IV
The desire to comprehend meaning, in its ordinary as well as theoretical forms, is not only a desire for understanding butalso
a desire for mastery. The pictures that it fosters aim to determine in advance the possibilities of the application of words by determining the grounding of their sense. In so doing, they respond to (what one might describe as) a fear of words getting away from us, of their meaning escaping our regular ability to anticipate and control the implications of their use; as if without such pictures or the assurances they offer, the meanings of words could vanish into idiosyncrasy or arbitrariness, as if there would then be nothing to insure the possibility of mutual understanding, nothing to guarantee the possibility of a shared human life. Like the various forms of hegemony and authority that structure the form of society as the phantasmal response to a desire for security or order, they repress the ordinary anxiety to which they respond (that I might not be understood) only to allow it to re-appear, partially obscured and hyperbolized, as theabsolute
form of an anxiety (that words mightnever
work, that there might not be such a thing as meaninganything
ever) that now demands a total response in the form of a vision of the possibilities of sense that holds in general and at all times.
The pictures or accounts that then offer such a response - pictures of the regular structure of language, and hence of the life that is determined by its practice -- then operate in an “overdetermined” fashion to enforce what is, in any case, necessary by their own lights: the determination of meaning by structures of rules that are, though perhaps partially obscure to us, in any case present andcapable
of being described. In so doing, they inscribe in the everyday life of our practices a characteristic double bind. They present the dictates of reason that they claim to adumbrate as prohibitions of what is in any case, by their own lights, impossible. Articulating the universality of what preconditionsall
possibilities of sense, they subsequently use this articulation to prohibit or preemptspecific
ways of talking, interpretations of situations, “ways of going on.” The double bind facilitates a distinctive violence, inseparable from our ordinary understanding of language in all of its forms: that of the preclusion or pre-emption, the prejudicing or alienation, of human possibilities of meaning in the form of the pre-determination of possibilities of sense.
The ordinary or philosophical, technical or authoritarian projects that exercise this violence operate, in large part, by projecting the image of this pre-determination on the basis of their claim to comprehend the structure of language.
The modern experience in which language, once delivered as a specific object of investigation to theoretical or practical self-consciousness, is subsequently taken as a total structure of signs and accordingly investigated, explained, developed or manipulated as such, is by no means unique to analytic philosophy. It is pervasive, as well, in the technological developments of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Its effects are present wherever the technologies of communication, computation, and media determine forms of social, political, economic and personal life on the basis of their ability to handle and manipulate language in its “abstract” or informational forms. These developments of media, technology, and social life develop the same desires for standardization and regularization that underwrite the technical and formal methods of symbolic logic, from which they in many cases (in particular in the case of computational technology) actually arose. They shape and form the lives of their participants or consumers, the regular possibilities of meaning open to them, by determining in advance the symbolic forms in which these possibilities can be captured, stored, repeated, transmitted and exchanged.
The technological metaphor by means of which language regularly appears as a total instrument or object of use, subject uniformly to the pre-existing and presupposed desires and intentions of what are supposed to be its “users,” (and by means of which, conversely, the leading forms of what appears as the technologies of information and communication are themselves determined as extensions of the usefulness of language) will, doubtless, take a long time to overcome. It remains one of the most typical and pervasive metaphors of our time. Yet as we have seen, the analytic critique of language, both through its revolutionary criticism of psychologistic and subjectivist assumptions about the ground of language and through its radical interrogation of the category of “use” or “application,” can serve to expose the ultimate ground of this metaphor - and hence its claim to power over the determination of life - as null. The critical projects of continental philosophy and critical theory that have attacked contemporary social and technological forms for their artificial imposition of control over a human life conceived as otherwise innocent of them have not generally portrayed the depth of their actual roots in what is intelligible as the forms of language, as soon as systematic reflection on them begins. The modes of critique that the analytic tradition has developed, grounded in its interrogation of the effects of the objectification of language that begins already with the first question of meaning, could perhaps begin to do so. Their exposure of the structuralist picture of language as grounded in nullity exposes as baseless the claims to power that accompany the systematic technological or social control of language or manipulation of its possibilities. In this, it leaves these phenomena of signification or developments of technology exposed to the baselessness of their own claims to force, demystifying the narratives of transcendence, progress, and development that continue to support them.
The analytic tradition’s critique of language thus continues and develops the continental critique of metaphysics on the ground of language that underlies its claims, both to truth and to power. It does so, in part, by discovering in the history of philosophy and the forms of ordinary life characteristic fantasies that are also, in each case, intelligible asfantasies of language
, pictures of the regular relationship of language to life. In a passage from theBig Typescript
, Wittgenstein finds the effects of one of these pictures in the texts of Frege that he reads critically:
And here one can appreciate what a disastrous effect the preoccupation with the ‘sense’ of a proposition, with the ‘thought’ that it expresses, has had. For as a result of this, characteristic mental images that attach themselves to the words of a sentence are seen as decisive even when they aren’t, and when everything depends on the technique for using the sentence. - And onecan
say that the proposition has a different sense if it creates a different image. And if I might take the liberty at guessing at Frege’s basic idea in his theory of sense and meaning, I would now continue: that themeaning
of a proposition, in Frege’s sense, is its use.
… The proposition, or its sense, is not a kind of breathing organism that has a life of its own, and that carries out various exploits, about which we need to know nothing. As if in a manner of speaking we had breathed a soul into it from our soul - it sense - but now it has its own life - like our child - and all we can do is explore it and more or less understand it.
The instinct is guiding us rightly that leads to the questions: How can one know something like that? What reasons can we have to assume that? From what experiences would we deduce such a proposition?, etc.
Sense is not the soul of a proposition. So far as we are interested in it, it must be completely measurable, must disclose itself completely in signs.
Wittgenstein interrogates the picture of sense that he finds still in Frege’s text, a picture of meaning as dependent on the powers of actions and events of thought themselves pictured as mysterious and obscure, a picture of the possibility of linguistic meaning as dependent on the metaphysical (anyway super-sensible) accomplishments of its speakers, the life of an obscure spirit whose breath is the inspiration of sense into the dead matter of signs.
The picture operates by responding to the characteristic obscurity of our understanding of language with the form of an answer that leaves it obscure. It dissimulates the life of language by producing a phantasmatic image of its metaphysical production in the hidden, inner life of its speakers.
To this picture, Wittgenstein responds by repeating and displacing the demand for the intelligibility of language that the metaphysical picture purports to satisfy, but in fact forecloses. He reminds us that what we seek, in understanding language, is not the biography of the hidden life of a subject of experience whose powers and accomplishments must remain obscure, or the pseudo-empirical description of its sublime capacity of inspiring dead signs with the life of significance, but the understanding that produces the clarity of a life in which the inquiry into meaning is no longer felt as (only) atheoretical
problem.
Staging the metaphysical picture of sense in order to demystify it, Wittgenstein alludes to the legitimacy of those positivist or materialist methods of criticism that have, in the past, taken up parallel claims of metaphysics in order to expose them as groundless. His critical response thus inherits the methods of an earlier project of positivist thought, one that, demanding the universal “measurability” of all facts and phenomena, has indeed played a decisive role in the analytic philosophy’s consideration of language. He says of this project, which opposes the metaphysical picture by exposing its groundlessness in anything that we can call knowledge, that its instinct is the right one. But if his critical reading thereby resists the picture of sense as the soul of language, its reason for doing so is not, essentially, a materialist or positivist one. It is, rather, that sense discloses itself “completely in signs,” that is, in the ordinary life of language itself. The critical reading aims to deliver the life of language to its immanent sense.
The picture that portrays sense as the soul of language, conceiving of the life of its use as dependent upon the inspiration of matter with spirit, of sound with meaning, is not only contingently or superficially related to the deepest and most enduring forms of metaphysics.
Other regions of twentieth-century philosophical thought have critically considered this picture, demonstrating its regular connection with the same metaphysics of sense that Wittgenstein interrogates, and documenting the effects of its regular appearance in ordinary and philosophical language. In the 1959 text “The Way to Language,” Heidegger quotes from Aristotle’sDe Interpretatione
:
Now, whatever it is [that transpires] in the creation of sound by the voice is a showing of whatever affections there may be in the soul, and the written is a showing of the sounds of the voice. Hence, just as writing is not identical among all [human beings], so too the sounds of the voice are not identical. However, that of which these [sounds and writing] are in the first place a showing are among all [human beings] the identical affections of the soul; and the matters of which these [the affections] form approximating presentations are likewise identical.
(pp. 400-401 in translation).
Like the quotation from Augustine that begins the text of thePhilosophical Investigations
, the passage stages a fantasy of the life of language, one that understands it as the outward expression of the inner life of the soul, one that seeks to guarantee the possibility of a common linguistic life on the phantasmatic ground of the absolute self-identity of this inner one. The picture, as Heidegger reports, thus culminates in the idealist metaphysics that makes the life of language the recurrent work of the spirit’s labor of self-expression, the realization of spirit in the material world, the historical progress of the animation of matter by soul up to the point of their absolute identity.
This metaphysics takes a long time to complete, but it is already prepared by the conception of subjectivity that, constructing and modulating the distinction between matter and spirit, has long determined the concepts and projects of Western history. The ancient ground of this construction, and the conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity it produces, is perspicuous to modern thought as the envisioning of language itself:
Along with the assertion-character of language (assertion taken in the broadest sense that language, the said and unsaid, means something (a being), and represents it and in representing shapes or covers it over, etc.), language is known as property and tool of man and at the same time as “work.” But this interconnection of language to man counts as something so profound that even the basic determinations of man himself (again as animal rationale) are selected in order to characterize language. What is ownmost to man, in terms of body-soul-spirit, is found again in language: the body (word) of language, the soul of language (attunement and shade of feeling and the like) and the spirit of language (what is thought and represented) are familiar determinations of all philosophies of language. This interpretation of language, which one could call anthropological interpretation, culminates in seeing in language itself a symbol for human being. If the question-worthiness of the idea of symbols (a genuine offspring of the perplexity toward be-ing that reigns in metaphysics) is here set aside, then man would have to be grasped as that being that has what is his ownmost in his own symbol, i.e., in the possession of this symbol (logon echon
).
The ancient metaphysics that defines the human as thezoon logon echon
presents the life of this being, animal in itself, as essentially determined by its possession of language, and thus by its capacity for, or mastery over, the labor of the progressive manifestation of supersensible meaning in sensible forms that is seen as permitted by this possession. The image and correlate of this picture of the essence of the human is the picture of language that opposes the perceptible character of the sign to its imperceptible sense through the mediation of subjective thought, experience, or intentionality in linguistic “expression.”
The structuralist picture of language develops this picture as one of the figuring of the total structure of language’s signs within the life of the being that speaks, whether this figuring is presented as grounded in the capacities of an individual subject of experience or in the regular practices of a community. Developing this picture to the point of totality at which it undermines itself, the tradition demonstrates the nullity and baselessness of the distinction it attempts to draw between language and life and, thereby, of the everyday metaphysics that seeks to guarantee this distinction. As Heidegger points out, this metaphysics is the most characteristic contemporary expression of the ancient definition (tracing to Aristotle) of the human being as the unity of a life determined aszoon
with the articulated structure oflogos
. It is unclear whether either this definition, or the forms and practices of everyday “human life” it still supports, can survive the critical inquiry suggested by the results of the analytic tradition, into the forms of metaphysics underlying it and their continuing force over ordinary life.
One of the most characteristic and deep-seated effects of these forms of metaphysics is the picture that presents signs, in their repetition across the diversity of the contexts of their employment, as self-identical bearers of an unchanging sense, “contents” or “meanings” invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear, but nevertheless carried by the sign in all the great variety of its employments. The picture extrapolates from the perceptible identity of sign-tokens the unity of an imperceptible identity of sense even as it adduces the arbitrariness of theparticular
connection between sense and sign-type in anyparticular
language.
The metaphysics that develops this fantasy of sense finds in this possibility of repetition an immortality of meaning that dissimulates the mortality of everyday speech; it constructs the temporality of language’s life in the medium of the eternal. The critical thought that interrogates the terms of this construction recognizes it as a form of the dissimulation of death, as the projection of an attempt to control the life of language or guarantee its vitality against a standing threat of nullification. The projections and images that try to display the total structure of language attempt this guarantee in forms that are both normally constitutive for our self-understanding and repressive of that very self-understanding.
Yet if its diagnosis of the deep linguistic sources of distorted pictures of our lives allows it to expose the nullity of the claims to power on the basis of which these pictures exert their effects, the critique of language can nevertheless hardly hope to replace them with a better one. For the forms of metaphysics that it diagnoses are, as we have seen, present in the most everyday forms of language itself, and evident already in the first moments of its reflection on its own role in a human life.
Thus the critical reflection that once hoped to purge language of illusion and lay bare the form of a finally purified life is consigned, with the intrinsic deepening of its own critical problematic, to trace endlessly and perennially the claims of metaphysics over a linguistic life that would beunintelligible
without them, the claims of an immortal distinction between sound and sense, matter and spirit, (without which this life would be meaningless) that it must redraw with one hand even as it erases with the other.
This tracing, and erasing, is none other than the envisioning of language with which the analytic tradition began and whose ambiguities, as I have argued, continue to define the tradition’s most significant results. The possibility of its continuance may determine the fate of philosophy in our time.
V
The quotation that serves as the epigraph for this chapter comes from the “Lecture on Ethics” that Wittgenstein prepared, and probably delivered, in Cambridge sometime in 1929 or 1930. Wittgenstein’s aim in the lecture as a whole is to consider the status of “ethical” propositions or, as he puts it, propositions intended to express claims of “absolute” value, for instance claims of intrinsic and non-relational goodness, beauty or worth, or about the meaning of life, or what makes life worth living. His argument is that such claimscannot
be expressed by propositions. For if one were to write a book that describes all the facts concerning the position and movement of bodies in the world, “this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment.”
The statement offacts
, no matter how complete, does not express anything “sublime, important, or trivial”; facts are all on a level, and their description thus never suffices to express what is aimed at in a judgment of absolute value.
It follows that, if there could be a “science of ethics,” “nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.”
The claim to express an absolute value is the claim to express in propositions the elevation, above all others, of aparticular
state of affairs, for instance (as we may put it) the claim of a path judged “good” tocompel
us to follow it. But as soon as the claim is stated that way, we can see it to be chimerical. For “no state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.”
If we remain tempted to speak of absolute value, we canonly
express ourselves in metaphors that are actually inadequate to this purpose. In so doing, we fixate on what we may describe as particular experiences which we have, or call to mind, when we find ourselves under this temptation; one such (“entirely personal” and subjective) experience for Wittgenstein is, he says, the experience he would express as “wondering at the existence of the world.”
But the attempt to express this experience itself reveals the expression as nonsense; for since it is inconceivable that the world mightnot
have existed, it is incoherent to wonder that it does. No expression of language can capture what the expression of wonder gestures at, for no fact or event, however outlandish, can confirm it. Recognizing the failure of language to express it, we might now put this, Wittgenstein says, as “the experience of seeing the world as a miracle”; and now we might also say that, failing any expressionin
language, it finds expression in theexistence
of language itself.
This expression is itself nonsensical; as Wittgenstein emphasizes, it puts into wordsonly
the feeling of frustration we had before, our frustration with the inability of language to “go beyond the world” to express what we meant. But we can now see this frustration as an expression of the basic tendency that underlay all our formulations. This was the “perfectly, absolutely hopeless one” of “all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion,” namely “to run against the boundaries of language.”
This desire to run against the boundaries of language is perspicuous, in Wittgenstein’s own text, as the root of what we may attempt to express as the mystical or transcendental, for instance the vision of the world “sub specie aeterni” as alimited
whole.
It is at the root, as well, of the ambiguous envisioning of language that the analytic tradition takes up from its first moments, and to which, as we have seen, we can trace its most decisive critical results. Appreciating these results, we may follow Wittgenstein in deeming nonsensical all of the expressions that seek tofix
the boundaries of language oraccount
for its relation to a life separable from it. But by way of a displacement and renewal of the analytic tradition’s linguistic critique, it remains possible that we might nevertheless venture to take up again the desire at their root, in the irreducible dispersion of language’s everyday life.
Within the logically structured language whose possibilities of sense are evident in propositions, whose statements capture a world made up of facts (and so make possible reference to such a world at all), Wittgenstein’s expression for wonder at the existence of the world has no sense. Outside this language (but there is no outside, since there is no other language), it has the significance of a gesture. It ostensively indicates that which it is surely impossible for any gesturewithin
the world to indicate, the singularfact
of language, the existence of the possibility of gesturing itself. Thus, by means of a “showing” that could not be reduced to any saying, Wittgenstein evinces that desire whose adequate expression would transcend the world or destroy it, the mute pointing at the boundaries of the world that transmits to human cognition the null space of a beyond. Without delivering its object, in critical forms that, indeed, incessantly trace its withdrawal, the demonstration takes the place of revelation, the purity of lighting that, without explanation, first shows the world as it is.
The significance of this gesture is easy to miss. Within the more general critique of language that Wittgenstein himself pioneered, the point of staging the tendency that leads us to misleading or metaphysical forms of words is usually only to repudiate it. Yet as Wittgenstein recognizes, beyond the linguistic criticism of ethical claims as nonsense, the desire thatleads
us to seek these claims will remain, and is eminently worthy of our respect. Passing through the completion of this criticism of sense, we can even recover this desire in a clarified form for a critical inquiry that takes it up anew.
If Wittgenstein’s gesture were successful (but it cannot be) it would ostend the being of the world by gesturing at the existence of what cannot be said, the fact of the existence of language that is itself the presupposition for any saying. The terms of its demonstration would define the paradoxical distance between the world’s boundaries and what can always only appear, within it, as a determinate and limited fact: the total fact of the existence of language, the totality of actions, events, and practices that exhaust its actual and possible occurrence. The void space of this distance is the site of wonder, of the paradoxical revelation of the indeterminable possibility of language itself.
Wittgenstein’s description of the experience his gesture expresses as that of “seeing the existence of the world as a miracle” formulates his recognition that no fact or set of facts can account for it. There is no way, we may say, toexplain
the “fact of language” that is more simple or basic than it itself. Thus, if we should attempt to put this fact as the fact “that language exists,” it would, like the sentence expressing wonder at the existence of the world, again immediately undermine itself. So, too, would its denial; no proposition justifies either form of words, no proposition can account for, or put in simpler terms, what they would say. It remains that the very ordinary possibility ofusing
the terms “language,” “meaning,” “sense” and “significance” constantly and immediately invites us to invoke the existence of what they obscurely seem to name. The ground of this possibility, what we should like to express by asserting the existence of language, then remains, in an essential way, mysterious.
At the end of linguistic demystification, the critical project that took it up therefore faces a more pervasive mystery, at the root of its own claim to envision language and so to practice its criticism. This mystery is no longer a mystification, for it is not afalsification
or anerror
; it will remain even whenall
the facts are in, when “nothing is hidden” and there is no (factual or scientific)question
left to be posed. Yet its appearance in the form of thequestion
of the existence of language, a question whichcannot
be answered affirmatively or negatively, will remain essential for the acts and events of an ordinary life.
What are the means by which what can never be said thus shows itself, and what does this showing mean for the continuing practice of critical reflection on language and its “forms”? (What is revealed in the revelation of whatcannot
be said?) If we had to find a basisin
language for the possibility of Wittgenstein’s gesture at “the existence of language itself,” we could find it in language’s paradoxical capacity to refer to itself, to take up the question of its own sense and application to the circumstances of life in which linguistic meaning is constantly at issue. This capacity inscribes the extraordinariness of Wittgenstein’s gesture in every word of ordinary language’s consideration of itself; its determinate instances are manifestations of the extraordinary in the everyday, revelations of the basis of significance in the inconsequential moments of an ordinary life.
We have seen that this paradoxical capacity of ordinary language to refer to itself underlies both the analytic tradition’s detailed and explicit critical envisioning of language and the instabilities to which it is repeatedly prone. Historical retrospection marks the ambiguities of this envisioning as those of language’s own vision of itself. It is the image of the clarity of a life’s constituent forms, as reflected in (what then appears as) the determinate forms of language itself. The analytic tradition’s longstanding and determinative claim to envision language, the root, as we have seen, of its most important results and the basis of any possible claim to continue its methods, must then be deemed neither successful on the level of its original demands nor unsuccessful in its demonstration of (what we may wish to call) the everydayfact
of language which grounds the problematic possibility of linguistic self-reference. The critical vision that attempted to master language saw it as a set of possibilities to be described, elucidated, traced and delimited, a silent and unified structure of rules underlying every expression of sense. The inherent paradoxes that this vision encountered, in its more explicit development, demonstrated a more basic and problematic ground for sense in the irreducible actuality of a life. The place of this appearance of these paradoxes is marked by language’s own obscure capacity to demonstrate itself. With this self-demonstration, language shows itself in a way that cannot be reduced to any description of its structure or any differentiation of its forms. Its critical power is no longer that of the distinction of reality from illusion, of the truth of linguistic forms from their power to mislead the imagination, for the medium of language it irreducibly evinces is the imagination itself. If there is no placeoutside
the forms of language from which the grip of imagination over them can be criticized, there is equally no discernible groundwithin
them from which its productive power can be elucidated or checked. When they are allowed to come to critical expression in these everyday sites, the claims of power that sought to master life by comprehending the possibilities of language can cede to wonder at its very existence.
From the beginning, as we have seen, the analytic tradition’s envisioning of language invoked it as a positive object of possible elucidation, elaboration, and description in relation to the possibilities of life that it was recurrently envisioned as determining. The most determinate form of this invocation was what I called, in chapter 1, thestructuralist
picture of language. For philosophers throughout the tradition, and even today, it formulated the possible intelligibility of language to the theoretical reflection that would elucidate it. It formulated, as well, the claim of this reflection to elucidate the points of linguistic reason’s forceover
a human life, to describe the ground of the “force of the better reason” in determining thought and action. But the picture was unstable in relation to the actuality of the life it aimed to capture. And the critical results that articulated the instability, in particular (but not only) Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, demonstrated the essentially unforeclosable openness of life to what then appears as language’s “use,” at every moment of its practice. Showing the actual futility of any attempt finally to master life’s possibilities in the forms of language, they opened an uncrossable theoretical gap between the symbolic expression of a rule and the instances of action or behavior that may be said to amount to following it.
Henceforth, this gap can be the site of a life that cannot be explained in terms of possibilities of language, even as it recurrently takes up again language’s envisioning of itself. The ground of life on which structuralism would seek to situate the ultimate possibility of sense, by reference to which it would seek to guarantee the possibility of linguistic meaningfulness, is revealed as null and void. The forms of explanatory or theoretical discourse that would seek to express it cede to a mute gesturing, the ostension of a ground of language that is everywhere presupposed but nowhere describable.
The tradition’s demonstration of the nullity at the center of language’s structure can then be seen as the revelation to everyday thought and practice of what Giorgio Agamben calls “The Idea of Language:”
The fulfilled revelation of language is a word completely abandoned by God. And human beings are thrown into language without having a voice or a divine word to guarantee them a possibility of escape from the infinite play of meaningful propositions. Thus we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language.
To an age in which the self-consciousness of language is thus complete, the desire to run up against the limits of language that Wittgenstein diagnoses is visible as the previously obscure root of every attempt to articulate propositions of ethics or religion. It finds obscure expression, in particular, in the search for transcendence, what we can now see as the search for a position outside language from which it would bepossible
to comprehend, describe, trace or express the being of language as a whole, to determine the boundaries of its sense or the possibilities of its reference to a world conceived as outside it. As we have seen over the course of this work, in a double movement of criticism that can be considered its own specific method, the analytic tradition repeatedly moves to formulate this position and then repudiate this very formulation. At the limit of this doubled criticism, it will no longer be possible to discern the logical structures of language or identify the specific points of their force in constraining the possibilities of a human life. There will be, then, no ultimateground
for language in life, no moment of life or component of its pursuit that will be identifiable as the source of language or the basis of the possibility of meaning. But the everyday critical modalities that constantly call language into question on the basis of its own vision of itself also constantly inscribe the nullity of its center, its freedom from the claims of power that would master it from without or within.
With respect to a metaphysics whose forms are as old as language itself and whose specific claims operate anywhere and everywhere we speak, the critical results of analytic philosophy thus do not mark its end or overcoming, the death of what is surely immortal. But they do reveal the nullity of its specific claims to power by demonstrating the nullity of the fact of language that they claim to master. The revelation of language that the analytic tradition has developed thus witnesses the possibility that these claims, grounded in the imposition of distinctions that themselves stand exposed as groundless, could (without denying the reality of their effects or foreclosing the continuance of their memory) be allowed to lapse into a correlative insignificance along with that of the history they have organized. This insignificance is the erasure of the line that metaphysics traces at the center of a human life between that life itself and the language that it speaks.
The radical vision of language that transformed philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century and continues to support its deepest critical modes therefore reveals the sense of words and the significance of symbols, everywhere and always, as phenomena of a ground that can only be incomprehensible to it. It bears witness to the paradoxical possibility of what remains, within the metaphysics of a language that continues to pre-determine every possibility of the significance of a human life, impossible or inconceivable, ineffable or unspeakable: the dream of the self-revelation of a life without mystification or violence. Within the metaphysics that still determines the sign as the mute bearer of memory, archive of the violence of life and guarantor, beyond death, of the immortality of its significance, such a life remains insignificant. Open to the play of phenomena of sense and significance without determining them in the forms of possession, intention, mastery or control that have regularly defined them, it gives no sense to its language beyond that of the immediacy of its own breath. It thereby opens itself to an experience of language which, beyond the violence of history and the regimes of its force, abandons its life to the peace of what remains. The vision of language that would have comprehended this life ends by exposing it to its own immanence. That we who speak and write become incomprehensible to ourselves may be the stake, and the promise, of the clarity of its light.
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Author: Paul M. Livingston
