Quote Comparison : Ambiguity

Japanese poetry expert : It's not a doctrine but a simple fact. Semantic undecideability of all text and speeches is far from being a weakness to be corrected or deplored, a keen and constant awareness that your words can be apprehended in unexpected ways, like in lalanku someone else would put a completely surprising verse to your own verse, a common benevolent readiness to all for a variety of interpretations and misinterpretations by different people in different contexts paradoxically is the only hope we have left for true mutual understanding between different cultures. So I think that wordplay is a trivial thing but there is something really important in this kind of verbal construct. (Radio Japan, Sep 16)

Stanley Cavell : (Macbeth Appalled 1992)

I will call these features language as prophecy and as magic or mind reading.

These features interpret conditions what what can be called the possibility of language as such. Prophecy, or foretelling, takes up the condition of words are recurrent; mind reading takes up words as shared. Philosophy has wished to explain the recurrence of words (which may present itself as their evanescence) by a theory of what it calls universals; and similarly (taking universals as ocncepts or as rules) to explain their sharing or mutuality, so far as this is seen to be a separate question...

My idea of the first the conditions of langauge acknowledged by this play [Macbeth] - language as prophecy - is that a kind of foretelling is effected by the way the play, at what prove to be charged moments, will bond a small group of generally small words so that they may then at any time fall upon one another and discharge or expel meaning. The play dramtizes the fact that a word does not exist until it is understood as repeated ...

Emmual Levinas : (Totality and Infinity 1961)

The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights.