The Open Book of the Humanities

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THE OPEN BOOK OF THE HUMANITIES James J. Bono, Tim Dean, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds), A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, Fordham University Press, New York 2008; pp273, £21.95 paperback. What does the future hold for the humanities? Might there be a future that remains receptive to the intellectual practices of the humanities? Indeed, might there be a future at all that will still matter to those who identify themselves as humanists? The collection of essays brought together iriA Time for the Humanities prompts us to recognize that the question of the uncertain futures for the humanities is first of all a critical matter for the humanities themselves. As such, the question about the fate of the humanities and their critical legacies in the light of economic uncertainty, political scepticism, and their potential redundancy as a field and scholarly practice is a pressing one.1 Yet this is not just a question of ensuring that the right kind of future is secured, one within which the humanities are guaranteed the presence they might claim to deserve. And neither is it a matter for simply arguing for the irreplaceability of the humanities by producing the evidential goods for their purportedly indispensable role within a society's knowledge economies.2 It is rather a question of the field's autonomy versus its heteronomy - and it is this question that is opened out in A Time for the Humanities. At a time when the humanities are undergoing substantial changes it might be hard not to empathize with the hopeful humanist who wishes to stay abreast so as to adapt to unpredictable times to come. In other words, if the humanities are deemed to lose the outlines they were once entrusted with, and thus also their alleged autonomy within which the humanist could take shelter, then one might say that it is not unreasonable to invest in the future. (Is not 'investing in the future' at once capitalism's unrelenting premise and its consolation?) Still, the returns of this investment will be more than one could reason with. What the humanities may yield from the endowments of futurity derives its force abo from the nonhuman of time, thus bringing to the fore 'the constitutive tension between human and nonhuman aspects of and praxis' (p3). Or put differently, 'the orientation of any praxis towards the unforeseeable future' involves manifestations 'of the nonhuman agency of time' (p3). The standpoints adopted in A Time for the Humanities, particularly those emphasizing non-human agency, direct us towards a thinking as to how acts of practice in the humanities cannot be solely reduced to the building of an autonomous subject, but how the very potentiality sustaining such practice is 'based on the heteronomy rather than the autonomy of the subject' (p4). As the editors propose: 'Unlike related terms in contemporary theory - such as heterogeneity, otherness, or difference - the notion of heteronomy, in addition to maintaining the reference to differentiation and to the multiplicity of heterogeneous principles, more specifically links otherness to the questioning of subjective autonomy and as the principle of freedom' (p4). What follows, then, is that in order to realize the critical drives of the future, that is, to expose the humanities to futurity's 'ought to', entails the unveiling of the of time itself. What is more, such turning towards the future brings to the fore the broader entanglements of human praxis of doing and thinking with the non-human - of time, its demands and stakes, but also of the letter and its inscribing forces, of the topos of the unconscious and its drives, of the technology of writing and its apparatuses, of the humanities' edict and its evolving disciplinary accounting. Such premises as the technology of writing and its apparatuses are echoed in the book's topical structuring, which gathers the viewpoints of the twelve contributors around four thematic parts: 'The New and its Risks' (Paola Marrati, Andrew Benjamin, Martin Jay); 'Rhetoric and the Future of the Political' (Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy, Rey Chow); 'Heteronomy and Futurity in Psychoanalysis' (Rudi Visker, Tim Dean, Elizabeth Weed); 'Inventions' (Steve McCaffery, N. …