Abstract A reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of his life as a slave provokes the idea that his learning to read reveals the resistance of things to words and may both have opened his eyes to a freedom more than civil and drawn him to a form of thinking irreducible to calculation, thinking otherwise. Foucault and Wittgenstein agree in dividing seeing from saying, but while Foucault finds in the space between a chance to think otherwise, Wittgenstein writes to close that space, albeit only for a moment: Now it’s a rabbit. Now I can go on. An interlude with some paintings of Magritte prepares for a discussion of Foucault’s insistence that what is seen resists being captured by what is said, and conversely. In the resistance of things to the diagram of their proper uses we get a feel for thinking otherwise and a taste of enjoying becoming-lithe.
Gordon C. F. Bearn (Fri,) studied this question.