Mariana Dimópulos, "The Novel as Philosophy" (02/23/2026)

Mariana Dimópulos, The Novel as Philosophy (02:23:2026)

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Enver Ali Akova: (00:17) Welcome, and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host Héctor Hoyos is joined by the Berlin-based Argentine intellectual Mariana Dimópulos, whose latest book is a collaboration with J. M. Coetzee, and Amir Eshel, professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Mariana visited the center on February 23rd to deliver a lecture engaging with the novel of ideas as a problem both for the narrative form and for the emplotment of truth. This episode was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal conversations. Héctor Hoyos: (01:14) Welcome Mariana. Welcome Amir. Thank you for joining CSN Café. Let me start with some introductions. For those listening at home or wherever this podcast may reach you, I am Héctor Hoyos, Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University. With me here today are Mariana Dimópulos and Amir Eshel. Good to have you. Mariana Dimópulos: (01:36) Thank you for having me. Héctor Hoyos: (01:37) And thank you, Enver, who is making this recording possible, of course. Mariana is a Berlin-based Argentine intellectual and translator whose latest book is a collaboration with J.M. Coetzee. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Bonn and is currently preparing a manuscript precisely on philosophy and translation for Routledge. She has spent many hours in the company of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Robert Musil. Not literally, of course, but she is a denizen of that particular library, and so is Amir Eshel. My colleague in comparative literature and German studies, whose courses on Hannah Arendt have impacted generations of students in one way or another since joining the Stanford faculty at the turn of the 21st century. Amir's PhD happens to be from Hamburg, which, as the crow flies, is much closer to where Mariana currently resides than Palo Alto is to Los Angeles. Amir's latest monograph, entitled Poetic Thinking Today (2019), is a major intervention into furthering Hannah Arendt's capacious style of thinking for today's criticism. So today is a story about Californian and German connections by way of Argentina. I have invited Mariana and Amir to converse about the relations between the novel and philosophy, writ large. I cannot fathom better interlocutors. I'd like to start us by raising a provocation to tap onto your expertise. One intuitive way to think about the relationship between the novel and philosophy is as follows. The novel provides the form, and philosophy provides the content. What is wrong with this picture? Does your hair raise as much as mine does when the word content comes up? Amir Eshel: (03:27) That's a great question, Héctor. I thank you for raising this important question. Maybe the first step I would take is to question the very distinction of form and content and to suggest that the best novels invoking philosophical questions embody philosophy rather than presenting philosophy as content. So, there is something in the form of the novel itself which is philosophical. A classical example would be a dialogue in the Platonic tradition. But that's just a very, you know, classic, even cop-out. If we were to think, for example, about J. M. Coetzee and the way he engages or works through the junction of philosophy and literature. If we take his book, Diary of a Bad Year, for example, the very constitution of the narrative itself raises the question. For example, of narrative, what does it mean to narrate an event? What does it mean to be in a relationship with oneself and with other people? So not so much through content, but really through the embodiment of the philosophical life, you know, the life of the mind. Yeah, but this would be just one example. Mariana Dimópulos: (05:00) I think that this is the ideal picture for this combination between novel and philosophy. And of course, content is kind of a difficult concept for aesthetics right now, or for the novel as a product of the mind which works. I would say it's just an old idea of making this distinction between content and form. But I think that when we think on the relationship between novel and philosophy, ideas play a very important role. And ideas can be seen as content. So, we have a kind of a problem. So, I would kind of defend that there is a content, a philosophical content in a novel, in order to make this text philosophical in some way. It is not only structure. So, in terms of like a bit of dialectics between you and me. Héctor Hoyos: (06:09) Yeah. Ideas indeed. I wonder how that breaks down. Like if we go in a grander level, is it claims? Because in philosophy, and you've translated philosophy, you've translated also fiction, and you have written fiction. When you have a philosophical treatise, it can actually be broken down into claims. There are premises that lead to conclusions. They stand in this relationship to each other where there is logical consequence and dependency. Do we have claims in the novel? Mariana Dimópulos: (06:43) Well, I think we have claims. What we don't have is inference. It's kind of inference is the typical relationship between two ideas, and this is logic. So logic is inference. So, in a philosophical text, you can ask a philosophical text to provide inference, to be identified, proved, etc. While in the novel you can have ideas, you can have claims, but you cannot, as a reader, require this kind of inference. And this is sometimes a bit of a tricky thing, because, for example, there is a well-known Argentine novelist, César Aira, who is well known for his ideas. But the thing is, when you go exactly in search of inference in his works, it's kind of disappointing for me, because I'm trained in philosophy. For many other readers, it's just wonderful. For me, it's kind of, I don't know. I'm not completely into it. Héctor Hoyos: (08:06) Also, in the interest of dialectic, I am completely into it. And I wouldn't want to out myself as a philosopher or recovering philosopher, but actually what is really fascinating to me in César Aira is that non sequitur plays a huge role, including generating humor. So, you have these claims that spectacularly do not follow from each other. There's one of his novellas that ends with God being a spider with a wig or something to that effect. But we arrive to that figure by way of not logical inference, but I think the term is paralogical. Mariana Dimópulos: (09:01) Yes, there is a kind of paralogics, but that's a discipline in itself. So, we can take it as a metaphor, but I wouldn't say, I don't know, Graham is to be found within César Aira’s works. It's just like, as a metaphor, it's okay. Sorry. Héctor Hoyos: (09:24) That's better. This is why we have conversations. Amir Eshel: (09:28) So, ideas is a very good point. My suggestion would be that what the novels, you know, or the best novels afford is the invocation of ideas but without authority, without closure, without sovereignty. So, ideas are made present without claiming finite knowledge or finite judgment. If we're thinking about The Brothers Karamazov as an example, if we think of Kafka's Trial, for example, if we think of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, ideas are definitely present, but there's very little truth claim or the kind of authority you find in a philosophical treatise, for example. Héctor Hoyos: (10:28) So let me ask, why don't we focus on poetry instead, right? Given that inference perhaps does not play a role, that there's a bit of a Rorschach test going on in the novel in terms of its philosophical, yes, let's say you use that word content, right? Heidegger would think that the site for philosophy and for truth, for Aletheia, is poetry. Where do you folks stand on that? Amir Eshel: (10:54) My personal take on it is that the claim he makes about poetry could also be made about a certain type of novels or a group of novels. So I would not restrict it to poetry alone. I think there's something quite restrictive in this idea that only poetry has this capacity. Mariana Dimópulos: (11:21) Yes, I think that you can take the Frankfurt School as a correction of Heidegger's idea for focusing on poetry, because Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno would allow for truth or truth content in the novel as well. Or I would say more than in poetry. And that's important. I would say that the idea of truth content, it's crucial to our discussion right now. So just like Iris Murdoch would say. So she said truth is both in philosophy and in the novel. Héctor Hoyos: (12:15) For the Germanist listeners out there who are screaming, “Wahrheitsgehalt”. This is for you. We are thinking of you. and indeed, in Adorno, the paragon is not even the novel, but theater, right? In Beckett. In Fin de Partie, as that which illustrates the truth content. And that's such a far cry from the way that many novels are read and consumed and enjoyed these days. I will editorialize and say that our content is very operative and it's very useful for the market. And so sometimes editors, agents, publishers might be tempted to want to replicate their business model because, you know, literature is a business; it has been since Gutenberg. You print books, you want to sell them, and what if you could find a way to identify forms that can convey content in a way that is efficient? Wouldn't you want to replicate it? That sometimes generates all kinds of effects out there in the world and in readers' minds. But that's neither here nor there. Are there any examples since we're talking about philosophical novels, the novel of ideas? Amir has already mentioned a number, so have you, Mariana? Are there other books, and even more recent books, that you feel are, you know, potent as philosophical novels or novels that engage in philosophizing? Mariana Dimópulos: (13:46) Well, I have just mentioned Iris Murdoch, and I think she's a very good example for the exploration of the kind of giving the novel as a form, the authority maybe, or the possibility of conveying philosophical ideas, but with the caveat that she would say that: okay, this I do because I am a philosopher. It's not because the nature of the novel requires this. And she was kind of, I would say, contradictory in her position about this relationship between fiction or novel and philosophy. More classical, a more classic example would be Robert Musil, of course. Not only for philosophical contents but also for mathematical contents in his first writings, which are very difficult. I was I had to translate a couple of short stories by Musil, and that was the worst experience as a translator ever. Yeah. But very interesting, I must say. Amir Eshel: (15:16) One thought coming to mind is, you know, to think of you know the novel as a form and philosophy in a constellation. So, to think about novels that are capable of raising philosophical issues without being committed necessarily to a philosophical question or a philosophical tradition even. So let me give you an example of what I have in mind. Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, a recently translated, very successful, brilliantly written in terms of the form, I think, in a constellation with theories of alienation makes, you know, substantial philosophical claims about the alienated nature of our reality and culture at the moment. That could be, you know, one example. Another example, Marilynne Robinson, a contemporary American writer whom I greatly admire. If we put her, for example, in constellation, you know, with Martin Buber's dialogical philosophy, I think, you know, beautiful insights or resonances, you know, emerge from this constellation. So, we have the tradition, of course, of the novel of ideas but I think there's another mode to this encounter, and this is by way of constellation. Héctor Hoyos: (16:44) So, I have a bit of a follow-up. And this is totally half-baked, but are there places in the world that are more amicable, more like friendlier to the novel of ideas? And I'm asking this because in the US, let's say, where we are presently located, if you are a 17-year-old who likes to read, very soon you might find yourself majoring in a discipline, possibly embarking into a doctoral study, and this is going to be in a very specific track. We are quite siloed. It's a metaphor that we use. We're siloed. And so, philosophers who bear that name, that title on their degrees, are for the most part analytic philosophers. The agenda there is the naturalization of philosophy; it's cognitive science. It's a number of fantastic questions, meta ethics, but it's not the kind of ruminatory thing that we're engaging in right now. It is not Hannah Arendt, by and large. I mean, there are exceptions, right? But for the most part. So, you have places like the US where if you are a philosopher, you are a philosopher. If you are a specialist in the seventeenth century, you are a specialist in the seventeenth century. And you and you don't go out of your track because you're not incentivized to do that. I'm thinking of other places where there is a vibrant amateur culture inside and outside of academia, I'm thinking of Argentina in particular, where I've struck really great conversations on a cab with taxi drivers. That's an extra example, which is not even, I'm sure, to you, Mariana. How is that? I mean, is there a more fertile ground for the philosophical novel than others? Mariana Dimópulos: (18:30) Well, I would say as an Argentinian writer, you have Borges. So, Borges is like a passport, you know, you go to the world and you say, okay, Borges is behind me, and you are kind of authorized, for better or worse to say something relevant. This might be tricky as well, but tradition is built in this kind of ways. You receive something, and you receive this kind of authorization to say something. And I can remember a well known Brazilian writer who said in an interview, you know, Argentinians may say something and it would kind of sound universal, but we have to write about Brazil. It was kind of too exaggerated, but there is something to it, I would say. Mariana Dimópulos: (19:43) But it's just chance, you know, it's just someone else, fifty or seventy years ago wrote something which was kind of universal, and you are automatically, you know, engaged in this kind of tradition. Héctor Hoyos: (19:58) Right. We have this convention of taking, say, a detective story, as metaphilosophical. We don't do that with many detective stories, but when Borges wrote them, we kinda do. The philosophizing happens in prose, but not in the novel. He was never a practitioner of the novel form. There's that manuscript that never went anywhere, but Dan Balderson likes to think that it did. Hello to you, Dan, if you're listening. But Borges preferred the short form, and in the short form, very much like Amir was saying, there are no solutions, but there is questioning. I mean, there's opening of philosophical dilemmas, trilemmas, tetralemmas, you name it. But it doesn't or maybe, you know, my premise was wrong, and there is not a more fertile ground. Amir Eshel: (20:48) The one thing I would say about this country, Héctor, because you know, you raised the question about what's happening here, is that partly it has to do with political traditions. And I think the victory of analytic philosophy, you know, in this continent has a lot to do with the Cold War, as far as I understand it. And very unfortunately, the Cold War led to the closing of the American mind in some regards. With a few exceptions. And exceptions I think are very telling. So, someone like Richard Rorty, for example, fought against this closing of the American mind, breaking down or trying to break down the distinction between, you know, analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, arguing for the value of literature as a form of philosophical reflection. So, I think not all hope is lost when it comes to the United States and to the United Kingdom. I would hope that this tradition for which Rorty still stands, you know, will have a revival in the future. Héctor Hoyos: (21:57) Yep, yep, yep. Fantastic. That's music to my ears. I think well the the charter of this center, the Center for the Study of the Novel, is keeping a form of scholarship as vibrant as it is, understanding that the landscape has changed, and that, for instance, cultural studies exists, cultural studies is real, and the literary as something that's text-centric is just less the one conversation to have. It's one conversation among many. And I think that's a-okay, but I also think it's important that this conversation, you know, is vibrant. Again, that is neither here nor there. What I do want to follow up with is a question about an author that you have both thought about a lot, and that is Hannah Arendt, who doesn't seem to leave us for a second. I mean, she's present in so many ways. She's even present in pop culture now, surprisingly, you know, through film adaptations, through readers, graphic novels; she seems to be everywhere. Does Hannah Arendt have something special to tell us about the novel? Mariana Dimópulos: (23:11) Well, I think yes, but in a negative way. I think she was kind of a defender or a proponent, we would say, of the distinction between the novel and philosophy or literature and philosophy. She was a professional philosopher who didn't want to be seen as that. So, when asked about her position as an intellectual, she would say, I'm not a philosopher, but a historical writer, as a social theorist, but not a philosopher, unless a novelist or a writer. So, for example, the author of -I just forget the name- Hermann Broch, the German author, wanted to write a philosophical text and told Hannah Arendt. She said, please don't. You're a fictional writer, and there are other people who are dealing with this kind of complicated topics of philosophy; you don't have to matter about this. So I kind of and do both in some ways; I try to establish kind of clear differences between one thing and the other. When you have to go professional, you need to make this distinction. Amir Eshel: (25:05) You know, here again I would go back to the notion of a constellation. So, I tend to read a rant in a constellation with a novel, the genre as a form, as a tradition, thinking that one of the many things novels do is to serve as a laboratory of human agency. No, the novels, in various ways, and all novels, not all the time, but often, more often than not, novels explore what it means to act as a human being, in the private, in the public. We could think of many examples for this. And I think for this major domain of The Human Condition, namely our ability to act in various ways. Arendt's thought, again in constellation, seems to be incredibly fruitful. And if you think about the way she reflects herself in The Human Condition, on the ability of the historian to reflect on human agents and how they act in history, in the fifth part of The Human Condition, where her main attention is to action, if you put this in constellation with what many novels do, I think wonderful insights, you know, surface. You know, take War and Peace, for example, and the ways in which War and Peace reflects on human agency and in all its broad span. That would be just one example. So, while she herself maintained a very strict distinction, I think we're allowed as thinkers, as writers, to think about in her thinking and her legacy as a way to enrich our understanding of the novel. Héctor Hoyos: (27:03) This is CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. And today you have listened to Amir Eshel coin the phrase, the novel is a laboratory of human agency, a phrase which we hope will lead to a monograph here. No pressure, but it is terrific. It is really enlightening. And then I wanted to pick up on something that Mariana mentioned, which is this separation of, I hope it's okay to ask, your work as a novelist, of your work as a philosopher, translator, and so on. I had a conversation with Mariano Siskin for Public Books Networks a while back, and we examined the question of schizophrenia versus neurosis. So, schizophrenia, the model here would be you're a writer by day or by night, and you are a critic by day or by night, and those two things are separate. You have two minds. And I'm not, you know, poking fun of mental illness; it's a real thing. This is just a metaphor, folks. Neurosis is where you want to bring everything together. Mariano was on the side of neurosis. I was like you on the side of schizophrenia. But let me push just a little bit. Can you really distinguish? Can you really separate your life as the author in English of Eminence and All My Goodbyes, among others, with your life as the co-author of Coetzee’s Speaking in Tongues or the author of Il Siglo de Hannah Arendt, the book about the century of women thinkers? Can you really? Is it even possible? I mean not for you personally, but is it really possible? Mariana Dimópulos: (28:36) Well, I would say my whole life is an attempt to get to this point of clearly and healthily getting this apart and the failure of this attempt. So, and I'm kind of this two personalities in one, which are not. I'm healthy in the sense that I'm just one person who writes sometimes theory or philosophy and used to write fiction. But I think that it is kind of, in my case, it's a gift, I would say, from life to be in a position to develop towards something else, which was always there because I always wanted to write philosophy in some way, but the path to this point was a long path, I would say. And maybe by writing novels I would have this kind of sense or experience of thinking too much, you know? And I couldn't get rid of this sensation, this idea of, okay, there are other people who are writing alongside me with kind of very well-known writers and writing things that are appealing, and I'm too heavy sometimes, you know, I think too much. And sometimes that's bad for fiction. So, I kind of ended up doing literature in a heavy way, I would say. That's my way of life and thinking, and that's why I say I'm just one person, but I'm struggling with this distinction, which I wish for myself, but I don't get it a hundred percent, I would say. Héctor Hoyos: (30:51) Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for articulating that. Very insightful. Another separation, you know, speaking of philosophy and the novel, is the sacred and the profane. There's another porosity there. And it's much discussed in novel theory. Lukács, who has just kept coming back in this podcast for the last few episodes, had this contention that the novel is a place where the sacred lies now that, you know, the unity of the spheres has collapsed, now that the time of epic is behind us. The one place where you can find that oneness would be the novel. And so that's an approximation of the sacred. You just said, Mariana, a moment ago, that it was a gift of life. So that's something quite secular, right? And I know, Amir, that you've been thinking about and writing about the sacred. Where do you all stand vis-a-vis the sacred and the novel? One of those big questions. Amir Eshel: (31:55) Well, I find myself not only, you know, on this point, but also in this point in agreement with Lukács. I think the novel is definitely a site of the sacred, precisely because in the novel the distinction between the sacred and the profane falls away, or at least, is being questioned. I think this distinction has a lot to do, you know, with Protestant interpretation of the sacred as a human experience. It has good reasons, you know, within, you know, Lutheran thought, within the Lutheran, you know, universe, but I think we don't have to accept it. I was born and was raised Jewish, although I'm not, you know, practicing Judaism in any way. But within Judaism, you know, this distinction does not exist the way it exists, for example, in Protestant theology. And I think what the novel affords us, again, among many, many other things, is to question this distinction and to discover what we call the sacred in the most mundane and most profane experiences of human life. You know, looking at a flower or the tree or being and the human relationship, love, worry, anxiety, all of this mean, as far as I'm concerned, touch on the sacred, experience the sacred. So, I'm with Lukács on this. Mariana Dimópulos: (33:29) Well, I think he was partly skeptical. So no, I agree, of course. and I think it's a huge topic in the twentieth century, this idea of the mythical and how it's everywhere and in pop culture and kind of very common experiences are loaded with mythical contents etc. Yes. And this is, I would say, a kind of a part of the dialectics described by Adorno and Horkheimer, and this is needed, so we cannot stay fixed to the idea of a clear distinction between reason and myth, or the sacred. We need a mutual relationship between the two. But I also need clear thoughts, and let's try to obtain from all these sometimes clear ideas, sometimes a clear inference. So that can be much more difficult, as we can imagine. Héctor Hoyos: (34:59) I'll confess that I've struggled with clarity all my life. Not in the sense that, I don't know, I cannot express myself clearly. I have been trained to do so, but in the sense that clarity is also an ideology. As encapsulated in the word transparency. Transparency is a good thing, almost universally. And I start to worry when you take a value, and it turns into this seamless construct, clarity, transparency. And so I'm reminded of the Baroque, which is another way of bringing the sacred and the profane together. In the Southern Catholic tradition originally, but you know, spread around the world, it gives us things like, for lack of a better word, magical realism or Lo Real Maravilloso, which is a very interesting German-Latin American connection, by the way. Emerging as Neue Sachlichkeit and becoming in Carpentier and in García Márquez in a place where there's this blurring. I often find myself going back to these texts. I enjoy teaching them here at Stanford, as far away from the culturalist as I can, because I'm reminded of the Brazilian author that you mentioned; there is this burden on many places to provide the culture, provide the color for others to provide the ideas. So, that's another thing that I guess is on my mind. And if this quasi-closing monologue is too long, we can always cut it from the final version of this podcast. Is there anything else, dear colleagues, dear friends, that is on your mind or that you would like to ask of each other as we slowly wrap up our conversation? Mariana Dimópulos: (36:59) I would go back to the idea that you suggested, about auctoritas, I would say, authority, as a crucial thing in this distinction. Because if there is something difficult in philosophy to get is auctoritas. So, you can produce a text; you can tell everyone this is my quest for truth. But if you lack authority, you would end up just in wishful thinking and in thinking itself. And that's a huge thing. So, that's I would say another reason why we should stick to the distinction between the novel and philosophy when we go professional. Because if you allow for too many, would you say, contamination, I don't know. It's an awkward word, but you know, it's too close a relationship between the two; authority is gone. And that's a huge problem if you want to write philosophy. But that was your idea, actually. Amir Eshel: (38:29) That's a great thought. Thank you for that. And you know, to some extent I find myself in agreement because I think one thing we need to hold on to is our ability to judge and to make judgments. And sometimes judgments, to be effective, have to rely on authority because otherwise, you know, they're meaningless. The one thing I would say, though, that I would like to try to push the blurring as far as we can, let's put it this way. To leave things open as far as we can. Leaving authority only to, you know, the most kind of dire circumstances. And when it comes to, you know, crucial ethical questions that do not leave space for the blurring. So, when I'm thinking, for example, of cases of crimes against humanity or clear cases of racism, discrimination, you know, clear cases where human rights are in question, these places I think demand the authority of philosophical discourse. And the authority of something we may call truth. And I think their philosophy has a distinctive role to play, as it did throughout the ages. Héctor Hoyos: (40:11) It is not common in podcast conversations that we get to have kind of like an articulate exposition of things that we agree on and things that we disagree on, right? It's not a monolithic proposition. So, I have to say I do disagree on this one. But I see how there is a matter of aesthetic affinity here. I like the auctoritas of the math genius as personified in César Aira, for instance. That's an auctoritas I feel closer to. I never did like Ricardo Piglia's self-serious Borgesianism. These are two of, you know, fourteen paths, no pun intended, of Borges, you know, in the self-serious Piglia and in the playful math genius César Aira. To mention, you know, only two of many, many possible paths, right? I am reminded of the Arendtian distinction of force and violence. Being force what a state has, if I'm not mistaken, and violence what the disrupting element has against the state or the auctoritas. What happens, though, is that sometimes mad geniuses too become the state. And then that kind of disruptive, violent stance has to renegotiate with force. It happens that graduate students who want to take down the system, write dissertations, get jobs, and become part of the system, and then what? And then what? And if you would, maybe on that open-ended note, I'd like to thank you very much for this conversation. Amir Eshel (41:54) Thank you very much. Mariana Dimópulos: (41:55) Thank you.