Human speech is rooted in our inchoate encounters with things. It grows in response to their primordial language, nourished by our attempts to come to terms with the world into which we are born. If, as Hannah Arendt claims, action corresponds to the human condition of natality insofar as it names the capacity to begin something new, speech must be heard to belong to a world of action in which new possibilities open as we are addressed by a language always operative in our encounters with things. Human speaking emerges in and through acts of response to the saying of things.

If human speaking is intimately bound up with action in the manner Arendt so powerfully suggests, it is because the speech acts that give rise to human speaking are themselves predicated on an ability to respond to things in ways that do justice to the paradoxical ways they show themselves, at once lending themselves to and eluding human articulation. However insightful, Arendt's analysis of the human conditions of action and speech does not go far enough. By grounding speech in “the fact of distinctness” and “the actualization of the human condition of plurality,” she registers only the human side of the dialogue, in effect muting the eloquence of things.