regulated behaviours, material transformations – the Althusserian definition
of practice – and communication which is communication in the physical
sense: the communication of a power). We understand the power of insults
and their impact on the body of the victim; we understand how the words
of the English language caused Louis Wolfson, to whom I referred earlier,
physical pain. Finally, we understand what the subject that emerges at the
end of the chain of interpellation is: a body to which linguistic interpellation
assigns a place, a socially and historically situated body, the ‘labouring’ body
of praxis. Before being fetishised into an ideal system facilitating the
communication and exchange of ideas transmitted with the aid of words,
language is a system of places, a site of struggles and power relations, but
also of processes of subjectivation through the assignment of places (an
operation described by François Flahault in La Parole intermédiaire).^12
Phenomena that illustrate this social materiality of the body are not wanting.
I have referred to insults and to what Judith Butler calls ‘hate speech’, which
fix the body of the victim rather as the pin fixes the butterfly, but which are
the site of a possible counter-interpellation when the victim seizes hold of
the insulting word to appropriate it or turn it against the aggressor (numerous
examples will be found in the case of homophobic words). But we can
generalise this implication of the materiality of the body to all language
games: even the practice of philosophy is not void of affects, which are not
(one hopes) as devastating as amorous passion (on the other hand,.. .). This
enables us to understand why it has been possible to claim that order-words
are the basic utterances; and readers will find excellent illustrations of this
in Favret-Saada’s work, where sorcery is a question of words even more than
of rituals, and where these words sometime have devastating physical effects
on the bodies to which they are addressed. Finally, we can understand why
we do not need to decide which – language or labour – came first: as attributes
of the social body, they presuppose one another. They are both derived, in a
dialectical embrace, from social praxis.
182 • Chapter Seven
(^12) See Flahault 1978.