ABSTRACT
National languages have usually been posed, in part, as solutions to the problem of divisiveness figured by the Tower of Babel. In his classic discussion, George Steiner, portrays the story of Babel as the loss of a world in which Adam's act of naming brings things into being. This chapter implies rupture between two linguistic functions, reference and denotation on the one hand, and performativity, with all the active and interactive features of speech, on the other. It discusses the separation that follows on the first: if naming is only a linguistic act (and if denoting is the only linguistic act), then there exists a rupture between what exists in the world and the names for what exists. This is the foundation for the arbitrariness of the sign, the semiotic condition of possibility for linguistic diversity. Only, according to this narrative, it is the rupture in language which brings about the subsequent social diversity.
