To formulate it in terms akin to yours, in the dynamic of that third phase of the female fantasy resulting from the incest prohibition (“It’s not me, it’s him who’s being beaten”), guilt comes accompanied by a longing for redemption. There is no other way of meriting recognition and grace from the Other, that is, of rising above the unmistakably anal score-settling with those around me, than by overinvesting the psychic representations that are language and thought. My thought and my word are redemption; my writing and my creations likewise.
Unlike boys, who are bound to engage in interminable bouts of physical and erotic contests with the father and his doubles, merciless duels that will dominate and absorb all their most elaborate intellectual activities, girls exhibit (over and above their individual genetic dispositions and favorable or unfavorable developmental contexts), through their academic and intellectual prowess, commonly greater than boys’, a precocious overinvestment in the activity of thinking. Thinking may thus take on a “redemptive” value for little girls, in the sense of endowing them with a symbolic, phallic power that is the fantasy equivalent of the Other’s power. Some boys also take this more delicate, spiritual, intellectual road; they include artists and intellectuals, of course, and men of God, it goes without saying. This is how they sublimate their “psychic bisexuality” (according to Freud, again). In the end, at the top of this road to sublimation, to which sex do we belong? An inept question, since, properly speaking, once we reach the heights where Flesh and Word merge into one, each person belongs to the unique sex that she or he constitutes at her or his own peril. There’s a certain happiness in it.
Let us recapitulate. The terminal fantasy of “A child is being beaten” erases, from the girl’s conscious mind, the representation of the masochistic scene (“He is beating me”) and replaces it with a twofold movement: On the one hand, the sadistic version of the fantasy “He is beating him”; on the other, its accompaniment by a heightened level of imaginative and cognitive activity, alongside a critical moral conscience identified with the parental superego. The female superego roots itself in this movement, as does a critical vigilance liable to go to delirious extremes of self-scrutiny. It’s understandable, then, that the conflicts between this strongly invested symbolic construction and an equally consistent sensibility may cause the symptoms manifested by such conflictive, divided personalities labeled “hysterical.” They are particularly common among women, although they are also found among men who have followed a similar path. In the right family and historical circumstances, the same tensions may stimulate and develop women’s symbolic creativity. This occurs against the background of a domesticated masochism that can only in that way be tempered.
Let us pause for a moment on this strong identification, defensive and creative at once, that girls have with the paternal superego merged with the phallic function, at the expense of female identifications. It leads to a repression of the mother seen as castrated or infirm, prompts imitations of virile attributes, and propels the subject into a glorification of spirituality alone—so as to reunite the little girl, and the woman she will become, with the symbolic Father.
In line with this logic, masochism is preserved and cultivated while undergoing a final inversion, this time under the pressure of the superego, into hyperactive talking and thinking and other busy activities (in accordance with individual capability), an exhausting program that requires a…sadistic dominion over others. We are back with the sadistic voyeurism that characterized phase 1 of the little girl’s fantasy, and she makes the most of it: “I excel in my representational and symbolization activities, they also comfort me, and by thus drawing near to the agent of the Law, I seal a pact with the symbolic Father. I also take my revenge on the boy who has the penis, when he is beaten in place of me: I am the Phallus.”
However, as far as the girl’s unconscious is concerned, the beaten boy is just the mask of herself, which causes her sadistic jouissance, underpinned by a virile identification with the Father, the agent of the Law who dispenses punishment, to rely on a masochistic jouissance that is even more deeply buried in the unconscious (“I know it’s my own incestuous desires—for Daddy and Mommy both—that are being punished. But what advantages come with it!”). Ah, the impressive contortions and interminable polyphonies of the hysteric’s progress! Few can come up with an answer to the question, “What do women want?”
Boys for their part are not impervious to this sadomasochistic economy (John of the Cross and the monks at Pastrana attained heights of masochistic euphoria that made even Teresa feel queasy). Except that the boy’s whipping fantasy is always experienced as passive: “I am loved by the father” (subtext: like a passive woman). Thus male masochism, culminating in the scenario of his flagellation by a whip-wielding woman, in reality protects the subject from the father’s sadistic desire, something that must at all costs be kept at bay, for this paternal desire persists at once as unconscious homosexual attraction and as the ultimate danger. So, although the masochistic fantasy of being beaten by a woman by no means prevents a man from occupying a feminine position in the sense of a passive role, this fantasy nonetheless affords him a double boon. In the first place “it” isn’t happening between two men, for I’m getting pleasure from a woman; I might be playing a passive, female role, but my choice of object is heterosexual; furthermore, the child-beaten-by-his-mother who I have become is not even a passive female, since the man suffering from his mother, that is, I myself, mirrors the suffering I always divined in my own father—a humiliated man, always weighed down by the power of maternal hysteria. By being punished myself, I become one with my debased father: we are united at last in a kind of wedding beneath the whip. However you look at it, my masochism as a man beaten by a woman is the one thing that makes a man of me, an abused man, no doubt, but one who exists, by reason of his injury and his castration, just as I exist exclusively through my experience of pain. This man is my mother’s man, of course, the one I always desired with a cowed and fearful longing, but whose sadism I need no longer dread, since I have taken his place and erased him from the scene with Venus and her whip.
Such are, on the female side and on the male, the agonies and ecstasies of sexual identity. Does each sex suffer and die apart?
And what of the Passion, in this strange perspective? What if Jesus were not only a Son, but also a consubstantial representative of God the Father? A Father who is tortured to death?
We know that for the Freud of Totem and Taboo, the murder of the father was a foundational act, a historically real event in the course of human civilization. In the same way Jesus Christ is, for Christians, a historical character, and the faithful commemorate a murder that really happened. I’d rather keep a distance from these issues: leaving aside the question of whether the events actually took place, I shall confine myself to assessing the psychic reality they generate among subjects who literally believe in their fantasies and representations. In addition, while the Christ of the Gospels is a Son, I am interested in the logic that would have God the Father likewise put to death in the Passion (Saint Paul touched on this long before Hegel and Nietzsche). Given the inextricable knot of the Trinity, it would be hard to delink the suffering unto death of the Son from that of the Father, which is consubstantial with it.
To recap, what would happen if Jesus were not only a beaten child or brother, but a beaten father—beaten to death?
For the little girl, this situation implies that the one she loves—the object of her mother’s desire and the phallic function upholding her access to representation, language, and thought—is equally as victimized as the boy of her sadistic fantasy: “It’s not me being beaten, it’s a boy. Now here’s a father being beaten. This father must then be a sort of boy, or brother-figure.”
Mixing the son with the father, this scenario has the advantage of simultaneously alleviating the incestuous guilt that imbues the desire for the sovereign Father, the Other, and encouraging the girl’s virile identification with
the abused man. A glorious and gratifying identification, to be sure, but under cover of the masochism this twofold movement promotes, not to say incites: “This beaten father and/or brother is my double, my likeness, my alter ego—me, equipped with a male organ.”
The way is thus cleared, in the unconscious, for the Father as agent of the Law and the Forbidden to merge with the subject of the guilty passion, that is, myself, the cherished daughter of that same father. The superman Father becomes humanized and, more importantly, feminized by the suffering he undergoes; as a result he is at once my ideal and my double. A cozy “us” is constituted by and in the passion of the Father, whose love, guilt, and punishment we both share. As far as my unconscious is concerned, not only is the Father the agent of prohibition and punishment, he is also, manifestly, the object of the interdiction itself and suffers from that prohibition and punishment just as…I do! Hence my idealization of him, in which the ideal of the ego and the superego are mingled, and which, by superseding my experience of myself as junior, ignored, and excluded from the primal scene, staunches that exclusion. This returns me to the first stage of my oedipal fantasy: “I love him and he loves me.” But in the light of our osmosis in the father’s passion, this love is formulated differently: “We are both of us in love and guilty; we deserve to be beaten to death together, to be reunited in death.”
For the unconscious, this father–daughter reunion suspends the incest prohibition in and through the suffering of the two protagonists, jointly in love and punished. Their pain will necessarily be felt as a wedding. A suffering sexualized under the “whip of faith,” in the ordeal of the father beaten to death, is seen and felt as a “merciless love” (to paraphrase Baudelaire).10 The only way out of this masochistic paradise lies in sublimation.
By placing the fantasy of the father beaten to death at the summit of the evangelical narrative, so that it calls out for our identification, Christianity does more than reinforce the interdictions: paradoxically, it displaces them and paves the way for them to be worked through or sublimated.
On the one hand, neurotics of either sex continue to be inhibited and/or stimulated by the threats of judgment, condemnation, and expiation that mutilate desire. Nevertheless, by being beaten, like the son-father, the subject can liberate his or her unconscious desires from culpable suffering, moving on to a suffering that could be qualified as sovereign or divine. Once past the guilt linked to transgression, the issue will be one of passion as the sole highway to union with the ideal Father. This new type of suffering, Christlike or Christian, is not the reverse of the Law so much as a suspension of Law and guilt in favor of the jouissance in a suffering that is idealized, precisely—the jouissance of calling, pining, crucially failing to satisfy the desire for the Son-Father; the pangs of pain-delight in the ambivalence of perversion, père-version. God’s Calvary unto death does not normalize suffering, nor does it authorize incest. However, by virtue of its glory and thanks to our desire for and with the father, this shared agony, this com-passion hover on the verge of admitting, and justifying, both the sin of incest and the pain that punishes it.
This goes beyond pleasure. We speak here of jouissance, in as much as pleasure taken with the Son-Father is a pleasure unto death. John of the Cross expressed this better than anyone: “Where have You hidden, / Beloved, and left me moaning? / You fled like the stag / And after wounding me; / I went out calling You, and You were gone” (“The Spiritual Canticle”). “And spread his shining arms,…/ And hung by them, and died, / His heart an open wound with love” (“Song of Christ and the Soul”).11
The worship of the beaten Father entails a fundamental consequence: along with, and beyond, my surreptitiously avowed incestuous link with the Father, it is symbolic activity itself that the Father’s passion invites me to eroticize, to develop, to magnify, to love. How does this occur?
Reinforced by the incest taboo and the punishments the father metes out in order to maintain it, repression creates the neurotic and his or her representational capacity. We have just seen how the fantasy of the beaten Father establishes another structure inside me, the underside of the neurotic apparatus: his Passion, as physical suffering infused with value, incites me to resexualize and load with affectivity my own movement of idealization of the father. But this masochistic variant of père-version affords me little more than partial, largely unsatisfying pleasures, and the resulting frustration unleashes a cascade of somatic or functional disorders.
As it is by means of thought and language that I connect with the Other, the activity of representing my (however frustrated) desires is clearly favored by the Father-as-Passion, the figure poised to replace the Father-as-Law. The resexualization of the ideal Father into the man of the Passion fosters an unprecedented resexualization of representation itself—of all fantasy- and language-producing activity. First, in a way that induces compassion, the abused Father’s Passion invites me to realize my sadomasochistic drives in physical reality, by way of extravagant rituals; this is what is usually encouraged in self-mortification and atonement. In parallel, the religious and especially the mystical experience tend to deflect my sadomasochistic impulses, beyond the reality of pain unto death, into the realm of representation where language alone is fit to appropriate it. This is because it is through thought, imagination, and language—far more than through the fantasized communion—that I create around the subject of the “Father beaten to death” and become his chosen one, the Other’s elect.
Acts of representation-speech-thought, activities attributed to the father in patrilineal societies and that link me to him, become—in the Christic system—the foremost domain of a jouissance that embraces and transcends sadomasochism; this activity ultimately emerges as the “kingdom” where suffering, thus metabolized, can be expressed and appeased.
Following Freud, this displacement of pleasure from the body and sexual organs into representation has been termed sublimation. Perversion and sublimation impose themselves as the two faces, underside and upper side, of this relaxation or indeed fabulous suspension of the incest taboo, brought about by the Son-Father being beaten instead of me.
No other religion, including Greek polytheism, has proved as effectively auspicious for the experience of sublimation as the religion of the Son-Father beaten to death. By way of this fantasy, Christianity maintains, on the one hand, the inaccessible ideal (Jesus is a God, which makes Him a forbidden Father who forbids me to approach or to touch Him). On the other hand, and without avoiding the contradiction, Jesus is a son, a brother, a man who redeems our guilty desires by submitting to the lash as though he were a party to our transgressions and sins. On the one side, legalistic coldness and apathy; on the other, fervent jouissance filtered through the passion of pain. The alternation of the two can play out within an individual (feeding into autoerotic sadomasochism) or between a subject and his or her erotic object (boosting the sadist–masochist oscillation enjoyed by partners in perversion).
Not a father who begets, in the manner of the biblical patriarchs, Jesus as the Man of pain and the abused Son-and-Father sets in motion a spiraling cycle of repetitions that displace carnal passions into mental rewards. Coming after the figure of Baby Jesus and the sacralization of birth as an eternal starting over, the figure of Jesus as the beaten Father shows that the repetition of pain is the supreme act of atonement. By beaming back to me from the heights of his Fatherhood the mirror image of my own nonshareable pain, Jesus reinstates the symbolic or spiritual element of human suffering, and ennobles it by so doing. He reveals and reinforces the psychic participation that is intrinsic to the pain of beings with the power of speech. That is his lesson for those who would tend to overlook it, and that’s why Christianity acted for two thousand years as a laboratory for modern psychology and even psychoanalysis. But at the same time, as we know too well, it is susceptible to the idealism of indiscriminate pyschologization. Isn’t there an ersatz kind of Christianity lurking in the “heart of hearts” of globalized TV spect
ators, for whom nothing is “universal,” bar the universality of amorous or spiritual pain?
Whatever the truth of past excesses and their contemporary exemplars, my aim is to salvage the kernel of intrapsychic truth they contain, which with Teresa’s help can be summed up as follows: the myth of the murdered Son-Father tells us that the prohibition of incest is not simply about the deprivation of pleasure; it invites sexual excitement to perform a jump on the spot in order that, while remaining contained in me, it travels through my sensorial and genital apparatus to become fixed in psychic representations and acts—ideality, symbolism, thought.
Shockingly, but not without veracity or profit, Jesus as the beaten Father is the figure of language experienced as a representation that encompasses bodily pleasure and pain, travels through them, and wrenches itself away to reach the ideal. This language in its Christian version—though who has ever lived that version in all its transubstantial complexity, apart from Teresa and the great artists?—is not a pure abstraction, but rather an exaltation that heals suffering by means of a jouissance that is forever open and forever wanting. The speaking being’s life is a continual starting over, over and over again, in a series of communions with the Man put to death: “Sown in destructibility, indestructible we rise.”
Catholicism was more propitious than other religions in this respect, because it simultaneously maintained and transgressed sexual or carnal prohibitions and inscribed this happy culpability into signs. It ostentatiously highlighted that bis repetita, the desire of the speaking being, as a desire that infringes the Law insofar as the Law is prohibition (resulting in the feeling of suffering) and also as a desire to be recognized by the Law insofar as the latter is a symbolic code (resulting in the blooming of the self in jouissance outside the self). Pierre Klossowski invokes that very point when he writes that the reiteration of the carnal act in language not only provides an account of transgression, it is itself “a transgression of language by language.”12
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