Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence

As far as language is concerned, it is the lateral relation of one sign to another which makes each of them significant, so that meaning appears only at the intersection of and as it were in the interval between words. This characteristic prevents us from forming the usual conception of the distinction and the union between language and its meaning. Meaning is usually thought to transcend signs in principle (just as thought is supposed to transcend the sounds or sights which indicates it), and to be immanet in signs in the sense that each one of them, having its meaning once and for all, could not conceivably slip any opacity between itself and us, or even give us food for thought. (p.42)
Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that it is, if you wish, silence. The relation of meaning to the spoken word can no longer be a point for point correspondence that we always have clearly in mind. (43)
Malraux says so in his best passages: perception already stylizes...There will be in the painting not just "a woman" or "an unhappy woman" or "a hatmaker." There will also be the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it by a face as by clothing, by agility of gesture as by inertia of body--in short, the emblem of a certain relationship to being. (54)
... it is the expressive operation of the body, begun by the smallest perception, which is amplified into painting and art. (70)
The words, lines, and colors which express me come out of me as gestures. They are torn from me by what I want to say as my gestures are by what I want to do. In this sense, there is in all expression a spontaneity which will not tolerate any commands, not even those which I would like to give to myself. Words, even in the art of prose, carry the speaker and the hearer into a common universe by drawing both toward a new signification through their power to designate in excess of their accepted definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us, and through what Ponge appropriately called their "semantic thickness" and Sartre their "signifying soil." The spontaneity of language which unites us is not a command, and the history which it established is not an external idol: it is ourselves with our roots, our growth, and, as we say, the fruits of our toil. (75)
... it is going to lead us to detect beneath spoken language an operant or speaking language whose words live a little-known life and unite with and separate from one another as their lateral or indirect signification demands, even though these relations seem evident to us once the expression is accomplished. (75-6)
The fact that it contains, better than ideas, matrices of ideas--the fact that it provides us with symbols whose meaning we never stop developing. Precisely because it dwells and makes us dwell in a world we do not have the key to, the work of art teaches us to see and ultimately gives us something to think about as no analytical work can; because when we analyze an object, we find only what we have put into it. (77)
...language is literary (that is, productive) only on condition that we stop asking justifications of it at each instant and follow it where it goes, letting the words and all the means of expression of the book be enveloped by that halo of signification that they owe to their singular arrangement, and the whole writing veer toward a second-order value where it almost rejoins the mute radiance of painting. (78)
In short, language speaks, and the voices of painting are the voices of silence. (81)
Language is not just the replacement of one meaning by another, but the substitution of equivalent meanings. The new structure is given as already present in the old, the latter subsists in it, and the past is now understood. (81)
... language is not meaning's servant, and yet it does not govern meaning. There is no subordination between them. Here no one commands and no one obeys. What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said. With our apparatus of expression we set ourselves up in a situation the apparatus is sensitive to, we confront it with the situation, and our statements are only the final balance of these exchanges. (83)
What one too deliberately seeks, he does not find; and he who on the contrary has in his meditative life known how to tap its spontaneous source never lacks for ideas and values. (83)