In the middle of the seventeenth century a French surgeon stumbles upon the astounding discovery of a boy who has lost his physical tongue yet continues to fluently articulate every word of his mother tongue. Twelve hundred years earlier a group of Christian martyrs all have their physical tongues cut off as a punishment for refusing to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ. And yet they all miraculously continue to use their mother tongue. Erik Bünger's lecture performance examines the recurrent historical phenomenon of a tongue without a tongue – an examination that returns us to the one unsurpassable question that remains unanswered at the root of human language: if there is no necessary connection between tongue and tongue, if the words we speak belong to no particular limb in our bodies, then where does language come from?

In the middle of the seventeenth century a French surgeon stumbles upon the astounding discovery of a boy who has lost his physical tongue yet continues to fluently articulate every word of his mother tongue. Twelve hundred years earlier a group of Christian martyrs all have their physical tongues cut off as a punishment for refusing to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ. And yet they all miraculously continue to use their mother tongue. Erik Bünger's lecture performance examines the recurrent historical phenomenon of a tongue without a tongue – an examination that returns us to the one unsurpassable question that remains unanswered at the root of human language: if there is no necessary connection between tongue and tongue, if the words we speak belong to no particular limb in our bodies, then where does language come from?