Ordinary Language and Race: Hanna Pitkin and Toni Morrison in Tandem and Tension

This essay focuses on Hanna Pitkin’s understanding of what was at stake for politics and theory in her book on ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J). It does so by contrasting her preface to the first edition, in 1972, to the preface she wrote for the second edition in 1993, both of which I then compare to Toni Morrison’s 1992 preface to Playing in the Dark. Why Morrison? Morrison’s preface is built around a 1975 novel, The Words to Say It by Maria Cardinale. Her novel exemplifies Pitkin’s claim that ordinary language philosophy and psychoanalytic practice are deeply connected, but Morrison also pushes us beyond Pitkin to consider race and what Morrison called the “word-work” of her own creative fiction-making. By focusing on the novel’s racial subtext, Morrison’s preface presses the fact of racialized social division on Pitkin’s Wittgensteinian idea that ordinary language is a home to return to. Still, Morrison invokes the idea of “shareable language,” and the transformational possibilities in the word-work of truth-telling, in ways that suggest the resonance— and potential extensions—of Pitkin’s 1993 re-imagining of politics and theory.