Language and Politics

Catalog description

Will study Wittgenstein’s text in the philosophy of language, Philosophical Investigations, connecting to contemporary work on the phenomenology of voice, race, gender, and gesture by Elaine Scarry, Robert Gooding-Williams, Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, Jose Munoz. Approach Wittgenstein in context, reading other classics in the philosophy of language: Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception, JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” and Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? We ask: what does it mean to be a linguistic creature? Is language a cut that agentifies, a rupture that alienates, a practice that humanizes, an ideological fortress that concretizes relations of inequality, or a game? Will include films: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Chazelle), Sorry to Bother You (Riley), and Dancer in the Dark (von Trier).