The relationship between power and language has been a central theme in critical theory for decades now, yet there is still much to be learned about the sheer force of language in the world in which we live. In Empire of Language, Laurent Dubreuil explores the power-language phenomenon in the context of European and, particularly, French colonialism and its aftermath. Through readings of the colonial experience, he isolates a phraseology based on possession, in terms of both appropriation and haunting, that has persisted throughout the centuries. Not only is this phraseology a legacy of the past, it is still active today, especially in literary renderings of the colonial experience―but also, and more paradoxically, in anticolonial discourse. This phrase shaped the teaching of European languages in the (former) empires, and it tried to configure the usage of those idioms by the "Indigenes." Then, scholarly disciplines have to completely reconsider their discursive strategies about the colonial, if, at least, they attempt to speak up.Dubreuil ranges widely in terms of time and space, from the ancien régime through the twentieth century, from Paris to Haiti to Quebec, from the Renaissance to the riots in the banlieues. He examines diverse texts, from political speeches, legal documents, and colonial treatises to anthropological essays, poems of the Négritude, and contemporary rap, ever attuned to the linguistic strategies that undergird colonial power. Equally conversant in both postcolonial criticism and poststructuralist scholarship on language, but also deeply grounded in the sociohistorical context of the colonies, Dubreuil sets forth the conditions for an authentically postcolonial scholarship, one that acknowledges the difficulty of getting beyond a colonialism―and still maintains the need for an afterward.

Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression

Literature & Fiction

Dubreuil, Laurent

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition (Volume 32) (Posthumanities)

The Intellective Space explores the nature and limits of thought. It celebrates the poetic virtues of language and the creative imperfections of our animal minds while pleading for a renewal of the humanities that is grounded in a study of the sciences.
According to Laurent Dubreuil, we humans both say more than we think and think more than we say. Dubreuil’s particular interest is the intellective space, a space where thought and knowledge are performed and shared. For Dubreuil, the term “cognition” refers to the minimal level of our mental operations. But he suggests that for humans there is an excess of cognition due to our extensive processing necessary for verbal language, brain dynamics, and social contexts. In articulating the intellective, Dubreuil includes “the productive undoing of cognition.”
Dubreuil grants that cognitive operations take place and that protocols of experimental psychology, new techniques of neuroimagery, and mathematical or computerized models provide access to a certain understanding of thought. But he argues that there is something in thinking that bypasses cognitive structures. Seeking to theorize with the sciences, the book’s first section develops the “intellective hypothesis” and points toward the potential journey of ideas going beyond cognition, after and before computation. The second part, “Animal Meditations,” pursues some of the consequences of this hypothesis with regard to the disparaged but enduring project of metaphysics, with its emphasis on categories such as reality, humanness, and the soul.

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Poetry and Mind: Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)

What one cannot compute, one must poetize: this essay theorizes the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience by putting the emphasis on poetry. Poetry grants us the ability to move “beyond the limits of thought” and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein’s point of arrival in the Tractatus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, or neuroscience cannot be ignored, if, as “humanists,” we are ever interested in the way we think. Thus, a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition serves to better situate the normal regimes of thought―and to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. This essay shows that poetry―a very widespread and possibly universal phenomenon among humans―arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations; but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, they singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. They tend to exceed their own algorithms, made of iterations and linguistic re-organizations. They are often reflexive, strange, cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than “global:” it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, or from cuneiform tablet to rap music.

Fordham University Press

“What one cannot compute, one must poetize.” So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems―Western and non-Western, low culture and high―Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience.Poetry grants us the ability to move “beyond the limits of thought” and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein’s point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up.Poetry and Mind shows that poetry―a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans―arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves.The literary scope of this book is more than “global”: it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil’s readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains.

The Refusal of Politics (Incitements)

Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics - toward a break from politics, the political and policies. He calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Edinburgh University Press

Laurent Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics: toward a break from politics, the political and policies. Rather than yet another re-articulation, he calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable.The first chapter situates the refusal of politics in relation to different contemporary theoretical attempts to renew politics, and makes the case for a greater rupture. The second moment takes up what is liveable in life by way of apolitical experience, in contrast to appropriations of the collective, including a discussion of the arts. Finally, Dubreuil draws up an incomplete inventory of means: forms of existence - often frail and fleeting - that make an exit toward atopia.

Dialogues on the Human Ape (Posthumanities)

<div> A primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a "human animal" Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology.&nbsp; Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a "human animal" means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research. Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the "human animal" self. </div>

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue

A primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a “human animal”
Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology. 
Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a “human animal” means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research.
Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the “human animal” self.

Bienvenue dans le monde de la politique d'identit, qui, d'Amrique jusqu'ici, est en passe de devenir notre horizon commun. Selon la bonne nouvelle identitaire rpandue chaque seconde par le brouhaha de la communication et le babil des "rseaux sociaux" , nous agissons, vivons et pensons en tant que catgories, au besoin croises (par exemple homme blanc juif, LGTBQ) et volontiers blesses. Comme le rvle son exprience amricaine et prfiguratrice, qui diffuse partir du foyer des universits, la politique d'identit conforte l'avnement d'un despotisme dmocratis, o le pouvoir autoritaire n'est plus entre les seules mains du tyran, du Parti ou de l'Etat, mais la porte d'tres manufacturs et interconnects que traversent des types de dsirs totalitaires. Cet ordre mondialis est une dictature moralisatrice qui distribue les prbendes en fonction du mme, qui remplace le dialogue par le soliloque plaintif et la vocifration, qui interdit, qui censure l'inattendu - dont les arts - au nom du dj-dit et des comme-nous. Malgr son succs grandissant, une telle entreprise peut encore tre dfaite, condition, du moins, d'en vouloir comprendre les manifestations contemporaines.

La dictature des identités

Sociology

Gallimard]

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Books by Dubreuil, Laurent

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dubreuil, Laurent. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression

The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition (Volume 32) (Posthumanities)

The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition (Volume 32) (Posthumanities)

Poetry and Mind: Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)

Poetry and Mind: Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)

The Refusal of Politics (Incitements)

The Refusal of Politics (Incitements)

Dialogues on the Human Ape (Posthumanities)

Dialogues on the Human Ape (Posthumanities)

La dictature des identités