While a proper treatment of this interesting, if not pivotal, scene is outside the purview of the current essay, the ability to speak in a language that one has not learned in this lifetime suggests a much more expanded notion of the subject’s trajectory through time and space, a notion that is not allowed for in conventional models that try and map modern day subjectivity. Categorically speaking, this essay designates the highly interactive, embodied procedures involved in the production of subjectivity under a rubric of three: apocalypse, a solution to the non-zero-sum game and a planetary event of post-anthropocentric ramifications language, a new use of symbols in affective and transformational communicativity and temporality, a remembering of the future and a vision of self-destiny. To invoke such an experience, we draw on specific narrative elements in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” as well as its cinematic adaptation, Arrival, to elucidate how subjectivity can become reconstructed, existentially, through language and time in very precise, yet nonlinear ways. What kind of event could destabilize, simultaneously, planetary trajectories and existential subjectivities? We argue that an encounter with an alien logic has the power to irrevocably dislodge common sense thinking from conventional spaces that have been molded into representational thought.

Story of your life ted chiang