1 Words and Things Centre for the Study of Theory

WORDS AND THINGS CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM WINTER 2017

Instructor: Kevin Mooney Office hours: by appointment (TC 217) Email: [email protected] Web: www.einbahnstrasse.xyz

Class meetings: Wednesdays 1:30–4:30 (SH 2348)

Overview

“El original no es fiel a la traducción” — Borges

Les mots et les choses (1966) appeared fifty years ago and became an immediate if unlikely bestseller. The archaeological method advanced in this book turned away from human subjects as makers of meaning toward the impersonal frameworks or epistemes that allowed thought to be thought, knowledge to be known. “Man” emerged as a kind of homo factum in Foucault’s text, a figure of discursive logic, as impermanent as a “face drawn in sand.”

This course will examine questions of language and representation in the writings of Foucault, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, and Borges. Do words represent things or are they wholly in themselves, pointing as it were to the nonexistence of things? Do things, insofar as they exist for us, exist sub specie verbi, as the shadows cast by words? Such questions, still unsettled, have elicited responses from a diversity of thinkers. The quartet I’ve assembled is improbable on many counts, but on the ground of “words and things” each member elucidates the others by setting the scope of language anew. By studying them together, we gain perspective on a range of topics: Translation/translatability, language and power, linguistic determinism, and constructed languages are a few of the branches of words and things.

1 Course Texts

Electronic copies of all texts will be provided, but you may want to buy the following:

1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 2. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. [Translated by Alan Sheridan.] New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden [and F. P. Ramsey]. London: Routledge, 1922.

AbeBooks.com is a good option for discounted texts.

Reqirements

Position paper (15%) Seminar presentation (20%) Final paper (50%) Participation (15%)

Evaluation

Position Paper (1000 words) You will stake out a position in reponse to some idea, debate, or problem encountered in one or more of the readings. This might be a short-form exploration of a final paper topic or a stand-alone analysis of something else. (Due March 1.)

Seminar Presentation (40 minutes) The readings will tempt us down paths that are not part of the main itinerary. Any of these sidelines could be the basis for a seminar presentation. Generally, I’d like you to begin with ideas from the readings, but feel free to redirect these toward relevant interests of your own. Your presentation is an opportunity to steer the course “off course” and teach us something while you’re at it. A 1000-word overview will be due one week after your presentation.

Final Paper (4000-5000 words) Your topic is open, but it should treat some aspect of language and representation. It should also be discussed with me several weeks in advance of the due date (approx. April 12).

Participation I expect you to come prepared and ready to make thoughtful, space-opening contributions to each class. This includes engaging with each other generously and using difference to advance the conversation.

Boilerplate

“Scholastic offences are taken seriously and students are directed to read the appropriate policy, specifically the definition of what constitutes a Scholastic Offence, as found here:“ http://www.uwo.ca/univsec/pdf/academic_policies/appeals/scholastic_discipline_grad.pdf

2 READINGS

Week 1 (1/11): Introduction

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, 68–81. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. ______. “Funes, His Memory.” In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, 131–37. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Week 2 (1/18): Wittgenstein

Diamond, Cora. “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” In The New Wittgenstein. Edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read, 149–73. New York: Routledge, 2000. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden [and F. P. Ramsey]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922. [pp. 30–63, 154–89]

Week 3 (1/25): Wittgenstein

Kenny, Anthony. Wittgenstein. Revised Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. [Chapter 4. 44–57] Ware, Ben. “Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 4 (2011): 595–611. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden [and F. P. Ramsey]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922. [pp. 63–103]

Week 4 (2/1): Wittgenstein

Kenny, Anthony. Wittgenstein. Revised Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. [Chapter 5. 58–81] Ramsey, F P. “Review of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.” Mind 32, no. 128 (1923): 465–78. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden [and F. P. Ramsey]. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922. [pp. 103–53]

Week 5 (2/8): Benjamin

Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, 62–74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights.” In Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, 92–109. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. Eco, Umberto. “From Adam to Confusio Linguarum.” In The Search for the Perfect Language. Translated by James Fentress, 7–24. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1995.

Week 6 (2/15): Benjamin

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Word-Music and Translation.” In This Craft of Verse. Edited by Cǎlin-Andrei Mihǎilescu, 57–76. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Rendall, Steven. “Notes on Zohn’s Translation of Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe Des Übersetzers’.” TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 191–206.

Reading Week (2/22): No class

3 Week 7 (3/1): Foucault

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. [Translated by Alan Sheridan.] New York: Vintage Books, 1994. [Chapter 2, 17–45] Maclean, Ian. “Foucault's Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: an Aristotelian Counterblast.” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 1 (1988): 149–166.

Week 8 (3/8): Foucault

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. [Translated by Alan Sheridan.] New York: Vintage Books, 1994. [Chapter 3, 46–77] Harris, Roy, and Talbot J Taylor. “The Port-Royal Grammar: Arnauld and Lancelot on the Rational Foundations of Grammar.” In Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I: The Western Tradition From Socrates to Saussure, 95–108. London: Routledge, 1997. Rousseau, G S. “Whose Enlightenment? Not Man's: the Case of Michel Foucault.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 2 (1972): 238–256.

Week 9 (3/15): Foucault

Evans, Fred. “Language.” In The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Edited by Leonard Lawlor and John Nale, 236–42. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. [Translated by Alan Sheridan.] New York: Vintage Books, 1994. [Chapter 4, 78–124]

Week 10 (3/22): Constructions

Borges, Jorge Luis. “John Wilkins' Analytical Language” In Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, 229–32. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

Week 11 (3/29): Translatability

Balderston, Daniel. “Borges, Averroes, Aristotle: the Poetics of Poetics.” Hispania 79, no. 2 (1996): 201–07. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Averroës’s Search.” In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, 235–41. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Jullien, Dominique. “In Praise of Mistranslation: the Melancholy Cosmopolitanism of Jorge Luis Borges.” The Romanic Review 98, no. 2-3 (2007): 205–23. Sharkey, E Joseph. “The Comedy of Language in Borges' ‘Las Busca de Averroes’.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 60, no. 1 (2006): 53–69.

Week 12 (4/5): Post-truth?

Bevir, Mark. “Humanism in and Against The Order of Things.” Configurations 7, no. 2 (1999): 191–209. Foucault, Michel. The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Wilson, Richard A. “The Trouble with Truth: Anthropology's Epistemological Hypochondria.” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (2004): 14–17.