How Can I Have a Language That Is Not Mine? Derrida, Saussure, and the Question of Origins

“At any given period, however far back in time we go, a language is always an inheritance from the past. In fact, no society has ever known its language to be anything other than something inherited from previous generations, which it has no choice but to accept. That is why the question of the origins of language does not have the importance generally attributed to it. It is not even a relevant question as far as linguistics is concerned”.

— Saussure, F. de, Course in general linguistics

1. “I Have but One Language”

“I have but one language—yet that language is not mine.”

The sentence seems contradictory. To have a language ordinarily means to speak it, to use it, perhaps even to identify with it. Yet in Monolingualism of the other; or, The prosthesis of origin, Derrida immediately withdraws the possession that his statement appears to claim. He has one language, but that language does not belong to him.

The difficulty lies in the word have. Derrida is not denying that he speaks French, nor that French is the language through which he has lived, written, and thought. The problem is what follows when speaking a language is described as having it. To speak a language is not quite the same as owning one.

Ownership suggests choice. I can possess something because I acquired it, received it, or decided to make it mine. A language does not ordinarily enter our lives in this way. We find ourselves speaking before we have made a decision about what to speak. It is there before we can claim it.

This gives Derrida’s sentence its peculiar force. The language is intimately mine in the sense that I speak through it, but it is also other than me: something I have received rather than chosen. The paradox, then, is not simply that the language is both mine and not mine. It is that the two meanings of have no longer coincide.

Derrida’s sentence asks us to look more closely at that gap. What does it mean to have a language when the language through which I become a speaking subject was already there before me?

Saussure helps us see what is at stake in that question.

2. The Language We Inherit

In the Cours de linguistique générale, Saussure describes language as “an inheritance from the past.” However far back we go, he writes, a language is always something handed down. No society encounters it as a system it has consciously created; each generation receives what previous generations have left in place.

This temporal priority matters. The subject enters a linguistic world shaped by a history that precedes the individual. The words available for speaking, the distinctions they establish, and the relations among them are not inventions of the speaker. One begins to speak within an arrangement that already has a history.

But inheritance here should not be understood as the conscious acceptance of something already prepared. Saussure observes that people generally use their language without conscious reflection on the laws governing it. We do not receive a language like a document that can be read, inspected, and either accepted or rejected. We acquire it through participation.

There is therefore no moment at which the individual can point to a decision and say: this is the language I have chosen. By the time choice becomes possible, the linguistic environment in which that choice would have to be expressed is already in place.

The point is not simply that language has a history. It is that the speaker enters that history without first standing outside it. What comes from the past becomes the medium of speech before it can become an object of deliberate possession.

This brings us to a further question. What kind of thing is an inheritance if no one consciously agreed to receive it?

3. An Institution No One Founded

Saussure calls language a social institution, but immediately qualifies the comparison. William Dwight Whitney, he says, was right to emphasize its institutional character and the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Yet the arbitrariness of language “radically separates” it from other institutions. Language cannot simply be treated as a contract established by a community and subsequently maintained by agreement.

This distinction is important. If language were an ordinary institution, society could appear as its author: people would establish the rules, preserve them, and, at least in principle, change them. Saussure’s account makes such a picture difficult to sustain. No collective decision lies behind the ordinary functioning of a language, and no speaker can simply redesign its fundamental arrangements at will.

His comparison with chess makes the point from another direction. A chess player enters an existing system and deliberately moves the pieces within it. Language resembles chess in its dependence on relations and positions, but there is a decisive difference: the player intends each move, whereas “language premeditates nothing.” Speakers do not normally approach their language as conscious strategists manipulating a known system.

Linguistic competence therefore does not require explicit possession of the rules that make speech possible. We can follow patterns we could not formulate and participate in an order whose workings we may only recognize afterward.

We inherit a language without inheriting a rulebook.

The institutional analogy thus leads somewhere more precise than the idea of ownership. A language is social without being the product of a founding agreement. It governs speech without presenting itself to speakers as a consciously administered code. What is inherited is not a set of instructions authored by someone, but a form of participation whose beginnings are difficult to assign to any particular act or subject.

And this brings the question of origin into view.

4. What Happened to the Origin?

Saussure considers the possibility of an initial moment in which names were assigned to things, but immediately points out that no one has ever observed such an event. More importantly, he argues that the question of linguistic origins does not have the importance usually attributed to it. Linguistics, for him, is concerned with the language that exists, as it is transmitted and used, rather than with a hypothetical moment at which it first came into being.

The question of origin does not disappear, however. It changes its object.

If I cannot return to the beginning of the language I speak, what would it mean for that language to provide me with an origin of my own?

Derrida’s Monolingualism of the other; or, The prosthesis of origin gives this question a sharper form. His phrase “the prosthesis of origin” in the title suggests that origin is not simply something waiting to be recovered behind language. The desire to locate an authentic beginning is itself entangled with the structures through which identity is formed and expressed.

The issue is therefore no longer simply Where did this language begin? It becomes: What would it mean for a subject to possess an origin of its own?

Language matters here because the subject can formulate that question only through language. The search for an origin is articulated within a medium whose history exceeds the individual. What appears to be a search for something prior to language may already depend on the linguistic conditions through which the search becomes thinkable.

The question of origin has thus moved from the beginning of a language to the beginning of a self.

5. The Language That Is Not Mine

Let’s read more closely Derrida’s sentence “I have but one language—yet that language is not mine.”

The first words, I have, seem straightforward. Derrida speaks French; French is the language in which he writes and through which he addresses his readers. But have cannot mean simple possession. The language is not an object the speaker acquired and can therefore claim as property.

Then comes but one language. The point is not merely numerical. Derrida’s linguistic existence is situated within a particular language. He does not occupy a neutral position from which he could simply select one language among others. The language through which he speaks is also the medium in which he describes his relation to it.

Then comes the small but decisive word yet. It interrupts the apparent logic of possession. Everything before it seems to support the claim that this is his language; what follows withdraws that claim.

That language is not mine.

The statement does not mean that French is foreign to Derrida in the ordinary sense. The difficulty is precisely its intimacy. A language can be closest to us without becoming private property. It can be the medium of memory, thought, writing, and self-description while remaining marked by histories that exceed the individual speaker.

This becomes especially significant in Monolingualism of the Other because Derrida’s relation to French is inseparable from the history of colonial Algeria. French was the language in which he was formed, but it was also marked by a political history that exceeded his individual relation to it. The “mother tongue” could therefore not simply function as the transparent expression of an already existing identity. What appears most intimate is already marked by history, authority, and otherness.

The problem is thus deeper than the question of who owns a language. What kind of self can claim ownership of the language through which it becomes a self?

There is no neutral position from which the speaker can settle that question. Even the statement this language is not mine must be made in the language whose possession it places in doubt. The speaker cannot first establish an identity outside language and then decide whether the language belongs to that identity. The self who claims, questions, or refuses belonging is already speaking from within a linguistic history.

Derrida’s paradox therefore concerns more than possession. It concerns the conditions under which a self can say mine at all.

6. To Have a Language Is Not to Own It

We can now return to the question with which we began: How can I have a language that is not mine?

Its paradox depends on two different senses of have. To have a language is to speak through it and participate in it as a speaker. To own a language would mean something stronger: that it could first be possessed as an object of choice or property.

The two senses do not coincide.

Derrida’s formulation exposes something ordinary that is easy to overlook. The language closest to us is not necessarily the language we can call our own in the sense of possession. We speak through what we did not first choose, and we can question our relation to it only by speaking through it.

This is why the paradox in Derrida’s sentence cannot be resolved by choosing between possession and non-possession. I have a language precisely because it comes to me from elsewhere; and because it comes to me from elsewhere, I can never simply stand outside it and make it mine.

I have a language because I inherit it, but it is not mine because the inheritance precedes me.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other; or, The prosthesis of origin (P. Mensah, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1996)

Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds.; R. Harris, Trans.). Open Court. (Original work published 1916)

Saussure, F. de. (2006). Writings in general linguistics (S. Bouquet & R. Engler, Eds.; C. Sanders & M. Pires, Trans.). Oxford University Press.