Curative Speech: Symbol, Body, Dialogue

I am going to address this question, the question of the mutative action of language, from two different, indeed opposite, directions. One perspective stresses the embodiedness of language and speech while the other stresses the dimension of symbolization, an overarching term encompassing figurability, performance, and “as-if-ness.” Both these approaches to language carry an aesthetic charge as well as a pragmatic one. Both aspects—the aesthetic and the pragmatic—are at the heart of language's mutative function, and both are lived out at conscious and unconscious levels.

One, perhaps fanciful, way I have found to address these distinct but interdependent aspects of speech and language comes from Homi Bhabha (1994). In The Location of Culture he worked out two—let's call them metaphoric spaces, or temporalities. Tangiers and Casablanca he named them, and I want us to think about the action of speech in analysis, the idiom of analysis, to use Judith Butler's terms, our place of work and speech, as occurring always in and between and around these two sites—Tangiers and Casablanca, both carriers of melancholy and loss.

“Tangiers” refers to a wonderful passage from Roland Barthes (1975) in which he remembers sitting, sleepy, in a bar in Tangiers. In reverie and in retrospect he remembers the sounds: “the stereophonic music, conversations, chairs, glasses, Arabic, French…. Through me passed words, syntagms, bits of formulae and no sentence formed, as though that were the law of such a language. This speech

Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

This essay is dedicated to Roy Lilleskov . Submitted for publication July 19, 2014.

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was at once very cultural and very savage,1 was above lexical, sporadic: it set up in me, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity. It was what was outside the sentence” [p. 49; Harris 2009, p. 16].

These terms—sites of meaning, addresses, locations,