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  • Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz
  • Margaret Littler (bio)
Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition By Yasemin Yildiz; Fordham University Press, 2012

There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue sets out to historicize, denaturalize, and critically assess the “monolingual paradigm” that has existed in Europe since the emergence of the modern nation-state. In German culture it emerges with figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who abandoned Enlightenment universalism for a relativist view of languages as fundamentally inflecting the thought of their speakers. The term “mother tongue,” inaugurated by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813 to assert the innate relationship to a singular primary language, is “the affective knot at the center of the monolingual condition” (10), founding a persistent “linguistic family romance” (12). It is this exclusivist claim that one language only can be the “the single locus of affect and attachment” (13), as well as of originality and creativity, that is put to the test by the writers discussed in the book: Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoğlu. The term “postmonolingual” applied to their works implies not a complete overcoming of the monolingual paradigm, but a critical perspective on its strictures, and a means of “reimagining the identitarian force of language” (6). The tension between multilingual experimentation and the dominant monolingual paradigm is the central focus of Yildiz’s study, rather than a celebration of the latter’s demise. And “postmonolingual” both designates a mode of reading and characterizes the chosen texts themselves (21). [End Page 215]

The book situates itself between Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, and more recent scholarship on globalization and migration, as its spanning of early and late twentieth-century texts suggests. In contemporary German studies it is a welcome addition to the work of such scholars as Azade Seyhan (Writing outside the Nation 2001), Leslie A. Adelson (The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature 2005), Tom Cheesman (Novels of Turkish German Settlement 2007), and Venkat Mani (Cosmopolitical Claims 2007), offering a unique focus on language in the extension of what might be considered “German” literature. Beyond German studies it might be considered a valuable supplement to Ronald Bogue’s Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (2010), which explicitly brackets out the deterritorialization of language in its study of world literatures that unsettle the global status quo. And if deterritorialization is understood as the destabilizing of standard usage and a decoupling of language from fixed notions of identity, then these things are at the heart of Yildiz’s project. Despite its initial focus on Kafka, and an expression of qualified sympathy with Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka (223), this study does not engage explicitly with their materialist philosophical project, nor with their nonindividualist view of language. It deploys mainly psychoanalytical concepts and deconstructive strategies in its critique of the coupling of identity and mother tongue, which it sees as rooted in a foundational epistemic paradigm. Thus, for example, the denial of multilingualism that preserves the integrity and exclusivity of the mother tongue is seen as sharing the structure of fetishism (22), and the individual’s affective connections to language(s) occupy an important position in the analyses.

Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin provides the inspiration for Yildiz’s study, as a reflection on his own experience of “language dispossession” as an Algerian Jew deprived of French citizenship during the Vichy regime (40–41). The insight that “‘having’ a language, even if it is one’s only language, does not ensure the recognition of one’s claims on it” (41) led Derrida to reflect on the impossibility of possessing any language, and indeed to formulate “an ethical injunction to transcend proprietary thinking vis-à-vis language(s)” (42). It is this model of “language depropriation” that Yildiz sees exemplified both in Kafka’s relationship to German, and in relation to the Turkish German writers discussed later in the book. Unlike “language appropriation,” which claims that...

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