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“Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something ‘maddening’ about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.” — Nicholas Royle
Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something ‘maddening’ about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.