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Almut Sh. Bruckstein / House of Taswir

The Talmudic Bride and Her Shadow’s Dream: A Letter to the Psychoanalyst of my Beloved

Translated in Collaboration with
Frederick AJ Simon

• Gestaltung: Luise Bartels

The Talmudic Bride turns into an intransigent, jealous and threatening ‘outsider’ to the psychoanalytic setting, a psychotic hallucinatory female voice from a barbaric past, disavowed, undead, knocking, even screaming, at the scene from without.

The laws of yichud are transformed in the public house of study into a libidinous speech act among scholars. The dizzying a-topia of their tangential speech, the libidinous dynamics of their spontaneous interventions, their precise literary associations and intimate proximity with a text that radically withdraws in its opaque fullness and depth, evokes a verbal ejaculate within the extimacy of the Lehrhaus. Unlike the bride-lover, who rhythmically structures, postpones, withdraws and returns the touches of her beloved, the (textual) bride of the scholars in the Lehrhaus is a permanently absent ‘third’, a deep void of evocative emptiness that turns every single written letter into an in-situ saying-to-the-other, one that withdraws in ­elliptical loops as it is spoken: my chavrutha plays with my words when they are still on my lips, and turns them into a kiss.

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