Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity

ISBN-13: 9780415942195 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 272 str.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Opis

How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone Geoffrey Halt Harpham provides a comprehensive survey and critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language.

Spis treści

Preface Chapter One: Language for Beginners 1. Turning (in)to Language 2. Saussure and the Concrete Object of Language 3. Metaphor and the Law of Return: Saussure, Derrida and Rorty 4.Language and Human Nature 5. Science and the Thought of Language Chapter Two: Ideology and the Form of Language 1. Ideology and History 2. Marxism and the Economic Specter 3. From Post-Modernism to Post-Marxism; or, It's Not the Economy, Stupid 4. Language and the Psycho-Ideological Subject 5. Inversions Chapter Three: Ethics and the Law of Language 1. Words as Guides: Modernity from Hume to Bernard Williams 2. Language as Law: On the Kantian Maxim The Irrational Law: Nietzsche, Levinas, Deconstruction Law and Language of the Unconcscious: Freud, Chomsky, Lacan 3. Words against War: The Dream of a Virtuous Language 4. Language Against the Law: Postmodernism, Feminism, and the Fundamentals of Language 5. Coda: On Culture In Conclusion: Language and Humanity Works Cited

O autorze

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is Professor of English at Tulane University. His many books include On the Grotesque, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad, and Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society.