Jean Luc Nancy : Talking Nice Lago
I’m talking is a statement homologous to any statement in the first person, apart from the following well-known difference: the fact that the stated action is identical to the utterance itself. For this to be so, the statement has to stand alone and be decontextualized because if I say, or convey by my tone, such values as "I’m talking, so shut up" or "I’m talking, so leave me alone”, the act of talking becomes analogous to that of eating or reading. But the statement I talk, separate from anything else, says nothing other than what is articulated by these two words.
But what is articulated here is a redundancy. Each word says what the other one says: "I" can only be a word and says nothing other than the "talking" itself. As far as "talk" is concerned, it only says that someone talks, which can only be done if someone says “I”. I can say "you talk" but, in order to say it, I myself have to talk.
I cannot be given in any other way than in speaking of the spoken word. But what does that mean? Would "I" ever be anything other than speech (to talk), as speaking and spoken at the same time? Who, indeed, is speaking? It is the word that speaks, not some transmitter which precedes it. Enunciation is, quite obviously, not the same as transmission. We may consider that the sound is transmitted, but not the meaning.
Even this distinction is fragile, because where is the meaning without the sound? Nowhere, but this nowhere is precisely what resonates in the speaking / spoken sound ...
Is it possible for a word to be deprived of meaning? No, if it is a word and not just a noise. For example, a word in an unknown language does not make sense to me but I know or I feel (the same thing in this case) that it makes sense in another language.
And if I say “NICE LAGO”, does that make sense? Even if nobody had told you it was the title of a film, you would have heard these sounds as words, therefore with a possible meaning, and heard this possibility because "I", a "speaking subject," said it to you (rather than it being, for example, a collection of random, jumbled letters as though somebody had upset a box of Scrabble). Since I spoke - and therefore I spoke to you, I spoke to someone, even to myself - there was a presumption of meaning.
I repeat “NICE LAGO”. I do not know myself what it means. But the simple fact that the first word is pronounced “nice”, in the English not the Frenchway, anglicizes it. I was told to pronounce it like this by the person who invented this voiced or verbal coupling. It therefore reflects or already betrays an intention, confused at the least, thus a latent significance. For example, pretty, charming lago. If you read it like this, LAGO awakens echoes of the word lagoon. But at the same time it evokes the wordlargo, mediated by a sort of prosody that is itself contaminated by the very idea that this is the title of a film: Key Largo is not far away. Largo is an Italian or Spanish word. More Spanish in this case, as the Cuban island Cayo Largo is not far from Key Largo in the U.S....
But where is all this leading us? Nowhere at all; drifting through an archipelago of islands of words, with the wrecks of meanings floating amongst them.
The title of a film, book, or piece of music is, after all, in general, a floating meaning, detached from the significant network it announces, and which it will succeed as its emblem. Less and more than a name, or a simple sound, or a real word, a title is not very different from “I talk”; just something that puts things into motion. Or just a way to give consistency and presence to an "I talk" that would otherwise remain redundant (“I speak, I state, I announce - something, a story, an intention, a direction ...”).
And what if I’d said ALGO CINE ?
What about the Greek άλγος, which means “pain” … “film pain?”, “film suffering?” or Arabic and algorithms? – “calculating film?”, “computing film?”
And what if I’d talked about NICE OLGA, with the meaning of Olga the simple, silly or ignorant, based on the Old French word derived from the Latin nescius??
But you can see very well that, each time, I propose a whole programme, a whole arborescence, a whole thicket of stories, of themes, of topics, of figures, of possibilities. Each time the title puts into motion a system, an appearance, or a bundle of shapes or of possible textures. Each time it says "I talk": it opens up a profile, a pattern of speech; it excites a confused expectation which is less that of the content of the film that is to come than that of the talking subject. Who said NICE LAGO or even CIEN GLOA? Who? Which mouth, which voice, which words? Precisely the one we have just heard in these words, like these words - even if they are not really words at all.