“The Paradox of ‘Misunderstanding’ as the Condition of 'Understanding’"

The sentence, dead cell of language, does not belong to anybody, is not turned to anybody, is deprived of context, implied meaning, intonation, sense and cannot be misunderstood. The sentence can be amphibological, ambiguous, contradictory, but not involve misunderstanding. Instead, the utterance, the live cell of discourse, has everything the sentence lacks, sense, and is exposed to misunderstanding. Utterance misunderstanding is inevitable. Unlike the sentence the utterance calls for understanding, listening, answering comprehension. Definition does not. It involves ommission, arbitrariness. Understanding implies integration among differences. To expunge misunderstanding from the utterance is to coerce it into a single sense, the boundaries of reason, however much it struggles to resist. To eliminate misunderstanding means to homologate the utterance with what is defined, ordinarily signified, to deny singularity. Misunderstanding is a risk the utterance takes, even when forced to monologism in the name of wanting to understand, the “will to know”, wanting to hear. To eliminate misunderstanding completely is to impose a single worldview. But what is denied on denying misunderstanding and eliminating the shadow reappears in terms of contradiction and paradox. The shadow, that is, the otherness of the text – and each one of us is also a text – cannot be suppressed. If, instead, this were possible, not only would encounter with the other not occur, but there would no longer be the conditions, the motivations and the need for communication that is effectively communication, that is, communication that is not reduced to mere information.