ABSTRACT
The beginnings of the discipline of linguistics were imbued in the notion that one could find an origin to language, an original language. Modern linguistics, with Chomsky for instance, has returned to such a notion through universal grammar, which gives rise to a generative grammar steeped in genetics, another type of assumed genesis or origin. This chapter proposes that this and other pronouncements are put forward by Saussure, and others, as a type of prohibition, a necessary prohibition for the study of language. It examines the place and function of the concept of the origin of language in reference to psychoanalysis. The Linguistic Society of Paris had an internal rule which excluded any communications on the origins of language. Saussure ruptures such a schema firstly by separating speech from language by proposing two linguistics, and secondly, by inverting the relation between the potential and the act.
