2nd Prague conference
otto fenichel
AND HIS LEGACY

There are no bridges from one world to another, from one identity to another. Still a stranger in a new world, already a stranger to the world abandoned, a stranger to oneself, the expatriate is both a subject and an object of the loss. Exile is questioning of basic myths and affiliations, it is an explosion of a former psychic body. It is straying and searching, a question how to be the other to oneself. Walking through the riverbed, through an endless path of mirrors, through the way of uniqueness of the subject beyond the borders of mother tongue and fatherland – that is an expatriate’s fate. Exile is an experience to “speak and think the world differently” where language is a living treasury of the original speech real to which the reality of the new will relate. Exile is a kind of solitude, of the price for that extent of freedom that has no other name than devenir*: “becoming oneself in reinvented speech”.
* Cf. Gilles Deleuze