We are induced to postulate that being, at least for us, sets limits because we live, in the horizon of the entities and also in the horizon of that limit that is being-for-death. Either we do not talk of being because its presence overwhelms us, or, as soon as we talk of it, among the first statements that we are accustomed to considering a model of all certain premises, we find «All men are mortal.» Our elders inform us of this very soon when, once we learn to speak, we formulate the first whys.
Since we talk of being in the knowledge that there is at least one limit, all we can do is continue with our questioning to see whether, by chance, there are others. Just as we don’t trust those who have lied to us at least once, we don’t believe the promise of the unlimited made by those who have introduced themselves to us by immediately setting a limit.
And, as we pursue the discourse, we very soon discover other limits in the horizon of the entities we have named. We learn by experience that nature seems to manifest stable tendencies. It is not necessary to think of obscure and complex laws, like those of universal gravitation, but of simpler, more immediate experiences, such as the rising and setting of the sun, gravity, the objective existence of the species. The universals may well be a figment and infirmity of thought, but once dog and cat have been identified as species, we learn immediately that if we mate a dog with a dog, another dog is born of it, but if we mate a dog with a cat, nothing is born of it—and even if something were born, it would not be able to reproduce itself.
This still does not mean that there is a certain (I would like to say «Darwinian») reality of the genera and species. It is only intended to suggest that even though speaking in generalia may be an effect of our penuria nominum; nonetheless, something resistant has driven us to invent general terms (whose extension we can always review and correct). The objection that one day some biotechnology might make this grain obsolete is invalid: the fact that any breach of the grain would require a technology (which by definition alters natural limits) means that natural limits exist.
The Possible Worlds are part of another region of being. In the ambiguous horizon of being, things might have gone differently, and there is nothing to exclude that there might be a world in which these confines between the species might not exist, where the confines are other or even absent—that is, a world in which there are no natural genera, and in which the crossing of a camel with a locomotive might produce a square root. Nevertheless, if I can think of a possible world in which only non-Euclidean geometries are valid, the only way I can think of a non-Euclidean geometry is to establish its rules, and therefore its limits.
1.11 The Sense of the Continuum
It is also possible that there are regions of being about which we are unable to talk. It seems odd, seeing that being always manifests itself in language only, but let us grant this—since there is no reason why one day humanity might not invent languages different from the known ones. But let us keep to those «regions» of being we usually talk about and tackle this talk of ours in the light not of a metaphysics but of a semiotics, that of Hjelmslev. We use signs to express a content, and this content is carved out and organized in different forms by different cultures (and languages). What is it made from? From an amorphous stuff, amorphous before language has carried out its vivisection of it, which we will call the continuum of the content, all that may be experienced, said, and thought: the infinite horizon, if you will, of that which is, has been, and will be, out of both necessity and contingency. It would seem that before a culture has organized it linguistically in the form of content, this continuum is everything and nothing and therefore eludes all determination. Nonetheless, scholars and translators have always been perplexed by the fact that Hjelmslev called it mening in Danish and in the English translation of 1943 (which the author cosigned with his translator) «purport.»
At a certain point Hjelmslev makes it clear that the fact that dif ferent expressions such as Jeg véd det ikke, I do not know, Je ne sais pas, Naluvara «have a factor in common, namely the purport, the thought itself,» even though this purport still exists as an amorphous mass and receives a particular form only in and from a particular language (1943: 50–52). The same could not be said of expressions such as Piove, Ilpleut, It is raining.
What does it mean to say there is «purport» before any sensate articulation effected by human cognition? I would prefer to translate Hjelmslev’s mening as «sense,» a term that can suggest both meaning (but there is no meaning or content before a given language has segmented and organized the continuum) and direction or tendency. As if to say that in the magma of the continuum there are lines of resistance and possibilities of flow, as in the grain of wood or marble, which make it easier to cut in one direction than in another. It is like beef or veal: in different cultures the cuts vary, and so the names of certain dishes are not always easy to translate from one language to another. And yet it would be very difficult to conceive of a cut that offered at the same moment the tip of the nose and the tail.
If the continuum has a grain, unexpected and mysterious as it may be, then we cannot say all we want to say. Being may not be comparable to a one-way street but to a network of multilane freeways along which one can travel in more than one direction; but despite this some roads will nevertheless remain dead ends. There are things that cannot be done (or said).
The fact that these things were said once upon a time does not matter. Afterward we ran up against some evidence that convinced us that it was no longer possible to say what had been said before.
Here we should avoid a misunderstanding. When we talk of the experience of something that obliges us to recognize the grain and lines of resistance, and to formulate laws, by no means are we claiming that these laws adequately represent the lines of resistance. If along the path that leads through the wood, I find a boulder blocking the way, I must certainly turn right or left (or decide to turn back), but this gives me absolutely no assurance that the decision taken will help me know the wood better. The incident simply interrupts a project of mine and persuades me to think up another one. To state that there are lines of resistance does not yet mean, as Peirce would have said, that there are universal laws at work in nature.
The hypothesis of universal laws (or the hypothesis of a specific law) is only one of the ways in which we react to the onset of a resistance. But Habermas, in his search for the kernel of Peirce’s criticism of the Kantian Thing in Itself, emphasizes that the Peircean problem is not that something (concealed behind the appearances that would mirror it) has, like a mirror, a rear side that eludes reflection, a side that we are almost sure we will one day discover, as long as we manage to get around the figure we see; it is that reality imposes restrictions on our cognition only in the sense that it refuses false interpretations (Habermas 1995: 251).
To state that there are lines of resistance merely means to say that being, even if it appears only as an effect of language, is not an effect of language in the sense that language freely constructs it. Even those who state that being is pure Chaos, and therefore susceptible to all discourse, would at least have to exclude that it is Order. Language does not construct being ex novo: it questions it, in some way always finding something already given (even though being already given does not mean being already finished and completed). Even if being were moth-eaten, there would always be a fabric whose warp and web, confused by the infinite holes that have eaten into it, still subsist in some stubborn way.
This already given is in fact what we have called the lines of resistance. The appearance of these Resistances is the nearest thing that can be found, before any First Philosophy or Theology, to the idea of God or Law. Certainly it is a God who manifests Himself (if and when He manifests Himself) as pure Negativity, pure Limit, pure No, that of which language cannot or must not talk. Which is something very different from the God of the revealed religions, or it assumes only His severest traits, those of the exclusive Lord of Interdiction, incapable of saying so much as «Go
