Call for Papers
The term we still use to designate someone’s attachment to a particular language, her potentially flawless competence, or the very “place” for her thoughts to emerge in coherent form, is “mother tongue”. We take it to be a natural condition of language acquisition, equally valid for every individual speaker, and thus forget that it is a mere metaphorical reference to the “first” language, spoken by what is referred to, with an even more misleading metaphor, a “native” speaker. Throughout history, the use and connotations of the expression “mother tongue” have undergone several changes. In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the Latin “lingua materna” referred to the vernaculars in opposition to the learned Latin. In the eighteenth century, “mother tongue” became an emotionally charged term: establishing a more intimate, allegedly natural and privileged relationship between the speaker and her primary language, it lent authority to the Romantic aesthetics of originality and authenticity. The new emphasis on the “maternal” element in the metaphor inscribed the speaker into broader networks of relationships, from kin to nation. Carrying gendered and political meanings, the term “mother tongue” thus links its fortune to a “monolingual paradigm” coeval with the historical constellation of the emerging nation-states.
The conference intends to re-think affective and cognitive attachments to language by deconstructing their metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions. If traditional conceptions of the monolingual, pure “mother tongue” reveal the ideology of the European nation-state, then today’s celebration of multilingual competencies simply reflects the rise of global capitalism and its demand for transnational labor markets.
French poststructuralist thought has problematized the notion of a “mother tongue” by dividing it into two discrete elements—the “maternal” and the “linguistic”—and by exposing their metaphysical and colonialist presuppositions. Thus, Derrida has exposed the metaphysical implications of the dream of a “mother tongue”: a desire for origin, purity, and identity. In his Monolingualism of the Other—permeated with reflections about his affective relation to French—, Derrida has maintained that “the language called maternal is never purely natural, nor proper, nor inhabitable”. Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, has addressed the relationship between “maternal” and “language” in her elaborations on Plato’s concept of chora—a sort of pre-ontological condition of reality. While the Platonic chora is a formless matrix of space, in Kristeva it becomes “a non-expressive totality”: that is, paradoxically, both a generative principle through which meaning constitutes itself and a force subverting any established linguistic or epistemological system.
The conference asks what can be salvaged of the notion of a mother tongue: what are the remains, traces, or vestiges of a language no longer directly tied to the mother yet resounding with a maternal echo and at the same time manifesting itself as a primary idiom with respect to its affective and aesthetic dimensions. This “residual notion” of a mother tongue supposes that language is indeed a basic human need (like food, shelter, or clothing), since it provides an indispensible access to a symbolic dimension shaping affectivity and knowledge.
Multidisciplinary papers are most welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
1) How does a deconstructed notion of a “mother tongue” overcome the traditional opposition between monolingualism and multilingualism? Do these terms have to be revised individually or in their vexed constellation?
2) How would this revision affect the notion of language as a medium for expressing emotions, in particular in relation to traumatic experiences?
3) How would it affect the theory and practice of (literary) translation?
4) How would it modify our perception of linguistic errors, slips of the tongue, and other mistakes?
5) What would the role of linguistic phenomena like language mixing, hybridization, incorporations of multiple vocabularies be in this new conceptual constellation?
Presentations will be limited to 30 minutes. Please email an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short bio-bibliographical profile with academic affiliation (no more than 1 page) to mothertongue@ici-berlin.org by 15 September 2015. An answer will be given before 15 October 2015, and a detailed programme will be published on the ICI Berlin website (www.ici-berlin.org). Organizers: Federico Dal Bo (ICI Berlin) and Antonio Castore (ICI Berlin).