It comes as a surprise to the non-Portuguese speaker that the word normally used for chain is corrente, current. There is something counter-intuitive in this idea of displacement which, in turn, denotes a displacement in language itself. It is surprising that an image that evokes subjection, that even symbolizes generic concepts such as oppression or slavery and that makes one imagine the impediment to something or someone moving, would share its name with that which flows, with that which runs. And it denotes a displacement of language itself, as I say, because it is easy to reconstruct, backwards, the chain of phonemes that in their progressive transformation (sound shift, linguists call it) form its etymology up to the Latin currere and, from there to the voice*kurs in Pre-Indo-European, both naming the simple act of running. The displacement of the sounds made into words along languages and times, takes us, reversing the course of that progression, now forward in an unexpected bifurcation, from *kurs and curro, to the English horse. The running animal. The archaeology of language that is etymology thus uses phonemes as material, sometimes detached from their correspondence with meaning to the point of discovering a link between the animal that runs free and the chain that tethers it.

If meaning is fixed to the sign (to the word, the phoneme, the image) by condensation, language as the motor of thought and desire operates by displacement. This is the difference between metaphor and metonymy. What produces significance is the ungraspable movement from one sound to another, from one form to another. Significance is not knotted at any specific point in the chain, meaning appears as a flow and only stops, provisionally, in the form of encounters between the simultaneous and indifferent stream of language and world.