A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Historical Materialism)

hierarchy of places and a power relation. Let us take a fairly frequently speech act: uttering a threat. It is indeed a specific ...

The argument is manifestly circular. It sets out from the facts: threats are not obviously directed towards agreement, but perta ...

talks about literature. This is because literary texts, envisaged as the product of specific speech acts, sit badly with his mod ...

interpreted as sedimentations of interlocutions that can be validated with a view to agreement, but which have been validated in ...

doubtless not a good myth. (The Marxian myth of the constitution of the social around the labour relationship has considerable a ...

he inverts the Marxian myth of origins, why language becomes the condition of emergence of labour and hence society: language as ...

reasons): it is our duty to strive with all our might for their disappearance, their withering away. To make agreement an eschat ...

as the defining characteristic of human beings and the qualitative leap from hominids to human beings, which recalls Chomsky’s t ...

form: colonialism – and the establishment of a semblance of international legal order by means of international organisations li ...

rate of unemployment or very low wages), the whole indirect wage, which the welfare state had the role of administering, was und ...

that he abandoned, just as it was in a weak position vis-à-vis him in the previous conjuncture. We must therefore reconstruct Ha ...

vocabulary of human rights, must not be confused with the imperialist claim that the political form of life and the culture of a ...

actuality of agonin the name of messianic values of linguistic irenism, just as we concede the existence of exploitation and str ...

rocated, as in the famous diagram in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. A singularly paradoxical mentality is required to ...

is involved is communication, which ‘informs’ populations about ‘how things stand’, which in turn determines – ‘beyond political ...

The second form of domination of the dominant philosophy is what, following Althusser, I have analysed in connection with Chomsk ...

abstracting from any contact between language and the world. Internal linguistics does not ignore the mundane context: it delibe ...

The fourth principle is the principle of ideality. Langueis an abstract, ideal system, realised in parole, or a biological compe ...

have seen that they lead to excluding a fair few linguistic phenomena from the field of study (everything that comes under ‘exte ...

The third principle is the principle of opacity. The transparency of language, or of meaning, is an illusion. Language never mak ...