The word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other hears it

The word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other hears it names a reversal built into expression: a speaker experiences language as evidence of the listener’s freedom, while the listener encounters the speaker’s words as properties of an object whose meaning can be read. Language makes the Other present, but it never gives the speaker command of how the Other understands or constitutes what has been said.

Expression and Uncertainty

The speaker first tries to find a language that will fascinate the Other, but proceeds blindly. Gestures and attitudes can acquire meaning only when the Other’s freedom takes them up and gives them significance. Their effect therefore cannot be known in advance: the speaker cannot be certain of signifying what was intended, or even of signifying anything at all. To learn exactly what an expression means to the Other would require access to that person’s freedom at the very instant it interprets it—something the speaker cannot have.

Expression consequently becomes an incomplete flight outside oneself. Because to express and to be are joined in this account, guessing at the meaning of one’s words is also guessing at what one is for the Other. The Other is not a later addition to communication but is already present as the one who lends language its meaning.

The Other’s Freedom and the Theft of Thought

Each word, gesture, and expression provides concrete evidence of the Other’s alienating reality. The discussion draws a contrast with the psychotic claim that someone has stolen one’s thought: in a broader sense, expression itself involves a taking-away, since thought becomes an object only through the cooperation of a freedom outside the speaker. What is expressed is no longer constituted by the speaker alone.

That dependence makes language sacred from the speaker’s side. The sacred is described as an object within the world that points beyond it; language points beyond the speaker’s expression toward the listener’s transcendence, or freedom. Speaking thus reveals not only something expressed but also the independent subject who hears it in silence.

The Word as a Magical Object

The same exchange looks different from the listener’s side. The speaker remains for the Other a meaningful object, and no path from that object-state can lead the listener directly to the speaker’s transcendence. Words, attitudes, and expressions can indicate only further words, attitudes, and expressions. For the listener, language is therefore a property of a magical object: an action at a distance whose effect the listener can know.

The speaker, by contrast, does not know this object-language as the Other knows it. The speaker cannot hear himself speak or see himself smile. The account treats language as parallel to the body: in both cases, an experience lived from within becomes an object for another person, and the speaker cannot simply occupy the Other’s view of it. The sacred and the magical are not two kinds of word but two irreducible perspectives on the same expression.

Limits of Fascination and the Possibility of Love

Fascination does not by itself produce love. An orator, actor, or tightrope-walker may hold attention without becoming the ultimate object of another person’s transcendence. The fascinated spectator remains absorbed, but fascination alone does not establish the relation of love.

For love to arise in the beloved, the beloved must project being loved. An object-state by itself cannot generate that relation: seduction through one’s object-like presence may make one precious to possess and may prompt efforts at conquest, but such appropriation is not love. Love can begin only when the beloved gives proof of alienation and of a flight toward the Other—that is, when the relation engages the beloved as a subject rather than merely as an object to be acquired.