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Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance; or, How to Really Do Things with Words

Author(s): Barbara Cassin and Andrew Goffey


Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 42, No. 4 (2009), pp. 349-372
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655365
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Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance;
or, How to Really Do Things with Words

Barbara Cassin

"How to do things with words?" How can you really do things with nothing
but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of dis
course that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a "performative" in
Austin's sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies considerably in
extension and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that
transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a "world effect."
Making the connection with performativity is all the more tempting,
as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse,
cannot be rendered better than by "performance," on condition that "perfor
mance" is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a "hap
pening," an "event," an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is
the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus)?something
like an "exploit."1
"Performative" is Austin's own invention, acclimated to French by
Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); there
after it was immediately adopted and popularized by Emile Benveniste
(1966). "Performance"is a much older term, which, after ceaseless borrow
ings to and fro between English and French, has seen its meaning shifted
and extended accordingly. Kleins Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary
of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English "performer"

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 42, No. 4, 2009


Copyright ? 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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BARBARA CASSIN

was coined from Old French parfour ir (from medieval Latin perfurn ire
and/or parformer, in addition French borrowed the term at least three
times, if the Dictionnaire culturel de la langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be
believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races to mean
the "manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public"; in
1953, to denote "individual result in the accomplishment of a task"; and
in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, to mean the opposite of "competence.
In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport (perfor
mance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of
the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics
(performance/competence), and modern art (performance in the sense o
happening).
Let us start with the relationship between performance and performa
tive. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, with
out naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the "locutionary"
on the one hand and the "illocutionary" or performative on the other, calling
it the "perlocutionary" ("per" precisely as in "performative").2
But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contempo
rary frame of reference that informs us today: he "invented" the performa
tive as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty,
the permeability, of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the
difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do
Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: "It is time [...] to make a fresh
start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in
which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we
do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which b
saying something we do something). Perhaps some clarification and defi
nition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, 'doing something' is
very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not
'doing something'?" (1975, 91-92).
In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the differ
ence between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary has
for a long time been in a "tangle". It is not so easy to differentiate between
the three. All three are, precisely, "acts" of language, and without doubt the
categories are at once abstract, slippery, and overlapping. The "locutionary"
or "constative," a "normal" statement, is an utterance that "says something";
it is an "act of saying something" (1975, 100): "The cat is on the mat" has
a meaning (both a "sense" and a "reference") and is susceptible of being
either true or false. For its part, the "illocutionary," or performative in strict

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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words

sensu does something "in saying" it (1975, 99): "Excuse me" or "The session
is open," has a "force" and is susceptible of "success" or "failure" ("felicity"
or "infelicity"). Finally, the perlocutionary does something by saying it: to
convince, persuade or mislead has an effect and produces consequences.3
The difference between the performative-illocutionary and the perlocu
tionary, between force and effect, is all the more labile as the illocutionary,
to be felicitous, is itself "linked with effects": in particular, "an effect must
be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out"
(1975,116).4
It is the difficulty of stabilizing this difference between "force" and
"effect" that leads me to reflect on what I call "performance before the
performative" as an invitation to shake up the status of rhetorics.
In truth, my interest is in what unites three types of objects I have been
working on in recent years. And the answer is something like discursive
performance. Trying to explain this to myself, I would like to set out a route
that traverses various epochs and places as well as various literary genres
and disciplines.
We first stop in ancient Greece: the primal scene of Parmenides/
Gorgias, where one understands the distinction between "faithful discourse"
(truly reporting things) and "efficacious discourse" (doing things for real),
between ontology-phenomenology on the one hand and logology on the
other. One understands the distinction and at the same time acquires
the means by which to call it into question, to the profit of a generalized
logology. That is to say, one reevaluates ontology as a discourse that acts, as
an absolutely successful performance, even.
The model for the sophist performance is epideixis, in the rhetorical
sense of the term, and the model for rhetorical epideixis is the Encomium of
Helen. It is an epideictic performance that produces not only persuasion but
a "world effect": we are now in a world in which the innocence of Helen?
from Euripides to Offenbach and Hoffmansthal?is thinkable and even
plausible.
We then pass through the South Africa of the end of the last century,
taking up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aimed at
and thematized the effect of a doing with words. Of course, it did not
operate with words alone, because it was a concrete apparatus (Foucault
would have said "dispositif"); but to the extent that the goal was to make
a rainbow people, to construct a common past and produce reconciliation,
it was essentially words, statements, and stories that were required of this
apparatus.

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BARBARA CASSIN

Finally, we arrive in the here and now, at the Vocabulaire europeen des
philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004), whose Hum
boldtian foundation is the difference between the worlds that different
languages produce, the impact of the plurality of languages on discursiv
performance.

LOGOLOGY, EPIDEIXIS, RHETORIC

Ontology/Logology; or, How Gorgias Reads Parmenides, On Nature


as a Speech Act

In the reading that Gorgias's treatise On Nonbeing, or on Nature propose


of Parmenides' poem On Nature, or on Being, everything manifestly turns
around the way being and saying are knotted together. To make thing
brutally plain, it is one of two things: either there is being, esti, es gibt sein
and the task of man, the shepherd of being, is to speak it faithfully, in the
co-belonging of being, thinking, and saying: ontology, from Parmenides to
Heidegger. Or being is and is only there in and by the poem, as an effect of
saying, a discursive production, what I propose to call a performance: "logo
logy," to use Novalis's term.5
Gorgias's procedure, treatise against poem, consists simply in drawing
attention?an insolent attention?to all the maneuvers, whether of the
Greek language or discursivity itself, that allow the unveiling between
being and saying to take place. In particular he draws attention to the
manner in which On Nature passes from esti to to on, from the verb to the
subject-substantive participle (by a sort of linguistic "secretion"), by play
ing on the ensemble of meanings of esti ("it is possible," "it is true that,
"it is the case that," "is" in the sense of the copula and of identity, "is" i
the sense of existence) or, to put it in post-Aristotelian terms, by playin
on homonymy, or pollakh?s at least, and on amphiboly. To put it in slightly
more Austinian terms, On Nature can be seen as a situated utterance, as
discourse that makes the illocutionary force of each constative phrase felt,
at least as much as it can be seen as a series of propositions. On Nature,
then, as a speech act.
The limit effect or catastrophe thus produced consists in showing
that, if the text of ontology is rigorous, that is to say, if it does not consti
tute an exception in relation to the legislation that it sets up, then it is
sophist masterpiece. The presence of Being, the immediacy of Nature, th
evidence of a speech that is charged with saying them adequately, vanis

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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words

together: the physics that speech uncovers gives way to the politics that
discourse creates. Thanks to the sophists?the "masters of Greece," as Hegel
put it?one effectively attains here the dimension of politics, as an agora
for an agon: the city is an ongoing creation of language. It is even, as Jacob
Burkhardt and Hannah Arendt say, "the most talkative world of all."

The Status of Epideictic "Performance": Rhetorical Effect and


World Effect

The status of epideixis is central in this perspective.


Epideixis is the very word that tradition uses to refer to sophistic dis
cursivity. The term is consecrated by Plato (in, for example, Hippias Major
282c, 286a, Hippias Minor 363c, Gorgias 447c) and designates the speech
delivered by Prodicos, Hippias, and Gorgias in opposition to the dialogue
through questions and answers that Socrates is fond of. It is something
like a "lecture," or, indeed, a "performance," so much does the orator give of
himself: "The Thessalonians try to Gorgianize; they would have Critiasized
if Critias had gone on to give them an epideixis heautou Sophias'1 (Philostra
tus 1921,1:16), that is to say, with the same words Aristotle uses to refer to
Thaless shrewdness in using astronomy to make money, "a striking way of
performing his know-how" {Politics I259ai9).
The term itself can only be understood by contrast with apodeixis.
Deixis is the act, and the art, of pointing without speech, with one's index
finger extended, to the disappearing phenomenon. Or, with a sovereign
gesture, of indicating the route of being, like Justice in Parmenides' poem.
Apodeixis, which refers to all the apo (apophainesthai, apophansis) char
acteristic of phenomenology, is the art of showing "starting from" what is
shown, using it as a basis to "de-monstrate."6 With apodeixis, the phenomenon
becomes an object of science, passing from the singular to the general,
Socrates the man becomes visible in Socrates, and in such a way that one
is compelled to adhere to what is shown (let's not forget that apodeixis,
"proof," is the name for the technique of adhesion that constitutes the heart
of Aristotelian rhetoric).
Epideixis is the art of showing "before" and of showing "more,"
according to the two main senses of the prefix. In these two senses of epi,
performance and eulogy are linked together. It is to show, publicly, "before,"
in everyone's eyes: an epideixis may thus be a demonstration of force (the
deployment of an army, in Thucydides, for example, or the demonstration
of a crowd), an exhibition. But it is also to show "more" on the occasion of

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BARBARA CASSIN

this public demonstration: by putting an object on display, one makes use of


it as an example or a paradigm; one "overdoes" it?"making an elephant out
of a fly," Lucian says (2005, Praise of the Fly 12). And one thus shows oneself
"as well," as a talented orator, capable of contraries, or as a real "poet," a
fabricator. It is a matter, then, in the broad sense, of a performance; it may
be improvised or planned, written or spoken, but it is always related to the
show, the public. In the restricted sense, precisely codified by Aristotle's
rhetoric, it means epideictic eloquence, praise or blame, which speaks the
good or the shameful and aims at pleasure.
With sophistry, the two senses of performance and of eulogy are joined,
and each amplifies the other. The most memorable epideixis (the one
man show that made him a celebrity in Athens, that is to say, for always
throughout the world) is the Encomium of Helen, in which Gorgias praises
the praiseworthy and blames the blameworthy but nonetheless succeeds in
clearing the name of the infidel at whom everyone since Homer has pointed
an accusing finger. The paradoxical nature of the eulogy reveals itself clearly
here: Helen is the guiltiest of women, since she brought blood and fire to
the whole of Greece, yet Gorgias convinces us that Helen is innocence
itself. The supplement of deixis that is epideixis succeeds in turning the
phenomenon into its contrary: the phenomenon becomes the effect of the
all-powerful logos. This is why every eulogy is also, or, above all, a eulogy
to the logos'. "Discourse is a great master, which with the smallest and least
perceptible of bodies accomplishes the most divine of acts \theiotata erga
apotelei]" (82 Bn, ?8, DK II, 290; cf. Gorgias 1982).
I render apotelei as "accomplishes," I could say "performs": discourse
acts and performs acts and oeuvres (erga) to the end (apo). In his "game" of
re-creating Helen as henceforth?from Euripides and Isocrates to Goethe,
Hoffmanstahl, Offenbach, Claudel, and Giraudoux?innocent, Gorgias
makes it manifest that what is at stake in epideixis is not, as it is in phenom
enology, a matter of passing from the phenomenon to its saying but rather,
in a logological mode, a matter of passing from the saying to its effect.
The model, which Aristotle's De interpretatione will invert, finds itself
in place: is not phenomena but discourse that makes the soul suffer. Once
again, as Gorgias puts it:

Into those who hear it comes the shiver of fear, pity full of tears,
mournful longing, and faced with successes and failures belonging
to foreign actions and bodies, by the intermediary of discourses, the
soul experiences a passion of its own [ep'allotrion tepragmaton kai

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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words

s?mat?n idion tipatema dia ton logon epathen hepsukhe]. (Encomium


of 'Helen, ?9)

With this praise of poetry as a "speech with metre" (ibid., ?9), we are not
simply within rhetoric, in the classical sense of the term. Tyrannical and
demiurgical, discursive performance is double: it has an effect on the soul,
which passes from the strange or foreign to the proper with nothing but
words. At the same time, though, it has a world effect; the object of dis
course, the "fiction," takes on consistency and becomes reality.7 As Jean
Francois Lyotard underlines in The Differend: "It is not the addressee who
is seduced by the addressor. The addressor, the referent, the sense are no
less subject than the addressee to the seduction exerted" (1983, 84).
In fact, the world is transformed: with sophistry, we said, one goes
from physics to politics. The eulogy shows itself to be a moment of political
invention, which serves to forge a passage from the communion in the values
of the community (including the communion in the values of language, via
the meaning of words and metaphors, as Nietzsche emphasized) to the
creation of new values.
The first two paragraphs of the Encomium of Helen testify to this
passage and begin to produce it. I don't wish to recite the entire analysis,
just to sketch it out by quoting the paragraphs:

Order, for a city, is the excellence of its men; for a body, beauty;
for a mind, wisdom; for an action, virtue; for a speech, truth. The
opposite is disorder. Man, woman, speech, deed, city, thing, should
be honored with praise if praiseworthy, and incur blame if blame
worthy; for to blame the praisable or to praise the blamable is of
equal error and ignorance.
It is to the same man that it befalls to say with rectitude what
must be said, and to contradict those who blame Helen, a woman
which brought together, in one voice and one soul, the poets'
[songs], the auditors' credence, and the noise of a name which
bears the memory of misfortunes, / want, giving logic to discourse,
to have brought to an end the accusation against she of whom we
hear so much abuse, demonstrate that those who blame her are
wrong, show the truth and put an end to ignorance. (?1-2)

It is in this way that, the "self" giving logismon to the logos?"come and
pass from the one to the other in my discourse"8?the liturgy (kosmos,

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BARBARA CASSIN

kallos, sophia, arete, aletheia) opens onto a happening that performs another
world.
It seems to me that here we are closest to the labile frontier between the

"perlocutionary," which has a rhetorical effect on the other in its by saying,


a subjective effect, one might say (Austin talks here, it will be recalled, of
"what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing,
persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading" [1975,109]),
and the "illocutionary," the most active of speech acts, capable of directly
changing the state of the world in saying and exceeding the perlocutionary
with something like an immediate and objective world effect (even if often
"disappointing": "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow").

FROM GORGIAS TO DESMOND TUTU

Let us open another scene, one that to my eyes represents a passionate


contemporary instantiation of sophist performance. As an epigraph one
might picture the magnificent graffiti, in black and white, that adorned the
wall of the house Desmond Tutu lived in when in Cape Town: "How to
turn human wrongs into human rights." How to turn a phenomenon into
its contrary by the force of discourse?9

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

To begin with, it is doubtless necessary to sketch out the landscape. Th


South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the key apparatus
invented to avoid the predictable bloodbath at the end of apartheid and t
promote what Tutu calls the "miracle of the negotiated settlement" (Truth
and Reconciliation Commission 1998, 1.1.22). It should contribute to the
production of a new nation, a rainbow people (1998,1.1.93).
Three conditions appear necessary, even if they are never sufficient,
in order to deal with hatred: a politics of justice, a politics of memory,
a politics of speech. It is evidently the third that matters to us, via the
other two.
Justice: it is not a punitive justice (apartheid belongs to those acts
that, we can say, along with Hannah Arendt, "one can neither punish nor
pardon" [2003]). It is rather a restorative justice ("reconciliation") an
even a founding justice (it founds the rainbow people) or even "transi
tional" (this time we say, with the Protagoras in the apology of Theaetetus,
it makes us "change a worse state into a better state" [1997, 167a]). It is

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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words

possible only because one is engulfed in the kairos, "at this instant," when,
unlike at Nuremberg, there are "neither winners nor losers." From this the
commission drew its singularity: it was a commission, not a tribunal; it
was presided over not by a judge but by a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize;
it didn't set out penalties but recommended amnesties; and, in what con
cerns us here, it didn't examine court cases but listened to depositions,
declarations, stories.
Memory: unlike the first historical amnesty, that of the Athenian
decree of 403 BC, after the tyranny of the Thirty and the civil war, it is not
an amnesia ("amnesty" and "amnesia" are one and the same word, a doublet,
in ancient Greek10). On the contrary, it was a politics of memory: its task
was to construct a common past so as to constitute a new community, a
"rainbow people," with its archives consultable online and its publicity (the
sessions of the grand theater of the itinerant commission moving from
town to town were broadcast on television on Sunday evenings?one could
never say "I didn't know"). But still there was no "overmemorization," nor
was there a need for an infinite memory: only "enough of the truth for," in
the words of the Commission's Report itself, had to be obtained?enough
of the truth for sharing a common past and living together (Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 1998, 1.1.70). The truth that was obtained,
carefully distinguished from historical truth, was an explicit production,
a construction out of discourse.
Speech: speech is the key to the apparatus and is legible in the conditions
of the amnesty. These conditions are defined by the law of July 1995
that organized the commission as such, two years after its "invention" in
sunset clauses. The three legal conditions that had to be met for an act
to be susceptible of amnesty, and therefore amnestied, were the following
(I mention the first two so as not to mutilate the apparatus):

1. It must have been committed during the so-called period of


apartheid (between 1 March i960 and the "firm cut-off date" of
6 December 1993).
2. It must have been an "act" or an "omission" (once more no "nega
tionism" will have been possible) or an "infraction" "associated with
a political objective committed within the mandate period" (Truth
and Reconciliation Commission 1998,5.3.1).11
3. Finally applicants for amnesty had to make "a full disclosure of the
truth"; amnesty is thus thereby defined as "freedom in exchange for
the truth" (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998,1.1.29).

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BARBARA CASSIN

One's revelation is not an "admission": no one is compelled or is in a position


to compel the "perpetrator" to talk. That is even the key to the apparatus.
This major condition for amnesty is "ironic," in the Socratic sense of th
word, and Tutu uses the term repeatedly: it makes the criminal, the m
cious, play the role of the public servant, the good. In effect, those crimina
given amnesty, civil or moral entities (firms, universities, journals, political
parties), are not accused persons one brings before a tribunal and from
which one extracts admissions but petitioners, "claimants" who presen
themselves and whose interest, all morality aside, is to say everything,
disclose the true. Since the amnesty is not a blanket amnesty but is pro
nounced act by act, only what is said can be given an amnesty: claiman
can only be condemned for what they do not say (the assumption being
that everyone has an interest in talking, in saying something), which cross
checking could uncover. It is a question then of a very particular discursive
act: a "statement," a declaration as proper name, operating by itself an
as such.
In other words, this new politics of justice is built on a politics of speech,
built on the attention given to language as act and as performance.

"Language, Discourse and Rhetoric, Does Things"

This performance can be described as comprising four components.


The first, the most decisive, relates to the construction of the world, to
the "world effect" of the performance. Allow me to take a detour and make
a rapprochement between the sentence from the Encomium of Helen that
I have already cited?"Discourse is a great master, which with the smallest
and least perceptible of bodies accomplishes the most divine of acts" (?8)?
and this no less sovereign phrase from the report of the commission:

It is a commonplace to treat language as mere words, not deeds,


therefore language is taken to play a minimal role in understand
ing violence. The Commission wishes to take a different view here.
Language, discourse and rhetoric does things: it constructs social
categories, it gives orders, it persuades us, it justifies, explains,
gives reasons, excuses. It constructs reality. It moves certain people
against other people. (1998,5.7.124)

One sees here that like in sophistry, language "does things," "constructs
reality," while acting on those who listen and those who speak.

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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words

The second component leads from the sophists and from Aristotle to
Tutu via Hannah Arendt. It is linked to the construction of human being
in his very humanity, that is to say, in his political being, his politcalness,
and with what Aristotle takes from the sophists in order to counter Plato's
philosopher-king, to wit the construction of politics in language.
The commission was sophistico-Aristotelian-Arendtian in that it
rehumanized all those who appeared before it by allowing them to speak.
It made all of them, victims as well as perpetrators, animals endowed with
logos, discourse-reason, and thus political animals, "more political than
the others," as Aristotle specifies. They could once again appropriate what
is proper to man. No longer were they "monkeys" or passers-by stuck in
silence, nor even were they executioners rendered mute by the horror of the
crimes that they had to deny so as to continue existing.
The third component is cathartic and therapeutic: it leads from
Protagoras (to "change a worse state into a better state") or Gorgias to Tutu
via Freud. I would like simply to underline the importance of this the
matic of the logos-pharmakon across antiquity and relate the therapy of dis
course to the matrix of its expression that one finds, yet again, in Gorgias's
Encomium of Helen:

There is the same relation [/?gw] between the power of discourse


[he tou logou dunamis] and the disposition of the soul [ten tespsukhes
taxin], the disposition of drugs [he ton pharmak?n taxis] and the
nature of bodies [ten ton.somaton phusin]: just as one drug expels
a humour from the body, and some stop illness, and others life, so
amongst discourses, some distress, some charm, cause fear, make
the hearers bold, and some, by some wicked persuasion, drug the
soul and bewitch it. (?14)

It is not difficult to make the rapprochement between the logical pharmacy


of Gorgias and the order words of the commission: "Revealing Is Heal
ing" on the cover of the dossiers that it examines, "Healing Our Land"
on the banners of the public sessions. The therapy develops in the slightly
obsessional metaphorics of apartheid as a sickness of the social body, with
its syndromes, symptoms, wounds, antiseptics, and medication. To talk,
to speak, to tell the story, to tell your story, to make full disclosure marks
an individual and collective undertaking to heal ("personal and national
healing," "healing through truth telling") in which, as a witness noted
at the health sector hearings held by the commission in June 1997, the

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BARBARA CASSIN

truth becomes the "essential component of the needed social antiseptic."


But as it is a question of a sickness of the soul, a sickness one treats by
speaking, it is finally a matter of a countrywide psychoanalysis, for which,
moreover, the country pays. While it might merit more detailed study,
psychoanalysis as a discursive performance is something that can hardly
be doubted.

Semantic Responsibility: How do we talk?

The last component is apparently less connected to what we have conserved


of sophistry, although Prodicus is caricatured by Plato for his scruples over
synonyms, and Protagoras gets irritated by the discordance between the
feminine he minis, Achilles' anger, and the eminently virile character of
the hero and of the epic itself that this anger sets off {Protagoras 337a-c,
Aristotle, Topics 173^7-22, Aristotle, Rhetoric 14070-6). It is a question of a
politics of responsibility with regard to the words that one employs: what
world do we contribute to producing by speaking as we speak, and how is
language articulated with our speech acts? Thucydides already remarked
that stasis, the civil war in Athens, was also a war of words: "Words, too,
had to change their usual meaning" (1954, 3.82). Twenty-five centuries
later, Victor Klemperer sensed, as a philologist, the rise of Nazism in the
German language: "Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swal
lowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the
toxic reaction sets in after all" (2000, 14). And once again this resonates
with the distressing, sober testimonies collected by Jean Hatzfeld in Into the
Quick of Life (2005): "There is something important I must point out: the
genocide changed the meaning of certain words in the survivors language;
and it completely lifted the meaning out of other words, and so the person
listening must be alert to such changes in meaning" (2005,159).
Antjie Krog, the remarkable Afrikaans journalist and writer who
followed the work of the commission, quotes a letter from January 1986
addressed by the magnate Anthon Rupert to President Botha: "I am
appealing to you in person. Reaffirm your rejection of Apartheid. It is cru
cifying us; it is destroying our language."And along with it, she quotes this
statement by the president that serves as a kind of reply: "I am sick and
tired of the hollow parrot-cry: Apartheid!'I have said many times that the
word "apartheid" means good neighbourliness" (Krog 1998, 266, 270). For
her part, Krog begins with the question: "How easily and naturally the

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story shifts from politics to language_What do we do with the language


of the boereT (1998, 99). The commission also vigorously collared the civil
war of words. Thus, the security forces "failed to exercise proper care in
the words they used," those who were guilty of terrorist acts and those
who struggled by legal and peaceful means were called "terrorists" without
distinction, all conflated in the single category of "persons to be killed"
(Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1998, 5.6.99, 90). That is why the
young military recruits complained to the psychologist that "the present
has destroyed the foundations of meaning' these conscripts adopted to
cope with their traumatic experience" (1998, 5.9.26). The discourse of
apartheid was therefore a bad medicine, exploiting the poisonous side of
the pharmakom "In the opinion of the Commission, the kind of rhetoric
used by politicians and SSC functionaries was reckless, inflammatory and
an incitement to unlawful acts" (1998, 5.6.90). Like the euphemism of
the "final solution," it is what allowed certain of those in charge to claim
that they never gave the order to kill. Take out, wipe out, eradicate?that
doesn't mean kill. There must have been a misunderstanding, an excessive
zeal, a mistake, bad will on the part of the subordinates. To which the
commission replies: "One has to conclude that these words were intended
to say exactly what they said" (1998, 5.6.97c). "Exactly what they said"'.
taking words at their word. It's not just that one's speaking is an act but
also that what a word says is an act. Signifier, signified, and referent, or
phonic matter, meaning and denotation form a bloc.
Without wanting to project more distinctions loaded with history
and doctrines onto this, I would simply like to underline how close this
injunction is to what Aristotle considered as the intractability of soph
istry What the demonstration of the principle of noncontradiction comes
up against is that the sophist pretends to stop at his "the logos which is in
the sounds of the voices and in the words" (1979, ioo9a22).12 This require
ment, which obliges Aristotle to use constraint (bid) and not persuasion,
underlies discursive performance: the characteristic of the act is to say
what is said, without regard for the intention, and even to say the whole of
what is said, including homonyms and amphibolies, since what is said, is
said. It provides the ground for the "sophistical" refutations that Aristotle
analyzes: sophists take the adversary at his word because they take the
word, and even the phrase, at its word. They consider that for reasons of
discursive propriety one cannot escape from the fact of saying what one
says and of hearing what one hears.

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Performance is thus put to work in a multiple fashion within this very


particular political attempt, but it is always a matter of pausing on the act
that discourse constitutes at all levels?let words do things.

THE DIFFERENCE OF LANGUAGES AS PLURALITY


OF PERFORMANCES

The Universal/Singular Tension

As a third step I would like to start from the recent Vocabulaire europeen
des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004). An impossible
book: over twelve years, 150 collaborators worked on philosophical texts
written in fifteen European languages, or languages constitutive of Europe.
We started from "untranslatables," that's to say symptoms of the difference
between languages?not what one doesn't translate but what one doesn't
stop (not) translating: after Babel with happiness. But it is well known
that the Greeks were, to borrow Arnaldo Momigliano's expression "proudly
monolinguistic"?so much so that hellenizein signifies "to speak Greek"
as well as "to speak properly" and "to think and act as a civilised man";
barbarizein, by contrast, mixes the foreign, the unintelligible, and the inhu
man. How then can working on the Greeks furnish us with the slightest
grasp of the difference of languages?
It is very simple?in any case I believe that I can simplify with the
ontology/logology key. Either one begins with things. Or one begins with
words.
The "onto-logy" of Parmenidean unveiling opens onto a metaphysics
of adequation. With Plato and Aristotle, things can be described like this:
language is an organon, a "tool," a means of communication, and languages,
as Socrates says in the Cratylus, are simply the different materials that serve
to fabricate this tool, sort of habits of the idea.13 That is why one must start
from things, from what is, and not from words (Craty/us 439b). From this
perspective, it is a matter of getting to the things under words as quickly as
possible, of producing the unity of being under the difference of languages,
of reducing the multiple to the one: translation is then what Schleiermacher
calls dolmetschen, interpreter, a go-between.14
The world that starts from words is a completely different world;
language is no longer considered, firstly or solely, as a means but as an end
and as a force: "Whoever finds language interesting in itself is different
from whoever only recognizes in it the means for interesting thoughts"

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(Nietzsche 1971,134). Hence the only "there is" is the Humboldtian plurality
of languages: "Language is manifest in reality solely as multiplicity" (1903,
240). Language is and is only the difference of languages. From this per
spective, to translate is no longer dolmetschen but ubersetzen, understand
ing how different languages produce different worlds, making these worlds
communicate, and disquieting them by playing the one against the other,
in such a way that the reader s tongue goes to meet that of the writer.15 The
common world becomes a regulating (or guiding) principle, a goal, and
not a point of departure. This regime is that of the Vocabulaire europeen des
philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles: at bottom it is sophist logology
immersed in the plurality of languages. It then becomes appropriate to ask
oneself about philosophies as they as they are expressed or said, about what
it is to philosophize in languages.
From this point of view, Philosophy (with a capital P) is a tension
between the universal and a multiplicity of singulars. Schleiermacher
describes it perfectly, right down to his "not even":

Here [in authentic philosophy], more than in any other domain,


each language contains, despite the diversity of contemporary or
successive opinions, a system of concepts, which, precisely because
they touch each other, are united and complete each other in the
same language, form a whole whose different parts do not corre
spond to any of those of the systems of other languages, not even
with the exception of God and of Being, the first substantive and
the first verb. Because even the absolutely universal, although it
finds itself outside of the domain of particularity, is illuminated
and colored by language. (1999, 84-85, my emphasis)

Neither Globish nor Ontological Nationalism

Now this philosophical gesture is also, and today perhaps above all, a politi
cal gesture. Which linguistico-philosophical Europe do we want? Answer:
there are two that we don't want that I propose to characterize as "every
thing in globish" and "ontological nationalism."
The first catastropic scenario only allows one language to remain,
without oeuvre or author: "globish" ("global English"). Globish and dialects,
that's all. Every European language, French, German, and so forth, would
only be for speaking domestically and would be preserved as an endangered
species via a politics of the patrimony. English itself, that of Shakespeare and

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BARBARA CASSIN

of Joyce, would become one of those dialects that no one understands an


longer. Globish, meanwhile, the language of communication par excellence,
would allow for proposals to the European Council that delineated "issues
and "deliverables" in a "knowledge-based economy." The difficulty evi
dently bears on the relationship between globish and the English language.
It is, even, the thing that makes the menace so intense: the risk of collusion
between a pragmatic esperanto and the language of a culture.
I would like to develop things in the following way. English is evidently
the language of an empire, as koine, Latin, and, to a lesser extent, Frenc
were before it. It is the language of American economics and diplomacy,
one that will become an "auxiliary international language" (AIL), to borro
Umberto Eco's expression, before it gets deposed by another, no doubt.
However, there are philosophical reasons for globish being English: in my
opinion, the link between the language of an empire and analytic philosophy
constitutes the cultural foundation of such an AIL. On the one hand, a cer
tain analytic philosophy effectively advocates the angelic innocence of th
universal. What counts is the concept, not the word?Aristotle is my col
league at Oxford. Wherein one rediscovers Plato: languages are the habits
of the concept and the habit matters little. Recall Leibniz and his universal
characteristic?"When disagreements arise, there will be no more need for
discussion between two philosophers than there is between two calculators.
In truth it will be enough for them to take their pens, to sit down at a table
and to say to each other (after having called a friend, if they wish): calcu
emus, let us calculate" (1980)?and the project of the Lumieres: "Before th
end of the eighteenth century, a philosopher who would like to educate
himself thoroughly concerning the discoveries of his predecessors will be
required to burden his memory with seven or eight different languages.
And after having consumed the most precious time of his life to learnin
them, he will die before beginning to educate himself. The use of the Latin
language, which we have shown to be ridiculous in matters of taste, is of
the greatest service in works of philosophy, whose merit is entirely deter
mined by clarity and precision and which urgently requires a universal an
conventional language" (Le Rond d'Alembert 1963, 92-93).
This is good philosophical company, in truth, encouraging us to find
in the English language a contemporary version of Latin and a plausible
ersatz of a universal language. So why not English?
Especially given that the angelic innocence of the universal is
accompanied by the militancy of the ordinary. Taken this time as an idiom,
in the singularity of the oeuvres and authors who have expressed themselves

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in English in the philosophical tradition, English is the language of fact


par excellence, the language of everyday conversation attentive to itself.
Whether through empiricism or the ordinary language philosophy result
ing from the "linguistic turn," one deflates the pretentions of metaphys
ics by being "matter of fact" regarding the "fact of the matter," by being
attentive to what we say when we speak everyday English. No longer "why
English?" but rather "because of English."
Hence the exceptional force of a globish supported by, or reliant on,
"analytic English" that makes a continental philosophy stuck in the history
and thickness of languages appear amphigoric and that would have Jacques
Derrida teach in comparative literature departments only. From this per
spective, the very idea of untranslatability is null and void. Worse, it has no
usefulness.
The other catastrophic scenario, ontological nationalism, results from
a hermeneutic and continental rather than analytic failing, whose modern
point of departure, linked to the inconvenient problem of the "genius" of
languages, is German Romanticism. Herder, for example, writes "while the
muse in Italy converses by singing, recounts and ratiocinates with preciosity
in France, has knightly imagination in Spain, thinks with acuity and depth
in England, what does it do in Germany? // imitates"161 always come back
to this passage of Heidegger's, which renders the problem legible in a cari
catural manner:

The Greek language is philosophical, i.e. not that Greek is loaded with
philosophical terminology, but that it philosophizes in its basic
structure and formation [Sprachgestaltung]. The same applies to
every genuine language, in different degrees to be sure. The extent
to which this is so depends on the depth and power of the people
who speak the language and exist within it [Der Grad bemisst sich
nach der Tiefe und Gewalt der Eixstenz des Volkes und Stammes, der
die Sprache spricht und in ihr existiert]. Only our German language
has a deep and a creative philosophical character to compare with
the Greek. (2002,36)

The Greek language then, and the German, more Greek than the Greek.
I have proposed calling the second catastrophic scenario "ontological natio
nalism," taking up the diagnosis of Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (1990). All the
work of the Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies (Cassin 2004) runs coun
ter to this tendency to sacralize the untranslatable, which constitutes a

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BARBARA CASSIN

symmetrical failing to that of universalist contempt. But if this tendency


persists, it is because, on the one hand, Greek and German are two idioms
pregnant with philosophical oeuvres that are determining for philosophy
and its history. On the other hand, it is because Heidegger is the contem
porary who has taught us or reminded us that "to speak language is totally
different from employing language" and that translating is a "deployment
of ones own language as an aid to an understanding of a foreign language"
(1968 128,1982,79-80).

"To Deterritorialise": Synonymy and Homonymy

The strategy to take to get around these two stumbling blocks may be
named in Deleuzian terms: "to de territorialize. "The two points of impact
of the notion of performance on a work like that of the Vocabulaire may be
grouped together under deterritorialization.
The first relates to what Humboldt designates as the "synonymy of prin
cipal languages": the way different languages produce different worlds that
are neither exactly the same nor completely different. With the Humboldt
of the "Fragment of a Monograph on the Basque" it must be maintained
that "the plurality of languages is far from reducible to a plurality of des
ignations of a thing; they are different perspectives on the same thing, and
when the thing is not the object of the external senses, one is often dealing
with as many different things fashioned differently by each language.
Being is an effect of saying; not only are we perspectivists, or relativists, but
we are also logologists. Humboldt adds: "The diversity of languages is the
immediate condition for us of a growth in the richness of the world and
the diversity of what we know about it. At the same time, this is how the
region of human existence expands, and new ways, of thinking and feeling
are offered to us with determinate and real characteristics" (1996,433).
Such is precisely the ambition of a work like the Vocabulaire, for which
Humboldt, endeavoring to translate Aeschylus's Agamemnon despairing o
ever succeeding, prefigures the design (and the sketch, disegno). "A synon
ymy of principal languages of this sort ... has never yet been attempted
although it may be found in fragments of many writers, but if it was treat
ed with intelligence it would become one of the most seductive works.
The "synonymy of principal languages" relates to the fact that correspond
ing words in each of these languages passes for an expression of the sam
concept. But they only do so with a "difference," a "connotation," a "degree
in the scale of sentiments" that makes the distinction between words and

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concepts: "So little is a word the sign of a concept that the concept cannot
be born without it, still less be fixed; the indeterminate action of the force
of thought is condensed in a word the way that faint clouds appear in a pure
sky. It is, then, an individual being, of a determinate character and figure, of
a force acting on the spirit and capable of transplanting itself" (2000,33).
It is also by the movement of deterritorialization, from the outside of
another language, that one thus succeeds in perceiving how "equivocally"
ones own language is fabricated. It is on Lacan, as a good logologist, that
I will rely to make this heard. One can apply to the languages of philosophy
what he writes in "L'etourdit" regarding the "lalangues" of every uncon
scious: "A language, among others, is nothing more than the integral of
equivocations that its history has left in it" (1973,47).
Instead of being the radical evil of language, as it is in Aristotle,
homonymy, equivocation, is not only the condition for wit and for jokes,
but the condition for what is proper to one language among others. The
choice of symptoms that untranslatables are arises from attention to hom
onymy. It is not difficult to make it heard with some examples. Thus in
Russian, pravda, which customarily one renders by "truth," signifies "jus
tice" primarily (it is the agreed-on translation of the Greek dikaiosune) and
is thus a homonym from the French point of view; inversely, our "truth"
is a homonym from the Slavic point of view, as the term conflates pravda,
which arises from justice, and istina, which arises from being and from
exactness. It is the same with the ambiguity "for us" of the root svet, "light"
or "world," and with the problematic homonymy of mir, meaning "peace,"
"world," and "peasant commune," on which Tolstoy doesn't stop playing in
War and Peace. One could unravel a good part of the dictionary by pulling
on this thread. And that is because it is not only a question of isolated
terms but of networks of terms: what German designates as Geist is some
times "mind" and sometimes "spirit," and the Ph?nomenologie des Geistes is
sometimes the Phenomenology of Spirit and sometimes the Phenomenol
ogy of Mind, making Hegel a religious spiritualist or the ancestor of the
philosophy of mind. And this point also applies to syntax and grammar,
the skeleton of languages, with the amphibologies and syntactic hom
onyms created by the order of words, with diglossia (a high language and
a low language in Russian that one doesn't know how to translate), with
the conflation of tense and aspect in some languages but not in others,
down to the Spanish doublet ser/estar, which makes our "being" even more
equivocal. In short, at least two languages are required in order to know
that a language is spoken, and in order to be able to speak a language.

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Basically it is the homonyms of a language that give the best access to the
synonymy of languages.
Hannah Arendt, who wrote her Denktagebuch in several languages,
both as a way of dealing with her exile?"all the same it is not the German
language which has gone mad," she said in her interview with Gunther
Gauss?and as a way of practicing philosophy, thematizes this very pre
cisely as a philosophical gesture.

Plurality of languages: if there were only one language, we would


perhaps be more assured about the essence of things.
What is determining is that i) there are many languages and
they are distinguished not only by their vocabulary but equally by
their grammar, that is to say, essentially by their manner of think
ing, and that 2) all languages can be learned.
Given that the object, which is there to support the presenta
tion of things, can be called "Tisch" as well as "table" indicates that
something of the genuine essence of things that we make and name
escapes us. It is not the senses and the possibilities for illusion that
they contain that renders the world uncertain, any more than it is
the imaginable possibility or lived fear that everything is a dream.
It is rather the equivocity of meaning given within language and,
above all, with languages. At the heart of a homogeneous human
community, the essence of the table is unequivocally indicated by
the word "table," and yet from the moment that it arrives at the
frontier of the community, it falters.
This faltering equivocity of the world and the insecurity of
the human that inhabits it would naturally not exist if it wasn't
possible to learn foreign languages, a possibility that demonstrates
that there exist still other "correspondences" than ours in view of a
common and identical world or even if only one language were to
exist. Hence the absurdity of the universal language?against the
"human condition," the artificial and all-powerful uniformization
of equivocity.17

So even an "object of the external senses," contrary to what Humboldt says,


is diffracted according to its name: trapeza, on four feet like the counter of
a money changer, or rather tabula, like a wax tablet for writing on, or mesa
as a plateau at the foot of the mountains. This "faltering equivocity of the

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world" means that we are not sure about the essence of things: logology
thus calls into question ontological certainty.
Under the loose notion of performance, I have so far brought together
at least , two types of language act (in French, "actes de langage"): on one
hand, speech acts ("actes de parole") like Parmenides' On Nature as read
by Gorgias and the "statements" from the hearings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and, on the other hand, what I would like to
call "tongue acts" ("actes de langue"), with the semantic responsibility, or
the world effects, of bearing the difference of languages. It leaves open
the question of the relationship between performative and performance, a
much vaster category, of which the performative constitutes something like
the tip. But to my eyes, thinking in terms of performance is linked with the
general transformation of the landscape that Austin seeks to accomplish
with the performative. He insists on it in his last lecture when describ
ing the five most general classes of performatives, which, even if he is "far
from equally happy about all of them," nevertheless allow him "to play Old
Harry with two fetishes which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry
with, viz. (i) the true/false fetish, (2) the value/fact fetish" (1975,151).
And one should not forget this last phrase, at the very end of his final
lecture: "I leave to my readers the real fun of applying it in philosophy"
(1975,164).

(Translated by Andrew Goffey)


Centre National de la Recherche scientifique, Paris

NOTES

. Philostratus 1921,1,492.
2. But "per" doubtless doesn't have the same meaning in both cases, even if t
something Austin makes explicit. The "per" of "performance" denotes the accomp
of a "to the end" whereas the "per" of "perlocution" denotes the means, that is,
of "by saying": it is "by means" of saying, and not "in" the saying itself ("in sa
characteristic of the illocutionary or performative) that the perlocutionary acts.
1975,108, see the quote that follows, where the perlocutionary figures in parenthese
3. It should be noted that Austin does not then give an example, in quot
perlocutionary utterance. This difficulty is doubtless linked to the complex defin
perlocutionary acts as "what we bring about or achieve by saying something" (1
This "or," which, for better or for worse, manages the difference between the sp

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the listener, recurs on page 118: "The perlocutionary act may be either the achievement
of a perlocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a perlocutionary
sequel."The illocutionary act is distinguished from the perlocutionary act byway of refer
ence to the statement "I ordered him and he obeyed," on the one hand, and "I got him to
obey" (1975,117), on the other. The subtle difference doesn't relate necessarily or directly to
distinct utterances. It is as if the perlocutionary, the utterance of the third kind, appeared
and disappeared between the seventh and the tenth lectures.
4. "So here are three ways, securing uptake, taking effect, and inviting a response,
in which illocutionary acts are bound up with effects; and these are all distinct from the
producing of effects which is characteristic of the perlocutionary act" (1975,118).
5. Here is how Novalis describes logological reduplication: "Everyone ignores what is
characteristic of language, that is that it is quite simply only concerned with itself. That is
why language is such a marvelous and fruitful mystery: someone speaks just for the sake
of speaking, and this is precisely when language expresses the most magnificent truths."
Allow me to refer here also to my Leffet sophistique (1995,113-17). This "speaking for the
sake of speaking" cannot not be compared with the legein logon kharin by which Aristotle
expels the sophists from the community of speaking beings, who, obeying the principle
of noncontradiction, always speak in order to signify something {Metaphysics ioo6an-26,
ioo9a20-2i). See also Cassin 1989.
6. One need only consult ?7 of Being and Time (2008,49-62).
7.1 am deliberately using the risky word "fiction" in the sense of discursive "fab
rication," which should be spelled "fixion" as it is in Lacan, to make us sensitive to two
issues. The first is the "etiolated" or "parasitical" status of literary or poetic creation in
Austin (see, for example, Austin 1975, 104). The second is the fact that the distinction
between genres of discourse is called into question (including the difference between
"philosophy"and "literature," given the oh-how ambiguous status of Greek poetry) when
one takes the logological point of view (here I refer the reader to my Leffet sophistique).
8. Phere de pros allon ap'allou metasto logon; "Now then, let me move from one speech
to another" (82 Bn, DK, II, 290,1. 25; cf. Gorgias 1982, ?9). This is how Gorgias punctuates
his eulogy to poetry, by drawing attention to the act of language that is operating and in
the process of being accomplished.
9.1 rely here on the work by Philippe-Joseph Salazar (2004a and 2004b).
10. The decree stipulates me mnesikakein ("You will not recall the evils of events past")
and punishes those who do with death. See Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens 40:2.
11.1 don't wish to make a point here of the evident difficulties of this, which coincide
with those of the "law of due obedience" in Argentina, because it is not relevant to the
matter at hand.

12. Aristotle Metaphysics (1979, 1009320-22). Here is the context: "One doesn't discuss
with everyone in the same way: some require persuasion, others constraint. On the one
hand, for all those who have maintained this position [the refusal of the principle], having

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found themselves in an aporia, their scorn is easy to cure: it is not with what they say but
with what they think that one confronts them. But all those who discourse for the love
of discourse, their cure is a refutation of what is said in the sounds of the voice and in the
words [tou en teiphonei logou kai en tots onomasin]."
13. "If all legislators [who name] don't work on the same syllables, this should not be
forgotten: that all blacksmiths do not work on the same iron, whilst making the same tool
for the same purpose; yet, as long as they give it the same form, even if it is from a different
iron, the tool remains correct, whether one makes it here or with Barbarians." (Plato 1997,
Cratylus 389ei~39oa2).
14. Schleiermacher 1999,34-35, and see also C. Berner's glossary, 135-38.
15. I am paraphrasing the well-known bifurcation: "Either the translator leaves the
writer as easy as possible and makes the reader go to meet him, or he leaves the reader as
easy as possible and makes the writer go to meet him" (Schleiermacher 1999,49). And, with
Schleiermacher, I am choosing the reader's uneasiness of the first way.
16.1996,105. Imitation becomes the genial characteristic of a language that would be
lacking in genius, exactly as the hand in Aristotle is the "tool of tools," capable of using,
and thus standing for, them all.
17. Arendt 2003, [15] I, 42-43. See also November 1965 [58] and [59] II, 642-44;
July 1968 [76] and [77] II, 690.

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