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Watching an American detective show with Korean subtitles, set in the Korea town of Las Vegas, I became witness to a most remarkable sleight of hand: the name 박 (Pak), anglicized into “Park,” became “바크” (pak’ŭ).  A slight difference shatters the propriety of the proper name: a most remarkable property theft.   Having passed through exile and diaspora, the name returns to the mother tongue, and yet it is no longer at one with itself: it includes, like a scar, the mark of a double incomprehension covered over by a double  supplement. For indeed, if “Park” would have comprimised all the dissonance of the Other, giving him or her the name of a most conforting, everyday thing,  the Korean  ”바크” preserves almost nothing of the English “park” but the exaggerated sound of its difference, its strangeness, its no longer being properly “Korean” anymore.

The possibility of different inscriptions in different languages and writing systems does not, of itself, challenge the singularity of the proper name.  But something else is going on:  the connotation of belonging, of “being simply Korean,” which every Korean name carries with it through a certain, almost oppressive, excessively systematic uniformity, is turned against itself, into its opposite: the name with a little twist, becomes a mark of all that is foreign to itself.

Perhaps the aim of criticism is something similar.  Language is always subject to the enormous gravitational pull not only of life (of utility, of the everyday, of every form of necessity that reduces language to a mere tool) but of the truth of the already true, of the momentous weight of everything that  has been revealed, exposed, and awaits language as a means of conveyance.  This pulls language into its orbit.  Criticism is the clinamen: the sleight of hand that, with a slight twist and spin, sends it heading another way.

The linguistic turn should have never been about turning everything into a phenomenon of language.  To do so only brings all things all the more roundly under the ban of necessity. (The greatest triumph of the linguistic turn, as Badiou rightly notes, is mathematical formalism: the transformation of mathematics into a technique of calculation).   Rather it is something seemingly more modest, yet far more significant in its effects: it is the matter of turning language every so slightly away from its own proper destiny.  Of finding in language the possibility of the greatest risk, chance, strangeness, wonder, shock.