The claim that communication is always possible is fundamental to Donald Davidson’s philosophy. According to him, understanding and agreement are necessary, and a shared world precedes any discord.  The current paper makes the contrary claim: it demonstrates that Davidson’s conceptual apparatus entails that dispute, disagreement, and misunderstanding are inevitable, and an irreducible gap between perspectives is a necessary condition of any dialogue.

The argument is based on three pillars. One is science-fiction stories (“A Martian Odyssey” and “Story of Your Life”). These depictions of a primary encounter between humans and aliens are a vivid portrayal of Davidson’s philosophy. The two sides owe this resemblance to a common source of inspiration: the colonial encounter.

Secondly, the text delineates two of Davidson’s major influences: Quine’s Radical Translation and Rational Choice theory. While the first is still an overt attempt to deal with the challenges of intercultural relativism posed by anthropologists, the second enables Davidson to eschew historical, communal, and political elements and construct an abstract, serene, individualist model.

Juxtaposing Davidson’s system with these two influences foregrounds an ethical and political question which remains implicit yet crucial: what is the criterion by which one is acknowledged as a speaker, an object of interpretation, and hence a subject? Reading Davidson closely, this condition will turn out to be disagreement and acceptance of the other’s authority, which hinders and curbs full harmony and autonomy in advance.

Thirdly, to clarify this last point, the paper draws on Jacques Lacan and traces a homology between Davidson’s triangulation and the Oedipal triangle. This comparison, while also constituting a modest act of radical interpretation between analytic and continental philosophy, clarifies the assertion that any communication and understanding necessarily depends on an irreducible antagonism.