Marxists, from following philosophers who do everything in their power to
warrant the sobriquet anarcho-désirants? Rather than engaging in this reading
against the current, would it not be better to abandon them to the ‘anarchist’
reading of their work, which has the advantages of being obvious and
immediate, and is not bereft of lessons for a Marxist (e.g. the Deleuzian
concept of event, developed in Logic of Sense, or the critique of representation,
including political representation)? In the list of most frequent citations in
Daniel Colson’s Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme,^25 Deleuze comes
second, behind Proudhon but before Bakunin. My answer is simple: if there
is a domain where Deleuze and Guattari have advanced critical thinking, it
is that of language.
As we have seen, the fourth plateau of A Thousand Plateausproposes a
vigorous critique of the dominant philosophy of language and of the linguistics
that derives from it. But, underlying the negative theses, marked by the
conditional of the propositions expressing the four postulates of linguistics
(le langage serait informatif et communicatif), there are positive theses. Proceeding
rapidly, I shall formulate six of them:
The basic utterance of language is not the declarative, assertive and constative
sentence (‘the man hit the ball’), but the order-word.
The fundamental type of speech is not direct speech, which is supposed
to refer to the world and to offer communicable information about it, but
reported speech – what is called indirect speech.
The fundamental sector for the study of language is not phonology (as in
the original structuralists), or syntax (as in Chomsky), but pragmatics– a
pragmatics that is nevertheless different from that of Anglo-American
philosophers in that it is basically political.
In that they are order-words, speech acts exercise powerand have a specific
effectivity. This effectivity takes the form of incorporeal transformations.
Utterances are produced not by individual speakers, but by collective
assemblages of enunciation.
If a language is not a homogeneous system, it is because it is shot through
with contradictions. The principal contradiction lies between the major dialect,
or major usagesof the language, and dialects or minor usages.
Continuations • 129(^25) See Colson 2001.