Langue and Ideology

Abstract

The reader may be thinking: ‘Whether or not there are sciences, whether or not there are philosophies, idealist or materialist, it remains the case that men speak, that languages exist, that their objective (scientific) study is possible, and indeed partly achieved today’ — a declaration by which he implicitly attests to the spontaneously materialist character of linguistics, as a scientific practice within the limits of its own domain, which is to recognise, as I said at the beginning of this work, that linguistics is constantly solicited outside its own domain, on a certain number of points about which, it is thought, linguistics must surely have ‘something to say’ (and, above all, semantics, logic and rhetoric). Basing myself on all I have argued hitherto, I now want to show that linguistics cannot avoid the issue simply by saying ‘I am not what you think I am!’, i. e., by reinforcing the defences at its frontiers. If the solicitations brought to bear on linguistics inevitably concern the questions I have just recalled, this is no accident: ‘the tongue finds the aching tooth,’ said Lenin, meaning that the constant return to a teasing question indicates that there is ‘something behind it’, it bears witness to the non-resolution of the question.