Man, this IaI piece asking about The Patriarchy in Question has got my knickers properly twisted. As I gather the scattered crockery of my thoughts, the first issue is the Sorites problem of patriarchy.
Audio:NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Mirroring the old question of when a collection of grains becomes a heap: when, exactly, does a society become a patriarchy? How much concentration of patriarchal residue is required before the noun is earned? Is one bad apple enough to spoil the whole lot, or does that give us only the faint homoeopathic aftertaste of patriarchy?
I doubt many people would openly defend this homoeopathic definition. One sexist custom, one male-coded institution, one inherited assumption, and behold: The Patriarchy. But if not that, where’s the threshold? Fifty per cent? Ninety? Thirty? Or is the question itself badly formed?
The issue isn’t only composition but degree, location, and power. One king over a kingdom gives us monarchy; it becomes patriarchal when rule is authorised through masculine-coded inheritance, legitimacy, property, office, or paternal command. But what of a queen operating under the same institutional grammar? Has the patriarchy been interrupted, or merely furnished with a woman at the apex? If she inherits the language, offices, succession rules, and symbolic architecture of patriarchal power, then the body on the throne may change while the grammar of rule remains intact.
‘Now’ is one of the most overconfident little words in the language. It presents itself as immediate, self-evident, and available. We speak as though it names the present cleanly: now I speak, now I decide, now I know, now is the moment. Yet the word performs a small fraud every time it appears. By the time ‘now’ is recognised, it has already slipped into retention. By the time it is spoken, it has become a trace.
‘Now’ is not an experienced unit but a heuristic boundary-marker within temporal flow. It names a vanishing horizon between retention and protention: already past by the time it is recognised, already structured by what is expected before it can be stabilised. What it designates isn’t a thing, not a slice, not a metaphysical bead on the string of time, but a practical fiction by which consciousness, language, and action coordinate within a moving field.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This distinction matters because philosophy has often treated the present as though it were the privileged site of certainty. Presence has been taken as the place where reality gives itself without delay, mediation, or distortion. The present moment becomes the imagined sanctuary of immediacy: before memory corrupts it, before language deforms it, before interpretation arrives with its grubby little toolkit. But this pure present is nowhere to be found. It’s not hidden; it’s impossible.
Experience is never given as a dimensionless instant. To experience anything at all requires temporal thickness. A sound must persist long enough to be heard as a sound. A word must unfold across time to become intelligible. A gesture is not apprehended as a gesture unless its beginning is retained and its likely completion anticipated. Even the flash, the shock, the sudden pain, the glimpse at the edge of vision, all require some minimal structure of retention. Without that structure, there isn’t immediacy but nothing recognisable as experience.
Husserl saw part of this with his account of retention and protention. The present isn’t a sealed point but a flowing field in which the just-past and the about-to-arrive are already implicated. A musical note isn’t heard as an isolated acoustic atom. It’s heard as part of a phrase, against what has preceded it and toward what may follow. The same is true of speech, perception, decision, and action. The present is always already fringed. It’s bordered by memory and expectation. It’s not pure presence but organised passage.
Derrida presses the wound further. If the now is always contaminated by what is not-now, then the metaphysical dream of presence collapses. The present cannot ground meaning because the present is never simply present. It arrives marked by absence, delay, difference, and trace. The spoken now does not deliver the present. It testifies to its disappearance. It isn’t the arrival of immediacy but the inscription of loss.
This isn’t merely a technical problem in phenomenology. It has consequences for how we think about agency, meaning, and reality. We routinely speak as though action occurs in a present moment of self-possession: I now choose, I now intend, I now decide. But this grammar flatters us. Decision is never contained in a punctual present. It condenses prior dispositions, pressures, perceptions, habits, bodily states, histories, and anticipated consequences. The now of decision is a narrative compression imposed after and within a process that exceeds it.
The same applies to moral and institutional language. Law loves timestamps. Bureaucracy loves decision-points. Politics loves moments. Each requires a tractable ‘now‘ because institutions must act, record, assign, and close. The administrative present is useful because it can be filed. But usefulness shouldn’t be mistaken for ontological depth. A timestamp isn’t the structure of temporality. It’s a human coordination device, a nail hammered into water.
The now survives because it’s pragmatically indispensable. We need it to coordinate action. ‘Do it now’ doesn’t mean ‘act in a dimensionless metaphysical instant’. It means ‘act within the authorised window of urgency established by this utterance’. The operational now is a tolerance band, not a point. It belongs to practice, not purity.
This is why the present should be deflated rather than worshipped. The now isn’t an entity. It’s not a metaphysical foundation. It’s a boundary-function within temporal flow, a stabilising fiction by which agents orient themselves amid movement. It marks a horizon that vanishes as it is named.
The metaphysician wants the now to be a foundation; the phenomenologist discovers it as flow; the deconstructionist hears in it the trace of what has already departed. The institution converts it into a timestamp and pretends the problem has been solved. Each inherits the same word, but not the same burden.
To invoke ‘now’ is therefore not to seize presence. It’s to gesture at the impossible purity of presence from inside its failure. The word works, but it works heuristically. It coordinates, compresses, and stabilises just enough. What it doesn’t do is deliver the present as such. The now is always late to itself.
This post is a bit different to the rest, though it is about language use. I’m not officially neurodiverse or on a spectrum – at least not this spectrum – but I know many who are, and so I advocate in my own way. Given that we are all neurodiverse, I suppose we all are unofficially so.
There’s a term currently doing heavy administrative labour in HR departments, disability frameworks, school inclusion policies, and the more compassionate corners of LinkedIn. We likely have already encountered this term: neurodivergent. It is, we’re assured, a kinder, more affirming way to describe people whose cognitive, sensory, attentional, or communicative profiles don’t quite fit the expected mould. It has replaced older, uglier vocabulary. It comes with badges and a flag. Cue Eddie Izzard. Workplaces run training sessions about it. People put it in their Twitter bios with quiet pride. 🏳️🌈🤔 No, a different sort of pride. It’s also, philosophically speaking, a mess – and not an innocent one.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The Grammar Problem
Start with the word itself. Neurodivergent is a compound: neuro, meaning something to do with the nervous system, and divergent, meaning departing from something. This second element is where the trouble begins, because divergent is a relational predicate. It cannot mean anything in isolation. To diverge is necessarily to diverge from something – a path, a norm, a baseline, a centre. The word is semantically incomplete without its relatum. So, ask yourself: divergent from what, exactly?
The term takes the Fifth. It presents divergence as though it were an intrinsic property of certain people – a fact about their neurology, full stop – rather than a relation between a person and an implied standard. The standard is left unnamed, unexamined, and serenely unaccountable. This isn’t a pedantic complaint. Suppressing the relatum is suppressing the normative commitment that does all the actual work. You can’t hide what you are measuring against and then claim to be merely describing what you find.
The Norm That Dare Not Speak Its Name
So what is the suppressed baseline? What is the nervous system that neurodivergent people are diverging from? It’s not a biological fact. There isn’t a neurologically standard human template, no Platonic baseline brain from which variation can be objectively measured. Every nervous system differs from every other nervous system. Neurological variation is not deviation; it’s quite literally the condition. If neurodivergent meant simply having a nervous system that differs from other nervous systems, it would apply to everyone and say nothing.
In practice, the implied norm is something far less neutral: a composite of statistical frequency, institutional convenience, behavioural compliance, and the tacit preferences of the systems – educational, occupational, social – built around a presumed cognitive majority. The neurotypical person – add scare quotes if you must – isn’t discovered. They’re assembled retrospectively. The centre is a construct. And the term neurodivergent relies entirely on this construction while refusing to acknowledge it.
This is the move that I, as a language philosopher, finds objectionable. The term behaves as though it were tracking a natural kind – a real biological category with a stable referent – when it’s actually encoding a social judgement: this person’s profile doesn’t pass through the normative aperture cleanly. Dressing this judgement in neurological vocabulary doesn’t make it scientific. It just makes it harder to argue with.
Euphemism With a Retention Problem
One might charitably read neurodivergent as a well-intentioned euphemism – an attempt to replace stigmatising diagnostic language with something that affirms rather than pathologises. Fair enough, as far as that goes. The older vocabulary was often brutal, and the intent to do better deserves acknowledgement before it receives its drubbing. But here’s the problem: it retains the entire logic it was meant to replace.
The old pathologising vocabulary said: these people deviate from normal, and that deviation is a deficit. The new vocabulary says: these people diverge from typical, and that divergence is a difference worth celebrating. The architecture is identical. There’s still a centre and a periphery remains. There are still people installed at the unmarked middle and others who are marked, managed, diagnosed, accommodated, sentimentalised, or quietly struggled with. The only thing that’s changed is the tone of the managing.
Euphemism of this kind isn’t neutral, for sure. It performs a service for the system it appears to critique. By making the language warmer, it makes the underlying structure harder to see and therefore harder to contest. As I note, neurodivergent isn’t a challenge to the norm. It’s just more photogenic with a soft filter.
The Tolerance Regime and Its Conditions
If we strip the euphemism back to its functional content, the term actually describes something like: a person whose failure to conform to the behavioural expectations of the statistical fiction called ‘normal’ has been traced, however loosely, to their nervous system, and who has been granted conditional tolerance on that basis.
Conditional tolerance becomes the operative phrase, a tolerance with terms, the primary term being legibility. The person must be divergent in a form the system can process: diagnosable, accommodatable, adaptable enough to participate in the institutions built around the norm they are diverging from. Masking – the performance of neurotypicality sufficient to pass institutional scrutiny – is the behavioural proof that the condition is being met.
Who Gets the Label, and Who Doesn’t
The term’s selectivity is its own quiet indictment. Neurodivergent, as socially deployed, doesn’t even cover the full range of neurological variation it nominally describes. It covers the functional end – those whose divergence is legible, manageable, and compatible, at least in principle, with participation in mainstream institutions. Those whose difference is more severe, more disruptive, more genuinely incompatible with the machinery of normal life don’t get the badge.
The term, then, extends its conditional warmth precisely to those who least require protection from the norm, whilst those most genuinely strained by it remain outside even the euphemism.
And within the group the term does cover, the employment picture is instructive. This cohort suffers markedly higher rates of un- and underemployment than the general population. Where employment is secured, it’s sometimes, if not usually, tokenistic – the divergent hire serving the firm’s reputational and fiscal interests as much as their own, their characteristic drive to succeed and conform exploited rather than accommodated. The vocabulary promises inclusion, but the outcomes record something closer to managed exclusion.
What an Honest Term Would Look Like
A more philosophically honest term would need to do three things the current one refuses:
name the relational structure explicitly
locate the norm rather than concealing it
attribute the social judgement accurately rather than laundering it as biology
Something like norm-attributed divergence comes close inasmuch as it captures that the divergence is from a norm, and that the attribution to neurology is an explanatory move rather than a simple observation. However, it is a bit ungainly to the point of unusability by anyone not already beyond saving.
The more pointed observation may be that no honest replacement term could be as palatable as neurodivergent – and this may very well be self-indictment. The term’s warmth depends on its vagueness. Specify the norm, and you have to defend it. Specify the attribution, and you have to evidence it. Specify the conditionality of the tolerance, and you have to justify it. The language works precisely because it doesn’t do any of these things. It’s a vapid term meant not to offend. Neurodivergent is comfortable because it is evasive. Make it honest, and it becomes uncomfortable. Which is where the honest conversation was always waiting to begin.
Allow me to start with a declaration: I am no Hegel expert, and whether I am an expert at anything is debatable. Still, I’ve been reflecting on Hegel through my own lenses, and I have an opinion – because of course I do. My comment isn’t on a single Hegel publication. Rather, it’s a commentary on some of his general ideas – some more specific than others – that just so happen to be rattling around my noggin as I type.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I know I’ve already claimed to have started, but this is the real start. Let’s talk translations.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
I recently discussed the problem with translating Meursault’s French maman. The short version: English lacks a clean equivalent. Every option – Mother, Mummy, Mama – over-interprets the son’s relation to his mother, leaning warmer or colder or more infantile than the French allows. Camus’ problem is at the level of affective register. The ambiguity is tonal, intimate, and culturally situated. English simply can’t carry it without choosing a side.
Hegel has a different problem, more philosophically weighty. His problem is Geist. Almost immediately, I think of zeitgeist and Poltergeist. Ghosts. Spirits. Phenomenology of Spirit, right? Easy peasy.
Not so fast. Some translators render it as Mind, in an attempt to distance themselves from theological baggage. The problem is that Hegel himself equivocates – so he’s of little help. He may have been intentionally cheeky, being stuck in the milieu of his day, as well as a product of it and producer through it.
Where maman exposes language’s insufficiency at the level of affective register, Geist exposes it at the level of metaphysical architecture. English can’t preserve the conceptual promiscuity by which Hegel binds mind, spirit, culture, history, and ontology into one unfolding term. The word doesn’t just mean something; it enacts a view of what is real and how the real moves. If that weren’t bad enough, enter ontological grammar commitments. (I’m a teetotaller, so someone else hold the bear.)
Video: Hold my bear
The translator is not neutrally asking: What does Geist mean? They are already asking, even if silently: What kind of reality do I think Hegel is describing?
Translation here isn’t the neutral transfer of meaning – it’s the exposure of ontological allegiance. The quarrel over Geist is not a lexical dispute. It is ontology laundering itself through vocabulary.
Let’s consider the two camps.
The Mind camp hears:
“You are importing theology into what is fundamentally a logic of intelligibility.”
The Spirit camp hears:
“You are evacuating the historical-metaphysical depth of the term and pretending Hegel was doing philosophy of cognition with better hats — nicer hats, perhaps, but hats all the same.”
Neither objection is irrational from within its own grammar. Both are locally coherent. They simply don’t share the same ontology of the term.
Reason doesn’t choose between Mind and Spirit from nowhere. It adjudicates from within a prior ontological settlement, then mistakes that settlement for neutrality. This is worth remembering well beyond the Hegel literature.
In disputes over Geist, reason doesn’t fail because the parties are irrational. It fails because each party’s reason operates inside a different ontological grammar. What appears as clarification within one frame appears as distortion within the other. A reason is not self-legitimating. It becomes a reason only inside a grammar that knows how to receive it.
Which brings us back to the title. Titration works when you have a known reagent and a neutral solvent – you add one to the other until the system reaches equilibrium. The whole method assumes there is an equilibrium to reach. Geist has no neutral solvent. Mind and Spirit are not two concentrations of the same substance. They are different substances, differently constituted, differently reactive. There is no volume at which one cancels the other out. You can titrate the word all you like. The indicator never changes colour. What you are left with is not a settled meaning but a record of your own ontological commitments, precipitated out of solution and sitting at the bottom of the flask – which, in the end, is more than most translations will admit.
Door Prize: Here’s your parting gift courtesy of NotebookLM…
Those who follow me closely know that I am not a supporter of Democracy or Enlightenment Age ideals. I published an extended post on Substack, after which I had a bit of an epiphany.
In brief, for expansion later, is my realisation that Democracy – nor the so-called Justice system – is not a utilitarian or consequentialist project. Although I have issues with all normative ethics stances, I am particularly not a deontologist. This disconnect has caused me much consternation.
Through a utilitarian lens, I had been primed to expect better outcomes – considerations for the Greater Good™ and all. This is the source of my disillusionment.
Through a deontological lens, democracy and justice are about the repeatability of processes, not outcomes. Outcomes are a secondary byproduct despite being framed as a main event.
Even though neither of these is empirically evident, it feels more honest to present it this way. Of course, the rhetoric would require more effort. We’re not all Kantians.
Anyway, I just wanted to capture the moment before considering this in more detail and sharing a position piece later.
Were you already aware of this distinction? In so, does it matter? In any case, does it matter? Enquiring minds want to know.
On God, Objectivity, and the Grammar That Outlives Both
NB: After I posted this, I put some more thought into the notion. Rather than extending this post, I decided to post the follow-up on Substack. Where Nagel asks, What’s it like to be a bat? I ask What’s It Like to Be a Human?
I know a nice philosophical parlour trick. It’s performed by asking someone whether they believe in objective truth. If they say yes, ask them where it comes from; if they say no, ask them whether that denial is objectively true. The trick is not a refutation of anything. It is a demonstration: the concept of the Objective has been installed so deeply in the grammar of the question that you can’t coherently step outside of it long enough to evaluate it. In this respect, you’re a starling who can’t see the murmuration from within it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Let’s start with Nagel. In 1974, Thomas Nagel published a paper that broke a perfectly serviceable assumption in half. The assumption was that consciousness, while subjective in character, was at least comparably subjective across humans – that the gap between my inner life and yours was a matter of degree, navigable by imaginative projection and shared biology, whereas the gap between me and a bat was of a different order entirely. Nagel’s intervention was to question the first assumption by taking the second seriously. If the bat’s echolocation is genuinely inaccessible – not merely unfamiliar but structurally unreachable, given that I have no experiential raw material from which to construct what sonar feels like – then the inference from ‘I can’t imagine this being’s experience‘ to ‘this being probably has no experience worth worrying about‘ is invalid. Not difficult. Invalid. The bat has a perspective; I can’t access it. These two facts are entirely compatible, not mutually exclusive.
The extension Nagel resisted, but which his own argument demands, is this: the same epistemic closure obtains everywhere. Not merely between humans and bats, or humans and artificial systems, but between any two subjects whatever. What we call human-to-human understanding is not epistemic access to another’s inner life. It’s coordination: shared linguistic conventions, overlapping heuristics, statistical regularities of behaviour stable enough to be gamed and relied upon. We don’t experience each other’s experience. We model each other, well enough for most practical purposes, but then mistake the model for the contact. It’s all too common.
The murmuration of starlings is useful here. A rule of seven: Each bird responds to its seven nearest neighbours. Local rules, local information, irreducibly individual embodiment. The apparent organism wheeling across the sky – that single fluid entity that seems to breathe and turn as one – is a scale-dependent phenomenon that observers impose from a sufficient distance. Pareidolia at work. There is no murmuration-subject, and there is no fact of the matter about what it is like to be the flock, because the flock is not the level at which anything is happening. Whilst the coherence is real, the subject isn’t.
A statistical person is the murmuration.
A statistical person is the murmuration. Every apparatus of governance, moral philosophy, and institutional coordination operates by constructing a subject at the flock scale – the rational agent, the bearer of rights, the member of the moral community, the person before the court. These constructions aren’t errors at all. They’re necessary compressions. Courts can’t adjudicate the irreducible particularity of each defendant; they need the type. But the utility of the compression at the institutional scale isn’t evidence that the compression names anything real at the experiential scale. As the average human isn’t actually a human, the murmuration is not a starling.
What does this mean for the consciousness debate – about bats, digital systems, or the person sitting across from you? The question ‘is there something it is like to be X?‘ isn’t merely unanswered, but it’s malformed as posed. It presupposes a subject-object grammar within which the question makes sense: a discrete, bounded subject, either possessing or lacking inner experience, in principle distinguishable from other such subjects. That grammar produces the apparent problem. Dissolve the grammar, and the problem doesn’t get solved; rather, it gets diagnosed. Which brings us to God…
if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
Here, Voltaire’s quip – if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him – is almost right. But its failure is in the verb. Invention implies architects: identifiable agents who construct a useful fiction and install it in a credulous population. This is the wrong model for how the objective world works. No one decided to construct it. Rather, it accreted. Each starling wasn’t conspiring to produce the murmuration; the murmuration is what the local rules produce at scale – No intention necessary. The exogenous imposition has no imposer behind it, which is precisely why it presents with such unimpeachable authority. Expose an inventor, and you discredit the invention. But when there isn’t an inventor – when the cage precipitated rather than being built – there isn’t a conspiracy to unmask; there’s no priest to dismiss – only the structure itself, which continues to function regardless of whether anyone believes in it.
Nietzsche understood this better. The death of God, for Nietzsche, wasn’t the liberation it appeared to be. It was the removal of the only anchor the entire normative structure had, without anyone noticing what was actually anchoring what. The Enlightenment didn’t interrogate the theological grammar. It secularised it. Reason, Nature, Science, Progress, History – each of these performed the same function God had performed: the external, authoritative, mind-independent referent against which claims could be measured and from which institutional authority could flow downward to the subject. The architecture was identical; only the tenant changed.
Objective is the edifice. When God was evicted, Reason, Science, Objective Truth became the new tenants
And that’s the point. The Objective isn’t a discovery. It’s a slot, a structural position in the grammar of subject-object discourse that requires an occupant if coördination at scale is to function. God was an early and effective tenant. When God was evicted, the slot didn’t disappear. It couldn’t because it’s not a belief but a grammatical necessity. It was immediately re-occupied, with the additional ideological advantage that the new tenants – Reason, Science, Objective Truth – present themselves as discovered rather than inherited. You can lose faith in God. You can’t, without apparent irrationality, lose faith in Objective Reality, because Objective Reality is now the precondition of the concept of rationality itself. The successor is more entrenched than the original. The slot has been occupied so continuously that it now looks like part of the foundation.
But it’s not. The building is the subject-object grammar, which generates the Objective slot as a structural correlate of the Subject. What fills the slot – God, Reason, the Market, the Algorithm – is the history of ideas, the history routinely mistaken for intellectual progress: the mature species finally locating the real external anchor, after centuries of superstitious misdirection. What’s actually happening is tenant succession. Each eviction is experienced as crisis, where each new occupant presents as the permanent solution. The edifice is never inspected because it’s always occupied, and this occupied building looks like a home.
The diagnostic move, then, isn’t to find a better tenant. Every reform programme, every Enlightenment, every revolution has done exactly that, and the slot fills again within a generation. The diagnostic move is to show that there is an edifice, that the grammar has a structure, that the structure generates the slot, and that the slot’s current occupant inherited its authority from the grammar rather than earning it from the world.
This is a different kind of intervention. Rather than a replacement, it produces a recognition that the coordinating function of the Objective is genuine and the ontological claim isn’t, that the murmuration coheres and the murmuration-subject doesn’t actually exist, that we are starlings – or turtles – all the way down, responding to our seven nearest neighbours, producing from the outside the appearance of a unified orientation toward a common truth.
the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed
A relativistic social model operates well enough on this account: It doesn’t require an objective world; it simply requires stable enough local rules that the flock coheres, that the statistical person is regular enough to be governed, predicted, and addressed. The objective world is the name we give to that coherence when observed from a sufficient distance. It’s robust enough for almost every practical purpose. What it isn’t is foundational. Remove the coordinating conventions, and it simply stops being produced.
The starlings don’t need gods. They don’t need Objective Reality either. They only need the local rules, which, unlike their theological and epistemological successors, make no claim about what they are. Which is, in the end, the only honest position available.
Me: I got an admission: I never enjoyed musical ear training – trying to name a pitch, interval, or chord.
You: That’s nice. So what?
Me: Well, let me tell you…
I’ve been doing a similar exercise… also involving ears. I’ve decided to engage in IPA phonetic ear training as part of my language curriculum, as it were.
I’ve created an Anki flashcard pack, of – as well as other things –phonetic symbols to match to the sound and vice versa. It’s harder than it sounds. Like pitch, if I play an A (Do) I can tell what an E (Sol) sounds like, a perfect fifth; but I can’t produce an E from vapour: If I hear it absent of musical information, I can’t name it; neither can I produce it without a reference. This is a limitation of relative pitch.
On a guitar, I can play an E relative to other strings, but I can’t tell you whether the A is pitched to 440 (top) or 432 (bottom).
440 Hz432 Hz
Of course, if you tell me the top sound is pitched to A-440 and ask if the second one is higher or lower, I can tell you that. Hooray for me. But if the A-432 was actually A-431, you’d have had me tricked.
You: Where’s this going?
I experience the same challenge in my IPA studies. In context, if I hear an open and closed O sound – ɔ and o – I can tell you which is which, but I haven’t yet mastered the ability to utter these in the wild. I might be able to manage a nasal O – ɔ̃ – but we still haven’t arrived at the neighbours – ɵ, ɞ, ɤ, and so on. Source. Here’s a random or at least arbitrary IPA site.
I wonder if you people have perfect pitch in this regard.
Have you ever wondered why Winnie the Pooh sounds faintly ridiculous in French?*
No? Just me then. Settle in.
« Mr et Mrs Dursley, qui habitaient au 4, Privet Drive, avaient toujours affirmé avec la plus grande fierté qu’ils étaient parfaitement normaux, merci pour eux. Jamais quiconque n’aurait imaginé qu’ils puissent se trouver impliqués dans quoi que ce soit d’étrange ou de mystérieux. Ils n’avaient pas de temps à perdre avec des sornettes. »
I recently acquired Harry Potter à l’École des Sorciers, and I found myself unexpectedly arrested by the opening paragraph. The Dursleys, we are told, were parfaitement normaux, merci pour eux – ‘Perfectly normal, thank you very much’. Except the French does something slightly different – the merci pour eux tips the narratorial mockery just a fraction more toward open contempt than Rowling’s original, which keeps its disdain politely implicit. It’s a small thing, but telling.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This brings us back to Pooh as an exercise not only in a language insufficiency, but also a lesson in how meaning is still lost outside of the words of language.
The French translation of Winnie-the-Pooh is a perfectly competent piece of work. It conveys the plot, translated verbatim. Honey is still honey, miel. Piglet remains small and anxious, which is presumably universal. And yet something has gone definitively missing – specifically, the thing that makes Pooh Pooh. That voice. That particular brand of amiable, bumbling, upper-class English vagueness that signals, to anyone raised in the relevant tradition, a whole social type: the loveable aristocratic dimwit, defanged and harmless, too intellectually untroubled to be threatening. Bertie Wooster** with stuffing.
In my case, the experience was audible rather than merely inferred. I encountered Pooh not on the page but watching on screen with my daughter so many years ago, but where the French dubbing lands over the original animation like a category error made flesh, but not quite so bad as an old Godzilla dub. The Hundred Acre Wood remains constant – le miel, the anxious Piglet, the blustering Eeyore – providing a kind of control condition. What varies is the voice. And hearing a French Pooh is hearing, with uncomfortable precision, exactly what has gone missing, because the original signal is still ghosting underneath the translation. The bumbling posh vagueness, the hesitations, the particular music of English aristocratic dimness – all of it evaporated, replaced by something perfectly serviceable and entirely wrong. It is, if you’ll forgive the term, a controlled experiment in loss. The mismatch isn’t inferred from the page. It’s heard. Which is either wonderfully appropriate or deeply ironic for an essay about what language can’t carry. Probably both.
So, what’s the problem? Alors, French doesn’t have this type. It has the libertin – decadent, cynical, not remotely cuddly. It has the pompous bourgeois. What it conspicuously lacks is the post-Victorian English settlement in which the aristocracy became safe to find charming rather than necessary to behead. Pooh requires a specific historical precondition that France declined to provide, for understandable reasons involving the 1790s.
We may know Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling French idiot. Except Clouseau is an English fantasy of French incompetence, essentially invented by Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards. The French didn’t make that joke about themselves. It was made for them, which is rather a different thing, and arguably confirms the point. So much for bears. What about a more serious case of translational vertigo?
« Maman est morte. » The famous opening words of Camus’ L’Étranger – and one of the most analysed sentences in twentieth-century literature, with good reason. Every English translation is already weak tea. It doesn’t carry the English class freight, the faint infantilism, the drawing-room associations. It sits in an affective middle ground that English can’t occupy, somewhere between intimacy and distance, which is precisely where Meursault himself lives. The ambiguity about whether he feels anything – the philosophical core of the entire novel – hinges on a word the target language cannot render. Every translator has to decide, and all fail because English fails to accommodate. This colours Meursault, who I’ve described elsewhere as autistic in principle if not in practise. Without going down a rabbit hole, read The Stranger in this light, and you’ll see systematic abuse of an autist – a textbook neurodivergent – instead of a clueless protagonist.
These examples tighten the philosophical screws at each turn. Pooh is charming and sociological. The Dursleys are technically interesting. Meursault, existential.
But there’s the uncomfortable conclusion they collectively point toward: translation failure is merely the most visible symptom of a much deeper condition. Language was already lossy before one introduces a second language as an additional compression stage. The register, the tone, the class coding, the cultural memory, the sheer music of Pooh’s voice – none of this was ever in the text. It was the environment, in the air or water around the text, in the shared form of life that allows certain performances to land and others to fall silently into the void.
whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
Wittgenstein said that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. He was right and characteristically unhelpful. Because we can’t speak of most of it – the embodied, gestural, socially-saturated ground on which language rests – and yet it’s doing at least half the communicative work, possibly more.
Barthes reminds us that the author is dead. Derrida might have told you there’s no escaping the text, that the instability runs all the way down, that speech is already writing in the relevant sense. He’s not exactly wrong but he’s diagnosing a different condition – the internal slipperiness of signs, rather than the gap between the linguistic and the everything-else. The argument here is less that meaning defers endlessly within language, and more that language was always an approximation of something richer and irreducibly situated. There was never quite enough text to escape from.
What this means is that translation isn’t a solved problem awaiting better tools. It’s a hard limit on what language can carry – a reminder that when Pooh speaks, what you’re actually hearing is a century of English class history, a specific post-Victorian emotional settlement, and a cultural permission to find a certain kind of helpless gentleness charming rather than contemptible.
Or, as Andy Rooney might have put it: Did you ever notice that words don’t quite say what you mean?
Yesterday, I complained about the psychoanalytic approach Fanon employed in Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 4, The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonised. Today, I share my feelings about Chapter 5, The Lived Experience of the Black Man. But first, let’s reorient the reader to my own perspective.
I am decidedly anti-colonial and even anti-post-colonial, or at least I see this trajectory as tragic. All of this is consonant with the views expressed in my Anti-Enlightenment Project.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
On one hand, I want to complain about the circuitous approach he took in Chapter 5. It was meant to be metaphorical and poetic. Whilst I feel it’s a bold move to present an areasonable approach – one that refuses the terms of Enlightenment rationality without simply inverting them – it seems that he cherry-picks his tools from the arsenal of Enlightenment thought. This applies to much of the post-colonial project broadly, though my objection there is less to any particular theoretical allegiance and more to the foundational commitments: I oppose colonialism, empire, and hegemony on grounds that precede the debate about which critical vocabulary best serves their dismantling.
Fanon’s anti-Enlightenment critique is weakened where he imports psychoanalysis too trustingly. Psychology and psychoanalysis are themselves Enlightenment byproducts: systems for rendering the human subject legible, classifiable, interpretable, and administrable. To use them against colonial Reason without first subjecting them to the same suspicion risks reproducing the very machinery under critique. The result isn’t fatal to Fanon’s charge, but it is methodologically untidy. I don’t necessarily object to using Enlightenment-derived tools after critique; I object to retaining them as though their own conceptual machinery were innocent. Psychoanalysis may be useful as metaphor, rhetoric, or historically situated vocabulary, but if it’s treated as a valid evidentiary lens without scrutiny, it smuggles Enlightenment legibility back into an anti-Enlightenment critique. That’s where Fanon’s chapter loses force for me.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Fanon is at his strongest when he shows that colonial ‘reason‘ produces the colonised subject as irrational, bodily, affective, and deficient. He rightly treats unreason not as a natural property of the colonised but as a category imposed by colonial order. My difficulty is that he then routes this insight through psychoanalysis, a method I regard as metaphorically suggestive but evidentially weak. The critique of colonial rationality survives; the psychoanalytic apparatus remains suspect.
In the end, we may both at least tacitly agree that colonialism, and the Enlightenment more generally, was not the best path. Where we part is on what should have been taken instead. Cue Robert Frost.
But the more searching question isn’t which fork we should have taken – it’s what we do with the road we’re already on. When the system itself is the problem, the question of what within it is worth retaining rarely gets answered on its merits. More often, it gets answered by inertia: by what is convenient, familiar, or already institutionally embedded. Fanon isn’t exempt from this, and neither, if we’re honest, is any thinker who inherits a tradition whilst attempting to dismantle it. The tools available are always already compromised. The most we can ask – and what distinguishes the sharper critiques from the merely passionate ones – is whether the thinker knows this, and accounts for it. Fanon sometimes does. In Chapter 5, at the moments that matter most, he doesn’t quite.
NB: I used ChatGPT for the cover image. I think it did a good job.
I just read Chapter 4 of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and it has similar problems I’ve also critiqued for Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In all three cases, I accept the primary argument. What I reject is psychology, especially psychoanalysis, as a legitimate form of scientific inquiry.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My issue isn’t that Fanon, Beauvoir, or Butler fail in their central diagnoses. I broadly accept their claims. My issue is that the psychoanalytic material typically functions like a grinding side quest: time-consuming, rhetorically elaborate, and only weakly connected to the main argumentative progression. It may enrich the atmosphere, but it doesn’t materially alter the outcome. Once one doesn’t accept psychoanalytical psychobabble as a valid evidentiary lens, the material becomes a time sink. Not only can’t I get my time back, but I also expend even more time here, railing on.
Speaking of distraction: evidently, WordPress has added a new blog-to-podcast feature, so I tried it out here. Whatevs.
Fanon’s central claim about colonial racialisation doesn’t require dream interpretation – the dreams themselves are seemingly apocryphal at the start. The stronger route is through embodied recognition, imposed category structures, conceptual nomenclature, and the racialised field of encounter. The dream material reads as psychoanalytic side-content: thematically adjacent, occasionally vivid, but methodologically low-yield. It doesn’t deepen the case so much as delay it. The entire time, I am thinking to myself, ‘Where is he going with all this?’ and ‘Are we there yet?’ only to get dropped off just where I had started – a round trip to nowhere.
But Fanon’s mistake isn’t necessarily insincerity. It’s an over-trust in a psychological lens that converts metaphor into method. The psychoanalytic examples may have seemed to him like evidence; to a reader sceptical of psychoanalysis, as I am, they register as rhetorical illustrations. Once a reader withholds confidence in this method, the chapter’s supporting material becomes distracting rather than strengthening.
Enfin, psychoanalysis too often behaves like a prestige tarot deck for the academically credentialled: it turns ambiguity into confirmation, opacity into symbolism, and resistance into further evidence. Fanon’s broader account of colonial alienation survives because it doesn’t depend on this machinery. The dreams aren’t necessary to the argument; they’re decorative scaffolding around a structure that’s stronger without them.
Philosophics 