Thanks to Many, One
Thanks to Many, One

Summary/Abstract: Harvard University professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Doris Sommer has graciously granted us permission to republish an excerpt from her widely acclaimed book Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke University Press, 2004). The excerpt is taken from the third chapter entitled ‘Irritate the State’, in which Sommer suggests a middle way between abstract liberalism and particularist identity politics by highlighting the democratizing effect playing of bilingual games and creolization. Her provocative plea to ‘teach a taste for irritation’ seems to disturb the agenda of both liberal political philosophy and multicultural aesthetics in that it propagates respect for minority languages even while underscoring the sociopolitical relevance of a neutral but flexible lingua franca. Sommer’s thesis about the importance of bilingual puns and double-talk as counterpoints to the monovocalism of the modern nation-state directly impinges on the issue of language in American Studies as a globalizing field of study. We hereby offer it to the reader as an ‘irritating’ stimulus for further debate.

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