The Flesh of All Words

Abstract

Scrutinising Santner’s comments on his own method in his recent book Untying Things Together, the paper argues that at the heart of Santner’s theoretical endeavour lies something that might be called “the flesh of all words.” To elaborate this thesis, I begin, following a corresponding hint by Santner himself, with a description of Freud’s peculiar “way of working with concepts” in his The Interpretation of Dreams. From there I move on to the analysis of an author who has been one of Santner’s main points of reference at least since his Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Franz Rosenzweig. The paper outlines Rosenzweig’s self-interpretation in his essay “‘The New Thinking’” and compares the specific methodology explained and developed in this text with the main work of Ferdinand Ebner, whose closeness to his own work Rosenzweig himself emphasised. Finally, against the background of these theoretical conceptions, I will borrow one of Santner’s own neologisms and use it to describe his work as the “encystance” on/of this flesh of all words.

Keywords:

• methodology
• dreamwork
• interpretation
• word
• body

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The title has been translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir as, somewhat awkwardly, “The Cares of a Family Man,” thus disregarding all references to the specific kind of cura which a (or rather, quite specifically: the) pater familias has for his domus that resonate in the German title.

2

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. (Kafka, “Cares of a Family Man” 427)

3 See (as the first English translation by A.A. Brill) Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1913) 315: “a point of junction for a number of conceptions” and “a predestined ambiguity.”

4 In this respect, Strachey’s translation of The Interpretation of Dreams from 1955 is more precise, as it uses the expression “verbal malformations” (320).

5 “The linguistic habits of children, who at certain periods actually treat words as objects and invent new languages and artificial syntaxes, are in this case the common source for the dream as well as for psychoneuroses” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1913) 288).

6 Brill’s first English version of the book wavers in this respect, translating “Zergliederung” sometimes as “dismemberment” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1913) 266), sometimes as “analysis” (490). Since Santner puts the verb “distort” in inverted commas, he is presumably also alluding to the “Distortion in Dreams” which Brill uses as a translation for the title of the fourth chapter of the Traumdeutung. The German title is “Traumentstellungen.”

7 See with regard to Lacan and a corresponding literally literal understanding: “Mais cette lettre comment faut-il la prendre ici? Tout uniment, à la lettre. Nous désignons par la lettre ce support materiel que le discours concret emprunte au langage” (Lacan 251).

8 “In this method, there is concentrated whatever renewal of thinking can come of the book” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 87).

9 “[T]hinking and writing are not the same. In thinking, one stroke really strikes thousand connections. In writing, these thousand connections must be artfully and cleanly arranged on the string of thousand lines” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 72).

10 “The new thinking, knows, just like old-age [thinking] of common sense, that it cannot know independently of time” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 83).

11

Thus the new thinking’s temporality gives rise to its new method […] The method of speech takes the place of the method of thinking, as developed in all earlier philosophies. Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless. With one stroke it wants to make a thousand connections; the last, the goal, is for it the first. Speech is bound to time, nourished by time, [and] it neither can nor wants to abandon this ground of nourishment; it does not know beforehand where it will emerge; it lets itself be given its cues from others; it actually lives by another’s life. (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 86)

12

The thinker plainly knows his thoughts in advance; that he “expresses” [ausspricht] them is only a concession to the defectiveness, as he calls it, of our means of communication; this does not consist in the fact that we need speech, but rather in the fact that we need time. To need time means: not to be able to presuppose anything, to have to wait for everything, to be dependent on the other for what is ours. All this is entirely unthinkable to the thinking thinker, while it alone suits [entspricht] the speech-thinker […] the difference between the old and new, logical and grammatical thinking, does not lie in sound and silence, but in the need of an other and, what is the same thing, in the taking of time seriously. (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 87)

13 “Truth in this way ceases to be what ‘is’ true, and becomes that which, as true – wants to be verified [bewährt]” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 98).

14 See Hamacher (“Nicht im Satz der Identität” 70–74), with reference to Hegel’s “Wesenslogik,” especially his remarks on the “Satz der Identität” (Wissenschaft der Logik 510–15, esp. 514).

15 See, however, on the importance of a “Methode des Erzählens” (method of narration) and a “erzählende Philosophie” (narrative philosophy), with reference to Schelling’s Die Weltalter (Rosenzweig, “Neue Denken” 436; “‘New Thinking’” 81).

16

Independently of those mentioned and of each other, Martin Buber in Ich und Du [I and Thou] and Ferdinand Ebner in Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten [The Word and the spiritual realities], a text produced precisely at the same time as my work, made their own advance on the focal point of the new thought, the one that is treated in the middle book of the Star. (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 88)

17 See Rosenzweig, “Neue Denken” 426. This preface by the editor is not included in the English translation of the text.

18

It is an immediate ordeal for the reader who does not bring to this highly interesting case the interest of a professional psychologist or of a psychiatrist by vocation, winding its way through 300 pages in an endless repetition of a single thought and identical phrases, giving rise thereby to the feeling of always revolving around the same point. (Ebner, Word 48)

19 “‘Jewish book’” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 69).

20 “Rather, it is merely a system of philosophy” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 69).

21 “I received the new thinking in these old words, thus I have rendered it and passed it on, in them” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 92).

22 “I know that to a Christian, instead of mine, the words of the New Testament would have to his lips […] But, to me, these words” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 92).

23

And yet this is a Jewish book: not one that deals with “Jewish matters,” for then the books of the Protestant Old Testament scholars would be Jewish books, but one for the old Jewish words come in order to say what it has to say, and precisely for the new things it has to say. (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 92)

24 “Just as language is something put directly into man, so also is religion – not, however, as a demand raised by him, but rather as one placed on him” (Ebner, Word 95).

25

What is reason? Let us for once take the word at its word. For one never goes wrong when one calls on the profundity of linguistic usage, of the etymology of the word, for help in his thinking, after the example of many thinkers. Reason [Vernunft] comes from perceiving [vernehmen] what is heard and absorbed. Reason is originally and essentially the sense of the word, which the word in the divinity of its origin placed in man. Reason is the possibility of being addressed by the word and the meaning of the word and only subsequently the ability to form concepts and ideas. (Ebner, Word 116)

26

If we attempt to examine the reason for this perception, the altogether extraordinary and remarkable depth of the spirit that forms language and the word suddenly opens to us. We see, as it were, how spirit and nature touch one another in the acoustic material of isolated words [Wörter]. (Ebner, Word 160)

27 Hereunto already in more detail Schestag (13–15) and Fenves (133–35).

28 The English translation uses the expressions “interlaces” and “interweaving” (Rosenzweig, “‘New Thinking’” 78).