It may well be that we belong to an age of criticism whose lack of a primary philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its fatality: an age of intelligence that keeps us irremediably at a distance from an original language. For Kant, the possibility and necessity of a critique were linked, through certain scientific contents, to the fact that there is such a thig a knowledge. In our time--and Nietzsche the philologist testifies to it--they are linked to the fact that lan- guage exists and that, in the innumerable words spoken by men--whether they are reasonable or senseless, demonstrative or poetic--a meaning has taken shape that hangs over us, leading us forward in our blindness, but awaiting in the darkness for us to attain awareness before emerging into the light of day and speaking. We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the task of hearing wjat has already been said. But is it inevitable that we should know of no other function for speech (parole) than that of commentary? Commentary questions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; it tries to uncover that deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth; in other words, in stating what has been said, one has to restate what has never been said. In this activity known as commentary which tries to transmit an old, unyielding discourse seem- ingly silent to itself, into another, more prolix discourse that is both more archaic and more contemporary--is concealed a strange attitude to- wards language: to comment is to admit by definition an excess of the signified over the signifier; a necessary, unformulated remainder of thought that language has left in the shade--a remainder that is the very essence of that thought, driven outside its secret--but to comment also presupposes that this unspoken element slumbers within speech (parole), and that, by a superabundance proper to the signifier, one may, in questioning it, give voice to a content that was not explicitly signified. By opening up the possiblity of commentary, this double plethora dooms us to an endless task that nothing can limit: there is always a certain amount of signified re- maining that must be allowed to speak, while the signifier is always offered to us in an abundance that questions us, in spite of ourselves, as to what it 'means' (veut dire). Signifier and signified thus assume a substantial autonomy that accords the treasure of a virtual signification to each of them separately; one may even exist without the other, and begin to speak of itself: commentary resides in that supposed space. But at the same time, it invents a complex link between them, a whole tangled web that concerns the poetic values of expression: the signifier is not supposed to 'translate' without concealing, without leaving the signified with an inexhaustible reserve; the signified is revealed only in the visible, heavy world of a signifier that is itself burdened with a meaning that it cannot control. Commentary rests on the postulate that speech (parole) is an act of 'trans- lation', that it has the dangerous privilege images have of showing while concealing, and that it can be substituted for itself indefinitely in the open series of discursive repetitions; in short, it rests on a psychologistic interpretation of language that shows the stigmatas of its historical origin. This is an exegesis, which listens, through the prohibitions, the symbols, the concrete images, through the whole apparatus of Revelation, to the World of God, ever secret, ever beyond itself. For years we have been commenting on the language of our culture from the very point where for centuries we had awaited in vain for the decision of the Word. To speak about the thought of others, to try to say what they have said has, by tradition, been to analyse the signified. But must the things said, else- where and by others, be treated exclusively in accordance with the play of signifier and signified, as a series of themes present more or less implicitly to one another? Is it not possible to make a structural analysis of discourses that would evade the fate of commentary by supposing no remainder, nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical appearance? The facts of discourse would then have to be treated not as autonomous nuclei of multiple significations, but as events and functional segments gradually coming together to form a system. The meaning of a statement would be defined not by the treasure of intentions that it might contain, revealing and con- cealing it at the same time, but by the difference that articulates it upon the other real or possible statements, which are contemporary to it or to which it is opposed in the linear series of time. A systematic history of discourses would then become possible. Until recently, the history of ideas was only aware of two methods: the first, aesthetic method involved analogy, with diffusion charted in time (geneses, filiations, kinships, influences) or on the surface of a given historical space (the spirit of a period, its Weltanschauung, its fundamental categories, the organization of its sociocultural world). The second, which was a psychological method, involved a denial of contents (this or that century was not as rationalistic, or irrationalistic as was said or believed), from which there has since developed a sort of 'psychoanalysis' of thought, the results of which can quite legitimately be reversed--the nucleus of the nucleus being always its opposite. --

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