Even as, within rethought and re-configured spaces of the study of literature, World Literature goes cosmopolitan, transnational, comparative, and translational, geopolitical divisions re-assert themselves. The erstwhile ‘national’ of philology, literature, and pedagogy is being displaced onto new divisions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, between a restrictive affirmative literariness and literary autonomy, between an autonomous ‘world literary system’ and localised cultural manifestations tethered to a normatively postulated or in other respects re-inscribed nation-state. Scooped up within this sweep are even the considerations pertaining to literary figurations, like that of Kafka’s ‘minor literature’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s explication, under conditions in which the relationship between nation and state has been severed, or is not historically-politically or culturally demonstrable.

In this paper, I would like to mount some considerations about the place of the political in constellations in which the relationship between state and nation, taken to be normative for Western European nation state formation, is unhinged – not only historically and politically speaking, but in the process of philosophy and theory-formation itself. Jan Patočka’s idea of ‘Europe’ pitted against a Eurocentric diffusionism, and Hannah Arendt’s early ideas on the rise of the social in the public realm and the ‘conquest of the state by the nation’, pave the way for investigations of orders of discourses reaching across and beyond Europe.