"Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so.

But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern, as so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us."

Martin Heidegger

~~~~~

Language and Death

What is the reason to concatenate these two words, these two concepts, these two objects ? To deliberately conjoin these, to account for the experience of language, its relation to the unconscious, to madness, and death - and how what we say and write mark us for death. Negativity Lets start with a term that is commonly used, but not well defined in my estimation, in most of the philosophic literature I am familiar with. I am speaking of the term Negativity. All but the most recent compendiums of philosophy are blank when it comes to a clear definition of this term, so I will take a crack at my version of a workable definition. Negativity as a concept is operative when, in describing a state or process (as in Art or Physics, or Philosophy), the answer lies not in what is present, but rather in what is absent. For example in Physics, the now commonly accepted dictum that the mere act of measuring something forever alters the thing measured. So in essence, when attempting to define or quantify any object or process, the fact of its being measured will alter either its physical constitution, or its behavior, or both. As a concept, this was a startling arithmetic not all that long ago, and subsequently an entire cosmology has been extrapolated from this notion of reality, and forms the basis from which modern philosophy, linguistics, culture theory, psychoanalysis and sociology has attempted to explain our current experience of the world. Either explicitly or implicitly, we have been told that we are living the image of a de-centered, unstable, arbitrary self.

No telos, no destiny, no origin, no compass. No gold standard with which to definitively say all this. The irony does not escape me as I sit here attempting to define an experience that refuses to be defined. Or if you prefer, to be murdered with a name. There is a word-game by Wittgenstein that goes like thisRound Square. Try to process this as a single thought, a single object. Impossible. But why? Because there is no such thing? That would be like saying there is no such thing as Round or Square. And we know that Round and Square stand for very specific concepts and are quite useful to us as we navigate the world. But what causes this construction to denigrate into nonsense, when we jam these two concepts together? It is the difference between the two that defines each, not the thing in itself. Round may have been just as useful a descriptor in detailing the shape of an ice cubeand vice versa. You see where I am going with this. It has been theorized that it is language that makes up reality for us, and is not merely a convenient tool with which we are obligated to describe some a priori state of being. We have stopped looking at things in-themselves, and have begun scrutinizing the relationships between things. It is not the word itself that is of value, it is the space between the words, the difference , that gives us deep meaning, allows us to understand one another. That is Negativity. It follows that if meaning is therefore based on relationships and not on some direct immutable thingin-itself, and those relationships are loosely tethered, it also follows that if those relationships should become un-tethered, madness ensues. schizophrenia
personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with ones present, andthat such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still, of the sentence as it moves along through time. If we are unable to identify the past present and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past present and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.1

More precisely, I invoke Jamesons definition of

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 27 [italics mine].

Here, Jameson, with great equanimity, states as a given what Lacan seemed to toil so diligently to convey that Language is what tethers us, orders our perceptions, and gives us passage into the Symbolic, having usurped the biological imperatives that Freud, in an earlier generation, proclaimed was our destiny. The traverse from the biological to the metaphysical is an important point I will return to later on. "From within language experienced and transversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their farthest point, what emerges is that man has 'come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of the origin interminably recedes." 2 This is why Language = Death. There, now I have stated it, once and for all. Structuralism and Nihilism What do we do with this equation? For if Language equals Death, then we are all reading, writing, and speaking our way to the grave to nothingness, non-thought, and non-sense. The metaphysical implications of Post-strucuralist thought is clearly nihilistic and godless when viewed from this angle, and finds its roots really in structuralism.

Foucault quoted in Joshua Schuster, Death Reckoning in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, Other Voices, v.1, n.1 (March 1997) < http://www.othervoices.org/jnschust/death.html#Note >