well as every intonation [finds its] place at this intersection of linguistic
philosophies and [is] drawn into an intense ideological struggle.^24To summarise. The thesis that language is a political phenomenon contains
a certain number of propositions.
First proposition: human beings are political animals because they are
speaking animals. Language is the requisite, even constitutive, medium of
politics. Agôn– this generalised ‘athleticism’, as Deleuze and Guattari call
it^25 – is the archetypal form of the political relation. For Deleuze, this is the
essence of democracy, in the form of democratic debate. For Marxists, this is
the essence of struggle (which is also class struggle) in that it initially, and
inevitably, takes the form of a linguistic struggle.
Second proposition: the converse is also true. Human beings are speaking
animals because they are political animals. Political action is the canonical
form of praxis, at least it is for a tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle
to Habermas; and, for us, linguistic praxisis the archetypal form of praxis. This
comes down to saying that language and politics are inextricably interwoven.
Language is at once the expression and form of constitution of the human
collectivity; it attests to the fact that, among human beings, one never begins
with the individual, but always with the socius, from which the individual
emerges through a process of individuation which is a process of subjectivation
by interpellation. The umbilical cord, which is also the social bond, uniting the
individual to the sociusis language. We understand why Marxists have never
been afraid to have truck with the mythical question of the origin of language –
to which, naturally, they suggest different answers, from the collective practice
of the hunt in Tran Duc Thao to the division of labour in Marx.
Third proposition: ideas become material forces when they seize hold of
the masses. They do so only because they are embodied in language – because,
in reality, they are language (what is called order-words). For political ideas
do not pre-exist order-words, which they do not ‘translate’ into a language
that is more accessible to the masses: they areorder-words that inscribe
them on the body of the socius. We have seen that, in his early works, Marx
emphasised the materiality of language as a sensory reality. The ideas that
Propositions (II) • 195(^24) Bakhtin 1984, p. 471.
(^25) Deleuze and Guattari 1993, p. 8.