You are not there. You veer about for a fold in the painting that would at last apprise you of the partition you play in a piece of theatre that was acting itself out before you were born and sings imperceptibly in your body like a bat. It is the snatch of music you are harking after, song like a raft of architecture. ‘Writing in a post-Derridean era’?

So many turns you sigh, the linguistic turn, the political, the ethical and so on et cetera, enough to make you turn in your grave, prematurely, you think, no need for another, especially not a literary turn, you have to be joking. You always considered the phrase ‘linguistic turn’ to be a sort of joke, a somewhat comical but also delusory gesture apparently intended to refer to a new attentiveness to the importance of language in thinking, in philosophy and culture more generally, as if there were something before the turn, as if it thus confirmed that there were writings (Shakespeare's, for example) that weren't turned and already turning from the beginning, and as if the words ‘linguistic turn’ could be written, read, spoken or thought about without any need to register or try to reckon with the metalinguistic logic thereby inscribed.