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WITTGENSTEIN’S PRIVATE LANGUAGE This page intentionally left blank WITTGENSTEIN’S PRIVATE LANGUAGE Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, §§243–315 STEPHEN MULHALL CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Stephen Mulhall 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–920854–9 978–0–19–920854–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 If language represents our ineluctable publicness, then language as free association is the closest we can get to speaking that contradiction in terms, a private language, a language of desire. Adam Phillips This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . Introduction: Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics of Austerity Wittgenstein’s Monologuists (§ ) A Child is Crying (§§ – ) Wittgenstein’s Cloud: Of Unknowing (§ ) Privacy, Patience, and Pictures: First Methodological Interlude (§§ , – ) Cavell’s Corsican Brothers (§ ) Wittgenstein’s Semi-Colon: Second Methodological Interlude (§ ) Wittgenstein’s Diarist: Three Readings (§ ) Excursus: Cavell’s Mezuzah Wittgenstein’s Gift (Of Grammatical Imagination): Pots and Dolls, Stones and Flies (§§ – ) The Human Manometer (§ ) Coda: Wittgenstein’s Beetle (§ ) Bibliography Index viii Acknowledgements The author and publisher would like to thank Blackwell Publishers for kind permission to reproduce material from the Philosophical Investigations ( nd Edition), by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The author would also like to acknowledge the very useful comments of two anonymous readers of the manuscript for Oxford University Press, and the forbearance of Alison, Matthew and Eleanor during its composition. Introduction: Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics of Austerity Although my primary concern in this essay is with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,¹ and specifically with its famous sequence of remarks on the idea of a private language, my approach to those remarks takes its orientation from a set of issues that have dominated a rather different corner of the field of Wittgenstein studies for the last