language betrays phenomena by tending to fetishise processes into objects,
human relations into things; and it saves the phenomena by making it possible
to think them. Thought is a happy fetishism, by allusion; if it so readily turns
into doxa, it is because of the slope that inclines it towards harmful fetishism,
by illusion, which fixes and naturalises historical processes into natural objects.
The standpoint of the totality in linguistic matters consists in thinking the
two aspects of the contradiction at the same time (this is called the dialectic).
To think only one of them leads either to scientistic positivism and
methodological individualism, or to the romanticism of poetic expression,
always betrayed in advance by language.
Imperialism
Linguistic imperialism is part of imperialism tout courtand is one of its
privileged instruments. But it possesses specific characteristics, which means
that language is the site of specific contradictions (this does not mean that
imperialism tout courtis without contradictions: in reality, they are parallel
but not identical). In the case of linguistic imperialism, and its most notorious
consequence – glottophagy (etymologically, the devouring of one language
by another)^5 – the contradiction takes the form of an opposition between
centripetal forces, which reinforce the domination of the language of
imperialism, and centrifugal forces, which tend to render it minoritarian and
destabilise it. Thus, English is the language of imperialism in the current
conjuncture because it is in the process of imposing itself across the globe,
but also because it is beginning to crumble, and lives only because it is
constantly subject to processes of becoming-minoritarian. This contradiction
concerns not only English, which is simply the most striking illustration of
it, but all languages in that they are linguistic formations. For English will
make French suffer what French is making Corsican suffer. Faced with this
contradiction, we can adopt one of two attitudes. If we are pessimists, we
shall reckon that the battle has already been won by English and that it will
not suffer the fate of Latin – the canonical historical example of an imperial
language. In a singularly bitter irony, the dream of Zamenhof – the creator
of Esperanto – is supposedly on the point of being realised, but not in the
206 • Conclusion
(^5) See Calvet 1974.