YASHA! they/them :D jewish studies grad student; interested in yiddish, psychoanalysis, and marxism!

"I'm writing novels because I don't jerk off every fifteen minutes That's really all it is." - Louis CK

I'm ostensibly a nobody. I dont mean to be self-effacing, only accurate, in that had I jerked off in front of people, it may have been reported on the local news but no one in China would have heard about it.

But gradually something, a knowledge has been transmitted to me, a knowledge of the shared structure, the common structure that allows one speaking being to have their life, or history, mapped point for point onto that of another speaking. And not just other humans, but situations, periods, formulae, mechanical inventions, all of which we know or apprehend through description, definitions, in short, through words -- my life is isomorphic with potentially any other being speaking being or even thing -- insofar as the latter are the productive of speaking beings.

What do speaking beings produce? The answer is obvious if all we have to go on is thus strange combination of words, speaking and beings.

What do speaking beings produce? Statements.

How do speaking beings produce statements? By speaking, through speech.

If it is true that a signifier cannot represent itself, then the answer to the next question - what is a speaking being? - cannot be simply: "A being that speaks". Because it still isn't even certain that this 'speaking' is an adjective that describes the quality of a being. It could, after all, be a verb.

This is important because depending on whether we take 'speaking' as an adjective or a verb, being can be read as either the pre-existent thing, defined as the speaking sort of this thing (being), while there are other kinds of being that perhaps do not speak or do something else. As a verb, the matter is turned on its head: being is no longer the thing which brings speech into existence, but it is speaking which brings being into existence.

I speak therefore I am. Only, this 'I am' supposes a lot about this 'being'.

It supposes, correctly, that it is through speech alone that it is possible for being to be, insofar as being is brought about through the saying of the words "I am". No being without speaking. And yet, to the extent that being is not prior to but the product of speech, this "I" who "is", was not "I" until 'it' said so, and thus there is no "I" that "is" prior to speaking. So the matter of who speaks receives its Freudian response: it speaks. And it is only in speaking that retroactively this 'it' becomes an 'I'.

The speaking being is not therefore an 'I speak therefore I am', but an 'it speaks to be'. Freud's,' where it was there I must come into being'

thinkobinge

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