Abstract
The chapter further explores the idea that an experience of astonishment brings about a difficulty of intelligible expression and can challenge language’s sense-making capacities. This, I argue, reveals a more general and chronic difficulty with meaning, namely the impossibility of finding an ultimate ground for the meaning of our words. The difficulty of the groundlessness of meaning, a central theme both for Lacan and for Wittgenstein, gives rise to the temptation to avoid it either through an attempt to ground meaning in the a priori or through the rejection of the difficulty as a fictitious by-product of grammar. I discuss this and sketch the possibility of a third stance that does not attempt to avoid groundlessness.
How can it be possible, Socrates, or to give a name to anything else of this sort, if while we are speaking it always evades us, being, as it is, in flux?
Plato, Theaetetus
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Notes
- 1.
It might be helpful to add here Lacan’s own criticism of any equivalence between discourse and pointing, as well as of any act of pointing to a thing to show what one means. For even if one points to something, it still remains open what they are really pointing to, so that one is always in need of further meaning:
In no way can we consider that the fundamental endpoint is to point to a thing. There is an absolute non-equivalence between discourse and pointing. Whatever you take the ultimate element of discourse to be reduced to, you will never be able to replace it with your index finger—recall the quite correct remark by Saint Augustine. If I designate something by pointing to it, no one will ever know whether my finger is designating the object’s colour or its matter, or whether it’s designating a stain or crack, etc. You need words, discourse, to discern this. (1997, 137)
- 2.
As I discuss later on, I approach the notion of analysis in a way that objects to the logical empiricist reading of the Wittgensteinian analysis. Instead of being a tool for finding the cement of logic , analysis is rather a tool that we can use for clarity, a tool for understanding oneself and others.
- 3.
This is her version of Cavell’s “avoidance.”
- 4.
I owe this example to Christos Ioannidis.
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Balaska, M. (2019). The Expression of Astonishment. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_2
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