Excerpt
L’existence prépositionnelle by Irving Goh (review)
Goh, Irving. L’existence prépositionnelle. Galilée, 2019. 111pp.
In the concluding stages of Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Jacques Derrida remarks that
what remains insurmountable in [the monolingualism of the other], whatever the necessity or legitimacy of all the emancipations, is quite simply the “there is language,” a “there is language which does not exist,” namely that there is no metalanguage, and that a language shall always be called upon to speak about the language – because the latter does not exist. It does not henceforth exist; it never exists yet. What a time [temps, meaning tense and also weather]! What sort of weather it is; what the weather is like in this language that fails, lastingly [à demeure], to reach home.
It is within the givenness of any given language, through its contingencies, that it falls to us to think of our linguistic condition and to hypothesize an operation of language per se. There is hence a dislocation, a non-arrival at the place of dwelling or full self-identity (à demeure) – that imaginary space most intimately vehiculated in the myth of the native/mother tongue. One is called to speak of language (la langue) in the given language (une langue), because the former does not exist – other than as a horizon within the latter.