Discourse, Figure

APPENDIX: Jean-François Lyotard’s French Translation of “Die Verneinung”

391 APPENDIX Jean-François Lyotard’s Translation of “Die Verneinung” by Sigmund Freud In Discours, figure, Lyotard wrote that he included his own translation of Freud’s “Die Verneinung” (1925) “if only to give the French reader access to a text otherwise impossible to find.”This must have been true in 1971, when the only available French translation of Freud’s essay was Henry Hoesli’s, published in 1934 in the specialist journal Revue française de psychanalyse . After Lyotard’s version, another fourteen years would pass until Jean Laplanche’s translation of “Die Verneinung,” now considered authoritative, came out. (Laplanche’s text, titled “Négation,”first appeared in S. Freud: Résultats , idées, problèmes, vol. 2 [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985], 135–139, and now forms part of Sigmund Freud, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 17 [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992], 11–16.) But Lyotard is being modest when he defends the inclusion of his own translation of “Die Verneinung”in Discours, figure as merely a means of facilitating access to a hard-to-find essay, for his is clearly a more precise translation than Hoesli’s. For example, Hoesli consistently translates Wiederholung as “reproduction” instead of “repetition,” thus erasing Freud’s key distinction in “Die Verneinung” between Reproduktion and Wiederholung. Perhaps most egregious is Hoesli’s omission—corrected by Lyotard—of a crucial sentence in Freud’s text: “In this stage of development [from pleasure-ego to realityego ] regard for the pleasure principle has been set aside” (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 19 [London: The Hogarth Press, 1953– ], 237). By suggesting that the sole purpose of his translation was to give wider circulation to “Die Verneinung,” Lyotard was also being slightly disingenuous , because his translation represented a fairly explicit attempt at leaving his mark on an important and ongoing French debate surrounding Freud’s text that involved a number of leading intellectuals from varying ideological 392 appendix quarters—Émile Benveniste,Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan,and Paul Ricoeur among them. As John Mowitt indicates in his Introduction to the present book, Lyotard’s translation of a text that had stirred such heated debate since the mid-1950s could only have been perceived, and intended, as a bold move on the part of a philosopher aspiring to the rank of Maître de conférences. Knowledge of this historical background sheds light on some of the particularities of Lyotard’s translation. Lyotard, for example, emphasizes (by placing the word in brackets) Freud’s choice of Aufhebung to describe the process repression undergoes through negation (denial). In contrast to both Hoesli and Laplanche, who translate Aufhebung as “suppression,” Lyotard, in a nod to Hegel, opts for “levée” (“lifting” in the Standard Edition ). Lyotard makes another telling passing gesture, to Marx this time, by adding Entfremdung and its translation aliénation in brackets, even though Marx’s Entfremdung stands at a considerable distance from Freud’s in this context—something Lyotard seems ready to acknowledge by using éloignement (“differentiation” in the Standard Edition) in the text itself. The original essay by Freud is published in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (London: Imago Publishing, 1925), 11–15. * * * La manière dont nos patients présentent ce qui leur vient à l’idée (leurs associations ) pendant le travail analytique nous donne l’occasion de faire certaines remarques intéressantes. « Vous allez sans doute penser que je veux vous dire quelque chose d’offensant, mais en réalité je n’ai pas cette intention . » Nous comprenons qu’il s’agit là du refus (Abweisung) d’une idée qui vient justement d’émerger par projection. Ou encore : « Vous vous demandez qui peut bien être cette personne dans mon rêve. Ce n’est pas ma mère. » Nous corrigeons : c’est donc sa mère. Nous prenons la liberté, avec l’interprétation, de détourner les yeux (absehen) de la négation et de ne retenir que le contenu de l’idée. C’est comme si le patient avait dit : « C’est vrai, ma mère est ce qui m’est venu à l’idée à propos de cette personne, mais je n’ai aucun plaisir à admettre cette association. » 393 appendix A l’occasion, on peut obtenir d’une manière très commode l’éclaircissement qu’on recherche sur le refoulé inconscient. On...