This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity

This Self We Deserve offers a fresh inquiry into modern language, knowledge, and the individual from intercultural philosophy and art-historical perspectives. It contends that modern knowledge has become precarious, an instability bequeathed by a modern tradition of thought that “makes us malfunction in everyday life.” Advancing from Foucault’s account of an epistemic rupture at the turn of Kant’s 19th century, Fann avows that we may become an “anthropocentric structurally overloaded subject” whose “will to truth” seeks self-certainty amid uncertain-knowledge. Despite Weber’s esteemed Occidental rationalism and self-chosen values, our knowledge appears reversed. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” has reversed today into “we think therefore we are.” If we all believe in the same values, belong to the same network of “artificial rationalization,” participate in the systematic manipulation of objects-as-signs, where is our individualism? Fann argues, the modern language examined by Foucault, takes on its own life as an “inner narrative of self” as in Shakespeare, Flaubert, and Joyce. Literature and Pop lyrics articulate the same privileged “ontological status” that Hegel attributed to phonetic language, while “logocentrism” for Derrida is an ethnocentrism. As the phonetic “writing of history” amounts for Lévinas to a form of “ontological imperialism,” personally, our “inner narratives” keep creating “an abyss between self and reality whose edge can never be reached.” We must “unlearn and relearn what we know” to comprehend our baffling of use value into exchange value; heroic modernism into the banality of post-aesthetics; traditional consumption into the simulacral post-consumption; and Super Powers into States of Indebtedness. Fann envisions a world in which the cultural and racial diversities are the human unity. Read more