Tim Craker

This dissertation seeks to show a non-anthropocentric conception of language at work in Wittgenstein's thought, one in which the language-game is the "primary thing." It does this by inquiring into features of language that Wittgenstein remarks on but which are, for the most part, neglected in the literature on Wittgenstein. Through a discussion of Wittgenstein's typology of the modes of production of a work and of the concept of mimesis at stake in this typology, as well as of the roles of Witz, physiognomy, fragmentation, and tempo in Wittgenstein's language, I seek to show the way Wittgenstein is continually re-marking that there is language--and not nothing. Just how this re-marking of language occurs in Wittgenstein, and how it compares to the treatment of the "there is" to be found in the works of Lyotard, Blanchot, Derrida, and others, is perhaps the matter of most concern for this work. ;Each chapter, then, responds to the question of how to understand the remarkable "fact" that there is language at all. As a consequence, certain new questions are introduced into Wittgensteinian scholarship. More essential than the question of the "style" of Wittgenstein's writing is the question of "who" speaks in a text produced via mimesis . More puzzling than Wittgenstein's distinction between description and interpretation is the deep ambiguity, marked by Witz, of the appearance of language that calls for an interpretation at the same time that it marks an interpretation as nonsense. And the question of what Wittgenstein means by "physiognomy," hardly ever addressed in the literature on Wittgenstein, is only a part of the more deeply puzzling question of the relation of the meaning of Wittgenstein's fragmentary writing founders upon the question of how to remark that there is language at all. And one is led back to this question in pursuing, as Wittgenstein suggests one should, what it means to read Wittgenstein's work according to a certain tempo