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untexted territory, making as necessary new names for the strange
creatures it encounters. By saying as much, I am admitting alle-
giance to thinkers such as Hans-georg gadamer and his unmiti-
gated vision of the linguisticality of the human world.13 Whenever
we search for the nonlinguistic, outside the horizons of our text, we
fall silent and our thoughts are not recorded: there is no text. and
yet our texts also discuss this possibility, claiming not to tread
where they are surely treading, looking back at crossed horizons,
pretending to ignore their own footprints. Or can we make gestures
within the text to beyond the horizon? – without shifting it in any
way, gestures towards the outside which allow us to remain inside?
Which allow us to remain anchored in our linguisticality?
gadamer’s concept is of fusing horizons, the act of stepping into
other centres and allowing them to resonate with our own, and rear-
ranging – hopefully extending – our horizons accordingly.14 I wish
to suggest that, just as the horizons of the mind may, if we think far
enough, become dimensionless and lose their gravity, so might it
be that, as we name our horizons, there comes a fleeting prior
movement, a timeless element of reconsideration, as if we were
standing aside and watching ourselves in action. Can we then
engage in crossing our horizons without actually extending them?
Can we envisage the possibility of looking forward, as it were in a
reversal of retrospect, a gesture which is not quite the same as the
action itself? In an activity which is conscious of the action and
watches it happen before it begins? I return to the woman with her
sick child and her terrible memories:
Of course, her thumb pointed upward – quite a common gesture
in speech. What was she saying with it? Look at my thumb, look at
what I am saying? Could it be that the thumb was pointing in some
way, an indicator of meaning? But we cannot call it an indicator –
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13 “For language is not only an object in our heads; it is the reservoir of tradition and the medi-
um in and through which we exist and perceive our world.” Hans-georg gadamer, Philo -
sophical Hermeneutics, trans. and edited by David E. Lynge, Berkeley, Los angeles and
London: university of California Press, 1977, p. 29. In this essay gadamer discusses among
other things Habermas’s criticism of gadamer’s ‘idealism of linguisticality’ (Habermas’s
phrase, quoted by gadamer, loc.cit.). and of course gadamers’s concept of an all-pervading,
universal linguisticality is an extraordinary index – or pollex – of humanity, whatver its
cogency.
14 Hans-georg gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald g. Marshall,
London and new York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 304–306.
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