Traces

After our rich evening of July 6, 2022, our publications part of the interventions.

Here are the interventions of D. Kamienny, Jean Michel Rabaté and we are waiting for that of Marie Jejcic.

Our third Beckett

Diana Kamienny Boczkowski

As I indicated in the mail that you found, there are three Beckett evenings after the beginning of the Psychoanalysis and Cultural Transfers evenings in 2013.

It is with Artaud, Joyce and others, the place of writing-remedy that leads us to deal with this subject and the knowledge that these writers produce and from which psychoanalysts learn.

The remedy can cure or prolong the disease as Shakespeare says.

Marie Jejcic’s book caught the attention by the style of her son, the spatial deployment of his journey, the presence of times in his book. Time in Beckett’s life and also time of the author in the encounter with Beckett and his work.

A luminous line of others. It is the one linked to the body, as I am sure that my colleagues will speak about it I do not approach it. You will point out the brilliant trait of the voice that you will find and revive.

I was seized especially in the first part of Marie Jejcic’s work, by the resonance of her writing and of Beckett’s writing by the feeling that both of them wrote Haikus at times.

Japan influenced Joyce. Mrs. Butterfly is present in her works to the point that she asked me a long time ago if Nora Bernacle had never died. The Japanese are present for the thousands of current languages.

In our other island author, Japan is a more subtle presence. A Beckett student had spoken of a “haiku like” style, I wonder what is the influence of this extreme form of poetry where reality is so present. Like Tanaka, a friend of the said, Beckett was influenced by the haiku of Einstein’s intermediary. He even asked Eisenstein to study cinema in the 30s with him in Moscow. His request remained a dead letter but his letter is present in the Eisenstein archives.

Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema and film theory confront Beckett with this idea of ​​opposing two non-congruent elements that produce in the spectator “the vocal eyes”

More interesting than the anecdote is to know if Beckett is inspired by knowing that Marie JEjcic describes how she writes, “which edges a silence”, a hole.

Is it the work on the language that led him to this type of creation or is it the practice of Hayku?

About silence, by the way, another Japanese, Takahashi, is there to see Beckett to tell him that according to him, Beckett was a Zen master because he had reached the point of “Nothing left to tell” and he showed him perfect circles made in a state of satori by Zen masters.

Beckett with his usual irony answers “I would be incapable of drawing such circles” is this an ironic answer or simply practical?

The question then is the haiku style an entire invention of his own? a style that I adopt? How is it that the Japanese academic thought of Zen when for Beckett as Marie Jejcic underlines, the essential thing is never to arrive? Because, she says, “arrival is the death of saying” (p 160). Or “Again. Say again Let it be said again. This reminder of piss is so bad.

“Quasi-nominal” mode that can make one think of haiku and that I would like Marie Jejcic to clarify for us. The Beckett effect is to transform us into poets, into “Beckett like”, his writing touches us in a way that collectivizes without producing the crowd.

Marie tells us that with his life he transforms poetry

You announce this method p. 280: positioning the work without dissociating it from the very movement that foments it”, you do not speak of dissociating it from the author but from the movement that foments it and you evoke the loss to which the author consents.

But in writing precisely you situate an “increase in life” “a new opening”. You focus the study on the relationship to metaphor, central to operating on reality through language.

Why attack Beckett? You shoot him for his courageous radicalism. Bring psychoanalysis to all those who engage in this courageous radicalism. Not sure. Maybe we like it, it also seems that a writing imposes itself in an analysis of what is written or of what is written.

A point that I would like to see developed is that of enjoyment, a theme for us this year here.

I would like to know your points of view on the type of enjoyment that Beckett encounters, the one he creates, the one that he avoids. Not that this is absent from the book, Marie you evoke enjoyment several times and you invent this “asphyxiation of the symbolic”, so appropriate to Beckett.

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Jean-Michel Rabaté

I will begin with one of the quotes from Lacan that you mention, the one that comes from the seminar On a Discourse That Would Not Be a Semblance, from May 12, 1971. Lacan reads with some variations his essay entitled “Lituraterre” that you quote on p. 39 and p. 253:

“… I was a little tired of the trash can to which I had riveted my fate. However, it is known that I am not alone in sharing the avouère. (= to confess in the published version). // The avouère, to pronounce in the old way, the having that Beckett balances with the right that makes waste of our being. This avouère saves the honor of literature and what pleases me enough relieves me of the privilege that I could believe to hold from my place. »

He immediately adds:

“The question is whether what textbooks seem to display since they have existed – I am talking about literature textbooks – is that literature is the accommodation of remains. Is it a matter of collocation in writing, of what would initially be song, spoken myth, dramatic procession?”

Lacan evokes the trash cans in which Hamm’s parents are buried; when they end up dying one after the other, Clov only has to put the lid back on. We know that in old French, “avoir” was pronounced \a.vwer\. There would therefore be a link to be made, a knot to be produced between “avoir”, “avouer” and “devoir”, the “doit” in which we read a Kantian categorical imperative. Only Beckett would save literature from its dishonor by showing the subject seen as waste on the one hand, but carrying an “imperative of narration” on the other.

Lacan goes on to cite his treatment of Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” and suggests that psychoanalysis can only illuminate a text by “showing its failure,” less a failure of the text than a failure of the method of reading that focuses primarily on what leaves a hole in the text.

“It is by this method that psychoanalysis could best justify its intrusion into literary criticism. It would mean that literary criticism would effectively renew itself because psychoanalysis is there so that texts can measure themselves against it, precisely because the enigma remains on its side; it is silent.”

Lacan allusively evokes one of the witticisms of Endgame. HAMM has seen a flea and asks for insecticide powder. CLOV pours a large dose into his shirt and pants and exclaims, “Holy cow!”

HAMM asks, “Did you get it?” »

CLOV – It seems (…) Unless she keeps quiet.

HAMM – Coite! Coite you mean. Unless she keeps quiet.

CLOV – Ah! Do we say coite? Do we not say coite?

HAMM – But come on! If she kept quiet we would be fucked. » (F.Partie, p. 51.)

I cannot explore Lacan’s multiple allusions to Beckett, Llewellyn Brown did so in two superb works. I will simply note that what you propose avoids the pitfalls of classical literary criticism. Your book is not, fundamentally, literary criticism. It is a book by a psychoanalyst, but it is also a piece of writing: we feel the art of the formula, the text breathes, and the polyphonic repetition of the same quotes, themes, and motifs makes this book closer to a novel or a theoretical autofiction.

Your book takes place after two important psychoanalytic readings of Beckett, and you cite them both:

A reading that I would call dogmatic, that of Didier Anzieu who criticizes Bion for not having succeeded in psychoanalyzing Beckett; An erudite Lacanian reading that explores a certain philosophical knowledge, that of the late Franz Kaltenbeck, with whom I often discussed Beckett.

Your reading is different because you focus on reporting an experience. It is an encounter, and you emphasize the Real. Moreover, you write lucidly: “Beckett is no more a philosopher than Lacan. » (p. 87)

You are dedicated to uncovering the Real to which writing gives access, and want to share a certain experience, such as the jumps of the young Beckett: you went to Cooldrinagh near Foxrock, the family home near Dublin, to check the height of the larch on which the young Beckett threw himself to let himself slide to the ground (p.66)! This passage really impressed me!

I completely agree with you in taking a starting point in Beckett’s poetry and poetics. You write: “A subject has no other consistency than poetic.” (p. 51). Yes, for me too, poetry is a major key to understanding Beckett.

This brings you to the reading of one of the first poems, “Sanies I,” a reading that begins boldly by reading in “mu de now” under the German, the dull echo of “mud” in English—which would point to Comment C’est, which you speak of too little but which would provide confirmation. In English, we read:

“bound for home like a good boy

I was born with a pop with the green of the larches

ah to be back in the caul with no trusts”…

Ten lines later:

“Oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork” (Echo’s Bones, in Poems, p. 12)

Beckett later explained that this poem evokes a double trauma: birth and weaning. Its occasion was a long bike ride to survive a romantic crisis. Beckett came to relive his own birth, thinking back to the walk of his father who fled so as not to witness the birth; he had only understood that Ethna McCarthy, the woman he was in love with, was going to marry his old friend Con Leventhal. With Beckett everything revolves around birth and love. But it is above all the love of the mother, of which it must be made clear, Beckett does not say “love” but “loving”: “I am what her savage loving has made me, and it is good that one of us should accept that finally…” Letters, I, p. 552 (October 6, 1937). In this same very psychoanalytical letter, he describes maternal love as physical torture—the central theme of How It Is.

There is therefore a sadism in love, and Beckett had found the model in Proust. This sadism nevertheless leads towards a certain infinity because it surpasses and transcends all ethics—such is the strong idea of ​​Alain Badiou that you quote. I admit to having been impressed by Alain Badiou’s book, L’immanence des vérités (2018), which goes in the same direction: Badiou analyzes the dialectic of what he calls the recovery and discovery of the infinite in Beckett’s poems. And above all, he no longer uses the concept of an “event” that would be inscribed in the texts; it seems to me that Badiou was then confusing the Lacanian Real with a historical or fictional event… You avoid this pitfall in a spiral reading that is based on Compagnie, a text that she accompanies from beginning to end, to relay it with L’innommable—two excellent choices. Your perspective reminds me of the thesis defended at Paris VIII, I was part of the jury, by Solveig Hudhomme, from whom you cite an excellent essay p. 222. Her thesis, defended in 2013, became The Elaboration of the Myth of the Self in Beckett’s Work in 2015. Hudhomme develops this sentence from the short story “The End”: “My myth wants it that way.” (Short Stories, p. 109). She ends with a beautiful analysis of the “myth of a voice” in The Unnamable, applying Maurice Blanchot’s idea of ​​neutral speech to Beckett’s corpus, which would revolve around a “so-called Self.” » But you shift this myth to make it a profession, in which I would willingly see the loom of style, with Beckett’s constant rewritings, who “twenty times on the loom” put his work back on.

This brings me to a fundamental question: if it is quite obvious that the “profession of man” must be understood in the generic sense, is there a difference between the “myth” self-constituted by writing and what you describe as the courage to continue living? When you comment on “I alone am a man, all the rest is divine” from The Unnamable, are we in humanism, or in anti-humanism? In short, where do we base the “necessity” (p. 95) of being a man without the Sartrean or other humanism always rejected by Beckett? Could it be that we remain stuck in contingency, which would lead us back to waste and the trash?

Jean-Michel Rabaté

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The impossible profession of being a man-Christian Fierens

Three professions—governing, educating, psychoanalyzing—are impossible professions according to Freud. “The profession of being a man” is also impossible. This fourth impossible profession is not added to the other three; it is their root. Beckett experienced it in the flesh and blood of his writing that touches reality through the radical impossible. This is what resonates and challenges in Marie Jejcic’s book, this is what makes it an admirable, necessary, essential book for the meditation of any psychoanalyst.

Instead of answering by directly questioning myself, I would like to lend my word to Beckett, who, from his past, himself answers and questions the topicality of the “profession of being a man,” from Marie Jejcic’s book. I quote The Depopulator, a very small book by Beckett published in 1970.

“A dwelling where bodies go, each seeking their depopulator. Vast enough to allow searching in vain. Small enough for any escape to be futile. It is the interior of a low cylinder with a circumference of fifty meters and a height of sixteen for harmony. Light. Its weakness. Its yellow. As if the approximately eighty thousand square centimeters of total surface each emitted its own glow” (p. 7).

What is the depopulator? It would be easy to suspect the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp and to find confirmation in the last paragraph where the title of a book by Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, insists: “if this is a man”…, “if this is a man”…, “if this was a man”. The depopulator would be the infernal machine of genocide.

The first sentence of Beckett’s book immediately invalidates this historicizing reduction: “bodies each seek their depopulator”. Each of the bodies is a seeker. What is sought is a way out of the low cylinder, out of the depopulator, but it is impossible to escape from the search which necessarily goes round in circles. It remains to describe the cylinder and what happens inside it: fifty meters around, sixteen meters high, eighty thousand centimeters, figures that are mathematically incompatible with each other. The approach will not be quantifiable. On the walls, a few niches that can be reached by mobile ladders seem to leave the vain hope of a way out. Bodies, close ones, distant ones, ordinary people, climbers, sedentary people, half-wise people, agitated people, they follow the laws of the functioning of the depopulator and its ladders. Man is never mentioned: could man be impossible? Researchers end up getting discouraged, stop looking and become: the vanquished. The depopulator is thus populated by two types of bodies, the researchers and the vanquished. The North, the only beacon that allows one to orient oneself in the depopulator is a vanquished: “She is sitting against the wall with her legs raised. She has her head between her knees and her arms around her legs. Her left hand holds her right shin and her right hand holds her left forearm. Her red hair, faded by the lighting, reaches the ground. It hides her face and the entire front of her body, including her crotch. Her left foot is crossed over her right. She is the north. She rather than any other vanquished person because of her greater fixity” (p. 46). She is the spatial reference.

The last paragraph locates the temporal reference, in order: “the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained” (p. 49) and “an unthinkable past if this notion is maintained” (p. 51). The end is unthinkable because there is not enough room for everyone to become vanquished, for everyone to lie down. It is only from this unthinkable that the first emergence of man occurs: “And here he is indeed, this last one, if he is a man, who slowly straightens up and after a certain time reopens his burned eyes.” Everything is frozen around him. “So here he is, if he is a man, who reopens his eyes and after a certain time makes his way to this first vanquished one so often taken as a landmark” (p. 50). He pushes aside the hair of the vanquished landmark, opens his eyes, wanders his eyes into the “deserted calms” of the vanquished one, who ends up closing her eyes. “He himself, in turn, after a time impossible to quantify, finally finds his place and his pose.” Then comes the extinction of all sensations: black (for vision), zero degree (for temperature) and the “silence stronger than all these weak breaths combined”.

Then comes the last sentence: “This is roughly the last state of the cylinder and of this small people of researchers of which a first if it was a man in an unthinkable past finally lowered his head for the first time if this notion is maintained”.

In this last sentence alone, we know what the depopulator is, it is the machine that destroys, denies, undoes the people finally mentioned, mentioned as “this small people of researchers”, and makes them vanquished. Destruction of humanity? On the contrary. It is in the encounter with the vanquished par excellence, who no longer seeks a way out, that the evocation of a man rises for the first time: “if it is a man”.

The people were going around in circles in this measured, numbered, objectified, digitalized space. “After a time that is impossible to quantify”, “if it is a man” “finally finds its place and its pose”. Time is impossible to quantify, because the notion of an end is unthinkable (there is no determined goal to this whole affair) and the same goes for the past, the notion of the past is unthinkable (it will never be a past fact that will explain the present). If these notions of an end and a past are maintained, they are each time unthinkable.

The very notion of man appears only as “if it is a man,” between the thinkable and the unthinkable. Grammatical ambiguity where a substantial noun (man) is replaced by a proposition of possibility, where it ceases to be written, “the man” ceases to be written to be replaced by “if it is a man.” The last “if it is a man” stands up straight. Here is if it is a man who reopens his eyes. Not the man, but the pure pending emergence of an if, “if it is a man.” No name, no nomination, except in the form of a possibility, where it ceases to be written. The audacity of a new language replaces the name with a verbal expression “if it is a man.” “If This Is a Man” transcends the future and the past, because it is only an emergence from an unthinkable past: “a first if this was a man in an unthinkable past finally lowered his head for the first time”.

Between thinkable and unthinkable, the infinite field of questioning or the gay science. I quote Nietzsche: “not asking questions, not vibrating with the desire and pleasure of asking questions, that is what I feel as contemptible” and I never stop “persuading myself that every man has this feeling, if this is a man” (The Gay Science, p. 60, modified translation).

The questions flow from the book Marie Jejcic, from the beginning of the book to the end — if these notions of beginning and end are maintained, because one can read the book in a loop, starting it at the end, at the beginning and in the middle. Everything is re-examined in terms of the Real, so precisely summoned in the book. I will focus only on three questions from a paragraph called “present of a man…”, of which we must understand the time as well as the gift that is given to us, I will only read you the end:

“The present is not prescribed. The present is this gap that he must create. Beckett does not create his work, therefore not himself as an author either, he creates his present, constantly to be renewed. Constant requirement. So, he is a man!

In seeking how to escape from the mental misery that was his, in holding on to the reality of everything impossible to orient himself, he transformed his moral misery into joy!

In this, this invention of so-called concerns us. If Dante, with his Comedy, offered Florence a language capable of unifying Italy, Beckett, through the function he confers on reality, demonstrates to our society that we can do something other than fear it. Having started from its most extreme singularity, it encounters the universal and for this, welcomes a reader capable of becoming a reader…

This is why we will not in any way call Beckett’s writing aesthetic, but firmly ethical.” (p. 228-229)

Questions:

1. How does ethics imply invention and creation? And how and why differentiate invention and creation?
2. The evocation of Dante implies the gift, the present of a language, with Beckett, the new language — another “novolanguage” — would allow us to do something other than fear reality (all the new horrors threatening our society). Could Beckett open up a path for us to hear and respond to what we could call the generalized depopulator of neoliberalism, capitalism, news?
3. Does this present imply a new conception of time? On the side of searching? (for example in the following paragraph “The letter: bone of voice, dust of verb”).