Tuesday, January 04, 2011

The English language is a very effective counter-terrorism mechanism

Fascinating commentary from the Anglosphere Conference in London:

I’ll say something about the substance of those ideas in a moment. First, it is worth pausing to register the medium in which the ideas unfold: English. Nalapat remarks that “The English language is . . . a very effective counter-terrorist, counter-insurgency weapon.” I think he is right about that, but why? Why English? In a remarkable essay called “What Is Wrong with Our Thoughts?,” the Australian philosopher David Stove analyzes several outlandish, yet typical, specimens of philosophical-theological linguistic catastrophe. He draws his examples not from the underside of intellectual life—spiritualism, voodoo, Freudianism, etc.—but from some of the brightest jewels in the diadem of Western thought: from the work of Plotinus, for example, and Hegel, and Michel Foucault. He quoted his examples in translation, he acknowledges, but notes that “it is a very striking fact . . . that I had to go to translations. . . . Nothing which was ever expressed originally in the English language resembles, except in the most distant way, the thought of Plotinus, or Hegel, or Foucault. I take this,” Stove concludes, “to be enormously to the credit of our language.”

Effectively he is arguing that the English language and more importantly the anglospheric way of thinking that it enables is not congenial to totalist systems of thought - it is too empirical (or dare I say, common sensical) for that - you need to go to French, German or some other language to structure totalist fantasies.    And note who is saying it:  not some triumphalist Colonel Blimp but a 'cat named Nalapat.

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