The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…
Tag: The Language of Foreignness
Essay Series
Packing her suitcase, the traveler wonders how she will manage in the first days, with no help, no mastery over the language. The language gap appears as the first – and in some cases the final – hurdle that would force the foreigner to remain, at best, at the very edge of her new society. A foreigner would be foreigner first with regards to language. And in turn, the discussion of foreignness can only be made more satisfactory if its language, its method, too become somehow nomadic, hoping to see emerging the just expression of one’s experience between the settled lines of stable language and arguments.
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.1
Asking a foreigner for a definition of the foreigner is a guarantee of failed objectivity. My status as a foreigner, and further, my particular historical and spatial context, as well as my experiences as a foreigner, necessarily influence my intellectualizations of this situation…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.1
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argues that human life is profoundly marked by its existence in time. The human being (Dasein, “being-there”) is “thrown in the world” (Sein-in-der-Welt), a world which is in time. Temporality is a source of angst and worry since it is the plane of realization of the fundamental incompletion of Dasein…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.2
Two decades after Heidegger’s Being and Time, and not without the mediation of Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) attempted a profound application of the German fathers of phenomenology to one particular question: perception…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.3
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty, and directly influenced by Phenomenology: his first university works were on Husserl. The phenomenological heritage is perhaps not visible in the content of Derrida’s work – Derrida is not remembered for his use of the phenomenological method in any of his main studies – but in the form of the philosophical approach already adopted by Heidegger and by another direct inspiration of Derrida’s, Emmanuel Levinas…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.1
“India… what a beautiful country.” An awkward situation; the flagrant exposition of one of India’s many calamities before our eyes. My friends are Indians, born in this country and they are its foreground actors as young citizens of the democracy…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.2
And as for the language, well I don’t know. English is comfortable, or rather, comforting. A foreign language, for the one who always found himself to be the foreigner. The easy foreign language, so foreign that it is even foreign to most people one encounters in India. Funny thing. And foreign to me, indeed. A safe terrain to express my thoughts…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.3
Spring 2013. The never-ending heat of Manipal has fallen for a few hours. Early evening at End Point Road, for a session of frisbee. The decreasing attendance of our classmates pushed some of us to resort to other players. A community of foreign students from Malaysia comes at an impressive regularity, almost everyday, and seems to end up always very numerous – fifteen, sometimes twenty players…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.4
Three years in Delhi and another one in South India. Enough Hindi to maintain a two-minute rudimentary discussion, not to mention anything in Kannada besides uttha, neer and illa. If one is to focus on the matter of foreignness and language, one question should be addressed in priority: any language, in a situation of foreignness, is in general an unknown language…
The Language of Foreignness – Conclusion
Alain Badiou’s mention of philosophy as foreignness is not an unprepared statement. For the thinker, the foreign is truly a character, if not, the main character, the main aspect, of the philosophical approach: “I think it is very important to understand this: genuine philosophical commitment, in situations, creates a foreignness…”