separating her from the totality. The standpoint that makes it possible to elude
fetishism is, therefore, the standpoint of the totality. Lukács adds that the world
of fetishism is the world of the ‘eternal laws of nature’ and that the ‘faculties’
of the mind are the symptom of the alienation of a subject trapped in fetishism.
We can see how the concept is important for a Marxist philosophy of language:
it enables us to avoid Chomskyan naturalism and, at the same time, suggests
an explanation of its emergence and scientific success. It does the same thing
with individualism, which is ubiquitous in the philosophy of language. In
matters of language, however, the concept produces a contradiction, but a
happy contradiction, which enables us to understand the real functioning of
language. On the one hand, language is the source of fetishism: words have
a natural tendency to freeze processes into objects (this is the function of
‘ontological metaphors’ which are all words of abstraction). Thus, ‘inflation’
is a set of processes and human relations. Thus named, it becomes a ‘thing’
(the referent of a noun). It therefore becomes manipulable: we can construct
a theory of it, fight it, seek to eliminate it, and so on. This natural dynamic
of language – this fetishism by illusion – is the source of the dynamic whereby
the ‘science’ of language constructs its object by separating what is pertinent
from what is not and excluding the major part of linguistic phenomena.
Against this fetishism of illusion, which directly counter-poses an equally
fetishised subject (the subject-speaker or enunciator) and object (la langue),
the Marxist philosophy of language must adopt the standpoint of the totality,
as a set of contradictory historical relations which constitute the reality of
language and the linguistic formations that we call languages. But there is a
second aspect: linguistic fetishism is not only illusion, it is also allusion, like
ideology in Althusser. For abstraction, the tendency to fetishise processes into
objects, is essential to the functioning of language. There is no thought without
abstraction – my discourse is proof of the fact – and the concept is a concrete
abstraction (I refer here to Althusser ’s well-known analysis of the concrete-
in-thought).^4 We shall observe, moreover, that fetishism is attributed by Lukács
to the historical epoch of capitalism and that language did not await the
constitution of capitalist relations of production before emerging. There is,
therefore, a dual, potentially contradictory relation to fetishism in language;
and this contradiction constitutes the heart of the functioning of language:
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 205(^4) See Althusser 1969, p. 182 ff.