Introduction: That Which is Read

It is quite clear that, in analytic discourse, what is involved is…that which is read…

At the start of a recent meeting of a psychoanalytic working group, each of the members went around the room detailing their inhibitions, symptoms, and anxieties as they related to writing. One couldn't write until he had read everything he could think of on the topic at hand, which meant writing was perpetually deferred, disinvested. Another was too in love with his citations, smitten with the poetry of his textual beloveds: enough homage to fill a bookshelf. Another wrote in fits and starts, despair always on the horizon. One of us—meaning the two of us editing this volume—reported a symptom that involved trying to make other people, especially loved ones, write. Clearly, this wish for others to write could be understood as the corollary of a question about how to produce, in writing or anywhere else. Where do words come from? Can we ever trust them to appear? What must happen for such an emergence of language to take place?

Undergirding these questions is a logic: if I can see how others make language, on demand, I'll have an idea as to how I myself might proceed. Such thinking wouldn't seem all that remarkable for an editor; for an analyst, however, it inevitably leads to yet another question, that of why one has chosen a rather particular position vis-à-vis the production of language—by the other—as a calling.

The issue that follows is, among other things (we hope), the product of this symptomatic questing for the language of the Other and a questioning of this questing. We have asked our friends and colleagues to write about writing and psychoanalysis for DIVISION/Review, providing them with very little instruction beyond this basic demand. Needless to say, this has caused some difficulties with the issue's production: not only are we quite late in coming out with the volume, but as we weathered cancellations by a handful of typically reliable contributors