Leclaire’s notion that there is no truth beyond or before unconscious desire, which supports truth as much as it veils it, is the premise on which this work has been written. Like Alain’s three second book, likened to the three second session, it both supports his truth, that of the formalization of philosophy, along with his desire for the absolute formula to be synonymous with himself. It also veils his desire that this formula eclipse desire which cannot but extend itself, in particular, to the sacrifice of psychoanalysis. He would like to eradicate psychoanalysis from his knowledge. Perhaps it means he breaks free of his debt to Lacan, just as Freud’s book of dreams was the beginning of the dissolution of his tie to Fliess, which ended, as we might remember, in his failing to give him credit for the theory of bisexuality.
In any case, this fact about unconscious desire, in the end, has nothing to do with me or with Badiou. I can only offer the semblance of an instruction, which is the closest I have gotten to any formula. As for psychoanalysis I learned from Badiou what I have come to see as our only fighting chance—to remain in complete fidelity to desire, to the unconscious—the militant maintenance of a strength to stand there when “nothing is promised to us but the power to remain true to what comes to us” (Badiou, 1998/2006a, p. 23), even if that is nothing.
As these dreams progressed, from the first to the third, I had the strange sensation of being able to write less and less about them as if one was closer to this supposed formula of desire—the place where interpretation stops, the moment when an object comes closest to the thing and no longer requires the supplementation of a meaning. A purified signifier, close to absolute nonsense, impossibility, and something like the rhythm of the body that animates speech.
What does this mean for writing? It is surely different from Badiou’s infinite production of texts, out from under the “truth” that he has grasped. His work, as he likes to tell us, is planetary. He is “living in thought like someone who had fallen upon an oil well: an inexhaustible intellectual energy lay at my disposal” (Badiou, 1998/2006a, p. iv). A truth, Badiou has said, is “scarcely-said,” and yet, miraculously, he finds a great deal to say about it. For Lacan, the ethics of the analyst is quite different than this. Lacan asks:
what sort of disaster does analytic knowledge produce? That is what was in question, what has been in question for as long as it has not made them all itching to become authors. It is a very curious thing that the non-signed [anonymous authors] should appear paradoxical, whereas of course over the centuries all the honest men there have been have always acted as if someone had torn their manuscript from their hands, as if someone played a dirty trick on them. No one expected to be sent a note of congratulations on publication” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 191).
The anonymity for Lacan was important, and in a way, these dreams grew increasingly anonymous. This also holds true for our three figures. Even further, this makes the task of writing increasingly difficult, also meaning that in order to do so one had to start taking risks, forcing a measure of sacrifice. Anonymity might be the cover that allows the work to be ripped from one’s hands, to bare a certain amount of shame. Badiou will say about anonymity that “ethics … consists entirely in exercising a sort of restraint with regard to its powers … the reserve of the non-saying; in the limit of the voice vis-à-vis that which shows itself; in that which is subtracted from the absolute imperative to speak the truth” (Badiou, 2004, p. 116). This quality of reserve came to guide my idea of the ethics of psychoanalysis precisely as prudence, tact, grace, and modesty, which were only possible as linked to the feminine. This was done in accordance with the Lacanian collapse of the feminine and the unconscious—the necessity for a confrontation with impossibility.
It took my finding my way out from under Adorno’s seductive weight, out from under the betrayal of Lacanians, and with Badiou, it was a relationship such that his inability to subtract himself from his discourse meant that I must go to the very edge of my own precisely in order to uphold it. If I hadn’t grasped this possibility before I entered into his thought, I certainly have an indication of it now. Like this work, it is only through a series that is set off, Adorno, Lacan, Badiou that one can discover what belongs to them—that one can discover what it is to be given back their desire.
So I have tried and most likely failed to write this kind of ethics in setting off this series. It is a task slightly different from any writing about ethics, and tries to remain closer to desire pure and simple. It has meant, I’m sure, that my passion has gotten the best of me, which will no doubt turn-off a great many of you. I will try and take it as a compliment, as did Lacan, since the attempt to invoke desire might mean an inspiration toward judgment. Impetuousness has more possibility than the supposed lack of it.
Psychoanalysis, one could say, if it does anything, truly initiates a series, a chain of associations, a set of signifiers, which begin to articulate desire. This is why movement is so important. One could say that is all that psychoanalysis does—it gets things moving. It is around these figures that it begins to highlight the subject; figures which no doubt condense with the analyst him or herself on whom its final act will turn. By virtue of this it gives rise to a singularity, not of the others, but of the subject. It produces a subject in rendering this other utterly anonymous, nameless even. Not my father, not my mother, not my maternal grandmother, not Adorno, not Lacan, not Badiou. But not nothing either.
These others who had paralyzed the subject with their imagined watchful gaze, return to the mere fact of an encounter. Someone I came to love and came to leave. It happened, that’s about all that needs to be said; and it has its effects, structural ones in fact, which was what I was after from the beginning. The slow rate of change. This is Lacan’s definition of truth—universal in structure, singular in content; and the formula as formula with the particular words and images that decipher it. It constitutes a psychoanalysis oriented toward the future, and by virtue of this may be the sole means for addressing its life and death. With the past relegated to the past, what matters is what is said.
This changes, as Lacan said in Television (1974/1990), the Kantian question “what may I hope for?” (which already shows that the addressee is to provide an answer in the form of an object) to “from where do you hope?” “From where do you hope” reorients the subject as a question, as someone in the midst of a search already bound by desire. So truth be told, a great deal of this work is wrapped in a complete conceit—the future of psychoanalysis and my dreams? Are you joking? Why does it matter that psychoanalysis disappoints you and whether or not you get out from under that? That you hope for too much? With a grandiosity you’ll no doubt fail not to detect, I suppose with Freud I must ask the reader “to make my interests his for quite a while, and to plunge with me, into the minutest details of my life” (Freud, 1900, p. 121). I will, with a lingering tinge of hysteria, take the life and death of psychoanalysis as my own.
Badiou wrote that “what [truths] produce (the unnamable in language itself, the potency of the pure letter, general will as the anonymous force of every namable will, and the Two of the sexes as what has never been counted as one) in variable situation is never but a truth of these situations … onto which no knowledge can ‘pin’ its name, or discern beforehand its status” (Badiou, 1989/1999, p. 107). So the situation was my own, it was the time I had spent with psychoanalysis as a discipline in various contexts, it was my educational experience, it was, of course, my analysis, and it was these dreams. Is it too much to say that each dream falls into these effects of the truth of a situation—the unnamable in the memorial, the letter, the general will that fells, and the one that is never counted, the always absent one?
If it is only there where I am not that I am thinking, then dreams are one place that we can think in the place of nonknowledge, a raid on the inarticulate that had to be my own. I took the risk of bringing this into articulation through the series of transferences—Adorno, Lacan, Badiou. Dreams, it is said, take hold when a transference is at work, “raising the question of the secret of phantasy … the profound passion that drives the discoverer of enigmas and the explorer of origins … manifest at once in the intensity of the transference” (Leclaire, 1968/1998b, p. 62). These two, dreams and transference, taken together, point to a writing that complicates the process of exchange, destroys any supposed symmetry between the partners, and in this, risks losing them completely. It does so founded on little else than a guiding ethics and an intensity of passion. It aims for a fundamental change in the nature of discourse. Whether that happens is not up to me anymore. You will read this as you choose.
With every one of these thinkers there was for me in the beginning a kind of madness, reading for hours on end, I couldn’t get inside it enough, much like the beginning of any common love affair. I used to, I’m sure you can imagine, become increasingly disappointed. The reading would trail off with a mild depression. It isn’t like that so much for me anymore. It’s more like enthusiastically waiting to be inspired again, perhaps with an anxiety that the last may truly be the last. A change of discourse is indicated by Lacan when something has fallen. Love is in the air. A turning has initiated a delicate but powerful chain of events that cannot be stopped, that one would never let stop. It is there that it becomes a matter of life and death.
In the final editing of this piece of work I had a dream I think, perhaps, in order to finally close it. I was on a train with someone who is of immense importance to me and also to this piece of work. The train is strewn with objects whose quality as object comes across very clearly somehow—they seem to have no utility whatsoever. They are almost like objects purified as things. One of the objects starts screeching. He picks it up, takes out a screw-driver, and makes a quarter turn in a switch on the back. He looks at me and says, “some of them are made for that, you just might not necessarily know it.” It returned to its status as thing.
I think I could properly say that this is the formula for my desire— the importance of the turn, the one who isn’t afraid of the object that screeches, a knowledge one doesn’t know and the one who in fact has a know-how with it, and, last, the idea of being made a thing. If being made a thing had its previous echoes in the idea of sacrifice, it is now this thing in the hands of my friend that epitomizes for me the feminine as the opening onto desire, the possible elevation of the object. He is of course, for me, the psychoanalyst. In Lacan’s theory of discourse there is the quarter turn between the hysteric and the analyst, and I don’t think it is possible without a deep love and respect for the unconscious. We are made for that even if we don’t know it, or further still, precisely because we don’t.
To conclude, Celan, the poet to whom I constantly turn to in order to rehabilitate my relationship to language, to arouse again some obscure piece of desire, comes close to this in his name for poetry. A breathturn, Atemwende, he called it. He says, “it is no longer a word. It is a terrifying silence. It takes his and our breath and words away. Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath … It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa’s head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here in this manner, some other thing is also set free?” (Celan, 2005, p. 162). Perhaps. For the life of psychoanalysis, I offer this silence, that freedom. As for me, it’s beyond me, but I’m happy.