The things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network – a "biospheric web" wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others – has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty's late description of sesnuous reality, "the Flesh," as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and "prolongs unto the invisible" the wild, interpenetrating, interdependent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things..." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 85

it is not human language that is primary

Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Language is an evolving medium we collectively inhabit

While individual speech acts are surely guided by the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Semiotic but not languagelike

But representation, as I have been arguing, is something both broader than and different from what we expect given how our thinking about it has been linguistically colonized. Extending linguistic relationality to nonhumans narcissistically projects the human onto that which lies beyond it. And along with language comes a host of assumptions about systematicity, context, and difference, which stem from some of the distinctive properties of human symbolic reference and are not necessarily relevant to how living thoughts might more generally relate. In the process, other properties that might permit a more capacious view of relationality are obscured. My claim, in short, is that an anthropology beyond the human can rethink relationality by seeing it as semiotic but not always and necessarily languagelike.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 83-84

Wholes precede parts

In semiosis, as in biology, wholes precede parts; similarity precedes difference. Thoughts and lives both begin as wholes – albeit ones that can be extremely vague and underspecified. A single-celled embryo, however simple and undifferentiated, is just as whole as the multicellular organism into which it will develop. An icon, however rudimentary its likeness, insofar as it is taken as a likeness, imperfectly captures the object of its similarity as a whole. It is only in the realm of the machine that the differentiated part comes first and the assembled whole second. Semiosis and life, by contrast, begin whole.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p.64

Our bodies are the products of semiosis

Symbolic thought run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are the products of semiosis. Our sensory experiences, even our most basic cellular and metabolic processes, are mediated by representational – though not necessarily symbolic – relations. But symbolic thought run wild can make us experience "ourselves" as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground this special kind of symbolic thinking in "our" bodies, bodies that are themselves indexically grounded in the worlds beyond them: I think therefore I doubt that I am.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p. 49

Language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed

By means of poetic language, waves of newness flow over the surface of being. And language bears within itself the dialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression, it opens up.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 222

Poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom

The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.

Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, as it appears in the evolution of language across the centuries, the poetic image, assa a mathematician would say, presents us with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speec. And if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship of freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes in making game of censors! Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced fredom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxiii

Words are the first layer of a cocoon

What do we write to a woman whom we have kissed without declaring our love. To ask her forgiveness would be offensive, especially since she returned the kiss with passion. If on the other hand we did not say, upon kissing her, I love you, why should we invent the words now, at the risk of not being believed. The Romans assure us in the Latin tongue that actions speak louder than words, let us therefore consider the actions as done and the words superfluous, words are the first layer of a cocoon, frayed, tenuous, delicate. We should use words that make no promise, that seek nothing, that do not even suggest, let them protect our rear as our cowardice retreats, just like these fragmented phrases, general, noncommittal, let us savour the moment, the fleeting joy, the green restored to the budding leaves.

José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (The Harvill Press, 1998) p. 218

God is a brain mutation

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 377

Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by lagnuage – language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 187

Memory is a sort of anti-museum

The dispersion of stories point to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 108

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark

No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty). It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Vintage, 2004) p. 169

Places and non-places are opposed like their words and notions

Places and non-places are opposed (or attracted) like the words and notions that enable us to describe them. But the fashionable words – those that did not exist thirty years ago – are associated with non-places. Thus we can contrast the realities of transit (transit camps or passengers in transit) with those of residence or dwelling; the interchange (where nobody crosses anyone else's path) with the crossroads (where people meet); the passenger (defined by his destination) with the traveller (who strolls along his route – significantly, the SNCF still calls its customers travellers until they board the TGV; then they become passengers), the housing estate ('group of new dwellings', Larousse says), where people do not live together and which is never situated in the centre of anything (big estates characterize the so-called peripheral zones or outskirts), with the monument where people share and commemorate; communication (with its codes, images and strategies) with language (which is spoken).

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) pp. 86-87

The trick is to be at home in many homes

It is not true, the novelist and the philosopher suggest in unison, that great art has no homeland – on the contrary, art, like the artists, may have many homelands, and most certainly more than one. Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. Learning the trick is the chance of the exile: technically an exile – one that is in, but not of the place. The unconfinedness that results from this condition reveals the homely truths to be man-made and un-made, and the mother tongue to be an endless stream of communication between generations and a treasury of messages always richer than any of their readings and forever waiting to be unpacked anew.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 207

The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers

Jacques Attali has recently suggested that it is the image of the labyrinth which nowadays comes to dominate, even if surreptitiously, our thinking about the future and our own part in it; that image becomes the principal mirror in which our civilization in its present stage contemplates its own likeness. The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers. Millennia have passed, and the settlers have finally acquired the self-confidence and courage to rise to the challenge of the labyrinthine fate. 'In all European languages', Attali points out, 'the word labyrinth became a synonym of artificial complexity, useless darkness, tortuous system, impenetrable thicket. "Clarity" became a synonym of logic.'

The settlers set about making the walls transparent, the devious passages straight and well signed, the corridors well lit. They also produced guide-books and clear-cut, unambiguous instructions for the use of all future wanderers about which turns to take and which to avoid. They did all this only to discover in the end that the labyrinth is firmly in place; if anything, the labyrinth has become yet more treacherous and confusing owing to the illegible tangle of criss-crossing footprints, the cacophony of commands and the continuous addition of new twisting passages to the ones already left behind and new dead ends to the ones already blundered into. The settlers have become 'involuntary nomads', belatedly recalling the message they received at the beginning of their historical travels and trying desperately to recover its forgotten contents which – as they suspect – may well carry the 'wisdom necessary for their future'. Once more, the labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition – and it means 'the opaque place where the layout of the roads may not obey any law. Chance and surprise rule in the labyrinth, which signals the defeat of Pure Reason.'

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 138

Language may be regarded as an old city

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 174-175 

There is politics because man separates himself from his own bare life

There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 8

All speech is violence

All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it – a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 42

Speaking is not seeing

– Words are suspended; this suspension is a very delicate oscillation, a trembling that never leaves them still.
– And yet, they are also immobile.
– Yes, of an immobility that moves more than anything moving. Disorientation is at work in speech through a passion for wandering that has no bounds. Thus it happens that, in speaking, we depart from all direction and all path, as though we had crossed the line.
– But speech has its own way, it provides a path. We are not led astray in it, or at most only in relation to the regularly traveled routes.
– Even more than that perhaps: it is as though we were turned away from the visible, without being turned back round toward the invisible. I don't know whether what I am saying here says anything. But nevertheless it is simple. Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. I'll let you count all the words through which it is suggested that, to speak truly, one must think according to the measure of the eye.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 27