Language as Zero

[Mark Kohut]

Coming up later in GR are words that virtually say this: that the language
is not the thing itself. More than once even, I think.

Also, Barthes' *Writing Degree Zero* attempts something like what you write
of re 'stripping language' [for understanding] to a zero point. It was
first published in the US in 1967, fyi, one of the increasing uses of THE
ZERO.

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 1:47 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sayeth Mark: "I also think: one of P's motifs is the failure of words to
> capture the ineffable from Lot 49 thru GR passim.
> He wants the ineffable to Be."
>
> I think you're right. And along those lines I think you can think of the
> final membrane separating language and being as its own kind of zero point
>  that might be gone beyond. I was trying to get after this in my
> discussion of the irreducible "screaming." I guess you could think of this
> as being a sort of linguistic atomism. You keep stripping away layers of
> decoration, descriptiveness, figurativeness, etc., from language, as an
> attempt to keep reducing it down to its truest and most basic
> representation of the thing.
>
> But there is that final zero where the language is not the thing. The
> "screaming" that "comes across the sky" is in a sense closer to the thing
> than is, say, "an apocalyptic mechanical banshee-wail" that "explodes and
> resounds throughout the once-playground of the now-dead gods." But it is
> still not quite it. It is the zero not gone beyond.
>
> How to get beyond it? How to get to the thing? Maybe, as the book evolves
> (unfolds, explodes) the language no longer attempts to be the thing, but
> seduces the reader, totally disorients the reader, captures the reader in a
> sort of dream, and in that dream is the thing.
>
>
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