Speaking the language

The subject of this essay is the dialectic between word and thought. Between the word and the thought there is therefore no priority of one over the other, but mutual presupposition and a perpetual overlapping: it is at this level that the link between word and thought is actually affected by creativity. Between thought and word there has always implicitly been an original complicity that makes it impossible to separate the two dimensions, thought and expression. Therefore language appears as an inner dimension that is incarnated in expression giving shape to the unrepresentable; it is not merely a sum of positive elements added to each other, but a series of diachronic relations; the linguistic sign cannot be seen as having one definite, univocal meaning, but it is in the gaps and in the opposition between signs that all language becomes meaningful. Language is a constant work-in-progress, which cannot be schematised and viewed in static form. It is an equilibrium in incessant movement between signs and signs, living and dynamic, and is continually being renewed. It is about what is said: talking does not finish in what is said, but in what is said the talking is captured and held. As far as language is concerned, if it is the relation between signs that gives each sign meaning, then meaning arises from their overlapping as well as from the gaps between words; meaning lies in the verbal chain since it stands against other signs; its sense is an integral part of language; words always operate on a background of words, and it is never anything but a fold in the vast fabric of speaking. In the light of contemporary philosophical thinking, language is to be seen as a set of margins between signs and meanings, in a process of continual revelation, in a transformation of contents that generate other contents. The assumption is that in language there is something problematic, the coexistence of the logical level with the pragmatic one, in a continuous movement that cannot be stopped in signs. In this sense, it is right to call it the unsayable, the ungraspable. Language lives precisely due to and on this constant aspiration to say the unsayable, to take into oneself the ungraspable.