"There Is a Limit to the Magic Powers of Language": Will Eno and the Dispossession of Being

The nameless Man who speaks Eno's monologue Title and Deed describes himself as "not homeless, but unhomed." In this article, I investigate the condition of "unhomedness" in three recent works by Eno, arguing that it refers to the ontological-linguistic nature of speaking beings who must situate themselves within the symbolic order of language to achieve subjectivity. This subjectivity, however, remains fragile, marked by loss and fragmentation since language itself alienates the subject from being, submitting it to what Lacan (whose work is my main theoretical lens) terms "the dispossession of being." Eno represents figures who constantly run up against the limits of a language they utilize in a desperate attempt—in the words of Eno's character Peter Gnit—"to uncover the authentic self," to stabilize themselves within the symbolic that grants them linguistic presence at the cost of ontological absence.