What one cannot compute, one must poetize: this essay theorizes the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience by putting the emphasis onpoetry. Poetry grants us the ability to move "beyond the ...limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in theTractatus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, or neuroscience cannot be ignored, if, as "humanists," we are ever interested in the way wethink. Thus, a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition serves to better situate the normal regimes of thought-and to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. This essay shows that poetry-a very widespread and possibly universal phenomenon among humans-arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations; but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actualthinking experimentsfor the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, they singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. They tend to exceed their own algorithms, made of iterations and linguistic re-organizations. They are often reflexive, strange, cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global:" it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, or from cuneiform tablet to rap music.Admirably comparative in orientation, showing a mastery of philology and poetics, but also of recent work in neuroscience; of analytic but also continental philosophy; of written poetry but also popular song; and of languages ranging from European tongues to Japanese and Chinese, to a number of languages of Africa and pre-Columbian Latin America.In a series of lucid, logically connected propositions, Dubreuil argues that the sort of work done by poetry is every bit as crucial to the work of cognition as more scientifically grounded techniques.
The Intellective Spaceexplores the nature and limits of thought. It celebrates the poetic virtues of language and the creative imperfections of our animal minds while pleading for a renewal of the ...humanities that is grounded in a study of the sciences.
According to Laurent Dubreuil, we humans both say more than we think and think more than we say. Dubreuil's particular interest is the intellective space, a space where thought and knowledge are performed and shared. For Dubreuil, the term "cognition" refers to the minimal level of our mental operations. But he suggests that for humans there is an excess of cognition due to our extensive processing necessary for verbal language, brain dynamics, and social contexts. In articulating the intellective, Dubreuil includes "the productive undoing of cognition."
Dubreuil grants that cognitive operations take place and that protocols of experimental psychology, new techniques of neuroimagery, and mathematical or computerized models provide access to a certain understanding of thought. But he argues that there is something in thinking that bypasses cognitive structures. Seeking to theorize with the sciences, the book's first section develops the "intellective hypothesis" and points toward the potential journey of ideas going beyond cognition, after and before computation. The second part, "Animal Meditations," pursues some of the consequences of this hypothesis with regard to the disparaged but enduring project of metaphysics, with its emphasis on categories such as reality, humanness, and the soul.
The relationship between power and language has been a central theme in critical theory for decades now, yet there is still much to be learned about the sheer force of language in the world in which ...we live. InEmpire of Language, Laurent Dubreuil explores the power-language phenomenon in the context of European and, particularly, French colonialism and its aftermath. Through readings of the colonial experience, he isolates a phraseology based on possession, in terms of both appropriation and haunting, that has persisted throughout the centuries. Not only is this phraseology a legacy of the past, it is still active today, especially in literary renderings of the colonial experience-but also, and more paradoxically, in anticolonial discourse. This phrase shaped the teaching of European languages in the (former) empires, and it tried to configure the usage of those idioms by the "Indigenes." Then, scholarly disciplines have to completely reconsider their discursive strategies about the colonial, if, at least, they attempt to speak up.
Dubreuil ranges widely in terms of time and space, from the ancien régime through the twentieth century, from Paris to Haiti to Quebec, from the Renaissance to the riots in the banlieues. He examines diverse texts, from political speeches, legal documents, and colonial treatises to anthropological essays, poems of the Négritude, and contemporary rap, ever attuned to the linguistic strategies that undergird colonial power. Equally conversant in both postcolonial criticism and poststructuralist scholarship on language, but also deeply grounded in the sociohistorical context of the colonies, Dubreuil sets forth the conditions for an authentically postcolonial scholarship, one that acknowledges the difficulty of getting beyond a colonialism-and still maintains the need for an afterward.
"La censure sera vite la chose du monde la mieux partagée : chaque camp vise désormais à en être si bien pourvu que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose perdront ...bientôt coutume d’en désirer plus qu’ils en ont." Ainsi commence le nouveau discours de la méthode autoritaire servant de bréviaire commun, du nord au sud, et d’est en ouest, aux régimes contemporains de la dictature mondialisée. L’un des enjeux principaux, pour les diverses formes contemporaines du contrôle arbitraire de la société, consiste dans la mise en place de puissants instruments capables, à terme, de museler ou d’annuler toute expression non-autorisée. En régime identitaire, on observe la conservation des instruments classiques de la prohibition de la parole : réduction au silence d’individus qui ne devront plus publier nulle part, retrait voire appel à la destruction d’œuvres ou de textes jugés offensants, enfouissement de propos réputés inacceptables sous un gigantesque brouhaha, relégation de pensées hétérodoxes dans un mutique dédain.
Toward Transcultural Theory Dubreuil, Laurent
Comparative literature studies (Urbana),
12/2018, Volume:
55, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"Theory" is a label that first gained significance in the context of American (and multinational) universities in the late 1960s onward, in reference to the groundbreaking work led by European (and ...mainly French) scholars, whose writings (both literarily and philosophically inflected) were cutting across the disciplines and vigorously reassessing epistemic prejudices and consensus, in a way that also seemed to respond to the demands of the times--and to the political crisis in the West. Here, it should be noted that the phrase "critical theory" gained currency in the US before the 1960s, thanks to the exile of several prominent figures of the Frankfurt School. "Critical theory" (as developed by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and their colleagues) presented itself as both a method and a discourse transcending the compartmentalization of knowledge, linking a critique of the contemporary with longstanding scholarly traditions and the conceptual methods of philosophy in particular, finally offering a political value for the present--often in a (post-)Marxist, or "radical" perspective.
Beyond commemoration, beyond the boundaries of historical determination, “Haiti” is here taken as the name of a productive locus for thinking the dynamics of Francophone circulation. The article ...constructs an anachronistic cross-reading of Baudelaire’s “Spleen” poems and Coriolan Ardouin’s “Moi-même.”
