There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

16. Homage to Serge Leclaire

October 23,1994

Serge Leclaire, my friend.

Someone said to me recently that there are no friends in politics. Are there any friends in psychoanalysis? In my case, there was one friend: you. From the very beginning, you honored me with your friendship, and I was as proud of it as I was intimidated by it. Thanks to your good offices I very quickly accepted the risks and the pleasures involved, without ever becoming accustomed to them. And today, I thank Geneviève Leclaire, who has done me the honor of inviting me to talk about you here.

I met you as you were going from one bank to the other, going against writing (à contre-écriture), swimming with the tide of history from the right bank to the left. For me it was a few days before I left for China, for Peking, for the first time, a few days before my daughter’s eleventh birthday and at the end of a seven-year analysis with Lacan. I felt as though I were a woman in parentheses, between West and East, between mother and daughter.

I came to you with a demand for work that was imprecise, undecided, and perhaps undecidable. You almost immediately skewed the deference, displaced the respect, subverted the place of the master, and abolished the analytic generations in order to establish a reciprocity between us, to make me your partner, to make yourself my contemporary. Neither analyst nor father, neither brother nor son. The scene between us was neither analytic nor incestuous. Instead, informed by your analytic history and oriented by my political history, the relationship between the man that you were and the woman that I am, between you and me, similar but nonidentical, was one of equality within the differential dissymmetry that concerned us. It was, as we desired it to be, a relationship of parity.

There was little resemblance between us. You were born in the North, and you were a solid bourgeois. Your voice was poised, chocolaty, unctuous, even. Your discourse was slow and composed. We had little in common, except perhaps our small stature. We remained small.

I recognized in you the primal friend, the one I had known before we first met: the little boy I had known when I was three reappeared in my life a grown man, just as I was a grown woman; we met in our maturity. From the very start you joined me in the parenthesis between father and son in order to free yourself from some secret that was weighing on your man’s heart.

We turned the primal ground between us—childhood—into a time that existed before the written word or, rather, into a writing that existed before writing, into an undeciphered writing like Linear A. Through what we shared we practiced friendship, friendship as experience.

Our common objective was to take over, fulfill a promise, and work toward the future. The object of our (unconscious) work was our ongoing invention or what I would now call the democratic personality.

Nothing was agreed between us, nothing was familiar, nothing was fixed, nothing was natural. We never shook hands, never called one another. We were just there, simply, quietly there together, facing each other, in the joy and the smile of one another’s presence. We used to meet in gardens, in paradise. I loved your house in the mountains, and you loved my houses in other places.

But while you liked to welcome and receive, perhaps you liked coming and going even better. You liked coming to my home, for example, and presumably to the homes of others as well. You liked me to invite you, and when I forgot to do so for too long you would remind me: “I’d love to pop over for a few days.” You would turn up, cheerful, in good form, with almost no luggage, no phobias, ready for anything. Everything was to your liking: the water, the air, indoors, outdoors, the gardens, the kitchen. You would make yourself at home, frisk about and purr, half-dog and half-cat. And we talked a lot. A lot.

Childhood smiled at us in our respective homes, which we often exchanged, like a promise that could finally be kept. We were attentive to each other, accepting and understanding. It’s simple: we got on well. There was a bond between us, a space that was incurably fresh and innocent. Before and beyond envy and hate, before and beyond sexuality and transference.

Love between a man and a woman, between two men or between two women is difficult but possible. Friendship between two men is normal; friendship between two women has been decreed impossible. But friendship between a man and a woman is suspect, as though it were always a matter of frustrated love, as though the beast were always prowling in the jungle. It is a truism to say that friendship (amitié), which should be written as âmitié with a circumflex accent, true âmitié comes from the soul (âme), and many still hold the view that women have no soul. But you were one of the few men, the precious few, who have known from birth, naively and natively, that women do have souls. What we had was, precisely, that state of the soul, a friendship that was gracious and fervent, light and dense, joyous and thoughtful, idle and curious, episodic and constant, dispassionate and sexed, blossoming and reserved, primal and definitive, elective and nonexcluding, voluble and studious, open and faithful, nonexclusive, sharing, and loyal, frank and straightforward. In a word, and to use our respective and allotted signifiers, our friendship was living and thinking.

When we were together, we let each other be. We had, each of us in our own right, a taste for escapades, a sense of escape, an ability to break ranks, to set off in the opposite direction from where the killers of hope were lying in wait for us. It was hard to shut us up in the fortress of dogma, in the prison of ideologies, or to force us to wander endlessly in the labyrinth of libertinage. We had both survived, come though the persecutions and the bombardments of war and Nazism. Perhaps conjugating endurance and humility was all we had to do in order to escape.

We confided in each other, told each other our secrets, but never those of others; we were never complicit, never waged war on anyone. We would meet for, never against.

You would discreetly evoke the youthful love you felt for Geneviève; after more than twenty years you were still astonished at her youthfulness.