conceive this linguistic sociology. But if we attend as closely as possible to
language, we note that in linguistic practice the specific form taken by class
struggle is the contradiction between agônand eirene. The dominant philosophy
of language, in the form of Grice’s pragmatics or Habermas’s theory of
communicative action, thinks in terms of co-operation – a noble objective that
is regrettably exploited when action becomes strategic, which it always does.
For our philosophy of language, agôndominates and co-operation is the
unstable result of an effort, a struggle, of the establishment of a power
relationship, which is also a relationship of places. This means that a principle
of struggle, which I have sought to formulate in The Violence of Language, will
be preferred to Grice’s principle of co-operation.^1 The motto of this position
is: there is no communicative action that is not simultaneously strategic action.
The principle of struggle will have a general formulation (we speak in order
to lay claim to a place and to impose one on an interlocutor) and some detailed
maxims, which can be combined in a super-maxim of agonistic relevance:
adapt your linguistic tactics to your strategy, never lose sight of the objective,
which is to remain in control of the discursive terrain. This conception of the
primacy of agônis consistent with my description of linguistic praxisin terms
of interpellation and subjectivation. It makes it possible to account for
phenomena that are usually dealt with (co-operation as an equilibrium in a
power relation) and those which are no less invariably excluded (whether
directly aggressive language games, like insults or threats, or linguistic
phenomena that escape the liberal framework of the egalitarian contract of
communication, like the rhetoric of reticence, the linguistic expression of
madness, or all the stylistic games that subvert the rules of grammar). But
the link is closer still. To think linguistic agônin terms of class struggle (and
to think class struggle, at least in part, in terms of linguistic agôn) is to effect
three inversions with respect to the dominant philosophy: it is to pass from
the individual to the collective (in order to struggle, you must not be alone:
you need opponents just as you need comrades in arms); it is to move from
thing to process (agônproduces speaker-subjects as the struggle produces the
classes who wage it); and it is to abandon the conception of the egalitarian
contract that governs the dominant thinking (in the form of the famous
Saussurian schema of communication): la langueis not a code equally possessed
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 201(^1) See Lecercle 1991.