“Ik ben toch niet gek!“ – Othering en normativiteit in het Nederlandse en het Servische vertoog

The goal of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand, I am looking at the “normative” continuum (comparable to crazy – awkward/weird – strange – peculiar – normal – common in English) in Serbian and Dutch, in an attempt to identify the main similarities and differences using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard &Wierzbicka 2002). On the other hand, I am proposing moving away from the comparison paradigm. Instead, I am developing an account approaching languages diffractively (Barad 2007), as an ongoing intra-action. Under such an approach, the role of the practices of the (broadly defined) bilingual speaker changes radically: the speaker is invited to live the difference productively and to overcome the ideology of sameness and representationalism. The bilingual speaker is always consigned to being more-than-normal and accountable for how she speaks the constitutive boundary.But there is more. The goal of this contribution is to spoil othering/normativity/universality for you, strategically using the insight that not only are different things “crazy” in different discourses, but also the very scale of measuring “crazy” is discourse/language-specific and ever-becoming. In this sense,there is no transcendental norm(ality) to measure against, only what we make of what has been entrusted to us.