ABSTRACT
If there is such a thing as language, the historical singularity of the analytic
tradition lies in its ambition to lay it open to view, and so to render its
underlying principles, the form and order of its terms, and the basis of its
possibilities of meaning open to philosophical criticism. The unprecedented
envisioning of language that the analytic tradition undertook from its first
stages would, if successful, have delivered the human ‘‘capacity’’ for lin-
guistic meaning to philosophical thought as an explicit object of descrip-
tion. In so doing, it would have revealed language as the previously unthought ground of the expressive possibilities of a human life, the source
of its deepest possibilities of clarity and the root of its most threatening
illusions. Yet as we have seen, the critical discourse that originally sought to
produce a clarified life by policing the bounds of sense could not foreclose a
more problematic encounter with the pervasive question of the basis of its
own authority. Thus, with a necessity that is the same as that of reason’s
own reflection on its inherent forms, the analytic tradition’s modalities of
linguistic analysis and interpretation became more and more involved in the underlying problems of our everyday access to language itself.
