{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.031146179401993355, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0170265780730897, 'mean_word_length': 4.749403341288783, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A New Mystic Practice? On Charles de Foucauld’s Tuareg-French Dictionary

The publication of the second volume of La Fable Mystique by Michel de Certeau (2013) incites not only a deeper reflection of the mystic discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also brings present attention to the question of knowing if and how, at the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, a mystic practice had come to substitute for the traditional mystic discourse (Cravetto, 1995: 113). In the new mystic practice, the unfolding of manners and arts of doing (de Certeau, 1990), together with their singularities and powers, transform an utterance which, like a voice that is muffled, resonates mutely. These manners of doing function in effect from out of the heart of a language that is strange – the language of the other – which is for the subject both a language of exile and of proximity. Absorbed by the universe of the Other,1 the subject tries to advance, to go further. He puts himself to the test in a very particular form of communication. This approach seems echoed by the memory of what the Tuareg language was for Charles de Foucauld and the story of the slow formation of his Dictionary and its hidden tapestry of threads, whose power is more revealing than the work itself. When I composed a short article entitled ‘History of the French-Tuareg Dictionary of Charles de Foucauld’ for the Revue des Études Islamiques (Cravetto, 1979, where the inadvertent error in word-order ‘French-Tuareg’ had slipped into the title), I had reconstructed the series of steps which led from the drafts to the Dictionary, of which we have – still today2 – only the photostat edition brought out by André Basset (Foucauld, 1951). As soon as Foucauld perceived that the semantic field of a word was broader than he had thought, as soon as he discovered a new rule of grammar, he amended not only the Dictionary but also his other linguistic studies: the Poems of the Tuareg (Foucauld, 1925–1930), the Proverbs (Foucauld and Calassanti-Motylinski, 1922), the Notes for a Trial Tuareg Grammar (Foucauld, 1920) ... By re-integrating the drafts and the successive edited versions of the Dictionary into Foucauld’s linguistic works and his correspondence, one gains a sense of the effort he accomplished to engage with and share ‘from within’ the mentality of the nomad people among who he lived.