ABSTRACT
It is increasingly apparent that we lack an appropriate archaeology of contemporary ‘literary theory’. This chapter will begin to establish aspects of such an archaeology by investigating philosophical arguments whose relevance to and influence on subsequent theory will only become fully evident in later chapters. I trust the reader will bear with me in this trip through the ‘icy wastes of abstraction’: exploration of these philosophical arguments will help us both to understand what differentiates literary theory from other approaches to literature, and to see how the issues associated with literary theory play an ever more important role in contemporary philosophy. The figures of Immanuel Kant and his contemporary F.H.Jacobi (1743–1819) appear in virtually any book on the Goethezeit, as participants in the debates which lead to Romanticism, but they are hardly ever seen as being inextricably connected to ideas that have recurred in the work of Derrida and in other areas of contemporary philosophy. This recurrence can suggest how intellectual traditions which diverged in the course of the nineteenth and throughout much of this century have now begun again to converge, for reasons which will become apparent in the course of this book.
