ABSTRACT
How does the theologico-political fiction of the perpetuity of the universitas enter into the concrete time of human history and what role does language as both a particular and universal play in this process? A certain idea of universal history emerges from Averroism, where the uncreated world theory implies the immortality of genres and species. Detached from the Christian eschatological plan and the allegorical reading of signs, but also distinct from the transient and disordered plane of accidents, this secular universal history refers to a plan in which events and actions concern the perpetuity and rationality of the whole of humanity, even when it is considered as a nested plurality of universitates. Language plays a major part in this configuration. Taking as point of departure the so-called “quarrel of the dictionaries,” this chapter demonstrates how the construction of the French language, as grammatically stabilized and endowed with perpetuity and sovereignty by the model of Latin, made it a laboratory of the universal, which contributed to the possibility of the appearance of philosophies of history in the eighteenth century.
