Author: staceymeeker

The contradiction in the intentional structure of the imperative between the speaker’s and the hearer’s intentions reflects the fundamental asymme­try of the speech situation, which emerges at this stage, and which is not so much resolved in the higher forms as made explicit and thereby deferred. This asymmetry was in fact present from the beginning, even independently of the assumption that not all the members of the group grasped the meaning of the sign at the same moment.

In the originary event, each individual’s participation in designating/representing the sacred object, although productive of the same intentional structure of deferred desire/sacralization as that of the others, was at the same time an imaginary possession of the object at the others’ expense. From the vantage point of the imperative, however, and a fortiori from that of the higher forms, we may now express this asymmetry in more formal terms, because the significance expressed by these forms is no longer, as with the ostensive, inherent in scenic presence but is mediated by the desire of the speaker. This mediation occurs in its most overt form in the imperative; in the declarative it is discounted but not simply eliminated.

The “objective” formulation of the distinction between speaker’s and hearer’s intention requires that we consider linguistic presence as a virtual relation actualized voluntarily by the speaker but entered into by the hearer as a duty incumbent on him qua member of the commu­nity. In the originary event this enforcement was experienced as incarnate in the sacred object. But the deritualization of the modern world has not lessened this dissymmetry. On the contrary, the rise of the media, and more recently, of the social media, has tended only to accen­tuate it. Thus the speaker chooses to speak, or for example to tweet, but the listener/viewer cannot help but view or listen, collectively if not individually. It is not that virtual linguistic presence confers on the speaker a permanent advantage; the commu­nity imposes appropriateness-conditions that if violated will be punished a pos­teriori. But he benefits a priori from a presumption of significance. Viewed from without, speaker and hearer in the speech situation are equally present to one another, yet the speaker need not justify his role to the hearer otherwise than through the linguistic representation expressed in his utterance.

For the hearer, however, the representation does not appear alone, but as spoken by the speaker-speaking-the-utterance, and thus the hearer’s intentional model of reality in the speech-situation is complicated by the addition of a supplementary factor. The speaker intends only the linguistic model, but the hearer intends the speaker’s intention. If this were not so, the communication situation would not be “intentional,” that is, representational at all. To understand the speech act as something other than an instinctual/involun­tary signal, it must be seen as an inten­tional actualization of linguistic presence. On this point it might be said that hearer and speaker are in accord, since the latter is certainly aware of his own intentionality. But the speaker does not intend this intentionality; it is not an ele­ment of his representation. Were this not so, the speech act would suffer from infinite regression, as do in fact all theories that attempt to propose a completely symmetrical (or “metaphysical”) model of the communication situation. Linguistic presence is not a “channel” of communication, and although for the higher lin­guistic forms the channel analogy is an adequate approximation in most cases, it cannot help us to understand the origin of these forms.

The speaker’s model of the com­munication situation must be incomplete if it is to exist at all. Thus he acts as though a “channel” indeed existed into which to pour the information he desires to communi­cate, whereas for the hearer, the actualization of this “channel” depends on the intentional act of the speaker.

Before pursuing our formalization of the speaker-hearer asymmetry and the analysis of the dialectic of linguistic forms on which it directly bears, we should dispose of a potential epistemological objection. We communicate through language and conceive of this communication as “transparent” to our thoughts, the proof being that we can always add qualifications to our previous statements; in Peirce’s terms, to every sign there may correspond an “inter­pretant” that may be made as explicit as we like. But if in some undefined sense this is not true and language is indeed “opaque,” then there is no vantage point from which we may speak of the inherent contradictions of linguistic communication, because our own discourse must remain sub­ject to the limitation we purport to denounce. This objec­tion, then, has a double expression, “optimistic” and “pessimistic,” the one “metaphysical” and traditional, accepting philosophy’s presumption that the declarative proposition is the “natural” form of the “expression of ideas,” the other, post-Nietzschean and nihilistic, using language only to deconstruct its earlier pretensions.

In response to this double objection, I would defend both the need for and the possibility of a humanistic theory of representation—the first, in answer to the “optimists” who find it unnecessary, the second, to the “pessimists” who think it inconceivable. The transparency of communication does not consist in the sharing of a “pure intuition” but simply in the capacity of language to include indefinitely many levels of metalanguage—what in a somewhat different context Chomsky calls “recursion.” This capacity is virtual and by definition cannot be exhausted; what we say on any subject can never be a definitive “last word.” And precisely because this virtuality is an element of the intentional structure of our dis­course, our communication remains “transparent,” that is, open to explanation and eventual refutation. But this condi­tion of language is not contained in the extant works of language; it consists rather in our capacity for further construc­tion on them.

In particular, the originary hypothesis is the realization of a possibility latent, but certainly not preexisting, in the discourses of social science. From its perspective,  neither these discourses nor their linguistic structures preexisted in a timeless metaphysical realm called “language,” but all were con­structed on the basis of earlier forms, the earliest of which is the object of the hypothesis. Linguistic “transparency” was not available a priori, but became a virtual reality through the construction of the general form of dialogue, which is itself based, as we shall see, on the preexisting form of the declarative sentence. “Transparency” being merely potential openness to further discourse, it does not abolish the original asymmetry of the communication situation, but permits its effects to be indefinitely deferred. And only once the founding hypothesis has been made explicit—providing an epistemological link between the subject matter and the theory that purports to explain it—can the discourse that performs this task properly claim for itself the name of science.

From this perspective, the logical impossibility of complete self-inclusion does not prevent the construction of forms to resolve what­ever contradictions may arise, and it is to our analysis of this process of construction that we now return.

The speaker intends his words as a model of reality; the hearer intends them as intended by the speaker. This opposi­tion can be expressed schematically in very simple terms. If S says “X,” then

Speaker’s model: X

Hearer’s model: S (X)

It is important to note, however, that this schema applies only to mature language, because only by means of the declarative sentence can the “hearer’s model” be explicitly formulated. At the elementary stages, although the hearer realizes that the words are being pronounced intentionally by the speaker, he cannot say this himself, and therefore cannot conceive that his model of the situation might possess the same objective status as that presented by the speaker. To briefly recapitulate the preceding stages of linguistic evolution in terms of the schema just proposed demonstrates its unavailability to the forms of “elementary language.”

In the originary event, the participants are presumed to experience, in emitting the sign representing the sacred object, an imaginary participation in the mediating or presence-compelling power of this object. Each individual’s ostensive gesture is both a (linguistic) sign of the object and a (ritual) sign of his participation in the communal attention to it. The model of the central sacred object is reinforced by the deferral of action within the communal presence around it. Thus the significance of the speaker’s utterance is fully guaranteed by the community. Conversely, from the hearer’s standpoint, the intentionality of every speaker coincides with that by which the community as a whole establishes itself, through the deferral of action within the nonviolent scenic presence mediated by the sacred object.

Yet on each individual scene of representation, the symmetry of the communal intention is disrupted by originary resentment, the supplement to appetite that, once the sacralization of the central figure has been established, leads the group from its originary stasis to the controlled violence of the collective division of this figure in the sparagmos, in which each receives an “equal” portion. A more synthetic term for this combination of appetite and the frustration occasioned by its (sacred) object’s withdrawal is desire.

The above schema provides the means both for understanding and discounting the element of desire in linguistic intention, although the participants in the originary event neither possess nor have need of these means, given the symmetry of the situation mediated by the sacred. Desire nevertheless exerts a dialectical pressure on representa­tion by conferring on the sign the power to evoke the appetite-deferring significance of the object, eventually bringing about the lowering of the threshold of significance to include other, profane objects, while in a parallel development, the sacred guarantee of the communal scene of representation is reenacted and rein­forced through ritual.

From the standpoint of our schema, this evolution takes place as though the individual-as-hearer were reinterpreting the others-as-speakers’ originary designation of the sacred object as the expression not of a collective but of an individual choice of referent, so that the ostensive-in-­general can come into existence to represent profane as well as sacred objects. The sacred power of the object was one with its desirability. But what is its “desirability” other than the fact of its designation by others? The dialectic of desire appears here fully mystified; language at this stage offers no possibility of representing its own operation, even in others. The individual not only cannot see the beam in his own eye, he is blind to the one in the eye of his neighbor.

But the spectacle of this blindness illuminates for us the entire dialectic of representational forms, which can be seen—as Girard first saw it—as a progression in the understanding of desire. At the same time, it permits us to grasp the element of anthropological truth in the enduring notion of the lost paradise of original presence, the falling away from which was described by Heidegger as the “forgetting of being” coeval with the institution of meta­physics, the world-view that considers the declarative proposition as at the same time independent of and transparent to its content.

Stripped of its theoretical reinforcement in philosophical doctrine, “metaphysics” is simply the non-recursive understanding of propositional form as expressed in our schema; that is, capable of seeing desire in the representations of others, but not in our own, and therefore not in the form itself—treating the declarative sentence as not merely originary, but natural.

When desire was born in the originary event, its blindness was symmetrical and therefore “innocent.” The higher forms of language mark a fall from grace where each speaker begins to suspect the “subjectivity” of his fellows. This suspicion is a step on the road to the objectivity of scientific discourse, and well as an incentive for the construction of ever-more-powerful modes of deferral.

The second stage in our dialectic, the passage from the ostensive to the imperative, requires less comment. Here we are much closer to the opposition represented in our schema, because the hearer of the inappropriate ostensive can only treat it as an imperative if he understands it as the expression of the speaker’s desire. The imperative sign denotes an absent referent, signifi­cant to the speaker, in contrast to the ostensive, which designates a phenome­non of communal significance. But if in the ostensive the role of individual desire was neglected, in the imperative it is exaggerated. In the ostensive, the speaker’s own intention is absorbed into that of the commu­nity, and his original initiative forgotten in the collective repetition of his utterance. In the imperative, quite the opposite is the case: whatever the referent’s communal significance, it can appear only through the mediation of the desire of the individual subject. This opposition reflects the polarity between the presence/absence of the referent. This polarity is all the more striking when the absence is only relative to the speaker, as when he requests that a nearby but “distal” object be placed in his immediate possession, making it unambig­uously clear that what is desired is not the mere presence of the object but its appropriation by the speaker. In the imper­ative model, the linguistic presence of the referent reflects its worldly absence, and by responding to the “inappropriate osten­sive,” the hearer demonstrates that he understands that “possession” in language is a sign of desire for real possession.

If we examine the ostensive-imperative progression in terms of our schema, we observe that, if the ostensive utter­ance is interpreted not as S(X) but simply as X, the impera­tive interpretation must be expressed as something like S→X. The absence of a parenthesis represents the lack of a formal barrier between the speaker and the referent, so that his utterance is interpreted by the hearer not as the speaker’s significant model of reality, but as the hearer’s significant model of his reality.

This functionalization of the imperative in turn tends to limit its referents to objects whose appropriation by the speaker is considered felicitous. It thus serves to “educate” desire as no longer a purely subjective phenomenon but one capable of being communicated in linguistic presence and consequently obliged to take criteria of communal significance into account. Thus a point of equilibrium is established at which the imperative speaker can continue to profit from his command of linguistic presence to realize his desire, but where his desires are functionalized in the service of the community, making them more likely to be adhered to. From the standpoint of intentional structure, however, the external func­tionality of the imperative request is irrelevant; the speaker’s desire as expressed by the imperative is “significant” by definition. Whence the disequilibrium that will lead to the emergence of the declarative form.

To be continued…

The preceding discussion has shown that the requirement of human performance in the imperative is the source of the categories of tense, person, and governance that will become the touchstones of the grammaticality of the declara­tive sentence. By grammaticality we simply mean an utterance’s capacity to present a model of reality no longer dependent on the conditions obtaining during the communication situation, having cor­rected by means of “shifting” elements chosen from these categories for the specificity of time and speaker.

But because we cannot discuss these categories in terms of a hypo­thetical imperative language, our presentation has un­avoidably been oriented teleologically toward the declarative. Tense and person can already be associated with the verbal imperative, but they remain context-bound as they will not be in the declarative, without which they could not have emerged as “grammatical” concepts.

The categories of person, tense, and governance (case) are precisely those that give rise to the most familiar paradigms of the declarative and its related modes, as a glance at a Latin or Greek grammar will show. Even in languages with few or no paradigms these categories must be marked in other ways. For they are constitutive of the notion of gram­maticality itself, and the declarative sentence is inconceivable in their absence. Thus the intentional structure of the declar­ative not only admits of the possibility that oppositions between persons, tenses, and so on will generate paradigmatic combinations in a given language, but, regardless of the morphological means employed, the declarative sentence presents a model that is situated with regard to the time of utterance and to the speaker and his audience, and where the relations among nominals and verbals are, within certain limits, specified. The constitution of this intentional struc­ture, which we shall take up in the following section, is the result of a dialectical process generated by the internal contradictions of the imperative.

Although if we would explain the genesis of the declarative from the impera­tive it is reasonable to assume the inchoate existence of grammatical categories in imperative language, the intentional structure of the imperative does not require their specification. The imperative model minimally re­quires only the definition of the phenomenon whose presence is requested. The time of the action is not a true tense, but an extension of linguistic presence; similarly, the “governance” of the passive object by the active performer is a matter of practicality and not truly of gram­maticality. Thus it is senseless at this stage to speak of grammatically “correct” and “incorrect” utterances because the only relevant criterion, assuming that the addressee accepts his role in the intentional structure, is whether or not the task itself is well-defined in context. We may as well assume that the dominance in mature language of the more explicit verbal form of the imperative had already begun in impera­tive language. But the greater explicitness of the verbal form does not make it any more correct.

The category of person appears at first to constitute an exception because, in contrast with that of tense, it can be said to possess a true paradigm in the opposition between the second- and third-person imperatives. But for proof that this paradigm is not essential to the imperative, we need look no further than our own language, where the third- (and first-) person imperatives employ periphrastic constructions, in contrast to the second-person form, which simply uses the root form of the verb. (Even in Greek, where the third-person imperative is classified as part of a paradigm, it contains a true ending [–(ε)τω] in contrast with the “zero” ending [–ε] of the second-person form.) But morphological evidence aside, the question of whether the basic form of the imperative is truly a “second-person” form involving an implicit opposition to third- and/or first-person forms must be answered in the negative. It is the real-world person, not the linguistic “person,” who is the true subject of the imperative.

In a word, the “elementary” linguistic forms lack true grammatical structures because they are not yet fully emancipated from their origin in the original crisis. The scene of representation is still primarily a place of deferral of conflict, not contemplation of a model of reality. The imperative and ostensive are pragmatic, not theoreti­cal, which is to say that the linguistic present internal to the utterances is not fully separated from the linguistic presence in which they are uttered. Thus although the imperative takes different forms, these can never be grasped as paradigms of possibilities inherent in the imperative intention; their use merely corresponds to different real-world situations.

Language even at this stage is anything but instinctual, but there is a sense in which behavioral models still apply: each word is still “associated” directly with the real or desired appearance of its object. Thus not only an ape but even a rat could be trained to “speak” in elementary language by pressing one lever when a cat appears and another when it is hungry, the two levers being connected to a mechanical voice which would produce, respectively, the ostensive “Cat!” and the imperative “Food!”

Such models of human language, because they neglect the crucial element of scenic presence, are nonetheless etiologically inadequate to explain the elementary forms, and incapable of even conceiving an explanation for the higher forms. But so long as we confine our analysis to the practical functioning of the imperative, we will not touch on its contradictions and the forms generated in response to them. Our assertion that the proto-grammatical developments to which we have referred do not make use of true grammatical categories is in effect equivalent to saying that they could à la rigueur be described as accretions to the original ostensive arrived at under the pressure of “conditioned reflexes,” that is, by mere trial and error. Yet condi­tioned reflexes produce only insoluble pragmatic paradoxes that are incapable of provoking formal evolution.

Whence the significance of the absence of a first-person form at this stage. If utterances are to be explained as resulting from “association” with the presence of their objects, then the self, being by definition always present, must either be spoken of con­stantly or not at all. The most elementary form of the recursivity that Chomsky sees, rightly if taken in a broad enough sense, as the mark of human language in opposition to pre-human signaling systems, is simply the speaker’s linguistic reference to himself.

Dialectic of the Imperative (I)

The intentional structure of the imperative has up to this point been presented as a structure in equilibrium: a verbal request establishes an awaiting of performance by its hearer, compliance with which abolishes the awaiting and terminates the prolonged presence that it maintained. This indeed constitutes the felicitous performance of the imperative. Because, how­ever, felicitousness requires the action of someone other than the speaker, it cannot be predicated of the utterance alone, whose expectations, however reasonable, may not be fulfilled by the ad­dressee. The imperative utterance is not complete in itself. The asymmetrical positions of its speaker and hearer are not simply those of the speech situation; the hearer must, within the linguistic presence created by the speaker, not only hear but act. It is the contradiction implicit in this asymmetry that will lead to the creation of the “objective,” information-bearing declarative form.

The dialectic of the ostensive was motivated by the power implicit in the (ostensive) sign in its capacity to generate linguistic presence. Once this presence has been actualized by an inappropriate ostensive utterance, the hearer may fulfill the expressed desire of the speaker for the object designated by supplying it, whether to avoid conflict with the speaker or simply in order to render his utterance appropriate. Thus the contradiction between the (inappropriate) ostensive speaker’s power in the linguistic situation and his symmetry with the ostensive hearer in the real-world situation (where the referent is at least potentially present to both) is resolved in favor of the former. In the imperative, the implicit asymme­try of the ostensive speech-act becomes explicit, so that the speaker commands not only linguistic presence but the extra-linguistic actions of the hearer within the extendable limits of this presence. But by the same token, from the standpoint of its own autonomy, the speech act overextends itself, leaving itself open to disconfirmation or infelicity not on its own merits but at the hands of another.

The ostensive can be inappropriate if it refers to an absent object, but this is a feature of the real-world situation. The imperative eliminates this possibility by ordering the hearer to himself modify the situation. But at the same time it creates a new possibility of infelicity that has no analogue in the ostensive, and which points up the contradiction latent in the intentional structure of the imperative between the status its model of reality holds for the speaker and that which it holds for the hearer. This contradiction is not the effect of a “misunderstanding” but of the limitations placed by the imperative intention on the hearer.

For the speaker, the imperative is in effect nothing more than an extended osten­sive, as it was in its origin. The presence of the referent gave him power over the other; now he employs this power, transferred to the sign, to demand the presence of the object. And the hearer’s perfor­mance justifies this exercise of power; the act once accomplished, the original “ostensive” has indeed been made correct.

The speaker’s awaiting, as this analysis shows, is not merely in origin but in function a prolongation of the defer­ral of action characteristic of linguistic presence from the beginning. In the true ostensive, this deferral lasts only for the instant of the utterance, followed immediately by its confir­mation by the hearer; in the imperative, the same deferral of the hearer’s own activity, “instinctual” or simply self-moti­vated, is prolonged until such a time as the utterance, like the ostensive, can be verified.

It must again be stressed that this prolongation, which of course lends itself to exploitation by those who possess authority over others, is a formal possibility of linguistic presence itself and thus perhaps as much a source as a product of social authority. But although the imperative obtains its original force from the sanctity of the scene of representation, from the hearer’s standpoint, the awaiting of his presentation of the object is not a simple equivalent of the deferral required in order that he may understand the speaker’s message. Here we need not even speak of an unwill­ingness to perform the requested action, although the very possibility of this unwillingness is already a distinguishing feature of the situation. The deferral of linguistic presence itself is very different in kind from that necessary to the performance of a worldly action, which must be maintained throughout the duration in real time of the requested performance. Thus the imperative is dependent on extra-linguistic real time in a way the ostensive is not. This, the hearer, however great his good will, cannot help but experience, whereas the speaker, however well he may understand this truth, cannot put his understanding “into words,” that is, into the intentional structure of the imperative.

To say that from the speaker’s standpoint the imperative is no more than an extended ostensive is to say that for the speaker, the hearer’s performance is not a voluntary act, not a worldly act at all, but merely an element of a linguistic construction. The supplying of the object that will convert the imperative as an “inappropriate” ostensive into an appropriate one is awaited in linguistic time, although it must take place in real time. The hearer, insofar as he performs this act, is not truly the addressee of the imperative but only its agent. This implicit denial of the role of interlocutor to the hearer can be realized explicitly in a situation where a third party is present. Thus if a fashion designer showing his dresses to a prospective buyer says “summer dress” and a model wearing the appropriate clothing appears, his speech act is an ostensive addressed to the buyer and only secondarily an imperative, the presentation of the dress being simply assumed to take place upon the utterance of the ostensive.

This analysis is, however, made from the speaker’s point of view. The hearer of the imperative, however “mechani­cally” he obeys it, is not reacting “instinctively” but through the mediation of linguistic presence, so that his act of obedi­ence is not merely voluntary but intelligent, mediated by a prior representation. And thus not only nonperformance but deliberate disobedience is possible. Here again there is no reason to assume the speaker to be ignorant of these facts; but the intentional structure of the imperative has no place for them. The per­formance is implicit in the structure, which would otherwise be simply infelicitous. Conversely, the hearer can well understand the absolute nature of the imperative; but its intentional structure from his own view­point, by the very fact he has a viewpoint and is not simply an element of a linguistic construction, cannot be the same as that of the speaker. The hearer can only interpret the imperative as expressing the desire of the speaker, as was indeed the case of the original “inappropriate ostensive.” His performance is for him the worldly fulfillment of the speaker’s desire, whereas for the speaker, this desire is fulfilled in linguistic presence, the performance being merely a pro­longation of this presence.

The inherent contradiction between these two versions of the intentional structure of the imperative remains latent in the case of satisfactory performance. In the event that the task is not performed, however, it manifests itself openly. In effect, whatever his intention, the hearer who fails to satisfy the imperative request restores the imperative to its original status as an inappropriate ostensive. Now if this is indeed the hearer’s intention, that is, if he simply ignores the imperative and considers the absence of its referent not as an indication of an act to be performed, but as an impropriety on the part of the speaker, then he reacts as a speaker of ostensive, not imperative language. In language which admits the imperative, however, this reaction can only be understood as a refusal of linguistic presence, for within this presence, performance is the only satisfactory response to the imperative.

The hearer who is unwilling or unable to accede to the request is thus faced with the latent contradiction of the imperative situation: the response demanded by the imperative is representational for the speaker, but real for the hearer, and if this real response cannot be made, then the latter has no representational response available. The hearer thus can be said to feel the need to maintain linguistic presence, as the speaker wished, even if he cannot provide real-world satisfaction for the latter’s desire. It is this need that will give rise to the declarative form.

To be continued…

The Intentional Structure of the Imperative

The intentional structure of the ostensive can be summed up in a few words: The speaker transmits to the hearer an immediately verifiable model of the universe as containing one significant present object. That of the imperative is more complex, and this complexity is expressed as well in the existence of variant forms, such as the “collective imperative” and the third- and first-person forms.

In its primitive stage the imperative has the same linguistic substance as the ostensive. The appropriate reaction would then depend on the interpretation of the utterance: either the referent is present, and is being designated, or it is absent, and being requested. In ambiguous cases, the dynamic of the situation would tend to lead to the dominance of the imperative: because the speaker’s designation of the object indicates that he, at least, is interested in it, whereas the ostensive presupposes the interest of the other interlocutors as well, the imperative will be preferred as assuming less a priori significance. By informing its interlocutor of the desire that defines the speaker’s relation to the object, the imperative, even in the absence of any morphology or specifically verbal element, is a protogrammatical form, possessing in its intentional structure the fundamental grammatical relations of person and time.

An utterance-form is more grammatical when it contains more information, not about “reality,” but about the communication situation. The identity of substance between ostensive and imperative corresponds to an identity of information about the world. But whereas the ostensive communicated nothing about the desire of the speaker that it did not at the same time presuppose in the hearer, the imperative accentuates the asymmetry of the speaker’s role as conveyor of information by making his desire mediate the action of the other.

In certain social contexts this mediation may be taken to imply the existence of an asymmetric authority relation that transcends the immediate speech situation. But it is important to explain why this need not be the case. It is the situation of linguistic presence itself, the evocation of the scene of representation, that is the original source of the “authority” of the imperative. To be a participant in this situation, the hearer must defer his attention to worldly tasks in order to attend to the intentional model constructed by the speaker. In the imperative, the speaker takes advantage of this attention in order to extrapolate his linguistic intention into a worldly one aimed at the appropriation of its object. The ambiguity of the word “intention” here is not coincidental, nor is the instrumental nature of the imperative that exploits it. This identity of linguistic and practical intention resolves the paradox arrived at in the dialectic of the ostensive and thus produces a stable linguistic form, although, as we shall see, the use of this form will give rise to a paradoxical situation of a different sort.

The originary ostensive would have been maintained until it was clear that no individual would attempt to appropriate the object, that is, that it was sacred to all. But in the profane use of the ostensive, the end of the utterance is the end of the linguistic scene, which would presumably give way to actions not dictated by the utterance itself. In contrast, the felicitous imperative’s extrapolation of linguistic into practical intentionality prolongs the interlocutors’ virtual presence on the linguistic scene until the assigned task is carried out, independently of other worldly claims. The deferral constitutive of linguistic presence now becomes the awaiting of an anticipated action.

Grammatical Form

Our discussion up to this point, concerned exclusively with intentional structure, has maintained the assumption that the primitive form of the imperative was substantially identical to that of the ostensive. As we know, however, although the nominal imperative continues to exist, the imperative in developed languages has a verbal form. We have seen that the temporality of the imperative, that is, its tense, is the prolongation of the linguistic scene in awaiting. The time of awaiting is both real, lived time standing outside the scene stricto sensu and a prolongation of the presence intended by the utterance. Thus the imperative includes within itself a model of a time other than that of its moment of utterance. We should contrast this with the simple identity of linguistic and real time in the ostensive, where the time of linguistic presence remains, as in the originary event, merely the time of deferral of action while attending to the speaker. The ostensive model has no temporal dimension; the word and its referent coexist in the same suspended present. The temporality of the imperative, although not yet a true tense independent of the scene of communication like that of the declarative, is if not a temporal mapping of reality on language, already a mapping of language on reality. The hearer of the ostensive can immediately verify its informational content for himself, and so to speak discard the linguistic model that conveyed it; the hearer of the imperative must retain the model as a guide for his conduct, “verifying” it only upon the conclusion of his performance.

Whether the imperative takes on a nominal or a verbal form, the anticipated result of the imperative is an action by the hearer, so that the verbal form provides a more explicit model of the action. This is not true merely in the trivial sense that “bring the hammer!” or “Give me the hammer!” is more explicit than “Hammer!” If we compare “Hammer!” (conceived as a nominal) with “Run!” (considered as a verbal substantive rather than a verb), the former requires the performance by the hearer of actions not explicitly stated, whereas the latter is a fully explicit instruction. And this because the run, unlike the hammer, is wholly under the control of the hearer. This difference between nominals and verbals was not visible in the ostensive, where in either case the significant phenomenon was merely a “thing” present to the speaker and potentially to the hearer. In the imperative, the hearer can perform an action but can only supply an object. This divergent relationship to nominals and verbals in effect inaugurates the governance of the former by the latter, although, as with tense, not yet in the fully realized model of the declarative, which presents the relationship of agent, verb, and object independently of any action.

It is nevertheless this action that permits us to explain governance from a generative perspective. It is perfectly conceivable that “double” or even “triple” ostensives may have existed, consisting of a verbal and one or more nominals; for example, on observing a flight of crows, “Fly! Crows!” or even something like “Burn! Fire! House!” But it would be an error to consider such utterances as true linguistic forms and thereby as the direct ancestors of the declarative. The elements of such compound utterances would remain independent as potentially complete utterances in themselves, whereas the declarative sentence is not complete until all its positions have been filled.

The fact is that no governance relation, even the inchoate one of the imperative, is conceivable in ostensive language. “Fly! Crows!” is no more a “sentence” than “Fly! Sky!” or “Sky! Crows!” or indeed any other combination of ostensives. Governance, which is a relation between linguistic elements of an utterance as opposed to the intentional relationship (expressed in tense and person as well as in the reference of substantive words) of the utterance to reality, cannot be derived from the mere observation of relationships in nature, but only from the significant functioning of these relationships on the scene of representation. In the ostensive model this interaction ends when it points out a significant phenomenon in the real world. The imperative model, however, includes not the mere presence of its object but the relationship to be assumed toward it by the hearer. If a compound ostensive like “Fly! Crows!” presents two independent observations, a compound imperative like “Bring [the, a] hammer!” or, if the notion of “bringing” be thought to beg the question, “Come! [with] hammer!” requires of its hearer not a contemplative analysis of the relation of its elements but a performance in which the referents of the elements are combined.

We need not suppose the analytic counterpart of this practical operation to be present in the mind of the hearer. It suffices that his performance be more explicitly determined in its verbal than its nominal aspect so that, in the example at hand, the hammer cannot be provided without the hearer’s coming to the speaker, although the action of coming can be performed without the hammer. And in general the verbal element will be performed by the hearer as agent accompanied in some way by the nominal element as object or instrument. Thus although a bystander could describe the performance in our example in an ostensive coming! hammer! analogous to fly! crows!, the performer of the act could not be unaware that his coming was “governing” the appearance of the hammer. The phenomena described by the ostensive, whether or not they involve human agents, are independent of the linguistic model that refers to them, whereas the imperative specifically requests a human performance.

Similarly, the extension of the scene of representation created by the imperative to the awaiting of a requested performance adds the notion of tense to the verbal element of the imperative. As a result, this element acquires in its most rudimentary form the character of a verb. In the nominal imperative the requested object is merely made present, but in the performance requested by the verbal imperative (Run!) the object created in order to put an end to the awaiting is defined within the temporality of the imperative speech-act. The same hammer may be requested today as yesterday, but not the same run.

Here again the contrast with the ostensive brings out the increased grammaticality of the imperative model: The ostensive, concerned only with the presence of its object, is indifferent to its temporal specificity. The “run” observed today is no more different from that observed yesterday than today’s hammer differs from yesterday’s hammer. The function of the ostensive is to designate phenomena of general significance, and significant objects are always “the same” object because their appearance leads to functionally identical situations. We say “Fire breaks/broke out,” as though today’s and yesterday’s fire were two appearances of the same object. But where the ostensive is unconcerned with the distinction between the identity of phenomena and their repetition, the imperative is not, because it requests its hearer to present the identical and/or reproduce the repeatable within linguistic time. The imperative does not yet permit the distinction among different tenses, but only the more fundamental distinction of the verbal, which possesses a tense, from the nominal, which does not.

The genesis of the notion of person follows similar lines, although in contrast to that of tense, it can undergo internal differentiation within the context of the imperative model. The verbal imperative is personalized even in its basic “second-person” form because, again in contrast to the nominal, it requests an action to be performed, and thus made to exist, by the hearer. Just as we have seen that the “run” requested is a “run now,” so we may say that it is also a run-by-X, which is by no means identical to a run-by-Y. And as in the case of governance, the specificity of action on the part of the hearer of the verbal imperative may be presumed to be included in the intention of the speaker. Thus if several hearers are present and the speaker requests a hammer (Hammer!), the intentional model includes only the hammer. Even if one person is specifically addressed, this intentional structure is not violated if someone else brings the hammer, although the speaker’s expectations may be. But if he says “Come!” to one of the group, then the “come” he is requesting could not normally be performed by any other.

Now at this point “person” simply means second person, the contrast with the first person not having any basis in the intentional structure, and the third being for the moment undefined. The speaker is normally at least the “dative” object of the imperative, and he may on occasion be its “accusative” object, as in a request for help or other personal services. But although personal “shifter” pronouns must have been among the first “words,” each individual being obliged to refer to himself or to the other by means of symmetrically “shifting” gestures, even as the accusative object of an imperative verb, the speaker is never in symmetry with the hearer. The performance requested of the hearer implies no contrast with one by the speaker.

Once the imperative acquires functionality in the profane world, it is easy enough to conceive how its third- and first-person-plural (Let’s) forms might have evolved. The use of language to assign tasks would naturally enough be extended to other parties, including the speaker, the principle being that an intentional structure that names an object on which work must be done, whether to make it present or to construct it from scratch, would (like Wittgenstein’s language games) not remain limited to the dialogue of two interlocutors. However, the paradigm in which all three persons play parallel roles as subjects of a verb cannot exist prior to the declarative.

To be continued…

It is easier to understand the domestic American situation than to conceive what might be the future evolution of “global” civilization. Clearly we are not yet ready for world government, and the United Nations, which may do good in some of its auxiliary functions, seems increasingly less worthy of respect. Trump’s UN appointees’ expressions of impatience with its barely disguised antisemitism are long overdue, but it is difficult to imagine them turning the body around. The Jews remain, for their glory and suffering, the “chosen people” of the West, and the UN’s chief merit has been to make clear how little this has changed over the centuries.

If Israel is particularly hated because the very idea of a “Jewish state” appears as a contradiction in terms, this has at least the merit of clarifying the crux of the current conflict: the self-affirmation of the nation apart from humanity as a whole. The persistent hostility of our European allies to Israel’s national self-affirmation—the US hypocritically abstained on Resolution 2334, but France and England voted for it—coincides par contraste with Brexit and other signs of a recrudescence of national identity. There are still-inchoate rumblings of reaction against the West’s persistent victimocracy, in many ways far worse in Europe than in the US, and even less helpful in the long run to the far larger unassimilated population whose interests it purports to advance.

Israel has recently become more nationalistic in response to the intransigence of those who continually demand concessions of it and offer nothing in return. The European countries face no such existential threats, but the influx of Muslim immigration has made them increasingly aware of the problems caused by weakly assimilated populations in a culture that has become reluctant to affirm any kind of national or even civilizational identity.

Just as the Jews as the “first nation” are the natural targets of anti-nationalist reaction, so the Muslims, the faithful of a religion that denies the legitimacy of nationality, are the poster children for this new fear, even as they profit from the post-Hitlerian victimary reaction to any hint of collective firstness.

The strange symbiosis between Islam and the post-nationalist West is not hard to explain. Islam was the first real global ideology, and however retrograde the tribalism that is the local organizing principle in virtually all “Islamic” states, its hostility to Western and above all to Jewish nationalism makes it a secret ally, and, with Africa exemplifying the recipient of “post-colonialist” charity, the ideal victimary entity to oppose to Western “imperialism.” The more the jihadists give us excellent reasons for “Islamophobia,” the more the latter can be moralistically denounced.

It suffices to stand back a little, not easy in the midst of screaming mobs, to become aware of how simple these configurations really are. It is fascinating how, despite the irrationalities that surround these issues, their crucial dimensions follow a kind of prophetic logic. What else is there after all in the West’s current malaise that cannot be summed up in its relationship with the two “Semitic” peoples? Antisemitism has returned as a serious problem in Europe despite the paucity of Jews, its virulent Near-Eastern Islamic strain provoked by the scandal of Israel’s existence and vastly multiplied by the fact that it is so much more successful and productive than its neighbors. Not to speak of the fact that the UN never spent a dime on its “refugees”—let alone after 70 years—while lavishing funds on its corrupt and inefficient Palestinian counterpart. What could illustrate better than the obscene comparisons between the IDF and the SS and the talk of Palestinian “genocide” the accuracy of Girard’s aphorism that “Hitlerism avenges its defeat by making the concern for victims [le souci des victimes] despairing, caricatural” (Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair [Grasset, 1999]: 271; my translation).

The notion of firstness, which entered GA as a result of Adam Katz’s clarification concerning the necessarily non-unanimous onset of the conversion of the originary aborted gesture of appropriation into a unanimous sign, has remained, in my usage at least, deliberately vague, in contrast to the elegant symmetry of the “moral model” that the reciprocal exchange of signs would ultimately embody. This passage from firstness to equality is, if not the inherent telos of historical evolution, at any rate its natural gradient. The moral model is our only real point of equilibrium. All hierarchies and dissymmetries in human relations are meant to exist only to eventually dissolve themselves for the benefit of all, whether the Last Judgment be, as wisdom once had it, divine, or that of the “final conflict” of the Internationale, or simply the ultimate result of “progress.” This is an insight that the Judeo-Christian world, and in its often perverse way the Muslim world as well, have set at the heart of their religious traditions. The question of who should be counted in the “all” in the short term, however, is not thereby resolved.

In contrast to our “moral instinct,” the resentment that drives enforcement of the moral model, conservatism’s basis in Edmund Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution has only “tradition” and “common sense” on its side. The difficulty is that unless guaranteed by a universally shared faith, these values, ethical rather than moral, can operate only so long as they remain unthematized. As the left has not forgotten since 1789, as soon as you begin to assert the “naturalness” of a social norm—opposing homosexual marriage, for example—you have already refuted your claim by plunging it into the cultural stream in which it cannot help but be swept along. Burkean conservatism is always a rear-guard action, a rational appeal to the irrational.

The essential political quality of Donald Trump, as Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out with his usual astuteness, is as a Burkean conservative, a non-ideological believer in our “traditional” and “common-sense” values. Many so-called conservatives have been repelled by Trump’s demotic crudeness. Why could we not find someone more refined and articulate than Trump to oppose the victimary? But one cannot operate in the real world with “counterfactual history.” Like many initially repulsed by him, I have learned to admire what can only be called his political genius.

Trump’s triumph only goes to show that there was no opportunity for someone who could actually articulate an anti-victimary position rather than signal one with tweets and occasional enormities. Rather than take this out on the one whose insight saved us from another four or more years of ever more noxious victimocracy (though perhaps less hostile to Israel), we should focus on the problem itself.

There are plenty of intellectuals on the right, not all of whom were caught up in the fatuous never-Trump crusade. But none of these would have been capable of embodying the anti-victimary position, even with all the caveats attached to Trump’s embodiment of it. Whether or not he is a “true conservative” according to the latest post-Burkean definition, he was the only viable candidate to reject the kind of White Guilt-saturated victimary thinking that has become second nature to most “right-thinking” people. The instinctive reaction of such people after every jihadist massacre—which mainstream US (though no longer European) newspapers, e.g., the LA Times‘ first report of the recent Westminster Bridge incident, still avoid until absolutely unavoidable associating in any way with Islam—is to express fear for the ever-menacing backlash against innocent Muslims. As I have said, if such people had been around on December 7, 1941, they would have warned us against Nipponophobia.

What this suggests is less lack of courage than of an ethical vocabulary that can defend firstness without recourse to the traditional religious bulwark of ethical values. The real point of victimary thinking, as I have said repeatedly, is to impose ascriptive discrimination as the model for all inequalities of outcome, and thereby to explain away all humiliating differentials of success by “disparate impact.” In a developed world that still lives by but can no longer defend the idea of national difference, that grieves for every unsuccessful boatload of economic migrants crossing the Mediterranean but whose very existence depends on it not being so easy to cross, there is virtually no form of social order that cannot be condemned for “disparate impact” at its most extreme. Hence as “Godwin’s Law” makes clear, comparisons with Hitler are not about to go out of style. Although it is easy for me to say this, it is not possible for any politician, even Donald Trump, to clearly articulate it. Indeed, as the whole history of GA and even to some extent of “mimetic theory” has shown, the only way to get to the bottom of these anthropological problems today is to stay out of the “public sphere.”

But to say one cannot say something is nevertheless already to say it, and this reminds us that Trump’s inarticulateness is after all only relative. No doubt he will fall into many of the victimary clichés that have become our second nature; he is not, indeed, a consistent ideologically-driven affirmer of firstness like the Alt-Right that the left loves to assimilate him to, as though he were ready to send his beloved Ivanka to the gas chamber. Nor need we fear that Trump’s enormities, like complaining when a hostile judge is “Mexican,” will by his example become respectable. But we can have some assurance that the more extreme forms of the victimary already openly mocked on the right, such as “safe spaces” and “micro-aggressions,” will become less so.

Firstness cannot and should not be treated as a moral principle on the same level as moral equality. The attempt to ground any such attempt on a firm ontology produces something like the Nazi ideology of the Master Race—for which btw the now-sainted Nietzsche, not to speak of Heidegger, provided much of the ammunition.

As John Rawls demonstrated in his own quasi-originary way, difference must always be justified by its contribution to reciprocity. The difficulty of the current stage of the modern economy is that as it grows more productive and more creative, it puts an increasing premium on the manipulation of symbols as opposed to things. This was humanity’s originary distinction from the animals, but until recently its development beyond the universally accessible level of ordinary conversation remained a minority activity. It is only with modern robotics and digital technology that the direct manipulation of things, for which we are all more or less gifted, has increasingly given way to highly technical forms of symbol-manipulation, putting our essential humanity into question as never before.

For indeed the fundamental guarantee of our moral equality is our common ability to exchange words, and as Seth Saunders brings out in his The Invention of Hebrew (Illinois 2009), the great advance in religious insight that enabled the West’s ultimate modernization has its origin in the Hebrews’ democratization of writing. But if we can all read the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran, not too many of us can decipher Gödel’s proof or Einstein’s paper on General Relativity.

It is always paradoxical to offer reasons to recommend the revival of religious faith. But inasmuch as the victimary functions in fact less as a principle of secular morality than as a sad caricature of Christianity, it has the potential to stimulate a revival of the real thing. Real Christians—and not only Christians—along with loving their enemies, which comes all too easily to those who idolate the resentment of their “victims,” are able to recognize evil. Love the sinner, hate the sin is not possible when one finds every excuse for not “judging” the victimary Other. All religions, Islam included, understand that all human beings belong to a single race.

These remarks are not meant as mere exhortations, but to express a certain optimism that the false virtue of victimary morality can be overcome. Along with Brexit and other European stirrings, Trump’s election is only a beginning, and it is regrettable but inevitable that many people will tend to focus on the imperfect messenger without grasping the importance of his message. But the clichés of one generation will more easily appear ridiculous to the next, and to the extent that the weakening of the victimocracy can actually produce some positive results in the schools, the economy, and the international scene by deculpabilizing the West’s capacity for the healthy promotion of firstness, it still remains possible for Western civilization to put itself back on its feet. Only then can it continue to pursue, necessarily in fits and starts, its apparent destiny to lift the rest of the world to its current level of human welfare and beyond.

Linguistics even in our post-Chomskian era still takes NP + VP as the fundamental form of the sentence; anything less is a “defective” transformation. But once we attempt to explain how à partir de rien NP became associated with VP, we discover that this synchronic model not only does not provide us with an answer, but does not even permit us to ask the question. Thus the foundation of perhaps the most advanced of the human sciences is surrounded by a taboo even more constraining than those of primitive religion, which at least attempts through etiological myths to explain the origins of cultural forms.

Although traditional grammar does not recognize the existence of the ostensive as a distinct utterance form, it is willing to grant syntactic status to the imperative as a poor relation of the declarative sentence. Although the imperative has no true tense, its verbal form may be considered a sort of immediate future. Similarly, although its nearly universal zero-morphology attests to an apparent ignorance of the category of person, it can generally be classified functionally with the second person. We need not concern ourselves here with the related third- or first-person forms (Let him; Let’s).

From our perspective, the imperative is characterized not by “defective” but by nascent grammaticality, which we shall define as a linguistic form’s degree of self-containment or “context-free-ness,” considered as an intentional model of reality. From this definition the situation of the imperative between the ostensive and the declarative on the grammatical scale follows immediately. The ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent. The imperative operates in the absence of its object-nominal or -verbal, but can be satisfied only upon the object’s being made present. The declarative stands at the end of the scale of grammaticality as the telos of linguistic evolution, after which no substantial progress is possible. This explains, if it does not excuse, the grammarians’ inclination to treat all other forms as imperfect declaratives irrespective of their evolutionary status.

As we have noted, the ostensive makes no formal distinction between verbals and nominals; because verbality proper is a quality of predicates, the very term “verbal” is at this stage an anachronism. If the ostensive “Run!” designates the presence of running, the imperative “Run!” would similarly request running from the interlocutor, indifferently by asking him to run or “do a run.” But the “nominality” or substantivity of this object obtains in principle because only as a substance capable of being an independent object of the imagination can it become an object of desire. Yet the fact that in mature languages the imperative is always considered to be a form of the verb, and that nominal imperatives like “Scalpel!” are categorized, if at all, as elliptical forms of the verbal imperative (“[give me the] scalpel!”), cannot simply be attributed to the perversity of grammarians. What it demonstrates is that by subordinating the appearance of the desired object to the action of the interlocutor, the imperative has already taken a major step in the direction of predication.

Let us now consider more precisely the intentional structure of the imperative. The ostensive is an expression not of individual but of social concern, the significance of its object being measured by its capacity to arouse the community to action. The individual speaker of the ostensive thus expresses an interest in the object no greater than and possibly even less than that of his addressee, because the speaker, being already aware of the significant object, may be assumed to have already at least begun whatever action its presence might require. The ostensive may indeed be wholly altruistic, warning the hearer of a danger to which the speaker is immune. It creates a symmetrical situation with regard to its object, which it situates on the scene of representation as equally present to all interlocutors, retaining the nonviolent symmetry of the originary sign.

It is not a priori apparent from the consideration of the two forms simply as intentional structures that the imperative should be a less public form than the ostensive. If the ostensive points out communally significant present objects, the imperative may equally well refer to communally significant absent ones. The ostensive reference to a present object creates a model of reality—the simplest possible—in which this object becomes the unique and therefore unifying object of attention. A collective imperative would use essentially the same model, although now its referent would become the object of a communal effort to procure it. Examples of the collective imperative are not hard to find: the sanguinary shouts of crowds, Kill the umpire! or Down with X! as well as the celebratory Three cheers for Y! and Long live the king! In these cases the imperative functions to “spread the word” within a group and to reinforce a particular decision concerning what is to be done, the content of which may be nominal as well as verbal.

Because the originary ostensive as name-of-God would remain associated essentially with the scenic center rather than the animal that was eventually devoured, this dichotomous representation of “the sacred” remains ever a conundrum whether for believers (who cannot point to the object they originally pointed to/deferred appropriation of) or non-believers (who speak of “God” as a being while believing “he does not exist”). Thus in ritual the repetition of the originary collective ostensive is always already a collective imperative; to evoke God is to call on him, and to call on him is to presume not that he will “come” but that he is already there. I think the reader will agree that our depiction of the hypothetical originary scene gives a plausible real-world configuration to these paradoxical frontiers of language/culture, while showing, to the extent that it can be shown, that their paradoxes cannot be “resolved” by Creationism or “materialism” or anything in between.

A closer examination of collective imperatives reveals their apparent symmetry to consist rather of a reciprocity that is necessarily unstable, hovering between the asymmetry of the true imperative and the group identification of the first-person Let’s! construction. In this context, it is noteworthy that the typical example of the “collective imperative” is less the expression of the need of a community genuinely threatened by some outside agency or of its pleasure on the discovery of an object of collective satisfaction than the cry of the mob intent on discharging its violence on a designated victim. The fact that GA does not follow—as the original TOOL in fact did—Girard’s scapegoat/emissary murder scenario of the originary event does not mean that it should be taken, as Girardians often do, as a bowdlerized substitution of a rationalistic “social contract” for the originary reality of human violence. The origin of language is, as Chairman Mao would have reminded us, not a tea party. And the sparagmos in which the original “sacrificial” animal is divided up may be assumed to discharge not only the hunger but also the resentment derived from the frustrated mutual aggression of the participants. But the simple instinctive discharge of aggression is not a cultural phenomenon. Even a lynching “consecrates” its victim, often in a violently degrading fashion. The sparagmos, to be one, that is, a sacrificial feast, must follow the deferral of instinctual appropriation, just as the provision of food must be, as it remains to this day in human interaction, the chief reinforcing mechanism for sacrificial activity. We should not ignore the evidence of such “primitive” cultural phenomena as the ostensive sign and the sparagmatic communal gathering in our own lives, just as we should not fail to note the pervasive presence of “Maussian” gift-exchange in our social relations everywhere outside the market-place.

The action of the sacrificial/scapegoating mob is motivated not by instinct but by desire— a desire founded on representations. The indifferently ostensive and imperative designations of the victim by the mob are a degraded version of the original designation of the sacred central object in which the originary resentment directed at that being takes precedence over awe at its numinous centrality. Indeed, the merely aggressive rather than alimentary nature of the mob’s desires—which serves to indicate their liminal rather than central social significance—makes the mob’s common action a less fraught process, since dividing the spoils is, if at all, of less concern than causing pain and death to the victim.

It is worth noting that collective imperatives tend in less violent circumstances to be addressed not to the group formed by the speakers but to a real or undefined figure of authority who is called upon to carry out the desires of the mob. Thus when baseball fans shout “Kill the umpire!” they have no intention of performing the “murder” themselves, or even of inciting anyone in particular to perform it. The task of the totally undefined “murderer” is to satisfy the collective desire while the collectivity incurs neither danger nor guilt. A more sinister version of this are the cries accompanying the execution of “enemies of the people”; these are nominally imperatives addressed to the executioner, but the mechanism of desire remains the same. Only at the most extreme moments does the mob return to the participatory frenzy of the originary sparagmos, and at such moments, it is no longer useful to speak of an “imperative.”

The scene of representation, once established in the originary event, can be recreated between any two members of the community, because once the protection of nonviolent presence vested in the sacred object is deemed to extend over nonritual communication within the community, the size of the group involved would be unimportant. In the originary event that gives birth to human desire, the individual desires of the participants for the sacred object cannot be satisfied; the object can only be possessed in common, leaving a residue of resentment. In contrast, the imperative form overtly expresses such desire qua desire, which is to say, claims for it potentially communal significance. The imperative is a more “secular” mode than the ostensive, one more oriented to the practical world. Its existence alongside the ostensive allows for continued dialogue—for example, the operating surgeon’s conversation with the assistant who presents him the requested instruments: “Scalpel!” – “Scalpel!” “Forceps!” – “Forceps,” and so on. This was not possible with the ostensive, which outside the ritual context is rather a means for revealing an unexpected presence than for facilitating continued action. It is indeed difficult to imagine a cooperative work situation without the imperative, the use of which would tend to contribute to the lexical categorizing of necessary implements and therefore to their distinctly cultural quality as tools.

It is significant that in Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations, which bring together the linguistic speculations that occupied him during the last decades of his life, the “language games” that he analyzes turn constantly to explorations of the “elementary linguistic structures,” questions of how an imperative is used to request something and how the same word can be used as an ostensive in reply, with the ultimate goal of carrying out a predetermined praxis. For example:

. . . is the call “Slab!” in example (2) [which describes a language in which a builder calls out the names of building materials to request them from an assistant] a sentence or a word?—If a word, surely it has not the same meaning as the like-sounding word of our ordinary language [i.e., the noun “slab”], for in §2 it is a call. But if a sentence, it is surely not the elliptical sentence: “Slab!” of our language. . . . [Y]ou can call “Slab!” a word and also a sentence; perhaps it could be appropriately called a ‘degenerate sentence’ . . . ; in fact, it is our ‘elliptical’ sentence. (P. I. p. 8, §19, Blackwell, 2001 [1953])

What is missing from these fascinating if confused speculations is a plausible origin for the exchange of signs that gave us the tools of language in the first place. It is nonetheless significant that the last great theoretician of the philosophical proposition, of the declarative raised to an ontological principle, ended his philosophical career fascinated by what he clearly intuited were more originary linguistic structures.

Thus far we have been concerned with the hypothetical preconditions for the existence of the ostensive utterance form. We now turn to the “linguistics” of what we can conceive of as “ostensive language.” Here we benefit from the observation of ostensives in our own language.

In the originary event, the central referent is not detachable from the sacred scene of representation on which it appears. In the profane world, however, this scene is evoked in the communication situation, but the sacred is no longer an attribute of the referent itself. The ostensive offers a “profane” version of the scene, an intentional model of the universe limited to a single present reality, whose significance is presumed to require immediate attention. Enlarging the ostensive lexicon can increase the precision of the model, but without modifying its intentional structure, the relation of the model to our perception of the world and to its potential interlocutors under the specific conditions of joint shared attention in which it is communicated.

We may assume that the ostensive would indifferently designate actions and their real or potential agents. An expression like “Fire!” would refer indifferently to a fire and to its burning. Similarly, an ostensive such as “Run!” could be understood as not distinguishing the nominal (a run or running) from the verbal ([something] runs). But although it is pointless to divide its vocabulary into nominals and verbals, epistemologically speaking, it seems reasonable to classify all ostensives functionally as nominals. For example, stampede is a verb as well as a noun, but until such time as the verbal form becomes a true predicate and takes on a tense relating linguistic time to that of the real world, Stampede! would be simply, like a fire or a wolf, a thing/event to be reacted to.

The intentional structures of elementary language, the ostensive and the imperative that emerges from it, do not possess the “third-person” stability of the declarative’s mapping of the world, but as the Wolf! example demonstrated, reflect the tension between the different standpoints of speaker and hearer. It is this tension that will lead, through the dialectic of desire and paradox, to the mature form of the declarative.

The Intentional Structure of the Ostensive

The ease with which we construct complex declarative sentences inspires in us the illusion that such sentences reveal “transparently,” as Sartre described prose in opposition to poetry, the order of things, or more precisely that of “phenomena.” In contrast, the ostensive, which asserts no propositional truth, appears to grammarians as less an objective model than a “defective” expedient inspired by practical necessity.

It will take more than the deconstruction of the discourse of Western metaphysics to make a dent in the stubborn logocentricity of this perspective. The “truth” of the ostensive is by no means that of the declarative proposition. But to recognize the ostensive as nonetheless the simplest linguistic model of reality, subject to verification within the limits of its information-bearing power, makes us appreciate both the declarative’s superiority for conveying information and its derived, non-originary nature. In contrast, Western philosophy is founded on what I call the “metaphysical” postulate that the declarative is not an evolved linguistic form but simply the natural one.

Considered from the standpoint of mature language, the ostensive utterance lacks the two shifters of person and tense that explicitly relate the present of linguistic communication to the scene it evokes. The ostensive needs no tense because its referent is present to the speaker and verifiably present to the hearer. Similarly, it lacks person because the hearer(s) are intended to stand in the same relation to the referent as the speaker. Thus after hearing an ostensive, and possibly observing its referent for himself, the hearer may repeat it for the benefit of others; the first person to cry “Fire!” has no monopoly on his utterance. Even in the case of “Ouch!” what is referred to is not the internal sense of pain so much as the verifiable violation of a social norm (“you stepped on my toe!”). The ostensive presents its model and does nothing more, it being assumed that its representation is of sufficient significance for the hearer to react to it as soon as possible. The hierarchical relation between speaker and hearer on the scene of representation thus gives way to a symmetrical sharing of information, and if necessary, to cooperative action. But we should note that, unlike the imperative that derives from it, the ostensive does not explicitly refer to or demand such action. Its only reference is to the present, which it does not yet distinguish from the scenic presence of linguistic communication in general.

Within this intentional structure, the ostensive can potentially make use of a lexicon extendable in theory to the totality of perceptibles—things and actions. But although there is no a priori limit on the semantics of an ostensive language, its “signifieds” are not equivalent to those of mature language. Employed only in the presence of their referent, ostensives express an ontology of events rather than of beings. Because they define their object as significant in a given situation, and their enunciation necessarily implies the presence of this significance (danger or benefit), they are closer to exclamations than to models of conceptual thought, which signify without themselves participating in the significance of their object. The ostensive “word,” itself a complete utterance, does not possess the context-free conceptual status of our own vocabulary. The establishment of the ostensive within the profane world outside the sphere of ritual will reveal the contradictions latent in its model of reality.

Dialectic of the Ostensive

The originary sign had no place in a lexicon, not simply because it was unique, but because in its evocation of the sacred object as center of the communal scene of representation—as name-of-God—it was only in retrospect detachable from this scene. Even today, the enunciation of a divine name hints toward the ritual enactment of this scene, which in its more complete versions reproduces the originary deferral and its festive resolution. The formal or linguistic evolution of the sign must take place through the differentiation of the criteria guaranteeing its appropriateness in a given situation.

This guarantee has two aspects, of which the first is prerequisite to the second. First, the act of speech must be justified, as opposed to saying nothing at all; second, the specific sign used must be appropriate to the situation. We may call these the criteria of significance and of signification. The intersubjective basis of the significance-criterion, which applies to ritual as well as language and other forms of representation, is the reconstitution of the public scene of representation. In contrast, the signification-criterion is roughly speaking that of truth, although only declarative sentences possess a genuine truth-value.

Although it is perfectly possible for a “true” sentence, ostensive or otherwise, to be insignificant, when there is a high threshold of significance, as we may presume existed at the earliest stages of language, the danger of falling below it makes the criterion it imposes far more critical than that of appropriate meaning. The ostensive’s emphasis on significance over signification suggests that the lexicon at this stage is likely to remain relatively undifferentiated.

In the lexicon of a language possessing declaratives, a word is not an utterance, and its meaning or signified can be considered apart from any given use of it. But in the case of the ostensive, the word can only be associated with its appropriateness condition, which is the significant presence of the object that it can be said to designate. Fire means a certain state of matter, but Fire! means the presence of a (dangerous) fire. To think “fire” is to imagine a fire, but to think “Fire!” is to imagine a situation where the cry would be appropriate, perhaps accompanied by its expected consequences: panic, flight, organization of a bucket brigade, and so on. Use of an ostensive creates a scene, and its speaker’s power to do so is an element of its “definition,” given that its appropriateness condition is the existence of a situation where the exercise of this power would be appropriate. Thus to think of an ostensive is to imagine a public scene of action. Such a thought not merely gives rise to desire but is in itself an expression of desire.

To use a sacred name, even today, evokes a power that reconstitutes at least symbolically the communal scene. Most societies impose strict limits on such evocations (“taking God’s name in vain”). But the appropriateness of “profane” ostensives, in contrast, depends on circumstances that can only be observed a posteriori. Thus the very existence of an ostensive lexicon contains an implicit contradiction, and to think of any of its constituent elements presents the thinker with a pragmatic paradox. It is no doubt true to say that in contrast with fire, Fire! means the presence of a fire, but the word itself will provoke the same effect independently of this presence. In imagining, in the absence of this referent, its power to compel the presence of the community, the potential speaker cannot help but realize that, given humanity’s shared scene of representation, the use of the sign alone will unleash the same power.

As we have seen in the Wolf! case, this gives rise to the possibility of lying, of deliberately provoking a fire-reaction in the absence of its object. Considered simply as a lie, one presumes it would be sanctioned, but seen subjectively from the speaker’s point of view, this “inappropriate ostensive” opens the door to a broadening of the intentional structures of utterance forms to include the expression of desire. Because the hearer of “Fire!” is enjoined to react, the utterance itself expresses independently of its “truth” the desire to provoke the hearer’s anticipated reaction. The expression of desire that emerges from this new use would tend to disambiguate itself from the ostensive’s revelation of a socially significant presence. Once it becomes accepted as an utterance-form in its own right, the word would signify not the presence of its referent but the desire of the speaker for (the power conferred by) this presence. The ostensive will have become an imperative.

A possible framework for such a development is linguistic apprenticeship. One must learn the words of the language before grasping the totality of their appropriateness conditions. Yet in the case of the ostensive, the very constitution of a personal lexicon involves the learner in a contradiction. No real practice use of the ostensive is possible because it cannot be imagined in abstraction from its use. Even if we assume that a child learns the ostensive by observing its appropriate use rather than through a deliberately con­ducted apprenticeship, he cannot be expected to learn to use these words appropriately without a few trials. But to “practice” the ostensive is to evoke the scene of its legitimate use. A child’s inappropriate ostensive will not be taken seriously, but a mother may well respond to what she understands as the child’s intention, which is to bring about the presence of the object designated by the ostensive, thereby treating his utterance as an imperative.

A plausible scenario might be a child, having learned a word as an ostensive, using it in the absence of its referent to bring about, as it were magically, its presence. Indeed, this remains the standard ostensive-vocative use of personal names, Mommy! for example. In learning to use any ostensive, the child relives in his own linguistic universe the dialectic we are now describing. He need neither learn the imperative use of the word by example nor need he know in advance that its imperative use is acceptable. Motivated by the desire for the physical presence of his mother or some other necessity of life, he simply (re)creates the imperative for himself in the same way that its creation would have occurred in the course of the formal evolution of language.

From the presumed near-instantaneity of this evolution in the modern child—an assump­tion that it would be useful to confirm by research—it does not follow, of course, that the historical ostensive-imperative evolution was equally instantaneous. We cannot exclude the possibility that linguistic signs, as opposed to prehuman “calls,” may have retained for many generations a strictly communal, religious function.

In sum, because the ontology of the ostensive remains like that of the sacred dependent on a public scene, even with the lowering of the threshold of significance to permit its application to the profane world, the ostensive sign cannot attain the stable lexical status of a concept-sign or “signifier.” Only the reinterpretation of the inappropriate ostensive as an imperative resolves the pragmatic paradox it poses.

In St. Anselm’s “ontological proof” of the exis­tence of God, our possession of the concept of the “most perfect being” (ens perfectissimum) itself implies that being’s existence. Kant refutes this proof by affirming that existence is not a predicate. But at the stage of language at which the concept of the sacred was generated, the predicative function of the declara­tive sentence had not yet been conceived. Because the ostensive word means its object-as-­present, to conceive of using the word is to conceive its object as present, and to pronounce the word is to provoke this conception in its hearer.

But this means that the ontology of the ostensive is identical with that of the sacred as expressed by St. Anselm. Whatever punishments may have been meted out to the inappropriate users of the ostensive who were its first “believers,” with the emergence of the imperative, their faith in the ontological proof at last obtained its reward. The desire of the individual soul, to which the ostensive had provided a means of expression but not an accepted vehicle for its communication, had now attained significance in the eyes of the community.

To be continued…

A recent column (“The Democrat Patient”, National Review 1/31/17) by Victor Davis Hanson, perhaps the wisest of our current pundits, deplores the self-destructive anti-Trump passion that seems to be leading to the marginalization of the Democratic Party, as though following the disastrous example of the UK’s Labour. From Tony Blair to Jeremy Corbyn, from Bill Clinton to Keith Ellison and Thomas Perez, the direction is eerily the same.

But the political situation in the US or elsewhere cannot be understood by focusing wholly on its pathologies. These polities remain for the moment political marketplaces that evolve as wholes; this is not North Korea, where one wonders what Marx would have made of the fusion of socialism with oriental despotism.

If Donald Trump’s personal style is part of the reason for the hysteria, I must return to my point about the felix culpa: no mainstream politician of either party was capable of naming the principal enemy, which is not the Islamic radicalism that the Democrats refused to name either, but victimary thinking, more commonly known as Political Correctness. Trump is no kind of “white supremacist,” let alone an antisemite, but the important thing is that he is not cowed by accusations of being either. That some Jews compared last November 8 to Kristallnacht is certainly “deplorable,” but what is needed is not deploring but analysis.

As someone old enough to remember how happy everyone was at the victory in WWII, even at the cost of Dresden and Hiroshima, I have retained my “Fukuyaman” faith in liberal democracy as the system that best controls the paradox of human desire by channeling resentment into productive activity. If, as some of my friends seem to believe, democracy is truly in the process of breaking down, means to deal with this are hardly within the purview of an old academic like me. If such is indeed to be our future, I’ll let the survivalists fight it out among themselves.

Assuming that democracy is not lost, the question then becomes: how do we interpret the pathologies of our moment in history so as most effectively to return to democracy’s “normal” unstable equilibrium? As a premise of such analysis, we must stipulate from the outset that the recoil from the victimary that has produced Brexit, Trump, and various nationalist movements in Europe, even including a return to something like Russian Czarism, is not (with some exceptions) the sign of a new fascism, but on the contrary a generally healthy development. Its excesses, although they should not be overlooked, are a necessary evil compared to the horrors currently visited on the world by the West’s victimary fever.

The worst symptom of victimary excess must be the nightmare of its “cure” via submission to Islamic supremacism, soumission being the translation of the word Islam as well as the title of Michel Houellebecq’s recent hopefully-not-prophetic novel. I would not go so far as René Girard, who saw Islamism as a wholly “Western” phenomenon, generated by the hatred resulting from failed mediation, but there is little doubt that the supremacism that inspires suicide bombing and worse derives its negative energy from the vacuum of the West’s own lack of self-confidence and resolve. Perhaps, however successfully it seemed to be concluded before Obama removed all our troops, W. Bush’s war in Iraq was bound to lead to chaos, but had the victors in the battle against Saddam had the confidence of being on the “right side of history” that animated the occupying forces after WWII, there might well have been a reasonable chance that Iraq would have developed into a viable democracy.

An illustrative example of the West’s bad conscience was given recently when, speaking in Algeria, French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron called colonialism a “crime against humanity.” This deeply offended the pieds noirs, former non-elite French colonials in Algeria who were forced to leave when the colony became independent. In the same vein, a friend told me recently that when he attempted to give a presentation about Christopher Columbus to a Spanish class in a private LA high school, a student complained to the administration that Columbus was an “Indian killer” and that it had “distressed” her to hear him favorably portrayed.

It is clear that our schools almost unanimously cultivate such moral preening. The younger generation has grown up with attitudes very different from the simple patriotism I absorbed from my teachers in the 1940s. The notion that uncompromising moral indignation toward “one’s own side” is the only permissible mindset for the beneficiaries of historical “privilege” is virtually uncontested among the apostles of victimary morality who feel at best a condescending pity for the “deplorables.” Hillary’s use of this term was no doubt a political blunder, but unlike much of her rhetoric, it appeared to reflect a sincerely held belief shared with a good part of her constituency.

The victimary mindset is characterized by an exclusively negative view of human difference. The model of moral reciprocity is interpreted as the sole ethical principle, so that the sufferings of the least successful member of the society become, as for Sartre, and more subtly for John Rawls, the measure of the moral value of the society. This is not merely a theoretical stance. The “liberal” West’s preference for the Palestinians over the Israelis, which cultivates their resentment in preference to their welfare, requires a blank refusal to consider either the relative value of the two societies’ contribution to world progress or the moral worth of their collective behavior. Palestinian schools teaching children to despise the Jews and to believe their historical claim to the land a mere myth; naming streets and squares after terrorists; the corruption and inefficiency of the West Bank economy; the exclusive orientation of that of Gaza toward preparations for the destruction of Israel; in contrast, Israel’s extraordinary scientific and technological productivity: none of this prevents the constant UN condemnations of Israel, which after several decades Trump’s appointee Nikki Haley has finally denounced for what they are. Similarly, the European colonial conquests of the previous centuries are condemned en bloc with no credit given to the long-term advantages they brought in health, quality of life, prosperity, and longevity for the world as a whole and for the (former) colonials themselves, even if imposed in many cases by force of arms and involving a good deal of arbitrary cruelty—as though the powers they replaced were exemplars of gentleness and tolerance.

There is no question of returning to the de jure status differences that the Holocaust rendered henceforth intolerable, but this should not prevent us from understanding the past in its own terms, including realizing that the moral evolution leading to the condemnation of past practices was itself the long-term product of these practices; slavery was abolished not in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, but in the West.

But if balanced historical judgments bear no guarantee they will be accepted, it is because there is no moral absolute except the “moral model” of universal reciprocity that is a corollary of GA’s originary hypothesis. Unlike this model, the allowances that every ethic beyond the most primitive must make for firstness alongside reciprocity are not absorbed into our moral DNA.

GA encourages us to look at the “big picture” and avoid the pettiness that has taken over much of our moral thinking. The dilemmas of evaluating mixed moral balance sheets such as that of colonialism vindicate GA’s pragmatic vision of the moral as well as the economic world as a marketplace. If people had had to negotiate the issues in the recent presidential election, they would never have come to an agreement. The electoral system, more or less universally accepted, adjudicates such disputes not through any kind of centralized arbitration but on the basis of an extension of the moral model itself, one person, one vote. Although purportedly logical arguments are employed by both sides based on principles we all presumably hold in common, the only common value absolutely required is respect for the system itself, which despite minor exceptions has held firm over the years throughout the world’s democracies.

It should be no surprise that, rather than permitting a rational conclusion as in a scientific debate, such matters must be adjudged politically. This should at the very least serve as one more demonstration that the primary function of culture, and of language and the other representational systems that embody it, is not to draw logical conclusions but to defer conflict by moving it to a higher level.

The big difference between postmodern victimary thinking and the Left’s insistence on equality over firstness that began with the French Revolution is the absence after 1989 of any credible alternative to liberal “capitalist” society. Left-wing hysteria over such things as “cultural appropriation” and “micro-aggression” (a term that already sounds dated) reflect a constant need to find new forms of sinfulness in the social order in order to confirm its analogy to the Nazi model that started it all. Thus the originary model of the ubiquitous American term “white privilege” is Southern slave-ownership filtered through the more radical cruelties of Nazism.

It is easy to become obsessed with the “spiritual” focus of these critiques, which remind one less of the Nazi camps than of Chinese (or Cambodian) “re-education.” But seen as a program, they are means of providing an endless demonstration that our society’s disparities of wealth and power are products of ascriptive “racism” of one kind or another. The “disparate-impact” quotas promoted under the Obama administration (notably by the new leader of the DNC) were rooted in earlier decisions, for example, to compare mortgage rates in black and white neighborhoods. The idea that a larger percentage of black than white pupils might be subject to suspension, or that a larger percentage of young black men are in jail, is taken as prima facie proof of racial discrimination, confirming the “narrative” in which social stratification in general is attributed to “white privilege.” The political value of this procedure, in which elected officials benefit from minority resentment that they have consequently no incentive to diminish, has been immense. We shall see if Trump’s more honest approach to improving life in the “inner cities” will end this vicious circle.

The strength and weakness of victimary politics is that it has no endpoint and no criterion of success. But its drive to interpret every form of firstness in ascriptive terms as a form of discrimination should not be seen as merely the result of an obstinate fidelity to the originary moral model despite all the failures of “socialism.”

From the collapse of the USSR to the misery of Cuba and Venezuela to the decline of the kibbutzim of early Israel, it has been made as clear as historical lessons ever get that “human nature” makes it impossible outside of extraordinary circumstances to enforce collective reciprocity in any functioning society. As a consequence of these failures, the persistent existence of Marxist and post-Marxist opponents of “capitalism” today is marginal. But this means that the only moral critique of the liberal democratic system with any chance of attracting adherents is the pseudo-internal one that it fails to fulfill its own ideals of equality. Here the example is less the Holocaust than American slavery; we are reminded that the “peculiar institution” persisted for fourscore and seven years after the Declaration of Independence had declared that “all men are created equal.” To analyze every form of social differentiation, including what used to be called “meritocracy,” as a form, often unconscious (“micro-aggression”) or unthinking (“cultural appropriation”) of ascriptive victimage, the oppression of victimary groups by the “privileged” white majority, is to make every social difference a demonstration of the hypocrisy of the liberal democratic order, which purports to offer everyone an equal chance but is thereby shown to be infested with racism and its recent avatars, such as “transphobia.”

Why indeed, seventy years after the Holocaust, has the victimary not only persisted but grown increasingly powerful—the recrudescence of antisemitism being one obvious measure of this transformation? From the perspective of Sirius, as Voltaire might have put it, the victimary attitude toward the liberal democratic system is a toddler’s revolt against a benevolent and all-powerful parent. To the extent that it can be defended, it is a means of conserving the purity of the moral model untainted by the contingencies of the social order that make it unrealizable, but that we may hope to make someday “wither away.”

I have spoken in earlier Chronicles (see in particular Chronicle 484) about the Marxist (actually Ricardan) labor theory of value‘s loss of credibility in the digital age. Although I am skeptical that within a few years all the cars and trucks on the road will be self-propelled and all industrial production will be carried out by robots, clearly the trend is toward increasingly intelligent automation, with a concomitant diminished need for labor as Marx defined it. The decline of the white working class that sparked Trump’s election is one product of this development, but the white population is merely the canary in the mine. Whether this presages genuine long-term economic decline is unclear, since productivity increases benefit everyone, including those living on welfare or disability payments. But to the extent that the system provides incentives to its more productive members, increasingly meaning those most gifted at sign-manipulation, it makes the reciprocity of the moral model ever less attainable.

I don’t think that the recent increase in inequality is in itself a sign of social decline. The wealthiest get wealthier because the ability to generate wealth is increasingly concentrated. Microsoft and Apple and Oracle and PayPal and Facebook and Amazon could be created only once. It is precisely because the West has virtually done away with real poverty that the need to share the wealth has diminished; one has a claim on relief from starvation, but not from obesity. Hence as the society becomes wealthier, it appears increasingly unjust, and the “privileged” are increasingly harassed unless they are truly privileged enough to avoid it. Luxury goods, such as first-class airline tickets that once cost 50% more than coach and now are five and more times more expensive, become signs of status that make life difficult for the “upper middle class.” But this is the sort of problem that Mensonge romantique was written to allay.

Social trends like this must be understood, like language and culture itself, as fundamentally means of reducing conflict. By redefining the “injustice” of liberal democratic society in ascriptive terms, the “Social Justice Warrior” does more than just flatter his own ego. He performs a social service in distracting public attention from the increasing gravity of the “coming apart” described by Charles Murray. If Black Lives Matter and the Trumpian movement of the “deplorables” have one thing in common, they are both means for channeling the resentments generated by market society’s frustrations into political action.

Trump’s surprising victory is an opportunity for a new and, despite appearances, less resentful approach to mitigating these problems. As Barack Obama said after his first meeting with his successor, we should all hope Trump succeeds. Given the state of malaise that reigns after several decades of increasing indulgence of our society’s victimary tendencies, I cannot imagine that the new administration will not be an improvement.

In a future Chronicle I shall attempt to address the “transnational” question, so instrumental to Trump’s victory, that has been raised in the recent discussions on the GAlist.

 

In any account of the genesis of language one must assume that the first linguistic sign was both absolutely new, a “symbolic” sign (Peirce), yet as close as possible to what animals were capable of producing. I have always been amazed that the recent accounts I have read, such as the one in Fauconnier and Turner’s How Do We Think (Basic Books, 2002; see Chronicle 528), simply neglect this question. This is no doubt a residue of the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy that has since the beginning taken the existence of propositional language for granted. This tradition has persisted throughout the entire history of philosophy, and the attempts in the Early Modern era (see my The Scenic Imagination [Stanford, 2007]) to theorize the origin of human culture, and in some cases specifically of language, that culminate in Freud’s father-murder scenario in Totem and Taboo, never penetrated mainstream philosophical discourse, even among thinkers whose avowed intention was to abolish “metaphysics”—for which they had a rather different definition than mine.

As I have described the originary event, the first linguistic sign was an “aborted gesture of appropriation,” and since it was performed in the presence of its referent, I labeled it an ostensive, a term not altogether original but scarcely common in the linguistic literature. I have no desire to boast about the profound intuition that led me to this term; on the contrary, I think it would be difficult for anyone to choose a “first sign” very different from this one, given Terrence Deacon’s well-taken point that human linguistic signs are not outgrowths of the signals or “calls” used by animals to signal to their conspecifics, including the complex signal system of the vervet monkey. The fact that such obvious thoughts do not occur to those who write on this subject is a clear indication that the elephant in the room of language origin, the specificity of the human, is in fact taboo, and must be drowned in a sea of “cognitive” detail that makes language the essentially inevitable outcome of our increasing intelligence, for which it is easy to allege a Darwinian justification.

Let me repeat that what makes the originary ostensive different from any kind of signal is the fact that it emerges not from a need to exercise the newly added neurons in the proto-human brain but from a deferral of action. This is the central concept lacking in Girard’s groundbreaking account of human origin in La violence et le sacré. It is this first example of shared joint attention that is the beginning of human language. It requires no special cognitive abilities; what is new is not cognitive but communicative, and the deferral becomes necessary not because we have become more intelligent, but because with the growth of our intelligence we have become more mimetic. One wonders why this rather obvious point is so difficult to communicate in a world of people capable of solving differential equations and describing multi-dimensional vector spaces.

In order that the originary ostensive gesture become a sign, it cannot be the simple negation of the original gesture of appropriation. Here as elsewhere, we can well imagine that similar interruptions of the attempt to obtain nourishment took place well before the birth of the sign, which can only occur once the abortion of the gesture has become expected, so that the aborted or deferred gesture is performed deliberately. What had been at first an “instinctual” gesture inhibited by fear of the others in the group morphs into a voluntary gesture of communication to these others that they have nothing to fear or to defend against, while designating the central object of desire as the cause of this deferral—the originary template of joint shared attention. The repetition of the gesture would then be self-reinforcing until at least the moment at which all are confident that no individual will break the symmetry of the group, at which point the communal division of the animal in the sparagmos can begin.

In the course of this process, the sign becomes a conscious act that is no longer a failed attempt at appropriation but has acquired a form of its own. The fact that animals do not point is most significant; the first sign need be no more than a pointing, yet not solely a pointing-at but also a pointing-for the other members of the group. The very fact of designating something to the others’ attention makes the gesture more than a directional indication. It has become a mark of significance, and thence of signification. The sign is not a simple designation but a re-presentation.

At the origin, we assume that language began with a single sign, and that the significance it attributed to its object signaled the sole significant object in the universe: this is significant, and all the rest is not. And this is indeed the fundamental characteristic of the scene of representation in general. Obviously when speaking about A we are not denying the significance of B, but language is a mechanism for directing the selective attention of our audience. Each utterance assumes the existence of a world in the background, but cannot allude to it without thereby moving it out of that background.

Calling the first sign the name-of-God is not just a mnemonic device that serves to point out the uniqueness of the bearer of significance at that moment, but an affirmation of the originary indistinguishability of the sacred and the significant, and of the source of both sacrality and significance in the excess of desire that is generated by and at the same time constitutes the new human collectivity, which we can rightfully call a community. The contrast with the old pecking-order system lies precisely in the reciprocal relationship that links all in their distance from the sacred center. At the same time, the inaccessibility of the center generates an originary resentment that is beyond the mere rivalry inspired by the pecking-order system, since it concerns not a single member of the group but a sacred being that stands over against the group as a whole. Our originary ambivalence toward the sacred is the central problematic of all religious traditions, a subject that falls outside the purview of the study of language as formal representation.

Once we have provided a plausible understanding of the genesis of the originary sign, the rest of the development of language might be expected to belong to linguistics proper—save that we have no clear evidence of any “primitive” form of language. The apparent fact that the Pirahᾶ language lacks recursive structures, a discovery of anthropologist Daniel Everett recently popularized in Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech (Little, Brown, 2016; see Chronicle 525), may be a sign that not all modern languages possess all the features of mature language, but whether or not Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device has heuristic, let alone biological validity is not something that GA need concern itself with. The important point is that it is absurd to use the complexity of mature language as the basis of a demonstration that the earliest forms of language must have been driven by a watershed advance in our cognitive ability. On the contrary, a simple increase in mimetic tension is the only contribution our increased intelligence need have made to language’s emergence.

How then might an ostensive language have evolved into mature language? Here again, it seems to me that the most fruitful avenue for speculation on this subject is not that of cognitive subtlety but of the broadening of the uses of language as a mode of communication. The peace-producing effect of language may not have left any direct evidence, but our survival (so far) as dangerously mimetic creatures is its unmistakable testament. This implies, independently of any accompanying improvements in our cognitive abilities, what I called in TOOL a “lowering of the threshold of significance” to accommodate a broader spectrum of significant objects and differences among them: different signs for different (sacrificial) animals, for example.

Thus we must assume that although the use of signs may well long have been restricted—as much later, written language commonly was—to sacred circumstances, language eventually liberated itself from ritual, the formal becoming “secular” in contrast to the institutional reproduction/commemoration of the originary event. The originary scene would have been a locus of extreme tension, in which the emergence of the sign was a means of avoiding conflict. But once the peace-bringing effects of this scene become anticipated, the sign will spread to less formal encounters, and in particular to groups of humans that are part rather than the whole of the local community.

Once utterance of the sign has become an act in its own right, it is in principle detachable from the collective scene of representation and capable of recreating this scene between any two interlocutors, or in a somewhat different sense, in the individual consciousness. One’s internal scene of representation is not that of an imagined conversation, but the mental space within which we conceive the meaning of language, as when listening to another or reading a book. Such an individual space, however implemented in our nervous system, must have begun to exist in the originary event itself, or in any case in the memory of those who had participated in the event and its early repetitions.

In Chronicle 419, I developed the idea that Eve’s temptation by the snake, making woman rather than man the first sex to experience resentment, might well reflect a time when only men were permitted to use language. Clear examples of male priority in the use of sacred signs remain to this day among conservative religious groups, and that Catholics, Muslims, and traditional Orthodox Jews have only male clergy is in all probability a reflection of the priority of (more violence-prone) males over females in the origin of language. But if men indeed used language before women, Eve’s taking up the snake’s suggestion to acquire forbidden knowledge when Adam had remained content to name the animals is a fascinating parable of the productivity of resentment.

Thus we may assume that at some point there emerged an ostensive language by means of which individuals could communicate in small non-ritual groups about objects they were able to point to. As in the originary event, reality was no doubt messier than our theoretical model; it is not unlikely, for example, that the introduction of the more advanced utterance-form of the imperative might not have awaited the development of a full-fledged ostensive language. But treating separately in the large developments that were necessarily chronological in the small—one cannot conceive that an imperative sign would not have been previously intelligible as an ostensive—brings heuristic advantages with no obvious side-effects.

One essential aspect of language that GA need not consider is the trade-off between sound and sight, gesture and speech. The fact that sign languages enable the deaf to communicate with much the same efficiency as the hearing shows that a sufficient supply of signifiers is available in either case, although given the choice, making sounds is clearly more efficient in energy and, in most situations, in signal effectiveness. But as for determining what kind of articulation existed at the dawn of language, I would leave this question to the paleontologists who study such things as the evolution of the vocal tract, and even of the hand—for example, some have speculated that the relative lack of pigmentation in the palm gives evidence of the use of the hands for communication.

We use ostensives today for such things as teaching new words to children (for example, in picture books), where a pointing gesture is supplemented with a spoken word. Beyond its pedagogical function, the ostensive serves in emergencies to alert those around of a danger potentially present to all but hitherto unnoticed. The major example I gave in TOOL was Fire!, which is not simply an exclamation but a warning to those who have not yet detected the fire, and who would be expected to repeat the word to warn others farther off.

The secularization of language obliges us to consider the notion of felicity or appropriateness conditions. In the originary event, the sign is so to speak dictated by the presence of the central object, and this constraint remains in the reconstitution of the event in ritual. The question of felicity arises only for signs uttered outside the institutional framework of the ritual scene (we can ignore at this stage the question of infelicitous institutional representations, such as black masses).

Once signs began to be used to convey “information,” their use would be subject to criteria concerning the validity and pertinence of this information. With regard to pertinence, the “lowering of the threshold of signification” implies the use of ostensives in circumstances less urgent than the originary mimetic crisis, to point out significant objects or phenomena in the environment, dangers as well as opportunities. Assuming the pertinence of the information conveyed by the ostensive sign, its felicity would depend on its fulfilling its implicit promise that the object referred to as present to the speaker is indeed present, and thus can normally be made to appear to his interlocutor(s).

The classic example of an infelicitous ostensive is that of the boy who cried wolf!, “wolf!” being an ostensive intended to signal the presence of a wolf. In the normal case, the boy would have seen or heard the wolf, no one else being close enough to do so, but his hearers would presumably be within range of the danger the wolf represents. This common vulnerability is an important detail; “Wolf!” is not the equivalent of “Help!,” which signals only a private danger. The boy presumably wants others in the community not simply to come to his rescue but to praise him for pointing out a danger to all.

This Aesopian parable of the infelicitous use of the ostensive is meant to warn us against the danger that such actions will make one an unreliable interlocutor whose future warnings risk being ignored with fatal consequences. It is of interest to us here as a demonstration that once signs exist, even signs that can presumably be easily verified, this verification, being independent of the sign itself, may fail, and the sign-user may use this fact to deliberately mislead. Higher animals are known to practice deception, but only a human being can be a liar.

To be continued…

The first TOOL was chiefly devoted to a discussion of the basic utterance-forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), speculating on how they might have evolved from the original ostensive gesture/sign. This sequence of forms will be developed in the following chapters. This focus on language rather than ritual, formal rather than institutional representation, was reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Formal Theory of Representation.

As the reader may have realized, the originary event of language as I have described it is also that of sacred ritual. Indeed, the spectacle of a group of humans whose gestures designate a central object inaccessible to them not coincidentally resembles the configuration of virtually all religious services. More specifically, it suggests the preliminaries of ritual sacrifice, which culminates in the sparagmos that we hypothesize as following the emission of the originary sign. The “linguistic” moment of deferral and the moment of distribution, whether or not followed immediately by consumption (presumably the hunters would bring back meat for their women and children and others too feeble to participate in the hunting party) are two phases of a single event. There would be little profit in inventing the sign if it did not lead to an alimentary outcome for the group superior to that of the pecking-order system, which had formerly allowed everyone to be fed.

The unity of this scenario provides a model for the complementary relationship between the formal and institutional elements of our representational culture. In the originary event, this separation is merely potential, since the sign has not yet been revealed as detachable from the event as a whole. What has been created is less “language” or “the sacred” than the scene of representation, the shared space within which we contemplate an object that, from appetitively attractive, has become significant. This scene within which we defer the “reflex” of the appetitive, being inhibited from action not by a conditioned reflex, but by a will outside the realm of the appetitive itself, marks the inauguration of the human.

By its nature, the sign is an individual act, even when performed with others. This act of intending its object, which sacralizes the central god/offering and keeps it from consumption by any individual until the formation of a new human collectivity, can subsequently be performed by the individual subject independently of the public scene, and while it may recall the scene as a whole, it would nonetheless specifically re-present the scene’s central figure, the original object of the aborted gesture. The new category of significance contains within it both the sacred—the quality of indefinitely attracting and thereby deferring human appetite—and the desirable— the same quality, but with the horizon of the deferral experienced as finite rather than transcendental. The persistence of the sign after the sparagmos realizes the difference between these two modes of significance. The animal itself is eaten as an object of desire, but the sign remains as a reminder of its transcendent central role, as the name-of-God.

It is the aim of GA to remove the artificial frontier between empirical anthropology, and “human science” in general, and the speculative anthropology we call philosophy. Philosophy originated in Greece with the political liberation of the inherent freedom of the sign from ritual constraints. It has ever since remained metaphysical according to what I consider the most useful definition of that term: thought that takes for granted the existence of mature human language, that is, language that includes declarative sentences or propositions.

But now that GA has provided the birth of our signing ability with a plausible real-world foundation, the problems of both philosophy and the human sciences can be placed on a new footing. The new way of thinking that is generative anthropology is not a panacea for solving the world’s ethical problems, let alone those of empirical social science, but it should allow thinkers of all disciplines to situate themselves in a non-confrontational manner toward the totality of the human culture we share. It is time that the Enlightenment divorce of science from religion, however necessary and even inevitable within the Judeo-Christian world itself, be followed by a reconciliation that renews their sense of common purpose.

Unlike the hypothetical utterance forms of “elementary” or pre-declarative language, no evidence of which subsists, the institutional or ritual aspect of the originary event is historically well documented and cannot be discussed without concrete reference to actual practices. This task transcends the speculative limits of GA, but the anthropological community would surely benefit from taking its originary insights into account.

The preceding Chronicle sought to demonstrate the underlying affinity of Jacques Derrida’s conception of la différance to the aims of GA. Derrida’s original French neologism is not unsurprisingly richer than the English deferral, as the French word différer means both defer and differ, and différance, which is pronounced the same way as différence, meaning simply “difference,” adds to it the gerundive verbal element of the act of deferring. Although Derrida’s idea was intended not as an anthropological concept but as a “deconstruction” of metaphysical “presence,” it requires only a small change in mindset to convert it into a key anthropological term.

In Derrida’s conception, the deconstruction effected by the revelation of la différance exposes the mythical nature of sacred presence in order to liberate us from the dominance of the authoritarian center. Derrida never saw that it was precisely this deferral of the appetitive relationship between the human subject and the object of his desire that embodied our freedom from the animal world of instinct, as reflected in Sartre’s conception of the pour-soi—that (sacred) presence in the human sense was made possible as a result of différance rather than being undermined by it.

As Derrida implies but cannot explain, deferral is much more central to the act of signification than simply delaying the application of a paradigm. Even if that “paradigm” contains but a single member, any use of language is a deferral. Before humans invented/discovered the sign, no creature could relate to objects in the world other than appetitively. Inappropriate appetitive urges, when not blocked at the source by innate reactions, could be countered by learned inhibitions (“conditioned reflexes”); but deferral as it emerged in the originary event is a voluntary, cultural act.

I imagine that Derrida would have agreed with me that la différance is the minimal definition of the human. But he would surely not have wished to situate it at the first moment of human history as the source of language and representation itself. Derrida’s différance denies the very notion of origin; it is always already constituted by a set of differences, and offered as a refutation of phenomenology’s conception of the scene of representation as the presence of the object to our consciousness.

As implied by the nostalgic text cited in the previous Chronicle, this debunking of metaphysics was in fact its final affirmation. Metaphysics, even when it distinguishes with Kant the “thing-in-itself” from the “thing-for-us,” affirms that our specifically human understanding of the world is independent of language and is merely expressed in it. But for the Nietzschean aftermath of metaphysics, the language of philosophical reason betrays a secret nostalgia for the plenitude of the sacred Word, for the “language of presence” as sole guarantee of revealed truth. Save in asides such as the quoted passage, deconstruction inverts the positive sense of this affirmation but does not question its substance. The object’s presence being always différée, we cannot claim any unmediated knowledge of it. Hence any claims that may be made of such knowledge are mystifications, tools of oppression. To deconstruct presence is to reveal the hidden (political) agenda of metaphysics.

For GA, on the contrary, the metaphysical myth of presence is indeed a misprision of la différance, but it is properly the latter, not the former, that provides the characteristically human understanding of the world. “Presence” is less a sinister myth than a theologically inflected understanding of what is in fact the separation of consciousness from its object, as inaugurated by the originary abortion of the gesture of appropriation. Something can be present to us only if we stand back from it and contemplate it independently of our appetitive interest in it; we sacralize the originary object of our intention by deferring its appetitive role. Its numinous presence to us depends on its absence from the animal world of appetite that would henceforth be doubled by the human world of representation.

Once this is understood, deconstruction’s critique of authority imposing its mythical-theological presence on the duped multitudes is shown to be based on the false premise that language is itself a form of oppression rather than the fundamental locus of human reciprocity. On the contrary, language cannot be understood as a product of social hierarchy. The originary sign as the name-of-God is a guarantor not of tyranny but of the human community’s liberation from the reign of the strongest. The equality before God that monotheism would later make explicit in the face of the god-kings of the ancient empires was there from the beginning at the birth of human society.

The relationship between language and ritual has scarcely been explored in recent decades. The nineteenth century Sanskritist Max Müller saw language as emerging in the context of sacred ritual, and the coevality of language and religion was more recently explored in its broad outlines by Roy Rappaport in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), but this line of inquiry has not been pursued by recent students of language origin. The throwaway quip about religion cited in Chronicle 533 is emblematic of the désinvolture of not just one highly respected scholar but of the entire field.

No one expects contemporary linguists to share Müller’s concern for religious practices, but they should be aware of the originary unity between the simplest form of formal representation and the basis it establishes for its eventual institutional repetition, if only as a way of understanding how the sign acquired a “portable” linguistic association with its referent while at the same time guaranteeing the reaffirmation of communal solidarity, to use Durkheim’s term, in the ritual repetition of the entire event.

Such matters are, indeed, quite susceptible to being studied empirically, provided the “religious” be understood as an anthropological reality rather than as a fanciful excrescence on “secular” rationality. The underlying identity of significance and sacrality is not a mere metaphor. Although the idea is understandably absent from the metaphysical/philosophical tradition, the characteristics attributed to God are in fact those of the embodied or “incarnate” signified. The sign is “immortal,” and in the originary event and on the scene of representation to which it gives birth, it is “omnipotent” in interdicting the central object, and “omniscient” in embodying a knowledge of the whole configuration that the individual participants do not possess—the foundation of Durkheim’s insight that the sacred embodies the ethical values of the community that transcend individual interests.

The identity of origin, God, and the word / logos / verbum affirmed in the first line of the Gospel of John is inscribed thereby in Christianity and in Western civilization as a whole. It is time we began once more to take it seriously.

To be continued…

Il n’y aura pas de nom unique, fût-il le nom de l’être. Et il faut le penser sans nostalgie, c’est-à-dire hors du mythe de la langue purement maternelle ou purement paternelle, de la patrie perdue de la pensée. Il faut au contraire l’ affirmer, au sens où Nietzsche met l’affirmation en jeu, dans un certain rire et dans un certain pas de la danse. Depuis ce rire et cette danse, depuis cette affirmation étrangère à toute dialectique, vient en question cette autre face de la nostalgie que j’appellerai l’espérance heideggerienne. Je ne méconnais pas ce que ce mot peut avoir ici de choquant. Je le risque toutefois, sans en exclure aucune implication, et le mets en rapport avec ce que La parole d’Anaximandre me paraît retenir de la métaphysique : la quête du mot propre et du nom unique. Parlant du “premier mot de l’être “(das frühe Wort des Seins: το χρεών), Heidegger écrit: “Le rapport au présent, déployant son ordre dans l’essence même de la présence, est unique (ist eine einzige). Il reste par excellence incomparable à tout autre rapport. Il appartient à l’unicité de l’être lui-même (Sie gehort zur Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). La langue devrait donc, pour nommer ce qui se déploie dans l’être (das Wesende des Seins), trouver un seul mot, le mot unique (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). C’est là que nous mesurons combien risqué est tout mot de la pensée [tout mot pensant : denkende Wort] qui s’adresse à l’être (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). Pourtant ce qui est risqué ici n’est pas quelque chose d’impossible; car l’être parle partout et toujours au travers de toute langue.” Telle est la question : l’alliance de la parole et de l’être dans le mot unique, dans le nom enfin propre. Telle est la question qui s’inscrit dans l’affirmation jouée de la différance. Elle porte (sur) chacun des membres de cette phrase : ” L’être / parle / partout et toujours / à travers / toute / langue /. “ Jacques Derrida.

There will be no unique name, be it the name of being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside the myth of a language purely maternal or purely paternal, of the lost homeland of thought. We must on the contrary affirm it, in the sense that Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laugh and a certain dance step. From this laugh and this dance, from this affirmation alien to any dialectic, comes into question that other face of nostalgia that I shall call Heideggerian hopefulness (espérance). I am not unaware of how shocking this word may appear in this context. I risk it nevertheless, without excluding any of its implications, and put it in relation to what “The Anaximander Fragment” [Das Spruch des Anaximander] seems to me to retain of metaphysics: the quest for the “proper” noun/word (le mot propre) and the unique name. Speaking of the “first word of being” (das frühe Wort des Seins: το χρεών [necessity]), Heidegger writes: “The relation to the present, deploying its order in the very essence of presence, is unique (ist eine einzige). It remains exemplarily incomparable with any other relation. It belongs to uniqueness itself (Sie gehort zu Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). Language should therefore, to name what presents itself in being (das Wesende des Seins), find a single word, the unique word (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). Here is where we measure how risky is every word of thought [every thinking word: denkende Wort] that is addressed to being (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). However, what is risked here is not something impossible; for being speaks everywhere and always through every language/tongue.” This is the question : the alliance of speech and being in the unique word, in the at last proper name. This is the question that is inscribed in the played/performed affirmation (affirmation jouée) of la différance. It bears (on) each element of this sentence: “Being / speaks / everywhere and always / through / every / language /.” Jacques Derrida.

« La différance » in Théorie d’ensemble, Seuil, 1968, p. 66.

Although for GA, Jacques Derrida’s notion of la différance is second in importance only to René Girard’s conception of the mimetic origin of the sacred, I never had the opportunity to discuss these matters with him, even indirectly. As Richard van Oort can tell you, although Derrida had promised to participate in Anthropoetics’ special issue on deconstruction (IV, 1: Fall 1998), and I still have somewhere a brief letter to that effect bearing his signature, when he arrived in Irvine for his annual visiting professorship, rather than spending an hour on the freeway, I asked Richard, who was then a doctoral student intending to take his course, to make the first contact, a procedure that no doubt failed to show the great man an appropriate level of deference. The fact is, however, that what Derrida was undoubtedly prepared to do was to answer questions about his ideas, not engage in a discussion where they might be challenged, and recognizing this fact, he gracefully withdrew from the issue. We had no further contact.

This is regrettable because although today it is not uncommon to hear Derrida dismissed as a mystificateur by those who emphasize his irritating preciosity over his philosophical genius, this does no service to human thought. As a parenthesis in the new TOOL, I therefore propose to comment briefly on the final paragraphs of his seminal essay/lecture on la différance. A sympathetic analysis demonstrates both the quasi-anthropological insight of this “last metaphysician” and his desire to “save” and transcend metaphysics (I dare not speak of a Hegelian Aufhebung), as well as what seems to me the obvious fact that GA answers this desire as far as possible while extracting the kernel of Derrida’s intuition from the mystifying language in which he envelops it. For with all his genius, his loyalty to the metaphysical tradition, so different from Girard’s healthy skepticism, made Derrida incapable of dealing with the paradoxical nature of the enigma that could only be clarified in a language structurally different from the language of the sacred that he borrows, with irony and bad conscience, from Heidegger.

The linguistic foundation for la différance is Saussure’s famous dictum that in language there is nothing but differences. This is obviously true at the boundaries of the physical components of language; a phoneme can only be defined as such by comparison with contrasting phonemes, whence the practice of minimal pairs to distinguish them as elements of contrasting words. We note, for example, in contrast to the English phoneme set, the absence in Spanish of a distinction between “b” and “v” (v de vaca y b de burro), or between “r” and “l” in Japanese. And if we consider paradigms such as colors, similar boundary confusions are equally possible. And so on.

But aside from the fact that one need not think about red and green to call something blue, or gorillas and lions to call something an elephant, the fundamental flaw in this understanding of language is that the primary difference in language that must precede all others is not between elements of a paradigm but between the sign and its referent. The first word is a sign because it is no longer a “practical” gesture of appropriation nor is it an “instinctive” signal; in its persistence as a communication the aborted gesture acquires a meaning transmissible to the other members of the group. It is this difference, which inaugurates the sign as a wholly new category of being, that creates the representational doubling of signifier and signified that in turn allows differences within the first category to designate different worldly objects via the second. But the original deferral that allows for difference, la différance, is the deferral of appropriation and thereby of the practical, “horizontal” world of instrumentality, which creates the néant, the empty scenic space, into which the new dimension of meaning can emerge.

Derrida develops his “non-concept” of la différance over 26 pages. The “misspelling,” which in French cannot be heard, and is therefore an artifact of writing, the form of language that does away with “presence” and becomes therefore for Derrida its canonical form, is the central symbol of the lack of a proper name for the sign-in-general.

But in the essay’s surprising conclusion, reproduced above, the author returns with great nostalgia of his own to Heidegger’s nostalgic hopefulness (espérance) for the single word of metaphysical Being. If we read Derrida sympathetically, while nonetheless refusing to accept that the only possible expression of this paradox must be itself paradoxical, the intuition expressed in this passage can be reformulated in much clearer anthropological terms.

What is the mystery evoked in reference to this “one word,” the nostalgia for which Derrida rejects yet cannot avoid evoking in a secondary nostalgia for the hope it continued to inspire in Heidegger? Clearly one could go on in this vein as so many have, my own text nostalgically evoking in turn Derrida’s nostalgia as a reminder that metaphysics never really leaves us, that the absence that founds it is of its very essence, und so weiter. But having had the good fortune to study with someone whose impatience with philosophy was so to speak the contrapositive of his anthropology, I understand that rather than remaining complacently in the world of concepts, we are obliged to do our best to ground them in reality.

Clearly in thinking of the one word Derrida, at least, if not Heidegger, is thinking of the name of God, which for Jews is ineffable, or to take God at his word in Exodus 3, inexistent: the only “name” he gives, in what I consider to be the most important passage of the Bible, is the proposition “I am that I am.” But this understanding of the one word represents a great historical insight. Revelations such as this, or John’s later rival insight that In the beginning was the word . . . and the word was God, help to explain the aura that surrounds the question, but at the price of incorporating into the scene of origin a level of understanding which at that point could have only been that of a deity.

At the origin of human language, the “one word” these gentlemen are seeking was simply the aborted gesture of the originary event, which in reality was no doubt repeated a number of times before its status as a sign acquired the communal recognition necessary to the establishment of a sacred culture around the scene of representation.

As described in the previous Chronicle 534, the hypothetical originary event is concrete and easily imaginable, and above all it is plausibly motivated rather than the result of some unfathomable cosmic decision by God, Being, or The Anthropic Principle. This should not be taken to mean that I consider Derrida, or even Heidegger, to be mere mystifiers. These thinkers came at the end of the great tradition of metaphysics and were straining great intellectual powers to seek a way out of it. But they failed to realize that reaching this goal requires the addition of a new anthropological dimension to their conceptual analysis. Their language, like that of Sartre and the other major philosophical minds of the 20^th century, is, following in the footsteps of the more empirical-minded Husserl, but open as the latter was not to the resentful dissatisfaction of Nietzsche, an attempt to think through what Kant had recognized as the aporias of thought itself. But “thought” is not an autonomous entity, and its categories must finally be grounded in the reality of human existence, in a scene that is not merely internal to the individual consciousness, as for Sartre and phenomenology in general, but situates the human mind in the sole context in which it can exist and has ever existed, which is that of a linguistic, cultural human community.

Once this is done, one realizes in all humility that the “end” of metaphysics in no way brings with it the solution to the world’s problems. I remain convinced after 35 years that GA, if only as demonstrated by its complete absence from the contemporary scene of public discourse, is bound to play an important role in the “history of thought.” But the effect of its “discovery” on the general welfare, if any, is wholly unpredictable. It is an instrument of freedom, as are all such discoveries, but only faith can provide the espérance that adding it to the mix will make things better. It is nonetheless clear to me that it represents an objectively higher level of human self-consciousness, one that in no way trivializes the results of the human sciences, but that may hopefully influence their future choice of research subjects.

The fascination of Girardians for the discovery of “mirror neurons” is understandable, but the neuroscientists, for their part, show no signs of making use of the humanistic understanding of mimesis that “mimetic theory” provides. Let us hope that these scientists’ eventual exploration of the neurological substrate of the scene of representation, both individual and collective, will take place in a more cooperative environment. Only then will we truly be able to speak of the end, or more prudently, of the Wendung (turning point) of the metaphysical era.