as the way to defuse antagonisms. This position is familiar to us: it grounds the
distinction in Habermas between communicative action and strategic action.
The second obvious fact is that there are linguistic policies and political
movements whose demands are in part – and sometimes in the main –
linguistic. There is, therefore, a politics of the national language, just as there
is a politics of dialects and regional languages. As we have seen, the concepts
of ‘linguistic imperialism’ and ‘becoming-minoritarian’ are useful for describing
such situations.
So language has a close relationship with politics. However, my thesis
wishes to argue that this relationship is not contingent. Let us take the example
of the relations between language and war. If war is a non-politics, it is
possibly because it not only replaces communicative action by strategic action,
but also acts directly on language. Elaine Scarry argues that war causes the
collapse of language, by reducing it to propaganda and cries of pain; that its
objective is the national self-description of the participants: it is a question
of imposing one’s own self-description and destroying the enemy’s (the forces
of Good against the forces of Evil). In short, war constitutes an operation of
‘verbal unanchoredness’.^13 However, this is not enough: this analysis makes
language the victim of politics (of a form of undemocratic politics) and does
not suggest that the link between language and politics is constitutive.
Yet acknowledgement of such a link is age-old. In fact, it dates back to
Aristotle. We have seen that he defined praxisas action in common and that
the cardinal example of praxisis political action. If we re-read the famous
opening of the Politics, we come upon the following passage:
[M]an is a political animal in a sense in which a bee is not, or any other
gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose;
and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of
speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by
other animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for their
nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain, but to
communicate these feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves
to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and
what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is184 • Chapter Seven
(^13) See Scarry 1985.