UNTHEORIZING DISCOURSE

A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound, by Joshua Kates, examines a range of philosophical, literary, and literary-theoretical approaches in attempting to formulate a view of language sheerly as individual events. Kates considers works from philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Continental tradition; Donald Davidson and W. V. O. Quine in the analytic tradition of philosophy of language; and such “crossovers” (an arguable categorization) as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Martha Nussbaum. The book also investigates the work of literary scholars including Mary Poovey, Charles Altieri, Paul de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, and Steven Knapp, among others. In each instance, the thinkers under scrutiny offer some support for the new philosophy of discourse that Kates proposes but fall short of the radicality of his anti-foundational, anti-structural approach. Kates coins the term “talk!” as a way to refer to language in an anti-foundational vein. The new philosophy of “talk!” proposed here emphasizes the shortcomings of the wide range of authors with respect to thinking of language as only its instances, begging the question of what avenues of thought the new philosophy opens.