Philology and Psychoanalysis: At the Borders of Language

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This project aims at re-examining the relation between philology and psychoanalysis. The term 'philology' will be understood in a sense that precedes the modern differentiation of scientific and academic disciplines, thus addressing the various relations between poetics, rhetorics and grammar, as well as the types of knowledge involved in textual criticism and historical linguistics. In terms of history of science, the project aims at reconstructing the role played by philological methods and knowledge during the different stages of psychoanalysis, from the founding period to the 1980s. Based on this historical analysis, the project intends to open up cultural theory to developments in psychoanalytic thinking that up to now have mostly been conceived as a mere internal affair of the discipline. The idea is to go beyond the limiting 'minimal consensus' between cultural analysis and psychoanalysis, which is still largely based on the 1960s influence of linguistic and anthropological structuralism. The project will therefore investigate fields that lie before, aside or after the structuralist paradigm and as a consequence put an emphasis on various aspects in the works of Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, the later Jacques Lacan and Fernand Deligny that have not yet been thoroughly considered from a philological point of view. All these authors work at the margins of language and investigate its non-logical, gestural foundation, thereby questioning its multifaceted forms of semiotic activities not only in such classical phenomena as lapsus and dreaming, but also in knots serving as theoretical models or in drawings and types of writing that are found in cases of autism. Since such an extension of the scientific field of philology entails consequences for its epistemological conditions and procedures, the project will also be devoted to a re-examination of this very epistemology.