Foucault thinks language according to a movement, which appears repeatedly in his writings, of simultaneous constituting and undoing, a movement of coinciding forming and rendering formless: That which constitutes any subject and its networks of relations holds within itself an exteriority or an abysmal interiority that undoes, subverts, and renders formless its previous work of constituting and thus renders available new sites, in which new possibilities of constituting and forming dwell.
This movement of generating and undoing, of forming and rendering formless, appears in Foucault’s introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, where Foucault says that imagination confines us to, or traps us in, the images that it generates. But it is also the same imagination in its constant generating of images that destroys, renders evaporated, and consumes its own images and therefore lets us encounter and touch “the origin of the constituted world”.
The same movement appears again in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, where Foucault says that power relations hold within themselves sites rendering possible the emergence of points of resistance that support the very existence of these power relations by reversing them and thus allowing them to be constituted anew.
Foucault thinks language according to this self-reflexive movement. Language, for Foucault, constantly transgresses itself by exceeding and overflowing itself, all governed structures of saying, thinking, and understanding, and all systems of truth and authority that it created and delimited in the first place.
In Preface to Transgression, The Thought of the Outside, and Language to Infinity, which are all written during the “archeological period”, Foucault repeatedly revisits and further clarifies and develops his understanding of language as self-reflexive and self-transgressive. In these three papers, Foucault says that “the being of language” is itself transgression and radical exteriority, which create voids letting language constantly multiply itself to infinity.
Language as Transgression
In Preface to Transgression, Foucault thinks language from out of the relation linking together limits and transgressions. Foucault says that “the death of God restores us . . . to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it“.
According to Foucault, limits and transgressions belong to each other; they are related, existing because of each other, into each other, and through each other. That is, limits are limits to the extent that they are crossable. Transgressions are transgressions insofar as they cross, leave behind, and render porous real limits.
The limit really limits and truly renders limited to the extent that it faces its own limits by being constantly challenged by its own disappearance. The limit confirms itself and its existence by limiting and announcing an uncrossable horizon and therefore encourages another crossing, a new transgression.
For Foucault, transgression is neither negative nor positive. It is not negative because it affirms and renders confirmed the being of the limit and its limiting as a limitlessness into which it enters as it discovers new horizons for its own existence and extension. And it is not positive, for there is nothing holding it together, since there is no limit that can hold it within.
Foucault says that transgression is a “nonpositive affirmation”, constantly proceeding by leaving limits behind until reaching an emptiness where being encounters its own limit and where the limit is itself what indicates being.
Foucault thinks language according to this movement of transgression, in which limits constantly cross themselves by closing up the site opened up because of every crossing toward this emptiness.
Language, too, generates voids; it generates voids by dispersing and fragmenting the subject carrying out the speaking, and by multiplying the subject in the same site rendered empty because of the absence of the subject, disentangling, laying bare, and rendering understandable institutionalized discourse.
Language, Foucault says through his reading of Georges Bataille, realizes its own limits by challenging itself, opening up a path connecting it directly with death. There is thus between language and death a shared horizon, in which language finds and touches its own being in its transgressing of limits.
Death, which is also a void reached by crossing a certain limit, is not the end of language, but rather where language is reborn; constantly and infinitely. The emptiness of this void does not mean the end of speaking, but rather the beginning of saying what cannot be said, which is itself a transgressing of a limit.
Language as an Outside
In The Thought of the Outside, Foucault takes Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the outside to support the relation in which he places language and transgression together.
Foucault says that “the experience of the outside” conceals and erases the subject, denies and rejects our current discourse, and therefore grants language a void in which it could continuously unfold; a void from out of which and toward which language speaks.
The subject, effaced and erased, thus speaks by merely being an opening through which language passes in its speaking. That is, the subject is nothing but an opening through which language spreads forth in its saying-speaking.
The subject speaks by disappearing, by being turned into a channel through which language passes in its fragmenting, dispersing, and scattering of the absence of the already effaced subject.
Language spreads forth by constantly beginning anew as rebeginnings. Such beginnings are new because they are pure origins in the sense that they are the voids appearing because of the effacing and dispersing of the subject. But they are nothing but rebeginnings because this emptying is carried out by “the language of the past” in its hollowing of itself out so that such voids could be freed up.
Language is forever outside of itself, constantly indicating the significance of origin and death; it constantly hollows itself out so that it could begin anew in the same void rendered possible only because of its own disappearance into itself, which is outside of itself, by multiplying itself.
“Language to Infinity”
In Language to Infinity, Foucault revisits the notions of voids, death, and limits, and specifies the language that speaks in the void. Foucault says that death is a limit that creates a void within life. From out of this limit and toward it speaking happens.
Language, or more specifically, literary language, is our endeavor to momentarily postpone death; it is our own attempt at evading our most fateful decisions, but it also lets us hear in our own speaking and within our own words another language, a different language, preceding our own speaking, permeating our words, and surviving our own death by leaving it behind, by continuing to say itself even after our own silence, even after we are long gone; a different language resembling an image in an infinite number of mirrors, constantly duplicating itself, attempting to pursue itself, and tracing itself to infinity.
Language thus speaks of itself through itself to infinity. In its speaking of itself through itself, it multiplies itself, infinitely. This self-multiplication occurs because language is self-transgressive and an outside, constantly crossing and re-crossing itself by leaving itself behind, toward and into an outside, which is also itself.
This is the namelessness to which Foucault repeatedly refers when he says that his whole attempt is to enter into, to reside in, a nameless voice that ”long preceded” him, his own voice, and his own speaking.
The Relation Between Words and Things
Words, traditionally, describe and render present and available the things about which they speak, the things to which they refer. In a word, words form a visual representation of the thing toward which they are turned. Foucault disrupts this stable and dependable relation between words and things through René Magritte’s This is not a pipe.
To disrupt this relation of dependency between the word and the thing that the word describes is to let new voices — contested and contesting, dispersed and fragmented —arise, destabilizing the meaning of the words referring to, describing, and speaking about the thing.
Foucault’s attempt is not only to disrupt this relation, but also to show how disruption and instability are already at work in this relation, that is, how this relation is never stable or dependable.
To read the words “This is not a pipe” written under a drawing of a pipe could indicate that what appears as a pipe is something different from the word “pipe”, or that the word “pipe” describes something different from the drawn pipe, or that the drawn pipe and the written word “pipe“ do not depend on each other. The two versions of This is not a pipe problematize, disrupt, and constantly stop all attempts at interpreting and every endeavor to choose a specific pipe as the real pipe.
For Foucault, this deliberate attempt at destabilizing the relation between the word and the thing that the word is describing does not say something new about language, for it is already at work in language, since the relation linking together the word and the thing is itself neither stable nor dependable; it has always been unstable and non-dependable.
In other words, instances of pure, complete, and simple resemblance in which a real model is rendered completely available and fully present through language never take place, since there are only networks of similitudes and dispersed elements in intricate networks of meaning and speaking, repeating each other without ever reaching a final moment of full or simple resemblance.
There are only nameless and faceless murmurs of anonymous voices, saying and repeating different versions of significance, meaning, and truth. The relation between the thing and the word that describes the thing is itself nothing but nameless, faceless, and anonymous voices and murmurs. Even the meaning of René Magritte’s painting is itself these nameless murmurs and anonymous voices attempting to interpret what René Magritte means.
Again, this is where language emerges by disappearing through transgressing itself into an outside that is also its own horizon. This is the site where anonymous voices and nameless murmurings talk about the visible, attempting to render it available and connected, speaking about themselves through themselves and through the language of the past, permeating and evading them, by moving themselves to infinity, where everything begins anew and where every new beginning is nothing a re-beginning, preceding all new beginnings and awaiting what is yet to begin, where language is born and re-born, from out of and toward “the anonymity of a murmur” and the numerosity of voices.