I
The question I would like to address here, as acutely embodied in the life and work of the figure from whom I take this essay’s title,2 is how to begin to get a grip on certain non or anormal language forms? Understood in a broadly linguistic/psychoanalytic sense – I’m interested in how signifying systems (or asystems) that do not conform to the symbolic realm as we understand it to function – that is, as law – offer productive examples against the limitations of language as we might find it to be conditional of certain types of alienated experience.3
In a number of recent (curatorial) projects I have applied what might be called a ‘cluster fuck’ approach to this question, jumping from myriad different points in an ever-oscillating, slightly irresponsible framework of analysis. The synthesis of this messy strategy into a text is therefore no easy thing for me to do. In order to temper this difficulty I have decided to abjure both complexity and depth here in order to present this text as a reasonably straightforward introduction to the problem (which is then to be extended and developed in sequel texts).
2 … that master of the breath-word (mots-souffle) and howl-word (mots-cris), Antonine Artaud
3 We can go further – and will here – in our critique of the normative signifier. A question that Zizek asks when exploring the potential violence of language is this: “what if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organics unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.” (Zizek, Violence. 2008, 52).
Page 2 of 13