Why is this example of anamorphosis on this table?1 It is here to illustrate my ideas.
Last Time I sketched out the meaning or the goal of art in the usual sense we give that term – the fine arts, for example. I’m not the only psychoanalyst to have been interested in that. I’ve already mentioned Ella Sharpe’s article on the subject of sublimation, an article that starts out with the cave walls of Altamira, which is the earliest decorated cave to have been discovered. Perhaps what we described as the central place, as the intimate exteriority or “extimacy,” that is the Thing, will help us to shed light on the question or mystery that remains for those who are interested in prehistoric art, namely, its site as such.
It is surprising that an underground cavern was chosen. Such a site only creates obstacles to the viewing that one assumes is presupposed by the creation and observation of the striking images which decorate the walls. The production of images and their viewing could not have been easy given the forms of lighting available to primitive men. Yet in the beginning those paintings that we take to be the earliest productions of primitive art were thrown up on the walls of a cavern.
One could call them tests in both senses of the word, subjective and objective. Tests no doubt for the artist, for, as you know, these images are often painted over each other; it’s as if in a consecrated spot it represented, for each subject capable of undertaking such an exercise, the opportunity to draw or project afresh what he needed to bear witness to, and to do so moreover over what had already been done before. That suggests the idea of something like the updating of a certain creative potential. Tests also in the objective sense, for these images cannot fail to seize us as being deeply linked both in a tight relationship to the world – and by that I mean to the very subsistence of populations that seem to have been composed chiefly of hunters – and to something that in its subsistence appears as possessing the character of a beyond of the sacred – something that we are precisely trying to identify in its most general form by the term, the Thing. I would say it is primitive subsistence viewed from the perspective of the Thing.
There is a line which runs from that point to the other end, infinitely closer to us, in the exercise of anamorphosis, probably around the beginning of the seventeenth century. And I pointed out the interest that exercises of this kind had for the constructive thought of artists. I tried to make you understand briefly how the genesis of this tradition might be sketched.
In the same way that the exercise on the wall consists in fixing the invisible inhabitant of the cavern, we see the link forged between the temple, as a construction around emptiness that designates the place of the Thing, to the figuration of emptiness on the walls of this emptiness itself – to the extent that painting progressively learns to master this emptiness, to take such a tight hold of it that painting becomes dedicated to fixing it in the form of the illusion of space.
I am moving fast and I just throw out these crumbs so that you can put them to the test of whatever you may subsequently read on the subject.
Before the systematic establishment of geometrical laws of perspective formulated at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, painting passed through a stage in which various artifices made it possible to structure space. The double band that appears in the sixth and seventh centuries on the walls of Santa Maria Maggiore is one way of treating certain stereognoses. But let’s leave that aside. The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness. It is this that the appearance of anamorphoses at the end of sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries represents.
I spoke last time of a Jesuit convent; it was a mistake, I checked in Baltrusaïtis’s excellent dictionary of anamorphoses, and it is a convent of the Minim Friars in Rome as well as in Paris. I don’t know why I also placed Holbein’s Ambassadors in the Louvre, when the painting is in the National Gallery in London. You will find in Baltrusaïtis’s book a subtle study of that painting and of the skull that emerges when, having passed in front of it, you leave the room by a door located so that you see it in its sinister truth, at the very moment when you turn around to look at it for the last time.
Thus, as I say, the interest of anamorphosis is described as a turning point when the artist completely reverses the use of that illusion of space, when he forces it to enter into the original goal, that is to transform it into the support of the hidden reality – it being understood that, to a certain extent, a work of art always involves encircling the Thing.
This also allows us to approach a little closer to the unanswered question on the ends of art: is the end of art imitation or non-imitation? Does art imitate what it represents? If you begin by posing the question in those terms, you are already caught in the trap, and there is no way out of remaining in the impasse in which we find ourselves between figurative and so-called abstract art.
We can only sense the aberration that is articulated in the unyielding position of the philosopher; Plato places art at the lowest level among human works, since for him everything that exists only exists in relation to the idea, which is the real. Everything that exists is already no more than an imitation of a more-than-real, of a surreal. If art imitates, it is shadow of a shadow, imitation of an imitation. You can, therefore, see the vanity of the work of art, of the work of the brush.
That’s a trap one must not enter. Of course, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent.
Everybody knows this. At the moment when painting turns once again upon itself, at the moment when Cézanne paints his apples, it is clear that in painting those apples, he is doing something very different from imitating apples – even though his final manner of imitating them, which is the most striking, is primarily oriented toward a technique of presenting the object. But the more the object is presented in the imitation, the more it opens up the dimension in which illusion is destroyed and aims at something else. Everyone knows that there is a mystery in the way Cézanne paints apples, for the relationship to the real as it is renewed in art at that moment makes the object appear purified; it involves a renewal of its dignity by means of which these imaginary insertions are, one might say, repetitively restated. The fact is, as has been noted, such insertions cannot be detached from the efforts of earlier artists to realize the ends of art in their own way.
Obviously, the notion of historicity should not be used here without great caution. The expression “history of art” is highly misleading. Every appearance of this way of proceeding consists in overthrowing the illusory operation so as to return to the original end, which is to project a reality that is not that of the object represented. In the history of art, on the other hand, by virtue of the necessity that supports it, there is only substructure. The relation of the artist to the time in which he appears is always a contradictory one. It is against the current, in opposition to reigning norms – including, for example, political norms, or indeed, systems of thought – that art attempts to operate its miracle once more.
With the anamorphosis I have here, we find ourselves faced with a game that may seem futile to you, when you think of the sophisticated operational techniques required for the success of such a little artifact. And yet how can one not be touched or even moved when faced with this thing in which the image takes a rising and descending form? When faced with this sort of syringe which, if I really let myself go, would seem to me to be a kind of apparatus for taking a blood sample, a blood sample of the Grail? But don’t forget that the blood of the Grail is precisely what is lacking.
The argument I have been developing thus far in my lecture should be interpreted only in a metaphorical way. I have only been following this line of argument because I want to discuss today that form of sublimation which appeared at a certain moment in the history of poetry, and which interests us in an exemplary way in connection with something that Freudian thought has placed at the center of our interest in the economy of the psyche, namely, Eros and eroticism.
I just wanted to point it out to you at the beginning: you might almost structure around this anamorphosis the ideas I am sketching out for you on the subject of the ethics of psychoanalysis. It is something that is wholly founded on the forbidden reference that Freud encountered at the terminal point of what in his thought one might call the Oedipus myth.
It is remarkable that the experience of what goes on in the neurotic caused Freud to leap to the level of the poetic creation of art, to the drama of Oedipus, insofar as it is something datable in the history of culture. You will see this when we take up Moses and Monotheism, which I asked you to read during our break. There is in Freud no distance from the facts of the Judeo-Greek experience, and I mean by that those that characterize our culture in its most modern everyday life.
It is equally striking that Freud couldn’t fail to pursue his reflection on the origins of morality to the point of examining Moses’ action. When you read the astonishing work that is Moses and Monotheism, you will see that Freud cannot help revealing the duplicity of his reference, of the reference that I have declared to you over the years to be the essential reference, namely, the No / Name-of-the-Father in its signifying function.
From a formal point of view, Freud makes recourse to paternal power for a structuring purpose that appears to be a sublimation. He emphasizes, in the same text in which he leaves at a distance the primordial trauma of the murder of the father – and without worrying about the contradiction – that this sublimation emerges at a given historical date against the background of a visible, evident fear that she who engenders is the mother. There is, he tells us, genuine progress in spirituality in affirming the function of the father, namely, of him of whom one is never sure. This recognition implies a whole mental elaboration. To introduce as primordial the function of the father represents a sublimation. But, Freud asks, how can one conceive of this leap, this progress, since, in order to introduce it, it was necessary that something appear that imposes its authority and its reality from outside?
He himself underlines the impasse constituted by the fact that sublimation exists, but that such sublimation can only be motivated historically by means of the myth to which it has recourse. At that point the function of myth becomes evident. In truth, this myth is nothing other than something that is inscribed in the clearest of terms in the spiritual reality of our time, namely, the death of God. It is as a function of the death of God that the murder of the father which represents it in the most direct way is introduced by Freud as a modern myth.
It is a myth that has all the properties of a myth. That is to say that it doesn’t explain anything, anymore than any other myth. As I pointed out in citing Lévi-Strauss and especially in referring to that which buttresses his own formulation of the issue, myth is always a signifying system or scheme, if you like, which is articulated so as to support the antimonies of certain psychic relations. And this occurs at a level which is not simply that of individual anguish and which is not exhausted either in a construction presupposing the collectivity, but which assumes its fullest possible dimension.
We suppose that it concerns the individual and also the collectivity, but there is no such opposition between them at the level involved. For it is a matter here of the subject insofar as he suffers from the signifier. It is in this passion of the signifier that the critical point emerges, and its anguish is no more than an intermittent emotion that plays the role of an occasional signal.
Freud brought to the question of the source of morality the invaluable significance implied in the phrase Civilization and Its Discontents or, in other words, the breakdown by means of which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to find in itself its own exacerbation, as the result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority. It remains to be seen how within this breakdown in the depths of the psychic life the instincts may find their proper sublimation.
But to begin with, what is the possibility we call sublimation? Given the time at our disposal, I am not in a position to take you through the virtually absurd difficulties that authors have encountered every time they have tried to give a meaning to the term “sublimation.” I would nevertheless like one of you to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale, look up Bernfeld’s article in volume VIII of Imago entitled “Bemerkungen über Sublimierung,” [“Observations on Sublimation”], and give us a summary of it here.
Bernfeld was a particularly powerful mind of the second generation, and in the end the weaknesses of his articulation of the problem of sublimation are of a kind that will prove illuminating. He is first of all quite troubled by Freud’s reference to the fact that the operations of sublimation are always ethically, culturally, and socially valorized. This criterion, external to psychoanalysis, certainly creates a difficulty, and on account of its extra-psychological character clearly merits to be emphasized and criticized. But as we will see, this character causes less difficulty than at first appears.
On the other hand, the contradiction between the Zielablenkung side of the Strebung, of the Trieb or drive, and the fact that that takes place in a domain which is that of the object libido, also poses all kinds of problems for Bernfeld – problems that he resolves with the extreme clumsiness which characterizes everything that has so far been said on the analysis of sublimation.
According to him, at the point he reached around 1923–1924, we must start from the part of the instinct that may be employed for the ends of the ego, for the Ichziele, in order to define sublimation. And he goes on to give examples whose naiveté is striking. He refers to a certain little Robert Walter, who like many children tries his hand at poetry even before puberty. And what does he tell us on the subject? That to be a poet is an Ichziel for the boy. It is in relation to that choice fixed very early that everything that follows will be judged, namely, the way in which at the onset of puberty the upheaval of his libidinal economy, which is clinically perceptible although quite confused in this case, will be seen to be gradually integrated into the Ichziel. In particular, his activity as a little poet and his fantasms, which were quite separate at the beginning, come to be progressively coordinated.
Bernfeld thus assumes the primordial, primitive character of the goal set by the child to become a poet. And a similar argument is to be found in the other, equally instructive examples he gives us – some of which concern the function of the Verneinungen, of the negations that occur spontaneously among groups of children. He was, in effect, very interested in this question in a publication devoted to the problems of youth for which he was responsible at the time.
The important point to note on the subject is the following, and it is something that is to be found in all formulations of the problem, including Freud’s. Freud points out that once the artist has carried out an operation on the level of sublimation, he finds himself to be the beneficiary of his operation insofar as it is acclaimed after the fact; it brings in its wake in the form of glory, honor, and even money, those fantasmic satisfactions that were at the origin of the instinct, with the result that the latter finds itself satisfied by means of sublimation.
That is all well and good as long as we assume that the already established function of poet exists on the outside. It seems to be taken for granted that especially among those whom Bernfeld calls eminent men, a little child might choose to become a poet as an ego goal. It is true that he hastens to add parenthetically that, in using the expression “hervorragender Mensch,” eminent man, he is divesting it as much as possible of all connotations of value – something that is very strange as soon as one starts to talk of eminence. To be frank, the dimension of the eminent personality cannot be eliminated. And we see that, in fact, in Moses and Monotheism it isn’t eliminated by Freud, but thrust into the foreground.
What needs to be justified is not simply the secondary benefits that individuals might derive from their works, but the originary possibility of a function like the poetic function in the form of a structure within a social consensus.
Well now, it is precisely that kind of consensus we see born at a certain historical moment around the ideal of courtly love. For a certain highly restricted circle, that ideal is to be found at the origin of a moral code, including a whole series of modes of behavior, of loyalties, measures, services, and exemplary forms of conduct. And if that interests us so directly, it is because its central point was an erotics.
What interests us here very probably emerged in the middle or at the beginning of the eleventh century, and continued into the twelfth or even, in Germany, to the beginning of the thirteenth. The phenomenon in question is courtly love, its poets and singers, who were known as “troubadours” in the South, as “trouvères” in the North of France, and as “Minnesänger” in the Germanic realm – England and parts of Spain were only involved at second hand. These games were linked to a very precise poetic craft and emerged at that moment, only to be eclipsed subsequently to the point where the following centuries only retained a somewhat dim memory of them.
At the high point, which stretches from the beginning of the eleventh century to the first third of the thirteenth, the very special technique of these courtly love poets played a highly important role. It is difficult for us today to evaluate precisely the importance of that role, but certain circles – in the courtly love sense, court circles, aristocratic circles – that occupied an elevated position in society were certainly influenced markedly.
The question as to whether there were, in fact, formal lessons in love has been raised. The way in which Michel de Nostre-Dame, otherwise known as Nostradamus, represents at the beginning of the fifteenth century the way in which juridical power was exercised by the Ladies – whose extravagant Languedocian names he cites – cannot fail to excite a thrill in us at its strangeness. This is something that was faithfully reproduced by Stendhal in On Love, an admirable work on the subject, and one that is very close to the interest displayed by the romantics in the resurgence of the poetry of courtly love, which was called Provençal at the time, but which was, properly speaking, from the region of Toulouse or indeed from the Limousin.
The existence and operations of these tribunals devoted to the casuistry of love and evoked by Michel de Nostre-Dame are open to debate and often debated. Nevertheless, we do have certain texts, including especially the work by Andreas Capellanus that Rénouart discovered and published in 1917. The shortened title is De Arte Amandi, which thus makes it a homonym of Ovid’s treatise – a work that was passed down to posterity by the clergy.
This fourteenth-century manuscript that Rénouart discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale gives us the text of judgments handed down by Ladies, who are well-known historical figures and include Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was successively – and this “successively” involved a great degree of personal involvement in the unfolding drama – the wife of Louis VII the Younger and Henry Plantagenet, whom she married when he was Duke of Normandy and who subsequently became King of England, with all that that involved relative to claims made on French territory. Then there was her daughter, who married a certain Henry I, Count of Champagne, and still others who were historical figures. In Capellanus’s work they are all said to have participated in tribunals devoted to the casuistry of love, and such tribunals all presuppose perfectly coded points of reference that are by no means vague, but imply ideals to be pursued, of which I will give you some examples.
It doesn’t matter whether we take them from the Southern French domain or the German domain except as far as the signifier is concerned, which in the former case is the “langue d’oc” and in the latter the German language – this is after all a poetry written in the vernacular. Except for the signifier, then, the terms overlap, repeat each other; both involve the same system. They are organized around diverse themes, the first of which is mourning, and even mourning unto death.
As one of those put it who at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany formulated its characteristics, the point of departure of courtly love is its quality as a scholastics of unhappy love. Certain terms define the register according to which the Lady’s values are attained – a register indicated by the norms which regulate the exchanges between the partners of the strange rite, namely, reward, clemency, grace or Gnade, felicity. So as to imagine the extremely rarified and complex organization concerned, think of the seventeenth-century Map of Love (Carte du Tendre), although what one finds there is a far more pallid version; the précieuses, too, at another historical moment placed the emphasis on a certain social art of conversation.
With courtly love things are all the more surprising because they emerge at a time when the historical circumstances are such that nothing seems to point to what might be called the advancement of women or indeed their emancipation. To give you an idea of the situation, I would just refer to the story of the Countess of Comminges, the daughter of a certain William of Montpellier, that took place at the time of the full flowering of courtly love.
There was a certain Peter of Aragon, who was King of Aragon and was ambitious to extend his power north of the Pyrenees in spite of the obstacle raised at the time by the first historical campaign of the north against the south, namely, in the form of the Albigensian crusade and Simon de Montfort’s victories over the Counts of Toulouse. By reason of the fact that the lady in question was the natural heir upon the death of her father of the county of Montpellier, Peter of Aragon wanted her. She was, however, already married, and seems to have been someone who was not cut out to involve herself in sordid intrigues. She was of a highly reserved personality, not far from sainthood in the religious sense of the word, since it was at Rome that she ended her days with a reputation for saintliness. Political intrigue and the pressure of the noble Lord Peter of Aragon forced her to leave her husband. Papal intervention obliged the latter to take her back, but on her father’s death, everything happened in accordance with the will of the powerful Lord. She was repudiated by her husband, who was used to such things, and she married Peter of Aragon, who proceeded to mistreat her to such a degree that she fled. And that is why she finished her days in Rome under the protection of the Pope, who turned out to be on occasion the only protector of persecuted innocence.
The style of this story simply shows the effective position of woman in feudal society. She is, strictly speaking, what is indicated by the elementary structures of kinship, i.e., nothing more than a correlative of the functions of social exchange, the support of a certain number of goods and of symbols of power. She is essentially identified with a social function that leaves no room for her person or her own liberty, except with reference to her religious rights.
It is in this context that the very curious function of the poet of courtly love starts to be exercised. It is important to recall his social situation, which is of a kind to throw a little light on the fundamental idea or graphic style that Freudian ideology can give to a fashion whose function the artist manages in a way to delay.
Satisfactions of power are involved, Freud tells us. That is why it is all the more remarkable to emphasize that in the whole collection of Minnesange, there are numerous poets who occupy positions that are not inferior to those of emperor, king, or prince. There are, in fact, 126 Minnesange in the Manes manuscript collection, which was in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which Heinrich Heine used to go and pay homage to, as if to the very beginnings of German poetry. But after 1888, as the result of negotiations I know nothing about, but that were certainly justified, it was given back to the Germans and is now in Heidelberg.
The first of the troubadours was a certain Guillaume de Poitiers, the seventh Count of Poitiers and ninth Duke of Aquitaine. Before he devoted himself to his early poetic activities in the sphere of courtly love poetry, he appears to have been a formidable brigand of the kind that, goodness knows, every right-minded feudal nobleman of the period seems readily to have been. In a number of historical situations that I won’t go into, he can be seen to have behaved in conformity with the norms of the most barbarous practice of ransom. That was the kind of service one could expect from him. Then, from a particular moment on, he became the poet of that singular form of love.
I urge you right away to read those specialized works that contain a thematic analysis of the veritable love ritual which was involved. The question is, How should we situate it as analysts?
I will just mention in passing a book that is somewhat depressing in the way it solves problems by neatly avoiding them, although it is full of material and quotations, namely, The Joy of Love by Pierre Perdu, which was published by Plon. Another work of a very different type, since it deals less with courtly love than its historical relations, is also worth reading, and that is the nice little collection of Benjamin Perret, which, without explaining very well what it’s about, he has called The Anthology of Sublime Love. Then there is René Nelli’s book, published by Hachette, Love and the Myths of the Heart, in which I find a certain philogenic moralism along with a lot of facts. And finally you have Henry Corbin’s The Creative Imagination from Flammarion; however, it goes much further than the limited domain that interests us today.
I am not going to expatiate on the obvious themes of this poetry, both for lack of time and because you will find them in the examples in which I will show what might be called their conventional origin. On this subject all the historians agree: courtly love was, in brief, a poetic exercise, a way of playing with a number of conventional, idealizing themes, which couldn’t have any real concrete equivalent. Nevertheless, these ideals, first among which is that of the Lady, are to be found in subsequent periods, down to our own. The influence of these ideals is a highly concrete one in the organization of contemporary man’s sentimental attachments, and it continues its forward march.
Moreover, march is the right word because it finds its point of origin in a certain systematic and deliberate use of the signifier as such.
A great deal of effort has been expanded to demonstrate the relationship between this apparatus or organization of the forms of courtly love and an intuition that is religious in origin, mystical for example, and that is supposed to be located somewhere in the center that is sought, in the Thing, which comes to be exalted in the style of courtly love. Experience has shown that this whole effort is condemned to failure.
On the level of the economy of the reference of the subject to the love object, there are certain apparent relationships between courtly love and foreign mystical experiences, Hindu or Tibetan, for example. As everyone knows, Denis de Rougemont made a great deal of this, and that is why I told you to read Henry Corbin’s book. There are nevertheless serious difficulties and even critical impossibilities involved, if only because of dates. The themes in question among certain Moslem poets from the Iberian peninsula, for example, appear after Guillaume de Poitier’s poetry.
Of interest to us from a structural point of view is the fact that an activity of poetic creation was able to exercise a determining influence on manners at a time – and subsequently in its historical consequences – when the origin and the key concepts of the whole business had been forgotten. But we can only judge the function of this sublimated creation in features of the structure.
The object involved, the feminine object, is introduced oddly enough through the door of privation or of inaccessibility. Whatever the social position of him who functions in the role, the inaccessibility of the object is posited as a point of departure. Some of those involved were, in fact, servants, sirvens, at their place of birth; Bernard de Ventadour was, for example, the son of a servant at Ventadour castle, who was also a troubadour.
It is impossible to serenade one’s Lady in her poetic role in the absence of the given that she is surrounded and isolated by a barrier.
Furthermore, that object or Domnei, as she is called – she is also frequently referred to with the masculine term, Mi Dom, or my Lord – this Lady is presented with depersonalized characteristics. As a result, writers have noted that all the poets seem to be addressing the same person.
The fact that on occasion her body is described as g’ra delgat e gen – that means that plumpness was part of the sex appeal of the period, e gen signifying graceful – should not deceive you, since she is always described in that way. In this poetic field the feminine object is emptied of all real substance. That is what made it easy subsequently for a metaphysical poet such as Dante, for example, to choose a person whom we definitely know existed – namely, little Beatrice whom he fell for when she was nine years old, and who stayed at the center of his poetry from the Vita Nuova to The Divine Comedy – and to make her the equivalent of philosophy or indeed, in the end, of the science of the sacred. That also enabled him to appeal to her in terms that are all the more sensual because the person in question is close to allegory. It is only when the person involved is transformed into a symbolic function that one is able to speak of her in the crudest terms.
Here we see functioning in the pure state the authority of that place the instinct aims for in sublimation. That is to say, that what man demands, what he cannot help but demand, is to be deprived of something real. And one of you, in explaining to me what I am trying to show in das Ding, referred to it neatly as the vacuole.
I don’t reject the word, although its charm derives from the virtual reference to histology. Something of that order is, in effect, involved, if we indulge in that most risqué of reveries associated with contemporary speculation that speaks of communication in connection with transmission inside organic structures – transmission that functions pseudopodically. Of course, there is no communication as such. But if in a monocellular organism such communication were organized schematically around the vacuole, and concerned the function of the vacuole as such, we could, in fact, have a schematic form of what concerns us in the representation.
Where, in effect, is the vacuole created for us? It is at the center of the signifiers – insofar as that final demand to be deprived of something real is essentially linked to the primary symbolization which is wholly contained in the signification of the gift of love.
In this connection I was struck by the fact that, in the terminology of courtly love, the word domnei is used. The corresponding verb is domnoyer, which means something like “to caress,” “to play around.” Domnei, in spite of the fact that its first syllable in French is an echo of the word “don,” gift, is, in fact, unrelated to it. It is related instead to the Domna, the Lady, or in other words, to her who on occasion dominates.
That has its amusing side. And one should perhaps explore historically the quantity of metaphors that exist around the term “donner,” to give, in courtly love. Can “donner” be situated in the relationship between the partners as something that is predominantly on one side or the other? It has perhaps no other cause than the semantic confusion produced in connection with the term domnei and the use of the word domnoyer.
The poetry of courtly love, in effect, tends to locate in the place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture. And it does so at a time when the historical circumstances bear witness to a disparity between the especially harsh conditions of reality and certain fundamental demands. By means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner.
The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. If she is described as wise, it is not because she embodies an immaterial wisdom or because she represents its functions more than she exercises them. On the contrary, she is as arbitrary as possible in the tests she imposes on her servant.
The Lady is basically what was later to be called, with a childish echo of the original ideology, “cruel as the tigers of Ircania.” But you will not find the extreme arbitrariness of the attitude expressed any better than among the authors of the period themselves, Chrétien de Troyes, for example.
Having brought out the artifices embodied in the construction of courtly love and before proceeding to show you to what extent these artifices have proved to be so durable, thus complicating still the relations between men and the service of women, I would like to say one other thing. The object in front of us, our anamorphosis, will also enable us to be precise about something that remains a little vague in the perspective adopted, namely, the narcissistic function.
You are aware that the mirror function, which I thought it necessary to present as exemplary of the imaginary structure, is defined in the narcissistic relation. And the element of idealizing exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love has certainly been demonstrated; it is fundamentally narcissistic in character. Well now, the little image represented for us by this anamorphosis permits me to show you which mirror function is involved.
It is only by chance that beyond the mirror in question the subject’s ideal is projected. The mirror may on occasion imply the mechanisms of narcissism, and especially the diminution of destruction or aggression that we will encounter subsequently. But it also fulfills another role, a role as limit. It is that which cannot be crossed. And the only organization in which it participates is that of the inaccessibilty of the object. But it’s not the only thing to participate in that.
There is a whole series of motifs, which constitute the presuppositions or organic givens of courtly love. There is, for example, the fact that the object is not simply inaccessible, but is also separated from him who longs to reach it by all kind of evil powers, one of the names for which, in the charming Provençal language, is lauzengiers. The latter are the jealous rivals, but also the slanderers.
Another essential theme is that of the secret. It embodies a certain number of misapprehensions, among which is the idea that the object is never given except through an intermediary called the Senhal. It is something also found in Arab poetry in connection with similar themes, where the same curious rite always strikes commentators, since the forms are sometimes highly significant. In particular, at a certain point in his poems, the extraordinary Guillaume de Poitiers calls the object of his aspirations Bon vezi, which means “Good neighbor.” As a result of which, historians have abandoned themselves to all kinds of conjectures and have been unable to come up with anything better than the name of a Lady who, it is known, played an important role in his personal history, a forward woman apparently, whose estates were close to Guillaume’s.
What is for us much more important than the reference to the neighbor, who is supposedly the Lady whom Guillaume de Poitiers occasionally played naughty games with, is the relationship between the expression just referred to and the one Freud uses in connection with the first establishment of the Thing, with its psychological genesis, namely, the Nebenmensch. And he designated thereby the very place that from the point of view of the development of Christianity, was to be occupied by the apotheosis of the neighbor.
In brief, I wanted to make you realize today, first, that it is an artificial and cunning organization of the signifier that lays down at a given moment the lines of a certain asceticism, and, second, the meaning we must attribute to the negotiation of the detour in the psychic economy.
The detour in the psyche isn’t always designed to regulate the commerce between whatever is organized in the domain of the pleasure principle and whatever presents itself as the structure of reality. There are also detours and obstacles which are organized so as to make the domain of the vacuole stand out as such. What gets to be projected as such is a certain transgression of desire.
And it is here that the ethical function of eroticism enters into play. Freudianism is in brief nothing but a perpetual allusion to the fecundity of eroticism in ethics, but it doesn’t formulate it as such. The techniques involved in courtly love – and they are precise enough to allow us to perceive what might on occasion become fact, what is properly speaking of the sexual order in the inspiration of this eroticism – are techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus. The stages courtly love lays down previous to what is mysteriously referred to as le don de merci, “the gift of mercy” – although we don’t know exactly what it meant – are expressed more or less in terms that Freud uses in his Three Essays as belonging to the sphere of foreplay.
Now from the point of view of the pleasure principle, the paradox of what might be called the effect of Vorlust, of foreplay, is precisely that it persists in opposition to the purposes of the pleasure principle. It is only insofar as the pleasure of desiring, or, more precisely, the pleasure of experiencing unpleasure, is sustained that we can speak of the sexual valorization of the preliminary stages of the act of love.
Yet we can never tell if this act or fusion is a matter of mystical union, of distant acknowledgment of the Other or of anything else. In many cases, it seems that a function like that of a blessing or salutation is for the courtly lover the supreme gift, the sign of the Other as such, and nothing more. This phenomenon has been the object of speculation that has even gone as far as identifying this blessing with that which in the consolamentum orders the relations between the highest ranks of initiates among the Cathars. In any case, before reaching that point, the stages of the erotic technique are carefully distinguished and articulated; they go from drinking, speaking, touching, which is in part identified with what are known as services, to kissing, and the osculum, which is the final stage before that of the union in merci.
All that has come down to us in such an enigmatic form that, in order to explain it, the attempt has been made to relate it to Hindu or even Tibetan erotic practices, since it seems that the latter have been codified in the most precise way and constitute a disciplined asceticism of pleasure from which a kind of lived substance may emerge for the subject. It is only on the basis of extrapolation that it is supposed something analogous was effectively practiced by the troubadours. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it. Moreover, without assuming an identity between the practices taken from different cultural spheres, I do believe the influence of this poetry has been decisive for us.
Following the notable failure of the different attempts to explain in terms of influence the emergence of this particular kind of idealizing cult of the feminine object in our culture, I am struck most by the fact that a number of the most ascetic and most paradoxical of the texts utilized in the discourse of courtly love are taken over from Ovid’s Art of Love.
Ovid wrote in a sparkling verse form a little treatise for libertines in which one learns for example, in which neighborhoods of Rome one can meet the prettiest little whores. And he develops his theme in a poem in three parts that ends with the direct evocation of what can only be called the game of the two-backed beast. In the midst of all that one also comes across formulas such as Arte regendus Amor, “Love must be ruled by Art.” And then, ten centuries later, with the help of those magic words, a group of poets starts to introduce all that word for word into a veritable operation of artistic incantation.
One also reads Militiae species amor est, “Love is a kind of military service” – which means for Ovid that the ladies of Rome aren’t as easy as all that. And then in the discourse of chivalry, in a form that is nicely outlined in DonQuixote, such terms begin to resonate so as to evoke an armed militia devoted to the defense of women and children.
You can certainly understand the importance I attribute to such well-attested analogies, for it is clear that in the priesthood itself, Ovid’s Ars Amandi had not been forgotten; Chrétien de Troyes even translated it. It is through these kinds of revivals that one is able to understand what the function of the signifier means. And I would like to make my boldest assertion today at this point in affirming that courtly love was created more or less as you see the fantasm emerge from the syringe that was evoked just now.
That doesn’t mean that something fundamental isn’t involved, however; otherwise it would be inconceivable that André Breton could celebrate in this day and age l’Amour fou, “the madness of love,” as he puts it in terms dictated by his concerns, or by his interest in the relationship to what he calls “objective chance.” That is a strange signifying configuration, since who, a century or so from now, on reading these things in their context, will understand that objective chance means things that occur and are all the richer in meaning because they take place somewhere where we are unable to perceive either rational, or causal, or any other kind of order, that can justify their emergence in the real?
In other words, it is once again in the place of the Thing that Breton has the madness of love emerge.
As I take leave of you today and remind you that we will meet again three weeks from now, I would like to conclude with four lines from a poem, which, thanks to my memory, came to mind this morning. They are from another surrealist poet, Paul Eluard. They are in their poetic context exactly at that frontier or limit which in my own words I am attempting to enable us to localize and feel:
Against this dilapidated sky, these panes of fresh water,
Which face will appear and, like a sonorous shell,
Announce that the night of love has turned to day,
Open mouth joined to a mouth that is closed?2
February 10, 1960
1 For a description of an anamorphosis in the form of an object, see page 135.
2 Capitate de la Douleur