Mia Couto: the supplement of (at) the origin, in Sleepwalking Land…

Abstract

We saw, in Mia Couto’s novel, the implications of Muidinga’s referring to Kindzu’s writings as letters. We thought they are based on the derridian notion of supplement and – to understand Muidinga’s amnesia – and the following the differences, on the field of psychotraumatology, between Freud, Pierre Janet and Ferenczi up to those psychoanalists like Philip Bromberg that, in our days, think dissociation as constitutive to the subject as a plural entity, instead of simply reducing it to repression. Given Kindzu’s self-definition as a writer of dreams, we asked ourselves what could be a “writing before the letter” – as that of the dreams conceived, by Muidinga, as “letters sent to our other remaining lives” – reading “Freud et la scène de l'écriture”, from L'écriture et la différence, “Ce dangereux supplément...”, in De la grammatologie, “Envois”, in La carte postale and “Télépathie”, in Psyché - Inventions de l'autre, by
Jacques Derrida.