Time and History in Deleuze and Serres by Herzogenrath Bernd.;

Author:Herzogenrath, Bernd.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441185709
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

If they had been less parochial, the literary scholars awed by Derrida’s assault on the whole edifice of Western thought would have seen beyond the provincialism of this claim. They would have known that science, the most successful branch of human knowledge, had for decades accepted anti-foundationalism, after Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934) and especially after Popper’s 1945 move to England, where he was influential among leading scientists. They should have known that a century before Derrida, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection—hardly an obscure corner of Western thought—had made anti-foundationalism almost an inevitable consequence. I say “parochial” because Derrida and his disciples think only in terms of humans, of language, and of a small pantheon of French philosophers and their approved forebears, especially the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. There was some excuse for Derrida in 1966, but there is none for the disciples in 2006, after decades of scientific work on infant and animal cognition (Boyd, 2006).1

Like all the other turns, returns or reassemblings, Boyd’s argument takes the form of a redemption narrative: we used to be Cartesian, computational, humanist, linguistically enclosed, but now we have discovered life. The humanities now takes everything in and in abandoning the closure of the literary object regains the world, the living, dynamic and inter-disciplinary world. De Landa also writes about materialism’s capacity to save us from linguistic narcissism or idealism, while Andy Clark specifically refers to putting the world back together again (although his culprit, as with Evan Thompson, is not French theory but Cartesianism and computationalism).

Would the humanities be worth saving in such a world? Would not humanities scholars be better replaced by journalists – reporting and disseminating findings from the sciences – or by scientists themselves? If, as Boyd claims, understanding literature really requires understanding evolution, would you not rather trust someone with a rigourous training in that area? And if the body and its neural responses were really the basis for what goes on in digital media, who would you save, a critic who can correct Deleuze by looking back to Bergson or someone who just received an NSF grant for a new fMRI machine?

There is a definite historical sense and teleology here: language, literature and the objects of the humanities – including “man” – emerge from life. Man, unfortunately, made the mistake of regarding himself as distinct from life, leading to Cartesianism and linguisticism, but science has redeemed us. Neuroscience has returned the brain to affective emotional life, and evolutionary theory has returned that living affective life to a broader narrative of the organism’s efficiency. Inter-disciplinarity will save the humanities as will a sense of historical emergence or genesis. We will become post-human via consumption – absorbing information and methods from the sciences – and extension: no longer limiting human predicates such as thought, affect, pathos and signification to humans.

It might seem to follow, then, that a combination of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres would finally be in order.

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