Abstract
Bilingual games play on the broad field that Ludwig Wittgenstein cleared through his Philosophical Investigations. Language had become a problem for philosophy because the field was cluttered by prejudices about what language can or should do. Why worry, he asked, when it evidently does many things effectively? The only way to solve philosophy’s problems is therefore to take a fresh look and to see the almost endless variety of existing “language games” instead of perpetuating tired assumptions about ideal functions that came to grief all over the world. Wittgenstein’s cure for this self-inflicted anxiety was simply to induce relaxation, because beating a live horse to death, as it were, or asking for peras al olmo was causing a whole syndrome of ailments for scholars. Natural language doesn’t demand perfect fit as long as it is useful; and it doesn’t need philosophy’s blessing even if the discipline presumes greater clarity than everyday speech. On the contrary, Wittgenstein insisted, philosophy could advance a bit if it developed some respect for the subtle mechanisms of everydayness that produce intended effects through so precarious a medium as language.
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Notes
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 79.
See David Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture v12, no. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 529–564, 531–53, for a summary of many contemporary calls to pedagogical action based on [Kantian] appeals to knowledge and understanding, to which Harvey counterpoises an equally misleading [Foucauldian] taste for heterotopia and misunderstanding.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, translated and edited by Marcia Bunge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 43: “The age that wanders toward the desires and hopes of foreign lands is already an age of disease, flatulence, unhealthy opulence, approaching death!”
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. London: Blackwell, 1995. Translation by G. E. Anscombe, p. 47.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), pp. 213–390, esp. p. 215.
Miscegenation has been pronounced with mistrust or revulsion, while Latin American racial mixing, called mestizaje, has often been an official slogan in Spanish and Portuguese. Mestizaje endorses the particularity of New World peoples through a rhetoric of national brotherhood that is meant to ease racial tensions, not necessarily to address material equity. Latin Americans would immediately recognize Du Bois’s manifesto for merging as a conventional banner of cultural pride. It was, for example, the standard of the Independence movement throughout the continent, when Simón Bolívar proclaimed that Spanish Americans have many fathers, but only one mother; that they are neither Spanish, nor Indian, nor Black, but all of these. A century later, to mention just one more of many examples, mestizaje reaffirmed Mexico as a modern country with a mission to the world. For a hundred years, the republic had been torn between indigenist liberals like President Benito Juárez, and Euro-peanizing monarchists who replaced him with Maximillian. Both sides would contribute, said the minister of education during the Mexican Revolution, to making the new man. Whites and Indians would be joined by Blacks and Asians in the unprecedented culmination of one “cosmic race.” This would happen in Mexico, José Vasconcelos wrote in 1925, because no other country was as free from the racial prejudice that obstructs human progress. Anglo-Saxons (like Emerson and Whitman) seemed to prosper by divine will, but, Vasconcelos underlined, “they committed the sin of destroying those races, while we assimilated them, and this gives us new rights and hopes for admission without precedent in History.” José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997).
See chapter 1, “My Intellectual Path” in Isaiah Berlin’s The Power of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
See Terry Eagleton, “Postcolonialism: The Case of Ireland” in David Bennet, Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 128–134.
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (London: Verso, 1996).
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© 2003 Doris Sommer, ed.
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Sommer, D. (2003). Introduction. In: Sommer, D. (eds) Bilingual Games. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982704_1
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