Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “nonsense.” He was apparently like that in his personal life as well.

There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us – man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language – and now, in late Lacan, there is the language we can create and choose. Lacan should have said at this moment, if he wasn’t so determined to be fascinating, that we can h

‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’