company noted for its manufacture and global distribution of unhappy skull crushing "blows and shocks" as well as happier "moments of being". [ The terms: blows, shocks and 'moments of being' belong to Virginia Woolf.] All objects or events produced by GUOCH are, in cooperation with the Everyday Sublime Group, guaranteed to deflate any hope of their conceptual accounting. [That guaranty's deflationary effect springs from Cora Diamond's essay, "The Difficulty of Reality, The Difficulty of Philosophy".] ENJOY!"
Grendel begins...
With too few shelves to accommodate them, the books in my rooms at Crab Midge find themselves in stacks, fallen stacks, or just scattered about in random piles like autumn leaves. I insist that this disorder not only discloses the range of my intellectual endeavors but, more importantly, de-monst(e)rates me. [As the DED Talk begins, I sit at the baby grand improvising an accompaniment with hammering fists -following Bartok et al, I play the piano as what it is- a percussion instrument- to a spontaneous song on the words: "Alone, alone, all, all, all alone". In mid strike I turn to the camera] "Welcome to another episode of Grendel's DED Talks. While dead is forever, my talks are not...and, you are welcome." Yet, such is my enthusiasm for this book, I could go on forever about at it. But where to start, how to go on...how to go on? The book attracts and holds my attention first, because it treats Wittgenstein's difficult, obscure, and claimed point of the "Tractatus" as being a work of ethics rather than a work on mind numbing (skull crushing) logic. And, second, because Zumhagen-Yekple shifts her focus of the "Tractatus" from its written logical content to its unwritten but claimed ethical point; and that move also shifts the 'logical' space (ha, ha, ha) of the "Tractatus" out of its tautological vacuities into the rhetorical and aesthetic spaces of literature. And it is just here on the airy spur of a goading ethics (and just what is that?) that one views through the prisms of literature the bands of color, the bands of strategies for the management of one's quest for solutions to the riddle existence.
He went on. He would limit this Talk to the third chapter of Zumhagen-Yeklpe's book, titled, "Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality". The camera follows his glance to the portraits hanging on the walls (where there should be book shelves) or held in frames on the piano (if not shaken to the floor). Pictured there are his spiritual darlings: Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and special for this program, Virginia Woolf. [Grendel suddenly grimaced and began messaging his phantom arm -although he grew a new one. He picked up a picture from the mess on the floor. It is of him as a young happy thing with both arms around a cow's skull.] "With this picture I begin, even though in swotty-hood practice it is probably at the wrong place. Oh, and one last DED Talk 'game' rule: because I can't say Yekple correctly then from now on I'll use her initials KZ-Y instead."
Now, the magnets that pulled my attention to Chapter Three are its plethora of trinities (such as, the trinity that glues KZ-Y's book together: difficulty, obscurity and transformation, and any number of variations of this trio), its focus on such 'existential' questions, such as in the opening line of Chapter xviii of "The Window" posed by Mrs. Ramsay, "But what have I done with my life?" and their attendant managements in "To the Lighthouse". Additionally, I want to say a little bit about KH-Y's exploration of Lily Briscoe's "phantom table". Here she suggests that a phantom table functions like a photograph in that both challenge the tenses of our everyday language. That is to say that the linear nature of grammatical structures must proceed diachronically rather serve the synchronic demand to describe both the pre presents and the absents of the not present limb or as in a photo of a kitchen table. This discussion accounts for Woolf's "free indirect style" of writing. So, diversion one: here I note a family resemblance between a "phantom table" and a "phantom limb". In "To the Lighthouse", Lily Briscoe relates that the philosophy Mr. Ramsay engages the notion: "To think of a kitchen table when you are not there." A effective way to fulfill Ramsay's command is to treat one's 'not- there-ness' as if one were looking at a photograph of say (as Diamond does is her essay) of six young men happy together, yet captioned: "all dead within six months of this picture taken." For Diamond this presents a difficulty of reality, which for some renders their conceptualizing capacity for generating "word-world even-ness" bankrupt. On a personal level, but not irrelevant to the topic, consider the connection here of Grendel to Captain Ahab: we each have a phantom limb, we each see the world in a photographic way (say as a paste board mask), we each seek or quest for the 'reality' concealed by the masks, we each assume that there is a 'reality' there to find, and once found that finding will satisfy all of our 'existential' questions. That is that our finding will 'change our lives' by clarifying our worrisome view of the world to something better. [Wishful thinking? But here we also hear the three note pedal point that glues KM-Y's book together: difficulty, obscurity and transformation] And a reminder, that both Ahab and Grendel lost their limbs by violent encounters; and by virtue of their skull shattering traumas each also lost command of their otherwise effective conceptual constitutions of reality. Now, here then, both had an up close and personal encounter with the 'difficulty of reality'. Worse yet was/is the isolation they suffered; Starbuck, for example, refused to acknowledge Ahab's quest--which was not for revenge but to blot out an evil; and only my Aunt Wyrd (no other Norse diety would talk to me) forgave my Beowulf pranks as being those of an adolescent male "monster"- a personification of "Contingency"- you know, "outrageous fortune". [I love my Aunt Wyrd, we formed a Wittgenstein Reading Club together. We often meet at the once and future site of his Norwegian Hut.]
And Grendel, tears in his eyes, turns from the camera.
"La commedia es finita."
Lust, I do for works with "Wittgenstein" in the title. Read them I do (if I can afford them). This work I read (and re-read many of this work's scholarly references- and Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"- all ready in my library) and was instantly raptured by Zumhagen-Yekple's stance toward Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" as well as her celebration of literature's ability to transfigure or transcend one's life (if that is, that is what one quests for; but, as Cavell has written, "Nothing is more human than he want not to be human." "The Claim of Reason") Now, I would write a more in depth review of this work; this is, however, an arduous task that promises days of fret and fumble.
Two companions, neither alike in dignity
In timeless Crab Midge where we set this review:
"A Different Order of Difficulty, Literature after Wittgenstein"
By Karen Zumhagen-Yekple written and by Grendel reviewed.
Grendel, the once Lord of Blows, Shocks and fatal indignities
Turns now to Philosophy's redemptive humilities;
Here reports he of Karen's set-to with modern literature's difficulty
And obscurity and the reader's quest for life transforming clarity.
It is, she insists as many do, that such clarity is literature's task to do.
And, thus, she deflates the ancient feud, the quarrel,
Where the blood of poets
Makes unclean the hands of philosophers.
Hogimous Higimous
Alone, Grendel watched from the aspect of 'sub specie aeternitatis' for anyone or anything that might bare an answer to his existential question: How come death did not resolve the riddle of my existence? He yearned for an answer, for wholeness, for that totalizing synchronic "moment of being": that moment of "enough-ness" that would connect him with the "it" ... with the 'All'- or just with another "splendid mind". "When, O, when...," he howled to no one or thing in particular, but then, "Do words of time have meaning in eternity?" Now, he searched the obits on his laptop. Hosanna! He's dead! Finally! That means that that "splendid mind" I seek arrives on the next train... here. Ah, I'll meet, no, pick him up at the station. And so, Grendel went to Eternity's Arrivals Gate to pick up Wittgenstein.
Predictably, Wittgenstein refused/rejected Grendel's want to study with him; so, Grendel picked him up and licked his face until Ludwig [Grendel, prone to Big Bird type slippages, would accidentally call him Luddite] in a flash accepted his new pupil...happily.
Grendel's DED Talks, [Distracting Existential Difficulties] sponsored by GUOCH [ (the) Goading Urgency Of Contingent Happenings -from A.N. Whitehead] is a company noted for its manufacture and global distribution of unhappy skull crushing "blows and shocks" as well as happier "moments of being". [ The terms: blows, shocks and 'moments of being' belong to Virginia Woolf.] All objects or events produced by GUOCH are, in cooperation with the Everyday Sublime Group, guaranteed to deflate any hope of their conceptual accounting. [That guaranty's deflationary effect springs from Cora Diamond's essay, "The Difficulty of Reality, The Difficulty of Philosophy".] ENJOY!"
Grendel begins...
With too few shelves to accommodate them, the books in my rooms at Crab Midge find themselves in stacks, fallen stacks, or just scattered about in random piles like autumn leaves. I insist that this disorder not only discloses the range of my intellectual endeavors but, more importantly, de-monst(e)rates me. [As the DED Talk begins, I sit at the baby grand improvising an accompaniment with hammering fists -following Bartok et al, I play the piano as what it is- a percussion instrument- to a spontaneous song on the words: "Alone, alone, all, all, all alone". In mid strike I turn to the camera] "Welcome to another episode of Grendel's DED Talks. While dead is forever, my talks are not...and, you are welcome." Yet, such is my enthusiasm for this book, I could go on forever about at it. But where to start, how to go on...how to go on? The book attracts and holds my attention first, because it treats Wittgenstein's difficult, obscure, and claimed point of the "Tractatus" as being a work of ethics rather than a work on mind numbing (skull crushing) logic. And, second, because Zumhagen-Yekple shifts her focus of the "Tractatus" from its written logical content to its unwritten but claimed ethical point; and that move also shifts the 'logical' space (ha, ha, ha) of the "Tractatus" out of its tautological vacuities into the rhetorical and aesthetic spaces of literature. And it is just here on the airy spur of a goading ethics (and just what is that?) that one views through the prisms of literature the bands of color, the bands of strategies for the management of one's quest for solutions to the riddle existence.
He went on. He would limit this Talk to the third chapter of Zumhagen-Yeklpe's book, titled, "Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality". The camera follows his glance to the portraits hanging on the walls (where there should be book shelves) or held in frames on the piano (if not shaken to the floor). Pictured there are his spiritual darlings: Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and special for this program, Virginia Woolf. [Grendel suddenly grimaced and began messaging his phantom arm -although he grew a new one. He picked up a picture from the mess on the floor. It is of him as a young happy thing with both arms around a cow's skull.] "With this picture I begin, even though in swotty-hood practice it is probably at the wrong place. Oh, and one last DED Talk 'game' rule: because I can't say Yekple correctly then from now on I'll use her initials KZ-Y instead."
Now, the magnets that pulled my attention to Chapter Three are its plethora of trinities (such as, the trinity that glues KZ-Y's book together: difficulty, obscurity and transformation, and any number of variations of this trio), its focus on such 'existential' questions, such as in the opening line of Chapter xviii of "The Window" posed by Mrs. Ramsay, "But what have I done with my life?" and their attendant managements in "To the Lighthouse". Additionally, I want to say a little bit about KH-Y's exploration of Lily Briscoe's "phantom table". Here she suggests that a phantom table functions like a photograph in that both challenge the tenses of our everyday language. That is to say that the linear nature of grammatical structures must proceed diachronically rather serve the synchronic demand to describe both the pre presents and the absents of the not present limb or as in a photo of a kitchen table. This discussion accounts for Woolf's "free indirect style" of writing. So, diversion one: here I note a family resemblance between a "phantom table" and a "phantom limb". In "To the Lighthouse", Lily Briscoe relates that the philosophy Mr. Ramsay engages the notion: "To think of a kitchen table when you are not there." A effective way to fulfill Ramsay's command is to treat one's 'not- there-ness' as if one were looking at a photograph of say (as Diamond does is her essay) of six young men happy together, yet captioned: "all dead within six months of this picture taken." For Diamond this presents a difficulty of reality, which for some renders their conceptualizing capacity for generating "word-world even-ness" bankrupt. On a personal level, but not irrelevant to the topic, consider the connection here of Grendel to Captain Ahab: we each have a phantom limb, we each see the world in a photographic way (say as a paste board mask), we each seek or quest for the 'reality' concealed by the masks, we each assume that there is a 'reality' there to find, and once found that finding will satisfy all of our 'existential' questions. That is that our finding will 'change our lives' by clarifying our worrisome view of the world to something better. [Wishful thinking? But here we also hear the three note pedal point that glues KM-Y's book together: difficulty, obscurity and transformation] And a reminder, that both Ahab and Grendel lost their limbs by violent encounters; and by virtue of their skull shattering traumas each also lost command of their otherwise effective conceptual constitutions of reality. Now, here then, both had an up close and personal encounter with the 'difficulty of reality'. Worse yet was/is the isolation they suffered; Starbuck, for example, refused to acknowledge Ahab's quest--which was not for revenge but to blot out an evil; and only my Aunt Wyrd (no other Norse diety would talk to me) forgave my Beowulf pranks as being those of an adolescent male "monster"- a personification of "Contingency"- you know, "outrageous fortune". [I love my Aunt Wyrd, we formed a Wittgenstein Reading Club together. We often meet at the once and future site of his Norwegian Hut.]
And Grendel, tears in his eyes, turns from the camera.
"La commedia es finita."
Lust, I do for works with "Wittgenstein" in the title. Read them I do (if I can afford them). This work I read (and re-read many of this work's scholarly references- and Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"- all ready in my library) and was instantly raptured by Zumhagen-Yekple's stance toward Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" as well as her celebration of literature's ability to transfigure or transcend one's life (if that is, that is what one quests for; but, as Cavell has written, "Nothing is more human than he want not to be human." "The Claim of Reason") Now, I would write a more in depth review of this work; this is, however, an arduous task that promises days of fret and fumble.
June 21, 2024
This book changed my life probably more than any other has - at least over the last few years.
April 2, 2024
This is the smartest academic book I've read in a very very very long time. Not only in terms of its treatment of how reading Wittgenstein can make available new ways of thinking philosophically, but how reading literature in a Wittgensteinian spirit can also grant us crucial insights about criticism and teaching. It's deft and subtle in that regard. But this is a book by a brilliant author who handles her substantial erudition with a light touch. Seriously A+
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews