The Claim of Language: An Interview with Christopher Fynsk

Hello and welcome to the latest

installment of Being Human from the

University of Pittsburgh.

This series is devoted to exploring

the humanities, their connections to

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is Chris Fynsk,

professor and dean of the Division

of Philosophy, Art, and Critical

Thought at the European Graduate

School.

Professor Fenske has published

widely on contemporary European

literature and philosophy.

In his writing, he often takes

inspiration from Paul Celan's Bremen

address, which Celan delivered while

accepting an award in 1958.

In his speech, given against the

backdrop of the violence and

destruction of World War Two, Celan

argues that poems model a kind of

open, approachable reality.

Celan hopes that his work helps

bring this kind of reality into

being and aligns himself with the

efforts of younger poets who work

towards the same goals.

Closing his address, Celan offers

a striking description of the work

of poetry as "efforts

of those who with manmade

stars flying overhead, unsheltered

even by the traditional tent of the

sky, exposed in

an unsuspected, terrifying way,

carry their existence into language

wracked by reality and in search

of it." Fynsk

cites this passage often and has

dedicated his work to exploring and

enacting the possibilities offered

by the moment of terrifying exposure

that Celan describes. His

books on Martin Heidegger, Maurice

Blanchot, and others are rightly

applauded for their deep and

intelligent analysis.

But readers also get the sense that

Fynsk is working together with the

writers he discusses, much as

Celan hopes to work with younger

poets. Fynsk's 2004 defense

of the humanities, titled The Claim

of Language: A Case for the

Humanities, is no different.

In the book, Fynsk argues that the

humanities should stake their claim

to value on their unique ability to

interrogate language as the medium

of human thought.

While this may seem aggressively

theoretical to some, the results are

characteristically expansive and

affirmative and offer an important,

if underappreciated, contribution

to the defense of the humanities

genre.

I began our conversation by asking

Chris to recall the occasion for the

book and what made him feel that it

was important to make this argument

at that time.

Yes.

I mean, there is a political

intent here, but

in a certain sense, I'm

taking a bit of a

sideways step with regard to the

kinds of politics that were being

pursued in the humanities at that

moment.

And this has to do with the

resurgence of

cultural politics and

identity politics, multiculturalism,

and so forth, which I was

completely with through those years.

But with

the real sort

of ascendancy of

cultural theory and cultural

politics in the eighties and

nineties, the kind of work

that I had done and that I'd started

out doing in the seventies and

eighties, which was more in

the area of continental philosophy

and theory informed by that, that

work was slowly pushed

aside. And

to me, it felt as though something

was being lost in that.

And part of what was being

lost was the capacity to

address the

status of the humanities themselves.

It seemed to me that with a

political turn we were seeing and

the shape that it was taking,

the specificity of the humanities

was being lost in some measure.

I didn't see why we couldn't

be calling what we were doing,

insofar as it was politically

directed, social science.

And so, I was trying to step back a

little bit and say, "Well, what is

it that the humanities bring to

bear?"

It links to a very long-standing

interest in institutions

and the politics

of philosophy.

That essay that I published on

Granel, which is the one

that you mentioned, and

I think it's called the Politics of

Philosophy, that was

written quite some time before.

And what I published there is

actually an auto-critique because

I came to understand that the

notion of critique that I was

putting forward there of sort of

a philosophically informed political

critique really needed

some adjustment.

And so, I was

trying to rethink the position of

the critic

from my perspective.

But that essay,

I think that goes back to 1978.

And

that essay, in turn, picks up on an

essay that I had written quite early

on in response to

Derrida's efforts in

something he called

le Groupe de recherches sur l'enseignement philosophique, so the GREPH it

was called in short. And that was a

very specific initiative in France

in 1975, 76

to address educational reform.

And I was quite, I might say,

influenced or moved by that.

I was really struck by the way in

which this was an effort

to address the institution of

philosophy, not just the

philosophical positions or ideological

perspectives.

And at the same time,

I was working closely with people

who weren't so much in the

Derridean framework but were more

associated with people like Ranciere

and Foucault.

And they were a bit more scrappy.

They were a group to call themselves

"turbo prof" because

they were riding on trains to

distant universities.

And they had a very

hard perspective on some of these

questions. And I was working with

them as well. So

I guess what I'm saying-- you're

asking about why I did this.

From

almost the beginning of my work as a

graduate student, I became

interested in the question of

institutions.

And I believed from

that first experience in 75,

76 that you can't

hope to pursue an effective

thinking if you don't address the

conditions in which you're doing it.

And that's why-- I think I've said

to you before. And that's why I do

so much administration.

I mean, there are some wonderful

things about administration, but a

lot of it is simply a real

pain.

Nevertheless, I think it's

absolutely essential because if

you're not attending to

the conditions in which teaching and

writing and thinking are

taking place, then you'll

find very quickly that those acts

are neutralized.

And this is something that

I worry about a lot in North

America. And perhaps

it has to do with the

place of the university in the

culture

and then the way the universities

themselves are structured.

Whereas in Europe what I experienced

when I was in Europe was an

insertion of the university in the

broader culture, which was very

different from what we have seen in

North America. I'm

telling you this because it bears

upon this question of the

humanities.

I mean, when I was working in

Paris in 1975-76,

and then I returned to Strasbourg in

79, the

professors that I was working with

didn't think of themselves as

academics.

They understood themselves to be

working in partnership with writers,

theater, people, musicians,

artists of various kinds.

The academic

job was a day job. They

would give their classes - and it

was obviously very important - give

their lectures. They write from that

basis.

But being a professor

at this or that institution was not

significant for them.

And they certainly wouldn't tout it.

And the ones who did were considered

a little bit gauche.

And

not gauche in the good sense.

So

I was

very moved by

the way in which I saw the

humanities being pursued

in Europe.

I had some exposure to literary

theory and philosophy as an

undergraduate and then in the

beginning of my graduate studies.

But when I went to Europe,

I saw how this could be part of a

much broader cultural

scene.

And at the same time, I saw how this

could be part of

a different understanding of,

I suppose, intellectual life in

or the construction of intellectual

life in the academy

as well as beyond it.

And there, I

want to add something because

what really moved me in

modern French thought

was the postwar initiative

to really address

the totality of social experience.

And this

is even before structuralism,

the work of people like Lévi-Strauss

or

Leroi-Gourhan, various figures in

anthropology and

political philosophy, Althusser

comes out of this, although he was

certainly structuralist in

orientation. There

was an effort to address the

totality of social experience.

And you couldn't

take up the question of literature

without taking up questions

relating to political philosophy

or anthropology

or any number of other fields.

Questions were always immediately

moved toward

this broader perspective.

And to pursue literature, you had

to address the question of the

meaning of literature or in

the same thing across the board.

So when I came

to the scene, post-structuralism

had already sort of opened

a breach

in that scientific endeavor of

structuralism.

But even post-structuralism

in those years was

addressed to thinking

the totality of social experience.

And I use the word cautiously, but

there's an early

interview with Derrida where he says

he's trying to think the greatest

totality. And

so that question of

the whole of social experience has

sort of guided

my ambitions with respect to the

humanities. I like to see the

humanities in terms of what they can

contribute to those questions.

And that's why I immediately take it

in a cross-disciplinary

perspective.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in

that I'd love to pick

up on and follow through.

Maybe the first thing

will be to

think about

what you were mentioning about kind

of the specificity of the humanities

being lost and that being something

you were trying to examine in the

claim of language and think that

what would happen if we

regained it. What would it mean to

regain it? And that's the kind of

the question that I see

being at the kind of the heart

of the work here is what would it

mean to renew the attention to

language, renew the question of

language for the humanities there?

And I wonder if you can talk a

little bit about that as

a guiding question for the claim of

language, like why was

that your guiding question, renewing

that attention to language?

And what would it allow it-- what

did it allow you to do in the essay?

Well.

I suppose, again, this has a lot to

do with my training.

I

was doing my

graduate studies in the seventies

and then going into

the early eighties, I was working

closely with people in

France who were

associated with deconstruction

and psychoanalysis. And

there, in reference to people like

Foucault and Derrida or Lacan, the

question was language.

So I

was trained in that way.

And as I undertook my

own work,

specifically with regard to

Heidegger at the outset, but I very

quickly understood that what was

really speaking

to me in all of this was the

question of language.

But language, as I was

attending to it was,

was-- well, the question of language

as I was attending to it was sort of

shunted aside as

cultural

analysis came to the fore.

And you had an emphasis on semiotics

and forms of interpretation

which were analyzing the play

of the signifier and

how language was constructing

reality and so forth.

Whereas the

question that I had tried to address

was the question of the relation

between human being and language.

And that

question, it's a very difficult

question.

I allude at one point in this text

to

Foucault's remark near the

Les Mots et les choses, the Order of Things.

He says, "thought

will have to take one of two paths.

Either it goes in the direction of

the question of language, or it goes

in the direction of--

Human.

The human existence." And

my answer to that here is that, in

fact, I think Foucault missed

what he was taking from Heidegger

here, which is that you can't

divorce the one question from the

other.

And so, I was trying to recover

that - I'm not going to say that - that

bridging or rather that necessity

of thinking how language,

as Foucault tries

to think it needs

something like a human

enunciation to occur.

So I was trying to-- I thought that

I saw a way of recovering the

question of the human in this

and thereby possibly

reconnecting with the question of

the humanities.

With regard to the question of

language, at the same time, trained

as I was, I understood

that language was the material of my

work. Right?

I find it still

amazing that this is not a

basic assumption for people in

literature or philosophy or

psychoanalysis or any of these

fields because, in fact, they're

working through text or they're

working with the spoken word.

And

the problem is, I think that

my view has been that the

socio-political agenda at work

in the humanities, which I

think is tremendously important I

don't mean to criticize, but

it has drawn attention away from

the materiality of

these forms of creation,

research, reflection,

and toward the, you might

say, toward the meaning

in a context that's defined by

sociopolitical imperatives.

And very quickly, one turns

away from the more ambiguous,

the more complex dimensions of

the text. I'm saying things that

everybody certainly

will know and appreciate

or has answers to. But nevertheless,

it was in that context. And I

thought, "Well, we really must

attend to what distinguishes the

humanities as forms

of practice".

And it seemed to me

that what makes that distinction is

the way we in humanities

relate to language and

work with it, how we write with

it or produce

it in various ways.

And

for that reason, it was necessary to

move away somewhat from

the sort of theoretical

construction of

a kind of, say, the approach to

sociopolitical questions and

towards a different kind of

engagement with texts and

with the practice of texts or

the performance of texts.

And so I was calling for

a different way of

practicing critical thought.

And again,

I didn't want to do this

in opposition to two other

practices. I'm very much a proponent

of the idea that we should let a

thousand flowers bloom.

But it did seem to me that questions

and approaches to questions were

being lost by not

attending to this question of

language.

Yeah.

So thinking about language and

the humanities,

one thing that's

important for you and that you

mentioned a few times in the essay,

The Claim of Language, is that

you're talking about language,

not just as language-- people who

are listening here might think we're

just talking about literature, but

we're not. You're talking about the

humanities. You're talking about

dance and performance and music and

all these things. Can you talk about

language in that broad sense

and how it encompasses all of those

different kinds of fields and thus

what we know of as the humanities?

Yes, yes. Today,

I wouldn't use the word in language

in the same way.

Interesting.

Precisely in order to

avoid that kind of possible

misapprehension you're describing.

Because as soon as you say language,

you think communication.

You think linguistics.

Whereas I'm

constantly trying to move back to,

well,

what Heidegger called the essence of

language or Foucault, who

talked about the nature of language.

I'm talking about the presence of

language and what it means

that language should occur

and what it is.

It draws forth language.

Yeah.

I'm talking about language in an

ontological level and an existential

level.

So

I start to refer more to symbolic

practices today, even though I don't

really like that word.

The symbol is problematic

to me. And

I also think it's really terribly

important to attend to the

specificity of these forms.

I certainly see

dance as language,

but it's not a signifying language.

It engages

signification in a different way.

I see the images really introducing

some very big

questions that cannot be approached

by linguistics or are

approached inadequately by

linguistics. So, yeah.

I think I would prefer symbolic

form. But again,

when someone studying

dance engages

dance, they are looking

at the schemata of movements, and

I'm using the word schemata because I'm

working on that right now, but some

rhythms.

But the use of space

and time, occupation of it, and

the gesture that occurs there.

And to me, this is

a language.

I did a lot of work on the painter

Francis Bacon, and

one of the things I was trying to do

was fight the idea that you could

read Bacon's work using

semiotics because, ultimately, I

don't think it signifies in that

way. And yet I would call it

language because

of what is happening

there in

his drawing forth

of his relation

to the world or his relation to

others in terms of

sexual relations and so forth.

So,

yeah, I'm using language very

broadly.

Right. Well, one thing I think that

it's important to say about

your work, and this is

something that-- you

talk about your work as being

affirmative, that it's affirmative,

that there's a kind of an outward

movement in it.

The kind of attention to language

that you talk

about here as being something they

can kind of ground practices in the

humanities is one that when

it's put into practice, it requires

a kind of ethics, requires a

relation and attention to ethics.

It enables community.

That's another word that's important

to you. And I wonder if you can

say a little bit about the

kind of affirmative possibilities or

the saying "yes" that you talk about

in your work a lot. And in

particular because I think that

some listeners here or people

who read your work might see

it to be a simple way of

understanding of reading

it. But I think I could understand

it on some level. It seems like the

attention to language.

It looks like a regression

in the sense that, well, in the one

sense, you can say, "Oh, well, we've

already done that." And that's one

way to look at it. But another would

be just the sense of it's kind of

a going backward, but that enables

a kind of an outward movement for

you. And I wonder if you can talk a

little bit about that.

Yes.

This question of

an affirmative yes saying really

does go way back for me, and

I come back to it insistently.

Let me just point

to what I'm working on right now in

that respect.

I've been attending

to Maurice Blanchot's

post-work politics because there's

been a tremendous debate about the

relation between his pre-war

politics, which were geared

to the right, and his postwar

politics, which were geared to the

left.

And a lot of controversy,

a lot of difficulty because

the nature of his political

commitments in the postwar period is

not easy

to define.

But I've been concentrating on his--

I think one of the master

concerns, one of his primary

concerns is the notion of freedom.

And so, I've been trying to follow

how he conceives of freedom

in a socio-political

context and

how he understands what he calls

being provoked by the

res publica, the public thing.

And so my question is, what is the

thing? What is to be provoked?

What is the political passion

involved, and what

does provocation mean in terms of

speech and in answering

this exigency

of this call?

So a lot of different themes there.

But I've been especially

attentive to his

insistence in the latter part of

his work that we

can only think freedom from

and by a relation to the other.

And he will insist that

we are not free as long as others

are not free.

But that doesn't mean that we need a

political program in the sense of

a particular

ideological political construction.

Rather, we have to start from the

ethical relation for him.

And so, it's from

a relation together that freedom

can come not as a question.

Now, in Blanchot, this is extremely

complicated. The

way in which some kind of

transcendence can occur, using

transcendence in the sense of

freedom, it's

not something I could summarize in

this context because it has to do

with his notion of

exceeding the hold of

the negative or the concept and

engaging with what he calls the

neutral or neutrality.

But in Blanchot, this produces

a kind of spring, and there's

a kind of springing forth as a

kind of affirmation that takes

shape. And so, I've been trying to

pursue that.

I can go back to

that auto-critique that I referred

to earlier in the essay on the

philosophy of politics.

When I was first following Gerard

Garnel's work--

and I was extremely excited by this

work.

Garnel wrote a very beautiful

introduction to Derrida

with a strong Nietzschean twist.

And he wrote in

a form which, for me, as a young

scholar, was just absolutely

intoxicating. I mean, I

became a little suspicious of that

intoxication after a while, but it

was absolutely gorgeous.

So I began to read him.

I discovered that he's a kind of

- I don't want to use the word cult

figure - a

widely recognized but not well-known

figure in France.

So people like

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considered

him to be a mentor.

There were a lot of people like

that, actually.

And Granel hung back

in Bordeaux.

He was a very difficult man.

And I was

doing some incredible work on Marx,

on Wittgenstein, on Nietzsche.

Did he translate Vico?

He translated a lot of people. He

was the first to translate Husserl.

And Husserl's crises

in particular. And this is pure

Granel in his introduction.

He made the statement what

he just translated is a piece of

pure philosophical paranoia.

And

of course, I loved it. And

he was a very good translator.

Granel affirmed

the project of deconstruction and

did it with a political intent.

Because he was also reading Marx,

and

this became the basis of a

controversy with Derrida, but

I found this very exciting.

He had also, and very early on,

taken quite seriously

what Heidegger was attempting to do

in his rectoral project, which is,

of course, again, an outrageous

thing to do because that was

Heidegger's entry into National

Socialism or, rather,

the Nazi Party. He was already a

national socialist. My

initial version of that was

suppose we were to take the

Rektoratsrede seriously, and

that's exactly what Granel had done.

And if one does that, you see that,

in fact, a lot of these points are

quite powerful.

There's some very unfortunate stuff,

but the way he lenses

his language to the National

Socialist, or

I know I should say more precisely

the Nazi agenda.

His thinking about the place of the

university in the contemporary

social structure is really

very powerful.

His

critique of the university in the

early through the late thirties,

I would say, is astonishingly

pertinent today.

So I was very excited about Granel. But

I began to

grow wary

of the, I guess, almost

the insistent

negativity for the project.

In the name of

revolution, he could only

undo. And

I began to think that

this was leading into a trap.

And

I don't know if you want--

I can recount that little story at

the end of my essay, which is

a story about a rabbi.

Yes. Please.

And it's

a rather famous story, but Rabbi

Shimon, sitting with a couple of

friends, and he is

groaning about the Roman oppression

and denouncing the Romans.

And there's a spy at the table.

So very quickly, it comes about that

he is to be arrested

for this, and he goes into hiding.

Ultimately, I'm going to tell the

story quickly, he ends up in a cave

with his son, and

he has to go into hiding there for

ten years.

He comes out,

Elijah comes by and says,

"You can come out now." And

he walks out, and he sees that

nothing has changed.

The same sort of compromised

existence of the local

population with the Romans is going

on. Everyone seems perfectly

comfortable with this.

So he burns everything with his eyes

and fury.

At that point, a voice

comes from above and says, "Would

you destroy my world?

Get back in the cave."

And so,

he goes into the cave with his son,

and they go back for another year.

And the story tells, well, that's

because, in Jewish

thought, hell lasts only a year.

And so, they go back to

the cave, and then they come out

after a year.

And again,

things don't seem to have changed.

And at this point, the son was

- obviously learned from his father - is about

to do what his father done before,

which is burn everything in anger.

And the father stays his hand