The other day
I stop by her practice. Her secretary, whose name is Nadine (Nadine Martin), doesn’t tell her right away that I’ve arrived. She finishes her mail, her phone call, typing on the computer, whatever. Then she picks up the phone and tells her “Christine is here,” she says to me “she’s examining someone’s breathing.” I wait a moment, several minutes. Then I leave, I don’t wait. This secretary whose name is Nadine and who is creating a barrier, after what’s happened, I won’t put up with her. Marie-Christine had told me “when I was interviewing her, she told me her first name, I said ‘that’s good.’” Finally a Nadine she can order around. I really am spouting nonsense. I said this secretary’s name several times, and I left:
—Nadine, will you tell her I couldn’t wait, that I was in a hurry, OK, Nadine?
—Certainly. In any case, I’ll tell her you stopped by.
—Thank you, Nadine, thank you. Good-bye Nadine.
Familiar hallucinatory process, one Nadine replaces another. One head of black hair replaces another, especially if it falls softly on the nape of the neck.
Yesterday, Thursday, December 3rd, I called the hospital in the morning:
—I wanted to let you know that Saturday I’m going Christmas shopping with Claude. He wants to give me my present, we’ll go to Avignon for the day…
—To Avignon?
—You know there’s nothing in Montpellier.
Then, I call her back five minutes later.
—I wanted to tell you something else, but it will hurt your feelings.
—Go ahead.
—I don’t want you to give me any Christmas presents, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to tell you early enough, it’s December 3rd, it’s about the time when people start looking for presents. And that’s just it, I couldn’t stand it if you gave me a present. You can understand that. After everything that’s happened, I think.
—Anyway, we had said we’d exchange presents in Rome.
—You know perfectly well I don’t want to go anymore.
—We hadn’t really decided yet.
—Well, me, I’ve decided. I don’t want to go anymore. I’ve known since noon on Wednesday (November 25th) when you didn’t call. You know that. And since then I haven’t changed my mind (impervious).
Ten minutes ago, I called her at her practice, the tickets to Rome have been canceled at my request. I asked her never to call me again. Ten minutes ago, I called her:
—Maybe it was a mistake to cancel the tickets.
—You want to go?
—No. I told you I wouldn’t change my mind. I don’t want to go. But we could have waited a bit longer just in case.
—I could call them back if you want.
—But I don’t want to go to Rome, not at all. Rome is finished. After all that’s happened. The only place that would be possible for me now is Seville.
—I could call if you want.
—But I didn’t say I wanted to go. I can’t at the moment. You know very well I’m blocked, and that I haven’t wavered, not for one second, since Wednesday noon.
At the cost of a fight to the death, which Lacan identifies with the dialectic of master and slave. I can’t take it any more, I can’t go on, I want someone to help me. Writing made me feel better, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, but since the definitions, it’s over. The relief ended with the first difficulty I ran into.
A while ago I was thinking of another example of sadomasochistic inversion: Sujet Angot, the structure.
Other points of view
Gisela: Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little bit.
Marie-Christine: You’re making me crazy. You’re pushing me to the limit.
Nadine: It’s extremely perverse, the way you present your suffering to others, telling them afterward that, in any case, there’s nothing they can do. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to call Marie-Christine tonight and give her clearance. Under these circumstances, I’m no longer interested. You can’t say what you’ve just said and then play innocent, as if you hadn’t said anything, telling me it was just so I would know how you’re suffering.
Yvon Kermann: You have a sado-masochistic relationship with the public.
But most of all, during the night from the 1st to the 2nd, Marie-Christine had wept in my arms, telling me: I love only you, I’ve never loved any one but you, you’re the first and only one, but you don’t want me so I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to disappear, you won’t hear of me ever again, not ever. You can’t stop me, because I’ll do it when you’re not here.
The last few days (flashback)
Saturday, November 28th, in the evening, there’s a party at Nathalie’s, in the end I accept the invitation. I don’t watch Marie-Christine dance, I don’t dance, I pout, I tell everyone that I’m tired, exhausted, I’m told “not me, I spent the whole day kayaking and I’m not tired…” Or “drink a little whisky, it will wake you up.” Red wine makes you sleepy, and whisky wakes you up. Or “I’m sorry I told you the other day that you were overreacting. —Well, it’s your point of view. —No, I shouldn’t have said it. —It doesn’t matter.”
It was horrible.
The key moments:
We make love. My fantasies are often of humiliation. Marie-Christine humiliating a girl, who is such an idiot, she doesn’t notice that I’m there, I know what Marie-Christine is thinking, I get off on this. Marie-Christine doesn’t give a shit, while the other one would lay siege to her house for eight days just for a chance to sniff her. Marie-Christine will take advantage, will tell her “since you’re here, go ahead, lick me, you won’t have come here for nothing.”
Another element, a Freudian slip while writing yesterday, that encapsulates my sadistic and sadomasochistic disorders, instead of ‘vaginal penetration’ I wrote ‘vaginal, sodomization.’ And you see, the comma comes in, the virgule, the little verge, little penis, it’s starting all over again. As if my head, mounted on a pivot, had two faces always present, I connect, I associate, everything relates, that’s what I call my incestuous mental structure. Which I’m trying to lessen a bit, like a fracture and a facture. A digression on fracture-facture, on puns:
Puns, jokes
On multiple occasions, Freud used Witz as much to make fun of himself as to show those around him that he could laugh about the most dire realities. A joke is an expression of the unconscious. Like human sexuality, it has infantile and polymorphous aspects. Freud studied joke-techniques and the mechanisms of pleasure they generate. There are inoffensive Witze and those that are tendentious, motivated by aggression, obscenity or cynicism. When they hit the mark, jokes, which require at least three people, the author, the recipient and the spectator, render suppressed desires more bearable by giving them a socially acceptable mode of expression. According to Freud there is a fourth motivation, one more terrible than the other three: skepticism. Jokes in this register bring absurdity into play and instead of targeting a person or an institution, they attack the certainty of our common sense. They lie when they tell the truth and tell the truth with a lie. Jokes produce pleasure. If they rely on condensation and displacement, they are characterized primarily by the playfulness of language. Humor, the comic, and jokes, all three bring us back to an infantile state, because “the euphoria we try to reach along these routes is nothing other than the temper of our childhood, a time when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making a joke and had no need of humor to feel happy in life.” Freud did not consider his book on jokes to be very important, he viewed it as a psychoanalytical essay applied to literary creativity. The book was not received with much enthusiasm, the first edition of a thousand copies took seven years to sell out. Jacques Lacan was the first, in 1958, to raise Witz to the level of a concept.
A few examples: Crêpe: Flip like a crêpe. Marie-Christine wanted to spend Christmas with me, Nadine calls her, sheds three tears over the phone, she lets herself be flipped like a crêpe with a little butter. Butter, Vaseline,
tears. Sodomy, the body is flipped. Practical, you end up with a body that has no vagina and no breasts, at an age when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making jokes, and had no need of humor to feel happy in life. Still, jokes about Toto, lemons, carrots. There, no lemon, no vagina, a carrot.
Other examples: Folle: A gay man with a limp wrist. I often let my wrist go slack, my father used to. Elisabeth (my father’s wife’s name): bête, animal. The reason why I don’t like animals, not even the poor Baya, Marie-Christine’s dog. Another example: The mark: I am marked, the mark, and also the D-mark, to the point, my father’s wife was German, he deeply admired Germany and its culture. I’m trying to keep things more or less in order, not too cluttered. I reached a point of no return, the word associations were threatening, incestuous ideas were filling my head: always experienced as a tragedy by those who engage in it. There is no partition, everything touches, nothing is untouchable. It’s disapproved of by social opinion and always experienced as a tragedy caused by irrationality or leading to madness or suicide. I’m not making this up. The brain cannot be divided into separate parts. It’s not that I’m missing something upstairs, as the saying goes, it’s a house without walls, like those lofts that are very fashionable these days, I had some press in September, you hear all the noises, from the kitchen and the bedroom, and the radio, and the TV, and the telephone, the fridge kicking in, the doorbell ringing yesterday, one o’clock in the morning, Marie-Christine wanting to tell me she loves me, and the bathroom, you’re never alone.
Lacan turned the joke into a signifier, that is a sign through which a trace of truth emerges. Like Freud, he had a biting sense of humor. He often used the technique of figuration through the opposite as evident in “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” As to vaginal sodomization, I agree completely with Melanie Klein’s theses in which she considers female homosexuality as the use of a sadistic penis. In my case it’s undeniable. I don’t have a dick, but I still sodomize you, not in the ass, but I sodomize you anyway. We have nothing, we have nothing for ourselves, and our head is fucked. Fucked, pulled out, of the cunt, that is, unblocked. Our head is fucked, you understand, it’s pulled out of the cunt, our head is, but where should it go? Rome? You want it to go to Rome? We canceled the tickets, there’s no more flight, no more hotel. Seville? It’s two weeks before Christmas, you know we won’t find any rooms at this date. In Egypt, the pharaohs of Egypt and the mummies, there are no rooms at this date.
(My old reflexes set in again on this page, I’m not working well, in fact, I don’t feel well, as I’m writing I want to cry and that’s not normal. I’d promised Léonore we’d go see Kirikou and the Sorceress today, Sunday, at eleven. Marie-Christine came and rang the doorbell in the night, I’d just fallen asleep, to tell me she wanted to stay together. I said no. Maybe I’ll add the intermediate phases later. After Kirikou. I told her no. I repeated it. She asked her question again several times. I said “you woke me up” in any case the answer is no. It’s not a question of whether I want to or not, it’s that I don’t want to. She left at a run, she ran away, her dog running behind her, not even on a leash. She’d tried to choke me before. She got down on all fours above me, I was lying down, I was in bed in my nightshirt. She was fully dressed, in the outfit she wore to that dinner and her leather jacket. She straddled me, she took my throat, my neck, in her hands and pushed with all the strength in her arms. I grabbed her wrists to make her stop, she could have killed me. She sat on the ground next to the bed and started squeezing my arm very tight and shaking it. I let my arm go limp, completely, I let it go. I was exhausted. Of course I still am. She slammed the door and stumbled down the stairs, running down the street to disappear from my sight as quickly as possible, I was at the window, I was calling to her, I think I’d have liked her to come back, complete nonsense, ridiculous, overdone, disproportionate, again I took the usual dose before going to bed. This morning my tongue is swollen, doughy, I’m thirsty, nothing matters anymore.)
The cinema with Léonore, Sunday morning, 6 December
We’re on time, but the line extends to the wall across the way, people are wondering if they’ll get a seat, there are children, adults. Everyone is standing on line. I go to the end of the line with Léonore, it’s not a straight line, it’s hard to tell who’s in front and who’s behind, it’s not obvious. Unless you’d gotten there first and watched the order in which everyone arrived. I take my place in line and move forward as the line advances. Some guy, thirty, tall, brown-haired, with a mixed-race wife and a young child, says to me, very confidently, “so you want to cut in front of me, is that it? You know perfectly well I’m ahead of you.” No, I’m moving forward, that’s all, I’m not trying to take his place, not at all. I’ve got other things on my mind. The line moves forward again, again he gives me a sidelong glance, bending down because he’s very tall, and a lot heftier than I am, “you’re in a hurry, what’s your problem?” I’m already upset enough by the night I just spent, but I finally say to him “if you don’t like the way I walk, that’s too bad, I’m sorry.” Again he accuses me of trying to cut in front of him, he was first. At that point, I grab him. The whole street can hear, I yell, I grab his arm by the sleeve of his anorak. I push him in front of me, shoving him so he’s well in front, completely and fully in front. “You’re ridiculous,” he tells me. The crowd is silent, people look away when I meet their eyes, their mouths are busy with other things, their eyes too. I tell Léonore that the guy was bugging me, I hope it didn’t bother her. She said no.
(The film was good.)
When I got home, there was a long message.
“I don’t know if you’re there or if you’re screening your calls. I’d like to see you today, so we can give each other something before we break off completely or get back together. I don’t want us to forget, but to forgive. What we had together was beautiful.” She wasn’t home, I called her cell phone, she was on the tennis court. She was happy when she heard it ring.
That’s fine, but everything that happened before this is not going to just disappear. The trigger on November 25th can’t be overcome. I was talking about causes, profound causes. To go into that, stir it all up? What good would that do? Will it make the book more interesting? No. It won’t make the book more interesting. And most of all, it’s not very polite. It’s not essential, essential, I’m perverse, just consider the way I engage in mental torture. To the point where some people, made crazy by things I’d said to them, these people around me, close to me, were driven to beat me, to insult me, sometimes very harshly (bitch, disgusting, perverse, whore, that all happened), to strangle me (two times, once in Bordeaux, and once right here in Montpellier), to shake me, to beat me, insult me. But always, pushed to the limit, I trust them when they say, at their limit, that they know me, they know me well, they’ve seen me, they’ve heard me, pushed to their limit by a mechanism inside me, a verbal mechanism, extremely effective, extremely destructive, extremely sly, above all extremely sadistic, at all times evoking elements from reality, fitting, wounding, in a kind of ferocious machinery that no one can stop, certainly not me. Except death one day. Or another trigger, in the other direction. But it would all come down to the same thing. My motto could have been ‘everything can always be twisted around’ and ‘everything can always be mashed together’ so it’s logical. I went to see my homeopathic doctor yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d last seen her, she gave me mercurius, mercury, quicksilver, quoting the corresponding phrase: “wanting to break social conventions or to see them only as the instrument of human relations, he ended up breaking human bonds themselves,” it’s logical. I need logic. I’m getting there, others understand that I say what I think. In Sujet Angot, there’s a passage in which Claude says as a compliment: “your writing is so unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical. Your readers don’t understand a thing and they understand everything. It’s intimate, personal, s
hameless, autobiographical, and universal. You are touching without using gimmicks, without being emotional, you make people think with bits and bobs, a miracle of logical disorganization. Freedom without chaos, openness without drift.” That’s very kind, but he doesn’t get it. It wasn’t freedom without chaos anymore, but the opposite, nor was it openness without drift, but the opposite. I couldn’t take it anymore. With my muddled bits and bobs. I have a critical apparatus, there, a rather solid one. Roudinesco’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, I’m happy with it. At my level. As they say, by the way, people who say “at my level” put themselves down, I don’t claim to be a specialist either, I’ve got my limitations, I’m a failure, I try to be logical, simple, and to make myself understood by most people. If everyone did the same, we wouldn’t have all this shit. A lot of writers think they’re hot shit, that’s not very polite.
Valda candy
What is a substratum? It comes from substernere, underlay. That which serves as a foundation for another existence, without which a reality (conceived of as accidental) could not subsist. Without which the trigger would not have had all these consequences. It’s the substance, the essence, the base. On which an action is carried out. Queneau, “a solid substratum for the development of the actions which he might conceive,” Renan, “the earth provides the substratum, the field of battle and of work, but man provides the soul.” The earth, that element upon which lies a geological layer. Linguistically, the Gallic substratum in France. The substratum. What are the zones? What is the terrain? Upon what does it grow?
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