Quotes About Referent

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.

If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight—and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

What happens when we accept that style, mediated through yet detached from a racial referent, may not be simply the excess or the opposite of ontology but may in fact be a precondition for embodiment, an insight that challenges the very foundation of the category of the human? What is at stake here is not just the objectification of people but also how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood.

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.

Batter-Sea is not a word,' I said at last. 'It has no referent. There is nothing in the World corresponding to that combination of sounds.

In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.

Cumplido su sueño de instaurar la democracia, México descubre que se ha quedado sin un referente común.

That is not how it is for the Ariekei. Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

The problem of reference was already an almost insoluble one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of the real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more.

As soon as it becomes impossible for states to attack and destroy one another, they turn almost automatically against their own peoples, their own territories; a sort of civil war or internecine conflict begins between the State and its natural referent. Is it not in fact the fate of every sign, every signifying and representative agency, to abolish its natural referent?

a "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.