This essay considers King Lear ’s invocation of an animal voice as a mode of expressing the nothingness that contests and eludes speech. I argue that the imitation of animal voice, in its resistance of the play’s representative frame, offers an experience of a positive negativity that radicalizes Cordelia’s inexpressible love and effectively indicts the construction of discursive meaning. At this thematic ground zero, I contend that King Lear not only explores the porous boundary between man and animal but also depicts a tragic vision that arises from the tension between linguistic meaning and inarticulate grief.
The essay argues that Francis Bacon's considerations of parables and cryptography reflect larger interpretative concerns of his natural philosophic project. Bacon describes nature as having a language distinct from those of God and man, and, in so doing, establishes a central problem of his natural philosophy—namely, how can the language of nature be accessed through scientific representation? Ultimately, Bacon's solution relies on a theory of differential and duplicitous signs that conceal within them the hidden voice of nature, which is best recognized in the natural forms of efficient causality. The "alphabet of nature"—those tables of natural occurrences—consequently plays a central role in his program, as it renders nature's language susceptible to a process and decryption that mirrors the model of the bilateral cipher. It is argued that while the writing of Bacon's natural philosophy strives for literality, its investigative process preserves a space for alterity within scientific representation, that is made accessible to those with the interpretative key.
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