Coming to (Language): Introduction

In the spring semester of 1988, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk was invited to deliver the famous Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen (Frankfurt lectures in poetics) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. The topic he chose to explore in the course of the five lectures was that of beginnings: ‘Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen’ [coming to the world – coming to language]. The title of the series opens an interesting perspective on the problem of commencement – as it suggests that before we can arrive in order to ‘start something’, there must be a pre-existing context that is going to host our arrival. Otherwise put, we are never the ones ‘starting’ the world – on the contrary, whatever project we might wish to begin, it begins within a context that had already begun and whose beginning was not contingent upon our arrival. Which is to say that whatever beginning is possible is only possible to the extent that something had already begun, that a beginning had been made in the course of which the very field had been opened up within which thenceforth the making of beginnings was possible. Our beginning is feasible only because it transpires in the context of a world within which beginning is, in principle, possible, but whose own beginning is not conditional upon us, our arrival, nor our beginning. If the world is the context that allows for the gesture of beginning, this gesture itself is incapable of inaugurating the world. After all, we are mortals – not world-making divinities; and our beginnings are thus never absolute but derivative and secondary, inscribed within the field of possible beginnings whose own beginning must elude us. The first phrase of Sloterdijk’s title – ‘zur Welt kommen’ – therefore already signals a rift between beginning and beginning: as though a commencement were never just one but multiple. And once the possibility of beginning was begun, a dissemination of beginnings would occur that rendered a conceptual unity of all beginning unthinkable.