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The Ineffable and the Ethical
Author(s) -
Srinivasan Amia
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12484
Subject(s) - citation , psychology , computer science , library science
A recurring theme of Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject (2015) is that which exceeds language. It is a difficult topic for something written in language. If we say, as Butler does, that ‘the body’, ‘the subject’ or ‘the infinite’ cannot be fully represented in language, then what is it exactly that we think we are doing when we say so? Either we are saying something that makes sense – in which case those things turn out not to exceed language after all – or we are saying something that makes no sense, that is simply nonsense. Ramsey joked that ‘what we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle. . .either’ (1931, 238). His target was Wittgenstein’s apparent willingness to describe what, by Wittgenstein’s own account in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, could not be described, namely the fundamental preconditions of linguistic representation. This hostility to expressing the supposedly inexpressible – shared by Ramsey’s contemporaries Russell and Neurath – has largely been inherited by later analytic philosophers. Indeed this is as good a way as any of marking where analytic philosophers take their leave from the socalled ‘Continental’ tradition. Unlike Continental philosophers (the story goes) analytic philosophers pride themselves on confining their remarks to the coherent and non-paradoxical. But those who work outside the analytic tradition, like Butler, might very well think that Ramsey’s joke is on him. After all, if I’m unable to tell you in words just how delighted I am, an ecstatic whistle might do the trick. Ramsey’s metaphor is unfortunate, one might think, precisely because musical expression is the paradigm case of showing what cannot be said. In Senses of the Subject, Butler suggests that we don’t have to employ non-representational forms of expression in order to get a grip on the inexpressible, that the work of music can be done with and through language itself: indeed, that it can be done by philosophy. We see this in how Butler reads the historical figures with whom she is concerned, particularly Descartes and Kierkegaard, and also in how she invites us to read