Endless war and infinite strife is always preceded by the erosion and the putrid decomposition of language. Such is the thesis of Adan Kovacsics’ idiosyncratic and historically situated Guerra y lenguaje (Acantilado, 2025), which sets a specific date for the moment of such linguistic rot into consciousness in European modernity: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter” of 1902 in which civilizational decline signaled the total detachment of expression, making language flourish in the form of opinions resembling rotten mushrooms. For Hofmannsthal this event was neither accidental nor a temporary malady, but a tonality of existence that soon enough broadened like a “spreading rust” (Kovacsics 11). Just a few years later in his posthumous Persuasion and Rhetoric, Michelstaedter will describe this rusting of language as the triumph of “darkening ornaments” (kallopismata orphnes) of the epoch, liberating the destiny of language as a mere transactional exchange between “technical terms” mastered by everyone regardless of their idioms (it surprises the reader that the thinker of Gorizia is absent from Kovacsics’ Austro-Hungarian constellation on the crisis of language). 

The decline of an empire shimmering with languages and dialects across its territory began to suffer the malady of miscommunication that resulted in making language uninhabitable, throbbing in its empty chatter. Thus, the attempt to initiate an exodus from language began to appear everywhere according to Kovacsics: Fritz Mauthner drafts an encyclopedic treatise on the venereal misapprehension of language, Gustav Landauver battles in the trenches of linguistic scepticism and the mystical tradition in the name of revolution, while others like Hugo Ball attempts to flee from language altogether through the liberation of sounds and words, from the Dada avant-garde to his later Byzantine Christian asceticism. For his part, Karl Kraus in The last days of Mankind prefers to expose the surface of language as it becomes a regime regulated by opinion for bureaucratic administration over facts of reality. The nihilism that colors politics at the turn of the century is accompanied by the instrumentalization of language as the primordial technical apparatus that allows the flows of information through the acceleration of the autonomization of the linguistic mediation; as consequence, language began to arouse constant disbelief and doubt over the very essence of the sayable (Kovacsics 31). This throws light on contemporary debates about “misinformation” that, precisely because they are caught up on the epistemological determination proper to the linguistic crisis, it comes short to putting into perspective the range and depth of language over the problem of appearance now deprived of the expressive mediation between the speaking animal and phenomena, reducing experience to rhetorical commonalities or inter-social allocation of commands. 

Kovacsics’s Guerra y Lenguaje (2025) brings to bear – without totally exhausting the crushing weight of its archive and set of problems for thought – the immense significance of the first decade of the twentieth century at outset of the waning of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which has always been understood historically as the condition for the last configuration of European nationalism and its war-economies, but rarely in light of its functionalization of language. If read against the backdrop of Simone Weil’s “Are we heading for the proletarian revolution?” (1933) intervention about the “functional” dimension of the state form in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kovacsic’s essay ultimately helps us to define the concrete nature of functionality as the index of mobilization of ‘worlding’ through the commanding force of language. To deliver this point home, Kovacsics tells how language itself severed enunciation from action:

“La transformación que se produjo y que la ha alejado, como si un tablón se hubiese desprendido del muelle y se hubiera adentrado en el mar, no se debe a que otras gentes se impusieron en su día en Grecia, sino a un cambio radical en el uso concreto de la palabra. Es en la Gran Guerra cuando esa corriente inicial de la utilización del lenguaje como herramienta se consolida de manera definitiva. Es entonces cuando la palabra pasa a ser plenamente funcional y su papel se reduce a aportar argumentos para la acción o incluso a “parirla” mediante el tópico. Hemos visto hasta qué punto el silencio de Karl Kraus al comienzo de la contienda se debía a la percepción de este vínculo entre palabra y acción, al que no quería ni podía sumarse de ningún modo” (Kovacsics 76-77). 

Language does not disappear as much as it transforms itself into two vectors of social enforcement towards communication: functionality and rhetorical enthymemes. In this way, language is able to colonize reality and stabilize for the concrete order, or what Walter Benjamin called during those years the “bourgeois conception of language” hindering on causality and objectivity accelerating the collapse of its vocation to naming the exteriority of the world (Kovacsics 81). The totalization of this new rhetorical social structure becomes the main stage for the production of justification and competing regimes of fiction. But this implies no general theory or systematization of a linguistic science, but rather how language coincides with life in the form of an ethics. This is at the heart of the different attempts to retract language in the eclipse of empire and the new interstate fragmentation – which also entails grammatical and functional unifigies of national language – as a problem that concerns the limits of ethics. Ethics here cannot coincide with the general condition of ‘knowability’ that makes morality possible; rather, the problem of ethics can only reveal in turn the senseless of wanting to go beyond the facts of the world and allows us to dwell in one without completion.  The withdrawal from the language of propaganda and objectivity demanded an ethics of the sayable beyond the commodification and intentionality of words promoted by “war” and “ware” (commodity) that the West had continued to endure; a total communication of ends that decades later evolved into cybernetics as the warping of world into informational encoded relation.

Kovacsics reminds us that there is a story here of extreme violence and creative destruction, only comparable to nuclear fusion and the flaying of a human being, only that this time, unlike the myth of Marsyas, without ever reaching transcendence of redemption through the proximity of language to myth (Kovacsics 129). Underneath there is the body of language, stripped of its capacity for truth and reduced to functions of survival and needs oriented towards the homogeneity of the future. Towards the end of Guerra y lenguaje (2025), and glossing Hobbes’ notion of political authority that legitimated the modern interstate system to neutralize truth contents and the stasis over words, one cannot help but think that the date 1902 as a. arcana was an effective culmination rather than genesis of the modern, which means that the foul scent of the twentieth century was destined for decomposition since it had already stripped bared one of the most beautiful lacunae of the human species: being in language and the event of appearance became integrated into the worldly utopia of the machine.

As captured in Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare”, the obsolescence of language over time evolved into a candid instrument of social functions of proportional exchange, coordinated fortuitous relations, and increasing moral indictment that purported parodies of contested realities. Thus, the sickness is always unto language – a basic assumption that reveals the need for infrapolitical analysis before there is any political practice and categorial reinvention. The overexposure of language as an avatar of metaphoric communication for ends and needs of humankind brought itself bare and all encompassing in its appropriative force, but only at the expense of darkening and losing the world forever.