Can we find an analogue of matter in the order of thought itself? Is there a matter of thought, a nuance, a grain which makes an event for thought and unsettles it, analogously with what I have described in the sensory order? Perhaps here we have to invoke words. Perhaps words themselves, in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e. what it cannot manage to think.

Words ‘say’ sound, touch, always ‘before’ touch, always ‘before’ thought. And they always ‘say’ something other than what thought signifies, and what it wants to signify by putting them into form.

Words want nothing. They ae the ‘un-will’, the ‘non-sense’ of thought, its mass. They are innumerable[….] They are always older than thought. They can be semiologised, philologised, just as nuances are chromatised and timbres gradualised. But like timbres and nuances, they are always being born.

Lyotard, from The Inhuman