ABSTRACT
If language grants the possibility of sense to a human life, then the systematic
inquiry into its structure consigns this life to an ambiguous basis in the relation
of signs to their meanings. For as soon as it becomes the object of systematic
analysis, the totality of language both demands and refuses completion by a
principle of meaning exterior to its own economy. Wittgenstein’s text, writ-
ten in 1933 or 1934 as part of a series of notes intended for his students at
Cambridge, identifies the desire for such a completion in the thought of his great philosophical progenitor, Frege. The anxiety to which this desire
responds is one of death, specifically a death of sense in the materiality of
the sign. The characteristic resource it marshals against this anxiety is the
life of the human being who speaks, understands, intends and thinks.
