Dante’s unitary vision, for all its immediacy, is a vision of mediation through language and its constitutive binaries. This is demonstrated in terms of Saussurian linguistics, but the principle had been anticipated with sophistication by the semiological and language-theoretical consciousness of the Middle Ages in ways that Dante particularly develops and foregrounds. Moreover, the post-structuralist turn in which meaning is generated no longer just internally to the system of language by diacritical difference but depends on relation to an Other outside the system is also eminently embodied in Dante’s theological understanding of language. Only relation to the absolute Other of divinity can lend language its meaningfulness. Every system must relate to other systems in order to have any meaning at all, and this is structurally equivalent to referring all meaning to God.

The entering into a gathering that discloses time and everything temporal and historical occurs through a submitting to determination by history rather than by turning away from it towards supposedly eternal ideals. Dante’s poem, even in its affirmation of theological transcendence, is remarkable for its showing of language in its emergence in and from historical realities. Dante’s thematization and dramatization of language and its component letters lends itself to suggesting a probe that scrutinizes the sense of language as such. Language speaks to him in the Heaven of Jove directly; it becomes not just an instrument or means, but also in itself immediately a revelation. Heidegger’s philosophy, similarly, culminated in an attunement to what language itself says, for “language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”). It speaks in the connectedness and disclosedness of things in a world, their lying-together-before us, which is not produced by human activity or techné, but is discovered as unaccountably given. Hence also the astoundingly organized order of the letters that Dante sees spontaneously sparking – as if contingently – into recognizable and even portentous shapes. Language, deeply considered, is the imperative presence of the Other facing us with its ethical demands. The imperative here is justice – the ethical imperative vis-à-vis the Other. Like Levinas, Dante represents language – when it is displayed to him directly as divine revelation in the heaven of Jove – as a revelation of Justice. Levinas’s ethical injunction is already revealed to him in the form of a peremptory imperative: “Love justice.”