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Alterations, AIterities in/of Language Anne Tomiche being a lapsis linquo [...] he would wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse —James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, 178 Il faut vaincre le français sans le quitter, /voilà 50 ans qu'il me tient dans sa langue, /or j'ai une autre langue sous arbre —Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes XXII, 13 WHILE SHEM-JOYCE, the ghost figure (Spuk) who haunts and "spooks" this issue by his absence, and dreams of wiping English off the face of the earth, Artaud wants to defeat French. For neither of them, however, does this erasure/defeat of the mother tongue entail writing or speaking in a different language. Or rather, it entails writing or speaking in a different language yet without leaving one's own language. Erasure or defeat of the mother tongue entails speaking language "multaphoniaksically ," broaching and branching language out by the multiplicity of its phonic elements. Artaud's "other language beneath the tree," hiding as it were in the system (langue) of French, resonates with Joyce's expression in Finnegan's Wake: "alter in the garden of Idem" (263). Alterity is always already in the garden of Eden, in the garden of the Same, camouflaged from the roots to the branches of its trees. To alter the garden of language is precisely what is at stake in all the texts-linguistic and visual texts, literary or non-literary texts-examined in the present issue. From Hélène Smith, the turn of the century medium who spoke a "non-terrestrial language" to the 20th-century literary experiments (that extend from the Russian futurists to avant-garde film, Artaud, Beckett, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) and to the alterations within common language , what is at stake is the fact that rational and communicational language may be altered, may itself "stammer" and slip, up to the point of reaching the limit of communication, articulation and reason, that is, the unsayable, silence. One way to alter language is by giving voice to the material dimension of its sounds, by treating "the word as such" (Kruchenykh). No need to focus on contemporary literature to find literary traces of this idea of the power of sound. As Blanchot notes, the enigmatic song of the Sirens, which Ulysses alone heard without dying, is a "chant de l'abîme qui [...] ouvre dans chaque Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 3 L'Esprit Créateur parole un abîme."1 Since its content is never given, the song of the Homeric Sirens, however, draws its power from its textual absence and suggests in and by its absence that language may open itself onto what Blanchot calls an "abyss." On the other hand, in the wake of Mallarmé who, commenting on his own "Tombeau d'Edgar Poe," proclaimed that he wanted to produce extraordinary sound effects ("rendre quelques-uns des effets de sonorité extraordinaire de la musique originelle"2), writers such as the Russsian futurists, Joyce, Artaud, Beckett, and Kafka, for example, have tried to give voice to the radical alterity that the material dimension of the voice and its effects of sound introduce in discursive and rational language. These Mallarmean "effects of extraordinary sound" are precisely those that Joyce, rewriting the Sirens episode in Ulysses, gives voice to, as he opens the words onto the "abyss" of their materiality and their musicality. Yet the abyss may ultimately be the heterogeneity of the absence of sound rather than the heterogeneity of sound, for, as is the case in Kafka's rewriting of the same episode, the silence of the Sirens constitutes the "abyss," the most radical alteration of language and its most radical other. Another way to alter rational language consists in syntax being destabilized : "tracer [dans la langue] une sorte de langue étrangère, qui n'est pas une autre langue, ni un patois retrouvé, mais un devenir-autre de la langue [...], création syntaxique, style, tel est ce devenir de la langue."3 To let "words do as they want to do" (Gertrude Stein), "to drill holes" in syntax (Samuel Beckett ), to play with "cut-ups" (William Burroughs), with...

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