Multilingual Body: The Case of Louis Wolfson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Louis Wolfson, multilingualism is not only a creative force but also, and primarily, a necessary force. Wolfson cannot physically bear the sound of his mother’s shrieking voice, and every word uttered or read in English hurts him just the same. In order to escape his own language, he embarks in the simultaneous study of four foreign languages: French, German, Hebrew and Russian. Though not physically removed from his home country, he manages, by way of complex literary transformations and various bodily contraptions, to extract himself from the language that surrounds him. The world he creates as the result of his rejection of the English language is multilingual and entirely his own. Wolfson inhabits a linguistic world which bears no trace of his painful English experience, but instead belongs to mute dictionaries and linguists’ textbooks. \n \nThe extraordinary account of his linguistic inventions and survival techniques is written in French, and was eventually published in 1970 under the title Le Schizo et les Langues ou la Phonétique chez le Psychotique, with a preface by Gilles Deleuze. Deemed unstranslatable by many, I will show that the book is to some extent already a work of translation, comparable to what Derrida calls an absolute translation, from a source language which does not exist – or in Wolfson’s case has ceased to exist – to a new destination language of his own, and is accompanied by a partial loss of the sensing body.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".