ABSTRACT
The last several chapters have constituted a detailed examination of the
concepts and values of ‘‘language,’’ ‘‘meaning,’’ ‘‘practice,’’ and ‘‘use,’’ ‘‘rule,’’
‘‘regularity’’ and ‘‘institution’’ in the dialectic of analytic philosophy in the
twentieth century. At each stage, I have examined the relationship of these
concepts with the notion of a language as a total logical, grammatical, or
practical structure, and with the ambiguities inherent in an appeal to lan-
guage that constantly tends to figure it as a structure of signs, while subse-
quently finding just this structure to be inadequate to account for its own institution, extent, limits, or ultimate guiding principles. In the repeatedly
enacted dialectic that I have explored, the attempt to describe or theorize
the logical form or structure of language in terms of a corpus of analytic
rules, principles, or norms has, I have argued, repeatedly been contested by
those moments of presence, genesis or institution that resist being included
in the structural system of language as simply another element or another
moment (see Chapter 1). The dialectic has repeated itself consistently,
unfolding each time out of the inherent dynamic of the analytic tradition’s founding and originally determinative recourse to language. Language, with
almost every resort that the analytic tradition has made of it, then appears
ambiguously as an objectively present structure or system, accessible in princi-
ple to the schematic resources of a theoretical description of its structure or
form; and then again, in its moments of founding principles, limits, or ulti-
mate nature, as something radically transcendent to, mysterious, or proble-
matic for any such accounting.
