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Munira Khayyat Of Goats and Bombs: How to Live (and Die) in an Explosive Landscape
Goats remain the most viable livestock in the warzone of South Lebanon because of their compatibility with wartime environments and ordnance. They can survive periods of scarcity during active war, occupations, or invasions by foraging for food and eating almost anything. Most crucially, goats are small and light and can graze in the borderland’s many minefields without setting off the hidden explosives designed to kill humans, who are not as light-footed. In this essay, Munira Khayyat explores how an enduring, explosive military technology is both domesticated and resisted by a homegrown, anti-mine survival assemblage.
2023. Borderland; Goats; Minefields; South Lebanon; War
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Jumana Emil Abboud Hide Your Water from the Sun: A Performance for Spirited Waters
This essay is an excerpt from Jumana Emil Abboud’s ongoing journal, which she started keeping in 2010. With the help of photographer Issa Freij, the artist identified spirited water spots in the topography of Palestine, based on her childhood memories and a 1922 study on Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine. The text was written as part of a performance by Abboud at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in 2016.
2023. Childhood memories; Palestine; Spirited water spots; Topography
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Nadine Hattom Great Sand: Grains of Occupation and Representation
Nadine Hattom’s text is written as a sequel to the artist’s ‘Shadows’ series (2016), comprised of ten digitally altered photographs made from US Department of Defense public-domain images depicting Operation Iraqi Freedom. As Hattom’s piece explores migration and landscape, it untangles narratives rooted in the colours, textures, ecosystems, and geographies of the Middle East, but also in the political implications of the author’s position in the landscapes of the West.
2023. Germany; Landscape; Operation Iraqi Freedom; Sand; ‘Shadows’ series (2016); War
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Kali Rubaii Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq
A series of creative non-fiction short stories based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation in Iraq from 2014–2022, Kali Rubaii’s reflection asks: what is a toxic affect? In these stories, war-torn ecologies are packed with living and non-living beings that emerge in the floor of a mosque, in a graveyard, from a pillow, a toilet, and construction sites in Iraq.
2023. Iraq; Living and non-living beings; Occupation; Toxic affect; War
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Marwa Arsanios Who’s Afraid of Ideology?
Artist Marwa Arsanios shares textual fragments from research she conducted for the first and second parts of a video trilogy titled Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Meditating on the voiding effects of war, and the ecological and affective texture of communal resistance and eco-feminist praxis as they emerge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and northern Syria, the text takes us to ecological milieux made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees, Kurdish guerrillas, and farmers in a women-only commune.
2023. Communal resistance; Eco-feminist praxis; Fig trees; Kurdish movement; Kurdistan; Rojava; Voiding; Wild medicinal plants
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Umut Yıldırım Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia — in particular, centenarian mulberry trees — as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state’s denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
2023. Armenian genocide; Eco-redaction; Kurdistan; Kurdish movement; Mulberry trees; Resistant roots; Testimony; Tigris River
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Umut Yıldırım War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts
Umut Yıldırım’s introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
2023. Arts; Ethnography; Genocide; More-than-human relations; More-than-human memory; Occupation; Political aesthetics; Resistance; War
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Françoise Vergès Foreword
Françoise Vergès, ‘Foreword’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), p. vii-xix
2023
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War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East Ed. by Umut Yıldırım
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
2023 | Cultural Inquiry, 27. war; affect; ecology; middle east; archive; displacement; fragment; art; resistance; popular belief; affective ecology
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Libera Pisano Wandering Words: Translation against the Myth of Origin in Fritz Mauthner’s Philosophy
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue — the only way to conceive patriotism — is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious Heimat (home).
2023. Fritz Mauthner; Translation; Mother Tongue; Linguistic Skepticism; Autochthony
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Antonio Castore The Staircase Wit: or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose
‘The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose’ explores idioms and Sprachbilder as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller’s Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller’s prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the ‘singularity’ of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of ‘conventionality’.
2023. Herta Müller; Nobel lecture; idioms; poetry; mother tongue; singularity; conventionality
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Caroline Sauter The Mother Tongue of Love and Loss: Albert Cohen’s Le Livre de ma mère
This article reads Albert Cohen’s Le Livre de ma mère, which mourns the death of his mother, as a poetics of love and loss. It is a poetics of otherness that disavows the claim to expression and selfhood. The mother, being the paradigmatic figure of otherness, is a figure for literature, a form of language that is characterized by saying things differently. Literature itself is a motherly space insofar as it others the language of the self. This argument is developed along close readings of both the French original and the English translation of Cohen’s work, following three thematic axes: first, the peculiar kinship of love and death; second, the mother as the other; third, literature as filio-logy: a logic of filiation that does not leave the self unchanged.
2023. Albert Cohen; loss; mourning; mother; mother tongue; translation; death; love
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Jeffrey Champlin ‘I know you can cant’: Slips of the Mother Tongue in Fred Moten’s B Jenkins
This article reads Fred Moten’s collection B Jenkins as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler’s techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten’s detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the ‘cant’, slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our post-national age.
2023. Monolingualism; Derrida; Kittler; Globish; Palestine
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Teresa Prudente The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement: Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue
The essay focusses on how Woolf’s quest for a ‘universal’ language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, The Waves offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf’s stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge’s perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
2023. Modernism; Woolf; feminist theory; consciousness; linguistics
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Juliane Prade-Weiss Scarspeak: Thinking the Mother Tongue as a Formative Mark
This chapter proposes the scar as a productive image to conceptualize the relation of speakers to the particular language otherwise called mother tongue, native or first language. Thinking of this relation in terms of a scar avoids the biopolitical implications of concepts derived from the context of family and birth that have, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, come to present language as basis of a nation state. The image of the scar also avoids the biographical normalization and linguistic hierarchization implied in the term first language, as both are equally important biopolitical strategies of forming individuals and communities. Thinking of the mother tongue in terms of a scar emphasizes the intensity of lasting formation and identification entailed by acquiring this particular language, and it highlights the violence inherent to these processes that tends to be covered up by the naturalizing and family-related imagery of native or mother tongue as well as by the favour implied in the term first language.
2023. multilingualism; trauma; scar; lament; origin of language; language acquisition; Freud; Joyce; Veteranyi
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Jakob Norberg The Mother Tongue at School
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm’s writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
2023. Jacob Grimm; nationalism; nation building; 19th century; mother tongue; schooling; compulsory; education; folklore; philology; German literature
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Federico Dal Bo ‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’: On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in Exile
This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true ‘mother tongue’ to him but rather ‘a foreign one’. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by la page blanche, or the ‘blank page’. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès’s writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his ‘mother tongue is a foreign language’, because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer’s ‘mother tongue’ — and, by extension, human language — is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.
2023. Jabès; Talmud; Mother Tongue; Foreign Language; Shoah; Tzimtzum
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Michael Eng Philosophy’s Mother Envy: Has There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue?
This essay approaches the problem of untying the mother tongue using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of onto-typology, along with the concept of the outre-mère (the ‘beyond-mother’), a limit-figure he and Jean-Luc Nancy devised in their critical assessments of psychoanalysis and its relationship to politics and the problem of mimesis. The essay argues that it will not be possible to deconstruct the figure of the mother tongue, or to untie ourselves from it, as long as we leave unquestioned both the theoretical dependence on figuration and our affective tie ( Gefühlsbindung) to theory.
2023. Lacoue-Labarthe; Nancy; language; mimesis; affect; theory; figuration
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Deborah Achtenberg But You Don’t Get Used to Anything: Derrida on the Preciousness of the Singular
This chapter argues against the view that Derrida’s emphasis on change makes him complicit in the neoliberal requirement of flexibility that results both in precarity and in the dominance of English. To the contrary, the essay argues that Derrida’s idea of différance includes the view that openness both involves loss and is always partial (since incision involves excision), that the singular is precious, and that deconstruction is justice since it is alert to what is excluded even by efforts at inclusiveness. Examples of the preciousness and loss of the singular are circumcision (where incision is excision), hospitality (in which unconditional hospitality has material limitations and conditions), subjectivity (which is never based on full presence), language (which both is my own and comes from an other), and neighbourhoods (since they continue only by incorporating new people). Deconstruction, the essay concludes, need not be complicit in neoliberal dominance but, properly understood, makes us aware of the power dynamics by which the openness of plurilingualism can lead to the dominance of English.
2023. Derrida; singularity; neoliberalism; deconstruction; circumcision; hospitality; mother tongue; plurilingualism; loss; justice
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Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo Introduction
Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, ‘Introduction’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 1-9
2023
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Untying the Mother Tongue Ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo
Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
2023 | Cultural Inquiry, 26. mother tongue; language acquisition; linguistics; literary criticism; multilingualism; affect; resistance; philosophy; Jacques Derrida
Video
Christoph Holzhey Introduction
Christoph Holzhey, Introduction to the book presentation David Kishik, Self Study, ICI Berlin, 13 July 2023, video recording, mp4, 07:26
2023
Video
Maggie Nelson in Conversation with David Kishik
Maggie Nelson in Conversation with David Kishik of the book presentation David Kishik, Self Study, ICI Berlin, 13 July 2023, video recording, mp4, 01:11:24
2023
Book Presentation Video
David Kishik Self Study
David Kishik’s Self Study (ICI Berlin Press, 2023) is a genre-bending work of autophilosophy. It opens a rare, rear window into the schizoid position of self-sufficient withdrawal and impassive indifference. This inability to be enriched by outer experiences feeds the relentless suspicion that hell is other people. Laying bare his life and work, Kishik engages with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural inquiry to trace loneliness across the history of thought, leading to today’s shut-in society and the autonomous subject of liberal capitalism.

David Kishik will read from his book, followed by a conversation with Maggie Nelson and a Q&A with the audience.

David Kishik lives in New York and teaches at Emerson College. Self Study is the fifth and final volume in his series of books, To Imagine a Form of Life. Previous titles include The Book of Shem and The Manhattan Project, both published by Stanford University Press. Some shorter texts appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming collection Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (2007), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). In 2016 she received a MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellowship. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition
(Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023)
Paperback | 12 EUR | v, 174 pp. | 17.8 cm x 12.7 cm | ISBN 978-3-96558-045-9
2023