Abstract
Welcome back, folks. It has been a long break since Vol 2.1 in August ’92, but we are back in force, with enough to say for two volumes. Splitting up our sayables in two, this means we will return rather shortly with Vol 2.3.
You could begin Vol 2.2 immediately by skipping down a page; otherwise, this Forward will greet you with a little theme: the force of sayables. According to Sextus, the Stoic philosophers said that thoughts refer to things only by way of certain “sayables” (lekta), which are the things as signified or as said. As displayed in BITNETWORK discussions, postmodern Jewish philosophers join the Stoa in noting that signification has at least three elements and not just two: that is, that we can’t reflect on things without reflecting on what we say about things and how we say it. It is not apparent, however, that the Stoa went as far as their Second Temple contemporaries in noting (albeit non-philosophically and non-diagrammatically) the performative force of sayables: that is, that divine speech (dibbur) creates and that, in its image, human saying is also a form of doing (a “faith that works” is one of Edith Wyschogrod’s phrases).
As evidenced in their activities of the past months, BITNETWORK folks do not only say that sayables are doables (speaking philosophies of performative discourse); they also do things in the saying and about the saying.
Recommended Citation
"Old Series: Volume 2, Number 2 (February 1993)." Journal of Textual Reasoning Old Series: Vol. 2 (1992): 39-80. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jtr/vol0/iss2/2