was one of relief. After the damage done by the Lysenko affair and the doctrine
counter-posing proletarian science to bourgeois science, Stalin’s intervention
seemed full of good sense and his dead opponent, Nicholai Marr, appeared
to be one of those ‘literary madmen’ who claim to demonstrate the squaring
of the circle or maintain that the earth is flat. The reaction of Marcel Cohen,
member of the Paris School and a follower of Meillet, who at the time performed
the function of official linguist of the French Communist Party, is typical of
this mind-set: in linguistics at least, one could once again be both a loyal
activist and a scientist respected by one’s peers.^8 This relief still finds orthodox
expression in a passage in For Marxwhere, at one point in his analysis,
Althusser evokes the ‘madness’ of Marr, which Stalin had reduced to ‘a little
more reason’.^9 This doxawas widely shared by the academic linguists of the
time and their successors.
Fifty years on, readers will not be surprised to learn, this relief cannot as
readily be shared. In the first place, it simplified for Western purposes a
discussion in Soviet linguistics where it is not obvious that the contrast between
the good and the bad, the sane and the mad, was so clear cut. In particular,
the condemnation of Marr’s theoretical eccentricities (his theory of the four
elements, his theory of stages) eclipsed the positive impact of the New Theory
of Language – for example, as regards the description of the languages of the
countless Soviet nationalities.^10 And, by declaring it closed, it buried the issue
of the relations between language and the social totality, between language
and the superstructure – that is, the question of what constitutes the specificity
of Marxism when it comes to thinking about language. We must therefore
induce a dialogue, from beyond the grave, between two Marxists: Stalin,
whose intervention is all too famous, and Pasolini, author of a little-known
text with the revealing title of ‘Dal laboratorio (appunti en poèteper una
linguistica marxista)’.^11
For obvious reasons, Stalin’s text has not been reprinted in France for a
long time. Short extracts appeared in 1966 in Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, when
the Althusserians were (briefly) interested in Stalin as a possible antidote to
The Marxist Tradition • 75(^8) See Cohen 1950 and 1971.
(^9) See Althusser 1969, p. 22.
(^10) On these discussions, see Marcellesi and Gardin 1974; L’Hermitte 1987; and
Langages 11 1969 and 1977. [Editorial note: also see Brandist].
See Pasolini 1972.