Итог полностью

rules which bring into existence what they decree, to speak with authority, to pre-diet in the sense of calling into being, by an enforceable saying, what one says, of making the future that one utters come into being.² The regio and its frontiers (fines) are merely the dead trace of the act of authority which consists in circumscribing the country, the territory (which is also called fines), in imposing the legitimate, known and recognized definition (another sense of finis) of frontiers and territory - in short, the source of legitimate di-vision of the social world. This rightful act, consisting in asserting with authority a truth which has the force of law, is an act of cognition which, being based, like all symbolic power, on recognition, brings into existence what it asserts (auctoritas. as Benveniste again reminds us. is the capacity to produce which is granted to the auctor).³ Even when he merely stales with authority what is already the case, even when he contents himself with asserting what is. the auctor produces a change in what is: by virtue of the fact that he states things with authority, that is, in front of and in the name of everyone, publicly and officially, he saves them from their arbitrary nature, he sanctions them, sanctifies them, consecrates them, making them worthy of existing, in conformity with the nature of things, and thus ‘natural’.

Nobody would want to claim today that there exist criteria capable of founding ‘natural’ classifications on ‘natural’ regions, separated by ‘natural’ frontiers. The frontier is never anything other than the product of a division which can be said to be more or less based on ‘reality’, depending on whether the elements it assembles show more or less numerous and more or less striking resemblances among themselves (given that it will always be possible to argue over the limits of variations between non-identical elements that taxonomy treats as similar). Everyone agrees that ‘regions' divided up according to the different conceivable criteria (language, habitat, cultural forms, etc.) never coincide perfectly. But that is not all: ‘reality’, in this case, is social through and through and the most ‘natural’ classifications are based on characteristics which are not in the slightest respect natural and which are to a great extent the product of an arbitrary imposition, in other words, of a previous state of the relations of power in the field of struggle over legitimate delimitation. The frontier, that product of a legal act of delimitation, produces cultural difference as much as it is produced by it: one need only consider the role of the educational system in the development of language to see that political will can undo what history had done.⁴ Thus the science which claims to put forward the criteria that

are the most well founded in reality would he well advised to remember that it is merely recording a state of the struggle over classifications, in other words, a state of the relation of material or symbolic forces between those who have a stake in one or other mode of classification, and who, just as science does, often invoke scientific authority to ground in reality and in reason the arbitrary division they seek to impose.