the Hegelian ‘essential section’ criticised by Althusser, ignores, in favour of
the system whose construction it makes possible, the complex temporality of
real languages (a differential temporality, which is not the same for the
vocabulary, the syntax, or the phonemes); and the fact that languages are
never immobile but constantly subject to historical change, rendering synchronic
description somewhat arbitrary. The time of history is not to be stopped and
languages evolve much more rapidly than linguists would like. We therefore
need to conceive a language not as a stable, arrested system, but as a system
of variations.
Finally, we need a conception of languages that does not ignore the
proliferation of dialects, registers and levels of language; a conception which
does not ignore the fact that, for reasons which are not unconnected with a
politicsof language, there is a major dialect, but that this majordialect is
constantly subject to a process of becoming-minoritarian, which subverts it but
also causes it to live. These terms are borrowed from the critique of linguistics
by Deleuze and Guattari.^9
Readers will understand that a linguistics, whichever one it might be, would
be insufficient here, for both negative and positive reasons. For negative
reasons: in taking as its object Saussure’s langue, linguistics prevents itself
from thinking the phenomena that interest us – the historicity of linguistic
phenomena, the bond between a natural language and one or more cultures,
and so on. This is, in a sense, its grandeur, but also its limitation. And for
positive reasons: the controversy between Stalin and the supporters of Marr,
whose aporiae I shall recall later, obliges us to let scientists work in peace. It
is highly likely that Marxism as such has nothing to say about linguistics or
any other scientific activity. On the other hand, it is indispensable when it
comes to formulating a philosophyof language and criticising those adhered
to by linguists, whether implicitly or explicitly. That is why I shall attempt
to propose not a theory, but a Marxist philosophyof language: a theory of
language would be nothing but a linguistics that dare not speak its name.
And this philosophy will be understood in an Althusserian sense – as an
instrument with which to draw lines of demarcation, as a political intervention
in the field of language.^10
‘Chirac est un ver’ • 11(^9) See Deleuze and Guattari 1986 and 1987.
(^10) See Althusser 1990.