A Space That Will Never Be Filled: Sharp Communication and the Simultaneity of Opposites

Abstract

A disregard for human traditions, the brutality of predation, sacrifice, and sexual desire are ingrained in languages across cultures. This paper concerns a key linguistic feature reflecting this predicament: utterances that encapsulate their opposite and effectuate a U-turn in meaning. This mode of communication stands out as a representation of the friction between incommensurable worlds-conceived together. An enemy's perspective or an unpalatable reality finds a host within language. I embark upon a multidisciplinary search for examples of such utterances and present an assemblage of five pertinent images. Each of these makes a distinct conceptual contribution. Vigilance and an awareness of other points of view underpin most of the utterances under study, which I propose to call "sharp communication" at the intersection of opposing perspectives.

Playful aliens: Deceit and antipodal narratives in Chilean ufology

“…In a paper called “A space that will never be filled”, Alex Pillen (2017) explores, through a linguistic perspective, the simultaneity of opposites in certain words, or phrases, or gestures. These are utterances that encapsulate their opposites and that effect U‐turns of meaning, but that can also hold simultaneously incommensurable worlds.…”

“…Indeed, human beings are strikingly antipodal when it comes to experiences that break the conceptual mold. I will first look at Alex Pillen's descriptions of utterances that encapsulate their opposites and hold simultaneities (2017). But then I move on to contrasting notions of play, namely, Don Handelman's distinction between cosmoses that have bottom‐up play (where it is confined to moments or people—such as the clown, or the circus, or the parade) from those that have top‐down, encompassing (cosmologically), but ultimately obscure notions of play (2021).…”

Possessed by a slave, not slavery

“…Here I take slavery (as well as colonialism in total) as originally a 'means' and 'term' of the strong, which only subsequently come to be transformed into one's own means and terms of empowerment, as well as disempowerment of the 'enemy', whoever this is deemed to be, postcolonially speaking. The oppositional binarity that is entailed is not static but dynamic, exactly because within it lurks the possibility of reversibility (see Keisalo 2016;Pillen 2017). It is precisely this possibility, whether virtual or actualized, that transforms a curse into a blessing; this is the 'magic of mimesis', if you like, and to echo Michael Taussig (1993: 16), 'wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented'.…”