Rose

The "word ‘rose’ " has neither stem nor leaf nor thorn. It is neither pink nor red nor yellow. It exudes no odor. It is, per se, a wholly arbitrary phonetic marker, an empty sign. Nothing whatever in its (minimal) sonority, in its graphic appearance, in its phonemic components, etymological history or grammatical functions, has any correspondence whatever to what we believe or imagine to be the object of its purely conventional reference. Of that object ‘in itself’, or its ‘true’ existence or essence, we can, as Kant has taught us, know strictly nothing. A fortiori, the word rose cannot instruct us. The organization of our senses, the structures which generate intellection and expression are either beyond our cognition or self-referring or both. Language is embedded in these organizations and structures. There is no external Archimedean point to give it referential autonomy and authority. This concept of language is, we have seen, inherent in scepticism. It has adumbrations in certain elements of Renaissance linguistic speculation. Saussure en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure will give it canonic and systematic form. But Mallarme en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9 goes further, and his is the ontological critical step.

To ascribe to words a correspondence to ‘things out there’, to see and use them as somehow representational of ‘reality’ in the world, is not only a vulgar illusion. It makes of language a lie. To use the word ‘rose’ as if it was, in any way, like what we conceive to be some botanical phenomenon, to ask of any word that it stand in lieu of, as a surrogate for, the perfectly inaccessible ‘truths’ of substance, is to abuse and demean it. It is to encrust language with falsehood (“impure” is Mallarme’s preferred epithet). ~ Page 95