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Chomsky and Deconstruction

The Politics of Unconscious Knowledge

Christopher Wise 2011


E-Book: 308 English pages

Price: Free

Download: Chomsky and Deconstruction: The Politics of Unconscious Knowledge (Wise 2011).


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This book offers a careful and measured response to Noam Chomsky’s criticism against deconstructive theories of language. The author reveals the connections between Chomsky’s linguistic theories and politics by demonstrating their shared philosophical basis.


Review

Chomsky and Deconstruction provides an important and original look at Chomskian biolinguistics while thoroughly analyzing the implications of its uncritical acceptance in institutions of learning.  Interwoven with a well-researched and theory-rich study are the author’s sometimes humorous and often unequivocally poetic thoughts, reflecting a sensitive and subtle philosopher who is equally concerned with the preservation of incalculable beauty and care within relationship as with delivering a well-executed and exacting academic critique.”
— Mara Steele, Derrida Today

“Chomsky makes very harsh assessments of the scholarship of people like Derrida, and Wise does a good job of showing that it is not simply that deconstructionist theorists ‘write gibberish,’ but that they hold views that challenge many of Chomsky’s basic philosophical assumptions. This book places Chomsky in the history of Western philosophy and shows why the linguists influenced by Chomsky would do well to pay more attention to what is happening in critical theory today, outside the more narrowly defined field of generative theoretical linguistics.”

– Fallou Ngom, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Language Program, Boston University


About the Author

christopher-wiseChristopher Wise Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Western Washington University, USA.

Christopher Wise lives in Bellingham, Washington. Much of his writing focuses on Critical Theory, West Africa, and the Middle East.