In the various specific investigations of this book...

In the various specific investigations of this book, I have therefore tried to trace the consequences of the philosophical vision of language for the development of some of the main historical projects of the analytic tradition, asking, in each case, what ensures or precludes the openness of language to philosophical reflection, what constitutes language as an object or ensures the possibility of a critical inquiry into its structure or limits, and also what permits, and what problematizes, our everyday rational reflection about the bearing of language on the form of a human life.

My aim in posing these historical and conceptual questions is not to espouse or invite any positive doctrine or theory. Instead, I hope only that this book can serve as a kind of signpost or marker, a historically based indication of a question that was once open for philosophy and could be taken up again, not only in the future inheritance of its specific methods, but also in the practices and events of an everyday life that knows itself as transfigured by the language it takes up.