You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book deserves to be read by all who are interested in the wider interrelations of language and experience. The author is a philosopher and psychoanalyst and this unusual combination of disciplines leads to new and exciting perspectives, not only on language, but on western philosophy and epistemology as well. One of the author's explicit concerns is to make bridges between disparate realms of human knowledge; an aim that is beautifully realised in her well researched and clearly presented exposition.
Her specific focus is language, especially metaphoric language. From this point of view the book offers a guided tour of recent philosophical writing in this field which serves to bring into relief an emerging and more humanistic approach. She develops this in fresh and exciting ways.
Western philosophy, we are told, is based on a foundation of Cartesian dualism, and this split is nowhere more developed than in mainstream academic writings on language. Although a product of human evolution, language as academically discoursed upon has come to be regarded as quite separate from the sentient life of human beings. According to this view, it forms a quasi independent set of representations, or symbols, which correspond to, or mirror, the real world. From this perspective, it could be said that the user of language is not really engaged in living his life. Instead, he looks out on the world from a detached, objective vantage point and from such an empyrean position, he translates what he sees into the appropriate linguistic code.
Within this view, three things cohere—a detached subject, an objective world and a language tool for providing descriptions of this world. According to the author, this approach takes language ever further from lived life, into a rarefied, academic realm in which embodied and feeling subjects have virtually ceased to exist. Discussions of language have become, in this way, nothing more than discussions of its propositional structure and its means