Language trafficked in totalitarian islets
- Ariane Bilheran
- Sep 14, 2021
- 15 min read
Bilheran, A. "Language trafficked in totalitarian islets", in the revue Argument, vol. 24, n°1, Quebec (Canada), autumn - winter 2021-2022.
— Why were you in jail? I asked.
— Well, I said some words that didn't sit well.
Victor Klemperer, LTI, The Language of the Third Reich Notebooks of a Philologist.
To justify themselves, they changed the usual value of words in relation to the actions they describe.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War.
We live in curious and unprecedented times.
Curious because we see totalitarian islands emerging everywhere, in the workplace, in the economic, health and political spheres, in religious and spiritual approaches, but more broadly, in all collective dimensions, in the name of anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-homophobic, ecological ideals, etc. Unprecedented, because if ancient totalitarianism had functioned with a monolithic ideology, today it is the multiplication of totalitarian ideologies in the social field that is surprising and continues, in what they produce in the corruption of language.
Totalitarianism is a political moment that works through terror and persecution, which aims at "total domination", that is, it interferes in all social, private and intimate spheres, including in the psyche of individuals, in their beliefs and their capacity to reason. It is, above all, a collective psychic phenomenon, which produces a paranoid delirium (a "madness of reasoning") that works through delusional contagion. It is detected, among other symptoms, in a corruption of language, which bogs down thought and leads it to a shared delusional belief, without concern for the search for truth or the relationship with experience.
All totalitarian islets create their own "newspeak", for example within companies that operate by terrorizing, harassing and persecuting their employees. All totalitarianism lives off the conquest of "ideological pretension" (Hannah Arendt) and the "rectification of thought" (Mao). To overcome these ideological levels, which are increasingly moving away from the search for truth and knowledge, and to persecute opponents, the instrumentalization of language is necessary.
Every language is a heritage. Totalitarian ideology, which always aims to destroy the old and rewrite history, to produce the "new man" without roots, monopolizes it. Attacking language has the ambition and the effect of destroying this rootedness in a heritage and destabilizing individuals, in order to offer them a new field of representations that corresponds to the new delusional reality proposed by totalitarianism.
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