On language and the body

Paul Henry

pp. 70-74

in: Colin MacCabe (ed), The talking cure, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

One of the most remarkable aspects of Chomsky's concept of competence is the transformation it introduces into the representation of the relations between language and the body. By positing that something fundamental in language is not learnt, this concept freed linguistics from the behaviourism inherent in structuralism while at the same time opening the way to a systematic theory of syntax in linguistics, breaking with grammar and rhetoric. But Chomsky's undertaking has remained dominated by a basic psychological principle: in man, everything which is not learnt comes from the body. Chomsky speaks of the innate genetic bases of linguistic competence, conceives the latter as a "mental organ". In other words, it is in the guise of the psychological duality of body and mind that, even in Chomsky, linguistics meets the body. Paradoxically it seems nonetheless that it only thus meets it the better to be rid of it and to establish itself in the dimension of the subject, the dimension which is properly that of language. It is by proxy of the notion of knowledge (savoir) and more precisely of a knowledge supposed to lie in the body, at least in its foundations, that the autonomy and specificity of the concept of competence is speculatively guaranteed.