Pour introduire la rumeur en pragmatique. Performatif et politiques de la voix après Benveniste

Abstract

For an Introduction of Rumour to Pragmatics. The Performative and the Politics of Voice after Benveniste

During these last decades a category of performative has polarized the problematic articulations between the analysis of power and the theory of discourse. This article starts from Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of one of its sources, namely Émile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation. We aim at reconstructing a heuristic contrast between two borderline cases of speech acts, enlightening and contesting, in two opposite ways, the discursive-institutional presuppositions of standard pragmatics: the Leninist revolutionary slogan (mot d’ordre), the rumour in M of Fritz Lang. These two singular speech acts are also two types of voice as “the effect of bodies” or “body events” in a political field. They both raise the problem of incorporation of the voice in a subject of political enunciation, or the problem of the material operations that “machinate” voices onto bodies, amplify them, or, on the contrary, disconnect them so as to produce disembodied voices or voiceless bodies. Finally that leads us to outline how the Deleuzian conception of performative incorporates the reflections presented in Cahiers du cinema in the early 1970s concerning the concept of “voice-over”, the ambiguity of the relationship between the voices and bodies suggested, and the ambivalence of the powers of voice for an entire century which, undoubtedly, is not over yet; herein, the creation of new phonic bodies and the political capture of stagings of discourse have both intensified.

Keywords: performativity, linguistic pragmatic, Benveniste, Deleuze-Guattari, revolutionary slogan, rumour


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