Fantasies of Forgetting Our Mother Tongue

Abstract

ABSTRACT From Augustine's drive toward an imaginary time before speech to Marx's drive toward an imaginary time after speech as we know it, we learn that we are always already bound by our mother tongue. When Derrida turns to both Augustine and Marx to repeat the fantasy of escaping the mother tongue, he makes explicit the intertwined fantasy of escaping the mother's touch. I explore the theological and political underpinnings of twentieth-century psychoanalytic framings of the touch of language upon our skin, leading to Derrida's specific fantasy of the lick of the mother tongue.