Culture against itself

Tomislav Brlek (University of Zagreb)

Email: tbrlek@ffzg.hr

 

ABSTRACT:

Since culture informs all our thinking, it is only logical that all assessments of it are fraught with contradiction. The dominant trends in the humanities are by and large intent on emphasising the sinister underside of the cultural enterprise, spotlighting the exclusionary mechanisms enabling it and insisting on the toll its achievements demand. But, as Adorno pointed out some time ago, the conditions of possibility of every such critique are inevitably premised upon the very situation that it is being condemned. The current censure of universalism understood to be underpinning every concept of culture, for example, can easily be shown to be but a universalising of a particular perspective, which, being American, can hardly deny its Enlightenment lineage. Instead of such stridently one-sided scolding, a more complex approach to the tortuous issue of the availability and the uses of culture could be found in the work of Wittgenstein, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rancière, all of whom are to a considerable degree indebted to Kant’s notion of critical judgement. Focusing on the examination of the auto-heteronomy of language as the “originary alienation” constitutive of all identity, that Derrida undertakes in his rather neglected Monolingualism of the Other (1996), this paper intends to suggest that discussion should take place on different grounds. If the language we speak is never our own, while at the same time being the only language we have, and if all that we conceive in and by language – and this might as well be called culture – is our “absolute habitat,” impassable and indisputable, the one condition we can never grow out of, then the hope of transforming it can only lie in that very language. The appeal of the various discourses of identity derives, as does their authority, from the power to ascertain, to establish proper and proscriptive usage. The inventive use of language, the idiom that would resist being regulated and appropriated, is, in contrast, only a promise. “But,” as Derrida writes, “the promise is not nothing; it is not a non-event.”