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Peter V. Zima. Essay / Essayismus. Zum
theoretischen Potential des Essays: Von
Montaigne bis zur Postmoderne. W€urzburg:K€onigshausen & Neumann, 2012, 292 pp.
In The Essayistic Spirit (1995) Claire de
Obaldia calls attention to the fact that the
essay as a genre is often regarded as unsta-
ble and open, as an anti-genre or a non-
genre or a hybrid, and she explains this by
describing the essay as literature in poten-
tia, charged by ‘the essayistic spirit’.
The Austrian professor Peter V. Zima
has now published Essay / Essayismus.
Zum theoretischen Potential des Essays:
Von Montaigne bis zur Postmoderne; in
many ways he follows the ideas of de
Obaldia. ‘K€onnte es nicht sein’, Zima
writes in his opening chapter, ‘dass der
Essay keine Gattung im herk€ommlichen
Sinne ist, sondern ein Text, der zwischen
allen Gattungen gleichsam vermittelt?’
(p. 5). He describes the essay as a ‘symbio-
sis’ between all kinds of text and declares
the essay to be ‘Intertext par excellence’
(p. 6). Zima does not refer to de Obaldia
but joins a German tradition, with Theo-
dor Adorno as the outstanding model –Adorno who once embraced the essay as
‘the critical form par excellence’.
Zima’s history of the essay starts where
one normally starts, with Montaigne, and
ends with Roland Barthes and J€urgenBecker. On the way he discusses Diderot, a
few German Romantics, Nietzsche, Luk�acs,Adorno, Pirandello and Musil. The selec-
tion shows that he mixes philosophers and
novelists in order to substantiate his idea of
the ‘theoretical potential’ of the essay and
its capacity to unite otherwise diverging
texts.
Zima’s ideal essay is no essay, but a
hybrid exposing an essayistic mode or
‘spirit’. This mode is critical and dialogi-
cal. Zima does not hesitate in situating the
essay in the tradition of critical philosophy
and seems to mean that the essay could
save philosophy from some of its prob-
lems. He even seems to think that the
essay could save mankind. On the last
page of the book he declares that the essay
unfolds the ‘“M€oglichkeitssinn” des kriti-
schen Intellektuellen’ leading to the insight
‘dass es Perspektiven jenseits des scheinbar
unab€anderlichen Wirklichen gibt’ (p. 269).
In Zima’s history of the essay the Eng-
lish and American essay is conspicuously
absent. Just as absent are the practical and
institutional conditions of the essay. Zima’s
essay takes place in the mind alone, while
the essayistic reality has to do with the art
of printing, with newspapers and journals.
Zima insists that the essay is, and has
always been, ‘critical’ – an idea that belongs
to the German tradition, emphatically
declared by Adorno. Zima therefore has to
credit his essayistic favourites with the criti-
cal ambitions that he believes they must
have. He even makes Montaigne – a coun-
try gentleman from Gascony, who never
questioned God or Law – an exponent of
the critical essay.
So: add the English-American tradition
and the institutional preconditions to
Zima’s essay, subtract some ideas of its
critical character, and you have a history
of the essay.
Arne Melberg
University of Oslo
Orbis Litterarum 68:2 176, 2013© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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