Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington

Author:Geoffrey Bennington [Bennington, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory, Literary Criticism, Caribbean & Latin American, Philosophy, Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780748639854
Google: mc3rwAEACAAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh UP
Published: 2010-09-15T21:25:08+00:00

The Limits of My Language

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, as Wittgenstein notoriously puts it in the Tractatus.1 My interest in this paper is not so much to discuss that assertion itself, as to wonder what to make of the notion of language having limits at all. What sense can we make of the expression ‘limits of language’? And this question might itself divide into at least two sub-questions, namely: (1) what kind of limits does language have (assuming it has any)? and (2) does language even have limits?

It might seem at first as though language must have limits, and that those limits must be where it abuts onto ‘the world’. Language ‘over here’, or so the thought would go, is separated from, but in some relation to, the world ‘over there’. That relation would be essentially, if we are to follow the tradition, the relation of reference, or at least possible reference. On this view the world, which intuitively existed long before language, sits there waiting, as it were, for language to arrive on the scene and to refer to it. In referring (or at least in successfully referring), language both recognises its limits and transgresses them, in the sense at least that it points beyond those limits (maybe even puts out ‘feelers’) to reality or the world beyond. On this simple but powerful view of language, reality, whether construed as empirical, as in Locke, or of some higher order, as in Plato, not only comes first in the relationship, but ‘wears the trousers’, as J. L. Austin might have said. If I can quote David Pears characterising this view (as that of the Tractatus) in his magnum opus on Wittgenstein:

The idea is that in all our operations with language we are really running on fixed rails laid down in reality before we even appeared on the scene. Attach a name to an object, and the intrinsic nature of the object will immediately take over complete control and determine the correct use of the name on later occasions. Set up a whole language in this way, and the structure of the fundamental grid will inexorably dictate the general structure of the logical system.2

My intention is not to follow what happens to these questions in Wittgenstein, however, but to see how they fare in the work of Jacques Derrida. It might plausibly be thought, for example, and often indeed has been thought, that Derrida is proposing (however obscurely) a philosophy of language, and one that also attempts to produce a non- or anti-Platonist account of what holds language together in its relations with the world, once the Platonic presumption has been refused, albeit not an account that obviously turns to what Pears calls ‘the stability of our own practices’ to do the trick.3 It would also have in common with Wittgenstein that it gives rise to what Pears calls ‘the characteristic intellectual giddiness of withdrawal from Platonism’. On this view of Derrida proposing a philosophy

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.