Poetical Anamnesis

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Being a writer and artist-scientist it was obvious for me to (also) use language as a resource for my artistic research on the margins of medicine and philosophy. In the course of my PhD project I developed poetry-based practices to broaden the horizon of our (mainly bio-medically informed)understanding of autoimmunity. The Poetical Anamnesis / PA is a language-based technique I designed to investigate the existential dimension of autoimmune diseases. It conceptualizes the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. The symptoms of an autoimmune disease are read as signs of a starting transformation of an organism into a poetical means of world modification. The background to this understanding is provided by Novalis, the Romantic poet and scientist, who postulated that the poetic process of creation, in its ultimate consequence, means transforming the body and its organs into tools for creating and modifying the world. The goal of the PA is to interpret the signs of change, of transformation (i.e. the symptoms), expressed by the patient, in regard to the world and the status of its carrier. It is about capturing the body poem, translating it and reconstructing it as transforming serial poetry. The practical part of the PA consists in editing processes deployed on the transcripts of anamnesis interviews. It is based on poetical principles, like on the formal rules of a specific verse form, or on a specific rhythm triggered by the words that where randomly selected. The end result of the application of these principles is a lyrical series: With every new poem the patient is created as a transient poetical formation; new information emerges and becomes comprehensible, and the ideal result is a gain of meaning on all sides – on the aesthetic as well as on the medical and the personal side.

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Overcoming Boundaries: A Dialogue Between Artistic and Scholarly Research

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