Claim Of Language: A Case For The Humanities

by Christopher Fynsk

The humanities--in their conceptual and intellectual specificity, disciplinary rigor, and ethical, social, and political potential--are very much in need of defense and rearticulation in our time, particularly from a perspective that moves beyond the political and philosophical reductions of identity politics. In "The Claim of Language, Christopher Fynsk clearly and eloquently does just that. Leaving aside polemics, Fynsk asserts that discourses in the humanities will find real ethical-political purchase when they engage with the material events in art, literature, and social life that call for humanistic reflection. Fynsk describes the collapse of the traditional terms of defense in the contemporary academy, and then sets out to establish that the humanities are more than a loose affiliation of academic disciplines and research projects. Showing how events in language raise questions fundamental to the humanities--questions about the nature of human experience in the modern era and the nature of the human itself--"The Claim of Language proposes a renewed relationship to language as a way to rethink humanistic research. Fynsk extends his philosophical meditation with two essays on the university and the politics of philosophy. The first, devoted to the work of Gerard Granel, explores the political implications of a quite radical project of fundamental critique. The second focuses on Jacques Derrida's propositions for a reconception of the nature and task of critical thought in the new College International do Philosophic.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Alyosha · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is most surprising about this work is that it has already been twenty-one years since its publication! And what has occurred regarding the "case" of the Humanities? Nothing but further degradation, this extenuated dying of an aspect of the university already dead...

And yet, Fynsk's text remains as timely today as it may have been in 2004. The exigencies which he foregrounds remain, in seems to me, just as pressing as they were then, if not more so (if not being even further from the actuality - let alone the possibility - of teaching within the university today; one is less and less surprised by Fynsk's transition to the EGS...). Especially striking is the essay, republished in this volume, on Gérard Granel's De l'université (such an untimely text, yet marking a past to be retaken and thought as a means for the future...). One might take up this volume (again? for the first time?) in response to the question which the Humanities still bear - far from an apologia - but how to do this when one is already rejected by an institution which considers you without value, dead before even being able to speak?