Writing as an effect of language on the body
Myriam Mitelman
To the extent that the intelligibility of the manifestations of the unconscious emerges from the processes of writing, let us attempt to grasp something of the effects of language on the body.
Upon reading the passionate history of writing Les trois écritures : langue, nombre, code[1] by Clarisse Herrenschmidt, we come to understand that if writing was invented for the aims of knowledge, counting, and remembering, this is not without having incorporated diversely the speaking body in this symbolization. Indeed, Sumerian writing has the body image in its spelling, syllabic writing promotes the auditor’s point of view, by noting what is heard in language, whereas consonantal alphabets, constituted by semantic roots, produce letters representing the “non-sounds”, which require putting the body into play (breath, voice) for their enunciation.
We can thus note that the history of writing is characterized by a disjunction with and of meaning: if Sumerian spelling maintains a certain correspondence between the things of the world and the part of language made visible through writing, the consonantal alphabet is already emancipated from the image, whereas the syllabic system and then the Greek alphabet produce a system of notation that is totally freed of meaning, what Herrenschmidt calls “the disunity between the things of the world and the things of language”.
The inexhaustible history of writing to which Lacan constantly refers his reader, teaches us, starting from this new work, that in an analysis, it is not the signifier that is to be read (this can be heard or listened to), neither the letter within the meaning of our alphabet –this meaning would neither give an account of the contribution of Herrenschmidt’s book, nor of the concepts that Lacan summons with regard to writing: missive, unary trait, trace –, but the effects of separation between the things of language and the things of the world, produced during four millennia by the slow production of an alphabet that is indifferent to meaning, whose relation to the body in its obscurity are the same enigmas that become deciphered in the cures.
Translated by Yannis Grammatopoulos
Reviewed by Eva Reinhofer and Joanne Conway
References
[1] Herrenschmidt C., Les trois écritures : Langue, nombre, code, Paris, Gallimard, 2007.