since the middle of the twentieth century, European philosophy has always shown that knowledge has no direct bearing on the world of phenomena. Mr Husserl had offered access to the ‘very things’ to the German legislature, but since then we have learned how to respect — if not feared — the constitutive power of language. We now know that the object of our knowledge is already understood in the speech. It is not just a question of naming the subject by capturing it, May...