John E. Joseph, « Schizolinguistics, from Tuczek’s Analyse einer Katatonikersprache (1921) to Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970) », Language & Communication 106 [2026], pp. 13-29 ; publié en ligne le 5 décembre 2025.
Libre accès : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2025.10.006
Abstract : Attempts to diagnose schizophrenia have been grounded in theories concerning what linguistic deviance reveals about mental function. Tuczek’s patient ‘Frau M.’ was institutionalized for using a language which mixed German and French elements. The psychiatrist Goldstein cherry-picked her utterances to support his advocacy of frontal lobotomy. Louis Wolfson was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for his intolerance of hearing or seeing English, his mother tongue. His book lays out his phonetic and translinguistic strategies for converting English utterances into other languages. The evidence provided by these cases of schizolinguistics are significant for present-day understanding of the psychology and philosophy of language.
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Wolfson figures […] as one of five writers whose ‘logophilia’ is analyzed by Pierssens (1980), along with Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837–1919) (see Brisset, 1878), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), Roussel […], and Saussure. The only published English translation of part of an article by Wolfson, to my knowledge, is the brief Wolfson (1978), the introductory note to which says that it is the conclusion to his new version of Wolfson (1970), ‘to be called Point final à une planète infernale (“Full stop to an infernal planet”)’.
Pierssens repeatedly juxtaposes Wolfson and Saussure, saying for instance thatLike Mallarmé, Saussure, and Roussel, Wolfson comes face to face with something like a transcendence, an enigmatic being which effects the collusion of a desire and a form. This elusive phantom, some aspect of which escapes from every grasp, whether it be that of science, literature, or whatever, is the sign. (Pierssens, 1980: 60)
Pierssens, along with Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021) and many others in the 1970s, believed that Saussure’s search for anagrams as a hermetic technique used by poets since ancient times is symptomatic of a madness on his part, which was subsequently cured when he formulated his theory of the linguistic sign. This is important to ponder, because their treatment of Saussure parallels the diagnosis of Frau M. as catatonic and of L∗∗∗∗ as schizophrenic, along with all the others so diagnosed by Goldstein and his fellow psychiatrists. Pierssens actually labels Saussure as ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘paranoiac’ alongside Wolfson.
Wisdom and madness, what is born of the encounter between the sign and desire produces both delight and anguish, despair and hope. [ …] Wolfson roams through Manhattan and even finds a fraternal prostitute; Saussure believes in the solidarity of poets.
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