I want to think about the word لفظ (lafẓ).

But what is lafẓ? And, somewhat differently, if lafẓ is utterance, what is an utterance? In order to think about lafẓ, I wish to think about it in relation to language and the poetic, in relation to matter and the social, and in relation to the sort of act it occasions—and the sort of doing it may be said to be—and to do so I begin with Ibn Manẓūr, who notes in his thirteenth-century lexicon لسان العرب (Lisān al-ʿarab; The Tongue of the Arabs) that لَفَظَ (lafaẓa) is رمى (ramā; “to toss”); it is, he writes, أن ترمي بشيء كان في قيك (“to toss out something that was in your mouth”), and it is, further, to spit something out: يلقي ما يخرجه الخلال من بين أسنانه (“to propel outward what a toothpick dislodges from between one's teeth”).Footnote ¹ Lafẓ, Ibn Manẓūr explains, points as well to the motions of the sea when it tosses something on the shore: والبحر يلفظ بما في جوفه إلى الشطوط (“And the sea tosses what it holds in its interior upon the shore”). And so lafẓ, if it is something, is a certain sort of doing in relation to the mouth, and the projecting of matter across a threshold, and I notice that lafẓ is therefore a material practice, an act given in the expulsion of matter through an opening or across a passage. In this lafẓ is a tossing—Ibn Manẓūr, in a passage I've cited here, uses the verb ألقى (alqā; “to cast” or “to fling”)—as when the sea presses its detritus, “what it holds in its interior,” upon the shore. And so lafẓ speaks to us of a particular sort of doing with the tongue—it is, one might say, a language praxis—in excess of the temporal mode of a self-determined subject of language, or a being that would be itself and that would, then, do the sort of act that language occasions and is. Instead, in the sort of doing occasioned in lafẓ the time of language is the time of its utterance, where صوت (ṣawt; “voice” or “sound”) would be akin to the matter pressed forth and upon the shore of the sea, in a temporality with which I wish to linger as I think about lafẓ in relation to language and form, in relation to materiality and the social, and in relation, finally, to being and world.

But to think about lafẓ, and to think and write about it in the English language, and at the site of the university and its disciplines, is already to do so in relation to a certain kind of translation. And so to approach a reflection on lafẓ I underline that this translational context makes visible an incommensurability between the sense of language given through this term and the conception of language that has been privileged in the hegemonic and normative, at once philological and philosophical, traditions of Europe and its language practices in their globality, since at least the seventeenth Christian century. In these traditions language is to be an occasion for a subject's interiorizing self-reflection and its formation of world, and this through an idiom that divides, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has explicated it, the subject of self-determination and historicity, the subject capable of interiorizing self-reflection, from the racialized subjects of affectability and incapacity.Footnote ² It is in this frame that non-European languages, textual and linguistic practices, and social forms have become objects of study in the university, and it is in this frame that the modern disciplines for reading have been formed—for example, the modern philological, and, later, literary disciplines—and so my intention is to decline such an understanding of language and in this way approach lafẓ in a manner that explicates the sort of doing it occasions without subordinating this doing to the social, epistemic, or juridical terms privileged in modern philosophical self-representation, linguistic or literary cultivation, and the critical understanding of reading and world.Footnote ³ I've shared that in the reflection on lafẓ, in thinking about it, I observe an incommensurability among languages and historical and social forms; at the same time I offer, in thinking about lafẓ, a refusal of the practices of social obliteration directed, through the privilege of a particular sense of what language is, at non-European languages and modes of doing, being, knowing, and life.

And so from a question about the materiality of lafẓ I turn to a question about language and sociality, underlining several passages in two texts of the ninth-century writer al-Jāḥiẓ. I begin with a passage that appears in his manual on rhetoric, البيان والتبين (al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn; Eloquence and Elucidation) where al-Jāḥiẓ writes of lafẓ in its relation to “sound” or “voice,” which is, he writes, its آلة (ālah; “instrument”),

To think about lafẓ, I want to linger with ṣawt and consider it as a material substance in relation to language and the poetic. If voice is the instrument of utterance, and if utterance is the occasion for the giving of speech through the mouth, then voice, or sound, is the matter through which the sort of doing that utterance is occurs. I notice that in this the practice of speech bears a relation to a mode of comportment and to a linguistic and corporeal performance, to which al-Jāḥiẓ calls attention in the إظهار (iẓhār; “bringing forth”) of sound in the practice of lingual formulation. The doing of language in the articulation of speech turns on a movement of the tongue, and so I notice as well in this passage a relation, and a temporal or material doing, anterior to any language practice. It is only through the motion of the tongue that the matter of sound or voice transmutes, in utterance, into كلام (kalām; “speech”); it is only through this motion that there is something like speech, or language, at all. And so if there is language, it may be understood as what is given in حركات اللسان (ḥarakāt al-lisān; “the movements of the tongue”) in utterance. The performance of the tongue entails a formal economy of motion, made manifest in poetics and rhetoric in the formulation and articulation of sound in relation to utterance:

I observe, in order to move toward a reflection on language and the social, that the material phonemic utterance becomes speech—it becomes the social form that language is—only through its rendering as lafẓ in the sense that al-Jāḥiẓ explicates here, where language occasions a certain doing in lingual practice.

In Eloquence and Elucidation, the economy of language turns on what al-Jāḥiẓ calls إيجاز (ījāz; “concision”): والإيجازهو البلاغة (“The eloquent use of language is concision”; 1.79). Al-Jāḥiẓ emphasizes بيان (bayān; “clarity of expression”) in the relation between “speaker” and “listener”:

And yet “clarity of expression” does not refer to an ideational content—to the explication of an object of language—but to the form through which the material practice that language is occurs:

What is privileged is speech wherein the material expression of language does not give rise to a plurality of uttered forms but of meanings:

Al-Jāḥiẓ underlines that if eloquence were concerned only with meaning, then the sense of what language is would become convoluted:

A privileging of understanding in relation to meaning would mute the practice of economy in speech, the doing of language in clarity of expression, where language is understood as a corporeal act with the tongue in its relation to a sensual doing in voice. Al-Jāḥiẓ's emphasis on the formulation of language points to language's not being derivative of the form of a subject that speaks and that, through its speech, would give rise to a self-reflective interiority, because language occasions a practice in formal articulation in excess of any single being or act.Footnote ⁴ Language becomes a practice for a collective form of linguistic life, a sociality of doing with matter, one instance of which is the phoneme in its relation to sound, which the passage I've translated above explicates.

The practice of language occasions a collective form of aesthetic life where الجمال (al-jamāl; “beauty”) relates to a phenomenology of the tongue that gives place to a shared, if still not selfsame, form. Al-Jāḥiẓ reports:

If the eleventh-century philologist Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī comments, in citing this passage attributed to the Prophet, that here يريد البيان (“he intends eloquent speech”; 1.241), this is to point to a sense of language anterior to the poetic and the rhetorical, where language is a practice of form and constraint that does not impose a sense of communality organized around a subject but instead generates a shared practice of comportment given through an inessential gathering in linguistic life.Footnote ⁵ Here, there is no ontologically selfsame or linguistically constituted being presupposed for the social, but instead the social is an indetermined practice in lingual doing. Al-Jāḥiẓ writes of this doing in relation to the poetic, linking it to the understanding of language and eloquence that the pages I'm reading here explicate:

I wish to emphasize the verb سَمِعَ (samiʿa; “to hear”) in this passage, to underline the practice of sound in utterance, and to draw out a relation to the ear in the poetic and its relation to form.Footnote ⁶

الشعر كلام عُقد بالقوافي (“Poetry is speech held together by rhyme”), Ibn Rashīq further notes, and yet if الوزن أعظم أركان حد الشعر (“meter is the most important of the pillars in the delimitation of poetry”; 1.134), it is equally understood that

Each of these—meter and rhyme—is linked, in Ibn Rashīq, to نية (niyyah; “intention”), and his explication relates each of these, as well, to lafẓ:

There is an intention in poetic speech; for العرب (“the Arabs”), al-Jāḥiẓ writes, كل شيء (“everything”) is

We may then understand the tradition of prosody as bearing an inheritance where language is a temporal practice, a certain sort of doing, which convokes a collective of beings without substance. القصار أولج في المسامع (“Short poems enter the ear more easily”), Ibn Rashīq explains (1.187), and we may understand this entering of language into the ear as a material occurrence in the social formulation of the poetic as a practice of linguistic life, where the being of the speaker of language is not its own, and where language is merely a particular sort of doing in a practiced, if still inessential, form.Footnote ⁷

To consider this practice we may turn to the explication of niyyah in Ibn Manẓūr, where the verb نوى (nawā) is قصد (qaṣada; “to aim toward”), as in انتوى المنزل (literally, “to intend toward a house”), and the noun al-nawā is الوجه الذي يذهب فيه (“the direction toward which one departs”) or, as Ibn Manẓūr cites al-Jawharī, it is الوجه الذي ينويه المسافر من قرب أو بعد (“the direction a traveler intends, from near or from afar”). It is, further, a بعد (buʿd; “distance”), just as it is

And nawā is also حفظه (ḥafiẓahu; “to protect or guard someone”). Al-Farrāʾ said, as Ibn Manẓūr cites him, نواك الله أي حفظك (“May God protect you [nawāka], which is to say, may He guard you”), as when God accompanies someone on their travels. I wish to linger with the corporeal dimension of intention as Ibn Manẓūr explicates it and consider its relation to the poetic, where, as Ibn Rashīq explains, “following” intention, one is to consider the material form of poetic statement in its relation to lafẓ (“utterance”), maʿnā (“meaning”), wazn (“meter”), and qāfiyah (“rhyme”). If it is in this way that the field of the poetic is specified, I notice that doing in the poetic presupposes a sense of language in relation to the form of a being that intends in a particular manner. And if this intending entails a pointing in a “direction,” or a directing of oneself toward a “distance,” I notice that the taking place of intention in language entails a particular sort of sociality as one moves or changes location. There is an alteration in orientation that mirrors the giving of language in articulated form, and so the intention, which poetry presumes, and which is to precede the allocation of voice in its relation to utterance in the movement of the tongue—where what is privileged, al-Jāḥiẓ writes, is concision—itself presumes an understanding of language. In this understanding, one's intending in language precedes the poetic, and the poetic may therefore be said to be a practice of intending in linguistic form. The sociality of utterance thus gives rise to a mode of poetic life—a life of linguistic sociality—where, if there is an I that speaks, this is only in a practice that temporally exceeds itself, in a doing in form and concision that gives itself to others, a doing that may be said to be this giving, and which, as the Prophet said in the passage cited by both al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn Rashīq, is that in which beauty consists.

Language, in al-Jāḥiẓ, is a practice of social form and a giving of sense in the formation of world. To consider this, I linger now with al-Jāḥiẓ's discussion of language in his treatise on creaturely life, كتاب الحيوان (Kitāb al-ḥayawān; The Book of Living Beings). Al-Jāḥiẓ writes that

If here al-Jāḥiẓ outlines a formation of language where air transmutes into voice or sound into utterance, I note the sense of language as a communicative practice, which is also explicated in al-Jāḥiẓ. Al-Jāḥiẓ underlines that language is a practice shared among living beings—birds لها منطق تتفاهم بها حاجات بعضها إلى بعض (“possess a language through which they give their needs to be understood by each other [tatafāham]”; 7.35)—and this sense of language as tafāhum (giving one another to understand) is privileged in these sentences, where the social is constituted through the being together of creatures in relation to their communication of needs.Footnote ⁸ إعلم (“Know”), al-Jāḥiẓ writes,

Al-Jāḥiẓ comes back to this conception of language later in the Book of Living Beings, when he turns to the question of the language of the birds:

Al-Jāḥiẓ refers in this passage to a Qurʾanic verse in سورة النمل (Sūrat al-Naml; “The Ants”): يٰأيُّها الناس عُلّمنا منطق الطير (“Oh people, we have been taught the language of the birds”; 27.16), and as he does so he generalizes speech as a practice among living beings, where language is what transpires among beings in a communication of needs. In these passages there is an attention to the verbal form تفاعَلَ (tafāʿala) and to the verb تفاهَمَ (tafāhama), which I've translated as “to give one another to understand.” In his ninth-century manual for secretaries Ibn Qutayba notes that the verbal form tafāʿala relates to an action that occurs من اثنين (“between two”; 304), and I notice that al-Jāḥiẓ renders the verb tafāhama, which is formed from the verb فَهِمَ (fahima; “to understand”), as a practice that exceeds two beings to encompass a field of sociality constituted through linguistic practice. If فصيح (faṣīḥ; “eloquent”) means بيان القول وإن كان بغير العربية (“articulate speech, even if it is not Arabic”) as it refers to someone جادت لغته حتى لا يلحن (“whose language is well formed so that they do not speak ungrammatically”), as Ibn Manẓūr explains, we may understand al-Jāḥiẓ to point to a sociality of linguistic form where “understanding” is already a kind of “giving one another to understand,” and where eloquence or expression in speech is to be understood in relation to this sociality. There is a non-self-centric doing of language with the tongue, which gives rise to the social as a practice of linguistic being in inessential life, where the life of a single being is not to be understood as a ground for the social, and where the practice of language mirrors the understanding of what being is, what thought occasions, and what relation, in collectivity, may be said to be.Footnote ⁹ In a passage I cited above al-Jāḥiẓ uses the word جماعة (jamāʿah) to refer to a plurality of beings, and we may understand this plurality as being produced through a language practice that institutes the social, where an inessential mode of being together, a gathering without substance, is convoked.

In this linguistic gathering, a coming together of creatures, we might think of al-Jāḥiẓ as giving to us a practice where thought transpires in language as a plural social form, and where what it is that one does when one understands is a shared practice among living beings. And so if the interrelational form of the verb tafāʿala promises a communication between beings, the action occasioned in it exceeds this frame to become a social mode in excess of what transpires when one being gives language to be understood by another—as in Ibn Qutayba's manual. Instead of an exchange of semantic content, language becomes a doing that calls into being an inessential collective. In this way, the gathering of creatures of which al-Jāḥiẓ writes is indistinguishable from language and this gathering may be said, therefore, to be منطق الطير (manṭiq al-ṭayr; “the language of the birds”), at once the birds’ language and their gathering in a collectivity occasioned in a scene of address where any single being is already more and less than itself. What is given is a sense of the social that is also a mode of being where relation is a practice for an indetermined collective life, a gathering without return to a temporally coherent or self-determined subject or ground: a language praxis. Al-Jāḥiẓ gives us to think this collective life as poetic, and, more generally, as linguistic, and in this sense we may understand lafẓ as giving us to think the relation of utterance to language, language to form, form to sociality, sociality to collective being, and being to its formation in a linguistic life where this or that utterance—as well as this or that being, thing, word, or relation, as indistinct as these are—will never merely have been its own.