Medusa's Ear: University Foundings from Kant to Chora L

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

MEDUSA’S EAR Dawne McCance State University of New York Press University Foundings from Kant to Chora L Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY© 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic , magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address the State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCance, Dawne, date. Medusa’s ear : university foundings from Kant to Chora L / Dawne McCance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7914-6247-1 (alk. paper) 1. Education, Higher—Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, European. 3. Postmodernism and higher education. 4. Derrida, Jacques. I. Title. LB2322.2.M33 2004 378'.001—dc22 2003069330 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Head of Medusa, Alinari Art Resource, New York; Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Draughtsman Drawing a Nude in Perspective, Foto Marburg / Art Resource, New York. A Pair of Shoes, 1887, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland. My Shoe is Your Shoe, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. Untitled (Shoe and Leg), The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. Diamond Dust Shoes, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. Diamond Dust Shoes, hung upside down, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. A Pair of Shoes, F 255, Amsterdam, van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Nunotani Corporation Headquarters Building. Eisenman, architects. Shigeo Ogawa/Shinkenchiku. Parc de la Villette. Bernard Tschumi, architects / J. M. Monthiers. Exploding Folie. Bernard Tschumi, architects. La Villette. Eisenman Robertson, architects. Canadian Center for Architecture, Montréal, Québec. for Robert, and for Carson, Patrick, Erin, and Rob Viviparous quadrupeds utter voiced sounds of different kinds, but they have no language. In fact, this is peculiar to man. For while whatever has language has voice, not everything that has voice has language. Men that are born deaf are in all cases also dumb; that is, they can make vocal sounds, but they cannot speak. —Aristotle, History of Animals Can we use the senses vicariously? that is, can we use one sense as a substitute for another? If a deaf man was once able to hear, we can get him to speak as he used to by gesturing to him, and so by means of his eyes. He can also use his eyes to read our lips, or his sense of touch to feel our lip movements in the dark. If, however, he has been deaf from birth, his sense of sight must begin with movements of the vocal organs and convert the sounds he has been taught to make into a feeling of moving the muscles of his own vocal organs. But he never arrives at real concepts in this way, because the signs he uses are not the sort that can be universalized. —Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View In textbooks, images of developing embryos look like the outer shell of the ear. And our ability to hear is the first sense to develop in utero and the last to shut down before death. With infinite divisibility, sound is decoded in the remotest reaches of the inner ear. Deep inside the auricular labyrinth—the oracle—there are microscopic bones called ossicles which are said to resemble the bones of our feet. The last extreme of littleness, Edmund Burke wrote, is in some measure sublime. —Evelyn Juers, “She Wanders” ...