and prior to her, and on which she will leave her mark – possibly even a
lasting mark – through linguistic or literary creation. Possession here is a
transitive relationship, something clearly marked by the ambiguity of the
word: I possess the language in as much as I am possessed by it, just as
people were once possessed by the devil.
We can see why the Heideggerian expression die Sprache spricht(the language
speaks) – a formula that contrasts with the ‘I speak the language’ of common
sense – is not necessarily (or not only) a flagrant example of linguistic fetishism
(I hypostatise the language, which rebounds on me to oppress me), but, rather,
the expression of a dynamic process of subjectivation: subjection to language
is, at the same time, the active creation of subjectivity. The apparent fetishism
of the expression is a symptom of the fact that language, as a social process,
is manifestly not the result of the composition of individual choices and
calculations. We certainly have the impression that we ‘use’ language like an
instrument at our disposal. But this relationship is dialectical, for, if we reflect
on it, we shall come to understand that the hammer guides the hand which
wields it: we ‘use’ language within strict constraints and our ability to transform
it by a deliberate decision, while not completely non-existent, is highly
restricted. The history of feminist attempts to invent or impose an epicene
pronoun, especially in English, is instructive in this respect: they have largely
failed to invent a pronoun to replace the un-marked ‘he’ that refers to the
reader or author whatever their sex. But they have, in the English-speaking
world at least, completely succeeded in imposing the equal use of ‘she’ and
‘he’ in epicene contexts (i.e. contexts where the sex of the referent is not
specified). The same might be said of official attempts, laid down in decrees,
to erase any trace of franglais from our beautiful French vocabulary: today,
who in France says baladeurrather than ‘walkman’ and who, outside official
documents, characterizes her email as a mel?
The third change of standpointinvolves adopting the standpoint of history.
The semi-frozen time of evolution is not enough for me, nor is the time of
the system, which, in its natural course, transforms Old English into Middle
English and then Modern English (this ‘natural bent of the system’ is obviously
a retrospective construction on the part of science). If language is a form of
human praxis, its time is that of the history of human beings and the societies
they form. Accordingly, the history of language is not the immanent history
of a system – what post-Saussurian linguistics marginalises under the rubric
Propositions (1) • 143