Antiquitopia

One of Bakhtin's most distinctive features as a thinker is the notion of "dialogism," and yet, he would point out, this is not quite right, for speech is more like "trialogism" between the speaker, the listener, and those who have used these speech patterns before, that have formed the ways of speaking: The word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the "soul" of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author. (M.M. Bakht...

I was amused by this line from Borges's short story, "The Aleph": ...as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn't get all scrambled up together overnight... (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"; trans. Andrew Hurley) Indeed! How did he know that they didn't scramble up overnight and rearrange themselves when he reopened the book? (I would think this is an observation Borges would appreciate!)

No...this is not Derrida; it is Michel de Montaigne: Our disputes are about words. I ask what is Nature, Pleasure, a Circle, and Substitution. The question is couched in words, and is answered in the same coin. A stone is a body. But if you press the point: And what is a body? -A substance.- And what is a substance? and so on, you will end by driving the answerer to exhaust his dictionary. One substitutes one word for another that is often less well understood. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M Cohen) Words refer only to other words, which refer to other words. Meaning is always deferred, even diminished, and never stable. It is the endless field of signifiers, a signum of a signum of a signum ad infinitum with no res .

One of the things I have emphasized as one of the major common threads in ancient literature is the power of speech. Words are strange things, and their power is highly ambivalent. They can build up or tear down. They can deceive or enlighten. They can find great resource in ambiguity and double-speak. People can manipulate speech and manipulate by speech for a multitude of ends, whether positive or negative (or even determine what is positive or negative). One type of speech among these is the speech-act. The speech-act emphasizes that speech DOES something. In particular, speech can be tranformative. Often, or in fact usually, this speech-act is highly formulaic, the formulae based upon particular social developments or contexts. The transformative speech-act based upon formulae is recognized in so-called "magic." In this case, for the speech--the spell--to have effect, to have efficacy, it must be said just right. Again, its power is ambivalent--such a speech-a...

What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, all , world ,...

Ok...I love Umberto Eco. He has fantastic verve in his verbage. He can present some extraordinarily complex ideas in beautiful language that is, at the same time, succinct. He has this to say about some rather loquacious critics: ...those who are so orgasmic in words are in fact very unlibertine in reality, and abhor alterity, since in every one of their critical embraces they are simply making love to themselves. ("On Style" in On Literature , 173). I'll remember that one, Umberto, when reviews of my work start rolling in! ;)