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PARTISAN REVIEW
always
loose
enough to retain
some
transfer-some
metapherein–
between senses,
some
poetical resonance . We are caught up, whether
we will or no, in the play ofwords which is
the
play of the world.
I have been talking so far about distinctions between kinds of,
or aspects of, linguistic activity: outer vs . inner processes; language
spoken or written; explicit vs . implicit sense or meaning; literal lan–
guage as against metaphor. I
come
now to a contrast between lan–
guage itself and something other than speech but rerated to it: to
the
contrast between speech and gesture. In the
Confessions
passage from
which we started, you will remember, Augustine remarks that the
grown-ups show their intentions by their bodily movements, "as it
were," he remarks parenthetically, "the natural words of all peo–
pIes, "
(tamquam verbis naturalibus omnium gentium).
Wittgenstein
makes little of this parenthesis at the outset,
yet
it plays an important
role in his whole enterprise
(some
of
the
notes in
Zettel
bring this out
especially clearly). Gesture is natural language, as it were. Language
is then a sort of artificial gesture . If we put it back into
the
context of
movement from which it sprang, we may free it from the immobiliz–
ing influence of philosophy and get it going again in its right and
proper way. "Proper": there might
be
a whole Derridaan excursus
there, but let
me
stay for now with Wittgenstein: let language
come
unstuck, let it work naturally once more . Hence the "form of life"
formula: natural ways of movement, forms of going on, are the con- .
trolling medium, the limits, of the artifacts of culture, including
words. Nature controls culture, or ought to control it.
Derrida's move, again, is just the opposite of this. Husserl, he
points out, considered gesture external to language because it is not
said,
only done. But the universality of the indicative as against the
expressive role of language shows that the moment of pure presence
is unreachable; there is always a sort of trailing of the indicative, of
the pointing aspect of speech behind what is truly to
be
expressed. If
presence were attainable, that would indeed
be
"natural language,"
like Rousseau's imagined fust moment of speaking at the spring. Far
from showing us, therefore, that language is a natural activity,
the
omnipresence of the indicative, of gesture-the omnipresence of
absence, if you will-betrays the fact that language is wholly artifi–
cial: a product of culture through and through. We gesticulate
through words in their referring, as against their expressive, func-
