| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods and Theory

Sandra Rudnick Luft. Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science between Modern and Postmodern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 213. $45.00.

This book by Sandra Rudnick Luft, twenty years in the making (p. xvii), 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's interpretation seeks to recover the strangeness of the New Science, its "confrontational, dislocative tendencies" (p. 111), because these aspects of it can speak most powerfully to our current need for new models of being human. "Being subject as humanity," Luft quotes Martin Heidegger, "has not always been the sole possibility belonging to the essence of historical man" (p. 167). Luft's approach follows from her aim, and it is, appropriately, unhistorical. Against "efforts to place the work in the history of ideas" (p. ix), Luft ignores "the search for historical and eidetic influences" and reads Vico "interactively, hermeneutically, fragmentarily, as one holds conversations with strangers only to discover shared insights" (p. ix). This "alchemical" reading, enabled here by two other sets of texts, postmodernist critiques (especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida) and new interpretations of Genesis and the rabbinic tradition, reveals how Vico got outside of the most fundamental metaphysical assumptions of both Western philosophical thought and Christian theology to imagine a radically different way of being human in the world.

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