The Chattering Mind shows how a characteristically unproblematic form of modern communication—everyday talk—became a communication problem in itself, notably one in need of careful conceptual commentary and now, in the digital age, ongoing technological support. Part One focuses on Søren Kierkegaard’s inaugural theory of “chatter,” paying special attention to the concept’s literary and philosophical origins, its early entanglement with modern democratic culture, and its corresponding annex of mid-nineteenth-century religious discourse. Part Two explores Martin Heidegger’s subsequent work on “i ... More

The Chattering Mind shows how a characteristically unproblematic form of modern communication—everyday talk—became a communication problem in itself, notably one in need of careful conceptual commentary and now, in the digital age, ongoing technological support. Part One focuses on Søren Kierkegaard’s inaugural theory of “chatter,” paying special attention to the concept’s literary and philosophical origins, its early entanglement with modern democratic culture, and its corresponding annex of mid-nineteenth-century religious discourse. Part Two explores Martin Heidegger’s subsequent work on “idle talk” and several related terms, notably “babble,” “scribbling,” and “everyday discourse.” It shows how his development of these terms in the early-1920s not only served as a biting social critique of the university system in which he was struggling to secure a professorship, but also allowed him to elaborate a theory of discourse that would eventually culminate in the existential analytic of Being and Time. Part Three considers Jacques Lacan’s elusive notion of “empty speech” alongside its linguistic counter-possibility, “full speech,” reading both terms against the backdrop of his radical postwar return to the founding moment of psychoanalytic theory and technique: Freud’s iconic 1895 dream of Irma’s injection. By way of conclusion, The Chattering Mind suggests that the conceptual history of everyday talk which stretches from Kierkegaard’s notion of chatter to Heidegger’s theory of idle talk to Lacan’s treatment of empty speech also extends into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms has now become the basis for big data in the hands of tech-savvy entrepreneurs.