If I try to conjure up his image, I see double. So I focus my vision and two photos appear, superimposed in a single image. He is a small man, refined, even elegant in appearance. Outdoors he always wears a hat. He is a man of another generation. His gaze is piercing, painful; it is at once the gaze of a man and that of a dog. I create this tension by superimposing two portraits by the same painter: the man-fruit and the man-book by Arcimboldo. One is the handsome Alexis, Virgil’s faithful shepherd. The other, my father, is the knight of the Alliance, the adventurer. Abraham and Montaigne, rather than Moses and Pascal. These two men would have nothing in common if not for me, through whom their two names crossed in time, for the space of a story, in a book.
1 The worker and the thinker are both men of exile, experience, independence, men of honor, men of ethics more than morals. At the heart of my memory and my unconscious, these two men will continue to play, work, think, and travel within me.
I remember now. I am three years old, it’s a suffocating day in August; my father takes me by the hand; I trust him; he takes me to a bullfight. It’s a real massacre; I pee in my pants. From then on I understand that all games are sexual and bloody, that joy for one can mean suffering for another. Michel Leiris,
L’âge d’homme (The age of man), preceded by
De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie (Literature viewed as bullfighting): a study of murder viewed as one of the fine arts.
2I am seventeen years old; he is teaching me to drive, in his car, the one with front-wheel drive.
I am thirty years old and, no matter how familiar this man is, the one who will lead me into the psychoanalytic arena, I side with the wild beast, our prehistory, wisdom through tears. Never will I be able to identify with the brightly clad son who kills, with the spectator who applauds and who, generation after generation, has still never reached “the age of man.” He will try in vain to offer me all his objects, his toys, his concepts, he will give them to me or he will lend them and then take them back; they will never be mine. He would like us to be contemporaries, would like fathers and daughters to become brothers and sisters—the eternal seduction.
“My little one, you have to see everything, do everything in life.” I was three years old; I was thirty years old. He renews the invitation: “The important thing is to say everything.” I shall learn the lesson, without really making it my own—and yet I do not lack words or audacity. I have also learned that truth lies in half-saying and that I am not all His, not all Him, God, the Father, the Phallus. I am not even his
filse,
3 his girl-son, his Antigone, half victim, half accomplice—even if, after yielding to the “object transfer” by getting married, I have kept her initials, A. F., Anna Freud, his own daughter.
4 If he has landscaped a huge portion of the wild terrain of my unconscious, he only knows me as he has made me, still such a small part. My father, Freud, Lacan, all my androphile fathers, you don’t understand me through and through. They have not managed to decode my “Linear A,” my intimate writing.
Without him, I wouldn’t be alive; without them, I might not be in the world. I feel respect, gratitude. They have often wounded me; I have sometimes been ashamed; when the one wanted my sister to be his son’s slave; when the other demands that the mother’s love for the son be exclusive and without ambivalence; when, always and
Encore, he claims that the hysteric says what she knows “without knowing what she is saying,” he, the father-son longing for a Name, who pretends not to know that the “Father doesn’t exist.”
5Even if here where I live you are still present and always will be, we shall never be contemporaries. Time to call a halt to matricidal writing, the matricidal
Écrits,6 the confusion of genders, the life drive and the death drive on equal footing. The era that is beginning is the age of women. As for me, I belong to the generation of women.