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Human communication has long been characterized as a problem of transmitting information, or the “outward” sharing of “inner thought” through mediated channels of exchange. Butchart questions that model and the various theories to which it gives rise. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Lacan—thinkers who, along with Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have critiqued the modern notion of a rational subject—Butchart shows that the subject is shaped by language rather than preformed, andthat humans embody, and not just use, the signs and contexts of interaction that form what he calls a “communication community.”

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