The second manner paints sounds but without splitting up words and propositions. It would
thus be ideo-phonographic. Each signifier would refer to a phonic totality and a conceptual
synthesis, to a complex and global unity of sense and sound. One has not yet attained purely
phono-graphic writing (of the alphabetic types, for example) in which the visible signifier
refers to a phonic unity which in itself has no sense.
It is perhaps for this reason that the ideo-phonogram presupposes a “twofold convention:” that
which links the grapheme to its phonematic signified, and that which links this phonematic
signified, as a signifier, to its signified sense, to its concept, if one wishes. But in that context,
“two-fold convention” might also mean—it is less probable—something else: linguistic and
social convention. (“That can be done only when the language is completely formed and an
entire people is united by common laws.”) One does not need institutional laws for being
understood through the paintings of things and of natural beings, but one needs them for sta-
bilizing the rules of the painting of sounds and of the unity of words and ideas.
However, Rousseau calls “barbaric” the nations capable of these “common laws” and this
“twofold convention.” The use of the concept of barbarity in the Essay is very disconcerting.
Often (in Chapters 4 and 9) Rousseau makes it function in a perfectly deliberate, rigorous, and
systematic way: three states of society, three languages, three scripts (savage/ barbaric/civil;
hunter/shepherd/ploughman; pictography/ideo-phonography/analytical phonography). Yet
elsewhere, an apparently looser use of the word (certainly of the word “barbarity” if not of
“barbaric”) designates again a state of dispersion, whether it be of pure nature or of domestic
structure. Note 2 of Chapter 9 calls “savages” those whose barbarity is subsequently
described: “Apply these ideas to primitive men and you will see the reason for their barbarity.
. . . These barbaric times were a golden age, not because men were united, but because they
were separated. . . . Scat-tered over the vast wilderness of the world, men would relapse into
the
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stupid barbarism in which they would be if they were bom of the earth”
[Essay, pp.
33, 36].
Domestic-barbaric society had no language. Familial idiom is not a language. “Living almost
without society, widely scattered, hardly speaking at all, how could they write?” Is not this
sentence in flagrant contradiction with the attribution, in Chapter 4, of a script and even of a
twofold convention to barbaric peoples?
No commentary can, it seems, efface this contradiction. An interpretation may attempt it. It
would consist, uncovering a profound level of literality while neutralizing another one more
superficial, of searching then within Rousseau’s text for the right to isolate relatively the
structure of the graphic system from the structure of the social system. Although the social
and graphic types correspond ideally and by analogy, a society of the civil type may have in
fact a writing of the barbaric type. Although barbarians hardly speak and do not write, one
finds the characteristics of a certain writing within barbarity. In saying thus that “the depicting
of objects is appropriate to a savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric
people, and the alphabet to civilized peoples [peuples policés]” [Essay, p. 17], one does not
contravene the structural principle, rather one confirms it. In our society, where the civil type
has appeared, the elements of pictographic writing would be savage, the ideo-phonographic
elements barbaric. And who would deny the presence of all these elements in our practice of
writing?
For even while maintaining the principle of structural analogy, Rous-seau insists nonetheless
on preserving the relative independence of social, linguistic, and graphic structures. He will
say it further on: “The art of writing does not at all depend upon that of speaking. It derives
from needs of a different kind which develop earlier or later according to circumstances
entirely independent of the duration of the people, and which might never have occurred in
very old nations” [p. 19].
The fact of the appearance of writing is therefore not necessary. And it is this empirical
contingency which allows the putting in parenthesis of the fact in structural or eidetic
analysis. That a structure whose internal organization and essential necessity we know should
appear in fact here or there, sooner or later, is, as I have noted elsewhere, the condition and
the limit of a structural analysis as such and in its proper moment. In its proper in-stance,
attention to the internal specificity of the organization always leaves to chance the passage
from one structure to another. This chance may be thought, as it is here the case, negatively as
catastrophe, or affirmatively as play. This structuralist limit and power has an ethico-meta-
physical convenience. Writing in general, as the emergence of a new system of inscription, is
a supplement of which one would wish to learn only the additive aspect (it happens
unexpectedly, at a stroke [sur-venu d’un coup], into the bargain) and the noxious influence
(arrives ill-advisedly, in addi-
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tion [mal-venu, en plus], from the exterior, when nothing in the conditions of its past made it
necessary) . Not to attribute any necessity to its historical appearance is at once to ignore the
appeal of substitution and to think evil as a surprising, exterior, irrational, accidental and
therefore effaceable addition.
The Alphabet and Absolute Representation
Thus graphics and politics refer to one another according to complex laws. They must thus
both clothe the form of reason as a process of degradation which, between two universalities
and from catastrophe to catastrophe, should return to a total reappropriation of presence.
Should [devrait] : it is the mode and tense of a teleological and eschatological anticipation
that superintends Rousseau’s entire discourse. Thinking differance and supplementarity in this
mode and tense, Rousseau wishes to announce them from the horizon of their final
effacement.
In this sense, in the order of writing as in the order of the city, as long as the absolute
reappropriation of man 19 in his presence is not accomplished, the worst is simultaneously the
best. The furthest in the time of lost presence is closest to the time of presence regained.
Hence the third condition: civil man and alphabetic writing. It is here that, in the most
conspicuous and grave manner, law supplements nature and writing speech. In one case as in
the other, the supplement is representation. We recall the fragment on Pronunciation: