Abstract

Preview: Words have weight and power; and so do narratives and ideas. They can shape and re-shape realities. They can reveal unheard and unthought of before aspects and dimensions of the world we live in, and in this sense, constitute truth for us; however, they can also, by means of the very same gravity conceal, distort or even destroy our view on reality and our vital relations with it and with ourselves. They are the basic means of our self-understanding, but they can also destroy the very fundaments of it. We always find ourselves within a certain discursive space providing us with the basic ontological, existential, and axiological coordinates for our living and acting. These coordinates indicate and are expressive of our values and concerns, our plans and projects, our normative ideals, and basic attitudes toward ourselves, others, and strangers. They are informative of who we are by pointing out where we stand. They constitute a space of mattering: the space within which our lives are possible only because first they are meaningful; that is, worth of standing for, worthy of defending. However, these spaces quite quickly can become taken for granted, then de-temporalized, de-historicized, petrified, and finally no longer expressive of our identities.