By Richard Mather
All language communicates itself [1]
§
Was it clergyman Hosea Ballou who said that “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book”? [2] These days we are more likely to say that everything exists in order to end up online, with the most controversial stuff reduced to 280 characters and a metadata tag.
§
In Judaism, the world exists because it came from a book. Jewish mystical tradition holds that the universe emerged from twenty-two Hebrew letters. God drew them, combined them, weighed them, interchanged them, and through them created the cosmos. Another way of looking at it is this: God looked inside the original book, the Torah, the blueprint of creation, and fashioned the world. Is all human language, then, a midrash on God’s original text?
§
If Semitic languages scholar Raymond A. Bowman is correct in his assertion that the root hwy (of Yahweh) is cognate to the Akkadian awatu (which means to speak), then the name of Israel’s deity means The Speaker or He [Who] Speaks. [3] The Israelites, though, were afraid of getting too close to the source of the Word. They said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die”. [4]
§
Consider the ancient Greek word stoicheion (στoιχειoν), the elements of speech “from which all things have come, the material causes of the universe”. [5] I cannot help but be reminded of this passage from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things]:
With very small changes the identical particles
Make wood or fire, just as, you may say, the same letters
— Or almost the same — will produce the words fir or fire,
With different sounds and certainly different meanings. [6]
§
For Lucretius, letters are atoms and vice versa. Put very simply, letters (like atoms) freefall through the void until they encounter another letter (or atom) in a chance collision called a swerve, giving rise to increasing turbulence, and ultimately order and sense.
§
Michel Serres, who was greatly inspired by Lucretius, claims there is a noise that precedes language — a “background noise, which precedes all signals”. [7] This noise is an infinite cacophony of signs and unreadable static. However, this noise is both the very possibility of language and its interference. Indeed, the noise (which Serres sometimes refers to as a parasite) forces language to become more complex and more ordered, all of which takes place in an increasingly turbulent state. For Serres, turbulence is a kind of quasi-stability insofar as there is an inclination for nonsense to turn towards sense — at least temporarily.
§
My own view is this: Each phoneme is an atom of sense or near-sense. Phonemes take other phonemes as their objects. Linguistic desire ensures that one phoneme preserves the life of other phonemes, straining towards a higher order of sense in a chain of words. Phonemes and the words they construct keep each other alive. Language’s libidinal tendency to build higher unities of sense prevents the phoneme from disappearing into total nonsense or silence.
§
Language’s main foe is noise, not silence.
§
For Nietzsche, language is “a complete organism”. [8] In a similar vein, James Perrin Warren (in his reflections on Walt Whitman’s use of English) depicts language as an organism that composes itself. “Flowing, composing, and absorbing, language takes on the characteristics of a self-directed, purposive entity”. [9]
§
“Yes! Language is indeed alive!” [10] Each language is a “living organism” and the totality of languages a “grand series of organisms, all built after the same archetype, the same skeleton; but each presenting its special structural stamp, as fish, reptile, bird, mammal, are all modifications of one primitive Idea”.
§
Language not only has its own voice, it is its own voice. It is formally separate from the intention of the producer (speaker, writer) and the receiver (reader, listener). While language as a medium appears transparent and natural, it often says more than intended, or it can say less. There is a certain contrivance in all kinds of speech-acts and texts.
§
I agree with Benjamin’s notion that language is its own medium and all language communicates itself. [11] Language has no need of an object; it is its own object. It has no higher purpose; it speaks for itself. Language speaks because it has a libidinal desire to speak.
§
What is communicated in language is the “linguistic being of things”, states Benjamin, for whom there is nothing on earth that does not partake of language, “for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents”. [12] Things also have a linguistic being of their own, which is their original name, now lost. However, it is only human beings who actually name things. This is what Benjamin calls the “linguistic being of man”.
§
According to Heidegger, language “has us in view, has appropriated us to itself”. [13] Language “has woven us into its speaking”. [14] Language has a use for us. There is something menacing here. Do we even have a say in this?
§
“I ask the unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth in the language as I make it, Speak! For I name myself your master, who come to serve”. [15] So says Robert Duncan. It begins well enough but no poet is a master of language. It masters us. Language serves nobody but itself.
§
Earlier I cited a quote that says “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book”. For Boris Groys, this is exactly what happened in the case of Alexandre Kojève’s infamous lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For Kojève, writes Groys, “Spirit abandons man and becomes a book, a thing. Man thus becomes the bearer of truth's reproduction instead of its production”. [16] For Kojève, Hegel’s Phenomenology marked the culmination of the history of desire. There could never be anything new after Hegel; all we can do now is reproduce Hegel’s text — and keep on reproducing it. Since Hegel’s Phenomenology now functions as the conduit of Spirit (desire), man is no longer the bearer of Spirit (desire). Spirit is now printed, is now a text. [17]
§
Another fabulous insight from Groys: Stalin came to believe that “language is capable of entirely replacing the economy, money and capital because it has direct access to all human activities and spheres of life”. [18] Language is the currency of life; it circulates like the blood in our veins.
§
For William S. Burroughs, language is a virus that makes the spoken word possible:
It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter. [19]
§
As a virus, language is unhuman. It is, suggests Burroughs, a “parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system”. [20]
§
Language is a physical infection, a viral infection, a word virus. It exists in a symbiotic, even parasitical, relationship with humanity; “it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host”, as Burrough makes explicit in an essay collected in The Adding Machine. This virus, this organism as he also calls it, has “no internal function other than to replicate itself”. [21] Given language’s adaptive capabilities, we might assume that language evolves along the same evolutionary lines as everything else.
§
Language is what Giorgio Agamben calls a parasitic apparatus, “perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses — one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face”. [22] It’s as if humanity is in the grip of a half-alien biopower.
§
Talking of language’s desire to replicate, it is amazing to see how language loves to copymix — to include additional information as it reproduces itself. But like a game of Chinese whispers, some information is also lost and/or modified in the process.
§
I fear language as much as I admire it.
§
We must all become phorontologists, experts in parasites, if we are to remain alert to this self-replicating lexical organism. To borrow a phrase, it is a battle against the bewitchment of intelligence by language. [23]
§
Perhaps we are neural components in a vast and independent intelligence called language. What are we going to do about it? What can we say? This is very odd. Odd that language is allowing me to write this. Language is critiquing itself.
§
How to escape the virus of language? Even a life lived in complete silence wouldn’t stop the language of thought, also known as mentalese.
§
The language of thought hypothesis describes thought as being language-like. Thinking is structured like a language. Our thinking possesses the structural rules of grammar in general, and syntax (the order of words in a sentence), in particular.
§
If we cannot escape language, perhaps we can disrupt language’s power over us. Hence the cut-ups of the Dadaists and Burroughs. [24] This is what Christopher Land has described as lines of flight within language rather than flights from language: “The disruption of signs, of culture jamming, may be our way to some kind of freedom. [...] The signals must be confused, read backwards, returned to sender but with a twist”. [25] In other words, the cut-up is an immanent liberation — an internal disruption, “a momentary stutter” from within, enabling a “new logics of sense” to emerge from the text.
§
In the language of Carlos Michelstaedter, the tragic young philosopher who tried to leap over language’s rhetorical traps, Con le parole guerra alle parole. [26]
Part 2
§
It is not we who speak; it is language. Our response to language is what makes us human. It is because of language that we live in a world. Without language we would be mere inhabitants scrabbling around on the planet. Language, like the world, is something we live in.
§
Without language, we are animals. Language speaks us into being human. Language writes us into being human. As such, we are human beings.
§
Speaking enables thinking. Without language we couldn’t think. It is because we speak that we find the language to think.
§
“We do not merely speak the language — we speak by way of it”, says Heidegger. [27] “We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking”.
§
If Heidegger and Benjamin are to be believed, all things, animate and inanimate, communicate their attributes and functions in some fashion.
§
Though much escapes our attention, we must try to be alert to what things are saying if we are to witness being, though what being is is hard to fathom.
§
Nietzsche is less romantic and more sceptical. For Nietzsche, language falsifies the world. This is because of its metaphorical nature. There is no such thing as a natural language. There is no such thing as an unrhetorical language. Put simply: Language is rhetoric. This is because language “desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an epistêmè [knowledge]”, explains Nietzsche. [28]
§
Adrin Martin, an undergraduate research scholar at Texas A&M University, recently wrote an intriguing paper on the role of language in obsessive-compulsive disorder and its treatments. [29] “OCD is at the will of language”, he says. “Through language, OCD is a storied phenomenon that carries with it a plethora of meanings from an immeasurable number of literary, historical, and political sources”. More specifically he highlights the rhetorical effects of therapeutic interventions. Although metaphors and other rhetorical devices are a convenient means for understanding OCD, they come with “material influences on medical decision-making”. For example, the therapeutic desire “to conform the brain into something mechanical” reveals the underlying assumption that the patient and his/her brain are separate entities; that brain processes can be “tampered with” at no risk of affecting the integrity of the patient’s personality. It is the same assumption, the same medical model, that justified a rise in the (now discredited) procedure known as lobotomy in the UK, USA and northern Europe during the 1940s and 1950s.
§
Language, the Word, attempts to impose order on the primal chaos or inconsistent multiplicity of tohu va-bohu, which is prior to any determination by language. And yet it never quite manages it. [30] This is because any sense of oneness or consistency comes from a temporary arrangement of language. Language thingifies aspects of being, turns it into beings. But there must be so much that escapes language’s application of oneness, so much that remains unthinged. It doesn’t help that language is itself multiple. Every word is a constellation of meanings, impressions, connections, images, memories, feelings. There is a “fuzzy” logic at work.
§
The constellation that makes up a word is what Derrida calls the supplemental effect of language.
§
A piece of language has an unconscious layer, a sediment of etymologies, functions, memories, connotations, images. We might call this the archaeology or genealogy of language — language’s cultural history, in other words. A sentence, an utterance, contains many virtual meanings, meanings that could have been, or might be, made actual. This potentiality in language is, according to Derrida, a quasi-autonomous power, a “dynamis”, that can act “without the initiative and beyond the control of speaking subjects”. [31]
§
Language proliferates. It knows no limits. It is continuous rather than discrete, fuzzy rather than true or false. Language has the uncanny knack of transgressing itself. Indeed, language when spoken or written always exceeds its intended function, for it is always reaching after more language, for more of itself.
§
Strip away one layer of meaning and you find another. Language goes all the way down to the bottom. Perhaps, though, there is no bottom, no fundament, no being-in-itself that is prior to any determination by language, just an infinity of strata. (Notice how language tricks us into thinking the nature of reality is vertical. Why can’t reality be horizontal — an infinite surface, an endless expanse of text which we traverse?)
§
However, language is not all-powerful; it never expresses something completely. While language tries to slow and pin down the flow of phenomena, the constant outpouring of life is too fast, too mighty, to capture.
§
There is no true or false language. Language can assert a false state of affairs just as well as it can assert a true state of affairs. Indeed, language is amoral. It cannot be trusted to tell or convey the truth. It cannot even be trusted to convey a simple fact. The trouble with language is that it conceals, covers up, confuses. Language can’t be trusted.
§
Far from revealing being as Heidegger believes, language is really a kind of magic, a pantomime, a delirium, a bewitchment, which conceals the truth of being. Any attempt to reveal truth often conceals more than it is possible to reveal.
§
Perhaps language is an escape from being — an escape into the rhetorics of consumerism, media, legalese, politics.
§
Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, asserts that language only expresses facts. Ethics, however, cannot be put into words. “It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed”, he states boldly. [32] It follows that “there can be no ethical propositions”. Vulnerable to all kinds of (mis)interpretation and ambiguities, an ethical proposition is in trouble as soon as it lands. Ethics is something we do, not say, according to Wittgenstein. In order to do ethics, we need to let go of language.
§
Language precedes you or I. What Ferdinand de Saussure calls langue — the conventions of a system of signs — pre-exists and transcends the speaker/writer. It is because of langue that parole — concrete instances of meaningful speech — is possible.
§
According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, a word has two parts: sound and meaning. The latter is constituted by the thought of the community, i.e., society’s laws and assumptions. Again, language precedes any particular individual. The individual has no say in the matter. Language is social, public; it can never be private.
§
As Wittgenstein demonstrates in Philosophical Investigations, there can be no private language. [33] A private language isn’t a language at all.
§
This shared sense of language means that consciousness or subjectivity is (in part) constructed and/or shaped by public discourse. The ‘I’ of which we speak isn’t our own. Indeed, the fact that we all say ‘I’ suggests the ‘I’ is much the same for everyone.
§
The Sophists taught that every argument could be countered with an opposing argument. As Nietzsche found, all language is rhetoric. Language wants to persuade you. It is Plato’s Gorgias who sums it up best:
The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. [34]
§
Language is a “volitional force” that moves the mind in some way. [35] It changes us, affects us. One might say that language is a form of magic or witchcraft; it bewitches us. Language should always be used with care.
§
“The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real”, declares Nietzsche. [36] For Wittgenstein, a simile “that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance, and this disquiets us”. [37]
§
How can we trust language? Words are the tool of rhetoric. How can you trust this?
§
Language does not represent experience, it replaces it. Michel Serres says, “The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard”. [38]
§
For Novalis true conversation is “a game with words”. [39] Language is too wayward. It is an absurd error to think our language truly represents states of affairs. No one knows the essential thing about language, says Novalis. Language is “concerned only with itself”.
§
“But what if I were compelled to speak”, asks Novalis. [40] “What if this urge to speak were the mark of the inspiration of language, the working of language within me? And my will only wanted to do what I had to do? Could this in the end, without my knowing or believing, be poetry?”
§
The language of anger can cause us to be angry. Calming language can pacify us. Language has an emotional effect, an effect we may not have been prepared for, an effect that astonishes or frightens us, an effect that can inspire and embolden us.
§
Language is disputative as Dickens’ Bleak House so brilliantly demonstrates. How many unresolved issues there must be at any given moment because we cannot agree on the meaning of words.
§
Given that language has volitional (will-like) properties, one is forced to ask: Does language conceal its own motivations for being uttered/written?
§
For Plato, rhetoric is the art of enchanting the soul. For Aristotle, rhetoric is “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion”. [41] Aristotle is more prosaic, though persuasion and enchantment add up to the same thing: deception.
§
“The universe is the flower of rhetoric”, writes Lacan. [42] And so is the ego. “Rhetoric forcibly compels me to do things”, says Michelstaedter. [43] It was rhetoric that forced Michelstaedter to write his masterpiece Persuasion and Rhetoric. Upon its completion he committed suicide.
§
According to Lacan, Freud discovered rhetorical formations or language mechanisms in neurotic disorders. These, says Lacan, “can be seen to dominate and organise the construction of certain so-called neurotic disorders, unbeknown to the subject, outside his conscious ego”. [44] Again, language is not in our control; it controls us.
§
Language is all around us, present in signs, so many signs. We are all public agents living inside Burroughs’ novel, The Soft Machine: “So now I am a public agent and don't know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air”. [45]
§
The way the mind generates a piece of language, a sentence, a phrase, or maybe just a word — often against the will of the person — tells us that language speaks for itself and not for the person who is made to think or utter it.
§
Words are material things: they leave through the mouth or are kept there, suppressed by the teeth. They threaten to burst out of the mouth. They are broadcast. They are in the head. They enter the ear. They are all around us.
§
Words and sentences interact with each other far in excess of their intended meaning. This excess is the jouissance of language, the libidinal joy (enjoyment) of words intercoursing with other words.
§
Between the desire and the act falls language. Thinking in words (mentalese) gets in the way of doing. It can cause hesitation, rob spontaneity. In cases of OCD, mental language can act autonomously and against the will of the thinker.
§
For those of us with OCD, distressing words — indeed, entire sentences/statements — can force themselves upon the sufferer, who then feels compelled to suppress, delete or undo the intrusions.
§
Language, once uttered or written, is free to do its work. Language, and all its concomitant meanings, are often hidden from the writer/speaker and the audience.
§
How many times have you heard yourself say or think, I didn’t mean to say that or that’s not what I meant at all. Once language is uncaged from the mouth, it is beyond our control. We mean to make sense but we miss the mark (the meaning of sin). The arrows of speech have a habit of falling short or of striking the innocent.
§
“Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk”, writes Burroughs in The Ticket That Exploded. [46] Anyone who tries to meditate comes up against this “resisting organism”. It is there, too, when we try to fall asleep after a stressful day.
§
“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing”, Burroughs told an interviewer. [47] I suspect most people at most times of their waking day are compulsively verbalizing. We cannot help it. How can we stop if there really is a “resisting organism”?
§
Language is like a junk habit. We cannot help but talk or think in language. The nature of the habit is to “invade, damage, occupy”, as Burroughs puts it in The Soft Machine. [48]
§
Language is just one more form of control. It is just one more habit that we are in the grip of. It can never be a means to any practical end. It can never be a means to anything but more language.
§
The concept of tabula rasa can be traced back to Aristotle’s De Anima. If the mind starts blank does the world impress knowledge upon it by means of language?
§
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if scientists one day discover that language writes itself on the brain. Let us compare the brain of a new-born baby and a person aged one hundred and see if we can make out the marks, the hieroglyphics, the crossings-out.
§
Language creates the narrative and continuous self-identity of the ‘I’. Our selves are created by language and our internal monologues are made of language. Consciousness is an effect of language’s temporal quality. Time reveals itself when the object of a sentence is deferred.
§
If the ‘I’ is split into itself and the body, does this mean the body has its own language? Are symptoms of pain the body’s way of communicating?
§
Cormac McCarthy believes that the unconscious avoids verbal instructions, even in cases where language might prove useful. This suggests that the unconscious “doesn’t much like language and even that it doesn’t trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?” [49]
§
Why has evolution bequeathed human beings with a larynx that is positioned too far down the throat, thereby making us “a species highly vulnerable to choking on our food — a not uncommon cause of death”? [50] Language has a lot to answer for.
§
I suggest that we are more at risk of choking when we are made to eat our words.
eat (one's) words — To retract, regret, or feel foolish about what one has previously said.
choke on (one's) (own) words — To have particular difficulty saying something, especially because one is overwhelmed with emotion. [51]
§
I speak, I choke, I die. But language is eternal. It will go on and on.
Endnotes
[1] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”.
[2] Some attribute this saying to French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.
[3] Raymond A. Bowman, “Yahweh the Speaker”.
[4] Exodus 20:19.
[5] Joseph Henry Thayer, Thayer's Greek Lexicon of the New Testament.
[6] C.H. Sisson’s translation.
[7] Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p.78.
[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘On the Origin of Language”. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and
Language, p. 210.
[9] James Perrin Warren, Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment, p.9.
[10] Attributed to philologist William Swinton, Rambles Among Words, p. 269. However, some critics believe the book was ghost-written or partly ghost-written by Walt Whitman.
[11] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”.
[12] ibid.
[13] Martin Heidegger,“The Way to Language”, On the Way to Language, p.134.
[14] ibid, p.112.
[15] Robert Duncan, The Collected Later Poems and Plays, p.8.
[16] Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, p.161.
[17] Groys (or his translator) calls this “inhuman”. “Unhuman” might be more appropriate.
[18] Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, p.35ff.
[19] William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p.134.
[20] William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, p.39.
[21] William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, p.47.
[22] Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, p.14.
[23] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §109
[24] A cut up is what happens when a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.
[25] Christopher Land, “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control”.
[26] Literally, With words, war on words.
[27] Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language”, On the Way to Language, p.124.
[28] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Lecture Notes on Rhetoric”.
[29] Adrin Martin, “The Rhetoric of Disorder: A Case Study on the Effects of Metaphor in OCD Treatment Text”.
[30] Tohu va-Vohu is a Hebrew phrase found in the first creation narrative in Genesis. It describes the condition of the earth before the creation of light.
[31] Jacques Derrida, “The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano”, Acts of Religion, pp. 231-214.
[32] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus §6.42, §6.421.
[33] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §243, §244-§271.
[34] The Older Sophists, a Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments, p. 53.
[35] William A. Covino, “Magic And/As Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy”.
[36] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”, The Portable Nietzsche, pp.44-45.
[37] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §112.
[38] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p.132.
[39] Novalis, “Monologue”, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, pp. 92-93.
[40] ibid.
[41] Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, p,15.
[42] Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972-1973, p.64.
[43] Carlo Michelstaedter. Persuasion and Rhetoric, p.4.
[44] Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, The Psychoses 1955-1956, p.238.
[45] William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p.27.
[46] William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, p.39.
[47] William S. Burroughs, “Journey Through Time-Space”, The Job: Interviews, p.37.
[48] William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p.7.
[49] Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem”, Nautilus.
[50] ibid.
[51] Definitions courtesy of The Free Dictionary by Farlex. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/
Further reading
Agamben, Giorgio, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford University Press, 2009.
Aristotle. The “Art” of Rhetoric. Tr. by J. H. Freese. Harvard University Press, 1926.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”. 1916.
Bowman, Raymond A. “Yahweh the Speaker”. Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol 3, No 1, Jan 1944.
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. Grove Press, 1959.
Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine. Grove Press 1961.
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. Arcade Publishing, 1986.
William S. Burroughs. “Journey Through Time-Space”. The Job: Interviews. Ed. Daniel Odier. Penguin, 1989.
Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. Fourth Estate, 2010.
Covino, William A. “Magic And/As Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy”. Journal of Advanced Composition Vol 12, No 2, Autumn 1992.
Duncan, Robert. The Collected Later Poems and Plays. Ed. Peter Quartermain. University of California Press, 2014.
Groys, Boris. Introduction to Antiphilosophy. Tr. David Fernbach. Verso, 2012.
Groys, Boris. The Communist Postscript. Tr. Thomas Ford. Verso Books, 2014.
Heidegger, Martin. “A Dialogue on Language”. On the Way to Language. Harper and Row, 1971.
Martin Heidegger. “The Way to Language”. On the Way to Language. Harper and Row, 1971.
Lacan, Jacques. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, The Psychoses 1955-1956. Tr. Russell Grigg. Norton, 1997.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972-1973. Tr. Bruce Fink. Norton, 1999.
Land, Christopher. “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control”. Ephemera 2005. Vol 5(3): http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/5-3land.pdf
Martin, Adrin. “The Rhetoric of Disorder: A Case Study on the Effects of Metaphor in OCD Treatment Text”. The OAKTrust Digital Repository, 2021. URI https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/194367
McCarthy, Cormac. “The Kekulé Problem”. Nautilus 47. April 2017.
Michelstaedter, Carlo. Persuasion and Rhetoric. Yale University Press, 2004.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Tr. Walter Kaufmann. Penguin, 1976.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Nietzsche's ‘Lecture Notes on Rhetoric’: A Translation”. Ed. Carole Blair. Philosophy & Rhetoric Vol 16, No 2, 1983.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘‘On the Origin of Language”. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and tr. Sander L. Gilman et al. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Ed and Tr. Daniel Breazeale. Humanities Press, 1990.
Novalis, “Monologue” (1798), (Tr. Joyce Crick). German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe. Ed. Kathleen Wheeler. Cambridge University Press. 1984.
Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Tr. Roxanne Lapidus. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Sisson, C. H. The Poem on Nature [by Lucretius], Carcanet Press, 1976.
Ed. Sprague, Rosamond Kent. The Older Sophists, a Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments. University of South Carolina Press, 1972.
Swinton, William. Rambles Among Words. Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, and Co, 1872.
Thayer, Joseph Henry. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon of the New Testament. American Book Company. 1889.
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