Introduction: The Phantasm between Speech and Language

For Deleuze, speech is a structure summed up by the series title ‘Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished’ and by the formulation ‘intention-result’ – it is a self-dividing intention constitutive of the event (the ‘result’). Thus the event is not actually the result of speech but of its intention, which in its self-division divides between speech and something else, in relation to which alone the event can be seen as a ‘result’ of speech. This something else is language. As Deleuze writes, ‘Speech is never equal to language. It still awaits the result, that is, the event which will make the formation effective.’ However, we saw in the previous chapter how the event as castration-effect retroactively constitutes the Voice as a language that will have castrated the infant: it is in relation to language – as a ‘pre-sense’ insisting in the heights – that the infant develops ontogenetically; yet, paradoxically, to accede to language and its sense, the infant must contribute to it the event – which is inherent to language if outside it, and essential to language's functioning – as the difference between speech and language, or as the limits of sense retroactively imposed on speech (speech is nonsense only in relation to language). Thus, if Deleuze writes soon after his discussion of Poord'jeli as esoteric word that ‘Nonetheless, there is still no language; we are still in a prelinguistic domain’, this is because speech is literally pre-linguistic – it ontogenetically precedes language. Despite this (or rather because of it), speech acts as the crucial mediating structure between language and the bodies from which language must distinguish itself so as to constitute itself as language.

Now, while we have established that in ultimately speaking the event speech genetically founds language, it is nonetheless ultimately language which expresses the event by retroactively framing speech.