Space and Translation in Le Schizo et les langues

“Efforts were made to give credit where credit is due, but how can we thank all the architects and builders of the city of words in which we reside?”

Amos Oz & Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words

Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues presents schizophrenia as a body-mind concept through multilingualism, translation, and disability studies. It is through the unification of these distinct yet complementary fields that Wolfson’s autobiographical account innovates postmodern, or dismodern — per critical disability theory — conceptualizations of language in thinking about space. Both his approach to translation and the secondary literature that engages critically with Wolfson’s thoughts indicate a certain materiality of language that inverts the contemporary notions of language by assigning it spatial physicality. The materiality bequeathed unto language invites linguistics into the same discussions that debate humanity’s constitution; whether embodiment, sentiment, or something else entirely determines who is human. Post-Wolfson, language is seen not only as part of the debate on humanity but also as having a preceding debate of its own that may lend critical thinking to the debate on human identity. Inserting language into the material world suggests Wolfson gives language space, and, per Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Wolfson’s creation of ‘a langue – an impossible one, his own’^[1] suggests that Wolfson is attempting the creation of another world through linguistic space. When taken into consideration with studies of other writings by people with schizophrenia and with certain core disability theory texts, Wolfson’s space creation can be typified as a creation of a ‘crip space’ where his body-mind persists and is accommodated through the reorganization of language. Once established, the language-as-material paradigm gives Wolfson the ability to reconstruct a body-mind through language, heretofore called a language-body for its linguistic consistency, in which he can interact with the world dominated by a language that causes him suffering. Wolfson’s invention and subsequent acceptance of a language-body and its use of crip space are means to accommodate his disabled ontology, and yet his avant-garde ideas also offer insights into the future direction of research at the interstices of world literature, translation studies, and disability theory that could generate new meaning for both disabled and nondisabled people as they craft their own identities.

This study will trace a logical path to the implications of Wolfson’s language-body. It begins with an explanation of the language-as-material phenomenon, interspersed with a presentation of Wolfson’s translation methodology. After this presentation, Lecercle’s translation theory serves as a foundation for implications of Wolfson’s methodology. The theoretical framework having been established, this study will offer a reading of Wolfson’s text for evidence of the language-body and its significance within the text, which culminates in Wolfson’s choosing disability in order to reclaim his identity formation. 

            Before entering into Wolfson-inspired notions of language and humanity, it is important to clarify the disability theory terminology that structures this interpretation. First, the theoretical framework of dismodernism situates disability as ‘the postmodern subject position.’ Its implication is ‘the concept that difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable.’^[2] In other words, dismodern thought designates difference in embodiment, or body-mind, as the unifying feature of the human category. It follows that identities constructed on these differences change with their aggregation and erasure. In reference to the terms embodiment, body-mind, and language-body, embodiment is the most common term in disability studies for the material body and its dis/abilities, while body-mind originates as an alternative phrase for embodiment in Eli Clare’s memoir. Body-mind reaffirms the inextricable links between mind and body in a critique of contemporary Western separation of mind and body.^[3] From body-mind, the phrase language-body has been adapted for this study’s purposes as a sense of Wolfson’s body-mind as constituted in linguistic material and space, out of which, the relevance of disability gain becomes clear. Disability gain comes out of Deaf gain, ‘reframing deafness, not as a lack, but as a form of human diversity capable of making vital contributions to the greater good of society.’^[4]

Gilles Deleuze’s preface to the text presages the construction of a language-body, through the notion of words as things becomes a focal point for the reader. Deleuze writes:

Il est tout à fait insuffisant de dire que le schizophrène traite ou appréhende les mots comme des choses. En vérité choses et mots sont soumis au processus primaire, qui ne les confond nullement, mais leur donne à chacun un rôle spécifique oral conforme aux règles formelles de l’objet partiel, en tant que celles-ci les distribuent de force, les imbriquent, les emboîtent les uns dans les autres, en suspendant tout rapport de désignation et de signification possible.^[5]

In other words, particularly English ones, the conceptualizations of things and words are distinguished from one another but are juxtaposed on the same plane, instead of allowing signifier and signified, word and thing, to have an unequal relationship. Entering into Wolfson’s text, presented in the third person, the reader receives an elaboration of Wolfson’s process:

[Il] essayait de développer des moyens d’en convertir les mots presque instantanément…en des mots étrangers chaque fois après que ceux-là pénétreraient à sa conscience en dépit de ses efforts de ne pas les percevoir…En effet, il nourrissait des réactions parfois aiguës que le lui faisait même douloureux que de l’écouter sans qu’il pût vite en convertir les vocables en des mots pour lui étrangers ou en détruire en esprit d’une manière constructive, pour ainsi dire, les vocables qu’il venait d’écouter de cette sacrée langue, l’anglais!^[6]

Wolfson’s pain if he fails to ‘convert’ or ‘destroy’ the English language as quickly as possible necessarily casts words as capable of inflicting that psychological pain. Words, then, can cause harm as much as objects might, especially when embodiments are configured as body-minds, where both material and mental components compose one’s identity, and blur the distinction between objects and words in relation to humanity. The signifier and signified are further disjointed in Wolfson’s translation methodology: 

Bien que ladies signifie seulement femmes, dames, ou mesdames tandis que, plus inclusive, le rousse lʲoudʲi veut dire gens, monde, public, etc., la chose fondamentale à l’étudiant de langues schizophrène en ce qui concerne la similitude entre le sens de ces deux vocables était, comme mentionné, qu’ils représentent tous les deux l’être humain.^[7]

The meaning conveyed in the word used for his conversion does not adhere to common equivalences employed in translation, which is perhaps why Wolfson uses the word ‘conversion’ instead. The semblance between signifier and signified spans both the meaning encapsulated and, evidently more important, the sonic likeness to the English term. The dual-faceted construction of language introduces a sensual component in its sound to the conventional, conceptual function of language, creating an object of sorts out of language. It is this complicated and generative understanding of language that Lecercle and other scholars engage with to elaborate on language’s materiality and its ramifications on translation theory as well as its designation of humanity.

            The literature on Wolfson’s text spans psychiatry, translation studies, and critical disability studies to discern his method and its underlying significance. As a point of departure, it’s crucial to see Wolfson’s text according to Stella Bolaki’s ideation, in her case study of the schizophrenia memoir genre: 

[rather] than being a symptom of his exclusion from the ‘real’ world or a textual puzzle to be deciphered like a dream by the analyst, this story is a ‘fragment’…of a different world that Henry constructs and into which we are ushered as readers by bearing witness to it.^[8]

Such a perspective dismisses the medical model of disability, which ‘defines disability in terms of individual deficit…to reduce the complex problems of disabled people to issues of medical prevention, cure or rehabilitation,’^[9] from the interpretive strategy so that one might focus on the critical theory regarding language and translation in exegesis. In addition, the psychiatric paradigm shifts outlined in Postpsychiatry 

identify [a new framing of the relationship between knowledge, power, and expertise] as a move beyond modernist psychiatry…[and] attempt to redefine a discourse about meanings, relationships and values as primary.^[10]

Encountering postpsychiatry in this study also relates to the problematics of language, reality, and identity, because

[one] can only speak confidently about ‘norms of function’ and ‘rational action’ in the human world after one has bracketed out contextual phenomena such as culture, language, gender, social and political circumstances. However…in hermeneutic philosophy these phenomena actually constitute the meaningful reality of human beings.^[11]

All this to say that this analysis must suspend the normative medical considerations of conditions such as schizophrenia because the language itself constitutes Wolfson’s material world and his self-construction. 

From here, Lecercle’s article on the trouble of translation in relation with Wolfson’s text emphasizes two ideas of translation theory. The first: that the ideal of translation in conveying all meaning from the source language into the target language breaks down when considered side-by-side with Wolfson, since his writing takes words from foreign languages to replace the words in his native language. Of the translation ideal, Lecercle writes that Wolfson ‘appears to have made this somewhat naïve dream real…and yet this person is also he who has given the lie to the translator’s deepest conviction, for he is the author of perhaps the only utterly untranslatable text’.^[12] With this in mind, the previous Wolfson quotation displays the ideal translation of meaning. For him, ‘la chose fondamentale à l’étudiant de langues schizophrène en ce qui concerne la similitude entre le sens de ces deux vocables était, comme mentionné, qu’ils représentent tous les deux l’être humain’^[13], such that conveying humanity designates the translation as effective, along with the homophonic relationship between the two words, but this notion cannot be translated, as the phonic relationship is rooted in the languages employed. The second of Lecercle’s positions on Wolfson is that in breaking down translation’s omnipotence, Wolfson generates a materiality of language. Because the languages’ interrelationship occupies a certain space into which translation cannot intrude, from the fact that ‘[the original words] must be dissolved into the translated words, which means that there must be material, even physical contact between the two languages,’^[14] the material, physical space of the language must also not be connected via translation but make direct contact without translation as intermediary. If we return to the idea of Wolfson’s world construction through his use of language, it is possible to understand Wolfson’s process as creating a space – a crip space, or space designated to accommodate disabled ontologies – adjacent to the English language where his body-mind does not suffer from the language’s effects.

Consequently, as process and product are inextricably linked, the construction of Wolfson’s crip space is of utmost interest to the understanding of the text. From Wolfson’s descriptions of English and his method, words in the English language embody space; a kind of body emerges from the use of words and phrases such as ‘embêtant,’ ‘monstruosité,’ and ‘démembrer le vocable anglais.’^[15] English becomes an undesirable embodiment for Wolfson’s language-body, or as Sylvie Boudailliez considers it, ‘une reconstruction de l’image de son corps qui marque un virage vers l’écriture comme voie de guérison possible.’^[16] Wolfson’s use of language emerges as a reimagining of his own body-mind, although one must be wary of finding meaning in psychiatric texts not aligned with postpsychiatry since Boudailliez also writes that Wolfson’s method of conversion ‘ne s’accompagne d’aucun effet de création de sens, contrairement à la création poétique qui tend à combler la faille.’^[17] If Wolfson’s text does not create meaning like poetic works, but only reimagines his language-body, then his reconstituted language-body holds the same meaning as his English language-body, according to Boudailliez, despite the suffering his English language-body imposes. In addition, this way of thinking resembles an ideal translation, as Lecercle conceptualized it, whereas the reconstruction of the language-body imagines contact between language and human embodiment. Such reconstruction of the body becomes Wolfson’s crip space, as it is a reordering of the space taken up by his material language-body: space taken up by his language and his body.

This is clear from Wolfson’s opening, as it describes the appearance of his material body. He refers to himself as ‘maigre comme beaucoup de gens de tels états mentaux…plutôt dénourri’^[18] with a normalizing emphasis on the relationship between body and mental state. Not only that, but he also connotes ‘un état de marasme’ with his conceived language-body through ‘[son] visage et en particulier sa bouche semblaient le plus souvent grimacés par un mélange de tristesse et de douleur,’^[19] in which case, the suffering he experiences is inscribed into his facial expressions, both incorporating and locating his suffering within his language-body at the beginning of his text so that the reader confronts embodied suffering and reflects on Wolfson’s memoir and conversion methodology with suffering body and space as a background. 

After this description of Wolfson’s material body, there are five pages of expository information on Wolfson’s family. Meaning seeps into Wolfson’s lived spaces through familiar relationships, which Wolfson juxtaposes with provocations of his suffering due to the English language. However, the charged relationship coincides with the innovation and generative manner of such relationships as conceived by Israeli writer Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger when they write about archetypal Jewish relationships:

In our post-Freudian era, the teacher-student and father-son pairings, sometimes overlapping, and metaphorically akin, carry great fascination. Think of it this way: Jewish tradition allows and encourages pupil to rise against teacher, disagree with him, and prove him wrong, up to a point.^[20]

In this cultural critique, the notion of the student or son through inquiry expanding the limits of knowledge accepted by the teacher or parent resembles Wolfson’s study of multiple languages, because it permits him to rebel against the language-body in which he suffers through the construction of a new body of knowledge: his language-body. On one hand, due to the unfixed quality of identity in dismodern precepts, imposing this Jewish archetype unto Wolfson’s relationship with his parents, since the presence of Jewish ancestry and identity in Wolfson’s text only arises as a justification for learning Hebrew, comes with theoretical complications. On the other hand, Wolfson’s crip space as a subversive one where he can reconfigure his language-body resembles questioning those who set precedents for him while supporting the main contention as the Israeli co-authors stipulate it: ‘in order to remain a Jewish family, a Jewish family perforce relied on words. Not any words, but words that came from books.’^[21] The tokenizing application of this cultural critique notwithstanding, Oz and Oz-Salzberger’s scenario in which Wolfson rebels in an educational, discursive manner provides Wolfson’s occupation of space to embody it and avoid suffering. Within the layout of the text, where Wolfson situates the familiar space between his language-body and the explanation of his created linguistic space, this notion of discursively rising up against the parent or teacher to create new understanding reinforces the creation of such spaces through language.

            From the text’s first paragraph with the presentation of a language-body, examples of conceptualizing his condition elaborate on Wolfson’s suffering and body-mind. A prime example is the conversion Wolfson makes between ‘mad’ and ‘malade,’ which he rationalizes because ‘il n’aurait qu’à intercaler sur-le-champ dans ce mot les deux lettres la, une seule syllabe…et il aurait instantanément un vocable étranger…pour qu’il ne souffrît guère de la pensée de ce dernier.’^[22]Notice that Wolfson uses ‘guère’ as an indication that the conversion of ‘mad’ does not remove all suffering with regards to this word as a designation of identity. The remaining suffering follows his French interactions with Italian workmen, which culminated in one of them saying, ‘He’s a screw-ball!’^[23] In addition, just after the conversion, Wolfson relates another such story:

Deux jeunes adolescents du voisinage passaient et l’un dit en employant crazy,     « Il est fou, ce type-là! » L’autre répondit plutôt à voix basse: « Je le sais bien! » mais d’un ton comme si cela était un fait connu à tous, et pour ainsi dire c’en était un.^[24]

These two instances textually surround his conversion of ‘mad’ into ‘malade’ which removes the suffering encountered due to English, but it cannot remove the suffering inscribed in a negatively-valued identity with mental disability. Leaving aside the impulse to reject mental disability altogether, since the text was written in the 1960’s, this study would be remiss to neglect the choice to convert ‘mad’ into ‘malade,’ or sick as a more general term. Despite having ‘un sens suffisamment proche de celui de mad’^[25], the use of ‘malade’ suggests that disabilities of any kind are interchangeable, in that, for Wolfson, the two signifiers share a similar enough meaning to satisfy his conversion methodology, thereby designating madness as a comprehensive example of all the meanings that illness can convey. Therefore, Wolfson’s generalization of madness into illness and disability suggests the extent to which his language-body integrates disability into its identity composition, for disability’s meaning to him is signified in his language-body.

            His language-body becomes further complicated in his conversion of the term ‘crazy.’ He uses the term ‘crise,’ to which he again ‘ne souffrît guère de la perception.’^[26] His justification for this conversion traces the etymology back to the Greek ‘crísis…signifiant jugement,’^[27] which recognizes others’ imposing the terms ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’ on him. However, that is only the root word’s added meaning, whereas ‘crise’ itself introduces a ‘crisis’ into this linguistic interplay that constructs his identity and his language-body. ‘Crise’ replaces disability per se from the language constructing his language-body as a shift in his identity from the meaning-ridden notion of being disabled to having crisis in his life experience.

            In terms of potentially reimagining himself, Wolfson presents the two endings to his text. The first ending posits that his conversions could allow him the space he requires to be ‘un jour capable, de nouveau, d’employer normalement cette langue, le fameux idiome anglais.’^[28] This possible return to English resembles disability theory’s cure, where disability is understood only as a problem to be resolved through medical intervention.^[29] This use of crip space for cure just to return to normate space and life afterward transgresses crip space’s accommodation of disabled people such as they are. Through translation studies Wolfson’s return to his native language also finds rejection: ‘one assumes one can always return to it. But that is not so…language changes year by year.’^[30] In the second ending that Wolfson wrote, he seems to have acknowledged this problematic dénouement of his use of crip space to reinvent himself, in that he adopts his suffering and his language-body such as they are:

Il ne resterait pas moins le fait que cela avait été, qu’il y ait eu tellement de la souffrance au monde, et plus que probablement cette souffrance avait été une condition nécessaire de manière ou d’autre pour, par exemple, qu’il soit né personnellement, pour qu’il existe en tant que lui. Du reste, la souffrance, la plus vive souffrance physique,…n’avait-elle pas été une nécessité préalable pour la naissance de l’homme tout entier, de l’espèce humaine…et n’est-elle quelque chose d’intrinsèque à la vie[?]^[31]

Most notably, Wolfson refers to suffering as a ‘necessary condition’ for his birth. However, the construction of his language-body also recognizes suffering as a necessary condition for his rebirth into a language-body through which he acknowledges the intrinsic nature of suffering to life, only to come to think ‘la vie n’est pas tellement mauvaise…trouverait-il ainsi sa « liberté » perdue?’^[32] This is represented in the conditional tense, used throughout the added chapter concluding the second edition, and expresses the potential of the crip space to improve life and reclaim one’s freedom. This contrasts greatly with the cure of the first ending, for the second ending maintains disability’s integral role in his identity per his language-body rather than removing disability from the embodiment. The explicit possibility of regained freedom celebrates Wolfson’s disability in his identity. In other words, the prospect of disability gain abounds in this second ending to Wolfson’s text through his multilingualism, translation, disability, and identity.

            Louis Wolfson is a celebrated thinker in French literary and critical circles for good reason. J.M.G. le Clézio wrote, referring to Le schizo et les langues, that ‘[les] vrais livres, les livres profonds sont…ceux qui nous permettent d’approcher de l’état de conscience… qu’on ne lit pas vraiment, mais qu’on vit ; alors il semble que c’est la littérature tout entière qui soit remise en question.’^[33] Wolfson’s paradigmatic impact comes as no surprise once one takes into account the numerous ways in which Wolfson’s text revolutionizes postmodern thought, fully creating dismodern thought. Not only does he assert the materiality of language, but also then creates for himself a crip space in the form of a language-body that accommodates his linguistic needs. As such, he united postmodernist and translation scholars through his work, but since Wolfson wrote just before the field of disability studies was formulated, disability scholars have not engaged with this truly pivotal text in their field where disability gain and dismodernism are established well before the thinkers who supposedly formulated any such theories set words on paper, which Wolfson would not have read anyway due to a dominance of English language in disability critical theory. In any event, Le Schizo et les langues advances notions of language, translation, and the body, presaging as a byproduct disability theory as a source of meaning and identity within human societies and cultures. With this text as a point of departure, disability scholars can expand their research into linguistic and other abstract identities revolving around disability perception and representation.

Bibliography

Bauman, H-Dirksen L. and Joseph J. Murray, ‘Deaf Studies in the 21^st Century: “Deaf-gain” and the future of human diversity’, The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, 2 edn., ed. by Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 210-225

Bolaki, Stella, ‘The cultural work of disability and illness memoirs : Schizophrenia as collaborative life narrative’ in Changing Social Attitudes toward Disability : Perspectives from historical, cultural, and educational studies ed. by David Bolt, Routledge Advances in Disability Studies (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 89-98

Boudailliez, Sylvie, ‘Première experience d’écriture : une agonie’, Savoirs et cliniques, 15 (2012), pp. 97-106

Bracken, Patrick and Philip Thomas, Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Clare, Eli, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)

le Clézio, J.M.G., ‘La tour de Babil’, Dossier Wolfson : ou L’affaire du Schizo et les langues, ed. by J.-B. Pontalis and Thomas Simonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 39-52

Davis, Lennard J., ‘The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: on Disability as an unstable Category’, in The Disability Studies Reader, 2^nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231-242

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, ‘Louis Wolfson and the Philosophy of Translation’, in Oxford Literary Review 11.1 (2012), pp. 103-120

Lerner, Gerda, ‘Living in Translation‘, in Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflecting on Their Craft, ed. Steven G. Kellman, (Lincoln, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 275

Oz, Amos and Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)

Shakespeare, Tom, ‘The Social Model of Disability’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis, 2^nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 197-204

Wolfson, Louis, Le Schizo et les langues, ed. by J.B. Pontalis, Connaissance de l’Inconscient, 2^nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1970)

---

^[1] Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Louis Wolfson and the Philosophy of Translation’, in Oxford Literary Review 11.1 (2012), p. 103.

^[2] Davis, Lennard J., ‘The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: on Disability as an unstable Category’, in The Disability Studies Reader, 2^nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231 – 242.

^[3] Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. xvi.

^[4] H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, ‘Deaf Studies in the 21^st Century: “Deaf-gain” and the future of human diversity’, The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, 2 edn., ed. by Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 210.

^[5] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Préface: Schizologie’, in Le Schizo et les langues, by Louis Wolfson, ed. by J.B. Pontalis, Connaissance de l’Inconscient, 2^nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p.17. Deleuze’s italics.

^[6] Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues, ed. by J.B. Pontalis, Connaissance de l’Inconscient, 2^nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p.33.

^[7] Ibid., p. 62.

^[8] Stella Bolaki, ‘The cultural work of disability and illness memoirs : Schizophrenia as collaborative life narrative’ in Changing Social Attitudes toward Disability : Perspectives from historical, cultural, and educational studies ed. by David Bolt, Routledge Advances in Disability Studies (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 93.

^[9] Tom Shakespeare, ‘The Social Model of Disability’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis, 2^nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 198-9.

^[10] Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas, Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World, International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 5.

^[11] Ibid., p. 158.

^[12] Lecercle, p. 103.

^[13] Wolfson, p.62.

^[14] Lecercle, p. 107.

^[15] Wolfson, p. 54.

^[16]Sylvie Boudailliez, ‘Première experience d’écriture : une agonie’, Savoirs et cliniques, 15 (2012), p. 97.

^[17] Ibid., 106.

^[18] Ibid., 29.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 15.

^[21] Ibid., p.26.

^[22] Wolfson, p. 215.

^[23] Ibid., p. 184. Wolfson’s italics.

^[24] Ibid., p. 217.

^[25] Ibid., p. 215.

^[26] Ibid., p. 218.

^[27] Ibid., p. 219.

^[28] Ibid., p. 247.

^[29] Shakespeare, p. 199.

^[30] Gerda Lerner, ‘Living in Translation‘, in Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflecting on Their Craft, ed. Steven G. Kellman, (Lincoln, NE, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 275.

^[31] Wolfson, pp. 248-9.

^[32] Ibid., p. 256.

^[33] J.M.G. le Clézio, ‘La tour de Babil’, Dossier Wolfson : ou L’affaire du Schizo et les langues, ed. by J.-B. Pontalis and Thomas Simonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p. 39.