Notes on a Prehistory of Poststructuralism

In recent years, psychoanalysis has received renewed interest across a wide range of humanities disciplines, promising a new take on the problem of materiality and the unconscious in culture. This essay unfolds the history of a footnote to Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History in which the historian wrote that psychoanalysis teaches us how the body speaks and speech hides. In the following, I attend to the epistemic surroundings in which this notion assumed plausibility and became true. It first emerged in the late nineteenth century discourse around hysteria when silencing the voices of hysterics was considered a necessary condition of the exact recording their bodies’ symptoms. With its transfer to psychoanalysis and its recontextualization in poststructuralist humanities, this notion leaves us with the question, If speech hides, what does it conceal, obscure, suppress, or censor? To address this question, I discuss how the episode at La Salpêtrière and its reverberations can be interpreted as prehistory of poststructuralism.