Thomas Schestag
Photo: Annette Hornsicher

Associate Professor of German, Brown University, Rhode Island

John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Fall 2013

Thomas Schestag is a scholar of German and comparative literature who began teaching at Brown University in January 2014. Since 2005 he has taught in the United States at Northwestern University and The Johns Hopkins University, as well as in Germany, at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. As of January 2014 he will be an associate professor of German at Brown University. Educated in Zurich (PhD, 1988) and at the Freie Universität Berlin (MA, 1984), Schestag has published widely on theories of names and naming, hermeneutics and translation, and the intersection of philosophy, poetry, and political theory. An English translation of his 2006 book, Die unbewältigte Sprache (Engeler), on Hannah Arendt’s theory of poetry, is in preparation. He is also investigating the idea of sensus communis (koinē aisthēsis) concerning the existence of a sense for language preceding the pre-conceptual notion of a linguistic “common sense.”

Project Description

SOL: Francis Ponge’s Unpublished Dossier “Le Soleil”

In his Academy project, an edition of the unpublished dossier “Le soleil (The Sun)” by the French poet and essayist Francis Ponge (1899-1988), Schestag applied his extraordinary philological skill to the theory and practice of objeu, or, in his translation, “ob-play.” It took Ponge more than half a lifetime (at age 50) to decide to take up the sun as an object of consideration; even at that point in his scholarship, he continued to express hesitations about this choice. While “sun” is just one word designating just one thing among others, he believed this one word did not simply designate a phenomenon among others but named the very source of phenomenality. As Ponge wrote in 1949, the sun is also “the formal and indispensable condition of (our) existence,” of life and death (on earth). As an exploration of Ponge’s sweeping literary imagination, Schestag’s volume, under contract with Matthes & Seitz, promises to be a major point of reference for discussions of where the difference between subject and object no longer holds. Along with a critical and integral facsimile-edition of the collected 225 manuscript pages and typescripts of “Le soleil,” Schestag will provide transcriptions, translations, and philological commentary. The project also includes Schestag’s critical essay comparing Ponge’s understanding of the sun with other philosophical and literary texts: Plato’s allegory of the cave and the almost obsessive preoccupation with the sun in the writings of Georges Bataille, and Saint Francis of Assisi’s Il Cantico di Frate Sole and Jean de La Fontaine’s fable about the wind and the sun, “Phébus et Borée.”

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