he would already be directly one with his linguistic nature and

would nowhere find any discontinuity or difference where any

history or knowledge might be produced.
The double articulation of language and speech seems, therefore,
to constitute the specific structure of human language. Only
from this can be derived the true meaning of that opposition of
dynamis and energeia, of potency and act, which Aristotle's
thought has bequeathed to philosophy and Western science.
Potency - or knowledge - is the specifically human faculty of
connectedness as lack; and language, in its split between language
and speech, structurally contains this connectedness, is
nothing other than this connectedness. Man does not merely
know nor merely speak; he is neither Homo sapiens nor Homo
loquens, but Homo sapiens loquendi, and this entwinement
constitutes the way in which the West has understood itself and
laid the foundation for both its knowledge and its skills. The
unprecedented violence of human power has its deepest roots in
this structure of language. In this sense what is experienced in the
experimentum linguae is not merely an impossibility of saying:
rather, it is an impossibility of speaking from the basis of a
language; it is an experience, via that infancy which dwells in the
margin between language and discourse, of the very faculty or
power of speech. Posing the question of the transcendental
means, in the final analysis, asking what it means 'to have a
faculty', and what is the grammar of the verb 'to be able'. And
the only possible answer is an experience of language.
In my unwritten work on the voice, the site of this transcendental
experience was sought instead in the difference between voice
and language, between phone and logos, inasmuch as this
difference opens the very space of ethics. From this perspective,
there are numerous drafts transcribing the passage in the Politics
where Aristotle, almost inadvertently, poses a decisive question
which I set out to interpret:
Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for the
purpose of making man a political animal she has endowed him
alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech. Speech
is something different from voice, which is possessed by other
animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for the
natural powers of some animals do indeed enable them both to feel
7
INFANCY AND HISTORY
pleasure and pain and to communicate these to each other. Speech
on the other hand serves to indicate what is useful and what is
harmful, and so also what is right and what is wrong. For the real
difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have
perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. And
it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a
household [oikia] or a city [polis].2
It has perhaps not been sufficiently noted that when, in De
interpretatione, Aristotle defines linguistic signification by referring
from the voice to the pathemata of the soul and to things,
he is not merely speaking of phone, but uses the expression ta en
te phone, what is in the voice. What is it in the human voice that
articulates the passage from the animal voice to the logos, from
nature to polis? Aristotle's response is well known: the voice
articulates grammata, letters. The ancient grammarians began
their argument with this opposition of the confused voice (phone
synkechymene) of animals and the human voice, which is
instead enarthros, articulated. But if we ask in what this
'articulation' of the human voice consists, we see that for them
phone enarthros simply means phone engrdmmatos, vox quae
scribi potest, the voice that can be written- in short, always preexisting
as written.
Aristotle's ancient commentators had asked why the philosopher
had introduced the gramma as the fourth (hermeneut'
alongside the other three (voice, pathemata, things) which
explain the circle of linguistic signification. So they attributed the
particular status of the gramma to the fact that, unlike the other
three, it is not just a sign, but also an element [stoicheion] of the
voice, as articulation. As both a sign and a constitutive element
of the voice, the gramma thus comes to assume the paradoxical
status of an index of itself [index sui]. In this way, the letter is
what always pre-exists within the moat between phone and
logos, the primordial structure of signification.
The book I did not write had quite a different hypothesis. The