When you speak a kind of substitution occurs. Speak and the words you speak, if they are to be intelligible, are not your words; others have said them and others still will say them; there are always others to say the same, as if, over an infinite expanse of time, it is the same that would be repeated, the same sentences in the same order (however dubious this cosmological hypthesis might be). No escape: then language itself is infinite, everywhere, it is the condition of our experience over which we assert only a borrowed mastery. No exit! It is as if language were a fine, glistening web that had spread over everything, covering our faces and our mouths: impersonal horror. But this is still to evince nostalgia for a true speech, for an uncovered mouth, for an edenic language which would name everything again.
Proceed in another direction. It is a question of what is outside the movement of sense and was outside from the start. But outside with respect to what? With respect to the language that places itself at my disposal. For the most part, language functions. And when it does not? When I lose my power over language? When the capacity to speak, to find a word, fails me? When I fall from my capacity to express myself? Then I am lost in the frozen ocean where words emerge from the obscurity like ice-bergs, drifting, vast and in their stillness, they no longer offer themselves as the means by which I might communicate with others. My words? No one's words, for the ship of meaning has shattered against them and gone under.
Stranded words. Now they are detached even from the possibility of exchange, like coins from an abandoned currency. Yet, like those coins, obscure markers, they become nonsubstitutable, valuable to no one. Who would dare linger in their presence? Only those who have to linger there, for whom speaking, writing, for one reason or another, is no longer possible. But for these powerless speakers, another substitution has occured. Who are they, as they speak, as they fail to speak? Who are they, the ones stranded amid words (and not only words, but sentences, too - tendrils which lead nowhere)? Those who fall beneath the power to appropriate language and thereby outside the world which, through communication, is held in common.