Reversing it could bring about the substantial...

Reversing it could bring about the substantial methodological renewal of a tradition whose dispersal and exhaustion have often, of late, been bemoaned.[^430] If the problems of our access to language indeed inflect the most ordinary acts and circumstances of our lives, then the analytic inquiry can also be seen as the tradition’s critical encounter with their most pervasive contemporary ideological determinants.

For the claim to comprehend language is itself, in part, a claim of power; the analytic tradition’s reflection on this claim provides internal resources for resisting it, at the point of the everyday metaphysics of meaning that it presupposes. The structuralist picture of language itself figures determinately in some of the most deeply seated assumptions and strategies of power in the modes of life definitive of advanced industrial societies of the twentieth century.

The critical results that articulate its failures are therefore intelligible, as I have argued, as chapters of a liberatory project of demystification, the checking of claims of power by the diagnosis and criticism of the false and misleading pictures of human life that form their basis.

Here, reflection leads to freedom: the demystification of structuralism’s false pretense to master language’s own inherent possibilities offers to deliver a clarified human life from the claims of power it facilitates. But if the claims of linguistic reason that threaten to exert violence over life are, as I have argued, rooted in the very forms that would make (that do make) language intelligible to us at all, the critical work of “demystification” becomes more complex and harder to place.

For this work can no longer ascribe the violence of identity and totality simply to the consequences of an optional picture of language or its claim on a human life. Since there is no other picture, they are revealed as instances of a more fundamental violence, one that arises with, and is already fully present in, the first word of language’s reflection on itself.

In tracing the pictures that mystify the heterogeneous moments of our lives by assimilating them to the identical and totalizable, the critical inquiry that aims to check the violence of language can, similarly, no longer count these pictures simply as errors or illusions.