A plurality of peoples inhabits the world, and frequently the world is presented as a common space where differences among peoples are manifest. Each people is a group, so differences among peoples are not entirely reducible to differences among individuals. In order to tell the plurality of peoples from the plurality of human individuals, we often rely upon categories for collective identities such as family, kin, race, nation, ethnos, and culture. The most commanding category for collective unity in the modern world is given in language, so that the language is represented as expressing the primordial union of a people. If one human body is somewhat a marker of human 'individuality,' the image - or figure, trope, or schema - of a language gives the sense of an individual or indivisible collectivity. Yet, on what ground is it possible to claim that the image of a language is autonomous and self-oriented?
My paper argues that what is primarily given is not an image of a language but the image, figure, trope, or schema of languages; the locale where languages are identified is never contained within a single language. The identification of a language is possible only in an heteronomous encounter of frontier where translation is conducted. Differences among peoples precede the union of a people, just as translation comes before the identification of a language. I call this process of social encounter "bordering," borrowing the term introduced by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson.
Then my argument seeks the consequences of the language's pluralist origin in two directions: the first is a historical analysis of a schematism by which the image of languages was reorganized in modernity. The national language comes into being through this schematism. The second is the question of culture, and of its subordination to the schematism of national languages. Culture is often modeled after the image of a national language.
From these two perspectives, I seek to explore the concept of 'heterolingual address' and "bordering."