Anagnosis of Hysteria

Abstract

This paper confronts, initially, the personal library of the French neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893)—known especially for his work on ‘hysteria’—which after 150 years became a patrimonial one. By tracing its journeys, we discover that over the course of time it has been considered by some to be ‘an inhabited library’, and by others, ‘a deserted library’, ‘a dead library’ and ‘an avatar’. The library reached a point when it became disembodied, with the books (organs) castrated from the original bookcase, furniture or boiserie (the body) that its founder and former owner designed especially for them. Today, this bookcase, now a Body without Organs, is ‘uninhabited’ and displayed in a deserted room, whereas the book collection has been relocated to another library, and is also about to enter a virtual body after the completion of its digitization. But what will become of the furniture? Each column that defines the sixteen sections of the library has a wooden, carved head on its top, portraying a range of physiological expressive emotions, from the most fearful to the most dramatic and ludicrous, mirroring the surprisingly asymmetric, grotesque faces that characterize the hysteric family. It seems as though Charcot’s sketches jumped out of his notebooks to take shape as rococo-style wood ornamentations on the bookcase’s façade. Given that hysteria was a somewhat pre-linguistic, silent, somatic language, a form of corporeal ‘poetics’ (Breton and Aragon), a ‘language of gestures’ (Didi-Huberman), and with Charcot establishing an alphabet of passions through the categorization of its phases, I propose that the boiserie, despite its lack of books, is by the same token something that is meant to be read. My investigation results to a reimagining of the bookcase by turning it into a shrine and a film set.

Notes

1 Anagnosis: from the Greek, meaning the act of reading.

2 Shrine: known as a sacred place dedicated to a hero of respect, it comes from the Latin scrinium, meaning a case or a chest for books or papers; from the Old French, escrin, meaning box or case.

3 Boiserie: from the French, meaning woodwork panel.

4 Écorché: from the French, meaning a drawing, painting or sculpture of a human figure with the skin removed to display the musculature.

5 This ancient Chinese proverb, meaning that, if one is capable of doing something, he must do it, is used by The Christophers as their motto.