ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE - HEIDEGGER AND SCHIZOPHRENIA by Ronell

ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE: HEIDEGGER AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
Author(s): Avital Ronell

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 2, No. 1, PARANOIA AND SCHIZOPHRENIA (SPRING 1988), pp. 55-69
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20685859
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You know the story. Heidegger has claimed the sign
for the cutting edge, language's blade runner, Zeichen being
sculpted out of the Latin secare, to cut. "Ein Zeichen sind
wir" (H?lderlin): we're cutting out. He figured it out; we
felt it all along the expecting horizon. The schizo knows
how to disconnect, how to depart; perhaps, even, how to cut
the shit.
ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE: HEIDEGGER AND

SCHIZOPHRENIA1
I
THE WAKE-UP CALL:
Someone is calling you elsewhere.
When the disappearance of long-distance impresses

itself upon you, it sometimes becomes necessary to make a
conference call to the question itself of technology, the place
where a call can break into a body (the body politic, the
"body without organs," or simply the orificial openings of a
subject). Historically, the organization of the schizobody,
with its break-ins and technological deposits, took place
sometime after the death of God, when the transcendental
signifier came crashing down and every body was on the
line. This line, still engaged, is what we try to cut into, if
only by emergency verification. I have traced a call, through
its umbilicus, to the telephone apparatus, in order, on the
one hand, to probe the possibilities for a genuine
Ferngespr?ch or long-distance call. Hence, Heidegger.
Hence, Schizophrenia. They are linked by a hidden
telephone monopoly whose effects I shall try to read with
you. This reading I call a "speculative telephonies." Its
name in part derives from the fact that, as such, the
telephone?its figure and field of semantic registers?has
slipped by the technophobic screening systems established in
the texts of Heidegger, R.D. Laing and Jung. Even so, their
56 ? On the Way to Lainguage
largely pretechnological ears are trained on the telephone.

The telephone goes underground in Heidegger, like a cable.
And yet his dwelling is bugged, completely infiltrated by call
waiting systems that he transfers, now to the Gewissensruf
(the call of conscience) of Sein und Zeit, now to the destinai
calls of the state or the planet in the "Rectoral Speech" and
The Question Concerning Technology. As for the talking
schizo heads of Jung and Laing, they are themselves
telephone extensions, answering devices controlled by
Operators. One of the patients claims to have swallowed a
telephone, and has voices distributed all over her body.
Another remembers with traumatic intensity the call box
from which her father made a mysterious connection. The
doctors, themselves recording machines, transcribe the
network of mentions without ever addressing the telephone
as image, drive, desire, phantasm, concept, object, etc. It
has been overlooked and underread by Jung, Heidegger and
R.D. Laing. Elsewhere, I shall tap into state terrorism and
electric speech (Bell's name for it), aiming for a reading of
killer telephones and what it means to have the future on the
line. Presently the switchboard is lighting up according to
another zoning law: that of schizontology.
The question posed by Sein und Zeit: where does the
call come from?
Answer: the call comes from me and from beyond
and over me.
II
We ourselves shall follow the exorbitant path from
electrical carriers to nocturnal emissions, sheltering our
hopes in the neighborhood of poetry, even if that
neighborhood should be inclusive of devastated ghettos
where schizophrenia speaks from telephone booths. "I am
amp amp amplify . . . whoishe whoishe?" (Joyce)
Somewhere Heidegger has written of the technological
Enframing (Gestell) and its eerie qualities. It was a
bookrack according to ordinary usage. "Gestell is also the
name for a skeleton. And the employment of the word Ge
stell that is now required of us seems equally eerie ... Can
anything be more strange? Surely not. Yet this strangeness
On the Way to Lainguage ? 57
is an old usage of thinking."2

Even though it is elsewhere done in the spirit of
denial, there is no reading of technology that is not in some
sense spooked, even when Heidegger displaces the focus to
Gestell, at whose basis a skeleton rises. The eerie, uncanny
dimension of technology is precisely what engages us, as is
the rapport to grief or loss and Heidegger's hermeneutics of
mourning. In "The Turning," writing on the restorative
surmounting (wunden) of the essence of technology,
Heidegger uncharacteristically designs a wounding which is
to be dressed, covered over, overcome: "... the coming to
presence of technology will be surmounted (verwunden) in a
way that restores it into its yet concealed truth. This
restoring surmounting is similar to what happens when, in
the human realm, one gets over grief or pain." The
surmounting of Enframing, as a surmounting of a destining
of Being is precisely what causes us to pause and wonder.
Perhaps "the essence" of Heidegger's dream of restorative
overcoming might be located in this sheltered allusion to a
grief or pain under promised anesthesia. What would
constitute the successful mourning but another forgetting?
What was this thinking trying to overcome, subdue and
carry over to a convalescent home of Being?
Telephonies coils itself around a concept of "being
there" supported by the recognition that contact has been
broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was
never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity,
presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain
historical mutation in the relationship of the "self' to other,
to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in M?moires,
of the other. The other calls; you answer. But "you" have
not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to
the call. Let's listen to what they have to say. The machine
is kind of old; the messages were put on there I don't know
quite exactly when.
When you or I get on the line to a schizophrenic you

do not know who is there, who is speaking; in fact, one has
the feeling that no one is there and, like Ophelia, the no one
that is there or not gives you the sensation that she is not a
person. Her mouth shoots a poesy that Jung identifies as
Wortsalat and Laing translates into Word-Salad?well get to
the head of this lettuce momentarily. In the meantime, word
salad remains a broken heart of lettuce, a linguistically tossed
salad posed by schizopoesy, utterly detechnologized into
edibles that cannot be reconstituted. Yet the schizo's word
salad seems to be the result of a recording, registering a
number of quasi-autonomous partial systems striving to give
to themselves, out of the same mouth, simulcast expression.
So where were we? Her mouth shoots out a poesy that Jung
unfolds as Wortsalat. R.D. Laing slices the salad further:
The overall unity of their being is disconnected into several
"partial assemblies" or "partial systems" (quasi-autonomous
"complexes," inner objects, each of which has its own little
stereotyped "personality" (molar splitting). Their being is
dystonic. There is a lack, asserts Laing, of an overall
ontological boundary.3
Listen:
In being with her one had for long periods that

uncanny "praecox" feeling described by German
clinicians ... that no one was there. There might be
someone addressing us, but in listening to a
schizophrenic, it is very difficult to know "who" is
talking, and it is just as difficult to know "whom"
one is addressing.
In listening to Julie it was often as though one were
doing group therapy with one patient.
The absence of a total experience of her being as a
whole meant that she lacked the unified experience on
which to base a clear idea of the boundary of her
being.
Perhaps the itinerary of this schizontology, which regards as

it does whom the patient is addressing, might be fruitfully
complicated by introducing some remarks concerning, let us
say, a constitutive disordering of destinai address. One
obvious source reference upon which to base such an
argument would be the richly articulated cross-wires of La
carte postale, stamped by Derrida with its heavy accent on
purloined postal systems. In Laing, however, the readings

of a subject's normativity are constellated via strictly
metaphysical aspirations for the self, as if the divided self
were a falling off from a self-totalizing presence, and so
forth, across the board. You know the argument. Still, it
seems necessary to emphasize the extent of these
determinations, for they arrange the place from which
schizophrenia receives treatment. In two decisive case
histories?one composed by Jung, the other just cited by
R.D. Laing, called "The ghost in the weed garden"?the
patients try to incorporate microchips of technology?they
swallow telephones that communicate with state terrorism
and the doctor. Like Heidegger, they are taking calls;
persecutory voices, echoing command posts, are stationed
along their bodies while they endure the agony of the being
called, l'?tre appel?. They are themselves automatic
answering machines, listening devices, recording surfaces
hooked up to the persistent probes of the technosphere.
Schizophrenia has supplied the reception desk for incoming
phantasms of telecommunications. The condition lights up,
jamming the switchboards, fracturing a latent semantics with
multiple calls of another order.
Both Jung and Laing document the existence in the
schizo's vocabulary of telephony: one of the partial selves of
each patient is a straight-talking telephone that models
different styles of irony. Not a word from the doctors on the
telephone. Instead, Laing, for his part, cites Heidegger.
Indeed, Laing refers us to the Gewissensruf in Sein und
Zeit, to the call of conscience which he uses as a kind of
directory assistance for grasping schizophrenia. Even so,
the schizophrenic utterance remains a pistol shot in the dark
of metaphysics, shattered, fragmenting. Like the telephone
whose ring cuts into the elusive pages of these case
histories, schizophrenia plays itself out along the walls of a
mute inside that responds to an unbearably noisy outside,
linking death to the clang of a technologized life whose
slapping lightstreams strike the schizophrenic as an immense
catastrophe.
Noise-disaster keeps the schizonoiac on the run (even
though she's not going anywhere. Nonetheless, they're
hitting the streets: Rousseau's Promenades. Nietzsche

cruising in Turin, Artaud's strolls, H?lderlin in Bordeaux).
When the heat is on, it comes down hard on you.
Everything crashes.
First question: How is it that for Laing the
schizophrenic is an unrehearsed citation of Heidegger?of
Heidegger citing H?lderlin, in fact? To what extent has
philosophy (which H?lderlin named a ward, a hospital
wing, one severely clipped), to what extent has it arranged
the terms for this state-of-the-art breakdown? Some of
Laing's patients are shown to be quoting, apparently without
their knowledge, Heidegger. They are quoting and copying.
As radically docile receptors, the schizos have committed
Heidegger's H?lderlin to memory. Caught up in the
mechanics, as Laing puts it, of "obedience, imitation,
copying," schizophrenia shines like a xerox machine of
philosophically blinding exactitude (assuming you flip the
lid), like its study which, on a no lesser intensity, xeroxes
Heidegger without border problems. You see, there is no
vegetal allowance for photocopying philosophy, the end of
philosophy, the other end of metaphysics; and still, one
always risks spoilage and the word-salad.
Where were we? says the scholar.
The doctors resist the modalities of disconnection for
which H?lderlin and Heidegger however singularly
spoke to one another.
The Conference Call:

Delay Call Forwarding
A way to language is needed. To spring

schizophrenia from the dragnet of reactionary psychiatry,4
Laing poses the schizo on the Heideggerian path, like a
hitch-hiker, looking for trouble and a dose of aporia. In
general, we have been fed clues about the devotion which
the doctors of schizophrenia practice towards philosophy.
The names of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger make
up the catalogue of referrals that these doctors provide. In
Jung's case study, Nietzsche is made to sail under the
banner of wholesomeness in order to make it into the
On the Way to Lainguage 61
directory of patrons. Heidegger is convoked, cited;

transactions are openly carried out to borrow certain
principles from his thinking. You can now automatically
transfer the call from philosophy to schizoanalysis; the
psychiatric switchboards are working on it. It becomes
necessary to follow the path which Heidegger has cut
through schizophrenia. His name is a signpost, put up
painstakingly by Lainguage. Yet, Heidegger speaks, we
could venture to say, on the side of schizophrenia, in a
manner that would cut against the grain of the doctor's
referral systems. Heidegger leaves marks that show his
traversal through the weed garden, he has spoken to their
ghosts who continue to beckon, and most uncannily, he has
conjured the ghost that inhabits technology?to such an
extent, indeed, that philosophy is over. "Schizophrenia"
may be the naming word for the new, ghostly tenants of
overphilosophy. Since they are ghostly, however, they
collect images of that which has been made to vanish, still
projecting a pale double of a fading regime, a cypher of its
own disappearance.
If Heidegger indicates the beckoned sign put up by
we who puzzle over schizophrenia, he understands his
position as the place where disconnectiveness is assigned.
The sign places him in the possibility of newly designing the
garden:
The "sign" in design (Latin signum) is related to

secare, to cut?as in saw, sector, segment. To design
is to cut a trace. Most of us know the word "sign"
only in its debased meaning?lines on a surface. But
we make a design also when we cut a furrow into the
soil to open it to seed and growth. The design is the
whole of the traits of that drawing which structures
and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom
of language. The design is the drawing of the being
of language, the structure of a show in which are
joined the speakers and their speaking: what is spoken
and what of it is unspoken in all that is given in the
speaking.5
It is as if the weed garden had been read by what Heidegger
calls the debased meaning of sign, by the lines on a surface,

rather than by the cuts that it openly designates. The
question regards speaking, speaking as listening, as a
hearing given to the precocious patient. At the end of the
essay whose title reads "Words" Heidegger falls into silence
when these words trail off: "our hearing may err"; they open
in a quiet way the disordering flow of destinai address which
has come at us.
Again, dwelling in the neighborhood of that towards
which his name has been convoked, Heidegger tells us about
language. His telling comes eerily close to the hearing
disability of which the doctor complains. As if in response,
for speaking is always an answering, he calls out:
But language is monologue. This now says two

things: it is language alone which speaks
authentically; and, language speaks lonesomely. Yet
only he can be lonesome who is not alone, if "not
alone" means not apart, singular, without any
rapports.
With these words, Heidegger grazes schizophrenia; it

touches him, scratching a distinction between lonesome and
alone, wounding his language in some essential way. Was
H?lderlin not at times alone? Language will not leave one
alone. When Heidegger establishes this distinction it tells us
language is pregnant with its flipside.
For what if Language were speaking precisely in the
mode of "die Sprache spricht," through the instrument of
being, but subterraneously designing an unheard-of way
through the telephone implanted in technology's weed
garden? We must wait. Heidegger himself will give up a
reading of the ghosts that lighten, calling forth radiance and
white ashes. It grows out of the poems of Trakl, where the
lunar sister speaks. Derrida traces the inhabiting spirit by
another route, in his recently published book.6 As for the
thinker, Heidegger, he organizes himself around curious
turns, constantly cutting into the unpresent tense
characteristic of a schizophrenic discourse.
In the first place, speaking, as a form of cognition
and practice, "is known as the articulated vocalization of
thought by means of the organs of speech." Now we come

upon the amendment that doubles the structure of
speaking?in the form of a simultaneity, however.
Speaking, argues Heidegger, is at the same time also a
listening. It is the custom to put speaking and listening in
opposition, as does Laing: one man speaks, the other listens.
But listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking
such as takes place in conversation. "Speaking is of itself a
listening. Speaking is listening to the language which we
speak." What is called speaking, if not the invisible
structures which have been manipulating the schizo scene of
telehearing, and that of Heidegger, in other words, a being
on-call as the predicament of an answering device whose call
it is to be listening, aufh?ren!
This assigns the condition of listening to the
language which we speak, simultaneously achieving a
speaking and listening no longer to be understood in terms
of an opposition. Heidegger grafts the assimilation of a
telephonic structure onto the first known meaning of
speaking, the organic vocalization which speaking-and
listening complicates and doubles. Speaking-and-listening
may be simultaneous but listening will have had the edge on
speaking, asserting a certain temporal priority. A listening,
in fact, is prior to speaking, so that when speaking gets on
the line, "it is a listening not while but before we are
speaking." What do we hear there, asks the text: "We hear
language speaking." (124) This is a non-organic speaking,
Heidegger advises, a form of language not equipped in this
way: "But?does language itself speak? How is it supposed
to perform such a feat when obviously it is not equipped
with organs of speech? Yet language speaks:"
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.
To "reach out and call" has become the gestural trait par
excellence of commercial telephony, so much so that one
regrets its homonymy with the "same" utterance in
Heidegger. Yet the two utterances appear to breathe in the
64 ?On the Way to Lainguage
unity of the same apparatus, from the being-of-the-telephone

which, immobily fixed, ejects a soundless voice whose
sound, kept in store, one then calls for. This is the mutism
of anticipatory calling that schizophrenia frequents.
In order to bring the drift of the thought to "our
human saying in this light," Heidegger has drawn a
distinction between saying and speaking (one may speak
endlessly and all the time say nothing); "say" means to
show, to let appear, to let be seen and heard. Speaking
belongs to the design of language, which is pervaded by all
modes of saying and of what is said, in which everything
present or absent announces, grants or refuses itself, shows
itself or withdraws. But "saying" has a history of
degradation behind it, which Heidegger must first cast aside.
In the mostly disparaging sense,
saying is accounted a mere say-so, a rumor

unsupported and hence untrustworthy. Here "saying"
is not understood in this sense, nor in its natural,
essential sense of saga ... In keeping with the most
ancient usage of the word we understand saying in
terms of showing, pointing out, signaling. Jean-Paul
called the phenomena of nature "the spiritual pointer"
or "spiritual index finger" (der geistige Zeigefinger).
(123)
Language could be resumed as the history of this finger,

even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking.
The teacher points, the god and the schizophrenic speak
through or to the spiritual forefinger. In the discipline of
Anthropology, a digital has won man distinction over other
animals. Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to
the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger
comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of
Geschick. The spiritual forefinger presses towards
schizophrenic partial systematizing. Also, it is the
bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press
red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated
with magical arrests (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage
ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this
spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency). The
history of this finger of which the stylus is an extension,

includes making the marionnette come alive, but mostly it
points to the essential being of language, which is "Saying
as Showing. Its showing character is not based on signs of
any kinds; rather, all signs arise from a showing within
whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs/1
This, importantly, is not a trait of the properly human,
Heidegger argues, for:
In view of the structure of Saying, however, we may

not consider showing as exclusively, or even
decisively, the property of human activity. Self
showing appearance is the mark of the presence and
absence of everything that is present, of every kind
and rank. Even when Showing is accomplished by
our human saying, even then this showing, this
pointer, is preceded by an indication that it will let
itself be shown.
The structure of saying exposes the human as only

one of its properties, though not in a unique or even decisive
way. Self-showing and telling cannot be claimed as trophies
of the properly human. After marking the appearance of
every kind and rank, Heidegger brings into view the
simultaneousness of speaking and listening. Perhaps this
supplies the transparency of context in which to circumscribe
the kind of aggravated misreading that the science of
schizophrenia presses upon Heidegger. This occurs
precisely when it draws limits to its hopes for a decisively
human property of self-showing. The question, as we saw
it, concerned the presencing of the speaker, which appeared
to be cut off from itself like an effect from a cause.
"Speaking must have speakers," Heidegger shows,
but not merely in the same way as an effect must

have a cause. Rather, the speakers are present in the
way of speaking. Speaking,, they are present and
together with those with whom they speak, in whose
neighborhood they dwell because it is what happens
to concern them at the moment.
At this point, Heidegger appears to rely on a communality of
66 * On the Way to Lainguage
sense, a sensus communis or an essential consensus, into

which the unpresent tense of the schizophrenic word could
not, admittedly, be happily entered. However even in this
convocation of something like a contractual agreement of
sense, a common contextuality and steadiness of address,
Heidegger amends the speaking to include, as an address,
the human and the thingly:
That includes fellow men and things, namely,

everything that conditions things and determines men.
All this is addressed in word, each in its own way,
and therefore spoken about and discussed in such a
way that the speakers speak to and with one another
and to themselves. All the while, what is spoken
remains many-sided. Often it is no more than what
has been spoken explicity, and either fades quickly
away or else is somehow preserved. What is spoken
can have passed by, but it also can have arrived long
ago as that which is granted, by which somebody is
addressed. (120)
The Laingian reading of Heidegger establishes a

dimension which appears to set objections to
schizophrenogenic modes of address, to the distortions of
the place of sender and recipient towards which Heidegger's
thinking may appear to harbor intolerance. Nonetheless
even in these passages, the temporal rendering of that which
is spoken in addition to the incomparable inclusion of thingly
speakers already complicate any itinerary that would seek
reliably to reroute schizophrenic Saying from a more
normative grasp of language. But the material with which to
seek presence of person in the speaking cannot be securely
retrieved from any Heideggerian path of language. In his
essay, entitled "The Way to Language," Heidegger continues
in this way, averting the dangers of the straight and narrow:
Everything spoken stems in a variety of ways from

the unspoken, whether this be something not yet
spoken, or whether it be what must remain unspoken
in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking.
Thus, that which is spoken in various ways begins to
appear as ifit were cut off from speaking and the
speakers, and did not belong to them, while in fact it

alone offers to speaking and to the speakers whatever
it is they attend to, no matter in what way they stay
within what is spoken in the unspoken. (Emphasis
added)
Not long after this reading, which in part corresponds to the

descriptive analysis of schizophrenic utterance in Lainguage,
Heidegger offers to accentuate the cutting. Analyzing die
sign in terms of secare, to cut, he returns to the decisive
disconnectedness in all language tracings. The speaking
which appears as if disconnected from speaking and the
speakers cannot therefore be used to explicate an essential
dimension, gleaned from Heidegger, of schizophrenia in its
most advanced stages of psychosis?unless, of course,
Heidegger were himself to be implicated in the unfolding of
a schizophrenogenic understanding of language. This would
be going very far, on the other way to language whose
essential sign post reads "Wrong Way, Do Not Enter."
In another essay, devoted to "The Nature of
Language," Heidegger has the following to say on the
question, raised so often by the doctors, of not being-there:
All is way ...

The way allows us to reach what concerns us, in that
domain where we are already staying. Why, then, one
may ask, still find a way to it? Answer: because
where we already are, we are in such a way that at the
same time we are not there, because we ourselves
have not yet properly reached what concerns our
being, not even approached it. The way that lets us
reach where we already are, differing from all other
ways, calls for an escort that runs far ahead. (93)
That which has been with us, the companion, stretches itself
apart from us in answer to a call. The escort does not cease
to be an escort when a long distance runner is called for. It
is one that reaches the place where we are not but towards
which we point. We are where we are in such a way that, at
the same time, we are not there. This is where we stay ...
Rewind:
And play.
We ourselves will have followed an exorbitant path

from electrical carriers to nocturnal emissions, sheltering our
hopes in the neighborhood of poetry, even if that
neighborhood be inclusive of devastated ghettos where
schizophrenia appears not to object. The way we have
proceeded would suggest that something like technology has
not dominated our course, though the Framing could not be
disposed of, either. In Heidegger's readings of Trakl, one
listens to a stone speak, an implanted calcul, in the bodies
who wander on the fringes of surrealism's talking
dismemberments. We could have read, beside ourselves,
the electrical flashes of remote spirits, flamed and inflaming,
generating a strangely lunar heat through which we can hear
from one another. This is not the language of technology, in
the sense that technology would be placed at the source of
this reflection, or possess it as a piece of property,
something to be annexed to the house of Being in order to
increase the property value in the secluded community of
thinking. To a large extent, the community is no longer
sectioned in this way. The fourfold has been undone, there
is no earth left, we have been told in the listening-after that
Heidegger had programmed.
Neither the source of a new insight, nor the site of
epochal closure, technology itself answers a call. That is
why we have had to plod through the endless weed garden.
It would have been pleasanter to establish the newly laid
ground of technology as our foundation, pretending that
nothing were covered over, pushed deeper under the tabula
rasa, suppressing an older ecology of reflection.
Technology too obeys the law of responding, of answering a
call at whose origin we are encountering so much static
when tracing. We cannot yet answer the question
concerning technology except by answering its call. And
yet, while the technological call may be the same, it is not
identical with what has preceded it. It amplifies, intensifies,
passes down death sentences while keeping the body in
custody. You cannot put up bond or bail?no bailing out of
technology's iron-collared intensifier. This is why we have
to stay with the call that seeks to pull us in, and to shorten
our leash ...
We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and
from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there
and often we do not see what is there. In the first place
because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as
if we cannot see a thing.
Avital Ronell
1 This article has been excerpted from a larger context, that of The
Telephone Book: Technology?Schizophrenia?Electric Speech,
University of Nebraska Press, Spring, 1989.
2Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, trans. William Lovitt, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1977,
p. 20.
*The Divided Self, Penguin Books, 1960, p. 195.
4See Deleuze-Guattari: Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
University of Minnesota Press, 1983 or LAnti-Oedipe, Les Editions de
Minuit, 1972.
5On the Way to Language, Harper and Row Publishers, 1971, p.121
6De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question, Editions Galil?e, 1987.

ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE - HEIDEGGER AND SCHIZOPHRENIA by Ronell

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ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE: HEIDEGGER AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

Author(s): Avital Ronell

ON THE WAY TO LAINGUAGE: HEIDEGGER AND

When the disappearance of long-distance impresses

largely pretechnological ears are trained on the telephone.

is an old usage of thinking."2

When you or I get on the line to a schizophrenic you

In being with her one had for long periods that

Perhaps the itinerary of this schizontology, which regards as

purloined postal systems. In Laing, however, the readings

hitting the streets: Rousseau's Promenades. Nietzsche

The Conference Call:

A way to language is needed. To spring

directory of patrons. Heidegger is convoked, cited;

The "sign" in design (Latin signum) is related to

It is as if the weed garden had been read by what Heidegger

calls the debased meaning of sign, by the lines on a surface,

But language is monologue. This now says two

With these words, Heidegger grazes schizophrenia; it

thought by means of the organs of speech." Now we come

In our speaking, as a listening to language, we say

unity of the same apparatus, from the being-of-the-telephone

saying is accounted a mere say-so, a rumor

Language could be resumed as the history of this finger,

history of this finger of which the stylus is an extension,

In view of the structure of Saying, however, we may

The structure of saying exposes the human as only

but not merely in the same way as an effect must

At this point, Heidegger appears to rely on a communality of

sense, a sensus communis or an essential consensus, into

That includes fellow men and things, namely,

The Laingian reading of Heidegger establishes a

Everything spoken stems in a variety of ways from

speakers, and did not belong to them, while in fact it

Not long after this reading, which in part corresponds to the

All is way ...

We ourselves will have followed an exorbitant path

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