A Conversion Disorder

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2012

Through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze we can begin to think about reading and writing as processes of transformation. When one reads or writes, one plugs into impersonal flows and affects and becomes something else. Likewise, Deleuze theorizes masochism as an embodied practice that produces transformation on a multitude of levels. Beginning with Deleuze’s analysis of Leopold von Sacher- Masoch, from whom he developed a concept of masochism as a process of inversion and rebirth, this article reads Deleuze’s theories on reading, writing, and masochism together. This article argues that Deleuze saw these three processes as kindred methods of producing impersonality and freedom. As a way of complicating Deleuze’s notion of freedom as the production of impersonal flows, this article reads his meditations on his own chronic illness as a way to flesh out his own reading and writing on masochism and becoming. This article suggests that we reflect back on Deleuze as a reader and writer in order to critically engage with our own readerly and writerly relationships to reading, writing, masochism, and identity. Against a universal notion of impersonality, this article argues that fusing reading, writing, and masochism opens ways to think about the intimacies between text and body, and the importance of the specificity of flesh.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020

The nature of the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis has been variously theorized since Freud first acknowledged his debt to the “poets and philosophers”. I propose that one way we might conceptualize the shared work of poetry and psychoanalysis is as the working-through of the founding violence of our initiation into language, a working-through sustained by a bonus of pleasure. A detailed reading of “In the village” by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop suggests that she and Piera Aulagnier may be read as parallel theorists of this necessity for a bonus of representational pleasure. Aulagnier’s concept of the pictogram, a primal psychic representation recording the affect present at the moment of the first encounter between mother and infant, places reciprocal pleasure at the origins of the infant’s capacity to invest in the activity of representing. Bishop’s text stages an initial trauma, a maternal scream, damaging her child’s linguistic functioning. It then chart...

2001

Cover image: 'The Rape of Persephone', by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Per gentile concessione dell'Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of 'ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation-Paper for documents-Requirements for permanence'.

2012

It has oten been argued, in the wake of poststructuralist theory, that interpretation is a violence inlicted by the reader upon the text; that interpretation closes the possibilities of the text; that interpretation, because it aims at capturing the meaning of a text, ignores its formal and contextual aspects. A paradigmatic example of how we have charged against interpretation, is the now classic 1964 essay " Against Interpretation, " in which Susan Sontag, full of the rebellious and contagious spirit of the sixties, and the rising of the poststructuralist thought, triumphantly proclaims that " in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. " More than forty years later, at least for this reader, it is still impossible to contend with those who were against interpretation during the sixties and seventies. Yet, now that the euphoria of the times has subsided, and those works inscribed in that tradition have been canonized (Derrida, de Man, Levinas, et al.), we have forgotten that in their original project there was no higher truth found in reading against interpretation, and that the " opened wound " of reading against interpretation is always painful. he wounding of reading, a metaphor coined by Derrida, Gadamer, and Celan (as we will see later in this paper) seems to refer to an aspect of reading that pertains to a diferent metaphorical register than that of the Enlightenment, which uses the metaphor of light or illumination to refer to knowledge. In reading there are also dynamics that rather than illuminating the reader with a higher truth, harms him. It is an aspect of reading that cannot be reasoned with and that refers not to the world of ideas, but to world of the body. We could think about the wounding of reading in the terms of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which trauma is a wound that opens up the membranes of an organism to the point that one does not know if the wound came from the inside or

2018

This thesis investigates the ways in which the body and metaphor are involved in the expression of experiences which are often difficult to articulate and with which, according to Virginia Woolf, literature has largely failed to engage. Female bodily experience, for instance, has been suppressed as a result of censorship by society and by the self. The aim of this thesis is to explore how certain metaphors are able to express powerful bodily experiences which have often remained unwritten and which literal language cannot accurately portray.To do this, the thesis presents a critical analysis of two of Woolf’s novels alongside an original collection of poetry. Woolf’s middle fiction departs from the conventions of the realist novel, and in Mrs Dalloway (1925) this experimentation takes the form of free indirect discourse in conjunction with highly figurative language. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I examine the ways in which Mrs Dalloway deploys metaphors about t...

RELIEF-Revue électronique de littérature française, 2010

What do children who cannot learn to read tell us about the very effect of the Letter? What connections can be made between psychopathology and the writer's craft itself? The iconic figure of the Reader coiled around a novel will allow us to think about the link between the magical thinking at work in the child who "prefers" not to see and the writer who would like to un-read, to undo the psychic implications of the advent to the alphabetic Symbolic and its laws, a humanizing initiation because it is a critique of incestuous jouissance. ------------------------------------------------------- Que nous disent les enfants incapables d’apprendre à lire sur l’effet même de la lettre ? Quels rapports peuvent être établis entre la psychopathologie et la démarche même de l’écrivain ? La figure iconique de la Lectrice lovée autour d’un roman nous permettra de penser le lien entre la pensée magique à l’œuvre chez l’enfant qui « préfère » ne pas sa-voir et l’écrivain qui voudrait dé-lire, défaire les implications psychiques de l’advenue au symbolique alphabétique et à ses lois, une initiation humanisante parce que critique de la jouissance incestueuse

Mètode Revista de difusió de la investigació

The authors offer an analysis of mental illness in the work of a key twentieth century author: Virginia Woolf. A critical review of her literary legacy allows us to get closer to what might be one of the most intense literary portrayals of illness and its metaphors and, at the same time, to the representations, euphemisms, silences, and monsters depicted in the chapters of her life and in the unique voice of an essential author.

Print) 1745-8315 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ripa20 'My capital secret': Literature and the psychoanalytic agon Vera J. Camden To cite this article: Vera J. Camden (2009) 'My capital secret': Literature and the psychoanalytic Taking as my departure point Freud 's unequivocal claim in The Question of Lay

Comparative Drama, 1973