Re: Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the O …

看板EngTalk (全英文聊天)作者fizeau (Gratias ad Opus)時間18年前 (2008/01/06 18:16)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

留言0則, 0人參與討論串1/5 (看更多)

Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil. Desire desires the exteriority of presence and nonpresence. This exteriority is a matrix. Among all its representations (exteriority of nature and its others, of good and of evil, of innocence and perversity, of consciousness and nonconsciousness, of life and death, etc.), one in particular requires our special notice. It will introduce us to The Essay on the Origin of Languages. It is the exteriority of mastery and servitude or of liberty and nonliberty. Among all these representations, the exteriority of liberty and nonliberty is perhaps privileged. More clearly than others, it brings together the historical (political, economic, technological) and the metaphysical. Heidegger has summa- rized the history of metaphysics by repeating that which made of liberty the condition of presence, that is to say, of truth. And speech always presents it- self as the best expression of liberty. It is by itself language at liberty and the liberty of language, the freedom of a speech which need not borrow its sig- nifiers from the exteriority of the world, and which therefore seems incapable of being dispossessed. Do the most imprisoned and deprived beings not make use of that interior spontaneity which is speech? What is true of the citizen is in the first place true of those naked beings exposed to the power of others: the newborn. "Your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture. Their voice alone is free; why should they not raise it in complaint?" (Emilr, p.15 [p.11]; italics added). The Essay on the Origin of Languages opposes speech to writing as presence to absence and liberty to servitude. These are almost the final words of the Essay : "But I say that any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to the people assembled is a slavish tongue. It is impossible for a people to remain free and speak that tongue" (Chap. XX). With this sentence, through the detour of the Levi-Straussian ideology of the "neighborhood," of a "small com- munity where everybody knew everybody else" and where nobody went beyond ear- shot we have set foot again upon a Rousseauist ground that we had hardly left: a classical ideology according to which writing takes the status of a tragic fatality come to prey upon natural innocence, interrupting the golden age of the present and full speech. Rousseau concludes thus: These superficial reflections, which hopefully might give birth to more pro- found ones, I shall conclude with the passage that suggested them to me: "To observe in fact and to show by examples, the degree to which the character, customs and interests of a people influence their language, would provide mate- rial for a sufficiently philosophical investigation." (Remarks on a General and Reasoned Grammar, by M. Duclos, p. 2 [pp. 73-74]). In fact, the Commentary(3) of Duclos, with the Essai sur l'origine des con- naissances humaines of Condillac (1746), seems to have been one of the major " souces" of The Essay on the Origin of Languages. One might even be tempted to consider Rousseau's Essay as the accomplishment of the "philsophic" program charted by Duclos. The latter regrets the penchant we have of making our language soft, effeminate and monotonous. We have reason to avoid roughness in pronunciation, but I think we go too far into the opposite fault. Formerly we pronounced many more diphthongs than we do today; in the tenses, as J'avois [jhavwa], j'aurois [jhorwa], and in many nouns, such as Francois [Franswa], Anglois [Anglwa], Polonois [Polonwa], whereas today we say j'avais [jhavay], Fransay, Anglay, Polonay. Those diph- thongs, however, gave force and variety to pronunciation, and saved it from a monotony that partly arises from our multitude of mute e-s. (4) The degradation of the language is the symptom of a social and political degra- dation (a theme that will become most frequent in the second half of the eigh- teenth century); it has its origins in the aristocracy and in the capital city. Duclos announces the Rousseauist themes most precisely when he holds forth thus : "What we call society, and what our ancestors would merely have called a coterie, decides the nature of language and manners [moeurs] today. When a word has been for a time in use in these social circles, its pronunciations softens. "(5) Duclos fins equally intolerable similar multilations inflicted upon words, their corruptions, and above all their abridgements; one must on no account shorten [couper] words: This nonchalance in pronunciation, which is not incompatible with an impatience in expression, makes us corrupt even the nature of words, by chopping them up in such a way that the meaning is no longer recognizable. Today, for example, one pronounces the proverb as, in spite of him and his teeth [ses dens], rather than in spite of him and his helpers [ses aidans]. We have more of these words shortened or corrupted by usage than one would credit. Our language will become imperceptibly more proper for conversations than for the tribune, and conver- sation sets the tone for the Chair, the Bar, and for the Theater; whereas with the Greeks and Romans, the tribune did not submit to it. A sustained pronun- ciation and a fixed and distinct prosody must be maintained in particular by peoples who are obliged to treat publicly matters that are of interest to all the auditors, for, other things being equal, and orator whose pronunciation is firm and varied would be understood at a greater distance than another... Deterioration in the language and in pronunciation is thus inseparable from political corruption. The political model that inspires Duclos is Athenian or Roman democracy. The language is the property of the people. Each derives its unity from the other. For if language has a body and a system, they inhere in the people assembled and "bodily" united: "It is a people in a body that makes a language....A people is thus the absolute master of the spoken language, and it is an empire they possess unawares." To dispossess the people of their mas- tery of the language and thus of their self-mastery, one must suspend the spoken element in language. Writing is the very process of the dispersal of peoples unified as bodies and the beginning of their enslavement: "The body of a nation alone has authority over the spoken language, and the writers have the right over the written language: The people, Varro said, are not masters of writing as they are of speech" (p.420). This unity of political and linguistic evil calls for a "philosophical exami- nation." Rousseau already responds to this appeal by means of the Essay. But we shall, very much later, recognize Duclos's problematics in a much sharper form. The difficulty of the pedagogy of language and of the teaching of foreign languages is, Emile will say, that one cannot separate the signifier from the signified, and changing words, one changes ideas in such a way that the teach- ing of a language transmits at the same time an entire national culture over which the pedagogue has no control, which resists him like the already-there preceding the formation, the institution preceding instruction. You will be surprised to find that I reckon the study of languages among the useless lumber of education....If the study of languages were merely the study of words, that is, of the symbols by which langauge expresses itself, then this might be a suitable study for children; but languages, as they change the sym- bols, also modify the ideas which the symbols express. Minds are formed by lan- guage, thoughts take their color from its ideas. Reason alone is common to all. Every language has its own form, a difference which may be partly cause and partly effect of difference in national character; this conjecture appears to be confirmed by the fact that in every nation under the sun speech follows the changes of manners, and is preserved or altered along with them (p.105 [p.73]). And this entire theory of the teaching of languages rests on rigorous distinc- tions separating thing, meaning (or idea), and sign; today we would speak of the referent, the signified, and the signifier. If the representer may have an effect, sometimes pernicious, on the represented, and if the child must not and cannot "learn to speak more than one langauge," it is that "each thing may have a thousand different signs for him; but each idea may have only one form" (ibid .) Launched by Duclos, the invitation to the "philosophic examination" occupied Rousseau for a long time. In 1754 it had been formulated in the Commentary. It is cited at the conclusion of the Essay; elsewhere other passages of the Commentary are evoked, notably in Chapter VII. Do these citations, which could not have been anterior to the publication of the second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men), also dated 1754, lead us to some certainty about the date of the composition of the Essay? And to what extent can one connect this chronological problem with the systematic problem of what is called author's thought? The importance that we assign to this work compels us to consider the question. On the date of the composition of this little known and posthumously published text, the most authoritative interpreters and historians rarely agree. And when they do, it is generally for different reasons. The ultimate question at stake within this problem is evident: can one speak of this as a work of maturity? does its content accord with the second Discourse and the later works? In this debate, external arguments always mingle with internal ones. The de- bate has continued for more than seventy years and has gone through two phases. If we begin by remembering the most recent, it is primarily because it has de- veloped a little as if the first phase had not brought the external aspect of the problem to what I would consider to be a definite conclusion. But it is also because, in a certain way, it has renewed the form of the internal pro- blem. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 163.25.118.131