Abstract
The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinter-like, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us — often long outstaying its welcome. Old word-scars embody a ‘knowing it by heart’, as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ. But their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we cannot forget.
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Notes
Joan Scott, writing about history’s phantasms, notes that ‘retrospective identifications, after all, are imagined repetitions and repetitions of imagined resemblances’. In ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2001, pp. 284–304 (p. 287).
Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 158–9.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Ecrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 315.
V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans, from the 1930 edn by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 39.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 187.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 103.
Marcus Aurelius, maxim 20, Book 9, Meditations, Penguin Classics, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (London and NY, Penguin Books, 1964), p. 142.
A recall of the title Love’s Work, by Gillian Rose (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995).
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© 2004 Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley
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Lecercle, JJ., Riley, D. (2004). Bad Words. In: The Force of Language. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503793_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503793_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52139-5
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