Abstract

The title: Thought, Language and the Unthought; Transiency, Caesura, and Finitude in Foucault, Heidegger, and Kant, addresses directly the main issues discussed in the dissertation. My main concern here is with the relationship between thought and language especially as represented in Heidegger's later works, "On The Way To Language," "Poetry, Language, Thought," "What Is Called Thinking?," "An Introduction To Metaphysics" etc., in contrast to Foucault's reevaluation in "language, counter-memory, practice," "The Archeology Of Knowledge," "The History Of Sexuality Vol. I," and especially "The Order Of Things," of the idea of classical representation and the reinterpretation of the Cartesian "Cogito", along with the Kantian "Pure Reason." There is a lengthy discussion of the sections on "Time" and "Space" in Kant's "Critique Of Pure Reason" as they relate to the ideas of finitude and being in Foucault and Heidegger. ;It was my intention to try and explain the relation between thought and language as one which takes place along the lines of a transgression, a passing away of either thought into language or of language into the word. I take transiency to mean the demise of thought into language and of language into the word; a demise which we ourselves are, and which is one of our most important relations to being, as Heidegger explains it. This demise of being, this transiency, as I understand it, is both imparted to us and hidden from us in what Foucault, in "The Order Of Things," calls the "unthought." The unthought for me hints at the precarious partnership of thought and language and the ephemeral, or the perishable, similarity of the idea and the word, the thought that thinks it, and the language that speaks it. My assertion is that we find ourselves somewhere in between these two transiencies at all times, and that perhaps this is the realm in which being happens. ;To help with this argument I also include brief readings from Derrida's "Of Grammatology" etc., especially his idea of the "trace" as it corresponds to my interpretation of the interplay between thought and language, and the eventual expiration of the word as their invariably transient offspring. I conclude with the idea that the space between being and finitude, as indeed, between language and thought, opens into the unthought