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German Romanticism’s View on Language and Derrida’s Language of the Other: Under the Perspective of Taoistic ‘Wuwei’
Cross-Cultural Studies
2020,
58(), pp.53-78
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2020.58..53
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2020.58..53
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
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The Taoistic concept of ‘non-doing’, ‘Wuwei’, shows a paradoxical structure. It is a doing by not doing. Acts full of will or intention are to be rejected in the Taoistic worldlview. To be in harmony with ‘Tao’, the legitimacy of an act should be searched within the context of unintentionality. Such mode of ‘doing’ fulfills ‘Water’. Taoistic water brings all things into being while it falls. Water lets all things be in intimate connection with each other by effacing itself. This is the way of the non-doing act. German Romanticism’s view on language shares the same change of perspective. Novalis’ Monologue advocates the undeterminableness of language. Language is not a sort of medium that is expected to be transferring something beyond. It is autogenous in the sense that it is constantly self playing. The ‘romantic’ quality of language lays where it escapes the human will to seize the ultimate meaning. One step further goes Derrida’s The Monologue of the Other. He explains the ‘romantic language’ with the concept of ‘the Other.’ Language does not provide us with final meanings. The process of determining the meaning is always delayed. The language we use is structurally alienated with itself in its origin. This originary otherness of language is yet to be continuously pursued and faced, for it marks the potential possibility for deconstructive reading as intervention. These three thinkers of ‘non-doing’ lead us to question and rethink the allegedly absolute state of human subjectivity.
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