Excerpt from an article on Julia Kristeva's concept of "the silence of the polyglot"

By Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio. You can read it in full, as well as track references, here: http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=74

"Extraneity of one's language is extraneity of one's own conscious, extraneity of the unconscious. “Tell me the language you speak and I will tell you what your unconscious is”: the Freudian postulate recalls that the conscious and the unconscious speak the same language that the subject speaks. Vološinov develops this position in Freudianism, 1927 (see Chapter IX on language, unconscious and ideology).

But the situation in which signification manifests itself glaringly as a heterogeneous process, as nomadism and extraneity, is that of the subject that does not speak its own language, but another language, or better, that speaks a language which, though one's own, resounds all the same as foreign, while the language of origin lives in the nocturnal memory of the body, as a language of other times which, even if it withdraws from possession by the subject, never abandons that subject. Kristeva analyzes this situation in a section of Étrangers à nous-mêmes entitled, “Le silence du polyglotte”.

The subject that speaks a new language can perfect itself as to how to manage a new instrument, but his or her word remains the word of others. In this situation as a speaking subject placed between two languages, in “cette anesthésie de la personne happée par une langue étrangère”, in this “mutisme polyforme” of the polyglot, hetereogeneity of the process of significance itself evidences the doubling of the “unitary” subject, hidden in the normal use of language.

In literary writing the “silence of the polyglot” is transformed into “silence” of the writer, as a listening position, a position that characterizes the writer, that becomes the possibility of distancing, typical of the writer: as Bakhtin says in his 1970-71 notes (in Bakhtin 1986), the writer dresses in silence and uses a language while standing outside it. The writer gives up mastery over the word which is delusory, goes into the listening mode and resorts, through writing, to the “different forms of silence”: irony, allegory, parody, metaphor, parable… Between two languages, as Kristeva observes, the foreigner knows what the loquacious and arrogant native speaker does not know, that it, that nobody is master of one's “own” language (nor is it possible to statalize, to nationalize language, in spite of the “reality” of national languages, on the basis of which identities are established, exclusions are justified and conflicts triggered).

The foreigner knows that with respect to the language he speaks, the language that speaks him, that silence is not only imposed upon him, but is part of him, in him. Here then comes the refusal to say, nothing to say, no reply, no answer to interrogation, to wanting to hear. Not to say anything, there's nothing to say, nothing can be said, the unspeakable (cf. Kristeva 1988: 28–29). With respect to this situation, the way out is writing. "