ABSTRACT
Contrary to appearances, this is not merely the customary pre-lecture joke, a classic instance of captatio benevolentiae. This is already the core of my paper. The gap between meaning and saying is what I would like to explore, in the company of Lewis Carroll: does one have to mean before saying, and if so what is the status of this ‘before’? Can we say without meaning, or again, do we say what we mean and/or mean what we say? Those questions are already at the centre of my so-called joke, as it seems to possess two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, there appears to have been an idea before or behind the first utterance of my title: I have a faint memory of this origin, a meaning that (chrono)logically precedes my saying. But, on the other hand, since I have forgotten it, and yet am developing this title, which I can no longer claim to be mine in an intentional sense, into a text, saying seems to be, to a certain extent (to what extent?), independent of meaning. This paradox is what the two words of my title seek to capture. Or rather, since I no longer know what I originally meant by those words, it is what they will be trying to capture, after I have ascribed a meaning to them by stipulative definition, a move that would have deeply pleased Lewis Carroll.
