The Revelation of Language

Language is a lie detector itself. Research to uncover  secrets is not needed. You are broadcasting truth, even if you don't know it or like it, "the truth of language is that it unveils the Nothing of all things...Nothing is the final veil, the final name of language" (Giorgio Agamben. Leland De la Durantaye. A Critical Introduction 179).

Not to misunderstand, nothing is not what is thought. Language masks it, the sometime points of history dress up.  Chuang Po said that the reduction of all things to our opinion of them  is like this strip off the  "nothing to reveal" (Legge I, 184).  "Human history is [not] unfolding with a progressive purpose in view." Where are we going?  Chuang Tzu says, "Men bustle about and toil; the sagely man seems stupid and to know nothing. He blends ten thousand years together... (Legge, I, 195f) so in the end the butterfly dreams it is Kuang Kau (197). Combatants argue yes and no in their arguments about nothing. What is it out of which they argue? A dream? Language about nothing. The truth in their words is like soda in a bottle. Take the substitution word LORD for the real word that stands in those texts. Is it better pure,  a certain name unpolluted by subversion if the use itself prevents more of the truth than the polluted would? Truth in words or in the thing? We hesitate to call what is behind the words anything except an attitude. Attitude is the truth to judge, the soda in the word. Internet sales and cold calls are successful because their words are empty cans. It is no surprise to us when words are used empty, when justice is spoken to hide injustice, beauty ugliness, so we're not surprised when language fails in this sense, but we are surprised when it succeeds, when justice, beauty, love come out of the words themselves, when the nothing survives its expression, when the words come forth, The Bright Extensive Will. So the can is important, but we can feel the attitude without the words.

Human ethos is "human speech itself" in social connection,  a function of one anothers'  language who  "become transparent to themselves." We therefore attempt "to become conscious of the meaning of the fact that human beings speak" (Agamben,180). The joy of this  experience is "language itself." I call it joy because  you have heard it done in your children and know intuitively the language universals that exist in the child's acquisition, the ma ma and da da of its being, fundamental identities that overwhelm  philosophy. Language is sound and meaning, the cells connect tissue and the fabric is sewn, tailored with age to become the marvel of  being to no purpose other than to be language. That is language itself, "being conscious of the fact that human beings speak." So language is the fact itself of speaking. 

Everything dishonest and hidden is already revealed in the event of language. I have not met the hypothetical person who exists who can hide language and prevent its ultimate revelation of themselves.  Language is the revelation of everything.  So it must be obvious that Agamben  concerns "the very matter-- or the potentiality-- of thought (la materia stressa o la potenza del pensiero"). Language is thought, not thought language.  I don't know how to write that large enough. Actually thought is mental speech overheard. Language itself is social connection, "the rendering common of what one thought of as one's own" (Agamben,181).  I can see into it and know it itself, what it really is and not some other you may pretend it to be. 

Unmasking language in common expands the "expropriation of language"  to the communication of everything. Agamben sees this as a problem for media speech and entertainment  as we all do. Unmasking is not just of the masked media, but of all society that media language has drained of meaning, of words become nonsense, untruth, falsities. The expropriation  that "free usage" of  language brings to communication is this, that like some state dispossessing a foreign corporation from its natural resources, deceit is expropriated from its trappings, hence comes the possibility of change.

"To liberate [the means] of communication so that they do not again fall prey to this isolation and separation" (182), language is already liberated-literate in itself. Deceit is shorn. Something deeper than language is at play if language  manipulated against itself reveals itself, reveals deceit in all speakers in common. 

"So thought finds itself for the first time, today, confronted by its task without any illusion and without any possible alibi" (182)...forfeiting every imaginary integrity...of home, race, class." Agamben says there is "no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize (Coming Community, 43). De la Durantaye says what everyone thinks anyway, that "the impoverishment of political discourse, and the increasing reliance on spectacular situations, sound bites" (182) is a crisis. Wasn't Crises Antigone's father?

Agamben says it's too soon to get off the bus. The destruction by the global that "empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities" (Coming Community, 83) must be carried through to its unclothing, "not remaining unveiled in its nothingness... bringing language itself to language" (183). Whatever mess this makes in the telling, I can't learn much about you if your speech is honest, only if it is deceitful, so the one to whom language is no revelation is honest. Pleased to meet you. "Your word O LORD is eternal. To all perfection I see a limit, but your commands are boundless."