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With Eric Hayot's The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain, the Modernist Literature & Culture series for the first time steps noticeably outside of its “comfort zone”—even, one might argue, eschews its stated goal of exploring the cultural bearings of literary modernism. To such a charge, we can only plead “guilty”: a book as wide-ranging and thoughtful, as well as thought-provoking, as The Hypothetical Mandarin is bound to unsettle comfortable visions of period, field, nation, and method, making the series’ founding logic somewhat strange to itself. For Hayot takes as his object of inquiry not modernism per se, but the Western project of modernity writ large—and yet zeroes in, with uncanny precision, on one of its most persistent and disturbing topoi: the figure of the suffering Chinese subject, and its relationship to two hundred years’ worth of Western discourse about human sympathy and human rights.
The book opens—in its very first sentence—with reference to Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1790), which includes a excursus Hayot calls “a remarkable thought experiment” (and from which he derives his title). It's an apt description of this text, as well: experimental in method and form, bold and risk-taking, conveying all the excitement of an essai, a trial: a tenacious tracking of cultural traces according to their own sinuous logic, a trail that leads inexorably back, across two centuries, to that hypothetical, unseen, suffering Chinese stranger. In this sense, Hayot's is a postmodern investigation of a constituent aspect of our modernity; as Jean-François Lyotard suggests in his evocation-cum-description of “the postmodern” writer, “the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for.”1
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