Abstract
In this chapter, the authors address the linguistic helplessness that befell Anglophone countries in the wake of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s election in the United States. A general uncertainty about how to counter the weakening civic vocabularies in these societies stems from the fact that their majorities have paid little systematic attention to language, except when regulating it in exclusionary ways. Instead, the task of critical vigilance has been silently outsourced to minorities. To reverse the pattern and dismantle language as a form of entitlement, the authors advocate for “language critique.” Formulated around 1900 and first practiced by Germanophone thinkers, this holistic approach to observing and documenting the social and medial transformations of language draws on three key practices: distrust, disinterest, and distance.
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Notes
- 1.
Translation by Paul Reiter, in The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, ed. and trans. Jonathan Franzen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 127.
- 2.
Samuel Beckett, Dream, 191, cited in Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, 10.
- 3.
In English: Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich. LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, edited by Martin Brady. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- 4.
Griehsel, “Interview with Herta Müller.”
- 5.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” December 16, 1966, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx, accessed on September 19, 2017. See also, Moria Paz, “The Failed Promise of Language Rights: A Critique of the International Language Rights Regime,” Harvard International Law Journal 54:1 (Winter 2013): 159–160.
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Komska, Y., Moyd, M., Gramling, D. (2019). Critique. In: Linguistic Disobedience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92010-8_2
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