So my thesis is not trivial in that it ejects the individual speaker as the
source of utterances and meanings from the front of the stage. The question
that then follows is: what is she to be replaced by?
Previously, I explored the Heidegger-style response that consists in saying:
by language itself. It is the language that speaks and which interpellates the
individual as a speaker. From it, I derived a theory of the violence of language
whose main concept is remainder.^27 This recourse to the entity ‘language’, and
to the ontological metaphor that calls it into being by naming it, risks making
me succumb to the same fetishism that produced the concept of langueas
object of science, by excluding the rest of the phenomena. There is a difference,
however, over and above the fact that naming by abstraction is a necessity
and a basic characteristic of language, which is therefore not only the instrument
but the source of fetishism – a fetishism that becomes inevitable and not
always harmful: this ‘language’ is not some human creation transmuted into
a thing and rebounding on humanity to oppress it, but, rather, marks the
introduction of the standpoint of the totality of praxis. Unlike the concept of
langue, it does not exclude any linguistic phenomena but enables us to think
the totality of linguistic praxis. This is the totality that subjectifies the subject.
To say that it is the language which speaks is to put the subject back in its
place, which must also be understood in a positive sense: it is to assign the
subject a place. We can compare the concept of language thus formulated
with the Marxist concept of class, which is an example of abstraction but not
of fetishism, precisely in that it does not refer to entities fixed prior to the
class struggle, but to a process of struggle that produces the classes in struggle –
which presupposes adopting the standpoint of the social totality, of society
as a set of processes. The same is true of individual speakers: they are produced
by interlocution just as classes are produced by class struggle. They are,
therefore, products of the whole of the language and, by this token, are spoken
by the language.
We have seen one of the consequences of such a position in the materialist
pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari: they replace the concept of individual
speaker by that of collective assemblage of enunciation. But we have also
seen how hostile they were to the concept of ideology, at least in its Althusserian
version. However, this is concept that I am going to try to breathe life back
Propositions (1) • 163(^27) See Lecercle 1991.