"Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard

“What is it,” Kierkegaard asks, “to chatter?” The question is not posed here for the first time, nor does it lend itself to the closure and resolution a definitive answer might promise. Language, it seems, does not exhaust itself in the conceptual resolution of philosophical problems, but continues to speak. The question of “chatter” becomes the question of language itself: What speaks when language speaks? And what speaks when language continues speaking? This question is counted among the most substantial and elusive of modern philosophical thought, formalized for the first time by Kierkegaard under the rubric of “chatter,” and taken up in the twentieth century variously by such diverse thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. The difficulties confronted in modern thought become most profound when language no longer means exactly what it says—when it stops working, not by failing to meet rules of intelligibility, but, in spite of all conformity, by continuing to speak and by still meaning nothing. Idle talk. Empty speech. Prattle. Chitchat. Language that continues speaking long after everything has been said, long after any communication takes place. “Chatter” conforms to and remains indistinguishable from all language and every act of speech. Nothing said cannot not be interpreted, understood, and read. “Chatter is the very medium in which everything makes sense [ . . . ]” (138). “Chatter” thus characterizes not one mode of language among others, but a mode of language which consumes all others. Moreover, in Peter Fenves’ recent assessment, “chatter” is not to be perceived as a “threat” to language, but rather becomes the requisite condition of all language. It is not that language must run the risk of “chatter” in order to communicate, but language itself must always “chatter,” thus threatening the claim of any potential communication. “The vehicles of communication carry nothing of weight. Communication continues to take place, and its pace may very well accelerate, but everything is still somehow idle. In such non-movement—or incessant movement at a standstill—empty and idle talk finds its point of departure: the vehicle of communication, language as structure and act, remains in operation, but it no longer works, for whatever it carries is somehow ‘nothing’” (2). This “nothing” works at the foundation of every possible communication, every possible understanding, questioning the very possibility of foundation itself—whether conceived as concept, referent, or causal historical narrative.

The task of Fenves’ new book, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard, is precisely to take this “nothingness” of language seriously. Fenves offers an entirely new and seemingly exhaustive exploration of Kierkegaard’s work by opening up the understanding of language to an always potential “chatter”—thereby evading the more common tendencies of Kierkegaard commentary to “explicate,” for example, Kierkegaard’s so-called “existentialism.” Fenves’ reading presents a far more precise, challenging, and ultimately perhaps even more ‘Kierkegaardian’ reading of Kierkegaard. Framing his discussion of Kierkegaard with readings of the two book reviews by Kierkegaard in which “chatter” is most explicitly and thoroughly thematized, Fenves explores the various ways in which all philosophical problems in Kierkegaard’s work ultimately confront and are confounded by their inability to free themselves from the profound negativity of “chatter,” removing in one way or another any possible guarantor of meaning. “Chatter” continually disrupts all discursive presentations, showing words to be variously irreducible to either reference or concepts. All language, then, unable to indicate anything other than itself, simply consists of a language of names. The “name,” a word freed of all conceptuality, unable to recall anything but the “moment of its nomination” (127), becomes capable then of communicating “nothing.” “Nothing” is ever communicated, while only “nothing” is always communicated. The impossibility of communication, in Fenves’ terms, becomes the communication of the impossible, the communication of “nothing”, as presented under Fenves’ slogan, “communication cannot not take place” (145): “the very attempt to void the necessity of communication testifies to its force and confirms the singular law of communication: communication cannot not take place. It is impossible to avoid communication...