60
Monolingualism of the Other

the genealogical drive, the desire of the idiom, the compulsive impulse to anamnesis, and the destructive love of the interdict. What I was calling just a while ago the tattooing of all colors on the body when they are allowed to be seen. The absence of a stable model of identification for an ego—in all its dimensions: linguistic, cultural, and so on—gives rise to impulses that are always on the brink of collapse and oscillate, as a result, between three threatening possibilities:


1. an amnesia without recourse, under the guise of pathological destructuring, growing disintegration: a madness;

2. stereotypes that homogenize and conform to the model of the "average" or dominant French person, another amnesia under the integrative guise, another type of madness;

3. the madness of a hypermnesia, a supplement of loyalty, a surfeit, or even excrescence of memory, to commit oneself, at the limit of the two other possibilities, to traces—traces of writing, language, experience—which carry anamnesis beyond the mere reconstruction of a given heritage, beyond an available past. Beyond any cartography, and beyond any knowledge that can be taught. At stake there is an entirely other anamnesis, and, if one may say so, even an anamnesis of the entirely other, about which I would like to explain myself a little.


This is the most difficult thing. It should permit me to return to my initial and apparently contradictory propositions, but it involves another thought of avowal or confession, of the "truthmaking" that I might have outlined in Circonfession, next to a mother who was dying while losing her memory, her speech, and her power of naming.

Let us sum up. The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language o f which he is deprived. The French language is not his. Because he is therefore deprived of all language, and no longer


Jacques Derrida - Monolingualism