ABSTRACT
what is the relation between, for example, the proposition ‘I am forty years old’ and me? By what right do I connect this ‘I’ with the living, breathing, moving concretion of sensa that constitutes my empirical specificity? For the first person singular of the pronoun in no sense belongs to me, nor can it refer directly and unambiguously to me; how can that belong specifically to me which has been used and is being used and will be used countless billions of times by all who are familiar with the English language ? Indeed, it is this very familiarity, by which words are to us closer than breathing and nearer than hands or feet, which masks from us the fantastic nature of the link which binds sentience to symbol. Between my actual, existent, palpable, empirical self and the language I utter there is an ontological gulf which I cross every time I do utter a word; and the gulf must be crossed if I am to be a man, and not an animal on all fours like a cow or a cat. In the uttering of ‘I am forty years old’ I cross the gulf into another and fundamentally different ontological dimension; and in the crossing of the gulf I give up, I have to give up, my existential actual self; in the saying ‘I am forty years old’ I erase that self and create, as it were, a new self which is totally virtual and set for ever apart from my existent self which it annihilates. The link, that is to say, which binds my sentience to the words I utter is a link which is forged by first being snapped; it is a contact which is made by first being broken; a bridge which is thrown across by first being blown up; and a light which is switched on by a plunging into darkness. The proposition ‘I am forty years old’ does not and 268cannot refer to me; it projects a new ‘me’, a ‘me’ in virtuality which in a manner endlessly baffling and paradoxical wipes me out and in the wiping out creates me for ever, no longer in actual but in virtual specificity.
