Beyond the Survival of the - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Beyond the Survival of the
Global Humanities

Sara Guyer

Over the past several years, scholars and critics have begun to talk about the survival
of the humanities rather than its crisis. This essay traces the emergence of a rhetoric
of salvation and survival in academic advocacy literature, evident in the genres, ar-
guments, and metaphors that writers use to describe the academic humanities. Fo-
cusing, first, on a set of recent books that advocate for the humanities as a resource
for deliberation, community formation, and critique, the essay then turns to the or-
igin of the contemporary humanities in European philology as a background for the
dualism of survival and crisis in narratives about the humanities. The essay con-
cludes by arguing that we need a new framework for understanding the survival of
the humanities as global humanities, in particular, one that does not emerge from
a European and Christological sense of survival. Drawing upon research conducted
as part of the “World Humanities Report,” the essay identifies some of these alterna-
tive frameworks based upon the humanities in China, South Africa, and Argentina.

T he survival of the humanities is on our minds. While for decades the hu-

manities were ensnared in the rhetoric of crisis, our lament has recent-
ly turned to strategy, argument, and manifesto, and with this turn, io sono-
plicitly and explicitly, to life and survival. Recent book titles like Sidonie Smith’s
A Manifesto for the Humanities and Eric Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argu-
ment. A Plan., and collections like A New Deal for the Humanities suggest that change
is afoot. Judith Butler, in her President’s Address to the Modern Language Asso-
ciation, called this persistence, evoking a form of feminist stubbornness.1 Further,
those who continue to hold on to the crisis discourse of the humanities do so now
not to indicate an event that could be overcome, but rather a condition that may be
permanent, which is nowhere more clear than in Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s
Permanent Crisis. Permanent crisis is nothing if not a name for endurance and sur-
vival. But what does it mean to talk about the humanities in terms of survival?
What kind of survival are we talking about? And what exactly is going to survive:
where and in what form and at what critical cost?

These questions resonate throughout the World Humanities Report, a collabora-
tion between the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and the Inter-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

national Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences, which I have directed
since 2018. The organizing questions of the report–Where do the humanities live
in the world today? And what are the conditions of their flourishing?–suggest
survival more than crisis. Further, the report’s ground-up approach, organized
around contributions from distinct national, regional, continental, and linguis-
tic settings, has the secondary effect of reflecting survival as a global condition. In
the report, the humanities appear as other than a lasting European formation and
colonial/imperial project whose legacies continue to shape disciplines and insti-
tutions. Piuttosto, the humanities are a multitudinous, vast, and uneven set of en-
gagements with interpretation, critica, judgment, representation, translation,
preservation, voice, experience, and aesthetics that are not exhausted by Europe-
an humanism and its disciplinary effects.

The report’s contributors account for a wide range of institutional, disci-
plinary, and financial interventions, as well as policies and commitments, Quello
will serve today and for the future. It shows further that the institutions of the
humanities are modern universities on the European model as we know them,
but also NGOs, museums, public humanities projects in radio and podcasts, In-
formal “street” universities, scholarly societies, academies, summer schools, E
independent research institutes. These alternative formations include the Forum
on Contemporary Theory in India, a mobile winter school that includes partici-
pants from across the subcontinent; the Africa Institute, a new graduate program
in the arts and humanities based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; and Les Ate-
liers de la Pensée, a collaboration of scholars, artists, and intellectuals focused in
the francophone world working through books, a media campaign, conferences,
and an intensive program for early career scholars.2 Yet the new rhetoric of surviv-
al focuses almost exclusively on the university-based humanities: hiring faculty,
maintaining levels of undergraduate enrollment, ensuring lively academic press-
es, and envisioning forms of collaboration and interdisciplinarity through which
the humanities become embedded in all areas of the university, from AI to public
health to urban studies.3 In this sense, they raise questions of reproduction and re-
producibility, of legacy, and of the difficulty of breaking from dominant legacies
that include colonialism and myriad forms of institutionalized political violence.
In what follows, I provide an overview of the emergence of this powerful rhetoric
of survival in academic advocacy literature, before suggesting the risks of this new
discourse and asking whether there are alternatives beyond crisis and survival.

I n her account of the precarious state of the humanities within the university,

Sidonie Smith, former president of the Modern Language Association, frames
the challenge faced by the humanities in terms of “sustainability,” borrowing
a framework typically used to describe the future of the planet.4 Implicit in sus-
tainability is that a set of collective choices and strategies, whether conceived as

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

imaginative or sacrificial, has the power to change the lifespan of the humanities
and guarantee a future. In Smith’s account, the humanities will need to be recon-
ceived in order to be durable; their (our) practices and protocols, particularly as
they relate to reproduction (graduate education), will need to be reenvisioned to
shift from risk of extinction to survival. The newly sustainable practices she enu-
merates include collaboration, flexibility, open access, innovative teaching, net-
working, and inclusion. What I find notable in this example is the way that a long-
held attachment to crisis and near-death in accounts of the humanities (a crisis
that once dominated popular, administrative, and scholarly discourse) has been
subsumed by a “life drive.” If the earlier account of near-death left many to won-
der whether the end already had taken place, whether our time was both that of
an ever-deferred future crisis and a past event that had escaped us and for which
we were constantly making amends, I want to suggest that this new attention to
life in the humanities might also correlate to what Cathy Caruth has called “a dif-
ferent history of survival,” one less preoccupied with death and newly consumed
with life.5

Another version of this preoccupation with life is more subtle in its appear-
ance, less about sustainable strategies and more about the very conception of the
humanities and its (their, our) value. Take, Per esempio, Amanda Anderson’s Clar-
endon Lectures on “Psyche and Ethos,” in which life is the concept and condition
through which values are established and affirmed. There, the examined or mor-
al life becomes the vehicle for the survival of the humanities within “transdisci-
plinary collaborations and precisely around questions of value clarification and
understanding of human experience.”6 In other words, affirming moral life and
value as an overlooked (even disparaged) priority of humanities scholarship is
also the condition under which the humanities will take on a new and more sus-
tainable life in the university and society. (This is in distinction from the human-
ities conceived as engaged with precarious life, the hermeneutics of suspicion, ir-
resolution, or futurity.) For Anderson, when understood in relation to moral life,
the humanities become increasingly valuable to actual sustainability: climate sci-
ence, global health, good governance.

As both of these examples imply, the life or death of the humanities is almost
inextricable from an analysis of the one place where we know the humanities are
supposed to live: the university.7 This analysis has been brewing over many de-
cades, Per esempio, in Jacques Derrida’s account of the humanities in his lecture
on the university without condition or Bill Readings’s collection The University in
Ruins. Taking Readings’s understanding of ruins one step further, Chris Newfield
recently asked, in the title of his article, “What Are the Humanities For?” New-
field begins his response by making abundantly clear that the place where the hu-
manities should live–the public university–is itself already dead. As Newfield
explains: “Public universities . . . seem not just unable but unwilling to save them-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

selves. Given their inertia, public universities will have an easier time moving
forward if they start from the idea that public universities as we knew them are
dead.”8 One wonders who is this public university that is coming into self-aware-
ness of its own death? Is it merely the board of regents, the senior administration,
the academic senate, or–insofar as it is not just a single university but the many
“flagships” that he lists, in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Chapel Hill–is
this merely an impossible or fictional instance of recognition, as impossible as the
dead recognizing themselves as dead?

Allo stesso modo, one wonders whether life in Newfield’s account, however metaphor-
ical, is a physical condition, a matter of motion (inertia), or biological, and whether
sustainability and survival are the same as “movement.” (As if “no motion has she
now, no force” describes not a child but the public university.) Newfield continues
to qualify what exactly he means by death (if not salvation), describing an insti-
tution that lives on as a corpse or ghost, hollowed of the intellectual and socially
transformative project at its core. He writes:

Obviously, the institutions and their activities carry on–the building mortgages, IL
student activities, the administrative hiring, the sports programs, and the academic
labor. But their public missions do not . . . they no longer present themselves as form-
ing the destiny of humanity. . . . The mid-twentieth-century public university, in short,
is dead.9

Newfield concludes his essay on the use (or position) of the humanities by ar-
guing for a reversal of strategy that would amount to revitalizing and reanimat-
ing the public university, lifting it from its grave. I am less interested here in the
accuracy of his account of universities (though having worked at two of the uni-
versities that appear on his list, I can say that it is not so much the abandonment
of mission as it is a turn away from the humanities as the steward of that mission,
a turn that can be reversed, which Newfield acknowledges) than I am in New-
field’s reliance on a passage from death to life, especially to a life that is ghostly
and unfulfilled.

Newfield makes five suggestions for what universities could do to salvage the
humanities: three are speech acts (proclaim, admit, define), events in and through
language that would also be the evidence of salvation and recovery; two are fi-
nancial commitments, reinvestments in research and teaching, that also take the
form of agreements. He concludes by responding to the question that provides the
title of his essay: “My answer to what the humanities are for is that they are for
putting mass Bildung back at the center of the postcapitalist university that is now
in the early agonies of birth. The public university is dead. Long live the public uni-
versity.”10 For Newfield, the humanities are for saving the university as a public
university and for reestablishing its values; the humanities remain the unit within
the university that attends to these values. In other words, by saving the universi-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

ty, the humanities save the person, and save the people. They turn the infant into
a subject and even a citizen.

But this account of a recovered and reformed university as “forming the desti-
ny of humanity,” and of the humanities not just as forming selves or a commons
but as a project of mass bildung, possesses the over/undertones of twentieth-
century populist movements. The evocation of birth agony, destiny, monarchy,
sovereignty, and immortality, even if only in order to issue a somewhat hyperbol-
ic call for a public good, cannot ultimately shed its tinge of redemption, a sticky
association that attaches onto this rhetoric of the humanities’ salvation and sur-
vival. To borrow from the insights of a recent “theological-political genealogy”
of survival, I wonder whether the rhetoric of the survival of the humanities, for
all of its strategy and pragmatism, recasts the humanities in a quasi-theological,
redemptive mode at the moments when the humanities are being recognized as a
public good and as valuable to the university’s research mission. E, taking this
ulteriore, because the humanities issue from a conception of the human and the
humane with which they continue to struggle, I wonder too whether any turn to
salvation and survival also hosts a history of Christianity, imperialism, and Euro-
nationalism. If the university, saved by the humanities, stands in the place of the
sovereign, especially at the moment when Newfield announces that the (public
good) university is dead–and lives on–what does this mean for the global hu-
manities?11 Can the humanities survive in modern universities beyond their Eu-
ropean and Christian origins? Or is the only method of overcoming their origins
one that seeks not survival but a radical reconception of the humanities as global
humanities?

Put more explicitly, I am asking whether the shift from crisis to survival that I
have been tracing, the shift from a preoccupation with death to a preoccupation
with life and living-on, cannot be extricated from a Christological account of the
humanities. I am asking whether this reasserts–rather than rearranges–the de-
scent of the humanities from a Latinate and ultimately European framework with
the powers of civilization and redemption that it animates (and that animate it).
In other words, the survival of the humanities is not just the survival of the human-
ities. It is the survival of the humanities as “human destiny,” “life beyond death,"
and redemption through the university. In this logic, do we need a new concept for
their survival, one that opens a global frame and resists destinal thinking?

In what follows, I would like to draw out this example even further, looking
first to a somewhat traditional history of the humanities that borrows this figura-
zione (in distinction from the more advocacy-oriented work of the literary scholars
I already have introduced), then revisiting the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
definition of humanities (and its location), before finally considering a Chinese ex-
ample in which the humanities, modeled after a European or “Western” history,
are evoked as part of a nationalist project of survival. In conclusion, I ask wheth-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

er there is an alternative to the crisis/survival or apocalypse/redemption frame-
lavoro, and what it might be.

I am following this line of thought not only in order to ask about the condi-

tions of the humanities flourishing in a scholarly or abstract sense, but be-
cause I spend a great deal of time arguing for the importance of the human-
ities within the public university and the value of humanities centers and insti-
tutes as sites of possibility and collaboration. At my own University of California,
Berkeley, and in national and international contexts, I insist, like Smith and An-
derson, that we must think further about “what is to be done,” whether that
means redesigning graduate programs or confronting “the question of the moral
life more directly, without fear of sounding didactic, benighted, or insufficiently
political.”12 I also am aware that when it comes to substitutions of life for death
(and death for life) that we should linger and see how the specter of life and death
is overdetermined and how the rhetoric of survival draws not only from ecocriti-
cism and allegory, but equally from ethnonationalism, theology, and the variety of
administrative regimes that issue from them and that have led to multiple forms
of colonial violence and the repression of Indigenous and minority knowledges.
These are projects that universities and humanities scholars often have facilitated
rather than resisted.

While I have been looking at Smith, Anderson, and Newfield and their inqui-
ries at the intersection of analysis and institutional activism, even more tradition-
al scholarly accounts of the humanities deploy a survivalist frame. Take, for exam-
ple, historian James Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities.
Turner’s argument is that despite their disciplinary diversity–ranging from anthro-
pology to visual culture to philosophy–the humanities, as they have come into be-
ing at least since the nineteenth century, are indebted to and entangled with the
study of language and literature. Yet Turner’s account of this history of the human-
ities registers still another version of the rhetoric of survival. In the book’s introduc-
tory chapter, he describes his own contribution in this idiom: “Despite many fine
monographs, no one to date has ventured an overview of . . . the birth of the mod-
ern humanities in the English-speaking world from the womb of philology. . . . Questo
book tells that story.”13 Here, the feminized biologization of philology as womb and
the humanities as progeny, the suggestion that there is an (unacknowledged) event,
following a period of gestation, that occurs in a moment that could be dated, E
further the implication of infancy, growth, E, implicitly, death reflect an imagina-
tion of the humanities as a living being. More than this, Turner positions his study
as having a particular role to play in the obscure birth of the humanities becoming
knowable. It is only through his “venture,” his “over-view,” made possible by his
fictional stance as a historian who exists outside, above, and beyond the humanities,
that the birth and the proper life of the humanities become visible.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

When, a few paragraphs later, Turner explicitly talks about survival, it is not
the survival of the modern humanities that interests him, but of the “antiquat-
ed” practices of philology that are their predecessor, leading him to explain: “Be-
cause philology’s legacy survives in the ways we build knowledge today, the excava-
tion of the philological past becomes an effort at once of historical reconstruction
and present-day self-understanding.”14 Turner’s history itself is in the mode of
bildungsroman. But what of this mother-child scene and the humanities as “bless’d
babe”? Is it a Kleinian moment of betrayal or a Christological moment of grace?
The mother, while the hero of the tale, is also merely a womb. She ends up dead
and buried, incapable of telling her own story, and in need of excavation and his-
torical reconstruction, a project Turner enthusiastically takes up. And yet it is
she, silent vessel, who is also the very condition of the reconstruction of which
she is the object.15 Just as Newfield’s vision of survival rides on a logic of redemp-
tive sovereignty, so too does this image of maternal death and recovery also make
manifest a dichotomy between biologization (and the mortality it implies) E
symbolization (and the immortality it invokes). The humanities, here, become
merely human, and this is a story of resurrecting the mother–unless, Ovviamente,
the progeny (the humanities) is Christ himself.

The origin story that Turner recovers focuses on the early (and ongoing) use of
the humanities at Oxford to refer to the secular study of Latin or Latin and Greek:
the classics. Turner, once again absorbing the rhetoric of institutional survival,
writes:

It is telling that John Edwin Sandys’s venerable History of Classical Scholarship, when it
reaches the western Middle Ages, becomes no longer a history of scholarship (of crit-
ical editions, commentaries, and scholia) but of survival–of where knowledge of an-
cient texts persisted, of where grammar and rhetoric were still taught.16

He goes on to refer to the relationships across time and geography in the biblical
idiom of “begetting.”

Even here, in resonance with Newfield, institutional survival displaces schol-
arship, a move whose overdetermination indicates the high stakes of this history.
While Turner is compelled by a return of philology in the humanities, his account
of that return is somewhat underdetermined. Questo è, it misses some of the more
visible recent returns of philology. While they are not strictly historical in outlook,
if included, they might have shaken some of the book’s more confident claims.
Here, I am thinking not only of Nietzsche, whose relation to philology was ambiv-
alent, but also the late work of Paul de Man and Edward Said, both of whom, COME
Geoffrey Galt Harpham points out, despite their differences of style, project, E
understanding, wrote essays at the end of their lives with the title: “The Return of
Philology.”17 If, for Turner, philology is the origin of the humanities that he is at
work to recover, for de Man and Said, philology already has found its way back to

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

the humanities, whether as speculative science or as theory. Philology will not just
save the humanities, rather it is, as Harpham explains, a way of naming its crisis.

I n a very different history than the one we find in Turner, Harpham carefully

recalls the origins of philology as the study of languages that for a brief mo-
ment served as a model for science–and appeared to be more scientific than
science itself. In this context, he also recalls the deep imbrication of philology and
racial (racist) theory.18 Passing from Darwin to Gobineau to our present, Har-
pham argues (without reference to Turner) that we do not merely get the human-
ities from philology, we also get from philology the crisis of the humanities, E
the response to crises outside of the humanities (crises of identity, the nation, E
belonging). We get the antagonism between science (theory) and criticism, schol-
arly and generalist practices, complicity with racism and the resistance to racism,
professionalization and skepticism of it. He argues that after the Cold War ended,

the humanities lost something of their reason for being, the legitimating crisis in
which they were to have played a necessary part. Inoltre, as the humanities, like
other academic disciplines, became professionalized, they became insular–self-vali-
dating, self-legitimating, self-referring, self-interested. The link between the human-
ities and the state on the one hand and the individual on the other became attenu-
ated. Detached from its rationale and isolated from its supporters, the humanities,
conceived as a response to various crises themselves fell into crisis; and as higher ed-
ucation took a pragmatic, scientific turn, other sectors of the university, particularly
the sciences and professional education, came to command more attention, resourc-
es, and prestige.19

Moving from Turner’s redemptive account of philology as grounding the hu-
manities to Harpham’s account of philology’s unsettling and contradictory re-
turns, we see that, whether understood as the return of science and theory or the
return of pseudoscience, mere criticism, and speculation, whether framed in re-
lation to the impossible return to (or of ) a stolen homeland (Said) or the refused re-
turn of a repressed complicity (de Man), philology is not simply an empty vessel
to be recovered from the ruins of the present humanities. It is a mobile signifier
whose repetitions are entangled with the crisis of the humanities in a scene that
the humanities are called upon to witness. In other words, the return of philology
can be both central to an account of the living humanities and a source of crisis
(and death). While life or death narratives surely raise the stakes of the human-
ities, these stakes also precede the critical and historical interventions that I have
been describing. I have been suggesting that the survival of the humanities and
its rhetoric does not merely replace crisis with optimism and a new framework
of creative interventions. It also harbors an enduring set of risks and attachments
that we cannot ignore.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

This confusion of life and death is inscribed in the English definition of the
humanities–and in that definition’s displacement. The OED has no stand-alone
entry for humanities. Invece, humanities in English remains a definition within the
entry for humanity. Humanize, humanitas, humanistic–I could go on–all have their
own entries, but to get at a definition of humanities, one must access it as the plural
of humanity, which it is, Ovviamente, but which it also is not. Here humanities is iden-
tified as a subset of the primary definition of humanity. It is the plural of humanity
defined as humane, recalling the Latin and the study of Latin letters, and suggest-
ing that the humanities are an index not of the human understood as race or spe-
cies, but rather as disposition, behavior, and character, as civilized and civilizing.
It is humanity as ethos, not bios, and this suggests that ways of relating and ways
of knowing are inextricably linked. The fact that there is no stand-alone entry for
the humanities in the OED introduces a set of further questions about what we are
talking about when we talk about survival. In this defining moment, we can see
(and hear) how the humanities’ persistence–the value and persistence of methods,
disciplines, or practices–do not just evoke, but are indissociable from humanity’s
persistence. The inclusion of the humanities within this single entry that includes
collective and species identities as well as civilizational practices also evokes the
long history of the humanities as a violent force within nationalist, colonial, E
postcolonial networks and the reproductive force of the humanities at home and
in the world. I am suggesting that recent academic narratives of the humanities’
survival, however liberal in their claims, remain burdened by logics of resurrec-
tion and redemption that are doggedly Eurocentric and Christological, leading us
to question whether there can be a future for the humanities that is at once affir-
mative and detached from colonial violence and repression.

W hile I have focused until now on Europe and its legacies, particular-

ly in U.S. academic discourse, I now want to turn to the case of Chi-
na. From a philological perspective we have seen that humanities as a
concept and word is untranslatable, troubling an account of the global humanities.
It is also a word and concept that increasingly circulates in a globalized system
of knowledge dominated by English and in the negotiation of institutional forms
modeled after those in the United States and Europe.20 At the same time, some
historically European institutions today are turning to China (and by extension to
the Chinese state) for institutional and financial support, rearranging the global
academic order and establishing a new ecosystem for the humanities.

In China, where the fraught relationship between the humanities and human
rights continues to play out, it seems that violent force was always part of the mod-
ern university’s “public mission” (to use Newfield’s language). As historian Wang
Hui has explained, the modern Chinese university emerged with the founding in
1881 of Beiyang Naval School, which connected philology to its global project, Rif-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

quiring daily study of Chinese classics and English language, as well as technical
courses taught in English and embedding the humanities within a military educa-
tion.21 Beiyang was the precursor of Peking University, which expanded its offer-
ings in the humanities to include not only classics, but also literature and history,
as well as sciences, law, agriculture, and the professions. Wang Hui uses this exam-
ple to reflect upon the entanglement of the Chinese, American, and European uni-
versity systems and identifies three stages in the recent history of the humanities
in China. These include the removal of all international and scholarly standards,
whereby the humanities became pure ideology, followed by the establishment of
a university system that had scholarly and intellectual relevance outside of China
in the mid-1990s. Tuttavia, the latest developments in China suggest still another
stage. The former relevance and influence of the humanities have been supplant-
ed by a new international strategy that incorporates, rather than overcomes, vio-
lence and ideology.

In many ways, it appears as if the humanities in China are flourishing, leading
to international conferences, collaborations, and commitments. They certainly
have gained the attention and influence of a number of international organiza-
zioni, including the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences
(CIPSH), an NGO formed in the last century to serve as the conscience of UNESCO
in the aftermath of European fascism. CIPSH is known for its publication of a
massive study of The Third Reich that was designed as a platform for European in-
tellectuals to recognize and expose the forms of political violence that led to the
near destruction of Europe’s Jews, and it also is one of the leading partners for the
World Humanities Report. Yet because the humanities are underfunded in the Unit-
ed States and Europe, CIPSH today is a benefactor of the contemporary Chinese
state that Wang describes, and it is as much a Chinese organization as it is Euro-
pean. But can the humanities flourish even as censorship and repression are the
norm? Can they have international resonance while ignoring political violence?
Increasingly well endowed and well supported, the state-supported humanities in
China have become a source of “soft power” made more powerful by the defund-
ing of the humanities in the rest of the world. Their new stability, unlike the pre-
carity and risk experienced in the United States, is correlated to what Wang calls
a “new orthodoxy,” which also produces what he does not explicitly state: a set of
distractions and justifications for ongoing abuses of freedom and human rights. IO
read in Wang’s history of the humanities in China that the humanities–and the
university–today can be made to live and apparently flourish, but they do so in a
context where “inquiry without condition” is foreclosed. The history that he tells
reminds us that the Chinese university today is, despite its explicit commitments
to the humanities, as it was at its outset, a project “with military, industrial, E
political motivations . . . the product of ‘national salvation and survival.’”22 The
place in the world where the humanities are most apparently alive and most ro-

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

bustly supported is also where they have been left for dead. The life drive here is a
cipher and a veil.

I would like to conclude not by outlining a set of new strategies or fashioning a

new polemic, but by asking, in light of the account I have provided, whether
there are–whether there could be–nonredemptive, nonapocalyptic strategies
for the humanities. Can we break from these dramas of life and death and the vio-
lences that they permit? Or can we only become increasingly aware of them and
commit to reworking them and sustaining the humanities in this way?23

Returning to Sidonie Smith’s Manifesto, where I take sustainability as another
example of the new life drive in the discourse surrounding the humanities, I also
find in its somewhat modest and deeply pragmatic tone (questo è, this is not mass
bildung or even moral life, but mere sustainability in what she calls, after D. W.
Winnicott, “good enough times”) the seed of possibility. Primo, the way that Smith
understands sustainability is, surprisingly, as a form of nonreproduction. Simi-
larly, many arguments about sustainability in an environmental idiom also focus
on the nonreproduction of our practices and institutions. This logic, whereby the
future is dissociated from reproduction, evokes, even as it differs from, arguments
like those Lee Edelman laid out in No Future. Even more recently, in an essay on
queer philology, Daniel Link asks another version of these questions: “But how to
teach, how to develop a non-reproductive or non-reproductivist pedagogy that re-
covers the power of transformation that the humanities once had, without being
confined to the cabinet of useless curiosities?”24

Yet for all of our efforts at preservation, nonreproduction is also one of the sig-
nificant methods of the humanities. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, his-
torian Dipesh Chakrabarty, Per esempio, stakes out a new set of scholarly alliances
and practices to reflect on his own version of non-self-reproduction and his break
from postcolonial theory. He explains: “The fact of the planet . . . coming into view
in the everyday lives of humans leads us to question whether the relationship of
mutuality between humans and the earth/world that many twentieth-century
thinkers inherited, assumed, and celebrated has become untenable today.” He goes
on to ask: “How do we move, in the face of the current ecological crisis, toward
composing a new ‘commons,’ a new anthropology, as it were, in search of a redefini-
tion of human relationships to the nonhuman, including the planet?”25 Even more
radically, and somewhat perversely, Claire Colebrook, in a bleak account of hu-
man extinction, suggests that nonreproduction means the artifacts of the human-
ities will remain without anyone to read them: “the earth’s strata will be inscribed
with scars of the human capacity to create radical and volatile climactic changes.”
Because there will be no one left to read, she is left to ask, “how do we account for
the fossil records or archives borne by the stone?”26 And, returning to the geneal-
ogy of survival that I mentioned earlier, Adam Stern leaves us at the end of the book

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

with the same question with which he began–“Who is speaking of survival?”–a
question that he proposes to answer by inventing a new, imaginary figure of schol-
arly perseverance.27 The questions in each of these texts, by Link, Chakrabarty,
Colebrook, and Stern–which also belong to distinct traditions in the humanities
(Latin American studies, postcolonial history, critical theory, and religious stud-
ies)–and the alternate futures and practices they anticipate suggest a path that
might be neither a life drive nor an apocalyptic collapse, even as they each are ful-
ly engaged with the histories and theories of life and survival. And all of this leads
me to ask whether it is the question itself, “inquiry without condition,” and the
other questions to which we have looked–Can we loosen our grip on survival? Can we
let go of life? What would this look like?–that will enable the humanities to persist,
persevere, endure.

I am convinced that these are not merely rhetorical questions, nor strictly the-
oretical ones. They are the same questions that almost every academic human-
ities department in a U.S. university asks as hiring season comes around. At that
moment, the question inevitably surfaces of whether to replace faculty who have
retired with those in the same fields, or to create spaces for new fields and new
voices, often in interdisciplinary, emergent, or historically under-recognized ar-
eas of research and teaching. Do these new voices have a place in the university if
it means having to give up areas of study that it seems always belonged there and
thus always should belong? Is nonreproduction a form of risk or a form of surviv-
al? Can it be both? These questions and strategies of differentiation give us some
sense that there can be nonreproductive substitutions. So too do the emerging
sites of the humanities with which I began–mobile, adjacent, temporary, instru-
mentalist, and activist–reveal how collaborations within and beyond the univer-
sity, even as they appear to be acts of abandonment, are also instances of survival.
These ongoing negotiations, which cut across the boundaries and disciplines that
we know, are and will be worked out in time.

about the author

Sara Guyer is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. She served as President of the Consortium of Human-
ities Centers and Institutes from 2016–2022. She is the author of Romanticism after
Auschwitz (2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (2015)
and the editor of the book series Lit Z.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer

endnotes

1 Judith Butler, “Stumbling, Errancy, Persistence: The Struggle for the Humanities,” The
Presidential Address, MLA Convention 2021, Gennaio 8, 2021. See also Amy B. Wang,
“‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’ Becomes New Battle Cry after McConnell Silences Eliz-
abeth Warren,” The Washington Post, Febbraio 8, 2017.

2 See Forum on Contemporary Theory, a Member of the Consortium of Humanities Cen-
ters and Institutes, https://fctworld.org; The Africa Institute, https://theafrica
institute.org; and les Ateliers de la Pensée, https://www.lesateliersdelapensee.org.
3 At my own university, three examples come immediately to mind: the Kavli Center for
Ethics, Scienza, and the Public; the establishment of the new College for Comput-
ing, Data Science, and Society, which includes society as part of its mission; and the
multiyear program “The Art of Writing,” designed to integrate writing as an art of
persuasion and inquiry into courses across the campus, and not only in the arts and
humanities.

4 Sidonie Smith, “Manifesto for a Sustainable Humanities,” in Manifesto for the Humanities:
Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2016), 108.

5 Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2013), 17.

6 Amanda Anderson, Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2018), 13.

7 The Humanities Indicators and the National Endowment for the Humanities have made
a point of identifying the place of the humanities in American life, but that realm of
inquiry will await another occasion.

8 Christopher Newfield, “What Are the Humanities For? Rebuilding the Public Universi-
ty,” in A New Deal for the Humanities, ed. Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed (Nuovo
Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 160.

9 Ibid.
10 My emphasis. Ibid., 176.
11 On a somewhat different topic, Smith in her recovery of the humanities turns not to a
set of speech acts and the monarchy but to the workers, evoking Lenin in a chapter she
calls “What Is to Be Done?” See Smith, Manifesto for the Humanities.

12 Anderson, Psyche and Ethos, 104.
13 James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

Stampa universitaria, 2014), xiii.

14 My emphasis. Ibid., 185.
15 My thinking here is indebted to a set of analyses of mothers and poetry, including those
by Cathy Caruth and Barbara Johnson. See Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality,
Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2003); E
Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

16 My emphasis. Turner, Philology, 25.

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesBeyond the Survival of the Global Humanities

17 See Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1986); Edward Said, “The Return to Philology,” in Human-
ism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey
Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: The University of Chi-
cago Press, 2011).

18 I am here glossing over a history of literature and science that Amanda Jo Goldstein more
completely tells. See Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New
Logics of Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).

19 Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America, 189.
20 See Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Mi-

chael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).

21 See Wang Hui, “The Humanities in China: History and Challenges,” History of the Human-

ities 5 (2) (2020): 309–331.

22 Ibid., 314.
23 See Ralph Hexter, with Craig Buckwald, “Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and
Fate: The Ethics of Reading and the University Administrator,” in The Humanities and
Public Life, ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press,
2014).

24 Daniel Link, “Why Should We Be So Humanistic?” in World Humanities Report (forth-

coming).

25 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (London: The University of

Chicago Press, 2021), 19–20.

26 Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays in Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, Mich.:

Open Humanities Press, 2014), 23.

27 See Adam Stern, Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

D
o
w
N
o
UN
D
e
D

F
R
o
M
H

T
T

:
/
/

D
io
R
e
C
T
.

io
T
.

e
D
tu
D
UN
e
D
UN
R
T
io
C
e
–
P
D

F
/

1
5
1
3
5
4
2
0
6
0
6
7
4
D
UN
e
D
_
UN
_
0
1
9
2
8
P
D

B
sì
G
tu
e
S
T

o
N
0
8
S
e
P
e
M
B
e
R
2
0
2
3

151 (3) Summer 2022Sara Guyer
Scarica il pdf