The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan : 1981 : Catherine Clément

Index of this post

Publication

Chapter titles

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PREFACE [p ix] of Listen, Woodcutter, Stay Your Saw a While – Catherine Clément

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION : 1983 : Arthur Goldhammer, [pvii-viii]

Citations – includes a quotation from Chapter 2, p70-75

Publication

Published : Vies et legends de Jacques Lacan (1981) Catherine Clément, Editions Bernard Grasset

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer : Columbia University Press 1983

Chapter titles

Translator’s Introduction pvii – see below
Listen, Woodcutter, Stay Your Saw a While p1 – see below
1. Love’s Pleasures p5
2. The Ladies’ Way p53 (a quote from p70-75 is in Citations)
3. No Caviar for the Butcher p103
4. The Game of Hopscotch and the Four Corners p149
The Firebird p197
Notes p205
The works of Jacques Lacan p217
Index p221

Availability

Download at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Texts by request (Request to Julia Evans)

PREFACE pix of Listen, Woodcutter, Stay Your Saw a While – Catherine Clément

You think I came to play with you, but in fact I came to turn the game upside down. You think I’m cheating because you think I’m in the game—you don’t see that I’m not. You thought you had me and I jumped you, but I didn’t do it on purpose. I’m always getting away from you, but I don’t do it on purpose. You don’t look for me where I am when I’m there, and you don’t watch where I’m going. I win hands down every time, and if I lose it’s only for a little change of pace. Like a flame crazy about itself, I creep and then I leap and then I subside into ashes, from which I shall rise again when I please. I die knowing that I shall live again. And yet in dying I bleed; but you don’t see the blood; and when I was bleeding you didn’t see it.

Montherlant,
Le Génie et les fumisteries du Divin

LISTEN, WOODCUTTER, STAY YOUR SAW A WHILE

In 1899, Freud, who was about to publish ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and knew that it would become the fundamental work of psychoanalysis, decided to date the book 1900, anticipating by a few months the advent of the new century, our own. In the following year Jacques Lacan was born in France. He is thus almost as old as the century. [Lacan died in October 1981, shortly after this book was first published in French—trans|.

One day, at the age of seventy-nine, he decided to dissolve his school of psychoanalysis, which he prided himself on having founded. This aging figure had become the centre of a fierce intrigue, notable for the distress it caused his disciples. He was by now one of the most illustrious of French psychoanalysts. Behind him was a solid body of work and teaching; he had made a name for himself. He was loved by some, hated by others. But his disciples were worried: what would become of them once the master was gone? In their agitated enthusiasm they became conservative idolators of Lacan’s theory, jealous to defend his minutest utterance, as if the poor man did not have the right to make any statement that was not pure gold. In muffled tones they deplored the onset of old age, signs of whose ravages were beginning to appear. Until one day the old man shook them all off with one furious shudder, scattering the swarm of hangers on that buzzed around him as one might chase away flies. The general public took a lively interest in the affair, though most people knew very little about Lacan, beyond his name, and understood nothing of a theory whose secrecy was jealously protected in the most traditional way, by shrouding it in esoteric language. Perhaps they sensed in some vague way that what was going on was a life and death struggle, a battle for survival.

And in a way it was just that. Lacan was fighting for his life. He shed his old skin as he had done on many previous occasions. But he held on to what was essential: his glory, whose lustre he would not allow to be diminished by those who called him “old.” And his work, which was being dispensed piecemeal by those who repeated his dicta badly and too often, who had been heaping discredit on his teachings for some time. I felt like saying to all of them, to all who had been sneering at the old man, what Ronsard said long ago to the woodcutter in the forest of Gastine:

Those are not trees you’re cutting down:
Don’t you see the blood trickling
From the nymphs who lived beneath the bark?

A thinker cannot be put to death. He survives his idolators. Not because he is the master and they are the disciples—no, not that. What could possibly be more deadly than all those disciples dedicated to immortalizing Lacan, who repeatedly told them that he was not their master and wanted no part of their adoration?

A thinker cannot be put to death if he has really done his job of thinking. No matter how his life comes to an end, whether by old age, accident, suicide, madness, or crime, his thought will have lived and will go on living. In spite of his disciples, in spite of itself.

‘Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan’: my intention was to write a sacrilegious work, to write of Lacan as if his old age were no longer an issue, to go beyond the life and death of the man and treat him as I always experienced him, as a shaman, a sorcerer possessed by a poetic inspiration—which he was at least as much as he was the unbending founder of a new psychoanalytic theory (there can be no doubt that he was this too). I hoped to anticipate history, writing, not without affection, in a style that would run the gamut of tenses from past to future. I wanted to speak of Lacan in the past—the simple past as it is sometimes called; in

the pluperfect—more than perfect; in the imperfect, so aptly named; and in the future anterior, which fulfils destiny while leaving open the possibility of the future. Lacan the shaman flirted with immortality: there are intimations of immortality in his thought, one of the most powerful and misunderstood intellectual achievements of our time. Lately, the misunderstanding of that achievement has been compounded by the fact that Lacan’s thought, now fashionable, has been reduced to jargon, turned into a parody of itself.

‘Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan’—let me end this introduction with the last line of Ronsard’s poem, which also deserves a place in the story of Lacan:

The substance remains and the form is lost.

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION : 1983 : Arthur Goldhammer, pvii-viii

In French this book is written in a brisk, colloquial style. In complete sentences of the sort common in everyday conversation abound, as do allusions to events familiar to Frenchmen, or at any rate to Parisians attuned to the vicissitudes of intellectual and political life. I have tried to retain the colloquial flavour, as far as English permits. I have also tried to explain, succinctly, allusions that might be lost on the reader unfamiliar with French politics and intellectual fashions. I felt, too, that it was necessary, even at the risk of seeming leaden and humorless, to explain the many French puns and word-plays that come up in the course of the discussion.

This brings me to a further problem of translation. The work of Jacques Lacan is fairly well known in this country, and some of it has been translated into English, most notably the selection from Ecrits, translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Norton. Normally, where such a standard translation exists, I would use it in rendering citations from Lacan’s work into English. Here, however, while drawing heavily on Mr. Sheridan’s excellent work, I have preferred to give my own translations of many passages. For the reader interested in comparing my translations with the existing ones, I have given page references to the original French edition of Ecrits as well as to the Norton translation whenever possible.
Readers of Lacan in English translation will know that it is customary to leave certain terms untranslated: jouissance, méconnaissance, objet-petit-a, and so forth. It is my understanding that Lacan wished this convention to be observed. I have gone along with this practice, though not without misgivings, except in the case of jouissance. Ms. Clément uses the word in one place to refer to orgasm, in another to refer to religious ecstasy. Lacan was not the first to link the two; Bernini’s statue of Saint Theresa translates the metaphor into stone. Nevertheless, to obscure the fact that the French word has two distinct connotations would only mystify the English reader, and I have dotted the i’s where I thought it necessary to do so.

Citations – includes a quotation from Chapter 2, p70-75

P177 – Other writings, in Commentaries & Information from ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality’ : 1982 : Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose quotes this text. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Mitchell or Rose or Index of Authors)

***

p14-15 at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan 40, TN 9 of Jon Anderson’s translation, Motives of Paranoiac Crime : December 1933 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19331201). P14-15 of F2L, Jon Anderson’s translation, We conceive of it then as being subject to variations of this drive, as for example in the drop that results from its gratification: in the original case of the particular type of paranoia that we have described (the Aimée case), [9] the delirium (délire) vanished when the aim of the action was accomplished.

TN9: This case is treated in Lacan’s thesis, On Paranoiac Psychosis in Relation to Personality. For a brief summary and analysis of this case, see Catherine Clements, The Lives and Legends of Jaques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (NY: Columbia University Press, 1983): 74‐75.

P70-75 of Clément, But psychoanalysis, with no claims to expertise in criminal matters [in France the exclusive province of psychiatrists—trans.], has nothing to do with labelling criminals or deciding upon their responsibility or lack of responsibility for their acts. Rather, it explores their childhood, looking for causes while the police are looking for motives. Almost the same thing, but not quite: the psychoanalyst traces the criminal’s whole life since childhood, whereas the police confine their investigations to the adult life of the accused and to his or her most immediate desires—what we call ‘‘motives,” the forces that set the criminal act in motion. Last but not least, psychoanalysis has a concept that corresponds to the uniqueness of the act, nowhere so apparent as in the case of the Papin sisters. Nothing foretold the murder they were to commit, much less the extraordinary way in which they were to go about it, and no act of violence followed the crime, at any rate none aimed at another member of civil society. Psychology, in the early days of its association with criminology, referred to such unique acts as “monomanias,” a convenient term for describing a form of madness that manifests itself only once. This concept broke new ground. The psychoanalyst refers to the act as an instance of “acting out.”

If the insane act is a question of acting out, this means that it is the result of an implacable logic that has been in preparation for a long time—not to say forever. For it is not only the childhood of the person concerned that shapes the sudden act of violence—or in less dangerous cases the action that is merely out of the ordinary—but also the childhood of his mother, or of his father; at one further remove, it is the institution of the family, as far back as memory can go. These are the root causes of a social malady that may ultimately take the form of true insanity. We now know that family memories rarely extend back more than three generations or so. This is the pattern revealed by the oldest known myths and cultures. Nevertheless, every act of madness has in some sense been in preparation since the beginning of time: as the psychoanalyst sees it, the question is always why it should be acted out in any particular instance. But then the act vanishes behind the process of anamnesis and the interminable search for the past. It is abolished by all that precedes it. As for its consequences, society decides what is to be done about them. Christine and Léa Papin were at first sentenced to be guillotined on the town square of Le Mans. Aimée was confined to a mental hospital. And yet the difference between the two acts was not one of kind but one of degree. To be sure, social aggression had assumed ancient proportions, and the open-mouthed horror of civil society in the face of such acts accounts for the primitive harshness of the sentence, proportionate to the disproportionateness of the crime. Later the sentence was reduced, as if society finally took note of the fact that the act committed was a question not for the courts but for the hospitals. Had the sentence been maintained, it would have confirmed the existence of crimes that had long since been wiped from the slate of the Law. A dead past had worked its way to the surface, and this past was not simply that of two sisters who had been reared in a climate of extreme emotional deprivation. The prudent thing to do was to entrust the whole matter to the psychiatrists and the analysts. For the “‘acting out’ had transgressed the boundary between the imaginary and the real, the myth and the fact, the repressed history and the sudden actuality of the deed.

The first point of similarity linking Christine, Léa, and Aimée is their status as women. Just as women alone can experience ecstasy without knowing what its nature is, so these women were able to act out their conflicts once and for all, releasing all their tensions and deciding their fate. In prison the Papin sisters became what they had previously been only in principle: stark raving mad. Once hospitalized, Aimée was delirious at first but within six months was cured. For acting out, however dangerous it may be, is also therapeutic, monstrously so. A conflict that becomes a deed, a fact, ceases to exist. Mental calm can then be restored. Such acts are little different from those that have been part of female mythology from time immemorial: from Penthesilea who devoured Achilles raw and then fell asleep quite rested to Pentheus’ mother, Agave, a Bacchante subject to trances, who mistook her son for a wild beast and tore him limb from limb; from Corneille’s Camille to Michelet’s witches, from Judith to Charlotte Corday, the list of women who owe their renown to crime is endless. These women are heroines, and it is as heroines that they fascinated Lacan. Consider the conclusion of his article in Le Minotaure:

They plucked out their victims’ eyes as the Bacchantes castrated their victims. The sacrilegious curiosity that has anguished men since the beginning of time moved them in their desire for their victims, in their search in the dead women’s gaping wounds for what Christine, in all innocence, later described to the court as “‘the mystery of life.’’ [22]

Calmly, he foreshadows the final explanation, the revelation of the secret shared in common by these two female crimes. In order to discover what this secret is we must trace the histories of both crimes back through time, step by step. We must follow Jacques Lacan as he makes the discovery that became the source of all his subsequent thought. The enigma stands before us: we must now decipher it.

When Christine was imprisoned, she was, as is natural in a French prison, separated from Léa. Five months later the effects of this separation made themselves felt. Christine suffered hallucinations; she attempted to tear her eyes out. Confined in a straitjacket, she refused to eat, she engaged in acts of self-punishment, she “expiated”’ her sins, and of course she began to rave madly. When Lacan learned of these facts – from the press and from the court psychiatrist, Doctor Logre—he immediately understood that the separation was the cause of the delirium, just as the close relationship between the two sisters was the cause of the crime. He understood this because the case of Aimée had already put him on the right track, and because feminine paranoia, even more than its masculine counterpart, had shed light on what is known in Freudian jargon as repressed homosexuality. But this was not the first explanation: it was to be the final one.

The first explanation involved language: this trail is already familiar to us. It begins with words and leads to action. In order for a paranoid crime to be committed, a metaphor must enter into reality. “I’ll tear her eyes out’’—this is hatred speaking, hatred at its most harmless. But when the metaphor is realized and the barrier between fantasy, imagination, and reality is eliminated, most people, Lacan tells us, react to the magnitude of the deed: their reaction is “ambivalent, double-edged, a product of the emotional contagion of the crime and the demand for punishment raised by public opinion.” [23]

The extraordinary crime of the sisters Papin could occur only on one condition: each sister had to constitute the entire world of the other. “Genuine Siamese souls, they formed a permanently closed world. Reading their depositions after the crime, Doctor Logre remarked that ‘you would think you were seeing double.’ With no other resources than those they found on their solitary island, they had to resolve their enigma, the human enigma of sex.”[24]

In other words, here we have a couple of sisters who, because they were brought up together, never had to faceup to the existence of the Other, man. Two sisters who found their pleasure together; who, in murder, found a sacred form of ecstasy; and who, after killing their victims and laying bare their sexual parts, fastened themselves on their thighs. “I am certain,’’ said Christine, ‘‘that in another life I was supposed to be my sister’s husband.” Actually she was her sister’s husband in his life as well.

When another female couple appeared in a hostile guise, the Papin couple let go. Their “‘twin insanity” had done its work. Its root cause was the ‘“‘difficulty of being two,” the impossibility of distinguishing themselves from one another, to the point that the other ceased to exist. From these circumstances came loss of identity and madness.

Lacan himself compared the two sisters to Aimé. Just as Christine and Léa were inseparable, so Aimée was also “inseparable.” Over the course of her life, however, she was “inseparable’’ not from a single woman but from a succession of different figures, and it was probably this that allowed her to stop short of murder. For Aimée, the primary object of identification was her mother—the same as herself. ‘““We were such friends,’ as Aimée tearfully put it. Next came a fallen aristocrat, Mademoiselle C. de la N., “a subtle schemer.’’ Reading Lacan’s thesis, it is easy to imagine the woman: a person who looked upon work as degrading, who ruled her colleagues with the authority of a duchess rebuking her lackeys, and who laid down the standards of good and bad taste with an iron hand. Her swagger fascinated Aimée, who first heard about the celebrated Madame Z in conversation with this woman. This fallen duchess frequently told Aimée that she, Aimée, was “masculine.’’ Here we detect a muffled echo of Christine’s belief that she was her sister’s husband. But Mademoiselle C. de la N. did not prevent Aimée from marrying, more for convenience and ‘Don Juanism” than for love. It was then that the third woman, the third double, entered Aimée’s life: her own sister, who came to live with the young newlyweds. Aimée’s sister had had a hysterectomy and so had no hope of having a child. Aimée twice became pregnant. The first child was stillborn; the second lived. In both cases the sister made no secret of her unsatisfied desire to be a mother herself. Christine had been so close to Léa that she could only project her hatred along with Léa onto another female couple. Aimée, on the other hand, would take some time to work out the amorous hatred that she secretly bore toward her alter ego, and the forms taken by the fantasies derived from this hatred became increasingly remote from their original object. Finally she left home in the grip of a fantasy that took her ever closer to those creatures of luxury and bright lights who were plotting against her, the courtesans and actresses of Paris. Love or hate? The word is ambivalence. ‘‘Each of these female persecutors was in fact merely a new image of the sister whom our patient had taken as her ideal. In other words, they were mere prisoners of Aimée’s narcissism. Now we can understand what the glass obstacle was that prevented her from knowing that she loved her persecutors, although she cried that she did: they were merely images.”[25]

Woman to woman, Aimée assaulted Madame Z: paranoia as self-punishment. Woman to woman, Christine and Léa, whose unconscious minds did not admit the existence of the Other, assaulted two women. They attacked, just as those mystics in whom Lacan later took an interest allowed themselves to be wounded by a God who loved them and hated them to the point of inflicting on them every imaginable suffering, in His own image, since He himself had undergone them. The “psychic inversion’’ that Lacan discusses in the case of Aimée and Christine, which made each of them a male figure in a homosexual couple, has affinities with the “‘eternal couple of the criminal and the (female) saint,” and with the exemplary story of Jean Genet.

Chapter 2. The Ladies’ Way from p53

P73 Footnote 22, Clément, Consider the conclusion of his article in Le Minotaure:

22. “‘De la psychose paranoiaque,”’ Premiers Ecrits. . . , p. 398.

On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts) P30 of www.Freud2Lacan.com /40.

P71 Footnote 23, Clément, But when the metaphor is realized and the barrier between fantasy, imagination, and reality is eliminated, most people, Lacan tells us, react to the magnitude of the deed: their reaction is “ambivalent, double-edged, a product of the emotional contagion of the crime and the demand for punishment raised by public opinion.” [23]

23. Ibid., p. 393.

2, Jacques Lacan, De In psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 1932. [Reprinted in De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa (Paris: Seuil, 1975).] p13 of www.Freud2Lacan.com /40 Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin – see On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P72 Footnote 24, Clément, The extraordinary crime of the sisters Papin could occur only on one condition: each sister had to constitute the entire world of the other. “Genuine Siamese souls, they formed a permanently closed world. Reading their depositions after the crime, Doctor Logre remarked that ‘you would think you were seeing double.’ With no other resources than those they found on their solitary island, they had to resolve their enigma, the human enigma of sex.”[24]

24. Ibid., p. 397.

P28 of of www.Freud2Lacan.com /40 Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin – see On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P75 Clément Footnote 25, Love or hate? The word is ambivalence. ‘‘Each of these female persecutors was in fact merely a new image of the sister whom our patient had taken as her ideal. In other words, they were mere prisoners of Aimée’s narcissism. Now we can understand what the glass obstacle was that prevented her from knowing that she loved her persecutors, although she cried that she did: they were merely images.”[25]

25. See also “Propos sur la causalité psychique’’ in Ecrits: ‘‘The series of female persecutors who figure in her story all personify, virtually without variation, an ideal of evildoing, against which her need for aggression increased constantly.” This implacable mechanism, in which aggression turns outwards to strike at another self in the other, Lacan calls the “paranoia of self-punishment.”

See Presentation on Psychical Causality : 28th September 1946 (Bonneval Hospital, Paris ) : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19460928). Also in Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan. P138 of Bruce Fink’s translation, I claim to have followed his method in the analysis of the case of paranoiac psychosis discussed in my thesis; I demonstrated the psychogenic structure of the case and designated its clinical entity with the more or less valid term of “self-punishing paranoia.”

…

The structural points that prove to be essential in this analysis can be formulated as follows:

(a) The succession of female persecutors in her history repeated almost without variation the personification of a maleficent ideal, and her need to aggressively strike out at this ideal kept growing.

However, not only did she constantly seek to curry both favor and abuse from the people to whom she had access in reality who incarnated this stereotype, but in her behavior she tended to carry out, without recognizing it, the very evildoing she denounced in them: vanity, coldness, and abandonment of one ’s natural duties.

***

For other texts on Aimée see On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

The category in the right margin, j) Aimée, in 1 A Lacanian Clinic