Ambivalence, the Humanities and the Study of Literature

Allow me to begin with an anecdote. Shortly before I sat down to complete this paper, I found myself writing a letter to the organizers of a conference to be held in Vienna, in which I had been asked to participate. The meeting was sponsored by an institution that seeks to bring together scholars from different cultural, linguistic and political areas-above all, although not exclusively, from Eastern and Western Europe-in order to facilitate communication between groups that do not often have the opportunity to discuss with one another. The name of this institution is the Institut for die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; in English: the Institute for the Sciences of Man. This title caught my attention for a number of reasons. First of all, it sounds quite unusual in German, almost like a neologism. In this respect, it reminds me of a similar designation that came into vogue briefly in the early seventies in West Germany, but which has since vanished from the academic scene: the phrase, Humanwissenschaften, which in turn was an attempt to find a German equivalent for the French notion of les sciences humaines. Paradoxically enough, it was French Structuralism that had done much to popularize the term sciences humaines; paradoxically, because of course it was also French structuralist writers, such as Foucault and Lacan, who had mounted a powerful and probing challenge to the normative value of the notion of Man, of the Human. This first line of thought- but perhaps association would be the better word - provoked by the rather bizarre resonance of the Viennese Institut for die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, led me on to a second series of considerations, which involved the question of the Human: the question, that is, of its scope or rather of the universality generally attributed to it. In Les mots et les choses (Words and Things), Foucault had argued that the Human was a peculiarly modern notion, one that could be historically situated and delimited, and which hence could not simply be accorded the kind of universal validity long regarded as self-evident. In this perspective, the idea of the sciences humaines could be understood only in terms of an effort to discern and establish the limits of the and thereby to render it a suitable object of scientific investigation. In the French human sciences, therefore, the epistemological accent had to be placed on the not on the human. And although the situation was somewhat less clear-cut in Germany, inasmuch as the so-called Humanwissenschaften never succeeded in articulating themselves as extensively as in France, the tendency there was no doubt similar. The prestige enjoyed by the term Wissenschaftlichkeit -scientificity- in academic discourse is indicative of a cognitive ideal that equates scientific- wissenschaftlich - with rigorous, coherent inquiry and knowledge, no matter what the domain

Ambivalence · Medical humanities · French Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis

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