Saying, Keeping Silent & Showing

Slavoj Žižek on Wittgenstein and Cancel Culture.

- Slavoj Žižek

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”

(‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein’s proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht ... kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: ‘You cannot talk/behave like that!’ The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself – that there are things impossible to talk about, such as metaphysical speculations – or else in a conformist moral sense: ‘Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!’