Prophecies of Leviathan

"Szendy uses a dialogical form of criticism to argue that Moby Dick should be read as a prophetic text; the prophecy of an unspeakable catastrophe turns into the experience of writing from the 'outside.' It is the proximity with such an 'outside' that frees Meville's text from its crust of ancient glosses and multiplies amazingly original close readings." -- -Jean-Michel Rabate University of Pennsylvania "Prophecies of Leviathan enacts and performs, within the movement of its language, what it seeks to convey: that any reading worthy of the name "reading" must undergo the storms of reading, must move without compass or anchor, must come to understand that reading means "learning to die." In this, Szendy proves himself to be-like Melville himself-one of the great meteorologists of reading in general. Indeed, in reading "reading," in reading the act of reading, this wildly wonderful book traces the whirlwinds and tempests, the stammering and staccato iterations, that are the signature of Melville's whale of a book and, in so doing, not only invites future readings but also comprehends and anticipates them. I therefore prophesize that by reading backwards in order to read ahead this book will continue to tell us how and why we read at all, regardless of whether we are reading a book, a document, or, in Melville's case, an archive of the world." -- -Eduardo Cadava Princeton University "Prophecies of Leviathan is an extraordinary reading of Melville's fictions as sustained meditations on the nature of reading. If Moby Dick is a prophetic text, this is because-as Peter Szendy shows us-the event of (its) reading is prophetic. Taking his bearings from Blanchot and Derrida while also reading in ways all his own, Szendy will have changed not only how we read Moby Dick but how it reads us." -- -Andrew Parker Amherst College