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By George Steiner

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Early in Grammars of production, George Steiner references Plato’s maxim that during “all issues typical and human, the starting place is the main excellent.” production, he argues, is linguistically basic in theology, philosophy, paintings, track, literature—central, in truth, to our very humanity. because the Holocaust, even if, artwork has proven a bent to linger on endings—on sunset rather than dawn. announcing that each use of the longer term annoying of the verb “to be” is a negation of mortality, Steiner attracts on every thing from global wars and the Nazis to faith and the observe of God to illustrate how our grammar finds our perceptions, reflections, and reviews. His research exhibits the 20th century to be principally a failed one, but additionally bargains a glimpse of wish for Western civilization, a brand new gentle peeking simply over the horizon.

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In its astonishing prefiguration of Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production it allowed them to be at once thoroughly socio-historical and thoroughly textual, and did so by dint of adding to the familiar (Althusserian) ‘relative autonomy’ of the ideological within the social totality an analogous and fully theorized autonomy – which, after the Formalists’ habit, they sometimes called the ‘specificity’ – of the literary within ‘ideology’. I It is time now, however, to tell another story for the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the wake of a pair of deeply (though obliquely) related historic failures: first, of the promises of the avant-garde in the face of repression in the East and of academicization or routinization in the West; second, of the soi-disant political ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat whose experiments in ‘actually existing’ socialism foundered at last in the 1990s (and not before time) in a grim mix of farce and tragedy.

What Fanon’s writing insistently says to us is that a politics of the boundary is nothing if not incarnated: any exposition courts the danger of reducing this order of intensely engaged thinking to the bloodless categories of a metaphysics. If that is all one can say about it, that is because ‘it‘ is an inapposite pronoun in this context; because it demands to be spoken or written not ‘about’ but ‘with’, in solidarity rather than commentary. Such agonistic thinking always throws a merely cognitive consciousness into disarray.

There can be no ‘dialogics’ – to use a barbarous and falsifying term much in use now but with no basis whatever in Bakhtin. Indirection is not simply a response to the danger of direct assertion under Stalinism; it is an internal imperative of Bakhtin’s thinking. Which is as much as to say: there are in Bakhtin only ‘philosophy effects’ generated by discourses that are not in themselves philosophical. The liminal discipline of translinguistics is not a philosophy – not even a ‘philosophy of language’ – but rather a discourse which signals certain philosophical bearings and has effects that might be called philosophical, while it is more directly preoccupied with other business: either polemicizing with 18 Bo unda r ie s ve r s us bina r ie s other disciplines of the sign or working on and within those special sites of dialogism called ‘novel’ and ‘carnival’.

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