If whatever was so oppressive and tormenting in loving a thinker like Adorno was repeated for the love of Lacan, it seems to me that an adherence to a debt, rather than a denial of it, were the stakes of this affair. I think his work is different from Adorno’s. For Lacan, this impossibility rendered affirmatively gives you your only bearings as a subject, no less a psychoanalyst. Through him one is permitted to attempt with passion an act that always involves in some way a renunciation (of narcissism, of knowledge), and he for one never assumes that such a sacrifice is easily made. For Lacan there is no erotic thrill or moralism attached to this act, always only offered as a possibility. If he focuses on it, it is because in his return to Freud these were the consequences, drawn out to their most extreme edge, of his discovery of unconscious desire.
Lacan tries to set up the conditions for what it might mean for any one of us to find a way beyond our own neurosis. He does this throughout his twenty-eight years of teaching, tracing the dilemma in a multitude of differing ways: from his re-reading of Freud, to his use of mathemes, philosophy, clinical forays, and his parables of art and literature. It is stunning to think of the ground one person was able to traverse, and even further, that he always did so in the company of others.
I have told you about the ways in which I had gotten lost in this immense terrain—the jargon, the split with the International, the militia of Lacanians at present. It felt like suffocating beneath the weight of an unknown presence, laden in the reading of seemingly endless transcripts. It was in learning to love him, always for Lacan, a gift of weakness, that I was able to take his thought in. To know him you have to let him pass through you, like the air that one breathes. It was one way that I was finally able to hear his ineluctable sense of humor. No other psychoanalyst can make you laugh like Lacan.
In the end, the question that I was left with was the question of writing. Certainly it is a question very much at the heart of the late Lacan. Beyond the arguments that already exist—those that trace the early Lacan of desire and speech to the late Lacan of jouissance and writing—I think it is important to understand the difficulty that a purely spoken discourse poses for its children. How do we, after Lacan, find a way to write psychoanalysis? From my own perspective, a certain sacrifice of Lacan felt necessary for me. In particular, to find what in him permitted his reader to do what he could not, to hear the promise that he left behind—the possibility of writing despite the unfortunate burden of knowing and of knowing him.
I have come to feel that Lacan’s abandonment of writing gave too much strength to his voice. In contrast to this, the silence of the women in his audience begins to hold center stage. They become the psychoanalyst. The very act of writing, no less the difficulty after Freud, is a necessity for the psychoanalyst who has already spent good time finding their place in speech, toward making oneself heard in this way. Perhaps there was something important in returning psychoanalysis to its own frontier of spoken language. But having done so, Lacan increasingly seemed turned to the women in his seminar. He asked them to form an answer which, as we know, came from them in the form of an écriture.
Through writing, it seems to me that a problematic omniscience can be brought down to a whisper in the play of the written word and the elusive signature of an author on their work. At its best, writing imposes a certain loss on an author that is different from the one needed in order to speak in front of an audience. It is a different order of commitment.
I’ve wondered if it is in fact here that Lacan finally did not want to give in. That he asked his readers, to say nothing of his transcribers, to take too much care of his words—to mind them, to keep them always in mind. Perhaps he also asked them to mind, behave, and I would not be the first to pick up on this thread of dire mastery (Roustang, 1976/1982). If one looks at his writing, it seems to bear his stamp through this putative tone—a binding tie, an impossible demand for identification. Writing should act as a different kind of invitation. It is this invitation that is needed more than ever for any continued life of psychoanalysis.
So it is between these two dreams—my grandmother’s letter, so close to her spoken voice, and dream about a book that I found and read—that I found something bearing this other invitation. The book felt like it was mine, unmistakably so, but its written quality disturbed the search for authorship. There is something quiet about this dream, silent almost, as if it tends toward that edge. And while the feeling of being myself is there, its softness seems to diminish the sharpness that usually comes of delimiting that space. There was a strange intimacy in the third person impersonal address. Here is the book: Instructions On How to Fell A Tree. One has to use breath. Your eyes, hands and voice will be too disruptive to the rhythm necessary to bring it down. That was it.
To begin, I woke fascinated with the image, though not in a way that solidified my gaze. The dream already seemed to undercut that possibility. The beauty of the object disrupted one’s eyes as a looking force, as if a veil had been drawn. This veil, contrary to what we might imagine, did not seem to obscure the stakes of this call to fell.
Nevertheless, after a time I found myself chastising the dream—like a typical hysteric I’m mistaking a tree for the forest; she can hardly do with one, to say nothing of a whole series of them; what rest can you possibly find? It was in hearing myself in this way that the absurdity of the command in the dream book dawned on me.
This impossibility in proximity to an injunction—one must use breath—became a point of relief. Nothing seemed more natural than this: An image of grace, a way with desire, patience and tact. Psychoanalysis is the grace of a losing strategy. It is as if the injunction itself emptied out. Even with a sense of humor, the one that we said can surround most feelings of impossibility—felling with breath, the three little pigs and the big bad wolf.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud tells us that plants are always close to a thought about genitals and intercourse. Given that the unconscious always seems to be close to such a thought as well, there seems to be a rather funny equivalence between the vegetal world and the unconscious. We might remember that Freud called the densest part of a dream the place where its wish sprouts up like a “mushroom from its mycelium” (p. 525). His book on dreams is perhaps always first a botanical one.
Perhaps we have fallen on something a little closer to the truth in setting off on this chain of thoughts that moves between nature and spirit, the weight of judgment and an immaterial point of relief, sexuality, and humor. There is something important about moving away from the immanence of judgment—the force of the super-ego. Even in the banal symbolism, plants equal genitals, we are taken a hair’s breadth away from mere pathologizing.
This dream seems to open out in a way that leaves little room for judgment, and in fact it may be this, as a wish, that acts as the dreams motive force—a longing for the minimal difference between a beautiful image, a joke, and the invective force of the super-ego. This precarious space, so close to something as immaterial as rhythm and breath, is necessary to finally get things moving, to bring it down.
I cannot suddenly help but see the hysterical wish to castrate the master and how it just barely succeeds in not being just that. In not being that, one would have to begin to see her virtues, to hear the juste in the just of just barely. The other side of failure, Lacan said, is this just barely succeeding which is how an analysis finishes. The fall, evoked by this kind of artifice—this leap through what is only the semblance of an instruction, a dream object—delimits a new starting point, constitutes a break. The other movements—the hands, voice, and eyes—were rather the force of stasis held in place by the object that never-fails not to capture. That is to say, until it finally fails in just the right way.
This is what Lacan called the hysterical à faire (hearing affair), a to do with love, which holds out the possibility that she may find herself quite somewhere else after all is said and done. He says in his Seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, about Oedipus:
What happens to him is not that the scales fall from his eyes, but that his eyes fall from him like scales … Is it not this very object that we see Oedipus being reduced, not to undergoing castration, but I would rather say, to being castration itself? Namely, what remains when one of the privileged supports of the object disappear from him in the form of his eyes (1991/2007, p. 156).
So rather than the tree being what falls in the end—certainly it was only a book of instructions which cannot guarantee its stated end—it is the support of a wished for act in the form of eyes, voice, and hands, that is given up. There was never the image of a fallen tree, just the act of reading, an intensification of rhythm, of breath, as everything fell around this tree and me.
Whatever one does, one does it on very little. Being castration, becoming castration itself, is close to the image of the psychoanalyst that Lacan maintained—the one who listens beyond the object presented to one’s eyes, ears, or hands (the last encompassing the Freudian triad of objects handled, breast, feces, phallus).
In his work The Function and Field of Speech and Language (1970/2006), Lacan plays with the word arbre, or tree. It is always the classical example used to describe the separation between a signifier and the signified—writing tree for the former and drawing a tree for the latter.
What is important for him is not that one comes to substitute for the other, certainly language is founded on this basis, but to recognize the radical fact of this barre, or bar, that separates the two. It is a barre that stands between the word arbre and the thing itself. This is the lesson of psychoanalysis in the form of the consequences of Oedipus and castration. Only when we have given up trying to have full access to a thing from which we are barred, incest no doubt, can we learn to find a certain rhythm that is our own—precisely in an encounter with this limit. Language happens not because of a successful substitution but by virtue of a radical separation. This barre-arbre might allow us to write, perhaps to write something not unlike a book found in a dream.