"After Babel argues that it is the constructive powers of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints...It is the miraculous...capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, 'if'-propositions and above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual." (George Steiner. After Babel.)
"We endure, we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say 'No' to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited 'otherness' for our consciousness to inhabit. It is this precise sense that the utopian and the messianic are figures of syntax." (ibid.)
These words present a curious contrast with Freud's view of dream's inability of saying "No": "The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of _opposites_ and _contradictions_. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts." (Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams.)
