vigour (especially when dealing with the relations of domination of one sex
over the other).
It is in this spirit that I want to return to the work of the Vietnamese
philosopher Tran Duc Thao, a work that is neglected today and unjustly
forgotten. He is the author of two books, one devoted to a critique of
phenomenology and the other to studies of the origin of language and
consciousness.^6 The second, written in Vietnam under the civilising influence
of American bombs, and without its author having access to contemporary
anthropological research except in the form of outdated articles published in
Soviet journals, seeks to propose a Marxist theory of the origins of language,
in which the contribution of the particular philosophical origins of Tran Duc
Thao – i.e. phenomenology – is apparent.
Tran Duc Thao starts out form the famous nineteenth-century thesis of
Haeckel, whom he cites via Engels, that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis:
the origin of language is therefore to be studied through its emergence in
children. This is combined with a phenomenological thesis, according to
which consciousness is consciousness of something before being self-
consciousness (this is Husserl’s thesis on intentionality); and a Marxist thesis,
which makes language the source of a consciousness, a source that is material
(the language of ‘real life’, language as material praxis), collective (language
emerges within a group of hunters), and social (the beginnings of work in
common and the division of labour).
His central thesis is that what distinguishes the human being from its
immediate ancestor is the use of indicative gestures: language and consciousness
emerge from these gestures. This is where the theory becomes original.
From this main thesis there follows a set of theses on the origin of
consciousness. (1) The immediate reality of consciousness is language (verbal
or gestural). (2) Conscious perception is perception that apprehends the
external object as external (this is a materialist thesis, which recognises the
externality and priority of the world vis-à-vis consciousness). (3) The indicative
gesture makes its appearance in the context of the summons to labour in
common; and its original function is collective and social. (4) This gesture
rebounds on the subject, who indicates himself as it were. The summons to
Propositions (1) • 147(^6) See Thao 1951 and 1973.