13/12/06
00:47:01
Last time we envisioned the idea of an encounter, with all this act implies in terms of fiction, between a speaking being who spun something from out of a specific experience he had had, that is Condorcet, and an analyst, Freud, who recoiled from a confrontation with the appearance of the specter of the Real in his work with Lucy R. near the end of 1892.
What I would like to do today is push things a bit further along these lines, by making a similar attempt to envision – since this is a seminar on psychoanalysis – an additional moment when Freud sought refuge within the confines of meaning or signification while working with one of his analyzands, the Rat Man, while at the same time continuing to interrogate what aspect of the Other as such presented itself to Condorcet in a way that was indicative of Freud’s discovery as it was later transmitted to us by Lacan, via his invention of the (concept of) object (a).
Let me return once more to the unique place Condorcet occupied with respect to the other Enlightenment thinkers. During the period when he began to get involved in the question of politics, he was already a philosopher and member of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of France.
Politicians may rightly say he was a failure on the political scene, but the picture becomes more complicated if we read the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Draft of a Picture of the History of Progress in the Human Mind) as being his last will and testament set down, beyond the well-known historical facts of those days, right before he came out of hiding and left his fate in the hands of those who were willing and able to be his “good listeners” (bon entendeur). Indeed he was one of the only revolutionary figures not to have been guillotined!
This fact alone is enough to generate questions, (I will try to say a few words later about the unique position he was found dead in, a position that itself raises questions), about the meaning of knowledge as a “picture,” especially the genuinely clinical one painted by the analyzand on the couch.
In other words, what exactly was it that was being progressively developed by his thinking and that of his contemporaries? The fact that by the end of the second half of the 18th century an extraordinary event had taken place: knowledge had become accessible to all by virtue of the fact that all were being motivated by reason. Condorcet knew a thing or two about what he was saying when spoke of reason, since this was precisely what he had run into time and again in the connection to the Real he established via his craving for mathematics, which so altered him he became able to spend ten, eleven or even twelve hours studying it in his room at a time.
The idea that each speaking being possessed the potential to gain access to knowledge was something absolutely new, even for Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, who believed it could be disbursed to certain students by preceptors, and who held that even if enlightened despots were to allow it to be more widely diffused, it would still need to remain within the confines of certain circles.
Condorcet’s encounter with knowledge on the other hand led him, as early as 1775, (as witnessed in his 1782 inaugural address to the Académie Française), to begin developing the underpinnings of what he would later refer to as instruction, the vehicle through which those who knew were to be able to deliver to all the others who did not, (and this was what was really new), elements of knowledge, an elementary knowledge that would enable the latter to take the scepter from the former and empower them to pass judgment on the knowledge they were being offered. The true wellspring of the res publica, the republic as such, was this fact that knowledge was no longer usurped by noblemen and clerics.
In this sense France became a kind of model whose implications resonated throughout Europe and beyond. This is what was fundamentally elaborated by Condorcet’s thinking on reason as he encountered it in his frequent dips into mathematics, and it is odd to think that it was as late as 1957 when Lacan added the words “or Reason Since Freud” to the title of his text “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” as though Condorcet were being invoked without his even knowing it.
For Condorcet, in the 18th Century, knowledge possessed two key characteristics: it was ruled by observation, or opsis, and it was transmitted or conveyed by letters, as proved by mathematics. And these same elements do indeed seem to have been what in a certain way oriented Lacan, and it might almost be said that Condorcet’s own relationship to knowledge is to be found along this same path. This is the key idea I would like to elaborate on this evening by staging an encounter between Condorcet and Freud.
As is well known Freud began an analysis with Ernst Lehrs, alias the Rat Man, on October 1, 1907, after the latter came to see him complaining of various troubles, most notably certain obsessive ruminations concerning thoughts that something disagreeable, that is to say painful, would happen to the two people he loved the most: his father and his Lady. Freud emphasized this last point, that she was not a woman but a venerated Lady, in the notes he carefully took of everything that was said in each session for the first three months and twenty days of the analysis, (until January 20, 1908), now known as the Journal d’une analyse.
Since we cannot revisit all the details of this analysis itself, what I would like to do, a bit like how we covered Lucy R. last time, is to instead recreate a moment of “breaking-and-entering” by the Real that occurred at one point in the unfolding of the cure, the manner in which it was subsequently covered up, and how it may now be in some sense made heard, since that is the more or less the theme of this seminar: “How is ‘it’ made heard?” (Comment ça s’entend?). What invisibly holds back the body? (qu’est-ce qui retient les corps invisiblement).
Everyone here knows how things unfolded. I have chosen a specific moment that did not occur during the first three months and twenty days, and that we therefore have to read about in the Cinq Psychanalyses, the moment when Freud, as with Lucy R., offered up a construction about the past. His construction involved forging a connection, (and by the way I have no idea whether Freud realized this had to do with his own past which, as you know, was always in the background), between what happened to Ernst Lehrs’ father and what happened to Ernst Lehrs himself: before his death when Enrst was eleven years old, his father faced the following situation: he had been obliged to give up on marrying the poor but beautiful woman he loved in order to marry a woman, the Rat Man’s mother of course, who brought him fame, fortune and a certain degree of social standing.
This was of course the proposition the Rat Man’s own mother made to him during the final year of his studies, to wit that he marry a young woman who would guarantee him the necessary social recognition and professional prospects. But he loves the young Lady in question and falls ill as a result. Thus Freud quickly makes the connection between what befell the father and the son, to Ernst Lehrs himself, and reveals it to Ernst as the cause of his symptoms – the conflict being that the son was unable to disobey his dead father by acting otherwise than he had done.
At the same time however, and this is what I’m leading us to tonight, Ernst Lehrs was unwilling to accept this interpretation. Numerous and rather heated exchanges then took place in the transference, and mechanisms began to appear that clearly had something to do precisely with knowledge, with something stemming from a certain hatred. Something was indeed percolating, and one day Ernst Lehrs was leaving a session and crossed paths with a young woman on the staircase about whom he immediately concluded: “She is without a doubt Freud’s daughter.” He then began to fantasize what Freud had told him was in fact true, that is that Freud himself wanted him to marry his daughter, and that this was why Freud was willing to tolerate Ernst’s aggressivity towards him. However that night or one of the nights that followed he had a dream, (and this is where I am really leading), that interests us greatly because it raised the question of the knowledge of the Other, the question of the object (a).
The dream went like this: Ernst Lehrs dreamt that Freud’s daughter was there but that she had mud packs instead of eyes. Freud writes in the case history that for anyone familiar with The Interpretation of Dreams, “the case is clear and straightforward, (the dream) means (signifie) he wanted to marry her not for her beautiful eyes, but for her money.”
His interpretation was made along the relatively straightforward lines of anal symbolism: the mud packs (“crottes,” also “turds”) were a reference to the gift of money. Freud does not say what effect his interpretation produced.
Interestingly in this respect, in his famous “Rome Discourse” of 1953 Lacan talks about the position of the analyst in the transference, and about the importance of not objectifying, in terms of the object relation, what happens in it. And in order to do so he revisits this dream in a way that transmits a kind of elementary knowledge about it, insofar as according to him what was occurring in the transference at that moment was Ernst Lehrs, in the position of analyzand, offering an Imaginary daughter to Freud in order to marry, (on the level of his subjectivity), what the dream was in fact revealing to him, “her true face, the face of death which stared at him through her asphalt eyes.”
The analyzand passes through the Imaginary in order to receive from the analyst the gift of the Symbolic at a point where the Real effects its act of breaking-and-entering.
Lacan’s interpretation takes us beyond “al-ready-made” knowledge. On the one hand his act is poetic in nature, and on the other it is an attempt to go beyond the transference Freud himself unwittingly entered into by repeating what he had already experienced at the age of sixteen when he fell in love with Gisela Fluss. This is what he wrote to his fiancée Martha in 1893: He was so thoroughly smitten with her (Gisela) that he was unable to love another woman for over ten years until finally meeting her (Martha), the woman who was to become his wife. And yet he did retain at least one remnant of Gisela, one remainder of her, in the form of an attraction to dark hair and eyes – the dimension of the object (a) as object of the fantasm as such.
The same could be said of the moment we explored last time with Freud and Lucy R., which was immediately covered up, just as in a way the totality of Lacan’s teaching was covered up too. What I mean is everything he said about the object, about the signifier, about the signified that does not account for all of the dimension of the signifier, about S, etc., all this is there and yet immediately covered up by an act of thinking that obscures what is at play. In other words, in the moment when Lucy R. told Freud “I already know that,” a kind of chasm opened up beneath his feet from which erupted a Real not entirely unlike the Real at play in the game of logical time with the three prisoners.
In the moment she tells him this, the situation became comparable to the time when each prisoner was, in a way, in the position of object (a): obviously he was not able to say anything about it. He was not in the position of object (a) with her, because if that were the case things would have remained in the domain of intersubjectivity.
Because understanding was not so much what was at issue here: instead what was at stake was to be able to see what was at play beyond the purview of thinking. To get a closer vantage point on this, think of mathematical letters instead. What was at play in that moment was that Freud was positioned as object (a), (and this is the appearance of analytic discourse as such, when object (a) is in the position of agent), because he was subjected to the gaze of the Other, or rather others in this case, because several Others may exist who make present the field of the Other as such.
Thus we are well-positioned to imagine that Lucy R. was performing this function, the same one that drove the prisoners to beat a hasty retreat for the nearest way out, to wit that at any moment each and every one of us is subjected to the gaze of two others. The pivotal thing indicating to them that they can leave is not so much whether what they see is white or black, (that was Lacan’s way of, as he put it, glossing the story at a time when the world was finding its “way out” of the War). Over time he revisits the story in his Seminar and eventually concludes that what was important for him was the structural constellation in which the speaking being is positioned as object (a) by the gaze of the Other.
But the gaze in question here, more precisely, is in fact the gaze Lacan would later call, in his Seminar Encore, an “assemblage,” and here we have truly entered the domain of this knowledge that has nothing left to do with anything that can be grasped by the activity of thinking itself, (I will try to write it on the board in a moment). What has to be kept in mind is something that was there from the beginning of set theory, a dimension of assembling characterized by the fact that the objects placed into the set (ensemble) have nothing in common with one another. What is truly interesting about set theory is that the set, what he referred to at the time as the dimension of the One, enables us to assemble, to ad-semble something that was a priori dissimilar to itself.
Because if it does seem to have something in common with itself, we end up with narcissism. Therefore everything I said before about Freud could in fact be said to have to do with a narcissistic knowledge in the sense that he remained mired in the dimension of the same, of comprehension, etc. And the entire question would therefore rest on the fact that it is in the transference that there occurs an eruption out of which something appears that is not at all shattered, but that is instead a genuine assemblage. The dimension of the written, of what writes itself, is not the dimension of writing as such. What writes itself is something that has to do with the act of assembling, of ad-sembling something, completely heterogeneous elements, and this absolutely is alterity in itself.
Thus mathematics as such, (and this is a hypothesis I am making a bit gratuitously, because in one way or another this has to be what Condorcet encountered in it), is what he was seeking to elaborate via the work he did on integral calculus and probability whose purpose was to know how it was possible to make elections as little fraudulent as possible, which is to say what he eventually arrived at was the act of representation.
This enables me to now revisit, with Freud, what Freud himself, (we are not going to reproach him for it because he transmitted it to us anyway, which we know because we are able to speak of it in the first place), in this infinitesimal moment, what Freud himself was unable to pick up on (recevoir), but which he was aware of on some level despite it all, (this is what he transmitted to us), to wit this assemblage that Lacan called “Il y a de l’Un” (there is “Oneness”). The One is not a narcissistic un-ion, it is an assemblage. And he was truly making a difference in this case, he reinforced the fact that it was he who uncovered the trace of this One of which he was speaking, in the written, in mathematics, and in set theory.
The result is that each and every time we find ourselves in a position in which the specular image falters, when it becomes impossible to remain within the specular, narcissistic dimension as such, we are driven to experience this moment, and this is why it is so crucial that the analyst in the transference be able to allow this moment to occur and to unfold, because this is what presents us with the new discourse that is analytic discourse, itself nothing more than a change in discourse as such, rather than a discourse specifically on the topic of psychoanalysis or its unique elements.
I imagine therefore what Freud ran up against in 1908 with the Rat Man, (and which Lacan would later transmit in revisiting the dream, he did not say it just anywhere, Lacan, he said it in the “Rome Discourse,” which was a highly crucial thing in the analytic community of 1953), was something he first introduced, (as I mentioned last time), in his article on the concept of Kränkung as a unique experience of mortification, meaning as the mark of death, of the disappearance of al-ready-made knowledge in order for something new to emerge. And this was written in the dream as something that appears and immediately overwhelms that which is visible and we might even say, that which is heard.
So, how does these bare facts, (of course we are not going to go looking for an exact match, more like correspondences), how can it be that it already lies before us? If we can prove it had already occurred to this one philosopher who obviously lacked any idea of it such as it is, to this one philosopher and revolutionary who was not one really because even though he initially supported the revolutionary ideal, it soon became clear what truly interested him was establishing the Constitution, a new Constitution comprised of the elements I mentioned earlier, and in the development of Public Instruction, which was his real contribution, in addition to what he left us in the form of his “Draft.”
It is possible to play on the word “draft,” (esquisse): the S, Est-ce (is?) of the Draft or Es-quisse, Esquisse d’un tableu (Draft of a picture), which contains the “one” (un) as well. It is not Draft of the Historical Picture, but rather Draft of a (un) Historical Picture. And then the word esprit (mind, wit, spirit) appears here too. It’s like the title is a library in and of itself.
Condorcet was found dead on March 29th, 1794 in his prison cell, and on April 3rd 1795 the Convention decreed, based on a proposition submitted by Daunou, that 3,000 copies of the Draft be bought and distributed because in the intervening period his wife decided to have it published. The foreword at the time proved the degree to which Condorcet had been misunderstood: “This a classic text offered to your Republican schools by a misguided philosopher.” It wasn’t until the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989 that he was finally accorded the recognition he deserved – his remains were transferred, from the communal grave where he was originally interred, to an empty coffin in the Pantheon.
Based on the fact that the dream is composed like a picture, I will conclude this evening with the supposition of knowledge that Condorcet left us with in the form of his Draft of a Historical Picture of Progress in the Human Mind (Esprit), by speaking to you of the picture he gave to be seen when he was discovered in his cell awaiting trial and condemnation by the revolutionary tribunal.
As I mentioned last time at first he was completely consumed with trying to justify himself: in fact his first month there was when he attempted to write his Fragments of a Justification, but he only completed about thirty pages. During this time wife Sophie most likely watched him deteriorate before her very eyes: It must have been visible in his face, his body, he was stuck, he couldn’t sleep, precisely because he could not really justify himself.
And then one day she told him he should be able to write something else, she knew he could let it go and write something new. And when she later published the Fragment of a Justification at the bottom of the thirtieth page, (where it ends), Sophic Condorcet wrote: “Left unfinished, at my behest, in order to write the Draft of a Historical Picture…”
This aspect involving her own “entreaty” is highly evocative, because curiously enough Condorcet had spent five years with the Jesuits in Reims and still bore the marks of it, going so far even as to have proposed drafting a calendar replete with a crime committed by Christianity marking each day. But he never published it. He had to write it instead…
However, (I say this more or less in connection with the dream that occurred to me concerning Freud and the Rat Man), after his arrest in Clamart he was imprisoned. The day after his arrest, March 29th, 1793, at 2 p.m., the warden entered his cell and found him dead “face down against the ground and his arms laid out alongside his body.”
Of course this raises one big question: Did he commit suicide, or did he have a stroke or brain aneurism?
For those who are more or less in the know, it is easy to see that this position is the one priests assume at the time of their ordination.
What did this man face in his final hour, this tolerant atheist shaped by Catholic schooling, in order to find himself in this ordination position? In other words, should we not interpret his face down to the ground as an encounter with something on the order of the Real of the Other? At any rate, this was definitely different from the way Robespierre bravely confronted the jouissance of the guillotine with dignity.
What would seem to be conveyed by this strangely living picture of the face of death is connected to something on the order of the knowledge in the Real Lacan spoke of, the significance of a unique encounter that holds back the body and that, quite clearly, may only be envisioned on the basis of there being a specific alliance between the Other and the Subject to come, an alliance whose face is that of Symbolic death…
This presupposes the speaking being is only able to enter into living existence to the extent he consents to allow himself to dance with death, yet another way of signifying the experience of mortification, Kränkung.