[Un]common Sense and [Un]disciplined Gestures

This article proposes that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an “[un]common sense;” one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a “sensual” logic. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time/material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. This paper seeks instead to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and “[un]disciplined” forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a “mimetologic” as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, formed of a wildly [un]disciplined set of (re-)marks and gestures.