that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc.
It is the sharing of a common view in thesematters that makes a household
and a state....It is clear...that the state is both natural and prior to the
individual.^14We recognise the distinction between phone and logos: animals are endowed
with phone, but they do not possess logos. The humanity of man consists in
the fact that he speaks. As is the case for Chomsky too, except that, in Aristotle,
it is a question not so much of a biological capacity (defended by Chomsky’s
sole argument – i.e. the child’s rapid acquisition of language, under-determined
by experience), but of a ‘logical’ capacity – that is, the capacity to go beyond
emotions and the cries they provoke and to distinguish between good and
evil (ethical capacity), the useful and the harmful (pragmatic capacity), and
the just and the unjust (political capacity). It even seems that his last capacity
has priority over the other two, since the first object proposed by nature is
the state. The linguistic bond is, therefore, indissolubly a social bond – i.e. a
political bond. We remember that the barbarians – those excluded from the
city – were thus named because they spoke gobbledygook – i.e. an idiom that
the Greeks did not understand. Whoever does not speak the language of
imperialism is a barbarian.
So the issue of the politics of the language is not a contingent aspect of a
set of political questions: it is essential to politics. In our modernity, it has
taken the privileged form of the issue of the national language. It is here
that we begin to take the methodological collectivismof Marxism seriously (I
use this expression by contrast with the methodological individualism of
the dominant philosophy of language and to recall its links with liberal
individualism). For, as we have seen, methodological individualism fetishises
the individual speaker. But language involves subjects living in society – what
Lucien Goldmann called ‘trans-individual’ subjects^15 – before interpellating
the individuals that we all are as subjects-speakers. We can, therefore, speak
metaphorically, but with a metaphor that hits the nail on the head, of a
collective speaker: this is called a national language. This metaphor, which
is, in reality, a synecdoche, tells us that one speaks a language only as a member
of a linguistic community which is also, inseparably, a political community,
Propositions (II) • 185(^14) Aristotle 1981, pp. 60–1.
(^15) See Goldmann 1970.