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129 Speech is born from the unheard-of in language ,it alters already existing connections,it reforms usage. It can contribute to the construction of a phrase—that collection of sedimented utterances, words, idea-grammars, and parts of speech. Speech is therefore an event, never original, that breaks with an established order with which it communicates ; it is also liable to be combined with other discourses. One never speaks once and for all, and spoken words die out often enough. For verbal posterity,the glorious act of yesteryear may sometimes appear an insufficient expression. Yet enough force can remain in a gesture to be conserved until its relegation. The single no of a slave to his master is not the final word of colonial servitude or liberation. It is nonetheless active in thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, in whose last name I fancy that the memory of rebellion may be heard (fait non, or “enact no!”). A word when spoken strikes silence and babble at once; it wages battle against them. I have outlined how the social body uses silence and babble alternately, and simultaneously, with the aim of preventing all indigenous speech. This prescription endangers neither the spread of the language nor the authorization of any specific expression. On the contrary, the claim is that through language a way of killing discourses becomes instilled. This programmatic system is valid for any exercise of power in language. In extreme totalitarian situations,nearly an entire population can be successfully muzzled, Chapter 7 Reinventing Francophonie 130 GIVING LANGUAGES, TAKING SPEECH condemned to stupor or verbiage. One thinks of course of the Third Reich,of the silence of pain or of complicity,and of that lethal usage of German,whose daily advances the philologist Victor Klemperer transcribed. Moreover, what Klemperer named LTI (lingua tertii imperii) derived from the Führer’s seizure of forms of speech. Through the exclusive figure of Hitler, the Volk had had at its disposal the inventor of a language of hatred, immediately ready to duplicate and to order. Speech became transformed into phraseology. However, by means of absolute interdictions and the business of physical extermination, words were “ex-changed” (des paroles s’échangèrent). This exchange occurs in general, under the most extreme conditions, as well as in the everyday. A power that allies itself with language,and by this I mean an unquestionable power, seeks to restrain, to hobble, to prevent formulations that would run counter to the order it establishes or ratifies. Total success would, in the final analysis,require the destruction of all but one,which would amount to a disappearance of power over others,and therefore a terminal failure. Whether censure is ultimately ineffective has, on the contrary, little influence on those who manipulate it. We have seen this with the colonizers who empirically changed tactics as they went, and when they lost, each lost a local battle. The time of power is the différance of its downfall. Dictatorship, the double fact of saying and interdicting (dire et interdire), will have only a vague suspicion of the weapons that it wields against itself, to the degree that it thinks it knows the parries in advance. Vaugelas puts Usage in the same position as the sovereign—one must follow both without rationally disputing their decisions . To crown this authority, the grammarian compiles proofs of power, using rules irreducible to logic, and—in a supplementary move—exceptions to these rules. He places everything under the patronage of a Court that is indistinguishable, strictly indefinable, and outside of which nothing else is possible. However, these orders without orders are disseminated, and therefore appropriable, including by those who, outside the holy site of language, will choose to respect and to challenge Vaugelas. Frozen, Stolen, Stealing Words By giving French, the second colonial empire seeks to protect itself. It develops the multiple strategies of prevention that we have identified and whose effects can be seen to this day. In social space, speakers can accumulate prescriptions . In his first novel, Le docker noir, Sembène Ousmane tells of how an individual receives a set of theologico-political interdictions by being indigenous, a migrant, and a worker. Diaw Falla, the main character, has his own words taken from him: the manuscript he is editing is stolen, and it will REINVENTING FRANCOPHONIE 131 be published bearing a signature other than his own. In our vocabulary, the anecdote comprises the phrase of both possession and dispossession, and it also demonstrates a convergence...

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