Hatred and Forgiveness

In response to this invitation to discuss some of the aspects of André Green’s work that have marked me, I will begin with an admission of personal debt: my personal history has not ceased to cross your path, dear André Green, through the clinical and theoretical problems I will try to articulate here before you. Through your amiable listening and your generosity as a thinker, and without being my analyst (but who can be sure?), you have already supported me for thirty years: supervisions, seminars, not to mention those sessions without a label in your various domiciles, late into the evening. First, I must thank you: briefly, to avoid the emotion that comes over me at moments like these, but without falling into ingratitude out of a sense of modesty.

The three problems I will formulate here will examine the resonance of your research as an analyst with the significant advances of contemporary thought, as I see them, in three areas to which my own work is attached:

These are not “questions,” strictly speaking, but rather “free associations,” reflections inspired by your works, and perhaps hypotheses that I would like to present to you today for your commentaries: your echoes, agreements, and reservations have always helped me and, I am sure, will help me again today to move forward and, to say it with pathos, to live.

In your first book on affect, when you developed the idea of a “primary symbolization of affect,”¹ I understood that you saw affect as a primary sublimation, as analytical experience revealed it to you. The regressive path of affect, you say, is not only a discharge oriented toward the interior of the body, but also a “capacity to retain,” an “inhibition of the drive with an internal goal.” Affect participates in the dynamics of drive-related introjection (which is experienced as shame, fear, joy, etc.), an already symbolic process (which I call semiotic), the degree zero of symbolism, similar to motivity and perception. This investment of the drive is objectalized, and, as a result, it is the primary form of sublimatory creativity that characterizes the speaking being. In other words, the investment called affect creates a transnarcissistic object: that is why we feel alive provided we feel affects.

If I am breaking down your concept of the “double reversal of the drive—toward the object and toward itself” this way, it is because it seems to share a kinship with various kinds of modern research beyond the psychoanalytical clinic—post-Saussurean, inspired by psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on the “heterogeneity of the signifier” (for example, my proposals of a “double register of meaning”: semiotic (drive related) and symbolic (language); Culioli’s linguistics, which works with the presupposition of a semiotic meaning subjacent to the signification of a given national language; indeed, Derrida’s notion of the architrace, which he suggested in response to the Freudian psychical apparatus (neither pure discharge, nor simple memory trace).

In this context, your sense of affect as “primary sublimation” shows that the latter is at once the condition for later modalities of the signifying process (gradually elaborated in the child and stratified in successive and interactive layers in the adult subject) and the double inseparable from language (in the sense of tongue, an object of linguistics that—obsessively?——isolates the signifier/signified pair of affect).

Understood this way, your conception of the heterogeneity of the signifier seems to me to have two consequences, which I will ask you to comment on, if you would:

1. While for Lacan the unconscious is “structured like a language” (linguistic imperialism over the unconscious), and, inversely, for Freudians loyal to the doxa of the first Freud, the unconscious is pure drive (censor of the initial linguistic environment that immediately modulates the infantile unconscious in the familial and transgenerational framework), you place affect at the interface of the artificial dichotomy of drive versus language. This theorization comes from analytical experience and allows it to flourish. Your listening to narcissism and early ties to the object, in sum, led you to decompartmentalize psychoanalysis and linguistics. We know the benefits that psychoanalytic listening would draw from this: following the patient’s discourse “as closely as possible” but without being limited to the formality of the signifier, interpreting desires and affects, object (objectal) links and preobject (preobjectal) states, in transference as well as in countertransference. I won’t belabor the point; all those who have taken your seminars or had you as a supervisor know what it means to be “close to the discourse” to interpret affect, revealer of narcissism, and the desire trapping Eros in Thanatos.

2. Outside of psychoanalysis your conception of language, based on the theory of affect and culminating in the notion of a heterogeneity of the signifier, seems to me to lead to a revolutionary consequence in the language sciences. Can we still speak of two separate agencies: psychic apparatus/language apparatus? If the signifier is heterogeneous (architrace and language, affect and linguistic sign), then it provides the link between these two artificially separated apparatuses. That is what we hear in psychoanalysis: a living discourse. But if that is true, it is no longer legitimate to separate linguistics from psychoanalysis. And this reworking, outlined in work like Culioli’s in linguistics or mine in semiology, is of interest to the fate of language sciences. In psychoanalysis it is perhaps the best response we can give to Lacan’s problematic gesture, which was an opening (opening the unconscious to language) and a trap (enclosing the unconscious in a particular state of linguistic science).

As an innovative reader of Freud, you propose a theory of sublimation that is striking in its originality, both in terms of your interpretation of works (Shakespeare, Proust, Nerval) and your strictly theoretical elaborations. I will examine the latter, supported by your interpretation of Freud’s text, The Ego and the Id.

Since sublimation is a narcissistic retention of the life drive over the productions of the ego, it is an investment of the investment and therefore liberates the death drive toward itself and toward others (a few examples of this are Nerval’s suicide and Proust’s asthma, sadomasochisms that culminate in modern art). Starting from there, you observe:

—on the one hand, the “drive quality [pulsionnalisation] of Ego defenses,” the psychological effect of which is to freeze time, to obliterate the other and the connection to the other;

—on the other hand, a parceling of the other: the one who is reduced to a part object of satisfaction (example: Proust, homosexuality, and fetishism).

In sum, you highlight a sublimation with two sides: the death drive is activated by sublimation, and the paradigm of perversion assuming ego defenses favors sublimatory processes.

My research (on Proust, Colette, Céline, and others) has led me to believe that this paradigm of perversion might be the foundation for the subject constructed on the mode of sublimation. There would be no sublimatory creativity without a certain perversity of the mother/child link. Isn’t the dead mother the mother of an artist?

An example borrowed from Proust, once again, supports this hypothesis, which I draw from your work: the character of Odette and her relationship to time. While all the male characters at the bal de têtes grow older and melt like wax dolls, Odette is the only one who does not age. Several passages before the end of Time Regained show us Odette de Crécy, the cocotte who became Odette Swann and ends up ennobled as Odette de Forcheville, as a possible phantasmatic double of the narrator’s mother, inaccessible and seductive, cold-hearted, complicit with the Jewish community, whose body is forbidden but intrusive through grooming, perfume, and trinkets. If Odette—the attractive and seductive version of mama—eludes time, is it because she is the first object of affect, the pretext of the first assimilation in the productions of the ego? Not the object created/found by the phantasm of the neurotic, but “my object” absorbed—swallowed orally—and refashioned anally in the “investment of the investment,” captive of my language, my creation? A narcissistic-and-erotic double of the ego subject of sublimation, of the ego outside time, capable of being timeless and therefore likely to leave in search of time?

Your conception of “thirdness” makes the Father not a ferocious father of the primitive horde, a hardening of the oedipal father; not a Name-of-the-Father; but a third object, a “reunion of the analysand and the analyst.” Perhaps closer to the Father of primary identification (which Freud mentions briefly—too briefly—in The Ego and the Id); a third party between the child and the mother, with whom the future subject will identify in a “direct and immediate” way—direkte und unmittelbare; a loving and nonaggressive father; a father of the “yes” beyond the “no.”²

The oedipal triangle understood this way allows us to approach the construction of the maternal imago in a particularly original way, through the “negative hallucination of the mother.” That is, the child internalizes the absence of the mother and not the object: “the maternal object that nothing can represent.”

This orchestration of the problem is laden with consequences. I will pass over the connotations this “negative hallucination of the mother” may induce in Mallarmé scholars (the object of poetry being the “flower absent from all bouquets”) and in Catholics (more than a woman who is forbidden sexuality, isn’t the Virgin an absence in the configuration of the trinity of Father/Son/Holy Spirit? The “hole” around which the filial/paternal symbolic revolves?). And I emphasize this: the “internalization of the absence of the mother” depends on the proper integration of the oedipal. Mama belongs to papa; I am left to console myself with her absence by withdrawing into “her” répresentance, which is “my” répresentance: affect + language + idea. That is what you call the integration of the “oedipal couple,” which opens the way to the répresentance/representation of the dramas of the oedipal. We are still within the consequences of the “double reversal”: the ego invests the oedipal couple in the optimal manner, which allows it to invest the investment, that is, its own psychic functioning, and to become a speaking being.

Question: what are the optimal conditions for this to come about? Isn’t it a certain eroticization of the link to the mother and the link to the father, in other words, a mère-version and a père-version? Which Freud suggests when he distinguishes the (loving) Father of primary identification from the (forbidding) oedipal Father? On the other hand, the founder of psychoanalysis is more discreet in terms of the mother. Now what about the mother in this dynamic who allows the “investment of the investment”?

While the oedipal forbids this for the infans, it is “eroticizing and eroticized enough” to allow it to invest the investment by making it narcissistic. There would then be a split of the maternal function, between eroticization and prohibition, in the link to the child. Source of maternal madness, inevitable psychic reserve of maternal hysteria?

Religious myths weave their fabric around this split: in Christianity, the splitting of Mary between the “hole” of the Trinity and Queen of the Church, between absence and immortality, between “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”³ and the Nativity-Pietà.

Because it assures the support of primary sublimation, the mother/ woman is destined to the hystericization of her desire (in the interval of excitation-frustration): she is torn between the Irrepresentable (a role the “Dead mother” aggravates, according to your terminology)⁴ and the part object that allows itself to be used as “perverse object.”

The sexual and professional liberation of women today makes the working through of the maternal split I have just discussed, based on your writings on maternal madness, difficult and perhaps impossible: a working through that made the existence of a humanity endowed with a complex psychical apparatus, with an “interior life” capable of sublimation and working through, possible. To turn the spotlight on the modern deficiencies of the paternal function, doesn’t modern psychoanalysis lack an audible discourse to draw attention to the difficulty of the maternal vocation in this modern civilization with its discontents? I would stress that this difficulty goes beyond an appeal to Winnicott’s “good-enough mother,” the unbearable dynamic of which your work allows us to understand anew.