APHASIA, HISTORY, AND DURESS (Review Essay) (original) (raw)
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The Speaking Archive. An Introduction to Adji Dieye’s exhibition ‘Aphasia’
Adji Dieye – Aphasia, 2023
The practice of Italian Senegalese artist Adji Dieye (b. 1991), based in Zurich and Dakar, Senegal, is dedicated to the themes of postcolonialism and nation-building. From an Afro-diasporic perspective the artist examines how language and the urban landscape function in the writing of history, whose linearity becomes the focus of her critical enquiry. This essay contextualises Adji Dieye's intermedial practice from a photo-theoretical perspective whilst focussing on the soundscape created in the artist's artwork 'Aphasia' (2022-2023) that gives agency and voice to the Afro-diasporic community. The same-titled publication was developed within the framework of 'Photographic Encounters', a biennial format with which Fotomuseum Winterthur and Christoph Merian Verlag accompany an artist in the realisation of an exhibition and a publication, thereby supporting the production and presentation of a long-term photographic project. Adji Dieye was selected for the first edition.
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Torsions within the same anxiety? Entification, apophasis, history.
Educational Philosophy & Theory, 2008
In Anglophone educational research in the United States, the name Foucault has been more pointedly celebrated in some subfields such as curriculum studies relative to its more noticeable censorship in subfields such as history of education. This paper illustrates how such differential epistemological politics might be accounted for through reapproaching the challenges to historiography that Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) raised. Through the formalist lens of performative apophasis, and with attention to the dependencies of discourse that characterize narrative prosthesis, this paper re‐engages the least referenced of Foucault's major histories in the educational field to bring into noticeability other ‘conditions of possibility’—ones that explicate how an apophatic turn might account for divergent reactions to less familiar philosophies of history and/or to ‘alternative’ approaches to documents through which history is now being narrated and critiqued in education and beyond.
This famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1944, refers to a troubled and painful context: the years of occupation on French territory. Between resistance and collaboration, a whole grey area and an interlope world arise. The temptation to give in to fear, revenge or greed is opposed to involved acts, sublime in their selflessness. For the survivor Jorge Semprún, evil and good exist side by side in mankind, even in the state of exception of the concentration camp (G. Agamben). Neither can be eradicated or forbidden. Literature appears to be the proper space to expose these paradoxes and to suggest the ontological stake. Through a new corpus that has been very little studied until now, this comparative study aims to echo Sartre's assertion that “for the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex, or inferiority complex, it is the very limit of his liberty, it is his power of resistance to torture and death” (Situations, III, 1948).
Dominance, Marginality, and Subversion in French (Post)colonial Discourse
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A Wound without Pain: Freud on Aphasia
Naharaim - Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte, 2011
In his talk in honour of Freud’s eightieth birthday, Thomas Mann referred to the understanding of disease as an instrument of knowledge. “There is no deeper knowledge without the experience of disease and all heightened healthiness must be achieved by the route of illness.”1 In line of this sensitive description, I approach Freud’s oft-neglected early work Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Freud’s work on aphasia (a group of speech disorders in which there is a defect, reduction, or loss of linguistic functioning) is a special case. In it, to use Mann’s terms, it is the “illness” of language that becomes central, and only through it is something essential about language itself revealed. My entry point into the text is precisely this predominance of illness, or more specifically of pain. I examine the relation of pain to language in aphasia, and show that their intersection reveals some essential characteristics of the structure of both pain and language.2 I turn to this early text since it is specifically here that I believe I can find Freud’s most primary and sometimes even “raw” treatment of language. Here is the primary moment in which the conception of language enters his theoretical “picture”, before it became one of the cornerstones of his speech therapy. I seek here to point to the immanent and intimate nature of Freud’s interest in language while deliberately avoiding familiar interpretations such as Lacan’s discussion of language’s function in Freud. Despite the enormous importance of Lacan’s
Out of Sight but Not out of Mind: Absence as Presence in French Postmemory Narrative
In this journal article I analyse Philippe Grimbert’s Un secret, Henri Racyzmow’s Un cri sans voix and Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance in the context of postmemory, that is the transmitted trauma of the children of survivors or victims of the Holocaust or Shoah. I begin my analysis with an exploration of silence (the absence of family members being painfully present in the absence of words) and voice (the absence articulated in the spoken and written word). I go on to explore how absence is exhibited in objects and photographs, having recourse to Carol A. Kidron’s theory of ‘intersubjectivity’ (2012: 17), Marianne Hirsch’s concept of photographs as ‘memory cues’ (2001: 7), and Froma I. Zeitlin’s warning against over-identification (2001: 147). Finally, I investigate the narrators’ attempts to fill in the gaps of post or ‘absent’ memory through creative investment, by resorting not only to their own imagination and imaginative framework, but also to the authentic memory of remaining eye-witnesses. While Grimbert takes a psychoanalytical approach, Raczymow refers to Jewish tradition, and Perec incorporates autobiographical passages with a childhood narrative of fabulation. Absence, then, is repressed in silence, emerges in objects and photographs, and, to use Dominick LaCapra’s terminology, is finally converted into loss (1999: 704) through the writing process, which becomes a form of working through transmitted postmemory trauma.