What could be more reasonable than a dictionary? It informs, it inquires, it even teaches, if we wish to read and not only consult it; with no long speeches, with no vain rhetoric, it delivers knowledge soberly and democratically, no matter who solicits it. But this robust, even simplistic object, if one considers the muddle of facts, notions, and substances of which the world is made, takes on, without mentioning it (nothing less talkative than a dictionary), the most serious, burning problems, perhaps even the most vertiginous problems the world has come to know.
The first touches on the infinitude of a language's words. No one knows how many words make up the French language. Language changes from minute to minute, from place to place, at the whim of the innumerable words that are pronounced; sometimes a new word (not even: simple "gibberish") spreads, propagates, "takes" -- it may be captured, added to the dictionary (and perhaps, soon, it may disappear). The dictionary battles endlessly with time and space (social, regional, cultural); but it is always defeated; life is always more ample, more quick, exceeding not language itself, but its codification. This is why we are constantly in need of new dictionaries. This, too, is why with each dictionary, we return to a certain idea of the essential: because the number of words is unmasterable, we decide upon a pertinence (of speciality or of audience) that will liberate us from the anguish of infinitude and produce a dictionary that is finite because it is selective: but let's not fool ourselves : it is just the tip of the iceberg. At least, knowing this, we have glimpsed, behind this modest object that many take for a simple instrument of verification, the very secret of the universe : its inifitude, or to use a less metaphysical word, its subtlety.
Here is a second kind of vertigo. We gather words together, give them definitions : it's a dictionary. We gather things together (with names, of course), give them descriptions: it's an encyclopedia. Sometimes, as in this edition, the two operations are wed, and a dictionary of words and things is produced, an encyclopedic dictionary. While we have felt the complementarity of the two functions, one normative (establishing the usage of words), the other objective (describing the particularity of things) since the 17th century, these kinds of dictionaries have not been, as far as I know, numerous. It's fairly paradoxical; since in fact -- and here is where an enormous philosophical debate arises -- every word names a thing, or a nebula of things, but also every thing can only suitably exist if it is supported, consecrated, assumed by a word. Words return to things? Yes, but also, in the same movement, to other words. The separation of words and things, as two distinct and hierarchised orders, is hence an ideological phenomenon, as M. Foucault has shown us. This separation implies that we are dealing with a realist philosophy that posits the thing in itself, outside of the subject who speaks of it, and makes of the word a simple instrument of communication : a view opposed, in the Middle Ages, to a nominalist tradition that was defeated, as we know, by the modern spirit. Since realism's victory, we believe that on one side we speak, and on the other, create; that on one side we discourse, embellish, idealise; and that on the other, we construct, produce, sell, possess; on one side, art (words), and on the other, science (facts). The dictionary, even though historically it was the product of it, makes this bourgeois reason falter : since in order to describe something, to pass from the word to the thing, we require still more words, and again unto infinity. For example: what is a "face"? A part of the head. But what is a "part", a "head"? How are we justified in stopping here, versus there? Where do words end? What lies beyond them? Language is not only the privilege of man, it is also his prison. This is what the dictionary reminds us.
And then, the final surprise of this object that is, even still, renowned for its wisdom: the dictionary exceeds its utensibility. We believe it to be an indispensible tool for understanding, and this is true; but it is also a machine to dream on; engendering, so to speak, itself, from words in words, it ends up confounding power and imagination. One page of the dictionary, or several pages, if one browses, as one is always tempted to do, parades before our mind or, if illustrated, before our eyes, the great, driving objects of reverie: continents, epochs, men, instruments, every accident of Nature and society. Precious paradox: the dictionary, all at once, familiarizes, acclimates, and disorients, raves and rambles: it bolsters knowledge and sets the imagination in motion. Each word is like a vessel; it seems first to be closed in on itself, encircled by the rigor of its armature, but it very easily becomes a departure, it escapes towards other words, other images, other desires: here the dictionary is blessed with a poetic function. Mallarmé and Francis Ponge have attributed to it a refined power of creation. The poetic imagination is always precise, and the dictionary's precision is the cause of the joy that poets and often children take in reading it.
To these philosophical and poetic functions, we must add the dazzling role that the dictionary plays at the heart of a historically defined society such as ours. In various forms, the dictionary has been involved, in France, in great clashes of ideas. Born in the 17th century, that is to say, at the dawn of modern times, it has accompanied, in a dynamic, occasionally militant fashion, the quest for a spirit of objectivity, and hence of tolerance; mediator of a knowledge accessible to all, it has participated in the constitution of a democratic practice of understanding. And yet, today, a new question arises. The circulation of knowledge no longer depends only on books, but also (mostly?) on what is called the mass media, and as this circulation is massive, labile and hazy (because entrusted to speech, and no longer writing), knowledge takes on a kind of faux-naturalness: one listens (more than one talks), one allows himself to become immersed, one slides from approximation to approximation without ever verifying anything; words become thoughtless myths, they enter into the service of this flaccid (almost anonymous) power that the press, radio, and television today possess: we speak of ourselves more and more, and we speak less and less clearly.
The dictionary calls us to order. It tells us that there can be no true communication, loyal interlocution, but in the rigorous usage of language's subtleties. I sometimes hear certain accusations of a writer of using "jargon"; I would like to respond, as Valéry would have, "Are you the kind of people for whom the dictionary doesn't exist?" The dictionary reminds us that language is not given for once and for all, and in an innate way; that no one is in himself the norm of clarity alone; that good communication cannot be the fruit of an idleness of speech, in brief, that each of us must battle with language, that this battle is incessant, that we require weapons (such as the dictionary), that language is vast, powerful, clever. The obstinate, ever-changing existence of dictionaries, the care that is taken to conceive of and create them, all of this says that something like a social vow exists within them: if human conflicts are inevitable (this is a certainty), that at least it will never be the fault of a misunderstanding of words. Words are neither true nor false, but sadly, language lacks the power to prove this on its own; but words can be correct: a good dictionary invites us to listen to the music of language's relations.
The first touches on the infinitude of a language's words. No one knows how many words make up the French language. Language changes from minute to minute, from place to place, at the whim of the innumerable words that are pronounced; sometimes a new word (not even: simple "gibberish") spreads, propagates, "takes" -- it may be captured, added to the dictionary (and perhaps, soon, it may disappear). The dictionary battles endlessly with time and space (social, regional, cultural); but it is always defeated; life is always more ample, more quick, exceeding not language itself, but its codification. This is why we are constantly in need of new dictionaries. This, too, is why with each dictionary, we return to a certain idea of the essential: because the number of words is unmasterable, we decide upon a pertinence (of speciality or of audience) that will liberate us from the anguish of infinitude and produce a dictionary that is finite because it is selective: but let's not fool ourselves : it is just the tip of the iceberg. At least, knowing this, we have glimpsed, behind this modest object that many take for a simple instrument of verification, the very secret of the universe : its inifitude, or to use a less metaphysical word, its subtlety.
Here is a second kind of vertigo. We gather words together, give them definitions : it's a dictionary. We gather things together (with names, of course), give them descriptions: it's an encyclopedia. Sometimes, as in this edition, the two operations are wed, and a dictionary of words and things is produced, an encyclopedic dictionary. While we have felt the complementarity of the two functions, one normative (establishing the usage of words), the other objective (describing the particularity of things) since the 17th century, these kinds of dictionaries have not been, as far as I know, numerous. It's fairly paradoxical; since in fact -- and here is where an enormous philosophical debate arises -- every word names a thing, or a nebula of things, but also every thing can only suitably exist if it is supported, consecrated, assumed by a word. Words return to things? Yes, but also, in the same movement, to other words. The separation of words and things, as two distinct and hierarchised orders, is hence an ideological phenomenon, as M. Foucault has shown us. This separation implies that we are dealing with a realist philosophy that posits the thing in itself, outside of the subject who speaks of it, and makes of the word a simple instrument of communication : a view opposed, in the Middle Ages, to a nominalist tradition that was defeated, as we know, by the modern spirit. Since realism's victory, we believe that on one side we speak, and on the other, create; that on one side we discourse, embellish, idealise; and that on the other, we construct, produce, sell, possess; on one side, art (words), and on the other, science (facts). The dictionary, even though historically it was the product of it, makes this bourgeois reason falter : since in order to describe something, to pass from the word to the thing, we require still more words, and again unto infinity. For example: what is a "face"? A part of the head. But what is a "part", a "head"? How are we justified in stopping here, versus there? Where do words end? What lies beyond them? Language is not only the privilege of man, it is also his prison. This is what the dictionary reminds us.
And then, the final surprise of this object that is, even still, renowned for its wisdom: the dictionary exceeds its utensibility. We believe it to be an indispensible tool for understanding, and this is true; but it is also a machine to dream on; engendering, so to speak, itself, from words in words, it ends up confounding power and imagination. One page of the dictionary, or several pages, if one browses, as one is always tempted to do, parades before our mind or, if illustrated, before our eyes, the great, driving objects of reverie: continents, epochs, men, instruments, every accident of Nature and society. Precious paradox: the dictionary, all at once, familiarizes, acclimates, and disorients, raves and rambles: it bolsters knowledge and sets the imagination in motion. Each word is like a vessel; it seems first to be closed in on itself, encircled by the rigor of its armature, but it very easily becomes a departure, it escapes towards other words, other images, other desires: here the dictionary is blessed with a poetic function. Mallarmé and Francis Ponge have attributed to it a refined power of creation. The poetic imagination is always precise, and the dictionary's precision is the cause of the joy that poets and often children take in reading it.
To these philosophical and poetic functions, we must add the dazzling role that the dictionary plays at the heart of a historically defined society such as ours. In various forms, the dictionary has been involved, in France, in great clashes of ideas. Born in the 17th century, that is to say, at the dawn of modern times, it has accompanied, in a dynamic, occasionally militant fashion, the quest for a spirit of objectivity, and hence of tolerance; mediator of a knowledge accessible to all, it has participated in the constitution of a democratic practice of understanding. And yet, today, a new question arises. The circulation of knowledge no longer depends only on books, but also (mostly?) on what is called the mass media, and as this circulation is massive, labile and hazy (because entrusted to speech, and no longer writing), knowledge takes on a kind of faux-naturalness: one listens (more than one talks), one allows himself to become immersed, one slides from approximation to approximation without ever verifying anything; words become thoughtless myths, they enter into the service of this flaccid (almost anonymous) power that the press, radio, and television today possess: we speak of ourselves more and more, and we speak less and less clearly.
The dictionary calls us to order. It tells us that there can be no true communication, loyal interlocution, but in the rigorous usage of language's subtleties. I sometimes hear certain accusations of a writer of using "jargon"; I would like to respond, as Valéry would have, "Are you the kind of people for whom the dictionary doesn't exist?" The dictionary reminds us that language is not given for once and for all, and in an innate way; that no one is in himself the norm of clarity alone; that good communication cannot be the fruit of an idleness of speech, in brief, that each of us must battle with language, that this battle is incessant, that we require weapons (such as the dictionary), that language is vast, powerful, clever. The obstinate, ever-changing existence of dictionaries, the care that is taken to conceive of and create them, all of this says that something like a social vow exists within them: if human conflicts are inevitable (this is a certainty), that at least it will never be the fault of a misunderstanding of words. Words are neither true nor false, but sadly, language lacks the power to prove this on its own; but words can be correct: a good dictionary invites us to listen to the music of language's relations.
preface to the Dictionnaire Hachette
1980
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