Arrangement and transcription
Peter Szendy (Listen: A History of Our Ears Charlotte
Mandell (Translator), Jean-Luc Nancy (Foreword)
Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel HellerRoazen (Apr 22, 2005)
See H-R’s chapter “The Lesser animal” on aphasia and Freud’s book
on aphasia, not included in the collected works, in which failure is
central. Freud is into translation and a poetics of memory. The
“language apparatus” 129-47
“the end of memory would lie in muteness, and forgetting would lead
to speech.” 146
The role of “translation” in this model of the psyche is clearly decisive.
/. . . . Who, first of all, could be said to translate in this case? It is
difficult to see how there could be a translator, in any ordinary sense,
when consciousness has not yet emerged. In a field in which the first
“signs” (Zeichen) follow on the heels of “perceptions” that “exclude”
all memory, moreover, there cannot be any “original text” to be
translated. Strictly speaking, there can be only renditions (and
renditions of renditions) that point to an event that is itself irreducible
to notation 143-44
A reading of the letter to Fliess of 1896 makes it clear that the words
of the young neurologist both hear and saw, “Now you’re gone” (Jetzt
ist’s aus mit dir), announced the imminent ruin of his “psychic
mechanism” not only in their semantic content, which was certainly
threatening, but also in their form. By virtue of their fixity, the words
“printed on a piece of paper floating in the air” spelled the end of
speech. . . Out of the hands of the writer and the reader, its letters
could not be “re-arranged” and “re-transcribed,” and for this reason
they marked a limit point in the process of continual rewriting that
defines the “psychic mechanism” as a while. It is significant, in tis
sense, that Freud describes the “speech remnant” he saw and heard
not as sketched, scrawled, or scribbled but as “printed” (gedruckt).
The imprimatur withdraws it definitively from the field of drafts,
rendering it resistant to all revision. It marks it as untranslatable, the
unforgettable text of a linguistic capacity now gone. 144-45.
Consciousness emerges, much like the Freudian theory itself, as the
product of a gradual process of writing and rewriting: the final result
of the multiple “re-arrangements” and “re-transcriptions” [Umschriften]
by which “signs” [Zeichen] bearing witness to “perceptions”
(Umshcriften] are “laid down,” revised, and reproduced in the course
of “at least” three different “registrations” [Niederschriften). Freud
went on to explain to his friend that each of the psychic “transcripts”
represents a distinct period of time and that between any two
“registrations” there necessarily lie gaps, which can be abridged, if
not effaced, by further forms of writing: “translations” (or
“transpositions,” [Ubersetzungen]. Such “renditions,” to be exact,
serve a vital function in the psychic mechanism. When a “translation”
fails to mend the breaks registrations, Freud argued, “anachronism”
(Anchronismen) develop. (142)
Quoting from Freud’s letter:
Every later transcript inhibits its predecessor and drains the excitatory
process from it. If a later transcript is lacking, the excitation is dealt
with in accordance with psychological laws in force in the earlier
psychic period and along the paths open at that time. Thus an
anachronism persists. In a particular province fueros [Spanish word
D H-R glosses as “out-dated laws”] are still in force we are in the
presence of “survivals” [es kommen “Uberlebeset” zustande]. A
failure of translation [Die Versagung der Ubersetzung]—this is what is
known clinically as “repression.” The moment for it is always a
release of the displeasure [Unlustbindung] that would be generated
by a translation; is is through this displeasure provoked a disturbance
of thought that did not permit the work of translation [als ob dises
Denksstoerung hervorreife, die die Ubersetzungsarbeit nicht gestatt]
[note 43] p. 143
Note 43, 250 Freud, Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fleiss, p. 208 trans. Modified.
Binding—central to speculate on Freud—also part about Freud
binding of the Ecrits in love Lacan.
Fort:Da, Can’t You See I’m Burning?
“A suivre “ at the end of the La carte postale, not continue.
To follow