COML 6782

Perversions of the Linguistic Turn: Figure, Fetish, Formalization

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

A number of influential thinkers have contested in recent years the so-called "linguistic turn" in twentieth century thought, and in particular the assumption that the "finitude" or decompletion of language dooms to failure any attempt to construct or transmit the objects of thought and experience.  If the "finitist" view is often identified with the structuralism of Jacques Lacan or with Jacques Derrida's influential account of the "supplement" (a tropological understanding of language as founded upon lack and substitution), recent critics of finitude have turned to practices like mathematical formalization (Badiou, Meillassoux) or to such concepts as "desiring machines" (Deleuze and Guattari), the "figural" (Lyotard), the "event" (Badiou), "plasticity" (Malabou) or "ancestrality" (Meillassoux) to elaborate approaches to the construction or transmission of an object that are characterized either as extra-linguistic or as modalities of language not conditioned by lack or substitution, which pretend to "write the real" rather than to re-present it tropologically in the mode of repression or negation.  We will focus our attention on three linguistic modes that purport to straddle the alleged gap between language and its "real": figure, fetish, and formalization.  In addition to the authors mentioned above, readings will include selections from Quintillian,Paul, Auerbach, Foucault, and Perniola, as well as literary works by Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Gide.

When Offered Spring.

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