I hear your question: In this theater of sadomasochism, does not Jesus as the beaten Father set free the death drive at the very moment he seems to “reconcile” it, to distill it into a Beyond? Absolutely, and we are all too familiar with the way Christianity has presented itself at certain points in its history as a justification of vengeance and a summons to the Crusades, to the Inquisition, or to sanguinary pogroms.
However, whereas some religions positively aggravate the same fundamentalist deviations, the Christic knot (particularly in Catholicism) of desire, suffering, and sublimation also gave rise to the perlaboration and analysis of these fatal excesses, thanks to the tremendous development of theology, writing, and art. Great artists like Mozart or Picasso responded to the intensities of this dialectic in a sustained fever of creation. Thus “set free,” the death drive was also set on a path toward its own deliverance, relieved of a certain…becalmedness.
Another crucial moment in the fantasy of “a father being beaten to death” does not stop at releasing the death drive as sadomasochistic aggression, properly speaking, but hoists it to a paroxysm of jouissance. The death drive in its radical, Freudian sense is pushed to the point of dissolution of bonds and uncoupling from the plane of the living. This is exactly what transpires in the story of the Passion.
For when Eros and Thanatos are released to “freewheel” down the Way of the Cross, the identity between body and soul comes apart in the transition from suffering to Nothingness. Here we confront the supreme difficulty always implicitly hanging over the figure of Christ, but coming tragically to the fore at Easter: Christ is not only a Son abandoned by his Father (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”)13 but also, yes, a Father (remember what he told Thomas and Philip) beaten to death (Saint Paul’s “Christ died”) before rising again.14
Let us pause over this death of the Father, a concept only very cautiously explored by Catholic scholars; it seems to appeal more to Protestant and Orthodox Christians.
The Father’s “descent into the bowels of the earth” is denoted in Greek by the noun kenosis, meaning “nonbeing,” “nothingness,” “emptying,” “nullity,” but also “senseless,” “deceptive” (the adjective kenos can mean “void,” “of no account,” “futile,” and the verb kenoun “to purge,” “to sever,” “to obliterate”). Calvary confronts us with the complete suspension of the paternal function and the elimination of the representational and symbolization capacities that this function, in psychoanalytic theory, assures. In theological terms, it is purely and simply the death of God. In philosophical terms, with reference to the death drive as the “carrier wave” of all other drives, we can declare with Gilles Deleuze that only “Thanatos is,” in the sense that only Nothingness is.15
God himself is “pending” or en souffrance in Christ’s suffering, and this outrage, which theological scholarship has trouble facing up to, prefigures a later, modern time when the “death of God” seemed to be a fact. “God has died, God Himself is dead,” writes Hegel: a prodigious, “frightful” representation, confronting representation with the deepest of cleavages or ruptures.16
But no sooner mooted, the death of the Father and/or the symbolic realm is negated: Christ resurrects! What astonishing therapeutic power resides in this bracketing of recognized, longed-for death with the negation of death! What a prodigious restoration of the capacity for thinking and desiring is effected in this dread exploration of suffering to the point of loss of the mind, to the point of death! It is because the Father and the Holy Spirit are themselves mortal, abolished by the intervention of the Man of pain, whose thought endures all through his suffering unto death, that they can be reborn. Thought can begin again—a different thought! Thought as resurrection? Might that be the ultimate form of the freedom proclaimed by Christian suffering? Nietzsche was not blind to the fact that this letting go into kenosis lent to the human and divine death on the Cross “the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of resentment.”17
One can understand the potent effects of this fantasy on the unconscious. This breaking, even for an instant, of the link that couples Christ to his Father and to life, this caesura, this hiatus does not offer an image so much as a narrative to the psychic cataclysms that endanger the putative equilibrium of the individual, and in so doing it thinks and heals them.* [*The author makes a play on the homophony of penser, “to think,” and panser, “to bandage or heal”: “et, de ce fait, les panse.”—Trans.]
We are each the result of a prolonged “work of the negative”: birth, weaning, separations, frustrations, bereavements. By staging this rupture at the heart of the absolute subject that is Christ, by presenting it in the guise of a Passion, the inseparable reverse of the Resurrection, Christianity brings back into consciousness the dramas inherent in our becoming, thus endowing itself with an immense, unconscious cathartic power. Only the gradual progress of science, the human sciences in particular, plus the psychoanalytical leap, would help us move toward the psychosexual interpretation of these variants of suffering. At the time that concerns us, we had hardly embarked upon that long road.
What if it were only through kenosis that the divine was able to recuperate the most beautiful consciousness of its new beginning? I say “the most beautiful” because, next to the suffering of com-passion, the sovereign suffering of kenosis is paradoxically a process of “dis-passion”: I contend that it de-eroticizes the agony that voyeurs feel along with the God-man when they contemplate the Calvary. More than this, the absolute necessity hardwired into the human spirit to aspire to the Other, to desire the divine, to hunger for meaning, is abruptly revealed—in kenosis—to be empty, futile, of no account, and senseless.
Extreme passion, extremes of delinking. Due to the conjoined presence of the Absolute-and-Nothingness of desire, Christianity touches the limits of the religious. With kenosis we move from religion into the terrain of the sacred, understood as the trespass of thought into the unthinkable: the space of Nothingness, futility, vanity, and meaninglessness.18 Medieval mysticism ventured into that space with Meister Eckhart: “I pray God to make me free of God.”19 But it may be John of the Cross who best encapsulated that presence of the impossible in the tension of desire and thought—the Nothingness that gives voice to the hopeless chase (“I went out calling You, and You were gone”) characteristic of the need to believe.
Teresa, more attuned to resurrection, finds bliss in the reconciliation in which the Son-Father’s death is resolved. Spinoza’s formulation may help modern man to interpret this ultimate mystery: “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love,” he writes in the Ethics, in terms that recast what is, for the believer, absorption of suffering into the “new body” of the risen Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father, and into the resurrection.20 Because “infinite intellectual love” (God the Father) coexists with the existential pain (God the Son and the believer) which it elucidates, it is called God and is a joy.
Having emphasized, in a completely novel way, values of compassion and an implicit kenosis without ever divorcing them from “loving intelligence,” the genius of Christianity fashioned a formidable counterweight to pain, namely the sublimation or perlaboration of pain in mental and verbal activity. I, a being that suffers because I desire/think, because I am loving/loved, am capable of conceiving my passion as a representation that will be my resurrection. My spirit, in love with the Passion, recreates it in works of loving intelligence, such as thoughts and stories and pictures and music.
Christianity both admitted and denied the Father’s ritual killing. Such was the solution it managed to impose on the universal “murder of the Father” that is the bedrock of human civilization. From then on, Christianity—more especially Catholicism, after the revolution of the Counter-Reformation—appropriated the Greco-Roman body to itself. It took the body of antiquity rediscovered by the humanists and pushed it to the limit in the Passion of Man. Painting, music, and literature were to nurture the passions of men and women, an
nounced by mysticism prior to baroque art, and to radically overturn the subject of monotheism.21
The tension between desire and meaning—the definitive trait of speaking beings and the motor of the sadomasochistic logic of human experience—is doubly resolved, then. I renounce incest in order to gain access to the desiring and desirable father as a symbolic father, and to be associated with him if, and only if, I succeed in appropriating his symbolic and imaginative powers. And yet this new beginning (“In the beginning was the Word”) is painful. The child who speaks must renounce its desires and repair its guilt; the verbal child is a beaten child. If it can conjure it up in thought, the way of perfection stretches ahead.
Soothing that infantile, incestuous, speaking humanity—for speaking humanity is suffering humanity—with his suffering as a Father who became incarnate in the Son in order to be beaten to death, Jesus does not merely act as therapist. He overturns capital components of the human condition.
The eroticization of his ordeal makes manifest the torments of the desiring body within the family triangle: incest with both parents, and more specifically with the Father, is not just an unconscious desire, for it turns into a preconscious one. With girls, the father–daughter encounter, unconsciously courted and sublimated in passionate nuptials with Christ’s “sacred humanity,” goes to stimulate the cultural and social energy of the Christian woman. With boys, the fantasy of a homosexual encounter with the father, equally unconsciously courted, ends up favoring social attachments based on warrior and political fraternities, with the risk of drifting into multiple forms of deviance and permissiveness.
In this situation the heroics of antiquity, and in another way the phallic omnipotence of monotheistic man, are clearly untenable. There are no supermen, proclaims the martyred Son-Father of Christianity. The only sovereignty is symbolic, propped up on the quasi-avowed sadomasochism of our desires and only thus qualifying for limitless transcendence. The libertines of the Enlightenment or the Sadean explosion went on expanding this unprecedented breakthrough, whose insights fostered a new European renaissance via the baroque. The repercussions continued with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose moral code based on the law and its transgressions continues to hold sway today.
Given the fact of repression, there is no solution to père-version other than to re-verse it through sublimation. Given that no subject is not perverted (père-vers, toward the father) the subject can become a “glorious body” if, and only if, it confines itself to the remit of the ideal—but a resexualized ideal. Art, whether thinking as art or art as thinking, in many modulations still to come, will demonstrate the truth of this. But I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity will end up as aesthetics, on the contrary. Over and above works of religious art, it is sublimation—at the core of the body-mind, murder-idealization transference—that reenacts the drama of the Father-Son, the metamorphosis of the Word into flesh, the transfiguration of thought-through passion. Sublimation ensures the planetary impact of all this, its human universality.
Was Teresa’s the first attempt to articulate the strange status of a thought that is neither abstract understanding nor unbridled fancy? An imaginary a-thinking? That way of being is barely comprehensible to us now, and for that reason seems more enviable, trapped as we are by technologies that have turned us into alienated, profiteering robots. Meanwhile the “hard-core” perversions are being decriminalized and normalized across the secular world.
As for the death of the Father (the kenosis) that interrupts the sadomasochistic flow with the promise of resurrection, it does more than to de-eroticize incestuous passion. It throws wide open the daunting possibility of another psychic upheaval: the abolition of symbolic or paternal power itself, with all the attendant risks of mental, social, not to say biological disorders, some of which are already to be glimpsed amid the globalized desolation of the world. And yet the death of the Father is also pregnant with the great libertarian potential that comes with the end of religious constraints, but will be delivered only if we can invent fresh versions of the “loving intelligence” that was once called God, that Teresa so faithfully depicted, and to which the love known as transference is presently making its own modest and markedly unsettling contribution—invented by the still youthful discipline of psychoanalysis.
Chapter 27
A RUNAWAY GIRL
We women have no learning…within us lies something incomparably more precious than what we see outside ourselves. Let’s not imagine that we are hollow inside.
Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection
“That saint of yours is going to kill you, give it a rest! When you’re not scouring her writings like a Benedictine, or a damn lunatic I should say, you’re on her trail! On foot, by plane, on wheels and online, from castle to castle, from convent to monastery…So where are you now? Salamanca? Toledo? Burgos? Pastrana? Slow down, for Pete’s sake, do you hear? Don’t patronize me, either. You’ve turned into a complete workaholic!*” [*“Workaholic,” like “runaway girl” in the title and passim, appear in English in the original.—Trans.] I’m not kidding. Just my luck, me the pleasure artist, laid-back Taoist sage, lover of eternal peace and quiet…”
Andrew is irate, under cover of chivalrous airs as though I were a real woman who needed protecting by a real man. Can he think for one moment that I’d fall for his promises to help me with anything and everything? Poor darling, flying to the rescue of his workaholic (well, at least not alcoholic) damsel. He couldn’t even make me a cup of tea! And who is he to talk, when he’s always rushing between New York, Paris, and London? He’s been acting extra virile of late, when not affecting a touch of the aristos—that’s a new one! Lord Andrew detests the plebs, and there’s nothing plebbier than working one’s socks off like poor, benighted Sylvia. The fact is, he’s jealous. All my attention is on Teresa, I don’t make enough time for my American writer; he can tell my mind’s elsewhere and I’m not really listening. I haven’t got time to go to art shows with him, or to the opera to see the latest gimmicky production of Don Giovanni, no thanks, not even to see the first night of Halévy’s La Juive (now there’s an author awaiting his Proust).
“Are you crazy, it’s four hours long!”
“It never bothered you before,” Andrew says grumpily.
Before Teresa, he means. All we share now is the bed, that’s something, the most essential, surely. Or is it? I think he may be wondering about that, even though he’s an American writer. Oh well.
“‘Workaholic’ suits me,” I say, pretending to take his dig as a compliment.
“It’s what Louise Bourgeois used to call herself, like that, in English. She was a hard worker, addicted to it, you know.” I know: the more he contrasts me with other women, the more he loves me.
My New World aesthete has been in London, making a DVD on Louise Bourgeois, who is showing at Tate Modern.1 His admiration for this sculptor is recent; when first we met he couldn’t stand the Spiders, and the Teats didn’t turn him on at all. Now he’s putty in her hands! It seems incongruous to find Andrew Garnett, the brooding novelist who rocks like Philip Roth (minus the wealth and the glory, but what can you do?), producing a hi-tech survey of Bourgeois’ works in the Turbine Hall, but there’s no mistake. Having always claimed to despise gadgetry, he’s become an electronics wiz and knows all there is to know about Bourgeois.
“Getting on a bit, isn’t she?” An experimental sword thrust from me.
“But still just a runaway girl,” parries Andrew, with heated self-assurance.
He’s right. The young Louise dropped everything: the family workshop steeped in the odor of wool dyes, the Aubusson tapestries they repaired, the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi; the libertarian mother, a reader of Zola, Louise Michel, and Rosa Luxemburg. But most crucially she dropped the libertine father, living under the family roof with his mistress Sadie, who was supposed to be the children’s English governess. Adieu sweet France, gray skies, banks of the Seine: Louise ran away to marry an American hist
ory of art teacher—an Anglophone, obviously, like Sadie. She settled in New York under what she called its cutting, humorless sky (ciel coupant qui ne plaisante pas), and began frequenting artists with a knack for creating outlandish spaces. “Settled” is not the word, though, since the emigrant was constantly switching her aesthetic, borrowing and appropriating different styles right and left. So mutable was she that the clerics of modern art often wondered, and still do, whether this Frenchwoman possessed a style at all, whether she was “anybody” in her own right.
“Ah, they don’t understand a thing, they seldom do,” says Andrew, making a face. “Her style, it’s…well, it’s a runaway style, do you see? It’s not about breaking up space, but accumulating spaces.”
He’s repeating himself, but it’s interesting. After all, this approach to adventure is not altogether foreign to me.
“So leave Teresa alone, and come see Louise.”
Andrew slots the DVD into my computer without asking. He clicks away enthusiastically. I watch the film, but I’m thinking about Teresa. Not that I say so, why bother. He’s on a roll.
“Space doesn’t exist, you see!” My writer’s eyes are full of what he saw in London.
That austere and lively city intoxicates me, projects me inside of myself, erases me, all the opposite of New York’s crystal clearness, which gets me going. In London I feel available, like an empty page, I visit, listen, read; I am receptive. My friend Juan, the Golden Age man, introduces me to his youthful fans, who learn about the new maladies of the soul with expressions of mild disgust. I let them talk, I daydream, I can’t help it, it’s out of my control; Christopher Marlowe put it nicely, echoing Shakespeare, or was it the other way around? “It lies not in our power to love or hate, / For will in us is overruled by fate.”2 In New York I’m like myself, I get excited, fired up, purposeful; I make efforts. I should have gone to London with Andrew and saturated myself with the Egyptians at the British Museum and Louise B at the Tate, why didn’t I…Andrew’s voice breaks in:
Teresa, My Love Page 49
