A Future for the Humanities: Praxis, Heteronomy, Invention brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the pressing question of the future of the humanities. Whereas many recent works have addressed this question in primarily pragmatic terms, this book seeks to examine its conceptual foundations. What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities' future in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? Although hailing from disparate disciplines and taking different angles on these questions, the essays we have assembled argue collectively that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and the very matrix for invention. Such a broadly conceived notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming; kinship and the foreign; "disposable populations" within a global political economy; queerness and the death drive; the parapoetic; electronic textuality; invention and accountability; political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy; art and art history; visuality; politicaltheory; criticism and critique; psychoanalysis; gender analysis; architecture; literature; art). This volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future. It will prove indispensable to a wide range of scholars, practitioners, and disciplines: philosophy, history, literature, political science, visual studies, art history, gender studies, film studies, psychoanalysis, poetics, architecture, technology studies, and art.

A Future for the Humanities: Praxis, Heteronomy, Invention brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the pressing question of the future of the humanities. Whereas many recent works have addressed this question in primarily pragmatic terms, this book seeks to examine its conceptual foundations. What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities' future in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? Although hailing from disparate disciplines and taking different angles on these questions, the essays we have assembled argue collectively that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and the very matrix for invention. Such a broadly conceived notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming; kinship and the foreign; "disposable populations" within a global political economy; queerness and the death drive; the parapoetic; electronic textuality; invention and accountability; political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy; art and art history; visuality; politicaltheory; criticism and critique; psychoanalysis; gender analysis; architecture; literature; art). This volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future. It will prove indispensable to a wide range of scholars, practitioners, and disciplines: philosophy, history, literature, political science, visual studies, art history, gender studies, film studies, psychoanalysis, poetics, architecture, technology studies, and art.

This remarkably ambitious work relates changes in scientific and medical thought during the Scientific Revolution (circa 1500-1700) to the emergence of new principles and practices for interpreting language, texts, and nature. An invaluable history of ideas about the nature of language during this period, The Word of God and the Languages of Man also explores the wider cultural origins and impact of these ideas. Its broad and deeply complex picture of a profound sociocultural and intellectual transformation will alter our definition of the scientific revolution. James J. Bono shows how the new interpretive principles and scientific practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries evolved in response to new views of the relationship between the "Word of God" and the "Languages of Man" fostered by Renaissance Humanism, Neoplatonism, magic, and both the reformed and radical branches of Protestantism. He traces the cultural consequences of these ideas in the thought and work of major and minor actors in the scientific revolution-from Ficino and Paracelsus to Francis Bacon and Descartes. By considering these natural philosophers in light of their own intellectual, religious, philosophical, cultural, linguistic, and especially narrative frameworks, Bono suggests a new way of viewing the sociocultural dynamics of scientific change in the premodern period-and ultimately, a new way of understanding the nature and history of scientific thought. The narrative configuration he proposes provides a powerful alternative to the longstanding "revolutionary" metaphor of the history of the scientific revolution.