A sharp way of thinking, a productive way of living. When Foucault meets Wittgenstein

A sharp way of thinking, a productive way of living.

When Foucault meets Wittgenstein

Paolo B. Vernaglione

In the present time an archaeological reconstruction of the subjectivity as a set of relations between powers,

knowledge and subjects based on language's faculty, is on the agenda. But every set of different forms of

power and knowledge, accomplishes a mobile subjectivity, fragmented and definitly not identitarian.

According to Wittgenstein, a private language doesn’t exist, just as Foucault assert that individual identity

from which it’s possible to infer our own subjectivity doesn’t exist, as he remarked in The Archaeology of

Knowledge and in The Discourse on Language, as in L’ ordre du discours with respect to the literary

authors.

As of an analysis of language is occupied with studying and clarifying grammar rules in the language that we

speach daily, it is precisely this function that Foucault recognizes in Wittgenstein's thought. In fact, with the

enquiry of daily speech we discover not only the rules of language but also the way in which those rules are

practiced when we speach, write and communicate as effects of expression; so in this way, they are a process

of subjectivation. This essential recomendation brings the Wittgenstein’s conception near Foucault’s

perspective of subjectivity, wich he elaborated over the mid Seventies of Twentieh Century, that is no more

linked to the individual identity, but, as on Nietzsche, to certain discoursive regimes, produced in the

relationship beetwen differents areas of knowledge and of power. So the public faculty of language, that is

valorized in this post-‐fordist era, after decline of industrial capitalism and the rise of “net society” and the

financial power, now shows its structure in which history (as individual, contingent daily praxis) and meta-‐

history (as a set of conditions of life and of agency) are strictly intertwined. So the relevance of subjectivation

as an activity of human beings leaves the general processes of “secolarization” and the generic issue of total

dominance of the state over the individuals in the background, and marks the role of individuality as a

voluntary assumption of values, as a form of subordination to the state power, but in the meantime as a

“counter-‐behavior”, there is a possibility of resistence, and also a possibility to build spaces of freedom.

At the cross point of the processes of subjectivation and of an ontology of the self we find a

miracoulous meeting: Foucault looks at Wittgenstein, as a philosopher of the rules of the

language, because he pays attention to the forms in which language is used. In fact, the position of

Wittgenstein on the logic of language is different from others such Russell or Frege, who think of

language in terms of applications of formal logic. From this point the language testifys to the way

in which we live, therefore it is an index of an ethic, considered as an effect of our existence, not

as a prescriptive form of agency.

But not only.

As of an analysis of language is occupied with studying and clarifying grammar rules in the

language that we speach daily, it is precisely this function that Foucault recognizes in

Wittgenstein's thought. In fact, with the enquiry of daily speech we discover not only the rules of

language but also the way in which those rules are practiced when we speach, write and

communicate as effects of expression; so in this way, they are a process of subjectivation.

If we mark this consideration of the language as the most extended important human faculty

among others, the explanation is in the first lines of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Here the obstensive way to consider the language of Augustin, is revoked. In fact, the denotative

function of language in which the noun is the indication of a named object, when we need to

indicate something or someone, seems to be the primary function with respect to a simmetry

between words and things, ordinary used for certain education of the language, for instance

between a child and his mother. This funcion, as Wittgenstein shows us with the example of the

commands given to the workers in a construction yard, isn’t the same as the obstensive one.

We can suppose ‘a primitive language’ formed only by adverbs and adjectives: For example:

“(put) this (sheet), here!”. In this case we simply use another linguistic game that derives from a

specific situation. This use of language demonstrates that the denotative function isn’t the most

relevant and that the reference to words and facts is arbitrary and isn’t simmetrical at all.

This essential recomendation brings the Wittgenstein’s conception near Foucault’s perspective of

subjectivity, wich he elaborated over the mid Seventies of Twentieh Century, that is no more

linked to the individual identity, but, as on Nietzsche, to certain discoursive regimes, produced in

the relationship beetwen differents areas of knowledge and of power.

In this way of thinking we have a common field of research, as the French Congress on

Wittgenstein and Foucault highlighted in 2007, and how reaffirmed during the Convention

“Wittgenstein/Foucault” at the Sorbona University, in last June.

In fact the singular thing that today we don't cease to remark upon, is this common field in which

the analytical perspective on language and the archeological method of inquiring are interlaced.

This fact, that Foucault noticed in 1978 at the Tokio Conferences, cancels much of the polemics

between the improperly named "continental philosophy" and the analytical one; polemics that

have been generated via postmodernism from Chomsky’s generative theory of language that

contrast the logic of the analysis of language with an onthology of historical languages, based on

the Heidegger’s foundation of Being.

Considering this history of conflicts, in which we put the contrast between phenomenology and

analytical thought, developped in an angloamerican context and which will be used in genetic and

biological applications, the position of Foucault in favour of the analytical philosophy, conceived

for knowing different forms of power, mark this new ground and outline it’s limitations; it builds

boundaries that separate the space of discoursive subjectivity from other human institutions

(state, religion, nation), other systems of constraint (family, church, hospital, school), and other

regimes of knowledge (science, history, literature, arts).

According to Wittgenstein, a private language doesn’t exist, just as Foucault assert that individual

identity from which it’s possible to infer our own subjectivity doesn’t exist, as he remarked in

The Archaeology of Knowledge and in The Discourse on Language, as in L’ ordre du discours with

respect to the literary authors.

But every set of different forms of power and knoweledge, accomplishes a mobile subjectivity,

fragmented and definitly not identitarian.

In this case the cartesian subject of the Cogito is achieved by the history of thought, and it

became an archeological profile of the western way of life (the capitalistic one in the last two

Centuries), which is the prerequisite understanding for the correspondence of the subject and

individuality. This identity, as Marx has written, is based on the false conception of the political

economy that tells about an isolated human being as owner, so that the common mental habit

that is hidden in the personal identity of the men in the free market.

This means, on the one hand the subject is subordinated to the powers, in every form they

present themselves and they have effects on the public sphere; but, on other hand, this means

that the subjects, because they are free, have the possibility to resist the dispositives of power,

building their proper form of life, practicing the care of the self and trying to define himself as

responsible for the self. We know that the powers, in the form of the national state or today the

E.U., or the transnational economic institutions, such as BCE, or FMI, or simple aggregates of

nations, such as the French-‐Dutch axes in economic government of Europe, exercises their power

in the form of governmentality.

But we are aware that this configuration of powers, plus the multiple systems of knowledges that

engine the financial course, and that are responsible for the crisis of the sovereign debt in

Europe, is created also because of the absence of a popular answer to the problem of the

economy’s “financialization”...Excluding the social movement against the precarity of life, spread

in the present time to large layers of populations, it seems that the absence of a generalized form

of resistance to this banker’s and trader’s power depends less on a systemic condition of crisis

than on systematic discourses and for a counter-‐agency triggering discoursive regimes that are

different from those superimposed by neoliberal ideology.

So, in this time an archaeological reconstruction of the subjectivity as a set of relations between

powers, knowledge and subjects based on language's faculty, is on the agenda. This means,

according to Foucault, who points to an ethic, based on giving an account of oneself, as Judith

Butler has written. But it's also important to say, in addiction to this profile of human praxis, that

the subjectivity in question is not only a construct of the personal identity but it concerns any

possible large collectivities, above all if we take seriously the assertion of Wittgenstein that a

private language doesn't exist.

Even if we may above all clarify the complexities that intertwine linguistic games and forms of

life, in order to build an ethic of the self that backs out of social imperatives and impositions, we

need to remember that the set of relations in which the subjectivity is constitute are effects of an

exteriority. An individual exteriority (that Nietzsche has described as continous disappointment

of the Humanism); an environmental exteriority; a moral, religious, familiar exteriority (in the

way in which traditions, habits and norms are accepted by the subject); finally a social

exteriority, (of the power of the State, of the administration of the economy, of the impositions of

chasteness in a time of crisis). Therefore, Foucault determines the subjectivities as the effect of

education or of the familiar morality or of the individual structure of thinking assumed to be

outside.

On the surface we can suppose some differences between Wittegenstein’s and Foucault’s concept

of the self. These differencies are schematically represented as follow:

1) While Wittgenstein elaborate a first person subjectivity founded in the sector in which

linguistic games and form of life are situated, in contrast Foucault asserts that this subjectivity is,

as Nietzsche does, fragmented and covered by a will of potence, that is specified as will of

knowledge, relations of power and practices of subjectivation.

2) While the ethical ground in Wittgenstein is determined by the right application of the

language's rules to the praxis, even if this issue is problematic and finally not solved, according to

there for Foucault is a question of method, maybe the major ethical question, in which habits are

interlaced with games of truth, and certain possibilities of subjectivation and paths to knowledge,

are linked to historical contingencies.

3) This determines different positions in order to consider the history and the relationships

between history and biographical history. While for Wittgenstein the historical time is

determined in part by the continous personal search for the foundations of reason, and in part for

different linguistic games that the men initiate in different situations in life; for Foucault the

history is an optical effect of a cronological way of thinking that doesn’t correspond at all to the

reality, whether it is the reality of the self, or the social reality, or the reality of different

discoursive regimes of knowledge.

Therefore, the genealogical method destroys the historicism and replaces it, after the lesson of

the historical school of the Annales and the teachings of Canguilhem, with a research into

statements of culture, social habits, and power's dispositives. But these differences, that

inaugurate a zone of separation don’t prevent compatibilities between Wittgenstein's and

Foucault's thought, even if those need to be discovered on the implicit refinement of the issues. In

fact it is'n a matter of static and absolute differences, and, on the other hand, these differences

need to be noted in order to avoid some genericity and consider the common ground of ordinary

and useful linguistic habits.

For example, where Foucault writes about approaching the true nature of language by searching

into the perifery, where the daily use of language permit us to make sense of a word, and where

the enunciation neutralizes the single word in a total regime of discourse, here we can see some

similarity (an “air of family” as Wittgenstein states) with the reflection made in Philosophical

Investigations about the meaning of words depending on the linguistic games that we play.

So, it is a matter of conceiving and assigning boundaries to the zone of intersection in which the

reflection on the language in Wittgenstein meets the urgent issues of subjectivation, so essential

in Foucault and so productive today. In fact, at the beginning of the XXI Century we didn’t need to

start again with the question of wheter or not the human faculty of language is more or less at the

origin of the human being; or if it's for education or it’s acquired by the environment, or society.

In the same way, it isn't a matter of knowing if and how the power builds the constraints and

dominates the mass of people in a state, or in the world, because we don't know wath the origins

of these powers are; or better, we know that these origins are a part of the classical european era,

but not the reason, although we feel their effects.

Moreover we are not totally dominates by the state, nor by an economic power that obstructs the

free individual enterprise, as Adorno and Horkheimer asserted for the consumption of mass’s

society in the Nineteen Sixties. The contrary, we live today in a free expanded market in which

power is largely caused by our praxis, our multiple relations with others, and finally by the kind

of relations of power that we manage and we can manage with other people. In these processes

marked by complexity, we find the governmentality as an administrative power exercised on

ourselves, also through ourselves; a kind of power that determines the government of the self

and of others.

So the public faculty of language, that is valorized in this post-‐fordist era, after decline of

industrial capitalism and the rise of “net society” and the financial power, now shows its

structure in which history (as individual, contingent daily praxis) and meta-‐history (as a set of

conditions of life and of agency) are strictly intertwined, as Paolo Virno has written and affirmed.

So in this present, singular intellect, affections and sentiments are valued. This technical,

scientific, and dispositional framework of our late societies, that preside to the creation of value

(plusvalue) was cold by Marx General Intellect.

These post-‐industrial conditions has generated precarity, joblessness and social discriminations

in which a small quantity of rich possess the largest quantity of goods; this present condition is

an effect of a multiplicity of governmental dispositives, and it depends on the financial power of

banks, as well as on the administrative power of the state, linked with the financial powers; as

with the individual ideology of a free market that is now a personal knowledge that overcomes

the personal way of life, preferences, and every form of the inner relations that humans have

among themselves. Therefore, the zone of intersection between an individual and social way of

following rules of language, that produces the praxis, all human habits of life, this zone, is a fresh

ground of existence and of knowledge (as well as of research), to wich we are constantly exposed

and we experience.

This field, that Foucault with the analysis of dispositives and Wittgenstein with his highlighted

sentences about "following a rule", has elaborated, delimits at the same time a zone of

neutralization of the differencies between nature and culture, innate and acquired, original and

derivative, istincts and behaviour, and a zone of differentiation with respect to other zones that

form the human praxis (e.g.: follow an ideology, believe in something, fight for something,

manage a friendship).

So, here it isn't a matter of world-‐of-‐life, as a separate rational region of the existence, as

Habermas has sustained, to be able to manage reality with a transparent communication; and

isn’t a matter of autonomy of discoursive practices, wich are ables to build a public sphere, to

oppose to the power of money, or to the political power of the state; but it regards the zone of

intersection in which linguistic games are structurally connected with forms of life. This is the

place of singularity, the place of embodiment of the rules, the zone in which the differentiation of

individual differences happens; the zone of separation of all singular intensities of individual

profiles, singular shapes of character, and particular ways of practicing ethical norms, because

they are inside different social and discoursive regimes of language, but, because they are inside

an individual praxis of subjectivation.

So, this delimitation of the problem, and this clarification of the limits of this zone of existence (in

which we recognize the intersection of relational and individual life), constitutes both the

articulation of the subject and the use of the language in an ethical context. This effect isn’t

expected because a similarity of Wittgenstein with Foucault in approching language is centered

on a productive and new escape from metaphisics and psychology.

This result has been obtained by Wittgenstein trough the requestionnning of the reasons for the

logic of language, first about the form of the sentence (proposition), and, after the Tractatus

Logico-‐Philosophicus, reflecting on the sliding relations between affects, emotions and their way

of expression, in Philosophical Investigations; while from the Foucault’s immense research on

subjectivity, resulting in relationships of a subject to an ethic as an onthology of the self, censured

by modernity and useful as a form of interpretation of the self and others.

For example, in the definition of the modern human being as “allothrope empiric-‐trascendental”,

that we found in The order of Things , that Foucault mark as description of the new conception of

the human being in modernity, with the centrality of the notion of “life”, and of “man”, this

definition underline an archaeological profile of the concept of the humans in which we are at the

end of the illuminist explaination of human nature and the “organicistic” and romantic (see

idealistic) reaction to the spirit of classification in the XVIII Century. But if we can recognize the

layers of the historical concepts of mankind, so we can also see more clearly the critical

distinction between positivism and escatology of the history in both versions of Comte and Marx

and a new direction of philosophy, in which historicity is the source of finitude. On the other

hand, this is not a termination of a critical function of philosophy that Foucault has specially

described in the Preface to Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology and in another context in the course

on The Hermeneutics of the Subject.

Now, the operation because Foucault removes the methaphysical kantian frame from the critic, is

very complex whereas the Pragmatic Anthropology delimits the zone that differs from that in

which the thought becomes praxis and the behaviour emerges as an effect of innate human

faculties through categories in the a-‐priori knowledge.

This zone moves the “I think” from the trascendental place that it has in the Critic of Pure Reason

to a place marked by an uncertain intersection between trascendental and empirical, and in

which we seem to view a hybrid constitution of the subject of knowledge. The radical operation

of Foucault, in his last courses, consist of tracking the critical function of philosophy. This is

retraced in an anti-‐methaphysical dimension of ancient thought: the “pahrresia”, so the function

of “talking frankly”, or “saying the truth”. In this way the subject of the cartesian tradition is

evicted in favour of a subject of relationships, constitued in empirical experience and as an effect

of an exteriority and doesn’t coincide with some “inner identity”, or with an “interiority” as in the

later christian era. On the other hand, and this is a very important gain, the remains of classical

subjectivity, and of duality of subject ond object, do not eliminate the trascendental issue and the

human requirement of the will of knowledge, in which modernity trasformed the trascendental

issues.

This process works within the formalized development of science’s languages in which we

identifiyed modernity, beacause, with Kant, the trascendental form of thought is derived from an

analytical approach to the subject and objects. So, we have a complex framework composed of

different and opposite requests: those of a trascendental reason that don’t accomplishes their

metaphysical tasks but exist in the empirical struggle of the present. Those of a dispersion of

knowledges as Husserl has indicated and demonstrated, and that Foucault has affirmed as the

historical evidence using the archeological method in Archaeology of Knowledge. But also those of

empirical experience of the world with the passage from general grammar to linguistic, from

analysis of wealth to political economy and from natural history to biology; and finally those of

governmentality in which the power of the state becomes an administrative government of every

individual life.

As we see, the field of philosophical reflection and of the praxis has been completely changed,

starting from the Eighteenth Century, and the role of discursive regimes of truth (in which we

find the concept of human nature), instead of the conception of truth as a simple and absolute

correspondence between words and thing, introduces a meaning of rules that are generated from

praxis that is no longer naturally subordinated to these. This concept can be synthesized in the

affirmation that the discourses are artificial products of human praxis – made through arbitrarys

rules of language. Therefore we have a natural institution, or the language’s faculty, that works

with artificial rules.

In this point we recognize the Wittgenstein’s reflection on “following the rules”. In Philosophical

Investigations the question about following a rule is described pinpointing different linguistic

games, for instance the rules of chess, the rules of languages and the rules of traffic signals. The

first two have a similar but not identical way of operating, following a prohibition signal on the

street is something different, more similar to an “instinct”, learned with the practice of driving.

From this observation, we must consider the following:

1) Following rules in a game means to know these rules as common, not private facts.

(referred as “common human habits ”, as Wittgenstein sustaines). We observe, as Paolo

Virno has affirmed while commenting on Gilbert Simondon’s biological theory, that there

is a pre-‐individual dimension in which is constituted every individual life, that grants the

praxis, every single our act, and , that mantains personal individuation. This field, this

condition of our existence, this context of our life, that seems to be a meta-‐historical

structure of the nature of living beings, in which works the rules that are contained within,

testify to the autonomy of these rules, so their differences are related to every field of

knowledge. In this case, for Wittgenstein the fact that a private language doesn’t exist is

determinated by the particular rules of language, different from every other “game” (that

will have its own rules).

2) Secondly, as the rules are conventions and historically situated, our “instinct” in following

the rules (as to knowing the meaning of the rules) is not a natural fact, but a continous

effect of modifications, due to learning, exercises and practicing the game. Indeed, an

historical fact. A convention that allows sense and comprehension. But this, with a

warning that comprehension and communication aren’t stable at all, and what we

consider a proper quality of language, the transparency of communcations, simply doesn’t

exist. This is beacuse we discover every day, in every act of speech, that a supposed link to

an absolute truth is at least problematic; the relationship between noun and nominate is

something largely asymmetric, as demonstrated in the case of a word referring to an

object’s quality (“red”, “large”), or on conventional notation, abstract terms, or commands,

or interrogations, (see Philosophical Investigations).

Finally, in Wittgenstein it seems that rules are generated by human praxis, holding their pre-‐

individual character, in a strange, but “naturally historic” way. This interlacing of pre-‐individual

rules of knowledge and individual character of praxis, in other words, the way in wich we

perform singles acts of speech, generate a blurred zone between rules and facts, visibile only

when we separate them in an analytical research on the faculty of language. On this the rules

depart from their absolute essence and a single speech act leaves its ordinary profile of a fact

which is similar to all others and gains a unique and unreplicated quality, that constituts its

singularity. So we live in this zone, mainly without been aware of the fact that every speech act is

different from all other acts of language (even if we use the same terms and sentences); but at the

same time, comprehension and finally knowledge is possibile beacause we use these common

rules.

Therefore, this naturally historical behaviour implies the evaluation of contingency as Foucault

recognizes in the modern era. In present time the understanding of rules and in general the

criteria of knowledge, the moral rules and principles of power, becomes ways of life, forms of

existence, are no longer linked to an imperative law, or religious commandment, or classification

of genres and living species.

In the meantime, we can recognize a common inclination in Wittgenstein’s reflections on the

ethic, in Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie, and in Foucault’s The Order of Things

that outlines differences between the interpretation of modernity in terms of ethic relativization

of values, (secolarization) after Weber’s thought, and the processes of subjectivation of moral

values. This occurs because in Foucault we have a precise evaluation of modernity in which it

isn’t a matter of secolarization of the religious values, but of the intersection between social

praxis (such as systems of governmentality, burocratic rules, economic regimes of accumulation,

etc) and forms of “internalization” of values that are used in human relationships and that implie

an “exteriority” in which humans are involved. On the other hand the modernity is marked by a

dominance of the state that conflicts with the free market as an expression of individual freedom,

as is clarified in 1978-‐‘79 course Birth of Biopolitic.

This incidentally means that the state as a set of social relationships (we would like to add that

they are related to certain relations of production) isn’t reductible to total dominance, in which

Adorno and Horkeheimer identified the essence of the state in late industrial capitalism. So, from

The Order of Things to the course on the Hermeneutics of the Subject we interprete modernity as

a complex set of practices that is active in singular daily life and determined by subjectivations,

that is the way in which moral values are assumed by the individual. Indeed, and this is very

important to point to the differencies between Weber’s and critical theory of Frankfurt’s School,

in Foucault’s elaboration of subjectivity the subject can resist those rules and norms of

behaviour.

So the relevance of subjectivation as an activity of human beings leaves the general processes of

“secolarization” and the generic issue of total dominance of the state over the individuals in the

background, and marks the role of individuality as a voluntary assumption of values, as a form of

subordination to the state power, but in the meantime as a “counter-‐behavior”, there is a

possibility of resistence, and also a possibility to build spaces of freedom. This process is less a

matter of a dialectical relationships between powers and indivuduals or a codified system of

subjectivation, than of a singular way in which the individual manages his relations to the State

and to a set of powers.

In this way we outline another conceptual element of this zone of intersection of Foucault and

Wittgenstein’s thought, useful for interpreting the so called “post-‐fordist era”, characterized by a

multiplicity of forms of subjectivation interlaced with forms of domination of individuals

(assujettissement). This element, that is also an idea for a possible new field in philosophy, is to

apply an analythics of forms of the expression of the self in the present regime of production, in

order to realize both forms of resistence and an ethic of a “good life”.

In Wittgenstein this idea of individual orientation to the values, and to the activity of the self as

an ethical search, is expressed in Tractatus Logico-‐Philosophicus in a continous interrogation

about the individual limits of language. As previously stated, the problematic and difficult

relationship between language and the world pushes Wittgenstein to affirm the priority of a

logical framework of language that reflects a framework of the world (therefore logical too). This

disposition is represented into the form of proposition but this first and last theorical gain isn’t

secure at all. In the Tractatus a field of relationships between propositions and “state of things” is

described in wich every time a “state of things” can’t be expressed by language, this state, as well

as the philosophical statements about the the world, aren’t real. This means that the reality of

proposition doesn’t correspond to the reality of the world. Secondly, the criterium of truth

applied by language to the world has an asymmetrical correspondence to each element of the

language and each element of the world. So, with respect to the traditional result of metaphisics,

here we have a productive twist caused by taking the impossible reduction of the world’s

framework into the form of proposition seriously. When in fact the criterium of truth as a

correspondence (adequatio) between words and things is dissolved, we can suppose on one hand

an infinite world, and on the other a language that expresses all that can be express, whitout

anything remaining, but limited in expressing the world. This signifies the attempt of language to

reach the sense of the world, starting from its limits, and seems, maybe different with respect

other interpretations of Wittgenstein’s thought, not proof of an impossibility but a challenge for

knowledge in order for individual to change life, trasforming his way of thinking.

But this continous comparison between facts and words also means that all that is appearing in

the world is thinkable and expressible by the language.

Now, with this we must’n think that the mere perception of things is simple and and that it is

resolved in the act of speeching; on the contrary, this attempt, in the Wittgenstein’s approach, is

a struggle of thought, as a sort of “mystic pilgrimage” to purify oneself from all the ordinary

casualties of common speech. So, for the moment, it is a matter of regenerating our habits of

expression, discovering a world with another view, or better, with an “other” view, and it isn’t a

matter of recognizing a form of life based on the way in wich we use language. In this point of

discontinuity, but not of fracture in Wittgenstein’s thought, Pierre Hadot ponts out the role of

linguistic practice.

As he writes in his collection of essays on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein et les limites du langage, to

recognize things in an immediate linguistic peception doesn’t mean that this operation simply

connects every object to a name; on the other hand, this inevitable discontinuity allows us to

recognize the expression of things as limited and marked by contingency. The common faculties

of mankind can’t express the illimited world, so “the limits of my language are the limits of my

world”. As Hadot affirms, the main problem with Wittgenstein’s conception of language revolves

around the insurmountable limits of expression, because we have been experiencing the

language since our birth and we are its thereshold. For Wittgenstein because rules that have

value only for me aren’t rules at all, the subject is at the outer limits of language, so this eccentric

position of subjectivity traces the infinite boundaries of an impossibility.

With regards to the limits of expression some of the examples in Philosophical Investigations are

about pain and the expressions of pain. These aren’t the same thing, as Wittgenstein has writing,

because to cry out in pain is different than to feel pain. Here the language let us discover our own

limits, that are useful both for the expression of pain, and for expressing this pain using our

language.

As Wittgenstein has pointed out, the nature of the language rests in this fracture between feeling

and it’s expression, because to account for a symmetry between things and their expression we

should be exterior to language and the world. In any ordinary situation every explanation of our

state of mind, or sentiments, or affects is a linguistic expression, and this expression needs to be

explained by another linguistic expression, and so on… We are forever inside the language and

paradoxally, a metalinguistic task with which we explain the language – object, should be exterior

to language, and this is contradictory.

Since we use the same rules of language and the assurance of comprehension of our speech is due

to this “natural human habit” that permits us to express the expressible, the problem is that the

prior limit of expression accompanies any single speech act; it constitutes our language faculty,

so we can’t ever separate it from a speech act. So every statement contains whithin inside itself

the inexspressible aspect of language, and this is the threshold of the expressible, the ineffable of

the world as demonstrate by the expression of feelings and the expressions of abstract things.

Hadot insist on the insurmountable nature of language and, for him, this limit gives an account of

“the mystic” that Wittgenstein conceives. But we observe that the sentence written at the end of

Tractatus is a matter of affects, feelings, emotions. The limits of language and the will of

expression of oneself with daily practice, is visible here; but, in contrast to Hadot, this fact isn’t

matter of an isolated person who has choosen to remove himself from the world, but with only

this limitation, so that the contingency of every speech act, contitutes the faculty of language, and

within this limitation we recognize the nature of language as our nature.

Hadot has compared Wittgenstein to the Stoics, in which philosophy is a therapy that consists of

removing any usual habits of using language (and of thinking) and performing a continous

analytical exercise on our way of thinking, based on the reflection of our speech. This strenous

and difficult daily practice leads to a transformation of the self attempts to achieve a sharpness

and to get to the essential of things. With this practice, at the end of Tractatus Wittgenstein points

out the result of philosophy as a therapy: the philosophical ladder as outline in Tractatus bring us

to a new dimension of thought that is also an ethical dimension of life.

Here we may observe two points in this syntetic reconstruction that brings Wittgenstein’s

thought close to Foucault.

To mention this, it is necessary to address Hegel’s reflection on language and referred to Giorgio

Agamben in his book Il linguaggio e la morte. Hegel, first in his poem Eleusis dedicated to

Holderlin, and later in the first chapter of Phenomenology of the Spirit, on the Sensible Certainty,

confronting the inexpressible zone of language, offers two solutions to the question of meaning.

In Eleusis a mythical language of the sacred is escaping and it is dissolved when the divinities

leave Earth and are seek refuge on Mount Olympus. So, from that moment every attempt to

restore speech in order to interprete and explain this sacred lost language is condemned to fail.

As Agamben has written, this means the unavailability of any language to express things anything

but a decayed way.

In Phenomenology of the Spirit Hegel’s thought on language changes and the question becomes

how daily language connects immediatly with Sensible Certainty in order to reach the true sense

that mankind strives to express. These difficulties of expression are shown in the adjectiv “this”

with which we express the case of Sensible Certainty: e.g., this tree, this horse, this situation. For

all of these simple specifications of objects using “this”, that renders a specificity of an object

through all others, in that specific case inevitably we find a universality, created by the “this” (all

“this), that doesn’t have any specific reference to the object to which it is associated. So, an

element of language normally used to describe individuality instead referes to universality. And

universality is the way in wich language necessarily expresses things and situations. For Hegel

this means that the Sensible Certainty isn’t the true essence of things. This truth, as we know, is

found at the end of a dialectical process in which the Spirit is plunged and, as Agamben

demonstrates, this end is also at the beginning of the dialectical process, for an important reason

that we will consider later. The dialectic is moved by the moment of negativity of language that

subtracts the meaning at the same moment in which it extablishes it. The “cast off” is the

essential dialectical movement of reality, without which we don’t have any synthesis of “the real”,

or any knowledge, so we don’t have any progress of the Spirit. The agency of this “determinate

denial” that provokes universality, builds the moment of abstraction in which Hegel recognizes

the work of language and the identity between real and rational.

If we attach Hegel’s elaboration to Wittgenstein’s writings about the constraints of language we

obtain a vision of speech acts that are referred to as common human habits, privious of any

historical language, but at the same time produced by historical languages. In the zone of

separation between any speech act and the will of expression we find the rules of language, and

the nature of these rules. These is the contingent nature of these rules because of their

metahistorical nature, as well as their transindividual nature that is primarily historical.

So the “common human behaviour” that gives us a certainty of comprehension in using language,

is founded on a determinate denial, that presides in every speech act. So the eminent

characteristic of language is building meanings with a negative imprint in wich is revealed its

nature. This historical negativity, or this historically determined denial, gets close to

Wittgenstein and Foucault’s perspectives on the function of language.

First of all, language doesn’t communicate at all. Second, the meaning of a word is it’s use in a

linguistic game. Third, the rules of these games are immanents to the game and are known

through practice, a continous “exercise” in which consists common human behaviour. Four, but

here we are aligned with Foucault’s analysis of “discoursives regimes”, research on enunciations

permits us to see the complex relationships beetwen knowledges, powers and forms of

subjectivation. Finally, as we can’t follow a rule “privatim”, any science, as a public fact, is

involved in common knowledge and find its formalization and abstraction in relation to forms of

power as they circulate through humans and as they are accepted or refused by each individual.

At this point of our enquiry Agamben’s reflection on language assumes an eminent relief. In

particular it’s important underline the separation between the will of expression and the sense

that words can express. In the case of pronoun “this”, the singular qualification of

someone/something doesn’t correspond to the true sense of the word. So, an abstraction of all

possible individuality is used to identify a single subject/object. This contradiction between

language and meaning, is really a contradiction between a will of expressing something and the

expression itself, whose use is the meaning itself.

This acquisition has informed the crucial work of Emile Benveniste, particularly on the notion of

“instance of the enunciation” attributed to a person speaking. In this case we must remark on the

real existence of a subject who is talking, (even if some critics have argued that in Benveniste isn’t

a matter of subject, but of a discursive instance in a linguistic framework), since the attention is

moved away from the semantic to the semiotic field.

So that, only in the “original” separation between language and speech, langue and parole after

Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction, we may reconnect language and subject, and we may talk

about an historical co-‐original source of language and subject. This way of considering the

language is testified to the pronoun “I”, and by all the deictic adverbs as “here”, “now”, “this”, that

Roman Jakobson called shifters, beacuse they point to an instance of enunciation. They really are

indicators of an instance of discourse, something exclusively linguistic before assuming some

sense, in which the nature of language is solved.

As Benveniste, quoted by Agamben, wrote, «… “I” means “the person that enunciates the present

request of discourse that includes “I”.» (my translation). And the indicators like adjectives and

pronouns (shifters), such as the “I” pronoun, have the function to operate, « the conversion of the

language in discourse». And again with Agamben, the shifters in Jakobson’s theory have the

function of passing from meaning to indication, from language (langue) to speech (parole).

So we don’t have an extralinguistic origin of language and of human kind, but, as the shifters of

the “instance of the discourse” indicate, we are inside the language “all the time” and “right now”.

In the second instance, verbs that indicate the act of say something (e.g.: “I say that…”,) or the

speech formulas that Austin calls absolute performative, such as “I promise”, “I command”, “I take

this woman as my legitimate wife”, “I baptize Paul this child” and all religious and civil

ceremonies, indicate a “fact of speech”, not “wath is being talking about”.

Therefore, as Paolo Virno affirm, this sentencies directly show faculty of language, here as

subjective instances of discourse, and not as particular meaning that words have express. As in

the speech formulas “How are you?”, “See you later”, or simply “Hi”, the “I say”: “(I say) how are

you”, “(I say) see you later”, “(I say) hi!” are supposed. So, these expressions as speech acts are

referred to the faculty of language, as potentiality of talking, embodied in a single subject. This is

the most important aspect of language in which we recognize a deep relationship between

general faculty and subjectivity. As Wittgenstein has written, “when the language fails” emerge its

quality… to be the nature of the subject; so that, human praxis.

In Foucault’s terms, modernity is carachterized for a will of know struggling with reality of

language. The voluntary aknowledgment of language’s rules requires expressions of speech that

are different respect to the will of talk. So, as this radical opposition is suppressed in to reality of

language, anyway its generates the space of the language, the place in which it’s becoming real.

This is the source of every speech act.

As Giorgio Agamben has clarified and Pierre Hadot has intensively described in his book Le voile

d'Isis : essai sur l'histoire de l'idée de nature, studying Goethe’s concept of nature, need to consider

the source of language as an Urphanomenon, a “pre-‐evenemential” origin that generates an

opposition between sense and speech willing, and at same time a linguistic identity between

concepts of the particular and the universal.

But the sense of Urphanomenon must be know, as Agamben pointed out, as historical source of

language, not as a pre-‐historical and absolute origin of it, which every form of expression should

depends. Contrary, the Urphanomenon is immanent to the practice of language and there isn’t

any trascendental form able to reduce all its functions. In this sense Urphanomenon need to be

considered as a set of possibilities of speech, and it’s strictly intertwined with every speech act.

So, it only exists as historical event and, on the other side, a single speech act in his own

contingency expresses common human behaviour (as faculty of language).

The Urphanomenon so conceived, let to emerge the historical nature of language and offer us,

differently from Kant, a conception of trascendental form less analythical (rational), and more

purposeful in accounting for relationships between subject and objects. As Goethe has criticized

Romantic poets because they had an absolute concept of origin of nature that he supposes they

employed, the historical view of language’s source, generating the modern comparative

linguistics, is one of the most important gain in modernity era.

This point was extraordinary highlighted by Gianni Carchia in the essay Nome e immagine. Saggio

su Walter Benjamin, in wich he has explained how the great dutch philosopher was conceived

historical materialism after Marx in a messianic dimension, as source of creation and as set of

tools of artistic creation. In the preface of the essay on Goethe’s Electives Affinities (Kindred by

Choice), Benjamin wroted as differently from Romantics Goethe has thought relationships

between Art and Nature as a series of creative links that derives from a set of natural figures, no

more mythicals but historicals. This is a fundamental gain that brake off the limits of idealistic

conception of the art in which the progress of self-‐comprehension of Spirit automatically should

allow to the “truth” of the art. But the misunderstand about Goethe consists in his idea of a

natural mythical remain in activity of the artist, even if Goethe considers art as historical product,

out of any natural archetype.

The conception of the language in Benjamin, as expression of noun that need to be rescued inside

the history, conducts him to the essential meaning of Goethe’s aestethics, while he affirm the

priority of some “naturally” historical source of artistic forms, and he explain it with necessity to

avoid the complete ruin of prior nominative function of language, same as Urphanomenon lost in

the historical languages. We catch a glimpse of an eminent theorical and historical effect of this

lost in Gershom Sholem’s polemical mail addressed to Franz Rosenzweig about a new language of

the Hebrew, after the world war two, largerly commented by Jacques Derrida in the essays Les

yeux de la langue.

This entire co-‐relationship between Urphanomenon and historical possibilities of language

defines the place of language itself as metahistorical source, not placed at the beginning or at the

end of the history, but inside it. This seems to be true in the present time.

Today in every speech act, in every daily action, in the whole praxis, we observe the

metahistorical faculty of language as historical one. And we see also the way in which the so

called “past” and the “future” too are both present in same time. The use of language testifies that

the link between the past and the present is already given whereas the past is available as

threshold of the present.

So, the past takes in the present all possibilities of a radical transformation of things, a

revolutionary change due to messiah beaking off in daily life. So the future becomes shorten in a

present considered as “time of now”, that gives rise to occasions of revolution. So, as we see, the

messianic “time of now” has the function to ricapitulate the whole history of mankind same as

the language in every present time has the funcion to restore the act of nomination in order to

align the meaning of words and the will of expression; so in this way the lost totality of relations

between nouns and things are entirely restored (restitutio ad integrum). In this situation,

according to Benjamin, we obtain happiness as unique, terrestrial gain of humans.

But with a foundamental warning: this “so restored” totality isn’t an absolute state of thinghs, or

an archetypal condition accomplished at the end of the history; or an Urphanomenon that

precede the history and it’s separated from it like an originary, pre-‐historical event. The integrity

which everyone aims to is an historical possibility, as a potentiality of human beings already done

in the present and in every terrestrial place. So, it’s a matter of praxis and not of dialectical

totality, or trascendental process of comprehension caused by some “a-‐priori” separated from

history.

Contrary, in this historical materialism of Benjamin’s thought, and in his conception of language,

that proceedes from a real movement, we see the precious structure of an “historical a-‐priori”,

identified in Foucault’s Words and Things as the cypher of modernity. In this historical condition

of the time, in which we clearly observe the true relations between subjects, knoledge and power

in our modern era, the large conceptual definition able to interprete the present time – while the

historical a-‐priori produces modernity at large – determines subject as effect of a tangled

entertwine.

So, the subject of modernity is configured as an “empiric-‐trascendental allotrope”, that is a being

which his own existence implies his essence, or, as in Marx, a being that in addition to living need

to produce conditions of his own life. We can say it because means of production are conditions

that assure the reproduction of human beings.

As Foucault point out, this process is spread in different grounds of agency, not only in

economical field, but also in the knowledge and in co-‐relationship with other men into industrial

way of working (as cooperation).

So, if we consider this point of view that join Marx with Foucault’s thought of capitalistic

modernity, the activities of manhood, the entire human praxis, we observe an entertwine

between meta-‐historical conditions of life and historical one as events of production, valorized by

capitalism. As Paolo Virno has written in many occasions, the lead carachter of capitalistic

modernity is the daily entertwine of meta-‐historical reproduction of life and goods and historical

acts of work, without whose, conditions of reproduction of the life simply aren’t available at all.

In this sense we have a figure of subject that, as Foucault has outlined, is characterized at least for

a double discoursive regime, or even, for a multiplicity of these regimes in a double articulation of

the individual life: the production of the “self” and “others” (reproduction) and the production of

social relations and goods (production). So that, subjectivity is crushed in multiple identities as

the utterances are. This mean, , according with Wittgenstein’s reflection on the forms of life, that

the concept of just one individual identity is achieved if everyday we are playing more than one

linguistic game.

In second istance, we need to consider subjectivity, particularly in the late modernity, as marked

by post-‐fordist’s production of goods, that is an effect due to valorization of linguistical

structures, that consist in non-‐substancial essence of individuality.

As we see, considering the spread of post-‐fordist regime of production until the Eighties of the

last Century, in philosophy we are present at the “linguistic turn”. But this perspective in many

cases was adopted in “continental” philosophy to justify via Nietzsche the so called “faible

thought”, in wich post-‐modernist thinkers declare “the end of the history”. On the other side,

according with interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought against the historism and the excess of

historical culture in modernity era, besides against the “faible tought”, we prefer to tell about

history in this post-‐fordist era, whereas in the theatre of capitalistic production shows its meta-‐

historical conditions of existence; so, a concept of subject fading his identity in contingencies of

multiple linguistic games is here elaborated. In this configuration of subjectivity, as Freud and

after Lacan have strongly affirmed (taking serious the sentence of the latter: “the inconscious is

structured as a language”), we can reconstruct a shape of a subject having many similarities

between Wittgenstein’s idea of man as threshold of language and of Foucault, conceiving human

being as affected by processes of subjectivation. So we can reconnect this similarity to a

materialistic philosophy, adopting the Aristote’s definition of man as animal provided with

language (zoon logon exxon).

This notion avoid the gross materialism based over a strict distinction between economical

structure of societies and redundant symbolic superstructure of these, including the

reproduction of life, as it’s occured with post-‐structuralism of last fifties, fortunately broked up

by feminist’s teory of genres and trans-‐genre (e.g. in Teresa de Lauretis’s thought).

Along this lines we attempted to clarify an aspect of the radical stance on subjectivity in which it’s

possible to recognize a point of departure of Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s reflection, indirectly

confirmed by a materialist and non-‐dialectical thought. This concept of subjectivity as eminently

clarified in the volumes on History of Sexuality (as The Will of Know, L’usage des plaisirs, really

published, and in the project of Les aveu de la chair), but above all in the courses at Collège de

France, from 1979 to 1984, and in the conferences in U.S. and Canada in the last Seventies. Here

we know how Foucault has considered the classical greek philosophy and Ellenistic schools of

thought (Stoics, Epicureans, Cinics and Latin stoicism) as models of the “technologies of the self”,

spreading a concept of subjectivity not primarily caused by economical or social condition of

existence, but which it’s covered by the sphere of knowledge and of sciences, as well as by

power’s relationships, and truth itself.

In this case we can reconnect different regimes of truth to a different dispositives of power (the

disciplinary institutions as psychiatric clinics, hospitals, schools, jails, barracks) and today to a

different dispositives of control, both burocratic and digital, indeed to a different way to govern

humans (governmentality). So the attention of Foucault to simply avoid such reduction of subject

to an affair of domination (because of the state or the economics), and his precious insistence in

outline different kinds of determinations in building relations of power and submission, definitly

has detached his thought as from Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory (see Birth of

biopolitics course of 1979), as from Habermas’s theory of transparent relationships between

humans in communication; but also from Husserl’s phenomenology, and Sartre’s existentialism

based on a free action choosed by the “I” oneself; as, at least, from all “faible” theories of subject

that have misunderstood the real meaning of multiple regimes of utterances in composing

different layers of subjectivity, and are given this effect as a definitive “end of the history” and

complete dissolution of material conditions of existence of subjects.

So, we have a large field of enquiry of subjectivity, simply drafted here, in which philosophy of

language, natural history and social sciences, all considered in an archaeology of knowledge, are

intertwined to scketching up, after Nietzsche’s end of the man, a new shape of subjectivity.

Moreover this approach to the human being constitutes a genealogy of present time that seems

useful in this present where government of livings is the core production of economical values.

The question of the subjectivity glimpsed in Wittgenstein’s notion of humans, which are placed at

the limit of the language and are playing different linguistical games as they are inhabitant of

forms of life, is so related to an ethical transformation of the self no more based on an abstract

moral duty but on a historical presence on earth. The emerge of subjectivity affected by intrinsic

flexibility of attitudes as it’s wanted by capitalism is already an evidence in Wittgenstein’s

conception of language in order to the public rules of behaviour.

This fact implies to ask oneself if it’s possible to build a form of life in which safeguard of our

historical nature it allows to deactivate dispositives of capture; and how is possibile to avoid anti-‐

historical turn constitued by fictitious, closed and dangerous ghetto-‐communities. In the

meantime, we need to ask ourself how avoid an out-‐of-‐time decrease in technologies that will

damage the attempts to escape the logic of profit.

In this last years many configurations of subjectivity has attempted to get out from neoliberal

form of societies: protests, occupying, riots, but a question is remaining: how, after the end of the

man, some subjectivity as complex between singular and common is possible. And we suppose

it’s done if we are able to manage relationships between language, power and freedom.

_____________________________

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