Abstract. Anasemic analysis, as I practise it in Goanology, is a way of reading words, institutions and places by turning back from the present residue to ask what meanings had to be emptied for the present to arrive. This paper sets out its logic. I argue that it is dialogical and not dialectical, because it refuses the synthesis that dialectics promises and lets competing voices stay unreconciled. I argue that it is hyphenated, because it holds two terms together without fusing or opposing them. And I argue that it is retroactive and not forward-moving, because it reads against the grain of the chronological story that interpretation usually tells. I borrow the word from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok and say candidly where my use departs from theirs. I illustrate the method with three cases: the Carmelite ruins at Chimbel, the Hospicio of Margao, and the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi. I close with the discipline the method requires if it is not to become a clever way of saying whatever we already believed.
Keywords: anasemia; dialogical thinking; hermeneutics; deconstruction; retroactive reading; Goanology
1. Introduction: a façade without a roof
Stand in Gaulembhat, near the Ribandar–Chimbel road, and you see a church façade with no roof, no altar and no Mass. Roots have found the nave. Monsoon water has found the cells. It is easy to read this place forwards, as a story with a beginning and an end: a retreat built by Goan priests in the 1740s, a congregation approved in 1750, a suppression in 1835, a home for the destitute, an asylum, an old-age home, a ruin, and, in recent years, a campaign to save what is left.[1] Each step follows from the one before. The ruin is the last page.
I have come to distrust the confidence of that reading. A story told from the beginning makes the ending look inevitable, as if every earlier moment were already walking towards the ruin. The inevitability is a product of how we tell it. So I begin elsewhere, at the façade, and I ask questions that run backwards. Why does the church still say Carmo when no Old Goa Carmelite lives here? Why was a congregation of Goan priests allowed to exist, yet not to wear its habit in public? Why did a house built for chosen enclosure become a place of unchosen confinement? Each question takes one word, such as Carmelite, Tertiary, obedience or choice, and asks what it had to stop meaning for the next stage to happen.
That habit of turning back and asking what a word had to give up is what I call anasemic analysis. In earlier Goanology notes I used it intuitively. Here I try to state its logic, to test it against its neighbours, and to say what it can and cannot claim. I want the result to be useful to a reader who has never heard the word.
2. The word and its debts
I did not invent the word. Anasemia (French anasémie) was coined by the Hungarian-French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham, in an essay of 1968 called “The Shell and the Kernel,” and developed with Maria Torok.[2] The prefix ana- in Greek carries the senses of up, back, again and anew, and it is joined to sêma, the sign or the unit of meaning. For Abraham the point was that the concepts of psychoanalysis cannot work like ordinary concepts. They do not name things that sit on the surface of experience. They mediate between a “shell” of conscious, phenomenal sense and a “kernel” of non-sense, the unconscious, whose displacements and disruptions keep unsettling the meanings on the surface.[3] An anasemic concept turns back from the finished meaning towards the conditions that made meaning possible.
Jacques Derrida helped to carry the word into wider conversation. In his foreword to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, “Fors,” and in “Me—Psychoanalysis,” his introduction to Abraham’s essay, he read anasemia as a movement that goes back towards a source and then goes past it, one that does not settle meaning but keeps it in question.[4][5]
This is a long way from Chimbel, and I should be honest about the distance. Abraham and Torok were clinicians. Their kernel was the unconscious, their crypt was a place where a grief or a secret that could not be spoken became lodged in the psyche. When I use the word to read a Goan convent, a hospital or a political slogan, I am not practising psychoanalysis, and I should not borrow its authority. I am borrowing a gesture, and an analogy, and I would like to name exactly which parts I take.
Three things carry over. The first is the backward turn: the direction of reading is from the surface meaning to what lies beneath or behind it. The second is the idea that meaning is a shell, a surface that has formed over something not fully said. A word that seems stable, like Carmelite, may be sitting on top of emptied or displaced content. The third is the refusal of closure: an anasemic reading does not end by announcing the true meaning. It ends by opening the question again.
Three things do not carry over. I do not claim a clinical aim of cure. I do not claim that what lies beneath historical words is an unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense. And I do not claim that Abraham’s terms such as crypt and phantom apply neatly to collective life, though they can suggest questions about inherited silences. Where the analogy fails, I will say so. The honest name for what I do may be an extension of anasemia, and the burden is on me to show that the extension earns its keep.
3. What anasemic analysis is not
A method is partly defined by what it refuses. I will take three neighbours in turn: dialectic, forward hermeneutics and deconstruction.
3.1 Not dialectical
The dialectic, in its Hegelian form, moves by contradiction. A position (thesis) meets its opposite (antithesis), and the conflict is resolved in a higher unity that preserves and cancels both, the movement Hegel calls Aufhebung.[6] The logic is progressive: each contradiction is a step, and the story is going somewhere. Even Adorno’s negative dialectics, which refuses the final reconciliation, keeps contradiction as its engine.[7]
Anasemic analysis differs in three ways. First, it does not require opposites. The relation between a Goan non-Brahmin priest and a Brahmin-dominated Oratory, or between the founding friar of a hospital and the officials who later administer it, is not best described as thesis and antithesis. Each speaks from a different position in a shared history, and neither fully answers the other. Second, it expects no synthesis. When the Archbishop and the Chimbel friars quarrelled between 1815 and 1819 over jurisdiction, the quarrel did not resolve into a higher unity. It ended, and its residue stayed. Third, the remainder it keeps is not a stage on the way to something higher. It is a leftover that goes on speaking.
The word I use for this is dialogical, and I take it from Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin a human voice is never finished. Every utterance answers earlier ones and anticipates replies, and meaning lives in that exchange.[8] In late notes he went further and suggested that dialectic is what remains when we take a dialogue and strip out the voices, the intonations and the persons, leaving abstract concepts.[9] That is a sharp reminder. The dialectician is tempted to treat the parties to a quarrel as positions in an argument. The dialogist insists that they are people who go on answering.
The difference is a matter of emphasis, and I do not want to caricature the dialectical tradition. Hegel’s own system is more open than its popular summary, and anasemic analysis shares with dialectic the idea that meanings change through conflict. What I refuse is the promise that conflict resolves upwards.
3.2 Not forward hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the tradition of reflection on understanding and interpretation. I use the phrase forward hermeneutics for a family of approaches that move from a text or tradition towards the interpreter’s present: they begin from what a text says, assume that it is meant to be coherent, and ask how it can be understood and applied now. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account is the most influential. Understanding, for Gadamer, always begins with a pre-understanding, among whose features is what he calls a fore-conception of completeness, the presumption that the text we are reading forms a meaningful whole. Interpretation is a fusion of horizons, in which the interpreter’s present meets the horizon of the text, and a text has an effective history that carries it into our time.[10] Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic arc, moving from naive understanding through explanation to a richer appropriation, has a similar shape.[11]
I do not want to flatten these thinkers either. Gadamer’s circle already runs back and forth, and Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle makes understanding a movement between part and whole, and between our projects and what we are trying to understand.[12] Ricoeur set a hermeneutics of faith beside the hermeneutics of suspicion. So my contrast is not between hermeneutics that looks only forward and anasemia that looks only back. It is a contrast of orientation and expectation. Forward hermeneutics expects, as its default, that the tradition can be made to speak to us and that understanding grows towards appropriation. Anasemic analysis begins from the suspicion that the tradition’s smooth speech has been bought at a price. It turns back, asks what had to be silenced, emptied or displaced for the text, the institution or the word to say what it says, and lets the answer unsettle the forward reading.
I want to avoid a misunderstanding here. The backward turn is not nostalgia, a wish to return to an origin. The origin is no more innocent than the present. At Chimbel, the “original” Carmelite meaning was European, and the first Goan congregation had to hollow out that Europeanness. The turn back is a way of seeing that the forward story is one story among several possible ones.
3.3 Not simply deconstruction
The third neighbour is closest. Deconstruction, in Derrida’s hands, shows that a text’s stable meanings depend on what they exclude, that oppositions such as speech and writing or nature and culture carry hierarchies that unsettle themselves, and that meaning is always deferred and marked by the trace of what is absent.[13] Anasemic analysis owes a great deal to this. Its sense that a word carries traces of what it replaced is a deconstructive insight. And, as we have seen, the word itself passed through Derrida’s reading.
The difference is one of material and aim. Deconstruction works mainly on philosophical and literary texts and on conceptual oppositions. Anasemic analysis, as I use it, works on a wider range of objects: a word, an institution, a building, a place-name, a slogan. And it is more explicitly historical and political. It asks not only how a word’s meaning is unstable, but who emptied it, under what pressure, with what result, and what remained. In that way it is closer to what Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion, the reading that asks what a text hides.
Yet it differs from a pure hermeneutics of suspicion in one respect. Suspicion tends to end by unmasking: it reveals the interest behind the appearance. Anasemic analysis tries to resist unmasking as its last word. It is as interested in what remained after the hollowing as in what was hidden. The habit that the Carmelites were forbidden to wear in public is not just evidence of a power that wished to suppress them. It is also a surviving sign that went on speaking. That is why the analysis keeps the notion of residue.
4. The logic in five gestures
If anasemic analysis is neither dialectical, nor forward-hermeneutical, nor merely deconstructive, what does it actually do? I describe it as five gestures. They are not strict steps, and a good reading will revisit them in any order, but it is useful to name them.
4.1 Turn back
The first gesture is the ana-: begin from the present and move back. The starting point is a residue, such as a name that has outlasted its meaning, a ruin, a policy slogan, a building that no longer does what its name says. The question is: how did this word come to mean what it now means, and what did it replace? The reader declines to start at “the beginning,” because the beginning is a result of the telling.
4.2 Ask what had to stop meaning
The second gesture is the central question of the method: what did this word have to stop meaning for this to happen? I call the answer a hollowing. A word, to carry a new function, loses part of its old content. Carmelite loses European. Tertiary loses marginal. Hospicio loses hospitality and acquires referral point. Schism loses heresy and acquires jurisdictional quarrel. The gesture is analytical and it is also humane: it reads the history of a word as the history of people who had to give something up, or had something taken from them, so that the word could be used differently.
A caution belongs here. I speak of words being hollowed, but words do not act. People and institutions act on them. Careful analysis therefore tries to name who did the hollowing, in whose interest, and with what means, or to say frankly that the agent is unclear. Sometimes the hollowing is deliberate. Often it is the unintended effect of many small decisions. I will return to this.
4.3 Let the voices answer
The third gesture is dialogical. Having found what a word gave up, I ask who spoke on each side and who did not speak at all. At Chimbel there are the Archbishop’s letters and the friars’ replies. There are not, in the sources I know, accounts by the women and children confined in the recolhimento, or the people classed as insane who lived in the asylum. An anasemic reading marks that silence as part of the evidence. A dialogical method does not pretend that every voice survives in the archive. It asks the reader to hear what the silence implies.
This gesture also guards against the dialectical temptation. The voices are not positions in a syllogism. They are particular people, answering one another, and some of them may never be answered.
4.4 Hold the hyphen
The fourth gesture is the one I find hardest to explain and most useful in practice. I call it hyphenated thinking. A hyphen is the smallest mark in the language that does two things at once: it joins two words and it keeps them two. Carmelite-asylum. Charity-state. Bamonn-Chardó. Hospice-hospital. In each, the hyphen holds together terms that history has bound without merging them.
There are three reasons the hyphen matters. First, it resists fusion. A dialectical synthesis would dissolve the two terms into a third. The hyphen leaves them side by side, each still carrying its own history. Second, it resists opposition. It does not say that A and B are enemies, only that they are in relation. Third, it makes room for what Homi Bhabha has called the in-between space, the interstitial zone where cultural meanings are negotiated, where neither of the joined terms stays pure and neither disappears.[14]
But the hyphen can also hide power. Compounds such as “Indo-Portuguese” or “Judeo-Christian” can suggest a symmetry that history does not support. So the analyst asks of every hyphen: which term sits in which position, and who chose the join? A hyphen that looks like friendship may record a conquest.
4.5 Read forward again
The last gesture returns the reader to the present with a changed question. The aim of turning back is not to stay in the past but to open new possibilities of reading. Once we have seen that Hospicio was hollowed from hospitality into something else, we can ask what a renewed hospitality would require. Once we have seen that the Chimbel ruin has been read as a monument to decline, we can read it as a memory of two things held together, the self-assertion of a Goan priesthood and the confinement of people who had no say. The forward reading is not abolished. It is reopened.
The five gestures can be summarised as a rhythm: turn back, ask what was emptied, let the voices answer, hold the terms together, read forward again. It is a way of thinking that is retroactive, dialogical and hyphenated at once.
