This is the positivist dream of a language keeping strictly to the level of what is known: a table language, like the one Cuvier was probably dreaming of when he attributed to science the project of forming a 'copy' of nature; scientific discourse was to be the 'table' of things; but 'table' here has a fundamentally different meaning from the one it possessed in the eighteenth century; then, it was a matter of dividing nature up by means of a constant table of identities and differences for which language provided a primary, approximative, and rectifiable grid; now, language is not so much a table as a picture, in the sense that, freed from the intricacy that gives it its immediately role, it stands a certain distance apart from nature in order to draw some of it into itself by means of its own passivity, and finally to become nature's faithful portrait.