Abstract

Roman Jakobson is best known for his reflections on the polarity of metaphor and metonymy. What is often overlooked is that Jakobson developed his theses in the context of his work on language acquisition and language loss. In contrast to the common medical categorisation of receptive and expressive aphasia, Jakobson proposes a linguistic division into similarity and contiguity disorders. While the similarity disorder results in a loss of metaphor, the contiguity disorder impairs metonymy. Jakobson subsequently expands his considerations to include all semiotic processes: from dreams to magic rituals to social practices. Since political processes, too, are about processes of articulation, this article pursues two goals: On the one hand, it asks to what extent Jakobson’s distinction between similarity and contiguity disorders can be made productive for the analysis of political conflicts – such as Lyotard’s differend or Rancière’s disagreement. On the other hand, and following Jakobson’s diagnosis that the study of language itself exhibits a contiguity disorder, the article puts forward the thesis that such a disorder is inherent in all scientific discourse – and consequently also in political theory and metaphorology.