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The untranslatable is at the heart of any and all languages. It confronts us with equivocation, which can become a source of invention and poetry. However, it can also expose us to destruction, such as when a society transforms what cannot be said into impotence or a lack to be filled. What happens to speech when we move from one language to another, or when a subject feels as if banished from the world because she speaks a different language, one that is considered impossible to share? Can those who are suffering in their so-called mother tongue find a name for their pain in another language? Clinical experience shows us that a foreign language can act as a refuge, a defense, or an attempt at a cure. In any of these cases, the issue is the subject’s relationship to “la langue.” La langue, which contains the unknown in its “deepest archaeology,” is at work in the foreign language, as a vehicle of what can neither be effaced nor translated into any acquired language. Whichever language we speak, we can never get rid of the unconscious.