It is a vision of words as objects. Freed of its expressive function, no longer means; reveals identities, curves, something that materially they are: chains of articulated sounds (which I speak), but also drawings, written brands (which I write). Every word composes then a unit that encloses at least four shapes: the heard word, the dropped word, the read word, the written word.
Multiple shape
It is a vision of words as objects. Freed of its expressive function, no longer means; reveals identities, curves, something that materially they are: chains of articulated sounds (which I speak), but also drawings, written brands (which I write). Every word composes then a unit that encloses at least four shapes: the heard word, the dropped word, the read word, the written word.
Repetition of difference
These words, dispersed in varied social fields across the time, suffer all kind of transformations: its meaning is altered, its graphic and acoustic forms incessantly repeats itself in different mouths, hands, ears, eyes…; the sense of what they say changes according to the context. This historical bustle of words owes to its finite character; unable to multiply it without end (naming every different stone and different leaf with different drawings and different sounds), we submit them to an eternal return across the time, and finally become empty. "The words, too much repeated, get exhausted and die. The spirit would need an infinite vocabulary, but its means are limited to a few terms trivialized by use" [1]
Infinite words
But, would it be possible to assign a new name to every object, to indefinitely multiply words up to exhaust the verbal universe? “These words, which crowd would overlay our memory, would not put any order in the objects of our knowledge and, consequently, in our ideas, and all our speeches would be as much confusion” [1] Confusion embodied by Funes the Memorious, a Borges character, whose intolerable precise memory, projected an infinite vocabulary for all the memories that he could not forget. That amount of words, in a curious way, prevents him to think. “I suspect, however, that he was not very capable to think. To think is to forget differences, is to generalize, to abstract. In the crowded Funes’s world, only had details” [2] Thinking would be possible because words are limited and have the possibility of grouping different things in a same word, because a relation with oblivion allows them to travel and disperse in time...[1] CONDILLAC, Etienne. Grammaire. [2] BORGES, Jorge Luis. Ficciones.
What is feasible to express?
The finite nature of words is indicated by Borges in The Library of Babel, included in Ficciones. Inside its books, there are “leagues of senseless cacophonies, of verbal medleys and incoherencies”, because its “shelves register all the possible combinations of twenty five orthographic symbols (number, though enormous, not infinite), or anything that is feasible to express”. The idea of a space that encloses all the possible combinations of words –all the speeches?- is also in the dictionary: as a book that includes all the words, it contains in a potential way the totally of texts; somehow, all the allowed books are already there, waiting for the combinations that will make them possible.Language-time, word-light
In the relation language-time, word-light, we detect an essential opposition. Given the infinite character of the light-time-, the finiteness of the word-language is opposed. The eternal return as word becoming across the light is only possible with an oblivion condition. As Klossowski noted, "Is not oblivion the origin, at the same time as the indispensable condition in order that the Eternal Return is revealed and transformed?" [1] The different meanings forget and circulate through the same signifiers.[1] KLOSSOWSKI, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
Signifier - signified
Signifiers are these words in rough, sounds and drawings that, in a strange exchange, make pass for others, hide themselves to make present some entities that are not there: the signified. In this game of transfer and replacement that seems to define the essence of language, words in rough acquire a condition of void. Being endlessly repeated by the subjects across the time and without being able to permanently fixed meaning, become hollow; empty cabinets in which we temporarily store objects, people, emotions, but also facts: events. We use the same system of symbols to designate real (a tree), mental (sadness, love) or abstract (concepts, ideas) things.
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