Language as Embodied PracticeNotes on Performative Processes of Subjectification with Reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Judith ButlerLucilla Guidi

Introduction

‘In the beginning was the deed’, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, echoing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.11Wittgenstein is quoting Goethe’s Faust (Part i). Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1969), § 396. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy thus involves an understanding of language as a weave of embodied practice. According to Wittgenstein, language does not correspond to a disembodied system of signs through which already constituted subjects express their inner life and depict the outer world. Rather, language is conceived as an interwoven fabric of practices in which Beginning of page[p. 16] we constitute ourselves as subjects and at the same time maintain and transform normative practices. From this perspective, in this chapter I will first of all emphasize that Wittgenstein’s account of rules as practices involves a process of mutual constitution of subjects and normative practices,22Wittgenstein writes: ‘“Following a rule” is a practice.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), § 202. which can be described in terms of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as iterability. As I aim to show, Wittgenstein underlines that the validity of a system of rules emerges as a retrospective effect of the repetitive embodiment of inherited practices and implies both repetition and variation.

In a second step, I will take into account Stanley Cavell’s insights, in order to examine the embodiment of language as an open and ongoing process of ‘initiation into forms of life’,33Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 180–90. which is based in ‘nothing more, and nothing less’ than in our mutual attunement,44See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 41–67 (p. 48). and thus in our mutual responses as speakers. Here I aim to show that the limits of ‘our’ ‘forms of life’ and communities are tested, confirmed, and renegotiated through our responses to each other as embodied beings. In a third and final step, I will further explore this mutual attunement in language as an embodied practice through Butler’s psychoanalytic and Foucauldian perspective,55Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005). On the similarities and differences between Butler’s and Cavell’s non-sovereign accounts of language, community, and embodied life, see Rosine Kelz, The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on Moral Philosophy and Political Agency (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. pp. 46–77 <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508973_3>. so as to examine this mutual Beginning of page[p. 17] attunement according to a twofold meaning of opacity: on the one hand, I will address the affective webs of relations to the environment and its caregivers that form the subject and make it opaque to itself, relational, and fundamentally vulnerable. On the other hand, I will consider a dimension of opacity as vulnerability to language. The latter points to the opaque fact that one finds oneself in a language which one has never chosen, which both constrains and enables one’s embodied life, and which is therefore fundamentally opaque. Finally, I will underline the pervasiveness of the ‘dual dimension of performativity’,66Judith Butler, ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’, in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 12–27 (p. 24); my emphasis <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373490-004>. which marks an account of language as embodied practice. This dual dimension refers to the fact that ‘we are invariably acted on and acting’,77Ibid. while reshaping the normative practices by which we are acted on through our enactments.

Wittgenstein’s Rules as Performative Practices: Subjectification as Training

At the core of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations there lies the description of human language, which is understood as a web of interwoven practices. Speech is thus an embodied practice, along with walking, eating, and drinking, which as such belong to our ‘natural history’.88Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 25. What is at issue in Wittgenstein’s account of language, therefore, is neither a theory of meaning nor a definition of the essence of language, but rather a description of the Beginning of page[p. 18] uncountable ways in which practices take place. Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language-games’ underlines precisely that language ‘is part of an activity, or a form of life’.99Ibid., § 23. It is worth emphasizing that the meaning of words lies neither in speakers’ intentions nor in the entities that the words denote. Words, therefore, are not designations which refer to the properties of external or internal objects. Hence, one does not learn a language by means of ostensive definitions; rather, in order to be able to ask what something is called, one must already have learned and mastered many other language-practices. As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘One has already to know (or be able to do) something before one can ask what something is called.’1010Ibid., § 30. Therefore, teaching a language is ‘not explaining, but training (Abrichtung)’.1111Ibid., § 5. He adds: ‘To understand a language means to have mastered a technique.’1212Ibid., § 199. As Wittgenstein famously argues, the meaning of a word lies ‘for a large class of cases’ in its ‘use in language’.1313Ibid., § 43. Furthermore, the metaphor of language as a game, with which Wittgenstein describes language as an embodied practice, suggests that those practices are constituted by rules. Indeed, when we learn to use a word, what we actually learn is how to react and behave correctly in a particular context, so as to learn to practically follow a rule.1414As representative examples of the extensive debate on Wittgenstein’s argument of rule-following, see especially Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Harvard University Press, 1982); and John McDowell, ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, Synthesis, 58 (1984), pp. 325–63 <https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485246>. Hence, the rules of our language-games do not exist Beginning of page[p. 19] as explicit, determined, and fixed instructions before we actually play. Rather, Wittgenstein underlines the very impossibility of separating the rules from their applications, that is, from our shared practices. Therefore, we do not distinguish between correct and incorrect language uses — applications of rules — on the basis of a system of explicit instructions or mental representations of the rules, but rather on the basis of the shared (and inherited) practices in which we live. Accordingly, the criteria of correctness or incorrectness for those practices are neither rooted in some alleged natural features of the human being nor in the ‘external world’. Even less do rules correspond to normative and fixed principles which lie outside our practices. Rather, these criteria are immanent in our shared practices as such. Wittgenstein expresses this point as follows:

Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. One is trained to do so, and one reacts to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts to the order and training thus, and another otherwise? Who is right, then? […] Shared human behaviour is the system of reference.1515Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 206.

From this perspective, I would argue that Wittgenstein’s understanding of language as ‘training’1616See ibid., § 5–6. and of rule-following as a ‘practice’1717See ibid., § 202. involves a performative process of subjectification. Thus, we constitute ourselves as living speakers in and through training, insofar as we are trained to respond appropriately in given contexts: we learn to embody and enact (to practically follow) rules. Learning a language and continuing to live in it means being trained, embodying and enacting inherited Beginning of page[p. 20] practices, or, as Wittgenstein calls them, ‘customs (usages, institutions)’.1818Ibid., § 199; emphasis in the original. Through and in this training, we learn to ‘project’ those inherited uses into ‘further life contexts’,1919Stanley Cavell’s description of the learning of language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations plays a crucial role for this interpretation. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 180–90. I will return to this point more extensively in section 2 below. so as to constitute ourselves and to contribute to and shape a shared language practice. We learn to use these inherited customs in further contexts and, indeed, to put it with Jacques Derrida, we learn to cite them.2020See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 307–30. In this (provisional) sense, ‘following a rule is a practice’2121Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 202. which is carried out through training and has a performative dimension.

In order to analyse this performative dimension more closely, I wish to read it in light of Butler and Derrida’s concept of iterability. For this purpose, I would like to emphasize first of all that at the core of Wittgenstein’s conception of rules there lies the social, recurrent, or — better — iterative character of the practices of rule-following. Wittgenstein writes:

Is what we call ‘following a rule’ something that it would be possible for only one person, only once in a lifetime, to do? — And this is, of course, a gloss on the grammar of the expression ‘to follow a rule’. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which only one person followed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood, and so on. — To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an Beginning of page[p. 21] order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions).2222Ibid., § 199; emphases in the original.

As Klaus Puhl has shown, binding rules emerge and constitute themselves insofar as ‘some contingent practical behaviours are retrospectively transformed into the normative criterion of the correct application of the rule, whereby their validity remains dependent on the fact that these contingent behaviours repeatedly assert themselves’.2323Klaus Puhl, ‘Die List der Regel. Zur Konstitution sozialer Praxis’, in Institutionen und Regelfolgen, ed. by Ulrich Baltzer and Gerhard Schönrich (Mentis, 2002), pp. 81–99 (p. 96); my translation. In other words, ‘the validity of the rule remains dependent on the maintenance of the regularity [of the practice] from which the rule has developed.’2424Ibid., p. 90.

From this perspective, I would claim that the sedimented practices of rule-following, that is, the customs and institutions — to which Wittgenstein also refers as a ‘world-picture’2525Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 95, 162, and 167. — do not correspond to a system of well-founded, fixed, and normative principles. Rather, they are marked by a constitutive ‘groundlessness’,2626Ibid., § 166. which is to say that they are contingent,2727I have tried to explicate this notion of contingency and situate it within a post-foundationalist paradigm in Lucilla Guidi, ‘Die Grundlosigkeit der Praxis in Wittgensteins Über Gewißheit. Kritik als Übung des Kontingenzbewusstseins’, in Crisis and Critique: Philosophical Analysis and Current Events; Contributions to the 42nd International Wittgenstein Symposium 2019, ed. by Anne Siegetsleitner and others, Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, xxvii (Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2019), pp. 86–90. since they correspond to the hardened retrospective effects of the repetition of practices. These uses, customs, and institutions, therefore, remain dependent on the regularity of our enactments: they are at the Beginning of page[p. 22] same time sustained and altered by the repetition of practices. A world-picture, which points to the inherited system of normative practices according to which we are trained so as to constitute ourselves, is determined as ‘unmoved’ by ‘movement’, meaning that it is sustained and hardened by our ‘ungrounded way of acting’.2828Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 110. Wittgenstein writes:

I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them retrospectively [nachträglich] like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not ‘fixed’ in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.2929Ibid., § 152.

In this sense, Wittgenstein compares the system of rules which builds up our world-picture to ‘foundation-walls [which] are carried by the whole house’.3030Ibid., § 248. Moreover, he underlines that this sedimented web of practices that we embody in order to constitute ourselves as subjects points to the background against which we distinguish between true and false, correct and incorrect embodied behaviours and uses of language. This web consists in nothing more (and nothing less) than the retrospective hardened effects of the repetition of practices. Thus, on the one hand, the ‘hardened’3131Ibid., § 96. background or — as Wittgenstein also calls it — the ‘river-bed’3232Ibid., § 97. enables the constitution of ourselves and points to the criteria according to which we distinguish between true and false. On the other hand, this background does not correspond to a necessary and universal normative horizon. On the contrary, it is constitutively contingent, since it is historically situated and altered Beginning of page[p. 23] over time: it is hardened and altered by the ‘movement of the waters’,3333Ibid. which is to say by our ‘ungrounded’ enactments.3434Ibid., § 110. From this perspective, I would claim that the repetition of practices — in which the normative dimension of the reference system of rules retrospectively emerges, and which sustains, hardens, and alters this system — points to a performative, or iterative, process and can be uncovered in light of Derrida and Butler’s notion of performativity as iterability.

In short, according to Butler, the notion of performativity refers to ‘the power of discourse to produce effects through reiteration’.3535Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge, 1993), p. 20. The temporal dimension of the process of iteration is crucial. On the one hand, iteration remains futural: it produces effects, which retrospectively constitute something that is ‘not yet’ there. On the other hand, iteration depends on a sedimented past. Iteration means citing, and therefore enacting and embodying, ‘sedimented’ discourses and practices.3636Ibid., p. 10. Herein lies the ‘dual dimension’3737Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 63. of a performative — iterative — process of repetition: on the one hand, an embodied social assignment is the retrospective effect of the iteration of practices (in Butler’s context what is at issue are ‘process[es] of materialization’3838See Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 15. of sex and gender as retrospective effects of iterated practices and acts of naming and signification). On the other hand, in this very same process of iteration, a predominant normative matrix, or, to put it in Wittgenstein’s Beginning of page[p. 24] terms, the reference system of regulated practices (uses, customs, institutions), is both ‘stabilized’,3939Ibid., p. 10. or hardened, and always already ‘de-stabilized’,4040Ibid. or altered.

This is the meaning of repetition conceived as a performative process of iteration. Hence, as Derrida has shown, when a sign (but this is ‘valid not only for the orders of “signs” […] but […] for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience’4141Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, p. 317.) is repeated or cited, it is cut off from its (previous) contexts, so as to be inscribed in a further context. From this perspective, every iteration implies at the same time both something identifiable, that which makes something citable, and a constitutive ‘différance’,4242Ibid., p. 327. that which inscribes the sign in a new chain of significations.4343See ibid., pp. 318–19. Hence, when a sedimented practice is cited and therefore enacted in a further context, this process of iteration is never the reproduction of an identical principle or ‘meaning’, since it always involves otherness: ‘itara, other in Sanskrit’, variations.4444Ibid., p. 315. From this perspective, iterability ‘links repetition to alterity’ and means both ‘repetition/alterity’.4545Ibid., pp. 315 and 317. As Wehrle argues with reference to Butler’s reading of Derrida’s notion of iterability:

Every use of language […] never signifies something in absolutely the same way, but transforms pre-established rules and meanings in its very application. In this sense, discourses [as practices]Beginning of page[p. 25] are neither stable nor fixed, but remain always fragile and open to transformation.4646Maren Wehrle, ‘Bodily Performativity: Enacting Norms’, in Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, ed. by Lucilla Guidi and Thomas Rentsch (Brill, 2020), pp. 120–39 (p. 124) <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004420991_009>.

In a parallel way, according to Wittgenstein, on the one hand, the regularity of practices, which is to say their iterative embodiments and enactments, retrospectively brings out the normative dimension of a system of rules, so as to stabilize and harden it in and through these enactments. On the other hand, the practice of rule-following is marked by the constitutive impossibility of logically deducing the application of a rule, that is, the particular use of language, from an abstract ‘instruction’ or ‘meaning’, so as to employ it in an identical way in another context. Wittgenstein thus emphasizes the fundamental hiatus between sedimented regulated practices and usages and their application or ‘citation’ in a different context, since no rule exists to regulate the application of the rule without running into an infinite regress.4747Wittgenstein writes: ‘Can’t we imagine a rule, regulating the application of the rule?’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 84.) Accordingly, our practices are never completely determined; rather, they are constitutively open. The practice of rule-following implies that it is always possible to act otherwise, to change the language-game by playing, to follow the rule differently — that is, to enact an inherited practice in a different way. Wittgenstein asks: ‘And is there not also the case where we play, and make up the rules as we go along? And even where we alter them — as we go along.’4848Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 83.

Moreover, it is not only always possible to enact an inherited practice in a different way, but, more radically,Beginning of page[p. 26] every application of a rule — that is, every embodiment of a sedimented practice in a particular context — is constitutively iterable. The enactment of an inherited practice in a new context is described by Cavell, following Wittgenstein, as the ‘projection of a word’, and by Derrida as the ‘citation of a sign’.4949Cavell critically engages with and distances himself from Derrida’s reading of J. L. Austin in ‘Signature Event Context’, particularly in relation to the notions of voice and intention. However, Derrida’s criticism of a disembodied, metaphysical notion of voice as transparent to itself, and the related conception of intention, are much more in line with Cavell’s account of voice as responsiveness than might seem to be the case at first sight. One should take into account here the phenomenological roots of Derrida’s criticism of Husserl’s notion of voice in Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, ed. and trans. by Leonard Lawlor (Northwestern University Press, 2011). I cannot analyse this point here, since it would require a separate article. For Cavell’s critical reading of Derrida, see Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Blackwell, 1995). The crucial point in both cases is that the particular situated enactment is constitutively variable and therefore remains constitutively open. Cavell writes in this regard:

[W]e keep finding new potencies in words and new ways in which objects are disclosed.5050Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 180. […] Any form-of-life and every concept integral to it has an indefinite number of instances and directions of projection [into further contexts]; and […] this variation is not arbitrary [since it is influenced by the inherited uses].5151Ibid., p. 185.

In Derrida’s words:

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written […], can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts Beginning of page[p. 27] in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center.5252Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, p. 320.

This means that there are only practices ‘with blurred edges’, as Wittgenstein would say.5353Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 71. The inherited practices which we embody and enact can thus be understood as iterable, since ‘we, in our conceptual world, keep seeing the same thing recurring with variations; […] concepts are not for use on a single occasion’.5454Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1967), § 568. From this perspective, Wittgenstein’s conception of language can be described as performative, that is, as the iterative enactment of inherited practices. Accordingly, the latter involves both regularity and multiple variations and is therefore constitutively open. Moreover, I would like to highlight one last feature of this performative process: the sedimented practices and customs that we simultaneously maintain and change in and through our enactments are never at our disposal. Rather, they are marked by a constitutive opacity, since it is precisely against the background of these weaves of practices — that is, in their very training, embodiment, and enactment — that we constitute ourselves as subjects and thus live and act. Wittgenstein also characterizes this inherited background of sedimented practice as a world-picture. In On Certainty, he writes:

But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness: nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the Beginning of page[p. 28] inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.5555Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 94.

What is at issue in the performative enactment of practice is neither a sovereign and individualistic form of self- and world-creation, nor mere subjection to and determination by the inherited practices which we enact. Rather, what is at stake is the acceptance of the constitutive opacity and openness of the inherited practices that we enact in order to constitute ourselves as subjects, and that we simultaneously maintain and change in and through our enactments. From this perspective, the mutual constitution of subjects and normative practices can be understood as a weave of performative, or iterable, processes.5656I have explored this performative — that is, iterative — constitution of practices in Lucilla Guidi, ‘Iterabilität und Kontingenz der Praxis in Wittgenstein und Heidegger’, in Praxis. Ausüben. Begreifen, ed. by Michael Corsten (Velbrück, 2021), pp. 46–68. The first section of the present chapter is a revised version of the first section of this German contribution.

Cavell’s Initiation Scene and Mutual Attunement in Language

In this second section, by drawing upon Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Investigations, I aim to show that language, understood as a weave of embodied iterable practices, is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our mutual responses and thus on our mutual attunement in form(s) of life. This mutual attunement is not a matter of sharing an allegedly given human nature, nor does it consist in social conventions conceived of as agreements on judgements or principles. After exploring Cavell’s insights, I will analyse more deeply the bodily, affective, and social dimension of this mutual attunement by resorting to Butler’s account,Beginning of page[p. 29] thereby reading this mutual attunement in forms of life as a constitutive ‘opacity’ to oneself ‘as a relational being’.5757Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 20.

Cavell draws attention to the crucial significance of Wittgenstein’s critical assessment of the account of language as a disembodied, symbolic system of rules or signs that denote outer or inner objects. For Wittgenstein, as Cavell underlines, Augustine’s idea that the child learns to speak because the adult teaches it to associate names and objects is not just a false picture of language. Rather, this picture fails to take into account the unrecoverable and fragile dimension of teaching and learning a language, which coincides with the very process of becoming oneself and at the same time giving form, sustaining, and transforming our forms of life. Cavell describes this unrecoverable dimension as follows:

When you say ‘I love my love’ the child learns the meaning of the word ‘love’ and what love is. That (what you do) will be love in the child’s world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought. When you say ‘I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise’, the child begins to learn what temporal durations are, and what trust is, and what you do will show what trust is worth. When you say ‘Put on your sweater’, the child learns what commands are and what authority is, and if giving orders is something that creates anxiety for you, then authorities are anxious, authority itself uncertain.

Of course, the person, growing, will learn other things about these concepts and ‘objects’ also. They will grow gradually as the child’s world grows. But all he or she knows about them is what he or she has learned, and all they have learned Beginning of page[p. 30] will be part of what they are. And what will the day be like when the person ‘realizes’ what [s/]he ‘believed’ about what love and trust and authority are? And how will [s/]he stop believing it?5858Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 177; emphases in the original.

Cavell is here drawing attention to three pivotal dimensions of our embodied practice of language. First, our language and the world are constitutively entangled and grow together. Second, he emphasizes that to learn a language is not to associate some names with some objects, so that an already constituted subject represents an already given external world. As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one.’5959Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 32. Rather, there is no sovereign mastery of language and no sovereign self-mastery as speaker, since one constitutes oneself by learning, embodying, and inheriting a language as a shared weave of practices, and this learning is something irrecoverable. (Echoing Cavell’s question: How will I stop believing what I have learnt?). Third, Cavell draws attention to the fact that learning and teaching a language means being initiated and initiating others into forms of life. This (open) process of initiation is founded on nothing more (and nothing less) than on our mutual responses, that is, our inheriting and embodying a shared language practice. For example, the child ‘produced a sound (imitated me?) which I accepted, responded to (with smiles, hugs, words of encouragement, etc.) as what I had said’.6060Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 172; emphases in the original. Through the acceptance and the response of the other, the child learns to ‘leap’, as Cavell puts it: the child learns to project Beginning of page[p. 31] certain words, that is, to use them in further contexts. Here Cavell emphasizes that:

Instead […] of saying either that we tell beginners what words mean, or that we teach them what objects are, I will say: We initiate them, into the relevant forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of our world.6161Ibid., p. 178; emphases in the original.

Moreover, this process of initiation does not only concern children, but is ongoing. In other words: this process of initiation is never-ending, since we keep finding new possibilities in words and new ways in which objects are disclosed, thereby sustaining, shaping, and transforming our embodied practice of language and thus our forms of life. Thus, we are always beginners and ‘“the routes of initiation” are never closed’.6262Ibid., p. 180. Hence, the boundaries of ‘our’ forms of life, that is, both our concepts and the aspects of a shared world, are not fixed or drawn a priori; rather, they are inherited language-practices (or conventions) that are shaped and expanded through our mutual responses in new contexts and life circumstances, and are therefore fundamentally contingent and open. They are marked by a constitutive futurity and open potentiality — a ‘not yet’.6363On this potential dimension of one’s community as something ‘beyond itself’, see Thomas Khurana, ‘This New Yet Unapproachable Community: Formen der Gemeinschaft bei Cavell und Blanchot’, in Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell, ed. by Kathrin Thiele and Katrin Trüstedt (Fink, 2009), pp. 43–65 <https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846747254_005>. As Cavell puts it:

Wittgenstein's discovery, or rediscovery, is of the depth of convention in human life; a discovery which insists not only on the conventionality of Beginning of page[p. 32] human society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself.6464Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 111.

Paola Marrati observes:

Cavell himself suggests that Wittgenstein’s understanding of conventions could be read along similar lines as Pascal’s remark that ‘custom is our nature’ [… or, I would like to add, along a phenomenological account of being-in-the-world as ecstatic, as being-outside-of-itself]. And indeed these are different ways of conveying how precarious, ungrounded, unnecessary, and ultimately ‘unnatural’ ‘human nature’ truly is. […] Such an understanding of the depth of conventionality challenges the idea of nature as a necessary and unchangeable given — a point that is quite important to recall in any discussion of forms of life.6565Paola Marrati, ‘The Fragility of Words, the Vulnerability of Life’, MLN, 130.5 (2015), pp. 1055–66 (p. 1061) <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2015.0081>. This point has been underlined by Rosine Kelz: ‘This leaves open the possibility that in future human nature could be defined differently. […] This implies that any definition of concepts such as “life” or “the human” must remain blurry. While Cavell refers to language, to specifically human ways of moving and perceiving, of being companions or seeking separation, finally the definite boundaries of human community cannot be defined. What “we” understand as the human remains a contestable notion, an ever shifting term. Instead of committing ourselves to a clearly delineated community of human beings, then, thinking about the “human form of life” as marked by contingent practices allows us to interrogate how distinctions between the human and the non-human are made and to acknowledge their ethical and political productivity’ (Kelz, The Non-Sovereign Self, p. 114).

Thus, Augustine’s picture of language is not only (and not primarily) a theoretically false picture of language; rather (and more radically), it involves a practical avoidance:

What is important in failing to recognize ‘the spirit’ in which we say ‘The child, in learning language, is learning the names of things’ is that we Beginning of page[p. 33] imagine that we have explained the nature of language when we have only avoided a recognition of its nature; and we fail to recognize how (what it really means to say that) children learn language from us.6666Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 177; emphasis in the original.

What Cavell is underlining here is that a picture of language as a disembodied system of signs that denote outer or inner objects is not just a theoretical position. Rather, this ‘picture’ involves a practical attitude toward our life in language: it means avoiding the acceptance of the fact that language does not work without us and that every time we speak we are already constitutively involved in, and committed to, the process of embodying, inheriting, sustaining, and renegotiating our life in language. Thus, we are constitutively involved in our ‘agreement’ in what we say and what we mean by saying it. In other words, we are mutually in agreement, or, better, in consonance, regarding what counts as something — what something is (called) — and at the same time what counts for us.6767On Cavell’s notion of criteria, see Davide Sparti’s afterword to the Italian edition of Cavell’s The Claim of Reason: Davide Sparti, ‘Fra Scetticismo e riconoscimento. Breve guida alla filosofia di Cavell’, in Stanley Cavell, La riscoperta dell’ordinario: la filosofia, lo scetticismo, il tragico (Carocci, 2001), pp. 505–23 (p. 508). See also Stephen Mulhall, ‘Criteria, Scepticism, and the External World’, in Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 79–108 <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198238508.003.0006>. In other words, we are mutually attuned in a ‘bustle’ of judgements which opens up the intelligibility of our life and the world. Wittgenstein also calls this ‘bustle’ ‘a world-picture’, that is, the sedimented and opaque background against which one distinguishes between true and false, correct and incorrect, and identifies what something (or someone) is. Cavell emphasizes the ‘astonishing’ nature of this agreement, as Beginning of page[p. 34] well as its fragility and precariousness. Hence, this is not an agreement on a set of words, judgements, or ‘criteria’ conceived as ‘social conventions’.6868As Cavell puts this point: ‘Since we cannot assume that the words have their meaning by nature, we are led to assume they take it from convention. And yet no current idea of “convention” could seem to do the work that words do — there would have to be, we could say, too many conventions in play, one for each shade of each word in each context. We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that would be necessary’ (Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 31). Rather, one might say, it is a sense of convention, as the German word Übereinstimmung suggests, a being-in-consonance. As Cavell observes, commenting on (and quoting) a famous Wittgenstein passage:

It is altogether important that Wittgenstein says that we agree in (forms of life) and that there is agreement in (judgments). […] ‘It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use’ [§241].6969Ibid, pp. 31–32; emphases in the original.

Cavell stresses that this idea of agreement (Übereinstimmung) does not mean

coming to or arriving at an agreement on a given occasion, but […] being in agreement throughout, being in harmony, like pitches or tones, or clocks, or weighing scales, or columns of figures. That a group of human beings stimmen in their language überein says, so to speak, that they are mutually voiced with respect to it, mutually attuned top to bottom.7070Ibid., p. 32; emphasis in the original.

From this perspective, our language — to quote Cavell again — ‘rests upon very shaky foundations’.7171Ibid., pp. 178–79.Beginning of page[p. 35]

Thus, our mutual attunement is the fragile and vulnerable basis of our embodied life in language, which has to be accepted as the ‘opaque fact’ of finding oneself attuned in an unchosen language. Yet this opaque fact is not altogether determined, but remains fundamentally contingent and open, and is constantly confirmed, reshaped, and renegotiated by us. Cavell writes:

If I am to have a native tongue, I have to accept what ‘my elders’ say and do as consequential; and they have to accept […] what I say and do as what they say and do. We do not know in advance what the content of our mutual acceptance is, how far we may be in agreement.7272Ibid., p. 28.

In other words, what is at stake are the limits of the possibility of speaking to and for each other, which come to the fore when we do not know our way around, when our mutual understanding is interrupted, or when for example the child asks: ‘Why do we eat animals?’7373Ibid., p. 125. In these circumstances, I am forced to come back to myself, in order to examine my embodied and inherited practice of language, thereby making explicit and appealing to what ‘we’ say and what we mean by saying it. In such a way, the limits of this mutual attunement in language are tested, as I examine the extent to which I can(not) speak to and for you, that is, the extent to which I (we) can(not) agree on what counts as something and what counts for us. In this sense, as Cavell writes:

The […] appeal to what we say, and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community. And the claim to Beginning of page[p. 36] community is always a search for the basis upon which it can or has been established.7474Ibid., p. 20. On the complex relation between the method of ordinary language philosophy, according to Cavell’s reformulation of J. L. Austin, and its connection to an account of philosophy as a practical conversion and ‘claim to community’, see Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. pp. 15–49.

As Sparti puts it: ‘Our mutual availability […] shapes the community that comes into being in the medium of our joint responsiveness to each other, the community of which we are a part and we help to make up.’7575Davide Sparti, ‘Projective Imagination: Therapy and Improvisation in Wittgenstein’s (and Cavell’s) Vision of Language’, in Wittgensteinian Exercises: Aesthetic and Ethical Transformations, ed. by Lucilla Guidi (Brill/Fink, 2023), pp. 19–44 (p. 34) <https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846767450_003>.

There are three dimensions at stake in this mutual and fragile attunement. First, the openness of our projections: the enactment of inherited practices in new contexts is constitutively open. How my words as actions will affect others — their ‘perlocutionary’ effects, to quote J. L. Austin — are not (entirely) predictable.7676On the significance of the perlocutionary according to J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, see Sandra Laugier and Daniele Lorenzini, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Perlocutionary?’, Inquiry, 68.6 (2021) <https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2021.1990792>. Second, in projecting a word, in using it in a new context, I am not only saying something, thereby disclosing a new aspect of the shared world. Rather, I am also expressing, disclosing myself — that is, constituting myself as a subject — so that this process depends on, and is shaped by, the other’s responses to my expressions: ‘My words are my expression of my life; I respond to the words of others as their expressions, i.e., respond not merely to what their words mean but equally to their meaning of them.’7777Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 355. Third, this mutual attunement is Beginning of page[p. 37] not only the contingent and ungrounded foundation of language as an inherited weave of practices, but also marks our relating and being related to each other as embodied beings. Here Cavell underlines that in inheriting, embodying, sustaining, negotiating, and reshaping a language, we are at the same time exploring, testing, and renewing our relation to each other, a relation which involves our separateness as embodied beings.

Hence, this account of language as embodied practice is, on the one hand, a critique of a disembodied account of language conceived as a system of signs or rules by which an already constituted subject represents an already given reality. On the other hand, this account of language as embodied practice emphasizes the embodied character of the mind, as well as the acknowledgement of the other (mind) as an embodied being, thereby radically overcoming any dualism between body and mind. Thus, according to ‘the myth of the inner’, disembodied minds are veiled and separated by bodies. According to this myth, ‘knowing other minds’ is a matter of ‘inferring’ the mental ‘inner states’ of others from bodily movements or behaviours. On the contrary, for Wittgenstein (and Cavell), the ‘body is the field of expression of the soul’.7878Ibid., p. 356. Here, Cavell is reading Wittgenstein’s passage ‘The face is the soul of the body’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. H. von Wright and others (Blackwell, 1998), p. 26. Each of us is related and relates to others on the basis of an inherited weave of practices that make our own and the other’s embodied being intelligible as such. Here, ‘knowing the other’s mind’ is not a matter of epistemological knowledge, that is, the inference of an inner mental realm from outer bodily behaviours (or the impossibility of doing so, per the ‘myth of the inner’). Rather,Beginning of page[p. 38] it means seeing and interpreting,7979See Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophy of Psychology — A Fragment’ (previously known as Part ii of the Philosophical Investigations), in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 164. ‘sensing’8080What is at stake here is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘modified concept of sensing’. Ibid., § 231. the other as an embodied being, responding to the other in a certain way, acknowledging the other according to an inherited weave of practice which makes the other and myself as embodied beings intelligible as such.8181See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 84. Here the metaphysical dualisms of inner/outer, sense perception/intellectual interpretation, and body/mind are called into question and overcome.8282I have analysed the overcoming of such dualisms in Lucilla Guidi, ‘Emotions as Embodied Expressions: Wittgenstein on the Inner Life’, Humana.Mente, 12.36 (2019), pp. 146–69 <https://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/article/view/295> [accessed 11 November 2025]. Cavell writes:

Now we may see more of what is expressed in the myth of the body as veiling or screening the mind. Something is veiled […]. But the idea of the body plays its role. In the fantasy of it as veiling, it is what comes between my mind and the other’s, it is the thing that separates us. The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated (by something); that we are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied […]. If something separates us, comes between us, that can only be […] a particular way in which we relate, or are related (by birth, by law, by force, in love) to one another — our positions, our attitudes, with reference to one another. Call this our history. It is our present.8383Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 369; emphases in the original.

In conclusion, according to Cavell, language — as an embodied practice — means relating and being related to one another as embodied beings, that is, being in a certain position or attitude toward oneself and the other, against Beginning of page[p. 39] the background of an inherited weave of practices. Thus, this inherited web of practices does not remain at our disposal. On the contrary, it points to the unchosen ‘agreement’ which enables our life. However, this ‘agreement’ is not given once and for all, but is maintained and renegotiated through our mutual responses. The boundaries of our agreement as mutual attunement in language as a form of life are (constantly) at stake, since they are confirmed, tested, expanded, reshaped, and redrawn each time I can(not) speak to and for you.

Butler’s Scene of Address and the Opacity to Oneself

I propose to deepen this idea of mutual attunement, as well as Cavell’s account of our relationality as embodied beings, by drawing on Butler’s psychoanalytic and social account of the living being as fundamentally vulnerable, that is, as relational and opaque to itself.

By combining a psychoanalytic and a Foucauldian perspective, Butler analyses in greater depth the formation of the subject, which at the same time means both the (trans)formation of a matrix of norms conceived as embodied iterable practices and our relating and being related to one another. In particular, I will refer here to Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, so as to analyse the double opacity and dispossession at the core of the formation of embodied life.8484On this double dimension of opacity and its ethical consequences, see Catherine Mills, ‘Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity, Opacity and Responsibility’, in Butler and Ethics, ed. by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 41–64 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748678860-004>. Butler underlines two aspects. First, they describe the ways in which the infant’s emergence through a web of primary bodily and affective relations with its Beginning of page[p. 40] environment shapes the very constitution of the ‘I’; these relations are formative and remain fundamentally opaque and unrecoverable. Second, they identify language, as a weave of social norms conceived as iterable practices, as the impersonal and opaque dimension which both constraints and enables one’s own embodied life. In this section, I wish to consider these two points in order to deepen, through an affective and social account, a conception of language as embodied iterable practice that I have sketched out following Wittgenstein and Cavell, and thus to further develop the idea of mutual attunement in language.

First, as ‘speculative philosopher’,8585Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 78. Butler describes the unrecoverable scene of becoming oneself, so as to radicalize the bodily and affective dimension of the process of initiation into a form of life described by Cavell. The starting point here is not the embodied child in relation to the world and others, but the infant’s body in relation to its environment and caregivers.

Drawing on Winnicott and Laplanche’s psychoanalysis, Butler describes the scene in which the infant’s body is impinged upon and overwhelmed by the other and thus by its environment. This ‘being given over to the other’, whose phantasmatic presence is experienced as overwhelming, is the way in which the infant first opens up to the world. Butler writes:

We cannot tell a story about this, but perhaps there is some other way in which it is available to us, even available to us through language. […] I am, prior to acquiring an ‘I’, a being who has been touched, moved, fed, changed, put to sleep, established as the subject and object of speech. My infantile body has not only been touched, moved,Beginning of page[p. 41] and arranged, but those impingements operated as ‘tactile signs’ that registered in my formation. These signs communicate to me in ways that are not reducible to vocalization. They are signs of an other, but they are also the traces from which an ‘I’ will eventually emerge, an ‘I’ who will never be able, fully, to recover or read these signs, for whom these signs will remain in part overwhelming and unreadable, enigmatic and formative.8686Ibid., pp. 69–70.

I would argue that Butler allows one to take into account the affective dimension of our mutual attunement in language as a form of life, by considering the ways in which corporeal and affective relations with an environment and caregivers are ‘formative’ of the ‘I’ that is yet to emerge. Drawing on Laplanche and Winnicott, Butler challenges the point of departure of Freud’s psychoanalysis by emphasizing that the starting point is not innate drives,8787Ibid., p. 71. but rather the constitutive relation of the infant with its caregivers and its environment, that is, its attachment to them — an ‘attachment which is overdetermined from the start’.8888Ibid., p. 74. Moreover, the infant does not yet exist as a separate, embodied ‘I’, but rather is a web of bodily and affective relations with its environment — that is, with its caregivers – a weave of bodily and affective relations which are ‘formative’ of this ‘I’ and that cannot be narrated, that is, recovered as such.

One can make the general claim that primary impressions are not just received by an ego, but are formative of it. The ego does not come into being without a prior encounter, a primary relation, a set of inaugural impressions from elsewhere. When Beginning of page[p. 42] Winnicott describes the ego as a relational process, he is disputing the view that the ego is constituted and there from the outset of life. He is also positing the primacy of relationality to any bounded sense of self. If the ego, as Bollas and Lacan would agree, ‘long precedes the arrival of the subject’, that means only that the relational process that seeks to negotiate a differentiation from the unconscious and from the other is not yet articulated in speech, not yet capable of reflective self-deliberation. In any case, the ego is not an entity or a substance, but an array of relations and processes, implicated in the world of the primary caregivers in ways that constitute its very definition.8989Ibid., pp. 58–59; emphases in the original.

Invoking Laplanche’s ‘Copernican revolution’,9090Ibid., p. 76. Butler emphasizes how adult experience is always decentred by infantile experience, thereby making it dispossessed, that is, outside of itself. Here Butler radicalizes the role of infancy, which still is present in Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s accounts of language as embodied practice, by decentring the (ongoing) initiation of the embodied child into forms of life through the (ongoing) scene in which the infantile body emerges as a weave of affective relations with its environment and the other. Furthermore, on the one hand, this scene calls into question a developmental and self-coherent narrative account of the self — in other words, the possibility of coherently narrating and thus being the author of one’s own story.9191On the failure of self-narration and its ethical potential both in Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself and in Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives, and on the similarities and differences between these two accounts, particularly with reference to bodily vulnerability, see Ann V. Murphy, ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26.3 (2011), pp. 575–90 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01202.x>. On the other hand, this scene inscribes an interruption at the core Beginning of page[p. 43] of embodied speaking life. This interruption is the very phantasmatic scene of having been addressed or called by the overwhelming presence of the other, the weave of affective relations from and out of which the ‘I’ emerges and which are still operative in our embodied speaking life with others. Here a double movement comes into play: in light of the primacy of one’s relation to the environment, Butler reformulates the Levinasian priority of the Other, rethinking it with Laplanche as an overdetermined relation of the infant to its environment and its caregivers:

For Laplanche, I am animated by this call […] and I am at first overwhelmed by it. The other is, from the start, too much for me, enigmatic, inscrutable. This ‘too-much-ness’ must be handled and contained for something called an ‘I’ to emerge in its separateness. The unconscious is not a topos into which this ‘too-much-ness’ is deposited. It is rather formed as a psychic requirement of survival and individuation, as a way of managing — and failing to manage — that excess and thus as the persistent and opaque life of that excess itself.9292Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 54; my emphasis.

This excess points to the overdetermined, formative, affective relation to the other and the world, and therefore is not something relegated to the past. This prehistory of embodied speaking life is not a past in the chronological sense. Rather, it is still happening and will not cease to happen, since these formative affective relations attune the relation to the other and thus the mutual attunement in language as an embodied practice and form of life.

That prehistory continues to happen every time I enunciate myself. In speaking the ‘I’, I undergo Beginning of page[p. 44] something of what cannot be captured or assimilated by the ‘I’, since I always arrive too late to myself. (Nietzsche’s bees in The Genealogy of Morals clearly prefigure the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit.) I can never provide the account of myself that both certain forms of morality and some models of mental health require, namely, that the self deliver itself in coherent narrative form. The ‘I’ is the moment of failure in every narrative effort to give an account of oneself. It remains the unaccounted for and, in that sense, constitutes the failure that the very project of self-narration requires. Every effort to give an account of oneself is bound to encounter this failure, and to founder upon it.9393Ibid., p. 79.

Both the persistent Nachträglichkeit of this prehistory and the failure to give a full account of oneself are therefore continuously involved in our embodied life in language and thus in our mutual attunement in language and to each other. In psychoanalytic practice, then, this nachträgliche prehistory and failure — which are ongoing operants — are taken explicitly into account. In psychoanalytic practice — in transferences and counter-transferences — the analysand ‘orchestrates’9494Ibid., p. 58. with the analyst those primary affective impingements by the other, namely, the infant’s attachment to its caregivers and environment. Hence, according to Butler, the analyst’s task is not to provide interpretations, nor does the goal of the psychoanalytic process lie in the narrating of one’s own story. Rather, what is at stake is the possibility of an embodied re-enactment of those formative affective relations within a ‘holding environment’,9595Ibid., p. 59. as Butler puts it with Winnicott, while at Beginning of page[p. 45] the same time continuing to abide within the limits of self-knowledge, within a fundamental not-knowing:

A certain humility must emerge in this process, perhaps also a certain knowingness about the limits of what there is to know. Perhaps every analysand becomes, in this sense, a lay Kantian. But there is something more: a point about language and historicity.9696Ibid., p. 69.

Accordingly, I would like to draw attention to this further (and final) point, a dimension of opacity related to the historical and social dimension of language, which opens up a second aspect of the opacity to oneself as a relational being and thus deepens the meaning of the ‘agreement’ in language as an embodied practice from a social perspective. This dimension points to what Butler also calls ‘enabling vulnerability’9797Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997), p. 2. — the fact that one has already been addressed and affected by a language which one has never chosen. ‘The “I” “agrees”, from the start, to narrate itself […] through modes of speech that have an impersonal nature.’9898Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 52. Butler emphasizes that one can become intelligible to oneself and to the other, thereby acquiring agency, by embodying a weave of social norms, understood as iterable practices. This vulnerability to language as the unchosen constraint and enabling condition of embodied life marks its impersonal and opaque dimension, a second and intertwined aspect of the opacity to oneself as a relational social being. As Butler puts it:

This follows, not only from the fact that language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through Beginning of page[p. 46] a complicated form of mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose.9999Ibid., p. 53.

This is where the ‘dual dimension of performativity’ comes into play,100100Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 63. the fact that ‘we are invariably acted on and acting’,101101Butler, ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’, p. 24. in such a way that we both stabilize and change the practices by which we are acted upon through our enactments. This dual dimension, which also emerges in Wittgenstein’s account of rules and Cavell’s account of language as embodied (and iterable) practices, acquires a more radical social dimension in Butler’s account. This dimension is related to the hegemonic nature of norms as practices and the risk involved in challenging them.

[N]o ‘I’ belongs to itself. From the outset, it comes into being through an address I can neither recall nor recuperate, and when I act, I act in a world whose structure is in large part not of my making — which is not to say that there is no making and no acting that is mine. There surely is. It means only that the ‘I’, its suffering and acting, telling and showing, take place within a crucible of social relations, variously established and iterable, some of which are irrecoverable, some of which impinge upon, condition, and limit our intelligibility within the present. And when we do act and speak, we not only disclose ourselves but act on the schemes of intelligibility that govern who will be a speaking being, subjecting them to rupture or revision, consolidating their norms, or contesting their hegemony.102102Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 132.Beginning of page[p. 47]

Butler adopts neither a voluntarist nor a determinist perspective. After all, these interwoven relations are historically determined formations, sedimented effects of the iterative embodiment of practices, not universal principles given once and for all. As Sparti puts this point:

We could even argue that every time we act and speak, we intervene in the schemes of intelligibility that determine who will be a speaking being, subjecting these schemes to revision. Knowing, however, that if I want to challenge the hegemony of schemes and categories, I can only jeopardize the intelligibility of my conduct.103103Davide Sparti, ‘Dal riconoscimento alla riconoscibilità. Soggettivazione e la questione dell’umano in Axel Honneth e in Judith Butler’, Lares, 89.2 (2023), pp. 205–22 (p. 215); my translation <https://doi.org/10.1400/297478>.

Conclusion

I have claimed here that Wittgenstein’s account of language as a weave of embodied practices involves a process of mutual constitution of subjects and normative practices that can be outlined in light of Butler’s account of performativity as iterability. Drawing on Cavell’s perspective, I have emphasized that embodying a language means being initiated and initiating others into a form of life, and being related and relating to each other as embodied beings. Moreover, I have stressed that an account of language as a disembodied system of signs by which already constituted subjects depict an already given reality is not just a false theoretical picture of language, but also means avoiding the practical responsibility for inheriting, maintaining, and renegotiating our mutual ‘attunement’ in the criteria that open up the intelligibility of ourselves, others, and Beginning of page[p. 48] the world. In other words, it means avoiding the responsibility for our mutual ‘attunement’ in an inherited and sedimented language as a form of life. I have further proposed to deepen Cavell’s idea of mutual attunement, as well as his account of our relationality as embodied beings, by drawing on Butler’s psychoanalytic and Foucauldian account of the living being as fundamentally vulnerable, that is, as a bodily and socially relational being, which is fundamentally opaque to itself. From this perspective, I have argued, with reference to Butler, that an account of language as a weave of embodied practices is intertwined with the social and hegemonic nature of norms as practices and the risk involved in challenging them. In conclusion, in this chapter I have described the mutual constitution of subjects and normative practices as iterable, performative processes in order to complement Wittgenstein and Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language and their account of language as embodied practice with Butler’s social and psychoanalytic perspective.