On Sebastiano Timpanaro

Perry Anderson

Philology has a bad name as a discipline encouraging sterile pedantry. Today, few could cite a contemporary practitioner. But the discipline had at least one remarkable after-life, contradicting every preconception, in the strange career of Sebastiano Timpanaro, the Italian scholar and thinker who died in November last year, one of the purest and most original minds of the second half of the century.

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Vol. 23 No. 9 · 10 May 2001 » Perry Anderson » On Sebastiano Timpanaro (print version)
Pages 8-12 | 7086 words

Letters

From Lesley Chamberlain

What Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose work was discussed by Perry Anderson (LRB, 10 May), failed to see in his book The Freudian Slip is that Freud's own (sexual) instances of slips show only one way in which repression can affect behaviour and speech. The source of the repression can come from within, from fear of oneself, or it can come from without, when a fear of political and social reprisals has become embedded. Freud gives the example of a man who is supposed to get up and declare a meeting open, but finds himself declaring it closed. The inability of millions of Eastern Bloc citizens to speak Russian, even after they had studied it compulsorily for 13 years, must have been a collective Freudian slip.

By only applying Marxist and philological analyses Timpanaro failed to read Freud as a writer interested above all in the irony of the human situation, and the way it is reflected in our use of language.

Lesley Chamberlain
London NW3