Quotes About Language

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other...There is a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other...What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality...The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

Tlie algorithm, the project of a universal language, is a revolt against language in its existing state and a refusal to depend upon the confusions of everyday language.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

I do not perceive any more than I speak--Perception has me as has language--And as it is necessary that all the same I be there in order to speak, I must be there in order to perceive--But in what sense? As one--What is it that, from my side, comes to animate the perceived world and language?

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

In a unified whole of this kind, the learned parts of a language have an immediate value as a whole, and progress is made less by addition and juxtaposition than by the internal articulation of a function which is in its own way already complete.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

The adoption of a level presupposes the expressive relation between the perceived and ourselves, presupposes our settling into it, that is to say, the raising of certain of its elements to the status of dimensions...The sensible thing speaks a certain language to us which we understand just as if a linguistic agreement were established between our perceptual system and it, as if we spoke its language without having learned it = expression.

In all dialogue there is an element of concrete universality.

The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

Se demander si le monde et réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

People would be very unhappy if they were to look closely at what lies beneath the words they use so readily. This is why they prefer, for the most part, not to do so.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

Language is a surpassing, operated by the subject on significations he has laid down, stimulated by the use made of words around him. Language is an act of transcending. Thus, we cannot consider it to simply be a container of thought; we must see in it an instrument of conquest of self through contact with others.

Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.