Abstract: Comparativism, this essay argues, should respond to the phenomenon of globalization by producing a critique of the concepts of literary value and universality. A polemical genealogy of the discipline of Comparative Literature shows "literary theory" in the post-war period to have emerged as a threat to disciplinary boundaries in the university, and for this reason to have always been regulated by a Cold-War humanism grounded in an Arnoldian belief in concepts like "the world." Comparativism should militate against such concepts rather than adopt them; it should take up the tasks of producing difference, of guarding untranslatability, of recapturing the discipline’s relation to speculative philosophy — in short, of unbuilding a unitary conception of literary value.