ABSTRACT
Ineffability is in the air these days, and has been for some time. In many areas of Continental philosophy, it is the very ethos in which thought is conducted. Examples range from Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that we are haunted by the irreducible infinity of the other, Jacques Derrida’s absence that cannot be reduced to presence, Gilles Deleuze’s positing of a virtual field of difference, to Adriana Cavarero’s more recent claim that philosophy has dissolved the singularity of human beings expressed in their voices to general conceptual categories. I argue that the realm of the normative is deeply linguistic. In contrast to the attempt of many thinkers to remove the normative from the conceptual or the linguistic, I try to show that it is central to normativity to have a linguistic reference, a reference rooted precisely in the sense of conceptual categories that so concern thinkers of the ineffable. My claim is not that normativity can be reduced to conceptual categories. Rather, it is that an important—indeed crucial—aspect of normativity is neglected when we focus on the ineffable.
