ABSTRACT
In multiple, fragmentary and often contradictory ways we struggle to achieve some sort of understanding of AIDS, a reality that is frightening, widely publicized, and yet finally neither directly nor fully knowable. AIDS is no different in this respect from other linguistic constructions which, in the commonsense view of language, are thought to transmit pre-existing ideas and represent real-world entities and yet in fact do neither. For the nature of the relationship between language and reality is highly problematic; and ‘AIDS’ is not merely an invented label, provided to us by science and scientific naming practices, for a clear-cut disease entity caused by a virus. Rather, the very nature of AIDS is constructed through language and in particular through the discourses of medicine and science; this construction is ‘true’ or ‘real’ only in certain specific ways-for example, in so far as it successfully guides research or facilitates clinical control over the illness.2 The name ‘AIDS’ in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look ‘through’ language to determine what AIDS ‘really’ is. Rather we must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language.
