Unless, of course, the void in which the contentless slimness of “I speak” is manifested were an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject – the “I” who speaks – fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space. If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of “I speak” then in principle nothing can limit it – not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.
Foucault, “The Thought from Outside”, p. 11
What is “language in its raw state,” whose gestures Foucault traces in this text? The pure exteriority of language must remain ineffable since, as he explains, it is content-less and indeterminate, engulfing any definite thematization of an object. And yet the pure being of language draws us with a force of attraction, the way Ulysses was drawn by the Sirens’ song. The hero had to tie himself to the mast of his ship or face the tragic fate of the sailors who had gone before him. So one, in yielding to the seduction of pure language, calls out for a solid handle to grasp onto. In this piece I’ll tie myself to the ancient history of thought as to a mast. I’ll begin, as Foucault does, by saying what language itself is not.
The paragraph above gives us four anchors whose undoing would be an entryway into the exteriority of language. To wit: the addressee, the object, the form, the subject. These articulations undeniably resemble the four causes of Aristotle (efficient, material, formal and final). Exploring this resemblance, we find that their four-fold framework would give language the solidity of a statue: the subject as efficient cause, setting expression in motion for the sake of communication with an addressee, who would take the role of final cause or end; in the act of expression, the subject applies linguistic form (grammatical, representational, dialogical, axiological) to the objective matter at hand (a state of affairs, a perception, a desire), converting a given truth into a meaningful enunciation. The result is an analogue of the statue from the classical example: a well-formed expression that serves a communicative purpose. I’ll sidestep the many difficulties opened by this brief account—Can we really speak of the objective content as the matter of the expression? What about the multiple layers of form and purpose that inevitably surface? And is the efficient cause the whole subject, the mind, or perhaps just the parts (tongue, hand) that produce the sign?—to highlight that this four-fold structure stakes out a circle of interiority within language. Each cause is a distinct answer to the question “why?” Taken separately, each contributes to the intelligibility of the linguistic act, and together they circumscribe a field of rationality that implicitly claims language as its own. Thinking begins in wonder and ends in the discovery of the cause. In the process it mobilizes the movement of discourse as a means to rational thought. Foucault’s project then is clearly a liberatory one: in seeking to free discourse from the tyranny of an overbearing reason, it would reveal the “raw state”, the pure being of language.
Language in its raw state sidesteps—is negligent towards—this four-fold apparatus of causality. Pure language is neither form (grammatical or otherwise), nor a content talked about, nor the addressee of a message, nor the subject responsible for the communication. Each of these constituents would rather appear as a fold of the pure being of discourse. Nor is language in its pure state the universal medium of communication that would connect separate subjects as speaking agents, prior to any actual transmission, simply through the universal possibility of discursive exchange. This interpretation equally subordinates language to an extrinsic purpose, that of communicative cooperation among rational beings. Language would play the role of a marketplace of discursive exchange.
Far from tending in the direction of rationality, unity, meaning, clear and distinct communication, etc., the pure being of language lies at the other extreme of the philosophical continuum. It marks the essential invisibility of things, their irreducible multiplicity and submergence into a void. It shares in the hazy infinity of mystical notions such as "the cloud of unknowing" and "the dark night of the soul"—with the absolute caveat that no communion or reconciliation awaits on the far side of the journey. Language is an indifferent and neutral space. It is traversed, Foucault writes, in a path of no return, a movement of attraction that flows into the unconcern of a smooth and infinite expanse. It is not a becoming or a transformation but a dissolution of the boundaries that hold intelligibility in place. Its linearity flouts the crescendos of the dialectic. It is a flat space of surfaces, foreign to the heights and depths of that familiar experience that revolves around sin, punishment and redemption—so familiar in fact, that it turns itself systematic by distilling these vicissitudes into a logic of the double negation. Transgression indeed comes to pass in the pure exteriority of language. But far from the ambiguous dread of an Abraham, it is rather one of negligence, indifference, akin to a dreamless sleep. Its desire—the draw of the void—is ever unconsummated, like Ulysses in his attraction for the Sirens or Orpheus in his passion for Eurydice. The drive that pulls into the void itself dissipates into a subtle jouissance spread thinly across its exterior. The scriptor traversing this void indeed transgresses, like Bartleby, by unconcern for the necessities of life, for purpose, history and projects. He chooses the space of neutrality and invisibility, equally the shadowless night and the sunless day. His transgression doesn't evade the positive law of the constituted world, so much as it elicits that other, hidden law of the void, draws it out of its concealment so as to dissolve subjectivity all the more into its glistening folds.
In the context of the four causes, language and its pure being would approach a pure matter unbound by an efficient, formal or final cause. But even this is saying too much: pure language is rather the void in which bare materiality subsists, the void of the ancient atomists. This void is anathema to reason, which weaves the causal circle of interiority in the very place where the void would emerge. Reason’s characteristic horror vacui inoculates it against the encounter with pure language. Both Plato and Aristotle rejected the void as incoherent. The Stoics allowed it but banished it from the world, seeing the latter as a plenum held fast by the forces of sympathy and tension. It was the atomists (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius) who gave the void a place among the constitutive principles of the world, alongside the material atoms. A key contribution of French (post-)structuralists like Foucault, Lacan and Althusser is to have repurposed ancient atomism as a contemporary theory of language, using it to model the production of meaning in the unconscious out of the movement of linguistic atoms (signifiers in themselves meaningless) in the void of the pure discursive field.
The other principle of ancient atomism that finds its way into French thought—and makes a brief appearance in Foucault’s text—is the notorious swerve or clinamen. Since the initial condition of atoms is taken to be a straight vertical fall through the void, something must disturb the linearity of their paths if a composite world is to ensue. This disturbance is posited as an infinitesimal swerve that inclines an atom ever so slightly off its linear trajectory (hence, a "clinamen"). The swerve cannot be the effect of an antecedent, since the only candidates for its cause would be the atoms with their predictable motion and the void, from which nothing can arise. The swerve is therefore its own principle, the absolutely new. To the extent that we can speak of a cause for it, we would need to appeal entirely to chance. This aleatory occurrence, whose time, place and effects are unpredictable, will be termed "an event". It is the rupture in the fabric of structures and meanings through which the genuinely new enters experience.
Surrendering to attraction and negligence on the neutral field of language occasions the wait for this event, as Foucault elaborates. The void swallows up articulated meanings (projects of communication, shared intimacy, ambitions, life), disassembling their constructed sense into bare atomic folds. What is left in this field of forgetting is the openness to a clinamen. That something new is to arrive—not as a promise or prophecy that might presage an end to history, but as an accident, an effect of some random negligence that makes its gesture by a stroke of chance. To wait for this newness of the new, enacting an immemorial transgression, is the scriptor’s aleatory fate.