ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Both matter and essence, the timeless memory of the humankind and the ephemeral glimpse of the mind, the eventful being of language has never ceased to captivate our imagination. The multiple ways in which language structures the human have given rise to some of the fundamental articulations of human cognition, individual and social being: the controversial ontological status of language (the aporetic divide between words and things, extending from Plato to Saussure and Foucault), the paradoxes of the language-thought correlation (the approach of Sapir-Whorf and the philosophical-rhetorical deconstruction of cognitive forms), the varied modes of ideological (mis)appropriations of language (the critical tradition from Gramsci to Bourdieu) and others. The heteronomy of our time appears as a good host for much of this intellectual questioning. It, however, also brings forth some new bifurcations and unexpected conjunctions. The panel Language Ideology and the Human addresses the position of language in the multi-paradigm setting of the new humanities: cutting across disciplines, epistemological frontiers, and political practices, it will examine the position and the potential of language as such.

Friday, March 24

Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University
“How to Do Things With Words in Colonial America: The Derrida-Searle Debate and an Indian-English Contract Dispute”
David Gorman, Northern Illinois University
“Meaning and Truth in the Analytic Philosophy of Language”
Dušan Radunović, University of Sheffield
“‘La Langue’ and its Enemies: Bakhtin, Bourdieu and the Sociologization of Linguistics”
Zlatan Filipovic, Goldsmiths College
“Language of Ideology: The Trick/turn/trope That Once Killed de Man”

Saturday, March 25

Joyce Apsel, New York University
“Humanism and Humanitarianism”
Joshua Beall, Rutgers University
“Eros and Language”
Leonardo Lisi, Yale University
“Kierkegaard and the Aesthetics of Indirect Communication”
Meliz Ergin, The University of British Columbia
“Autobiography of the Writing Machine”

Sunday, March 26

Marinos Pourgouris, Brown University
“Language, Trauma, Resistance: The Case of the Cypriot Dialect”
Metin Bosnak, Fatih University
“Raising the Language of the Son to Erase the Memory of the Father; The Turkish Language as a Battleground”
David Fieni, UCLA
“Language as a Symptom of Social Vitality in al-Shidyaq and Céline Name”