For the claims of identity and totality that structuralism...

For the claims of identity and totality that structuralism more explicitly formulates are revealed as inherent to the irreducible phantasmatic core of ordinary language itself, and invoked in its every word.

In this way, at the point of its encounter with the basic question of the relationship of life to language, the analytic project of demystification yields to a more fundamental mystery (one that is, yet, not a mystification) at the center of our ordinary access to words and the fatedness of our lives to what they can say.

The mystery is that of (as we may put it) the existence of language itself, the fact of its constant accessibility to the individual moments and circumstances of an ordinary life. It can be the occasion for wonder, or for a transformed sense of the immanence of a life given over, in every word of language, to the openness of its possible discovery of itself.

I In the contemporary texts that are today most representative of analytic philosophy, the question of language has neither the methodological nor the thematic centrality it had in the original and founding moments of the tradition. Once grasped as the basis for a…