Nobody Speaks. Everything Signifies

It's of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language.

Beckett, The Unnamable

Someone is speaking. Or something. He wants to live but hasn't been born. He wants to die, but words hold him in life. He does not want to say "I," but he has to give in: "There is I …it's preferable." Bakhtin remarks that we mostly talk about what other people are talking about: every word we speak is "half someone else's."⁸⁵ The narrator of Beckett's Unnamable attributes all his words to others: "I'min words, made of words, others' words," he says, "the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words."⁸⁶

Foucault opens his 1970 lecture, "The Discourse on Language," with a fantasy of being carried along by a nameless voice like the one that narrates Beckett's Three Novels. He would only have to "en-mesh" himself with it, taking up "its cadence" and lodging himself "in its interstices." The philosopher for whom individuation opens avenues for the deployment of powers dreams of losing himself in a torrent of words.

Foucault suggests that the desire to be borne along by "others' words" eases the anxiety and uncertainty that the "awesome materiality" of discourse arouses in its speakers. There is danger in the fact that people speak, as if discourse were a magical substance that not everyone can handle. So there are rituals for mastering its "barely imaginable powers."⁸⁷

Beckett's narrator points to the impossible possibility that nobody speaks. He proposes instead that everything signifies. Everything is "made of words" but always "others' words." If there is danger "in the fact that people speak," there is a parallel danger in those cases in which the torrent of words does not flow back to someone who says "I." For years I tried to follow the course of a singular statement—one of the "few things in all that can be said"—as it drifts between authors, periods, and genres. A statement, for Foucault, is an event.⁸⁸ The event that I followed binds itself to no context. But the fact that nobody speaks it suits it for deployment in any field, like a mobile weapons system on endless parade.

In his "Discourse on Inequality," Rousseau says that it took humanity a long time to enter the order of time. Without time, he explains, humans live in a "savage" state, and "everything seems to remove from Savage man the temptation as well as the means to cease being savage." Rousseau's savage folds the present back on itself. Savage time is confined to the now: "His soul, which nothing stirs, yields itself to the sole sentiment of its present existence, with no idea of the future, however near it may be, and his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the close of the day." The cultivation of orchards and tilling of fields require foresight, something "very alien to the turn of mind of Savage man" because it means taking "an initial loss for the sake of great future gain."⁸⁹ The orchards and field could not grow until Rousseau's savage joined the future-oriented time of deferral and delay.

Whose statement is this? Who oversees the transformation of time into a limit between savagery and civilization? Who racializes time for economic ends? The author, says Foucault, exists only on the contours of a discourse. But this statement is an event that cuts across every contour. It irrupts on both sides of a limit, simultaneously.

Bataille says that there are two extremes: work and violence, futurity and the present, accumulation and expenditure. "These extremes," he adds, "are called civilisation and barbarism—or savagery." Only civilization speaks. "The distinction is that civilised men speak and barbarians are silent," he explains, "and the man who speaks is always the civilised man."⁹⁰ The privilege of saying "I" is reserved for those who work with foresight in the anticipatory, future-oriented time of accumulation. Silence is the penalty imposed on those who spend everything now...