68 chApter two
our ethical grounds are always aspiring, shifting, experimenting, failing—
but striving nevertheless toward more ethical orientations.
Possessing Language
In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida writes of his own intimate es-
trangement with the French language, declaring, “I have only one language,
yet it is not mine” (1998, 2). Derrida reminds us, as an Algerian writing in
France, of the historical force rooted in the very use of language. To elabo-
rate the fantasmatic notion of language as “possession,” he turns to the
colonial politics of language: “Because the master does not possess exclu-
sively, and naturally, what he calls his language... because language is not
his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact, pretend historically,
through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially
colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose it as ‘his own’ ” (23). This
“always essentially colonial” relation between the master and his language
reveals the fraudulency of the master who by performing language posses-
sion conquers and usurps foreign cultures. Gauri Viswanathan’s account
of British language and literature education in India emphasizes this foun-
dational element of colonial “masking” in her argument about how “En-
glish literary study had its beginnings as a strategy of containment” (1989,
19). Aiming to “teach” colonial subjects how to mimic British civility, this
strategy of containment was, Viswanathan argues, a mask for “the vulner-
ability of the British, the sense of beleaguerment and dread” felt by British
colonial administrators who anticipated an almost certain rebellion by na-
tives against their authority (10). English language and literature education
was a “humanistic” method of civilizing natives by teaching them how to
approximate their colonial masters. Yet, as Viswanathan elucidates, “the
view that a humanistic education holds the same meaning and purpose for
both colonizer and colonized quickly crumbles under the weight of even
the most casual scrutiny” (7). When we read Viswanathan and Derrida
together, colonial language and its masterful framing emerge as a fantas-
tic defense against the vulnerability of the master who fears his own lack,
and who responds to that fear through instituting and enforcing his “own”
masterful language.
Derrida’s declaration of French as his sole language and as that which is
not his own is not only a historico- political problem but also an ontological