The Lick of the Mother Tongue: Derrida’s Fantasies of “the Touch of Language” with Augustine and Marx

Abstract

Augustine’s Confessions makes the impossible attempt to return to a time before language. Augustine claims that before we are aware of language, we learn our mother tongue through the touch of the mother. This lesson in language that we often first learn through a gentle touch—the nipple of the mother in the mouth of the infant—is later reinforced by a violent touch—the switch of the schoolmaster. Augustine suggests that any memory of a time before “the touch of language” is purely imaginary. And yet his autobiography is driven (by a death drive) to return to a time before the touch of the mother (tongue).