The General Desemantisation. Global Language and Hegemony

Rada Iveković

Semantic difficulties appears as soon as words are expected to express the symbolic, and also as soon as they need to translate a non recognised suffering. We announce some semantics here, as we notice that words do not denote what they are supposed to mean, and that a general desemantisation is not only part of the new international political situation with generalised terror and unheard of violence, but that it is at its core and its source. The desemantisation is the sign or symptom of the political and of heterogeneity – hushed to silence and repressed. The state takes the threat as rival, and will not convert it into an adversary with whom to negotiate openly. That rival is ethnicised, called a terrorist, and is thereby dehumanised and depoliticised, which legitimates excessive violence against it. Desemantisation is a condition and pretty much at work as a technology of power in the new topography of deterritorialised terror. We need to be aware of the pernicious and carefully staged process of desemantisation.  There are no more alternative or competing state sovereignties, and thus no alternative meanings. Dictated meanings and mono-semic “significations” are a sign of a world with Absolute Sense. A new type of planetary totalitarianism, starting from language. Victims need first to be made wordless in order to be killed. Language (or its impediment) is at the core of violence, its clue. This is why, alas, violence is not the opposite of culture. But putting it in words, creating a public sphere of verbal exchange and negotiation helps neutralise or decrease physical violence. Violence is before and within language too, but keeping meanings fluid, non fixed, and language polysemic helps defusing violence. It is important, in these things, to go against the stream of conventional and received meaning or understanding given by the establishment.

Rada Iveković

biography