Labyrinths of Language

Thirteen essays in the book explore and investigate diverse contemporary philosophically current themes and issues.  The title is derived from Wittgenstein's statement that 'anguage is a labyrinth of paths,' and it studiously avoids any conclusive claim on its central motif. What people, both users and theorists, do with language, rather than what it is, is the running theme. The book critically presents the views of a wide range of philosophically and analytically oriented authors including, de Saussure, Levinas,  Lévi-Strauss, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barthes and  Deleuze. Only two essays diverge from the main concern with language: the one on the discourse of death, and another on the philosophy of image. One essay involves an analysis of the cultural and political discourse in a contemporary Malayalam novel. The concluding essay attempts to develop a postcolonial field of language studies, with reference to the works of the 18th century British jurist and linguist Sir William Jones and the subsequent philological tradition, whose political consequences are only beginning to be understood.

Franson Manjali serves as Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics at Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His previous publications include: Nuclear Semantics: Towards a Theory of Relational Meaning; Meaning, Culture and Cognition; Literature and Infinity; Language, Discource and Culture; Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives.

Introduction 1. The 'Social' and the 'Cognitive' in Language: A Reading of Saussure and Beyond 2. Between the Self and the Other: Language after Levinas 3. On Language and the Assumed Unity of the Human Sciences 4. Between Pragmatics and Deconstruction: Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Derrida 5. Time, Language and the Destruction of Power 6. Kafka: Literature, Law and Language 7. Blanchot, Writing and the Politico-Religious 8. The Discourse of Death 9. The Body of Sense, the Sense of Body 10. Towards a Philosophy of Image 11. Culture and Politics in the Novel: On the Banks of the River Mahe 12. Globalization of English and the Indian Linguistic Context 13. Beginnings of Modern Linguistics and the Colonial Context: Perspectives from History, Culture and Religion