In 1972, the light of the summer lasted well into autumn. It illuminated a new life. I accompanied Lacan everywhere. In Barcelona, where he was invited to give a lecture, he showed me round the Picasso Museum, which in those days attracted few visitors, and introduced me to the works of Gaudí and Catalan Romanesque art, especially the Romanesque chapels with their mural paintings depicting Christ in majesty in the centre of a mandorla. A young woman took us to visit the Abbey of Montserrat. Over lunch in the sunshine, she spoke at length about herself with an intelligence which pleased Lacan. He was very attentive, very interested, and showed a presence to the other that was one of his characteristics.
It was in fact one of his most striking features, this alternation between extreme attention, where he was entirely turned towards the other, and withdrawal, an equally complete absorption in his own thoughts. It could be said that presence and absence alternated in him, but absence is not the right word. When he was so concentrated on his own reflections, the weight of his physical presence was all the more tangible; it was like having a rock at your side. If Lacan in motion, Lacan the ram, was impressive, Lacan when motionless was equally so. It was a total, unshakeable immobility, the reverse side of the decisive character of his relation to the world.
A few years ago, a young woman came to see me from Barcelona. She was writing a thesis on the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Spain, and knew that I had accompanied Lacan to that landmark conference which had not been recorded. I dug out for her the notes I had taken that evening. Scrawled in the margins there was a name and an address familiar to her. It was that of a well-known psychiatrist, a notorious Franco supporter. We had dined at his house, but I had no memory of it. She informed me that on the Internet one could find the extremely warm dedication Lacan had written for him that day in a copy of his Écrits, as well as a letter which he sent him a little later. ‘I was happy during this stay – and that it is thanks to you I have no doubt’, he had written. I read this letter, if I may say so, with emotion, like a declaration that he had not made to me but addressed to another person, a declaration that had reached me thirty-five years later. A letter, he said, always reaches its destination.
For if he gave abundant signs of his desire, Lacan was hardly inclined to sentimental effusiveness. At the very most he mentioned Stendhal to me and assured me that he felt an amour-goût for me.4 I rebelled against such a lukewarm attitude and demanded to be loved passionately. I would also say to him, with a certain malice, when he told me about his first women, that I wanted to be ‘the last’.
That autumn, he began to perfect my education by getting me to read the humourists of the beginning of the century who had mocked the clichés of love. He told me about Cami, and in my library I found two volumes of his works: Les Amants de l’Entre-Ciel and Christophe Colomb ou la Véritable Découverte de l’Amérique. He liked to quote to me from the ‘Album des Eugènes’ in Jean Cocteau’s Potomak, which he made me read. There are in it some nice sketches of the Mortimers ‘who have but one dream and one heart’, a formula which greatly amused Lacan. The Mortimers are so united and so happy that they always seem to be asleep, unless their closed eyes are a prefiguration of their conjugal bliss. Lacan’s love of Potomak was a reflection of his Dadaist side, which I think he never lost. He shared with the Dadaists their often caustic attitudes, their derision of the respectably conventional, and their taste for extravagance. He also liked to quote La Famille Fenouillard and Le Sapeur Camember. He particularly liked the famous adage: ‘Once you’ve overstepped the mark, there are no more limits’, which fitted him like a glove.
He also gave me as a present a more serious but equally humorous little book, a marvel of intelligence: Étienne Gilson’s L’École des Muses. I thought, at the time, that this gift was a warning: I shouldn’t take myself for a muse! But today I tend to think that he merely liked this work in which Gilson describes the avatars of courtly love in modern times, the dead ends and the misunderstandings encountered by Baudelaire, Wagner, Auguste Comte and Maeterlinck when they tried to update it to the style of the day.
He did not forget to supplement my education in other fields, too. So, one day, I told him of a dream in which I lost my teeth, and I interpreted this as the expression of castration anxiety. He immediately told me to go to the dentist’s, adding that if Ninon de Lenclos was still attractive at the age of seventy, this was because – and this was rare in those days – she still had all her own teeth.
Soon after Barcelona, Lacan delivered a lecture in Louvain which gave rise to the only recorded film of one of his public interventions. There was a crowd there, galvanized by the theatrical style which he deployed in response to big audiences. That evening, people saw Lacan the superstar. He spoke of death, which nobody believes in, he said, but which is the only thing that makes life bearable. Electrified by the atmosphere, a young man burst out and challenged him. The conference turned into a happening, though Lacan refused to back down, and tried to engage in dialogue with the troublemaker who, running short of arguments, ended up throwing a piece of bread soaked in water at Lacan’s shirt. He was escorted out, and Lacan resumed his lecture.
The intensity of his expression, his dramatization, made me think of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Another evening in Paris, a few months previously, at the Chapelle de Sainte-Anne, he had proclaimed that he was speaking to the walls and this was exactly what gave his audience a certain jouissance. Theatricalization was part of Lacan’s oratorical art. A mimicry of anger and ostentatious rage were its recurrent traits. They seemed to be aimed at his audience whose obtuse will to know nothing, whose deafness, in a word, doomed to failure his desire to be heard and understood. But if we gain satisfaction from being heard, we derive jouissance from talking to the walls. Beyond the address to an Other which does not hear anything, mainly because it does not exist, rage was aimed at the real. The real is when ‘little pegs don’t fit into little holes’, he liked to say. This rage was something Lacan often expressed in everyday life, which gave him many opportunities to do so. On these occasions, his rage was not in the slightest theatrical and was generally not addressed to anybody, except the maliciousness of the real, so to speak. He got extremely impatient if he was forced to wait, even at a red light or a level crossing. If he was not served promptly in a restaurant, he soon obtained satisfaction by uttering a resounding cry or a sigh that resembled a cry. And if he went back to the same restaurant, he was sure of being served quickly.
This theatricality was reserved for an audience. It was an integral part of his teaching. It was a matter of using a mimicry of rage to communicate the intolerable which confronts the ‘parlêtre’, being-as-speech, the intolerable with which the analyst must always deal in his or her practice. In private, Lacan was perfectly simple. Not in the sense of the great man whom we call ‘simple’ when he condescends to deal with his inferiors. It was just that, in his relations with others, he was deprived of the complications entailed by that dimension of intersubjectivity known as psychology. Lacan had no psychology; he had no ulterior motives; he did not try to second-guess the other. His simplicity was also due to the fact that he did not hesitate to ask for what he wanted in the most direct way.
My cousin Florence remembers having witnessed a disconcerting scene in Guitrancourt. Lacan had asked Jesus, the guardian, to procure a box of caviar from Petrossian, who for some reason or another had not managed to get hold of any. Lacan, unable to resign himself to the absence of caviar, began to implore Jesus to ‘do something’. He could roar for what he wanted, even if it was the most futile thing in the world. And this was no theatrical display.
The day after the memorable conference in Louvain, Lacan recorded an interview for Belgian television, held a long discussion with the Belgian Psychoanalytical Society, and found the time to take me to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts, where Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas made a great impression on me, as well as Brueghel the Elder’s The Fall of Icarus. He also took me to the Béguinage, with its deliberate austerity that made me dreamy. A community of individualists – that is how I imagined the Beguines – was just what I had always aspired to, I felt. Then he took me to Bruges. He made everything come alive.
At All Saints, we went to see Paola in Venice for a few days. We stayed at the hotel Europa whose rooms overlook the Salute, and we ate all our meals nearby at Harry’s Bar, which Lacan liked to the exclusion of all other restaurants – so much so that the days when it was closed left him distraught. I kept, in memory of that time, a little message signed ‘Dr Lacan’, as he liked to designate himself, which he had written on a piece of the famous bar’s headed notepaper and asked the waiter to pass to a nearby table where a couple had attracted our interest. He wanted to know which country the young blonde woman whom we had both been admiring came from. On the same piece of paper, the answer came back: she was the only blonde from Camargue, and her companion had chosen her to be his wife. Lacan was curious about everything and everybody, and always went straight to the point to satisfy his curiosity.
We went back together to Venice at least once a year. We stayed there for a week or two and visited the city from morning to evening; as in Rome, each time we would see the same places, as if we were dropping in on friends. Lacan always had his ‘Lorenzetti’ with him, the English guide book that is perhaps the most complete there is on Venice. Among the first things he had shown me, the most impressive were the Carpaccios in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, especially Saint Georges slaying the dragon, with the dragon amid the heap of its dead victims whose shredded limbs lay scattered on the ground. In his seminar Lacan had mentioned this painting as illustrating the fantasy of the fragmented body.
In this painter’s delicate works, calm and horror mingle. Another painting shows Saint George holding on a leash the dragon, dead or alive, which he has dragged to the feet of the king’s daughter on the square of the city which he has just delivered. Another painting, where fear herself seems peaceful, represents the headlong flight of a group of young monks running away from a lion who is already following Saint Jerome like a dog. Carpaccio in Venice is rather like Caravaggio in Rome; you can go round the city, its museums and its churches, following the artist’s trail, from the Legend of Saint Ursula in the Accademia to the Courtesans of the Correr Museum. But an even more productive trail is the work of Titian: his Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, for example, echoed by the no less beautiful Presentation by Tintoretto in the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, a little out of the way, close to Fondamenta Nuove. I loved that deserted area; we took the motoscafo to reach it, and not far from it, in the Gesuiti, is Titian’s Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, with its scene of night, gold and fire, which seems to prefigure Rembrandt. We did not fail to see them each time, nor Torcello, a place that Lacan was particularly fond of and not a great tourist attraction in those days. It was possible to admire at leisure the Byzantine mosaics of the cathedral, including the extraordinary Last Judgment, and to finish our stay with lunch in the gardens of the Locanda Cipriani.