Overview

In Language Alone , Geoffrey Halt 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 be best understood as linguistic problems. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, is any 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 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 critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of languages in contemporary thought.

Full Product Details

Author:   Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.500kg
ISBN:  

9780415942195

ISBN 10:   0415942195
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   06 September 2002
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

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

Reviews

"""Geoffrey Galt Harpham's new book is based on a simple insight, whose consequences have never before been so brilliantly drawn. Noting that there is no consensus about the meaning of Language as Such - indeed, that there is a bewildering variety of competing claims about its alleged essence - he challenges all of the philosophical, literary, and political efforts made to turn language into a foundational model for other aspects of the human condition. The rumbling you hear in the background as you read this remarkable book is the sound of a paradigm shifting."" - Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley"

Geoffrey Galt Harpham's new book is based on a simple insight, whose consequences have never before been so brilliantly drawn. Noting that there is no consensus about the meaning of Language as Such - indeed, that there is a bewildering variety of competing claims about its alleged essence - he challenges all of the philosophical, literary, and political efforts made to turn language into a foundational model for other aspects of the human condition. The rumbling you hear in the background as you read this remarkable book is the sound of a paradigm shifting. - Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

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

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