is a link in a chain of utterances. This recalls Lyotard’s serial montage, which
he contrasts with the parallel montage of divine revelation and the compulsive
return to the truth of the original text: in the serial montage of narrations,
there is no author who is the origin of the utterance, but a listener who, in
turn, becomes a speaker, who repeats but also embroiders and embellishes.^30
For Deleuze and Guattari, this absence of origin is constitutive: for them,
language does not proceed from something seen to something said, from a
perception to an expression, but always from something said to something
said – the narrative is always a ‘hear-say’. Hence the primacy of indirect
speech, which is an absence of origin: here, the separation between original
literal discourse and secondary figurative discourse is not inverted but
displaced. For nor is metaphor original: it is only an effect of secondary
discourse. We can detect here both Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known hostility
to metaphor (‘no metaphors, metamorphoses’ is one of their favourite
watchwords, meaning: no representation – even of a figurative kind – but
interventions); and the possibility of a non-trivial theory of metaphor, which
(imitating Sperber and Wilson and their theory of irony as mention)^31 might
be called the theory of metaphor as mention: like irony, a metaphor is then
the trace of another discourse, another voice. But, above all, we shall note –
something scarcely surprising on the part of Deleuze – a Nietzschean
inspiration, more precisely Nietzsche’s conception of metaphor: this primacy
of indirect speech is the effect of a fundamental property of language – its
capacity not for representation but for translation. Language does not reflect,
it displaces; it does not directly state the world, but translates a first
displacement, which is that of perception. This at least has the advantage of
putting the issue of translation at the centre of the study of language. As we
have seen, what poses a problem in the utterance Chirac est un veris that it
is not really translated, that it speaks English in French. This suggests that
what we have here is an example of indirect speech. This explains why the
French reader does not recognise the description (in the text accompanying
the title-slogan) of the president of the republic (whatever one’s opinion of
him): a chain of utterances in the English language – i.e. English culture – is
presupposed by this insult (e.g. the nursery rhymes I cited in Chapter 1). But
132 • Chapter Five
(^30) See Lyotard 1977, pp. 64–5.
(^31) See Sperber and Wilson 1978.