Speech, speech. Will we ever understand what is meant by this word? Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless, that's what Rosenzweig argues, we remind ourselves. The old thinking, as he calls it, is content to think. The old thinker is alone, alone before the timeless. But the new thinking depends upon speech, which is bound to time and nourished by time. It neither can nor wants to abandon this element, that's what Rosenzweig says.
Which means the new thinker is open not to the timeless, but to the time of the other. What does this mean? When two people speak together, they speak each in turn, that's the secret, we agree. One says something, then stops, the other something else, then stops. Conversation moves from partner to partner …
The interval is everything for the new thinker, we agree. Speech depends upon a passage from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed. It depends upon an interval, and not, then, upon the power to speak that belongs to either conversationalist …
It's not about what I say, or what you say, we agree. Which is fortunate, because we make very little sense. It's that we can be interrupted which matters. It's that speech is always fragmentary. Which means speech, in dialogue, belongs neither to one speaker nor the other.
Lars Iyer's Blog 