Beginning with Lacan is one of the hardest things to do. That his discourse even brings into question what it might truly mean to begin, which means that a whole lot of us never do, makes it all the more difficult because one starts to question themselves which is to go in the wrong direction entirely because in questioning oneself one is caught in an act of reflection that will never be an act in the proper sense of carving out a beginning. It is, in effect, just one more inhibition. In fact it may be inhibition par excellence. And if I’m already involving you in a dizzying set of logistics it is hopefully not for no reason; but certainly if one follows Lacan, the not for no reason is already quite suspect. With the double negation, perhaps all we can do is hope that we arrive at something a little bit more than not.
So it is with Lacan that one is trapped between a something that always amounts to nothing, his definition of the object, and a nothing that nevertheless must be made something, his hopes for the subject. About this, what does one say? Well, Lacan did that for the twenty-eight years of his seminar. And maybe then ask, what does one write? Well, Lacan surely did not do that, but, if I am not to be just one more contribution to the secondary elaboration of discourse, one that he never meant to be, then I don’t see anything other than the necessity for some extraordinary sacrifice. Those who take up the position of knowledge do so with an eye for the one who is vanishing—to reassure themselves that they are, not them, not there, with their gaze fixed on the horizon.
My part, I think it shall be lost. It is in its way a very feminine solution, which is a fine way to begin since the one thing I do know about Lacan is that he loved women. Through Lacan I will take up what Adorno left behind—the question of what form of sacrifice is necessary and what about this question is specifically feminine. Let us return to mythic origins.
A child stares at the television watching a nature show much like any other—the social behavior of a pride of lions. One scene in particular will be remembered. There is some determination at work. What would pique this child’s curiosity, narrow the attentional field, and open into excitement seems preordained. The father of the pride exiles himself. There can only be one and he is now too old to hold his place. From this moment on he will wander the plains in solitude. His work is done. He leaves without looking back. Sons were exiled from the pride once they reached puberty. There could only be one father so they lived alone or in the company of others awaiting their chance to take a pride for themselves. The anxious wait is over. Now was their moment.
The child, for a second, finds the space to wonder—how was this day chosen? By whom was it chosen? The new male enters the scene. One by one he slaughters the children of the old rival, announcing his arrival and dominion. Another question appears. Why? The other isn’t a threat having left willingly? Before an answer is found the females go instantly into heat. Head to neck they nuzzle him. It marks a turn, a new generation.
One sees much as a child and remembers little. For this child, this memory held. It is certainly a screen, but a screen for what, we might ask? What could its everyday, dare I say natural, ordinariness screen? Surely, analytically, we would begin to speculate. Primal scene. Indeed! Mothers are whores. Fathers are impotent or virile. Children are excluded, betrayed, and sacrificed. Can anything else be said?
This interpretation is hardly commensurate with the picture of a child’s eyes laying claim to these images. All the keys to sexuality, its crucial nexus in the subject, are contained herein, not as deterministic, but as a location mapped between a series of events:
The mode in which a work touches us, touches us precisely in the most profound fashion, namely on the unconscious plane, has to do with an arrangement, a composition of the work which no doubt ensures that we are interested very precisely at the level of the unconscious; but this is not because of the presence of something which really supports before us an unconscious (Lacan, 1958, L18.3.59, p. 4).
This is not simply an infantile or unconscious fantasy. It has something to do with logic, with an arrangement that interests us on the level of the unconscious. In one instantaneous glance the constraints imposed upon our very being are captured in a series of transactions that unfold.
We have to follow the structure in the series of displacements. The intrusion of the unfolding sequence short-circuits the questions that arise. The father? The children have been killed. The dead child? The mother is in heat. The father, who had left of his own accord, appears as someone who has been murderously eclipsed and betrayed. It gives the impetus for his murder to be avenged; the death wish resurrected and justified as a point of pride.
What this obscures is the fact that the father’s place exists only because of its potential absence, that its nature is symbolic in value. The father isn’t identifiable with the presence of this father or that father who attempts to substitute for him—the father is a placeholder, a name. The child captures this, wondering about an anonymous force (how was this day chosen … but he left willingly), a structure that holds beyond the participants at hand. The father’s potential, perhaps inevitable, sacrifice of his place is the condition of its possibility. He recognizes it as something beyond his self-presence. His failing preserves the function that he demarcates.
This minimal difference granted to the father, between himself and his place, is one saving grace—and certainly it is one that saves. The death wish does not proliferate in his name, but his name serves as a marker that runs counter to the wish. Accepting this means one must accept him, and perhaps oneself also, as substitutable and displaced. To this child perhaps it is not yet possible. The recognition is there, but it quickly disappears.
In Oedipus something must be renounced, sacrificed, in the name of a future guarantee. Sacrifice shifts in the drama of Sophocles from the act of infanticide, to murder, usurpation, and finally, self-castration. Sacrifice brings into play an unfolding sequence in the gap between the generations and the sexes, and only at the extreme end, in a moment of self-dissolution, does it locate the limit. If sacrifice has something to do with establishing one’s particular identity, it is a story that inevitably goes awry. But, it does so in particular ways, ways that are bound to a particular set of constraints.
Here, what goes awry can be seen in the act of remembering. To understand this, we have to proceed backward like most analyses of symptoms that take place in two moments, separated by a gap. There is something that is primary (yes also primal perhaps) in so far as it is before the excitement generated in the virile identification with the ravaging father, the ravished child, and the insatiable woman. This primary moment and its secondary effects points to a disjunction in a field of absence and presence, silence and the fury of fantasy. Something turns around an object and its absence. Sacrifice is not only a site where aggression, guilt, and punishment rear their head as obscene vicissitudes of the death drive. What we can also see is that there is a structure that it begins to highlight. The child, we might say, is looking for a way to give something up.
When Lacan returned to the question of hysteria, in particular through the Dora case, he read the case backward to understand the place her father held for her. It is the father whose origin and destiny as failure envelops the case and no doubt the repetition in the transference. Dora is on the scent of the father’s relation to sacrifice. In life he sacrifices her, in her first dream he refuses to—”I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewelcase” (Freud, 1905b, p. 64). He is the powerful, saving father. In the second dream, Dora has perhaps found a way to sacrifice him—certainly a moment of revenge, the death wish—but also something more than just that.
It is this more that Freud admittedly failed to pick up … the jewelcase, the nymphs, Frau K’s adorable white body, the Sistine Madonna. These hold the final word on her desire and point to the nodal organizers in the dream: representations, pictures, a geography of sexuality, a map of femininity. We can only imagine that Freud, having been able to mark this desire, could have found a different end than her morbid craving for revenge. She could have found a way to give way on her pride.
The structure of this failed father in relation to the feminine is a structure, Lacan says, that psychoanalysis has completely forgotten about, having become absorbed in the secondary elaboration of a virile fantasy. In fact, Lacan calls the myth of the strong Oedipal father Freud’s hysterical symptom. Even in the sadomasochistically rendered scene between the mother and child—which the father, not failing, successfully interrupts—psychoanalysis repeats the fantasy. It was evident to Lacan that this question was also the question Freud (1939) struggled with at the end of his life with the two Moses, or even before with his question about matriarchy and the primal horde in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913).
There must be a beyond to the demand for the benevolent unmov-able virile father who is equal to himself. Sacrifice read from within a posthaste arrangement cannot conceive of a beyond, is riveted to the spot. The logic has more to say about what couldn’t be said, coming to be occupied by these imaginarized scenes. The child’s attention was already drawn to the place of absence itself; drawn to this marker of difference and disjunction. However, this gap is quickly filled. Pride above all else seems to demand it. Children, when I think of them, are creatures of pride out of necessity. Pride then must eventually give when this necessity falls away.
Moving on. A child is told the story of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson (1836/1992). She’s the father’s favorite. Her voice is one of the most coveted objects in all the seas so it is her voice that she will lose. Like so many figures in fairytales, she is, for some reason or another, mute. In fact, for this princess, it is without her voice that she must win the heart of a man. Sacrifice of this precious object is the price of her reaching for any beyond, in particular anything beyond the constraints of her family. She fixes her eyes on the furthest horizon—to be loved by a human and to be given immortality in an afterlife with mortals and god.
“Pride must suffer pain,” she was told by her paternal grandmother—it is the condition of becoming a woman. From beginning to end, nothing is gained in this story without a cost. When she comes of age and can visit the surface of the sea, she is painfully adorned with oyster shells. Whenever she dances, a vision of absolute grace, each step cuts into her like a thousand blades. She not only has to seduce the impossible, she must seduce with impossibility. The thought of death, it is said, weighs heavily on her heart. She silently endures it.
In the end, the prince marries another woman that he misrecognizes as her. The mermaid princess is condemned to death. She cannot tell him of the pain of losing his love nor the very mistake that he has made. Yet, it is not clear that she would have told him even if she could. Given one last chance to live by her sisters, shorn of their beautiful hair, she can kill her prince with a magic knife and return home. She will not do it. She chooses her fate—her heart shatters and she is dissolved into foam upon the waves. Admiring the courage of the little mermaid, the daughters of the air offered her a place with them in their work circulating the winds on the surface of the earth.
Destiny hangs on the power of another. We are subjected to this Other. Love for this prince in the case of The Little Mermaid, but even more than this, her history. The words that come from her paternal line—her father and her father’s mother—seem to determine her path. They deliver her to her fate in the form of a life of pain that is to be commensurate with her sexual desire. For pride, she must suffer. Sexuality and death move hand in hand.
The Oedipal interpretation: this is the bind of being an Oedipal winner. You force the loss of what was most coveted in you. As punishment? Perhaps. You should not have enjoyed that. Fathers should not be so seductive. Renunciation is a moral lesson on how to live happily. The princess does not heed this lesson. “The prince’s happiness is my happiness”, she willfully declares. She desires only, and pathologically, through him.
But a question opens up: Has she repressed her incestuous desire too much or not enough? Must she temper her desire, a desire always bound at the extreme end of a wager, at the cost of her life? Or has she, in fact, renounced her desire to be the chosen one, faithful instead to a desire that goes beyond being only the beloved? Misrecogni-tion of this desire seems to rule the day. She leaves in her wake the enigma of woman’s love. It is somehow both a terrifying excess and the heights of renunciation.
We can see in The Little Mermaid her attempt to find her desire, to find it in love always subject to the hazards of chance. She is faithful. Otherwise it is a very boring and moralistic tale. Love, bound up with death at the most extreme point of passage, indeed in suicide, is a confrontation with fate and necessity—a formal rendering of desire. The little mermaid must try and pass through a certain threshold.
Is this not allegorized by her transformation into a daughter of the air? Through her sacrifice, she regains her life once again which takes on an exigent character. Life becomes driven. I will have to insist that these stories, their constellations, expose the impasse of an encounter between the sexes and the generations. This tale turns on the mermaid princess having to test the limits of love, of what one would be willing to do and endure for the sake of love, inverting the message that is handed down to her. If pride must suffer pain, that pain must become a pain unto death, a point of pride that is also the dissolution of pride.
There are always two women in these stories, the real love and her double. Life for this man is always more comfortable with the double. In fact, that life is secured by the sacrifice of the other. This, as a fact about men, is of little consequence. That choice was necessary for her to make her final move. Faithful to her prince, she was able to mark the threshold of this beyond. Finding a means for the circulation of desire defines both a subjectivizing movement and the play of femininity through various guises of sacrifice. These seem coupled through desire.
The little mermaid is one of those icons of femininity that no doubt feminists would rally against. A male fantasy of feminine self-sacrifice? Perhaps. I prefer to see how the limits of both the merman kingdom and the human world are overturned in act that rubs up against both through silence, grace, and determination. Through fidelity the beauty of the princess is made to appear in all its brilliance. This could be a tale of the errant man who fails to be captivated by such beauty, the inverse tale of the Siren’s song. The mermaid cannot sing after all—such is her sacrifice and her wager.
Lacan, as we said, claimed that he speaks with no hope of being heard. Hearing, with no hope of speaking, I think somehow also puts things back into circulation. Speaking, making oneself heard, like loving or listening without an investment in a return, reaches out toward the Other. The real threat seems to be if this mermaid princess had succeeded in her masquerade—her pretty white legs a sought after phallic substitute. With this substitute, what becomes of desire and its interminable movements? If earlier we moved from sacrifice to virility, here we make the reverse move from virility to sacrifice.
A tale of adolescent impetuousness surely but love without impet-uousness doesn’t move. It seems to me that the story’s end points to this question about fathers and the feminine—the little mermaid, in act of self-shattering, joins the daughters of the air in their quest to do good between the earth and the heavens above. Desire, aimed at this breaking point, finds a means of circulation. Has not our mermaid princess renounced every phallic value of having? The pretty white legs didn’t stand a chance. Eternal life depends upon a power beyond us, the spirits of the air tell her. As her eyes fill with tears, she looked down and smiled upon her prince and his bride. She was happy, it was said. She had found another way of living.
The mermaid princess is one of many renditions of the tale of the passage of a virgin girl into womanhood. Let us turn to the next in the series, child, girl, woman, and mother. If the father as failure is one side of the polarity, the mother on the other end seems absolutely criminal. A vision of excess. She is a trespasser, a terrifying violator of the boundaries of hearth and home. The one who would have if it weren’t for some limit that was held—perhaps by him, perhaps by others. One trembles before a mother or finds amnesty. Hers are the blows of fate like an unending potential for terrible violence.
One might imagine that this forms a lure in the image of a self-sacrificing daughter turned mother; that self-sacrifice, in the case of woman, must be made a necessary virtue. In fact, the desire to be a mother, the imputed narcissistic origin of such a wish, is a wish to be continually counteracted. Psychoanalysis has its own problematic version: the girl, deprived of her father, envious of his glorious appendage, acquiesces to a replacement in the form of receiving a baby from a father-substitute. Her painful destiny as not-male finds its fulfillment in her role as mother.
The solution, they say, is always too tenuous. Hysteria lingers around every corner, with every fresh disappointment. The psychoanalyst recoils: her super-ego is uneducable, she is prone to depression, and her claims are always too great. Is the baby or the husband the faltering substitute? Or do both, proving inadequate, need the supplement of the other? Motherhood also? She does not sublimate easily or well. It is not Kronos who devours his children, always mothers.
The little mermaid’s life of renunciation seemed necessary. Much as there was something important to read beyond this, the manifest demand for a mother’s sacrifice should be grasped in another fashion as well. Once again Nicole Loraux proves instructive. If the feminine as the object of appropriation or expulsion guided us through Greek tragedy, so too might the Athenian laws that surround the mothers— in particular, the decree that mourning mothers be secluded in their homes. A mother’s grief over the death of her child, her lamentation, is, like most incarnations of the feminine, a threat to the unity of the polis.
Her grief, they say, is too easily transformed into wrath. She is unable to sublimate this feminine grief for the needs of the city, notably a city that needs warriors. There is a utilitarian ethic at odds with personal pain. The singular and terrible tie between a mother and her child must be broken for the greater good. The examples multiply: Hecuba, Jocasta, Eurydice, Clytaemnestra, and Antigone.
Mourning and femininity seem inextricably linked and mourning is itself depicted as feminizing. Achilles is told that his grief over Patroklus is unmanly, which is repeated by Shakespeare in words from Claudius to Hamlet in the opening familial scene. Loraux says, “a mother’s sorrow is general in the sense that it is generic, a general sorrow that contains all mourning within it. A mother has given birth to mourning” (1988/1998, p. 3). This mourning to which she gives birth is emblematic of all mourning, all sadness.
Much as the body is exiled by Platonic philosophy, so too the mourning of a mother is negated in an imperative order by Athens that one forget. Athenians must swear an oath to the city not to remember the misfortunes. An alter to Lethe, oblivion, is erected deep in the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, enjoining us under the banner of repression.
Electra is perhaps the exemplary figure of this pathos of mourning and in her exemplary mourning she mirrors the mother that she loathes. Although saying little about his supposed Electra complex, Freud must have gleaned this mode of refusal from her tale. Electra cannot mourn the loss of her father, killed by her mother Clytaemnestra as retribution for his killing their daughter, Electra’s sister, Iphigenia. Perhaps Electra wishes it were she who was the chosen object of sacrifice, the cause. Certainly thereafter it is the sacrifice of her grief that she will not make. The affirmative oblivion of the utilitarian law of Athens meets here with Electra’s nonoblivion—her refusal to forget that consumes her alone.
Both processes, Loraux points out, are essentially a temporal. We move from negation—I will not recall—to Electra’s constant language of double negation—never to be veiled, never to be undone, never to be forgotten. Forgetting is linked to forgiveness and amnesty through a question of memory. Where does this utilitarian law of forgetting begin and end? And who would dare obliterate for good the unique memory of the beloved? These stories about mothers bring to the surface an order centered on questions of love and memory.
Many of the plays, Antigone perhaps best, show the virtues of an ethic of desire that refuses in the face of all laws to give up this loving tie to the object. If it ceases, so will she in the form of death—she declares in her grief. What is sublime in tragedy is precisely this devotion. It seems to me that the difference that separates Electra from a figure like Antigone cannot be located through any question of their excess. It is rather a question about movement, time, circulation, and the work of mourning which gathers (not expels) the desire of these women.
Electra, to the extent that one might fault her, is trapped in the double negation—she cannot and does not act. She is a figure who waits. Electra makes no appeal and forgives no one. Her double negation is a statement, a testament to her own static, self-identical willing. Antigone, Clytaemnestra even, are figures for whom mourning poses a problem and that problem means that an appeal must be made at all costs—Antigone to a higher divine order, Clytaemnestra to justice through the furies. They make themselves heard, the appeal forces the city to respond, obviating a disjunction between the Law and individual desire. Amnesty is neither obvious nor possible without a kind of work.
A way of continuing seems to me to be what is crucial in each of these stories, even with Electra who can find a way to continue only by continuing to mourn. It is rather well worn knowledge that exchange, debt, renunciation, guilt, and sacrifice, form an Oedipal constellation around desire and prohibition. But like the Athenians, we too dream of alleviation from these constraints, constraints that are perhaps bedrock. Alleviation then would have to be alleviation from the conflict between generations, an excess in sexuality, the problems of subjection to the caprice of others, the bind of grief and love. This desire, as Freud knew well, is the desire for death.
For psychoanalysis, one cannot be alleviated from these impossible constraints. One is responsible for finding a way. Forgetting or never forgetting, Athens and Electra, form a kind of illusory eternal order here on earth. Desire is something else than this. Suspended in a plea measured between earth and sky, these mothers beckon after an eternal order that is only ever beyond the world in which they immediately live. Their grief, their abjection, trembles on this limit.
Freud (1937) spoke of an original terror of passivity—the so-called bedrock of castration. In every solution within these stories there is a moment where the longstanding oppositions between passivity and activity, femininity and masculinity, and individual and community, find their appearance in and through a sacrificial act. That act does not cover over that opposition but finally makes it obvious, perhaps thereby prompting some way forward.
This solution can be read moralistically and condemned. It is a condemnation, in particular, that seems leveled at women and children. There is a curious correspondence between this moralism and the path of a virile identification. Sacrifice as a means of finding one’s desire points to a logic other than this one, and, rather than taking up the virile position, reads backward from it. I would at least expect that analysts would begin to pick up from this very point and point not to alleviation, condemnation, or identification (which, in this case, is only imagined virility), but something else.
This something else is indeed what Freud tried to construct with his notion of the bedrock of castration and its relationship with sublimation. If it is bedrock, where else have we to go? The act is both a fall, rock bottom, and the heights to which perhaps only then we may rise, the dignity of sublimation. There is, regardless of one’s anatomical sex, something like a bedrock refusal of castration, a repudiation of femininity (Freud, 1937). The cure only follows from a gratitude for what one never wants to sacrifice.
One more story. Anna O., the first analysand, became fond of a parable she found written by a woman in her family history in her maternal line:
During a storm, a nest of young birds was at risk from flooding. Papa bird brought his little ones to safety, one by one. While flying above the teeming flood with the first of his young, carefully held in his claws, he asked, “look at the amount of trouble I am going through in order to save you; will you do the same for me when I am old and weak?”—”Of course I will,” the first replied. At which the father promptly dropped him in the water, with the words, “one should not save a liar.” The same went for number two. When asking the question of the third and last one, he received the following answer: “My beloved father, I cannot promise you that; but I do promise that I will save my own little ones.” The papa bird saved this young one (Verhaeghe, 1999, p. 170).
Anna O., had nursed her father for years, found in this parable a father who could save his brood only in finding through them a way not to need to be saved himself. Furthermore, the declaration of sacrifice makes you a liar. Anna O.’s first analyst, as we know, like the prince of the mermaid princess, withdrew from the scene in the face of her desire.
This story painfully echoes Anna O.’s real-life fate. In one of her last poems she laments that “love had passed her by,” and indeed it seems that she never had a loving sexual relationship. The little bird tries to find a way not to sacrifice her desire for that of her father. Yet, what remains seems only to be the negativity of the wish—not to for him— rather than desire in its own right. Like the father bird, Anna O. cannot put into question why she questions her children as she does.
Love, in the fashion of King Lear, was an impossible submission and her desire for a true sacrifice was only realized by the sacrifice of any and all love objects. It reads as a rather uncanny repetition of the story that unfolds in Studies in Hysteria (1895d). Only able to reverse the order of power, close to her death, it was reported that she said, “if there is any justice in the next life, women will make the laws there and men will bear the children” (cited in, Britton, 1999, p. 3).
So this will-to-sacrifice did not occur as a transformation in her subjective position. This means of sacrifice did not prove a means of transforming desire beyond a commitment to a desire for dissatisfaction. As Lacan says of altruism:
The altruism of the neurotic, contrary to what one says, is permanent. And there is no more common path to the satisfactions he is seeking than what one can describe as devoting oneself to satisfying, as far as one can for the other, all the demands, which he well knows, however, constitute in his case a perpetual failure of desire or, in other words: to blind oneself in one’s devotion to the other one’s own dissatisfaction (Lacan, 1958, L03.6.59, p. 403).
In Anna O’s repeated attempts to articulate her position—through her many stories, poems, and plays, in her admirable social work—one can see this difficult, but ultimately untaken step, clearly within sight. With an ironic, sharp tongue, Lacan declares that this common path is a permanent one—permanent dissatisfaction, permanent blindness to one’s own desire, in other words, the permanent jouissance of the moral masochist.
So the difference between the little mermaid and these mothers in suffering from the figure of Anna O. (and we must qualify the difference between a life and a work of fiction), is the denouement. They disappear, vanish, while their desire remains. Death is a kind of metaphorical passage for the sacrifice entailed in any transformation—putting into relief this bedrock as our vanishing point. Desire seems to require it.
In Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (1985/1987), Nicole Loraux demonstrates the tie between disappearance, concealment, femininity, and desire, through the deaths of women in Greek tragedy. These deaths follow a precise logic for they are only staged in certain ways and very particular words are used. Women, as we’ve noted before, are hanged, whereas men die by the sword. Hanging contains a very clear idea of movement. It is elevation, flight, rising up, as well as throwing oneself down, falling into the depths: “the same word, aiero, which means elevation and suspension, applies to these two flights in opposite directions, upwards and downwards, as though height has its own depth: as though the place below, whether that be the ground or the world under that, could be reached only by first rising up” (Loraux, 1985/1987, p. 18). For Loraux, a woman’s death must always signify movement, and the more feminine the figure the more the emphasis lies on this—reaching its pinnacle in the flight of a bird that makes its escape.
Silence is another adornment of women in tragedy, the maintenance of silence under threat, accusation, and, censure. They can and will conceal their desire. This is linked to the bodily sight of death chosen for women. Through hanging, strangulation, slitting their neck, it is aimed at the throat. Women tear at their throats in moments of extreme grief. The throat, Loraux shows, is connected to both voice and the breath:
In the gynecological thinking of the Greeks, one is caught between two mouths, two necks, where vagaries of the womb suddenly choke the voice in a woman’s throat, and where many a young girl old enough to be a nymphe hangs herself to escape the threat of the terrifying suffocation inside her body. Anyone at all familiar with Freud’s work will remember Dora, the cough that was one of her symptoms, and the remarks of Freud on this “displacement from the lower to the upper part of the body” which invade the throat because “that part of the body had to a high degree retained its significance as an erogenous zone in the young girl” (Loraux, 1985/1987, p. 34).
Loraux cautions the exaggerated use of this gynecological psychoanalytic baggage. Tragedy, she says, ultimately remains silent on such issues; the only place given firm allocation is death itself. These women die evoking a link between their sex and their voice. If these have been refused to them, then perhaps in accepting death, they make them their own once again.
We might remember that Freud’s oral-erotic interpretation attempted to link Dora’s oral symptoms to his construction that she imagined her father undergoing fellatio with Frau K as the sexual method of choice for a man without means. Freud contended that symptoms—her bouts of silence, her cough—used displacement upward from genitals to mouth. Lacan pointed out a strange error, for cunnilingus is clearly the sexual method for impotent men, foregrounding Freud’s countertrans-ference. He missed the importance of the figure of Frau K whose adorable little white body captivated Dora as the mystery of femininity. This countertransference silenced Dora, or perhaps we might say, allowed her to keep silent on this dimension of her desire. It also allowed her to prematurely end her treatment.
Feminine deaths in tragedy are not only cloaked in silence, they are all unseen. Every female death takes place off stage. Loraux concludes that a woman’s tragic death is the only thing that belongs to her and the silence evokes this isolation. There are no words in a language of male renown that can give a place to a woman’s death. While men’s lives and deaths are written down in the history books—the glory of Athens—the woman remains a silent figure. These feminine deaths are bound by the secrets of body and home.
Keeping silent also meant that someone, at some point, was forced to speak of her, usually the chorus. What they come to say seems to center on the character of her will—her freedom, paradoxically, in the form of a submission to death. Through the act of refusal, which envelopes the tragic killing of a woman, the moment of choosing to submit is made conspicuous. This bivalent character of freedom and refusal, submission and silence, is particular to these feminine deaths and no others.
Loraux makes much of the sacrifice of the virgin Polyxena who, after struggling, bares her breasts to her sacrificer. It is both an act of defiance and acceptance that awes even her murderer:
Greeks! You who razed my city!
It is my will to die. Let no one touch my skin!
I shall offer my throat in good courage.
But let me stand free—I would die free!—for god’s sake
While you kill me.
…
When she heard the command she took her robe at the shoulderpoint
And tore it all the way to the navel.
Exposed her breasts beautiful as a statue.
Set her knee on the ground and spoke to all a word of absolute nerve:
“Here! If you want to strike the chest, young man strike!
Or, if you want the neck, I turn my throat to you!”
And he, pitying the girl, cuts her breath in two.”
(Euripides, 2006, p. 124)
A woman must die free, or, rather, it is through death that we glimpse something of the freedom of desire.
I am reminded of Goethe’s repugnance at Antigone’s final lament in her tomb before her death. As Lacan (1986/1992) refers to it in the Ethics Seminar, “It’s important that some madness always strike the wisest of discourses, and Goethe cannot help emitting a wish. ‘I wish,’ he says, ‘that one day some scholar will reveal to us that this passage is a later addition’ (p. 255). Goethe wanted Antigone to remain more steadfast in her will. He thought that would have made her a better heroine. But for Loraux, as Lacan, it is not a question of heroism and these moments, repeated throughout Greek tragedy, reveal something beyond individual heroics.
This something more is closely tied to the body, to the very tension of desire. For Loraux, this seems to be what tragedy emphasizes or tries to give representation to. There must be a fall and a flight. She must struggle and go willingly. She submits to her fate only to refuse once again, and she refuses only to reinforce her choice a second time. This highlights not only the difficulty of that choice, but the choice as a choice, through the medium of repetition. This building, wrenching tension, is desire, an experience that must be tolerated at the most extreme limit of the self, at its vanishing point. Through this play of affirmation and negation, their death is the counterpart to an exalted, but other-worldly, freedom and equanimity whose basis is desire itself.
“Whatever freedom the tragic discourse of the Greeks offered to women, it did not allow them ultimately to transgress the frontier that divided and opposed the sexes” (Loraux, 1985/1987, p. 78). Liberty, and the powerful place held within it by constraint, is played out in the field of communal life, only there where all paths lead to death. The sacrifice of virgins whose bodies are too inviolate, hanging which evokes falling and flying up, the sacrifice of the mermaid’s pretty white legs, a mother’s grief and memory, all point to a sacrifice made in order to establish the true frontier that divides and opposes the sexes wherein desire may be brought to life. Loraux does not judge nor make essential these markers of death and sexuality as they appear in the various constellations, circling around femininity or masculinity. The point is to trace this life of desire.
Perhaps this animates a faith, a faith that there is a limit that may shelter a beyond where a viable “temperate relation of one sex to the other” exists. A faith that desire can be a “desire to obtain absolute difference,” that this would serve as an opening in the field of love for a desire “outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live” (Lacan, 1973/1981, p. 276). This, Loraux says, abides by a certain logic: “that which you win you instantly lose” (Loraux, 1985/1987, p. 45). We have to wonder, or at least hope, that the reverse may also be possible. Such would be the “delusional” faith of feminine sacrifice.
Femininity, submission, limit, sacrifice, and castration, form a much-disputed series. Aware of the contradictions and problems, I’m willing for the time being to accept this constellation of terms until a new one emerges that isn’t merely a reversal in the direction of virility. If one wants to argue that this only comes into play as the result of a phallo-centric fantasy, then perhaps that argument participates in a fantasy itself, namely of enforced equality. My point isn’t to diagnose fantasy, but to put fantasy to use, to play with it. What other way is there with desire?
In any case, the limit that was taken as the aim in the Greek tragedies was not equality but absolute difference. Only in pushing toward absolute difference, living through the disjunction that marks it (Lacan’s “il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”) can one even begin to conceive of freedom, justice, or liberty. This takes place through a work with fantasy, not against it. In a fictional world where women die monotonously by the throat and men’s whole bodies are subject to penetration by swords, what becomes clear is that what is being constructed is this demarcating limit. That limit is established only in these death scenes which reconcile for a moment the disjunction in obviating it.
The irreducible reality of the anatomical distinction between the sexes, what gives us this terrible constellation of terms in the first place, is the only saving grace. But that grace only comes through a sacrifice whose specter, for the time, is always death itself. It is as if it is barely possible in this world. That it is only at the point where we move between this world and another unknown that we can begin to conceive of something else.
There are three questions we are told by Freud that a child cannot master: the sexual relation, the vaginal orifice, and the inseminating role of semen. Sacrifice becomes the act through which a boundary is made to appear in a constellation of lovers, women, fathers, and the violent parameters of living and dying—symbolic life itself. Sacrifice is surely a symptom, but it is a symptom precisely of this necessity for symbolic life, for something to come in the place where there is nothing and mark that impossible absence. As Lacan puts it:
For the subject the object appears, if I may put it this way, on the outside. The subject is no longer the object: he rejects it with all the force of his being and will not find it again until he sacrifices himself (Lacan et al., 1977, p. 23).
Clinically we know all too well a field of neurotic renunciation, the stringent position that nothing can be had or gained or won. This strategy in fact protects the object of one’s tenderness against this greater sacrifice. Adorno was master in this alone, and in this he declared an end to symbols, poetry, and art, no less philosophy.
The figure of omnipotence is there when the object is one that cannot be brought into this kind of play and circulation. Under a utilitarian law, perversion demands not elaboration, but a state of absolute well-being. If one cannot sacrifice, one murders ad infinitum. Always on this side of the pleasure principle, it lives according to its law—everything that is good is me, everything that is bad is you. The neurotic bemoans his subjection, a contortionist against the demands of life, and dreams of becoming this perverse figure. This logic of neurosis reverses these quadrants—everything that is bad is me, everything that is good is you.
In either case, one the negative of the other, ravaging fathers and ravished children, they all pay a price. Psychoanalysis, in elevating a certain kind of sacrifice that must be made, attempts to bypass these temptations—cowardice, perversion—in abiding by their very logic, drawing out this logic to its end. Psychoanalysis searches out the limit in order to stay there, trembling, as Adorno said, between fate and freedom.
What do these stories have to say then? Nothing, insofar as none of what constitutes their center speaks. The quiet self-delegated exile of a father, the mute princess’ suicide in the name of love, a mother’s grief, and all of those women hanged. The moment of continuing is always one that will refuse what introduces a form of stasis. Every act speaks to a turn in the generations or between the sexes. What is most intimate and personal finds a point of externality whose point of passage refuses, at bottom, any supplement, be it one of historical meaning, sense, moral lessons, or interpretation. It stands as it is. It asks nothing more than to be allowed to continue. What is new exists outside of sense, or between sense and nonsense, between what exists and what insists beyond existence. It ex-sists, or, as Lacan (2001) terms it, is ab-sense.
A whole movement of women began writing as a result of an encounter with Lacan’s thought. The strange transaction that seems to take place isn’t one of received wisdom, of mastering a body of knowledge, but something else, something that I would say is closer to wisdom about the body as that which fails in a particular way—fails in particular because of sexuality. The ego is first and foremost a necessary failure, namely a body ego. Despite the war between Lacan and so-called ego-psychology, it was to the question of the ego that he turned in his last seminars before his death, a question that I think cannot be dissociated from this question about the feminine to which he had also turned.
Lacan, in speaking about the fantasy Freud elaborated of watching a child being beaten, says that we should see in this something of an imaginarized scene that at bottom takes up the pain of life, our fall from grace—converting it into a scene of enjoyment. It is not only this scene, but the scene of the ego which must submit to the other agencies of the mind, one part turned around against the other. How do we accept the ways that we are subjugated and undone most intimately by the others that we love? Lacan says about it:
you should recall that no matter how strange, how bizarre the phantasy of perverse desire may be in appearance, desire is always in some fashion involved in it, involved in a relation which is always linked to the pathetic, to the pain of existing as such, of purely existing, or of existing as a sexual term. It is obviously in this measure that the one who suffers injury in the sadistic fantasy is something which involves the subject in so far as he himself can be open to this injury, that the sadistic phantasy subsists … One cannot but be surprised that it has been thought possible to elude it for a single instant by making of the sadistic tendency something which in any way could be referred to a pure and simple primitive aggression (Lacan, 1958, L15.4.59, p. 9).
Perhaps here we can see the value of elaborating the so-called feminine position: passivity, submission, humiliation, abjection, the exit from one’s own agency, the safety of voyeurism, and so on.
The problem for Lacan is always jouissance, not fantasy. The latter—in its relationship to desire—has an intimate bearing on the most universal of truths, even in its utterly perverse aspects. Gratification, jouissance, on the other hand, submerges truth along with desire, or one might say, submerges the truth of desire. Rather than constituting an opening, it may, in its isolation and repetition, become a point of closure.
Finding one’s place in relation to another’s writing poses similar difficulties: What opening can we find in their fantasy, what closes the other out? With Lacan, wanting to be gratified by him in the act of reading is instantly challenged. He meant it as much. I would say that after some time, I found in Lacan a kind of permission, an opening granted through the struggle with his work. Through him, I was able to accept more of what is impossible for me than through any other thinker, impossibility being something that a general hysteria usually converts to jouissance—the gratification of immediate refusal, outrage, or helplessness. Through him I was forced to find a certain kind of agency, and I was certainly forced to find my desire to continue reading.
Freud says in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937) that patient’s come looking for a cure they do not want, namely this encounter with femininity. What patient’s want an analyst to give them, something bearing the title of the phallus, cannot be given. Barring this, they will never allow themselves to be cured by another—they will not recognize a power beyond themselves. At the point where they might open themselves up to this beyond, they engage in intractable resistance. Analysis becomes interminable.
Termination seems to be dependant on the analysis creating the conditions for an encounter that gives it its end or limit. I think it is Lacan’s recognition of this important realm beyond the phallus that appealed to so many women and created this desire to write. In Lacan’s Encore Seminar (1975/1998), he speaks about love and jouissance. The confrontation with the impasse of the sexual relation, in particular with phallic jouissance, puts love to the test. Love must find some means of access to what lies beyond the phallus, which means that it has to confront this failure and impossibility. Lacan designates this realm femininity, or, for a less gendered variant, Other jouissance.
Analysis is a confrontation with this Other realm of possibility that he links with the act of writing. Analysis is “the displacement of the negation from the “stops not being written” to the “doesn’t stop not being written”, in other words, from contingency to necessity—there lies the point of suspension to which all love is attached” (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 145). What doesn’t stop not being written is everything that turns around absence in psychoanalysis—woman, fathers, authority, the sexual relationship, the unconscious. We encounter this absence and in doing so, make the negation shift—stops, doesn’t stop, won’t stop. We can see this in the move from Athenian ane¯ r, to Electra and Antigone, from pride to the little mermaid’s love and a mother’s grief. What is important is to find a way to continue.
The problems of gratitude, and here I am quite in agreement with Melanie Klein, run deep. Love and gratitude are given by Lacan the sign of impossibility—they do not come without a tremendous struggle, they must be invented anew. Somehow, submitting to Lacan’s work, finding pleasure in him, mirrored this impossible process of trying to make a negation, at many times a double negation, shift. To be grateful for what he was trying to do, for what he did, in particular, this act of teaching for twenty-eight years. The difficulty of Lacan, but even more so of having to follow his movements—from year to year in his seminars, from one joke to another, his shifts in register and conceptual system—required giving up, first and foremost, the idea that others understood what he was saying, perhaps above all, Lacan himself.
Ironically, Lacan calls out to the women in his audience on a number of occasions and asks them to say what it is that they know. He asks them to tell him about feminine sexuality and bemoans that they only keep silent. Lacan even seems to taunt them—if you aren’t the worst analysts one might imagine that you would be the best, unsurpassable. But not a word.
In so many of these women writers, from Catherine Clément, to Michèle Montrelay, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, it is not so much an answer in the form of divulging their secrets but a sheer act of writing that forms the response. Writing meets with voice, the last in a line of partial objects for Lacan, transformed by these women into a singular voice, perhaps feminine (it has been described as such), that informs both the form and the content of their works. It is as if saying something about the feminine can only be done as a feminine form of signature within an act of writing. Not a work on, but a work by, this woman.
Lacan (1975) will turn to this idea of signature as a final rendition of sublimation—a means of finding one’s way with their unconscious and jouissance. He would like for desire, sublimated in this way, to take on a character much closer to the drive pure and simple—its rhythm and patterning. The important distinction Lacan makes at this late point, between his earlier theory that emphasized the symbolic and his late theory that focuses on the real, is that writing, being on the side of the latter, calls for no supplementation by meaning. It requires no third. Lacan is defining this dimension of the real in the signifier:
What is this notion if we cannot define it as the very form into which desire flows … or more exactly that the very notion of drive far from confusing itself with the substance of the sexual relationship, is this form itself, that it is the interplay of the signifier … . And it is also indeed as such that we can define sublimation. It is something through which, as I wrote somewhere, desire and the letter can become equivalent (Lacan, 1975, L 1.7.59, p. 433)
Unlike the elaboration of a symptom in psychoanalysis—the work of unraveling the network of signifiers—writing is closer to the formula of desire. It is closer to the formal qualities of unconscious desire: the very interplay, or play, of the signifier.
Patients come and they are certainly their particular selves. I do not intend to invoke the opposite register as one of diffusion, pathologizing as a vindication of identity—the Athenians were playing at that game long enough. If desire inhabits us as something that must remain alien, then it is not that the alien is gone once and for all at the end of analysis, a kind of anal fantasy. Where we stop cannot be a point of assimilation or imagined eradication. Lacan’s play with this idea of signature is one way to talk about the end of an analysis—a singular mobilization of desire, a radical change in structure. This act of writing or signature is a way of putting to use a particular symptom rather than stagnating in the face of it.
I think the distinction between knowledge (conaissance) and know-how (savoir-y-faire) is important here. One does not understand desire— which in any case would be interminable—one finds a know-how through it. What analysis cultivates is one’s unique signature that is both a way of being with desire and desires way of being. Signature and signifier become the formal play and act, not as a source of meaning, but a means of punctuation. Period. Exclamation. Semicolon. End. Lacan says in the Les Non-Dupes Errent seminar (1973), “one has to stop. One even asks for nothing but that” (L.13.11.73, p. 22). Meaning is endless.
The question of desire becomes central for Lacan in reinterpreting the importance of the limit and act of psychoanalysis. He discusses Freud’s essay, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), noting that if the child has to reconcile himself with a narcissistic investment in his own body, the castration threat, against his incestuous desire in the familial complex, he will always choose to salvage his narcissism and turn away from his desire. But this is no solution. It still leaves the question of desire hanging in the balance. It seems that the child must come to terms with incestuous desire and abandon a narcissism that can only be a way station on the path toward desire for other objects.
For Lacan, a work of mourning must take place. In the case of the boy, for example, to desire his mother leaves him vulnerable to the threat of his father’s punishment, while on the other hand, to be the object of his father’s desire leaves him likewise castrated since he is in the feminine position. However you render this story, sexuality, having a body, conflicting gender identifications, locating yourself in the generational turn, have a significant impact that requires signification. The temptation to resolve these through being the object of desire (rather than the complicated subject of it) is a problem that Lacan called the problem of being the phallus for the Other—wanting to be for them what they are irrevocably lacking. Mourning means confronting this lack.
The phallus is a fantasy whose origin is signification itself—what comes in the place of absence. Fantasy tries to fix signification or reduce it to a static image—one signifier, the signifier one. All object relations are inherently fetishistic, as Freud says in The Three Essays (1905a). This is how Lacan reads the importance of the bedrock of castration—the encounter with impossibility and limit, with the failure of the phallus, that initiates the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. “Castration, I say it is real!” said Lacan.
With Lacan, desire, its interminable movement, is itself the limiting factor in so far as it draws you toward the castration complex. Psychoanalysis at its best pushes the patient as far as is possible across the threshold of his narcissism, the limits of his own identity, traversing the fantasy in the direction of desire. Lacan traces this to Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), when he says that one can locate an end to interpretation particularly when the desire to master the dream, to know it in full, in effect, dies out. Does the dream create this limit or is the limit one that allows us to truly get inside the dream? The answer, if there is one, probably extends beyond the simplicity of this either or. For Freud, in any case, this endpoint of interpretation was referred to as the omphalos. It evokes both origin and cut.
Lacan said that in analysis one person believes that something is impossible and it can never be the analyst. If the analyst refuses something, it is most likely the anxiety that the analysand demands of him as a way of avoiding castration. Like the demand for consistency, the analysand is brought in the direction of that which threatens it. This is always a logical move. “Logic is defined in the field where the subject supposed to know is brought to nothing” (Lacan, 1971a, Lecture X, p. 15). Unconscious fantasy manifestly is always a stated impossibility that harbors its opposite—the narcissistic pathos. The analyst’s faith in the unconscious is situated as the direct inversion of this principle.
Psychoanalysis is the unique act of finding our way with our unconscious, finding our way with desire, putting the unconscious to work as our instrument. We have little else that is truly ours. It is this know-how with desire that Lacan felt appeared in the analysis as a formal writing that was inherently transformative. He elevates this as the aim.
When I first went into analysis I only had one kind of dream—no memories, one dream. They were, on the whole, underwater dreams. I would be swimming and looking. I only understood this much later, but the act of looking was directly tied to the swimming. The feeling of being submerged and suspended is what allowed me to look with a sense of calm. Looking, no less being looked at, was not something that in my day to day life engendered ease. So follows the wish in the dream.
In fact looking might have been my greatest source of anxiety manifesting itself once in a strange symptom at the very beginning of analysis where I had to leave for a period of time because I didn’t like the way my analyst looked at me. At the same time I had a paradoxical feeling that he couldn’t look at me, and one might surmise in this a desire to be looked at. This is all well and fine, analysis brings to the surface these vicissitudes, and they are, in the case of a good enough analysis, weathered, if not elaborated.
The incestuous tie is certainly there in these quasi-uterine dreams and the transitory phobic symptom. Lacan’s brilliant insistence on reading the Oedipal in the preoedipal is instructive. It is not just the boundless narcissism of the watery expanse, the archaic mother of the Thalassa complex, or the death drive as a uterine calm, nor even the narcissistic voyeuristic complex, it is these too, but what these mask or block that is of utmost importance. The phobia certainly betrays that more is at stake, no less the pole of excitement that is always curiously missing in any sense of calm.
Being in analysis disturbed, to say the least, this particular sense of calm—at least for a while. The underwater dreams vanished for a period of years and I had nothing but nightmares. Buried in these nightmares were always the most tender of wishes and it took a great deal of work, perhaps mostly on the side of my analyst, to get me past a sense of horror or disgust in order to say or see something more. Such is the terror of recognizing one’s own desire.
It is the dream of the memorial and the dream of the vase and the letter that together emerged as a different mode of representation after a time of analytic work. From an absolute, almost dead calm, from the position of the passive voyeur, to the more actively experienced nightmares and a horrified fascination with scenes of imminent violence, there is still something about desire that remains split-off or submerged. In fact, I might say that it was in representing to myself impossibility in the dream of the memorial (no one can), certainly on the edge of a scene of violence and a calm initiated by the tortured memorial, that elaboration was first opened outward. Perhaps the memorial stood in for this way of representing my subjective place—outside safe, inside lost.
So it is not that these former ways of representation are not mine, of course they are mine, but I do not quite have a place within their structure. It is not as if I am not looking, or fascinated, or horrified, in these other dreams you have read, but there these are moments in a whole field of meanings, memories, representations, and wishes that serve as a series of co-ordinates. It is perhaps important to know that it is only after this shift that I was in fact able to remember anything at all of my early life, notably perhaps the time I spent as a young girl, just before the dissolution of my family, playing in the water with my father.
If I were to try and say what I think Lacan gives to his female audience, it is his elevation of the feminine, the not-all, Other jouissance, as the only place which can break new ground. Love and knowledge must aim for this beyond as the ground on which to break. In his way, Lacan gives what he does not have. The nothing that is “the destiny and drama of love” (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 256). This radical opening is linked to both an effect of the word, woman, and the possibility of sublimation as afforded by analysis:
But it is indeed something different that is in question. It is the opening, it is the gap onto this radically new thing that every cut of the word introduces. Here it is not only from the woman that we have to wish for this grain of phantasy or this grain of poetry, but from analysis itself (Lacan, 1958, L1.7.59, p. 435)
Certainly it was after the years of nightmares that something broke open and we might wonder what this has to do with femininity, no less Oedipus.
I can’t say that at the time I was happy to be relieved of my dreams of swimming and what sustained me was only the slightest faith that the analysis would come to something else with which I would be better off. I laugh thinking about it now. This problem surfaced, I think unbeknownst to either of us, in the transference. I tortured my analyst, no less myself, for months, insisting that I wanted to be a scuba-diver and not a psychoanalyst. Could he just say that that was ok? I would be cured, I insisted. I would be happy. You cannot go back the silence seemed to insist.
The all-loving, omnipresent father must fall. It is only here, in the fall to where he is not-all, that we can encounter the abyss. Like the fascinated child, the mute princess, and the criminal mother, what you win by way of knowledge you instantly lose. She will retain her desire as a question. Lacan, despite his pleas, knew this. And he knew the women would never give anything like answers; that what they know is perhaps only about what cannot be known. In asking women to speak, he reverses his position and makes the audience his analyst. Say what you know! Tell me the secrets of desire!
Some of the work that I would encounter in analysis many years later, during a more quiescent period of my life, was what it was that I was seeking in the water. The time I spent on beaches, in the ocean, aroused an intense desire to look and find, turning over rocks, seeking in nooks and crannies. I had to withstand a kind of terror in this exploration. How could you put your hand in there? All of the imagined culprits would multiply. I tested my courage. But it was never what was found—rocks, shells, small animals—that seemed to matter, but to find a way to continue looking, despite fear, disappointment, or even success.
I often couldn’t bear for this game to end, and indeed, it doesn’t have to, in which case not ending it also becomes a problem. I played with how to stop—when the bucket is full, three more of these, when I’ve found something I haven’t seen before. Which one could be a desired end? Which one allowed for another beginning? How quickly? When does beginning again lag behind desire, or when does desire lag behind already having found oneself in the act? Psychoanalyst’s who work with children know how this structuring of games seems to encompass so much of what we do in play. It is a way of mapping how desire lives and dies.
The little traumas of life give us an opportunity to rework this entire fabric of being—who we have been and who we will come to be after a given event. Often enough there are problematic snags in this process of stretching one’s identity—between what is no longer and what is not yet, like the reaching suspension in the process of signification. It can fill one with a sense of horror. Perhaps analysis allows us to encounter this movement, its ebbs and flows, with a little more ease. Perhaps in analysis, what we do is live through this impossible restructuring of our unconscious desire, always connected to the intensification of the transference.
My father, after my mother left, and subsequently after their divorce, never took me on holiday again. Would I have dreamt of water so readily if this hadn’t been the path of these experiences? Perhaps not, but as memories one might imagine that they have enough resonance on their own. Was it necessary for these dreams to be so extreme with respect to their cloak and dagger operation with desire? Necessary? Certainly one might hope not, but what is necessary? Whatever takes the unnecessary, which encompasses the majority of life, and makes of it a kind of necessity, a need to find one’s way, however painful, I imagine we should take on board.
A symptom is certainly something that takes an early scene, the efflorescence of desire in Oedipal childhood say, and colors it with the traumas of life. The pleasure is only a danger thereafter, relegated to a world of dreams where it is effectively lived in disguise. It would take what felt like an eternity of nightmares to recover what was left of my desire, split-off in this way. It is strange to know that it is a very simple absence or loss that sets off this chain of events when all is said and done. Yet, when all is said and done, getting closer to the effects of a simple absence on the entire composition of a life is something I wouldn’t easily barter away, even if that could have been the price of my nightmares. Perhaps this simple absence is one way of thinking through this question of the feminine. The dreams in this book, like the formation of a signature, are perhaps always, when all is said and done, feminine.
There is one story in the aftermath of these that I would like to tell. Once, when contemplating the idea of what it would be like to be back in analysis, I thought about how horrible I felt during much of it and this particular early moment of an infinity of nightmares. To hell with going through that again, I balked, not on your life. And pay for it? Money is always a good means of final resistance—we won’t sacrifice it for the world.
With some temperance by virtue of time, I thought about whether it would have to be like that a second time? Is there any way to know in advance? Trying to know like this seems wrong. Shouldn’t I know better? Maybe I do need more analysis. I went to sleep with these questions lingering in my mind, also mildly annoyed that I could feel so repugnant toward something that remains critical to what I do, who I am.
That night I had the first nightmare in what must have been five years or so. I was on my spiral staircase in my house and I reached back into my hair with my hands and encountered the remains of a dead spider. A chill ran through my body—I was increasingly petrified. I didn’t want to touch it, but how could I not, at the very least, to excise its presence. I managed, somehow, god knows, in this state of mortification to find a thought. I remember saying to myself—what could be worse than finding a dead spider in your hair, at which point, just as the thought concluded, an alive one crept around the other side of my face and reared its legs. I woke up with a gasp of breath.
Within a few seconds I ended up bursting into laughter. The dream was a perfectly structured joke: What could be worse than finding a dead spider in your hair? Finding an alive one! So the nightmare was a reminder of what I found in analysis—desire, a question of life and death, the reversal between tragedy and comedy, a sense of humor, the formal beauty of a wish. What are you afraid of, what can I know, also perhaps my annoyance with myself, found their answer.
Spiders have always symbolically been linked to the feminine, and while I might not have bothered with associations—wasn’t the laugh enough—and in particular with such grossly generalized ones as this, there is something of importance here to note. The site on the stairs is a place where my mother had recently fallen down and certainly the conflict between mothers and daughters, this mother and myself, is bound up with this scene, no less the original scene of analysis. Is she worse dead or alive? If I may put it in that interrogative form. And further, one cannot really make a choice like this when it comes to life and death, no less mothers. More than this, I would say that the dream, responding to thoughts about not wanting to live through certain moments again in analysis, says something about its bedrock—this encounter with one’s horror of femininity. It was a reminder that I am in fact grateful that I continue to be both horrified and good humored.
“Is she worse dead or alive?” is a question that is asked in its own way by Hamlet about himself—to be or not to be. Hamlet’s words circle around the question of life and death, action and inaction, the integrity of the object or its debasement and dissolution. “That this too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” … as he says in his first soliloquy. The question of death and mourning, Lacan points out, runs from one side of the play to the other. No one in this play speaks about anything but death and mourning. The encounter with the ghost is nothing other than the encounter with death itself, which causes a profound estrangement in Hamlet.
Gertrude mourns her husband, Hamlet’s father, too quickly; Hamlet is accused by his father’s murderer, his uncle Claudius, of mourning too long; Ophelia, whose father is buried in stealth after being murdered by Hamlet, descends into a melancholic madness; and, Laertes, like Hamlet, loses both his father and Ophelia, both men competing over their grief in a struggle that curiously takes place in Ophelia’s very grave. The play, Lacan says, ends in a pile of corpses. It is not our own death—which is something no one has—but the death of others that tears the very fabric of our being.
Just as Freud smuggles the Oedipus Complex into The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in a section on dreams of the deaths of persons of whom one is fond—where Oedipus is positioned as the direct inversion of the story of Hamlet who bears out its inhibiting consequences in his character—there is something important to be wrestled with in this tragic play. Lacan’s reading of Hamlet is a singular act of interpretation, disentangling the structure, form, and content of the play, loosening the bonds of hundreds of years of prior, often quite contradictory, interpretation.
Positioned between his 1957–1958 Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, and the well-known 1959–1960 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan takes up the question of Hamlet in 1958–1959 under the heading, Desire and Its Interpretation. I think it is important to see this reading of Hamlet as following a question about the unconscious, and, as a prelude to his remarks on sublimation and the ethical integrity of desire in his reading of Antigone.
Hamlet is Antigone’s tragic counterpart. Where he ends, she begins— notably as one who is marked and destined for death. Their difference hinges on their relation to their own will and desire. At the extreme end, Antigone, for Lacan, is an emblem of femininity, whereas Hamlet is described as being possessed by nothing short of an absolute horror of it. These two, taken together, tell us something about the action and aim of psychoanalysis unrivaled since Freud’s own coupled reading of Sophocles and Shakespeare. It is Lacan’s insistence on a return to Freud that gave him the impetus to take up this original question that marks the terrain of the birth of the Oedipus complex.
The reading of Hamlet stretches over two months of seminars. Each session is like a successive pass over the entire play, repeated and repeating elaborations of a building structure that keeps looping back around in order to gain fresh momentum. When I read Lacan’s seminars I almost have to find a state of consciousness that allows me to ignore the jargon, the bad translations, funneling my attention back and forth between the French and English, his text and the one he is commenting on, the difference between himself and Freud. I have to, as I have said, find a way to enjoy him and the unfolding of his words in a stretch of time that is not mine. It is not unlike the suspended attention that is demanded of the psychoanalyst.
In the case of Hamlet one might wonder if reading a play, I suppose like reading one of Lacan’s transcripts—something that is supposed to be seen, witnessed, experienced, and heard, in a setting that takes place among others in a heightened state of attention—is impossible. Reading what is meant to be a spoken discourse requires an added feat of imagination. When I first began reading this seminar, I did so without any particular interest. At a second pass, I stopped short at an exclamation of Lacan’s in his second session. It was a moment where I suddenly remembered that Lacan was speaking and I saw him there, saying what I was reading, in particular, saying it to an audience. It was a moment that I took to be unscripted, a surprise, even to him, perhaps only because of a reversal in an identification, a transitivity, where I was surprised.
This point of identification aside, it was the moment when I suddenly realized that we were in the midst of reading Hamlet and I wanted to know where Lacan was going to go with it:
For those who read the text, it is something that knocks you over backwards, makes you bite the carpet and roll on the ground, it is something unimaginable. There is not a verse of Hamlet, nor one of his replies, which does not have in English a percussive power, a violence of language which makes of it something which one is at every moment absolutely stupefied. You could believe that it was written yesterday, that one could not write things like that three centuries ago (Lacan, 1958, L11.3.59, p. 8).
What knocks Lacan over backward? What has him biting the carpet and rolling around on the ground? What in Hamlet is so violent and unimaginable? What can we identify with so strongly even though it is centuries old? I’d be hard pressed not to recognize this as a moment of Lacan’s desire that I encountered in such a way that it evoked my own.
I would say that this moment sets the tone for the entire reading of Hamlet. Whatever this percussive power, this stupefaction, Lacan goes on to say, the play unfurls like this—as if everyone has their back to a wall of truth that they cannot recognize and is hemming in on them from all sides. It is as if we are caught at a certain threshold where there is no relaxation. The world becomes a living reproach that they, and Hamlet best, are ensnared by. Hamlet’s words seem to try to shatter this intolerable limit—words that become a cruelty he unleashes in all directions, perhaps always first at himself.
Nothing can be gained, nothing can wanted, this is the melancholic’s nihilistic position. A cowardice in the face of life, an endless meditation on the object of action, as Hamlet says. For Lacan then, the violence of Hamlet, is the violence of failed mourning. Lacan conjectures that an intrinsic relation between time and mourning is staged in the very form of the play. Nothing is more out of joint in this play so much as time. Hamlet lives at an hour that is never his own, the time of his parents and of others to which he lends himself. Hamlet, chained to these others, endlessly procrastinates, only, in a burst of haste, to act with utter impulsivity. He is always too early or too late. Thought and action, words and deeds, are interminably at odds. The play seems to veer around disjointed moments: its long drawn out beginning only for Hamlet to be gone for months, with a final mad sequence of events where all parties meet their end.
If there is a difference between Oedipus and Hamlet the difference is one between action and inhibition. You only act when you do not know—that you’ve killed your father and are sleeping with your mother—and when you do know, the consequence of that knowledge is a morbid inhibition. “The one who knows is in such a dangerous position as such, so marked out for failure and sacrifice, that he has to take the path, as Pascal says somewhere, of being mad along with the others” (Lacan, 1958, L15.4.59, p. 12), in other words, pretending again not to know. The truth that Hamlet is exposed to—his mother is married to his father’s murderer, his father’s brother—is a hopeless truth, a truth without much redemption. If it doesn’t make one mad to begin with, like Ophelia, then one has to play a game of madness.
How can we identify with someone as problematic as Hamlet, Lacan asks? Why is the pinnacle of an actor’s career so often to play him? T. S. Eliot (1920/1997) famously called the play an aesthetic failure and yet it marks a critical turn in Shakespeare’s work from the pastoral comedies to plays that, Lacan says, are a quantum leap from these. What is it in this play that can act as such a turning point? Hamlet, to put it quite simply, evokes what Lacan calls the tragedy of desire “in so far as man is not simply possessed, invested by it, but that he has to … find this desire. Has to find it at all costs, and in great suffering, to the point of not being able to find it except at the limit” (Lacan, 1958, L11.3.59, p. 9).
This limit for Lacan is the limit of the self, of one’s narcissism, which must be traversed. Mourning is the pivot between narcissism and desire. This narcissistic capture that Hamlet embodies—this locked, internal tension of inhibition and the sense of injury—shows us the necessity of desire; it’s point of relief. However, what this desire represents is a tragic and painful passage through the process of mourning. Death is always the horizon of this self-shattering, loss is always in the background of any work with desire.
Hamlet shows us that loss is felt with such tortuous shame and humiliation that we retreat into ourselves. It is often only first through others that we take in the image of ourselves, that we begin to recover desire at all—a little like this moment of hearing Lacan’s desire to read the play in which I suddenly experience my own. We need these mirror-others as a support, and too much Otherness will unleash a fury of anxiety and aggression. It is this drama of desire—between the safety of like others and a terrifying unknown—that Lacan begins to outline through this play, exemplary of the dialectical unfolding of desire through narcissism as he metaphorized it in the mirror-stage.
Hamlet must be given back his desire—its ardor, its grief, its singular history. Through others, he tests desire, from his mother, to his step-father, Ophelia, and Laertes—this last acting like Hamlet’s double. These figures stand like our two sets of objects in psychic life: the primary objects that are one’s parents, and the secondary ones of lovers and rivals. The play alternates between these; they structure Hamlet’s tragic oscillation.
The play’s conclusion is initiated when Hamlet, watching Laertes mourn at Ophelia’s funeral, leaps at him in her grave, letting out an other-worldly cry of grief, declaring, “It is I, Hamlet the Dane.” Through his double—Laertes embodying his narcissistic image—he is able to find something of his desire in a moment of seeing himself, outside of himself, positioned in relation to this lost object. Hamlet says:
That to Laertes I forgot myself,
For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his. I’ll court his favors.
But sure the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a tow’ring passion.
Like the play within the play, we access something as intimate as desire in a moment outside of ourselves—in a flash identification. His grief, Lacan says, is found here for the first time. In saying I, Hamlet finally assumes his place as his father’s son.
This is the very structure of theater—the audiences’ relationship to this play itself and with Hamlet in particular. In part, it explains the importance of this encounter with Lacan’s desire when reading the seminar on Hamlet. Falling down backward, biting things and rolling around, because of a certain violence at the heart of desire, of suffering, of the beauty of language, is found through him when he enunciates it with a kind of inimitable passion. In minimal form, it is something like a beginning triangulation, Hamlet-Lacan-myself, Hamlet-Laertes-Ophelia. Through rivalry over an object of desire, we gain some movement and traction.
So for Lacan, the basic thesis of Freud’s that Hamlet cannot punish his uncle for what he has wished for unconsciously, is, as I hope you can see, more complicated than this. We should, Lacan suggests, take up this path that Freud points to and ask what is this unconscious of Hamlet and what is it that touches our own unconscious in the unfolding of the play. Hamlet idealizes his father, who has dispatched him to pursue justice in his name, and Hamlet is also perversely possessive of his mother, who has bedded down with this criminal uncle whom Hamlet calls a king of shreds and patches. Lacan asks, why would these two ones make zero?
Hamlet’s absolute horror of femininity—linked to a failure to mourn and the turn toward narcissism—is crucial to unfolding what is amiss. Ophelia, Lacan says, is the embodiment of this femininity, and as such, she is the play’s casualty. If Hamlet’s identification with Laertes served as an opening onto desire, Ophelia is in the reverse position. Her desire acts like an obstacle. In fact, not only Hamlet, but also most others in the play—Polonius, Laertes, and the king and queen also—dismiss that Ophelia is a subject with her own desire. She is taken as a pure object, as “bait”. No one ever asks her what it is that she wants. They never encounter her in the dimension of her own desiring. In her madness we see this desire explode onto the scene, her subjectivity immersed in a sexuality impugned from the beginning. From this, she slips into the river and dies. The scene is described through her dress, mermaid like and without distress it became heavy with drink. In this play, we are never very far from the dimension of orality, which I am beginning to suspect is why it has Lacan biting the carpet. Nowhere is the play more orally violent than in the encounter between Hamlet and his women.
Ophelia acts as a barometer throughout the play for Hamlet’s position with respect to his desire, says Lacan. Through her we find out about his wild estrangement, gone half-mad, after the encounter with his father’s ghost. After that encounter, Hamlet can do nothing but violently reject Ophelia—he has no desire for her any longer. It is only in her death, in the scene with Laertes just described, that Hamlet is in any possession of it again. The play seems to turn around her.
Lacan says that Ophelia has become for Hamlet, in his despair, “the pure and simple support of a life which in its essence becomes condemned for Hamlet. In short, what is produced at that moment, is this destruction or loss of the object which is reintegrated into the ego in its narcissistic framework” (Lacan, 1958, L15.4.59, p. 15). Hamlet’s melancholia causes a regression toward narcissism. Narcissism literally pulls desire inward, into the ego, as Freud outlines in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). The destruction of the world in melancholic sadness, its profit and texture, is the cost of this withdrawal of desire, which is the only thing that sustains our relation to the world. Without it, the world is flat, and Ophelia collapses into this object that Hamlet repudiates in the form of her femininity—”get thee to a nunnery,” “wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners,” “I say we will have no mo marriage.”
She is dissolved with such cruelty. The vicissitudes of her womanliness are attacked one by one. “She is herself a bud which is ready to blossom, and which is menaced by the insect gnawing at the heart of this bud. This vision of life ready to blossom, and of life which carries all lives, it is thus moreover that Hamlet qualifies it, situates it, in order to reject it” (Lacan, 1958, L 4.8.59, p. 12). Ophelia is this fecundity that is an offense, a breeder of sinners and calumny, a liar, a whore, and on the other side, always to be a chaste little girl. She is, Lacan says, what all girls are to men in the blossom of their youth—a phallus.
What is this object that Ophelia is that promotes this unfolding action in Hamlet? “Ophelia is one of the most fascinating creations which has been proposed to human imagination. Something which we can call the drama of the feminine object, the drama of desire, of the world which makes its appearance at the dawn of civilization in the form of Helen … incarnated in the drama and misfortune of Ophelia” (Lacan, 1958, L 4.3.59, p. 10). When Ophelia dies, she is given the sign of impossibility. She is literally evoked as lost—the lost, errant object that is at the dawn of civilization. Hamlet, through her death, confronts a desire that must be bound by loss, and finally begins to grieve. Her death acts like a second encounter with death that allows something of his own mourning to finally begin taking place.
But there is one more woman we must speak about and she is quite a woman at that. Ophelia is coupled with Gertrude, and their interplay is the play of a displacement of rage from mother to would-be-wife. Lacan famously said (with some impetuousness that many found offensive) that Gertrude is a gaping cunt. Mourning means nothing to her—when one goes, another comes. The question of the mother’s desire is a question about mourning, of a mourning transmitted between generations that must be assumed or accomplished. There must be something found beyond the image, especially beyond this image of a mother whose desire is only for her own satisfaction.
This is the same beyond that we see Hamlet try and fail to elevate in relation to Ophelia. Hamlet is looking for desire beyond jouissance—desire in the name of king and country, in the name of virtue and beauty, we might say, in the name-of-the-father. This attempt always reaches a sheer pitch of idealization from which it sinks back down—into filth, into rags, into shreds and patches. This splitting of the object, Lacan says, has its concomitant in the fading of the desire of the subject.
He wants to elevate their desire toward something beyond themselves. Without this beyond, an oral, greedy wanton desirousness which he sees in them seems to threaten him. With transitivity worthy of Lacan’s mirror stage, every reproach against his mother will reverse into a self-reproach: “Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous kindless villain … Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, that I … must like a whore unpack my heart with words, and fall a cursing like a very drab, a scullion!” The cause, the problem, is not, Lacan says, Hamlet’s unconscious desire for his mother, it is his mother’s desire that poses a problem for Hamlet.
With the death of his father Hamlet is thrown back upon the desire of his mother in a melancholic identification with her. He cannot separate. Lacan is reinterpreting Freud’s statement that in melancholia the shadow of the object has fallen on the ego. Hamlet is crushed by his mother’s desire at every step—”Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on … frailty thy name is woman,” he says with bitter irony.
When Hamlet speaks, what he says always seems to slip from his place into his mothers. He speaks only to imagine his mother with Claudius, to remember her love for his father, to ruminate on her inju-riousness to him, to ponder her desire in its tempo and flush. If his mother pleads with him in the opening scene, “let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet,” then his answer, “I shall in all my best obey you, madam,” is the one oath that Hamlet sustains. “Nothing in him can oppose in short a sort of fundamental availability … hiring himself to another and again for nothing” (Lacan, 1958, L 4.22.59, p. 6).
Ultimately, he never confronts his mother with the truth that he has learned from the ghost of his father. She learns it only as she dies. It is only after Hamlet sees Gertrude die that he learns of his own poisoning, and only in the short interval between this wound and his own death, will he finally avenge his father’s murder. He proceeds, to the very end of the play, in lockstep with his mother’s desire. Desire, for Lacan, must cut through this mirroring melancholic identification. Some act of mourning must cut through this pride of injury in relation to his mother.
The ghost, Lacan says, is this cut. The ghost of Hamlet’s father always appears to intervene in the space of this cut, between Hamlet and his mother—beseeching Hamlet not to, to step back, to purify his desire of this preoccupation, to remember his duty there where he needs to most, namely in the face of his mother. The ghost pleads with Hamlet to hear him—”lend thy serious hearing”; “so art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear”; “now, Hamlet, hear”—and then leaves him with one imperative: “howsoever thou pursuest this act; taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven.” Hamlet, to be sure, cannot hear this message of the ghost.
It appears again and for the last time in the incestuous scene with his mother. The reading of this scene is the heart of Lacan’s interpretation of Hamlet. After staging the play within the play—something that should alert us of an important turning point—Hamlet catches Claudius defenseless in a moment of prayer and does not kill him. He has his evidence, his chance, and he procrastinates. It is “hire and salary,” he says, not revenge. Hamlet dreams of a moment of purifying violence, interrupting Claudius in a moment of incestuous passion, cutting him off in the blossom of his sin like his father was—a primal scene fantasy if there ever was one. Whatever it is about this fantasy, it gives him the impetus not to act, and instead, he goes to his mother. If there is something inexplicable about this stepping down, the inhibition that washes over Hamlet, we will learn of it in this scene with his mother.
“And there takes place this long scene which is a kind of highpoint of the theater, this something about which the last time I told you that to read it brings you to the limit of what you can tolerate, where he is going to adjure his mother pathetically to become aware of the point that she is at” (Lacan, 1958, L 3.18.59, p. 12). Once he reaches her in her chambers, Hamlet, in an act of rash haste, kills Polonius asking if it is the king—whom we know he has just left outside. It is as if this fantasy has gotten the best of him.
He then begins his appeal to Gertrude, that she should know and temper her desire—a message also no doubt meant for himself given in this inverted form. “O shame, where is thy blush? Rebellious hell, if thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones, to flaming youth let virtue be as wax and melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame.” His words mount in tension and violence and Gertrude literally writhes beneath them. As she cries for Hamlet to say no more, that he has cleft her heart in twain, the ghost suddenly appears:
Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul!
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
If Gertrude has no shame, this conceit cannot be matched by Hamlet’s own with which he mirrors her—her desirous excess and his aggressive one. Step between her and her fighting soul, the ghost asks, stepping into this space between her and him. Speak to her, the ghost implores.
“This place where Hamlet is always being asked to enter, to operate, to intervene, is here something which gives us the real situation of the drama. And despite the intervention, the signifying summons. It is signifying to us [psychoanalysts] because this is what is in question for us, what intervening means for us: ‘Between her and her’, that is our work. ‘Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works’, it is to the analyst that this appeal is addressed” (Lacan, 1958, L3.11.59, p. 15). The ghost, if I may put it like this, is the one who ushers a cut like the psychoanalyst. It asks Hamlet to step into a space, into the cut of this in-between, into the interval of desire. Between you and you, this is what the psychoanalyst offers. Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works, this is what our patients tell us.
Hamlet will only find this space in the form of a literal wound, a mortal cut. He cannot hear the message of the ghost any more than he can speak to his mother. What follows this scene with the ghost, Lacan says, is one more act of stepping down where we see the disappearance, the dying away of his appeal—”laying down his arms before something which seems ineluctable to him; namely that the mother’s desire here takes on again for him the value of something which in no case, and by no method, can be raised up” (Lacan, 1958, L 3.18.59, p. 13). And he sends her back to Claudius, tells her to let him kiss her neck, call her his little mouse, and denounce Hamlet as mad. He literally collapses into her, speaking not from the position of “I, Hamlet,” but from her position, what she will be for Claudius and Claudius for her.
At this intersection between body and identification, ideals and their problematic immateriality, Hamlet must locate his desire. Lacan turns our attention to what Hamlet says in his feigned madness after killing Polonius and stashing the body beneath the stairs: the body is with the king, but the king is not with the body; the king is a thing, a thing of nothing. “I would ask you to replace the word King by the word phallus in order to see that it is precisely what is in question, namely that the body is engaged in this affair with the phallus, and how, but on the contrary, the phallus itself is not engaged in anything … it always slips between your fingers (Lacan, 1958, L 4.29.59, p. 15). The phallus, Lacan declares, is a ghost—nothing but a shade. Crossing the castration complex means bearing this news, enduring its cut.
The dissolution of the Oedipus complex is this crossing between narcissism and desire, melancholia and mourning, tied to a question of the phallus. There is no happy success in this, and perhaps the tragedy of Hamlet is the staging of this difficulty. The Oedipus complex, as Freud tirelessly shows, leaves behind its wounds, its scars, in the form of the castration complex. When we come to the end of this affair, the exigencies of love—the “mother” being the first object of this demand, the “father” the first ideal—the loss in this is always radical. From this perspective, Lacan says, we can see the most radical position of the subject in the very negativity of this loss. Either this phallus disappears through the act of mourning, or it is desire.
The ethical figure for Lacan is embodied by Antigone. She puts herself beyond fear, beyond pity, beyond nostalgia even, and the boundary point for her is always that between life and death. Her object is “the still living corpse” that she seeks to animate with her desire. Antigone, he says, “even refers to the image of Niobe, who is imprisoned in the narrow cavity of a rock and will be forever exposed to the assault of rain and weather.” It is “around this image of the limit that the whole play turns” (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 268). Antigone, in pushing toward this limit—maintaining her tie to a brother whose loss cannot be replaced, must be acknowledged—embodies the potential virtues of the analyst.
The ethical stance of the analyst initiates the unfolding cure, what Lacan calls the subversion of the feeding Other to the sexual Other, the autoerotic to the genital, the masochistic subject to the castrated one, from the discourse of the hysteric to that of the analyst. Nothing is to be refused in this discourse, not least of all, a patient’s violent declaration of love. Psychoanalysis represents, at the extreme end of an ideal, a freedom of discourse—say anything, you must say everything.
For Lacan, fidelity to unconscious desire entails a certain kind of sacrifice or acceptance of castration—a giving up of the phallus. It does so in a particular setting, a setting that inherently carries varying characteristics of a kind of sacrifice—of all normative rules of discourse, of a wished for human relation, of cherished illusions, of money. Neurosis and perversion are particular structured ways of failing with respect to desire. In the latter, suffering and enjoyment condense in the figure of an essential hatred. Perverse hatred of this kind is without the possibility of the grace that Lacan hopes will come of desire. As he allegorizes it: “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you … I mutilate you.” Or, for the anal not oral variety, “I give myself to you … but this gift of my person—as they say—Oh, Mystery! Is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit” (Lacan, 1973/1981, p. 268).
As we have seen, knowledge, in relation to this freedom of discourse, always fails when it tries to tackle the question of sexuality. How had the sexuality of children escaped recognition for so long? And even to recognize it still leaves so many questions in its wake—Freud famously leaving behind his own in the form of the question, what does woman want? For Lacan, the castration complex is sexuality as this felt impossibility, as the encounter with impossibility. Perversion seeks to escape this—nothing is a problem, women have the phallus too.
Humanity, distributed between these poles, perversion-neurosis, one the negative of the other, is defined as the after-math of psycho-sexual development. Sexuality is to be reconciled by all, each in their own fashion, each by their very own symptom. We all bear the scars of this crossing. Lacan, like Adorno, with a faith in the work of a certain kind of negativity, will show no recourse to utopian ideals, sentimentality, or normative morality. Nostalgia is at root a way of avoiding the consequences of sexuality.
The task for Freud was to do something with what was given, particularly as an act of prolonging or continuing. The unconscious painfully raises the level of tension. Like Antigone, we must find a way to sustain the tension of desire. Fixations, inhibition, stasis, like empty repetition, are the real enemies. Nothing more. All life is a detour on the way to death. The specter of death raises its head at the moment when the unconscious fails to be put to work. Defense is always a defense against this unconscious act.
Love and marriage, Lacan says with some humor, are at the center of civilization and its neurotic discontents. My patients complain of nothing else. There is no knowledge that can suture the relation between the sexes and the discontent of marriage is the predicament, the tragedy even, of unconscious desire. Here is one place where Adorno’s and Lacan’s antiessentialism meet. We are not advocates for love and marriage, we hold to their impossibility. The hysteric arrives on the scene to represent a discontent with this discontent—love, marriage and family—at times a demand for something beyond its failure, and at other times, perhaps more analytic ones, a demand that one observe the law of this impasse as the condition for any overcoming.
Under this injunction, ethics coincides with epistemology. Epistemology is the counterpart question of any ethics of psychoanalysis. Their coincidence is perhaps in their absolute divergence, and this speaks to the important question of the limits of psychoanalysis. Today we are faced with the most spectacular contradictions concerning the epistemological basis of psychoanalysis. Does this threaten the unique ethical foundation of our work? At the very least, it displaces the question of ethics and having done so, risks replacing it with a question of mastery.
I have been asking about the transmission of psychoanalysis. What is the analytic process? How does one become a psychoanalyst? Lacan defined it as a kind of emptying out: the draining of the signifier (the past), a subversion of the pathos of suffering (present), and the fall of the overvalued or idealized object of love (the future). The precarious-ness of this process must be handled with tact. It is the declaration that one “cannot live in any other way,” mirroring an original symptom (I cannot live, and no doubt, in any other way) which made the same declaration in the service of suffering. Be this, as Lacan says, or be nothing.
Thus he defines the ethic of the analyst: We will forge for ourselves “a quite different ethic, an ethic that would be founded on the refusal of being unduped, of always being more strongly the dupe of this knowledge, of this unconscious which, when all is said and done is our only lot in terms of knowledge” (Lacan, 1973, p. 16). We should always be more strongly the dupe of the unconscious. The debt that psychoanalysis engages in with respect to the unconscious must remain. It cannot be paid off.
Even in knowing this, one must, as a psychoanalyst, still find a way to take this risk. For the wager to retain its character as a wager, we have to find ourselves in the middle of it. We must continue, analyzed or not, to find a way to recoil with horror at the lever we use in our work as psychoanalysts. I cannot but somehow believe that what has been lost in psychoanalysis is this character of risk, and, the humility that it paradoxically carries with it. This can always be found in Lacan, signposted by the words failure, weakness, stupidity, the dummy, and the dupe. This he sees as the path of greater risk and greater gain.
Truth, Lacan says, has feminizing effects. He means this with a tinge of irony, but perhaps we still accept this idea of the virtue of a certain kind of courage in the face of weakness. It is not an easy task to keep one’s eyes on the ephemeral. There is only one virtue for Lacan, pudeur, which one may translate as one likes—shame, decency, humility, modesty, prudence. Hopefully, without failing to hear the reference to the female genital.
As analysts, the cultivation of a lack of anxiety is indispensable. We are supposed to be able to withstand a certain amount of tension. American psychoanalysis labels this the maintenance of narcissistic equilibrium or the regulation of self-esteem. This is no doubt true, but such an idea would send the Lacanians into hysterics because this is precisely for them what the analyst must risk. Is this an issue of substance or terminology? Again it is always a question of how one constructs this limit and its beyond.
To return for a second to the new breed of Lacanians—I find their anxiety just as intolerable as that of the Americans, which might in fact be their double. The word of Lacan, brandished as the truth, makes true the very charge of intellectualism leveled against them from day one by the other side. The signifier is now something that is somehow both asserted with force and entirely discarded in favor of a theory of the Real. The real and the signifier function not as signifiers them-selves—conceptual tools in an unfolding elaboration of the project of psychoanalysis—they function as a sign. What they mean to say, what they sign, is always the same: it is the name Lacan through which they demonstrate their allegiance to the master.
I might say that I follow Lacan because I don’t really know what it is to be Freudian anymore, in particular, from the vantage point of a psychoanalyst in America. If Lacan only wanted to be called a Freudian, then I will say that I am Lacanian in the only way that someone who stands so far outside a discourse can claim that interior for herself— with total belligerence. A predicate come ethical subject.
If Lacan’s ethics starts ex nihilo, is grounded through desire in a faith in almost nothing, emptying the future of content, audacity is a testimony to ethics. The words reserve, precariousness, grace, come from the attempt to conceptualize this place of impossible opening—a narrow crack in a rock. These virtues, rather than merely a consequence, an effect of analysis, are also its driving force.
“My strength,” said Lacan, “is to know what it means to wait.” Against the weighty seduction of the hysteric, against the defensive angst of the obsessive, the analyst must wait. It is the strength of a passive ideal that is never bound up with the immoderate nature of knowledge. Repression is a testament against this character of knowing. Freud, as Rieff (1959) pointed out rather strongly, never aimed at removing the bar of repression. Not because he thought man vile, but because repression is our saving grace. As with Freud’s dream after his father’s funeral (see, Freud 1900), I would say, you are requested to close an eye.
The analytic discourse is a discourse of tact, and, to quote Goethe, we have a better knowledge of things in knowing how not to try and know them so thoroughly. That the prudence of the analyst with respect to interpretation is all that the analyst has once he removes himself from the field of knowledge, challenges the notion of interpretation in its dimension of historical objectivity, “meaning making,” transference dissolution, or any other such notion. It is all of these things, but more than these it is also a strategy:
If analytic experience finds itself implicated by taking its claims to nobility from the Oedipal myth, it is indeed because it preserves the cutting edge of the oracle’s enunciation, and I would say more, that in it interpretation always remains at the same level. It is only true by its consequences, like every oracle. Interpretation is not put to the test of a truth that can be settled by a yes or a no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true insofar as it is truly followed (Lacan, 1971a, Lecture XII, p. 13)
This cutting edge of the oracle is the enunciation that gets things moving, which unleashes truth.
This is close to what Glover (1931) called the beauty of the inexact interpretation. As well, we have what are called the three T’s of interpretation—tact, tone, and timing—in ego-psychology (Pine, 2001). For Lacan, since truth can only be half-said, all interpretations are inexact but beautiful, and all aim to be beautiful strategies of rhetoric. Beauty stands as the most important feature—hiding and revealing with exactly the right balance. How else would we allow ourselves to be led toward what is an unraveling, an undoing, a form of castration?
Knowing the difficulties of adding virtue to this series—castration, femininity, sacrifice, submission—let us remember that the word pudeur bears traces of the feminine. The nondupe, the nonpude, are not what we are as psychoanalysts. Let’s call it, the indecent. Decency, for me, evokes the notion of shame in a powerful way, whereby, far from being a primitive affect, guilt seen as superior, it is directly related to the body. Here, we can understand something more about why it is always for Freud the affect of women par excellence. You can find it everywhere in his writing—their modesty, their shame, their secrecy, and powerful silences. The tie between this characterization and the position of the analyst is not an uninteresting one from my perspective.
Furthermore, Lacan takes this link and joins the question of the feminine to the question of writing. I believe that new forms of writing psychoanalysis most somehow rely on this ground and all else will be painfully secondary. Psychoanalysis must find a way to write again in a manner beyond professionalization, and this criticism is also directed at Lacan, who in fact wrote very little. The shift Lacan effects from the letter of Freud to his spoken voice, is vastly important—but it leaves in its wake the question of writing.
If there was this moment of écriture feminine, its moment has passed. What new reinvigoration of psychoanalysis at this level of the written is still possible? A question about sublimation hangs in the balance. “The Thing is not there originally. Sublimation brings us to it—this is the new” (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 145). Sublimation is impossible without a certain kind of confrontation with impossibility. For now, that impossibility stands as the impossibility of psychoanalysis itself. Invest in its corpse. Reanimate this corpse as living. Love it in its utter uniqueness and impossibility.
Lacan joked with his audience in his 1972–1973 Encore Seminar, that all of what he had been saying about the “doesn’t stop not being written” of the sexual relationship didn’t mean that he didn’t write plenty of notes in order to get up and speak about it. I would like to demand a supplement. If it is true that what we do in analysis is follow through without detour to the end of what we have to say, why would this not prepare us to write? What danger is there in relation to writing that is preventing new forms from developing?
Psychoanalytic writing cannot engender an effect of truth predicated on criteria of demonstrations and reiterations of knowledge and understanding. It excludes writing as such. In a dual movement—exclude nothing, exclude everything—psychoanalysis hedges its bets. To be excluded is the essence of woman. They complain of nothing else, Lacan (1975/1998) said in Encore. Exclusion always makes a wager more real—risking everything, one risks exclusion from everything.
Lacan, speaking about Antigone, says, “there is one thing that man hasn’t managed to come to terms with and that is death, the Chorus says that he has come with an absolutely marvelous gimmick, namely, translated literally, ‘an escape into impossible sickness’ (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 275). The gimmick is also our own. Perhaps we need to come to terms with the life and death of psychoanalysis. Perhaps what is terrifying about new forms of writing is that it holds, like so many of these stories, onto the very path of our own disappearance. The analyst falls from his place in the unfolding cure and why should it not be the case outside the consulting room?
I have learned through Lacan to always go by way of this radical debt. I take in more than I can possibly give back. My faith in semblance, in the unconscious, turns on a kind of risk—incur greater and greater debt as one always does in love, giving and taking with what one does not have. In effect, this is nothing new about me, but it is cast in a new light through Lacan. The problems I always faced were in wanting a way out, but Lacan teaches you that when you really find your way inside, there doesn’t really seem to be a reason to leave anymore. What happens after that is inconsequential. Desire is a powerful antidote to fear. My failure will be where I finally succeed.
So I might, in the end, get out from under this disappointment with psychoanalysis after all. This debt may be the only insurance I have that I can escape from the trap of believing that either “they” or I have something solid to give. The ethics of psychoanalysis is an artful but immaterial business. Lacan’s ethics, as it turns out, is an ethics that will always be internal to psychoanalysis, internal to its very theory. It requires nothing outside, and if this isn’t a virtue, it at least gives one legs to stand on, with pleasure. So my debt is much less difficult to manage if not for the very reason that I enjoy its incursion. Lacan said, one’s relationship to enjoyment is work.
I hope that through this reading of Lacan I have shown you something more about what this work entails. If it seems like a fantasy of sacrifice in the form of a sacrifice of fantasy—that would be a fair characterization. I don’t really think that sublimation can be delinked from fantasy, nor from an elaboration of it, which inevitably means enduring or accepting some form of cut. Perhaps the humorousness in this fine line can be a point of leniency. It is at least the one that I have found that endures both with myself and with my patients. A cure is always on the cutting line between pathos and ethos, to say nothing of bathos as well.
This is more or less how I have learned to think through Lacan—to find room to breathe under the weight of his voice and his gaze. It is not a body of knowledge in the end, but knowledge of this body that fails, that laughs, that dreams, and risks everything. “When a slave redeems himself, he is master only in this—that he risks everything … It is here, in some way, that the function of the analyst offers something like the dawn” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 176).