A being possessing speech cannot coherently imagine its own prior absence.

Evidence

Derrida’s interest (to summarize it overhastily) bears not on the fictionality of the “experience” of the past that Rousseau’s account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulation. To work our way back mentally to a situation that must have once existed (language must have once upon a time emerged for hominids; there must have been a time when surpluses did not exist, when social and tribal institutions themselves slowly came into being) requires us to postulate, either in language or in writing, a condition from which both of those “properties” are absent, something whose many incoherences and contradictions can at least be dramatized by this one: namely, the difficulty for a being who “possesses” speech/writing to imagine what their absence could possibly entail. This particular focus then strikes at all imagination of radical change or difference and poses the question of how a being informed by one system in the present could possibly have any appreciation of a condition radically different, since by definition the thesis of difference and change means just that, that the past is inaccessible and unimaginable. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 504

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The self-referential trap of imagining radical difference — how a system informed by the present can never grasp a genuinely different condition — is a foundational paradox worth sitting with and applying to my own cognitive mapping.
• QUESTION: Does this argument also undercut all utopian thought — can anyone ‘informed by one system’ meaningfully imagine a post-capitalist condition? This bears directly on the falsifiability of Jameson’s totalizing thesis.
• XREF: connects to: The very act of questioning presupposes the possibility of non-being.; Speech’s apparent impersonal life is borrowed from the personal freedom of speakers. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1217