Giacinta Gandolfo

Mres Art: Theory and Philosophy.

Unit 4: Independent Research Project: Emilio Villa: speaking in tongues. A study under Michel de Certeau's
analysis on glossolalia.
Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London
3 June 2016
15074

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alla voce.
histrio fammi cantare

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Table of Contents

Introduction p.4

I - Notes on Glossolalia p.6

1.1 - Opera of speech or vocal utopias: glossolalia according to de Certeau p.9

1.2 - Roma, 1977. de Certeau,Fabbri, Samarin. p.11

II - Emilio Villa's tongues p.13

2.1 - refusal of native language / multilingualism/ decomposition of sense. p.13

2.2 - primordial voice / origin / beginnings ends of the word / void silence. p.16
2.3 - phonetic principle and sound repetition (alliterations, stuttering) / oral writing. p.19

III - Speaking in tongues: juxtaposing anomalies in literature. p.23

3.1 - Louis Wolfson-Antonin Artaud p.24

3.2 - Ghrasim Luca p.29

Conclusion p.34

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Introduction

The purpose of this research is to present and detect the phenomenon of glossolalia in the
oeuvre of Italian poet Emilio Villa and to juxtapose his practice to the one of other authors, at the
margins of the literary field, who similarly experimented what can be defined as a pathological use of
language. An introduction on glossolalia in its general history will be followed by a presentation of
Michel de Certeau's analysis on glossolalia to set up the phenomenon as occurred in Villa's writings. A
last section will be devoted to a selection of writers who share some similarities in terms of poetic
procedure with the Italian poet.

The study of glossolalia, literally talking in tongues, has been interpreted following three main theories:
1) that glossolalia takes place uniquely in religious environments, 2) that it is governed by some extra-
normal psychological authority, such as ecstatic states, trance, etc., 3) that it is, from the point of view
of linguistics, a verbal behavior that can be studied under the specific characteristics of its sounds,
languages and phonemes. Since the interest in the phenomena grew at the turn of the 20 th century,
extensive surveys in the mentioned fields have been developed. Reported cases of paranormal
glossolalia have been described already in the late 19 th century: in the book From India To The Planet
Mars (1899) Theodore Flournoy delineates the spiritualistic performances in languages of the
medium Hlne Smith, also under the guidance of Ferdinand de Saussure.
. Lombard (1910), E. Mosiman (1911), G. B. Cutten (1927), analyze the occurrence of glossolalia in
Christianity, considered in many cases as affiliated with Pentecostalism. L.C.May (1956) broadens the
documentation extending it to non-Christian religions, referring in particular to the Hindus in India.
Other studies undertaken by several anthropologists observed the behavior amongst different tribes and
cultures from North and South American Indians, to aboriginal groups, to various cults. American
linguist and anthropologist Felicitas Goodman (1914-2005) authored several publications on speaking
in tongues spanning from Pentecostal groups in South America, to the phonetic analysis of glossolalia,
to the ecstatic seances related to the term. In 1972 Canadian linguist William J. Samarin published a
meticulous study of the Pentecostal glossolalia, underlining the characteristics of the speech through its
phonetic and semantic apparatus, also describing the paralinguistic dimension of the term. Samarin
(1968, p.51) gives a definition of glossolalia also useful to the linguist: it is a meaningless but
phonologically structured human utterance believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no
systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead. During the 1970s and 1980s
philosopher and social theorist Michel de Certeau extends the study of glossolalia in relation to the
literary and poetic language. de Certeau's analysis of the phenomena proves to be particularly
interesting for the use of this investigation as the theorist's survey on the term does not discard its
religious or mystic roots, or the pathological and psychological terms related to it, however not limiting
to them and extending it to the poetic voice. I will merely refer to Michel de Certeau's theories to
develop the glossolalic aspect as occurred in Emilio Villa's writings.

Emilio Villa was born in Affori, just outside Milan in 1914. His poetic oeuvre spans from the
translation of the Bible and the Odyssey, to art critical texts and compositions on Mario Schifano,
Lucio Fontana, Roberto Burri, Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. The interest in
paleography and in Semitic languages, the question of modernity and of the primordial in general are
intertwined -in Villa's path- with the study of archaic and Gnostic philosophies, merging with the
constant leitmotiv of the distrust of communicative skills of language.

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Served by an heterogeneous and manifold approach, Villa's language is multiplied, broken, tuned to
ancient and dead etymologies, revisited phonemes and untranslatable words. The conflict takes place in
the search for a word devoid of language, only granted by deconstructing his mother tongue. By
annihilating the word, language is consumed to an inventive creation, controlled by destructive and
polysemic spellings, opening up to homophonic plays in French, Portuguese, Latin and English, in the
expressive force of a anti-normative language of difficult comprehension, hampering the
standardization to a word spoken by the majority, (and thus to power).
Few heroes exists behind Villa's production: Lucretius, Rimbaud, Mallarm, Lautremont, Roussel,
Artaud, Breton, Campana, Gadda, Joyce, Pound, Cioran, Duchamp. Their presence is scattered
throughout the poet's writings. Lucretius's boldness to create new words, his idea of variation as the
product of the clash between sense and nonsense described in De Rerum Natura, to which Villa pays
homage his Latin text Niger Mundus (end of 1970s-1980s), Rimbaud's idea of modernity and the
semantic-formal disarticulation of the poetic text, Mallarm and his calligrammes, Joyce and Pound's
multilingualism, Roussel's smart extravagance, the annihilation of the word as seen in Artaud's
glossolalia, the sacrifice of a language for the chosen few of Campana's Orphic Hymns (Canti Orfici).

Looking into Emilio Villa's oeuvre, I have come across few authors/artists that like him, have remained
at the margins of a linear history of literature for their being, at times schizophrenic, too pathological in
their procedure or to have dealt with forms of language untranslatable, incomprehensible,
uncommunicative. In such place are to be found poets and writers that express themselves in a different
language: Pound in his Cantos, Joyce in Finnegans Wake, Louis Wolfson, Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven, Gherasim Luca, Franz Kafka. Who disintegrates language or invents one: Antonin
Artaud, Tommaso Landolfi, J.R.R.Tolkien, Francois Rebelais. Who stuttered: Gherasim Luca, Louis
Wolfson, Thomas Beckett, Carmelo Bene. Someone played with phonemes and transformed sense:
Gherasim Luca, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset. Emilio Villa is in each of these characteristics.
But this practices are also true for glossolalia practitioners: Hildegard of Bingen and Helne Smith are
two cases I will describe later on.
The study I am proposing thus aims on the one hand to present Michel de Certeau's analysis on
glossolalia mainly following two texts, interestingly both edited in 2015: The mystic Fable vol. II
(edited by Luce Giard) published by Gallimard in 2013 and in its English translation by Michael B.
Smith in 2015, and a collection of dialogues held in Rome in 1977 recently transcribed in Italian thanks
to the fine work of Lucia Amara, (herself a scholar of performative languages and researcher of
irregular forms of literary languages), that in here are briefly traced in English language.
On the other hand, I interpret de Certeau's analysis on glossolalia in Emilio Villa's irregular writing
delineating few encounters that may have, or may have not occurred, but they become particularly
resonant for a mutual interest in peculiar forms at the borders of a normative use of language, practiced
with a sharpness comparable to few other authors during the same years.

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Notes on Glossolalia

1If I speak in the tongues1 of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a
clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13, 2011)
2For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them;
they utter mysteries by the Spirit.
10Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. 11If then
I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a
foreigner to me.
13For this reason the one who speaks in a tongue should pray that they may interpret what they say. 14For
if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.
21In the Law it is written:

With other tongues

and through the lips of foreigners
I will speak to this people,
but even then they will not listen to me,
says the Lord.2

(1 Corinthians 14, 2011)

In the First Epistle to the Corinthians (ch.13, 14) Saint Paul talked about speaking in tongues.
The notion (gift) has a positive, charismatic attitude: the one who speaks in tongues speaks within the
spirit; he speaks to God, not to men, and edifies only himself. (Whereas who speaks in prophecy edifies
the community). For St. Paul, who speaks in tongues is visited by the Holy Spirit, but he is not a
prophet able to save the men he is addressing to. Yet, who speaks in tongues is also able to express
himself in a completely invented language, rather than creating his own. The term glossolalia, was
coined by the theologian Adolphe Hilgenfeld who conjoined two Greek words glssa tongue,
language and lalia from lalein to speak, prattle, meaning to stutter in a tongue, or speaking in
tongues3 (Amara 2014, p.151) introducing the neologism in his 1850 Die Glossolalie in der alten
Kirche edited in Leipzig.

The study of glossolalia is usually treated as a controversial topic because affiliated to religious
practices, bound to secret and invented languages, orphic and orgiastic rituals, as in manifestations
within Gnostic communities and the ecstatic mantic (Amara 2015, p.8). In the centuries following
Saint Pauls's word, the history of glossolalia often develops in experiences bound to a single voice not
always amenable to the christian religion as related to a phenomenon not strictly recognized by the
Church system. An example is Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota (Unknown Language) described
in Lingua per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, An unknown language brought forward by
the simple human being Hildegard (Higley 2007, p.4). The German mystic (1098-1179) invented an
imaginary language with an alphabet of twenty-three different words drawn from her visions, those
words that I see and hear in vision are not like words that a human mouth utters, but like a glittering

1 Tongues meaning or in other languages 1 Corinthians 13, 14 (2011) New International version.
http://biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/13.htm
2 http://biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/14.htm,
3 Amara,L, Parlare in lingue. Wolfson Artaud, in Louis Wolfson. Cronache da un pianeta infernale. (Roma: Manifesto
libri, 2014), 151

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flame.(Higley 2007, p.35) The language, meant to restore the speech that has fallen 4 was a
commingling of Latin, German and Hebrew also engaging a particular gesture of opening and closing
of the mouth (Amara 2015, p.8).

A shift in the discourse on glossolalia happens between the 19 th and 20th century, becoming of major
scientific interest for it being one of the mechanisms to structure the generation of language. Specially,
in the 20th century a particular curiosity in the conscious-unconscious element begins to appear.
Namely: a second personality that takes possession of phonatory organs of ordinary personality, an
ecstasy that may generate a real possession and dispossession of the subject. (Amara 2015, p.9) Such
phenomenon, becomes of major interest for psychiatric and psycho-linguistic studies. In this regard, a
particularly interesting study, analyzed by several scholars in glossolalia is devoted to the case of the
medium Hlne Smith (Higley 2007, p.41), ne Catherine-lise MLller, occurred between 1885-1898.
The case study of somnambulism and glossolalia was followed by the Swiss Psychologist Thodore
Flournoy5: Mademoiselle Smith spoke Martian, Uranian and Lunaire (May 1956, p.76) and another
language that can be referred to as Sanscritoid (Flournoy 1900, p.329). Diverse Sanscrit specialists,
including Ferdinand de Saussure visited the woman's performances noticing the absence of the
consonant f, like in Sanscrit. As it is essential above all, and only, that it should not seem French (de
Certeau [1980] 2015, p.221), by omitting the f Smith exits from the French: Mademoiselle Smith is
leaving a language (French) rather than entering it, but that departure might also have been the
learning of Sanskrit if the learned circle of her examiners had thought to respond to her rather than
observing her, and sought communication (a speaking) rather than the existence of a knowledge (a
language).(de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.222) Much like Saint Paul, as she spoke in tongues, she
expressed herself in a completely made up language refusing her own; the sounds that she emitted were
just apparently Hindu in fact, they were a whole new private language that went to the heart of
communication by going around it. As one glossolal says (Samarin 1978, p.14) 6that instead of forming
words he concentrates on the communication rather than on the mode of communication, Hlne
Smith too pushed her speech through the crack of ordinary conversation: bodily noises, quotations of
delinquent sounds, and fragments of others' voices which punctuated the order of sentences with
breaks and surprises. (de Certeau 2015 [1980], p.213)

That said, starting from the 20th century the phenomenon of glossolalia begins to be associated with
language distortions and schizophrenia, due to the pathological inability of the speech to respond to
external events, and other linguistic forms engaging neologisms, stuttering, and expanding to the
literary field. In Concerning glossolalia in the early Christians and similar phenomena, 1910, French-
Swiss biblical professor mile Lombard, considering the phenomenon as a form of regression in
which infantile linguistic patterns come to the fore (May 1956, p.77), proposes a threefold grouping of
glossolalia (Lombard 1910, pp.25-34): 1) phonation frustes (incomprehensible sounds, mumbling,
gurgling, groaning) - These sounds usually precede complex forms of articulation but may be the
subjects's only vocalization during the entire period of his religious excitement. (May 1956, p.77) 2)

4 Although largely appointed as a manifestation of glossolalia, Hildegard's case is not properly considered as such by
Sarah Higley, author of a translation and study on the mystic's unknown language.
5 Flournoy devoted a book on the study of Hlene Smith, Flournoy, Thodore. (1901). From India to the Planet Mars, a
Study of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. English edition translated by Daniel Vermilye. Harper.
6 Quoted by William J. Samarin, Requirements for Research on Glossolalia, Centro internazionale di Semiotica e di
Linguistica (Urbino, 1978), 14. and after by Michel de Certeau in Utopies Vocales. Glossolalies, in Traverses, 20 (1980),
recently republished in The Mystic Fable. XVI-XVII vol.II The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries edited by Luce Giard
and translated by Michael B. Smith(2015) p.214

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pseudo-language or speech composed of articulate sounds which resemble words. (Mills 1973,
p.109)This entails alliterations and may conform to certain exterior aspects of ordinary language when
grouped into a form simulating a sentence (languages seemingly known but lacking of sense) 3)
verbal fabrication/glossopoiesis words coined by the individual may contain particles of native and
foreign phonemes and may be used according to identified grammatical rules.(Jaquith, J. 1967, p.1)
largely employing the use of neologisms.
As for literature, in 1922 appears a relevant study on the subject: Glossolalia, a poem about sound by
Russian poet Andrej Belyj. As he states in the opening paragraph Glossolalia is an improvisation on
several sound themes; just as these themes develop phantasies of sound- images inside of me, so do I
lay them out; but I know that behind the figurative subjectivity of my improvisations is concealed their
beyond-the-figurative, non- subjective root. (Belyj [1922] 2001, page not numbered) Being half way
through a poem and a linguistics essay, Bely presents glossolalia as in connection with the sound-
sphere, engaging the phonetic apparatus and the use of the mouth. Such a method occurs through a
sound and its related alphabetical letter: for example, the letter o produces a sound given by a
particular position of the mouth that recalls the written letter, and also the orifice. 7
It is from this very moment, that glossolalia links itself on the one hand to the voice and its articulation
within the expression of a word, subject that will be further analyzed in the poetic language, and more
precisely in sound poetry. (Amara 2014, 128) On the other, it begins to be connected with the concept
of maternal or native language and consequently to the idea of a language other, foreigner - as
addressed to the realm of literature.

7 [...]the inexpressibilities of the noise, of the warmth (in the orifice of the mouth) are - horrors [uzhasami]; and beyond the
distinct sound stretched a heat serpent in the gorges of the larynx, and had this latter sound turned back to itself, to the place
of exit of the throat, to its own infantile moments - it would have seen, that behind it they were beginning to crawl - from
the hole, from out of the depth.[...] Andrei Bely. Glossolalia. A poem about sound, trans, Thomas R. Beyer, Jr, 2001, . This
physical act of the mouth reminds of Helene Smith.

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Opera of speech or vocal utopias: glossolalia according to de Certeau

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), French theologian, philosopher and social theorist develops an
extensive study of glossolalia. His Opera of Speech: Glossolalias, included in The mystic fable volume
two, (originally published as Utopies Vocales. Glossolalies. In Traverses, 20 (1980), pp.10-18.) opens
up with a quote from a lecture8 by aphasiology scholar Andr Roch-Lecours, describing glossolalia as :
a class of similar deviant linguistic behaviors, characterized by a fluent, anarthric, segmentable speech
in terms of phonetic units, and consisting entirely or almost entirely of neologisms(de Certeau 2015
[1980], p. 212). Glossolalia speaks to say nothing in order to escape the traps of meaning and gets
back to the primary speech in his anteriority, as he says. (de Certeau 2015 [1980], pp. 212.-213) It
looks like a language, but it does not have its structure being in and of itself only a facade(de Certeau
2015, p.212) (Samarin 1972, p.128)
In a first analysis of glossolalia, seemingly derived from mile Lombard grouping, de Certeau observes
forms and places in which the phenomena can be found: infantine forms (am stram gram...),
pathological (neologisms, alliterations, etc.), literary (Dadaist) or religious (gift of tongues,
ecstatic utterances, etc.). As an originative language that organizes the act of saying without stating
anything, glossolalia is the art of saying within the enclosure of a semblance(de Certeau [1977]
2015, p.213). Less interested in the religious or the spiritual, and not less to the psycho-pathological
investigation side of glossolalia, de Certeau develops his research studying the phenomenon per se,
intercepting the mechanisms generated by the glossolalic enunciation both for what concerns language
and the auditory-vocal apparatus related to it. Not incurring into a significance, for de Certeau
glossolalia is linked to utopia, as produced independently from any kind of historical, natural or
positive language. (Amara 2015, 22) Glossolalia is a vocal delinquency that can escape to any system
of control because it lies outside of the logical criteria of error and truth, being outside of the walls of
a language (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p. 215) and thus discarding any significance. It its everyday,
glossolalia appears as bodily noises, [] fragments of foreign voices [that] punctuate the order of
sentences with unguarded outburst and surprises (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.213). Like in the case of
Helene Smith, the phenomena materializes when a secondary vocalization meaning these everyday
levels of oral communication- enters into the utterance, and the major voice gets compromised by
producing a different meaning. Such secondary vocalization manifests expanding in excesses and
suspensions of statements, where groups of voices escape any control or obligation with the speaker. It
is then a proliferation of sound (often given by alliterations or other figures of speech) that fills the
gap/interval by becoming itself the act/event that acquires more importance than the content. Such act
can be intended as mere representation of what de Certeau calls semblance-statements as it enters in
the sound sphere by tricking or deceiving the ear (trompe-l'oreille), because it sounds like a known
language but it is not (It resembles a language, but really isn't one.) (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.212).
However, there is for de Certeau a reserved voice, because a surplus is always guaranteed in
glossolalia, bringing it near to certain peculiarities of the poetic language. In his analysis, the theorist
recognizes glossolalia as a medium to cross a passage, moving from silence to speech from the
cannot say [...] to the can say, (as if obligation and belief compensated for the absence of statements
and allowed the utopian space offered to voices) (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.215), as it is true for the
opposite. This opposite direction, settled on eloquent utterance proceeds to deconstruct it by a play
on phonemes and/or by deriding the spoken word. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p. 215) This type of

8 Lecours, A. (1978). La glossolalie dans l'aphasie de Wernicke, das la schizophasie et dans les etats de possession.
Lecture, Centro internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Urbino. In: Michel de Certaud. The mystic fable volume
two, p.279.

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glossolalic figure -writes de Certeau- goes beyond the bounds of statements to try out the potentialities
of the vocal palette before falling into silence and to fill an enunciative space with polyphonic
rumours. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.216) In here lies a voice that speaks or makes the speech, or
makes itself speak, from which it must be possessed in order to enter the walls of a poem 9. It is in
this way that glossolalia repeats phonemes and always has to do with beginnings of the word, which
is nothing but linked with its end.

The passion of the fall intensifies that of birth. The one can, moreover, be the very locus of the
other. Hence the two figures are often intermingled. Furthermore, in every glossolalia, there is
a combination of something prelinguistic, relative to a silent origin or to the onset of the
spoken word, and something postlinguistic, made up of excess, of overflows, or of leftovers of
language. Like myth, these fictions cobble together the before and after of saying to construct
the artifact in which saying plays itself out. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p. 217)

What authorizes the speech thus always requires a spatial implication and that it is the constant
variation between silence and excess of speech, the beginning and the end, the origin and the abyss, an
erasing and conception of sense. de Certeau says that while a language is devoid of beginning or end,
speech possesses the pathos of time, namely of beginnings, of turning to a primordial non-sense, of
falls and withdrawals. The phenomena orientates around the enquiry of the origin as primitive or pre-
Babelic language or what supersedes it, an enquiry of unity that overcomes the disintegration into
languages (a point zero, or neutral, or divine point of speech (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.225)) that
coincides with the creation of space in speaking. In this intermission the word revives from echoes of
ancient worlds - de Certeau calls them wise- because they have no meaning and they objectify the
blind origin10 from which all meaningful speech originates. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.224)
A persistent fact which de Certeau locates in glossolalia is its manifestation in the form of vocal utopia.
This is a kind of supplementary process (de Certeau, [1977] 2015, p.71) where sense institutions lose
their effectiveness, and the meaningless speech takes charge (vocally) of what speaks while
remaining outside of sense. The possibility of a voice that leads to self-exile is the drift which throws
open the glossolalic phenomenon: the law of a linguistic order brings the voice to exile, but this output
can only be ephemeral because in it resides the voice (that strengthens) in the language system.

9 Villa befits this type, as we will see afterwards, for it is in the void that his language lies as event to be destroyed
10 A synonym of blind origin is for de Certeau the fable. (de Certeau [1980]2015, p.225)

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Roma, 1977. de Certeau,Fabbri, Samarin.

A volume edited in 2015 by Lucia Amara reports the dialogues of a seminar on glossolalia held
in Rome in 1977 between de Certeau, Italian semiologist Paolo Fabbri and William J. Samarin that
would have served as preparatory for another seminar that took place at the International Center of
Semiotics of Urbino (Italy) the following year. The dialogues set off because of the outburst of
glossolalic practices in the United States, starting in the 1960s, especially among pentecostal and
charismatic movements, with the aim of attempting to elucidate some areas of the phenomenon. Noting
that the flourishing of the process had developed especially within university settings, thus tied to a
dose of freedom in the interpretation of sacred texts, de Certeau analyzes glossolalia re-considering the
event starting from language for it is within it that truth reveals itself even if the language does not
produce meaning. The place, devoid of meaning can become a place from which to speak, and is
the reason why according to de Certeau glossolalia in this case returns to the original Christian matters:
the preaching of the good news and the place of divine utterance. (Amara 2015, p.38) And it is in the
loss of meaning, when the language remains devoid of content, that glossolalia reaches the vacant
space and from it begins to speak and ensures to be inhabited by a divine Spirit 11. However, this loss
of meaning it is not intended as a senseless language, for who speaks it is a surplus and it never exists
in the order of a loosing of sense. Thus, it is to be considered as a poetic experience that develops
within this surplus, even if in its content is not a language that organizes sense. (de Certeau [1977]
2015, p.71) Nevertheless, it must be noted that what we define sense develops in the effectiveness of
its phonetic organization; in glossolalia a communication is however ensured by an effectiveness that
makes it look like a language that says, or that -in some cases- leads to a meaning other than what it
seems. As the meaning produces a slip of sense, in the glossolalic subject itself a division between the
voice and the call takes place: the glossolalic subject is an invoking subject because he simultaneously
produces himself within the voice and in the call, which is an invocation of the name. ( Amara 2015,
p.41)
As the place for saying is the body, the here and now are my body ( de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.57);
hence glossolalia becomes performative 12 as it does what it says meaning that the act of saying is
simultaneously act of doing, (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.57) becoming itself the body that starts
talking. This glossolalic language thus moves from the body to the sound sphere, existing in the voice
that is already a linguistic fact, an inter-locution, because it calls into question the possession of the
subject by another one.(de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.41) And it is here that the voice manifests itself as
element that is branded on the body, that tracks itself, that organizes, and ultimately is a primary
voice which is the voice of the beginning: it is primordial and therefore necessarily maternal; it
produces an abandonment, a dying to oneself in order to be called back to the voice (de Certeau
[1977] 2015, pp. 59-60), thus becoming a regeneration, a re-birth. The abandonment and regeneration
has to do with babbling as it means to be brought back into the world, and thus to an infant form. In the
poetic work the babbling takes place in the juxtaposition of incomprehensible words, devoid of any
semantic relationship, that creates the possibility of sense proliferation. (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.82)
It is in this multifold quality of repetition that de Certeau sees unlimited effects of meaning and
11 Drawing from the definition given by John of the Cross, the Spirit is he who speaks (el que abla) but de Certeau
adds that is also what speaks and what makes the speech. (Amara 2015, p.52)
12 In referring to the performative quality if glossolalia, de Certeau explicitly isolates it from the definition given by J.L.
Austin according to which performative utterances are not aimed to describe or report, are not true or false, and they
are not solely linked to the act of saying but rather on the act of doing . (1962) How to Do Things with Words, 2nd
edition, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

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possibilities of sense hidden beneath a sound structure.This guarantees a space for the voices of the
body allowing an enunciation to speak by detaching itself from statements, disturbing and interfering
with the syntax thus creating an auditory space in language. It is in this space that voices are staged: a
plural body in which impermanent oral sounds move around, disseminating in vocal chunks including
words that transform into sounds, or noises that turn into words. Or also rhymes and sound-envelopes
(de Certeau 1984, pp.162-163) of distant meanings, breaking and simultaneously proliferating in the
text: an aphasic enunciation of what appears without one's knowing where it came from (from what
obscure debt or writing of the body):

[...]am gam gamme agam elle agamique gr am [...]

(Villa [1960-62] 2014, p. 341 L'homme qui descend quelque: Roman Metamytique)

That is what this mutilated writing becomes, a space for contextless voice-gaps that are initiating and
waiting for a language that includes within itself something else, other. Ultimately, on this plane of
vocal slit lies the importance of sound and sense: the relationship between the identity and the most
private language, subjective and unreadable, on the one hand, and on the other the universal language,
the language of the absolute, the one that in the mystic or in a certain philosophical tradition has been
long-sought designating it as a pre-Babelic language or language of God or tongue of angels. Here lies
this relationship, between what is most private and intimate, and together, what is absolute and
universal through the mediation that this language operates in a community. Rightly, it seems to me that
behind, not visible, there is a constant tension of sense. In other words, I wonder: what I perceive as
less visible is also that which is to establish the fact of communication in its fundamental essence?
(de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.83)

12
Emilio Villa's tongues

Disdaining any law, norm, conformism, a view of poetry and art as enchantment, his maternal
language, Ytaglia, Villa establishes a poetic discourse that probes the source and the abyss of
language, eventually gaining the silence that lies between birth and death, being and nothingness.
Emilio Villa reformulates the poetic word in a linguistic heteroglossia: multilingualism, phonetic
textures and etymological puns all merge to overcome the semantic field of language. Breaking the
relationship between signifier and signified means to enhance the potential of the word that in the less
visible conveys that sense proliferation de Certeau described in his study.
Starting from the postulates on glossolalia dictated by de Certeau, I will now trace some themes where
it occurs in the poetic oeuvre of Emilio Villa: 1) refusal of native language / multilingualism/
decomposition of sense; 2) primordial voice/origin, beginnings - ends of the word, void silence; 3)
phonetic principle and sound repetition (alliterations) / oral writing.

refusal of native language / multilingualism/ decomposition of sense;

I have previously mentioned the case of Hlne Smith that refused her own language, speaking one
completely made up by her. Not driven by any form of pathology, from about the mid-fifties Villa,
begins (also) to adopt languages other than his own. As he recalls during a Conference held in 1984:

[...]l'italiano, che molte volte ho proprio in odio. Non odio, ma rifiuto, un blocco contro l'italiano,
che non la mia lingua. [...]Io ho parlato il dialetto milanese per tutta l'infanzia. Essendo un
seminarista, indossando la veste nera per tanti anni, la mia lingua allora era il latino, parlavo latino
dalla mattina alla sera [] No! Non potevo parlare milanese n a casa n in seminario. La lingua
italiana mi era diventata nemica, un segno di schiavit. [] (Villa [1984]1997, p.44)

[] the Italian language, that many times I hate. It is not a hate, but a refusal, a blockage against
Italian, which is not my language. [...]I spoke Milanese dialect throughout my entire childhood.
As a seminarian, wearing the black robe for many years, my language was thus Latin, I spoke
Latin from morning to night [...] No! I could not speak Milanese, neither at home nor at the
seminary. The Italian language had become an enemy, a sign of slavery.13

Villa writes in French, Portuguese, German, Provenal, Spanish, Milanese dialect, Greek, Latin, Italian
and English, and studies and translates Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldean and
Phoenician14). All his written languages are anomalous: assemblages of contaminated etymologies,
neologisms, linguistic hybridizations and common used forms. The refusal of Italian coincides with the
years when fascism was conducting an anti-dialect campaign. For his entire life, but specially in the
early years of his career, Villa will not give up using words in Milanese dialect in his Italian texts
(Tagliaferri 2004, p.16) and few examples can be seen the collections Oramai, (By Now)15 (1937-1945)
and E ma dopo (Yeah but after)16(1943-1947) But it is starting from the 1950s that Villa begins his
linguistic experimentation; tested by his intolerance for the limits of a national confinement that had
disappointed the poet's intellectual and artistic expectations, Villa begins to develop different forms of
linguistic deformations. (Minciacchi 2007, p.22)

13 All translations are my own unless differently stated.

14 As Tagliaferri remarks, the study of Phoenician allows him to deepen his understanding on the origin of the alphabet, the
Chaldean, of the Mesopotamian cultures. Aldo Tagliaferri,(2004). Il clandestino, Roma: Derive e Approdi, p.17
15 Translation by Dominic Siracusa (Siracusa 2014, p.171)
16 Translation by Dominic Siracusa (Siracusa 2014, p.194)

13
Thus Italia, mocked in comizio millenovecentocinquanta3 (1947-1953) and Tenzone, (1948) a
grotesque poem about the war, becomes Ytalya and Itaglia -resembling its fascist pronunciation-
being then apostrophized as squaldrana (slut), alluding to a betrayed and treacherous language.
(Fracassa 2007, p.149) His polemic position against the Italian culture and its tradition, not less against
the use of a normative language in poetry, proves itself before, in the meta-poetic trials of some texts
in Latin, such as the collection Verbodracula (1929-1980), in the adoption of the French, only language
in which he finds substance and rest (Zanzotto 1998, p. 60), and then again in the use of different
living and dead languages, always imbued with an essential secrecy. (Francucci 2007, p.11) As dead
languages that can return to live with yet fertile psychic agencies (Tagliaferri 2014, p.57) Latin, Greek
and Semitic allow him to keep a relationship with his everyday, unlike Italian that in the present Villa
perceives as a negation of history and the disempowerment of the self. (Tagliaferri 2014, p.758) Such
dead languages17, intended as transgressions of secular distances (Minciacchi 1998, p. 86),
commingled with foreign ones and a contaminated use of the Italian, make possible the suspension of
the world from the fall of an absolute present that can be realized only by deconstructing the current
language and by chasing a word devoid of language. (Tagliaferri 2014, p.758) In this light, Villa's
language seems to revive those ancient words described by de Certeau (2015, p.224) as wise: in
their lack of meaning (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.224) the poet's speech is no longer submitted to the
legality of language and thus decomposes any determination of meaning.
It is the case of 17 variazioni su temi proposti per una pura ideologia fonetica (<1950> 1955,
ed. 1955) (17 variations on themes proposed for a pure phonetic ideology). Although very
different from each other, the 17 poems are made of a chaotic syntax that deforms and distorts
the discourse, especially in the last ones where he reaches a bastardization of language spanning
from the Lombard dialect and French-Latin sounds (in the first part of the 11 th), to the adoption
of French and English (6th ,9th), to Italian, French and Lombard, (13th), to the linguistic
breakdown of the 16th. In his refusal of his mother tongue, Ytalya subjecta,(14 th) in this
mixture of words, sounds and languages, as Antonio Pietropaoli points out, Villa performs three
actions: 1) destroys the language by reducing it to a minimum phonetic core, 2) conversely, he
builds up a semi invented language (artlang18), and 3) he brings the language to the limits of
aphasia. (Pietropaoli 2007, p.121) As in the 13th variation:

17 In tracing a poetic conception of language while speaking about Jarry in An unrecognized precursor to
Heidegger in Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze (1997, p.96) as opposed to considering a tower of Babel of
languages, the philosopher considers only living and dead languages the latter being put to work in the former-
agglutinations in the second inspiring new emergences or reemergences in the first. Such claim appears to be
pertinent for Villa's mixed use of living and dead languages.
18 An artlang is a constructed, invented language created for artistic or aesthetic ends. Sarah L. Higley. (2000) Audience,
Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1).
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> (10/05/2016).

14
[...]et les fourchettes charrue aromtre boomerang
tomahawk CHE, RKO cetera

les morphmes vi-vides

les thorhmes avides
les myephmes midides
les choeurs piquedermiques
du statopyge
du mlampyge
du yacintopyge
du leucopyge

pyge pyge pyge sur les paves rohoeurpyge

noirnoir des voixons subtilises
jusqu'au NUL qui est bien l'outre ou l'autre []

Here the infected French resembles in its sound a known language, but it is not. Only in this fraction of
the poem words are misspelled or modified in a metaplasmic 19 game (thorhmes), or they are purely
invented (myephmes, yacintopyge, rohoeurpyge, voixons) although overtly of French matrix. In its
being simulacrum or language-fiction takes place what de Certeau defines trompe d'oreille: the word
deceives the ear as it speaks to say nothing. This play is also true for cyphra indicated in Sibylla
(deimaginatio) (itself altered, in Italian: Sibilla, in Latin: Sibylla) part of the collection Sibyllae (1980-
1984) where EV moves a phony etymological game. The letter does not exist, its value is disavowed by
its own spelling that reveals its etymological impossibility. As Cecilia Bello Minciacchi notes (2007,
p.98), cyphra is false in Latin as it is in ancient Greek; it has an arabic provenance, through the
medieval Latin cifra, meaning void, secret code, but Villa modifies the word making it reminiscent
of kryph, or kypr from to conceal or Cyprus. Any of Villa's glossolalia is not centered to
produce a discourse, but only to exist in itself as a body that evokes a (or multiple) sense(s) and
simultaneously breaks its (their) rules. Renouncing or impoverishing the semantic state between words,
Villa dismisses meaning and disseminates the speech as in a chaos assembls as he writes in the 13 th
variation, that extends in a surplace / surparole(from Heurarium, ultimatum la corrrrr). It is in
this chaos that occurs what de Certeau identifies as sense proliferation: the lack of semantic
relationship that comes as an echo bringing about possibilities of sense hidden under the phonetic
structure (myephmes, yacintopyge, voixons). (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.82) Not intended as a
senseless language, in Villa's poetic oeuvre, glossolalia is to be considered as a poetic experience that
develops within this surplus of semblance statements(de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.71), even if in its
content is not a language that organizes sense.
Villa's process probes the enigma of a poem that has decided to communicate outside of itself, outside
of its own body. As Tagliaferri notes (2007, p.21), Villa acted Hugo Ball's (1916) prophecy of the Dada
manifesto: Each thing has its word, but the word has become a things by itself. The poet aims to give
poetry a presence, a body with gestures (Tagliaferri 2005, p.112) becoming itself the body that starts
talking (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.57), and equally dissolves. The word, being also the body that
operates, seeks its extension in the phon, in the cast of a voice that could exacerbate any field of
readability, thwarting any possible uniqueness of sense. (Campi 2014, p.105) Here operates the

19 Figure of speech where an alteration of the word occurs, also incurring in a deviation of its sound.

15
proliferation of the voices of the body (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.69) that let themselves speak in a
constant variation between silence and excess, multiplying the exposure of their possible extensions. In
all of these body-voices, according to different rules, there is an overabundance of data (sense) which
is then abandoned to disappear. As in the case of a 1950s performance, a sort of Action Poem 20- where
Villa threw stones into the Tiber after having written few verses on them. Qui, il pi severo e il pi
vero inventore sono io, che ho inventato la poesia distrutta, data in pasto sacrificale alla Dispersione,
all'Annichilimento: sono il solo che ha buttato via il meglio che ha fatto (Here, it is me, the most
severe and the most true inventor, I, that I invented the destroyed poetry, served as sacrificial meal to
Dispersion, to Annihilation: I am the only one who has thrown away the best he has done. (Villa [end
of 1970s-beginning 1980s] 2005, p. 183)
In its execution space, as Cortellessa notices, (2007, p.15) Villa's poetry is performative as it does what
it says, recalling de Certeau's notion of performativity in glossolalia where the act of saying is
simultaneously act of doing21, (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.57) becoming itself the body that starts
talking. In l'Act incessant d'expulser l'Act (the incessant Act to expel the Act) (Villa [1962] 2015,
p.16) the departure/rejection from any conventional use of language reaches even more remote places:
it is the total annihilation of the word that after having been brought to life, is deconstructed and
vanishes into a void that also has to do with an exit. And this is what Villa's mutilated writing aims
at: a space where the fall and demolition of sense produces contextless voice-gaps initiating and
waiting for a language that includes within itself something else, other. (As Tagliaferri defines him he
is the poet of the beyond (Tagliaferri 2007, p.10)) But at the same time, it endlessly informs the
possibility of an impossible presence (utopian) that in self-dissolution aims at drawing the eternal
from the transitory22.

primordial voice/origin, beginnings ends of the word, void silence

Non c pi origini. N. N si pu sapere se.

Se furono le origini e nemmeno.
E nemmeno c ragione che nascano
le origini. N pi
la fede, idolo di Amorgos!

chi dici origina le origini nel tocco nellaccento

nel sogno mortale del necessario?
No, non c pi origini. No.
Ma
il transito provocato delle idee antiche e degli impulsi.23 (Villa, E. Linguistica, in E ma dopo, 1943-37)

20 Here I borrow Harold Ronsemberg' term action-painting, artistic practice Villa admired. Action poem: poem as
destructive agent-Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, Valri. (Art in America, 1945-1970: writings from the age of abstract
expressionism, pop art, and minimalism, 2015)
21 Again, I will not refer to J.L. Austin theory of performative utterances as it does not prove to be a relevant strategy to
understand performativity in Villa's poetic oeuvre.
22 tirer l'ternel du transitoire Baudelaire, Charles. Le peintre de la vie moderne.
23 Theres no more origins./ Nor. / Nor does one know if. /If they were origins and not even. / And not even a reason why
origins are born / Nor any longer / faith, /idol of Amorgos! / who do you say originates origins in the touch in the accent /
in the mortal dream of the necessary? / No, theres no more origins. / No. /But / the provoked transit of ancient ideas and
impulses. Trans. Siracusa, D. (2014, p.202)

16
there is always the abyss and the void

(Artaud 1976, p.584, letter to Fernand Pouey and Ren Guignard, Feb. 1948)

The entire Villa's poetic develops around the theme of the Origin as void, abyss. C'est ainsi
que ORIGINE / et ANNIHILATION mystrieuse /s'teignent, (Therefore ORIGIN /and
ANNIHILATION mysterious / extinguishes) writes Villa translating Parmenides in the 1956 exergue
dedicated to De Kooning. (Villa [1956] 2008, p.72) (Cortellessa 1998, p.102) The structural
impossibility, the gathering in the text of heterogeneous languages is put in place in order to destroy the
normative language and to reach a silence which coincides with the void inevitably interrelated
between life and death. (Minciacchi 2007, p.99) As de Certeau says that the beginning of the word is
linked to its opposite, namely to its downfall, likewise Villa's glossolalia acts in this dichotomy: on the
one hand it belongs to a pre-linguistic level related to a source, or to an attack to the word, on the other,
it is placed on a post linguistic plane related to an excess of language. (Amara 2015, p.31)
Villa's word aims at returning to a primordial non-sense, una langue nulle, zrolangue, lahangue,
hangue, (L'homme qui descend quelque) but also a langue perdue / reste pendue (lost language /
left hanging) (Trou, Villa [1980s] 2000, p.54) that conforms to the point zero, or neutral, point of
speech to which de Certeau was referencing to. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.225) In L'homme qui
descend quelche: Roman Metamytique (1960-1962, 1967; ed. 1974), Villa talks about the falling down,
about an homme who goes to a temporarily absent event, toward the empty place that will have (or
have had, and at this time does not) what exists physically or it is physically possible. (Costa 1975,
p.15)

[...]Puisqu'il pouvait regaharder, for giving, coeur de liynx dans l'Ouragan (l'Urgang), plvre
de sphyinx, jusqu'au fond de la Nomination Vacuale (Ourgasme) ( une langue pour rien !
une langue mate! bon! une langue pour personne! disait-il, becbouche), toujouhours tel
( una langue telle bon, et une langue nulle, degrzro, zrolangue, lahangue, hangue
bon, becbouche, la), prt transformer le sous-sol d'une dynamisme du rvge en ide
prominente, idde permansive, et prt la transfuser (pour rejauffer son crne putal)
( bien conclure, soudain conclure, conclure, voil disait-il, becbouche) il lanait ses
souhaits dans l'air, en les tirant di zro d'ombre de ses mninges cortisonnes. (Qui crissent.
Christent) []
(Villa [1960-67] 2014, p.333)24

This French, mostly filled with semblance statements and invented/misspelled words (regaharder,
liynx, sphyinx, ourgasme, becbouche, Christent, degrzro, zrolangue) becomes a conflicting form of
delirious self-annihilation:Nomination vacuale: is the void and equally operates as void. Villa's

24 [...] Since he could regaharder, for giving, heart liynx in Hurricane (the Urgang) sphyinx pleura, to the bottom
of the Vacuale Designation (Ourgasme) (a language for nothing! A language-friend! good! a language
person!he said, becbouche) toujouhours such as (una language as good, and a language of nothing, zero
language degrzro, zrolangue, lahangue, hangue good, becbouche, the) ready transforming the basement
of a dynamic Revage in prominent idea idde permansive and ready to transfuse (for rejauffer putal his
skull) (conclude well, suddenly closing, conclude, voil that he would say, becbouche) it launched its
wishes into the air, drawing di zero shadow of his brain cortisonnes. (Who squeals. Christent) []

My attempted translation to clarify the amount of neologisms and senseless words within the passage.

17
words make themselves speak in other languages, reminiscent of that of Saint Paul, to then get to that
tongue of angels described by Henry Corbin as hermeneut of the divine Silence (de Certeau [1980]
2015, p.162). The goal of achieving something other, original, pre-Babelic it is shared both in the
speaking in tongues and in the divine silence, although oriented in opposite directions: one looks
at a proliferation, the other to a subtraction. However, both befits two diverging cases of glossolalia
detected by de Certeau ([1980] 2015, p.215): 1) it ensures the passage from the cannot say to the can
say, moving from silence to speech; 2) it deconstructs eloquent utterance through a play of phonemes
and /or mocking the spoken word. This latter type of glossolalic figure overcomes the rules of
statements experimenting vocal possibilities before falling into silence and to fill an enunciative space
with polyphonic rumours. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.216) These polyphonic romours, that always
proliferate are all of Villa's broken languages: they merge in a void where a language, without
speaking, begins to be spoken. Signification abandons itself, let itself go, and it falls in the sign of the
depth. L'Homme descends in the body where language lies, and on the body of the man there is the
whole extension of the speaker's depth. Man going down to the depth goes to his body. It is in the
bottom of the body (the voice from the depth, abyss) the void, where language is the event to be
destroyed. Here, in the bottom of the language, the man devours language, une langue nulle, and exits
it.
In its annihilation, the voice of the abyss is still destined elsewhere. I wish to be dissolved writes San
Paul (again) in the first epistle to the Philippians (1:23) - desiring to leave earthly life and conjunct
with Christ. Villa too is a case of cupio dissolvi whose primordial origin-void is lost in a sound that
vocalizes into other languages: maternal, exiled, living and dead. These are the languages that speak
the voices of those deaths and births that speech must play and parry. (de Certeau [1980] 2015,
p.226) And the encounter between living and dead languages, origin-abyss within a disintegration of
sense, which also coincides with its proliferation, corresponds to an utopia (as Gianni Grana would
define it, a-semantic, (Grana 1987)) that tries to reach the voice of silence. de Certeau says that it is
the voice of the beginning which in Villa produces an abandonment, in a formulation that takes the
form of loss (Tagliaferri 1996, p.14) corresponding to a dying to oneself in order to be called back to
the voice. (de Certeau [1977] 2015, pp.59-60) This can be seen in Letania per Carmelo Bene, a poetic
work configured as a celebration of the voice Grandevoix, Voix, Voie vox, in this case the
celebration of the voice of the Italian theater actor Carmelo Bene (1937-2002), in a commingling of
data that welcome glossolalic effects, alliterations, the use of portmanteau words (vedodire- translated
by Siracusa: Iseesaying) (Siracusa 2014, p.132) and words transformations (i.e. eidealologia from
ideologia, ideology, but also Bene's name is distorted into Carmel le Bien du Bn, C B, B C,
carmlange etc.)
The entire Letania, as a form of vocal writing, plays the role of an invocation (invocazione) that refers
to the crossing of a limit to overcome a condition of exile, most markedly objectified in the written
word, (Tagliaferri 1996, p.14) and to the return to that primordial voice that itself becomes oracle.
Such voice listens itself saying (Bene 1995, p.1008) recalling the definition of spirit as the one
who speaks given by Juan de la Cruz to which de Certeau refers to adding that it is also what it
speaks and what makes the speech. (Amara 2015, p.30) Invoked as a spirit-muse in written poetry,
Villa's voice discovers and enhances the tendency of the oracular word by repudiating the pact
between signifier and signified, and renouncing to any referral besides itself. (Tagliaferri 1995)

[...]ritu du Symbole Paresseux, Vux

et Symbole Santgrenue Voile
o gat ta Grande Vide Perle-Parole

18
 Grandevoix Vivante dont deferle
Leau collab
se a lAb su/ lAb
side des choses des mystres en joues luxes
Bien, Bn! C'est ta Voix en Goatre [] (Villa, E. Letania per Carmelo Bene. 1996)

phonetic principle and sound repetition (alliterations, stuttering) / oral writing

The phonetic principle and its variation connect Villa and glossolalia by implying a relationship with
the mouth. As for Saint Hildegard and Andrej Belyj, also for Villa the word weighs, and this weight
passes from the mouth breaking the relationship between signifier and signified. Villa's vocalism
breaks into a written word resembling other sounds, in the use of rhetorical figures, rhythmic
patterns, repetitions and morphemes, both canonical and invented. The pierced word is enlarged,
shortened, and develops as in a flow phonetic extensions and variations, in certain cases extending into
stuttering. L'Homme qui descend quelque: Roman Metamytique (Villa [1960-67] 2014, p.333) is
littered with forms of repetition and alliterations: Dnue Dans. Dans le tentatif (dans-dont) de de de,
Moi, le Lu I, Lui, lui, lus, liure liusant, l'Emancipateur Injurieux, l'Elu, l'Elu-tout-lu, l'Elu-tout-
lu, l'Est-lutoutencul, l'El exutral; ah, que oui, quel oui doux, doupe, quelle Queue / que que vous,
que -y ; que cacbau brr ; stuttering: Ground, Gr grrggrrgrr gr r rh,Chair splendide, in Cri, in
Cricri-, in Crimine Venturo!; and forms of glossolalia:

[...]am gam gamme agam elle

agamique
gr am n gative []

These commingling of sounds, play of phonemes and the compulsive conversion into foreign languages
all blend by deriding the spoken word (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p. 215) in order to deconstruct its
sense and semantic relationship. Repetition and figures of speech allow Villa to make the word exit
from the limits of the page, (and then to annihilate it, as Villa himself states) (Tagliaferri 2004, p.183)
passing from the mouth to become voice and, in its gradual disintegration, silence. This again
reconnects to the second example of glossolalia described by de Certeau and previously listed: it
overcomes the bounds of meaning to explore vocal possibilities before falling into silence and to fill
an enunciative space with polyphonic rumours. (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.216) In the sense,
stuttering coincides with the genesis of the syllables in the mouth, which is itself connected to the idea
of abandonment mentioned by de Certeau: stuttering means to become a child again which means to
die, to die at oneself, in order to be called back from the voice (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.60). In his
collection of Sybillae25, (1980-1984) Villa overlaps his voice to the one of the Sybil (as if every syllable
was already a potential Sibyl (Minciacchi 2007, p. 97)) stretched out at the limits of babbling. For
example, in Sibylla (trifida), a mix of English, Italian, Latin and French, shows again the presence of
stuttering good, God: i Am Am Am Azed! and neologisms, or better metaplasmatic figures I am
amazet a. Another example of alliterations can be seen in Sybilla (labia), where the phonetic and

25 Written at the beginning of the 1980s the collection of Sibyllae has been published in diverse and scattered forms.
Particularly interesting is the title of one poem: Sibylla (cumana). In the Aeneid Virgil writes about a Cumaean Sibyl
who spoke strangely while possessed (May 1956, 75). The actual poem does not refer to speaking in tongues, but
the connection is certainly relevant.

19
para-grammatical plays, are to be found in the principle of phonetic variation between sibylla and
sillaba (syllable), but also between syllaba ( misspelled from Italian: sillaba) and labyrinthia:
Sibylla labialis, alis labi queas, limine clam / sugillata, syllaba labyrinthia labilis labi lilium / sibylla
habeat sibyllabia sibyllalia 26 / tibi sepulta citrulla, ignota sibylla / sarabanda syllyba paranympha []
syllabatam sibyllam (Villa [1980-84] 2014, p.604). About Villa's use of such mutilated Latin, Cecilia
Bello Minciacchi notes how the presence of multiple idioms and significances, given by the sounds of
the heterogeneous languages, develop in a process that allows the voice to become evolving in a
secular glossolalia (Minciacchi, 2007, p.98)
Still, each poem included in the collection has to do not only with the overlapping of the poet's voice to
the one of the Sibyl, and thus to the connection between the prophetic virtue of the divinity and the one
to which the poet is called, but also to the sacred and lost demiurgic power. (Minciacchi 2007, p.99)
In this loss, The ultimate end of textual, semantic and phonetic disintegration is again that of emptiness
and silence, from which new primordial unities (atoms) can begin to originate. (As de Certeau would
say, to die [...] in order to be called back from the voice). In this process lies a ritual that allows this
recreation and regeneration to take place. For example, the intertwining between proliferation and void,
life and death becomes the ritual voice of the orifice-abyss that opens up the collection Verbodracula
(1929-1980):

OS APERIAT

OS SUUM

ET ARBOR ORIS

MATRIS DECYPHRET

VENTREM

VERBI INSOLESCENTIS

ANIMAM DECIPIAT

ET VENIAT

DENIQUE FETICIUM TOTEM

TOTO EODEMQUE DEFLUXO

IN QUA M

OSSUARIA AEONIS ORA

ATQUE VENTI

26 Sibyllabia: labia, from Latin, mouth, sibyllalia: lalia, from Greek, to talk, to chat. The two words show a clear
reference to glossolalia and its relationship with the mouth.

20
COENOTHAPION FODERE QUEAM

SERM ONIS

As Gian Paolo Renello (2007, pp.178-179) remarks Os aperiat, calls back the ancient Egyptian ritual
of opening the mouth, according to which the deceased was given the possibility both to speak and to
be fed. By metonymy, Os- the orifice, comes back four times within the text, and comes as the
original primordial word connected with ossuaria(ossuary), again revealing the connection with the
world of the dead. The opening of the collection is equal to the opening of the mouth and its fall into
this language, masticated, broken both physically and phonetically. The cavity of the mouth is the place
from which Villa's word, in the act of its total closure, which is also interrelated to its total opening,
completes the absence of forms. (Francucci 2007, p.15) But perhaps it can be best seen in the beginning
of ultimatum M la corrrre included in the collection Heurarium:

ultima AA
AA. AAA. A.AA
AAAAAA A A A
AAAAAA A.AA.
A. AAA.AA.A.A.
AAAAAA A A A
AAAAA A t u m
tu tu tu tu tu tum
1 x 1 x 2 1x1 x1x
1 x aux aux aux
[...]

The decomposition of syllables and combination of elementary alliterating sounds, create an indefinite
that is no longer subjected to the legality of a language. The atom is the primordial shout(de Certeau
[1977] 2015, p.65) that becomes voice of the beginning (de Certeau [1977] 2015, p.59), Organes
Oreilles /Organes Orcles. (Villa [1964] 2014, p.315)27 The word is destroyed by the repetition and
its sound, becoming an hapax like many forms of glossolalia are, word/utterance that occurs only once
within a text. With a highly futuristic echo, not interested in producing any sort of euphony, or
requesting to be listened28, Villa goes back to the origin of the atom, atum, respecting the supreme
law of phonetics professed by Delio Tessa in the opening of his essay collection L el dc di Mort,
27 Included in the poetry Ritu, published in EX no.2., 1964. The Roman magazine, conceived with a strong
experimental inclination and visual value, was run in the 1960s by Emilio Villa, Mario Diacono and Gianni De Bernardi.
28 Villa's word does not require listeners: Nietzsche The man in a state of Dionysean excitement has a listener just as
little as the orgiastic crowd, a listener to whom he might have something to communicate, a listener which the epic narrator,
and generally speaking the Apollonian artist, to be sure, presupposes. It is rather in the nature of the Dionysean art, that it
has no consideration for the listener: the inspired servant of Dionysus is, as I said in a former place, understood only by his
compeers. But if we now imagine a listener at those endemic outbursts of Dionysean excitement than we shall have to
prophesy for him a fate similar to that which Pentheus the discovered eavesdropper suffered, namely, to be torn to pieces by
the Maenads ... But now the opera begins, according to the clearest testimonies, with the demand of the listener to
understand the word. What? The listener demands? The word is to be understood?
Nietzsche On Music and Words, in Early Greek Philosophy , (1964) trans. Maximilian new York: Russell and Russell,
pp.40-41

21
alegher! in 1932. (Tagliaferri 2004, p.99)

Suprema legge! [...] Allesigenza, vorrei dire, allintransigenza della fonetica di volta in volta
tutto sacrificato: grammatica, ortografia, metrica e vocabolario. Mi occorse di chiedere il
significato e lorigine di alcune di quelle oscure parole a chi le usa e forse le inventa. In certezza
o silenzio. Mi son convinto cosd che alle fonti spesso basta un suono a rendere unidea, tanto
basta che i pie efficaci fra essi sono intuiti. (Tessa 1895, p.10)
Supreme law! [...] To the need, I would say, to the intransigence of phonetics everything is
sacrificed from time to time : grammar, spelling, and vocabulary metric. It occurred to me to ask
the meaning and origin of some of those obscure words to those who use them and perhaps
invent them. In certainty, or silence. I convinced myself that, to the sources, a sound is often
enough to render an idea, enough to extent that the most effective among them are insights.

The origin-atom coincides with the oral cavity that is the place-abyss where the glossolalic sound
consumes itself. It is the birth of a word in the mouth that being manducated 29 it disintegrates in its
sound and goes back to silence. Proposing to embark a cosmogony of the non-visible (Villa [1970]
2008, p.171)Villa's procedure aims at negating the visible, in which, in a cosmological vision of the
present, the word reaches a zerlangue. In such practice, Villa seems to respond to de Certeau's
( [1977] 2015, p.83) interrogation about what is visible and the fundamental essence of speech: in
the fall of a normative use of language, the matter of the poetic work merges with the body in which is
realized, informing of an achievement (in an absence of obligation (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.216))
that escapes the binding agreement with the word[s] (Zanzotto 1998, p.60) making them become
silencieuses (Tagliaferri 1998, p.5)

29 Saint Augustine refers to a spiritual manducation: to eat spiritually means to believe in Christ. (Trap 1987, p.240) In
Villa's case Christ can be identified with the word: Eating the word, thus to have the word inside. But to eat the
word is also a metaphor for the broken word. Even if often Villa shows his disillusion in the word, however, this
proves to be the only way to reach the reality to which he always subtracts himself.
A Trap, La manducazione spirituale nella dottrina eucaristica di S. Agostino. In Parole Spirito Vita 7 (1987)

22
Speaking in tongues: juxtaposing anomalies in literature.

With the same end, searching for an absolute language, Villa writes in foreign languages, as it
does Gherasim Luca, Louis Wolfson, Stphane Mallarm teaches in a foreign language, in Finnegans
Wake Joyce renders his English unreadable, Jean Pierre Brisset re-invents a language starting from
French, Tommaso Landolfi writes poems in an invented language. The language becomes the result of
a metamorphosis due to a hybridization, it is transformed and in certain cases for a need of self-exile.
Speaking about language exiles, Daniel Heller-Roazen writes (2008, p.51) What little remains today
of the language shall remain in exile, for there can be no return to a land whose wealth has definitely
disappeared. He argues that the exile may be a homeland that one accedes to the secret of a
tongue only when one forgets it. Villa's choice to depart from the Italian is due to his feeling of slavery
within his own language that the poet does not perceive as such; in order to exit it, Villa adopts
multilingualism and neologisms, forcing phonemes and breaking up the meaning.
Similar practices, around the same years, have been developed by other writers, object of study from
Deleuze, to Foucault, Agamben and other authors interested in what can be called pathologies or
alternative use of language in literature.

At this point of my research, I would like to present and juxtapose (not to compare, as one of the duties
of criticism is to make all comparison infeasible (Blanchot 1966, p. 80)) the linguistic procedure of
some authors who, to the same degree as Villa probed the limits of language through different writing
techniques and experimentations. In this study, I will not take into consideration the comparison
between Villa and Lewis Carroll's use of portmanteau words, or the affinities in the role of the vox
(Siracusa 2014, p. 63) between Villa and the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) that Dominic
Siracusa advances in his dissertation on Emilio Villa (to my knowledge the only one in English
language up to now, a few are in the process of being produced). The first reason is that in defining
Pascoli's poetic use of the vox (a word that lives in the opening space between sound and sense) and its
relationship with Villa, Siracusa only relies on Agamben's essay on Pascoli. Such study, as the title
suggests, gravitates around the idea of the voice also incurring in glossolalia, however, the philosopher,
who was familiar with de Certeau's theories as they both presented their research during a Paris
conference on glossolalia in 198230, believes glossolalia to be amenable to the voice alone, tracing a
line of such aspect from Saint Paul to Hegel's sinnloser Laut (meaningless sound) (Amara 2015,
p.17), whereas in this research de Certeau's more vast analysis on the subject appears to be more
pertinent in relationship to Villa's comprehensive oeuvre. Secondly, I will not bring further Villa's use
of portmanteau words in relationship to Carroll, as I believe the two authors were moved by different
poles of depth31, (Deleuze 1990, p.91) As advocate of Antonin Artaud's ideas, Villa might have been
exposed to Artaud's 1943 creative translation of Carroll's poem Jabberwocky (included in the novel
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871) or to a series of letters dated 1945 the
French author wrote in Rodez to Henri Parisot, describing his position against the poem and referring
to it as a surface poem, affectedly childish (Artaud [1945] 1976, p.448), thus not in line with
Artaud's idea on language which must be twisted from its own depth, as there is not, there is no
longer, any surface. (Deleuze 1990, p.86)
I will thus focus on different aspects of alternative use of literary language that can be found in the
practice of other (at times schizophrenic) authors: Jean-Pierre Brisset (in respect to origin, repetition,
30 Agamben, G. (1983) La glossolalie comme problme philosophique published in a special issue of Le
discours psychanalytique. devoted to glossolalia
31 Term used by Deleuze in reference to Artaud and Carroll in the chapter Thirteen Series of the Schizophrenic and the
Little Girl included in The Logic of Sense

23
play with sense), Gherasim Luca (language exile, phonetics principle) Louis Wolfson (language exile,
phonetic principle) and Antonin Artaud (disintegration of language, glossolalia)

Louis Wolfson-Antonin Artaud

In 1970, Deleuze writes the introduction to Le schizo et les langues, a book written in French by Louis
Wolfson, American, schizophrenic student of foreign languages and writer, that could not stand the
sound of his mother tongue. (Riponi 2014, p. 205) Deleuze compares Wolfson's delirious procedure
to the one of writers who transformed language to make it delirious(Deleuze 1997, p.v): Jean-Pierre
Brisset (1837-1919) and Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Even writing in his native language, French,
Roussel's procedure was to start a story with a sentence to then conclude it with another one similar in
sounds and phonemes but with a completely different meaning
Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (The white letters on the cushions of the old
billiard table), Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (The white mans letters on the
hordes of the old plunderer) (Ford 2012). The method of J-P Brisset evolves around the idea of an
evolution of the meaning itself, obtained by juxtaposing words from different languages according to
their phonetic or syllabic structure. (Deleuze 1997, p.9) In La Nourriture des Ancestres (1900) Brisset's
evolution spans from archaic words's etymologies to classical mythology and Christianity: Jupiter
evolves into God youpiter pre, youpippi! You! You! You! Didi, dii, dada, d'aii, Dieu; Adam becomes
the word homme, uomo, homo, au mot; Eve is female and hunger faim, femme, fam, fais moi, whose
original sound, decomposed, lends itself to rejection Eh! Va! Eva! (Hugill 2005, pp.124-138)
In his unorthodox writing Wolfson's procedure develops following a set of rules: from a word in his
native language he looks for a foreign one with an analogous meaning that has common sound or
phonemes. Referring to himself in third person as tudiant schizophrnique, psychotique alien,
Wolfson overtly presents these rules in Le schizo et les langue making the procedure itself its own
event (Deleuze 1997, p.11)

[...]En vrit, le psychotique n'tait pas encore arriv l'ide de gnie d'associer les mots plus
librement les uns aux autres ou peut-tre plutgt de les embrouiller en ce qui concerne le son,
ni non plus en ce qui concerne le sens [] (Wolfson 1970, p.125)

[] In truth, the psychotic was not yet arrived at the idea of genius to associate the words more
freely to each other - or perhaps rather to confuse - as regards the sound, nor regarding the
direction [...]

Here an example taken up by Deleuze (1997, p.8) of such process: Where turns into Tere, phonetically
resulting in Dere, thus recalling the Russian Derevo, language familiar to Wolfson. (Wolfson 1970,
p.41) This method aims at modifying a maternal sentence orientating around its phonetic value in a
way that it can generate a new sentence, similar in sound and meaning to the original one, but that
makes it disappear in a mix of other languages. I give another example: to dismember the word
shortening Wolfson calls Hebrew (chmmen), German, (schmalz) and Russian (jir); then again the
first part, short, symbolized in English with the sound ch moves to the French word chtif and to the
German schmal. (Wolfson 1970, p.54-55) The more the native language calls for foreign words, the
less his mother tongue becomes irritating. The conflictual relationship between Wolfson and his mother
tongue extends also to the mother herself -a musician who sings- and thus particularly to the maternal
voice, very high and piercing and perhaps equally triumphant (Deleuze 1997, p.12), which he mutes
using earphones. In the words of Nobel Prize Le Clzio, Wolfson perceives this maternal voice as a

24
sort of permanent rape, an assault perpetrated against himself to empty him from his essence. (Le
Clzio 2014, p.103) In order to annihilate the native voice, Wolfson accesses communication
sideways: not being able to face his own living language, he leans on other languages, inoffensive
and with no meaning (de Certeau [1980] 2015, p.224) because dead: French, Hebrew, Greek,
Russian, Spanish, Yiddish and German. (Le Clzio 2014, p.105) These languages, commingled
together, appear to be beneficial to the extent that they can not be understood by his mother and for the
fact that they are new languages he chose to learn. However widely spoken, these dead languages have
for Wolfson no other reality than the one he approaches on books or radio. These languages are thus
perceived as distant, potentially superfluous for it not being part of his own reality, and it is by moving
the weight from his native to such languages that he frees his mother tongue by eliminating it, or as Le
Clzio says (2014, p.105) by dominating it.
The schizo-author crosses the passage from the mutism of his mother tongue -that he can not
pronounce- to the spoken word, through a multifold language finding refuge in what Wolfson himself
refers to as Tour de Babil (tower of babbling).(Wolfson 1970, p.233) This babbling represents the
phonetic transformations/translations Wolfson uses in his procedure, meant to convert his mother
tongue in something of a foreign language, but also to stuttering, which occurs for example in a
conversation of Le schizo where he informs (in French) of his own insanity:
[...]J'y tais pour l'ali-li-na-a-tion, balbutia le jeune homme malade mentalement[...]
(I was there for the alie-lie-na-a-tion, stammered the young mentally ill man.)
Wolfson's phonetic translation is a procedure that takes place in his everyday: every time the schizo-
author listens to his mother language, the sound conversion takes the shape of phonetic transcription.
(Riponi 2014, p.208) The mentally disturbed young man had no choice: he had to write to save
himself from the language that so assaulted him, since only by transcribing his mother tongue could he
dissolve it into another. (Heller-Roazen 2004, pp.185-186)
In the same way Villa develops his form of vocal writing through figures of speech, mainly
repetitions and alliterations, not to mention the idea of the voix as the poetic subject of many of his
late experiments (the collections Trous, Sibyllae, and the Letania per Carmelo Bene), whose sound
makes it speak to then collapse into silence. It must be said that also Wolfson's language is
allitrative (Dotti 2014, p.115) as it places (or moves) the meaning through a play of sound
repetitions and forced etymologies. An example is Wolfson's second book Ma mre musicienne (1984):

Ma mre, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne minuit, mardi mercredi, au milieu
du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial Manhattan.

My Mother, the Musician, Died of a Malignant Disease at Midnight Connecting Tuesday

to Wednesday, in the middle of May of 1977, in the Memorial Hospice in Manhattan.

If for Wolfson it is English the language to be annihilated, for Villa is rather the entire poetic
language(s) that are equally torn apart, eventually to disappear. Guided by different aims, both authors
play with phonemes, write in different dead and living languages, although French, for Villa as for
Wolfson, still holds a favored position. Wolfson writes in an impure French, also resorting to Canadian
French words (i.e. breuvage gazeux for soda) (Lepori 2014, p.88), mostly because learnt through
magazines and radio. Villa's French too is bastardized; in a conference held in 1984 he would define it
like the one of a black man in Dakar.(Villa 1997, 59) As in all the other languages he uses, Villa adds
and changes letters from the original word (vraisemblableblment, from vraisemblablement meaning
likely-in this case also making the word stutter- from Heurarium), and creates words that do not

25
exist where the signifier still (seem) to hold a meaning but its morphology resets in the neologism.
(leuocopyge, yacintopyge).
There is, in any case, a desire to exit language; Wolfson attempts such departure while remaining its
prisoner, as in some erroneous expressions where his phonetic translation still display a relationship to
English (milles from miles; visiter le mdecin from to visit the doctor.(Lepori 2014, p.88)) In
turn, Villa tries to exit language through formal, phonetic and semantic ruptures, but in the agony of
sense and paradox(Tagliaferri 2007, p.10) the poet recognizes that the word annihilation is only
possible by means of the word itself, and language remains the only way to tap into the reality to which
he always subtracts himself. (Tagliaferri 2005, pp.142-143) Yet, there is another example of exit I
should now mention.

[...]but there is a thing / which is something, / only one thing / which is something, / and which I
feel / because it wants / TO GET OUT:/ the presence /of my bodily / suffering[...]
(Artaud [1947] 1997, p.566)

Wolfson exits his language through a phonetic translation, Antonin Artaud subordinates the word by
translat[ing] the drives of the body by disintegrating the word that becom[es] simply noise,
mobile chora. (Kristeva 2004, pp.118-124) J. F. Lyotard notes how pain and suffering exit from
Artaud's words: signifier and signified evoke a deviation, in his example: femme becomes fme; Rhne
et Sane becomes ron et saun. (Lyotard, J.F. 2002, p.185) This orthography movement is such that the
speech departs from the system of oppositions, decomposing the linguistic sign and its system.
(Lyotard 2002, p.185) (Kristeva 2004, p.118) But even more Artaud does it in the more abstract cris-
souffles (howl-breaths) (Deleuze 2004, p.29), that by laws of illogic, he aims at discovering a new
Meaning in a disintegrated language that becomes aphasiacs. (Artaud [1925] 1976, p.108) An
example from Here Now (1947):

[]
nuyon kidi
nuyon kadan
nuyon kada
tara dada i i
ota papa
ota strakman
tarma strapido
ota rapido
ota brutan
otargugido
ote krutan
[] (Artaud [1947] 1976, p.542)

It is from 1943 that Artaud's glossolalia, as Lucia Amara (2014, p.131) remarks, breaks in his French
texts without prior notice and apparent relation to it. In this invented language, that speak[s] with an
extra-grammatical meaning (Artaud [1943-45] 1976, p.449) however, it is possible to see the presence
of languages that remain hidden, Turkish, Greek and Italian, spoken in Artaud's house, Latin, and
sometimes sounds that echo Hebrew. (Amara 2014, p.136) As in the above mentioned example we can
see the Italian word rapido, (rapid) which is similar in sound to the invented strapido, but also to
otargugido, which again is invented but holds Italian language sounds. Brutan and Kada are

26
respectively a region of Himalaya and a Tibet's village. In any case, Artaud's intentions against
language are made clear in the letter to Parisot speaking about Carroll's Jabberwocky:

[] To abandon language and its laws only to twist them and to deprive the sexual flesh of
the glottis which provides an outlet for the seminal pungencies of the soul and the
complaints of the unconscious is all very well, provided the sex is aware of itself as an
orgasm of rebellion, desperate, naked, uterine, and also piteous, nave, astonished at being
reproved.[...] (Artaud [1943-1945] 1976, p.450)

This excerpt from the letter, that as previously mentioned orientates around Artaud's repulsion for the
superficiality of the linguistic puns in Carroll's poetry, appears in the second issue of EX, a literary
magazine Villa co-founded in 1961. Artaud's ideas are for the Italian poet a reference point thanks to
which Villa conceives his own forays into the French language along with the overrun of the word-
association level. (Tagliaferri 2005, pp.114-115) Villa's inspiration for Artaud's glossolalia is made
clear in the poem Genesis included in the collection Verbodracula which recalls in sound and
meaning an excerpt from Artaud's lingua ignota produced in Rodez:

kart kars
ker
crin krus
kres
kruk
christ cru
christ cresc
cerast cereal
cru
crux
rux aerug rug ros reg
krugs krag
crus crura
crurum
krak kren
kres
cruen kar krek car
crud croct
khrys
christ chrest [] (Villa [1929-1980] 2014, p.515)

27
kr puc te
kr Everything must puk te
pek be arranged li le
kre to a hair pek ti le
e in a fulminating kruk
pte order.
[] (Artaud [ 1947] 1976, p.555)

Artaud's Kru becomes in Villa cru, while kruk remains invariant32. These erratic shreds of words,
arranged in a fulminating order and never a product of randomness in Villa's case, recall in their
poetic body the notion of language as a dynamic expression in space (Artaud [1931-1936]1976,
p.242) described by Artaud in the Theater of Cruelty (1938). Fighting against the mystification of the
word, Artaud's speech (glossolalia) was to be intended as a potential for expansion beyond words, [...]
beyond the auditory language of sounds, extended until it becomes a sign that in turn becomes a kind
of alphabet. (Artaud [1931-1936]1976, p.242) In all these becoming other for Artaud also lie
Creation and Chaos (Artaud [1931-1936]1976, p.243) which have to do with the abandonment of the
Western uses of speech, aiming at terminating the intellectual subjection to language by bearing the
sense of a new and deeper intellectuality, concealed under the form of signs. (Artaud [1931-1936]1976,
p. 244) The abandonment of speech merges into the violent rejection to any form of judgement, which
Artaud fights with piercing sounds. Artaud's battle contrasts judgment because by fighting against it he
fights for his being a body without organs. (Artaud [1947] 1976, p.571) Deleuze (1996, p.171) writes
that Artaud presents the body without organs as a body stolen from God whose judgement would not
be possible otherwise. Becoming a body without organs thus means to find a way to escape the
judgment. In the Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus the philosopher, along with Guattari,
frequently recurs to Artaud's term, however interpreting it as a field where man experiments, through
the dissolution of his organic form (becoming animal, becoming woman etc.), the core of life. The
BwO is for Deleuze an intensive body, and reconnecting to Artaud's paradoxical aspect of the term, it is
a body that produces neither waste nor reuses it, but it let it be like an outside arising from the
residues of the symbolic systems. (Deleuze Guattari 1996, pp.20-21) By being vital and intensive,
the body continually escapes the grip of judgment.
Artaud, instead, develops the discourse from a wider perspective. A body without organs
simultaneously pushes the explosion of the organism and its inclusion of all its wastes. On one side is
then destruction of the symbolic judgment, on the other the impulse to retain the body waste of such a
system. But the destruction also implicates a solution that for Artaud coincides with the idea of suicide.
Artaud must die away from his own death in order be reborn immortal. (Derrida 2001, p.228) If
I kill myself, it will not be in order to destroy myself, but in order to reconstitute myself (Artaud
[1925] 1996, p.28) Furthermore, in a constant struggle (Weiss 2004, p.156) between Creation and
death, Artaud finds salvation only in an art without works. (Derrida 2001, p.230) As all
destructive discourses [] must inhabit the structures they demolish, and within them they must
shelter an indestructible desire for full presence (Derrida 2001, p.245), an art without works (no
32 Weiss (2004, p.153) notices how in Artaud's glossolalia frequently recurs the letter k, that is also one of the less frequent
in French language and not present in the Italian alphabet, it hence becomes in Artaud's case an attribute of his own
invented language; and in this case for Villa, being the whole poem Genesis developed around the letter k and its sound,
a possible indication of the poet's inspiration for the dramatist.

28
works, no language, no words) (from The Nerve Meter, Artaud [1925 ]1976, p.86)) implicates the
disintegration of its own form that vanishes to become a mobile chora, a breath. (souffle)

Et j'ose dire que tout un nouveau public suit avec emotion les ides que je dveloppe depuis quartre
mois sur le thatre, consider comme moyen de culture, et surtout sur la recherche d'une langue
universelle base sur l'energie et la forme du souffle humain. (Artaud [1936] 1996, p.20833)

And I dare to say that a whole new audience with emotion, will follow the ideas I have been
developing on theater for four months, considered as a means of culture, and especially on the search
for a universal language based on energy and the shape of human breath34.

In the negation of the normative and polluted forms of language, aiming to reach a word dematerialized
in the voice, thus becoming breath, Artaud was also looking for a universal language halfway
between gesture and thought(Artaud [1931-1936] 1976, p.242). The breath, as the missing synapse
between creation and language, represents an exit from speech, that the author had already lost in
The Nerve Meter (1925): I told you I have lost my speech. (Artaud [1925] 1976, p.86) In his exit
from the limits of language he too accesses communication sideways, or better conversely, by raving,
inventing words and sounds to destabilize language from all of its hierarchical structure, to find again
an (its) idea of the sacred. And with the hieroglyph of a breath I want to rediscover an idea of the
sacred. (Artaud [1931-1936] 1976, p.276)
In the escape from a false world, of which one must not partake (Villa 1997, p.48) the only way out
is for Villa an over-place (ultraloquus / ultralocus) beyond the discourse and the logos, in which the
word is manipulated and consumed in itself, in a complete absence of forms that harness the potential
of the graphic sign. (Francucci 2007, p.14)(Tagliaferri 1995 35) Looking for a new version of the
spoken word, a new language with which to pronounce the corporeal world (Minciacchi, 2007 p.22) in
its multilingualism and commingling of sounds he aspired to reach a renewal of the world through the
word (renovatum mundiloquium(1978: ed. 1990)). Speaking the words of the abyss-origin, Villa was
being spoken by an empty word. It is the suicide of words that become event of the void (Villa
1997, 59): the words are torn, forced in all their phonemes and etymologies, breaking up the
conventional rules to bridge new relationships between languages in order to make the void
meaningful, in the silence of an a-temporal, immortal, and absolute word. On one side lies silence on
the other breath. And creation/renewal is in the dissolution, destruction, in the simultaneous presence of
source and abyss, birth and death, accumulation and dispersion, in the collection and eruption, in
becoming a proliferation of (immortal) meanings.
I shall have no further need to speak. (Artaud, A. 1976: 87)

33 Letter to Gaston Gallimard. Mexico, 27 giugno 1936.

34 Italics my own.
35 Page not numbered.

29
Ghrasim Luca

As Artaud and Villa, Gherasim Luca cre-acted a vocal writing. Refusing to represent the void as a
lack, Luca tore language in its phonemes bringing it to stutter:

pas pas pas paspaspas

pasppas ppas pas paspas
the pas pas le faux pas le pas
paspaspas the pas le mau
the mauve the mauvais pas
paspas pas le pas le papa
le mauvais papa le mauve le pas
paspas passe paspaspasse
passe passe il passe il pas pas
il passe le pas du pas du pape
du pape sur le pape du pas du passe
[] (Gherasim Luca, Passionnment , 1936)

One of the members of the Romanian Surrealist Group, ne Salman Locker in 1913, Luca began
adopting French as his literary language starting from the Nineteen forties. On the one hand there is an
exiled language, as he himself became after moving to Paris in 1952, on the other a form of oral
writing. As he explains in the text Introduction M un rcital:

It is difficult for me to speak in visual language.

There could be in the very idea of creation - cr-action - something, something that eludes the
passivity of description, as it necessarily derives from a conceptual language. In this language that
is used to designate objects, the word has one meaning, or maximum two, and it keeps the sound as
its prisoner. By breaking the form in which the word is stuck, new relationships will begin to
emerge: sound will exalt itself, secrets previously laying asleep will emerge, the listener will be
introduced to a world of vibrations that implies a physical participation, simultaneous to a mental
adherence. Release the breath, and every word will become a signal. I am connecting with a vague
poetic tradition, and in any case, illegitimate. But even the term poetry it seems to me distorted. I
prefer maybe ontophonie. Whoever opens the word opens the matter, and the word is nothing
other than a material support of a quest that has the transmutation of the real as its end. More than
situate myself in relation to a tradition or a revolution, I apply myself to unveil a resonance of the
being, inadmissible. Poetry is a silensophone, the poem, a place of operation, the word is
subjected to a series of sound mutations, each of its facets release the multiplicity of meanings of
which is loaded. In the extension of my language noise and silence collide - shock center - where
the poem takes the form of the wave that has started it. Better, the poem is eclipsed before its
consequences. In other words: I become oral.37
36 A reading of Passionnment by Gherasim Luca is available on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=16ltchO5Vpw
37 Il m'est difficile de m'exprimer en langage visuel. Il pourrait y avoir dans l'ide mme de cration-craction-quelque chose,
quelque chose qui chappe la description passive telle quelle, telle qu'elle dcoule ncessairement d'un langage conceptuel.
Dans ce langage, qui sert dsigner des objets, le mot n'a qu'un sens, ou deux, et il garde la sonorit prisonnire. Qu'on brise la
forme o il s'est englu et de nouvelles relations apparaissent: la sonorit s'exalte, des secrets endormis surgissent, celui qui
coute est introduit dans un monde de vibrations qui suppose une participation physique, simultane, l'adhsion mentale.
Librer le souffle et chaque mot devient un signal. Je me rattache vraisemblablement une tradition potique, tradition vague et
de toute faon illgitime. Mais le terme mme de posie me semble fauss. Je prfre peut-tre : ontophonie. Celui qui ouvre le
mot ouvre la matire et le mot n'est qu'un support matriel d'une qute qui a la transmutation du rel pour fin. Plus que de me

30
That of Luca is a plethoric language in which the sound has a fundamental place, without aiming to
reach any sort of euphony. It is a sound that goes back to its pre-verbal quality, that babbling of the
primordial voice that begins to speak described by de Certeau; frozen in the moment before the vocal
emission substantiates in the word, and thus it begins to stutter. Stuttering leads to new assonances, to
echoes and to creating new boundaries of sense between words. In this action, as Torlini notes (2011,
p.54) the thought does no longer induce to sound, but the sound causes logical links, thus confirming
Tzara's words that the thought originates in the mouth. 38 And this has to do with repetition, which
implies a convulsive activity with the buccal organ.(Amara 2014, p.146) Repetition, and its slight
variations produce a rhythmic-sound sequence that involve a change in the attitude of the mouth,
therefore implying not only a verbal articulation but also a physical one. This is where the possibility
of sense proliferation described by de Certeau (2015, p.82) occurs: in the juxtaposition of
incomprehensible words the babbling voice creates unlimited effects of meaning and possibilities of
sense hidden beneath a sound structure. In the poem Passionnment the voice is left to the repetition
of (mainly) one sound (pas): the mouth opens and closes, it slits, and allows the enunciation to speak
by detaching itself from statements, interfering with the syntax thus cre-acting a space of silence, the
interlude between the word meant and the word (eventually) propagated:

[...] passepasse passi le sur le

le pas le passi passi passi pissez sur
le pape sur papa sur le sur la sur
la pipe du papa du pape pissez en masse
passe passe passi passepassi la passe
la basse passi passepassi la
passio passiobasson le bas
le pas passion le basson et
et pas le basso do pas [...]

Here, the exit from any given poetic code involves the exit from language as well as its gathering with
the sound: the sentence is no longer the bearer of a message, but it is rather the slipping or the collision
of phonemes that in a deconstructed language allow for openings of sense. (Torlini 2011, p.40) As
Deleuze observes (1997, p.112), Luca's language develops in a ramified variation of language
governed by the creation of a syntax evolving into a grammar disequilibrium. If the language is
unstructured, broken and repeated, the word is left merely to a sound vibration of the body, its echo. In
fact, the poet replaces poetry with the word ontophonie, thus aiming to unveil through the voice a
resonance of the being. And so Luca stutters in language by implying a complete physical
participation. Analyzing stuttering in the written language, Deleuze (1997, p.107) notes that it occurs
when saying coincides with doing, which is also what de Certeau states about the relationship between
glossolalia and the body: as the body is the place of saying, the here and now are my body, which in
situer par rapport une tradition ou une rvolution, je m'applique dvoiler une rsonnance d'tre, inadmissible. La posie est
un silensophone, le pome, un lieu d'opration, le mot y est soumis une srie de mutations sonores, chacune de ses facettes
libre la multiplicit des sens dont elles sont charges. Je parcours aujourd'hui une tendue o le vacarme et le silence
s'entrechoquent centre choc , o le pome prend la forme de l'onde qui l'a mis en marche. Mieux, le pome s'clipse devant ses
consquences. En d'autres termes : je m'oralise. (2001: XI-XII) Posted by Andr Velter in Talking stateless in preface to
Gherasim Luca. Hero-Limit Monitoring The Song of carp and Chronicles
38 Again, this statement is true for the glossolalic form in general, and it is, as previously mentioned related to the practice
of Andrej Belyj as well as in Emilio Villa's one.

31
turn says what it does becoming the body that starts talking.(de Certeau 2015, p.57) This happens in
Luca's continuous variation on language, on all [...]its interior elements [namely] phonological,
syntactical, and semantic (Deleuze 1978, p. 99) and this is how, according to Deleuze, Luca makes
French stammer in itself, with itself, to import stammering into language itself and not into speech
which means to impose a variation on language, that will make you a foreigner in your own language
or make a foreign language your own or make your language a bilingualism immanent to your
foreignness. (Deleuze 1998, 99) And this is why Deleuze (1978, p. 99) considers Gherasim Luca,
although ironically foreigner, to be one of the greatest French poets of all times.

[...]do pas pas ne domi

pas paspasse passio
vos pas ne do ne do ne dominez pas
vos passes passions vos pas vos
vos pas dvo dvorants ne do
ne dominez pas vos rats
pas vos rats
ne do dvorants ne do ne dominez pas
vos rats vos rations vos rats rations ne ne
ne dominez pas vos passions rations vos [...]

Yet, it should be noted that Deleuze describes Gherasim Luca's continuous variation of language in
One less Manifesto, a chapter included in Superpositions (France, 1979) or Sovrapposizioni (Italy,
1978) a book about, and co-authored with Italian theater actor, writer and playwright Carmelo Bene 39.
Deleuze refers to Luca's stuttering, (also mentioning Beckett, Kafka and Godard) while drawing on
Bene's use of theatrical language which follows a process of subtraction, detraction and
amputation (Deleuze 1978, p.95) of the text, that through the use of variations, corrodes meaning,
syntax and phonemes from within. It is thus the activity of imposing to a language the heterogeneity of
the variation (Deleuze 1978, p. 98) that unifies the poet and playwright. They both perform a voice
(voix) that stutters within language, in a constant variation of intensities. Bene does it with the aid of
play-back recordings, shifting the emphasis of the voice on the variation between low and high tones of
the utterance, Luca induces the written word to stutter in a repetition of sounds that makes it become a
stranger even to a native language reader.
Poetry as a silesophone 40: it is the weightiness of the codes of language that must be destroyed to
achieve the lightness of the body (Son corps lger, in La Fin Du Monde, 1969) to dissolve in silence.
Silence collides with noise: the extension of Luca's language meets in the coexistence between
proliferation and unspeakable sense. Laurent Mourey (2005, p.18) writes: In stuttering, or in making
[language] stutter, Luca includes traces of the unknown in the known. Stuttering embodies a certain
knowledge and in Luca, that is a philosophical strategy. Therefore Luca does not suffer any kind of
language disorder. With the same end of making the voice the vehicle of silence, Villa, like Bene,

39 Deleuze will return to the theme of stuttering in literature in the essay He Stuttered, included in Critical and
Clinical, emphasizing the work of Beckett, Gherasim Luca, also mentioning Roussel, Masoch and Melville, no longer
referring to Bene 1993.
40 Luca writes : Poetry / without language / Revolution / without anyone /Love without end Les Albums de Ghrasim
Luca, , p.41; this poem was reprinted under the title gREVE GENERALe sans fin ni commencement, in La proie
sombre (Corti, 1991) 4555. For an English version, see Ghrasim Luca. (2012). Self-Shadowing Prey, tr. Mary Ann
Caws. New York: Contra Mundum Press. 4050.

32
practiced a vocal writing in which the employment on the voice causes it to become noise and,
simultaneously with its opposite, silence. Noise is in the phonetic puns, repetitions, alliterations,
variations in sound; silence is the disintegration of the word which dissolves in a meaningless rhythm
in the written space. Villa and Bene distrust writing, in which they identify the attempt to harness and
codify a primary energy that both presuppose unrepresentable (Tagliaferri 1996, p.13) but this is also
true for Luca. The three perspectives meet to overcome the boundary that exists between written and
oral, surpassing the exiled condition of the printed word and making it becoming action of a voice, or a
cry that tends to silence. In the procedure, poetry and voice come up to a self-denial. This occurs in the
voice that disintegrates in its variations: it becomes body as the words become objects. And it is when
language becomes voice that annihilates itself in the intermission between sound proliferation, meaning
and silence, in the vocal writing that becomes act between what is pronounceable and the
unmentionable.

[...]je tai je terri terrible passio je

je je taime
je taime je tai je
taime aime aime je taime
passionn aime je
taime passionm
je taime
passionnment aimante je
taime je taime passionnment
je tai je taime passionn n
je taime passionn
je taime passionnment je taime
je taime passio passionnment.

33
Conclusion

The Genesis seeks the origins in the void, into the undifferentiated; it introduces a difference
between light and darkness. The presence of elements that can not coexist creates a space, a void that
gives rise to the origin, as to chaos. Emilio Villa begins translating the Genesis in 1953. The endeavor
will last for his entire life. During the same years are to be found the roots of his stylistic mutation:
Villa appeals to ancient languages of Mesopotamia and the Middle East to pursue the original sense of
words. In 1973 the poet will even attempt to produce an etymological dictionary of the Italian language
(project that never saw the light) aiming at tracing morphological relationships between ancient
languages and his native one. Such search clashes with the resistance of the orthodox thinking, but
allows him to chase that original etymon which bares the opening between signifier and signified,
confirming, as a translator, the inevitability of an endless re-etymologization of the word. (1998, p.10 41)
In a word always open to new interpretations, Villa stands out as one of the representatives of a critical-
deconstructive tradition that crossed the culture of the past century with the intent to counter the
conservative form of the classical logos. This results in the poet experiments in lexical distortions, the
use of polysemy, fragmented words, reassembled as in the Hebrew Melitzah42 or the Christian
Centuriae, phonetic puns, and permutations that always guarantee a sense proliferation.

Describing Carlo Emilio Gadda (much appreciated especially by the young Villa) and his poetic path,
Pier Paolo Pasolini talks about a serpentine line that starting from the top, falls, intersecting its
average line, then down again, and then back again, and so forth. (Pasolini 1972, p.7) Gadda's
serpentine line alternates dialects, slang and elevated locutions, foreign languages, industrial
abbreviations. The serpentine line exits language and simultaneously it is part of it. It enters all its
different regions without ever dismissing any. Its structure reminds of the rhizomatic process pursued
by Deleuze and the philosopher's interest in some deviant forms of language. I mentioned Wolfson and
Artaud, Roussel and Brisset. The last two also being the object of study of Michel Foucault. The
involvement in such pathologic forms (procd) of language grew high in the context of the Schizo-
culture43 during the 1970s. From the legitimization of madness raised by Foucault, carried out in terms
of anti-psychiatry by R. D. Laing and David Cooper in the United Kingdom, or the freeing of mental
41 Introduction to Villa's translation of the biblical texts. Villa: Sulla traduzione dei testi biblici in il Verri n.7-8. (1998)
Author's name is lacking.
42 In biblical Hebrew the word means aphorism. During the Middle Ages it referred to an elegant literary style. In
modern times it denotes a literary technique based on the artistic combination of phrases from the Bible. (Sherbok 1992)
The Blackwell Dictionary of Judaica. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?
id=g9780631187288_chunk_g978063118728818_ss1-272
43 In 1975 Sylvre Lotringer brought together, along with John Rajchman, two continents of thought through a revolution
of desire- as the mission statement of the Schizo-culture conference declared. It was held in New York at Columbia
University, Burroughs, Cage, Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Laing, Lyotard, Wolfson, Wilson are some names among the
invited speakers. Semiotext(e)(1978). Schizo-Culture. 3(2) New York: Semiotext(e)

34
asylums by Franco Basaglia in Italy. In the interest for the freedom of madness, the Western paradigm
of normality (regularity, uniformity) started to fade. In the same years a curiosity in authors aiming at
annihilating the apparent sense of language to make the word regenerate in a new meaning increased
more and more. Some, Brisset, Roussel, Artaud, Wolfson, (Franz Kafka) were schizophrenic. Roussel
being under the guidance of psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Others were not, Gherasim Luca, Samuel Beckett,
Carmelo Bene, Valre Novarina, Henry Michaux. During the 1970s Villa was composing some of his
most experimental works filled with graphemes, multilingualism, glossolalia and sound games, (i.e.
Verbodracula.) Simultaneously, a second wave of interest, after the beginning of the 20 th century,
started growing in glossolalia, (i.e. Samarin, de Certeau.)
In the past few years it can be noted a new born interest in recovering Emilio Villa's extensive body of
work, the recent anthology (2014) edited by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi is just an example, in English
language -in the same year- Dominic Siracusa published a translation of Villa's selected poetry. Same is
true for glossolalia and especially Michel de Certeau's analysis of the phenomena. In all the
encounters I presented, whether it be Emilio Villa, and his linguistic experimentations, or the ones of
other authors, or glossolalia, there exist a return to the genesis: womb and abyss. In a linguistic
madness these writers/artists turned from languages and writing, looking at a verbal proliferation of
meaning stripped from any relationship between signifier/signified. Echoes of obsolete languages,
mixed genres, repetitions manifest in the sense and sound reverb, creating the possibility of a sense that
forms in the body, in the voice, becoming performative. These languages are not translatable. Every
reader is a foreigner outside the author's language. Villa was a clandestine in the language he
fabricated, the poet made everyone becoming a stranger in his own language. In his use of
multilingualism Villa requested a collectivity: speaking in tongues turns into a collective creation of
becoming a stranger in your own language, in the language of others, in a dead language.What is a pre-
verbal language? What is English? What is translatable? What is the voice? Where does words come
from? What does mean mean? What is language? What is private language? What is silence.

Man (like bird), a creature of repetition. A child's babble, a fledgeling's: cheeping, repeating.

(Michaux 1997, p.27)

35
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