double determination precludes any conception of language as an instrument
of communication, in the service of an already constituted community. We
must conceive of language as constituting the community (the speaker is
spoken by her language and her subjectiveexistence is a product of this
language, through interpellation) and constituted by it, in that it sediments
its history and expresses it.
We must nevertheless acknowledge that the mature Marx is only rarely
concerned with questions of language – a subject that is evidently too
philosophical and too fuzzy to retain the attention of the scientific economist.
The main sites of Marx’s thinking about language are therefore to be found
in the 1844 Manuscriptsand The German Ideology. I propose two illustrations.
In the Manuscripts, we find the following text, devoted to ‘mutual theft’
drawn from Marx’s reading notes on James Mill and his theory of property:
The only comprehensible language we have is the language our possessions
use together. We would not understand a human language and it would
remain ineffectual. From the one side, such a language would be felt to be
begging, imploring and hence humiliating. It could be used only with feelings
of shame or debasement. From the other side, it would be received as
impertinenceor insanityand so rejected. We are so estranged from our human
essence that the direct language of man strikes us as an offence against the
dignity of man, whereas the estranged language of objective values appears
as the justified, self-confidence and self-acknowledged dignity of man
incarnate.^31This text is astonishing: Marx has an inexhaustible capacity to surprise his
followers and to rouse them from their dogmatic slumber. For two inversions
of the utmost importance are effected here. The first is that the language we
use every day is not directed to communicating our thoughts to others, for
those thoughts, irredeemably contaminated by our emotions, can only provoke
negative reactions in others: the nature of human language is to be agonistic;
we do not speak in order to co-operate by means of a peaceful exchange of
information, but in order to fight, to dominate the opponent, to claim a place
in the field, which is evidently a battlefield. Rather than a co-operative ethics
of discussion, we have here a primitive situation in which speakers represent
92 • Chapter Four
(^31) Marx 1975, pp. 276–7.