What can be enunciated, what presumes that language is more or less consonant with veritable insights and demonstrations, may in fact reveal the decay of primordial, epiphanic recognitions. […]

It follows that philosophy and literature occupy the same generative though ultimately circumscribed space. Their performative means are identical: an alignment of words, the modes of syntax, punctuation (a subtle resource). This is as true of a nursery rhyme as it is of a Kant Critique. Of a dime novel as of the Phaedo. They are deeds of language. The notion, as in Nietzsche or Valéry, that abstract thought can be danced is an allegoric conceit. Utterance, intelligible enunciation is all. Together they solicit or withstand translation, paraphrase, metaphrase, and every technique or transmission or betrayal.

George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan