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AGONIES OF THE REAL: ANTI-REALISM FROM KUHN TO FOUCAULT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

PETER E. GORDON
PETER E. GORDON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the word real? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marks themselves supposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one puts reality in quotation marks (thus: “reality”) we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté?

Type
Forum: Kuhn's Structure at Fifty
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 127 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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