What happens to one’s mother tongue when it is called upon to articulate a refusal of motherhood? How does language respond when women attempt to speak about bodily experiences that challenge the very maternal logic through which national, legal, and symbolic orders define them? This paper examines two contemporary literary works—Yael Neeman’s Hebrew short story “Akarut” (Barrenness, 2013) and Annie Ernaux’s French memoir L’Événement (2000)—to argue that writing non-motherhood constitutes a political and aesthetic intervention in the mother tongue itself. Though written in different languages and cultural contexts, both texts confront moments in which women’s bodies are expropriated by dominant discourses: state-funded fertility treatments in Israel, and criminalized abortion in 1960s France.

I argue that Neeman and Ernaux perform inverse but convergent movements toward a shared aim: the partial reintegration of the female body into language. Neeman exposes the persistence of a biblical narrative structure in which barrenness functions as a mechanism of infinite delay—now reproduced by medical discourse under the guise of “fertility problems.” Through exaggerated irony, militarized medical jargon, and the strategic declaration of “barrenness,” Neeman interrupts the ideological demand to remain indefinitely “potential,” reclaiming an ending where language insists on suspension. Ernaux, by contrast, confronts an experience that “had no place in language” not because it lacked a name, but because speech itself was legally dangerous. I show how L’Événement distinguishes between speech as a juridically regulated “father tongue” and writing as a material space in which what cannot be spoken may nonetheless be inscribed. Drawing on Elissa Marder’s concept of photographic writing, I argue that Ernaux mobilizes punctuation, spacing, and textual interruption to produce a visual and affective trace of bodily experience.

Together, these texts demonstrate how literature can reconfigure language—not by resolving its contradictions, but by inhabiting and reworking them—opening new forms of political subjectivity and feminist solidarity.

Colonial domination frequently operates not only through political institutions or economic extraction but through linguistic regimes that organize how subjects experience themselves and their world. This paper examines the psychic effects of linguistic domination through the assimilationist pedagogical formula “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors the Gauls”), long imposed in French colonial education in the Caribbean. As Martinican thinkers such as René Ménil observed, this phrase condensed a broader ideological project: the attempt to reshape colonized subjectivity by imposing linguistic identifications that contradicted lived historical and bodily experience. By compelling Antillean students to speak and imagine themselves as descendants of the Gauls, colonial pedagogy produced a disjunction between embodied life and linguistic self-description. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial subjectivity in Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such linguistic regimes function as mechanisms of psychic organization that structure recognition, self-perception, and social value. Colonial language does not merely describe the world; it organizes the relationship between mind, body, and social belonging. To deepen this account, I place Fanon in dialogue with François Tosquelles’ institutional psychotherapy, which emphasizes how environments shape psychic life. Colonial schools can thus be understood as institutions that reorganize subjectivity by regulating speech, identity, and imagination. From this perspective, linguistic domination produces forms of psychic alienation in which subjects must inhabit identities that cannot be reconciled with their embodied histories. Understanding colonial language in this way reveals how the politics of language extends beyond communication to the (de)formation of the psychic life of colonized subjects.

LLMs produce meaningful text, meaning they operate within the lack of language, navigating the interplay of signifiers without grounding in the world, much as human speakers do. Yet when LLMs are trained recursively on AI-generated data, they undergo what researchers call Model Collapse: a progressive deterioration in the ability to generate meaningful output. This empirical phenomenon reveals a qualitative difference between human and machine production of text that psychoanalytic theory can help explain.

Jean Laplanche describes how humans acquire language relationally, through early encounters with caregivers whose messages necessarily exceed their intended meaning. Because the caregiver speaks from an unconscious they cannot fully access, their discourse carries what Laplanche terms "enigmatic signifiers,” meanings the child cannot fully translate into private understanding. These untranslatable remainders are not deficits but productive failures of comprehension: they constitute the unconscious and, crucially, enable human subjects to generate genuinely new meanings. From the perspective of Model Collapse, we might call this capacity "surplus variance," an empirical property present in human discourse but absent in synthetic text.

LLMs, by contrast, are trained on text without maintaining any alterity in relation to their training data. Human-generated text may contain these surplus meanings, but the LLM faces no ambiguity in processing them. For LLMs all text is fully incorporated without remainder, producing no untranslated unconscious signifiers. My claim is that LLMs are embedded in the lack of language but acquire language non-relationally, and Model Collapse is the empirical trace of this difference.

How does the sensing body emerge as a bounded, unitary "I" from the primordial fabric of the world? While Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early work in Phenomenology of Perception established the body-subject as the anchor of experience, his later ontology suggests a more radical intertwining. In this paper, I argue that the transition from the anonymous Flesh—the pre-subjective "intertwining" of the sensing and the sensible—to the constituted sensory body is achieved through the fundamental techne of language. I contend that the traditional phenomenological distinction between the lived body (Leib) and the objective body (Körper) often takes for granted the "natural" givenness of the sensory self. By returning to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the Flesh, I propose that the unitary, bounded body is not a biological precursor to expression, but is itself a "technical" artifact of linguistic sedimentation. Language functions here as a primary embodiment relation: a diacritical interface that withdraws into transparency while simultaneously carving the Flesh into the grammatical categories of self and other, inside and outside.

By foregrounding language as the original technology of subjectivation, the sensory body is revealed not as a "natural" entity later modified by tools, but as a primary technical constitution. Consequently, contemporary digital media do not merely extend a pre-existing body; they re-mediate a subject that was already linguistically engineered.