Christopher Norris was awakened to the implications of CriticalrnTheory by the Gulf War, or rather by an article on the crisisrnwritten by a leading postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard, in thernleftist Guardian a few days before the war broke out. (See hisrnUncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the GulfrnWar, 1992.) We live inside language, according to the tenets ofrnthe faith, and there is no outside, no reality, no facts outside ofrnthe language games wc play. “We do not have a language,” Heideggerrnwrote. “Rather, language has us.” There is a profoundrninsight there, but it is not the whole truth. Baudrillard explainedrnthat the crisis that accompanied the Iraqi invasion ofrnIt is said that one bright youngrntheorist told his friends as hernlay dying of AIDS, 1 die happy, becausernI was infected by MichelrnFoucault/ Those words could be,rnmay yet be, the epitaph of thernhumanities in the United States.rnKuwait was a game played by the Powers That Be. There wasrnno There there. When the war was over, along with the massivernbombings and killings of soldier and ci’ilian from hostilernand friendly hre, the environmental pollution, the massacre ofrnthe Kurds who heeded the American call for an uprising againstrnSaddam Hussein which we had no intention of backing, thernmassive media cheerlcading, the putative lessons of Vietnamrngone up in smoke, Baudrillard wrote another article (in therncommunist Liberation for March 29, 1991), congratulatingrnhimself on being correct. We know, says the French intellectual,rnof the saturation co’erage of the war by CNN, so, grantedrnthe presence of some or much disinformation, we may doubtrnthe saturation bombing of Iraq. “If we have no practical knowledgernof this war—and such knowledge is out of the question—rnthen let us at least have the skeptical intelligence to reject thernprobabilit) of all information, of all images whatever theirrnsource.” Of course, he is right to point out that our knowledgernof the war came from words and pictures carefully crafted tornproduce an effect on the uncritical. Do we really thereforernknow nothing of the war? How did theory end up in this absurdrnposition?rnEarly in this century, a brilliant Swiss linguist named Ferdinandrnde Saussurc gave lectures that were published afterrnhis death. In these lectures, he made a simple but importantrnpoint, that there is no necessary connection between thernsounds of a spoken word, the sign, le signifiant, and what thernword refers to, the signified, le signifie. “Book” in English andrn”libro” in Italian, for instance, both refer to the same object.rnThe words function in the systems of English and Italian withrnno special significance attached to what sounds evoke the relevantrnobject. From this simple but true insight, the denial ofrnwhich was mocked by Plato in his Cratylus, the postmodernrntheorist extrapolated an intellectual nightmare. There is nornneeessarv connection between signifier and signified, spokenrnword and object. So language is a closed system which has nornnecessary connection to any putative outside reality. Words dornnot refer to an cxtralinguistic reality, and sentences are logicalrnconstructs in closed systems, which tell us nothing about thernoutside worid.rnThe extrapolation from phonetics to .semantics, and fromrnlinguistics to ontology, is not legitimate. It is refuted by, amongrnother things, the reality of translation. The languages of Europernand the rest of the world are systems, certainly, but they alsornreflect and uncover a common reality, despite their manyrndifferences. We can speak of books and dictatorship and love inrnmany tongues. As those who had sex with Michel Foucaultrnlearned to their cost, the fact that English calls it AIDS andrnFrench calls it SIDA does not make it any less communicable orrndeadly. It may be significant, however, that many of those forrnwhom these ideas are important are monoglot theorists in thernUnited States, dependent on translations of authors they cannotrnread in the original. I know of a university where the debaternover the future of the program in Comparati’e Literature wasrnsplit between those who felt that to compare literatures onernhad to be able to read the languages the literatures were writtenrnin, and those who insisted loudly that important work in Comp.rnLit. was done in English and amthing important from abroadrngot translated. These are the people trapped in the funhouse ofrnlanguage. Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer students arernchoosing to study with them?rnNorris tries to show that Jacques Derrida is aware of all this,rnand he cites an early article by Derrida on one of the highrnpriests of absolute alterity, Emmanuel Levinas, in which Derridarninsisted, against Levinas’s influential demand that wc respectrnabsolutely the absolute Otherness of the Other, that werncan have no understanding or communication with another exceptrnas an alter ego, different from us, yes, of course, but alsornlike us in at least some important respects. The point is wellrntaken and true. In a later essay, however, Derrida looked morernfavorably upon Levinas’s demands for absolute alterity. It is arnsymptom of Norris’s dilemma. He insists on a few recent paragraphsrnfrom Edward Said and Julia Kristeva that contradict orrnmodify their earlier influential stands, and then he must basicallyrnignore a later essay by Derrida, which is very sympatheticrnto Levinas.rnIs there a wav out for the humanities, which will preserverncontact with language and text and et will be thcoreticallv sophisticated?rnWe have seen how recent the fall into relativismrnhas been, with most work done since the 1960’s and only a fewrnnods to earlier figures, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger. Recentlyrnscholars in literary studies, repulsed by the directions thernModern Language Association has taken, have founded a newrnAssociation of Literarv Scholars and Critics. Like the Back tornBasics mo’cment in elementary education, they seem to thinkrnthat going back to the 50’s will suffice to salvage literary studiesrnand the humanities, without acknowledging that the 60’s werernthe child of the 50’s. The organization avoided words likern”text” and “philology,” which were claimed by Paul de Manrnand his admirers.rn18/CHRONICLESrnrnrn