accompanying the headline is written in correct French. We must therefore
look further or deeper for an explanation – to a philosophy of language, with
its theoretical and political stakes. This book is devoted to elucidating it. I
shall formulate it rapidly in two provisional theses: (1) the Sun’s antics exhibit
an implicit conception of languagethat has disastrous consequences, and which
unfortunately is dominant – not only among third-rate scribblers, but in the
media, among politicians, a fair number of philosophers, and even some
linguists; (2) English is the language of imperialism.
I am going to add a few words on each of these theses, which will serve
as a guiding thread throughout the book.
A conception of language
The Sun’s translation is correct but naïve. It is correct, because the statement
Chirac est un veris impeccably grammatical; and both the common noun and
the proper noun that it contains do indeed designate their referents: the
photomontage attests to this. For this is indeed a worm and that is our revered
president. But it is naïve. The translator has mentally opened an English-
French dictionary at the word ‘worm’. Robert-Collins gives: ‘1. ver; 2. minable
[wretched]’. But if he had done the converse, the problem would have emerged,
because the same Robert-Collins gives for ‘ver’: ‘1. worm; 2. grub; 3. maggot’,
without indicating any pejorative metaphorical extension. We can see what
the naïveté consists in: the operation assumes that the word denotes its referent
or the clause its state of affairs without further ado – that is, without metaphor
intervening, without everything that we understand today by connotation.
It was against this naïve conception that modern thinking about language,
starting with Saussure’s conception of langue, was constructed, introducing
the intermediary level of the meaning or the signified between the sign and
its referent. In short, for the Sun, there are no connotations, only denotations.
Yet the utterance ‘Chirac is a worm’ derives its meaning from its connotations.
And it is because these connotations are specific to the English language that
the utterance Chirac est un verdoes not mean much. A fine example of the
biter getting bitten: the contempt rebounds on the authors of the insult.
This conception of language, which makes a language a lingua franca, a
transparent instrument of communication (there are things which are sometimes
said in French, sometimes in English, with different words, but the same
‘Chirac est un ver’ • 3