Claim Of Language: A Case For The Humanities

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 Gérard 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 Collège International de Philosophie.