Naming

A trace is a distinction in the mode of access to an already accomplished act. A name arises much later, when a sufficiently developed structure singles out and retains a trace for subsequent recognition. Naming establishes this mode of the trace.

To name something, a structure projects a system of distinctions already familiar to it onto that thing’s trace. A name therefore does not reveal the inner essence of what is named or belong to it from the outset. It connects the available trace with the distinctions available to the naming structure.

If we consider what happens only in terms of distinctions, there are no names as independent entities. There are only distinctions and distinctions of distinctions, establishing the projection of one distinction onto another. We call a trace that retains this mode of projection a name.

The practical power of a name is that it lets us recognize a distinction and return to it without reproducing the entire history of its emergence each time.

There can naturally be stable structures outside the range of the naming structure, as well as structures already capable of entering that range but not yet named. The absence of a name means not the absence of a structure, but the absence of a stable mode of recognizing it within the given system of distinctions.

Thus there are no names in the dispassionate light of the sun.