The politics of the fragment, the fragment which undoes the system of representation, which, like the unconscious, does not stand for anything, is central to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s turn to a third “mad text,” Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. The second fragment, from the first years of the twentieth century, is the transcript of an oral interview with another seamstress, Babette S.: “I am the finest professorship”: “This is again the highest activity–double–twenty-five francs–I am double polytechnic irretrievable–professorship includes in itself the fine learned world-the finest world of art–I am also these titles–snail museum clothing, am I, that emanates from me–to cut no thread, to choose the best samples, those representing much, and consuming little cloth–I created that that concerns me–the fine art world is, to apply the trimming where it can best be seen–plum cake on an Indian meal layer. This is “hypertext” this is “untamed writing.” 1 She is declarative: ‘I,’ ‘mine,’ ‘my jacket,’ ‘my white stockings….’, ‘I am in the Hubert-us-burg / ground floor,’ ‘children,’ ‘sister’ and ‘cook.’ In the inside she has written ‘1894 I am / I today woman.’” Re-embroidering the laundry number printed on her jacket, “something institutional and distant” is transformed “into something intimate, obsessive and possessive.” She transcribes herself. There is no beginning or end, just spirals of intersecting fragmentary narratives. Words appear and disappear into seams and under layers of thread. In the words of artist Renée Turner, the jacket is “embroidered so intensively that reading is impossible in certain areas of the garment. It belonged to a woman called Agnes Richter who lived in an Austrian asylum in the late 1890s.

Freud & Jung by Anthony Stevens