ÉCRIVAINER. La langue morcelée de Samuel Daiber

ÉCRIVAINER. La langue morcelée de Samuel Daiber, 19 x 12 cm, 13 b/w ill., 112 pp.Collection contre-courant Infolio / Collection de l’Art Brut, Gollion / Lausanne, 2012. 

The letters of Samuel Daiber, an author of "brut writings,"  are in the safekeeping of the Collection de l'Art Brut. This publication inaugurates a counter-current collection presenting scientific texts on the Collection de l'Art Brut's holdings. The texts are drawn up by specialists in various research fields such as art history, linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Confined to a psychiatric center in Switzerland for the second part of his life, Samuel Daiber (1901-1983) invented a private language with a wealth of neologisms, such as "paroler" (to wordsay), ma "voixaday" (my voicely), "c'est Effrayantadique" (it's Frighteningish) and "Ecrivainer" (to Writer).

Working on the borderline between linguistics and psychoanalysis, Vincent Capt—a French language and literature researcher and teacher at the University of Lausanne, as well as the cofounder of "The Crab" (Collectif  de réflexion autour de l'Art Brut, i.e. a collective for the study of Art Brut), describes and interprets— as the subject of a research project—Daiber's singular manner of shattering a language to pieces.  Capt invites us to enter a world that forever plays around with the univocal nature of meaning; a world that bespeaks as much complaint and denial of reality, as salutary creation. Vincent Capt, who has authored several articles on "brut writings," devoted his doctoral thesis (La Manie épistolaire [a mania for letter-writing]) to this subject (under the co-direction of  Jean-Michel Adam of Lausanne and Gérard Dessons of Paris 8).