Aren’t you happy about it?
Norbert Leber
Reading “LEBER, Norbert (Vienna[1]), approved to be admitted to the NLS” the first time brought me a sort of anxious drowsiness. ‘Aren’t you happy about it?’, a colleague asked.
A dream – the day after
The dreamer is in the room of his first son. He looks at his bed which is empty, the blanket is pulled back. He looks a second time, the mattress has burst open along its seam. Small dark grey particles crumble out, like a swarm, he thinks. Then, like a caption over the picture of the mattress, the word Pi-Hirte[2] appears. He asks himself, Pi-Hirte? Then, he takes disbelievingly a second look and sees the letters got an h more: Phi-Hirte. He asks himself curiously, Phi-Hirte? He first understands: Ah! Phi, from Pi to Phi [, this must be a Lacanian logic. Then, he takes an introspective look and the Phi-Hirte transforms into Vieh-Hirte[3]: the equivocation of Phi [fi]and Vieh [fi] in German realizes and a loud laughter breaks out in the dreamers’ body: H(a) H(a) H(a), which wakes him up.
“The value of the joke lies in its possibility of betting on the underlying non-sense of any use of sense, thereby calling into question any sense insofar as it is founded on a use of the signifier.”[4]
It is the h which brings the new nomination and thus the new meaning. One more new silly meaning. The appearance of the h in phi brought curiosity, a movement of surplus enjoyment, then, the realization from Phi(fi) to Vieh(fi) struck the body and the affect resonates through the body. H H H – in German the letter H is pronounced Ha. A staccato which fragments.
“The appeal to the meaning exerted by the signifying chain”[5] and a speaking body resonating in its well-known and ever surprising style of humor.
I bet on the non-sense, on this playing with letters, this eager saying around the un-sayable [l’indicible[6]], which let the subject stay in front of the new gate like a cow(-boy)[7].
References
[1] It was ‘Vienna’, which made me hesitate and let me think, that Germans use to say eg. Villach, with a W – Willach like will, a town in my home-district Carinthia and locals say it with a F – Fillach – like figure
[2] If we suppose that it is a word or a signifier, it could be translated like: Pi-shepherd/-herder
[3] In this moment, the equivocation was understood: Vieh = cattle, beast, livestock and Hirte = herder, shepherd
[4] J., Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV, La relation d’objet, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1994, p.294 (transl. by the author).
[5] Cf. Orientation text of Daniel Roy for the NLS-Congress 2021, ‘What do we call ‘Body Event?’, https://www.nlscongress2021.com/blogposts/title-h8sct-5m96m-5xecx
[6] É Laurent, L’Envers de la Biopolitique, Navarin/Le Champ Freudien 2016, p.26.
[7] German saying to someone who is surprised and affected of a new situation and doesn’t move on: to stay in front of the new gate like a cow