a polis. I am aware that if this polishas something to do with the nation-state
of our modernity, it is not reducible to it: the English-speaking world covers
numerous states; the francophone world extends beyond the borders of the
Hexagon. The concept of ‘national language’, which is intimately bound up
with that of ‘natural language’, transcends the historical limits of the constitution
or dissolution of nation-states. But it plays a key role in what Benedict Anderson
calls an ‘imagined community’ – i.e. a nation:^16 a régime of distribution of
social capital, assigning places – i.e. identities – to subjects, creating
communities, and organising ideological consensus. This role is due to the
fact that man is a speaking animal in that he is a political animal (for
provocation’s sake I invert Aristotle’s formula); that inter-subjectivity emerges
from interlocution, which has a relationship of mutual presupposition with
social relations, the relations of labour and the division of labour, which are
also power relations.
We can see how Chomsky’s grammatical universalism, his refusal to consider
natural languages in that they are national languages, is profoundly mistaken:
English is something quite different from the few parameters more or less
which gradually make us slide from German to Dutch and from Dutch to
the language of Shakespeare. For this is the veritable unity of English, over
and above the dialects, registers, levels of language and language games that
make it up: a political unity in the broad sense – that is, the ever-unstable,
ever-consolidated result, in a historical conjuncture, of a power relation. This
is how a theoretician of translation, Lawrence Venuti, formulates the point:
There can be no question of choosing between adhering to the constants
that linguistics extracts from language or placing them in continuous variation
because language is a continuum of dialects, registers, styles, and discourses
positioned in a hierarchical arrangement and developing at different speeds
and in different ways. Translation, like any language use, is a selection
accompanied by exclusions, an intervention into the contending languages
that constitute any linguistic conjuncture....^17This text owes something to the conception of language that we have described
in Deleuze and Guattari (to refer to the extraction of constants as opposed
186 • Chapter Seven
(^16) See Anderson 1983.
(^17) Venuti 1998, pp. 29–30.