Sticks and Stones
As children, many of us heard the reassuring little rhyme from our parents: "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." I dare say, some of us still repeat these words to ourselves on bad days when we feel hurt by the words of others. Yet, in our everyday conversations we often give evidence that we doubt the truth of this rhyme.
On Menno-Link, for example, where Mennonites argue all day long on the internet about everything from recipes to sex, one frequently find people complaining that they have been deeply hurt, offended, or harmed by the words they find on their computer screen. And nearly everyday one finds messages on Menno-Link which suggest that participants worry about their well-being in this supposedly pacifist corner of cyberspace. Just browsing through a sampling of messages last week, I found the following lines in e-mail posts. "I think I've said enough of the wrong thing here on Menno-Link to have my head taken off, so I think I'd better stop," wrote one participant. "To those who read my answers and disagree, don't let your prejudices lead you to throwing stones until you understand the answers," pleaded a different writer. "And now I have made myself vulnerable again," sighed a another surfer after bravely critiquing someone else's post. "I never learn."
Like these Menno-Link discussants, we often use metaphors of violence to describe our experiences of conversation and communication. When someone else criticizes our viewpoint, we sometimes say that we have been attacked. On internet chat groups, after an avalanche of challenges to our viewpoint, we say that we have been flamed. Some words, we say, cut us to the bone. Such common-sensical expressions and many others suggest that we accept at an intuitive level that the childhood rhyme about sticks and stones is not true, that our words have great capacity for harm as well as good. We are more convinced, I think, by the biblical claims in the book of James: "How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell … With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God" (3:5-9).
For some time now, I have been curious about the capacity of words which roll off our tongues to wound as well as to transform, to do great harm as well as good. I have taken the opportunity of preparing this lecture as an occasion to suggest some ways we might think about the relationships between words and truth, between speech and self, between communication and ethics. And more specifically, I have sought to propose one interpretation of what it might mean for Christians who follow the outspoken yet defenseless Jesus to speak with both force and generosity.
Words and Truth
First of all, I want to take some time to explain my understanding of how language works. My views about language are indebted to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure as well as the poststructuralist texts of Jacques Derrida. I wish to briefly summarize what these thinkers have taught me about language by showing how they challenge our commonsensical understandings of the relationship between language and reality.
The popular view of language is that it works referentially; that is, words are signs for the realities to which they refer. If I say "brick," for example, I tend to assume that the words I'm using are simply substitutions for the thing itself, representations or reflections of the reality that's out there. In this view, which has much debt to Plato, signs such as words are secondary to the more fundamental ideas or objects that they represent. Since signs are considered secondary, they are also considered to be of less consequence than the realities which they are thought to represent. Put differently, language is dependent on the non-linguistic realities it represents for its existence. Language is brought into existence by the world to which it refers. If there were no actual brick, there would be no word "brick." Thus, the main critical question we ask about language from a referential perspective is whether or not it accurately represents non-linguistic realities. If language is not accurate, in our perspective, we dismiss it by saying that it's "only words" or "empty rhetoric."
Toward the end of the 19th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) led an intellectual movement that challenged this referential view of language. According to Sausurre, the meaning of a sign is produced out of the grammar system within which it is employed. To understand this view, it is necessary to elaborate on several basic notions used by Saussure.
1. Signs are made up of signifiers and signifieds. For Saussure, signs consist of two primary elements: the signifier (words and symbols) and the signified (mental concepts or ideas to which the words and symbols refer). Signs, therefore, do not refer to things in themselves; rather, they produce meaning in the relationship that is articulated between the signifier and the signified through the larger grammar of which they are a part (Saussure 65-70). We can represent this view of language as follows: S/s where S is the signifier and s is the signified.
2. Specific signs only produce meaning in the context of the larger system of signs. Saussure called the larger linguistic system that humans internalize, langue. He called the specific utterances that are made possible from this larger system, parole (Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure 39-41). According to Saussure, any specific utterance is given meaning by that which could have been said, but was not said. My capacity to communicate with another rests in this shared linguistic system that inhabits our minds, mostly at a subconscious level, from which we can draw when we strive to make meaning, either as speakers or audiences.
3. The linguistic system that makes meaning possible operates through binary oppositions. The linguistic system that underwrites all of our meaning making depends on the establishment of an opposition between the privileged term and the other terms from which it is set apart. As one interpreter of Saussure puts it very succinctly: "if language as signifying depends upon the selection of one linguistic item as against other possible items, then language as signifying depends not upon the particular positive properties of what is uttered but upon the formal difference between what is uttered and what is not uttered" (Harland 13). In other words, meaning depends not on the given reality, but on the linguistic reality that is made through this system of binary oppositions. The world of meaning must be divided up between mutually exclusive terms, on this view. The real, as such, cannot be comprehended except in its appearance as a product of this system of binary oppositions, which originates not with the real as such but with the human practices of signifying and communication.
A brief example can illustrate the structuralist account of linguistic meaning-making. On my way to class I frequently stop to watch the the family of ducks playing in Riley Creek. There is no doubt that the entities we call ducks have an existence independent of my consciousness. Yet, they appear to me as a meaningful spectacle only insofar as they are distinguished through a sign system as animals, instead of, say, plants; as ducks versus, for example, dogs. One of the pleasures in watching these ducks more recently is that at least one cluster appears to me as what I would call a family: two differently colored ducks appear to be male and female and the smaller size ducks capering about seem to be the children. As I watch the ducks I intuitively strive to give meaning to their actions by trying to distinguish, for example, this family from the other ducks that are wandering about that do not appear to be part of a family. At a common-sensical register, the way that I am thinking about these ducks appears to be a natural outcome of the fact that the ducks are there doing their thing. Yet what Saussure's structural linguistics teaches us is that in fact my experience of these entitities as animals, as ducks, and as a family, was made possible through the very human practice of signification that has nothing really to do with the ducks themselves. Specifically, I was able to make meaning of this spectacle because of all the possible terms available to me that were not applicable: not grass, not trees, not buildings, not dogs, not cats, not zebras, etc. Furthermore, in making this meaning, at each moment I privileged one term of a binary opposition over the other: i.e. duck/not duck. Notice that the system of binary oppositions forces me to give presence to one sign at the expense of the others. To the extent that I'm noticing the duck, this is possible because I'm capable of noticing that it is not any of the other things that it might be. This doesn't seem to be a big deal when we're talking about the "duck/not duck" binary but it is has far more implications when we think about the "family/not family" binary. In our society, we have learned that family is Mom, Pop, and the kids. That which doesn't fit this is usually categorized as "not family" just as I categorized those ducks that didn't seem to fit into this family scheme. So, to the extent that I was focusing on the family aspect of these ducks, the ducks that seemed to fit into a family were privileged in my consciousness whereas the other ducks were forced into the underprivileged category of not family. At that moment in which I was thinking "Oh, what a cute little family of ducks," I could not account for the ducks that didn't fit into family except to think of them as not belonging, as not part of the family, as not even having a family. They simply didn't figure except insofar as they were available examples of what the family is not. Notice that meaning-making as interpreted by structuralists like Saussure intrinsically forces us to make these kinds of exclusions. In order to notice anything; that is, to give anything meaning, we privilege one term over the other possibilities which then appear as the negatives of the privileged term. While binary oppositions are intrinsic to meaning-making and thus necessary to making it through the day; they also make much trouble for us when they function in ways that underwrite prejudice and oppression. An example of the latter is the cultural attribution of presence to whiteness and absence to blackness. Thus, in our society, the races have been divided into white and non-white in the average American's sign system. The many variations of skin color in our society are thus forced into a racial binary opposition that privileges whiteness as the norm against which all the other skin colors are rendered as non-white. Such an everyday binary opposition insures that most Americans get through the day as racists of one kind or another.
Now, it should probably strike you that this is quite a conservative way to look at language. Saussure's linguistics in its concern for understanding and explaining the system of signs that precedes meaning making suggests that habits of thought are culturally entrenched and unchanging, not flexible or yielding. If the meaning that I make of the world is constrained in this way by the available linguistic system that has been passed down to me and which I have internalized, then how is it possible for me to be transformed toward better ways of seeing and thinking about the world, not to mention relating to my fellow human beings? How is it possible for the world outside my inherited linguistic system to resist and challenge the binary oppositions that are harmful, such as racist or sexist or nationalist systems of meaning-making?
For answers to these questions, many contemporary rhetorical and cultural theorists have turned to the work of Jacques Derrida, who both extended and critiqued Saussure's theory of linguistics. Derrida, whose larger body of work is a profound subversion of the entire Western philosophical tradition, is perhaps best known for his argument that, contrary to the commonly held assumption that writing is a supplementary representation of the primary speech act, writing actually precedes speech and makes speech possible (Derrida, Of Grammatology 8). For this view, he owes much to Saussure's structural linguistics which demonstrated that meaning inheres not in a positive message associated with the sign but rather is produced through the establishment of linguistic differences in the system of signs that precedes communication. At the same time by reversing the priority of speech over writing, Derrida opened up the door for a more radical understanding of language: one in which the ephemeral and supplementary characteristics of writing become associated with the act of communication itself (Culler, On Deconstruction 100-106). Put differently, the lack of presence in writing and the concommitant inability of authors to proscribe a particular reception or interpretation of their writing is now characteristic of oral communication and conversation as well. Indeed, on this view, all of human communication takes place in this context of lost, rather than full, presence. Paradoxically, the linguistic system that makes it possible for me to communicate with another also stands between self and the other as an alienating structure, even in the most intimate of interpersonal communication contexts. Several implications follow from the Derridean reversal of the binary opposition of speech over writing.
1. The signifier is no longer supplementary to the signified. Instead of providing a means of access to mental concepts or images called signifieds, signifiers institute meaning only through the play of differences intrinsic to writing. In other words, signifieds are no longer a given array of available mental concepts that are named through the meaning-making capacity of the language system, or langue; rather, the signifiers themselves constitute highly unstable linguistic meanings that are produced through the gap or difference between the terms or signifiers themselves (Derrida, Of Grammatology 7). Furthermore, signification is no longer firmly structured by an underlying and unchanging linguistic structure; rather, meaning is made in the practices of writing which instantiate a provisionally secure yet continuously changing system of linguistic differences. Writing rules meaning without reference to any underlying or more fundamental presence whether it be an ahistorical structure or mental images or the present intentions of the speaker. Language thus has a kind of free rein that has been unacknowledged in Western philosophy until the arrival of poststructuralism. From this standpoint it makes more sense, for example, to think of language speaking us rather than us speaking a language.
2. Langue is no longer privileged over parole. Whereas Saussure's primary concern was the synchronic study of the enduring system of signs that gave meaning to any single utterance, Derrida's focus is on the diachronic appearance of specific historical utterances that organize for a given moment the play of differences that exceed and give meaning to the utterance. In other words, for Derrida, the search for grounding origins of any kind in an originary presence or intention, whether it is an underlying system of signs or economic relations or spiritual unity, is a futile search (Culler, On Deconstruction 96-97). We are always barred from the moment of origin by the intervention of historically constrained texts. As noted before, writing, which we had once assumed to be a supplement to the more originary presence of thoughts or ideas or a system of signs, is in fact the governing and constraining condition of possibility for thoughts. Thus, instead of investigating the overall structure of language that would be generalizable across time, we are stuck with the analysis of specific texts that don't in the final instance give us pure access to any underlying structure of signs that stands for all time as the ground of speech. The term that many poststructualists have come to use for such historically constrained writing, in both its oral and graphic forms, is discourse. This is the term I will use throughout the rest of this presentation, so that I'm not mistaken to have spoken only for the written-down kind of writing.
3. Signs not only differ, but also defer. Derrida notices that the system of signs described by structuralists is an unstable system. The system is unstable because during a given utterance the production of meaning requires both a distinctive signifier and the other of that signifier. Meaning requires that a given term is constituted partly by what it precisely is not within the sign system. Thus, a sign must call to consciousness that from which it is distinguished in order for the sign to constitute meaning. In calling its other to consciousness the sign defers temporarily the meaning of its other, an event that Derrida has labeled by the French word différance (Derrida, Margins 8-9). The sign is thus divided between itself and its other. The dilemma that I think best illustrates Derridean différance is that of the fundamentalist preacher who pleads with the congregation to maintain purity of thought and in so doing brings to mind all of those impure thoughts whose absence is urged. Impure thoughts are deferred, perhaps, but also aroused in the preacher's discourse about purity. We often tell the joke of the parent who forbids the child some absurd thing such as pouring water up their nose. We find this funny because we recognize the principle involved: in forbidding an obscure behavior we are calling to consciousness its possibility. For Derrida, this same principle is at the heart of the very construction of meaning through language.
Whether or not the structuralist and poststructuralist linguistic theories I've just outlined are plausible in every detail, the basic assumptions these theories makes about the power and independence of language are, I think, persuasive and compelling. Language precedes consciousness and carries the weight of history into all of our conversations and communication practices. We are profoundly constrained in our capacity to think and imagine the world by the inherited linguistic structures that inhabit our minds. The very capacity of language to give meaning to the world is also intrinsically exclusionary: we cannot give attention to all things at once but must always choose at any given moment to be conscious of one thing over another, of this and not that. This exclusionary rule associated with the binary oppositions of linguistic consciousness often underwrite our most problematic prejudices, including those of nationalism, racism, sexism, and other harmful social antagonisms.
Words and Selfhood
The ramifications of structuralism and poststructuralism are profound and dramatic, cutting across disciplines and affecting the way many intellectuals think about everything from science to politics to theology. But perhaps their most significant impact has been on the way that social theorists conceive the fabric of human selfhood and the relationship between self and other in the struggle for community.
Time and the limits of my own understanding restrain me from elaborating with any detail the dense and difficult psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Suffice it to say that Lacan's reconstruction of Freudian psychoanalysis along structuralist lines provides many resources for thinking through the complicated relationships between language and selfhood. Most of my understanding of Lacan is still second-hand, read through a number of interpreters who have sought to make Lacan comprehensible for those of us who seek to work through the many practical problems associated with the struggle for social justice (Zizek, Salecl). However, it is important for me to acknowledge that the points I want to make now about language and selfhood have their roots in Lacanian psychoanalysis, even if they are not informed by a direct reading of Lacan.
As explained earlier, the structuralist account of language suggests that we are inhabited by linguistic structures that make meaning possible, a structure that both prevents direct access to non-linguistic reality yet is also the condition of possibility for a humanized consciousness of such reality. I have also alluded to the role of language in self-construction. For structuralist psychoanalysts like Lacan, language is the condition of possibility for both self and other consciousness. The induction into language is simultaneously a coming to selfhood and a coming into community. It is language that makes both personal and shared meaning possible, in other words. Some of the specific arguments that have emerged from Lacanian psychoanalysis about this process include the following.
1. The intrusion of language into human consciousness produces a misrecognition of a coherent and stable self. According to Lacan this intrusion occurs during what he calls the "mirror stage," somewhere between 6 to 18 months (Lacan 2-7). At some point, the infant begins to form an image of itself as a differentiated from others, a moment that is illustrated for Lacan by the fascination that children at this stage have with their image in the mirror. The capacity of the child to abstract a self that is signified by the self-image seen in the mirror or mistaken in the face of the parent animates the child's induction into the symbolic order of signifiers and signifieds and the concomitant social structures of kinship, ritual, and gender associated with human societies. For Lacan, the abstraction of selfhood is a fictional gesture, a fruitful and productive misrecognition that makes the realm of the social possible, inhabited as it is by humans assuming self and other consciousness, along with all of the conventions and restraints that we associate with civilization.
2. The human self is structured around an unorganizable kernel of trauma that is left over after the child's induction into the symbolic order. In the same way that differance renders the sign itself unstable, this kernel of trauma prevents the self from achieving any final state of identity (Salecl, "See No Evil" 152-153). The kernel described by Lacan both animates the ongoing struggle of the self to achieve identity and closure and at the same time prevents this closure from taking place in the final instance. According to this understanding, the self is an always provisional construction, by necessity never fully complete or fixed and at the same time always seeking to accomplish that impossible closure. Just as language constitutes rather than reflects the reality we experience, so does language constitute rather than reflect the self. Just as language is, as Derrida notes, always on the move, differing and defering and never quite settling down, so is the socially and linguistically constituted self never quite at rest in its quest for full identity.
3. The self builds its quest for coherence on exclusion and antagonism. Because it is linguistically constituted and because linguistic meaning is constructed on a set of unstable binary oppositions, the self struggles to maintain an impossible coherence by locating itself in a social sphere littered with symbolic antagonisms designed to promote identity (Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom 15). Whether through the most basic opposition between male and female or whether by means of generational and nationalistic oppositions, human selves constantly define themselves by reference to an other rendered as the negative of the self. Such oppositions are at the root of human conflict and political antagonism and are often enforced and reinforced through the exercise of physical violence. Renata Salecl, for example, has written a book that explains the violent nationalisms which have emerged in the post-cold war era as efforts to reinscribe national identities after the disappearance of the grand organizing geo-political antagonism between the American and Soviet superpowers. Salecl describes nationalism as a fantasy designed to organize the self-concepts of members of national communities around an imaginary homeland. She believes that wars fought on behalf of nationalistic fantasies are designed primarily "to destroy the very way the enemy perceives itself, the way it forms its identity" (15). Likewise, she argues that hate speech is designed to do very much the same thing in the context of racial or sexual antagonisms. In these cases, the other of the self is perceived to be such a danger to the self's identity that performative or physical violence is used to attack and undermine the identity of the other, usually in ways that deny the very humanity of the other, acts which in turn usually cause the other to retaliate by seeking to destroy the identity of that which is attacking it.
The social implications of the linguistic constitution of identity become quite plain at this point. The very basis of conventional self and community construction is the act of excluding at best and killing at worst the Other of the self and its community, whether it is the community of the nation or the community of gender, or the community of religion.
Communication and Ethics
It should begin to dawn on us now why we experience so many communication encounters as dangerous to our well being, as violent and frightening. In communication we interface with the other, whose position outside ourselves contributes to our capacity to be constituted as a coherent and stable whole, and whose voice at the same time has great capacity to undermine our provisionally propped up selves. The other, just like language, you see, comes to us as both a blessing and a curse. Without the other we could not become selves; yet the other also prevents us from fully achieving self-identity. The other can never simply be reduced to the non-self upon which we base our identity. For even the most familiar other surprises us and forces us to rearrange our self-conception, dependent as it is on manageable and narrativizable differences between self and other, whether that other be a spouse, a colleague, a subject of research, or a sworn enemy.
Human communication can be seen, then, as the struggle to negotiate an ongoing and mutually fruitful relationship between self and other though signifying practices directed toward shared understanding and rationalizable misunderstanding. Unfortunately, because the impulse of much human communication is the discovery of what we often call common ground, we often seek in our communication acts to render the other purely as a fantasy object of our own desire, either as a reflection of our own commitments and anxieties, or as an antagonist of the self. In such efforts, I believe we often inflict violence on both self and other, often unwittingly and without malice at moments when in fact we have the best of intentions. We inflict such violence partly because we are imprisoned within the linguistic structures of binary oppositions that render the other always as a constituent of the self, when in fact the other always exceeds our capacity to control or organize its place in the social-symbolic world.
We can, I think, better understand the series of events associated with the recent protest in Lima by Bluffton College students and faculty who oppose U.S. policy toward Israel, if we take seriously these problems that are intrinsic to communication. It's clear to me that the students and faculty who protested the U.S.-backed Israeli government's policies toward Palestinians made every effort to distinguish their critique of the Israeli state from their respect for the Jewish people. Yet it is clear that some in Lima experienced this protest as an act of violence against their religious and social identity. One way to respond is to say that the protest was misunderstood, that there was no intention of anti-Semitism or critique of Jewishness as such, just a challenge to Israeli policy. And this needs to be said, of course. At the same time, the structuralist and poststructuralist account of language can help us understand how, for minority Jews in Lima whose religious ideology links their own well-being with the state of Israel, the Bluffton College protest was received as an attack on their own provisionally constituted selves, entangled as those selves are with Israeli politics. In fact, I suggest, it could not but be experienced as such, no matter what was said, given the apparently prevailing discourse of Jewish identity in the Lima synagogue. Furthermore, the binary opposition between the term Christian and the term Jew, carries with it a profoundly unsettling history of violent struggle, usually initiated by Christians, to somehow stabilize the Jew/Christian opposition through hateful attacks and massacres and holocausts designed to rid the Christian self of the uneasy tension between the Jewishness of Christ and the Jewish critique of Christ, to abolish once and for all that which reminds us of the Jewish origins of Christian faith.
This example should remind us of all the exclusions and oversights we are forced to perform whenever we seek to right a wrong, to give attention to this problem at the expense of another. We are always compromised by the original sin and marvelous grace of language with its divisions and antagonisms and hierarchies that are central to our capacity to make any meaning at all, not to mention seeking after justice. In his magnificent book, The Gift of Death, Derrida observes how the obligations we perform are always particular and not general. Any effort to respond to injustice, to right a wrong, requires sacrifice, not only of self, but of all the others to whom I have an equivalent obligation. As he puts it during his reading of the story about Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah:
By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention … I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't know, the billions of my fellows … who are dying of starvation or sickness…, to those who don't speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner…, thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day (69).
Derrida has here extended the structuralist and poststructuralist interpretation of language into the realm of ethics and shown how the very thing that makes it possible to conceive of justice and law also makes it impossible for us to follow the ethical demands that the law places on us. Even though they tried, the Lima protestors could not in the moment of their attention to the injustice done Palenstinians, avoid injury to Jews who associate the state of Israel with their well-being as minorities. The extent to which we are forced to make such sacrifices is also the extent to which the other undermines our self-coherence. This is why, in the moment of our most passionate solidarity with the oppressed, we remember the other oppressed that is excluded from our attention at that moment. This is why, as we heard several weeks ago, our colleague Teresinka Pereira's work with landless and natives in Brazil means constantly making incommensurate choices, siding with the landless on one day to the exclusion of natives, and with the natives on another day to the exclusion of the landless, all the while performing an apparent betrayal of her middle-class identified family whom she also clearly loves. What are our ethical obligations in the face of such linguistic and social incommensurability? How can we even conceive of ethics after the end of the confidence in humanity associated with the modern world? Is it possible for us to transform self and other toward a more just and human social order despite the return of historical antagonisms again and again through the always already compromised and violent discourses that inhabit our very selves and make our relation to the world meaningful?
I believe that it is only insofar as we can hope to exceed (not escape!) the constraints of our language, of our culture, of our history, that we can conceive of communication as anything but a selfish act, as an ongoing effort to simply shore up the self and its community of identification to the exclusion of that which threatens it. And while the structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of linguistic consciousness certainly make thinking this through difficult, they also provide some important resources. I suggest that these resources of thought provide at least two important qualifiers for ethical communication practices, qualifiers that I would associate with what I will call an ethic of radical hospitality.
1. Ethical communication is rhetorically radical. By this I mean that ethical communication seeks at the moment of utterance to not merely reinscribe harmful antagonisms but to subvert them with conviction and persuasion. I believe that the power of such harmful social divisions and prejudices as racism, sexism, and nationalism can only be undone through the power of persuasion. If Derrida's critique of structuralism is correct, we are not forever imprisoned by langue -- the big system of signs that is destined to be reinscribed in every utterance. It is only in our utterances that the structures of meaning that precede us are reproduced for the next generation. And while it is not possible to simply rid one's self of the prejudices and exclusions associated with a linguistic and social system, it is possible to exploit their instabilities -- to "deconstruct" them, as Derridians would say. Such radical acts of deconstruction require that we work within the impure world of meaning that we've inherited, rather than fool ourselves that we can escape it. It means that our acts of communication will be conditioned by attention to the audience and our best efforts to read the commitments, anxieties, and traumas associated with the other's self-constitution. It means that as we speak out, we acknowledge with humility all of the limits and sacrifices associated with our utterances, but that we will not prevent awareness of our own inevitable failures and oversights to stop us from speaking a persuasive, and hopefully redemptive, word. We might be inspired here by the earliest public speaking teachers, who helped give birth to the first known Western democracy in ancient Greece (Poulakos). These sophists were known for their craft at making the weaker argument stronger. Their skill with words, and their ability to overturn old hierarchies and subvert ancient divisions contributed greatly to the subversion of the aristocratic social relations in ancient Greece. I'm also reminded here of the life and teachings of Jesus, who sought to make the last first and the first last. The parables associated with Jesus are classic examples of working within conventional wisdom in order to overturn it. In our own society, we have given the skills of rhetoric over to the captains of media entertainment and reinscribors of the status quo. It is time for us regain those skills on behalf of the excluded and forgotten.
2. Ethical communication is rhetorically receptive. Even as we seek to persuade, we must open ourselves to the texts of others whose stories appear to undermine or harm our own self-constructions. Having been doers of the word, we must not forget to be hearers. My own thinking on this question has been inspired greatly by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who sought to articulate an ethical response to the dilemmas and problems associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism. Levinas insists that the message of the Torah is the call to give to the stranger without the hope of return, a going to the other without the hope of turning back (Levinas 183-184; Critchley 109). Like Abraham and his offspring who left their homes again and again to wander in exile, we to are called to risk the loss of self on behalf of the other. I interpret many of Derrida's recent writings as an effort to answer the question of how, in the face of historical, and political constraints, it might be possible to exceed a linguistic economy built on exclusion and division. His answer is suggest the possibility of a radical gift that can point the way toward a linguistic economy of generosity, not scarcity (Derrida, The Gift of Death).
From whence might come such a radical hospitality that gives without hope of return? What word, or words, might have the capacity to make the social order, underwritten as it is by violence and exclusion, tremble in the face of what might still overtake it? Where might be located a generosity that exceeds the brutality of the text? For us who are Christian, I suggest that the new economy of generosity and hospitality that is on the way, both here and still to come, is announced in a radical invitation issued two thousand years ago and repeated in Christian communities for all these centuries: "This is my body broken for you: Take, Eat, Drink!" (Critchley 108; Matthew 26:26-29).
Works Cited
Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1986.
---. On Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1995.
---. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1982.
---. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1976.
Harland, Richard. Superstructuralism. London: Methuen, 1988.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.
Levinas, Emmanuel. "God and Philosophy." in Sean Hand, editor, The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Poulakos, John. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia, SC: U. of South Carolina P., 1995.
Salecl, Renata. "See No Evil, Speak No Evil: Hate Speech and Human Rights." in Joan Copjec, editor, Radical Evil. London: Verso, 1996.
---. The Spoils of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1994.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986.
Zizek, Slavoj. For they know not what they do. London: Verso, 1991.