| Title | : | Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 064869058X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780648690580 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 181 |
| Publication | : | Published March 28, 2020 |
Where challenges to liberalism often accept some degree of the liberal frame, Bouvard strikes at the very root. Starting with the signifying center rather than agents alienated from each other, he penetrates and repurposes liberal disciplinary spaces.
Anthropomorphics enjoins us to reconfigure our practices by attending to our language, and to the relation of our language to our practices, offering a rectification not just of names, but of the very grammar of our discourses. Taking his point of departure from Eric Gans’ originary hypothesis, Bouvard shows that the prehistory of language is recapitulated in human social the move from a sacral, traditional social order to a modern one echoes the move from ostensive utterances to imperatives, and finally to the declarative sentence.
This powerful set of conceptual tools makes clear how our social imperatives come to be fragmented, and points the way to making them whole—by directing our shared attention back to the center. Bouvard suggests ways to begin thinking about such wide ranging topics as the economy, democracy, aesthetics, and education that foreclose on the most destructive tendencies of liberalism and the modern world in general.
Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center Reviews
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This is a short book but it took me forever to plow through and I gave up at around page 140. Bouvard is simply a terrible writer. He is terrified of any variation in his diction thus repetitions abound, constantly. It’s as if Martin Heidegger was bitten by a radioactive spider and became an analytic philosopher. Fucking HORRID. Before I encountered this work I read Eric Gans short book on the origin of language. Gans admits to crafting a “just so” story regarding the origin of language as a means to interrupt violence during a supposed shared sacrifice wherein the big man is neither dominating nor dominates but the “ostensive sign” takes the place of the raised fist prior to an ecstatic episode of σπαραγμος. Instead of everyone killing each other over “sacred meat” in Bacchic splendor they “point” and gesture and have themselves a nice little ritual THUS LANGUAGE IS BORN!!! Now…all that seems a tad silly but what IS intriguing was how Gans does effectively produce a probable “evolutionary timeline” of linguistic development. The gesture becomes the simple ostensive which becomes the imperative and when an imperative is “delayed” this is replaced by an interrogative which is answered by a declarative. It’s interesting and intriguing and is often well argued. It also exposes fascinating mechanical relationships between these sentence types I’d not encountered before (the imperative is always a miniature version of Hegel’s “master-slave” dialectic—Gans doesn’t really make this point but he displays it without realizing it). Of course, why not assume all these sentences were available when ONE was “discovered?” Because that would require something NOT secular, even, perhaps, miraculous. And this is both Gans and Bouvard’s biggest issue. Bouvard doesn’t really believe in the spiritual or actual metaphysics (“metaphysics is the just the declarative sentence” whatever that means…) but he believes that the “secular” has replaced the “center.” OK…so, maybe the center need be spiritual or, dare I say, religious? NO! And therefore we have pages and pages and pages of convoluted, abstract, and irritating prose that wants to be a polemic AND a treatise AND a political manifesto but fails on all counts. Oftentimes the work comes across as some deranged literary experiment akin to rewriting a VCR manual but without any active verbs and in the historical present. There are, sprinkled throughout, some fantastic observations and theories but the core of this text as some postmodern antipostmodern political formula is just absurd.
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It was quite interesting but I fail to see these ideas or any other Anthropomorphic works really picking up steam.
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10/20
