The Human in the Humanities

Abstract

In 1948 the literary critic Leo Spitzer published his celebrated essay Linguistics and Literary History. Originally titled Thinking in the Humanities when it was delivered a lecture at Princeton to the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, it became a foundational text and curricular staple in the burgeoning field of Comparative Literature and in the sciences generally. From Spitzer to Paul de Man, etymological method fired debates around the postwar humanist legacy, structural semiotics and intertextuality. It informed deconstruction's rhetorical practice, and, in political terms, it gave substance to linguistic and national claims, or more precisely, to language wars around philological heritage, patrimony, and the origins of literary culture. The fact that the French term racine (with its accrued, overlapping associations around verbal roots and the roots of national culture) may have stirred Gilles Deleuze to invent the counter-nationalist, nomadological rhizome or anti-root only attests to the monumentality of philological thinking. In what follows, I will be looking specifically at the role of what I'm calling the racial in Spitzer's concept of philology, testing a hypothesis that this etymon calibrates the shifting status of the in the humanities, from philology to philosophy, and from philosophy to the genetics of language. As the category of the subject begins to suffer signs of fatigue in contemporary critical theory, the category of the human acquires new significance. First, because it speaks to an intellectual surround dominated by the genome project, and the ethical dilemmas attendant on breakthroughs in cloning, reproductive technology, and biological engineering. Second, because, Thomas Keenan has pointed out, the human, a general category partnered uneasily with humanitarianism, serves, however problematically, as the name of that which would precede geographical divisions and political articulations, of that which is by definition essentially unbordered.I And third, because the represents a possible