ABSTRACT
But this is neither here nor there-why do I mention it?----- Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern it not. (Tristram Shandy, VI, 6)
L A N G U A G E SP E A K S, I SPEA K L A N G U A G E
The land of fairy tales is peopled with characters who hide a heart of gold under a gruff appearance. In our wanderings through the remainder we have met one such figure, the Unknown Coiner. The origin of all arbitrary and irrational changes in a language, a major source of its corruption, he is also the only selfless poet, he who imagines and creates, and whom language forgets while it preserves his creations and benefits from them. Thus, we saw that the *bonjour N P ’ phrase, which was used to make fun of the name of the French minister for universities in December 1986, went from poet to novelist, from novelist to common parlance, and from there to an advertising copy-writer and to the student movement. In this long chain, the poet, Paul Eluard, is in the position of the (un) known coiner - someone (in this case we can give him a name, and a famous one at that) and yet no one, for the speakers who now use the phrase are not interested in its origin. The progress of the phrase along the chain, going as it does from literature to language and to politics, and from individual speaker to collective speaker or no speaker at all, is an excellent embodiment of the contradiction that is at the heart of language, because it is the core of every speaker’s experience of his language: when the subject speaks, it is always also, or always-already, language that speaks. Language speaks only if someone speaks it, if langue is actualized in parole; it speaks only if someone has already spoken it. Each generation appropriates the
system anew, and we are all the heirs of the Unknown Coiner. Yet, nobody speaks: the speaker is cast in the mould of a system exterior and anterior to him, he negotiates his meaning with the expressive potentialities that language allows him. Sometimes he is even convinced, in exhilaration or sorrow, that the words he utters are not his, but someone else’s, usually God’s. For God, or Nobody, is the source of speech. As the Red King might have said in Through the Looking-Glass: ‘To be able to hear Nobody speak! And at that distance too! I wish I had such imagination.’
