defeats of the workers’ movement on a world scale have in no small measure
been due to the fact that the class enemy has always won the battle of language
and that the workers’ movement has always neglected this terrain.
This indicates my line of march. So here is my route map. I shall begin
with a critique of the philosophy of language that underlies the dominant
version of global linguistics: the Chomskyan research programme. I shall also
attempt a critique of Habermas’s philosophy of language in as much as it
does not reconstruct Marxism, but replaces it by a version of liberalism. I
shall attempt to reassess the Marxist tradition of thinking about language,
which is fragmentary and often sketchy. I shall make a certain number of
positive proposals regarding a Marxist philosophy of language. A balance-
sheet will be drawn up in the form of a box of conceptual tools that the
Marxist tradition has bequeathed us, and which enable us to think the linguistic
phenomena ignored by linguistics, but not by the dominant ideology.
‘Chirac est un ver’ • 13