Humanistic challenge: The relationship between humanistic discourse
and its cultural milieu is perhaps better described in terms of challenge,
confrontation, disruption, and fragmentation
Cultural Studies
cultural studies : often, presuppose that the cultural other can be
understood and accommodated under a common concept of culture.
Derrida would have no answer to the question, "What is cultural studies?"It
is an artifact with no concept.
cultural studies often privilege culture as the bedrock and matrix of
everything.
Dilthey'sDas Erlebnis und die Dichtung, The main point is
that culture turned into a seeming sphere of its own, with the preeminently
aesthetic embodiments of the spirit (in particular literature), at its center.
Dilthey's
legacy: Western humanistic discourses remain indebted to Das Erlebnis
und die Dichtung even if they have drastically altered their theoretical
make-up. Most conspicuously, the theoretical and interpretational management
of time, its transformation into philosophies of history and hermeneutic
schemes seems to separate the West from Japan.
Internal history: constant borrowings from other cultures; differentiation
within any given apparently unified culture) mean that the usage of "humanism"
or "humanistic discourse" in various languages is an extremely complicated
Humanistic Discourse
Behler
: Humanistic discourses probably function best in their cultural context
when they intervene -- in the sense specified in the first question of the
last memorandum -- even critically and confrontationally, by challenging
an entire set of established cultural habits, values, beliefs, and norms.
In
China : what cannot be avoided in the discussion of the discourse of
Chinese humanism is the extremely ambiguous relationship of
humanism/Enlightenment/modernity.
Miller:
"Humanistic discourse" can be taken simply to designate the languages of
the humanities as opposed to those of the social sciences or the natural
sciences, nevertheless the word "humanistic" implies that all men and women
of all nations at all times share a common essence.
Tay:
A local branch beyond the control of the center But, on a more general level,
"marginality" means that "serious literature is inevitably more and more
marginalized."
Phonocentrism
: Derrida perceives phonocentrism in the fact that Saussure excluded written
language from linguistics. Yet this is a deconstructive reading of Saussure
which tries to show that, by defining language as a system of difference
which has no positive terms, Saussure had paradoxically discovered the kind
of difference that precedes speech.
Traced back to the May Fourth period of 1917-1923, [...] [formed] around
the [Confucian] notion of ren or "humanness". [This] new conception of "human
nature", contrary to Confucianism, is based on a vague notion of human
individual.
Translatable, Untranslatable, Abyss of untranslatability
Iser's
translatability Whereas encounters between cultures or interactions between
levels of culture involve either assimilation or appropriation by making
inroads into one another, translatability aims at comprehension trying to
get out of a different culture or the different intra-cultural l evels what
seems attractive, useful, or what has to be combated and suppressed for whatever
reasons.
Behler
Hegel claimed that asian thought was untranslatable
Behler
Humboldt and A.W. Schlegel defended cross-cultural translation
Hillis
Miller: Translation in the sense of a carrying over through understanding
of the complex and heterogeneous cultural contexts within which a phrase
like "humanistic discourse" has meaning in one country or another.
Conclusion:
The inevitable presence of the untranslatable at every moment that makes
the project of translation possible and necessary, as a project whose failure
is built into its justification.
