ABSTRACT
The existence of language in the Classical age is both pre-eminent and unobtrusive.
Pre-eminent, because words have been allotted the task and the power of ‘representing thought’. But representing in this case does not mean translating, giving a visible version of, fabricating a material double that will be able, on the external surface of the body, to reproduce thought in its exactitude. Representing must be understood in the strict sense: language represents thought as thought represents itself. To constitute language or give it life from within, there is no essential and primitive act of signification, but only, at the heart of representation, the power that it possesses to represent itself, that is, to analyse itself by juxtaposing itself to itself, part by part, under the eye of reflection, and to delegate itself in the form of a substitute that will be an extension of it. In the Classical age, nothing is given that is not given to representation; but, by that very fact, no sign ever appears, no word is spoken, no proposition is ever directed at any content except by the action of a representation that stands back from itself, that duplicates and reflects itself in another representation that is its equivalent. Representations are not rooted in a world that gives them meaning; they open of themselves on to a space that is their own, whose internal network
gives rise to meaning. And language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself. Words do not, then, form a thin film that duplicates thought on the outside; they recall thought, they indicate it, but inwards first of all, among all those representations that represent other representations. The language of the Classical age is much closer to the thought it is charged with expressing than is generally supposed; but it is not parallel to it; it is caught in the grid of thought, woven into the very fabric it is unrolling. It is not an exterior effect of thought, but thought itself.
