"We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to actively develop new ones.”
-       Judith Butler, interview with Cristan Williams, Verso, 2015
 
Thinkers from Derrida to Deleuze to Butler have dreamed of, gestured toward, and proposed novel utilisations of language in a bid to transform the way we think and interface with reality. How can a turn to the vernacular show us a way beyond the theoretical and analytical? Of a way beyond coining of neologisms, retrievals of lost nuances? Hiding in plain sight, the realm of the everyday holds languages, colloquialisms, and idioms with the potentiality and immanent schematic orientations towards subversion against and circumvention around the constraints of representational, logocentric, or “proper” language.



This event looks at how the Malay language, with its self-aware polychotomies of language, tone and textural contexts, has in it embedded and coded ways of critique while maintaining a veneer of social and political valence, legibility and acceptability. We are interested in the coded, occulted and polyphonic modes of critique, and explore this through 2 short sharings by Sean Francis (On Language Nouveau, from Deleuze to Derrida) and Faris Joraimi (on language, proper and profane in 19th-century Malay texts).

These will be followed by a dramatised reading of selected parts of Salleh ben Joned’s The Amok of Mat Solo (2011) by Sha Sharif and Al Hafiz Sanusi.


We are immensely grateful to Singlit Station, our co-host for this event.