The Speculative Jewel: Perspective and the Fourth Dimensio

In this dissertation I claim that language has no objective apart from the incessant reproduction of Subjectivity, whereby the perspective it gains of the external world is contingent upon an inexhaustible survey of its own parts. I claim that these elements fracture endlessly into further constituents, without being reducible to a finite unit. The condition of comprehensibility of a phoneme is its displacement within an order of sense-making that never stops running its course. Each unit of language connects with the other, but the sequence of their arrangement can never be predetermined. This pure state of Being opens up infinite possibilities of meaning. I call this ideal transparence, the Jewel. How do we grasp the immense potential of language to express something? What is the condition of making a statement, so that it elicits a response generating a dialogue between us? Is not dialogue the spearhead of all social structures that condition human existence?;My answer is that enlightenment, or consciousness of our own finitude produces true dialogue as opposed to chatter. This happens when an utterance gets tangled in the barb of sounds and inscriptions, bringing about gradations of change within the entire frame of reference. Language becomes saturated with the intrusion of the Word. Unable to furnish it with meaning, it collapses upon itself. Structuralism's contention has long been that the condition of expression is the ineffable. Hence, it posits the dislocation of signifier relative to a place of return.;Language is reduced to logos and the phallus. Signifier materializes in the place of nothing. I refute the structuralist claim by asserting that language exceeds its own capacity of expression. As a result, the Word oscillates in the chasm between its finite being and language's infinite Being. I demonstrate how this fissure operates in the study of contrapposto in painting and sculpture. It is a gesture of seeming unbalance between two halves of the body that reiterates as a symbol of harmony. Yet, I claim that this fissure is purely tectonic. It is not part of the concept of beauty, which emanates from elsewhere. The feeling for 'beautiful' does not arrive from overcoming limitations, but rather in the interstice between language and its Other. Sense cannot help but appear as that which is Other to itself. Therefore, the history of art must be read into literature as another trope enriching narrative with the inclusion of new worlds.;However, such inclusion of art would be a simple addition and remain unworthy of its own uniqueness if it did not expand language in a radical way, enabling it to produce a real effect in this world. Art is the capacity of adding a new infinity to the existing one. Language stretches itself limitlessly, proliferating new dimensions that layer upon each other as a mystery to be unmasked. My argument is that art for Derrida remains akin to diacritics, which resists enunciation except through preservation of a perverse Name which is also the condition of its death. Immanence, on the other hand, turns perversity into praxis. It echoes the eminent Greek lithographer Myron's remark that sculptors are also philosophers. Derrida places the framing of art under erasure, but sculpture is the Frame of frames outside symbolism, conditioning meaning at the same time.;I begin with the question: What is the finitude of representation in language? I delineate writing as supplement back to Heidegger's Event of Appropriation, in relation to the ineffability of the Proper Name. I discern that the paradox underlying the presencing of the trace as a singular moment is that it is always already past. It is this passing, which I appraise as the condition of time's flowing. However, I claim that time is not a stream of moments but the passes which impresses itself as "this moment." She argues that the internal division of "now" does not end dividing itself and is the condition of auto-affection of time. The moment tarries by returning to itself from another place. Yet the moment has no substance since it is already Other to itself.;My contention with Derrida's notion of supplement is multi-faceted: first, I maintain that by withdrawing into aporia, time itself remains indeterminate. Second, since time cannot be determined except by marking it, it cannot complete its own analysis. Such infinity cannot actualize itself but only posits itself as possible. Therefore, I claim, thought for Derrida is remiss of praxis. I conceive of Derrida as the ultimate transcendentalist, and ponder whether immanence is not inherent in transcendentalism. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).