In the beginning there was language, say that. In the beginning, language set itself back from the beginning, the fact of speaking from the capacity to speak, so that it might always return, regardless of the will of anyone who spoke, who wrote. But what returned?
Failed language, language whose sense was suspended in sense: a word that referred but also suspended this reference – a sentence that presented only a parody of sense. Language seemed to be given twice over – firstly as that gift that allowed you to speak of the world, but then again as what robbed speech of speech: the fascination of words, the drone or the mantra, the sung words of ritual or the magic words of incantation. Right away, language belonged on the side of the sacred – it separated itself from itself, and the world from the world.
Language itself: but how can language be experienced as language? Only when the sacred is reduced to itself, when there is nothing divine. The sacred, the separate – certain kinds of writing, of speech follow the detour of sense, but by way of sense. Language was led to itself, but only because its author, its speaker, was ensorcelled, was lost in a trance. Led to itself, but not by one who would use language, who would dispose of it.
In the beginning, language, but language set itself back from the capacity to speak, to write. Always the chance of a writing, a speaking to come. Always the chance of return and by way of what spoke, what wrote, without the will of the speaker, the writer. By way of fate, then – by necessity. But also by freedom, language’s freedom, as it opens, through a sudden leap, that space that gives speaking and writing life anew.
Their rebirth, their eternal novelty, but only by way of came before – by that writing over which none of us could exert our power. Does this mean, then, that language only belongs to a greater order of power, that, like God, it lets open the field of creation, the playground of possibility? But the terror is that no power belongs to it; there is no language itself. Unless this names only that wandering that lays claim to writing as it fascinates the speaker, the writer, and fascinates her listeners, her readers in turn.
Lars Iyer's Blog 