Sunday, 26 April 2009

• Semiotics

    I am writing a paper for my advanced grammar and composition class.  (EDIT: the title is, "God is doG spelled backwards.")  I have already begun to go too long, and I need to be careful because I have a page limit.  I think this is a very... very funny problem to have.

    BUT- it is so interesting. 

    This is my thesis:

  The symbol “(insert any word here)*” is not the same, not equivalent to, or able to delimit the concept it names.

  I happened upon an article by Denys Turner titled, "Tradition and Faith" when doing my research.  This passage made me laugh aloud in agreement and glee:

  "‘Grammar’, therefore, is at once necessary and impossible in any absolute and final way. But it is the fear that language might be possible – might at some point resolve the paradox on the ground of some ultimate, redeeming ‘reality’ – which, as God, haunts this Nietzschean mentality. For were language not denied what it promises, were language to secure its hold on the meanings which it contains, and so be able to make finally ‘present’ the meanings which it seeks to disclose, then speakers would be trapped within their utterances, locked into an utterly deterministic world, a world determined by what can be said, since what can be said would be locked deterministically into its relations with its objects. Total loss of freedom would therefore be the price of any grammar which could be shown to have resolved its own contradictions" (24).     

  Ha! 

  *I didn't actually write "insert any word here" in my thesis.  I picked a word.

  Cite: Turner, Denys. "Tradition and Faith." International Journal of Systematic Theology 6 (January 2004): 21-36.

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