When does language speak itself as language? Curiously, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without really giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential Being . (Heidegger)
Again, absence is the highest form of presence – only when the rug is pulled from under me is its existence really disclosed in its specificity. We are suddenly, when we stammer and pause, in a position to gauge the difference language makes, the revelation that if we cannot name something there is a real sense in which we do not have it. Language, the binding force of the name, therefore brings things into our ‘owning’.
To say, for example, 'mountain' is to bring the mountain itself towards us out of the seamless continuum of the visible. Henceforth, when we look at a mountain it is silhouetted with this insubstantial word. Our gaze is afflicted with the frames of language.
'Language has been called the house of Being, it is the keeper of being present..’ Think of Wittgenstein’s famous example – the dog can anticipate its master’s return, sure, but not that its master will return in a week. And why? Because it does not have language. But this then means that in a certain sense Time - specifically here the Present, set over against the horizon of the coming week - can only appear to us (Dasein), to the language user and not to the ‘poor-in-world’ dog. The Present is in this case a kind of privative category – a cleft has opened up separating the ‘now’ from ‘a week’s time’ and the present is defined as the point of that opening up. The present = the beginning of that week interval. All this shows itself only to the language-animal.