ON CHARLES OLSON

‘The unconscious is knowledge; but it is a knowledge one cannot know one knows, a knowledge that cannot tolerate knowing it knows’ (Lacan, ‘The Non-dupes Err’)


‘Our manner of excluding,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘is at work precisely at the very moment we are priding ourselves on our gift of universal comprehension’. The manner of excluding to which Blanchot is referring here works to suppress within language the very silence that underlies and supports it, the silence out of which the text itself speaks. It is such a silence that James evokes, in The Turn of the Screw, ‘…a stillness, a pause of life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise we at the moment might be making…'. I want to suggest that to engage with poetry, with the literary thing, requires of one a peculiar kind of libidinal investment, an investment beyond the regime of pleasure, manifest in a decisive rupture of legibility and identification. It will require an engagement with what Lacan calls ‘something beyond, something at the point of origin of the signifying chain’. This something is, of course, jouissance—the enjoyment that Lacan explicitly contrasts with pleasure. The notion of jouissance is intended to evoke a movement of language beyond the representable or accountable: the literary thing is an enigmatic signifying event, an act that shows itself forth in ‘a suspension of constituted reality’ (Zizek), a point of singularity that resists any form of verbal equivalent and yet drives us irresistibly on towards it. To quote Luke Thurston, there is something about the literary thing that ‘resists our reading, and encumbers or drags against our attempts to enmesh it in a discursive network or introduce it to an economy of signifying exchange or translation’. Aesthetic experience testifies to some fundamental opacity—something not to be read, beyond analysis—at the heart of the fantasmatic investment. The attempt to enmesh the thing in an order of signification, an order of comprehension, is the very act that puts it beyond us: the dimension of the literary thing is the dimension of ex-sistence, the dimension—as Lacan would have it—of the extimate. ‘To explain art with the unconscious seems to me to be highly suspect; but it is what analysts do. It seems to me more serious to explain art with the symptom’. To identify with the singular, an unidentifiable particular, something impossible to reduce to a symbolic identification, is a distinctive procedure or act that Lacan designates (in Encore) as the not-all, pas-tout. This, for him, is a position of creative excess, where one may, perhaps, locate the feminine. One may also perhaps think of Antigone, of Lady Macbeth, or Laertes’s response to Ophelia’s madness: ‘This nothing’s more than matter’.

If we are to see sublimation as the elevation of an object ‘to the dignity of the Thing’, then I would suggest it has been characteristic of one approach to Olson’s work to see in it an operation of sublimation so understood. In De magia Giordano Bruno wrote of a ‘language of the gods’ immune to the change and decay of ordinary language. The hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt had been man’s last contact with the ancient symbols, before the invention of letters such as we use today brought about ‘a tremendous loss, first of memory, and then of divine science and magic’. To restore such a divine language would require the grammar of ordinary language to be displaced into a more originary structure, one in which the obfuscations that derive from the customary use of syntax and predication give way to an order of language that embodies what originates it—the primordial. To cite the ghost of Hamlet’s father: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul’. The ambition of such a language is to speak out of the very energies of the earth itself, to articulate in a concatenation of names—understood by analogy with the hieroglyph or ideogram—the essential configurations of being. Of a writing so understood it seems plausible to say, as has J.H. Prynne in his review of the later Maximus poems: ‘The nouns have an almost secret insistence, lent now to great fluent transitions of discourse and lyric measure, so that the passage-work here is powerful and immensely poignant’. Prynne’s account here implies, I think, some order of homology—even isomorphism—between what is made manifest within the ‘rhythmic flux & balance’ of the metrical energies of the writing and the energies of earth and sea. He clearly intends the following lines to be seen as an exemplary instance of such an intertwining of ‘flux & balance’:

The top of Dogtown
puts one up into the sky as free-
ly as it is possible, the extent of
clear space and air, and the bowl
of the light equalling, without at all
that other, false experience of mountains
climbed, heaven

It is passages like this, and others, including the opening lines of ‘Maximus from Dogtown—I’ and ‘Maximus at the Harbor’, that are able to persuade the critic ‘all over again’ that the concretion here achieved is that of ‘the man speaking to men’. What these lines manifest, Prynne avers, is ‘the image of the most exact freedom to be gained now, from the sustained sequence of full-grown poetic speech, and from nowhere else’. The voicing, the uttering, of the sequence of lines is inseparable from, is immanent within, the sequence itself: what generates the metrical energy is made manifest by it. The origin of the lines, their source in the breath and so in the voice and hence in the being of the poet, is given palpable existence in those same lines. The enounced is what it is inasmuch as it is the articulation of the process of its enunciation. The poet speaks as ‘the man speaking to men’ inasmuch as his words, in their rhythmic expressiveness, embody the function that engenders them. (I would be inclined set this beside an aphorism of Lacan’s: representation is the representation of the lack of the function that engenders it.)

The review concludes with a characterisation of Olson’s writing as such, a characterisation in which language is seen as ‘a mythic likeness resting on the earth, the mappemunde of man’s being, and not by any means a “universe of discourse”’. What we encounter here is ‘not secondary assemblage but primary writing’. Unlike the ‘great unifying sentimentalities of dream’ or the merely naïve procedures of ongoing narrative, Olson’s work ‘retains the whole freedom of primary speech’. That there is a slippage here between ‘mythic likeness’ and ‘universe of discourse’, a slippage whose effect is to bring into question certain aspects of the position being argued for, has been made clear by Anthony Mellors in his book on late modernist poetics, and I won’t rehearse his arguments on this occasion. What I would say is that the mesmerising power, the sheer bewitchment, of language used in this way should not under-estimated. The notion of poetic language as being in some sense an enactment of those processes whereby words are returned to some primordial adherence to things exerts a powerful fascination. Such a vision of language implies that it might in some way be possible to say pure existence itself, to say the originary presence of pre-linguistic space. It is as though the impossibility inherent in such an enterprise is what recommends it. That it is an impossibility is something Giorgio Agamben has made clear: as he says, there is a distinction within language, first made clear by the Greeks, between onoma (name or term) and logos (speech or proposition): ‘primal and simple elements can have no defining discourse but only names. A proposition cannot say what the name has named’ (Potentialities p69). He cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (3.221): ‘I can only name objects….I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them’.

It is in connection with Wittgenstein that something further emerges concerning the correlation of language with what lies outside it. In the Big Typescript, he reflects on the concept of a sentence: ‘Can one understand anything other than a sentence? … In a certain sense, there is no such thing as half a sentence’. In a discussion of this passage, Katherine Morris has suggested that the issue of whether something is to be counted as a sentence or a proposition is linked to the question of whether it is used to communicate something, of whether it makes sense to speak of understanding what is said. Seen in this way, there is no such thing as half a sentence. On this view, ‘Fire!’ may well count as a sentence (something may be said with it), whereas on a conception of the proposition to which ideas of syntactic structure are central (that of subject and predicate, say) it would not pass muster. For Morris, an approach to the proposition based on saying and understanding is to be contrasted with a different idea, according to which meaning is inseparable from rules and an order imposed by syntax and its articulation. Given that neither position in this contrast can impose itself definitively on us, the notion of there being a correlation between the forms of language and the forms of reality loses its immediacy and power of fascination. It is pertinent to note that in his earliest writings, in the Notebooks, Wittgenstein observes:

The method of portrayal must be completely determinate before we can compare reality with the proposition at all in order to see whether it is true or false. The method of comparison must be given me before I can make the comparison. (NB 23)

As Denis McManus has pointed out, one may be inclined to think that this true-false matching is ‘made possible by a deeper meaningful-meaningless match between the “forms” of proposition and possible fact. But this deeper match or mismatch must itself presuppose a “method of comparison”, not merely in order for us to be able to test whether the match holds, but in order for what it is for the match to hold or not to hold to be a determinate matter: only if the method is given, is it settled just what the test in question is….settling on the method is settling on what the relevant kind of similarity and dissimilarity is’. Or to evoke the idiom of Lacan, there is no Other of the Other: there is no metalanguage. The ‘autonomy of the signifier’ is strictly correlative to the ‘subjectivisation’ of the signifying chain. As Slavoj Zizek has it: ‘This is what the “arbitrariness of the signifier” means: not the fact that we can “compare” from outside words and things and ascertain that their connection is arbitrary (table is called “table” or “Tisch” or …), but quite on the contrary the very impossibility of assuming such an external position from which we could “compare” words and things’. Any ascertaining of a ‘correspondence’ between words and things, as when we ascertain the truth or falsity of a proposition, is possible only within the already established field of language. Any attempt to establish the accuracy of a factual statement already relies on language for the very meaning of the proposition to be established. That this is so is clear from the following set of remarks, remarks in which Wittgenstein also brings out with astonishing clarity the lack of foundation of language, the lack which alone supports it, its emergence ex nihilo:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)
“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.
“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. (Zettel §§486-87)

(One might substitute jouissance for ‘joy’ and the point will, I think, remain.) Our having the concept of joy that we do is part of our having that kind of complex life with language, its words, its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense) into which agreement—agreement in judgements, not just in definitions—enters in specific and often unforeseeable ways. In Zettel §351 he remarks:

‘If human beings were not in general agreed about the colours of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour could not exist.’ No: our concept would not exist.

It is in our lives with language that the concepts that we have are indeed the concepts that we have. There is nothing beyond this: our lives in language float free in empty space. We possess no firmer ground than this. One might say, as Zizek has it, that language maintains ‘an unnameable distance from the Real’. One might also say that what is being revealed here is the primordial character of the word. To repeat: discourse cannot say what is named by the name; there is no metalanguage. Something similar to the import of Wittgenstein’s vision is grasped by Agamben when he writes: ‘we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language’. To adapt a formulation of Zizek’s, the barrier separating language (the Symbolic) from the extra-linguistic (the Real), is impossible to trespass, since language (the Symbolic) is this very barrier. It is in this gap that Lacan locates the subject: the subject is in effect the ‘abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process’. [Cf Psycho: the impersonal abyss we confront when we are face-to-face with Norman’s gaze at the end of the film is ‘the very abyss of the subject not yet caught in the web of language—the unapproachable Thing which resists subjectivization, this point of failure of every identification, is ultimately the subject itself’’ (Zizek).]

It is in relation to this impossible gap separating the Symbolic from the Real that, in Agamben’s view, we may locate the voice. Insofar as the voice is conceived no longer as the experience of pure sound and not yet as the experience of a meaning, the thought of the voice alone leads to a dimension that indicates ‘the pure taking place of language without any determinate event of meaning’. It is this that shows, he contends, that ‘there is still a possibility of thought beyond meaningful propositions’. The dimension of at issue therefore is not that of meaningful speech but ‘of a voice that, without signifying anything, signifies signification itself’. An example of such a revelation of the voice is, I think, to be found in Joyce’s story, ‘An Encounter’. The story concerns the encounter between two boys playing truant from school and an older man in a park. As the man speaks to one of the boys, the narrator of the story, and reveals to him his fantasies of chastisement, his voice seems to become detached from him, and becomes repetitive, insistent:

He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

As Luke Thurston has noted, in an admirable account of the story, the obscure libidinal traces, traces of an obscene jouissance, set down by the narrator—‘almost affectionate’, ‘seemed to plead’, ‘he would love that better than anything in this world’—form an essential part of the narrative mystery unfolded in ‘An Encounter’. There is, Thurston observes, ‘a crucial perception of something more, something in excess of the discourse uttered, a surplus that possibly indicates (and the element of doubt is precisely the point) the libidinal force or pressure of some hidden fantasmatic object’. In other passages, in which the man describes his fascination with ‘looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her soft beautiful hair’, it seems to the narrator as though the man were repeating something he had learned by heart, ‘or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit’. As Thurston puts it, the speaker’s repetitive, insistent phrases point to an invisible centre, a fantasmatic black hole, at once restlessly motivating and always eluding his utterance. In the language of the man there is a split or antagonism between desire and drive. Inasmuch as this verbal jouissance is entirely circular, the man’s speech turns back on itself in masturbatory self-fulfilment, in what Thurston describes as ‘a kind of libidinal autism’. There is thus ‘a split between the chain of signifiers and the concrete utterance embodying it, which remains outside the signifying chain: the object voice, a raw pulsation of the real’. The voice is here identified as the objet a. In the graphs of desire, as Lacan sets them out, the voice occupies a place outside the signifying chain: the split between diacritical signifier and the singular condition of utterance is an inescapable and, so to speak, ‘transcendent’ condition of discourse.

I have been struck by something not unlike this in parts of Olson’s work. To bring this out, I propose to look at ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’. Whatever the argument, the discursive thrust, of the poem, the insistence of repetition, an insistence that constitutes one crucial mode of its unfolding, effects a shift from representation to something quite different—to a vision of the surface of language, to something not unlike the slimy and obscene utterance of the man in ‘An Encounter’.

In cold hell, in thicket, how
abstract (as high mind, as not lust, as love is) how
strong (as strut or wing, as polytope, as things are
constellated) how
strung, how cold
can a man stay (can men) confronted
thus?

Apart from alluding to the Inferno, what in this context might be signified by ‘cold hell’, by ‘thicket’? It is, I would say, the void around which the text, in the act of endeavouring to represent it, circulates. Even in the opening lines repetition of word and reiteration of syntactic structure are already strongly marked. The same pattern is evident elsewhere, for example see the indented section in Part 2, beginning ‘How can he change, his question is’. In connection with this poem, Robert von Hallberg quotes the following remark of Olson’s on his mode of writing (Olson is actually talking about ‘The Kingfishers’): ‘Each of these lines is a progressing of both the meaning and the breathing forward, and then a backing up, without a progress or any kind of movement outside the unit of time local to the idea’ (p145). The writing goes forward only to fold back on its own progress, in a circling movement around its own passing beyond itself. In an Escher-like topology, the writing describes a redoubled loop, in which the movement on and forward is twisted back into itself, disclosing within itself its own enunciation, which in turn stands beyond itself.

How shall he who is not happy, who has been so made unclear

In this line the second clause turns back on the first, in a movement one might see as anaphoric—even anamorphic. As one goes through the poem, the effect of this type of torsion is not so much to build to a conclusion or climax, as to create a sense of partial movement, first this, then that, an effect similar to that which Lacan calls démontage. I would see in this also a movement reminiscent of the game described by Freud, the fort-da, in which the constitution of child himself as subject is at stake.

Who am I but by a fix, and another,
a particle, and the congery of particles carefully picked by another...

As this section of the poem continues, the verb tenses set in the passive and active give way something more like that of the reflexive middle voice: ‘that they are, in hell or in happiness, merely/something to be wrought, to be shaped, to be carved, for use, for/others’. The reflexive voice effects a montage of the self and the other but as partial objects. One should note that Lacan’s grammar or formula for the drive is se faire, to make oneself. Outside the active and the passive voice, the drive aims to make itself be seen, be heard. As Mairie Jaanus has argued, it is a minimal way of making oneself exist: as she says, ‘it is matter of perpetuating our existence against what drives us towards non-being’. For Lacan, the fort-da game, with its throwing forth and pulling back of the cotton-reel, is not a game intended to master the mother’s disappearance. The reel is both the subject and its lost object—object a. What the child is aiming at, according to Lacan, is that which ‘essentially not there qua represented’. The repetition aims at something that is not there, and involves the ‘impossible to think’ and ‘the impossible to say’. It involves an encounter with the real ‘which is not situated at the level of thought, but at the level at which “oracular speech” yields non-sense, that which cannot be thought’ (Bruce Fink). ‘In Cold Hell’ does not end, it wavers, it gutters, to a finish, ‘precise as hell is, precise/as any words, or wagon/can be made’. In the later work also one can see the self-representation of a global ego with its geography doubled and disseminated by the colours of rhetoric and the insistent rhythms of repetition. The subject is able intermittently to escape the enclosure of an oppressive truth.

Were I to take this further, I would want to consider Eric Santner’s discussion in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life of Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of singularity, which, as Santner presents it, draws crucially on a notion of drive not unlike the one sketched out here. What I have tried to suggest is that on occasion in Olson there is a struggle to affirm a strange temporality, which is by no means an apotheosis of the present, but of the singular. The writing exhibits the lack of a present, a non-self-presence that typifies the mode of its rhetoric. Something is revealed that is untranslatable, and not be appropriated: one apprehends, as Thurston has it, a metempsychotic rupture of the ‘I’. Evident in parts of Olson’s writing there is that which testifies to something like the very dimension out of which the writing speaks. There is in his texts a dimension of foreclosure, an opening onto what Lacan has called ‘the realm between two deaths’, the realm of a death-in-life that for a moment one is forced to live. I will end with a quote from Olson himself. On the page immediately following his account of ‘In Cold Hell’, von Hallberg quotes the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’ and then the comment Olson wrote on them in the margin of his copy of Eliot’s poetry. Olson says: ‘This is a beautiful passage, & does not contradict space. But at the heart of it, in the man, is a lack of the hole of space, & it is that lack that gives Eliot his minority’. Set in motion by the word ‘lack’, there is a play here around and between the objective and the subjective genitive, as in ‘lack of the hole of space’ (one might compare ‘season of no bungling’), a play that, together with an ambivalence attaching to the word ‘hole’, serves to expose the very act that supports and generates Olson’s note as the act of its own un-doing. The lack Olson denigrates in Eliot is a lack Olson’s text is traversed by also.

I have little doubt that all this will have seemed unrewarding and beside the point. All I can say is that I find the struggle for semantic mastery to be what it is only insofar as it disappoints the authority of its own rhetoric.

Note:

The following remark by J.L. Austin is to the point: ‘There is no need whatsoever for the words used in making a true statement to “mirror” in any way, however indirect, any feature whatsoever of the situation or event; a statement no more needs, in order to be true, to reproduce the “multiplicity,” say, or the “structure” or “form” of the reality, than a word needs to be echoic or writing pictographic. To suppose that it does, is to fall once again into the error of reading back into the world the features of language’. One might add that grammar/language is not responsible to reality; only some statements are. To turn the form of our thought into a content, a statement, is not an intelligible project.

ON WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN: A FURTHER NOTE

Writing on the Tractatus in Beyond the Limits of Thought [pp. 188-190], Graham Priest has made the following point concerning any claim to the effect that a fact or proposition (the considerations are the same) has a certain form. The form of a fact is not a component of a fact in the way that the objects that comprise it are. The form of a fact is the way the objects are structured, and this can no more be another object than the form of a house can be one of the bricks of which it is built. If the form of a fact were just another object, like the objects that comprise that fact, the fact would just be a heap of objects, not a unity. The form of a fact functions in a way that is quite different from the objects that comprise make it: the form is the way the objects are put together, the way they are structured. Hence a fact cannot be about its own form in the way it can be about its objects. If the form is not an object, then there are no facts about it, and therefore no proposition that expresses such facts.

Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot express. (4.121)

The nature of structure cannot be said. Any attempt to make claims concerning the nature of structure must produce a string of signs that fails to make sense. Such a string will be nonsense (Unsinn). Structural claims are beyond the expressible. What we encounter in TLP is not a language about nonsense but a language of nonsense. We shift, as it were from logic to rhetoric. This is what coming to ‘understand me’, the author of TLP, amounts to.

This is comparable to what Shoshana Felman has described in relation to Lacan as ‘the very torment which inhabits logic’ (Writing and Madness, 125). There is a radical dimension opened up by Wittgenstein, a radical dimension corresponding to that discerned by Lacan. What is involved is nothing other than the loss of the security of a metalanguage, the loss of a ‘claim to a position of exhaustiveness, which would, Felman asserts, be the claim of grammar. If we replace ‘grammar’ by ‘logic’ or ‘logical form’, the implications become clear. We are faced, in TLP as in the work of Lacan, by nothing less than a shift from logic to the inescapable dimension of rhetoric, a shift which Felman describes as follows:

that ‘stumbling block’ which forces discourse to discover that it can only define rhetoric rhetorically, by participating in it, i.e., by stumbling, by elaborating not a grammar of rhetoric but a rhetoric of rhetoric…. (127)

She goes on to cite Lacan: ‘Stumbling, faltering, splitting. In a spoken or written sentence something slips…. It’s there that something else is asking to be realized—something which appears as intentional, of course, but partaking of a strange temporality’ (Four Fundamental Concepts, 25). It is this ‘strange temporality’ that Wittgenstein elaborates in the distinction drawn in his later work between agreement in definition and agreement in judgment, which writers such as Affeldt, or Guetti and Read, have considered in detail. One may see why Wittgenstein thought philosophy should be done in the manner of poetry, and why one might say of TLP that, like the poetry of the moderns, it shows itself to be a ‘a literary thing’.

ON WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN: A NOTE

‘In the beginning was the deed’ (OC §402). With this famous citation from Goethe, Wittgenstein seems to signal a gap or rupture between letter and voice, between signifying act and bodily singularity. The sense of an utterance cannot be separated from the conditions of that utterance, conditions that are accidental, contingent. One can see here something of how meaning, the flat, denotative meaning of a written chain of words, is transformed into sense. As Zizek has it, this takes place ‘only when a nonsensical vocal dark spot which, in its very opaqueness functions as the stand-in for the subject is added to it’ (IR, 197). If objective-denotative meaning is to be transformed into subjective-expressive sense, one has to supplement it with a vocal stain, a stain that is without meaning: sense = meaning + nonsense. This transformation of the chain is effected, of course, retroactively. (See the graphs of desire.)

The presence of this impenetrable vocal supplement effectuates the magic transmutation of a written chain of signifiers into ‘subjectivized’ speech in which one can discern, beyond its denotative meaning, the reverberation of a subjective position of enunciation. (IR, 197)

Wittgenstein evokes some thing very similar to this when he refers what he calls ‘the context of significant use’ in the Tractatus, a crucial insight which he goes on to elaborate in his later work. (See James Conant on this.) The transmutation of meaning into sense is inseparable from the unpredictable singularity of a language event. (See the discussion of Guetti and Read elsewhere on this site.)

As an example of what I have in mind here, I cite the following remarks from Zettel, remarks in which Wittgenstein also brings out with astonishing clarity the lack of foundation of language, the lack which alone supports it, the nothing from which it comes, ex nihilo:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)
“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.
“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. (Zettel §§486-87)

One might substitute jouissance for ‘joy’ and the point will, I think, remain. Our having the concept of joy that we do is part of our having that kind of complex life with language, its words, its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense) into which agreement—agreement in judgements, not just in definitions—enters in specific and often unforeseeable ways. In Zettel §351 he remarks:

‘If human beings were not in general agreed about the colours of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour could not exist.’ No: our concept would not exist.

It is in our lives with language that the concepts that we have are indeed the concepts that we have. There is nothing beyond this: our lives in language float free in empty space. We possess no firm ground under our feet. One might say, with Zizek, that language maintains ‘an unnameable distance from the Real’. One might also say that what is being revealed here is the primordial character of the word. Just as there is no name for the name, so there is no metalanguage. The import of Wittgenstein’s vision is also grasped by Agamben when he writes: ‘we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language’ (Potentialities, 45). To adapt a formulation of Zizek’s, the barrier separating language (the Symbolic) from the extra-linguistic (the Real), is impossible to trespass, since language (the Symbolic) is this very barrier. It is in this gap that Lacan locates the subject: the subject is in effect the ‘abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process’.

One can see here what is involved in Lacan’s later considerations of the Borromean knot. In the seminar of 1975-76, devoted to a consideration of Joyce, the knot moves from being threefold to becoming fourfold, the fourth element being le sinthome, that which links the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real together. This can be mapped—at the risk of gross oversimplification—onto the equation taken from Zizek that I gave above: sense (Imaginary), meaning (Symbolic and nonsense (Real). Le sinthome would then appear as a thread or line to be envisaged as looping around the three terms of the equation. The problem here of course is that the equation exists in the register of the symbolic, whereas the symbolic is only one element of the knot as it appears in Lacan’s presentation. What my suggestion does conform to, however, is Lacan’s insistence that the writing of the knot cannot be located ‘in symbolic structure, psychological meaning [‘sense’ in Zizek’s equation] or the mute insistence of the drive; in other words the knot itself is irreducible to the registers it inscribes’ (Luke Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, 195). The mute insistence of the drive is what turns around the black spot of the voice, object a. The topology of the split subject, barred S, in its circulation around the object is marked by Lacan in the matheme for fantasy as a diamond (the sign for ‘more than’ linked to the sign for ‘less than’): this dimension is to be located between ‘meaning’ and ‘nonsense’. The knot is thus a kind of letter, an asemic coincidence of linguistic substance and jouissance, and ‘it remains behind language as litter’ (Thurston, 196). According to Thurston, not only is the sinthome the non-metaphorical knot itself, but it appears in the knot and as its least stable element. (In my inscription of it onto the equation, it is not even ‘there’, but posited.) The sinthome is what reveals a singularity—what for Lacan is the untranslatable signature of a subject’s enjoyment.

On this showing, human subjectivity is not to be understood in terms of rules or laws of signification (as Wittgenstein had already shown): it is to be seen in terms of an act that is open to the void of creative jouissance-in-language. In Zettel we find the following remark: ‘Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)’ The extension in question is the extension of a language-game, so that the ‘primitive behaviour’ referred to here is always already language: and the same holds for ‘instinct’. The language-game is there like our life; it is not based on anything, reasonable or unreasonable. It thus makes no sense to ask: ‘from what did language emerge?’ Language truly is a creation ex nihilo. In the light of this, one can perhaps come to see why Lacan finally understood language and the subject’s relation to it, not in terms of metaphor, the Name-of-the Father, but as bodying itself forth without reference to the Other. Just such a vision of language is manifest in Wittgenstein’s account of the experience of meaning, and of seeing aspects.

LACAN AND THE TRINITY

Lacan considers the question of the Trinity in relation to Borromean rings or knots, and he takes the issue up in Seminar 23, Le sinthome (1975-1976). I propose to look at the account given of this seminar by Roberto Harari in How James Joyce Made His Name (trans. Luke Thurston, Other Press, New York, 2002). It will be remembered that rings of this kind had been used in the Middle Ages to symbolise the Trinity, though neither Lacan nor Harari refers to this fact. For Lacan, the rings serve to engage a certain relation between the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (R. S. I). Roman Catholicism is, on this view, ‘the only true religion’ inasmuch as by proposing the order of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit it exemplifies the triadic order of R.S.I. Harari cites (pp. 92-94) relevant passages from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and from Reinach’s Orpheus to justify the Catholic doctrine of the filioque, to which R.S.I. would seem to lend support. As Lacan presents the threefold ring, the third ring, which links the other two into a trinity, is identified with the Holy Spirit, which thus proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Lacan, however, does not remain with the threefold ring. He develops a ring of four elements (see Harari, Figure 11, p. 61), a quadruple Borromean ring, fuller details of which Harari sets out on page 61 and elsewhere. To develop such a ring, it is necessary to untie the original three rings, which had six crossing points, in order to include one more ring, which results in a figure with fourteen crossing points (as laid out on a flat surface like a page). If you want to retie you must first untie. This fourth ring, this fourth order, corresponds to the sinthome. According to Lacan, what Joyce achieved was, as Harari has it, ‘nothing less than a mise-en-scène of this quadruple knot’. The place, so to speak, of the sinthome is outside and yet within R.S.I., and it is from this position that R.S.I. may approached. That the manifestation of this position is what takes place in Joyce’s later writing is the thrust of Seminar 23 and of Harari’s book. I will do no more that suggest here that something not dissimilar may be found in the language of Wittgenstein’s considerations of aspect seeing and the experience of meaning. At the very least, it seems likely that an illuminating comparison may be drawn between these writers.

So far as the Trinity is concerned, on Lacan’s showing, this fourth order is exemplified by the figure of Mary, who appears as that to which the three rings refer themselves. It is though her intercession that one may approach the divine persons. However, a problem arises at this point, I believe. Mary, her blessedness and sanctity notwithstanding, is not divine. The fourth ring, however, is a ring like the other three: it has, so to speak, the same nature. There is, at any rate, nothing to distinguish it from the others, apart from the route it follows in relation to them. (In constructing such a figure, all one needs are four lengths of string which can come from the same ball.) In short, the fourth order, if there is to be a correlation with the Trinity, must also be divine, uncreated. This represents an impasse for Lacan’s argument, based as it is on Catholic doctrine. No such problem arises for the Orthodox tradition, however, despite the dismissal of it in Harari’s book. The fourth order is that of the uncreated grace which flows eternally from the Trinity, that which manifested itself on Mount Tabor, in the light of the Transfiguration. It was just such a theology of uncreated grace, of the uncreated energies, that Gregory Palamas developed in Constantinople after the schism. Palamite theology is taken by Orthodox theologians and by the Church itself as true to the Patristic experience: the Feast of Orthodoxy celebrated during Lent is a celebration of Palamas and his thought. An account of these matters is to be found in Vladimir Lossky, virtually passim, and in the work of Bishop Kallistos. (There are of course many other modern Orthodox theologians who have characterised the issues at stake.)

Lacan imposes on his rings a temporal succession. First, the Father (ring one), then the Son (ring two) and then the Holy Spirit (ring three), which holds the first two together and thus may be said to proceed from the Father and the Son. There is, of course, no doctrine of uncreated grace in Catholicism, hence the role of the Mother of God in explaining or parsing the fourfold set of rings. On the picture I am presenting (and it is a picture, no more), the fourfold set operates retroactively, a procedure that elsewhere is crucial to Lacan (see the graphs of desire, for example, or the discussion of logical time). It is possible to approach the Trinity, if ‘approach’ is the word I need, only by way of the uncreated grace of the Spirit: the Trinity is not accessible ‘in itself’. It is thus the fourth ring that constitutes the whole order of rings as fourfold. One conclusion to be drawn from this is that, if we stick with Lacan, the life of the Christian has more than a little in common with that of one who identifies with the sinthome, the holy man, Saint Thomas, etc. The sinthome is to be distinguished from the symptom, inasmuch as in it one achieves, or is seized by, an identification with one’s singularity: ‘what is in me more than I am myself’.

SOME REMARKS ON LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

I have suggested (on this site) that in TLP, so far as language and logic taken together are concerned, we are dealing with something that can be seen in terms of the Lacanian ‘il n’y a pas de rapport…’: what leads Lacan to the assertion that there is no sexual relation can also be taken to support the assertion that there is no relationship between language and logic. There is no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels of language and logic from the same neutral standpoint. They are inextricably intertwined. If the structure of such a relationship, of such an ‘impossible’ relationship, one might say, is to be represented, it is imperative that we look at a form favoured by Lacan, that of the Moebius strip: first, we move from language to its logical form, its logical infrastructure; then, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of language at the heart of logic itself. We derive the logical form of the proposition by means of what is called in TLP an operation, only to find that what constitutes an operation returns us, by virtue of what Lacan determines as the logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), to the context of significant use, to the specific occasion of an actual utterance. The attempt to step outside language, in order to say what it is that constitutes meaning as such, results in nonsense.

In The Parallax View (pp.37-40), Zizek has some comments that bear on the matter. He raises the question of how Lacan’s binary signifier, S1-S2, manifests itself in the context of the symbolic order. ‘What the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1-S2 as yin-yang, or any other two symmetrical “fundamental principles”. The fact that “there is no sexual relationship” means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is “primordially repressed,” and what we get in place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of “returns of the repressed,” the series of “ordinary” signifiers’. Zizek illustrates this by reference to Woody Allen, but so far as TLP is concerned we can see how the general form of the proposition marks the place of S1, inasmuch as it functions as the quilting point of the ‘multitude’ of empirical propositions (T/F).

This is not a binary logic, divided between the polar couple Masculine/Feminine (or logic/language). The split is not between the One and the Other, it is inherent in the One itself: the split comes between the One and its empty place of inscription (a theme made explicit by Wittgenstein in his presentation of the ‘operation’). In what looks like a critical aside aimed at Badiou, Zizek insists that the multiple is not ‘the primordial ontological fact’—an assumption that underpins Badiou’s system as a whole. The ‘transcendental’ genesis of the multiple, he argues, resides in the lack of the binary signifier: ‘the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier’. What we are dealing with here is the minimal difference between a signifier and its place of inscription, between one and zero.

On the one hand, we have S1 as the empty signifier, together with S2 as the signifying chain in its incompleteness. It is in order to fill in this incompleteness that S1 intervenes, as the quilting point. This is the ‘masculine’ side, in which a multitude is organised into a totality, into an All, through the exception, S1, which fills in its void. On the other hand, the binary signifier, the symmetric counterpart of S1, is ‘primordially repressed’. It is in order to supplement the void of this repression that the chain of S2 emerges. Here, as Zizek has it, ‘the original fact is the couple of S1 and the Void at the place of its counterpart, and the chain of S2 is secondary’. It is in these terms that we may understand the ‘feminine’ non-All. It is the logic operative here that accounts for the emergence of the inconsistent multitude characteristic of the non-All: the emergence of the multitude must be seen in relation to the void or lack of the binary signifier.

In his later work, Wittgenstein elaborates his notion of ‘grammar’, and it becomes clear—from the perspective opened by Lacan—that such an idea can be seen in relation to the non-All. Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Remarks, as follows:

If I could describe the point of grammatical conventions by saying they are made necessary by certain properties of the colours (say), then that would make the conventions superfluous, since in that case I would be able to say precisely that which the conventions exclude my saying. Conversely, if the conventions were necessary, i.e. if certain combinations of words had to be excluded as nonsensical, then for that very reason I cannot cite a property of colours that makes the convention necessary, since it would then be conceivable that the colours should not have this property, and I could only express that by violating the conventions. [PR 53]

I do not call a rule of representation a convention if it can be justified in propositions: propositions describing what is represented and showing that the representation is adequate. Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules. That is to say, if anything is to count as nonsense in the grammar which is to be justified, then it cannot at the same time pass for sense in the grammar of the propositions that justify it (etc.). [PR 55]

Rules of grammar, which he also calls grammatical conventions, cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed fact that they enable us to represent reality correctly. If it makes sense to say that an object cannot be reddish-green all over, then it must also make sense to say that it can be reddish-green all over. But then the grammatical convention is superfluous. Further, if one supposes that the colour word conventions are necessary, one could not say what property it is that makes them necessary, for then it would be conceivable that the colours might not have this property, and one could only express this fact by violating the very convention one was trying to justify. In effect, one has to say that there is no such thing as reddish-green, which means that the phrase ‘reddish-green’ is nonsensical, i.e. we have no use for it in making intelligible statements about how the colours are. (Analogously, there is no such thing as a double fault in chess, which is just to say that in chess there is no use for the phrase ‘double-fault’.) The nature of propositions of very many kinds can be elucidated by reference to the grammar they exhibit, but any attempt to impose a limit on grammar as such results in nonsense. This is part of the significance of the notion of a language-game: by means of it, language is exhibited in all its inconsistent and contingent multiplicity, and this in turn means that there is no point from which it can be surveyed in its totality. Language use is without justification, and language is without essence—a statement that is itself nonsensical.

One consequence of this view of grammar may seem paradoxical: it is that language is non-normative. Grammar is non-normative (a remark that flies in the face of most commentary on Wittgenstein). This is, however, a position that has been argued for by Stanley Cavell, and others, such as Steven Affeldt, James Guetti and Rupert Read. To see grammar in terms of the non-All is to see meaning in terms of the future. In this connection, Zizek cites a phrase of Brian Rotman’s: meaning is something which is always ‘borrowed from the future’, relying on its ever-postponed fulfilment to come [The Parallax View, p.51]. As Cavell has put it, ‘Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith, but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ Steven Affeldt glosses this by saying: ‘The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’. To cite Zizek again: ‘subjects cut the impasse of the endless probing into “do we all mean the same thing by ‘bird’?” by simply taking for granted, presupposing, acting as if they do mean the same thing. There is no language without this “leap of faith”’ [p.54]. Guetti and Read have examined in close detail the operation of an example very similar to this—the use of the word ‘waxwing’ [I have discussed this elsewhere on this site].

Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ [PI sec.242]. Affeldt glosses the force of this remark by saying that our intelligibility for one another depends continuously, from moment to moment, and in each act of speech, upon precisely our agreement in judgment. ‘It is not that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility. Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.’ One might reposition Zizek in these terms by saying that, for him, it is the status of such an agreement in judgment that it is not normative, nor could it be. It cuts across ‘the debilitating deadlock of language, its ultimate lack of guarantee, by presenting what we should strive for as already accomplished’ [p.52]. Language is a system that lives on credit it can never pay off.

NOTES:
Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell”, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998): 1-31.

Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent”, Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985).

James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62.

MAURICE BLANCHOT AND THE IMAGE OF LANGUAGE

Blanchot’s account of language and the religious experience of Simone Weil, and one should note that the significance of the word ‘experience’ is not straightforward here, draws together many of the insights of Blanchot’s literary critical writings in order to approach her in terms of what is described in those writings as an experience of the Outside. The Outside cannot be known, nor can it be experienced in any ordinary sense of the word. Nonetheless, the encounter of an ‘I’ with what is truly Other is the defining mark of experience as such. It is not a vision granted to mystics but a fleeting awareness of that which abides behind every experience. The Outside is the space of impossibility, not possibility, of dying, not death. The secret of the Outside is that there is no secret, only an empty depth. It is a mystery that involves the renunciation of mystery, and an acknowledgement of the ultimate insignificance of the lightness which the Outside is. It is in this spirit that he says of Simone Weil that ‘no one has set aside more firmly all forms of power, even spiritual power’ [The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.115. Hereafter cited in the text as IC].

Man is able to do nothing in relation to God; insofar as the approach of man to God involves the exercise of power (or the illusion of its exercise) the truth will forever escape him. There is no way to God that we ourselves can inaugurate, and this includes not only the theology of the Church but also its observances. ‘It is categorically and almost with horror that she rejects all the diversions offered by faith: the idea of salvation, the belief in a personal immortality, the conception of a beyond, and, in general, all that would allow us to bring close to us what has truth for us only if we love it’ [IC 110]. Blanchot notes that, for her, ‘We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love’. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present, and this for her is a thought designed according our measure, its one purpose to afford us consolation. It is more fitting to think that God is not; the purity of our love for him should be such that it is indifferent to us whether he exists or not. It is for this reason that the atheist may be closer to God than the believer. The atheist does not believe in God. This is the first degree of truth, and, so long as he does not substitute for his lack of belief a belief in any other god or gods, if he is true to his atheism, if he is in no way idolatrous, then he will believe in God absolutely, even while being unaware of it and by the pure grace of his ignorance. We reach here a crux. Blanchot writes: ‘Not to ‘believe’ in God. Not to know anything of God. And to love in him only his absence so that this love, being a renouncing of God himself, may be a love that is absolutely pure and ‘the emptiness that is plenitude’. But we must not know even this, or we risk consenting to emptiness only in the hope of being filled with it’ [IC 111].

This movement appears to license no affirmation whatsoever concerning God. It would seem impossible to rest in any thought of God, whether that be the thought of God’s abandonment, or the thought of death itself. It is almost as though all her talk about God is, if not superfluous, then empty. The very statement she would appear to be intent on making seems to refute itself, as when she writes: ‘Obedience to God, that is to say, since God is beyond all that we can imagine or conceive, to nothing’. Or again: ‘Not to speak about God (not even in the inner language of the soul)….’ The aporia here, of speaking about that whereof one cannot speak, is not only in play in these propositions but throughout her writing, where, as Blanchot indicates, she speaks constantly of God and ‘she does so without prudence, without reserve, and with the facility that universal tradition has accorded her’ [IC 111]. She would appear caught in an ineluctable contradiction: where God is concerned, thought of the truth is alone enough to falsify it, just as knowing the rules for salvation already constitutes their violation. The conclusion appears to be that we are either absolutely without power and salvation is impossible for us, or we are obliged to place our hope solely in divine mercy.

And yet she also writes: ‘For me, the proof, the miraculous thing, is the perfect beauty of the accounts of the Passion joined with a few fulgurating words by Isaiah and Saint Paul; this is what constrains me to believe’ [quoted in IC 109]. Again and again, she asserts that we know nothing of the Good and nothing of God except for the name. ‘Without the gift of this name we would have only a false, earthly God, conceivable by us. The name alone permits us to have a Father in the Heavens, about which we know nothing.’ The name alone, the gift of the name, is what permits us to know of God, and at the same time it is required that we do not speak about God, even in the inner language of the soul. Nonetheless, it is this aporetic doubling of the name, expressing most crucially what constrains us, displacing us from knowledge and from comprehension, that is at the same time the dynamic of her conception of God. For Simone Weil, the internal division of the name, its self-differing, would seem to inform not only man but God also. For her, man can do nothing, and God can do no more than man. A position such as this exhibits what Lacan calls the logic of separation. In contrast to the subject’s alienation within the symbolic order, where he is ‘spoken’ by the social structures of language, the big Other, separation takes place when the subject comes to see the Other as itself lacking, and ‘what we thought was the limitation of our knowledge about a thing is in fact an inherent limitation of the thing itself’ [Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 333. It is here that we can discern the ‘core of Lacan’s atheism’, according to Žižek]. Blanchot summarises the matter in the following words: ‘[God] is the absolute renunciation of power: he is abdication, abandon, the consent to not being what he could be, and this in the Creation as well as in the Passion. God is not able to do anything for us; as long, at least, as we are still ourselves encompassed by ourselves. ‘In this world God is a dissolvent. Friendship with him confers no power’ [IC 115].

There is, then, a question that imposes itself on Blanchot concerning what it was that so tore and divided Simone Weil from herself. He cannot, as an atheist, ascribe it to God’s doing, and clearly it was not within her own power. For Blanchot, the answer is absolutely decisive and of a piece with his thought in general: it was the tearing itself. It is here that her certitude and faith reside: ‘There is in us something that must be called divine, something by which we already dwell close to God: it is the movement by which we efface ourselves, it is abandon—the abandonment of what we believe to be, a retreat outside ourselves and outside everything, a seeking of emptiness through the desire that is like the tension of this emptiness and that, when it is the desire for desire (then a surnatural desire), is the desire of emptiness itself, emptiness desiring’ [IC 155].

This loving consent to be nothing, or what Blanchot calls ‘this immobile impetus of desire towards an anticipated death’, is the absolute itself—our common trait with God, our equality with him. ‘God abdicated from his divine omnipotence and emptied himself. By abdicating from our small human power we become, as regards emptiness, equal to God.’ (Blanchot, the atheist, comments: ‘we cannot but sense that there is in this humbling a great spiritual pride.’) A passage from Écrits de Londres (published in 1957) gives some insight into what it was for her to think in this way: ‘There is a poetry in poverty which has no equivalent elsewhere. This poetry emanates from the poverty-stricken flesh, seen in the truth of its poverty. The spectacle of cherry-blossoms in spring would not go straight to the heart as it does if their fragility was not so perceptible. It is, in general, a condition of absolute beauty to be almost absent, at a distance, fragile’. [Cited by Rush Rhees, Discussions of Simone Weil (New York: SUNY, 2000), p. 165.]

‘In creating what is other than himself, God necessarily abandoned it.’ God renounced both himself and us. (Blanchot draws attention to a parallel between Simone’s Weil’s thought and that of the sixteenth century interpreter of the Cabala, Isaac Luria: see IC 116-7.) Through renunciation God created the world, and through renunciation we become him by restoring unto him the being we are not. Simone Weil says: ‘The abandonment in which God leaves us is his own way of caressing us. Time, our single misery, is the very touch of his hand. It is the abdication by which he makes us exist.’ But from the moment I know this, I am again caught in aporia—the renouncing that is my divine part ceases to be pure and I renounce nothing, knowing that in renouncing I gain everything and more than everything: I become God himself.

What Simone Weil’s thought, in its undoing, its unworking, of itself, brings home to Blanchot—whose profound admiration for her is evident throughout his essay—is that the more thought goes toward expressing itself, then just to that extent it is obliged to retain a certain reserve towards itself, to retain some order of place that would be—as he puts it—an uninhabited, uninhabitable non-thought, a thought that would not allow itself to be thought. It is here that we encounter what Blanchot calls the impossibility of thinking, and it is this impossibility that thought becomes for itself in its reserve, that is, in its stepping back beyond or outside itself. We can become aware of the impossible in anything at all, in all that we may say and all that we may do, and yet despite this ubiquity there is something about the way it enters into our experience he wishes to call ‘negligible’. However, this word should not deceive us: negligible though it may be, the impossible can extend itself through the whole of our experience, until little by little that experience is transformed utterly. It is here, in the paradoxical space of the impossible, that Blanchot locates what he calls the thought of exile, and he seems to be absolutely in no doubt that the thought of exile is, finally, what characterises the thought of Simone Weil.

The ideas of the impossible and exile are integral to a particular picture of what language is, and in order to bring out what that picture might be, a comparison suggests itself between Blanchot’s approach to language and his ideas on the image. To that end it will be pertinent to examine a passage from Saint Theodore the Studite’s On the Holy Icons. In his third refutation of the iconoclasts, Theodore makes the following pronouncements: ‘The prototype and the image belong to the category of related things, like the double and the half. For the prototype always implies the image of which it is the prototype, and the double always implies the half in relation to which it is called double. For there would not be a prototype if there were no image; there would not even be any double, if some half were not understood. But since these things exist simultaneously, they are understood and subsist together. Therefore, since no time intervenes between them, the one does not have a different veneration from the other, but both have one and the same’ [St Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 110]. No image without a prototype, and no prototype without an image. This is very similar to an argument put forward both by Blanchot and by Emmanuel Lévinas: when a thing or an event presents itself it also gives an image of itself in the very gesture of its appearing. An event or thing resembles itself; it is doubled in its appearing, being both itself and its image. (This idea may be compared with Wittgenstein’s discussions of aspect change, or seeing-as.) Rather than a proposal to the effect that the real and the image are two distinct and stable orders, or that we can measure the truth of the image against the reality that it depicts, the argument is that the imaginary is already within the thing, or rather, that the distance between the thing and its image is always already within the thing. In the context of the icon, the argument suggests that Christ and His image should be seen as related in just such a manner. There is no secure interval between the icon of Christ and Christ Himself. The distance between the two is, in Blanchot’s idiom, already within Christ; in Him, we might say, ‘the limitless depth behind the image’ is ‘absolutely present although not given’ [St Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 110]. Seen in this way, the experience of the person in prayer before the icon will therefore be an experience of fascination, the fascination of being drawn endlessly towards the divine alterity depicted in the icon, for what fascinates us is what robs us of the power to give sense to what it is that is in the process of so captivating us. I cannot grasp the ‘meaning’ of the icon because its ‘meaning’ is precisely to disable meaning. For the worshipper, thus fascinated before the icon, there is no firm distinction possible between the icon in the world—in the church, in the home—and the world of the divine in the icon. Although the divinity of Christ cannot be circumscribed, it nevertheless dwells in the icon by way of a certain topology or radical reversal through which the distance between prototype and image within Christ is, so to speak, re-inscribed within the icon.

For Blanchot, literature is similarly part of a reversal to which it exposes the author and the reader. To name something is, according to Hegel, to annihilate its unique existence by bringing it under a concept. [For a brief comment on this idea of naming, see the note at the end of this piece.] Literature here idealises death by making it into a dialectical power; the negativity of death is given not in the senseless dissolution of life but in its ability to shape the world, and to master it. The literature of realism may, to a certain extent at least, be taken as an example of this. Blanchot’s example is de Sade. However, literature is linked to language in another, more problematic way. It is concerned not with the idea or concept but with retracing the passage between nothingness and language as such. Literature is an attempt—an attempt that must always fail—to bring about a return to an origin that must forever remain inaccessible. It is a process whereby words cease to serve as representations of something that pre-exists them. The word, bound no longer to representation, becomes in and of itself a sensible presentation, a non-existence made word. Seen like this, literature no longer exists in the realm of possibility and power, but in turning away from that becomes attentive rather to the materiality of words themselves. Language is manifest as itself a thing: words become detached from their contexts of significant use, and separated from meaning they acquire an empty power, a power no one can any longer do anything with, a power without power. (There is, perhaps, a comparison to be made here with Wittgenstein’s considerations of the ‘experience of meaning’.) Freed in this way from the concept, and the negativity of death attendant on it, literature transforms negativity into something unemployed, that renders it idle. Literature will have no work to do—its work is this nothing. The work unworks itself, it is nothing other than its own unworking of itself: it is its own undoing. From this there follows the inability of literature to invest dying with a context of meaningful action, an inability that consigns it to an endlessness that Blanchot calls the ‘impossibility of dying’, an infinite migration of exile, a slipping away both from life and from death that is enacted with exemplary power and precision in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, or The Unnamable. Literature is here a language no one speaks, addressed to no one, which reveals nothing. As a result, when I read it, it appears to be addressed to someone other than me, always awakening another person within me, speaking as if to my own difference from myself. Literature is the appearance of language within which the ‘other’ of language reverberates. Language no longer speaks, it is.

For Blanchot, the form of writing that most crucially engages with the self-differing of language is not the novel (roman) but the narration (récit). If we think that implicit in the notion of the novel is an idea of human time, whereby the novel engages with human emotions and experiences, as in the ‘realist’ works of Balzac, then the récit will differ from the novel in a number of ways. First, the récit relates just one unusual event (Ahab’s quest for the white whale, Malone dying); second, ‘narration is not the account of an event but the event itself, its imminence’, that is, it does not report an event but creates it in the process of narrating it; and third, it is a strange movement, comparable to that of a Moebius strip, or a spiral turning ceaselessly in on itself and at the same time beyond itself. It is a movement ‘towards a point—one that is not only unknown, ignored, and foreign, but such that it seems, even before and outside of this movement, to have no kind of reality; yet one that is so imperious that it is from that point alone that the narrative draws its attraction, in such a way that it cannot even “begin” before having reached it; but it is only the narration (récit) and the unforeseeable movement of the narration (récit) that provide the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring’ [Book to Come, p. 7]. Another passage similarly aims to capture Blanchot’s curiously topological vision: ‘It [the récit] only ‘relates’ itself and this relation, at the same time as it takes place, produces what it relates, and is possible as a relating if it realises/enacts what happens in this relating, for it includes the point or the level where the reality which the récit ‘describes’ can ceaselessly merge with its reality as récit, justify it and be justified by it’ [Book to Come, p. 7]. In this manner a paradoxical temporality emerges with regard to the space opened up by the récit, a space which has to be seen as both the genesis and the result of the work. The transformation effected by the work, the récit, involves a step back from representational language, and yet the space into which the step directs itself does not pre-exist the movement of stepping back; the space is the transformation of language wrought in language by language in its performance of that very step. This Blanchot calls ‘the space of literature’, and in it language no longer finds itself subordinated to the demands of truth or cognition.

The distancing or spacing at work in language, thus understood, is already present for Blanchot in the image. Here he is following Lévinas, reference to whose essay of 1948, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, will clarify what is at issue. The argument rests on a notion of resemblance as what constitutes an image. Resemblance, obviously enough, is the mode in which an image relates to its object. However, as we saw in relation to the icon, the resemblance of an image to its object is not to be thought of as an addition to that object. It partakes of the object itself. Resemblance is possible because objects are other than themselves: ‘A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image’ [Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 6]. The imaginary is what one might call an allegory of the real, which reality bears on its face, a distance which is inherent in the realm of proximate things themselves. A thing, an object, may very well exhibit qualities of an image—colour, form, a certain way of being in the light. Objects can be seen under new aspects: we can look at a thing and be overwhelmed by its exhibition of itself. A thing is and is not itself: non-identical, outside itself. It is what it is and a stranger to itself. An image is therefore not a concept: its relation to what it is an image of is not cognitive or one of knowing. It can take hold of us, grip us and in so doing make us passive, an experience that may overwhelm us whenever we look at paintings or at photographs. For Lévinas, this mode of captivation is also the captivation of poetry and music. ‘It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is there stripped of its prerogative of assumption, of its power, nor the form of the unconscious, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light, present’ [Lévinas, op. cit., p. 4].

The image does not go beyond the thing as its excess. It is on this side of the thing, the hither side of what it is in truth. The question is where this hither side is situated. Lévinas sees it as the place of the almost, the not-quite. He speaks of the ‘meanwhile’, which is the interval between neither and nor (neither the one nor the other)—not quite a past and not quite a future, and so not quite a present, not quite a moment or an instant, but an endless pause or interruption, a setting of time to one side, a spacing of time, so that art disengages time from its passing. ‘The eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilised differs radically from the eternity of a concept; it is the meanwhile. Never finished, still enduring—something inhuman and monstrous’ [Lévinas, op.cit., p. 11]. It is in relation to this notion of the interval, this incessant and interminable entre-temps, the time of the impossible, outside possibility, that Blanchot’s vision of literature and language comes together with his understanding of the image, and nowhere more so than in the course of his reflections on the cadaver, the corpse. In The Space of Literature, he writes:

The cadaver is its own image. It no longer entertains any relation with this world, where it still appears, except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow ever present behind the living form which now, far from separating itself from this form, transforms it entirely into shadow. The corpse is a reflection becoming master of the life it reflects—absorbing it, identifying substantively with it by moving it from its use value and from its truth value to something incredible—something neutral which there is no getting used to. And if the cadaver is so similar, it is because it is, at a certain moment, similarity par excellence: altogether similarity, and also nothing more. It is the likeness, like to an absolute degree, overwhelming and marvellous. But what is it like? Nothing. [The Space of Literature, p.258]

The corpse is a limit case: we experience it par excellence as an image, but an image more real than what it resembles, which is itself. It is like nothing: and it is the nothing it is like. Something is there before us which is not really the living person. Its is neither the same as the living person, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else. And to that extent it is the very embodiment of the uncanny. The image is the disappearance of the object and the appearance of its spectral double, but in the case of the corpse death has done the work of the imagination, and the spectral double—the shadow—has subsumed the object of which it is the shadow. There is an analogy with the damaged tool, which in its useless condition becomes its image. The tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. Art is linked to this possibility of objects appearing, of surrendering, that is, to the pure resemblance behind which there is nothing. And insofar as this is the index of the literary experience we may say that in literature we are brought into a passive relation with what cannot appear as a significant phenomenon in an event that cannot take place in the present. We are brought to a neutral zone outside of being: existence without being. ‘Man is made in his image: this is what the strangeness of the cadaver’s resemblance teaches us. But this formula must first be understood as follows: man is unmade according to his image. The image has nothing to do with signification or meaningfulness as they are implied by the world’s existence, by effort that aims at truth, by law and the light of day.’ Not only is the image of an object not the sense of the object, but in the case of the cadaver the object has finally been withdrawn from understanding into the immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble. [Cf. The Space of Literature, p.260.]

This kind of a-theological reading of the notion of the image with respect to man has already been addressed in relation to St Theodore’s considerations of the icon. Simone Weil is someone who, at least as Blanchot’s writings present her, lived out the experience of the loss of subjectivity that in writing and art is thought of as a dying into the outside. Writing—as manifest in the récit—is an act of dying, but not as suicide is an act, since suicide is still a subjective act of self-expression, an intention and a meaning, an assertion of the right to death, or of a will-to-power over death. If we see dying in terms of the space opened up by writing, so that writing—or language transformed in and by writing—becomes the paradigm of our understanding, dying becomes an experience, if we can call it an experience, of the meanwhile. Dying is intransitive and indeterminate, a translation of what is intelligible into what is alien and unspeakable, into what is outside the intelligible, where the process of it is always incomplete, since it is nothing other than absence and impossibility as such. Lévinas writes: ‘The time of dying itself cannot give itself the other shore. In dying, the horizon of the future is given, but the future as a promise of a new present is refused; one is in the interval, forever in the interval’ [Lévinas, op. cit., p. 11].

To see not only the writing, but also the life, of Simone Weil in these terms is to enter into one of Blanchot’s most difficult areas, his account bearing on two aspects of the encounter with her experience, and which he takes to be essential to it, namely, affliction and attention. ‘The thought of affliction is precisely the thought of that which cannot let itself be thought’ [The Infinite Conversation, p.120]. Like the dying revealed by writing, it is an ‘enigma’. Furthermore, affliction has the same nature as physical suffering, from which it cannot be separated: ‘Physical suffering, when it is such that one can neither suffer it nor cease suffering it, thereby stopping time, makes time a present without future and yet impossible as present (one cannot reach the following instant, it being separated from the present instant by an impassable infinite, the infinite of suffering; but the present of suffering is impossible, it being the abyss of the present). Affliction makes us lose time and makes us lose the world’ [IC 120].

The parallel between the temporality of the space of literature and the way time is endured in suffering is here evident. Not only this, but those who are forced to endure the suffering of affliction undergo an alteration in their ontological status such that, for others, they acquire a mode of being aspects of which are similar to those exhibited by the corpse. Blanchot writes: ‘The individual who is afflicted falls beneath every class. The afflicted are neither pathetic nor pitiable; they are ridiculous, inspiring distaste and scorn. They are for others the horror they are for themselves. Affliction is anonymous, impersonal, indifferent. It is life become alien and death become inaccessible. It is the horror of existence where existence is without end’ [IC 120]. The horror of existence where existence is without end, where death becomes inaccessible, the impossibility—the interminability—of dying, is ontologically a condition of complete powerlessness, of consciousness deprived of subjectivity. It is a condition of existence without being, such that existence is refractory to any of the categories or concepts of being. Blanchot characterises it, using the idiom that Lévinas employs for it in Existence and Existents, as the il y a, the there is. He also calls it the outside, the neutral: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never cease being there. It is existence at the limit of the human. In L’experiénce intérieure (1943), Georges Bataille speaks of ecstasy as a condition achieved by the renunciation of knowledge, action, work—of the whole field of project whereby the subject constructs its experiences out of the future. Inner experience does not occur in introspection but rather in the exposure or expenditure of the subject in communication, engendering that which is outside subjectivity and therefore outside the world that the subject creates for itself.

Simone Weil understood the extent to which affliction, far more than anguish, can hold within itself the limit from which we should be able to assume a perspective on the human condition—and yet she understood also that affliction is precisely that which ruins all perspective. As Blanchot puts it: 'In the space of affliction we have very close to us, and almost at our disposition, all that religion, in inverting it, projected up into the heavens. We are not above but beneath time: this is eternity. We are not above but beneath the person: this is the impersonal, which is one of the traits of the sacred. We are outside the world: this is not the beyond, nor the purity of nothingness, or the plenitude of being, but being as nothingness' [IC 120]. ‘For me who deliberately, and almost without hope, chose to take the point of view of those who are at the bottom . . . ’ These words of Simone Weil about herself, cited by Blanchot, are for him what we should be obliged to say about thought—if we are to talk about thought that is without fraudulence. Thought cannot but be fraudulent unless it is thought from out of the baseness and deprivation of affliction. And to think through affliction is to arrive at a point where one cannot arrive, where force is no longer the measure of what must be thought and said: thought becomes for itself the impossibility of thinking, an impossibility that is its ultimate centre. Through affliction we encounter time without event, a ‘pure’ time, without project and without possibility. We suffer an empty perpetuity that must be borne without end, and at every instant. We are time, time interminably endured. Attention, which is other than affliction, and is not to be confused with it, has nonetheless a very similar relation to time. For Blanchot, attention is an ecstasy of waiting, as though it were within an interruption that cannot be overcome. He says: ‘Attention is waiting: not the effort, the tension, or the mobilisation of knowledge around something with which one might concern oneself. Attention waits. It waits without precipitation, leaving empty what is empty and keeping our haste, our impatient desire, and, even more, our horror of emptiness from prematurely filling it in. Attention is the emptiness of thought oriented by a gentle force and maintained in an accord with the empty intimacy of time’ [IC 121].

Attention is impersonal. It detaches me from myself, and frees me for the attention that for a moment I become. Attention, according to our usual understanding of the word, organises what one sees and knows around the object of attention, enriching attention itself through the object one attends to and by so doing enriching the object also. The other attention, however, of which Blanchot speaks in respect of Simone Weil, is as though idle and unoccupied. ‘It is always empty and is the light of emptiness’ (IC 121). Attention of this other kind is thus paradoxical: attention is what escapes attention, an opening upon the unexpected, a waiting that is the unawaited of all waiting. Despite what appears to link attention to affliction, Blanchot is clear that one cannot conclude from whatever relation one seeks to ascribe to them that attention is in effect affliction redeemed and transfigured through its own agency, through its acting upon itself, or that the empty time of affliction can be transformed by that same agency into the empty time of attention. Simone Weil knows, and it is something she knows from her own experience, that extreme affliction is without relation to anything that could make it cease being what it is. Not even God himself could bring this about, for affliction removes God, making him ‘absent, more absent than someone who is dead, more absent than light in a dark cell.’ The relation between attention and affliction is a broken relation that only the plenitude of love can re-establish. It is love alone—become the immobility and perfection of attention—that by way of the gaze of the other, of the loving and attentive gaze of an other person, is able to open a way to the closing off of affliction. It is only under the gaze of love and attention that the afflicted are willing to allow themselves to be looked at, and are themselves able to acknowledge the other as other. ‘Knowing how to let a certain gaze take them in. This gaze is first of all an attentive gaze by which the soul empties itself of all its own content so as to receive in itself the being that it is looking at, such as it is, in all its truth’. Concerning God, she wrote: God is always absent from our love as he is absent from the world, but he is secretly present in pure love. Blanchot comments: ‘Affliction is inattention’s extreme. Attention is an attention that makes itself bearable to the affliction that cannot bear being attended to’ [IC122].

There is no dialectic of overcoming and synthesis in the relation between attention and affliction. The transfiguration of affliction—if there is to be such a thing—depends upon the intervention of someone other than the afflicted person. The instability of Simone Weil’s life and experience, an instability manifest, or so Blanchot affirms, in her argumentative and protracted questioning of those she knew, even of the priest who attended her on her death-bed, was an expression of the impossibility of remaining in place that comes with affliction. Affliction is the loss of a dwelling place, the unceasing disquiet—a cold and indifferent disquiet—with regard to what is never there. And yet, despite the agitated and uneasy details of her life, Blanchot insists that ‘Simone Weil gave in her thought the example of certitude and, in her works, the model of an even expression, almost calm and as though perfectly at rest in its movement’ [IC 122]. Attention is fully present in the depths of her language: through attention, language has with thought the relation thought would like to have with the lacuna in it—the affliction—that thought is and that it can never render present to itself. Blanchot concludes: ‘Language is the place of attention’. She herself remarked: ‘Humility is the primary characteristic of attention’. According to the standard notion—the pagan notion—of the link between man and God, man approaches God through spiritual purification, through casting off the ‘low’ material and sensual aspects—‘the flesh’—of his being and so elevating himself towards God. For Simone Weil, the Christian notion of that link is an inversion of the standard conception. When I, a human being, experience myself cut off from God, at that very moment of the most abject affliction, I am absolutely attentive to God, for I am myself in the position of the abandoned Christ, the Christ who cried out on the Cross: ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The love to which Simone Weil attends is a love beyond mercy. Love is love for the other insofar as he is lacking, in his limitation, poverty, impotence, ordinariness. The celebration of Divine (or human) perfection is pagan; perfection, in Simone Weil’s understanding of it, is a loving attention to the other’s imperfection. It is here, for her, that one meets Christ.

Note: The conception of naming as the essence of language is a version of the so-called ‘Augustinian picture’ addressed by Wittgenstein in the opening parts of Philosophical Investigations. Hegel and his followers like Kojève—and of course Blanchot—would also seem committed to a version of the compositional theory of sentence meaning, i.e. that the meanings of sentences are made up from the meanings of their constituent words organised into wholes by an application of appropriate syntactic rules. These presuppositions, however, do not seem to be indispensable features of Blanchot’s view of literature, and one might here refer to the work of James Guetti, whose approach to literature by way of grammar—in Wittgenstein’s sense—may well provide support, albeit from a rather different direction, for what Blanchot has to say.

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION III

I have been discussing Wittgenstein’s way of looking at pictures, and especially at the various ways in which pictures are used in the context of religious language. I have also raised the question as to whether religious language can be described as ‘non-cognitive’. The traditional realist—metaphysical—account of non-cognitivism and religious language is to say that ordinary descriptive terms like ‘my brother’ and ‘America’ and ‘the Parthenon’ all refer to something, but words used in the religious contexts Wittgenstein discusses do not refer to anything. That is, the realist would say that when Wittgenstein is speaking of the Eye of God or the Last Judgement he isn’t actually referring to anything at all.

In the third of his lectures on religion, Wittgenstein interrupts his discussion of explicitly religious language and experience to consider what it is for a thought to be about ‘my brother in America’. At the same time, he speaks about referring per se, about words that can be thought of as ‘referring’ and ‘designating’. Now, although the discussion of reference may look like a digression, it is, I think, central to his account of religious language. During the discussion, he does not, however, take any examples from religion; the only example he uses is thinking about ‘my brother in America’. The issue which the discussion is intended to clarify—and to dissolve—is the notion that, as Hilary Putnam has it, ‘in ordinary language we have pictures (and, of course, words) and uses of pictures and words and something beyond the pictures and words, while in religious language we have only pictures and words and uses of pictures and words’. [Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 159.]

Wittgenstein is struck by the fact that he can think of his brother in America without there being any causal interaction between him and his brother taking place now. He can’t see or speak to his brother directly, for example. So how can he think about him if he isn’t there, before him? In fact, we don’t usually think about reference as a causal relation at all (unless we are in the grip of some kind of causal theory of meaning). Our natural temptation, when philosophising about these matters, is to think that the intentionality of our words is something given in the experience of thought itself. (One can see here the intrusion of a picture derived from the so-called Augustinian picture, whereby the object designated by a word is the meaning of that word—words are names, designating objects.) Wittgenstein puts the issue this way: ‘If you are asked: "How do you know that it is a thought of such and such?" the thought that immediately comes to mind is one of a shadow, a picture. You don’t think of a causal relation. The kind of relation you think of is best expressed by "picture", "shadow," etc’ (LC, 66). Wittgenstein then goes on to talk, in ways familiar from the Philosophical Investigations, about how we simultaneously tend to think of thoughts as mental pictures and to ascribe to them powers that no actual picture could possibly have:'The word ‘picture’ is even quite all right—in many cases it is even in the most ordinary sense, a picture. You might translate my very words into a picture.But the point is this, suppose you drew this, how do I know it is my brother in America? Who says it is him—unless it is here ordinary similarity? What is the connection between these words, or anything substitutable for them, with my brother in America? The first idea [you have] is that you are looking at your own thought, and are absolutely sure that it is a thought that so and so. You are looking at some mental phenomenon, and you say to yourself ‘obviously this is a thought of my brother being in America’. It seems to be a super-picture. It seems, with thought, that there is no doubt whatever. With a picture, it still depends on the method of projection, whereas here it seems that you get rid of the projecting relation, and are absolutely certain that this is a thought of that. (LC, 67)

In Philosophical Investigations §680 Wittgenstein considers the case of cursing someone and meaning him. ‘When you tell me that you cursed and meant N. as you did so it is all one to me whether you looked at a picture of him, or imagined him, or uttered his name, or what. The conclusions from this fact have nothing to do with these things’ (PI §680). If meaning were some kind of process like picturing it would make sense to ask how one meant that person when one cursed him. And yet the question makes no sense: it makes no sense to ask how one meant the man whom one cursed, for meaning is not an activity or act, which one might engage in or perform in different ways, and at which one might be more or less successful. One might indeed say that cursing was effective only when one had a clear image of the man or spoke his name out loud. But still we would not say, ‘The point is how the man who is cursing means his victim’. In uttering a sentence like ‘I am thinking of my brother in America’ and meaning what one said, one means, usually at least, what the sentence one uttered means. One is speaking seriously, not joking or quoting. And yet that does not mean that one is engaging in multiple acts of meaning, nor yet in a continuous activity of meaning. Mental images or pictures are irrelevant to word meaning, and equally irrelevant to whether a speaker understands the words he uses or hears.

To give another example, deriving from Frege, if not Kant: the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ consists of exactly the same words as the mere list, ‘the’, ‘cat’, ‘is’, ‘on’, ‘the’, ‘mat’. Yet the sentence has a truth value, in an appropriate situation, while the list has no truth value. What constitutes the difference between the sentence and the list? As Wittgenstein drew to our attention time and time again, what makes it the case that a sentence can have reference and truth value, while a mere list of words has neither reference nor truth value, is that we use sentences in very different ways from how we use mere lists. Referring enters into our lives in any one of a variety of ways. Thus I may repeat the word ‘cat’ over and over, but in doing so I will not be referring to cats, whereas if I use the word in certain ways, and in certain contexts, this will be referring to cats.

In his account of referring in the third lecture, Wittgenstein speaks of the referring use of language as a ‘technique of usage’. He suggests that the illusion of intrinsic intentionality, that is, the illusion that reference is some kind of mysterious inner event or thing that exists while we think and about which nothing can be said, is due to the fact that we pay attention only to our subjective experience and not to the technique of using the word. Suppose that we say that the thought we have is some kind of process in the mind, and the thought is ‘my brother is in America’, how are we to say what the connection is between this thought and the brother in America?
Is thinking of something like painting or shooting at something?
It seems like a projection connection, which seems to make it indubitable, although there is not a projection relation at all.
If I said ‘My brother is in America’—I could imagine there being rays projecting from my words to my brother in America. But what if my brother isn’t in America?—then the rays don’t hit anything. (LC, 67)

Wittgenstein reduces the notion of there being rays, that is, some kind of mysterious connection, between the thought and what is thought about, to absurdity here. The strong hold of the idea of there being some sort of mysterious connection between our words and what they refer to is due to the idea that one can say: ‘Well, I know what I mean’. It is as though I could look at something happening while I am saying what I have it in mind to say, something which is entirely independent of what comes before or after what is actually said. ‘It looked as though you could talk of understanding a word, without any reference to the technique of usage [or, perhaps better, use]. It looked as though Smythies said he could understand the sentence, and that we then had nothing to say’ (LC, 68). One has to see that Wittgenstein is speaking here out of a highly complex and dynamic conception of grammar, of the kinds of lives we lead with language. It is a conception according to which it makes no sense for us to try to ‘explain’ language in terms of rules, of grammar. Speaking in a lecture given in Cambridge in the Lent Term of 1931, he refers to the logical rule of inference, dealing with how one proposition follows from another, and says of it: 'It is a rule of grammar dealing with symbols alone, it is a rule of a game. Its importance lies in its application; we use it in our language. When we talk about propositions following from one another we are talking of a game. Propositions do not follow from one another as such; they simply are what they are. We can only prepare language for its usage [use]; we can only describe it as long as we do not regard it as language. The rules prepare for the game which may afterwards be used as language. Only when the rules are fixed can I use the game as a language'. [Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 57.]

As two recent commentators, James Guetti and Rupert Read, have pointed out, ‘What is remarkable here is the insistence that "language" is not even language until it is used, that whatever our "preparations" are—whatever purely grammatical considerations may be anterior to the employment of [the] same—we do not so much as regard these as language until they are used. And, most important, we cannot take language as language—that is, use it—and continue to describe it: which . . . means that while we are explaining, justifying, drawing-out, or otherwise considering grammatical relations, these are just not active linguistic rules’.[James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996), 53-54.] The same may be said of the grammar of referring. It makes no sense to look for necessary and sufficient conditions that will determine in advance whether or not a particular use of words is or is not a ‘referring’ use. There are many varying ways of using words to refer, and it makes no sense to try to find some position from which they can all be surveyed or laid down in advance.

It is in Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein decisively undermines the presupposition that one can only use a word if one possesses a necessary and sufficient condition for its application. He takes the word ‘game’ as an example. In the case of this word, we don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions laid down for its use. To quote Putnam, ‘[w]e have some paradigms—paradigms of different kinds—and we extend the word ‘game’ to new contexts because they strike us as having similarities to cases where we have used the word before’. Putnam, op. cit., p.167.] To do this is, Wittgenstein says, a ‘natural reaction’. In a famous simile, he speaks of the kind of resemblance there is between different games as being like the resemblance there is between the different members of a family. He also uses the image of a rope. The rope is made up of fibres, but there is no one fibre running the entire length of the rope. There are only overlapping fibres. Analogously, one can say there are similarities between games, but there is no one feature common to all games. This conception of games is a good example of how a new, and striking, picture can open our eyes to new aspects of language, of language that already lies open to view. What this amounts to is summarised by Cavell: ‘it makes no sense at all to give a general explanation for the generality of language, because it makes no sense at all to suppose words in general might not recur, that we might possess a name for a thing (say "chair" or "feeding") and yet be willing to call nothing (else) "the same thing"’. [The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 188.]

In other words, Wittgenstein was not just making an empirical point about games, that in addition to words like red, which apply to all things which are similar in a particular respect, there are words like game which are not all similar in some one respect. As his further development of the analogy between games and language—in the conception of the ‘language-game’—makes clear, his primary interest was not in words like game, but in words like language and proposition and reference. The language-game of referring does not have an ‘essence’; there isn’t some one thing that can be called referring. Like the fibres of a rope, there are overlapping similarities between one sort of referring and another, and that is all. Because of this, Wittgenstein is not puzzled, as many philosophers have been, about how we can refer to abstract entities. Thus, there might seem to be a puzzle about how we can refer to a number, for example. Do we even know that there is such an object at all? For Wittgenstein, the use of number words is simply a use that is different from the use of words like ‘cow’ or ‘cat’. As we see from the opening section (§1) of Philosophical Investigations, we should stop thinking about ‘five’ as an ‘object’ or ‘abstract entity’, and attend to how the number word ‘five’ is used.

The pertinence of all this to a consideration of religious language can now, perhaps, be seen. Just as questions as to whether religious language is commensurable or compatible with other kinds of language, or whether it is cognitive or non-cognitive, have no purchase on the issues at stake, so with the question as to whether religious language refers or not. The way religious language works is both like and unlike ordinary cases of reference. There is no essence of reference. To refer to one’s brother in America is one kind of reference; to speak of God, ‘in Whom we live and move and have our being’, is not like this at all. On this showing, and assuming that there is something in it, it would seem true to say that, at the very least, Wittgenstein is engaged in showing us what religious language is not—in showing us how not to approach it.

I would like to develop this last point a little further. I shall do by drawing on the work of one of Wittgenstein’s most able commentators and translators, Peter Winch. In an essay entitled ‘Meaning and Religious Language’, Winch considers the position, advocated by certain philosophers of religion, that praying to God makes sense only if it is presupposed that God exists. There is the ordinary practice of talking to people and making requests of them, and the rationality of this practice is clearly not in question. Our ordinary practice can, of course, be criticised on particular occasions, as when the person addressed does not exist, or is no position to hear the request, or can do nothing about fulfilling it. For a philosopher who takes the view that one must presuppose the existence of God before the notion of prayer can be made intelligible, praying is to be treated as a special case of our general practice of making requests, and so on, and therefore to understand it is to understand it in a way that is similar to the way we understand those ordinary practices. The method of establishing God’s existence or non-existence may be a peculiar one, but that can taken as a separate issue.

Winch wishes to contest this position. He wants to say that there is a difference in grammar between ‘asking something of God’ and ‘asking something of another human being’. Here, in this account of ‘requesting’ and asking’, Winch is following the method of Wittgenstein, who drew attention to distinctions of a similar kind in relation to ‘referring’. Winch says: 'I mean that there is a difference not merely in the method it is appropriate to use in the two cases or in the nature of the requests it is appropriate to make, though both these things are true. I mean that what constitutes asking (and also answering) is different; or that the point of prayer (presupposed in any discussion of the rationality of particular cases of prayer) can only be elucidated by considering it in its religious context; that it cannot be elucidated by starting simply with the function ‘making requests to ‘x’, substituting ‘God’ for ‘x’, and then asking what difference is made by the fact that God has different characteristics from other xs. ‘Making requests of x’, that is, is not a function which retains the same sense whether ‘God’ or some name or description of a human being is substituted for ‘x’'. [Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 119.

Winch’s point is that it is certainly wrong to say that the existence of the addressee is presupposed in the one case and not in the other. But this does not mean that the existence of the addressee is presupposed in both cases. One should rather say that the question of ‘existence’ does not arise in the one case in the way it can arise in the other, anymore than the question of the existence of metres can arise in the case of someone wondering how tall a certain person is. The question simply makes no sense here. What the questioning of God’s existence amounts to is something quite different from what is involved in questioning the existence of a man. My ceasing to ask anything of someone I believe to exist no longer is a consequence of my ceasing to believe in that person’s existence. Ceasing to see any point in continuing to pray to God is an aspect of ceasing to believe in God. As Winch puts it, ‘there are internal connections between ceasing to believe in God’s existence and ceasing to see any point in prayer’ of a sort which do not hold between ceasing to believe in a human being’s existence and ceasing to make requests of him. (An internal relation [or connection] between two things can be defined as a relation that could not fail to hold, since it is given with or is (partly) constitutive of the terms (objects or relata) which make it up, as in the case of white’s being lighter than black. One might also put it this way: an internal property is a property a thing could not fail to have, because it is essential to its being the thing it is.) [Hans Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 189. One might consider Socrates to be wise or not. But one could not even conceive of him without thinking of him as a human being.] This is not to say that seeing a point in praying is identical with belief in God. But, as Winch points out, ceasing to see any point in prayer is one form which ceasing to believe in God may take. It is one aspect of that loss of belief. Thus certain attitudes towards prayer need not be seen as an external consequence, or result, or effect, of the belief or lack of belief in God.

As did Wittgenstein, Winch considers Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of Adam. When Michelangelo represented the creation did he presuppose that something like this event had actually taken place? When we respond to the painting in a way which respects the religious ideas which it expresses, what kinds of consideration are relevant for us? 'Well, one might speak here of how the power of God the Father and Adam’s dependence are, on both sides, inseparably linked with love. God’s power is not simply combined with his love; it is his love. And likewise with Adam’s dependence on and love for his Creator: they are one.' [Winch, op. cit., p. 121.]
For Winch, the point of the representation has to be seen in the way in which worship and love are combined—internally connected, one might say—in the life of a believer. It is here that the picture is related to reality—not by reference to an external event, depicted in the painting. Winch insists that the kind of connection the painting has with reality is wholly different from what we might see in, say, a diagram of an accident presented with an insurance claim. The crucial difference shows in the kind of question it is right to ask in the one case as contrasted with the other.

The point is not that there cannot or should not be any relation or confrontation between a person’s religious convictions and the understanding of the world he has in other circumstances. But this does not mean that the confrontation with reality that a religious man undertakes is to be expressed in terms of ‘evidence for God’s existence or non-existence’. Reality makes itself felt in how we use language—both in our ordinary dealings with the world and in the case of religious language—in terms of the factual circumstances in which language is applied. This is to repeat the point made earlier, that language is not even language until it is used in a context, that whatever our preparations are—whatever purely grammatical considerations may be anterior to the employment of language—none of these rules or grammatical considerations are part of language until they are used in language. This is to say that the reality which the word ‘God’ expresses is to be found in the conditions of its application. Winch quotes Simone Weil: ‘The Gospel contains a conception of human life, not a theology’. And: ‘Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things’. She continues: ‘Only spiritual things are of value, but only physical things have a verifiable existence. Therefore, the value of the former can only be verified as an illumination projected on to the latter’. [Quoted in Winch, op. cit., p. 122. For a rather different view of these matters, see Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 73-4.]

To return to a point made earlier: the force of this latter comment appears only if we see how the grammar of our language—the role of a concept, say, in our use of language—is inseparable from the actual use of that language. Thus the grammar of the function ‘x loves his children’ is altered when ‘my brother’ or ‘God’ respectively is substituted for ‘x’. What would count as an explanation of the sense of the one—‘my brother loves his children’—is of a different kind from what would count as an explanation of the sense of the other—‘God loves his children.’ As Winch indicates, what would be relevant to the genesis of a doubt about the one is very different from what would support a doubt about the other. This is the case even though the two uses of the word ‘love’ are connected: one would hardly be able to speak about God’s love for his children if one could not speak about the love of human fathers for their children. Conversely, our notion of what human love is will alter if the notion of God as a loving father comes to occupy a central place in our thought. Thus, in the painting by Michelangelo of Adam’s creation, it is perfectly intelligible for us to say that what we see in the painting is that God’s power and love are combined into a single whole. God’s power here is his love. And similarly for Adam—his dependence on his Creator is his love for him. To see this is to see the painting’s ‘relation to reality’, and perhaps in so doing we can experience, or undergo, an alteration in our vision such that we can get free of the need, or compulsion, or urge, to see the painting as being a depiction of some other ‘realm of reality’ distinct from that to which empirical structures belong. And analogously to that change in vision, we can perhaps come to see that religious uses of language are not descriptions of an ‘order of reality’ distinct from the earthly life with which we are familiar.

If we want to understand the way a system of ideas is related to reality, we had best proceed by examining the actual application in life—in contexts of significant use—of these ideas, rather than, as it were, fastening our attention on the peculiar nature of the ‘entities referred to’ by them. Such an approach may appear more persuasive if we can come to recognise how it coheres with certain of Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning what it might be to see language as emerging from instinctive behaviour. In Zettel §545, he writes: ‘Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive kinds of behaviour towards other human beings . . . Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)’ [ Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscome and G.H. Von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), §545.

This suggests that our primitive behaviour is, from the start, a language-game. We are, so to speak, born into language, into the language-game. It is not incumbent on us to see the language-game as being the result of reflection, or ratiocination. A similar attitude is evident in On Certainty: 'You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there – like our life'. (OC §559)

In this context, it would make no sense to ask, ‘From what did it emerge?’ and even less sense to ask, ‘From what did language emerge?’ The question of the origin of language is not, at least in this context, intelligible. Language is not the outcome of reasoning, or of the transcendental capacity of reason. But nor does Wittgenstein say that it was the outcome of instinct, or that it emerged from instinct. Nor does he speak of any development from something prior to a language-game (Sprachspiel). The primitive reactions—that is, the natural, instinctive behaviour towards other human beings—have their importance within the language-game, the Sprachspiel. They show up, as it were, in the character they have by being certain moves within it. He says: ‘The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction, only from this can more complicated forms develop./Language—I want to say—is a refinement. "In the beginning was the deed."’ [Philosophical Occasions, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), p. 395. ‘In the beginning was the deed’ is from Goethe’s Faust I, opening scene in the Studierzimmer.]

The language-game is in its beginning already the language-game, the deed. There is nothing prior to it. Language can be seen as a refinement on primitive reactions, which are already language-games. Remarks of this kind, it should be emphasised, are not factual claims or statements about language, nor do they try to lay out a theory about the origin of language itself—they are reminders only, ways of looking—no more than that.

This conception, or vision, of language as being from the beginning a ‘deed’, is, I think, crucial. In any event, it is against the background of these remarks on the matter, remarks that are (I should perhaps emphasise again) purely transitional and therapeutic, that I would like to return to Wittgenstein’s account of what it is to follow a rule, in order to bring out further—and, I hope, pertinent—aspects of it. As a first point, it is important to note that, though one may list the rules of a game, one cannot explain what playing a game is by any such listing. Playing a game is ‘a part of our natural history’ (PI §25), and until one is an initiate of this human form of activity, even the preliminary procedure—the human gesture, the human deed—of ‘citing a rule’ can mean nothing. Just as there is no one set of characteristics which everything that we call ‘games’ shares, so there is no one characteristic shared by all the activities we call ‘being determined by rules’. [I am drawing here on Stanley Cavell’s discussion of rules and rule-following in ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’ in his book, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Language has no essence (PI §66). Following a rule is a practice (PI §202), as is playing a game. And what are the rules for following a rule? There are none, and yet, as Cavell puts it, it can be done correctly or incorrectly—which just means that it can be done or not done. And whether it is done or whether it is not done cannot therefore (logically) be a matter of rules. It is a matter of what Wittgenstein has called ‘forms of life’. This is what Wittgenstein is appealing to when he writes: ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is imply what I do’. (PI §217). ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life.’ (PI p. 226)

It thus makes no sense to say either that there is, or that there is not, a ground of mutual intelligibility between human beings. In a passage from a later work, taking up precisely this question of what the ground or foundation of human reason might be, Cavell offers the following remarks: ‘Am I saying that human reason has, or that it has not, a foundation? . . . Am I saying that explanations come to end somewhere, each in its time and place, to be discovered philosophically, let us say, time after time, place by place? . . . I can put my question this way: Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is itself implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ [Stanley Cavell, "The Division of Talent", Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985), 530-531.]

Cavell’s idea is, it would seem, that the ground from which one leaps or steps (in speaking, or, more narrowly, in the practice, the action, of following a rule) is itself implied or defined, retrospectively, as it were, by that very leap. It is not that in order to speak intelligibly we must locate ourselves upon some given ground of the possibilities of sense, on some already given ground made up of logical or grammatical rules. The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which we are speaking; it is that in speaking we are, in that very act, articulating the position that we are assuming and from which we speak. This is very close to what Lacan has called the act: the act is a move that defines its own conditions; it retroactively produces the grounds that justify it. As John Forrester puts it: ‘the true reason for deciding only becomes apparent once the decision has been taken’ (The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 198, cited by Slavoj Žižek, For they know what they do (London: Verso, 1994), p. 191). There is no mediating structure—of forms, system, structure, rules—that justifies my position in speaking, nor need I seek, philosophically, that is, for any such mediating structure to act as the ground of my intelligibility. Thus, for each one of us, it must be that, if I am to speak intelligibly, I must articulate my point or position; I must draw a connection between what I say and what is before me—whether this be what I have to say about God, or about any other phenomenon, person, or experience, that concerns me, or even about previous remarks of my own or of someone else. In speaking, I project behind me and before me the ground of my intelligibility. There are no grounds other than this for our mutual intelligibility and acknowledgement, one of another.

To conclude, I would like to consider some remarks of Wittgenstein’s on ritual. Wittgenstein had a special interest in J.G. Frazer’s massive and magisterial The Golden Bough, completed in 1915. He wrote notes on it, and these were edited and first published in 1967 by Rush Rhees. The remarks in Part II probably come from sometime after 1948, towards the end of Wittgenstein’s life, and in them he considers, amongst other things, the Beltane or May-Day fire-festivals celebrated by Scottish children in the eighteenth century. Frazer tells us that the traces of human sacrifice were particularly clear and unequivocal in them. These traces are to be seen from the way the festival would develop towards its close, when the master of the feast would produce a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped around the edge. It was divided and distributed to those present. There was one special piece of cake, and whoever received it was called the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach (‘carline’ means ‘witch’ in Old Norse and in Middle English). Part of the company would try to put this person into the fire, but others interposed to save him. In some villages, he was laid flat, and the company made as if to quarter him. Wittgenstein wonders whether what we find sinister in the festival is something to do with the festival itself, or whether we shall find it sinister only if the conjecture that it originated in human sacrifice has been well established: ‘I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice itself which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. When I speak of the inner nature of the practice, I mean all the circumstances under which it is carried out and which are not included in a report of such a festival, since they consist not so much in specific actions which characterise the festival as in what one might call the spirit of the festival; such things as would be included in one’s description, for example, of the kind of people who take part in it, their behaviour at other times, that is, their character; the kinds of games they otherwise play. And one would then see that the sinister quality lies in the character of these people themselves’ [Philosophical Occasions, p.145]

A few pages later, he writes: ‘The fact that lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal with a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. ‘When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression that I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious’ [op.cit., p.147]. He sums up his response here in the following way: ‘. . . what I see in these stories is . . . acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,—through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others’ [op.cit., p.151].

Wittgenstein is responding to the murky world of the sinister and obscene rituals of eighteenth century Scotland, a country which had been ravaged by civil war and foreign invasion, resulting in forced expulsions of the rural population, land clearances and land grabbing. The rituals described by Frazer in this section of his book are to be seen as the shadowy doubles of the legal power relations recently imposed upon the conquered nation by the victorious power, Hanoverian England. The rituals are, in effect, so many forms of enjoyment (jouissance). While the rituals apparently transgressed and subverted the power of the English legal disposition, they were actually serving as the fantasmatic background to that power, as its ultimate support. There is thus something paradoxical and uncanny about the activities Frazer describes, which Wittgenstein picks up in the word ‘sinister’, a word, like ‘carline’, that suggests that what he saw attaching to the practices was evil.

Wittgenstein’s responsivenss to what is at stake here is evident from an extraordinary conversation Tania Pascal recalls having with him. She remembers how he picked up a volume of Grimm’s tales and read out ‘with awe in his voice’

Ach, wie gut ist, daß niemand weiß,
daß ich Rumpelstilzchen heiß!

'"Profound, profound"’, he said.’ She adds that, though she liked the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, and understood that the dwarf’s strength lay in his name being unknown to humans, she could not share Wittgenstein’s vision. ‘To watch him in a state of hushed, silent awe, as though looking far beyond what oneself could see, was an experience next only to hearing him talk.’ [Cited by Cora Diamond, The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 171.] The question is like that posed by Lohengrin: why can the dwarf exert his power only so long as his name is unknown? Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed—split in two—the moment his identity is publicly revealed. The reason is that the dwarf functions as a spectral apparition that cannot sustain its disclosure in the public domain of speech. No sooner is he named than he is divided in language, split between his symbolic identity and what is in him more than himself. Rumpelstiltskin’s evil is unapproachable and terrible, as Cora Diamond has made clear, and as such irreducible to psychological or moral judgement. Wilhelm Grimm himself spoke of the evil in his tales as something terrible, black and wholly alien that one cannot even approach [OP.CIT., P.166]. When, in the notes on Frazer, Wittgenstein refers to the sinister and dark it is something of this order that he has in mind. Stanley Cavell has said of what Wittgenstein calls forms of life that ‘Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this’.

It may need to be emphasised in closing that there are no grounds for imputing relativism (or scepticism) to Wittgenstein. As Cavell has made clear again and again, and Putnam in the article on which I have drawn earlier in this paper, relativism shares with scepticism the demand for some overarching metaphysical justification for our lives with language. In Putnam’s words, ‘[s]omething in us both craves more than we can possibly have and flees from even the certainty that we do have’ [Putnam, op.cit., p.178]. We find ourselves in the grip of a fantasy which we cannot traverse. To invoke the notion of fantasy is, of course, to invoke psychoanalysis, and it is precisely in this context (of Lacanian analysis) that Slavoj Žižek has addressed the distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ certainty as Wittgenstein sets it out in On Certainty. ‘Subjective’ certainty has to do with certainty subjected to doubt, and it concerns those situations where the usual criteria of ignorance and knowledge apply. However, ‘[t]he attitudes and beliefs that constitute "objective certainty" are not submitted to test and doubt. . . . It is superfluous and wrong [nonsensical?] even to say that "objective certainty" concerns things about which "we undoubtedly know they are true"’ [Slavoj Zizek, For they know what they do (London: Verso, 1994), p. 150.] From a Lacanian point of view, what Wittgenstein calls ‘objective certainty’ corresponds to what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’, the field of the symbolic which we have always already accepted, the field which is internal, as it were, to our language-games. For someone not to believe in the big Other, and to be excluded from it, is, as Lacan argued throughout his career, to be in the condition of the psychotic. Now, while Wittgenstein clearly understands this condition of psychotic disbelief in the place language can have in our lives, as his examples show, his crucial concern is with what appears as an irreducible gap separating ‘objective certainty’ from ‘truth’. While he insists that although a language game is only possible if one trusts something, he also wants to say that ‘it is not that on some points men know the truth with perfect certainty. But perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude’ [On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), §404].

As Norman Malcolm has put it, regarding this remark: ‘Being perfectly certain (i.e. objectively certain) of something — in the sense of regarding it as unintelligible that one might be wrong — is an attitude, a stance, that we take towards various matters; but this attitude does not necessarily carry truth in its wake’ [Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: Nothing is Hidden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 216.
Our forms of life float, as it were, in empty space, or, as Lacan would have it, there is an irreducible distance between the Symbolic and the Real. In Zizek’s words, ‘we cannot pinpoint any positive, determinate fact that would call “objective certainty" into question since all such facts always-already appear against the unquestioned background of "objective certainty"’. In other words, the irreducible distance that Wittgenstein brings out here is a gap made evident ‘by means of a radical discontinuity between certitude and "truth"; of positing a certainty which, although unquestionable, does not guarantee its "truth"’ [Zizek, op. cit., p. 152.] It is in this way that one can make out how radically misconceived—how fantasmatic—are charges of relativism (or scepticism) when levelled against Wittgenstein.