Excursus: Psychoanalysis as a Paranoid Theory of Antiphilosophy

From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

Psychoanalysis has a paranoid substrate in its discourse …

not because it points to specific entities, things or even processes but because it believes that things and events are connected, that they have meaning, that they are discoverable and analyzable, as Freud says. Furthermore, psychoanalysis holds that there is a traumatic origin and core to symptoms. As a result of all this, psychoanalysis believes that anything and everything that happens inside or outside of therapy is “grist for the mill”—meaning discoverable, analyzable and connected.

Psychoanalysis has no theory of contingency.

This has many consequences, both for its capacity to account for daily life and reality and its capacity to account for change in the shape of non-deterministic events.

Psychoanalysis cannot have a theory of the Event:

it is a hermetic universe, filled at best with hermeneutic possibilities

but these interpretations do not—pace catharsis, insight, mentalization and other such processes—actually open possibilities, only give meaning to what is already there, in a deterministic and rather closed way.

This is why psychoanalysis is and must perforce remain a theory of trauma, the closing down of possibilities laid by early processes, Anna Freud’s (1936) “developmental lines,” the drive and its defenses, and the whole infrastructure that this produces.

It is not accidental that Lacan’s reading, rereading and reformulation of Freud is antiphilosophical and that Badiou has been snared in a decades-long entanglement with Lacan.

Lacan is Badiou’s “Tar Baby,” like the Uncle Remus tale … once you get your paws stuck on it, there is no changing the nature of tar, it sticks to anything!

Lacan in fact goes much further than Freud in locating paranoia at the heart of human development, arguing that the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge operates on a paranoiac principle (see Freedman, 1984, p. 17).

It is not only paranoia which is totalizing and hermeneutic but psychoanalysis itself.

This explains to me Freud’s investment in the Schreber case: the foundations of psychoanalysis were at stake in his making of this case both meaningful (as opposed to random, contingent) and canonical (emblematic, paradigmatic).

This project was bound to fail, above all because it is, in Freud’s own terms, overdetermined.

*

In his essay on Philip K. Dick, Freedman elaborates a theory of paranoia …

“But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of an especially systematic and ambitious type. In the essay ‘On Narcissism,’ Freud explicitly links paranoia with the formation of speculative systems (XIV: 96), and in the reading of Schreber he notes a profound affinity between paranoia and megalomaniacal delusions of world catastrophe (XII:68-71). The paranoiac is not only someone for whom every detail is meaningful - for whom nothing can be left uninterpreted or taken for granted – but someone who holds a conception of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thoroughgoing, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her own grand system. The totalizing closure of paranoia is, in fact, noted as lucidly by Dick as by Freud: in ‘Shell Game’ (one of Dick’s finest stories and the germ of ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon’ [19641]), the massive frustration of attempting to break down such closure is powerfully recorded, and the basic problem is clearly stated. ‘The paranoid is totally rigid,’ says one of the characters. ‘He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’ (Dick, 1977, p. 181). (My italics)

Carl Freedman (1984). Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Science Fiction Studies, 11: 15-24.

Philip K. Dick (1977). The Turning Wheel and Other Stories. London: Coronet Books.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Who Killed Ellen West? A Philosophical-Psychiatric Investigation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Case of Existential Analysis

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an 

illness.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

One cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the illness as lived and experienced.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Foreword, Reason and Violence by Ronnie Laing & David Cooper (1964)

 

Who Killed Ellen West?

In 1944-45, Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), a Swiss psychiatrist, published The Case of Ellen West, the founding case of existential analysis and one of the most famous cases in modern psychiatry. Searching for a meaningful alternative to the reductive models of contemporary psychiatry, I began reading this case and entered a labyrinth where I investigated the founders of clinical psychiatry, questioned phenomenology, discovered a “whodunit” mystery and triggered a crisis of conscience as a psychiatrist.

With his account of the treatment of a “non-Swiss” Jewish woman at Bellevue, the private sanatorium he directed at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, Binswanger proposes an analysis of “the existential Gestalt to which we have given the name Ellen West” (1888-1921). To do this, he consults the patient’s clinical notes as well as her private journal, poems and letters to grasp the “totality of her existence.” Her two psychoanalysts are quoted—one sees hysteria, while another pronounces her a severe obsessional neurotic with manic-depressive oscillations. After two suicide attempts, a series of consultations with the founders of modern psychiatry begins. Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), architect of today’s psychiatric classification, diagnoses melancholy (a profound depression akin to psychosis) while an unnamed “foreign” psychiatrist, finds simple psychasthenia (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Binswanger has another idea—schizophrenia—confirmed by Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who named this emblematic condition of psychiatry.

Ellen West’s melancholy and suicide attempts persist, accompanied by serious eating problems. Convinced of her incurable diagnosis, more hopeless than ever, Ellen West demands to be released from hospital. After three days with her family, she appears transformed: she has breakfast, at midday she eats well for the first time in 13 years, in the afternoon she goes for a walk with her husband, reads poems and writes letters; all heaviness is lifted from her. In the evening, she takes poison. The next day, at the age of 33 years, Ellen West is dead.

Writing more than 20 years after her death, when the principals of the case are dead, Binswanger assures us no less than 17 times that her suicide is “authentic.” Who was he trying to convince? Was her death an “authentic suicide” as he insists, an “assisted suicide” (see Akavia, 2008) or a case of “psychic homicide,” a kind of soul murder (see Lester, 1971)? Stripped down, little in Binswanger’s account supports the diagnosis of schizophrenia, then an incurable disease. Against her family’s wishes, Binswanger consults “a foreign psychiatrist” who can now be named, Alfred Hoche (1865-1943), known to support euthanasia for life unworthy of life; all therapy is suspended; and, in spite of her suicidal plans, she is discharged home where her husband provides the poison that kills her.

In spite of the efforts of many great 20^th century thinkers—from her psychiatrists to later psychiatric readings (Mara Selvini Palazzoli, 1982; R.D. Laing, 1982; Salvador Minuchin, 1984) and even philosopher Michel Foucault (1954)—“Ellen West” remains an enigma. The case of “Ellen West” is a mirror of 20^th century psychiatry but the issues and the risks that we find there are still relevant for us (Di Nicola, 2011). And they speak to the debates about the state of psychiatry today.

After 25 years as a practising psychiatrist, this case makes me wonder: What is the mission of psychiatry? Is it to understand (Binswanger’s goal with existential analysis), to classify (Kraepelin’s and Bleuler’s contribution) or to heal (Freud’s contribution through psychoanalysis)? Are these different goals compatible or mutually exclusive? Critics of the case of Ellen West assert that she was misunderstood and mistreated. What lessons does she demand that we learn, at last? Can we let her find a voice to express her suffering, as Minuchin tries to do in his family drama about her?

 

About Me: Vincenzo Di Nicola

I am an academic psychiatrist with interests in the history of psychiatry, phenomenology and philosophy. By chance, I had a relationship with three psychiatrists in this story: Ronnie Laing was my therapist in London, I trained with Mara Selvini Palazzoli in Milan and know Sal Minuchin. All three wrote extensively about families. Selvini Palazzoli and Minuchin are also family therapists and specialists in eating disorders (a key aspect of Ellen West’s predicament). Like my mentors, I specialized in family therapy and eating disorders. Currently, I am doctoral candidate in philosophy in Switzerland, which makes the case more poignant for me. I have presented versions of this research at the Culture and Mental Health Research Seminar at McGill University and Clinical Grand Rounds of Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and will soon present it at the Institute of Mental Health of the University of Montreal. Parts of this research will be integrated into my doctoral thesis and I am working on a book and a documentary film about this case.

Bibliography

Binswanger’s “Case of Ellen West”

Binswanger, Ludwig (1944-45). Der Fall Ellen West. Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychologie, 1944, 53: 255-277, 54: 69-117; 1945, 55: 16-40. (Original in German.)

---- (1958). The case of Ellen West: An anthropological-clinical study (trans. Werner M. Mendel & Joseph Lyons). In: Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (Rollo May, Ernest Angel & Henri F. Ellenberger, eds.). New York: Basic Books, pp. 237-364. (Complete translation in English.)

Secondary Literature

Akavia, Naamah (2008). Writing “The case of Ellen West”: Clinical knowledge and historical representation. Science in Context, 21: 119-144.

Berlinck, Manoel Tosta & Magtaz, Ana Cecília (2008). Reflexões sobre O caso de Ellen West: estudo anthropológico, de Binswanger. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental, 11(2): 232-238.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2011). The enigma of Ellen West. In: Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, pp. 121-125.

Foucault, Michel (1954). Introduction et notes. Le Rêve et l’Existence par Ludwig Binswanger (trans. Jacqueline Verdeaux). Paris: Desclée de Brouweret.

Ghaemi, S. Nassir (2001). Rediscovering existential psychotherapy: The contribution of Ludwig Binswanger. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 55 (1): 51–64.

Laing, Ronald D. (1982). The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. New York: Penguin Books.

Lester, David (1971). Ellen West’s suicide as a case of psychic homicide. Psychoanalytic Review, 58: 251-263.

Marceau, Jean-Claude (2002). La question de la corporéité dans le cas Ellen West de L. Binswanger. L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 67(2): 367-378.

Minuchin, Salvador (1984). The triumph of Ellen West: An ecological perspective. In: Kaleidoscope: Images of Violence and Healing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 195-246.

Selvini Palazzoli, Mara (1982). L’anoressia mentale: Dalla terapia individuale alla terapia familiare. Nuova edizione interamenta riveduta. Milano: Feltrinelli Editore.

Vandereycken, Walter (2004). Book review: A. Hirschmüller (ed.), Ellen West. Eine Patientin Ludwig Binswangers zwischen Kreativität und destruktivem Leiden. Heidelberg-Kroning: Asanger, 2003. History of Psychiatry, 15(1): 125-126.

Derrida on the Event, Iterability and Textual Faces—Pre-, Post- and Peri-

“For Derrida … supplementarity is at the always divided ‘origin’ of presence.”

—The Derrida Dictionary by Simon Morgan Wortham (2010, p. 204)

While I was researching Jacques Derrida’s approach to the event and to iterability, I found this quote in The Derrida Dictionary.

In Derrida’s account, iterability combines the Latin iter (‘again’) with the Sanskrit itara (‘other’) (Wortham, 2010, p. 78).

The event as iterability in Derrida’s view is always supplementary: there is an add-on, an extra. Each “irreplaceable event is at once a unique, ‘once-and-for-all’ occurrence and yet manifests or inscribes itself on condition of a possible re-marking.” (Wortham, 2010, p. 78)

Even the single is always repeatable, or rather it is iterable, since every repetition (iter –‘again’) inevitably alters (itara – ‘other’). Thus, the notion of repetition as mere echo or replication is brought into question as a second instance is necessarily an alteration, an other. One thinks of Jorge Luis Borges and the impossibility of identity, in the sense of sameness and of repetition … the writer was not the same as himself (cf. “Borges and I”) and Borges the writer explored this radically in one of his most memorable short stories, “Funes the Memorious,” about an unlucky creature whose memory was so accurate, so impossibly perceptive that nothing was the same as anything, not even itself, as he noted the minutest changes in every instance. So Derrida changes our vocabulary and imagination of identity: not repetition but iteration.

This has critical implications for the notions of representation, performance, memory, identity and history. It also opens interesting vistas about the nature of “cases” …

I will argue in another essay that what creates canonical cases in psychiatry and psychoanalysis is simply their iterability. That is, they become living (I believe texts are forms-of-life) embodiments of the paradox of being authoritative, canonical and yet constantly mutative, open to radical rereadings, constructions, interpretations, deconstructions and delimitations. Freud’s cases are so interesting because they have just enough fixedness to create an image in our minds and more than enough porosity and openness to invite us to reread, even to relive—and then, resist and reframe them.

This addition that comes from our reading, this “supplementarity,” as Derrida describes and deconstructs it, “is at the always divided ‘origin’ of presence.”

*

In Dissemination (1981), Jacques Derrida treats Hegel’s attitude to philosophical prefaces in terms of this logic of the supplement:

Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries,

preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it

seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of 

the pre- (which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the 

presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader's eyes 

what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it. Such an operation thus appears contradictory, and the same is true of the interest one takes in it.

…

On the one hand—this is logic itself—this residue of writing remains

anterior and exterior to the development of the content it announces.

Preceding what ought to be able to present itself on its own, the preface falls like an empty husk, a piece of formal refuse, a moment of dryness or loquacity, sometimes both at once. From a point of view which can only, ultimately, be that of the science of logic, Hegel thus disqualifies the preface. Philosophical exposition has as its essence the capacity and even the duty to do without a preface. (italics added) (p. 9)

But why is all this explained precisely in prefaces? What is the status of

this third term which cannot simply, as a text, be either inside philosophy or outside it, neither in the markings, nor in the marchings, nor in the margins, of the book? (p. 15)

If a preface doubles back on itself to erase, to efface itself, presaging the event, announcing the philosophical event, what is trauma? What is this catechresis that doubles back on itself to lick its own wounds, reopening them? Trauma is the postface, always looking back, covering its tracks. But while the preface announces, wishing to efface itself like John the Baptist, almost apologetically wishing to diminish its presence, the postface denounces, defaces … it goes back to the text, undermining it to create its own authority, like Saul, become Paul, of Tarsus. Paul undermines the unexamined notion of authority, the “I was there” of the explorer, the anthropologist and the witness to assert a greater authority: “I wrote it down.” Paul who was not there, who was not a follower or witness of the Jewish reformer Yehoshua, assumes and asserts with the authority of the written word. Paul is post-evental, he is the postface to the life of Yehoshua (called Jesus), a traumatic remainder, covering its tracks, making new ones. In Badiou’s terms, Paul becomes faithful to the event which he lives vicariously, but to which he brings great clarity and this, combined with his fidelity (not in the sense of the true, unaltered copy but as Derridean iteration, that is instantiation with alteration), is what imposes his authority.

Unlike the preface that stays outside the text—neither an annotation “in the margins,” nor a footnote “in the markings”—the postface walks back all over the text, leaving tracks with its muddy boots, all over the periface or perimeter of the field of the text.

Paul as postface, trauma as commentary, erases memory. It is not the “flashbulb” memory of some strong incident which illuminates everything around it, but rather a blinding flash which engenders a kind of faith, but not memory. It burns that one image into our minds, making us forget what was around us at the time, if anything, and the lives we lived before, and rewrites the text all around the periface, the perimeter of what used to be our lives. A total rupture that Badiou properly calls an Event (when it opens possibilities) and that our age—the age of trauma—calls trauma (when it closes down possibilities).

For Christians, Paul names the Event (perhaps even more than Yehoshua) which radically alters their lives. For non-believers, in some of their encounters with Christianity, certainly at the margins of Christendom, Paul is not an Event but a trauma. For Jews, this trauma already has a name, an ancient one, given new meaning after the destruction of European Jews—the akedah, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. For the foreseeable future, the sons will not easily trust their fathers again, a condition, this contemporary condition of the age of trauma, that I call “Isaac Machine.”

But more on that later.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Montreal – 13 March 2012

Excursus—Hurbinek-Odradek: A Postcard from the Edge

This excursus from my doctoral dissertation concerns my pairing of two of the strangest—and most compelling—figures of twentieth century Europe: Primo Levi’s Hurbinek as the ruptured, “perfect witness” of Auschwitz and Franz Kafka’s Odradek as an “epistemological rupture” in our reading of literature.

Franz Kafka’s Odradek

The narrative begins with these words:¹

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

From this brief story, I have culled these descriptions:

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant.

Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him—he is so diminutive that you cannot help it—rather like a child. “Well, what's your name?” you ask him. “Odradek,” he says.

Even these anwers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek.

In an online site called “The Kafka Project” by Mauro Nervi,² Anya Meksin³ offers this analysis:

Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader. The need to normalize this rupture constitutes the “cares” or “worries” of the family man—a series of circular musings on the origin and destiny of Odradek, an effort to integrate him into the domestic regularity that it is the family man’s duty to preserve. For the reader, these same efforts at normalization give rise to a series of equally circular and anxious interpretations of the text, all proving inconclusive, but each fueling the need for the next. (italics added)

Primo Levi’s Hurbinek

In The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Judith Woolf⁴ introduces Hurbinek this way:

As we have seen, some of Levi’s most searing testimony involves children; at the start of The Truce⁵ he shows us the end product of the Nazis’ attempt to reduce their victims to the condition of animals in the depiction of a dying child so deprived that his very name is a meaningless sound, yet who nonetheless struggles indomitably to acquire human speech:

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz . . . (The Truce, p. 23⁵)

At least one biography gives primacy to the figure of Hurbinek in Primo Levi’s published work. Francesco Lucrezi’s book in Italian is entitled, “The Word of Hurbinek, The Death of Primo Levi” (my translation).⁶

Hurbinek-Odradek

Am I the only one to notice a resemblance between Primo Levi’s Hurbinek and Franz Kafka’s Odradek? No, a few others have made the connection …

1)    In an article in French which I translate as “Storytelling: Witnessing in the face of the silence of language,” Esther Cohen (2003, p. 66)⁷ wrote:  

Tout comme Hurbinek-Odradek, il semble qu’ils n’aient pas non plus pu faire face à l’authentique catastrophe ; ils devinrent muets, sans pouvoir donner de réponse. La langue, écrit Celan, « est passée à travers et n’a pas eu de mots pour ce qui s’est passé ».

Just like Hurbinek-Odradedek, it seems that they have also not been able to confront to the authentic catastrophe; they become mute, without being able to give a response. Language, Celan wrote, “passed through and did not have the words for what happened.” (My translation)

2)    In a Brazilian text I translate as “Still-life: Finitude and Negativity in T.W. Adorno,” Maurício Chiarello mentions Hurbinek and Odradek.⁸

3)    Another Brazilian author, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin presented, “Odradek, Hurbinek. Annotations in the margins of a text by Kafka,” at the 5^th International Michel Foucault Colloquium in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil.⁹

Uma das mais enigmáticas das pequenas narrativas de Kafka, no centro do “Médico rural”, trata da “preocupação do pai de família” em relação a um ser híbrido e inútil, chamado de Odradek, que escapa de sua compreensão e de seu controle. A partir de uma análise desse texto e de alguns comentários, tentar-se-á explicitar como e por que essa existência sem sentido pode despertar no leitor uma sensação de alegre resistência e de eficaz impertinência - em oposição à dor que provoca a descrição de seu irmão gêmeo, pelo menos no nome e na falta de sentido, Hurbinek, a criança sem palavras evocada por Primo Levi no início da “Trégua”.

One of the most enigmatic of the short stories of Kafka, in the middle of “A Country Doctor,” deals with the “preoccupations of a family man” concerning a hybrid and useless being called Odradek, which escapes his understanding and his control. Based on an analysis of this text and commentaries, an attempt is made to explicate how and why this existence without sense could awake in the reader a sensation of happy resistance and effective impertinence – in opposition to the pain provoked by the description of his twin, at least in the name and in the lack of sense, Hurbinek, the child without words evoked by Primo Levi at the beginning of “The Truce.” (My translation)

4)    In a doctoral dissertation in the German Department at Berkeley, David Jennings Gramling discusses Hurbinek and Odradek separately and does not link them in his studies of Levi and Kafka.

5)    Anny Dayan Rosenman’s article, “Hearing the voice of the witness,” connects silence as the best account of the suffering inflicted on children in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s purported memoir of a child of the Holocaust, Fragments, Jerzy Kosinski’s mute Gypsy-Jewish child in his novel, The Painted Bird, and Primo Levi’s Hurbinek in his memoir, The Truce.¹⁰

C’est encore le silence qui rend le mieux compte de la souffrance infligée aux enfants, de cet assaut d’autant plus violent qu’il est incompréhensible, qu’il fige la parole, emporte l’être, défait la conscience. Tel le petit Binjamin Wilkomirski qui sent en lui tout se défaire, se liquéfier, qui se sent se dissoudre dans la boue colorée où il est assis et, pour un temps, renonce à parler. Tel le narrateur de L'oiseau bariolé de Kosinski, enfant pourchassé, torturé et errant dans les campagnes d'Europe centrale qui, devenu muet au cours de l’une des épreuves qu’on lui inflige, met des années à retrouver sa voix perdue. Tel le petit Hurbinek, évoqué par Primo Levi dans La Trève, enfant né et mort au camp, qui n'a jamais appris à parler et qui reste le symbole de cette souffrance silencieuse. Sur un autre mode que celui des personages silencieux, le blanc, l’ellipse, les points de suspension, signalent ce qui dans l’écriture fait silence, traçant les limites qui ne seront pas franchies, permettant de cerner les zones où elle ne peut ni ne veut s'aventurer, d’appréhender ce qui ne sera pas dit, ne sera pas écrit, mais est pourtant là, dans l’entre-deux entre parole et silence.

Once again, it is silence that gives the best account of the suffering inflicted on the children, of this assault which is all the more violent as it is incomprehensible, that flees the word, sweeps away being, defeats the conscience. Such is the little Binjamin Wilkomirski who feels in himself that all is coming apart, liquifying who feels himself dissolving in the colorful mud where he is seated and for a time, renounces speech. So it is with the narrator of The Painted Bird, a child who is hunted, tortured and wandering in the countryside of central Europe who, having become mute in the middle of one of the trials that is inflicted on him, takes years to find his lost voice again. And so, too, with the little Hurbinek, evoked by Primo Levi in The Truce, a child who was born and died in the camp, who never learned to talk and who remains the symbol of this silent suffering. (My translation)

A Postcard from the Edge: “Return to Sender”

There are some disquieting aspects of this thread.

Rosenman’s article was published in 1998-99, when the veracity of Wilkomirski’s memoir was just beginning to be questioned by a Swiss journalist and only later declared unfounded. This is a very complex state of affairs. It is still not clear if the Wilkomirski affair was totally made up or stitched together in the life of the empirical author and constructed over decades as a regressive fantasy and above all as a therapeutic device induced by his therapist. For an overview of this episode by a medical anthropologist who is a key scholar on trauma, see Allan Young’ (2007) essay on this subject which he sees as a case of “traumatic mimesis.”¹¹

Kosinski’s novel is powerful and seems to capture reality better than documentary films against Zizek’s assertion that we have to invert Adorno’s infamous pronouncement about poetry after Auschwitz. Zizek claims that it is prose, not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz. The denouement of the two novel-memoirs cited here would seem to bear that out. Wilkomirski turned out to be at best a misguided fantasy, at worst an outright fraud, the real purpose of which is opaque to us. Kosinski never actually claimed that the experiences of the mute tormented Gypsy-Jewish boy were his own, but it was assumed as such and this hounded him until his eventual suicide. So it seems that Zizek is right: we can tolerate and accept the most painful documentary film (Lanzmann’s Shoah) or factual witnessing (Primo Levi’s memoirs) but prose has become much more difficult, if not impossible. Witness: Wilkomirski’s Fragments. Witness: Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. A possible counter-example: Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness. Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his treatment of Holocaust themes, but his work was never well-received in his own country of Hungary.

In an extended treatment of “Odradek as a Political Category,” Slavoj Zizek adds to these associations to Odradek another parallel in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge about a “creature that is perfectly harmless” (Rilke) that turns out to be “the monstrosity of the neighbour” (Zizek).¹² Although this passage occurs in a discussion of Levi’s Muselmänner and Agamben’s treatment of this category of “bare life,” Zizek does not connect Odradek with Hurbinek. The Muselmänner (German for Muslims) were prisoners who had given up on life and were considered the “walking dead” or “bare life” in Agamben’s terms.¹³

And now we come to Hurbinek-Odradek. The connection was sitting at the back of my mind in some inchoate but disquieting form for decades. It became explicit for me in a seminar with Judith Butler at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in the summer of 2011 while we were reading Kafka’s brief narrative on Odradek. As I was working on Levi’s account side by side with Agamben’s commentary at EGS, this new reading in Butler’s seminar finally pushed the parallel into conscious awareness. And it gave me a frisson.

I had a flight of ideas about it … Hurbinek-Odradek … the Slavic names that Levi invokes in trying to decode the name of Hurbenek, the putative Slavonic origins (but perhaps German only influenced by Slavonic) of the name of Odradek … Kafka as an Ashkenazi Jew from a Slavic country who wrote in German in contrast to the Sephardi and other Jews like Levi at Auschwitz who did not have Yiddish as the lingua franca among the Jewish prisoners there, acting as a shibboleth separating them … the Slavonic form of the two names which together repeat the K sound in Kafka … the combined place name and dual identity of Auschwitz-Monowitz (the death camp and the work camp) mimicking the combined names and dual identities of Hurbinek-Odradek …

And another, more disquieting thought: I have been immersed in the literature of the Holocaust for decades. The Muselmänner were described by many different survivor-authors. I clearly recalled both Bruno Bettelheim and Victor Frankl writing about them. But Hurbinek? Surely his case was among the most unique in the concentration camp world where millions died and uniqueness was extirpated. Were there other witnesses? Who else bears witness to this diminished life?

Let’s reread how Levi concludes his account of Hurbinek:

Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.

Born at Auschwitz? And tattooed, allowed to live? Who fed him? Who protected him? “Hurbinek, the nameless,” Levi calls him. Why would no one name him? Orphans and adopted children are named—often renamed in fact. Pets are named; some people go so far as to name inanimate objects: boats are christened, the English name their homes and place the moniker at the gate and on the household letterhead. Levi gives his Häftling Nummer 174517 or “prisoner number 174517” tattooed on his arm and often cites those of other Häftlinge. Hurbinek … “whose tiny forearm – even his – bore the tattoo of Auschwitz” … touches us. Although we want to know more, “Nothing remains of him ….” We want to know his tattoo number, the better to let him bear witness. Levi asserts that “he bears witness through these words of mine.” All we have are Levi’s words: no name, as Levi ambiguously avows (“Hurbinek” is a name after all), and no number, as the meticulous chemist Levi unaccountably omits it.

Jacques Lacan in his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” famously concluded that a letter always arrives at its destination.¹⁴ In his gloss, Jacques Derrida transformed the letter into a postcard (The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond).¹⁵ With a nod to Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge,¹⁶ which is a memoir (later filmed) about her limit experiences of suffering, some messages from the edge do not arrive because they are garbled or because they die in the throats of suffering victims. Some post cards are not, in fact, posted.

In a strange reversal, Kafka’s fiction about Odradek is an “epistemological rupture” in the way we read literature, compelling us to turn away from literature to examine the facts of Kafka’s life, while the story of Hurbinek, narrated in order to “bear witness,” by Levi whom Giorgio Agamben calls the “perfect witness,” creates a rupture in our understanding of history, forcing us to ask questions about how narratives are constructed. Isn’t Hurbinek too much like Kafka’s Odradek or Rilke’s neighbor, perhaps? Kafka’s Odradek, concerning a recognizable human in a strange form is the emblematic story of his own life. We see this again and again in Kafka’s anthropomorphic creatures, notably in the beetle Gregor Samsa (notice the isomorphism of the names, reiterating a syllable—Kaf-ka, Sam-sa), who have conflicts with the father of the family. Kafka’s own famous (to us) letter to his father was never sent. As I have tried to show, Levi’s post card from the edge on Hurbinek generates more questions than it can possibly answer. Mark this one “Return to Sender.”

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Notes

¹ Franz Kafka (1971). The Cares of a Family Man. In: The Complete Stories (pp. 427-428). New York, NY: Schocken Books.

² Mauro Nervi. “The Kafka Project.” http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=284.

³ Anya Meksin. “Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread” in http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=284. Accessed 2012/01/07.

⁴ Judith Woolf (2007). From If This is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved. In: Robert S.C. Gordon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35-49; citation: pp. 45-46.

⁵ Primo Levi (1965). The Truce. Trans. by Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head.

(Published in some editions with If This is a Man starting in 1979. Italian original, La tregua.)

⁶ Francesco Lucrezi (2005). La parola di Hurbinek. Morte di Primo Levi. Florence: La Giuntina. [Translation: The Word of Hurbinek, The Death of Primo Levi]

⁷ Esther Cohen (2003). Raconter: témoigner face au silence de la langue. Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, pp. 63-76.

[Translation: Storytelling: Witnessing in the face of the silence of language]

⁸ Maurício Chiarello (2006). Natura-Morta: Finitude e Negatividade em T.W. Adorno. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. [Translation: Still-life: Finitude and Negativity in T.W. Adorno]

⁹ Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2008). Odradek, Hurbinek. Anotações em margem de um texto de Kafka. Presentation given at: 5º Colóquio Internacional Michel Foucault (10/11/2008 a 13/11/2008), Campinas, SP, Brasil. Dra. Jeanne Marie Gagnebin – Docente, Departamento de Teoria Literária - IEL/UNICAMP e Departamento de Filosofia / PUC-SP. [Translation: Odradek, Hurbinek. Annotations in the margins of a text by Kafka]

¹⁰ Anny Dayan Rosenman. Entendre la voix du témoin. Plurielles n°7 Hiver-

Printemps 98-99: pp. 155-163. [Translation: Hearing the voice of the witness]

¹¹ Allan Young (2007). Bruno and the Holy Fool: Myth, mimesis, and the transmission of traumatic memories. In L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson,  & M. Barad (Eds.), Understanding trauma: Integrating biological, clinical, and cultural perspectives (pp. 339-362). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

¹² Slavoj Zizek (2006). Odradek as a Political Category. In The Parallax View (pp. 111-123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

¹³ Giorgio Agamben (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen). NewYork, NY: Zone Books.

¹⁴ John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds. (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, MD: The Johns  Hopkins University Press.

¹⁵ Jacques Derrida (1987). The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

¹⁶ Carrie Fisher (1987). Postcards from the Edge. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

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