The most recent version of the "linguistic turn," the revolution in language theory shaped by Saussure's structural linguistics and realized in a sweeping revision of investigations throughout the humanities and social sciences, has rushed past the most basic "fact" that there is language. What has been lost? Almost everything of what Heidegger tried to approach under the name of "ontology" until the word proved too laden by common misapprehension to be of use. Most immediately, this is everything of language that exceeds the order of signification, together with the subject's engagement with...

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation. Comment 1997] -Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way it...

This volume juxtaposes philosophical and psychoanalytic speculation with literary and artistic commentary in order to approach a set of questions concerning the human relation to language, a relation that cannot be taken as an "object" of critical or philosophical reflection in the traditional manner. Exploring the exigencies of figuring this relation at the limits of language, the multifold writing of this volume takes the form of a "triptych" (following the model of works by Francis Bacon) rather than that of a thesis.

The central (and organizing) section of the volume contains an...

This volume juxtaposes philosophical and psychoanalytic speculation with literary and artistic commentary in order to approach a set of questions concerning the human relation to language, a relation that cannot be taken as an "object" of critical or philosophical reflection in the traditional manner. Exploring the exigencies of figuring this relation at the limits of language, the multifold writing of this volume takes the form of a "triptych" (following the model of works by Francis Bacon) rather than that of a thesis. The central (and organizing) section of the volume contains an extended...

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...

Fynsk (comparative literature and philosophy, Binghampton U.) defends the claim that it is possible to speak of research that is specifically of the humanities, focusing on the conditions of fundamental research. He offers a set of possible paths, without claiming that they are the only ones possible, in order to identify important questions that o

Writing, Maurice Blanchot taught us, is not something that is in one's power. It is, rather, a search for a nonpower that refuses mastery, order, and all established authority. For Blanchot, this search was guided by an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required endless contestation of every usurping authority, an endless going out toward the other. "The step/not beyond" ("le pas au-dela") names this exilic passage as it took form in his influential later work, but not as a theme or concept, because its "step" requires a transgression of discursive limits...