ABSTRACT
In what is quite possibly the last piece he wrote before his death in early 2019, the remarkable historian Alf Lüdtke thinks through Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-known statement about the simultaneous “indispensability and inadequacy” of Western thought. The essay not only finds in the statement a paradox (in the strict sense of the term), but registers that Dipesh Chakrabarty assumes “English, specifically American English” to be the self-evident language of Western thought. Does such an assumption not reduce the range of address of Western thought, especially by ignoring the plurality of European languages that have gone into its making? In other words: to what extent English or U.S. American philosophers and men (and women) of letters can stand for “Western thought” is an entirely open question. Here, the essay queries the limits of employing English as “base language” which is apparently always already there by turning to the specificity of language through an examination of the terms work and labour, eigen-sinn, serendipity, and spirituality, including their grounding in the concreteness of place. It is after this excursus that the chapter queries Chakrabarty’s identification of Karly Marx with “analytical” protocols and of Martin Heidegger with “hermeneutic” procedures, where the analytical and the hermeneutic constitute the two principal modalities of modern Western knowledge. Specifically, the essay asks whether it is warranted to exclusively associate Marx with analytical and abstract modes of reasoning, and to assimilate, as Chakrabarty does, intimate “histories of belonging” set in Bengal to Heidegger’s more totalizing conception and terms of, what can only be called, belonging?
