ABSTRACT
Most theoretical discourses concerning language, learning, and context are, at their very heart, agential and “intentionalist.” With the adjective intentionalist I denote the fact that the verbs used in theories of knowing, learning, and being are agential, focusing on the subject who intends to do something. This is evident, for example, in the theories of learning according to which students “construct” knowledge or “position themselves” in doing identity work. But, as transitive verbs, both to construct and to position oneself, require an object toward which the action is intended and the outcome to be produced. In the case of the two verbs, the products are knowledge and identity. In the opening quote, however, Emanuel Levinas suggests that being does not resolve itself into things that we fully capture in consciousness, empirical events, thoughts, and intentions aiming at the events. Rather, as I point out in Chapter 1, there is a level of passivity in speaking that comes with language, which always already speaks prior to, and despite of, any intentions that I might have. In fact, speaking overflows with intentions, there are always more intentions possible than the one that might consciously or unconsciously generate what I say. This multiplicity of intentions is no more evident than in those everyday situations where a person charged with something responds, “I didn’t intend to hurt/insult/… you.” There are many aporias concerning language, learning, and context that are not dealt with in the relevant literatures, but which have already been outlined in, for example, continental (mainly French) philosophy in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Among the main aporias is a question already prefigured in Chapter 1 about how to think about language-text and contextif our thinking already is irremediably bound up with language, as shown in Chapter 3. How can we approach language without being impeded by language? Or, to put the question in yet another way, “how can any form of thinking, any psychology, sociology, or epistemology be intended and get off the ground given that, at the instant just prior to the beginning of history, no human rationality and language existed?” How could humans-whom Aristotle has called zo¯on ekhon
[B]eing does not resolve itself into empirical events and in thoughts that reflect these events or that aim at them “intentionally.”
