Philosophy Today© 2015. ISSN 0031-8256

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201551471Online First: May 19, 2015

Can a Language Go Mad? Arendt, Derrida, and the Political

Significance of the Mother Tongue

JENNIFER GAFFNEY

Abstract: This article examines Jacques Derrida’s criticism of the significance Hannah

Arendt attributes to her mother tongue in, “What Remains? The Language Remains.”

I begin by developing Derrida’s claim in The Monolingualism of the Other that despite

Arendt’s suggestion otherwise, the German language can and did go mad. I argue that

his criticism, while powerful, overlooks the political concerns at work in Arendt’s com-

mitment to her mother tongue. I turn to Arendt’s analysis of language in Eichmann in

Jerusalem to show that by distinguishing Eichmann’s “empty talk” from the mother

tongue, she suggests that our primary language is integral to political life insofar as

it reminds us of our radical singularity and our responsibility to the world. With this,

I maintain that Derrida’s decisive intervention in this discourse does not settle the

question of the mother tongue; instead it raises new questions concerning the political

significance of our relation to language.

Key words: Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, the mother tongue, politics, language

The purpose of this article is to examine Jacques Derrida’s criticism of the significance Hannah Arendt ascribes to the mother tongue. Derrida develops this criticism in The Monolingualism of the Other,

or the Prosthesis of Origin, challenging Arendt’s contention in her acclaimed 1964 interview with Günter Gaus that one’s mother tongue cannot go mad.1 Derrida argues that the notion of the “mother tongue” is itself mad, exposing us not to an originary context of meaning as Arendt suggests, but rather to our always already fractured and distant relation to this origin. In raising this objection, Derrida makes an integral and widely overlooked intervention in the discourse on the mother tongue.2 Yet, I intend to show that Derrida and, more recently, Donatella Di

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Cesare in her endorsement of his objection, fail to appreciate the political concerns at work in Arendt’s commitment to her mother tongue. My aim, therefore, is to bring into focus the political stakes involved in the question of the mother tongue and, in so doing, demonstrate that we must develop a deeper understanding of Arendt’s reasons for holding this view of language before we can reach a verdict on Derrida’s intervention.

To this end, I turn to Arendt’s claim in the 1964 interview that those who forget their mother tongue only have recourse to clichés in their new language. I take this up in light of her discussion of language in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to show that Arendt identifies a danger involved in forgetting one’s mother tongue through her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s incessant and incoherent use of clichés. Arendt suggests that in their interchangeability, these clichés give rise to “empty talk” or an instrumental use of language, which, in its meaninglessness, marks a departure from the mother tongue.3 As I shall demonstrate, Eichmann’s empty talk is characteristically totalitarian; it shields him from the reality of his deeds by divorcing him from both his singularity and the nexus of relations that grant him this singularity. I thus turn to this text to draw attention to the decisive role Arendt believes the mother tongue plays in political life, suggesting that for her, our primary language reminds us of our radical singularity and, with this, our responsibility to the world in which we find ourselves. Hence, by putting Derrida in dialogue with Arendt on the question of the mother tongue and by reframing Arendt’s attachment to the German language in terms of her broader political project, I argue that Derrida’s intervention by no means settles the question of the mother tongue; instead, it raises new questions concerning the political significance of our relation to language.

1. Derrida’s Intervention in the Question of the Mother TongueDerrida addresses Arendt’s remarks concerning her mother tongue in a footnote in The Monolingualism of the Other. As Michael Naas explains, Derrida’s discussion in this text is distinctive insofar as it recasts the familiar theme of spectrality in a political register through the language of the phantasm. According to Naas, he is especially concerned to draw our attention to the phantasm of “any putatively pure origin, indeed of any phantasm of purity and of any simple, seemingly self-evident or axiomatic origin, and indivisible, inviolable center.”4 Derrida accomplishes this by deconstructing the presumed purity of the language in which he finds himself. One of his most autobiographical works, he takes his point of departure in The Monolingualism of the Other from his own experience of language as a French speaking Algerian Jew, which leads him to conclude that we only ever have one language, but this language is never our own.5

Can a Language Go Mad?

The criticism Derrida raises against Arendt gives further contour to the broader themes he addresses throughout The Monolingualism of the Other. For Derrida, speaking French does not deliver him over to an originary and orienting context of meaning, as it does for Arendt. While Derrida has an enduring affection for the French language, he turns to his experience as a French colonial subject to show that the language he calls his own is in fact other to him, imposed from without by an unknown source in the colonial motherland. Though historically contingent, Derrida takes this experience of language to be disclosive of a universal structure of language, whereby we find ourselves always already alienated from the pretense of our “mother tongue” or the language that purports to promise a metaphorical homecoming through the restoration of our relation to the world. In suggesting that the mother tongue is not merely capable of going mad but the very condition for the possibility of madness, Derrida thus attempts to destabilize the ground of meaning that Arendt attributes to her mother tongue. In so do-ing, he maintains that the attempt to lay claim to a “mother tongue” is not only a maddening endeavor, but also an inherently violent one that always carries with it the colonial impulse to level difference.

Derrida frames his criticism of Arendt in terms of a larger question concern-ing the way in which the Jewish intelligentsia on both sides of the Mediterranean relate to the language in which they find themselves. The Jewish people, he explains, have always lacked a language of their own, speaking instead in the language of their host.6 Yet, upon turning to several Jewish intellectuals who set out to resolve “the question of Jews and ‘their’ foreign language,” Derrida argues that each stops short of coming to terms with the broader implications of their own linguistic exile.7 Rather than taking their experience to disclose an underly-ing structure of language itself, each of these figures tries to discern a “Jewish” language or find a home in the language in which they will always be guests.

With this, Derrida turns to Arendt and her proclaimed affection for the Ger-man language in her 1964 interview, “What Remains? The Language Remains.” In particular, he considers a moment in the interview when Arendt asserts without hesitation that even in the bitterest times, she has retained a closeness to her mother tongue that she does not experience in languages other than her own. Arendt says:

There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. For myself I can put it extremely simply: in German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind. I can never do that again. I do things in German that I would not permit myself to do in English. That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I have become bold, but in general, I have maintained a certain distance. The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have preserved.8

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According to Derrida, Arendt’s remarks are emblematic of a more fundamental feeling that one’s language is always there, inescapable to such an extent that one cannot help but remain faithful to it. Consequently, he says, “[Arendt] always kept this unfailing attachment and absolute familiarity.”9 For Arendt, this experience of absolute familiarity is at once redemptive and irreplaceable. It grants access to the singular and unique context of meaning in which one finds oneself at home in the world, while providing a ground on which to rebuild a world shattered by totalitarianism. This ground is easily forgotten when people and things are reduced to their instrumental value and rendered exchangeable through calcula-tive reasoning. Yet, Arendt retains the belief that the mother tongue reminds us of our unyielding singularity and, with this, an originary context of meaning to which we always have recourse even in the darkest times.

While Derrida does believe that we experience an unfailing attachment to the language in which we find ourselves, he challenges the move Arendt makes between this experience of language and her claim that it grants access to an ir-replaceable origin. In particular, he challenges Arendt’s famous assertion that, “It wasn’t the German language that went crazy. And, second, there is no substitution for the mother tongue.”10 Derrida takes these two claims in turn, first consider-ing how swiftly Arendt denies that one’s language can go mad. This denial, he thinks, is more like a disclaimer. It operates to reassure Arendt that it was not the language, but rather “certain Germans” who became diabolical and frenetic.11 Derrida insists that by denying such an aberration, Arendt covers over the fact that the German language can, and indeed did, become mad, while neglecting that this perverse possibility arises from the very nature of the mother tongue itself. He agrees with Arendt that language is not merely interchangeable content in a formal system, since, he says, “It is necessary that language be something more and other than a simple tool in order to remain all the time, ‘always,’ with oneself through displacements and exiles.”12 If, however, language is understood in terms of one’s closeness to it, then one can only become mad insofar as the language does too. Indeed, Derrida insists, the diabolical madman can only be mad in his mother tongue, and moreover, the citizen who speaks in a mad language cannot help but go crazy.13

The possibility of this madness arises from the “irreplaceable uniqueness” that is bound up with the maternal character that we attribute to our primary language. Derrida maintains that insofar as the mother is unique, she can and always will be substituted. Therefore, the very operation of coming to understand one’s language as natural or maternal is itself a substitution for the origin to which we no longer, or more precisely, never had access. This operation, whereby one asserts the existence of the mother tongue, is thus a kind of madness. Further-more, the mother tongue itself, in constituting a replacement for the irreplaceable uniqueness of one’s mother tongue, makes this madness possible.14

Can a Language Go Mad?

Insofar as this madness takes place in one’s “home,” Derrida explains that it produces unremitting anguish. He says, “When a mother loses her reason, and common sense, the experience of it is frightening as when a king becomes mad. In both cases, what becomes mad is something like the law or the origin of meaning (the father, the king, the queen, the mother).”15 He suggests that perhaps this is why Arendt refuses to leave open the possibility that the language can go crazy. Nevertheless, he is clear that the redemptive and irreplaceable quality she attributes to her own mother tongue leads her to make a self-effacing proclama-tion, one that not only reinforces the madness of the German language but also the madness of our monolingualism. Hence, Derrida argues that in laying claim to her mother tongue and, with it, an originary and orienting context of mean-ing, Arendt inadvertently illustrates that this origin is hopelessly fractured and always out of reach.

Derrida’s broader aim throughout The Monolingualism of the Other is to show that while we are assigned to a single language, we are prohibited from appropriating it. Moreover, he maintains that the claim to one’s mother tongue is not only self-effacing but also contains within it a violent colonial impulse. When Derrida reflects on his own monolingualism, he explains that like Arendt, he has a deep affection for the French language. In fact, he says that he possesses an “intractable intolerance” for accents and betrayals of pure French.16 However, whereas Arendt takes her ability to recite German poetry by heart to promise a homecoming, Derrida describes his love of pure French as a kind of convulsion that is symptomatic of the desire to overcome his inalienable alienation from this origin.

When Derrida attempts to find his way back to the origin of his own mother tongue he is led not to France, but rather to the French colonial “educational sys-tem” in Algeria.17 Here, he explains, all students were required to learn French, Arabic was taught as an optional foreign language, and Berber languages, along with Hebrew, were excluded from the curriculum altogether. The French colonial regime thus imposed what Derrida calls an “interdict” that sought to make Ara-bic an alien language and wipe away any trace of difference that threatened the regime’s effort to subsume Algeria under a single, homogenous language.18 Yet, while this interdict made Arabic the language of the other, Derrida describes this other as his closest neighbor. In recalling his childhood, he explains that he lived on the edge of an Arab neighborhood, “At one of those hidden frontiers [frontières de nuit], at once invisible and almost impassible.”19 He suggests in his account of this experience that his affection for the French language came not from its connection to an originary context of meaning, but rather from the command he was given in school to “speak in good French.”20 While this command sought to level everything that was other, it instead served only to reaffirm that what was nearest to him was at the same time furthest away. That is, in spite of the French

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colonial regime’s efforts, what remained for Derrida was not his mother tongue, but rather the Arabic speaking other.

In this colonial interdict, both the fiction of the mother tongue and the danger involved in laying claim to it are exposed. By turning to this interdict, Derrida shows that the language that is assigned to us does not return us to ourselves, as Arendt suggests, but rather points to something outside, a law originating elsewhere. Derrida says, “The monolingualism imposed by the other operates by relying upon the foundation, here, through a sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressively to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogenous.”21 Of course, Derrida insists that no such foundation exists. While we find ourselves thrown into a language, our experience of this language only ever discloses our exile from it. That is, he explains:

The language called maternal is never purely natural, nor proper, nor inhabit-able. To inhabit: this is a value that is quite disconcerting and equivocal; one never inhabits what one is in the habit of calling inhabiting. There is no possible habitat without the difference of this exile and this nostalgia.22

Derrida’s own love of French and his desire to speak properly and purely, even “in challenging in a million ways everything that is allied to it,” constitutes an effort to cleanse the language of any foreign agents.23 And yet, his experience as a French colonial subject and Algerian Jew clarifies that such an endeavor is itself mad. It not only does violence to difference, but reaffirms the impossibility of satisfying this enduring colonial impulse. In other words, Derrida feels affection for a language that reminds him in his very desire for it that he is not French, that France is not his home, and that the mother tongue is a myth.24 For this reason, he argues that while he has been assigned one language, he can never take possession of it as it only ever discloses the différance or fragmentation that underlies the notion of an origin. Upon turning to his own experience of language, Derrida thus recom-mends that we refrain from deceiving ourselves about the purity of our primary language and instead consider the possibilities that arise from our linguistic exile. Rather than remaining obstinate in our monolingualism, Derrida suggests that we should instead remain open to the exteriority of language through the unending task of translation, which he believes we are always engaged in even in the language that is closest to us.

2. Eichmann’s Officialese: Arendt’s Case for the Political Significance of the Mother Tongue

In raising this objection, Derrida not only identifies a tension in Arendt’s discus-sion of the mother tongue, but also intervenes more generally in the discourse on language that arises from the tradition of existential phenomenology. As we have

Can a Language Go Mad?

seen, Derrida is especially concerned to challenge the idea that we have a home in language, a sentiment from which a myriad of figures within Arendt’s intellectual milieu, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, arguably take their point of departure.25 As Donatella Di Cesare explains in her recent work, Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz, Arendt’s discussion of language undoubtedly has its taproots in this tradition. Arendt’s remarks in 1964 indicate that she, like Martin Heidegger and those who follow from him, takes language to be the most fundamental aspect of factical life. Di Cesare says:

In thinking and feeling the mother tongue as a unique and sacred place of origin, Arendt proves deeply Heideggerian. Thus, there is no dwelling and habitation outside of this place. ‘Removed or not, this language remains the final essence of the soil, the foundation of meaning, the unalienable property that one carries with oneself.’ Her exile itself is appeased, attenuated, and put into perspective by it.26

In light of this, Di Cesare argues that in her commitment to her mother tongue, Arendt fails to appreciate the deeper implications of Heidegger’s conception of language. Derrida, by contrast, shows through his criticism of Arendt that if language is as close to us as Heidegger suggests, then the German language, the very language in which Arendt feels most at home, must have had a hand in the insanity of Nazi Germany. Therefore, Di Cesare says:

Starting from Heidegger, but in order to set out in a completely different di-rection, Derrida turns Arendt’s sentence upside down. It is really the German language that has gone insane. . . . The insanity articulates itself linguistically, it occurs in and within language, with and within the mother tongue.27

According to Di Cesare, Derrida thus identifies a conflict that arises for the descen-dents of the tradition of existential phenomenology. This conflict is epitomized by Arendt who, Di Cesare suggests, fails to come to terms with the fact that the very notion of dwelling on which she relies gives rise to the possibility of the madness of the mother tongue and, with this, Arendt’s interminable exile from the origin it promises.28

Be that as it may, I maintain that Derrida’s objection cannot be adjudicated until we develop a deeper understanding of Arendt’s reasons for holding this view of language. Arendt introduces several subtle but powerful concerns regarding the political significance of the mother tongue in her 1964 interview through her discussion of what it means to forget one’s language. In so doing, she illustrates that the politics of the mother tongue are not as straightforward as Derrida leads us to believe. When taken together with her analysis of Eichmann’s empty talk, Arendt’s remarks in the interview suggest that just as our radical singularity arises from our thrownness in language, so too does our responsibility for the world or

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the nexus of relations that grant us this singularity. The interchangeable stock phrases and clichés that constitute Eichmann’s bureaucratic language, a language he refers to as “officialese,” thus mark a departure from the mother tongue that can be understood simultaneously as a departure from one’s thrownness and singularity.29 In light of this, we find that insofar as totalitarianism levels the radical plurality of individuals, its ends can easily be achieved when we fail to remember the language in which we find ourselves, along with our intimate and singular relation to it.

In the 1964 interview, Arendt indicates that there is a danger involved in forgetting one’s mother tongue. She says:

People can forget their mother tongue. . . . There are people who speak the new language better than I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and I often speak un-idiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But they do them in a language in which one cliché chases another because the productivity that one has in one’s own language is cut off when one forgets that language.30

Derrida mentions Arendt’s remarks on forgetting towards the end of his footnote, focusing in particular on her suggestion that this can be understood as repression. Arendt explains that such repression can occur as a result of shock, the kind that she and her husband underwent when they first learned of Auschwitz. She says, “It was really as if an abyss had opened. Because we had the idea that amends could somehow be made for just about everything at some point in politics. But not for this. . . . Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.”31 Derrida contends that this forgetting or repression not only functions as a substitute for the mother tongue, but also suggests that “the mother tongue” is the condition for the possibility of substitution par excellence.32 He thus takes Arendt’s remarks to reinforce his own claim that she has failed to grasp the implication of Auschwitz for the German language.

Yet, this response on Derrida’s part does not address the political signifi-cance of the problem Arendt identifies in losing one’s mother tongue, namely, that it gives way to speech that is flooded with clichés. While Arendt stops short of developing her concern for clichés in the interview, she makes this concern explicit in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil. In this text, Arendt famously and contentiously argues that Adolf Eichmann was a “clown,” not a criminal mastermind.33 Despite being responsible for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps, she main-tains that Eichmann’s disposition throughout the trial suggested that his crime consisted most fundamentally in the fact that he was a thoughtless, albeit diligent, bureaucrat. As Arendt says in her postscript:

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth and nothing would have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except

Can a Language Go Mad?

for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. . . . It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period. . . . That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.34

Eichmann thus stands as an emblem of the banality of evil, a new kind of evil produced by the bureaucratic machinery of totalitarianism and, more generally, modern man’s proclivity for instrumental reasoning.

The case Arendt makes for Eichmann’s banality turns on his inability to speak the German language. In her reflections on the German text of the taped police examination, Arendt explains that Eichmann’s own account of his participation in the events leading up to the Final Solution reads like a comedy. “Such a comedy,” she says, “cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him.”35 Upon failing to use the appropriate German idiom in response to a question he was asked during the trial, Eichmann apologizes, explaining that “officialese” is his only language.36 As Arendt explains, “Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”37 The emptiness of his speech was obvious to all in attendance. Yet, while the judges believed there was something more licentious behind Eichmann’s empty talk, Arendt explains that despite his bad memory he was able to recite “the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés” when he spoke of incidents and events that he believed were important.38 It therefore seemed that officialese was Eichmann’s primary language, which made him appear out of step with the world around him. Arendt says:

The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.39

Whereas Arendt’s experience of her mother tongue grants access to an originary context of meaning, she explains that these clichés and stock phrases had precisely the opposite effect on Eichmann. In only having recourse to officialese, Eichmann had no relation to the world and the reality contained therein. Hence, Eichmann’s use of clichés and stock phrases exposed a rift between him and the nexus of relations in which he found himself.

Arendt thus establishes a relationship between Eichmann’s inability to recall his mother tongue and his simultaneous inability to comprehend the impact of his deeds on the world; in divorcing him from this nexus of relations, his empty

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talk protected him from the reality of the situation at hand. This, Arendt argues, was true of the German population in general, eighty million of whom “had been shielded against reality by exactly the same means, the same lies, self-deception, and stupidity that had become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality.”40 If Eichmann had a world, it was one built on a network of “language rules” that prohibited speaking of “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing,” and demanded that the terms “final solution,” “evacuation,” and “special treatment” be used instead.41 It was therefore governed by a language of self-deception constituted by an elaborate network of stock phrases and clichés, which, in their meaninglessness, enabled Eichmann to tell the story of the turning points in his own career without con-sidering their relation to the Jewish extermination.42

Arendt explains that in displacing Eichmann from the world, this language undermined what she believes are our most natural assumptions about con-science. It did not remove Eichmann’s conscience, but rather transformed its call from “thou shalt not kill” to “thou shalt kill.” Thus, Eichmann, whose thoughtless-ness was made especially apparent in his inability to recall his own language, readily obeyed this command.43 Upon attempting to explain how he could have possibly obeyed his conscience in carrying out his orders, Eichmann had nothing meaningful to say. He only recited more stock phrases and clichés, which Arendt says he relied on until the moment of his death.

Eichmann’s empty talk can be understood as characteristically totalitarian, not just because it divorced him from the nexus of relations that Arendt believes bestow meaning on the world, but also because our radical singularity arises from this set of relations. Thus, Eichmann’s use of clichés in the place of his mother tongue revealed that he had not only been severed from the world, but also from his relation to himself as a human being. Eichmann lacked the ability to communicate because he was unable to stand in relation to others as a unique individual. Consequently, he could neither announce that he was the author of his action nor take responsibility for his action. Eichmann thus became “superflu-ous” through his own totalitarian rendering, effectively expelling himself from the human community.44

Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is decisive for elucidating the political sig-nificance of the mother tongue. The experience we have of our mother tongue reminds us of our radical singularity or, to use Arendt’s term from The Human Condition, our natality. Moreover, Arendt suggests that our mother tongue calls on us to remember that we are only radically singular to the extent that we are born into a world with others, or conditioned by plurality. According to Richard Bernstein, Arendt believes that totalitarianism is directed first and foremost towards the eradication of these fundamental features of human existence. That is, he says, “[Arendt] came to the shocking realization that the not so hidden aim of totalitarianism was the deliberate attempt to make human beings qua human

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superfluous, to transform human nature so that what is essential to live a human life – plurality, spontaneity, natality, and individuality – is destroyed.”45 Through her discussion of Eichmann, Arendt indicates that the meaningfulness we expe-rience in our mother tongue is disclosive of the most fundamental features of human existence. The mother tongue thus has a central role to play in political life for Arendt insofar as it is understood as a kind of antidote to the dehuman-izing forces of totalitarianism.

3. Caring for the Mother Tongue, or Preserving the Political Sphere

In her discussion of language, Arendt suggests that because meaning is only produced from out of a context, one’s mother tongue, or the language in which one finds oneself, is irreplaceable. For Arendt, the meaningfulness that is expe-rienced in one’s primary language will always be absent or at least distant when one attempts to speak in a language that is not one’s own. For Derrida, by contrast, the language in which we find ourselves is always already exterior to us, mean-ing that the very idea of the “mother tongue” is a substitution for a fractured and unreachable origin. Therefore, rather than laying claim to a mother tongue, Derrida suggests that we should instead remain open to this exteriority by more readily engaging the difference that underlies and displaces us in every language including the one we call our own.

Yet, through her discussion of language in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt gives us good reason to reconsider the significance of the mother tongue for political life and the consequences that can arise from failing to remember our relation to language. Her discussion of language in both her 1964 interview and Eichmann in Jerusalem, when considered alongside her conception of the political sphere, suggests that we have a responsibility to care for our mother tongue. This can be understood for Arendt in terms of holding open a space where individuals can appear in their singularity, which amounts to cultivating and preserving a political sphere.

According to Arendt, the possibility of political life arises from the fact that human beings are conditioned by natality and plurality. Our facticity, Arendt maintains, can be understood in terms of natality, or the fact that we are each born into the world anew. Arendt believes that these conditions are radically individuat-ing, and, in keying our thrownness to birth, she argues that we are marked most fundamentally by the capacity for new beginnings. That is, Arendt says, “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before.”46 This capacity is actualized when individuals take it upon themselves to act or initiate something new in concert with others.

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For this reason, Arendt argues that action is the political activity par excellence and conjectures that “natality, not mortality, may be the central category of the political, as distinguished from metaphysical thought.”47 It is only in and through the singularity of our experience in the world, or the fact that every human being can introduce something new to it, that it is possible to re-appropriate the world in such a way that it becomes meaningful. Moreover, it is only in being recognized in public as radically unique that our humanity is able to appear in its fullest form.

Arendt explains, however, that we are only radically unique to the extent that we stand in relation to others. That is, our singularity is granted to us through the condition of plurality or the fact that our uniqueness is constituted by the set of relations in which we find ourselves. Moreover, she says, “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”48 Whereas natality corresponds to action insofar as it conditions our ability to initiate something anew, plurality corresponds to speech, or our ability to an-nounce to others that in our radical singularity, we are the authors of our action.49 This ability to announce ourselves to one another in our diversity is a distinctly human capacity. For this reason, Arendt explains, action is only possible insofar as it is accompanied by speech. She says:

Without the accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words.50

To the extent that speech and action are expressions of our natality and plurality, what it means to be human is firmly rooted in these two capacities for Arendt. On her account, our ability to speak and act requires a space in which individuals can appear in their radical diversity among one another. In other words, it requires a political space or a space where individuals not only come together for the sake of acting, but also take responsibility for their action by announcing, through their capacity for speech, that they are the authors of their action. Arendt thus says, “Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.”51 If speech consists in announcing one’s authorship, then Eichmann relinquished his ability to speak by submitting to the language of totalitarianism, which Arendt seems to identify with his use of clichés and stock phrases. Though Eichmann seemed to be more than a “performing robot,” willing to act according to what he believed his conscience was calling on him to do, he was nevertheless immersed in a language that blinded him to his

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responsibility for his deeds by distancing him from his own singularity and the world from which that singularity arose.

In light of this, it is clear that the concern Arendt raises in her discussion of Eichmann can be understood more broadly in terms of her conception of the political sphere. While Derrida’s powerful criticism warrants serious attention, Arendt’s discussion of Eichmann’s struggle with the German language suggests that there is a danger involved in failing to care properly for one’s mother tongue. Taken together with her discussion of Eichmann, Arendt’s claim in the 1964 interview that those who forget their mother tongue can only speak in clichés is significant insofar as it suggests that we have a responsibility to care for our mother tongue. This responsibility, however, does not amount to obstinate monolingual-ism for Arendt, but instead consists in holding open a space where individuals can appear in their singularity. That is, it amounts to the preservation of a space of freedom or a political sphere.

4. ConclusionWhen considered in relation to her broader political project, Arendt seems to have good reasons for remaining committed to the notion of a mother tongue. She ef-fectively demonstrates through her discussion of Eichmann that when flooded with clichés, language becomes superfluous, dislocating individuals both from their individuality and from their relation to the human community of which they are a part. Hence, there is a danger involved in forgetting one’s mother tongue. This danger is made apparent in Arendt’s analysis of the relationship between Eichmann’s empty talk and his inability to appreciate the significance of his deeds. Beyond this, however, Arendt suggests that remembering one’s mother tongue is especially important for stateless people who, in being expelled from their com-munities, are most vulnerable to the bureaucratic mechanisms of totalitarianism. Perhaps it is for this reason that Arendt directs her cautionary remarks concerning the danger involved in forgetting one’s mother tongue towards those who, like her, had been exiled physically, politically, and culturally from their homeland.

Arendt’s insights also have bearing on Derrida’s remarks concerning his experience of language as a French colonial subject. For Arendt, the mother tongue is politically significant not because it refers us to the purity of our pri-mary language, but rather because it reminds us of the irreducible singularity of the world in which we find ourselves. As we recall, Derrida was forced to learn French, the language of a distant colonial motherland, rather than his mother tongue, Arabic. While Derrida believes on the basis of this experience that the mother tongue is an accomplice to the colonial project, Arendt’s view suggests that the French colonial regime eradicated the mother tongue by making Arabic a “foreign” language for the sake of advancing its own foreign national interests.

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Her conception of the mother tongue can therefore be seen as intervening in the colonial project, calling on us to take responsibility for preserving a historical and political singularity, the very singularity that the colonial project seeks to destroy.

While Derrida’s intervention undoubtedly makes an integral contribution to this discourse, Arendt’s appropriation of what it means to dwell in language illustrates that the politics of the mother tongue are more complex than Derrida suggests. On the one hand, Derrida draws attention to the violence and insanity that is always bound up with our impulse to purify the language in which we find ourselves. In so doing, he makes a powerful case for why we ought to consider the way in which our fractured relation to language demands that we overcome our desire to lay claim to a mother tongue. On the other hand, Arendt notes that our experience of our primary language reminds us of our radical uniqueness, and with this, our responsibility to the world in which we find ourselves. For this reason, she suggests that insofar as we take ourselves to have a “mother tongue,” we have a responsibility to care for it by holding open a space where individuals can appear among one another in their singularity. It therefore seems that the objection Derrida raises against Arendt is significant not because it settles the debate regarding the mother tongue, but rather because it raises new questions concerning the political stakes involved in our relation to the language in which we find ourselves.

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Notes

1. See Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” trans. John Stambaugh, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1994), 13.

2. Of Derrida’s many works, The Monoligualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin has received relatively little scholarly attention. Hence, a further aim of this project is to shed light on this decisive but underappreciated political text in his oeuvre. I focus here on the work of Italian scholar, Donatella Di Cesare, who gives considerable attention to this text, as well as to the objection Derrida raises against Arendt, in her Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz, trans. Niall Keane (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). Leading Derrida scholar Michael Naas takes up The Monolingual-ism of the Other in a different context. Yet, even he only mentions it briefly in his work, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Other scholars who address this text include Naoko Saito in “Beyond Monolingualism: Philosophy as Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures,” Ethics and Education 4(2) (2009): 131–39, and Denise Egéa-Kuehne in “La Langue de l’Autre au Croisement des

Can a Language Go Mad?

Cultures: Derrida et Le Monolingualism de l’Autre,” Changements Politiques et statues des langues: Histoire et Épistémologie1780–1945, ed. Marie-Christine Kok Escalle and Francine Melka (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 175–98.

3. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977), 49.

4. Nass, Derrida From Now On, 191.5. Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans.

Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2.6. Ibid., 78–79n9. In this, Derrida’s claim about the Jewish language is bound up with his

important discourse on the notion of hospitality. On this topic, see François Raffoul, “On Hospitality, between Ethics and Politics,” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 274–83.

7. In addition to Arendt, Derrida turns to Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, and, more tangentially, Kafka, Celan, Scholem, Adorno, and Benjamin to elucidate this problem among the Jewish intelligentsia. See Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 79n9.

8. Arendt, “What Remains?,” 13.9. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 85n9.10. Arendt, “What Remains?,” 1311. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 86n9.12. Ibid., 87.13. Ibid.14. Ibid., 88.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., 46.17. Ibid., 37.18. Ibid.19. Ibid., 39.20. Ibid., 49.21. Ibid., 40.22. Ibid., 58.23. Ibid., 49.24. The term “myth of the mother tongue” comes from Theodore George’s work in prog-

ress entitled “Lost and Found in Translation,” concerning Gadamer and Derrida on the possibility and impossibility of translation.

25. Di Cesare, Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz, 99.26. Ibid., 108.27. Ibid., 11028. Ibid., 111.29. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48.30. Arendt, “What Remains?,” 13.31. Ibid.32. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 90n9.33. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 54.34. Ibid., 287–88.35. Ibid., 48.

Jennifer Gaffney

36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Ibid., 49.39. Ibid. Arendt’s remarks on Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, especially with respect to the

relationship she seems to establish in this text between thought and conscience, have received a great deal of scholarly attention. Moreover, they have significant bearing on her work after Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was published in 1962. Though I have not focused on this debate, it is nevertheless worth noting that Eichmann’s failure to think is bound up with the danger Arendt identifies in losing one’s mother tongue. For more on thinking and conscience, see Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). See also Dana Villa, Philosophy, Politics and Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Paul Formosa, “Thinking Conscience and Acting in the Face of Mass Evil,” in Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt, ed. Danielle Calermajer and Andrew Schaap (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 89–106, and J. Schriff, “The Varieties of Thoughtlessness and the Limits of Thinking,” The European Journal of Political Theory 12(2) (2013): 99–115.

40. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 52.41. Ibid., 85.42. Ibid., 53.43. Ibid., 150.44. Ibid., 273. Arendt uses the term “superfluous” specifically to describe the way in which

totalitarianism and the instruments of modern technology dehumanize individuals, and how, thanks to modern technology, modern man is now in a position where he can easily render large swaths of the population superfluous.

45. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 144.46. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),

177.47. Ibid., 9.48. Ibid., 5.49. Ibid., 178.50. Ibid., 179.51. Ibid., 4.

RefeReNces

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Arendt, Hannah. 1994. “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” trans. John Stambaugh, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Forma-tion, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken Books), 1–23.

Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226924571.001.0001

Can a Language Go Mad?

Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. The Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Di Cesare, Donatella. 2012. Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz, trans. Niall Keane (Albany: State Univeristy of New York Press).

Egéa-Kuehne, Denise. 2001. “La Langue de l’Autre au Croisement des Cultures: Derrida et Le Monolingualism de l’Autre,” in Changements Politiques et statues des langues: Histoire et Épistémologie1780–1945, ed. Marie-Christine Kok Escalle and Francine Melka (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 175–98.

Formosa, Paul. 2010. “Thinking Conscience and Acting in the Face of Mass Evil,” in Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt, ed. Danielle Cal-ermajer and Andrew Schaap (Burlington: Ashgate), 89–106.

Naas, Michael. 2008. Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press).http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fso/9780823229581.001.0001

Raffoul, François. 1998. “On Hospitality, between Ethics and Politics,” Research in Phenom-enology 28: 274–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156916498X00164

Saito, Naoko. 2009. “Beyond Monolingualism: Philosophy as Translation and the Under-standing of Other Cultures,” Ethics and Education 4(2): 131–39.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449640903326763

Schriff, J. 2013. “The Varieties of Thoughtlessness and the Limits of Thinking,” The Euro-pean Journal of Political Theory 12(2): 99–115.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474885111430616

Villa, Dana. 1999. Philosophy, Politics and Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400823161