‘Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning
that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet
slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or
like a handicapped child–cherished and useless–that language of the
past that withers without ever leaving you. You improve your ability
with another instrument, as one expresses oneself with algebra or the
violin. You can become a virtuoso with this new device that moreover
gives you a new body, just as artificial and sublimated–some say
sublime. You have a feeling that the new language is a resurrection: new
skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear, upon listening to
a recording, for instance, that the melody of your voice comes back to
you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere, closer to the old spluttering
than to today’s code. Your awkwardness has its charm, they say, it is
even erotic, according to womanizers, not to be outdone. No one points
out your mistakes, so as not to hurt your feelings, and then there are
so many, and after all they don’t give a damn. One nevertheless lets you
know that it is irritating just the same. Occasionally, raising the
eyebrows or saying “I beg your pardon?” in quick succession lead you to
understand that you will “never be part of it”, that it “is not worth
it”, that there, at least, one is “not taken in”. Being fooled is not
what happens to you either. At the most, you are willing to go along,
ready for all apprenticeships, at all ages, in order to reach–within
that speech of others, imagined as being perfectly assimilated, some day
–who knows what ideal, beyond the implicit acknowledgment of a
disappointment caused by the origin that did not keep its promise.’
–Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994, p.5). Trans. Leon S. Roudiez
via SAES