Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center

Dennis Bouvard's Anthropomorphics is the inauguration of a meta-discipline: a strategy for entering and transforming the secular disciplines. Where challenges to liberalism often accept some degree of the liberal frame, Bouvard strikes at the very root. Starting with the signifying center rather than agents alienated from each other, he penetrates and repurposes liberal disciplinary spaces. Anthropomorphics enjoins us to reconfigure our practices by attending to our language, and to the relation of our language to our practices, offering a rectification not just of names, but of the very grammar of our discourses. Taking his point of departure from Eric Gans' originary hypothesis, Bouvard shows that the prehistory of language is recapitulated in human social history: the move from a sacral, traditional social order to a modern one echoes the move from ostensive utterances to imperatives, and finally to the declarative sentence. This powerful set of conceptual tools makes clear how our social imperatives come to be fragmented, and points the way to making them whole-by directing our shared attention back to the center. Bouvard suggests ways to begin thinking about such wide ranging topics as the economy, democracy, aesthetics, and education that foreclose on the most destructive tendencies of liberalism and the modern world in general.