Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis offers a reconstruction of Jacques Derrida's fundamental ideas on language, focusing on a period of his production that remains significantly understudied in contemporary scholarship - namely, the 1970s and the early 1980s - and examining in depth certain works that have often been either overlooked or inadequately treated by critics - such as "Glas" (1974), "Fors" (1976), or "D'un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie" (1982). These are read in close relation to their philosophical and literary sources as well as to the psychoanalytical concepts that they appropriate and elaborate (particularly those drawn from the works of Sigmund Freud, Nicolas Abraham, and Maria Torok), and, above all, in light of their sustained critical engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, which constitutes in my view the central critical target of Derrida's work throughout the 1970s. In fact, Derrida's writings from this period can be read as an attempt to respond to the fundamental idea of Lacanianism, namely, that human beings are fundamentally alienated by the simple fact that they speak. If language is, according to Lacan, the essential dimension of human existence, it is at the same time the place where human beings can never find themselves as such and become dispossessed of their own being - a dispossession that Lacan technically terms "castration". In my view, the thesis that castration is the truth of human beings is precisely the point of contention that animates Derrida's work throughout the 1970s, and that drives him not only to deconstruct the central tenets of Lacan's theory of semiosis (in particular, the notion of the phallus as a transcendental signifier), but also to develop his own theory of language and subjectivity - a theory that is capable of restoring the subject and of preserving its dignity. Since Lacan's and Derrida's theories of language and subjectivity differ significantly from our commonsense conceptions of language, and since their writings are often regarded as highly obscure and impenetrable, it was necessary to precede their discussion with an introduction to the question of language that could demonstrate the necessity for a philosophical treatment of this "object", such as that provided precisely by the works of Lacan and Derrida. In order to prove the necessity of a philosophical treatment of the question of language, I seek to show how certain commonsense views about the nature of language have become highly problematic over the past century, if not directly untenable, and that even when one turns to contemporary linguistics and semiotics, one cannot help but observe that at least some strands of these sciences are simply incapable of offering a satisfactory answer to the question of the essence of language. The point of departure is the thesis that language is a unique property of human beings, one that is not found in the animal realm. This thesis was first formulated by Aristotle and is not only still upheld by philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger, but also vigorously advocated by some authors in contemporary linguistics and semiotics, such as Noam Chomsky, Émile Benveniste, Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok, and it is still dominant in our commonsense understanding. However, contemporary research in ethology, semiotics, and linguistics has demonstrated that the properties traditionally considered to be definitive of human languages and wholly absent from animal communication systems, such as the use of arbitrary symbols, duality of patterning, reflectiveness, and recursive structures - all properties that seem to have been identified on the basis of some fundamental Aristotelian assumptions about the distinctive nature of human language - are either also present in some non-human communication systems or even absent in certain human languages (cf. Intro., § 1, pp. 1-21). As a result, it has become increasingly difficult today not only to determine what precisely distinguishes human languages from animal communication systems, but even to define what constitutes human languages as such. As a consequence, some strands of contemporary linguistics, confronted with the radical heterogeneity of human languages and the apparent impossibility to individuate some linguistic universals valid for all existing human languages, have even abandoned the attempt to provide a general definition of "human language" and instead restrict themselves to the empirical study of individual languages (cf. Intro., § 1, p. 21). This strange "thing" we call "language" is thus revealed to be a rather elusive object - something that seems to pertain to both humans and animals, and that resists any clear and satisfactory definition. Exemplary of this situation are some of the definitions of language proposed within contemporary linguistics and semiotics, which are often so general and abstract, or so unilateral, that they end up either allowing radically different phenomena to be considered as "languages" - such as bird vocalizations, the English language, or the alarm system of a hydroelectric dam - thereby flattening their differences through abstraction, or overlooking important phenomenal aspects of what we commonly take to be "languages", as in the case of de Saussure's definition of language as a system of strictly codified signs, which seems incapable of accounting for the phenomenon of literary language (cf. Intro., §§ 1-2, pp. 21-34) The first two sections of the introduction do not aim to provide a comprehensive critique of the definitions of language that can be found in contemporary semiotics and linguistics. Rather, they seek merely to open a space for a philosophical approach to the question of the essence of language by drawing attention to the limitations and unsatisfactory answers offered by certain strands of the contemporary sciences of language when it comes to this topic. It is because of this that, in the last section of the introduction, I turn to the philosophical tradition in order to seek a more adequate and satisfactory understanding and definition of language. According to this tradition, language is to be understood essentially as expression - a conception, held from Aristotle to Hegel, that views language essentially as a means of communicating one's own "interiority" (cf. Intro., § 3). While this view - maintained for centuries and still dominant in our commonsense conceptions - may seem solid and indisputable, it has nonetheless been the target of sharp criticism in twentieth-century philosophy. Among these critics are precisely Lacan and Derrida, whose philosophical theories on language and subjectivity begin precisely with a relentless critique of the idea that language is essentially expression. The first chapter is thus dedicated to reconstructing the key elements of Lacan's theory of semiosis as developed in his seminars and writings between 1953 and 1966 - a reconstruction that was necessary before presenting Derrida's philosophy, given the central role of Lacan's psychoanalytical theories in understanding Derrida's work of the 1970s and 1980s. While this chapter does not aim to offer an original interpretation of Lacan's theory, it seeks to provide a clear and comprehensive account of it from a historical and philosophical perspective, and in particular to elucidate those central notions (such as "signifier", "phallus", "castration", or "barred subject") that become the target of Derrida's relentless critique. As I explain in the first section of this chapter, Lacan's psychoanalytical theories on language and subjectivity can be seen as the culmination of a century-long debate over the nature of language. This debate originates from what I call the Hegelian "argument of generality" (cf. Ch. I, § 1, pp. 45-48), according to which language is inherently incapable of expressing singularity. To use an example to which I frequently return throughout this thesis: If I say to someone "I love you", these words do not convey the uniqueness and unrepeatability of my feelings. Rather, they vehiculate a generality - something that anyone could say, and that therefore cannot serve to express my singular existence. The originality of Lacan's thought lies in making this very fact the cornerstone of his theory of the speaking subject - a theory influenced not only by Alexandre Kojève's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Maurice Blanchot's ideas on language (cf. infra, Ch. I, § 1, pp. 49-63), but that also profoundly reworks de Saussure's semiotics, Freud's theory of the so-called language of dreams and Jakobson's understanding of metaphor and metonymy as fundamental mechanisms of language (cf. Ch. I, § 2). It is this eclectic and original combination of sources that allows Lacan to formulate his theory of the subject as essentially alienated within a network of signifiers that autonomously produce their signification effects independently of the speaker's conscious intentions, leaving the subject unable to find or recognize themselves precisely in the place where their own constitution takes place, namely, language itself. According to Lacan, it is precisely this impossibility of finding oneself in language that is the motor of semiosis, since it generates the subject's (unconscious) desire to signify themselves, whereas such desire is however destined to remain perpetually unfulfilled, since language, by its very nature, can never signify the singular as such. In other words, according to Lacan, human beings are essentially alienated - or castrated - within language, that is, their singularity is irremediably suppressed or lost in the Symbolic order. Originally dispossessed of what is most properly their own, the human being does not possess the λόγος - they cannot be thought of as the animal that possesses language (as the ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, to
Source: Lirias (KU Leuven)
Author: Braga, Pietro
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7111744582
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