Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Foreword

foreword i x veena das speaks of her “repeated (and even compulsive) reliance on Wittgenstein” as playing a role in the philosophical friendship that has developed between us. Beyond the clear evidence for this observation, the truth of it, from my side of things, is further confirmed, if perhaps less clearly, in an early and in a late thought of mine, each expressing my sense of an anthropological register in Wittgenstein’s sensibility, thoughts not reflected in Wittgenstein’s well-known recurrence, in his later (or as the French put it, his second) philosophy, to imaginary “tribes” different from “us.” I would like to mark my pleasure in contributing prefatory words for Das’s wonderful book Life and Words by putting those easily lost thoughts into words, into the world. My early thought was directed to a passage in Philosophical Investigations that roughly sounds to me like a reflection on a primitive allegory of incipient anthropological work: “Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (§206). This may, as other moments in Wittgenstein’s text may, seem either too doubtful or too tame to be of much intellectual service. “Common behavior” seems quite unargumentative in referring to the behavior of salmon and mallards and anthropoid apes, not quite in referring to that of human beings. But let’s turn the card over. Take it that the allegorical air comes rather from the fact that to ask a question of the form “In what circumstances would you say . . . ?” is precisely Wittgenstein’s most obvious (ordinary language) procedure directed to and about us, about us as philosophers when we are, as we inevitably are, variously tempted to force our ordinary words to do what they, as they stand, will not do, disappointed by finitude. It is our language that is, or that we perpetually render, foreign to us. The point of the allegory would then be that the explorer coming into an unknown country with a strange language is a figure of the philosopher moved to philosophical wonder by the strangeness of the humans among whom he lives, their strangeness to themselves, therefore of himself to himself, at home perhaps nowhere, perhaps anywhere. (I have spoken of the Investigations as a portrait more specifically of the modern subject.) Asking us either to find our behavior strange (seltsam), or not strange, is a familiar gesture in the Investigations, anticipated, for example, in Plato’s image of the everyday as a cave, and in Rousseau’s fantasm of the first word (the first naming of the human other) as a giant, and inThoreau’s perception in the opening pages of Walden of his fellow townsmen as self-tormenting “Bramins” (Thoreau’s spelling). The intersection of the familiar and the strange is an experience of the uncanny, an intersection therefore shared by the anthropologist, the psychoanalyst, and the Wittgensteinian (Socratic, Rousseau-like, Thoreau-like, etc.) philosopher. (Here an anthropological perspective is the counter to what is sometimes called, and disapproved of as, a humanist perspective, satisfied in its knowledge of what humanity should be. What I call Wittgenstein’s anthropological perspective is one puzzled in principle by anything human beings say and do, hence perhaps, at a moment, by nothing.) This brings me to the second, later thought prompting the sense of Wittgenstein’s seeking perspective on his unknown culture. I once shared a podium to discuss, perhaps debate, Wittgenstein’s later views with a friend who is fully recognized as one of the most accomplished philosophers of our generation. In his introductory remarks he asked, in effect: Why is Wittgenstein content to accord the status of a culture or an imaginary tribe to virtually any group of strange creatures with apparently the sole exception of philosophers? When my turn to speak came I replied that for Wittgenstein philosophy is not a culture, not one among others. It is f o r e w o r d x without (no matter how persistently it craves to have) a persistently accepted and evolving language of its own, retaining only some local terms that will be disputed and repudiated by other philosophers; “houses of cards...