Abstract

The dissertation considers the importance of Being and the ethical in the origin of language. Examining the writings of Heidegger, Stevens, Levinas, and Celan, it maintains that language in its "empirical" manifestations, its words and meanings, unfolds itself already in a double perspective: both ontological and ethical. Namely, language is always determined by an understanding of what Being means and is also already addressed and exposed to the other. Thus language is marked by this twofold otherness, which, although itself distinct from the semantic, grammatical, and lexical levels of language, prepares room and prescribes a direction for all linguistic phenomena. ;The first two chapters on Heidegger and Stevens focus on their attempt to secure access to an unthematizable region of language, which, although heterogeneous to words and meaning, to language in its empirical manifestations, constitutes the pre-semantic "essencing" of language. Both Heidegger and Stevens refer to this "essencing" as Being, as the verbal, active nature of language already on its way to words. The chapters on Levinas and Celan emphasize the separateness of the way in which the alterity of the other traces itself in language. Such mark indicates the elementary "ethicity" of language, beyond a thematic concern with ethics, beyond intentionality or a rhetorical address to the other. The dissertation offers a reading of this twofold otherness, and its originary importance for both poetic and philosophical discourse. It argues further that such ontologico/ethical otherness signals itself in its resistance to the notion of difference. Although already immersed in the language of difference, the texts of Stevens, Heidegger, Celan, and Levinas, point also to a discreet "room" in language, or rather--for language. This room, as yet unmarked by difference, announces itself as merely a readiness for differentiation. Emphasizing this "resistance" to difference, this study intimates a possibility of disengaging otherness from difference and implies a necessity of novel modes of philosophical thinking and critical analysis