Foreign Language (Jacques Derrida and Me)

‘I have only one language, and it is not mine’, says Jacques Derrida in The Monolingualism of the Other, in a formula that has become famous.1 Meaning at least two things by this: (1) something specific to Derrida himself, as a singular case or example, and (2) something general about the relation anyone at all might have to the language or languages they speak. Derrida speaks French, speaks only French (I will perhaps return in discussion to his real competence in English or more exactly American), but he speaks it from an eccentric place, as it were, a place of foreignness that we can quickly label the place of the ‘franco-maghrebian’ and more precisely the ‘Algerian Jew’. The French that Derrida speaks, a French that aims to be very correct, very pure, that has the ambition of being a French with no accent, is nevertheless not ‘his’ language, in the sense that it is the language of the other, of the metropole, of the colonial power, a language imposed more or less violently on little Jackie Derrida who might, indeed normally speaking should (or so one might think) rather speak another language, for example Arabic.

This singular situation, the singularity of which Derrida has fun emphasising (by contrasting his position ‘in’ the language with that of his friend Khatibi), is also exemplary, in the sense that its singularity supposedly reveals a more general truth. Following a logic of the example that has always fascinated Derrida, there is a paradoxical relation between on the one hand the example that is truly exemplary (the very example, and so the best example, a priceless example outside the series, possibly the only true example, and so somewhere an example without example), and on the other the example which is only an example, a sample among others, where any example, any old example is as good as any other and stands for any other. The exemplarity of Derrida himself here would also be exemplary of a general relation to language, the relation of anybody at all to language as language of the other, and therefore as foreign language, language with respect to which I am always a foreigner by definition.

And this would clearly be what is foreign in language, no longer in the sense of the foreign individual, but in the sense of what is foreign in language, language itself in its fundamental foreignness which means that I live my relation to this language (I mean this language which is just as much ‘my own’, my ‘mother tongue’) as a relation of submission to a law, as Saussure already said, a relation of subjection or alienation, as Lacan says. And we could easily show that this relation to language as relation to the law implies (in a strong sense of implication), entails in the logical sense, the foreignness of anybody at all (me, for example), with respect to language, even with respect to the language I inhabit, or which inhabits me, as familiarly as can be, as familiarity itself. Language as such would thus be fundamentally foreign, or else I, as a speaker, would be fundamentally foreign with respect to the language, whatever it be. And, I want to say, a good thing too. Because if the relation of habitation between speaker and language did not have this element of foreignness, non-nativity and non-naturality, if the law that language is did not come to me from elsewhere, from the other, as they say, if the legislator were not a foreigner (as is always the case: Rousseau and Joyce knew this, among others), if I could fully inhabit and integrate its law by speaking it without fault, then I would have not the slightest chance of saying anything, everything I might say would already be said, all the sentences I might come up with would be repetitions, mere cases of the law, cases already foreseen by that law. If one understood everything, if we all understood each other, there would in fact be nothing to understand because everything would already be understood. Let’s call it a Habermasian utopia which would be an absolute dystopia, a sad consensual eternity in which we would all agree on everything before even speaking, and so in which we would no longer speak. This would be the linguistic equivalent of the perpetual peace dreamed of by Kant (that we still dream of), that he obscurely realised was representable only as a universal cemetery, the peace of eternal rest, requiem aeternam.

For only the margin of foreignness that separates me from my language (whatever language it be) allows there to be, however slightly, an effort and a struggle to be waged to say what one has to say, a struggle with the language to produce a sentence that the language had not entirely foreseen, which was, then, not entirely legal, and so not entirely comprehensible (for me first of all, so that I don’t always understand what I say, and that’s just fine), a sentence that really is a case in the sense that the law is in fact, in spite of itself, necessarily surprised by the cases that come before it to be judged. Which is somewhat the case of what’s called literature, that struggle to produce unspoken and quasi-illegal sentences, or that’s called more simply writing, to the extent that it is never simply production or realisation in speech of a language given in advance. And this is also clearly a political remark, at a time when it is probably more difficult than ever to say something new in politics, and when one can sincerely feel sorry for politicians constrained to speak almost exclusively the kind of waffle that probably exasperates them as much as the rest of us.

You will have noticed that up until now I have avoided speaking about myself, my own case, although Christophe Bident politely suggested that I might do so. There are several reasons for this: among others the certainty that you can already hear what there is to hear about this case, even if I say nothing very explicit about it. For, like the very principle of the schibboleth, the simple pronunciation of which sufficed, in passing, to separate Ephraimites from Gileadites, you can hear immediately, beyond or before anything I might have said up till now, an accentual trace perhaps first of a simple foreignness, a ‘not from here’ (where ‘here’ means the French language in which everyone is foreign, as you will perhaps have granted me, but not in that way), and then of a different origin, but one that can be identified, ‘anglo-saxon’ certainly, as you say in French, and in the final analysis English. There, I’ve said it, let’s admit it frankly and shamelessly: yes, I am English.

English, yes, and not American, nor, as is said rather obscurely, ‘bilingual’, or at least bilingual only in the sense that is sometimes given to the words ‘false bilingual’ (ah, the powers of falsity . . . ). And even perhaps false-false-bilingual in the sense that not only did I not learn French alongside English in my childhood, like a ‘true’ bilingual, but I didn’t speak a word of French before learning it, badly like everyone else, at school from the age of eleven onwards, and then, without my having any real memory of this process, little by little feeling myself ‘inhabited’ by this language, especially during the longer and shorter periods when in later life I lived in the country, and within those periods the shorter and longer times when French was my daily language, all day. But the question is not only one of place or personal situation in life, because the false-false-bilingual that I am (in this like many others, and so exemplary if you like, why not) has to this language (that is still less mine than is English) a relationship that is also a professional relationship, that of the French professor (or at least of a Professor of French literature and thought, because it is years since I taught the French language as language). I made my profession of French, I profess French, also in the sense that one makes a profession of faith. And if I did this, it is certainly not (even if my motivations for this will remain forever obscure, for me first of all) by reason of necessity, not because of political or colonial force relations, or at least not in the usual sense of those words. If I have become even a little bit French (and the very fact of beginning to speak a language no doubt sets off something of that becoming), and thereby a foreigner in the language even if I sometimes behave in it as though I were at home, this is by virtue of a choice that I would call ‘free’ in the sense that nothing really obliged me to make it. Which, if you follow my drift, makes me still more foreign with respect to this language, because of the supplementary arbitrariness that qualifies my relations with it. It did nothing special to invite me in: it made me feel no obligation with respect to it. At most it allowed me to take refuge in it, without obliging me to do so, without imposing on me anything other than what in it is the law, as we have seen, for anybody at all.

So you see that there is here – it’s possible, it’s always possible – a certain experience of a certain liberty, or a certain liberation with respect to the old law, be it maternal or paternal, that is the law of one’s first language. This is obviously a paradoxical liberty, because the very fact of speaking imperfectly this refuge-language means that one is in a certain sense more constrained, more restricted, that when at home. Which is why it is not in fact the living or dwelling that liberates, but the coming and going, the passage from one language to another, without mix or confusion, though, which would lose the passage itself. This passage which I have here tried to describe in French, on the side of French, especially opens for me, as an exemplary foreigner, when I move into French, becoming foreign in language once more. But of course, and I’ll conclude with this, this experience is not without a reciprocal effect, so that when I go back into English (and this coming and going can take place several times a day, or even, as in translation, several times a sentence), I am now a foreigner ‘at home’, and so twice foreign (if everyone is already foreign in their language according to the structures we described at the outset), and even more than twice, if you count the fact that my daily language, the language with which I am most often surrounded, has become American rather than British English, American which is a language as foreign for me as is French (but that would be a long story) – and so no longer really at home, henceforth ‘at home’ nowhere in fact, for better and for worse.

Note

1. This brief talk was written in French at the invitation of Christophe Bident for a round-table discussion also involving Fehti Benslama, Hervé Joubert Laurencin and Pierre Vilar, under the title ‘L’Étranger dans la langue’, for the Salon international du livre in Tangier, Morocco, March 2007. In the event the participants preferred to improvise rather than read prepared texts.