Christopher Fynsk is Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Binghamton University. He is the author of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity.

The most recent version of the "linguistic turn," the revolution in language theory shaped by Saussure's structural linguistics and realized in a sweeping revision of investigations throughout the humanities and social sciences, has rushed past the most basic "fact" that there is language. What has been lost? Almost everything of what Heidegger tried to approach under the name of "ontology" until the word proved too laden by common misapprehension to be of use. Most immediately, this is everything of language that exceeds the order of signification, together with the subject's engagement with this "excess" that is the (non)ground of history and the material site of all relationality, beginning with that unthought that is widely termed "culture."
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