| | Review Article Language, or No Language Daniel Heller-Roazen Werner Hamacher. Maser: Bemerkungen im Hinblick auf Hinrich Weidemanns Bilder. ________. pleroma--Reading in Hegel. Trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. [pl] ________. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. 1. The Rest of Language When Aristotle, at the opening of his treatise on interpretation, defines the nature and function of language, he does so by referring "the things in the voice [ta en tei phonei]" to impressions on the soul (pathe¯mata), which, in turn, he refers to "things [pragmata]" [De interpretatione 16a4 ff.]. Aristotle's text establishes, in this way, that vocal utterances are signs of things. The philosophical significance of this gesture could not be more decisive. Once De interpretatione determines the canonical form of the statement as a "meaningful sentence [logos se¯mantikos]" and, more precisely, as a "proposition [logos apophantikos]" bearing truth or falsity, and once it asserts that truth and falsity reside in the composition (synthesis) of elements [16a10-15], 1 the consequence is inevitable: the paradigmatic form of true speech must be that of the "statement of one thing concerning another thing [legein ti kata tinos]" [17a25]. 2 Here it matters little whether the relation of speech to things is grasped as one of imitation or constitution, reproduction or production; it matters little, moreover, whether the things at issue--that which language means--are understood as sensible objects or supersensuous entities, material beings or logical idealities. In every utterance, speech, by virtue of its very form, is necessarily capable of being dissolved into those things of which it speaks. Indeed, the Aristotelian principle of analysis (literally, "loosening up") demands this [End Page 22] dissolution as the end toward which all speech, insofar as it is both assertive and predicative, ultimately tends. Language is thus posited only in order to be effaced; its specific constituents are identified only to be returned, in the end, to the world of things. When Augustine writes, in a lapidary formula at the start of his De doctrina christiana, that "things are learned by signs [res per signa discuntur]" [1.2.2.20], he simply summarizes what is already stated in the Aristotelian locus classicus: words, the elements of language, function in the service of things; when words show what exists, their task is accomplished. Werner Hamacher's works constitute perhaps the most powerful contemporary attempt to delineate and interrogate this aporetic structure, by which language, in its classical philosophical and theoretical elaboration, is simultaneously constructed and effaced, identified as such and destituted of all propriety. The implications of this structure, which are both logical and metaphysical, extend not only to the Aristotelian, but even to the most modern theories of language and its operation. "At the end of every semantic theory of language and its truth," Hamacher thus writes in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, "stands the aporetic verdict: language does not speak; it has nothing to say" [P 338; EV 325]. When language is determined by its "semantic and referential functions," we read, it follows that at "the end and thus the site of its destination, it no longer means anything and no longer refers to anything" [P 338; EV 325]. If Hamacher's texts often take as their point of departure contemporary doctrines of literary production and language, it is because, in the field of literary studies, the invocation of the semantic determination of language thus leads thought to eliminate the very element that might have been its subject of examination: language. The one discipline that might have resisted the apophantic dissolution of language proves itself not to be, as the German term has it, a "science of literature [Literaturwissenschaft]" but, rather, "more or less clandestinely a science against literature" [P 181; EV 151]. In its adherence to the "fundamental thesis [Basissatz]" that literary texts can be grasped as "empirical objects that are . . . retranslatable into their corresponding meanings" [P 261; EV 235], literary criticism is thus led, in an exemplary fashion, to repeat the Aristotelian gesture: no sooner is language made into the subject of reflection than it is effaced as such, dissolved and resolved into that of which it speaks. 3 It is this determination of the essence of language that Werner Hamacher's works, as a whole, call into question. As such, Hamacher's Premises, pleroma, and Maser, constitute nothing less than a systematic interrogation of the form and limits of the classical position of the concept of language. They therefore demand to be situated with respect to those efforts within and beyond the history of philosophy that, in various ways, seek to displace and reconfigure the model of Aristotelian apophantics. Decisive importance must be given here to the linguistic theory of the Stoa, which insists upon the indissolubility of syntactic "combination" or "interlacement [symploke]," 4 and which invents the notion of the "sayable [lekton]," thus rupturing the Aristotelian chain of reference between words, impressions, and things, through the introduction of a linguistic [End Page 23] element that indicates the very event of expression. 5 Significant attempts in the same direction are also to be found in the terminist concept of esse enuntiabile and the Scotist notion of esse intentionale, forms of purely linguistic and intentional Being (or non-Being) whose mode of existence is irreducible to that of actual beings. 6 In a different context, twentieth-century philosophy submits the model of Aristotelian apophantics to a number of critiques, which may well have their most radical forms in Heidegger's proposal "to experience language as language" ["Das Wesen der Sprache"] and Benjamin's thesis that "language has no content," but rather communicates "communicability pure and simple" [2.1.145-46]. In each of these efforts, the problem of linguistic signification is carried to a limit at which, in the impossibility of referring what is at issue in speech to any "thing," the Aristotelian determination of the essence of language must falter. It is at this limit point that Hamacher's work acquires its true significance as an attempt to consider that dimension in language that cannot be exhausted by the Aristotelian model of predication assertion. What is that element, Hamacher asks, in which language does not speak "one thing concerning another thing," ti kata tinos, in which language does not speak things at all and therefore, according to the traditional determination of speech, does not "speak"? It is this dimension that, throughout Hamacher's texts, is always at issue: "what withdraws from language," in Hamacher's words, and "what remains of language after meaning is withdrawn from it" [P 329-30; EV 316]. A decisive displacement of not only the apophantic but also the semiological, rhetorical, and hermeneutic theories of language is implied here. For the study of what exceeds meaning and what, in the movement of this excess, is left of language cannot be a study of the semantic and referential operations of language, whether these operations are understood in terms of signs or figures and the mechanics of their organization; nor can it, by that token, have the form of a consideration of the comprehension of language and the structures by which such a comprehension is, or is not, reached. This is why Hamacher's texts, which contain some of the richest contemporary readings of figural and poetic language, cannot be adequately grasped as studies in literary criticism or rhetorical language; this is, moreover, why Hamacher's texts, which propose a singular reinterpretation of hermeneutics and what is at issue in it, are not, strictly speaking, works of hermeneutic theory. Their philosophical and theoretical significance lies elsewhere. If there is an element in language that survives the reduction of speech to its semantic correlates, it cannot constitute one trait of language among others. It can only be what Hamacher, in a significant phrase, calls "the rest of language--and so language itself [der Rest der Sprache--somit aber die Sprache selbst]" [P 330; EV 316]. As that which is not exhausted in the work of meaning, the "rest of language" is what, in language, exists as language; it is what, in all speech, resists being dissolved into things and, in this resistance, testifies to the existence of speech as such. The "rest of language" is what, in language, does not constitute "a statement of one thing concerning another thing" and does not even constitute a sign, by means of an "impression," of a [End Page 24] thing; it is the dimension in all speech that indicates nothing other than the existence of language as such. This is the meaning of the graphic pause, the hyphen, between the "rest of language" and "language itself," which establishes a relation of both identity and distinction between the two in the phrase "the rest of language--and so language itself." The rest of language is language itself, that dimension in which language exists, released from its semantic and referential functions; yet by that very token, the "rest of language" is also the dimension in which language, once released from the determination of being "language" in any traditional sense, exists as something other than what it has been thought to be at least since Aristotle. To consider not "language" but the "rest of language" is to interrogate the mode of this aporetic existence. It is to examine the sense in which it is possible to say that language is or, perhaps more decisively, is not. Ancient philosophy bequeaths to Western thought a series of categories by which to understand the pure existence of a phenomenon and, at the limit, of phenomena as such, categories that are meant to articulate the most elementary "passions of Being [pathe tou ontos]" independently of any consideration of the characteristic determinations of actual beings. These categories, which are already clearly distinguished by Aristotle as necessity, impossibility, possibility, and contingency, 7 have as their function to define the totality of the modes of existence as such. Only if it is placed in relation to these categories and their articulation as a whole does the philosophical radicality of Hamacher's investigation into the "rest of language" come fully to light--namely, its singular investigation into the question of the mode of existence of language. And it is only in this context that it is possible to measure the significance and place of Hamacher's thought with respect to other contemporary European philosophies, which are perhaps first of all--from Derrida's "possible-impossible" [Apories 131] to Nancy's "trembling at the limit of all necessity" [82], Agamben's "sovereign potentiality" 8 and Deleuze's "beatific potentiality" 9 --reconceptualizations of the modes in which Being can be said to give itself, to exist and to be there at all. Language, in Hamacher's thought, proves to be the phenomenon by which the sense and limits of these modes are considered and, thereby, the very phenomenon--if it is one--that, before or beyond Being and its classical figures as present actuality, allows for the articulation of a series of altogether novel categories: those by which Being can, and indeed must, be said not to give itself, not to exist and not to be there at all. 2. In pleroma--Reading in Hegel, Hamacher undertakes an analysis of the form and limits of the idealization and universalization that language, as the means of signification and reference, accomplishes. One of the most decisive and far-reaching examples of this analysis is to be found in the last chapter of the book, in which Hamacher submits Hegel's exemplary scene of reading, "Sense-Certainty, or the This and Meaning," to a reading. The dialectical movement articulated in the first section of The Phenomenology [End Page 25] of Spirit is well known. In its least developed and most unreflective form, consciousness, Hegel writes, believes itself to be immediately certain of itself and the object to which it is related. "Of what it knows," Hegel writes, "consciousness says only this: that it is" [82]. It is the meaning and structure of this "is," however, that proves to be what consciousness, despite itself and what it says, does not yet know. In its presumed sense-certainty, consciousness, Hegel writes, holds to the most immediate, that is, that which it can call "this," "here" and "now." "And yet," we read, "it [sense-certainty] must be asked," "what is the This?" [84]. What is the Here, and what is the Now? By means of a "simple experiment" (einfacher Versuch), the self-consciousness indicated by Hegel's "for us" puts the consciousness of sense-certainty to the test. "We write this truth down," Hegel writes. "A truth," he explains, "cannot be lost by being written down anymore than it can be lost by our preserving it" [84]. Yet no sooner is an apparent definition of the "Now" recorded, "for example, 'the Now is night'" [84], than it no longer holds: "When we look again, now, this afternoon, upon the written truth, we must say that it has become stale" [84]. The case is the same, Hegel writes, with "the other form of the This, the Here" [85]. "The Here is, for example, the tree." And yet "when I turn around," Hegel writes, "this truth has disappeared and has turned into the opposite: the Here is not a tree, but rather a house" [85]. Consciousness's object thus escapes it in the very moment in which it thinks it has succeeded in designating it: what is said to be "this" necessarily becomes what was "this" and, therefore, what is not "this." The particular "This," Hegel writes, shows itself to be "not exactly what it once was, namely something immediate" but, rather, a "not-This [ein Nichtdieses]" [85], a "negative This [ein negatives Dieses]" [90]; consciousness's "This" reveals itself to be nothing less than "something reflected into itself [in sich Reflektiertes]" [89], that is, a "universal" (Allgemeines) [90], the "This" in its "permanent and self-sustaining" [85] substance. According to the "movement [Bewegung]" [89] of Hegelian "sublation [Aufhebung]," the "This" is thus affirmed as immediately true, as true in the form of "having been [Gewesenes]" and hence as no longer true and, finally, as true in the "universal immediacy" [94] by which the particular is "negated and preserved [negiert und aufbewahrt]" [94] in the truth of its concept. On the "piece of paper" [91] Hegel invokes for his "experiment," consciousness, therefore, reads more than it thinks. But the universality it is forced to read on paper is already inscribed in its speech. "Language," Hegel writes, "is the more truthful one [die Wahrhaftere]" [85]; despite what it thinks, the consciousness depicted in the first chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit necessarily "speaks [spricht]" more than it "means [meint]" [85]; it does not know, Hegel writes, "what it says [spricht]" [90] and "it does not say [sagt] what it means [meint]" [91]. This disjunction between speaking and thinking and between saying and meaning is, for Hegel, the sign of Spirit's finitude in the form of sense-certainty; it constitutes a negative image of fully articulated self-consciousness, whose language, as the very "existence [Dasein] of Spirit" [478], forms the medium of Spirit's self-reflection as absolute substance and subject. In this sense, the cleavage between what consciousness means and what it truly says in "Sense-Certainty, or the This and Meaning" is the mark of the negativity that, for Hegel, carries Spirit forward to the point at which it means what it already said and is what it always was, even as the circle of the speculative dialectic, in its final form, turns back to rejoin its own beginning. Or almost. Hamacher's text shows that this movement of excess and self-transcendence, which articulates the trajectory of Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, necessarily requires yet another excess of saying over meaning. This surplus, however, cannot be accommodated by the dialectical development and unfolding of Hegel's Spirit. It is, simply, language, insofar as it appears in Hegel's text as reading and writing. [End Page 26] "From the standpoint of immediate certainty," Hamacher writes, "the question concerning the 'This' in the 'double shape of its being, as the Now and the Here' can be answered only if a determinate being and a determinate time are indicated and enunciated: 'The Now is night' or 'The Here is for example the tree'" [pleroma 208]. Without this indication and this enunciation, Hegel's "experiment" could not take place; no particular "here" could be indicated, no particular "now" could be written, and the universal, as the mediated negation of these particulars, could not appear as such. "The universalization of the Now into the Now of time in general," Hamacher writes, "into the 'negative unity of self-external being' as defined by the Encyclopedia . . . is possible Here Hamacher's reading of Hegel's scene of reading shows itself to be at the same time a reading of the concept of "rest" as it is developed by In the very moment in which Aristotle's treatise on time formulates this impossibility, however, it also demands its possibility as the very condition of time. "The impossibility of coexistence," Derrida writes, "cannot be posited as such except on the basis of a certain coexistence, of a certain simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, where the alterity and identity of the 'now' are sustained together in the differential element of a certain sameness" [Marges 63]. If the "nows" were not in some sense "at the same time" as each other, they could not be ordered according to the form of succession; if they were not in some way copresent to one another, they could not be distinguished as such. According to its very essence as the form of the present, the "now" must therefore admit into its presence what is not, and cannot be, present to it: itself as something other than itself, itself as "another double" and so itself, in Derrida's pointed phrase, as "another self" and hence as "a different self [un autre même]." It is by the structure of this un autre même that temporal succession presupposes the very copresence and spacing that it excludes, even as spatial copresence, for Derrida, is conversely constituted on the basis of an irreducible "temporalization" [Marges 63]. In each case, the form of self-identity as such bears the marks of an original difference that exceeds it and that, as the rest and remainder it cannot accommodate, continues to be at work within its very presence. It is this original difference that Hamacher locates in the place of inscription that, while granting the possibility of Hegel's dialectic of sense-certainty, cannot be thought according to any of its terms. The "piece of paper" that Hegel surreptitiously introduces into his history of consciousness is the figure of the irreducible difference without which the reflection of the particular and the universal could not take place. As that which bears witness to a simultaneity prior to the succession of time itself, it is the marker of a time more original than Hegel's "Now." Hamacher writes: The contraction of the inscribed Nows into a simultaneity, which is achievable only by reading after the event, is the precondition for the sublation of the individual now-points into the universal Now of time in general. This simultaneity, though constructed after the event, must therefore precede time in general if the non-simultaneity of its moments and the persistence of its form is to be intelligible and if a concept of time is to be possible at all. [pl 210, trans. modified] Despite its evident proximity to the terms and concepts of "Ousia and Grammè," in this passage Hamacher's pleroma displaces Derrrida's problematic onto a terrain that is altogether its own. The simultaneity of which Hamacher writes in this passage is not simply the spatial coexistence excluded by the notion of purely temporal succession; nor is what "precedes time in general" in separating the "Nows" from each other definable in terms of time and space alone. Here time and its spacing are, rather, operations of reading and writing and, therefore, irreducibly tied to language and its occurrence. "Time and space," Hamacher writes, in this sense, "are constructions of writing, of language grasped in terms of writing" [pl 216]. At issue is thus no longer merely the spatialization of time but, rather, the temporalization of language itself, the mode in which language, in its taking place, exists. Time--writing and reading--is language: this is the sense of Hamacher's determination of "the concept of time," a few pages later, as "the absolute grapheme" [pl 227]. For Hamacher, the "remainder" that both allows and resists the movement of Hegel's dialectic is, therefore, simply the existence of language. It is the "rest of language" that takes time in taking place and, in this taking place, constitutes the very possibility of a phenomenology of Spirit while simultaneously marking its impossibility as an absolute [End Page 28] system of knowing. The fact that consciousness must speak is, in this sense, the bare fact that the unfolding of Hegel's Absolute cannot surmount. To say that human existence speaks, in its immediacy as in its reflection, is not to say that it speaks something, that it speaks something sensible or something intelligible, a particularity or a universality, the concrete or the concept. Such speech, which by definition refers to and signifies what it says, poses no problems for the development of Spirit; "Sense-certainty, or the This and Meaning" shows precisely that it constitutes nothing less than the first moment in the consolidation of the universality of reflected Being. The speech that no form of consciousness or self-consciousness can master is, instead, the one that refers to nothing, signifies nothing, and that therefore cannot, in any sense, either be "meant" or give way to the work of meaning. This speech has its cipher, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in the "piece of paper" Hegel cannot do without; it is the "undialectical remainder" that indicates the element to which the dialectic, by virtue of its very enunciation and inscription, is always already consigned. " 3. Promising In Premises, which collects Hamacher's most significant philosophical and literary essays of the past twenty years, a new concept is proposed for the mode in which language takes place, rendering signification, reference and predication possible while remaining essentially irreducible to them: the promise. Hence the striking conclusion to which Hamacher is necessarily led, namely, that the promise is not one form of utterance or speech act among others but, rather, language itself. "There is language," we read in "The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche," "only as promising [es gibt die Sprache selbst allein als Versprechen]" [P 101; EV 69]. Hamacher's statement, as should be clear by now, is not a metaphorical comment but, rather, a metaphysical thesis concerning the existence of language as such. "Language is nothing," Hamacher writes in a recent essay, but an "unfulfillable and unkeepable promise" ["Lingua Amissa"188]. But what is a promise? It is well known that in How to Do Things with Words, If "language itself," however, as Hamacher writes, "is nothing other than a promise," then neither Austin's nor de Man's accounts suffices to characterize the particular nature and structure of the promise. If "language itself" is "given as a promise," then the promise cannot be adequately conceived as a particular type of a speech act, for such types, as forms of particular linguistic utterances, already presuppose language and therefore cannot themselves define it. The same must also be said of de Man's concept of the promise, which, in defining the promise as a contradiction between the performative and constative functions of language, is meaningful only within the context of an already established linguistic code and on the basis of the existence of language. "Nothing would be more erroneous," Hamacher writes, than to speak here of a "performative contradiction." Contradictions arise only within an already established linguistic system of rules and therefore only where language has already established itself as an instrument at one's disposal, with which particular operations, each one regulated by certain conventions, could be performed: they are contra-dictions. [P 128-29, trans. modified; EV 98] The promise of which Hamacher writes is, instead, the very dicere in all diction, which does not presuppose but, rather, opens the possibility of all forms and conventions of speech. As such, the promise cannot be considered as the act or position of a subject, since the promise is precisely what allows for the possibility of all acts, positions and, insofar as subjects define themselves through such acts and positions, all subjects in general: "what is posited in the promise," Hamacher writes, in "Faust, Money," "is what exceeds all position" [136]. If, as Austin writes, "actions can only be performed by persons," and in the case of the speech act, "the performer must be the utterer" [60], then the promise of which Hamacher writes is no action, no action of a subject, and, consequently, however paradoxical it may sound, no act of speech. In the promise, language, for Hamacher, lies before all determinations. To the degree that language itself is defined as a particular structure or being, language, in the promise, therefore lies even before itself. In the form of the promise, Hamacher writes, language is "autonomous" in the full sense of Kant's term: giving itself its own law, language presupposes nothing other than itself. Yet if the promise is the mode in which language presupposes nothing, it cannot even be said to presuppose itself, insofar as it is a determined and existing entity; if language is to be preceded and grounded by nothing, it cannot even be said to be preceded by itself, for in such precedence language would cease to be absolute and become merely heteronomous, dependent on what it followed. In the promise, Hamacher therefore writes, "language . . . is autonomous only in its relation to an irretrievable 'pre-'" [P 96, trans. modified; EV 64]. By virtue of its very structure as a promise, language is thus not "performative," as Austin claims, but rather, Hamacher writes, "pre-performative" [P 114; EV 83], not predicative but "pre-predicative" [End Page 31] [P 209, trans. modified; EV 181] in the sense of "pre-saying" and "pre-diction" [P 149; EV 119], not propositional but only "pre-propositional" [Maser 42]. Insofar as the "pre-" of its "pre-performativity," "pre-predicativeness," "pre-dication," and "pre-diction" can by definition have no stable referent by which to measure the degree of its antecedence, the promise has not a "structure" but only a "de-structure" [P 115; EV 84; M 41]. In the promise, language is language before language and thus, according to Hamacher's repeated phrase, "language without language [Sprache ohne Sprache]" [P 19, 129, 209, 382; EV 24, 99, 181, 364]. This indetermination alone constitutes language in "the bare possibility of its determination as language" [P 209; EV 181]: as "language in relation to a future (künftige) language," as the "opening of the possibility of speaking" ["Lingua Amissa" 189, 188, trans. modified], as a "word" that is "the open place in which the 'word' can enter" ["Word Wolke" 153], and as a "word," finally, "that comes before every word" [M 39]. In the thesis that "language itself is a promise," the anaphora "itself" cannot therefore refer to an already existing structure or being. If the promise, as Hamacher argues, is the mode in which language exists in the form of absolute anteriority, then for language to be a promise can only be for it to be irreducibly before, and so necessarily not, itself. In the promise, language is "itself" precisely in withdrawing from the self-identity constitutive of all ipseity and therefore in being irreducibly different from the form of its "self." "Language itself is a promise" is thus not a reflexive proposition, in which the mirroring of a subject ("language") by its predicate ("promise") would be consolidated by means of the secure identity of the pronoun "itself." To use the terms with which Hamacher characterizes the movement of irony, one may say, on the contrary, that "language itself is a promise" is a "trans-flexive" or "ex-flexive" [P 249; EV 223] proposition, in that it ex-poses language, in the very moment in which it appears to define it, to "the uncontrollable de-posing [unkontrollierbare Ent-Setzung] of every fundamental epistemological figure of self-relation" [P 249, trans. modified; EV 222]. This "uncontrollable de-posing" cannot leave the form of the promise itself intact. The conclusion is unavoidable. If all language is a promise, and if the promise is the form in which language, in its absolute auto-thesis and pro-thesis, is never yet "itself," then the linguistic act that bears the name of the promise too is not itself. Whenever someone promises, whenever something is promised, something other than a promise has been promised, and something other than a promise has taken place. "In every promise," Hamacher therefore writes, "there must be a non-promise [ein Nicht-Versprechen] if it is to be and remain a promise" [P 128; EV 98]; every promise, by definition, must promise "something unpromisable [ein Unversprechliches]" [P 142; EV 112] and not be, in any sense, a promise. "The promise," Hamacher writes, "does not therefore promise" [P 219; EV 190]. "Nothing is promised [Nichts ist versprochen]" [P 128; EV 98]. The exemplarity of the promise as a "speech act" consists in this "not," by which it always does something other than promise; the significance of the promise lies precisely in this "nothing" (or "Nothing"), which is ultimately what the promise promises. For here the promise shelters "the Nothing of language [das Nichts der Sprache]" [P 222; EV 195], the "linguistic Being [sprachliches Sein] . . . in which language reaches out to its own nothingness [Nichts], to the nothingness [Nichts] of its reference, its meaning, and its determination" (EV 354; P 371). In the promise, in its "not" and in its "nothing," language, whenever it acts, refers and signifies, always also does more--and less: it abstains from the work of this speech, in order, merely, to be--nothing. [End Page 32] 4. Contingency In the history of philosophy, there is a term for what exists in relation to what is not and for what, in this way, can always necessarily both be and not be. This term, which Aristotle is the first to make into a true terminus technicus of philosophical discourse, is contingency. According to the Prior Analytics, the contingent (to endekhomenon) is not merely what takes place "while falling short of being necessary," but also, more precisely, what is as such "capable of taking place and of not taking place" [32b5-15]. Wherever something exists or takes place contingently, it could therefore always also have not existed and not taken place; wherever something, inversely, contingently fails to exist or to take place, it could always also have existed and taken place. The existence of the contingent implies the possibility of its nonexistence, even as the nonexistence of the contingent implies the possibility of its existence. Such is the aporia implicit in the very concept of contingency, which I. M. Bochenski, in an exemplary passage of his Formal Logic, formulates as a genuine paradox of contingency: if x is said to be contingent, then it follows that x is possible if and only if x is impossible, and that, conversely, x is impossible if and only if x is possible [98]. 12 By definition, what is contingent exists as capable of what it is not; it holds within itself the irreducible potentiality and possibility to be otherwise than it is and, at the limit, not to be at all. If language exists as a "rest" in which it no longer means anything, if language takes place as an event of "reading" that opens the possibility of all idealization and universalization in marking the necessity of its impossibility, and if language, finally, has the form of a "promise" that promises nothing and that is no promise, then this can only mean that language, in its essence, is contingent. Its capacity "to take place and not to take place" is what allows language to speak not only of what exists but also, at all times, to "reach out to its own nothingness [Nichts], to the nothingness [Nichts] of its reference, its meaning, and its determination" [P 371; EV 354]; its contingency alone permits speech not only to state "one thing concerning another thing," but also to speak otherwise and, more decisively, to abstain, as the very "opening of the possibility of speaking" ["Lingua Amissa" 187], from speaking altogether. As what can at all times not only be but also not be itself, language is irreducibly, irreparably contingent. In a text that considers the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, "Ou, séance," Hamacher identifies a linguistic mark of what sustains speech in its essential contingency. This mark, which Hamacher characterizes not as a word or a referential lexeme but as a "linguistic or graphic function" [1: 219] is or. Or, for Hamacher, marks the element in language that opens the possibility of all denotation and all signification, maintaining it, in its possibility, as capable of being wholly otherwise than it is. "There has to be an or," Hamacher writes, for there to be the possibility of citing, commenting, questioning, thinking here and now. This possibility . . . depends consequently on a linguistic element that is neither a noun nor a demonstrative, and which expresses neither an affirmation nor a negation. Or is a particle of disjunction and conjunction, and [End Page 33] thus of co-disjunction, which announces a different possibility, and more exactly, the possibility of difference. [1: 219, trans. modified] The ambiguity of or, whose sense can be either inclusive or exclusive, enumerative or disjunctive, and which has given rise to such careful measures in formal and logical notation, 13 thus follows from the function and sense of or itself: "no alternatives and no modifications are possible for the or that are not themselves already formalized in the or" [1: 230]. In its every use, "the or," Hamacher writes, "announces possibilities" [2: 103]--possibilities for or ("or . . . or . . . or") or, inevitably, the possibility of no or. "From the beginning," Hamacher writes, "or also always says: or without or" [1: 230, trans. modified]. As what allows language to speak both of and as what can be and can also not be, or is the linguistic operator of contingency. Or is the single term that, while remaining unthought, conditions and renders possible the classical definition of contingency as what "can or cannot be" (quod potest vel non esse). Contingency is precisely that Being that must, in every case, be or not be; it is that which, in its irreducibility to both Being and not-Being, contaminates all Being with the possibility of non-Being and all non-Being with the possibility of Being. Hamlet's "to be or not to be," Hamacher thus writes in Maser, "expresses not an alternative but, rather, the implication of possible non-Being in Being or the redefinition of Being as non-Being" [M 38]. "'To be or not to be,'" Hamacher writes in "Ou, séance," is then not "'either to be or not to be' but 'Being or more exactly: a being that can always also not be,' 'Being and thus the possibility of not-Being,' 'Being its Not'" [2: 105, trans. modified]. Or is that by which Being holds itself in relation to its own possibility of its end, which is to say, in relation to no relation at all. Or, Hamacher writes, "articulates the structure of finite existence, the possibility of the impossibility of existence" [2: 105]. If or, however, designates not a thing but a possibility, and indeed a possibility that is always also the possibility of an impossibility, then what can it mean for language to say or and, as Hamacher writes, for "each word" [1: 222] in language to say or, or as the "word of the word, the matter of the word, its element, its occurring" [1: 222, trans. modified]? What mode of truth--or nontruth--can belong to the mere articulation of a syntactical disjunction, if language is nothing other than this articulation? Toward the end of his 1929-30 lecture course, The Basic Problems of Metaphysics, Heidegger, investigating the ground of the possibility of Aristotle's determination of language in its propositional character, is led to consider or. In a critique that does not spare either Being and Time or Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger calls into question every attempt to found the totality of all logical utterances and the typology of their forms on the model of the positive, true proposition [488-89]. The "inner and essential structure" of language (logos), Heidegger writes, cannot be adequately grasped as a "present-at-hand formation [vorhandenes Gebilde]" expressed by the affirmative statement; it lies, rather, in a "faculty" or "capacity to [ein Vermögen zu . . .]" that first opens the possibility of the statement, whether it be true, false, affirmative or negative [488-89]. "The essence of the logos" Heidegger writes, "lies precisely in the fact that as such, it shelters the possibility of being 'either true or false,' 'both positive and negative'" [489, Heidegger's emphasis]. In the form of the either-or and the both-and, language [End Page 34] bears the mark of its constitutive "possibility-to." It presents itself, we read, neither as a true statement nor as a false one, neither as "unconcealment [Entbergen]" nor as "concealment [Verbergung]" but, rather, as the bare "possibility [Möglichkeit] of both" [492, Heidegger's emphasis]. As such, the or is the cipher of that which enables predicative and assertive discourse to be what it is and maintains it as such; it is the mark, in language, of the "freedom" and "pre-logical openness for the being as a being" that, for Heidegger, constitutes the essence of what it means to be human. Without citing Heidegger's own treatment of the same syncategoreme, Hamacher considers precisely the structure and status of the "prelogical" and "prepredicative openness" that Heidegger finds inscribed in the form of the either-or. Insofar as the "possibility" to which it refers cannot constitute one already established logical category among others, Heidegger's or can only be the mark of the "originary potentialization" or "originary rendering possible [ursprüngliche Ermöglichung]" by which human beings, as Heidegger writes in the same lecture course, "bestow possibleness or possibility [die Möglichkeit] on the possible as such" [215, Heidegger's emphasis]. It is this rendering possible that concerns Hamacher in the structure of the or, for it is what contingency (which exists in relation to its possibilities to be otherwise) accomplishes as such. "The or," Hamacher writes, "announces possibilities not as already given, to which it might be referred merely as external determinations; rather, or opens these possibilities" ["Ou, séance" 2: 103, trans. modified]. What the or marks is not the possible, Hamacher therefore writes, but, "if one may speak in this manner, [the] pre-possible" [P 209; EV 181]; its activity is not properly modal but, rather, we read, "premodal" ["Ou, séance" 2: 103]. As the possibility not of one thing or another, but of possibility tout court, such a prepossibility or rendering possible can therefore have no modal or categorial status. It cannot even be considered as the rendering possible of Being, to the extent that it would then be determined as the foundation of Being and, accordingly, stripped of its irreducible capacity to be otherwise and not at all. If its contingency is not to be eliminated, if its radical possibility is not to be transformed into the essentia of a possibilitas formed after the image of what exists, the rendering possible of which Hamacher writes must allow for the possibility of Being and its categories and, at the same time, allow for something other than them. Yet if what "bestows possibleness or possbility" is irreducible to what it renders possible, if rendering possible is capable not only of Being but also of something that is other than--and something that is not--Being, then what is possible, insofar as it is at all, is always other than, and hence also not, what it is. If rendering possible is irreducible to Being, always allowing for more and less than Being, then what it allows to be must, as a result, always be more and less than itself. The irreducible rendering possible that opens the possibility of all Being must mark the Being it allows with its own excess, defiguring the figures of existence it grants and deforming the very Being it forms. "Rendering impossible [Verunmöglichung]," Hamacher writes, "must then 'belong' to the structure of rendering-possible [Ermöglichung]" [P 33-34, trans. modified; EV 39]; to render possible, we read in Hamacher's studies on "or," must also be "to render possible the impossibility of this rendering possible: depossibilization [Entmöglichung]" ["Ou, séance" 2: 105, trans. modified]. The very modalization of Being cannot but entail its demodalization in the simultaneous movement of what Hamacher calls "infinite modalization" and "mortalization without beginning or end" [2: 105]. "Language," for Hamacher, is the name of this movement. Not necessary, possible, or even impossible, language, for Hamacher, is instead what lets the necessary, the possible and the impossible be what they are, while sheltering their possibility to be other than themselves. Developing a constellation of concepts drawn from Meister Eckhart and Heidegger, Hamacher here conceives of the most fundamental activity of [End Page 35] language as "releasement [Gelâzenheit]," "abandonment [Gelassenheit]," "letting [Lassen]," and "letting-be [Seinlassen]." In Hamacher's work, however, these concepts undergo a profound mutation. Here it is not the soul or even Being, but rather language itself that abandons and is abandoned: language releases itself, letting itself first be "itself"--and hence, as we have seen, always more and less than any "self"--in this very releasement. What is ultimately at issue in Hamacher's texts is this "letting-be . . . of language [Seinlassen der Sprache]" [P 223; EV 196]: the movement by which language, before it can even be called "language," allows its "self" to be. If language is deictic, constative, or performative, Hamacher argues, it must already have opened a field in which deixis, constation and performance may take place; if these operations of language, furthermore, are to be more than unrepeatable faits accomplis, then language must continue, at every moment, to hold this field open. As the "clearing of the field of play [Spielraum]" ["Lingua Amissa" 208] of all possible utterances and the "formless event [formloses Ereignis]" that allows for the formation of all possible performatives, language, Hamacher writes, is "admissive" 14 and "afformative." 15 If, as Kant argues, Being is pure "position," then one must say that language, in its afformative and admissive pre-positionality, "is not in the manner of Being." It is, instead, Hamacher writes, what "actualizes [verwirklicht]" language without ever "forcing it into actualization [Verwirklichung]": "not essentia, not 'essence' [Wesen], and also not the 'essence' of the ontological difference," we read, but rather something "ultra-transcendental and trans-ontological" ["Afformativ, Streik" 361]. The afformative and admissive dimensions of language are not conditions of possibility. As grounds, such conditions would necessarily introduce into speech and its operation the very teleology to which language, for Hamacher, is irreducible; they would determine language with respect to an ideal form whose achievement and actualization would constitute its end as such. The afformative and the admissive, for that very reason, are not transcendental structures; nor are they, furthermore, "quasi-transcendental" ones, to which the form of the transcendental, given certain adjustments, would still be adequate. The afformative and admissive, Hamacher writes, are "attranscendental" and "atranscendental" structures: "attranscendental" since, "at the edge of transcendental logic," 16 they open the possibility of language and its structures; "atranscendental" for, in the very movement by which they open this possibility, they always also expose language to its own irreparable deposing. The afformative and the admissive do not, therefore, simply lie before language, allowing it to be itself; they are, rather, at all times in language and with language, as that which is not language and, in not being language, allows language to be what it is. Their relation to language is the one indicated not by the Latin preposition trans but, instead, by ad: they prepare for language, move toward it and in its direction, while never coinciding with it as such. Whoever speaks, whoever means, and whoever acts already moves in the field opened by these attranscendentalia, which articulate the simultaneous "breakdown and possibility" ["Ou, séance" 2: 118] of language as such; whoever enters into language and that with which it is concerned is already taken into the medium of this releasement and remission, which consigns all speech to being itself only by possibly not being itself and not being at all. If there is speech and anything of what it implies, be it things, meanings, or acts, then it is because language, in its afformation and admission, lets itself be, consigning itself to its own irreducible, ineradicable contingency--to that, in it, which can: which can be otherwise [End Page 36] than every known form of Being, which can be otherwise than Being itself and which can, a limine, not be at all. 5. No Language Language, therefore, is not. The existence of language--that which simultaneously allows and forbids the articulation of the modalities of Being--cannot be called "existence," if existence is determined, in its classical sense, according to the form of what is present and actual. Hamacher's inquiry into the mode of existence of language leads to this paradoxical conclusion, according to which language, considered as such, proves irreducible to any known category of Being. The fundamental principle of the classical treatment of the problem of language, namely, that language is founded in the world of things, is thus radically called into question. While Aristotle, in De interpretatione, derives language from the beings of which it speaks, Hamacher suggests that there is such a thing as language only insofar as language, at every moment of its operation, holds itself in relation to what is not: the Nothing that, within all language, allows speech not only to refer and to signify but also, at the same time, not to mean things and not to mean at all. Language, in Hamacher's works, is thus loosened from its classical tie to the world of things; it is "set free" and "opened," as Hamacher writes of Celan's poetry, "to what remains unsaid in it, what indicates itself in it as an unrepeatable past, what merely announces itself as coming" [P 385, trans. modified; EV 366]. Here, language, in its ex-posure to what is not, is itself to the extent that it itself is not. Hamacher's analysis of the existence of language therefore implies a final consequence for every attempt to consider the form, structure, and concept of language, a consequence that is as radical as it is unavoidable: there is no language. Hamacher insists upon this thesis, which in some sense marks the ultimate point of his thought. "There is never any language; there has never been one, and none could ever be given" [P 19, trans. modified; EV 24], we read in the title essay of Premises. Hermeneutics must take as its point of departure not "a given language," Hamacher writes, but "the giving of language" [P 84; EV 52], which, in existing as a pure giving alone, demands that one affirm that "there is no constituted language" [P 210; EV 182], that "there is not yet a common language and so, strictly speaking, there is none at all" [P 107; EV 76]. "There is no language in which nothingness does not also speak," we read, "that would not be something other than language and that would not be in a mode other than language" [P 225, trans. modified; EV 198]. "However novel, unacceptable or senseless it may sound," Hamacher writes in a recent essay on prayers, "there is not one, not any, language" ["Bogengebete" 12]. To state that "there is no language" is not to deny the existence of what, in the discourse of literary criticism, hermeneutics, and philosophy, bears the name of language. It is, rather, to open the concept of language to something other than what it has designated since its canonical, Aristotelian determination in terms of reference and signification, predication and assertion. "There is no language" thus means that there is no language, in the sense given to the concept by Aristotle, that would not also entail what cannot strictly speaking be subsumed under this concept: the rest, reading, promise, and contingency of language, which render language in its classical determination possible even as they keep it open to something other than itself. In short: no language that is not no language. "No," in this phrase, marks the place, in language and in that with which it is concerned, of the essential void that, precisely in not being, is language. Hamacher's apparent negation of what commonly bears the name of "language" thus reveals itself to be, in the end, an affirmation of language in an altogether different sense: as "pure [End Page 37] language [reine Sprache]," in Benjamin's words, "mere" or "bare language [blosse Sprache]" [P 327; EV 313], according to Hamacher's phrase, the very occurrence, in all language, of language as such. Contracted into the nothingness of its rest, beyond Being, its modes and its categories, language here shows itself, at last, as what it never was and is not yet: itself. Daniel Heller-Roazen received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the Humanities Center of Johns Hopkins University in April. As of September 2000, he will be Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Notes 1. "For the true and the false exist with respect to synthesis and division [peri gar synthesin kai diaireisin esti to pseudos kai to alethes]." Aristotle insists upon the com-positional form of truth in several texts: cf. De anima, 430b3 ff.: "in truth and falsity, there is a certain composition [en hois de kai to pseudos kai to alethes, synthesis tis]"; cf. also Metaphysica 1027b19 ff., where Aristotle writes that "the true and the false are with respect to [peri] composition and decomposition [synthesis kai diaresis]." 2. Kataphasis de estin apophansis tinos kata tinos. It goes without saying that the apophatic statement, which speaks "one thing away from another thing [legein tis apo tinos]," is merely the inversion of the kataphatic, which, for Aristotle, constitutes the model of correct speech in general. 3. In one of Hamacher's other essays, this "fundamental thesis" appears as the "unstated principle" according to which "the literary sentence [Satz] is structured like a propositional sentence [Aussagesatz]" [see Hamacher, "Apotropäische Figur, ein Gedicht von W. B.Yeats" 288]. 4. It has often been pointed out that the notion of symploke is Platonic in origin. See, among other passages, Theatetus 202b: "the essence of the utterance [logos] is to be an interlacing [symploke] of names." That the Stoic philosophy of language constitutes a repetition and radicalization of the Platonic treatment of syntax has been noted, among others, by Ildefonse [132]. 5. Ammonius already notes the heterogeneity of the lekton with respect to Aristotle's model of signification when, in his commentary on De interpretatione, he can find no place in the economy of the Aristotelian treatise for the new term proposed by the Stoics, "an intermediary between thought and the thing, which they [sc., the Stoics] call the expressible." Cf. Ammonius, Commentarius in Aristotelis de interpretatione [17, my translation]. 6. Important terminist texts on the concept of enuntiabile can be found in Rijk. A useful account of the Scotist theory of esse intentionale or, more precisely, esse objectivum can be found in de Muralt, L'enjeu de la philosophie médiévale [in particular "La doctrine médiévale de l'esse objectivum" 91-167]. 7. The four-part modal articulation of Being as necessary (anangkaion), impossible (adynaton), possible (dynaton), and contingent (endekhomenon) is apparent in De interpretatione [see, for instance, the opening of chapter 12] and forms the basis of Aristotle's modal syllogistic in the Prior Analytics. 8. The structure of sovereign potentiality or power is the central subject of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Bare Life and Sovereign Power. 9. Deleuze's term, as is evident from the predicate "beatific," is Spinozist in inspiration. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l'expression; see also Deleuze's last text, "Immanence: Une vie. . . ," in Philosophie 47 (1995). 10. In pleroma, Hamacher in fact refers to both Glas and "Ousia and Grammè" [see, in particular, pl 213]. 11. This passage is also to be found in Hamacher's introduction to the German edition of Allegories of Reading [see Allegorien der Lektüre 20]. 12. It would not be difficult to show that this paradox is already clearly formulated in the philosophy of language of the Middle Ages, from which Bochenski drew so much of his own logic. The paradox of contingency, for example, is implicit in Abelard's definition of "possible things," in his Logica ingredientibus, as "those things that exist when they do not exist and do not exist when they exist, and that are thus naturally capable of turning over into either of the two by virtue of the ease of their nature [possibilia enim sunt esse, cum non sint, et non esse, cum sint, et ita in utrumque partem facilitate naturae verti possunt]" [440.38-40]. 13. To take only one, twentieth-century example from the history of these measures, P. F. Strawson's Introduction to Logical Theory [93] formalizes the two senses of or as the difference between "(p V q) . ~ (p . q)" (exclusive sense) and "p V q" (inclusive sense). Rich discussions of the status and sense of or can be found in later medieval logic. See, for example, the treatment of vel in Peter of Spain's Syncategoremata. 14. The concept of "admission" and "the admissive" is to be found in the last pages of "Lingua Amissa," in particular 45-48. 15. Hamacher develops the concept of "afformative" most explicitly in "Afformativ, Streik." 16. "Faust, Geld" 186. Hamacher also uses the term "attranscendental" in P 246-47; EV 220. Works Cited Abelard, Peter. Peter Abaelards Philosophischen Schriften. Ed. Bernhard Geyer. Münster: Aschendorffsche, 1919. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Bare Life and Sovereign Power. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Ammonius. Commentarius in Aristotelis de interpretatione. Ed. Adolf Busse. Aristotle. De anima. Trans. in Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes. Vol. 8: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Trans. W. S. Hett. ________. De interpretatione. Trans. in Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes. Vol. 1: The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics. Trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. Augustine. De doctrina christiana. Ed. Manlio Simonetti. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Bochenski, Deleuze, Gilles. "Immanence: Une vie . . ." Philosophie 47 (1995). ________. Spinoza et le problème de l'expression. de Man, Paul. "Promises (Social Contract)." Allegories of Derrida, Jacques. Apories. ________. Glas: Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? ________. Marges de la philosophie. Hamacher, Werner. "Afformativ, Streik." Was heißt Darstellen? Ed. Christiaan Hart-Nibbrig. Frankfurt am ________. "Apotropäische Figur, ein Gedicht von W. B. Yeats." Europa-Lyrik (1780-1980). Ed. Klaus Lindemann. ________. "Bogengebete." Lichtensteiner Exkurse III: Aufmerksamkeit (1998). My translation. ________. "Faust, Geld." Athenäum, Jahrbuch für Romantik 4 (1994). All translations from this text are my own. ________. Introduction. Allegorien der Lektüre. By Paul de Man. Trans. Werner Hamacher and Peter Krumme. Frankfurt am ________. "Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida's Spectres of Marx." Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Trans. Kelly Barry. Ed. Michael Sprinker. ________. "Ou, séance, touche de Nancy, ici." Paragraph 16 (1994): 216-31 and 17 (1995): 103-19. ["Ou, séance" 1 and 2] ________. "The Word Wolke--If It Is One." Trans. Peter Fenves. Benjamin's Ground: New Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 3: Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. All translations from this text are my own. Heidegger, Martin. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt--Endlichkeit--Einsamkeit. Vol. 29/30 of Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am ________. "Das Wesen der Sprache." Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Ildefonse, Frédérique. La naissance de la grammaire dans l'antiquité grecque. Muralt, André de. L'enjeu de la philosophie médiévale: Étudies thomistes, scotistes, occamiennes, et grégoriennes. Peter of Rijk, E. M. Logica Modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967. 2 vols. Strawson, P. F. Introduction to Logical Theory. London: Methuen, 1952. | |
Friday, March 9, 2007
Language, or No Language
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