We live in our language like blind men
walking on the edge of an abyss... This language is laden
with future catastrophes... The day will come when it will turn
against those who speak it.
Gershow Scholem
walking on the edge of an abyss... This language is laden
with future catastrophes... The day will come when it will turn
against those who speak it.
Gershow Scholem
All the peoples of the earth are now hanging over the abyss of their language. Some are sinking, others are already almost sunken and, as they believe they are mastering the language, they are unknowingly being mastered by it instead. Thus the Jews, who turned their sacred language into an instrumental language of use, are like larvae in the netherworld who must drink blood in order to speak. As long as it was confined to the separate sphere of worship, it provided them with a place free from the logic of economical, technical, and political necessities, with which they measured themselves in the languages they borrowed from the peoples among whom they lived. For Chrstians, too, Latin has long offered a space in which the word was not merely a tool for information and communication, in which one could pray and not exchange messages. Bilingualism could also be internal to the language, as in classical Greece, where the language of Homer — the language of poetry — passed on an ethical heritage which could somehow direct the behaviour of those who every day spoke diverse and changable dialects.
Aa a matter of fact, our way of thinking is more or less unconsciously determined by the structure of language in which we believe we express it. In this sense — as Pasolini tirelessly repeated, but as Dante had already fully realised, distinguishing the lingua volgare from the grammatical language we learn through study — some form of bilingualism is necessary to guarantee the freedom of individuals in the face of the automatisms and conatraints that monolingualism, historically crystallised in the form of a national language, increasingly imposes on them. One cannot think in such a language, because it lacks that inexpressible distance between the thing to be expressed and the expression that alone can guarantee a free space for the thinking subject. Thought is this gap and this internal disconnection, which interrupts the inarrestable flow of language and its supposed self-sufficiency. It is a caesura in the sense that this term has in the metrics of poetry: an interruption that, suspending the rhythm of linguistic representations, lets language itself appear.
What is happening today is that mankind, entirely enslaved to a language they believe they dominate, have become so incapable of thinking that they prefer to delegate thought to an external linguistic machine, the so-called artificial intelligence. If, like the Jews according to Scholem, all peoples are now blindly walking on the abyss of a language and a reason that they have, so to say, abandoned to itself, this implies that the language from which they withdrew as conscious subjects will sooner or later take revenge, leading them to ruin. Relying on a language that is both instrument and master, and of which they have lost all awareness, they do not hear the groan, the accusation, and the threat that it, while leading them to ruin, never ceases to address them.
Aa a matter of fact, our way of thinking is more or less unconsciously determined by the structure of language in which we believe we express it. In this sense — as Pasolini tirelessly repeated, but as Dante had already fully realised, distinguishing the lingua volgare from the grammatical language we learn through study — some form of bilingualism is necessary to guarantee the freedom of individuals in the face of the automatisms and conatraints that monolingualism, historically crystallised in the form of a national language, increasingly imposes on them. One cannot think in such a language, because it lacks that inexpressible distance between the thing to be expressed and the expression that alone can guarantee a free space for the thinking subject. Thought is this gap and this internal disconnection, which interrupts the inarrestable flow of language and its supposed self-sufficiency. It is a caesura in the sense that this term has in the metrics of poetry: an interruption that, suspending the rhythm of linguistic representations, lets language itself appear.
What is happening today is that mankind, entirely enslaved to a language they believe they dominate, have become so incapable of thinking that they prefer to delegate thought to an external linguistic machine, the so-called artificial intelligence. If, like the Jews according to Scholem, all peoples are now blindly walking on the abyss of a language and a reason that they have, so to say, abandoned to itself, this implies that the language from which they withdrew as conscious subjects will sooner or later take revenge, leading them to ruin. Relying on a language that is both instrument and master, and of which they have lost all awareness, they do not hear the groan, the accusation, and the threat that it, while leading them to ruin, never ceases to address them.
(English translation by I, Robot)
沈周 (Shěn Zhōu), Chanting Poems in Leisure Among Pines, ca. 1687. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. |
