The Severe Style

Chapter 13 interrogates the vision of universality often demanded by world literature. He reminds us of the difficulty of applying universality transcendentally, as a given norm lying outside time and space. Reading Lu Xun’s engagement with the ironies of law and norm alongside British philosopher Gillian Rose’s lifelong project of the “retrieval of speculative experience,” the chapter details Lu Xun’s comments on law, norms, and fair play in semicolonial Shanghai. Specifically, the chapter details the ways in which Lu Xun sought to ironically expose the groundlessness of universal propositions that betray their own premises in the complicated context of power and domination. While Lu Xun rejected simplistic desires for transcendence, his work nevertheless proposes the necessary horizon of the absolute, one from whose vantage point the contradictions of actuality could come into view. Lu Xun’s descent into irony and the negative provided the soil for a tenuous and difficult form of secular faith.