Category Archives: Reading Notes

“Robert Walsers Leben – Genie und Stimmen”

Anton Fischer: Zu Robert Walsers und Emmanuel Lévinas‘ Leben und Werk

Robert Walser

Robert Walser wurde am 15.4.1878 in Biel geboren. Von 1884-1892 besuchte er die Volksschule und das Progymnasium. Am 22.10.1894 starb seine Mutter. Von 1896 an lebte er zehn Jahre in Zürich, unterbrochen von Aufenthalten in Berlin, Thun, Solothurn, München und Winterthur. Ab 1905 bis 1913 hielt er sich in Berlin auf und lebte dort zeitweilig bei seinem Bruder Karl, der Jugendstilmaler und Bühnenmaler bei Max Reinhardt war. Dort schrieb er „Geschwister Tanner“, „Der Gehülfe“ und „Jacob von Gunten“, die Romane, die zu seinen Lebzeiten veröffentlicht wurden. 1913 wieder zurück in der Schweiz, in Biel, traf ihn 1914 der Tod seines Vaters. Im selben Jahr leistete er wegen des Ausbruchs des 1. Weltkrieges Militärdienst. 1916 starb sein Bruder Ernst in der Heilanstalt Waldau bei Bern. Im Januar 1918 schloß Robert Walser sein Manuskript „Seeland“ ab. Drei Jahre später ließ Walser sich in Bern nieder. 1925 arbeitete er am „Räuber“-Roman. In Bern verfaßte er seine Texte zunächst als Mikrogramme, einer zwei Millimeter hohen Süterlin-Handschrift, bevor er sie abschrieb und an Verlage schickte. Continue reading “Robert Walsers Leben – Genie und Stimmen”- Anton Fischer →

Reading Notes

Reading Notes. Dora Garcia, October 6 2014

October 6, 2014 Dora García

Reading Notes from the book “Gaze and Voice as Love Objects”, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, editors. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 1996

There is the signifying chain, reduced to its minimal features, which yields, as a result or as a leftover, the voice.

(…)

The subject is always only represented by a signifier for another signifier, as the famous dictum goes. In itself it is without foundation and without a substance; it is a lack, an empty space necessarily implied by the nature of the signifier—such was for Lacan, as it is well known, the nature of the subject that can be assigned to structure. So the voice seems to endow this empty and negative entity with a counterpart, its “missing half,” so to speak, a “supplement” that would enable this negative being to acquire some hold in positivity, a “substance,” a relationship to presence

S’entendre parler—to hear oneself speak—is maybe the minimal definition of consciousness

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Hearing Voices Movement, Reading Notes

Thoughts on Thought

October 6, 2014 Dora García

Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations, Simon McCarthy-Jones, Cambridge University Press, page 362

What is most problematic for the development of any inner speech account of auditory hallucinations is that we still know next to nothing about thought itself. Until we have some idea of the nature of thought and how the brain produces it, it remains very hard to assess how unusual manifestations of it result in auditory hallucinations. How can we know how thoughts relate to voices until we know what thinking itself is like? We have already seen how a traditional corollary discharge account views auditory hallucinations as resulting from efference copy signals from inner speech productions in left Broca’s area not being communicated correctly to the left speech perception regions of the brain, but what other accounts may we consider?

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