Language is the place we call "home"-that which bonds, binds us to the Other. But what happens if we leave home and wander into other reaches of language? Who and what do we leave behind and with ...what consequences? While we psychoanalysts are trained to pull for deep modes of expression from our patients, there is still a strong pull from our own academy to stay within bounds of the proven or provable, the intellectual, the abstract, the theoretical-to exclude the affective from our own discourse. This article explores this turn away from affectivity, not only in the clinical setting, but in other venues where analysts/therapists meet, greet, write, speak to each other. Our guides for this exploration are Kohut, Loewald, and Ferenczi, who brought us his concept of the "confusion of tongues." The article suggests another reading of Ferenczi's words, pointing to a new language of affectivity and inclusion.
Based on the authors' experiences as German-language speakers working at different stages of their careers within Anglo-American human geography, this article reflects on the workings of (foreign) ...language, not only through academic publications but more widely in research contexts and everyday work. This is done by three personal observations, highlighting the relevance of (foreign) language interactions in terms of research practice as well as the poetics and politics of language. We argue that a wider recognition of language in the practical terms of academic work is called for in the light of an increasing 'internationalization' of academia.
The objective of the essay is to, using the methodology of phenomenological and semiotic interpretation, suggest and then illustrate how the postmodernist structure of Pynchon’s novels The Crying of ...Lot 49 (1966) and V. (1963) incline contemporary readers’ perception and discourse analysis towards the definition of interpretation that a text gets realized in the reader himself. The enigma offered by this author, the specific realization of metaphor, personification, and parody of reality, would not have been realized without linguistic interventions which make anything possible. Pun, anti-logic, unusual sentence combinatorics, drama, and expressiveness that, contrary to expectations, do not lead to the unfolding, but the anticlimax or dystrophic end of the event, are, in fact, means of portraying characters accustomed to living in a meaningless and chaotic world, not trying or not doing enough to fix the systems and change the routine. The poetics of language is seen as reciprocal to their dispersive internal states, and the chronotope organized by such language and such characters is also correlated with nonsense. Anti-novels that promote anti-heroes as the basic component of construction nurture precisely the language that is the instrument of provocation and exposure of reality; therefore such narrative reality is also an anti-reality that, in a way, opposes the existing one. The fragmentation of expression speaks of the de-canonization of the creative process, a key feature of the modern novel, precisely in the era of postmodernism. Deconstruction has conditioned the creation of difficult-to-read or so-called printable text. The very types that arise from non-canonical literary procedures are hybrid, therefore, free in terms of genre and constant communication with other texts. The language of the absurd is spoken by absurd characters whose names are the function of symbols, and who live in an absurd time, and novels that revitalize all of the above are novels of the absurd, which are precisely Pynchon’s novels as expressive narrative speculations.
