Louis Wolfson (writer)

Louis Wolfson (born 1931 in New York)^[1] is an American author who writes in French. Treated for schizophrenia since childhood, he cannot bear hearing or reading his native language and has invented a method of immediately transforming every English word he hears of sees into a foreign word with the closest possible sounds and meaning.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia at an early age, Louis Wolfson was placed in psychiatric institutes during his adolescence, where he underwent severe treatments, notably electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). His relationship with his mother was deeply complex, as she was both his carer and the one who had him institutionalized. Because of his radical intolerance of his native language, which he refused to use, he learned foreign languages (notably French, German, Hebrew and Russian), and became used to spontaneously translating (through a sophisticated technique) whatever was said to him in English into a Sabir of these languages.

In 1963, Wolfson submitted a manuscript to the French publishers Gallimard in which he set out, in French, the principles of his linguistic system, and how he employed it in his daily life, along with his other mania, about the food he consumed and the possible microbes and worms it contained. About a third of the manuscript was published in 1964 in the Gallimard journal Les Temps Modernes, with the book Le Schizo et les langues (The Schizo and Languages) following in 1970 in the collection "Connaissance de l'Inconscient" that had just been launched by writer and psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. It generated great critical interest, due in parts to its introduction by Gilles Deleuze. Seven years later, Wolfson's mother died of complications from an ovarian tumour. The author, now liberated from her guardianship, left New York and moved to Montreal in 1984.

There, Wolfson wrote an account of the last months of his mother's life, marked by her increasing agony and his obsessive practice of betting on horses. The text — Ma mère, musicienne, est morte... (My Mother, a Musician, Has Died) — lacks the fascination of Le Schizo et les langues, and is deeply racist against African Americans, as well as antisemitic (despite Wolfson's own Jewish heritage). It was published in 1984 by Éditions Navarin. The text has become scarce. He wrote a new version during 2011. It was published by éditions Attila in 2012.

He moved to Montreal in 1984, and lived there until November 1994 (with a four to five year hiatus in Chicago), when he moved to Puerto Rico, where he still lives. He became a millionaire on 9 April 2003 after winning the lottery, but subsequently lost most of the money through investments which failed during the financial crisis of 2008.

• Wolfson, Louis (1970). Le Schizo et les langues. Connaissance de l'inconscient (in French). (Introduction by Gilles Deleuze). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-027436-5. (new edition in 1987)
• Wolfson, Louis (October 1977). "L'épileptique sensoriel schizophrène et les langues étrangères, ou Point final à une planète infernale". Change (in French): 119–130. (changes and additions to Le Schizo et les langues)
• Wolfson, Louis. "Full Stop for an Infernal Planet or The Schizophrenic Sensorial Epileptic and Foreign Languages". Semiotext(e). (changes and additions to Le Schizo et les langues, translated into English)
• Wolfson, Louis (1984). Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne mardi à minuit au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan. Bibliothèque des Analytica (in French). Paris: Navarin. ISSN 0756-273X.
• Wolfson, Louis (2012). Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne mardi à minuit au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan. Bibliothèque des Analytica (in French). (new, augmented edition). Le Rayol, France: Éditions Attila. ISBN 978-2-917084-47-2.

• "Louis Wolfson et la finance" Éditions Attila. (in French)
• Wolfson dit merde à la mort", Le Fric-Frac Club. (in French)
• Louis Wolfson, « L'étudiant de langues schizophrénique », in La Revue des ressources. (in French)
• L'Absentéisme verbal de Louis Wolfson schizo, École lacanienne de psychanalyse. (in French)

• Auster, Paul. "One-Man Language". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2017-07-01.

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