The Remains of the Say: Zero, Double‐crossing and the Landscaping of Language

Abstract

This essay argues for a “landscaping” understanding of language, contrasting this with the more contemporary tradition of deconstruction, through Saussure, on difference. The paper opens with an evocation of the method of “double crossing” in Heidegger's (1959) deconstruction of Western ontology, before drawing extensively on Heidegger's later discussion of the “bridge” to illustrate his landscaping argument over language. By crossing and criss‐crossing this reading of Heidegger with a critique of the same essay by Hillis Miller, a strong similarity in deconstructive technique is elicited despite an apparent clash in their views about language.

Notes

The two alternatives are either a something that implies a primal ground [Ur‐grund], or the nothing that is an abyss [Ab‐grund]. However, for Heidegger (1959, p. 3), the possibility exists as to whether the ground is neither one nor the other, but “presents only a perhaps necessary appearance of foundation—in other words, it is a non‐ground [Un‐grund]”. It seems clear from Heidegger's text that most conceptions of nothing, including perhaps zero, constitute this last kind of “non‐ground”.

The list is infinite. Nothing can escape. Except perhaps infinity; for we never would get there, even through a series. We can never check through the whole list, for existence remains iterative as well as endless. Each new doubt can throw the whole of the rest of the world's “things” back into disorder. Proof of existence, it seems, must always rely on the existence of something else. Or, at least, in the putative existence of that something else. Until, of course, the essence of that something else is itself placed under the microscope of doubt in an ever‐elusive chase for the underlying essence.

Like the woman in Henry James's story “The Altar of the Dead”. As Miller (“The History of 0”, this volume) reminds us, Stransom, the hero, is forever finding some new dead friend to light a candle for, while the woman he befriends at a Catholic shrine returns only to ever light her candle for a lover who abandoned her years before. So, where Miller (“Zero Among the Literary Theonists”, this volume) keeps lighting different candles—Barthes, Althusser, Lacan, Iser, Blanchot, de Man—Heidegger keeps returning to the proverbial problem of Being, devotedly lighting the same candle: Why is there something, rather than nothing? “Why are there essents, why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?”.

In speaking of space, we may be talking about two quite different things. Usually, the talk today is about a “representational” space, the “space” of a dot on a map in which anything can stand for anything else: “In a space that is represented purely as spatium, the bridge now appears as a mere something at some position, which can be occupied at any time by something else or replaced by a mere marker” (Heidegger 1959, p.357). In this kind of “universal” space—an abstract, mathematical space without landscape—the bridge is reduced to being something to be gestured towards, a mere signified. As such it has lost its landscaping powers and can be replaced entirely by a “marker”—a signifier—which does no more than represent the bridge.