Bachner-Anagrams in Psychoanalysis

Anagrams in Psychoanalysis: Retroping Concepts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Franois LyotardAuthor(s): Andrea BachnerSource: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1-25Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247369 .Accessed: 15/09/2011 18:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toComparative Literature Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

A. OWEN ALDRIDGE PRIZE WINNER 2002

ANAGRAMS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: RETROPING CONCEPTS BY SIGMUND FREUD,

JACQUES LACAN, AND JEAN-FRANOIS LYOTARD

Andrea Bachner

Why anagrammatize psychoanalysis?

Compared to the tropes of metaphor and metonymy and the broader theoretical concepts that have been developed under their names, the anagram - until recently - has fared poorly.1 Problems for its use in wider theorizations lie in its lack of a convenient opposite with which it could form a binary pair, and maybe also in its contiguity - causing the dismissal of the possibility of putting it to "serious" uses - to such "lowly" figures as puns, calembours, and other tropes marginalized for their bawdy excesses and lack of seriousness.2 Given the fact that metaphor and metonymy - especially in the context of their Lacanian equation with Sigmund Freud s principles of condensation and displacement, then with desire and symptom (derived from the theories of Roman Jakobson built upon the linguistics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure) - still seem to serve as psychoanalytical mastertropes, why should an attempt be made to trace sites of the anagram in psychoanalytical theory?

In fact, the sites of anagrams in Jacques Lacan s works and in the more psychoanalytically oriented works by Jean-Franois Lyotard consist of more than mere weak traces. Both Lyotard and Lacan - even while seeming to focus on Saussure's "official" theories - are aware of his unpublished work on anagrams, which was made partly accessible by Jean Starobinski in the 1960s and 1970s. Admittedly, this awareness seems to go no further than mentions in footnotes or short textual asides. However, in very different

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2003. Copyright 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

I

2 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

ways, the anagram is strangely present in Lacan's and Lyotard's works in unavowed uses of the concept of the anagram and also, more evidently, in the stylistic use of them (especially prevalent in Lacans seminars), though they never openly exploit - despite their drawing extensively on Freud s writings - Freud's anagrammatic tendencies.

In this essay, based on a wider concept of the anagram, I first want to point to the importance of anagrammatic concepts in some of Freud's writings (especially Die Traumdeutungy Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewujiteny Die Fehlleistungen) . From these points of departure I will trace sites of the anagram in Lyotard's Discours, figure and Lacans Encore and "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud" and uncover displacements of the anagram in their theories with a view to ad- dressing the following questions: What is at stake in such displacements of the anagram? What are the underlying theories and concepts of the anagram used? What could a psychoanalytical model gain from including the anagram among its privileged figurations?

Tamed and untamed anagrams Das ist ein Anagrammgedicht

Ein Anagramm ist das Gedicht gemacht im Anti-Sarg, im Sande An Ti gedacht, im Gras, im Sande stimmt dich der i-aa-Gesang an.

Das singt ein Tiger am am Dach Das ist mein Rachetag am Ding Da nagt sein Drama im Gesicht das ist ein Anagrammgedicht . . .

Unica Ziirn3

[This is an anagrammatic poem

An anagram is the poem made in the anti-coffin, in the sand Thought of Ti, in the grass, in the sand the i-aa-song turns you on.

This sings a tiger at at the roof This is my day of vengeance on the thing

Anagrams in Psychoanalysis 3

There gnaws his drama in the face this is an anagrammatic poem . . . ]4

Unica Zurn's expression "Das ist mein Rachetag am Ding" ["This is my day of vengeance on the thing"] in her meta-anagrammatic poem seems to hint at some of the characteristics attributed to the anagram. Through the combinatorial play with what is conventionally seen as the building blocks of univocal signification, through a spatialization, one (or more) potential text(s) under/in/with a text, the anagram foregrounds the materiality of language and deconstructs conventional notions of signification and representation.5 These characteristics remain relatively constant throughout the history of the anagram. They are present in the definition of its narrowest concept by Luzia Braun and Klaus Ruch, uAus dem Buch- stabenmaterial eines Wortes oder einer Zeile werden neue Wrter gebildet, ohne dafi ein einziger Buchstabe hinzugefugt oder weggelassen wiirde" (225) ["Out of the letter-material of a word or a line new words are formed without adding or substracting a single letter"], in the older magic, kabbalistic, kratylistic, etymological uses, but also in surrealist, nouveau nouveau romanian, oulipian concepts and practices of the anagram.6

Even though Saussure, in his work on anagrams, partly edited by Starobinski as Les mots sous les mots and triggering subsequent theoretical reappearances of similar concepts (especially in the work of the Tel Quel group), really retains important traits of prior concepts and practices of the anagram, he stresses the differences in his theory of it. This is strongly underscored by his ultimately failed attempts - his oscillations between anagram, anaphon, hypogram, paragram - at finding another name for the practice. Saussure engages in a taming of the anagram, which, however, is not fully successful. He strongly underlines the phonetic nature of his anagrams, making phonemes the units of the anagrammatic process of permutation. As Starobinski formulates it, "la recherche n'aura qu'un rapport de lointaine analogie avec l'anagramme traditionnelle, qui ne joue qu'avec les signes graphiques. La lecture, ici, s'applique dcrypter des combinaisons de phonmes et non de lettres"7 ["This study will only have a remote anal- ogy with the traditional anagram which only plays with graphic signs. Here, the reading occupies itself only with decrypting combinations of phonemes, not of letters"].

On the one hand, this stress on phonetics robs the anagram of its conventional graphic dimension that tends to isolate single letters, thus under- scoring their basically figurai character.8 On the other hand, however, another


space, that of sound, is uncovered as the anagrammatic echo foregrounds the phonematic materiality of language. Given the fact that Saussure cannot totally get rid of the graphic category of anagrams - this is foregrounded by his own reference to the critic s eye and ear: "L'il et l'oreille exercs feront donc leur butin jusque dans la prose latine" (116) ["The practised eye and ear will find their spoils even in Latin prose"], and underlined by Ruch's and Braun's interpretation of Saussure's analysis as a reading (see 228) - his displacement of the anagram is, finally, an enrichment. The fact that Saussure's anagrams are not complete ones further underscores the presence of an untamed notion of the anagram. The fragmentary character of the parts of the underlying thematic word {mot-thme) that are dispersed throughout the manifest text further underscores textual materiality and the possibility of dissassembling language: "la manire qui consiste broder des vers sur le canevas des syllabes d'un mot et celui des tronons ou paraschmes de ce mot" (115) ["the method that consists in stitching verses onto the canvas of the syllables of a word and on that of the sections or paraschemas of that word"].

In Starobinski s reading, it is Saussure's problem of attributing intentionality to this structure of "mme sous la figure de Vautre" (61, emphases Starobinski's) ["the same under the figure of the other'] that makes it potentially interesting to psychoanalysis. Is the hypogram reducible to a set of poetic constraints, and are the authors aware or unaware of them?9 Is it a coded message to be deciphered by a reader, or does the reader retroactively construct the underlying text? As Starobinski points out, Saussure's inabil- ity to prove the intentionality of a practice of the hypogram pushes his concept towards an unconscious, "authorless" process or an interpretative fantasy: "La posie n'tant pas seulement ce qui se ralise dans les mots, mais ce qui prend naissance partir des mots, elle chappe donc l'arbitraire de la conscience pour ne plus dpendre que d'une sorte de lgalit linguistique" (152-153, emphases Starobinski's) ["Poetry is not only what re- alizes itself in words, but what is born on the basis of/in separating itself from words, it escapes the arbitrariness of consciousness to depend hence- forth only on a kind of linguistic legality"]. This combination of possibly unconscious production, of a latent text within a manifest text and of the interpretative function of the reader adduced critics to equate it with the dreamwork or also with the latency of trauma.10

Interestingly, though Saussure's theory of the anagram in some ways really radicalizes the notion of this rhetorical figure, it is rather his superfi- cial taming of it together with a generalizing tendency that is taken over


into subsequent theories. This is true for Lacan and Lyotard, and partly also for Julia Kristeva's notion of the paragram as a universal characteristic of poetic language implying the following theses: n

A. Le langage potique est la seule infinit du code. B. Le texte littraire est un double: criture-lecture. C. Le text littraire est un rseau de connexions.12

[A. Poetic language is the only infinity of the code. B. The literary text is a double: writing-reading. C. the literary text is a network of connections.]

Rereading Saussure, Kristeva foregrounds the spatialisation of the poetic paragrammatic text, uaux deux dimensions de l'criture (Suject - Destinataire, Sujet de renonciation - Sujet de l'nonc) s'ajoute la troisime, celle du texte tranger'" (182-183) ["to the two dimensions of writing (subject - addressee, subject of statement - stated subject) is added a third one: that of the 'foreign' text"], thus both stressing the communicative, social function of texts and their authorless character as text upon/dialoguing with text.

Even though her concept does not allow for permutations that go beyond conventional linguistic units (her scriptural sousgrammes comprise phonetic, semic and syntagmatic units) she emphatically foregrounds a problematics of metalanguage and describes poetic language as based upon an infinity of combinatorial possibilities and the basic processes of combination and destruction, laws and transgressions: "Le lp [langage potique] est une dyade insparable de la loi (celle du discours usuel) et de sa destruction (spcifique du texte potique), et cette coexistence indivisible du V et du '-' est la complmentarit constitutive de langage potique, une complmentarit qui surgit tous les niveaux des articulations textuelles non- monologiques (paragrammatiques)" (179, emphases Kristeva's) ["PL {poetic language} is a dyad, inseparable from the law (that of common discourse) and its destruction (specific to the poetic text), and this indivisible coexistence of V and '-' is the constitutive complementarity of poetic language, a complementarity that occurs at all levels of non-monologic textual (paragrammatic) articulations"].

Both the characteristics of older concepts of the anagram and Saussure's and Kristeva's notions of the anagram (or whatever they choose to call it) are helpful for a concept of the anagram that can become creative in a psy-


choanalytical context. In my notion of the anagram, a radically untamed one, I want to undo Saussure's phonetic focus, untame Kristeva's and Saussure s units of permutation, partly degeneralize the anagrammatic concept again and foreground its dynamic character even further. My notion of the anagram has the following characteristics:

1. The anagram is the product of and the name for a process that consists in a disassembling and reassembling of parts of the same basic material.

2. The anagram is a meeting place of different sign systems and does not have to consist of units of only one of these systems.13 Transpositions of units from one system into the other are possible.

3. The anagram can consist of parts that can go beyond conventional units of discourse required for signification in the different sign systems.

4. The anagram is the site which makes the combinatorial character of sign systems visible. This visibility can be achieved by different means (and their combinations): through a potential incompleteness of the anagram, through a palimpsestic thickening of a text (in its widest sense), through a mixing of units of different sign systems, or through a destruction of the conventional textual units. The anagram as a figuration shows itself to be only the petrified trace of the anagram as a process, a permutation beyond the laws of specific discourses.

Freud's anagrammars of the unconscious

Reading through Freud's writings - especially through such texts as Die Traumdeutungy Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewujiteny Die Fehlleistungen, to state but a few examples - the reader comes upon strange verbal constructions that are actually adduced as examples for expressions in speech or dreams, either in real life or in fiction: dreamlike word chimae- ras like "Autodidasker" or "norekdal," anagrammatic slips of the tongue like "Knorprinz" (Kronprinz), "geneigt" (geeignet), "Agamemnon" (angenommen) or "Eischeifiweibchen" (Eiweifischeibchen) or Trennwitze, jokes that work through different segmentations of the phonematic content of their texts, like "Antik? Oh, nee" ["Antigone - ancient? Not really"], "buona parte" [ua large part of - Napoleon Buonaparte"], "O na, nie" ["onania - o no, never"], "Roux sot" ["Rousseau - the red-haired dunce"].14 Indeed, these anagrammatic figurations are not mere marginalia to keep


the reader amused, but are deeply linked to Freudian concepts, as all three, in different territories - dreams, slips of the tongue, Witze - are (maybe not the royal but at least) a road to the understanding of the unconscious.

This becomes most evident in Freud s equation of such figurations as Trennwitze and the larger category of verbally focused jokes that function through an economic double use of word material with condensation {Verdichtung). Indeed, this category is not exhausted by its subsequent Lacanian equation with metaphor. It is true that this principle of the dreamwork can function - the same way another category of condensation jokes does - through a signifier that expresses (at least) a double meaning. But this doubling of signification that can be done in the case of metaphors and double meanings without interfering with the material of language, can also work through a manipulation of the word material, a violence done to words.15 Indeed, condensation is an overdetermined category. In addition to the metaphorical and more narrowly anagrammatic processes outlined above, it is also described as material undergoing a loss, being overdetermined, merging, as a synecdochal process. Here, the only common denominator that is indeed expressed in the term condensation, seems to be a quasi palimpsestic thickness of the text having undergone condensation. The signifying surface of a text either directly points to a double reading or invites slight changes, permutations (of the order of letters/phonemes, of the signifying blancs), parsings (in the case of "Autodidasker") which then lead to two or more categories of meaning.

Though this is seemingly the most evident site of the anagram in Freud - at work throughout the whole process of dreamwork - , we are not yet at our anagrams' ends here. In a way, the displacement ( Verschiebung) in the dreamwork also reveals anagrammatic traits, though stressing different characteristics of a permutative process. What is permutated here is not the material or units of language as such, but rather, the displacement of a characteristic added on to language that is effected, a sliding of psychic emphasis, an investment along the elements undergoing dreamwork. In this, the process resembles a redistribution of word-stress similar to the functioning of some of the Trennwitze Freud quotes; whereas "Onanie" is stressed on the last syllable, "O na, nie" has its stress displaced onto ana". Arthur Schopenhauer's famous definitions of jealousy and of passion work graphi- cally through a separation of the two compound words (plus a doubling of the "f " in "schafft", which, however, does not induce a change in pronun- ciation), but also through a displacement of word-stresses. "Eifersucht" car- ries a heavy stress on the first syllable, whereas "Eifer sucht" has an additional stress on the last syllable. It is the same with "Leidenschaft" versus "Leiden


schafft" ["jealousy - to seek with effort, passion - what brings on suffer- ing"]. Thus, one could even venture the suspicion that condensation and displacement, at least in their anagrammatic dimensions, are implicated in one another - this is actually adumbrated by Freud through the claim that an overdetermined, condensed part could be a privileged site for a high level of psychic intensity.

In the wake of my restressing of the potential sign-systemic multiva- lence at work in the anagram, Freud s third category, his regard for representation {Rucksicht aufDarstellbarkeit)y adduces another anagrammatic trait: the transposition of material, through a thingification of words, into another sign system - from thought to image - , but in a fragmentary, uncon- vincing way. In the process of transposition the logical connections between the elements (that are retrospectively inferred to have existed prior to the dreamworking process) are severed and replaced by spatial or temporal con- tiguities, which, however, in spite of the (re)working - as Freud points out, the notion of retrospectivity is a wrong one - of the secondary revision (sekundre Bearbeitung)y never fit into one picture. In Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse he comments that, what is fabricated by secondary revision, is "etwas Ganzes, ungefhr Zusammenpassendes" ["a whole, something that somehow fits together"], but not quite.16

In its rebus-like character, the produced text is stranded halfway between signifying signs and figuralness. It becomes a text hovering in a no- signs-land between two economies of signification. It thus draws attention to its being caught up in the process of transposition rather than to its status as the product of an accomplished transposition. If Kristeva had not bought into the common overvalorization of mtonymie displacement and metaphoric condensation, she would have recognized the third category she sees herself forced to invent not only as incarnated in the category of Rucksicht aufDarstellbarkeity but as at work in all the categories of the dreamwork:

As we know, Freud specifies two fundamental 'processes' in the work of the unconscious: displacement and condensation. [. . .] To these we must add a third 'process' - the passage from one sign-system to another. To be sure, this process comes about through a combination of displacement and condensation, but this does not acount for its total operation. It also involves an altering of the thetic position - the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one. The new signifying system may be produced with the same signifying material;17


But I stated above that all the processes of the dreamwork can be seen as characterized by anagrammatic traits. Consequently, this also holds true for Freud's secondary revision {sekundre Bearbeitung) which is explicitly equated with a process of recombination. Freud uses a variety of metaphors to explain this fourth function of the dreamwork. These include that of mending clothes: "Was dieses Stuck Traumarbeit auszeichnet und verrat, ist seine Tendenz. Dise Funktion verfhrt hnlich, wie es der Dichter boshaft vom Philosophen behauptet: mit ihren Fetzen und Flicken stopft sie die Lcken im Aufbau des Traums"18 ["What characterizes and betrays this part of the dreamwork is its tendency. It functions in a way similar to that maliciously ascribed to the philosopher by the poet: it uses bits and pieces to mend the gaps in the construction of the dream"], the image of "Brecciagestein": "[Der Traum] ist vielmehr zumeist einem Brecciagestein vergleichbar, aus verschiedenen Gesteinsbrocken mit Hilfe eines Bindemittels hergestellt, so dafi die Zeichnungen, die sich dabei ergeben, nicht den urspriinglichen Gesteinseinschlssen angehren" (Vorlesungen 173) ["{The dream} can rather be compared, most of the time, to a rock of Brec- cia, made of different pieces of rock with a combining agent, so that the resulting patterns do not belong to the original irregularities of the rocks"], and that of the "Rtselhaften Inschriften" ["enigmatic inscriptions"] about which Lyotard will have much to say later. All of those metaphors clearly foreground the bricolage character of this function. Interestingly then, this process functions in an anagrammatic way, thus incorporating the very tendency it is intended to render invisible - the anagrammatic incongruence of the dreamfabric - in itself.

Thus, the dreamwork really resembles a multilayered process of anagramming in which - because of the incongruencies - this process is rendered visible. The "grammar" of the unconscious really is anagrammatic, it is an anagrammar. How else would the psychoanalyst s analysis be possible? But can anagrammatic processes be reduced to the stage of the dreamwork only? Evidently not, for the Witzarbeit also works with anagrammatic processes, but here, unlike the dreamwork, the process has to be carried out within stricter boundaries as it is caught up in a communicative process. Thus, the difference between the production of dreams and of jokes does not lie in a difference of processes, but in a difference of degree. What about the interpretation of dreams, then? Its process also closely resembles one of disassembling, transposing and reassembling of elements which can never be said to come to its end: "Wir haben bereits anfihren mussen, dafi man eigentlich niemals sicher ist, einen Traum vollstandig gedeutet zu haben;

IO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

selbst wenn die Auflsung befriedigend und lckenlos erscheint, bleibt es doch immer mglich, dafi sich noch ein anderer Sinn durch denselbenTraum kundgibt. Die Verdichtungsquote ist also - strenggenommen - unbestimm- bar" {Traumdeutung 285) ["We have already had to point out that, basically, one is never sure of having analyzed a dream completely. Even if the interpretation seems satisfactory and without gaps, it is always possible that yet another meaning is expressed by the very same dream. Thus, strictly speaking, the level of condensation cannot be determined"].

Would it be too audacious to see such problematics as a possibility to open the reading of the interpretation of dreams up to an anagrammatic creation instead of a recreation of a text that has undergone a sort of translation in the dreamwork? Thus the interpretation would not really uncover a prior text, but create another version. The dreamtext, then could really be seen as a "besondere Form unseres Denkens" {Traumdeutung 499, footnote 1, emphasis Freud s) ["special form of our thought"], i. e. a form as legiti- mate as its other version formed during the process of interpretation, but following different rules.

To carry this thought further, would this not give new sense to Freud s attempts at coming up with topographical metaphors of the psyche? I am thinking here foremost of his Rome-metaphor in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. The problem with this metaphor for the psyche lies in the impossi- bility of compressing a temporal succession of spatial forms into a synchronie space: "derselbe Raum vertrgt nicht zweierlei Ausfullung"19 ["one and the same space cannot be occupied doubly"]. Rome, in spite of its multiple layers, can never preserve intact all its layers, but the psyche can. One possible solution, a more fitting metaphor for the psyche - which would make a lot of sense in the above-developed anagrammatic traits of the dreamwork - could lie in a synchronie juxtaposition of elements and the potential possibility of different moulds, a pool of "subatomic" units (that can un- dergo further splittings, linkings and also transpositions into different vis- ibilities) with an infinite set of forms they can be made to shape. Such a set-up seems to be vaguely hinted at by Freud s insistence, in the context of the Rome-metaphor, on a difference of perspective that can then create different structures: "Und dabei brauchte es vielleicht nur eine nderung der Blickrichtung oder des Standpunktes von seiten des Beobachters, um den einen oder den anderen Anblick hervorzurufen" {Unbehagen 37) ["And maybe, only a change of the direction of the gaze or of the standpoint, by the observer, is needed to evoke one or the other view"]. Such an anagrammatic rewriting of the psychic structure would lead to two major conse- quences and reshapings of Freudian theory:

Anagrams in Psychoanalysis n

1. The psyche really has to be seen as a "Kampf- und Tummelplatz entgegengesetzterTendenzen" (Vorlesungen 72) ["battlefield of opposite tendencies"], as an agon between the destructive, untying forces of thanathos and the linking, combinatory forces of eros. In this dynamics, pleasure and repression would have to be rethought, too. Pleasure can be seen as inherent in both of those forces, but, as neither of them can ever exist on its own, they are both fulfilled and cancelled out in their mutual game. As Emmanuel Filhol puts it, in the context of this art of combining signs "chacun des signifiants du rve qui constitue [le dsir], le reprsente en mme temps qu'il le cache, autrement dit [. . .] chacun d'eux en est la fois la monstration singulire et son voilement"20 ["each signifier of the dream that constitutes {desire}, hides and represents it at the same time, formulated differently, each of them is at once a unique showing and its veiling"].

2. Freud's psychic topography would have to be reframed in terms of different constraints put upon this process of dis- and reassembling, as it is done by Marcelo Dascal:

If this is correct, then it suggests that the boundaries between the different 'systems' of the mind, the unconscious , the preconscious and the conscious, are correlated with the extent to which language plays a role in each of them. At the same time, however, since language seems to play a role - albeit different - in all of them, such boundaries would appear to be less sharply marked than suggested by Freud, and would become a matter of degree: on one of the extremes, thought-processes which are rule-governed, convergent, subject to linguistic constraints; on the other, thought-processes that are not subject to 'rules' (though they may be subjected to causal laws, of course), that are divergent, and that escape linguistic constraints.21

Lac (k) anagrams

Given the rich possibility of exploiting Freud's anagrammatic subtext that is signalled at the textual surface through his use of anagrams as examples, Lacan's texts seem to be marked by a surplus, an excess of anagrams - in his style - and a lack of anagrams when it comes to his theory. On the other hand, such a facile segregation of spheres cannot really be enacted in the context of a theory that claims language to be anything but transparent, and metalanguage to be inexistant.22 Language indeed is always double (triple


. . . ) - a suspiciously anagrammatic characterization of language as a palimpsestic thickening: "a signifie quelque chose, c'est--dire a peut se lire d'une infinit de faons diffrentes"23 ["this means something, that is, it can be read in infinitely different ways"]. Since - as he claims in Encore - the Lacanian text is not readable, except for, maybe, in its "inter-dit" (108) ["forbidden 7"said in the in-between"], I might as well take Lacan la lettre, i.e., I will not engage in the attempt at a coherent reading, in a reduction of the signifiers to transparent signifieds (what an overly facile transgression of the barre [bar]), but engage in an anagrammatic reading instead by iso- lating several different sites of anagrammatic traces in his work - without claims to completeness, without respecting the loudly proclaimed but very vaguely defined phases in Lacanian thought.

/phonocentrism/

The Saussure of the anagrams makes his entry into Lacan in a footnote in "LInstance" and in a short passage in Encore - and a reading of his tamed, phonocentric anagrams (in the context of passing remarks on poetic po- lyphony and against an arbitrary connection of signifier and signified) - seems to come in handy in the project of erasing the figurai dimension of the unconscious in Freud s Traumdeutung. The unconscious is structured like a language, the more strongly figurai functions of the dreamwork, Rucksicht aufDarstellbarkeit and secondary revision, are relegated to a secondary rank. This tendency comes under severe criticism in Lyotard s Discour, figure, and is foregrounded by Jean-Joseph Goux in an argument about the iconoclastic tendencies of Lacan s work, an argument about the Symbolic as inhuman, systemic machinery and the Imaginary as the visual dimension to be erased: "The machine is nonliving. The machine is inanimate. The machine is death. The death instinct is the machine inside of man. Man is the marionette, the robot of the symbolic order. When he constructs clocks, robots, computers, he exteriorizes more than ever the symbolic ac- tivity whose prey he is."24

Is this all that remains of Saussure s anagrammatic creativity in Lacan? Is this deadening clarity, this transparence of the system of pure signifiers (that Goux sees embodied best in Lacan s mathemes) really what Lacan valorizes? Should this tendency toward phonocentrism not be seen as one tendency among many that are equally present, one tendency that is foregrounded because it happens to be linked to the practice of psychoanalysis?


Lituraterre - ni tre/matre - dit-mention - ex-sistence - paule-et Paul - LSi-V essaim.25 Even in their purely phonetic dimensiony such anagrams - all by underlining the reign of the signifiers - are playful rather than machinic. Any- way > how phonetically focused are they once a punning on "Tire" and "Her" has to be underscored by emphasizing the same graphic letter-material they are com- posed of: Y est les mmes lettres, faites-y attention" (Encore io) ["beware, {. . . they} consist of the same letters J.26 Is this not rather the realm between writing and speech, according to Ellie Ragland- Sullivan, the realm of the crit (also

foregrounded as such by Lacan in the preface to "L'Instance")?27 Is not rather the "babyish" realm 0/lalangue valorized: "Mais V inconscient est un savoir, un savoir-

faire avec Mangue. Et ce quon sait faire avec Mangue dpasse de beaucoup ce dont on peut rendre compte au titre du langage" ^ Encore nj) ["But the unconscious is knowledge, a knowing of how to do things (savoir-faire,) with llanguage. And what we know how to do with llanguage goes well beyond what we can account for under the heading of language"] (ij)?

/point de capiton/

Nulle chane signifiante en effet qui ne soutienne comme appendu la ponctuation de chacune de ses units tout ce qui s'articule de contextes attests, la verticale, si Ton peut dire, de ce point. C'est ainsi que pour reprendre notre mot: arbre, non plus dans son isolation nominale, mais au terme d'une de ces ponctuations, nous verrons que ce n'est pas seulement la faveur du fait que le mot barre est son anagramme, qu'il franchit celle de l'algorithme saussurien. Car dcompos dans le double spectre de ses voyelles et de ses consonnes, il appelle avec le robre et le platane les significations dont il se charge sous notre flore, de force et de majest. Drainant tous les contextes symboliques o il est pris dans l'hbreu de la Bible, il dresse sur une butte sans frondaison l'ombre de la croix. Puis se rduit IT majuscule du signe de la dichotomie qui, sans l'image historiant l'armoriai, ne devrait rien l'arbre, tout gnalogique qu'il se dise. Arbre circulatoire28

[There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if at- tached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended Vertically', as it were, from that point.


Let us take our word 'tree' again, this time not as an isolated noun, but as the point of one of these punctuations, and see how it crosses the bar of the Saussurian algorithm. (The anagram of 'arbre' and 'barre' should be noted.) For even broken down into the double spectre of its vowels and con- sonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the significations it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty. Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the He- brew of the Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reduces it to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy which, except for the illustration used by heraldry, would owe nothing to the tree however genealogical we may think it. Circulatory tree]29

This passage, in its density, seems itself & point de capiton of different Lacanian theorems and a possibility of their rereading. Restatement and deconstruction of the horizontal and vertical ("si l'on peut dire", but, really, one cannot), the metaphoric and mtonymie axes of language. As different critics have noticed (Lacan's explicitness on this subject - especially in the two chapters on metaphor and metonymy in Sminaire III - does not really make that a difficult project), metaphor and metonymy are actually collapsed rather than set up as two completely different processes.30 Me- tonymy makes metaphor possible, it is the "sous-structure toujours cache"31 ["sub-structure that is always hidden"]. Indeed if we give this a radical reading, metaphor is only the isolation of a double meaning, of a specific thickness that is cut out from the swarming of contiguity around a signifier. This swarming is both multidimensional (not confined to a vertical and horizontal axis) and multisystemic, operating both on the graphic and phone- mic material of the signifier and its figurai connotations (the "Y", the cross). In a way then, the point de capiton is not really an anchorage point between signifier and signified. The barrey in this sense, can never be crossed and the two-dimensional model (the signifiers, the signifieds, the barre) has to be rewritten, indeed refigured, into a three-dimensional one. It becomes an empty centre around which, and into and out of which, the contiguous signifiers drift, linked to other such constructions in a chain: "anneaux dont le collier se scelle dans l'anneau d'un autre collier fait d'anneaux" {Ecrits 259) ["rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings"] (153). Through an anagrammatic reading - attention having been drawn to the passage by the anagram "barre"/"arbre" - the point de capiton oscil- lates into a Borromean knot.


But first, let me interrupt with a word or two on Lacaris algorithms: In Encore, Lacan taking up the algorithm S/s once more, hints at the palimpsestic complexity of using mathematical algorithms:

a n'a Van de rien quand vous crivez une barre pour expliquer. Ce mot expliquer, a toute son importance puisqu'il n'y a rien moyen de comprendre une barre, mme quand elle est rserve signifier la ngation. [. . .] Il y a une chose qui est encore plus certaine - ajouter la barre la notation S et s a dj quelque chose de superflu, voire de futile, pour autant que ce quelle fait valoir est dj marqu par la distance de V crit. (35, emphasis Lacan's)

[It doesn't look like anything when you write a bar in order to explain things. This word, "explain," is of the utmost importance because there ain't nothing you can understand in a bar, even when it is reserved for signifying negation. {. . .} There is something that is even more certain: adding a bar to the notation S and s is already a bit superfluous and even futile, insofar as what it brings out is already indicated by the distance of what is written.] (34)

Thus, algorithms are not the transparent webs ofsignifiers they seem to be. They are both inhabited by a figurai excess, an overwriting, and have to be surrounded by verbal explanations - a further thickening, repetitive pattern. General for- mulae have to be contextualized through the use of language: "rien ne tiendra de tout a, si je ne le soutiens pas d'un dire qui est celui de la langue, et d'une pra- tique qui est celle de gens qui donnent des ordres au nom d'un certain savoir" ^Encore 110) ["none of it would stand up if I didn't prop it up with an act of speaking that involves language (langue,), and with a practice which is that of people who give orders in the name of a certain knowledge"] (122).

/Borromean knots/

The structure of the Borromean knot, at least the figuration in Encore that is linked to a mtonymie chain of desire, is a highly anagrammatic concept. Foregrounded are its combinative permutative possibilities: the chain can be prolonged endlessly, the single links can be twisted and have to be thought of as possibly connected to other links of the chain, besides those at their two sides. But once one of the parts is disassembled the whole chain disin-

i6 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

tegrates and the links are potentially free to form other structures. This anagrammar of knots - interestingly, this permutation does not go beyond the different links, there are no possible further splittings of the units en- visaged - however, is transformed into a knotology of the Real, the Imagi- nary, the Symbolic and the Symptom in the psychic structure.32 This configuration of the Borromean knot leaves no room for further addenda or different figurations. It is almost as rigid as a topography, though it foregrounds the empty centres of the structure. Here we are already far from a concept of the Borromean knot that Ragland-Sullivan traces, "For Lacan the Borromean knot demonstrates how a nonlinear intrication and con- tinual reworking of identificatory and linguistic material compose any subject s ego fictions, desires, sufferings, and blind intentions" (82).

Even though the above-analysed sites of the anagram in Lacan s work smack of fragmentariness, they can nevertheless hint at some tendencies of anagrammatic displacements in Lacan.

1. Lacans theory and style (actually, the two categories cannot be sepa- rated) are dependent on a notion of the anagram, as a foregrounding of the linguistic character of the unconscious, of the human psyche as a whole, and of the construction of the subject rely on an economy of circulating signifiers.

2. On the other hand, this anagrammatic gesture cannot be allowed to go too far - this is a possible reason for his allowing an entry of the tamed Saussurean anagram, while not drawing on Freudian anagrammars. It cannot transcend given units of language and cannot really include strong de- viations from a language-based signifying system. As subjects and "reality" are constructed by signifiers - as Jacques-Alain Miller comments, "what we call the subject of analysis is nothing more than a function of the combination of signifiers"33 - and as those signifiers are theorized as detached from a secure anchorage in a signified, the rules governing such figurations of signifiers must be definite in order to foreclose chaos. To illustrate it with Henri Atlan's somewhat biologistic, though really systems-theoretic terms, what is at stake "dans ce combat incessant entre la vie et la mort, Tordre et le dsordre" ["in this ceaseless combat between life and death, order and disorder"] is "d'viter toujours un triomphe dfinitif de Tun quelconque sur l'autre, qui est en fait, Tune des deux faons possibles de mourir compltement"34 ["to avoid always a definite triumph of one of them over the other which is really one of two possible ways of total death"].


Lyotard red(r) earned figures

LyotarcTs arguments in Discours, figure can be seen as another displacement of the anagram in the wake of Saussure and Freud, but - at least superfi- cially so - in strong contrast to Lacan s dis/avowal of anagrammatic concepts. Lyotard's project consists in redeeming the figure that has been relegated to a secondary status by the logos of discourse in the service of a seamless signifying process:

Ce qui est sauvage est Tart comme silence. La position de l'art est un dmenti la position du discours. La position de l'art indique une fonction de la figure, qui n'est pas signifie, et cette fonction autour et jusque dans le discours. Elle indique que la transcendance du symbole est la figure, c'est--dire une manifestation spatiale que l'espace linguistique ne peut pas incorporer sans tre branl, une extriorit qu'il ne peut pas intrioriser en signification. L'art est pos dans l'alterit en tant que plasticit et dsir, tendue courbe, face l'invariabilit et la raison, espace diacritique. L'art veut la figure, la 'beaut' est figurale, non-lie, rythmique. Le vrai symbole donne penser, mais d'abord il se donne Voir'. (13)

[What is wild is art as silence.The position of art is a dementi of the position of discourse. The position of art indicates a function of the figure, which is not signified, and this function around and even in discourse. It indicates the transcendence of the symbol as figure, that is, a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorpo- rate without being shaken, an exteriority that it cannot interiorize as signification. Art, in its plasticity and desire, curved extension, is placed in alterity, confronting invariability and reason, diacritic space. Art wants the figure, "beauty" is figurai, unrelated, rhythmic. The real symbol provokes thought, but first, it gives itself up to "sight."]

Given this strong emphasis on the energetic, the visual, the non-logical, Lyotard s textual surface itself is strangely devoid of figurality (I would claim that the inclusion of pictures in the text or as appendix does not grant figurality more than a marginal position). Lyotard himself points to the lack of figurality in his work. Even though it lays claim to partaking of the sphere of art - "la signification est fragmentaire, il y a des lacunes et [. . .] des rbus" (18) ["the signification is fragmentary, there are gaps and re-

i8 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

buses"] - it does not perform a poetic sur-rflexion by framing the discours with its residues of figures in figurativity.35

Interestingly, the characteristics of such a good book - according to Lyotard's own judgement, Discours, figure would not fall under this category - can be read as a macro-anagrammatic structure, "Un bon livre pour laisser tre la vrit en son aberration, serait un livre o le temps linguistique (celui dans lequel se dveloppe la signification, celui de la lecture) serait lui- mme dconstruit; que le lecteur pourrait prendre n'importe o et dans n'importe quel ordre, un livre brouter" (18) ["A good book, because it lets truth exist in its aberration, would be a book in which linguistic time (that in which signification develops, that of reading) itself would be deconstructed; that the reader could take up at any point and in whatever order, a book to graze on"].

What gives such a work its figurai character would be a disruption of order. As Lyotard theorizes elsewhere, language is actually always already inhabited by the figure. This figurality is at work in the very linguistic process of commutation and in the fact that signs signify through and with a certain distribution upon their medium, which can also be seen as partaking of an aesthetic, non-signifying category.

In such a context, Lyotard 's easy dismissal of the anagram comes as a surprise. In the chapter "Le travail du rve ne pense pas" ["The dreamwork does not think"] when he discusses Freud s example of the secondary revision as a "Rtselhafte Inschrift" ["enigmatic inscription"], the theorist refers explicitly to de Saussure s work on the anagram, but only to dismiss it immediately as not going far enough. In a comparison with the triple text of the "Rtselhafte Inschriften" Saussure s hypograms, at least in Lyotard s description, seem just not figurai enough. The "Rtselhafte Inschrift" con- tains three texts that partake of different signifying economies: i) a manifest text that (in the majority of examples, but see Lyotard s example 18-a) does not have any meaning, but is intended to create the visible effect of a Latin inscription; 2) a latent text which occurs as soon as the fake Latin text is read and understood in its phonetic character as a meaningful text; and 3) the picture the inscription belongs to, which can either give a hint as to the cultural background of the latent text or reinforce the fake surface of the Latin inscription. The two texts in Saussure s hypograms, in contrast, do not belong to different languages. As the manifest text of the Saussurean anagram consists in "redoublements, inversions, conversions de syllables du nom cach" (266) ["redoublings, inversions, conversions of the syllables of the hidden name"], the two textual spheres are not of the same size, whereas


the secondary revision leaves no remainder. In this, as Lyotard states, it is unlike uun vritable anagramme" (266) ["a true anagram"].

It is through this reduction of the anagram to the Saussurean hypogram, that the theorist can then relegate the anagram to a phenomenon that consists less in a figurality than in its musical or literary characteristics:

Les rptitions, les chiasmes, etc., de l'anagramme, le rapprochent d'une combinatoire musicale (le Ricercare de VOffrande musicale) ou littraire (Impressions d'Afrique de R. Roussel). [. . .] C'est que, dans ces cas, le 'texte' manifeste (au sens large du mot) doit tre de mme nature qu'eux. La profondeur hypogrammatique est de l'ordre de la rsonance (assonance, consonance) et de l'harmonique: le vers de l'Iliade souligne le nom d'Agamemnon, et Saussure accepte pour son hypogramme ce sens de {moypcpew qui est 'souligner au moyen d'un fard les traits du visage'. Mais la profondeur de notre inscription est opaque. Ce n'est pas un graphe, mais un pseudo-graphe ; il est bien homophonique avec le texte d'origine, comme l'hypogramme de Saussure, mais au prix d'une htrosmie double: transcrit du phonme dans la lettre de faon produire la prsomption d'un autre sens, il suppose la transformation et de la nature du signe et de la signification suppose. (266-267)

[The repetitions, chiasms, etc. of the anagram, bring it closer to a musical (the Ricercare of Offrande musicale) or literary (Impressions d'Afrique by R. Roussel) combination. {. . .} In these cases, the manifest "text" (in the broad sense of the term) must be of the same kind as they. The hypogrammatic depth is of the order of resonance (assonance, consonance) and of harmony: the line of the Iliad underlines the name of Agamemnon, and Saussure accepts for his hypogram the meaning of twoypacpeiv which is 'underline facial traits by means of make-up'. But the depth of our inscription is opaque. It is not a graph, but a pseudo-graph; it is really homophonic with the original text, like Saussure's hypogram, but at the price of a double heterosemy: a transcription of the phoneme into letters so as to pro- duce the presumption of another meaning, it involves the transformation both of the nature of the sign and of the supposed signification.]

But does the Saussurean hypogram not also partake of a double heterosemy - with its two textual layers and their respective meanings and a


doubleness of systems of signification, i.e., the readable meaning and the audible effects of sounds and rhythms? The only surplus inherent in the "Rtselhaften Inschriften," then, would be the presence of the image that redoubles either the latent or the manifest text.

Other than that, the unique difference would possibly lie in one of quality: the visual as valorized in comparison to the audible. This, however, seems to me a rather artificial hierarchy, one that is furthermore seemingly alien to the general thrust of Lyotard s argument. If the valorized category that - as a sort of repressed other - underlies signifying discourses, can be seen as an energetic category (the word rhythm or rhythmic is used fre- quently) that transcends a simple vis vis of the reader to the sign as a signifying instrument and consists in a spatial dimension that interlinks with and influences the body of the reader (see 211-212), then it seems il- logical to exclude "sound effects" from figurality. Indeed, in other essays of Discours, figure the unarticulated cry and other similar phenomena of sound are also posited in opposition to discursive logos. It is exactly in such a context that Lyotard refers to the anagrammar of Freud s dreamwork: "Freud disait que le rve traite les mots comme des choses, ce qui signifie qu'il dcoupe la chane syntagmatique autrement que ne le fait le langage et qu'il en combine les morceaux sans gard la pertinence linguistique" (88-89) ["Freud said that the dream treats words like things, which means, it cuts up the syntagmatic chain in a different way than language and combines the pieces without paying attention to linguistic pertinence"].

Possibly, the overly strong insistance on the realm of the visual - a tendency which goes against Lyotard s more general argument - in connection with Freudian dreamwork in "Le travail du rve ne pense pas" ["the dreamwork does not think"] is induced by an intention of distancing himself from any suspicion of Lacanian phonocentrism which he criticizes harshly. In this gesture he goes to the other extreme. He rejects the Saussurean theory of hypograms because of their focus on a phonetic thickening of discourse. Furthermore, in the wake of Freudian uses of the anagram, he - except for such avowals as the above-quoted passage -

marginalizes the anagrammatic processuality of the dreamwork - in its possibly phonematic dimensions - in favor of a strong focus on figurai (here in the sense of visual) parts of the dreamwork, especially the regard for representation (Rucksicht aufDarstellbarkeit) and its rebus-character, and the secondary revision and its "Rtselhafte Inschriften." He describes condensation and displacement in spatial terms through the example of the "rvolution d'octobre"-flag and through the rendering of displacement as an


anagrammatic, but spatially permutative, process of thickening the text: "Effacer un fragment de l'endroit de la page (d'un point de la chane) et le dposer en un autre (o il faudra lui faire de la place) exige du morceau prlev qu'il fasse mouvement par-dessus le texte" (243, emphasis Lyotard's) ["Effacing a fragment from its place on the page (from a point in the chain) and placing it in another one (where one would have to make room for it) demands a movement of the displaced piece over the text"].

This is meant to foreground the fact that the dream is anti-discursive, destructive, but also, that it is a realm in which such tendencies inherent in all language are made visible: "Seulement il faudra convenir que le 'langage' de l'inconscient n'a pas son modle dans le discours, lequel se dit dans une langue, comme on sait ; mais plutt que le rve est le comble du discours dsarticul, dconstruit, dont aussi aucun langage, mme normal, n'est vraiment exempt" (253) ["One only has to agree that the 'language' of the unconsious does not have its model in discourse, which is expressed in a language, as one knows; but rather that the dream is the extreme of disar- ticulated, deconstructed discourse from which no language, even the normal one, is really exempt"].

Though, but also through, acknowledging Saussure s work on the anagram and exploiting Freudian anagrammars, Lyotard's treatment of anagrams seems contradictory. Those anagrammatic traits that are related to a thickening of space, introducing a figurai component in a visual sense, are more than welcome, whereas the equally valid phonetic category potentially inherent in anagrams is rejected as not figurai enough. This contra- diction, which seems to be connected to his turn against Lacanian phonocentrism, is cathected to another, foregrounds another more basic incongruence concerning the difference of the discursive and the figurai. On the one hand, the figurai and the discursive are placed in a linear tale of repression; the figurai is nostalgically revalorized, seen as the primordial, the transgressive desire related to the death-drive that has been discursively repressed through eros and logos. In the interest of reinforcing such a structure, the visual is ascribed to transgressivity, the phonic to discursivity. On the other hand, as Lyotard himself underlines, the figurai and discursive coexist and need each other. In such a structure, however, the nostalgic narrative of repression does no longer make sense and the two terms cannot be thought of as absolute differences any longer - they only exist with and through each other.36 Thus, here, orality and visuality - no longer needed as diffrenciation between the figurative and the discursive, no longer univocally paired up with these two categories - can be seen both as instru-


ments of signification and as disruptive of such a discursive function. In this sense, there are no privileged sites of transgression, just different inten- sities.

Such a perspective, however, would devalue Lyotard s focus on the transgressive force of thanathos in its fight against the erotic and logocentric forces of repression, and lead the argument back into a dynamic game of two opposite tendencies, as sketched out in my discussion of Freud in this essay. The real transgressive factor - one that is possibly too dangerous in the context of theories that can no longer operate with transcendental bases - would no longer be ascribed to one of the forces at work, but would lie in the anagrammatic truth par excellence', being consists of the traces of permutative processes that could also have been/become different, and is not even stabilized in dichotomic terms or nostalgic, linear tales of a fall into repression.

Combinatorial Paranoia

Und noch eines! Auch das Arbeiten mit kleinen Anzeichen, wie wir es auf diesem Gebiete bestndig iiben, bringt seine Gefahren mit sich. Es gibt eine seelische Erkrankung, die kombinatorische Para- noia, bei welcher die Verwertung solcher kleiner Anzeichen in uneingeschrnkter Weise betrieben wird, und ich werde mich naturlich nicht dafiir einsetzen, dafi die auf dieser Grundlage aufgebauten Schliisse durchwegs richtig sind. (Schriften 63)

[Let me add one more thing! Even working with small hints, as we always do it in this field, involves its dangers. There is a kind of psychological illness, combinatorial paranoia, in which such small hints are made use of without restriction, and, of course, I will not guarantee that conclusions derived from this basis are invariably correct.]

Perhaps the anagrammatizing of psychoanalysis as I tried to sketch it out in this essay partakes of what Freud calls combinatorial paranoia. Perhaps, not unlike Saussure, the attempt to trace the presence of a phenomenon in a given field leads to the danger of seeing it everywhere. But, as my essay does not lay claim to scientific verifiability, this is of secondary importance. As long as this anagrammatic view contributes to the opening up of a dif-


ferent perspective on the authors treated here, provides some hints on a strange, displaced, intermittent threat that binds them together, adumbrates some insights into specific condensations and displacements at work in their theories, it will have done enough. Ultimately, the work of interpret- ing is highly anagrammatical. It is a work of bricolage -, of disassembling and recombination. On the one hand, this could be seen as its drawback. On the other, it is also its greatest asset. It is thus that interpretation forecloses monolithic totalizations. It is itself a selection and recombination of elements and forms the basis for another such process performed with its body. Such is the material dialogue is made of.

Harvard University

Notes 1. As I will point out in the next section of this essay, more recent literary as well as

theoretical traditions have rediscovered the anagram. One could argue that more often then not, the anagram is not used with all its implications, but serves merely as the basis for a much more general concept (Saussure's hypograms, Kristeva's paragrams), or for a much looser literary use - and I will follow this route in my essay. But is this not also the case in the uses of metaphor and metonymy?

2. See Frederick Ahl's essay "Ars Est Caelare Artem (Arts in Puns and Anagrams En- graved)," On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 17-43.

3. Quoted in Luzia Braun/Klaus Ruch, "Das Wrfeln mit den Wrtern: Geschichte und Bedeutung des Anagramms," Merkur 42 A (469) (1988): 233.

4. As this is an anagrammatic poem, the translation can merely transport the content of the poem and try to imitate some of its irregularities due to the anagrammatic constraints without being able to preserve its anagrammatic form. Where the sources of the translations are not explicitly indicated, the translations are mine.

5. See Anselm Haverkamp, "Anagramm und Trauma: Zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, ed. Susi Kotzinger and Gabriele Rippl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) 169-174; Lynn Higgins, "Literature ' la lettre': Ricardou and the Poetics of Anagram," Romanic Review 73 A (1982): 473-488; and Alain Chevrier, "L'Anagramme comme genre potique nouveau," Critique 44.492 (1988): 416-430.

6. For discussions of the anagram connected to such issues, see Luzia Braun/Klaus Ruch, "Das Wrfeln mit den Wrtern: Geschichte und Bedeutung des Anagramms," Merkur 42 A (469) (1988): 225-236, and also H. Hunger, "Anagrammatismos - Paragrammatismos: Das Spiel mit den Buchstaben," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84-85.1 (1991-1992): 1-11.

7. Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 27-28. 8. Signs can be read in a dematerialized way, as simple carriers of signification, or in a

material way, as figurai themselves. See Ina Schabert, "Das Doppelleben der Menschenbuchstaben," Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, ed. Susi Kotzinger and Gabriele Rippl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) 95-106, and Jean-Franois Lyotard, Discours, fwure, 2nd ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974).

9. This problem of intentionality is read by critics like David Shepheard as a positive, creative ambiguity. See "Saussure's Vedic Anagrams," The Modern Language Review 77.3 (1982): 512-523.


10. Implicitly, this relation to Freud's dreamwork is already brought up by Starobinski himself. It is more explicitly theorized byT. Craig Christy, "Saussure's Anagrams': Blunder or Paralanguage?" History of Linguistics 1996y ed. David Cram etc., 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1999) 2: 300-301. For a discussion of its relation to trauma, see Anselm Haverkamp, "Anagramm und Trauma: Zwischen Klartext und Arabeske," Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, ed. Susi Kotzinger and Gabriele Rippl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) 169-174.

11. According to Edward Lopes who reads Saussure's anagram as a concept of poetic creation in general, this generalization is already implied by the parallel concepts in Saussure's different works. See "A Intertextualidade na teoria anagramtica de Saussure," Revista de Letras?>\{\99\):\-9.

12. Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une smanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969) 175. 13. This is foregrounded by Lynn Higgins in the context of Ricardous literary practice in

"Literature ' la lettre': Ricardou and the Poetics of Anagram," Romanic Review 73.4 (1982): 473. She writes, "words are but one of many possible signifying systems upon which anagrams can operate."

14. I have attempted a translation whenever possible, but some of the slips of the tongue cannot really be rendered in translation. In the context of my analysis, such criticisms as Andrew W. Ellis' of the errors in Freud's concept of speech errors (as proven by recent research) seem to be highly irrelevant. See "On the Freudian Theory of Speech Errors," Errors in Linguistic Performance, ed. Victoria A. Fromkin (New York: Academic, 1980) 123-131.

15. Sigmund Freud, Psychologische Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1970) 38. 16. Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse, 10th ed. (Frankfurt/Main:

Fischer, 2000) 173. 17. Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New

York: Columbia UP, 1986) 111, emphasis Kristeva's. 18. Freud, Die Traumdeutunv, 8th ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1998) 483. 19. Freud, Das Unbehaven in der Kultur, 5th ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1997) 37. 20. Emmanuel Filhol, "L'analyse Freudienne des formations de l'inconscient: Une logique

du signifiant," Travaux de Linguistique 28 (1994): 134 and 138. 21. Marcelo Dascal, "Language Use in Jokes and Dreams: Sociopragmatics vs

Psychopragmatics," Language and Communication 5.2 (1985): 105, emphases Dascal's. 22. See Michel Arriv, "Lacan sur le style, sur le style de Lacan, Qu est-ce que le style? ed.

Georges Molinie etc. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994) 45-61; and James Glogowski, "The Psychoanalytical Textuality of Jacques Lacan," Prose Studies 11.3 (1988): 13-20. Both critics engage (at least partly) in an explanation of Lacan's style through and in the context of his theories.

23. Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XX. Encore 1972-1973, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 37.

24. Jean-Joseph Goux, "Lacan Iconoclast," Lacan & Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 1991) 117-118, emphases Goux's.

25. It would be almost impossible to translate these word plays. 26. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality/The Limits of Love and

Knowledge. Book XX. Encore 1972-1972, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998) 120. 1 will use this translation for all subsequent quotes from Encore, only indicating page numbers.

27. See Ellie Ragland- Sullivan, "Stealing Material: The Materiality of Language according to Freud and Lacan," Lacan & Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991) 64.

28. Lacan, Ecrits, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1966 and 1971) 1: 261. 29. Lacan. Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 154. 1 will

use this translation for all subsequent quotes from Ecrits, only indicating page numbers. 30. See Franoise Meltzer, "Eat Your Dasein: Lacan's Self-Consuming Puns," On Puns:

The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 156-163.


31. Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre III. Les Psychoses 1955-1956, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1981) 262.

32. See illustration in Lacan & Human Sciences, d. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln: U of Ne- braska P, 1991) 15.

33. Jacques- Alain Miller, "Language: Much Ado About What?" Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland- Sullivan and Mark Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991) 33.

34. Henri Atlan, "Du bruit comme principe d'auto-organisation," Communications 18 (1972): 35.

35. On the concept of "sur-rflexion" see Mark Roberts, "The End(s) of Pictoral Repre- sentation: Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard," Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1998) 129-139.

36. Geoff Bennington addresses this question of a real difference (an uncrossable gulf between them, their belonging to different categories) or a mere opposition (their being merely different tendencies in one and the same realm that work together through opposition, but are dependent on each other) between the figurai and the discursive. See "Lyotard: From Discourse and Figure to Experimentation and Event," Paragraph 6 (1985): 19-27.

Article Contentsp. 1p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Literature Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1-108Front MatterA. Owen Aldridge Prize Winner 2002Anagrams in Psychoanalysis: Retroping Concepts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Franois Lyotard [pp. 1-25]

G. M. Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and Christopher Okigbo's "Lament of the Silent Sisters": A Comparative Study [pp. 26-36]Toward an Ideal Universal Community: Lotman's Revisiting of the Enlightenment and Romanticism [pp. 37-53]Queering the Stage: Critical Displacement in the Theater of Else Lasker-Schler and Mae West [pp. 54-71]Review EssaysReview: untitled [pp. 72-80]Review: untitled [pp. 81-88]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 89-91]Review: untitled [pp. 92-95]Review: untitled [pp. 96-99]Review: untitled [pp. 99-104]Review: untitled [pp. 104-108]

Back Matter

Documents

Bachner-Anagrams in Psychoanalysis