ABSTRACT
The somatic ecologies of language are self-guided entelechies of semiology, and morality that point to the need for a somatic ecology of translation as Dao: A Christian missionary believes he must instil in a primitive people the idea of soul. Saussure's actual late reflections on language were far more radical, indeed, far more radically grounded in a social psychology and sociosomatics of language. It is true that languages, like other social ecologies, lack the kind of initiative consciente/conscious initiative or rational agency that one take to be characteristic of individual humans; but depriving them theoretically of all agency would reduce them to Darwinian processes of random natural selection. The values assigned to linguistic units by the individual are not assigned to them by the individual. The potential for rules that creates linguistic regularity is random, fortuitous, a striking chaos or darkness that is neither chaotic nor dark.
