Book review essay: The modern self in crisis

While the humanities face various impasses and while any of us may sense that our "time is out of joint," seldom does a book emerge that traces the path of the vanquished leading to our present. Fuoco B. Fann's This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity offers an illuminating inquiry into modern knowledge, language, and the subject, drawing from French poststructuralism, continental and intercultural philosophies, and art theory. This review essay assesses the book's main claims: (1) that Euro-American (i.e., Western) knowledge has, over the past two centuries, lost its sustainability; and (2) that the present instability of knowledge has been bequeathed to us by a continuous modern tradition that we ought to "unlearn and relearn." Drawing from Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Fann's Quest After Modernity weaves these thinkers' ideas around a few central themes, including the modern speaking subject, modern phonetic language, ontology as white mythology, and various "post"-modern reversals.