Simon Wortham
BERLIN W, OR, MÉSALLIANCE POSTHUMOUS FRAGMENTS, 2022
BERLIN W, OR, MÉSALLIANCE POSTHUMOUS FRAGMENTS, 2022
Sometimes, with hair pinned, her bare neck like stripped bone or an alpine pass, pure wordless movement, stature in flight. Walking as the expression of a distance that encloses everything within itself. Memory losing breath in the slipstream of her. As if she was already there, wherever she was going. Inhuman grace, to borrow some words from Kleist, passing through infinity. That’s how she walked.
These are the last of the papers to be released by the estate of Peter Müller. Shortly before his death, Peter’s brother Luca replied to a speculative request from the editor with a hundred or so handwritten pages. The papers included what appeared to be a preliminary sketch for an academic publication, marked ‘Notes on the Typology of a Neurosis’. There was another set of pages describing Müller’s time in West Berlin during the 1970s. It is a memoir, of sorts. At its centre is a woman with another name than her own. But there is also material about Berlin itself. The story of Berlin, and the story of Müller’s experience of the city, is told through a variety of literary, historical, and architectural vignettes entangled with his reflections upon a love affair—an affair that carries a political charge as much as an existential one.
‘Sly and subtle. If Nabokov hadn’t hated psychoanalysis, and had actually read Freud, he might have written something like this.’
–> Peter Buse
‘An ingenious and uncanny conjuring of an instantly recognisable intellectual figure. The memoirs of Peter Müller stand as a type of meta-melancholia for a lost era. Formally skilful and cinematically evocative, Berlin W is a Russian Doll of a novel.’
–> Isabel Millar
‘Impeccably researched and beautifully written, at once evocative and provocative, this little volume daringly transports the reader from the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to the personal and historical realities of an obsession.’
–> Elizabeth Rottenberg
Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities at Kingston University. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), Modern Thought in Pain (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Resistance and Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Hope (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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These are the last of the papers to be released by the estate of Peter Müller. Shortly before his death, Peter’s brother Luca replied to a speculative request from the editor with a hundred or so handwritten pages. The papers included what appeared to be a preliminary sketch for an academic publication, marked ‘Notes on the Typology of a Neurosis’. There was another set of pages describing Müller’s time in West Berlin during the 1970s. It is a memoir, of sorts. At its centre is a woman with another name than her own. But there is also material about Berlin itself. The story of Berlin, and the story of Müller’s experience of the city, is told through a variety of literary, historical, and architectural vignettes entangled with his reflections upon a love affair—an affair that carries a political charge as much as an existential one.
‘Sly and subtle. If Nabokov hadn’t hated psychoanalysis, and had actually read Freud, he might have written something like this.’
–> Peter Buse
‘An ingenious and uncanny conjuring of an instantly recognisable intellectual figure. The memoirs of Peter Müller stand as a type of meta-melancholia for a lost era. Formally skilful and cinematically evocative, Berlin W is a Russian Doll of a novel.’
–> Isabel Millar
‘Impeccably researched and beautifully written, at once evocative and provocative, this little volume daringly transports the reader from the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to the personal and historical realities of an obsession.’
–> Elizabeth Rottenberg
Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities at Kingston University. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), Modern Thought in Pain (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Resistance and Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and Hope (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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108 pages
120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-910055-94-6
£10.00
SPECIAL OFFER
BUY THE TRILOGY: EARLY MASS. THE SMALL, with this book for £27.00, saving £5. 00
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120 mm x 190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-910055-94-6
£10.00
SPECIAL OFFER
BUY THE TRILOGY: EARLY MASS. THE SMALL, with this book for £27.00, saving £5. 00
Next Book ->
