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Monolingualism of the Other

has any other recourse—neither Arabic, nor Berber, nor Hebrew, nor any languages his ancestors would have spoken—because this monolingual is in a way aphasic (perhaps he writes because he is an aphasic), he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language [langue de depart]. For him, there are only target languages [langues d'arrivee], if you will, the remarkable experience being, however, that these languages just cannot manage to reach themselves because they no longer know where they are coming from, what they are speaking from and what the sense of their journey is. Languages without an itinerary and, above al, without any superhighway of goodness knows what information.

As if there were only arrivals [arrivées] , and therefore only events without arrival. From these sole "arrivals," and from these arrivals alone, desire springs forth; since desire is borne by the arrival itself, it springs forth even before the ipseity of an I-me that would bear it in advance; it springs forth, and even sets itself up as a desire to reconstruct, to restore, but it is really a desire to invent a first language that would be, rather, a prior-to-the-first language destined to translate that memory. But to translate the memory of what, precisely, did not take place, of what, having been (the) forbidden, ought, nevertheless, to have left a trace, a specter, the phantomatic body, the phantom-member—palpable, painful, but hardly legible—of traces, marks, and scars. As if it were a matter of producing the truth of what never took place by avowing it. What then is this avowal, and the age-old error or originary defect from which one must write?

Invented for the genealogy of what did not happen and whose event will have been absent, leaving only negative traces of itself in what makes history, such a prior-to-the-first language does not exist. It is not even a preface, a "foreword," or some lost


Jacques Derrida - Monolingualism