Language Alone

by Harpham,Geoffrey Galt

• ISBN13: 9780415942195
• ISBN10: 0415942195
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2002-09-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? InLanguage Alone, Geoffrey Galt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling 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. Through a provocative reassessment of major thinkers on the idea of language-Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty, and Chomsky, among them-and detailed accounts of the discourses of ethics and ideology in particular, Harpham demonstrates a remarkable consensus among intellectuals of the past century and beyond that philosophical and other problems can best be understood as linguistic problems. And furthermore, that a science of language can therefore illuminate them. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, isany consideration of contemporary linguistics, or any awareness of the growing agreement among linguists that the nature of language as such cannot be known. Ultimately, Harpham argues, the thought of language has dominated modern intellectual history because of its singular capacity to serve as a proxy for a host of concerns, questions, and anxieties-our place in the order of things, our rights and obligations, our nature or essence-that resist a strictly rational formulation. Language Alone will interest literary critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of language in contemporary thought.

Author Biography

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is Pierce Butler Professor of English at Tulane University and President and Director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Language for Beginners	1	(68)
Turning (in) to Language	2	(14)
Saussure and the Concrete Object of Language	16	(10)
Metaphor and the Law of Return: Saussure, Derrida, Rorty	26	(18)
Language and Human Nature	44	(13)
The Critical Fetish of Modernity	57	(12)
Ideology and the Form of Language	69	(72)
Ideology and Theory	70	(8)
Marxism and the Economic Specter	78	(11)
From Post-Marxism to Postmodernism; or, It's Not the Economy, Stupid	89	(30)
Language and the Psycho-Ideological Subject	119	(14)
Conclusion: Inversions	133	(8)
Ethics and the Law of Language	141	(78)
Words as Guides, from Hume to Bernard Williams	142	(11)
Language as Law	153	(35)
On the Kantian ``Maxim''	153	(4)
The Irrational Law: Nietzsche, Levinas, Deconstruction	157	(17)
Law and the Language of the Unconscious: Freud, Chomsky, Lacan	174	(14)
Words against War: The Dream of a Virtuous Language	188	(17)
Language against the Law: Postmodernism, Feminism, and the Fundamentals of Language	205	(11)
Coda: On Culture	216	(3)
InConclusion Language and Humanity	219	(22)
Works Cited	241	(14)
Index	255