Chapter 3 both deepens and problematises the legal understanding of literature by attending to the making and perception of typefaces, particularly the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set. Close reading a 2001 House of Lords decision, Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc, allows us to see that literary copyright and published edition copyright, though pertaining to the respective labours of authors and publishers, nonetheless share an ‘originalist’ aesthetics of the book that affirms the myth of proprietary authorship. To dislodge copyright’s originalist aesthetics, I revisit and compare Fichte’s and Kant’s accounts of the printed book in late eighteenth-century Germany, which, in their own ways, anticipate and undermine the contemporary legal perspective. Unlike Fichte, Kant recognised the visual materiality of the book, including the perceptibility of its typeface and typesetting, which pointed to an historical domain of embodied interactions. Guided by Kant, I attend to two aspects of the material history of the Breikopf Fraktur typeface: the history of its production and the history of its perception. This material history of the typeface, which reveals the deep interactions between human actors and print technologies, acts as a counter-image to copyright’s originalist aesthetics.

Chapter 4 charts a biography of Kant’s printed authorial name, ‘I. Kant’, so as to disclose its ethical function in late eighteenth-century Germany. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Roger Chartier’s studies of the materialities of authorship, I consider uses of the authorial name at the rhetorical level of Kant’s 1785 essay alongside its textual and typographical displacements, both within and outside the May 1785 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, and during and beyond the author’s lifetime. In so tracing the anthumous and posthumous movements of ‘I. Kant’, I clarify the authorial name’s role in implementing an ethical author-function that Kant understood to be responsive to the demands of enlightenment practice. I contend that Kant not only recognised the importance of printed authorial names to the enactment of authorial responsibility but further so deployed his own authorial name as to hold himself and others accountable for the print publications that contributed to the public discourse in his time. I argue that this ethically and socially concerned author-function in the German Enlightenment discloses the limits of copyright’s proprietary understanding of authorship and its material constitution.

This book begins by foregrounding that the material form of Kant’s 1785 essay could be analysed to critique the myth of proprietary authorship that presently prevails across copyright regimes. After reviewing four faces of Kant in authorship and copyright studies, I advance a medial rethinking of Kant by drawing on the intersecting traditions of book history, media theory and literary studies. In particular, Gérard Genette’s poetics informs my paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay to uncover the historical and medial-material conditions of literary production.

Chapter 2 juxtaposes the myth of proprietary authorship embodied in the legal idiom of ‘work’, ‘author’ and ‘originality’ with the realities of print production in late eighteenth-century Germany. I problematise the conventional view of the literary work as an intellectual creation of a personal author through a paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay that reconstructs its underpinning historical processes and conditions. This analysis includes not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment and the role therein played by periodicals such as the Berlinische Monatsschrift, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks and front matter that appeared within and alongside Kant’s text. I argue that these paratexts lead us back to the print machinery of the German Enlightenment: a socio-technological assemblage of human actors interacting with technologies, which Kant and others sought to steer so as to address the problem of print saturation. The existence of such a machinery, one that preceded the authorial figure, perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship. Insufficient to deal with the complexities of the book’s emergence, the terms and doctrines of copyright law tend to suppress the deep historicity of literary production.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the contexts of mass digitisation and the Kantian copyright debate in which Kant’s 1785 essay is to be reread. First, I consider the Google Books project as an emblematic case for our urgent need to rethink authorship, copyright and their profound co-evolution with media technologies. Then, I review the recent debate surrounding the utilitarian-proprietary approach to copyright and its limits as suggested by three readers of Kant’s 1785 essay. After that, I propose an alternative media-theoretical way of looking at a printed book, one that focuses on the paratexts of Kant’s 1785 essay to illuminate the medial dimension of literary production and the limits of proprietary authorship. My contention is that although the three Kantian copyright scholars have demonstrated the power of Kant’s essay and its concept of the book as communicative act to reshape our understanding of authorship and copyright, they have also underestimated the material dimension of the text that affords the production of its meaning. A more adequate understanding of Kant’s text and how it could illuminate the present digital transformation of authorship and copyright would require that we attend closely to its medial-materialities.

Chapter 6 examines how later stories about artistic competition, related by al-Maqrizi, Mustafa ‘Ali, and Qadi Ahmad, consider painting in the context of deceptive rhetoric in pursuit of truth, as advocated in Plato’s Phaedrus. The chapter concludes by comparing this understanding of painting with that rooted in a similar story, the competition of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Adopted from antiquity by German Enlightenment thinkers as the paradigm for representation and the disinterested observer, this story establishes paradigms of artistry and mimesis in the Western tradition that cannot account for opposite premises established in Islamic discourses. The comparison between the two narratives underscores the antique tradition as part of a shared Islamic and European heritage diverging through distinct histories of interpretation. Comparison with European theorization of the image uncovers the bias inherent to normative art-historical premises about the social and psychological functions of the image that obscure alternative modes of perception, whether in cultures whose alterity is determined by being in the past or by being elsewhere. The story of the competition of the artists outlines an alternative paradigm, rooted in spiritually trained subjectivity rooted in the heart and resisting the rationalist exteriority of representation presumed in dominant modern models.