Politics of the Mother Tongue

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

I wrote this essay in French for a conference on ‘women and education’ organized by Fatima Zadiqi, a Moroccan feminist and linguist, and held in Fez in 2002. A few years earlier, Derrida had read a portion of the final version of Monolingualism of the Other at a conference on the postcolonial Algerian linguistic predicament I had organized at Cornell University in the wake of the rampant internecine war that had killed tens of thousands of Algerian citizens in the 1990s. In short, this piece is dated. It is already ten years old; it dates back to a time – before the so-called ‘political turn’ – when questions of language could still be considered relevant to, even part and parcel of, political reflection. Since then, of course, a lot of important books and articles have appeared, some of which were inspired by Derrida, that dealt with the questions I was trying to tackle in that piece. I therefore feel as uneasy as I feel grateful to Ashley Thompson for recalling that essay from the s(h)elf where it had been put away and giving it a new life in our contemporary lingua franca.

The French version of this piece appeared in the transnational journal Expressions Maghrébines. Cf. ‘Politiques de la “langue maternelle” de la mère à l'autre’, Expressions Maghrébines, 5.2 (2006), pp.253–274.

¹ ‘Dingue’ is a slang word that means roughly ‘crazy’ in modern French. It comes from the verb dinguer: to stray, to go from place to place, or, in the familiar meaning, to send off, to send packing. The quasi-homonymy between ‘dingue’ and ‘dingua’ is as fortuitous as it is felicitous. [Note from the translators]

² Dingua is also the root word of the English ‘tongue’.

³ On this issue, see Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, Vol. IX, Part One, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), pp.638–40. In its nationalist furor, the Revolution even invented words that have since fallen out of use: dénationaliser, nationicide, antinational and so on.

⁴ Grégoire, ‘Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française’, in Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois, ed. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p.316. [Translators’ note: All quotations from this book are our translation].

⁵ Cf Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Formation des langues du nord’, chapter X, Essai sur l'origine des langues [1781], (Paris: Folio, 1990), p.110.

⁶ Michel de Certeau, ‘Le cycle de la langue maternelle’, V, in Une politique de la langue, p.107.

⁷ The Latin verb ‘institutere’ derives from sto, stare: to be standing.

⁸ Le Rapport Barère. ‘Rapport du Comité de Salut Public sur les idiomes’, in Une politique de la langue, pp.294–95.

⁹ Le Rapport Barère, ‘Rapport du Comité de Salut Public sur les idiomes’, p.296.

¹⁰ George Sand, Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, Group translation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p.118.

¹¹ Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice’, in Kant's Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss and trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970), p.73 [translation slightly modified].

¹² In his famous 1882 speech entitled ‘What is a nation?’ Ernest Renan offers an interesting hypothesis on the spread of langue romane (French's ancestor) in the aftermath of the Frankish conquest of the northern part of Roman Gaul (i.e., the event from which time on the conquered land received its current name, France). According to Renan, if a Romanic language became, centuries later, the national language, it is because the victorious conquerors (today we would call them colonizers) of France, far from imposing their language (Lingua Francica or Lingua Gothica), came to gradually forget it. ‘For several generations the chiefs espoused only Teutonic women; but their concubines were Latin, the nurses of their children were Latin; the whole tribe married Latin women. And so it was that the Lingua Francica and the Lingua Gothica had a very short existence, after the settlement of the Franks and Goths in Roman territories.’ (Ernst Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies, ed. Ernest Renan and William G. Hutchison (Newcastle-on-Tyne: The Walter Scott Press, 1896), p.65).

If Renan is to be believed, the propagation of French (a language of Latin hence Roman origin) took place thanks to women, more precisely, thanks to the transmission of their language to the tribesmen's children by their mothers and nursemaids. A women's tongue turned dominant language, French is perhaps the child of a successful ‘marriage’ between colonized and colonizers.

¹³ Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.2.

¹⁴ Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.42.

¹⁵ Jacques Derrida as quoted in Idiomes, Nationalités, Déconstruction, ed. F. Benslama, (Casablanca and Paris: Toubkal et Intersignes, 1998), p.260 [our translation].

¹⁶ Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.24.

¹⁷ Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.23. Renan said something similar already in his foreword to a series of speeches given in 1887, five years after ‘What is a Nation?’. Contesting the ethno-linguistic essentialism of the nationalist ideology, he claimed, ‘Man belongs neither to his language, nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is a free being […] One no longer permits anyone to persecute others in order to make them change their religion; persecuting them to make them change their language or country strikes us as equally malevolent’. (Ernst Renan, ‘Préface aux Discours et Conférences’, in Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation? et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1996), p.245.

A language belongs to no one, and, therefore, no one can impose it as his own. And no more does one belong to one's ‘own’ language than one can be made to belong to the language of the other. Renan's assertions emerge, however, from a mistrust of language and from a naïve belief in the freedom of man, which are not shared by Derrida. If ‘man does not belong to his language’, this does not mean that he can free himself from language. A man belongs to no language, and has no language which belongs to him. Even so, he does not simply belong to himself.

¹⁸ See for instance what Kateb Yacine wrote about his feeling of ‘inner exile’ (both from mother and from the mother language) that was caused by his enrolment in a French school as a child: ‘I have never ceased to feel this inner exile […] which brought the schoolchild closer to his mother only to tear them away, each time a bit more and more violently, from the murmur of the blood, from the reproachful shudders of the banished language […] Thus I had lost my mother and her language both at once: the only inalienable yet alienated treasures’. (Kateb Yacine as quoted in Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Incipits’, in Du bilinguisme, ed. Jalil Bennani et al. (Paris: Denoël, 1983) p.188.)

Yacine experiences this ‘exile’ as a dispossession. Both mother and language are called ‘treasures’, a word which signals the strength of this melancholic cathexis of the mother and her language as well as their status as (precious) things once possessed and then lost. Such a loss elicits a formidable desire to take back or own again those ‘treasures’, a desire underscored by the hyperbolic yet contradictory expression ‘inaliénables et pourtant aliénés’ [inalienable yet alienated].

¹⁹ Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Diglossia’ in Algeria in Others' Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p.157.

²⁰ Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Diglossia’, p.157.

²¹ See for instance what Assia Djebar writes in Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade: ‘Writing in a foreign language, not in either of the tongues of my native country – the Berber of the Dahra mountains or the Arabic of the town where I was born – writing has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins […] Writing does not silence the voice, but awakens it […]’ (Assia Djebar, Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (New York: Quartet Books, 1985), p.204).

²² Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p.146.

²³ The modern French language makes the distinction between ‘langage’ (the symbolic code or communicative system in general) and ‘langue’ (a particular idiom or tongue). One normally speaks of the ‘langue maternelle’ (a particular mother tongue), but rarely (if ever) of ‘langage maternel’.

²⁴ Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Incipits’, p.188.

²⁵ ‘Mais le langage maternel […] ne peut disparaître de la syntaxe du corps. Sa disparition serait une hypothèse tout à fait impossible.’ (Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Incipits’, p.188.)

²⁶ Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, p.147.

²⁷ Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, p.147.

²⁸ Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Incipits’, pp.181–182.

²⁹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2006), pp.144–145.

³⁰ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.43.

³¹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.43.

³² I am coining this portmanteau after Derrida's mondialatinisation, a formula through which the philosopher articulates the connection between globalization and the so-called ‘return of religions’.

³³ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.154.

³⁴ Hélène Cixous, ‘The Names of Oran’, in Algeria in Others' Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp.187 and 190.

³⁵ Hélène Cixous, ‘The Names of Oran’, p.190.