What can we say about those marked by the violence of language or whose distress can only be expressed as a scream or destructiveness? The failure of a language to allow a subject to engage his voice and subjectivity in it can have devastating consequences. This is shown by clinical work with certain subjects from other cultures, subjects exiled from their desire and/or having invested the language of the host country as a language of pure convention, reduced to its utilitarian aspects and no longer able to express subjective singularity. The author discusses the possibilities of trying to extricate oneself from the disaster by making the shift from the language of violence to the language of desire and invention.