Ne uter

For the most part, language is neutral, unobtrusive in its functioning. But what happens when, as sentence falls after sentence, this neutrality as it were foregrounds itself in its strangeness? When, sentence to sentence, one hears not the world that would be reflected in the words one uses, but just the rhythm of words, words no longer bound to the task of articulating a world. No longer is it a question of representing something through language: it is as though, rather, language had become a thing itself, a thing which exists unto itself, belonging not to the world but to an absence which opens when language no longer functions unobtrusively, neutrally, but when, through the fall of sentences, language itself breaks us from the immediacy of the world we thought we were able to represent.

Adrift from the world we are adrift from ourselves as the ones who occupy a world. Then we know that language had already separated us from the world to which we thought it bound us: that the power to speak is also the powerlessness to speak about the world. Language, our power, is also our fate, and its ‘neutrality’ might be the experience of what makes unbearably present the fact that we are bound to what tears from the world and ourselves. But are we entirely unmoored from the world? We can still speak of common objects and tasks; we talk to one another about one another. For the most part, communication does not fail us. The neutrality of language is its functioning – but then, with the novels of Kafka, say, or Beckett, this functioning is exacerbated and pushed beyond itself, becoming a kind of parody of the unobtrusive. Then the neutrality of language both binds us to and separates us from the world – both at once. Ne uter: neither one nor the other: neither the being of the world nor the absence of the world. The oscillation of being and non-being.