Architecture of The Invisible

There is the visible, concrete world. We label it with words and usually have little problems when it comes to translation across languages. But there is also another world, the invisible world, lined with its own architecture. These forms and relations we label with words but fail to translate. It is this world that is constructed by language.

Phenomenology of Narration

What space do you occupy when reading or telling a story?

Deconstruction

"Language works through us...the deconstruction is its impulse to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another"

Linguistic Disorder

Lacan views schizophrenia as a linguistic disorder, a breakdown in the signifying chain of meaning in a narrative

An Ancient City

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city, a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses and of houses with additions from different periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses"
-Lyotard

Inverted Forms

"Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject’s past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start"

Repressed Word

“The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of “prolongation of communication by other means’”: the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.

Slavoj Zizek

Expressing Deep Physical Laws

"Time is a subject subject and we are far from understanding it fully...the feeling that time flows is deeply ingrained in our experience and thoroughly pervades our thinking and language so much so, that we have lapsed and will continue to lapse, into habitual, colloquial descriptions that refer to a flowing time. But don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing experience than at expressing deep physical laws"

-Brian Greene

Theory of Language

"Any philosophical system is, in the last analysis, a theory of language. Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words"
-Albert Camus

No Exit

"Freedom is capacity to escape power, to subjugate no one. Then freedom can exist only outside of language. Unfortunately, human language has no exterior; there is no exist"

-Roland Barthes

Desires

"In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but prohibitions surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power. This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-or dissembles-desire; it is also the object of desire"
-Michel Foucault

Service of Power

"Once uttered, even in the subject's deepest privacy, speech enters the service of power...you are both the master and the slave of speech"
-Roland Barthes

Fascism

"Language, the performance of language system, is neither reactionary nor progressive. It is quite simply fascist, for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech"
-Roland Barthes

The Real

"From the ancient times...literature has been concerned to represent something. What? I will put it more crudely: the real. The real is not representable, and it is because men ceaselessly try to represent it by words that there is a history of literature"
-Roland Barthes

A Form of Life

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"
Wittingstein

Reality is the Loser

"For Plato's Dialogues are nothing but long struggles between language and reality, in which paradoxically, reality is the loser"
-Camus

Failure to Find Words

"The history of philosophy...is basically a history of the failure of the mind, confronted with the problem of language. Man has not managed to find words"
-Camus

Being is Everything

"The truth of the word is not something it owns, but something which creates itself little by little in sentences, speeches, literature, and history of literatures...All words thus form part of an unending adventure that moves toward a universal meaning. At that point too language is being, because being is everything"
Camus

Terrible Inadequacy

"Language goes beyond individuals, and its terrible inadequacy is the sign of its transcendence"
Camus

A Metaphysical Question

"What is Parain's problem? He makes language a metaphysical question....for the problem is to know whether our most accurate expressions, our most successful cries are not in fact empty of all meaning, whether language does not, in short, express man׳s final solitude in a silent universe. What this adds up to is a search for essences of language, and a quest for words that can give us the same reasons we require of God. For Parain's basic premise is that if language is meaningless then everything is meaningless, and the world becomes absurd. We know only by means of words. If they are proved useless, then we are finally and irredeemably blinded" -Camus

Second Part of the Story

World of Thought

From chabad.org by Freeman


I suppose what really bothers me is this: Why did the Creator have to speak in order to create? Wouldn't it be so much more wonderful if we were all just a thought?

Actually, we are. That's how things started off. And that's what we connect into on the day of Shabbat.

You see, first there was a World of Thought. The written Torah doesn't start with that world. The Torah begins with a bet--the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It starts at the second part of the story. But at first there was a world that just emanated out of thought--and never left that place.

The second part of the story is when all those thoughts descended to become a concrete world. A place that seems separate from its Creator, outside of its source. Like speech: Your words travel outside of you and become part of someone else.

That's the world we live in for six days. A world that pretends to have no source. We try to push it around a little, it pushes us around a lot, and we both pretend that this is a real and autonomous world. That there is a world and there is us and we are all separate things.

But then, on the seventh day, the Creator let into this world a taste of that higher plane of the "World of Thought." We tune into it by no longer pushing anything around--or letting anything else push us around. We don't change anything. We don't create anything. We don't make fires, we don't cook food, we don't stink up the air with carbon monoxide or make cyberspace connections. We only meditate, contemplate and enjoy. We get a feel of a world that is no more than a single, vast, expressive and wondrous thought.

And then we return to the other six days. But we've already experienced this world's hidden truth. We can see through its facade. We can rip it away. We can draw that higher plane to illuminate our mundane world.

Voice of Seeing

"And so looking has force: it tears, it is sharp, it is an acid. In the end, it corrodes the object and the observer until they are lost in the field of vision. I once was solid, and now I am dissolved: that is the voice of seeing"

-James Elkins, on the nature of seeing

God's Utterances

"The book of nature is written in the language of math, whose symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word; without which one is a wanderer in vain through a dark labyrinth."
— Galileo Galilei

Constructing Reality

"The linguistic turn, therefore, is the eruption into human consciousness of the perspectival, contextual, and contingent nature of all truth claims. Language does not re-present reality, rather it shapes and constructs it, refracting the light of the world through its unique phonetic and conceptual prisms"

A Lost World

There is no deeper longing than the desire to regain the world lost to language.
Take me to a space where linguistic realities dissolve
To a time prior to their existence where the subject-object dichotomy evaporates
it gives rise to an amorphous reality that privileges relations as opposed to concepts.
A space where linguistic concepts bleed for they are inadequate to contain the multiplicity of the world and the walls they construct become
malleable and permeable.
Things blend with one another,
an amorphous state of existence that lacks rigid boundaries
A flux of networks, all infused with one another.
Deep nostalgia for this lost world.
Language kills the multiplicity of that which it defines with its imposed structure.
Through the acquisition of knowledge, we lose the experience of the world that can never be retrieved.
Learning a word strips us of the experience of the moment and imprisons us with its embrace.
This loss is a tragedy.