Nina Perlman

…A poet confronting language’s arbitrariness and independence, its recalcitrant and even disgusting objectivity…sees words not as containers for thought, easy vehicles for relaying sentiment and knowledge, but rather as a series of dumb and nightmarish particulars. Not only is [he] unable to say what he means, he is unable to find familiar linguistic sense anywhere; having broken faith with words, the poet rediscovers language in its horrific autonomy: Language is a thing.”

If we can’t have a systemization or conventionalization of what we are doing, then there’s an inappropriateness in talking if what we are doing as a metaphor, since that presupposes that somewhere, lurking behind our talking, is a literal language. […]

Metaphor, in the Analytic tradition, is able to be reduced to a literal language, it’s always treated as a deviance…a deviation from ‘standard’ usage. You are presupposing that you do have a literal or conventional language to start with…and that it’s unproblematic…that’s to say, there is always some aprioristically privileged language granted (assumed) as natural and to be protected from ‘the deviants’…

[…]

Speaking is known as the articulated vocalization of thought by means of the organs of speech. But speaking is at the same time also listening.  it is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens.  but listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking such as takes place in conversation.  The simultaneousness of speaking and listening has a larger meaning. Speaking is of the itself a listening.  Speaking is listening to the language which we speak.  Thus it is a listening not while but before we are speaking.  This listening to language also comes before all other kinds of listening that we know, in a most conspicuous manner.  We do not merely speak the language—we speak by way of it.  We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language.  What do we hear there? We hear language speaking.

[…]

In our speaking, as a listening to language, we say again the Saying we have heard.  We let its soundless voice come to us, and then demand, reach out and call for the sound that is already kept in store for us.  By now, perhaps, at least one trait in the design of language may manifest itself more clearly, allowing us to see how language as speaking comes into its own and thus speaks qua language.[…] We hear Saying only because we belong within it.”