Living between languages: Linguistic exile and self-translation

Through the reading of various cross-cultural self-narratives that focus on further language learning, this dissertation addresses the problem of linguistic displacement and its effects on subjectivity in its experiential, theoretical and textual dimensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic and critical social theories, I conceptualize translingual subject formation as a process traversed by contradictory psychic, cultural and ethical claims actualized in the experience of linguistic exile and the process of self-translation. These conflictual demands produce a "signification crisis" (Santner Private 26) in which the mother tongue no longer upholds the subject's sense of ontological consistency, while the adopted language does not yet provide the symbolic resources necessary for a self-redefinition.;This thesis unpacks the notion of translingualism, transforming it from a descriptive account into a heuristic concept that illuminates the process of coming to terms in resistance with "the more than one/no longer one" language (Derrida Specters xx), that is, with the problem of linguistic multiplicity and the loss of the all-encompassing and auratic quality of the mother tongue. If from a purely descriptive approach, translingualism appears as the de facto condition of knowing various languages, this work's interdisciplinary perspective illuminates the various strategies through which the translingual condition is simultaneously embraced and rejected.;Most memoirs and autobiographical engagements with the question of linguistic displacement deal with the appropriation of languages with an imperial and/or colonizing valence, or with the switch to languages with higher symbolic currency. Accordingly, my theorization of translingual subjectification addresses the question of how particular socio-historical conditions such as monolingual hegemony, linguistic standardization, and power imbalance between languages shape the apparently neutral process of further language acquisition into various forms of linguistic alienation. The forms I have explored range from recalcitrant enclavism in the "language of elsewhere" (Djebar "Writing" 23) to furious monolingual assimilation into the host language.