Short Performances of Syntax

Return and Impossibility in Glissant’s Creolization

Résumé

Whence does the speaking subject of language return? Return is the mark and trajectory of filiation. It transitively entails a prior departure and a place from which one had left—derivatively, on terms not of their own. The detour of language—its rupta via, its broken way—is inaugurated by an impossibility inherited in a primordial scene of usurpation. Dispossession here retroactively marks an originary scene of possession: The subject is inducted into a circuit of language that is not their own while a “prior-to-the-first language” is postulated in the moment that it is dispossessed. Hence the desire to invent a “pre-originary” language is set into motion—to unite with the One that came before separation, before which one was separated, but one which could only be regarded as such after separation. The One—the impossibility—now remains to be fashioned, re-fashioned, or re-invented through another’s language, through the language of the Other. We are presented here with a knot of speech and language toward which Jacques Derrida attunes our attention—namely, the predicament of calling upon a language (the detour) to speak about the language (the impossibility) insofar as the latter “does not exist” and given “the absence of all metalanguage.” The former is a detour insofar as it can only inadequately translate the latter, for the latter is always subject to misrecognition in that it always remains to be given. Yet it is this impossibility and absolute resistance to translation that makes everything translatable. Derrida concludes this discussion concisely: “translation is another name for the impossible.” While the mother tongue [la langue maternelle] does not exist as such, it is not absent but in fact resides over all language and translation. It is thus the condition of possibility for conceiving of any notion of multilingualism. Though this language can only fail to be recognized as such in its absolute resistance to being understood or grasped through the Lacanian Symbolic (the register of order, language, and law), this prior-to-the-first language vies to be heard from within its detours.