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<![CDATA[Christopher Fynsk]]>
Fynsk]]>, <![CDATA[Christopher.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase: Infancy, Survival.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
precise terms, Freud could not help but note that the positions
presumably assumed by the parents could recall that of sheep,
which the young child had seen in considerable number on his
parents’ summer estate—an association that led to an evocation
of death (for the father’s herd had suffered an epidemic which
was only accelerated by a program of inoculation). Associations
with illness, his own and his mother’s, indicated that an expo-
sure to the fact of mortality was not separable from what the
child had supposedly witnessed in that earliest “scene” to which
he was exposed at eighteen months, and helped determine the
meaning of what Freud insistently referred to as castration.
But a no less striking allusion to an experience of “reality”
emerges quite late in Freud’s analysis, when he comes to account
for the patient’s cycle of brief recovery after the administration
of an enema (necessitated by the fact that the patient, in a
certain period, could not pass a bowel movement without such
an intervention from a male nurse). The world, the patient
would complain, was normally “veiled” except for a brief period
after the enema. At which point, he saw the world clearly and
experienced a kind of rebirth.
NOTES
make her wake up in the night screaming. What makes her so afraid?
She has no idea, the poor little one, and we don’t either, of course”
(cited by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in “In statut nascendi,” Hypnoses,
ed. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Eric Michaud, and Jean-Luc Nancy [Paris:
Éditions Galilée, 1984], 73).
7. I cite here the relevant passage from Joan Stambaugh’s trans-
lation of Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2010), 132.
that [Dasein] has the possibility of being a self, and has this factically
in keeping with its freedom in each case; the fact that transcendence
temporalizes itself as a primordial occurrence, does not stand in the
power of this freedom itself. Yet such impotence (thrownness) is not
first the result of beings forcing themselves upon Dasein, but rather
determines Dasein’s being as such” (trans. William McNeill in Path-
marks [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 135).
9. From Discourse on Thinking, Section II, “Conversation on
a Country Path About Thinking,” trans. John M. Anderson and E.
Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 84.
10. My remarks on Lyotard’s work on the question of infancy
are based on an essay first published in Yale French Studies in 2001
(YFS99, 44–61): “Jean-François’s Infancy.” I have expanded this essay
considerably for the Spanish translation (forthcoming from Paradiso
Editores, Mexico City), which will include the translation of this read-
ing of Phrase.
11. I refer to Lacan’s remarks in chapter 5 (“Tuché and Automa-
ton”) of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981),
53–64. There, he evokes the case of the Wolf Man at the outset of a
discussion that is preceded by the declaration that “No praxis is more
oriented towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel
of the real than psycho-analysis” (53).
12. Freud: “We know from our experience interpreting dreams
that this sense of reality [Wirklichkeitsgefühl] carries a particular signifi-
cance with it. It assures us that some part of the latent material of
the dream is claiming in the dreamer’s memory to possess the quality
of reality [Wirklichkeit], that is, that the dream relates to an occur-
rence [Begebenheit] that really [wirklich] took place and was not merely
imagined.” (I cite from Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories [New
York: Macmillan Publishing, 1963], 190–191; subsequent citations in
the text will be indicated with the abbreviation TCH). Later in the
analysis, Freud appeals for the reader’s provisional belief in the reality
(Realität) of the scene (TCH, 196), and reverts to the same term,
Realität, for a general discussion of the patient’s sense of conviction
regarding the reality of the scenes underlying dreams (TCH, 209). He
will also affirm their “lived reality” (erlebten Realität). Finally, Freud
will link his discussion of primal scenes in this case to the general
considerations of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and refer, in
this respect, to the Realwert of primal scenes (TCH, 214).
13. “The material of the analysis shows that there is one condi-
tion that this picture must satisfy. It must have been calculated to cre-
ate the conviction of the existence of castration” (TCH, 194). In the
long footnote that summarizes Freud’s interpretation of the Wolf Man’s
dream, he will word this conviction as follows: “So there really is such
a thing as castration” (Es gibt also wirklich eine Kastration) (TCH, 201).
14. Here again, we meet Freud’s concerns in his case of the Wolf
Man, for he tells us explicitly and repeatedly that his problem is one
of finding a form of presentation that could produce in the reader a
conviction comparable to that of the patient himself with respect to
the reality of the elements of his experience brought forth by Freud.
15. In 1990, I had the pleasure of presenting an important seg-
ment of this work in an edited volume, Typography: Philosophy, Mime-
sis, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).