9 - Life and Prison

Summary

The Prison of Language

In his inaugural lecture for the establishment of the Chair of Semiology at the Collège de France in Paris on 7 January 1977, Roland Barthes made a very strange and striking statement: ‘language […] is quite simply fascist’.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive […] Jakobson has shown that a speech-system is defined less by what it permits us to say than by what it compels us to say. In French (I shall take obvious examples) I am obliged to posit myself first as subject before stating the action which will henceforth be no more than my attribute: what I do is merely the consequence and consecution of what I am. In the same way, I must always choose between masculine and feminine, for the neuter and the dual are forbidden me […] Thus, by its very structure my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation. To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to subjugate: the whole language is a generalized rection […]

But language – the performance of a language system – is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. (Barthes 1979: 5)

The problem, of course, is that there is no way to escape language; there is no way out. ‘Unfortunately, human language has no exterior: there is no exit’ (Barthes 1979: 6). We are then in the prison-house of language, as Jameson says (1972).

The Prison of Philosophical Concepts

The capture of language is even more conspicuous when it comes to philosophical concepts. Let's look at the etymology of the word concept, at least in French and in English. It comes from concipere, which itself comes from capere cum, to grasp together. The term concept thus has the same origin as capture, captivity:

captive (adj.)

late 14c., ‘made prisoner, enslaved,’ from Latin captivus ‘caught, taken prisoner,’ from captus, past participle of capere ‘to take, hold, seize’ (from PIE root *kap- ‘to grasp’).