Abstract
The fact that we can speak and do speak has become a self-evident thing for us, at the point that we also take for granted what language is: an instrument (a tool) for expressing what we have to say. Usually, we master the use of an instrument. But do we also master language and, along with it, our speaking? Perhaps, the decisive thing about language – our language – is precisely that we do not master it, that it always eludes our complete disposal. And, all things considered, this is why we speak: not only because we have something to say, but because we do not yet have or do not yet completely know what we have to say. Thus, we find what we could have to say precisely within the language.
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Notes
- 1.
As a sort of loan. We always know that this loan it belongs to somebody else. But to whom, in this case? Perhaps it belongs to the words themselves.
- 2.
Metaphor and metonymy are different expressions of this. I am aware that our whole language is interwoven metaphorically and metonymically. Therefore, the “too much” belongs irrevocably to its speaking; it opens the space of language.
- 3.
Time and again the conditional “would” affects my formulations. It makes everything sound vague, floating, undecided. Could it be that this suspension comes from the initial question? In fact, also the conditional in the question sounded decisive, and from there echoed in our thoughts. Somehow, the question of our death puts us into a provisional situation, which is also expressed in our speaking. It is never a matter of “simply” saying what we want to say and can say, but rather it is a matter to express in our speaking what we would say. Something like the appearance of death, but also something like a beam of life, which – as life! – goes towards death. Death would put our whole life – and first of all our speaking – in a potential status: our task is not to get out of this potentiality, but to fill it (and, as we will see, not to fill it).
- 4.
Misunderstandings belong no less to the reality of language than understanding(s). However, not more either! (Such a statement would not compromise the floating character of language).
- 5.
To die means here: to relate to one’s death. According to Heidegger (2000, 180), animals do not do that: “Only the human being dies. The animal perishes. It has the death as death neither before itself nor behind itself” (my translation; original: “Nur der Mensch stirbt. Das Tier verendet. Es hat den Tod als Tod weder vor sich noch hinter sich”).
- 6.
Ernst Simon, when he tells of his first encounter with Franz Rosenzweig, reports: “FR was desperately looking for a place to live at the time. One of my shocks was when he told me that one could and must also pray for an apartment.” (Rosenzweig, 1979, 677, letter of 27th of August 1922 to M. Buber, my translation).
- 7.
“There are, after all, inhibited people who would prefer prayer to be entirely free of this will. Such ‘pure’ prayer has always seemed to me to be the equally bad counterpart of pure magic, a bland, tired bowing […].” (Rosenzweig, 1979, 817, my translation; original: “Es gibt doch verbogene Menschen, die das Gebet am liebsten ganz frei von diesem Willen hätten. Eine solches ‚reines‘Gebet ist mir immer als das gleich schlechte Gegenstück zur reinen Magie erschienen, ein fades, müdes Sichfügen […]”).
- 8.
Michel De Certeau comes to what interests us here: “Is the phenomenon [sc. glossolalia] so exceptional? A glossolalia is already instituted, in dotted lines so to speak, in ordinary conversation: bodily noises, quotes of delinquent sounds, fragment of foreign voices punctuate the order of sentences with unguarded outburst and surprises. Said by whom to whom? A secondary, disseminated vocalization crosses the stated discourse, the major voice that becomes the messenger of meaning appears caught up in a twinning that compromises it. cutting through or paralleling it. stated discourse. It frees itself from this unsettling doppelgänger only in the functions in which it is farthest from interlocution. The political, professorial, or predicatory discourse, for example, becomes increasingly less permeable to the vocal irruption and interruption that the presence of the other induces in a series of propositions” (2015, 213).
- 9.
Original: “In der Klage spricht sich nichts aus und deutet sich alles an. Sie ist die einzig mögliche (und auf eine besondere Weise wirklich gemachte) labile Sprache.” The beginning of the text reads: “All language is infinite. But there is a language whose infinity is deeper and different from that of all others (apart from God’s) [...]. This language is lamentation” (128, my translation; original: “Alle Sprache ist unendlich. Es gibt aber eine Sprache, deren Unendlichkeit tiefer und anders ist als die aller andern (von der Gottes abgesehen) […]. Diese Sprache ist die Klage”). Bader addresses this text in 2006, 245–251, and 2009, 364–366.
- 10.
Even in their simple utterance, these words already punish themselves. One cannot separate between primary and secondary pain; one cannot even establish a once and for all valid order between them. For only in the - failing - word pain comes to itself.
- 11.
One could also say: up above itself.
References
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De Certeau, M. (2015). In L. Girard (Ed.), Trans. by M. B. Smith. The Mystic Fable, volume 2: The sixteenth and seventeenth century. University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. (2000). In F.-W. V. Herrmann (Ed.), Gesamtausgabe Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953) (Vol. 7). Klostermann.
Rosenzweig, F. (1979). Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Werke I, Briefe und Tagebücher (1918–1929). Martinus Nijhoff.
Scholem, G. (2000). Über Klage und Klagelied (1917/18). In K. Gründer et al. (Eds.), Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923 (Vol. 2: 1917–1923, pp. 128–129). Jüdischer Verlag.
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Askani, HC. (2023). Would We Speak If We Did Not Have to Die?. In: Vestrucci, A. (eds) Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42127-3_6
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