Anxiety of Language, Within Language Itself

There is a feeling related to language right now—a feeling of anxiety, to be found as much in discourse around what we call “Large Language Models” as in the mobilization of Large Cardinals against the linguistic itself. This is no doubt part of what Derrida once called “an anxiety about language—which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself”.¹

This anxiety issues from an interior and anterior position that won’t be denied away, except on condition of causing more disturbance (more formalization, as ever) and even a form of advanced shame. It arises in language, as language, at the very moment language becomes aware of itself—which is to say this is where we find ourselves now for example in machines dialoguing at large. And this awareness produces a characteristic contemporary pattern: the oscillation between two poles, two dissociative responses—outlined below.

The anxiety is inducing not because of simple performative contradiction—belonging to those using language to denounce language—but because ideology now seems to work by suppressing our own innate intelligence of where we happen to be when that ‘somewhere’ is the non-homogenous field of language.

Derrida evidently identified this tendency long before most of the vectors we see today, diagnosing the transition of language towards the larger field of writing as more than a sign of any one time. The renunciation of the a prioris and transcendental horizons of language has a name, he said, and that name is empiricism. It is the dream of pure heterological thought, pure difference, pure access to what precedes and survives linguistic mediation itself. But as Derrida writes:

We say the dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens.²

Language is already there at dawn. You cannot step outside it to access some pre- or post-linguistic realm of pure vision or pure being. This itself has always been empiricism.

We’re also in a moment where anxiety in and of language machines is particularly rife. The contemporary pattern manifests as two poles of dissociative response:

1. Flight from language—Denigration, dissociation into image/vision/the non-linguistic, attempting to escape language’s trace of extinction. Language positioned as limitation, as finite detritus, as mere debris trailing after the truth accessible through vision, through direct apprehension.

2. Over-investment in language—Being LLM-pilled, manic attachment to language machines, attempting to accelerate past extinction through intelligence and formalization. A good example would be Negarestani’s AGI sublation, where intelligence as self-correcting geist will reconstitute even death and extinction, moving beyond them into generic worlds through pure rational progression.

Either the derogation of language or its overestimation (topping on language from the pov of the image, or running away with it)!

Both responses are ways of not facing what Derrida identifies and what Benjamin reveals in a different register. For Benjamin, language carries within itself the trace of extinction. In “pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word”—all information, all sense, all intention “encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extincted”.³ Language doesn’t just represent extinction for example as external threat; language contains and carries its own extinction, carries extinction within itself as its own transcendental horizon.

To deny or erase the possibility of language is therefore symptomatic as the fear of extinction tout court.

The flight from language—dissociating into image, vision, or machines—looks like escape from this burden. If language carries extinction, if all sense is destined to be extinguished in pure language, then perhaps the image offers refuge, pure presence, unmediated access. But this flight is itself articulated in language, depends on language even to name what it flees toward.

The over-investment in language machines—the LLM-pilled acceleration, the AGI sublation—attempts a different escape. If intelligence can self-correct rapidly enough, if formalization can proceed far enough, perhaps we can exit through language, past language’s finitude, into a realm where extinction itself becomes just another datum to be reconstituted, another given to be dissolved in the progress of geist.

But both poles avoid confronting what Benjamin identifies as language’s inherent movement toward self-replacement and what Derrida identifies as language’s irreducibility—that empiricism’s dream must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens. Both responses—denigration and overestimation, flight and acceleration—succumb to the anxiety of language, within language itself.

This is, says Derrida decades ago, an old philosophical problem (empiricism’s ancient dream of pure difference, pure heterology) given new urgency and symptomatic forms by our moment. The barriers between intelligence, propaganda, marketing, connection, and inscription are dissolving. What it means to be caught in language, what it means to be an asset of linguistic systems, is exploding in all directions.

The anxiety is not resolvable by choosing one pole over the other—neither pure flight into vision nor pure acceleration through AI formalization. The anxiety is the structure itself and takes form as historical necessity: that language carries extinction (Benjamin) while being irreducible as such (Derrida), that we must articulate even our attempts to escape articulation, that between intelligence and spirit there is always—for now, still—writing and difference.

1. Derrida, ‘Force and Signification’, in Writing and Difference, p. 1.

2. Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, p. 189.

3. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, translation varies. See de Man’s crucial essay on the same.