Abstract

The present is, in fact, made out of the residue of the past.For here the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man's humanity, and of humanism. But situated where language no longer lets itself be effaced.A note to readers, an apologia: this is an experimental critical theory essay, a performative piece of academic writing that attempts to wrestle with the porous zones, the hiccups, slips and falls between languages, translations, and between writing and genre. Some readers may find it obscure, dense, in parts; open and too free, too vulnerable, too self-revealing or narrative–too variable in its intensities, its modalities, its genres. But that is also the point. It is in part...