In Search of Speech

In this stylish and readable work, Jean-Yves Lacoste turns to phenomenology to develop a robust understanding of speech by way of speech acts and speech events, culminating in a consideration of liturgical speech.

Jean-Yves Lacoste is one of the best known French philosophers alive today. Along with Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry, Lacoste is hailed as a leading figure in the revival of French phenomenology in its engagement with Christian theology. In this highly readable and stylish translation by Oliver O'Donovan, Lacoste’s In Search of Speech considers how linguistic events are precisely what enable us to escape the threat of nihilism and to survive in a world now cynically regarded as having entered a phase of 'post-truth.'

In recent decades, language has been reduced by various philosophers, both Anglo-American and European, in treatments that render it abstract, flat, or distant from life. In Search of Speech seeks to do justice to speech in the various ways in which we perform it and in which it confronts us as one or more events. Speech always occurs in the world: it makes things present to us or it makes them absent from us. Speaking, reading, and even being silent, are never wholly free from anxiety, babble, boredom, humour, and concern for others. Liturgical speech deserves particular attention, and even here speech is in danger; for speech can conceal as well as reveal. Lacoste begins with very weak assumptions and slowly, using many examples, and clarifying as he goes along, builds up a rich picture of human speech and the forces that seek to drain it of meaning.