Armen Avanessian

I only remember what effect the first considerable exercise of it produced on my mind; and from that moment I date an uninterrupted knowledge of myself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have no knowledge of what passed prior to my fifth or sixth year

auto-hermeneutic act

The principle of language is not arbitrariness but contingency. Language, in other words, develops within a continually changing framework of possibilities constituted by its ties to thinking and the world.

In every metanoia, an elementary epistemological situation emerges in which the new subject and the world change at the same time. A third element—an other—always participates in this emergence that transforms subject and object equally. That is why thinking about metanoia compels us to go beyond a structuralist universe determined by oppositions: how thinking goes beyond thinking becomes intelligible only if we replace all descriptions of dyadic epistemic situations with descriptions of triadic epistemic situations. The engagement with metanoia furthermore compels us both to reformulate the connection of cognition and language and to understand this connection as the question of the mutability of thinking and the plasticity of our brains.