Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of "The Shell and the Kernel" by Nicolas

Abraham
Author(s): Jacques Derrida and Richard Klein
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 9, No. 1, The Tropology of Freud (Spring, 1979), pp. 3-12
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464696
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ME-PSYCHOANAL
An Introduction to the
Translation of "The Shell and
the Kernel" by Nicolas
Abraham

JACQUES DERRIDA

I am introducing here-me-(into) a translation.'

That says clearly enough to what lengths I will be taken by these double voice-
tracks [voies]: to the point of effacing myself on the threshold in order to facilitate
your reading. I'm writing in "my" language but in your idiom I have to introduce. Or
otherwise, and again in "my" language, to present someone. Someone who in
numerous and altogether singular ways is not there and yet is close and present
enough not to require an introduction.
One presents someone to someone or to several, and as regards what in French
are called h6tes, which in the language being translated are both hosts who receive
and guests introduced, elementary politeness demands that one ought not to thrust
oneself forward. And it is being forward to the point of becoming indispensable as
soon as you begin to compound the difficulties of translation (from the first there has
been at least one such difficulty here at every step) and start hampering the in-
terpreter of the interpreter, the one who in his own language is supposed in turn to
introduce the introducer. One has the air of someone indefinitely prolonging dila-
tory maneuvers, distracting attention, focusing it on oneself, commanding it by in-
sisting: this is what is mine here, belongs to me, the introducer, to my style, to my
way of doing, saying, writing, interpreting things my way, and believe me, it's worth
the detour, if I may say so, that's a promise, etc.
Unless by assuming the indiscretion so as to draw attention to the maneuver, I
no longer effectively withdraw behind the cover of the mother tongue (so called
presumably because, in the end, everything seems to come back to it, no matter
what you say about it, and to come back to her).
But isn't that what concerns us here? Where, here? Between the shell and the
kernel.
For I have already named, inducing you to think in advance, what you will
shortly hear Nicolas Abraham discuss:2 presence, being-there (fortlda)3 or not,4 the

1 Editor'snote. This text is entitled, in French, "Moi-La Psychanalyse";the first sentence

reads, "]'introduisici-moi-J une traduction."
2 Editor'snote. In this issue, Diacriticsis publishing one of Nicolas Abraham's
most important
essays. Since the publication in 1976of LeVerbierde I'Hommeaux Loups(writtenin collabora-
tion with MariaTorok),readershave begun to appreciate, notably in France,Germany,and the
United States, the scope and originalityof research that had long been overshadowed by the
output of the psychoanalyticinstitution.A psychoanalystof Hungarianorigin, Nicolas Abraham
4

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presumed presence to self in self-presentation, all the modes of introduction or of
hospitality given in me, by me to what is foreign, introjection or incorporation, all
the so-called "dilatory"procedures (the "means, as it were conventional, that are
implicitlyoffered by the whole cultural context to facilitate-except in the case of
fixation-detachment from the mothering mother while still signifying a dilatory
attachment");and you will shortly hear Nicolas Abrahamspeak about all that, and at
the same time about translation. Forhe is simultaneously speaking about translation
(and not just when he actually uses the word), about translationfrom one language
into another (with foreign words), and even from one language into itself (with the
"same" words suddenly changing their sense, overflowing with sense or exceeding
it altogether, and nevertheless impassive, imperturbable, identical to themselves,
allowing you still to read in the new code of this anasemic translationwhat belonged
to the other word, the same one, before psychoanalysis,that other language, makes
use of the same words but imposes on them a "radicalsemantic change"). Speaking
simultaneously of translation in every sense as well as beyond or beneath sense,
translating simultaneously the old concept of translation into the language of
psychoanalysis, Nicolas Abrahamwill also tell you about the mother tongue and also
about what has been said about the mother, the child, the phallus, about that whole
"pseudology" that subordinates any discourse on Oedipus, on castration, and law
and desire, etc., to a "childhood theory").
But if Abrahamseems to be speaking about these extremely old matters, it is not
only in order to propose a new "exegesis," to decipher or deconstitute their mean-
ing so as then to lead, along new anasemic and antisemantic paths, to a process
anterior to meaning and preceding presence. It is also to introduce you to the code
that will permityou to translatethe language of psychoanalysis, its new languagethat
radicallyalters words, the same, ordinary language words that it goes on using and
yet translates into a whole other language: so that between the translated text and
the translating text nothing apparently will have changed and yet between them
there will only be relations of homonymy. But as we will see, a homonymy incompa-
rable to any other. Involvedthen are the concepts of sense, of language [langue] and
translation. And speaking to you about psychoanalyticlanguage, about the necessity
of translatingit otherwise, Abrahamprovides the rule for reading "The Shell and the
Kernel":you will not understand much if you do not read this text as it teaches itself
to be read, taking into account its "scandalous antisemantics," that of "concepts
de-signified by virtue of their psychoanalytic context." This text then must be de-
ciphered with the help of the code it proposes and which belongs to its own writing.
So here I am now, supposed to introduce-me-(into) a translation,perhapsthe
first in English of a major essay by Nicolas Abraham. I ought therefore to efface
myself on the threshold and, in order to facilitateyour reading, to limitthe obstacles
to translationresultingfrom my writingor from the idiom of my linguistic habitus. So
I will. But what is to be done with what inheres in language [Ialangue] itself?

lived in Francewhere he initiallyreceived trainingin philosophy, linguistics and poetics. He

died in 1975just after finishing, with MariaTorok, Le Verbier .... Since then, his works and
those that he was preparing in collaboration with MariaTorokhave begun to be published
under the general title Anasemiesin the collection LaPhilosophieen effet[Aubier-Flammarion].
To date, two volumes have appeared, the aforementioned Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de
I'Hommeaux Loups,and, in 1978,Anasemies II: L'Ecorceet le noyau. The essay translatedhere
supplies its title to the lattervolume. It offers a privilegedmode of access to Abraham'sworkin
that it puts forwarda theory of anasemia.A double issue of EtudesFreudiennes[Paris:Donoel,
1978],nos. 13-14, was recently devoted to Abrahamand includes a full bibliography.
Jacques Derrida,who wrote the preface to Le Verbier,entitled "Fors"[translatedby Barbara
Johnson in the GeorgiaReview (Spring1977)],has agreed to present Abraham'sessay here.
3 The "game of fort-da, which has fed so much speculation," is illuminatedby the process of
introjectionin a remarkableunpublished manuscriptof 1963,"The'crime'of introjection,'"now
availablein L'Ecorceet le noyau. Thisnote is perhaps the place to add that introjectionis a sort
of introduction in itself, to the self, to (a) Me. Whathomonyms!
4 Editor'snote. The French reads "'l'tre-lI (fort/da)ou pas," a formula in which Dasein is
made to resonate with the double-sense of pas, both "not" and "step(s)."
diacritics/March 1979 5

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 Me, for example.
As always with a language, it is the marriage of a limitation with an opportunity.
In French, moi-unlike the German ich or the English I-fits the subject who
says je like a glove ("moi, je dis, traduis, introduis, conduis, etc."), just as it fits the
subject that takes itself, or lets itself or causes itself to be taken, as an object
("prends-moi, par exemple comme je suis" or "traduis-moi, conduis-moi,
introduis-moi, etc."). A glove through which I can even touch myself, or my fingers,
as if I were present to myself in the contact. But je-me can be declined differently in
French. For example, "je me souviens, je me moque, je me fais plaisir, je me fais (un)
present, je me fais du reste un cadeau" ["I remember, I make fun, I have fun, I give
myself (a) present, I give myself a gift besides," where me is an indirect rather than
direct object].
The appearance of this as if is not simply one phenomenon among others.
"Between the 'I' and the 'me'," the chapter thus entitled situates a hiatus, one which,
separating "I" and "me," escapes phenomenological reflexivity, the authority of
presence to self and everything it governs. This hiatus of non-presence to self condi-
tions the sense which phenomenology takes as its theme but is itself neither sense
nor presence. "Psychoanalysis stakes out its domain precisely on this unthought
ground of phenomenology" [ce sol d'impense de la phenomdnologie]. If I quote this
sentence, it is not only to mark an essential stage in the text's trajectory, the moment
when one has to ask "how to include within any discourse that very thing which in
essence, by dint of being the precondition of discourse, escapes it." And immedi-
ately following: "if non-presence-the kernel and ultimate ground of all discourse,
is made to speak, can it-must it-make itself heard in and through presence to self?
Such is the form in which the paradoxical situation inherent to the psychoanalytic
problematics appears." Indeed the question touches on translation, on the transpo-
sition into discourse of its own condition. This is already very difficult to think since
any discourse thus translating its own condition will itself still be conditioned and to
that extent in the end, as in the beginning, will miss its mark. But this translation will
be even stranger: it will have to translate into discourse what "in essence escapes it,"
that is, non-discourse or, in other words, the untranslatable. And the unpresentable.
That unpresentable which must be translated into presence by a discourse that in no
way betrays this structure is named by Abraham the "kernel." Why? Let that question
rest for a while.
If I have quoted this sentence, it is also to recall that the "hiatus" also necessarily
reproduces an interval, the moment of a new departure in the trajectory of Nicolas
Abraham himself. Himself, that is in his relation to self, to the je-me of his own
research: first, as far as that was possible, an original approach allying typically
psychoanalytic questions with phenomenological ones within a field into which
neither phenomenologists nor psychoanalysts were accustomed to venture. All the
essays before 1968, the date of "The Shell and the Kernel," preserve the still very
productive trace of that approach. I am thinking in particular of "Phenomenological
Reflections on the Structural and Genetic Implications of Psychoanalysis" (1959), and
of "The Symbol or What Lies Beyond the Phenomenon" (1961). All these texts are
now collected in the volume which bears the title The Shell and the Kernel (L'Ecorce
et le noyau [Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978]). They surround or envelop the essay of
1968 (you could call it a homonym) and would allow a telelogically oriented perspec-
tive to see in these first essays the direction of all the transformations to come. And
that would not be unjustified. But around 1968 the necessity of a break [une brisure],
the space both of the play and the articulation of terms, marked a new relation
between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, a new "logic" and a new "structure"
of this relation. They will affect both the idea of a structural system and the canons of
"logic" in general. One explicit indication comes at the end of the 1968 essay, when
it has just been demonstrated that the "key concepts of psychoanalysis" "do not
yield to the norms of formal logic: they relate to no object or collection of objects,
nor in any strict sinse do they have extension nor inclusiveness [comprdhension]."
In 1968, then, a new departure, a new program of research; but the earlier
6

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traversalswere indispensable. From now on, no reading can elide these premises.
Despite the fecundity, despite the rigor of phenomenological questioning, a
ruptureoccurs and it is a sharp break, a strange reversal rather,the conversion of a
"conversion" which upsets everything. A note from the chapter "Between the 'I' and
the 'Me' " situates the "misconception" of Husserl"concerning the 'Unconscious'."
The type of misconception is essential and allows us to read the hiatus that interests
us here. Husserl understood the Unconscious from the standpoint of experience,
sense, presence, as "the forgetting of experiences that once were conscious." Butto
think the Unconscious it will be necessary to remove it from all that it makes possi-
ble, from the whole phenomenological axiomatics of sense and presence.
The frontier, a very singularone indeed in that it separates two absolutely heter-
ogeneous territories, now passes between two types of "semantic conversion." The
one that operates within sense in order to make it appear and preserve it is bracketed
in the discursive translation by the inverted commas of phenomenology: the same
word, the ordinarylanguage one, once surrounded by inverted commas, designates
the intentional meaning made manifest by the phenomenological reduction and all
the procedures which accompany it. The other conversion, the one performed by
psychoanalysis,is absolutely heterogeneous to the preceding one. It presupposes it in
a certainsense, since one cannot understandit in principlewithout havinggone to the
limit, and in the most consequential fashion, of the phenomenological project (from
this point of view as well the path taken by Nicolas Abrahamappears to me to obey
an exemplary necessity). But inversely it gives access to what conditions the pheno-
menality of sense, proceeding from an a-semantic instance. The origin of sense is
here not an originarysense but pre-originary,if one can say that. If one can say that
and in order to say it, psychoanalytic discourse, still using the same words (those
belonging to ordinary language and those, bracketed by inverted commas, belong-
ing to phenomenology) quotes them once more in order to say something else,
something else than sense. It is this second conversion that is signaled by the capital
letters with which the Frenchtranslatorshave rightlyendowed the metapsychologi-
cal notions and it is once more a fact of translationthat serves Abrahamas a revealing
indicator. Already we can recognize the singularity of what is here being called
translation: it can operate within the same language, in the linguistic sense of iden-
tity. Within the same linguistic system, Englishfor example, the same word, "plea-
sure" for example, can be translated into itself and without reallychanging its mean-
ing can pass into another language, the same one, in which the alteration however
will be total, either because in phenomenological language and between inverted
commas the "same" word functions differently than in the "natural"language but
reveals its noetico-noematic sense, or because in psychoanalytic language this sus-
pension itself is suspended and the same word happens to be translatedinto a code
in which it no longer has any sense, in which, by making possible for example what
one feels or understands as pleasure. Pleasure itself no longer signifies "what one
feels" (Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, speaks of a pleasure experienced as
pain and one has to draw the rigorous consequences that follow from an affirmation
so scandalously untenable in terms of classical logic, philosophy, common sense, as
well as phenomenology). To pass from the word pleasure in ordinary language to
"pleasure" in phenomenological discourse, then to Pleasure in psychoanalytic
theory, is to proceed to translate in the strangest way. It is indeed a translation
process since one is passing from one language to another and since it is a certain
identity (or semantic non-alteration)which effectuates this traversal,letting itself be
transposed or transported. But that is the only "analogy" with what is currently or
phenomenologically called "translation."And the whole difficulty lies in this "anal-
ogy," a word that has itself to be subjected to an anasemic translation. Indeed, the
"translation"in question does not reallygo from one naturallanguage to another: it
is after all the same word (pleasure) that one recognizes in all three cases. To say that
we are dealing with a "homonym" would not be false but the effect of this
"homonym" is not that of designating different meanings with the same form. The
meanings here are not different, neither are they identical, that is analogous mean-
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ings, and if the three words written differently (pleasure, "pleasure," Pleasure)are
not homonyms, even less are they synonyms. The last one exceeds the order of
sense, of presence and of significationand "this psychoanalyticde-significationpre-
cedes the'very possibility of meanings in collision." A precedence which must also
be understood, again Iwould say translated, in the anasemic relation,that one which
goes back to the source and goes past it, to the pre-originaryand pre-semantic
source. Anasemic translation does not deal in exchanges between significations,
signifiers and signifieds, but between the realm of signification and that which,
making it possible, must still be translated into the language of that which it makes
possible, must still be repeated, reinvested, reinterpretedthere. It is this necessity
that is signaled by the capitalletters in the Frenchtranslationof the metapsychology.
What then is anasemia?and is the "figure,"which seems most "appropriate"to
translateits necessity, a "figure,"and what legitimatesits "appropriateness"?
I ought to stop now, let the translatorwork and let you read.
Just another word, though.
I am introducing here-me-(into) a translationand therefore, with this single
difficulty-saying me in all languages-am already introducing psychoanalysis in
person.
How do you present psychoanalysis in person? For that it would have to be
capable of introducing itself. Has it ever done so? Has it ever said "me"? "Me,
psychoanalysis?"Saying "me" and saying "the ego" [le moi] are not of course the
same thing. And one can be "me" without saying so, without saying it in all lan-
guages and according to all codes. And isn't "me" always a sort of homonym?
Doubtless something we identify as Psychoanalysishas said "the ego." It has iden-
tified it, defined, situated, and decentered it. Butthe movement which assigns some-
thing a place under a certain topic does not itself necessarily, or in any case simply,
escape the jurisdiction of that topic. At the moment it introduces itself as the re-
flexive, critical, authoritative, designated subject of a "movement," a "cause," a
"theoretical" discourse, a "practice," a multinational"institution more or less hap-
pily doing business with itself," Psychoanalysiscannot for all that be released a priori
from the structurallaws and notably from the topic whose hypothesis it has formu-
lated. Why not speak, for example, of an "Ego" of psychoanalysis?And why not
perceive in it the workings of metapsychological laws? The reapplication [repli] of
that structure must be acknowledged even if at first it seems formed according to a
simple analogy: just as psychoanalysisaims to teach us that, besides the Id and the
Super-ego, there is an Ego, in the same way psychoanalysisas the psychic structure
of a collective identity is composed of instances that can be called Id, Super-ego, and
Ego. Farfrom leading us to drift into a vague analogism, the figure of this relationwill
tell us more about the terms of their analogical relationthan any simple inspection of
their content. The I of Psychoanalysisis perhaps not a bad introductionto the Egoof
which psychoanalysisspeaks: what must an Ego be if something like psychoanalysis
can say "Me"?
To reapplyto any corpus the law with which it constitutes its object, to analyze
the consequences and the conditions of this singular operation, that I would say is
the inauguralgesture of Nicolas Abrahamin this domain. Inauguralbecause it opens
the essay whose translation I am supposed, as they say in English,to introduce: it
introduces it. Inauguralalso by virtue of the problematic it puts in place.
Taking as its apparent pretext the original French version of The Languageof
Psychoanalysisby J. Laplancheand J. B. Pontalis[New York: Norton, 1973], but in
realitydoing something other and more than that, Abrahamin fact poses the ques-
tion of the "right"and the "authority"of such a "corpus juris"to claim to have the
"force of law" in regardto the "status [le statut] of the psychoanalytic'thing.' " And
Abrahamadds this essential specification: "concerning the psychoanalytic 'thing,'
both in its relations to the exterior world and in its relation to itself." This double
relation is essential in that it authorizes the "comparison"and the "image"which are
then going to play an organizing role. It is the shell-kernel figure which, being at the
origin of every symbolic and figurative act, is not merely one tropic or topical
8

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mechanism among many. But at first it is advanced simply as an "image" or a "com-
parison":
Here then is a construction which, for all of psychoanalysis, is called upon to
fulfill the functions of that agency [instance] on which Freudconferred the
prestigious designation, Ego. Now, in referringin this comparison to the
Freudiantheory itself, we want to evoke that image of the Ego fighting on
two fronts: turned toward the outside, moderating appeals and assaults,
turned toward the inside, channelling excessive and incongruous impulses.
Freudconceived of this agency as a protective layer,an ectoderm, a cerebral
cortex, a shell. This cortical role of twofold protection, directed inwardand
outward, can be readilyrecognized in the Vocabulary;it is a role that under-
standably does not go unaccompanied by a certain camouflage of the very
thing to be secured. Yet the shell itself is marked by what it shelters; that
which it encloses is disclosed within it. And even if the kernel of
psychoanalysis is not to appear in the pages of the Vocabulary,its secret and
elusive action is nonetheless attested to at every step by its unbending
resistance to encyclopedic systematization.

The kernel of psychoanalysis: what it has itself designated, in Freud'swords, as

the "kernel of being," the Unconscious, and as well its "own" kernel, its "own"
Unconscious. I italicize "own" ["propre"]and leave it between inverted commas:
nothing here belongs properly to anything, neither in the sense of the property of
ownership (at least a partof the kernel is irreducibleto any Ego)nor in the sense of a
figure's propriety, in the sense of its literalsense [sens propre] (the "figure" of "the
shell and the kernel," as soon as it is taken anasemically, functions like no other
figure; it figures among the list of those "new figures, absent from the treatises on
rhetoric").
This strange figureless figure, the shell-and-the-kernel, has just taken place,
taken its place, claimed its title: it is double and doubly analogical. 1. The "compari-
son": between the corpus juris, the discourse, the theoretical apparatus,the law of
the concept, etc., in short between the rationalizedDictionaryon the one hand and
the Ego of psychoanalysis on the other. 2. The "image": the Ego-of which
psychoanalysisspeaks-appears to fight on two fronts assuringa double internaland
external protection; it resembles a shell. At least a third title must be added, one
hidden like a kernel under the shell of the last image (and alreadythis strange figure
opens onto its "own" abyss, since it behaves in relation to itself like a shell shelter-
ing, protecting, encrypting something like its own kernel, which is another figure of
the shell and the kernel which itself ... , etc.): the "cerebral cortex" or ectoderm
evoked by Freudwas already an "image" borrowed from the register of the "natu-
ral," picked like a fruit.
But it is not only because of this characteristicmise en abime that the "shell-
and-the kernel" very quickly exceeds every limitation and measures itself against
every possible risk, covers the totalityof the field one might say, if this last figure did
not imply a theory of surface and totality which, as we will see, loses all pertinence
here.
What then is the relation, we might ask, between this "shell-kernel" structure
and the "conversion" to which Abrahamsummons it? How does it introduce that
"radicalsemantic change," that "scandalous anti-semantics"which is supposed to
have marked the coming of psychoanalytic language? Is not the "shell-and-the-
kernel" merely one tropic, topical figure among many, a quite particularmechanism
that it would be misleading to generalize with a view to lending it vast powers. Could
we not perform the same operation starting with another tropic, topical structure?
These questions and other similarones are legitimate up to a point. To what point?
There is a point or a moment when the image, the comparison, the analogy
cease. The "shell-and-the-kernel"resembles and no longer resembles its "natural"
origin; the resemblance which refers to fruitand to the laws of naturalor "objective"
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space comes to be interrupted. In the case of a fruit, the kernel can in turn become
an accessible surface. Inthe "figure,"this version never occurs. At a certain point, at
a certain moment, a dissymmetry intervenes between the two spaces of this struc-
ture, between the surface of the shell and the depth of the kernel, which, at bottom,
no longer belong to the same element, to the same space, and become incommen-
surable within the very relationthey never cease to maintain.The kernel, by virtue of
its structure, can never become a surface. "This other kernel" is not the fruit one
which can appear to me, to me holding it in my hand, exhibiting it after having
shelled it, etc. I, to whom a kernel can appear, and so that a kernel may appear to
me, must remain the shell of a kernel forever inaccessible. This dissymmetry pre-
scribes a change not only of a semantic order, but ratherI would say it is of a textual
order, on the grounds that it prescribes as well and at the same time in turn another
law for the interpretationof the "figure" (the shell and the kernel) which called it
into being.
Let us specify the sense (without sense anymore) of this dissymmetry.The ker-
nel is not a surface hidden from view which, after having passed through the shell,
could become visible. It is inaccessible, and it follows that what marks it with abso-
lute non-presence passes beyond the limitation of sense, beyond the limit of what
has always tied the possibility of sense to presentability. The inaccessabilityof an
unpresentable kernel (escaping the laws of presence itself), untouchable and unsig-
nifiable, not susceptible to being signified except symbolicallyand anasemically,that
is itself the unpresentable premise of this peculiar theory of translation. It will be, it
already has been necessary to translate the unpresentable into the discourse of
presence, the unsignifiable into the order of signification. A mutation has even-
tuated in this change of order and the absolute heterogeneity of these two spaces
(the translatedand the translating)leaves the markof a transmutationon the body of
the translation. In general, it is assumed that translation proceeds from meaning to
meaning through the medium of another language or another code. Occupied here
at the a-semantic origin of meaning, as at the unpresentable source of presence, the
anasemic translation must twist its tongue to speak the non-linguistic conditions of
language. And it does it sometimes in the strangest ways, within the "same" lan-
guage, the same lexical corpus (for example, pleasure, "pleasure," Pleasure). The
pleasure Nicolas Abrahamtook throughout his life, in translating(especially poets:
Babits, G. M. Hopkins, Shakespeare,5etc.) and in meditating on translation,can be
better understood and shared if we transportourselves, translate ourselves toward
what he says about anasemia and symbol, and if we read him by turning back on his
text his own protocols for reading. At the same time, and by way of an exemplary
example, the "figure"shell-kernel ought to be read according to the new anasemic
and symbolic rule to which however it has introduced us. The law that it has given us
to read must be converted and turned back on it. And doing this we will not acceed
to anything that is present, beyond the shell and the figure. Beyond the shell, (there
is) "non-presence, the kernel and ultimate reason of all discourse," "the untouched
nucleus [I'intouch6nucldique] of non-presence." The very "messages" that the text
conveys must be reinterpreted with new (anasemic and symbolic) "concepts" of
sending, emitting, mission, or missive. The Freudiansymbol of the "messenger" or
"representative"must in turn be submitted to the same reinterpretation("we have
seen how [. . .] Freud'sanasemic procedure, thanks to the Somato-Psychic,creates
the symbol of the messenger and further on we will understand how it serves to
reveal the symbolic characterof the message itself. Byway of its semantic structure,
the concept of the messenger is a symbol insofaras it makes allusion to the unknow-
able by means of an unknown, while only the relation of terms is given. In the last

5 See for
example "The Phantom of Hamlet or Act VI,preceded by the Intermission of 'truth,'"
in L'Ecorce et le noyau. This volume bears an epigraph from G. M. Hopkins, translated by
Abraham. Volume III of Anas6mies will be entitled The Case of Jonah, a translation and psycho-
analytic commentary of the Book of Jonah by Mihaly Babits; and volume V, Poems Mimed, will
include translations of Hungarian, German and English poets.

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analysis, all authentic psychoanalytic concepts may be reduced to these two struc-
tures (which happen to be complementary): symbol and anasemia.")The very value
of authenticity ("authentic concepts") will not, it seems to me, emerge from this
transmutationwith its ordinary meaning intact.
To translateotherwise the concept of translation,to translateit into itself outside
itself. Absolute heterogeneity, signaled by the "outside itself" which extends be-
yond or on this side of sense, must still be translated, anasemically, into the "in
itself." "Translation"preserves a symbolic and anasemic relation to translation, to
what one calls "translation."And if I insist on that it is not only to invite you to notice
what is being said and done here and now, namelythat one is readingthe translation
of a text which is itself engaged in translatinganother text. But also this last text, the
first one, the one signed by Nicolas Abraham is already caught up in the same
thematic. A themeless thematic since the nuclear theme is never a theme, in other
words an object present to an attentive consciousness, posited there for inspection.
The "theme" of translationhowever gives every sign of being present, and in its own
name, in any case in its homonym, in "The Shell and the Kernel." Regularly,
whenever it is a question of the "vocation of metapsychology" ("it has to be trans-
lated " [my italics]), the phenomena of Consciousness (auto-or-hetero-perception,
representation or affect, act, reasoning or value judgement) reveal, in the language
of a rigorous symbolics, the concrete, underlying relations which in each particular
case conjugate the two anasemic poles: Kerneland Envelope. Among these relations
there exist typical or universalformations. We will focus here on one of them in as
much as it constitutes the axis both of the analytic cure and of the theoretical and
technical elaborations which derive from it. Whenever precisely it is a question of
the mythic or poetic function, in every case one must learn to distrust a certain
naivete of translationand translateotherwise: "the philistine claims to translate[my
italics] and to paraphrasethe literarysymbol and thereby he abolishes it irremedi-
ably." And further on: "this way of seeing imposes itself even more strongly when
the myth is taken as exemplaryof a metapsychologicalsituation. Itwould be naive of
anyone to take it literallyand to transpose [my italics] it purely and simply into the
domain of the Unconscious. And doubtless myths do correspond to numerous and
various 'stories' which are 'recounted' at the confines of the Kernel.")
A certain "trans-"assures the passage to or from the Kernel,through translation,
tropic transformations according to "new figures, absent from the treatises on
rhetoric," all anasemic transfers. In its relation to the unpresentable and non-
appearing Kernel, it belongs to that transphenomenalitywhose concept had been
posited ever since "The Symbol or What Lies Beyond the Phenomenon" (a 1961
unpublished essay collected in the volume of Anasemie II under the title L'Ecorceet
le noyau.) One ought then to turn back to the opening of the work.
In 1968 the anasemic interpretation certainly bore primarilyon Freudianand
post-Freudian problematics: metapsychology, Freud's "pansexualism" which was
"the anasemic (pansexualism) of the Kernel," that "nucleic Sex" which was sup-
posed to have "no relation with the difference between sexes" and about which
Freudis supposed to have said, "again anasemically,that it is in essence viril"(that it
seems to me is one of the most enigmatic and provocative passages in the essay),
certain elaborations coming after Freudwhose "implications,"and "dependant rela-
tions" are situated by Abraham ("pseudology of the child," "childhood theory,"
"immobilism"and "moralism,"etc.)-so many paths carved out for an historicaland
institutional decipherment of the psychoanalytic field. And also, consequently,
forms of reception or rejection, assimilation, avoidance, rejection or incorporation
that he can reserve for such investigations.
Forthis anasemic interpretationbears also, one might say, on itself. It translates
itself and asks to be read according to the protocols that it constitutes or performson
itself. What is said here in 1968, about anasemia, the symbol, the "duplicity of the
trace," prescribes retrospectivelyand by anticipationa certain type of reading of the
shell and the kernel of "TheShell and the Kernel,"etc. Allthe texts priorto and after
1968are in a way enveloped there, between the shell and the kernel. It is in that long
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term reading project that I wanted here initiallyto engage. Naturally,it is not only a
question of reading, but in the most workadaysense of the term, of translating.
How have I then introduced-me-(into) a translation?Perhaps I was expected
to gratifyat least two expectation. Firstthat I "situate"the 1968essay within the work
of Nicolas Abraham. It happens that chronologically it occupies an intermediate
place between the first investigations of 1961 and the more famous theorisations
(incorporation and introjection, cryptophoria, the "phantom" effect, etc.) that are
now accessible in Anas6mies I (LeVerbierde I'Hommeaux Loups, 1976)and chapters
IIto VIof Anas6mies II (L'Ecorceet le noyau, 1978). Buta chronological introduction
is always insufficient, and the work begun with MariaTorok goes on. The forthcom-
ing publications of MariaTorok will give us even more reason to believe in the
astonishing fecundity of that work. So I have not been able to "situate" it: how do
you situate what is too near and hasn't stopped occuring, here, elsewhere, there,
yesterday, today, tomorrow? Perhaps you were expecting me to say how this new
translationought to be translated. To do that I could only add another one in order
to tell you in sum: it's your turn to translate and you have to read everything,
translate everything; it's only just begun.
One last word before I withdraw from this very threshold. Quoting Freud, Ab-
rahamspeaks here of a "foreign, internal territory."And one knows that the crypt,
whose new concept he proposed with MariaTorok, has its locus in the Ego. It is
lodged, like a "false unconscious," like the prothesis of an "artificialunconscious,"
in the interiorof a divided self, and like every shell it faces on two fronts. And since
we have spoken here, as if it were finally a difficulty of translation, about the
homonymy between "Egos" [des "Moi"] and the singular expression "the Ego [le
Moil of psychoanalysis,"the question will have alreadybegun to be asked: and what
if there were a crypt or phantom within the Ego of psychoanalysis?And if I say that
question has already begun to be posed, by itself, like a toothing stone [en pierre
d'attente], it is not in order to presume to know what stone means.
Nor in order to decide with what intonation you will say, in the false infinityso
variously declined of I-me: ME-psychoanalysis-you know.
-translated by RichardKlein

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