Gustave Guillaume's ''Obverse Causation'': An Invocation to Deleuze from Linguistics

Abstract

The French linguist and professor Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), author of a vast body of work still not widely known in either the Spanish-speaking or the English-speaking world,is mainly remembered as the father of psycholinguistics, due to his complex psycho-mechanical theory of language. The term ´´psycho-mechanical´´ refers both to a theory and to a technique of analysis whose aim is to reveal the deep tensions and dynamic mechanisms that underlie each language and explain the production of its distinctive morphology and syntaxes. Guillaume also belongs to the constellation of ´´esoteric´´ authors that people the pages of Difference and Repetition. More precisely, he makes his entrance in chapter four, where Deleuze elaborates on the internal logic of the Idea in its double aspect, as differentiation in the virtual (différentiation) and in the actual (différenciation). According to the thematic index of authors at the end of the book, Guillaume serves as a source for the subject of ´´the logic of difference in language.´´ Deleuze values this linguist´s theory as an example of how difference can be subtracted from its oppositional and negative conception in structuralism, and also as a technical model appropriate for showing how the logic of the virtual and the actual operates with regard to one of the many existing Ideas: the linguistic Idea.In this chapter I will try to explain, in a general way, how Guillaume conceives of the operational field of linguistics. The focus will be on his linguistic theory, with the aim of gradually showing, throughout the sections that follow, its affinity with certain aspects of the Deleuzian theory of the Ideas.