Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the "New Science" between Modern and Postmodern

by Sandra Rudnick Luft

Overview

Sandra Luft, in her ambitious postmodernist reading of Vico's profoundly influential New Science, asserts the "strangeness" of texts that struggle to understand human existence outside the assumptions of traditional humanism. One of her central arguments is that Vico as a thinker moved toward such an alien understanding. Despite his warning against the tyranny of "familiar conceits," his work is commonly read within the traditional philosophic assumptions of the West—assumptions that she shows cannot contain nor explain the work's novelty.

The book includes extensive comparisons of Vico with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Luft does not regard Vico as a precursor of the postmodern, which she sees as a recurring perspective in the West, one critical of the assumptions underlying traditional humanist conceptions of human nature and knowledge. Luft finds anachronistic not the question of Vico's affinity to postmodern ideas, but rather his identification with traditional humanism and modernism by modern scholars. Luft's reading brings to the fore radical existential issues in New Science: its concern with origins, with the power of language and social practices, and with its critique of human subjectivity. That perspective makes Vico interesting and important for a wide circle of contemporary readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801441080
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2003
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sandra Rudnick Luft is Professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction	1
	The Cartesian Vico	4
	Theological Models of Human Creativity	8
1.	The Familiar: Verum-Factum as an Epistemological Principle	16
	Verum-Factum and the Emergence of Homo Faber in the Modern Age	16
	Epistemological Interpretations of Vico's Verum-Factum	24
	Verum-Factum as the Secularization of a Divine Predicate	26
	Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Humanist Interpretations of Verum-Factum	37
	Modernist Interpretations of Vico and the Rhetorical Tradition	49
2.	Verum-Factum and the Poetic Ontology of the Hebrews	62
	Hans Blumenberg and Verum-Factum as Principle of the Originary	62
	Descartes and the Legitimation of Constructed Knowledge	65
	The Limits of Constructed Knowledge	70
	Cusa and the Closed Circle of Self-Knowledge	70
	Nietzsche and the Absoluteness of Art	73
	The Originary as Language	76
	Scripture and Its Precursors: The Onto-theological Reading of Genesis	76
	Scripture and Its Precursors: The Postmodern Reading of the Hebraic Originary	88
	Reb Derissa and the Originary Language of Exile	97
	The Secularization of the Language of Exile	103
	Verum-Factum as the Principle of Poetic Ontology	107
3.	The Strange: Verum-Factum and the Secularization of Poetic Ontology	111
	On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians and the God of Neoplatonism	118
	The New Science as Divine Poiesis	135
	The Grossi Bestioni	135
	The Divine Originary Power of Human Language	148
	Heidegger, Grassi, and the Poetic Understanding of Logos, Davar, Gathering	167
	The "Settling" and "Enduring" of Poetic Things	175
	The Uncanny Poetic Humanism of the New Science	196
	Index	203

What People are Saying About This

March 2004 Choice

Luft shows that Vico knew nothing of rabbinic interpretations of Genesis and did not anticipate postmodernism; it is through rabbinic exegetes and postmodernist thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida that one is best able to understand the viewpoint at which Vico arrived and which all his modernist interpreters (many discussed in this book) have failed to grasp. Dense but provocative.

Carol Quillen

This book by Sandra Rudnick Luft, twenty years in the making, is a personal yet rigorous reading of Gianbattista Vico's New Science, put forth by a scholar who has clearly lived with (and, I think, loved) this text for a long time.... Luft recovers the strangeness of the New Science by interpreting its myth of origins, in which she sees a human defined not by knowing but by an act of creating through language that in no way depends on a prior subjectivity, in the light of the meaning of the Hebrew davar.... For those open to alchemical readings, this is a provocative, even exciting book.... Throughout she seeks not to explain where Vico's ideas came from but rather to uncover their radical potential, a potential that perhaps only becomes apparent in the wake of later, historically unrelated writings. Intellectual historians might consider how such an approach could enrich our own readings of complex literary and philosophical texts.

Gustavo Costa

This idiosyncratic book is destined not only to keep alive the interest in Vico among readers unable to approach him in the original but also to stimulate inquiries into the problematic connection of the New Science to Jewish studies.

Fred Dallmayr

Here is a new, captivating, and deeply learned reading of Vico's New Science. Relying on some postmodern as well as rabbinical insights, Luft finds in Vico's work a vindication of poetic creativity outside the parameters of traditional humanist and theological interpretations focused on subjective agency. Leaving behind the modern subject and its so-called 'end,' Vico emerges as the champion of a transformative praxis appropriate for our time.

Hans Kellner

This is an important book, one which will redirect the readings of Vico. The thinker Luft describes is simply more interesting than the one presented by others—more original, more radical, more all the things Vico claimed to be.

Hayden White

This is a deep, learned, and original (but in no way idiosyncratic) reading of Vico's magnificently flawed classic, The New Science. It is also a heroic work, respectfully but adamantly set against the grain of the currently dominant trend in Vico interpretation which seeks to make of him a man of our time rather than of his own. Sandra Luft combines erudition with hermeneutic tact in her reading of Vico's ideas about language, history, and humanism. And her expository style is a treat: precise, passionate, illuminating. A scholar's feast!

Editorial Reviews

"This book by Sandra Rudnick Luft, twenty years in the making, is a personal yet rigorous reading of Gianbattista Vico's New Science, put forth by a scholar who has clearly lived with (and, I think, loved) this text for a long time. . . . Luft recovers the strangeness of the New Science by interpreting its myth of origins, in which she sees a human defined not by knowing but by an act of creating through language that in no way depends on a prior subjectivity, in the light of the meaning of the Hebrew davar. . . . For those open to alchemical readings, this is a provocative, even exciting book. . . . Throughout she seeks not to explain where Vico's ideas came from but rather to uncover their radical potential, a potential that perhaps only becomes apparent in the wake of later, historically unrelated writings. Intellectual historians might consider how such an approach could enrich our own readings of complex literary and philosophical texts."—Carol Quillen, American Historical Reivew, February 2005

"This idiosyncratic book is destined not only to keep alive the interest in Vico among readers unable to approach him in the original but also to stimulate inquiries into the problematic connection of the New Science to Jewish studies."—Gustavo Costa, Renaissance Quarterly, Fall 2004

"Luft shows that Vico knew nothing of rabbinic interpretations of Genesis and did not anticipate postmodernism; it is through rabbinic exegetes and postmodernist thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida that one is best able to understand the viewpoint at which Vico arrived and which all his "modernist" interpreters (many discussed in this book) have failed to grasp. Dense but provocative."—Choice, March 2004

"This is a deep, learned, and original (but in no way idiosyncratic) reading of Vico's magnificently flawed classic, The New Science. It is also a heroic work, respectfully but adamantly set against the grain of the currently dominant trend in Vico interpretation which seeks to make of him a man of our time rather than of his own. Sandra Luft combines erudition with hermeneutic tact in her reading of Vico's ideas about language, history, and humanism. And her expository style is a treat: precise, passionate, illuminating. A scholar's feast!"—Hayden White, University Professor of the History of Consciousness, University of California, Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University

"Here is a new, captivating, and deeply learned reading of Vico's New Science. Relying on some postmodern as well as rabbinical insights, Luft finds in Vico's work a vindication of poetic creativity outside the parameters of traditional humanist and theological interpretations focused on subjective agency. Leaving behind the modern subject and its so-called 'end,' Vico emerges as the champion of a transformative praxis appropriate for our time."—Fred Dallmayr, Notre Dame

"This is an important book, one which will redirect the readings of Vico. The thinker Luft describes is simply more interesting than the one presented by others—more original, more radical, more all the things Vico claimed to be."—Hans Kellner, North Carolina State University

From the Publisher