Lex Icon: Freud and Rimbaud

Abstract

Rimbaud’s project of "Voyance," as articulated in certain letters and poems, engages linguistic processes which are proper to the activity of "unconscious ideation" which Freud discovers in jokes and dreams. For both writers, it is largely a matter of seeing as well and hearing language, a matter of language as matter, as writing. Freudian theory thus intersects with Rimbaud’s practice, both writers suggesting something like an iconic experience of language. Their common opposition to a pointedly Cartesian mode of discourse binds desire with violence, of which the letter is the single, uncanny mark. When Rimbaud renounces his apocalyptic vision of a fleshy Word incarnate, we find that his flight to Africa connects with Freudian theory at another level: his letters home reveal his poetic adventure, and his rejection of it, as an encounter with the alien and familiar language of his father.