Predator Comparison

Abstract

Comparison is predation: a violent severing, a forced fusion, a deadly contest of forces. Or this, at least, seems to be the specter that haunts Comparative Literature. The fraught legacies of Comparative Literature often impel methodological reflection into binaries of bad versus good comparison. This also leads us frequently to connect, maybe too closely, a certain way of doing comparison and its potential political value. This essay starts a reflection on the ethical dilemmas and rhetorical habits of comparison by analyzing one metaphor of good comparison, tied to the concept of friendship, and comparing it with an approach to comparison that embraces predatory structures instead. To think through the trope of friendship, the essay draws on R. Radhakrishnan work in ‘Why Compare?’ with Jacques Derrida's notion of friendship from Politics of Friendship via Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline. For a model for thinking comparison with and through predation, the essay draws on the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with its focus on predatory relationalities among Amerindian cultures of the Amazon. The essay suggests that we need to leave behind ‘safe’ comparative models as well as critique the tropes that drive reflections on comparison.