language; and that of Jeanne Favret-Saada on sorcery in the copse (where
language is very directly involved).^7 This is an impressive corpus.
The problem is that the erotic body, in its relations with language, is
theoretically unstable: we have just seen this with the history of the concept
of nodal point in Lacan. The turn that saw the Lacanians move from thinking
about language to thinking about jouissancedoes not help the philosophy of
language (which is not obliged to judge its relevance here). The erotic body,
nevertheless, remains of crucial importance for us. We owe it the concept of
‘mother tongue’ – an expression that the psychoanalysts did not invent, but
to which their theories impart a meaning. For the speaker is not an angel
(this is how Milner describes the ideal speaker posited by the Saussurian
schema of communication): she possesses a body, ensnared in the famous
triangle: she is inhabited by the language of her mother (this is only too clear
in the case of Wolfson, the literary madman who could not bear his mother
tongue – English);^8 and she is spoken by her mother tongue. A direct link
exists between the erotic body and accession to language.
If it is a good candidate, however, the erotic body is not the only one. There
is a fourthone: the labouring body. This expression is not current in French.
The reason is simple: the theory of it has been elaborated by a Canadian
Marxist, David McNally, in his book Bodies of Meaning. The concept of ‘labouring
body’ in McNally owes more to Benjamin and Bakhtin (especially his book
on Rabelais) than Voloshinov. This has some problematic aspects, but McNally’s
general position cannot leave us indifferent. This is how he formulates it in
his introduction:
One overarching argument runs through these pages: that postmodernist
theory, whether it calls itself post-structuralism, deconstruction or post-
Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body –
the sensate, biocultural, laboring body – from the sphere of language and
social life. As a result, I argue, these outlooks reproduce a central feature of
commodified society: the abstraction of social products and practices from
the laboring bodies that generate them....Propositions (II) • 179(^7) See Leclaire 1968; Irigaray 1985; and Favret-Saada 1977.
(^8) See Wolfson 1970.