[. . .]
Wolfson, like Brisset and Roussel, has no thought of producing a new language,
for which he would set codes, and which would compensate for the
insufficiencies of each language which has not provided signified and signifying
series totally isomorphous to those of English. By studying an increasing
number of languages, Wolfson, like the poet according to Mallarmé, strives to
‘remunerate the deficiencies of languages’. This is an interminable undertaking
that a personal Esperanto could have greatly simplified, had the rationality of
an economic calculation been able to find a place in that which recognizes only
the law of desire, whose despotism cannot be repelled. Like Mallarmé, Saussure,
and Roussel, Wolfson comes face to face with something like a transcendence, an
enigmatic being which effects the collusion of a desire and a form. This
elusive phantom, some aspect of which escapes from every grasp, whether it be
that of science, literature, or whatever, is the sign. The
absolute horizon of pleasure and suffering, of being and knowledge. Wolfson
cannot tolerate the idea of splitting the sign, and isolating the signifier
from the signified. The technique of universal translatability which he
institutes from one language to all the others seeks only to preserve the
integrity of the meaning, on condition that it be free to
migrate, to circulate among all languages without coming up against the
frontiers of a system which would arrest its flux, on condition that it be able
to reterritorialize or expatriate itself at will. This promotes an incessant
motility agitating from within the paradoxical content of a membrane, which
makes languages a coalescence of sounds and meanings struggling against chance.
The French in which Wolfson finally tells his story constitutes a makeshift
solution, the stasis of a respite in the depths of a temporary refuge to which
he episodically manages to withdraw. In no sense is it a metalanguage with
which the manipulator would put an end to the manipulations which affect him.
There is no more a place in Wolfson’s adventure for a metalanguage, than there
is for any Esperanto—thereby verifying Lacan’s formula. Language remains for
him an empirical continuum; the territory cannot be divided so as to permit the
emergence of a mastery, nor is there any possibility of a reprieve in which the
subject would no longer be in question, in which the interrogation which
continually calls him into question would lose its impact. In other words, for
Wolfson, there is no science.
SOURCE: Pierssens, Michel. The Power of Babel: A
Study of Logophilia, translated by Carl R. Lovitt (London; Boston; Henley:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 60.
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