Material Inscriptions by Andrzej Warminski

Author:Andrzej Warminski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

However pitiable or mockable the deaf man's predicament may appear to us – we can imagine him, say, tapping his foot to the “rhythm” of the sand-patterns’ transformations (just as in the case of the painter without hands we can imagine him, say, trying to “sing” a particular color) – we should not forget that he is a figure, a metaphor, for our lack of knowledge and self-deception in figure, in metaphor. As it turns out, he is not nearly so pathetic a figure as we are at the very moment we pity him or mock him. For the very “logic” of this metaphor by analogy requires that, sooner or later, we have to conclude that if metaphors lie, if metaphors are all insufficient and unable to tell us the truth of any thing-in-itself, then even the metaphor for the inadequacy and insufficiency of metaphor must itself be inadequate and insufficient. In other words, how is this metaphor, the figure of Chladni's sand-figures, itself an insufficient metaphor for the insufficiency of metaphor? And, to continue the analogy, how is it that we are mutilated, deaf like the deaf man? In other words, at this level we are no longer asking about the “truth” of the relation between language (i.e., metaphor) and the X of the thing-in-itself but rather about the “truth,” the X, of the relation of metaphors to the X of things-in-themselves in relation to the metaphor of Chladni's sound-figures. To schematize, we line up the following “proportion” with the other two in our analogy:

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