“Dying Wisdom” and “Living Madness”: A Comparative Literature of the Errant Star

Abstract

In this essay, Ukai traces the notion of the “planet” as an errant star or wanderer through the history of European and American thought, with a particular emphasis on philosophy after the Second World War. Beginning with the profound vertigo induced by the revelation that the very earth we stand upon is one of those distant stars once seen up above, Ukai pursues the dislocating thought of this wandering star through Kant’s writings on perpetual peace, Heidegger’s anxiety over the loss of differentiation, Jacques Derrida’s exploration of power, distance and friendship in his readings of Nietzsche, and finally Gayatri Spivak’s proposed methodology for a comparative literature that refuses to countenance the reduction of the planet to a human possession.