The Concept of Palimpsest

Palimpsest is a term that denotes a manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the new. The concept of palimpsest has recurrently been used to explain the layered construct of architectural monuments and urban morphologies developed through the course of history. This application of the concept of palimpsest is associated with Sigmund Freud’s use of Roman palimpsest to model the structure of human mind. He recognizes a similarity  between the way Rome evolved in stages and the mind of the individual person. He suggests that the city of Rome can be imagined not as a human habitation but as a psychical entity with similarly long past, an entity in which nothing that has once come into existence would have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one (Freud, 1989).

It is also the case in a palimpsest when just the appearance of the layers of partially erased texts is concerned. In this sense cities are not comparable with human mind. However, when the focus is not just put on the appearance of the physical construct of cities but on the intangible underlying spatial systems, deep similarities between cities and human mind, as it is understood by Freud, can be uncovered. Spatial layers in cities and their interrelations, like unconscious and conscious memories in human mind, are dynamic and ever changing. The reference to the metaphor of palimpsest can be useful when the content of the texts, and not just their appearance, is the focus of consideration.

The Palimpsest introduces the idea of erasure as part of a layering process. There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. Texts and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures. A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.

Barthes' use of the words perverse palimpsest highlights the will involved. This is not an accidental covering of one line with another, but a conscious 'un-writing', or rewriting. This is picked up again by Barthes in a separate piece of writing:

“Twombly seems to cover up other marks, as if he wanted to erase them, without really wanting to, since these marks remain faintly visible under the layer covering them; this is a subtle dialectic: the artist pretends to have "spoiled" some piece of his canvas and to have wanted to erase it; but then he spoils this erasure in its turn; and these two superimposed "failures" produce a kind of palimpsest”. (Barthes, 1985, p.179-80)

       

There is a suggestion that the play of truth and fiction is something that could be described as an undecidable element within erasure "undecidable truth and fiction of every erased stroke, title, word, writing, text, etc." (Leavey intro. to Derrida, 1980, p.15).), a balancing factor that prevented the erased text from being altogether obliterated. This fiction of an erasure, is like the theatrical staging of a death, where it is not the obliteration of that character or thing that is the aim, but rather that it is a means of gaining new knowledge about that character or thing which is (fictionally) killed or erased, and gaining new knowledge about the process of death or erasure itself.