THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

In the satirical hodgepodge that is book three of Gulliver's Travels, the prize exhibit is undoubtedly the Academy of Lagado. Among its improbable schemes is one designed to avoid the "Diminution of Our Lungs by Corrosion"; as well, this scheme would achieve communicative precision and provide an infallible esperanto. It consists simply in abolishing all words and replacing them with their referents:

Since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on.... which hath only this Inconvenience attending it; that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him.1

They may be fated, indeed, to an actual fatality. For in the space of that difference hovers death--or so it is asserted in a recurrent metaphor. It has even been suggested that this difference initiated the first death, that it was not "the Fruit/ Of that Forbidden Tree whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World" but a prior act of hubris for which God himself served as tempter: the translation of the world into words.3 In Hegel's First Philosophy of Spirit (1803Ð04), he writes: "The first act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account."4 Maurice Blanchot glosses this sentence as follows:

Hegel means that from that moment on the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and became an idea as well. The meaning of speech, then, requires that before any word is spoken there must be a sort of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all of creation into a total sea. God had created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared.5

Still, the word may be worth the price and, through an odd economics, may lead to the return of the thing. Martin Heidegger argues this case:

Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as.6

See Also Dick Hebdige: Even Until Death: Improvisation, Edging, and Enframement (Winter 2001) Peter Schwenger: Writing the Unthinkable (Autumn 1986)

This is not to say, though, that the thing, as opposed to the object, simply falls into nonexistence in surpassing, as it always does, the limits of representation. It is true that for Heidegger "the thing-in-itself, i.e., detached from and taken out of every relation of manifestation (Bekundung) for us, remains for us a mere x." But, he continues, "in every thing as an appearance we unavoidably think also of this x."9 The x that is the thing shadows the object as it is represented to our knowledge. In a paradoxical way, beyond that knowledge we always know something more, namely, that there is an unknowable otherness to the thing. Of this we must think in exactly the measure that we are unable to think it: "The thing as thing remains proscribed, nil, and in that sense annihilated. This has happened and continues to happen so essentially that not only are things no longer admitted as things, but they have never yet at all been able to appear to thinking as things" ("T," pp. 170Ð71). Annihilated in a certain sense, the thing is always present in another; unable to appear, the thing is in the first instance appearance. And beyond that appearance, which represents the thing to us as object, there is an ineluctable presence--the thingness of the thing--that we can never grasp.

Aporias such as these appear whenever words are confronted with things, and the attempt is made to think within the space of their difference. What that thinking produces is not so much a reconciliation as an assimilation to one side or another. Either it is argued that words are things, partaking in their solidity and presence, or else material things are hollowed out by an awareness that they can never be seen as anything but signifiers in a psychic space. Gertrude Stein, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Lacan represent this dynamic in the following pages as if on a spectrum. Yet at each point the position taken oscillates uneasily. This oscillation, as we shall see, is not unlike the dynamics of the Freudian death drive. And in this sense the space between words and things once again manifests itself as fatal--if only to our philosophies.