Metanoia by Armen Avanessian;Anke Hennig;

Author:Armen Avanessian;Anke Hennig; [Schott, By Armen Avanessian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350004740
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2017-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Linguistic turntable

“[T]here is no such thing as metalanguage (an assertion made so as to situate all of logical positivism), no language able to say the truth about truth, since truth is grounded in the fact that truth speaks, and that it has no other means by which to become grounded.”27 It is this criticism of Lacan’s of a meta-language that has inspired us to methodically recall the triadic epistemic situation of psychoanalysis (consisting of subject, object, and other).

From this point of view, let’s try once again to situate our method in relation to the two discourses of philosophy and contemporary linguistics, namely against the background of analytic philosophy’s attempts at making epistemology progress in the form of lingual analysis. At the end of this paradigm, the image of language was so distorted that it provoked massive objections from both the theory of language and from philosophy itself.

“What is needed is a confrontation with the proponents of the ‘linguistic turn;’ what is needed, too, is a return to linguistics, i.e. to an engagement with language that is based on sound knowledge.”28 Elisabeth Leiss’s accusation against philosophy as it developed in the wake of the so-called linguistic turn is substantial. In generalized form, her reproach is that the philosophy of language lacks insight into the way language functions and is therefore incapable of knowing anything about the world or of developing an ontology; it argues without knowing anything about its objects or isn’t, in the end, interested in them at all. Various currents of contemporary philosophy—from Badiou’s mathematical ontology to Latour’s theory of science—develop a complementary criticism: they reproach the philosophies shaped by the linguistic turn of language with having lost its genuinely philosophical dimension.

Are these just superficial agreements? Or do they conceal fundamental commonalities that overlap with our project of a realist theory of language? From this perspective, we can name at least four commonalities relevant to an ontological understanding of language: first, the anti-causality of language; second, its relationism; third, its realism; and fourth, its circularity.

First we can see a general anti-causal argument shared by Elisabeth Leiss and philosophical anti-nominalisms. “The main difference between a rationalist universal grammar and a semiotically conceived one is that the latter does not admit causal explanations.”29 The two discourses have very different reasons for rejecting causality; but they share the insight that thought and language are not causally linked to their objects. Meillassoux focuses on the concept of the facticity of facts, Leiss on the non-arbitrariness of language. We saw how they condition each other.

Second, there is a point of connection or an interface between recent linguistic realism and Speculative Realism in what we call an ontology of relations or relational ontology. Its essential insight is that language communicates to its speakers a relational knowledge. With this knowledge, we know the world—a world that consists of relations between things, to which we, too, belong. (Let’s recall that we already found this leveling of the difference between things and objects, both considered to be “individuals,” in Strawson’s metaphysics.

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