20.
Prodromus, p. 260, cited and translated by Drioton (cf.
DE, p. 46). On the polygraphic
project of Athanase Kircher, cf. Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combina-toria arte
delecta, 1663. On his relationships with Lully, Becher, Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz, cf.
DE,
pp. 61 f.
21.Réflexions sur les principles généraux de l’art d’écrire et en particulier sur les fon-
dements de l’écriture chinoise, 1718, p. 629. Cf. also L’Essai sur la chronologie générale de
l’Ecriture, which deals with “Judaic history,” “an abstraction of the religious respect inspired
by the Bible” (DE, pp. 8o f.) .
22.[This number was omitted from the French edition by mistake. The omission is carried in
this translation to keep the note numbers consistent with the original.]
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23 [sic]. Essai sur les hiéroglyphes des Egyptiens, où l’on voit l’Origine et le Progrès du
Langage et de LEcriture, l’Antiquité des Hiéroglyphes Scientifiques, et des Remarques sur la
Chronologie et la première Ecriture des Chinois ([Paris] 1744). It is the title of the French
translation of a portion [Vol. II, Book IV, sec. iv] of [Bishop William Warburton,] The Divine
Legation of Moses [:Demonstrated, on the Principles of a Religious Deist, from the Omission
of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation,
London,] (1737—41) . I examine below the influence of this work on Condillac, Rousseau,
and the collaborators of the Encyclopaedia.
24.DE, pp. 126-31.
25.Ernst Doblhofer, [Zeichen und Wunder: die Entzi f f erung verschollener Schri f ten und
Sprachen (Berlin, 1957); [translated by Monique Bittebierre as]
Le déchiffrement des
écritures ([Grenoble], 1959 ) , and
EP, p. 352.
26.Op cit., p. 2 [p. 110]. Madeleine V.-David criticizes this instrumentalism in the works
already cited. Instrumentalism, whose metaphysical dependence one could not exaggerate,
also often inspires the linguistic definition of the essence of language, assimilated into a
function, and, what is more significant, into a function exterior to its content or its agent. This
is always implied by the concept of the utensil. Thus André Martinet accepts responsibility for
and develops at length the definition of language as “instrument,” “tool,” etc., whereas the
“metaphoric” nature of this definition, recognized by the author, ought to have made it
problematic and to have renewed the question of instrumentality, of the meaning of
functioning, and of the functioning of mean-ing. (Cf. Eléménts de linguistique générale, pp.
12-14, 25 [pp. 18-20, 29].)
27.Cf., for example, Cohen, op. cit., p. 6.
28.Cf. GP II pp. 12 f., 23 f., 262 f.
29.I, p. 119 f.
30.Page 161 f.
31.Page 183. I refer also to L’Eloge de la main by Henri Focillon [Paris, 1964] and to Jean
Brun’s book, La main et l’esprit [P.U.F., 1963]. In a totally different context, we have
elsewhere specified the epoch of writing as the suspension of being-upright (“Force et
signification” and “La parole soufflée” in L’écriture et la différence).
32.Bk. I, chap. IV. In particular, the author shows there that “the emergence of writing no
more develops out of a graphic nothingness than does the emergence of agriculture without
the intervention of anterior states” (p. 278) ; and that “ideography is anterior to pictography”
(p. 280) .
33.Certain remarks of Leroi-Gourhan on “the loss of multi-dimensional symbolic thought”
and on the thought that “separates itself from linearized language” can perhaps be interpreted
thus.
34. Cf.
EP, pp. 138—39; GP I, pp. 238-50. “The development of the first cities not only
corresponds to the appearance of the technician of fire but . . . writing is born at the same time
as metallurgy. Here too, it is not a coincidence . . .” (I, p. 252). “It is at the moment when
agrarian capitalism begins to establish itself that the means of stabilizing it in written balance
accounts appears and it is also at the moment when social hierarchization is affirmed that
writing constructs its first genealogists” (p. 253). “The appearance of writing is not fortuitous;
after millennia of maturation in the systems of mythographic representation the linear notation
of thought emerges at the same time as metal and slavery (see chapter VI). Its content is not
fortuitous” (II, p. 67; cf. also pp. 161-62).
Although it is now much better known and described, this structural solidarity, particularly
between capitalization and writing, has long been known: among many others, by Rousseau,
Court de Gebelin, Engels, etc.
35. Linear writing has therefore indeed “constituted, during many millennia, independently of
its role as conserver of the collective memory, by its unfolding in one dimension alone, the
instrument of analysis out of which grew philosophic and scientific thought. The conservation
of thought can now be conceived otherwise than in terms of books which will only for a short
time keep the advantage of their rapid manageability. A vast ‘tape-library’ with an electronic
selection system will in the near future show pre-selected and instantaneously retrieved
information. Reading will still retain its im-
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portance for some centuries to come, in spite of its perceptible regression for most men, but
writing [understood in the sense of linear inscription] seems likely to disappear rapidly,
replaced by automatic dictaphones. Should one see in this a sort of restoration of the state
anterior to the phonetic confiscation of the hand? I should rather think that it is here a question