the most important aspect of this thesis arguably lies elsewhere. It consists
in the conclusion that follows from the primacy of indirect speech and which
links it to the first thesis: there is no individual author of the utterance, only
a speaker interpellated to her place and counter-interpellating from this place.
To put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms rather than mine: ‘There is no
significance independent of dominant significations, nor is there subjectification
independent of an established order of subjection. Both depend on the nature
and transmission of order-words in a given social field.’^32 As an Althusserian
Marxist, I have nothing to add to this formulation.
The fourth thesisfollows from the first. It poses the question of the kind of
power exercised by order-words. We have seen that we cannot make do with
the weak (because mainly classificatory) version of the Anglo-American
theoreticians of speech acts. Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to this question
is of the utmost interest, even if it seems to distance them from Marxism. For
them, the order-word effects an incorporeal transformation. On 4 July 1917, a
correct slogan directly transforms the situation, just as the sentence pronounced
by the judge immediately and radically transforms the situation of the accused,
who is now a convict: he no longer has the same rights, the same expectations,
and the same hopes; and this incorporeal transformation has an impact not
only on his social status, but on the body of the condemned man. We therefore
have a mixture of the incorporeal and the corporeal: thus it is that the first-
class passenger suddenly becomes a hostage. There is, in the correct slogan,
something that pertains to the event, in the sense in which the latter (e.g. in
Alain Badiou’s theory of the event)^33 revolutionises the situation in which it
rings out like a thunder clap. We are not far removed from a religious language
(the event is an epiphany), either in Badiou or in Deleuze and Guattari: trans-
substantiation is the canonical example of an incorporeal transformation. But
the interest of the thesis goes far beyond this: it enables us to understand
that language is not the vector of representation but a weapon of intervention.
As Deleuze and Guattari put it, we ‘tell things straight’; we operate a
transformation on them which is a veritable metamorphosis, which produces
a new mix of bodies. Here, the philosophical idiom turns stoic and A Thousand
Plateaustakes up Deleuze’s reading in Logic of Sense: incorporeal transformation
Continuations • 133(^32) Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 79.
(^33) See Badiou 1988.