ABSTRACT
In everyday educational endeavors-teaching, learning, or doing researchwe use language without reflecting on its nature and without reflecting how language enables us to do what we currently do. We say: “Hello, how are you? Nice weather today, isn’t it?” without reflecting even once about what we are saying and why. Yet we would immediately know if those words said by someone else make sense and are appropriate and true, that is, fitting in the present situation. Even among those who make language their main research topic, generally focusing on what we do with language-“making meaning,” “learning,” “positioning ourselves,” or “producing identities”—few ask the question Martin Heidegger asks in my introductory quote: how is language as language? Even a simple question such as “what is language?” already presupposes not just the three words but a whole system of language and difference (Derrida 1972), including an understanding of an utterance as a question. Heidegger answers his question by saying that language speaks, a statement he elaborates, among others, by stating that in our meditation on language we need to engage with and enter into language.1 Would it be possible to get a book on language, learning, and context off the ground without always already presupposing the existence of language? This question recalls a statement by Friedrich Nietzsche (1954b: 805) about the highest form of experience: the possibility to “read a text as text, without intermingling an interpretation,” which is, he recognizes, “perhaps hardly possible.” Would it be possible to investigate language without presupposing something that is even deeper than language, something that in any imaginable case (cultural-historically, individual-developmentally) precedes language: such as the unthematized experiences in a world always already inhabited with others?
