Psychoanalysis and the

Unrepresentable

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about
translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academ-
ics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of
essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary
scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought
through completely.
Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult –
if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoa-
nalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen.
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching trauma,
Sense and gesture, Impossible poetics,Without words,Wounds and suture and Auto/
Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption,
the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael
Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are
difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about.
The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including
those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, aca-
demics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and
film studies, filmmakers and artists.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award winning documentary filmmaker and

theorist, best known for her film Married to the Eiffel Tower (2009). Her new work
in both practice and theory focuses on post-colonial relationships in Zimbabwe,
including an internationally acclaimed documentary film Lovers in Time or How
We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in
Documentary Film and the editor of Embodied Encounters: New approaches to psychoa-
nalysis and cinema, both published by Routledge. Her new monograph Black and
White: Cinema, politics and the arts in Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2016) combines prac-
tice research with theory. She is co-coordinator of the Psychoanalysis in Our Time
research network.

Ben Tyrer teaches Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Out
of the Past: Lacan and film noir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and has published widely
on psychoanalysis and cinema.

Piotrowska and Tyrer together run Psychoanalysis in Our Time, an international

research network funded by the Nordic Summer University.
This anthology sets out to “do the impossible” in interrogating the paradoxes
of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impres-
sive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice,
film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves
a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic ­thinkers
as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays
are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as
trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media,
the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption and anxiety.
A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, lan-
guage, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical
and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion
of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de
foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that
seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become
essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.
—Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis,
University of Roehampton, UK.

This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with

compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the
Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture.
It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist
around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at
times provocative, essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the
experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability
to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions
in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.
—Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis,
University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema (2014).
This page intentionally left blank
Psychoanalysis and
the Unrepresentable

From culture to the clinic

Edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Piotrowska, Agnieszka, editor. | Tyrer, Ben, editor.
Title: Psychoanalysis and the unrepresentable: from culture to the clinic /
edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008666| ISBN 9781138954977 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138954984 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315666655 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis.
Classification: LCC BF173 .P77527 2016 | DDC 150.19/5—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008666
ISBN: 978-1-138-95497-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-95498-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66665-5 (ebk)
Typeset in BemboStd
by codeMantra
Contents

Figures xi
Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction: Representing the unrepresentable 1

Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

Part I
Approaching trauma 5
1 The body locked by a lack of meaning 7
Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær
2 Trauma without a subject: On Malabou,
psychoanalysis and Amour 20
Ben Tyrer
3 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable
in clinical trauma 39
Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

Part II
Sense and gesture 51
4 (Un)Representing the real: Seeing sounds and hearing images 53
Thomas Elsaesser
viii Contents

5 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial

discourse – From Lessing to Marechera and Veit-Wild 74
Agnieszka Piotrowska
6 Pointing at the other 94
Goran Vranešević

Part III
Impossible poetics 109
7 Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? Some
remarks about Paul Celan 111
René Rasmussen
8 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 118
Pia Hylén
9 Duras and the art of the impossible 130
Carin Franzén

Part IV
Without words 141
10 Representation without language: Freud and the
problem of the image 143
Annie Hardy
11 Understanding without words 158
John Miller

Part V
Wounds and suture 169
12 Rethinking the primal wound, trauma and the fantasy of
completeness: Adopted women’s experiences of meeting their
biological fathers in adulthood 171
Elizabeth Joyce
13 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 185
Per Roar
14 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 203
Richard Rushton
 Contents ix

Part VI
Auto/Fiction 217
15 Unnameable 219
Anna Backman Rogers
16 Each day at a time – A daily intervention into loss 222
Myna Trustram
17 The scent of philosophy 231
Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen

Index 237
This page intentionally left blank
figures

2.1 Georges and Anne at breakfast in Amour (2012),

dir. Michael Haneke: Amour_michael_haneke©2012 Les
Films Du Losange – X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film25
2.2 Georges’ dream in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke:
Amour_michael_haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange –
X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film28
2.3 Georges in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke:
Amour_michael_haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange –
X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film31
2.4 Anne in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke:
Amour_michael_haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange –
X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film33
5.1 Ery Nzaramba and Sonja Wirhol from a shoot of Flora and
Dambudzo (2014) Dir/Prod A.Piotrowska. DoP. Joe Njagu 87
5.2 Shooting Flora and Dambudzo. Agnieszka Piotrowska
and Joe Njagu. ©Agnieszka Piotrowska 87
13.1 Audience watching. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica,
Sarajevo 2006 188
13.2 Circle. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica, Sarajevo 2006 191
13.3 Crawling. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica, Sarajevo 2006 196
16.1 Collection of flowers. Photographer: Mary Stark225
This page intentionally left blank
CONTRIBUTORS

Anna Backman Rogers, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at The Univer-
sity of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites
of Passage and The Crisis-Image (EUP, 2015) and the co-editor, with Laura Mulvey of
Feminisms (AUP, 2015). She is currently writing a book on the films of Sofia Cop-
pola entitled The Politics of Visual Pleasure for Berghahn.

Thomas Elsaesser, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Cul-
ture of the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor
at Yale University and since 2013 teaches part-time at Columbia University. For
more information and recent publications: www.thomas-elsaesser.com.

Carin Franzén, PhD, is Professor in Comparative Literature at Linköping Univer-

sity. She has published various articles and books on literature and psychoanalysis as
well as on medieval and early modern literature.

Marie Hagelskjær has a MSc in Psychology and is a PhD scholar at the Department
of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her main area of research is
infantile sexuality and prevention and assessment of child sexual abuse, where she
focuses on developing and testing assessment methods.

Annie Hardy is a PhD candidate at University College London where her research
interests focus on visual thought and philosophical issues in psychology and psy-
choanalysis. She came to the department after obtaining an MA in Philosophy from
the University of Edinburgh and an Msc in Theoretical Psychoanalysis from UCL.

Pia Hylén is a psychoanalyst and a psychologist and the current Vice President of
Antena do Campo Freudiano, Center of Psychoanalytic Study in Lisbon. She was
xiv Contributors

educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenha-

gen. She did her psychoanalysis at École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris and has
trained as a TFP therapist with Dr Kernberg at Cornell Medical Center. She has
written numerous psychological and psychoanalytical articles, lately in Drift (Journal
for Psychoanalysis) and Afreudite (Revista Lusófona de Psicanálise Pura e Aplicada). She
is an artist and a poet and has published Au bord du continent, a collection of poetry
illustrated with her aquarelles and croquis. Pia Hylén is a member of AMP, EFP,
NLS and CEP and has her private practice in Lisbon.

John Miller is a psychoanalyst who originally trained under people who worked
with C.G. Jung but has since come to work in the post-Kleinian tradition, as a result
of a long association with the late Donald Meltzer. He has a background in educa-
tion, where he worked for a number of years as an Educational Psychologist. He is
the author of The Triumphant Victim (Karnac, 2013) and Do You Read Me? (Karnac,
2015). He is in full-time practice in Oxford.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award winning documentary filmmaker and a

theorist, best known for her film Married to the Eiffel Tower (2009). Her new work
in both practice and theory focuses on post-colonial relationships in Zimbabwe,
including an internationally acclaimed documentary film Lovers in Time or How
We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics
in Documentary Film and the editor of Embodied Encounters: New approaches to
­psycho­analysis and cinema, both published by Routledge. Her new monograph
Black and White: Cinema, politics and the arts in Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2016) com-
bines practice research with theory. She is co-coordinator of the Psychoanalysis in
Our Time research network.

René Rasmussen, PhD, Associate Professor in Danish Literature at the Department

of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, and psychoanalyst.
Selected publications: (2000) Bjelke lige i øjet—om Henrik Bjelkes forfatterskab (Bjelke
Bull’s-eye—on the Authorship of Henrik Bjelke), (2004) Litteratur og repræsenta-
tion (Literature and Representation), (2004), Kognition—en liberalistisk ideologi
(­Cognition—A Liberalistic Ideology), (2007) Moderne litteraturteori 1–2 (Modern
Theory of Literature 1–2), (2009) Lacan, sprog og seksualitet (Lacan, Language and
Sexuality), (2010) Psykoanalyse—et videnskabsteoretisk perspektiv (Psychoanalysis—An
Epistemological Perspective), (2012) Angst hos Lacan og Kierkegaard og i kognitiv terapi
(Anxiety in Lacan and Kierkegaard and in Cognitive Therapy).

Per Roar, PhD, is an artist-researcher who combines choreography, social-political

concerns and research. In his doctoral project ‘Docudancing Griefscapes’ (2015) at
the University of the Arts Helsinki, he explored this contextually based approach
to choreography, while drawing on his mixed background from choreography
 Contributors xv

(BA, Oslo National Academy of the Arts), dance history/-ethnology (NTNU,

Trondheim), performance studies (MA, New York University) and social sciences
and history (Cand. mag., University of Oslo, Corvinius University in Budapest, and
Oxford University).

Richard Rushton, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University,

UK. He is the author of The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester
University Press, 2011), Cinema after Deleuze (Continuum, 2012), and The Politics of
Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory (Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2013).

Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu has worked for 15 years as a psychologist and a psycho-

analyst for the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, France. She trained in philosophy at the
Sorbonne and has published the monograph, A Philosophical Relationship:Therapeutic
Links between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (Stock Editions, 2012). She
is finishing a PhD on psychoanalysis and intergenerational transmission of trauma
at the Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Society Research Center, (EAD, 3522), Denis
Diderot’s University, Paris.

Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen has a BA in Social Pedagogics 1994, MA in Educa-

tion 2000 and two years full MA in Philosophy of Education, Aarhus University.
Presently her research is a philosophical investigation into how psychoanalysis can
function as an epistemic foundation for social pedagogics.

Myna Trustram, PhD, held curatorial and research posts in museums and galler-
ies for many years including the Manchester Art Gallery and the People’s History
Museum. She currently works as a research associate at Manchester School of Art
(Manchester Metropolitan University). Her work is about loss, melancholy and the
abundance to be found in museum collections and is influenced by trainings from
the Tavistock Institute, Tavistock Clinic and Group Analysis North. She writes aca-
demic prose but also works in other written forms that move around essay, memoir
and performance.

Ben Tyrer, PhD, teaches Film Studies at King’s College, London. He is the author
of the monograph, Out of the Past: Lacan and film noir (Palgrave M
­ acmillan, 2016), as
well as articles and chapters on psychoanalysis and cinema. He is co-coordinator of
the Psychoanalysis in Our Time research network.

Goran Vranešević is a research fellow at the Institute for Applied Research and
Development in Celje, Slovenia, Coordinator of the Seminar for Political The-
ory at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a member of the council
of Aufhebung-­International Hegelian Association. He has written articles on
xvi Contributors

psychoanalysis, aesthetics, political philosophy, speculative philosophy and contem-

porary cultural phenomena.

Katrine Zeuthen, PhD, MSc Psychology, is an Associate Professor in Child Psy-

chology at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark,
and a Candidate in the Danish Psychoanalytic Society. In her research she focuses
on infantile sexuality, child sexual abuse and sexual trauma.
Acknowledgements

This volume was inspired by the Nordic Summer University’s ­ Psychoanalysis

in Our Time Symposium in Copenhagen in March 2014 organised by Anna
­Ioannou, René Rasmussen and Agnieszka Piotrowska. We also have included some
contributions from the symposium in Tallinn in 2015 which we, the editors of this
volume organised, and which was an inspirational forum for all concerned. We
would like to thank Carsten Freiburg and Per Roar and the board of the NSU for
their on-going support of the work of the Psychoanalysis in Our Time research
group. We are grateful to our own institutions, the University of Bedfordshire and
King’s College London, for enabling us to carry out this work.
We would also like to express our sincerest gratitude to Michael Haneke for his
permission to use images from his 2012 film, Amour, in this work, and to Lise Zipci
and everyone at Les Films du Losange for their help in attaining this. We are also
grateful to Professor Flora Veit-Wild for the comments on Chapter 5 On ­Touching
and Speaking in (Post) (De) Colonial Discourse and the permission to use the
Dambudzo Marechera poem in it. Material from The Grass is Singing by Doris
­Lessing is included here by kind permission of HarperCollins.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Representing the unrepresentable
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

This book attempts to think through things that are impossible to be thought
through. It is therefore by definition a collage, a loop, a space of discussion and
reflection. It draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense, but it is also a
political gesture against the “fixed and the frozen” as Edward Said would have
it in his descriptions of patriarchal authority pronouncing on the difference of
the exotic Other. That fixedness he thought un-ethical. We too believe in that.
We believe that things that are hard to talk about one must talk about in order
to bring them to light. The volume therefore aims to do just that and nothing
much more.
As mentioned in the acknowledgements, this project began in Copenhagen at
the symposium in March 2014, but at least half of the contributors are people who
have joined us since. The notion that there is something difficult to express, to
“represent” in language is not new and usually takes us to trauma studies – which
of course one way or another do start with psychoanalysis. But this book also looks
at other “unrepresentables”, we write about love and loss, forbidden sexual desire,
colonialism, the fear of mortality, anxiety over spiritual emptiness and a desire to
connect these things in a way that would make meaning of the contemporary
world, which is so fragmented and violent. We write about film and literature,
­psychotherapy and poetry, counseling and reconciliations, and hopes and fears.
In part the writers in this book give testimonies of the way they see the world
in this difficult moment in time. We write attempting to give a voice to something
that we sense might be important.We speak even though we know we are doomed
to fail – as we know language does fail when we approach things to do with the
Body, the Real as Lacan would have it. And yet the process of trying is a defiant
move – a move against the fear and darkness of the world around us, in which
innocent people are killed by terrorists only for governments to decide to kill more
2 Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

innocent people as a way forward. We give testimony and try and make sense of
what we might know.
Some time ago and in a different context, namely that of hearing voices about
concentration camps and the Nazis, Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic collaborator
Dori Laub felt that under the right circumstances, the process of giving testimony
might have transformational qualities:

It is a dialogical process of exploration and reconciliation of two worlds – the

one that was brutally destroyed and the one that is – that are different and
will always remain so. The testimony is inherently a process of facing loss –
of going through the pain of the act of witnessing, and of the ending of the
act of witnessing – which entails yet another repetition of the experience of
separation and loss. It re-enacts the passage through difference in such a way,
however, that it allows perhaps a certain repossession of it.
(Laub 1993: 91)

In some way all chapters in this book deal with a process of facing loss: the loss is
of a certain comfort from living in a world in which what happens next is known.
We do not know what might happen next anymore. We speak from a position of
complete non-knowledge, which we still hope might be generative, and this is a
classically Lacanian or post-Lacanian position that we, the editors of this collection,
have adopted. As a result, in this volume all the contributors abandon familiar sites
and move to the new territories, where they might be curious visitors, strangers.
Dany Nobus, talking about young Jacques-Alain Miller and drawing from influ-
ences from Plato to Derrida, describes the stranger as somebody who might be the
harbinger of a new and generative way of thinking:

The stranger speaks from ignorance and thus forces his interlocutors to break
the silence that governs mutual understanding and to explain at length what
they think they know. Combining within his presence (…) physical proxi­
mity and social remoteness, geographical nearness and mental distance, the
person of alien origin occupies a privileged position, which gives him an
opportunity to cross boundaries and somehow be exonerated by reason of
ignorance, and which can make him privy to secrets that will never be revealed to
any regular inhabitant of the community.
(Nobus and Quinn 2005: 67, my emphasis)

Almost all of the writers here venture into quite new territories for us – it is a risk,
and we are taking it deliberately. In testimony, as Derrida teaches us (which I address
in my chapter) in attempting to represent the unrepresentable one continuously
bumps into secrets of a variety of kinds. How can we even begin to share these
secrets in an ethical way? How much of ourselves can we put into our scholarly
essays?
 Introduction 3

I wrote elsewhere (Piotrowska 2014) about a documentary encounter dealing

with testimony and the ethical violence it might incur. Because speaking about
delicate unrepresentable matters, about secrets, can be very problematic ethically,
too, in sharing a secret, which has to do with truth, fiction and betrayal, we enter
a difficult and dangerous territory in which theories and emotions meet, but the
breaking of that boundary is often too painful to bear. And yet the non-representing
is fatal too: not just to individuals but to societies. We try consciously to move into
the unconscious – knowing that it is not possible and again risky. Jacques Lacan
in his Seminar XI makes a point that “his” unconscious is different from that of
Freud’s, namely, he says, it “is situated at that point, where, between cause and that
which it affects, there is always something wrong” (1977: 23). It is a gap that causes
something to happen – neurosis that then becomes a “scar” (ibid.: 22), not of the
neurosis but of the unconscious: something Lacan says, of the order of “the non-
realized” (ibid.: 22, original emphasis). Lacan says that perhaps the analyst should
“be besieged” by the zone of shades rather than bringing them to light as spelling
things out can be dangerous (ibid.: 23). Lacan introduces the idea of the uncon-
scious being in “the domain of cause, the law of the signifier, in the locus of which
the gap is produced” (ibid.: 23). Here we have tried in a gesture of defiance even to
our Master, to abandon the world of the shadows, believing, also after Lacan and of
course Freud, that representing fundamentally might have curative effects, despite
the pain.

The organisation of this book

This book is organised with the aim of bringing together interdisciplinary
approaches to a particular aspect of the unrepresentable. It begins with the question
of trauma, that most fundamental challenge to representability: from the complexi-
ties of fantasy and seduction in cases of sexual abuse, to the trauma of brain injury
considered in filmic, scientific, philosophical and psychoanalytic contexts and the
role of history in both transmitting and providing a framework for understanding
personal traumas. The next section addresses what can be communicated through
the senses of touch and hearing and through gesture, in encounters with the cinema
screen (e.g. synaesthesia) and in post-colonial encounters where forbidden desire
and historical legacy mean that, for example, voice can become violence when rep-
resentation (“metaphorisation”) fails and through encounters that reveal the para-
doxes of pointing. The third part examines poetics and the ways in which literature
of various forms can evoke impossibilities at the heart of subjective experience,
while the next section considers what can be transmitted without words in terms
of the metapsychology of mental images and profound transferential relationships
in the clinic. The fifth section addresses wounds, sutures and recuperations in the
psychosocial analysis of adoption experience, as a question of embodying national
grief at a personal level, and in the socio-political realm via the cinema. The final
portion of this book turns to creative writing, poetry, and auto-ethnography, which
4 Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

provide for our authors some means of addressing their own unrepresentable and
thus bears witness to the power of that founding psychoanalytic principle of the
“talking cure”, of finding ways in which to put into words (or indeed images) those
things that haunt us, press upon us, prevent us from going on.
We hope this collection might be an intellectual and emotional adventure for
the reader and that it will invite further reflection on the position of language in
our dealings with the difficult and sometimes impossible intersections of experi-
ence, history and the unconscious.

References
Lacan, J. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
­Psychoanalysis. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
Laub, D. (1993) An Event without a Witness:Truth,Testimony and Survival. In S. Felman and
D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York:
Routledge.
Nobus, D. and Quinn, M. (2005) Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic
Epistemology. London: Routledge.
Piotrowska, A. (2014) Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film. London: Routledge.
Part I

Approaching trauma
This page intentionally left blank
1
The body locked by a lack
of meaning

Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

Why is Freud´s dilemma still relevant today?

The theme of this collection, “Representing the Unrepresentable”, could also be
the title of Freud’s longstanding examination, discussion, and theory development
of how sexuality and sexual trauma come – or don’t come – into expression. Freud’s
examination began with his original scientific ambition from his Studies on Hysteria
(Freud and Breuer 1955) of uncovering a causal relationship showing that child
sexual abuse expresses itself through bodily symptoms in a significant way that
can be attributed to a specific starting point, thus proving what really happened.
Present societal as well as academic discussions of what infantile sexuality is, how it
expresses itself, and how it can be understood and not least protected, seem to hold
on to Freud’s original ambition of finding a causal connection between an event
and its expression: its symptom or its representation (see Elkovitch et al. 2009).
We still seem to be looking for a direct link between the child’s expression
and reality, a correlation that can free us from analyzing and thus free ourselves
from participating personally in what we see, hear, feel. We want to uncover the
truth; however, the manual for this does not exist. Sexual abuse doesn’t express
itself through unambiguous symptoms and reliable signs. On the contrary, sexual
abuse challenges us and demands that we make use of some of our best abilities of
discernment and interpretation: of analysis. It is therefore essential to have a theo-
retical model describing how infantile sexuality develops within the relationship
between child and adult and what this means for the child’s development: both
when development is handled with care and when the child is subjected to sexual
abuse. Without a theoretical frame with which to understand the development of
sexuality, our ability to assess and make judgments remains in a private and diffuse
sphere, making reference to our own unconscious without us being aware of it (see
Zeuthen and Hagelskjær 2013).
8 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

In his article “Fear of Breakdown”,Winnicott writes: “that what is not yet expe-
rienced did nevertheless happen in the past” (Winnicott 1974: 105). Something has
occurred, but it has no place to be, because the child’s psyche is not yet a place that
is structured in such a way that it can make sense of trauma. The French psycho-
analysts Botella and Botella would add that what happened is a negativity. Trauma
is first and foremost an absence or the negative of what could and should have
happened:

A violent and abrupt absence of topographies and psychical dynamics, the

rupture of psychic coherence and the collapse of primary and secondary
processes as the ego loses its means. This brutal disorganization has its origin,
not in a perception but in the absence of meaning in the violent excess of
excitation and in the ego’s state of distress: in the ego’s incapacity to form a
representation of them, to present them to consciousness.
(Botella and Botella 2005: 116)

Freud’s hysterics and the abandonment of the

theory of seduction
Maybe because Freud himself was looking for a presence rather than an absence, he
remained in doubt as to the origin and nature of infantile sexuality. He introduced
his final seduction theory in 1896 (Freud 1962a, 1962b, 1962c), where he pro-
claimed that a sexual trauma could always be found as the basis for hysterical symp-
toms. Hysterics were suffering from memories of events that had been repressed,
the brutal content of which they continued to defend against. The women had not
been able to protect themselves against the sexual violations in childhood, while
they were still in the process of growing up; therefore, the trauma came to delayed
expression or nachträglich through the hysterical symptomatology.
However, Freud’s search to find a universal connection between repressed
events and symptoms didn’t go so easily. He concluded that because his patients
had registered the sexual experiences at the time they took place, even earli-
est childhood must contain sexual tension. In this way Freud began to allude
to what would later take shape in his theory of infantile sexuality (Freud and
Breuer 1955; Freud 1953). Freud’s journey back into his patients’ factual reali-
ties ended when he gave up the seduction theory and with it the belief that
particular symptoms were always an expression of sexual abuse in childhood.
Based on this finding, Freud concluded that it was not possible to determine
whether the patients’ memories had actually taken place in reality or they were
simply expressions of their fantasies. Freud wrote to his friend Fliess that: “there
are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish
between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect” (Freud 1966b: 260).
Thus he confirmed his discovery that the unconscious did not distinguish
 The body locked by a lack of meaning 9

between fantasy and reality, which made it difficult or even impossible to dis-
tinguish between truth and fiction when it came to remembered experiences
that had been invested with affect.
Following this discovery, his studies shifted from investigating how outer events
came to be expressed in the patient’s inner life to examining the significance of the
patient’s inner world in and of itself to psychic life. Freud began from this point
on to be interested in fantasy as an expression of the psychic. Fantasies were not
direct depictions of external reality; rather, they represented something internal. In
this way, psychic reality rose up out of the ashes of the seduction theory and was
also constructed using some of the same clinical findings made by Freud under the
production of that theory. The clinical findings took on a new meaning when they
were understood in the context of psychic reality, now referring to something dif-
ferent and more uncertain than historical reality.
These examinations led Freud to the theory of a sexuality coming from
within: an infantile sexuality not yet grounded in the body as a genital and goal-
directed sexuality. And thus Freud’s groundbreaking Three Essays on Sexuality
were born (Freud 1953). With his description of the psychosexual drives Freud
broke from and for that matter still breaks from a more conventional view of
sexuality, because he defined the sexual drive as both distinct from and also more
than genital sexuality and the sexual act as such. Freud integrated the theory of
psychosexual development into his metapsychology, in which he described the
lack of synchronicity in development by showing that the individual is only able
to understand the meaning of his own maturation retrospectively or nachträglich,
as biology and the formation of cultural meaning do not progress at the same
pace. The small child has fantasies about life’s big mysteries: birth, reproduction
and the difference between the sexes; but he or she does not grasp the meaning
of these fantasies until later in life when he or she has reached a level of biological
maturity sufficient for understanding what we might call the culture of biology
(see Zeuthen, Holm Pedersen, and Gammelgaard 2010). Contemporary theorists
have attempted to reinterpret Freud’s essays by reading the theory of infantile
sexuality as a theory about the breach that occurs between childhood and adult
life at puberty, when the meaning of sexuality begins to dawn on the child. One
of the most important of these theorists is the late French psychoanalyst Jean
Laplanche, who rewrites Freud’s seduction theory in his own theory of general-
ized seduction (Laplanche 1970, 1987).

What is infantile sexuality according to Laplanche?

With his theory of generalized seduction and the sexual (2011a) Laplanche makes
it clear that the sexual emerges through the manner in which the adult meets the
child’s pleasure, and it is a premise of development that the child is at the mercy of
the adult’s interpretation of the child’s needs. His theory can explain why we must
10 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

give up a fruitless hunt for unambiguous symptoms of child sexual abuse, and it
can sustain us in our view that it is not a question of whether a child has or has not
been seduced, but rather of how and on whose premises the seduction took place.
Laplanche insists that the relationship between adults and the child must form
the core of our understanding of the way in which infantile sexuality is poten-
tially traumatizing. In his introduction to the concept of the enigmatic message,
Laplanche takes up seduction as the foundation of child development in relation to
the adult (1997, 1999a). The adult approaches the child with a special kind of care
that is characteristic of that particular adult and which the child can sense.With the
care comes a message: the adult shares something with the child, the meaning of which
the child does not understand. The message is enigmatic. Nevertheless, the child
must trustfully allow himself to be drawn in or seduced by the adult’s care, because
it is the adult that will ensure the child’s survival. The child must let himself be
seduced by the adult and by the meanings of the adult world, because children are
dependent on adults and dependent on figuring out what is involved in relations
to the adults, in order to be included and eventually to participate in the world on
their own. Thus, for Laplanche seduction is a universal phenomenon based on the
asymmetrical relation between adult and child: it is a fundamental anthropological
situation created by the fact that the adult has a sexual unconscious and the child
does not.
In this way Laplanche rereads Freud’s seduction theory and his later abandon-
ment of that theory by adding that the child always gets seduced by a specific
adult and that the child registers the adult’s sexuality and tries to understand its
meaning (see Gammelgaard 2010). The adult meets the child’s search for pleasure,
consciously as well as unconsciously, in a special way connected with the specific
person that he or she is. The adult’s story and membership in a culture propels the
child in his or her development, and in this way the child propels him- or herself
from being passive and open to being actively able to close in on him or herself and
create his or her own sense of meaning of the sexual. When puberty arrives and
sexuality becomes genital and aim-directed, its place has already been taken:

What is acquired through the drives precedes what is innate and instinctual, in
such a way that, at the time it emerges, instinctual sexuality, which is adaptive,
finds the “seat already taken” as it were, by infantile drives, already and always
present in the unconscious.
(Laplanche 2001: 49)

“The seat is already taken,” Laplanche writes, because sexuality has already been made
sense of in the relationship between the child and the adult even before the child was
able to understand this. Laplanche thereby confirms the importance of how we with
our care allow the child to give pleasure content and meaning in a way that makes
room for the child to turn his sexuality out into the world in accordance with the
 The body locked by a lack of meaning 11

child’s development. It is therefore the adult’s job to allow some of the space to stand
open by remaining unable to provide an explanation as to the meaning of the enig-
matic sexuality, so that the child in time can discover it. The way that the child up to
this point has been cared for, and the way in which the sexual has at once been pre-
sent, inaccessible, and enigmatic between the child and the adult, create the founda-
tions for sexuality (see Laplanche 2011b). When we begin to fathom the meaning of
sexuality, its foundation has already been laid down within us by way of relationships
with caregivers: for better, but also sometimes for worse.

The pathological perverse seduction: child sexual abuse

Today, psychological assessments of children causing concern about sexual abuse
are mainly done through classical psychological test-instruments, examinations
of drawings, observations of doll-play, and checklists such as The Trauma Symp-
tom Checklist for Children (Briere 1996) and Child Sexual Behaviour Inventory
(­Friedrich 1997) that assess different kinds of behaviors such as hyper-sexualized
behavior, sexual play, etc. It is commonly acknowledged that there is no direct way
to gain univocal insight into the meaning of the child’s expressions, but still the
aim is to get as close to the truth as possible. Furthermore great sensitivity from the
psychologist is needed, as there is an ongoing preoccupation and societal expecta-
tion that the psychologist doesn’t induce certain ideas, fantasies, or memories in
the child by being suggestive. From our point of view many of the internationally
used assessment methods lack the central understanding that the child’s experiences
and expressions are always embedded in a specific family, with specific relations
and with unconscious conflicts tied to the adults that are taking care of the child.
To examine the child detached from a theoretical understanding of the infantile
sexual unconscious as something always developing in the relation between child
and adult seems simplified and idealistic, putting the field in the same paradoxical
situation as Freud experienced over a hundred years ago.
Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction expresses a continuum of seduction,
from the seductive and enigmatic yet humanizing communication that takes place
between every caregiver and infant to the pathological perverse situations where com-
munication is solely on the adult’s premises. Following this line of thought Laplanche
divides the adult unconscious into a repressed part – what is generally known as the
unconscious – and an enclaved part, an inner foreign body. The enclaved part of the
unconscious is an encapsulated place where no psychic elaboration and representa-
tion can take place. According to Laplanche (2011b) the message given from the adult
to the child through the sexual abuse stems from this enclaved part of the adult’s
unconscious, and it affects the child’s psyche in a specific way. Laplanche describes
sexual abuse as an intromission of messages that the child receives passively and cannot
translate. The enigmatic part of the message is out of reach for the child, because for
translation to take place the adult unconscious needs to be working at a level where
12 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

the child can take part in the relation. The violent process of intromission creates
a rupture in the child’s development, as the sexual abuse isn’t subjected to psychic
representations and gaps of something unrepresentable, something that hasn’t been
subjected to any psychic elaboration is placed as a foreign body in the child’s psyche.
The enclaved message from the adult becomes enclaved in the child as well. This
stands in contrast to the generalized seduction where the child can participate in a
meaning-giving process (Laplanche 1999b). How these enclaved messages affect the
development of infantile sexuality is of great interest to us and thus is a central part of
our theoretically driven clinical research.

Practicing Laplanche’s theory

Here we try to combine Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction, translation,
and the sexual with our clinical research on childhood trauma, thus encircling the
gaps of the unrepresentable: that which isn’t directly approachable and yet is so
present in clinical practice. In one of our current studies we make use of a psycho-
analytic and projective imagery called Play Room, developed by Katrine Zeuthen
and grounded in the psychoanalytical theory of Laplanche (Zeuthen 2013). From
Play Room we use a selection of eight illustrations that depict everyday situations
between children and adults always containing an element of conflict, emotion, and
interaction. The illustrations are thematically distributed within four dualities, these
being voluntariness/force, activity/passivity, fantasy/reality, and care/abuse. All four
dualities have the general underlying theme of pleasure/unpleasure. The conversa-
tion unfolding between the child and the psychologist is structured around four
gradually more complex questions about the illustrations. The psychologist struc-
turing the conversation by performing the trial with Play Room is well known to
the child, as a good relation between the child and psychologist is a fundamental
premise for the study.
The children included in the study are divided into two experimental groups:
one group is made up of children whose sexual abuse has been fully or partly
substantiated by a conviction or child protection services assess the sexual abuse
as highly probable; one group is made up of children in psychological treatment
due to parental neglect and maltreatment but there is no suspicion of sexual abuse.
Furthermore, a control group of non-abused, non-neglected children has been
established.

Preliminary results and how they can be interpreted

in light of the presented theory
This division into the two experimental groups is easily done in principal, but
in practice it is difficult or even impossible to accomplish. When doing research
within the field of child sexual abuse, the categories applied – such as our two
research groups – are seldom extensive enough to capture the complexities of the
 The body locked by a lack of meaning 13

phenomenon. Interestingly, this problem first materialized when we tried to adapt

to the quantitative empirical methodological standards that are expected and that
other research projects within our field apply as a matter of fact. When we dis-
covered how this taken-for-granted methodology became a limitation rather than
a scientific objective we allowed our phenomenon in question to speak more
clearly for itself. The field of child sexual abuse seems to lack a concept of the
unconscious that opposes observation based on clear distinctions between cat-
egories. We have met many borderline cases where the structure and relations
within a given family can be severely pathological, sexually speaking, but where
no factual sexual abuse seems to be taking place. These cases are often excluded
from other studies, as they do not possess the simplicity to fit in to clear catego-
ries, and in this way the severe and diffuse pathology of sexual trauma and thus
the nature of the subject are neglected:

I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was

trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me
myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like stories and
that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science, I must console
myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently respon-
sible for this, rather than any preference of my own.
(Freud and Breuer 1955: 160)

Freud’s statement maintains its importance and relevance in relation to a field such
as child sexual abuse. Rather than following the methodological requirements that
stem from a positivistic paradigm that more often than not restricts and edits the
nature of the subject, he acknowledged the importance of letting the subject speak
for itself, thus amending his methodology in accordance with its nature.
One case that insists on the importance of letting the subject speak for itself is the
case of Hanna. Hanna lives with her mother, who originates from a poor European
country. Hanna’s mother was abused by her father throughout childhood and into
adulthood and became pregnant by him. She fled her country and has no contact
with him today.The rest of her family turned its back on her when she told them that
the birth of Hanna was the result of the intergenerational abuse to which her father
had subjected her. Hanna is not aware that the man that she knows as her father is
also her grandfather. She has no regular contact with him but has tracked him down
and visited him a few times without her mother’s knowing. Hanna was referred for
psychological treatment at 10 years of age when it was discovered that she visited
her father and that she has a massive daily use of Internet pornography, an activity in
which she has included other children.The psychological assessment of Hanna shows
no indication that she has been subjected to factual sexual abuse. Hanna is an intel-
ligent, chatty girl with no other scholastic or social problems.
In the case of Hanna and cases similar to hers we find it meaningful to distin-
guish between sexual abuse and sexual trauma. In sexual abuse there is a genital
14 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

sexual acting out, a sexual counterpart of the unconscious and enclaved message
from the adult to the child. In sexual trauma the enigmatic enclaved message from
the adult to the child has no genital counterpart; it isn’t acted out genitally. Hanna
might not have been subjected to sexual abuse in the literal understanding of the
word, but Hanna is born as the outcome of a massive intergenerational sexual
trauma. She is included in the empirical project in the non-abused group, and so
far in our analysis she doesn’t exhibit the same deviant pattern as the children in
the sexual abuse group. But something that is most interesting to us is that Hanna
uses the whole Play Room trial for one thing and one thing only, namely to try to
figure out what the relations between the illustrated children and adults are: “Is it a
brother, a mother, a father? Sometimes you can tell by looking at the color of the
hair. Are they lovers?” she often asks the psychologist.
When seeing the picture of a woman kissing a child, Hanna says that only
once and only by coincidence, her mother kissed her on the mouth. “Should
mothers do that more often? Or is once too much?” she thinks aloud. In light
of the theory of Laplanche, one could say that Hanna has received an enigmatic
message from her mother about her complicated heritage, but she has never been
given any help to translate this. The general seduction has been saturated with
the unspoken encapsulated trauma of her mother, a mother who has been unable
to show her daughter natural signs of affection, like kissing. Hanna’s emerging
biological maturation and dawning ability to understand adult sexuality makes
her seek out genital pornographic seduction in order to figure out how tender-
ness, closeness, and romantic relations can be understood outside and inside the
family. She is looking for the genital counterpart of her sexual trauma in order
to give it meaning.
Other preliminary research results from our study indicate that children for
whom there are strong indications of factual sexual abuse have great difficulty in
trying to give meaning to the illustrations in Play Room. This comes to expres-
sion as an over-representation of rejections of the dialogue with the psychologist,
“I don’t know, I don’t want to answer”, or only superficial, vague, and dismissive
answers within the group. The sexual abuse expresses itself as an absence of crea-
tion of meaning or in the words of Botella and Botella as a negativity (see 2005).
It isn’t there or it has no place to be, and genital maturation has not yet set in in
the child’s development, withholding the child’s attempts to understand nachträglich
what happened.
In the current empirical study we also conduct structured observations of the
children’s verbal and non-verbal expressions during the Play Room trial. It seems
that there is a pattern, where both experimental groups display a wide range of
deviant expressions, like strong bodily restlessness, a small shivering voice, or speak-
ing in a manic way. When confronted with illustrations that seem to have the most
provocative content (i.e., bathing children and an adult man), the children within
the sexual abuse group have remarkably more deviant answers with little or no rela-
tion to the specific content of the illustration. The situations in which the children
 The body locked by a lack of meaning 15

in the sexual abuse group are most affected are often followed by the children’s
having an urgent need to eat something or drink the small juice box, calming
themselves with what seemed to be instant oral pleasure in order to minimize the
tension from the enclaved message coming from the outside but acting as a foreign
body from within.
It seems that these children convey an absence of ability to symbolize and to
­create psychic representations when it comes to meaningful translations of the
content of the illustrations (see Botella and Botella 2005; Brilleslijper-Kater 2004;
­Dalenberg 2000; Dalenberg, Hyland and Cuevas 2002; Dalenberg and Palesh 2010),
as if something is blocking the way of creating the appropriate meaning or at least
trying to do so in cooperation with their psychologist. We find that our psycho-
analytical approach can offer a new way of uncovering that which isn’t identifiable
through mere observation and registration of a child’s behavior and symptoms.
By encircling the absence of meaning or the negativity of sexual trauma we find
an alternative way of investigating and supporting the child’s capacities of creat-
ing meaning and psychic representation, thereby giving room for the relational
­development of the encapsulated unconscious parts of the child’s psyche in due
time and in balance with the child’s overall development.

How does infantile sexuality and sexual trauma express itself?

When working psychoanalytically with children with sexual trauma we examine
how their bodily expressions are connected to their inner as well as their outer
world. Our aim is to show how the body expresses that which cannot be rep-
resented, symbolized, and integrated in the psyche exactly because an original
experience as such can never be situated as coming either from inside the body
or from the outside (see Botella and Botella 2005; Scarfone 2001; Zeuthen and
­Gammelgaard 2010).
Sara was referred to us when she was six years old because, according to her
parents, she has been masturbating excessively since she was a baby, something
that worries them increasingly. Also, Sara finds it difficult to relate to her peers in a
flexible manner, either wanting to control the game or withdrawing from it when
negotiations of what to play and how become too challenging for her. Her parents
describe her as a very intelligent, creative, and curious girl always seeking knowl-
edge. They find her insatiable when searching for the right answers to her many
questions. Her father especially seems to identify with her insistence and what he
calls her desire to always learn more from him: he himself enjoying his ability to
satisfy her thirst for knowledge and continuing to do so.
Martin is 14 years old and started therapy three and a half years ago due to an
intensified and seemingly dangerous preoccupation with pornography and sexual
chat sites on the Internet, as well as excessive masturbation. He was referred to us
from his child psychiatrist where he received psychiatric treatment for ADHD, a
diagnosis he was given when he was six years old.
16 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

How can we come to understand a child’s fantasies? What is at stake motivating

the child’s expressions? Is it anxiety that cannot be processed in fantasy and sym-
bolized? These children cannot find the answer in themselves and thus they act in
realized ways.What are they driven by? A thing-like inaccessible entity? An absence
of meaning? The negative of the trauma being: “The potentiality of an excess of
energy tending to deploy itself in an unbound hallucinatory-perceptual movement,
a potential effect without content?” (Botella and Botella 2005: 116). The dynamics
in the children’s families could qualify some of the answers to what it is that goes
on in them. Sara’s father is restless and anxiety ridden: the way he can relate to his
daughter is by seeing himself in her, by identifying himself as a child in her image.
His answers to her questions are not formulated as new questions with which she
can examine her fantasies; rather, they are fixed and very detailed descriptions of an
adult world full of terrifying reality. His answers intrude her like phallic but non-
genital fulfillments of something she is missing and should—in time—be helped
to find on a child’s premises. His answers project into her an anxiety she tries to
control by answering his phallic and enigmatic message with what she herself under-
stands to be phallic—with her masturbation she tries to fill that lack of meaning her
father does not allow to stand open with something. Thus she tries in an autoerotic
way to prevent him from entering her with his meaning, with his understanding of
her: that is with his mirroring of himself. The mother stands outside the relation,
not being able to intervene, carefully trying not to reveal the father’s approach to
his daughter, it being insecure and inflexible, leaving no room for other translations
of meaning than his own.
Martin’s relation to his father is regressive. Every other weekend it is only the
two of them: playing FIFA on the PlayStation, watching football, eating pizza, and
sharing the same bed—catching up for the lost time when he was small and they
were out of contact, the father says, without acknowledging the lack of a repressive
barrier established by him and the lack of an awareness of a necessary asymmetry
embedded in a sleeping arrangement with separate beds and bedrooms. “We need
each other”, Martin says. In terms of his relation to his mother, she is always look-
ing after him, guarding him, and guiding him. She is very often in conflict with
and in opposition to his surrounding relations, using his ADHD diagnosis as an
exhaustive explanation for the aspects of life that are so difficult for Martin. The
mother is very involved in his sexuality but it is an autoerotic sexuality she sup-
ports, making arrangements for when he may or may not masturbate, changing his
sheets, and educating him to use a specific towel for the purpose, suggesting to buy
him porn-magazines—to control his desire, she says—to keep it safely at home. She
has encapsulated his sexuality by referring it to his diagnosis. It is an encapsulation
she refuses to understand in the light of Martin’s development: in the light of his
relationship to her, to his father, as well as to his social world as such.
The intrusive and thing-like character of Sara’s father’s approach to Sara prevents
her from developing her own world of fantasy and reality, of symbolization—a
world where representations are created in interplay between the child’s ability
 The body locked by a lack of meaning 17

to create meaning and an adult world full of reality and enigmatic messages com-
ing from the “Other”. With her masturbation she tries to keep a room for herself
where the father cannot intrude, but her room is without representation, and thus
it is locked by the lack of meaning in her father’s approach. Sara’s inner world is at
one and the same time emptied and filled out by her father, and her masturbation
is a reaction to this that prevents her from symbolization and creation. She tries to
prevent an emptiness that captures her from outside as well as from within.
Also with Martin it seems that the controlling character of his parents’ rela-
tion and relating to him prevents him from developing his sexuality by means of
his fantasies. He is locked in an actual, external reality, which, due to its enigmatic
but at the same time untranslatable nature, remains poignant and excessive, yet real
(see Stein 1998a, 1998b, 2008; Scarfone 2001). This reality lacks a repressive barrier
that should have been established by his parents, a barrier that could and should
have been tested in fantasy by Martin. Instead the reality becomes distorted by
the timelessness of the unconscious, leading to his compulsive need to live out his
­unsymbolized fantasies in reality (see Zeuthen and Gammelgaard 2010).
What original scene could ever be constructed in order to understand these
children’s fantasies? What absence of meaning can be driving them, in fantasy
as well as in reality? When will Martin or Sara run like Emma did in Freud’s
famous scene from Entwurff (Freud 1966a) or close their eyes like Oedipus did
in The ­Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1958) and leave behind an original scene of
seduction, thus giving room for symbolization? When will they at one and the same
time establish nachträglich the sexual trauma and repress the unsymbolized excessive
infantile sexuality of their parents that seems to work from inside these children as
an internal foreign body and from outside of them through the parent’s enigmatic
and perversely seductive address poignantly capturing them? We conclude that it
would be just as wrong to understand these expressions of the body as exclusively
representing a sexuality imposed from the outside as it would be to understand
them solely as formations of fantasy. Paraphrasing Botella and Botella, the children’s
expressions represent the enigmatic approach of the Other as always being inside
and outside: always for real and in fantasy (2005).

Listening to listening
The child senses the sexual without conceptualizing it, and the adult must be in
balance with the child in this developmental limbo. The child’s utterances should
be understood on the basis of the actuality and insistence with which they, despite
their intangible nature, make themselves known (see Scarfone 2001). Infantile sexu-
ality is expressed in the relationship and must be understood as an inquiry and a
request. The unconscious speaks through the expressions of infantile sexuality, and
it speaks in a manner that requires the adult to listen openly and without prejudice.
It is the adult who holds the responsibility in relation to the child, because in the
sexual domain there is no symmetry or synchronicity. The child must find himself
18 Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

or herself in the presence of the adult (see Laplanche 2002). We support the deve­
lopment of infantile sexuality in the best possible way by listening to it with the
same openness with which it is expressed.This is not enough; we must also listen to
our own ways of listening (see Faimberg 1996). Infantile sexuality speaks, and we
must listen to the drive within ourselves and within the other as testimony to that
which is not directly accessible in our communications (see Gammelgaard 2010),
but which nevertheless takes place between us. Thus the adult is also responsible as
regards those aspects of the child’s development that are not directly accessible and
which awaken something in the adult’s own unconscious: because infantile sexual-
ity is never silent.

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2
Trauma without a subject
On Malabou, psychoanalysis and Amour
Ben Tyrer

The cinema of Michael Haneke is one that consistently interrogates the limits of
representation. This can be discerned in the relationship between the seen and the
obscene that Lisa Coulthard (2011) recognises in her investigation of violence and
the depiction of sexual abuse in, for example, The White Ribbon (2009). It can also
be found in the presence of death, as Serge Goriely identifies (2010), such as the
lingering familial suicide in The Seventh Continent (1989). There is a recurrent con-
cern here with what cinema can (or should) achieve, and what I will argue in the
first instance is that this tendency already seems to suggest an encounter with the
Lacanian Real and (or as) the unrepresentable.
In fact, Haneke’s Amour (2012) is almost wholly determined by mortality, pre-
senting its aged characters at the end of life and pursuing them into death. However,
my focus in this chapter will be on a different kind of death the film suggests: a kind
Catherine Malabou identifies as being precipitated by the radical supervention of
trauma, a kind where death takes a form of life. For those subjects whom she christens
the “new wounded”, this is the life of a psyche that survives its own destruction. My
aim is to investigate Malabou’s theory of trauma, with Amour, to ask what questions
they pose to each other, and – importantly – to psychoanalysis, as well as what per-
spectives psychoanalysis can offer on this dialogue. Amour thus takes a place in this
discussion, not as “proof ” of any of the realities of neuropathology – it is, as I will
discuss, fiction rather than a documentary – nor simply as an illustration of theoreti-
cal ideas, but as a participant in this debate making a specific contribution as a film
(i.e. in terms of the way in which the formal qualities of Haneke’s work make a case
for approaching neuropathology in a unique way).
Specifically, this chapter will explore the relationship between the unthinkable
and the unrepresentable in Amour through an engagement with Malabou’s dia-
logue with psychoanalysis in The New Wounded (TNW). There, Malabou identifies
 Trauma without a subject 21

new forms of post-traumatic subjectivity that necessitate “the complete theoretical

reinvention of psychopathology” (2012a: xv). I will approach this from a Lacanian
orientation and consider what sort of questions Malabou’s concept of “destructive
plasticity” poses for psychoanalysis and wonder whether – for example – Žižek’s
riposte to Malabou might be sufficient to meet her challenge. My approach is
equally that of a film theorist, and I will consider both the ways in which cinema
can engage in this dialogue on “plasticity”, and – equally – how this dialogue might
help us to approach the depiction of trauma in Haneke’s film. Malabou asserts an
important connection between narrative and a clinic of trauma, and so this chapter
will explore the possibility – through Amour – that the cinema could stage for the
psyche a representation of the unrepresentable neurological injury. By focusing on
Anne, I will attempt to explore the subjectivity of the new wounded and approach,
from a Lacanian perspective, the post-traumatic subjective experience.

New wounded, new subject

I can’t hope fully to convey the breadth and complexity of Malabou’s analysis,
particularly her close reading of Freud. Here, I will therefore constrain myself to
some brief notes on several key features of her thesis. Malabou’s project revolves
around her conceptualisation of “plasticity”, through the variant meanings of giv-
ing, receiving and – crucially – destroying or erasing form. She had begun to explore
the neuroscientific dimensions of “plasticity” before coming to TNW – in What
Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008) – but it was, in particular, Malabou’s personal
experience of her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease that, she professes, compelled
a more complete orientation of her philosophy towards both neuroscience and
psychoanalysis. In her dissatisfaction with the ability of either discourse (or her
philosophical training) to account sufficiently for what I could refer to as the subject
of dementia, she came to propose what she considers to be a radically new theory of
psychopathology (see 2012a: xi–xiv).
Psychoanalysis, I’d argue, deals with the unsayable and the unsaid, the unrep-
resentable, indeed, the unconscious: the presence of things made visible by their
very invisibility. To this, Malabou seeks to bring something – in her estimation –
­previously unrepresented and unthought by psychoanalysis: indeed, a new mode of
the unthinkable itself in the realm of cerebral trauma and what she calls “destructive
plasticity”, the “dark double” of the constructive plasticity that moulds connections,
which then makes form through the annihilation of form (ibid.: xix). It is a type of
trauma, Malabou contends, heretofore countenanced by neither psychoanalysis nor
neuroscience, but closely related to the principles of the former and fundamentally
informed by the insights of the latter.
As a paradigmatic example, she refers to the famous case of Phineas Gage, a
railway engineer who suffered a massive head trauma in 1848 when an explo-
sion drove a metal rod into his brain. He survived the accident but was affected
profoundly by its impact: he became utterly indifferent to those around him, and
22 Ben Tyrer

his personality altered to such an extent that, as Antonio Damsio relates, “Gage
was no longer Gage” (cited in Malabou 2012a: 16). In effect, Malabou argues, this
brain injury had created a “new person”, a new identity unrecognisable from the
old: indeed, predicated on the destruction of the previous one. Trauma thus super-
venes as a sudden disruption of the subject, which Francois Lebigot describes as
a “catastrophe” that introduces “a very radical rupture between [a] before and
[an] after”, and between which there can be no mediation (cited in Malabou
2012a: 15). Malabou extends the domain of this “after” to incorporate other –
if not all – forms of post-traumatic subjectivity, from her grandmother’s deterio­
ration through Alzheimer’s to victims of social exclusion and violence: all of
whom, she suggests, present this same detachment or “coolness”, this same radical
alteration in the subject, severing them from their former selves and creating an
“identity without precedent” (2012a: 49, 57).1
While Malabou claims that destructive plasticity is something that analysis
simply cannot approach (see ibid.: xiii–xiv), Adrian Johnston insists that certain
conditions – such as Alzheimer’s – may not be treatable in a conventional psycho-
analytic clinic, but this does not mean they cannot be theorised in psychoanalysis
(Johnston and Malabou 2013: xii–xiii). Moreover, as my analysis of Amour will
demonstrate, I suggest that this distinction can be compared to differing under-
standings of the Lacanian Real. Malabou seems to posit destructive plasticity as a
Real conceptualised as preceding the Symbolic and thus forever excluded from it
as a mystified, obscure and external realm; conversely, recognising the possibility
of theorising destructive plasticity within a Lacanian framework – rendering the
“unknowability” of the unknown in some way knowable (which isn’t the same
as turning the unknown itself into the known) – is analogous to recognising the
Real-within-the-Symbolic: a gap, a lacuna that can be circumscribed, but only
made “present” in or by its absence. It is such circumscription that allows us to
continue to the question of form.

The form of form

Malabou’s project allows us to begin thinking about representations of that unrep-
resentable and unthinkable dimension her work evokes: she insists “One does not
fantasize a brain injury; one cannot even represent it” (2012a: 9). The question of
form is, then, central to her project: plasticity is, above all, “an elaboration of form”
(2012a: 20), and discovering a “form” appropriate to the new wounded is vital for
her description of post-traumatic subjectivity.While cerebral trauma is for Malabou
an accident that resists all hermeneutics, she notes, nonetheless, that “cases of brain
damage can be written and narrated” (2012a: 53). Such case studies she refers to as
“literary forms of neuropathology”, which give the new wounded “their own form
of narrativity” (2012a: 53). Here she refers not only to clinicians such as Alexander
Luria and Oliver Sacks, whose very literary forms of case study are indebted to
 Trauma without a subject 23

Freud, but also to theatre of Samuel Beckett as a rhetorical expression proper to the
“brain ache” of the new wounded (cf. 2012a: 55–56).
In this respect, it is important to note that Freud himself expressed the mecha-
nism of psychic trauma in terms that suggest a sort of formal process:

There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from

being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises
instead – the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have
broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then
be disposed of. (1955b: 34)

The influx of disturbing energy constituting trauma must be contained in order

for mental functioning (i.e. the pleasure principle) to re-establish itself: it must be
bound and rendered quiescent. Moreover, as Adam Phillips suggests, the funda-
mental problem posed by trauma is how to find a form for it, to tell a story about it;
our experience is in large part a product of our annexing (or cathecting) traumas
internal and external (2013). Malabou brings the very idea of Bindung into ques-
tion (see 2012a: 194–198) – and we could perhaps consider destructive plasticity
as the trauma which finally refuses any psychic binding – however, I would contend
that the “case studies” she references could be considered a form of conceptual
binding: giving shape to the trauma of the new wounded, finding a way to tell a
story about it through theory.
Such cases then, in their literary elaboration, attempt to find a form specific
to the traumas they relate. And, I suggest, Haneke’s Amour fulfils a similar func-
tion given that it follows one of the “new wounded”, as Anne suffers a series
of increasingly debilitating strokes that ultimately leave her incapacitated and
dependent on the care of her husband, Georges. My focus therefore will be on
the way in which Amour presents but doesn’t represent the unexpected, unpredict-
able, unthinkable moment in which the radical supervention of trauma creates
another form of form that is elaborated as a living death. Amour can thus serve
to establish Anne – as Malabou advocates – as a “case” in the strong sense, a
paradigm, a mirror in which we learn to look at ourselves (cf. 2012a: 54). All
such case studies involve, as Malabou notes, an element of fictionality. Sacks,
for instance, compares his patients with characters in epic narratives; they
are “heroes, victims, martyrs, warriors (…) travellers to unimaginable lands”
(quoted in Malabou 2012a: 55). These “fictionalised” aspects allow the writer to
find the form specific to the case and thus to narrate the new wounded, which,
I suggest, is equally true for Amour.
Most importantly, what this fiction presents is what I will call “the moment
of the accident”. By its very nature, the unexpected, unpredictable interven-
tion of such brain trauma would be next to impossible to record as docu-
mentary footage, except perhaps as an accident itself while attempting to film
24 Ben Tyrer

something else. The fictional frame of Haneke’s cinematic case study therefore
allows for a staging of the Malabouan trauma while retaining a fundamental
unrepresentability.

The moment of the accident

The presentation of the moment of the accident in Amour – specifically, the first
stroke that precipitates the destruction of Anne’s psychic life (but also the second
stroke that completes it) – is therefore particularly significant. The “moment of
death” here becomes the moment of destructive plasticity: the point at which, Malabou
might insist, Anne’s psyche is “shredded” by her cerebral trauma. And, I suggest, in
order to appreciate the full import of these scenes, it is worth comparing them with
“death” scenes in some of Haneke’s other films.
Perhaps most striking is Benny’s Video (1992), which begins with home-movie
footage of the slaughter of a pig. The textural video image shows, in a continuous
take, two men trap the animal and then, in close up, apply a stunbolt gun to its head;
the pig’s squeals are cut short as it keels over and its body spasms. The image is then
rewound, and we watch again, this time in slow motion, the moment of the pig’s
death. The filmic image thus presents this passage to us directly and in the most
explicit way possible. Similarly, in Caché (2005), Majid stages his suicide both for
Georges and the camera in an immediate and shockingly violent way. By contrast,
much of the violence of Funny Games (1997) occurs off-screen. First, through extra-
diegetic sound, is the dog’s demise evoked as barking and howling turn to silence;
then, we realise that the son has been killed off screen as his body is shown in the
corner of the room; finally, the father lies just out of frame as Paul shoots him. Again,
this technique of suggesting rather than directly presenting the moment of death occurs
in Benny’s Video: in contradistinction to the pig’s slaughter, when Benny uses his pur-
loined stunbolt gun to kill a young girl, her death is again obscured by framing and
evoked through sound as her shouts are silenced by the stunbolt’s report.
Amour thus combines both representational strategies: in one sense, we see Anne
fall victim to the stroke just as clearly as Benny’s pig falls victim to its own head
injury – both are framed by the camera, we see their eyes, their faces, as destruc-
tive plasticity strikes – however, this irreparable damage is no more graphic (in fact,
much less) than the suggestions of Paul’s or Benny’s murderous violence. Indeed,
Anne’s psychic “death” lacks even the aural dimension of the earlier films; it is
marked by her profound silence alone. And like Majid, Anne is present before the
camera in a precisely arranged domestic space (see Figure 2.1), but whereas he
slashes at his throat with a razor, she succumbs to a blockage in that same carotid
artery: blood sprays up the wall in the first instance, its circulation stalled in the
second. One explicit, one obscure: both moments are, in the end, equally decisive.
Amour, in a sense, shows us “everything” while at the same time telling us nothing
about the violence that occurs.
 Trauma without a subject 25

Figure 2.1 Georges and Anne at breakfast in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke: Amour_
michael_haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange – X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film.

The catastrophe in Amour – this event that forever changes (and ultimately ends)
the lives of Georges and Anne – is thus presented as almost nothing at all. Preceded
by a slight movement of Anne’s leg and a tilt of her head, the accident goes entirely
unnoticed by Georges – and the spectator – as it strikes dead his wife’s present self.
It is effectively imperceptible, unseen, barely “represented” at all and, in a version of
Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, can only be discerned or constituted qua trauma after the fact,
once it has been diagnosed as what neurologists advocate calling a “brain attack”.
Although Haneke thanks doctors from the Salpêtrière hospital in the credits, I’d
argue that the complete medical accuracy of the film, and these scenes in particular, isn’t
necessarily what is here at stake. More important – following both Malabou and
Freud – is the question of finding the form for this trauma, and a purely “scientific”
representational strategy here would add very little. If we recall Malabou’s insistence
that a brain injury can’t be represented, here one could well imagine, by contrast, a
CSI-style computer animated rendering of Anne’s internal organs depicting every
detail of her heart and blood vessels and the flow of blood to her brain being
restricted thus precipitating a stroke, but this would tell us nothing of the radical
alterations Anne will undergo as a subject.
Haneke’s cinematic case study of destructive plasticity therefore allows for a
staging of the crucial, Malabouan unthinkable event, while – I suggest – retaining
an element of its unrepresentability, its ephemerality, as well as its devastation. The
moment of the accident is figured as a blank, an absence, an aporia of the sub-
ject itself; the film presents the unrepresentable – allows us, in a sense, to know its
unknowability – without rendering it known. Indeed, the second – truly decisive –
stroke that renders Anne profoundly debilitated presents itself only as a complete
absence. We might infer from the morning scene in which Georges finds that she
26 Ben Tyrer

has lost control of her bladder that this stroke took place during the night, but it is
again only reported after the fact in a conversation between Georges and Eva, and
without making clear when or how it occurred.
Goriely suggests that death in Haneke’s films is “like Medusa’s head; [it] cannot
be looked at directly” (2010: 121), and this is most obviously true in the cases of
Benny’s Video or Funny Games where we get only an indirect representation of the
fatal moment. However, I’d argue – and Goriely doesn’t seem to address this even
though he discusses Majid’s suicide – that this is no less true of those instances
where we do seem to witness the death “itself ” on screen (such as Anne’s smother-
ing). The cinema might be able to record the duration in which this instant occurs
(even – or especially – in documentary), but this doesn’t give us knowledge of
death, of what dying means to us. It remains – in a Malabouan way – unthinkable,
unknowable even then, and this is what Amour demonstrates effectively: we both
see and don’t see – for example – Anne’s psychic death, her cerebral destruction, at
the breakfast table. The moment is given to us in its fullness but it remains absent.
On the other hand, Anne’s breakfast time fugue in particular does accord strik-
ingly with the descriptions that Malabou relates as her “Psychopathological Cases”:
from the “absence seizures” endured by patients with epilepsy to the “akinetic
muteness” (loss of speech and motion) demonstrated specifically by those suffering
a stroke. In each instance is the subject’s disposition characterised by a “veritable
absence”, a “suspension of selfhood”, of being “there but not there” (2012a: 50–51).
And it is precisely this utter lack of self-presence that the stasis of Emmanuelle Riva’s
performance evokes as she sits blankly at the table. As Georges grasps Anne’s face,
dabs her with cool water, she remains impassive, unmoved, absent. And I am tempted
therefore to ask here whether we could say in fact that, “Anne is no longer Anne”?
This lack of self, Malabou suggests, extends to the very destruction of the self:
a radical rupturing of identity. She insists, “A person with Alzheimer’s disease, for
example, is not – or not only – someone who has “changed” or been “modified,”
but rather a subject who has become someone else” (2012a: 15). Over the course of
Amour, we bear witness to profound changes in Anne’s character that would cer-
tainly serve to corroborate a Malabouan psychopathology (indeed, it is after the
second stroke that we truly find Anne among the new wounded). However, I’d argue
that it isn’t enough simply for the film – any film – to illustrate the particular ques-
tions at hand (even if Amour can illustrate a certain impossibility when it comes to
representing the traumatic event). In a film-philosophy of destructive plasticity, we
must also ask in what ways does the film contribute to an on-going discourse here:
what problems might it pose to Malabou?

Trauma – break-in
Amour begins with a break-in, as the fire-service forces open the front door of Anne
and Georges’ apartment. Bright light and loud noise explode the darkened image
and silenced soundtrack of the film. This already suggests the classic definition of
 Trauma without a subject 27

trauma as wound: a rupture or invasion of the body. And, moreover, it evokes Freud’s
memorable declaration in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful

enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the con-
cept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in
an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external
trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning
of the organism. (1955b: 33)

However, as Malabou would no doubt be quick to point out, in the context of

Amour, the injury we are faced with should, in the first instance, be considered
cerebral rather than psychic (or “sexual”) in its eventuality (see 2012a: 39–44). None-
theless, Freud’s image remains useful: the threatening possibility of a break-in looms
over the first part of Amour. After Anne and Georges return home from the con-
cert, Georges inspects the front door and sees that someone has tried to force the
lock with a screwdriver. He then notes that several neighbours have already been
burgled, and Anne relates a story about a robbery in another building where the
burglars entered the top floor through the attic, knocking a hole in the wall – that
otherwise efficacious barrier – and removing valuable paintings (provoking large
scale disturbance).
The domestic space of the apartment is under the threat of intrusion from the
very beginning and in a Malabouan context it therefore starts to evoke a dimension
of destructive plasticity where a break-in through the attic points to the “break-in”
of brain trauma occasioned by Anne’s stroke. Anne suggests that she would be scared
to death if someone should break in during the night, while she was in her bed. And
if we recall, this is precisely how the second trauma – the decisive stroke – hits her:
one night in bed.The brain injury is thus an intruder in the dark that comes to take
something from them (dignity, mobility, control, life).
Such an intervention, I argue, further insists upon the psychoanalytic context:
it calls forth Lacan’s depiction of the “irruption” of the Real, the break-in of tuché,
that derails the smooth functioning of the Symbolic. This is how Lacan takes up
Freud’s theorisation of trauma and assigns it a function within his own metapsy-
chology. For Lacan:

The function of tuché, of the real as encounter – the encounter in so far

as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter – first
presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself
already enough to arouse our attention, that of trauma. (1977: 55)

I will return to the question of tuché in a moment, but what we can say first
of all here is that at the origin of analytic experience, Lacan notes, the Real
presents itself “in the form of that which is unassimilable in it – in the form
28 Ben Tyrer

of trauma” (ibid.). Trauma-qua-Real is the intrusion of an impossible event, an

unthinkable wound that resists symbolisation, a shock (or fright, Freud’s Schreck)
in the face of which the signifier stutters and fails. It is only this very failure
that the Symbolic can circumscribe, without ever signifying its traumatic core.
It could then provide fertile ground for a theorisation of the new wounded:
as I have noted, the way in which Amour depicts Anne’s injuries through absence
and blankness does suggest the impossible presence of the Real of her trauma.
However, Malabou is more sceptical, even closed to this possibility of thinking
together tuché and destructive plasticity.

Traum/a – dream
Amour addresses such trauma – its absent presence – in various ways at the formal
and diegetic levels, and in this context a particularly significant form here is in
dreams. In a striking sequence, we bear witness to one of Georges’ dreams – his
nightmare – which returns us, first of all, to the traumatic break-in/intruder motif:
the sound of a doorbell draws him into the hallway and he stumbles into ankle-
deep water. The film cuts to a close-up of his face: suddenly a hand reaches impos-
sibly from behind his head and clasps his mouth before an equally sudden cut to
black (see Figure 2.2). Georges’ waking screams form a sound bridge across these
images, which then reveal him nightmare-stricken in bed next to Anne.This dream,
then, suggests a terrible, unacknowledgeable truth for Georges: something impossi-
ble or unthinkable directly, a trauma that finds only indirect expression through the
dreamwork. The horror of Anne’s illness, her degeneration; the promise he made
never to take her back to hospital; the proximity of his own mortality: all this is
condensed into a dream-image of unbearable intensity.

Figure 2.2 Georges’ dream in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke: Amour_michael_
haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange – X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film.
 Trauma without a subject 29

Similarly, this is how to interpret the famous dream of the burning child,
which Freud related in The Interpretation of Dreams: a trauma given shape only
indirectly through the nightmare. A father sleeps, while in the next room an
overturned candle sets alight the body of his dead son; in his dream, the father
is confronted by the son, who reproaches him, “Father, don’t you see I’m burn-
ing?” (1958: 509). Here we can detect the Real, as Lacan puts it, only “in what
the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack or representation of
which there can be only one representative” (1977: 60). The terrible image is not,
therefore, a direct encounter with or access to the Real but a representation of its
traumatic impact, which, as Bruce Fink explains, is at the level of the “unthink-
able, unnameable, unspeakable” (1995: 227).
Again, I’d contend that, in the context of the new wounded and a destructive
plasticity that resists all hermeneutics, this could put us on the track of a psycho-
analytic theorisation, following Malabou’s insistence that we can, nonetheless, find
a form for this trauma with our case studies, and even narrate, to some extent,
this post-traumatic subjectivity. For example, Georges’ nightmare seems to narrate
(or prefigure) aspects of the central trauma of Amour: the suffocating hand over his
mouth perhaps suggesting his unconscious knowledge of, even his plan for, what is
to come and his sheer terror in the face of both this realisation and Anne’s decline.
Malabou, however, rejects any psychoanalytic rapport. She addresses Lacan’s the-
ory of “tuché and automaton” in chapter seven of TNW but instead of finding scope
for productive dialogue, Malabou deems the theory to be as inadequate as the rest
of psychoanalysis. First, she performs a predictable – but nonetheless interesting –
deconstructionist gesture by returning the Greek terms to their origin in order to
demonstrate how tuché and automaton can be shown to mean their opposites: con-
tingency becoming necessity, and vice versa (2012a: 136). It’s a nice move, and for
Malabou enough to suggest that psychoanalysis once again must fall silent when
faced with unthinkable trauma. Nonetheless, it doesn’t change the fact that this is
precisely what Lacan is attempting to conceptualise.
Lacan is clear from the outset that he is taking Aristotle’s terms and translating
(even redefining) them into his metapsychology.2 Thus an appeal to etymology
will only get us so far: for Malabou, tuché and automaton might signify differently for
the language of Aristotle, but Lacan is forging here his own language in attempt-
ing to think the unthinkable, represent the unrepresentable, through psycho­
analysis. Moreover, Malabou’s transposition of these two terms in her approach
to Lacan seems to result in a curious reading of the burning child dream, where –
again – I suggest that Lacan can be understood as being much closer to Malabou.
In German, of course, a dream is “ein Traum” and, as I have shown, both Amour and
Freud understand well the intimate relation between der Traum and das Trauma – one
effectively contained within the other – and by going into the dream again here
I will attempt to circumscribe the locus of Malabou’s missed encounter with Lacan.
Malabou returns to the question of tuché and automaton in an essay titled, “Post-
Trauma”, where she offers a sustained reading of the dream, and it is here, I suggest,
30 Ben Tyrer

that her particular (mis)interpretation of Lacan becomes most clear. In her com-
mentary on Seminar XI, she states:

Obviously, what belongs to tuché is the falling of the candle and the burning
of the child’s arm. This is the reality, Lacan says, but not the real. The Real is
the unreal “resurrection” of the child and the words “Father, can’t you see I
am burning?” And here, Lacan starts to analyze tuché as a secondary kind of
causality or of reality. The child’s burnt arm is not the real accident in this
dream, it is not the Real. The Real comes with the speech, the son’s address
to his father. Tuché has no autonomy, it is in fact only a means for the Real
or the automaton to emerge. There would only be one mode of happening,
that of automaton, with a disguised version of it, a mask, tuché. (2012c: 231)

And in this passage, I suggest, we can see how Malabou’s transposition of Lacan’s
terms causes a confusion in her reading of the dream and the place of the Real.The
tuché is not, as Malabou suggests, the falling candle; the latter is certainly an accident
that is woven into the fabric of the dream, but it isn’t the traumatic encounter.
The Real is indeed in the child’s reproach, but it isn’t literally “in” the words: they
only indicate its presence indirectly. Moreover, this doesn’t mean that tuché has no
autonomy, being only a means for the Real or automaton to emerge: it is that very Real,
its traumatic irruption in the father’s psyche, the disruption of automaton.
His trauma isn’t in the burnt arm (or the letter of the words themselves) but
in the devastating guilt over his son’s death that resurrects him in the dream and
burns in the address, Father, don’t you see I’m burning; and it is from this encounter
that he wakes in order to escape into reality. That Malabou seems to treat “Real” and
“­automaton” as somehow equivalent here further suggests the confusion of terms
that originated in TNW and by the end of the passage quoted above, tuché and
automaton have once again exchanged conceptual places: tuché is not, as Malabou
asserts, the “mask” of automaton but its cause. This doesn’t mean that trauma is
effective only to the extent that it resonates with some previous experience (as in
the classic Freudian version); it is an external shock precisely conceptualised by
psychoanalysis. Tuché is, like destructive plasticity or Freud’s Schreck, a violent, unan-
ticipatable catastrophe that disrupts the subject; what Malabou theorises (perhaps
beyond Lacan) is thus a type of tuché that doesn’t simply disturb automaton but irrevo-
cably damages (or destroys) it.3
Georges’ dream in Amour is thus a disturbance according to a similar principle:
it isn’t some noise outside the apartment that gives rise to his nightmare. It isn’t
the quotidian anxiety about intruders or burglars in the building, but what – as
I have already suggested – these interlopers could represent. Here, an arm appears
in the dream – impossibly reaching into the image with irruptive force – but it
serves the same function as the child’s words: indicating the traumatic Real that
lies beyond it. His automaton thus masks the truth of tuché and the impossibility of
Anne’s destruction.
 Trauma without a subject 31

No subject
To address this destruction, I will return, for the last time, to the moment of the
accident. What I want to suggest is that Haneke’s staging of the kitchen scene in
particular emphasises something that comes through again and again in Malabou’s
discussion of the new wounded, which is to say the fundamentally intersubjective
nature of this trauma. As I described, the scene begins in the recognisably observa-
tional, Haneke style: deep focus photography and slight reframings to follow Anne
as she prepares breakfast. It is also at this distance that we see, or rather don’t really
see, Anne suffer the stroke. However, as Georges begins to realise that something
has happened, the film switches to more intimate close-ups and – importantly – a
clearer orientation towards not Anne’s but his experience of the accident. Aside
from those striking shots where Anne stares blankly and Georges clasps her face, the
camera focuses mainly on Georges and allows Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance
to convey the combination of confusion and horror that the subject of the acci-
dent presents to the other. The camera follows Georges to the sink and back, and
as he wets his wife’s forehead: and almost throughout our perspective is simply the
back of Anne’s head (see Figure 2.3). Moreover, the camera follows Georges into
the bedroom as he dresses himself to leave for help, and so even Anne’s return to
self-presence – signified obliquely by the extra-diegetic sound of the running tap
being turned off in the kitchen – is presented from his perspective rather than hers.
This depersonalised image of Anne certainly evokes that loss of self that
­Malabou identifies, and prepares us for the creation – through her destruction –
of a “new” Anne. However, as the concomitant focus on Georges in this instance
must insist, when – as Malabou suggests – “neurologists speak of a person becoming
unrecognizable” (2012a: 19), the question begs itself: “unrecognisable” to whom?

Figure 2.3 Georges in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke: Amour_michael_

haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange – X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film.
32 Ben Tyrer

In this context, it makes little sense to suggest “to herself ” because – if we follow
Malabou – that (former) “self ” no longer exists. It is only for Georges that “Anne is
no longer Anne”: the identity “no longer Anne” cannot serve as a point of reference
for her because of this traumatic supervention.
While, in The Ontology of the Accident, Malabou asserts that “All of a sudden these
people become strangers to themselves” (2012b: 13), this isn’t congruent with her
wider conceptualisation of the new wounded. If it is the case that “When damage
occurs, it is another self who is affected, a new self, unrecognizable” (2012a: 141), as
she states in TNW, then there cannot be the requisite distance between two senses
of “self ” for such dissonance; if Malabou’s conjecture is correct – that destructive
plasticity brings forth a radically new form of subjectivity – then the “new self ”
would be unable to “compare itself ” with any sense of former identity. They are,
then, only strangers to themselves in a metaphorical way; the new wounded are more
literally strangers to those around them. Indeed, Malabou herself even describes this
at certain points in TNW: she explains, “What people with brain damage have in
common are changes in personality that are serious enough to lead their family and
friends to conclude that they have metamorphosed into another person” (ibid.: 48).
It is for family and friends, for others, that the transformation occurs. And this is
in fact reiterated in Amour: when Eva comes to visit her parents after the second
stroke, she is disturbed by her mother’s decline and exclaims that she is unrecognis-
able, which is to say that the daughter no longer recognises Anne as the mother she
knew. I will return to this point below, but what I want to emphasise here, in the
first instance, is that Malabou’s formulation of destructive plasticity seems to pre-
sent, then, a trauma without a subject: because the subject is simply not present at the
site of her own destruction. It is an event that erases its subject, while at the same
time preserving its form: psychic death as a form of life.
In light of this, Žižek offers an intriguing attempt to rehabilitate the Freudian
notion of present trauma’s resonance with past experience, arguing that destructive
plasticity “repeats” the founding gesture of the subject as such: the traumatic separa-
tion from substance that constitutes subjectivity. He asserts that “the subject is the
survivor of its own death” and this is why Lacan’s matheme for the subject is the
barred $: the subject as void, divided or alienated from itself (2010: 307). Apropos
of Malabou, then, it isn’t a question for Žižek of whether Lacanian psychoanalysis
is capable of thinking a new subject, a form of subjectivity that survives its own
death, because – for Lacan – this is the form of the subject as such: the “surviving
form of the loss of its substance” (ibid.).What results, Žižek argues, after the violent
intrusion of trauma – the destructive plasticity that “erases all substantial content” –
is nothing but “the pure form of subjectivity, a form which must have already been
there” (ibid.: 312, emphasis added). This does not entail, as Malabou suggests apro-
pos of Freud, a return of or to the “child” as the “imperishable” form of the subject
(see Malabou 2012a: 58–59), but of the emergence/persistence of form as such, of
the subject qua form (there is no “permanent” form except the form of form itself,
i.e. plasticity). It is therefore a bold speculative redemption of psychoanalysis that
 Trauma without a subject 33

Žižek proposes, and it is – I contend – by recognising what he describes as this

“zero-level” form of the subject without content that we can proceed in an inter-
rogation of both Malabou and Amour.
As I have suggested, the film charts Anne’s disintegration as a result of her disease,
but what remains perhaps the most striking and certainly most significant image
of Anne qua new wounded is her blankness at the breakfast table: her absent, star-
ing face clasped in Georges’ hands (see Figure 2.4). Haneke’s screenplay describes
her staring into the void (see 2012); however, I’d contend that it isn’t only she but
also we who stare into the void in this moment, as we lock eyes with her. This
could well invoke that most famous of Žižekian reference points, that “empty noth-
ing” of Hegel’s “night of the world”. As Georges gazes helplessly at Anne, this
much-quoted passage might resonate with our experience: “One catches sight of
this night when one looks human beings in the eye – into a night that becomes
awful” (quoted in Žižek 1999: 30). And in keeping with Žižek’s thesis that the
new wounded constitute a formal exemplar of subjectivity as such, we could simi-
larly consider the “night” in Anne’s eyes as that of the “pure self ” of every human,
reduced in extremis to pain and horror.
However, Žižek frames this night – via Schelling and Hegel – as a “passage
through madness” (1999: 34), while Malabou insists that “The brain injured are
not mad; they abandon even madness” (2012b: 24), and “madness” does not seem
here the appropriate paradigm. Instead, I’d suggest that Žižek himself offers a
more apt image where, in his response to Malabou, he reframes this look in terms
of the uncanny experience of “encountering nothing when we expected to see
something” (2010: 313). Where we expected to find a subject (Anne), we instead
encounter a complete absence: the pure void of subjectivity itself, which Žižek
suggests gives us the sense of an “empty house where ‘no one is home’” (ibid.).

Figure 2.4 Anne in Amour (2012), dir. Michael Haneke: Amour_michael_

haneke©2012 Les Films Du Losange – X Filme Creative Pool – Wega Film.
34 Ben Tyrer

And here again we return to the space of the apartment in Amour: when the fire
brigade breaks down their door, Georges and Anne are “there” but they are no
longer “home”.

The new blessed ones?

It is, moreover, this uncanny coincidence of presence and absence in Amour that
is so unsettling: as I suggested, we “recognise” Anne but at the same time, she is no
longer Anne. As Žižek notes of the new wounded in general, there is in fact a dou-
ble lack here: there is no recognition in us, no chance of empathy, and at the same
time there is no recognition of us as a partner in communication (2010: 300). For
Lacanian psychoanalysis, identity as such depends upon the Other, arising initially
from the imaginary dyad and developing into a relation to the trans-individual
unconscious, where desire is inscribed in the Other. Here, I’d argue, this dialectic of
identity is wholly suspended: as Malabou suggests, the subject becomes “intransi-
tive (he or she is not the other of someone)” (2012b: 24). I’d add, then, that Amour
can reveal instead only the point at which a trauma is inscribed in an other: there is
no Nachträlichkeit for Anne (qua subject) so “we” have to do it, to experience it as
trauma “ourselves”.
Indeed, the genesis of Malabou’s project begins with such intersubjective con-
nection: recall that it is her experience of her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease
and her speculation on the states of trauma involved that occasioned TNW. When
faced with this degeneration, she concluded that “this absence, this disaffection, this
strangeness to oneself, were, without any possible doubt, the paradoxical signs of
profound pain” and that only further exploration of neuroscience, philosophy and
psychoanalysis could help her to comprehend this malady (2012a: xii). Equally, as
Haneke explains, was the motivation behind Amour the question of dealing with
the pain of another, the pain of one that we love. This, he suggests, is more unbear-
able than suffering the disease oneself – to watch another stricken by illness – and
it was this feeling that motivated the writing of the film.4
This insight into both projects – and the proximity of intentions – is vital, but it
also raises important questions. Žižek captures something of this when he asks, in a
typically provocative manner, whether “les nouveaux blessés” couldn’t be understood
as “the new blessed ones”: their trauma only experienced as such from within
the horizon of meaning, while they themselves remain indifferent (2010: 299).
Predictably, for him this becomes a version of the tasteless joke, “the bad news is
you have Alzheimer’s, the good news is you will forget this by the time you get
home”. But Žižek’s contention – that when we approach such “trauma” we might
forget to include ourselves, to take into account our own desire in the observed
­phenomenon – is a crucial point for understanding destructive plasticity: one that is
equally emphasised by Amour in what I have identified as the presentation of Anne’s
trauma from Georges’ perspective.
 Trauma without a subject 35

Malabou claims that we live “in the epoch of the end of transference” because
a “deserted, emotionally disaffected, indifferent psyche” no longer has this capac-
ity (2012a: 214), and this is borne out in Amour by the blockage of intersubjective
connection caused by Anne’s blankness. Moreover, Malabou proposes that our task
in this light is – following Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière – one of
“becoming subject to the other’s suffering, especially when this other is unable
to feel anything” (quoted in 2012a: 214). And we can equally see both TNW and
Amour as gestures towards this, as the comments above from Malabou and Haneke
attest. Nonetheless, a nagging question persists, and this is where (in their very prox-
imity) the distance between the two projects – as well as the necessity of a Lacanian
perspective – becomes apparent.
Malabou further states that, “Between psychoanalysis and neurology, it is pre-
cisely the sense of ‘the other’ that is displaced” because of the need that she sees for
welcoming a conceptual alterity (i.e. destructive plasticity) (2012a: 215). To this I’d
add that there is also a need for Malabou to recognise the place of the other for the
new wounded. Her book ends where it began, with “a patient with Alzheimer’s”,
but we should recognise that TNW is not so much “about” a grandmother as it is
about a granddaughter’s response to this patient.This response is certainly a reparative
gesture, to “gather the other’s pain” not to take his or her place “but to restore it to
[her]” (2012a: 215); however, this proposition raises a number of questions.
Like Georges, we can become subject to the other’s suffering, but – in the
Malabouan paradigm – is there a “subject” there to suffer in the first place? Žižek
wonders, again provocatively, how we can be sure of the way in which this affects
the patient: “does it do them any good whatsoever?” and, more radically, “how can
we be sure that it is really the patient’s suffering we are assembling?” (2010: 297).
It is at this point, I contend, that Malabou’s attempt to think the limit of thought
(i.e. destructive plasticity) reaches its own limit. Malabou attempts to conceptualise
a trauma beyond the horizon of all meaning, but this conceptualisation itself must
remain en-deçà, on this side of the horizon. As Žižek observes, the traumatic inter-
vention of which Malabou speaks is only experienced qua trauma from our perspec-
tive because we encounter the absence of a meaningful Self: “when the patient’s old
personality is destroyed, the very measure of their suffering also disappears” (2010:
300). Whether blessed indifference or unbearable suffering, we are unable to deter-
mine and this, for us (the other), is indeed traumatic.
The point here, I’d insist, is not that Žižek is right (they really are “blessed”) or
Malabou is wrong, per se, but that within this framework any answer is unknow-
able. However, where the Žižekian paradigm does come forward, I suggest, is in
the necessity of understanding this as not an epistemological question but an onto-
logical one: “the gaps and voids in our knowledge of reality are simultaneously the
gaps and voids in the ‘real’ ontological edifice itself ” (1999: 55). And nowhere is
this more apparent than when we are dealing with the Real – the aporia of the
Lacanian Real-within-the-Symbolic – of destructive plasticity. Moreover, it is this
36 Ben Tyrer

unknowability that Haneke’s representational strategy in Amour preserves: showing

everything can tell us only that we do not know, even while this unknown is circum-
scribed and given form.

Representing the unthinkable, thinking the unrepresentable

To conclude, then: where Malabou argues of destructive plasticity – “We know it,
but the psyche cannot stage this knowledge for itself ” (2012a: 9) – I’d argue, first
of all, that a film like Amour, as a film, can further help us to “know it” through
the immediacy of its cinematic depiction. But, importantly, the cinematic form of
neuropathology that Haneke presents can serve to stage, to evoke, for the psyche this
unknowable, unthinkable event while at the same time retaining an element of
its fundamentally unrepresentable nature. The film thus demonstrates that – pace
Malabou – Lacanian psychoanalysis can theorise such an aporia, and bringing both
together can help us to think this unrepresentable.
Indeed, the question of representation comes to the fore as Malabou brings her
own project towards its conclusion. In the last section of TNW, she turns her atten-
tion to the death drive. Freud, she argues, doesn’t accord the death drive its own
form. He could not find its “representative” in the way that Eros functions for the
life drives; it is always given form by the “life drives” (e.g. the “example” of sadism/
masochism). The question thus becomes, as Malabou summarises, “How does one
render the death drive visible?” (2012b: 18). Sadism/masochism can’t account for
the new wounded qua “living figures of death” (2012a: 198), but destructive plastic-
ity can: these figures thus become, as Žižek notes, “the pure subjects of the death
drive” (2010: 305) and – Malabou contends – destructive plasticity therefore gives
the death drive its own particular form.
Her development of psychoanalysis here is compelling; nonetheless, in this con-
text I can’t help but detect – in Malabou’s phrase living figures of death – a summon-
ing of the figure of the undead, evoked from Freud to Lacan to Žižek. Freud might
not have found a representative of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
but he had already done so in his essay on The Uncanny (1955a), where the return
of the dead constitutes an avatar of das Unheimliche (and thus, retroactively, a render-
ing visible of the death drive). And in The Parallax View, Žižek renders this image
even more explicit: anticipating his subsequent description of the new wounded, he
connects this “zero-level” of the subject with the death drive and the space of the
death drive with “the ‘living dead’ (the monstrous life-substance which persists in
the Real outside the Symbolic)” (2006: 210, 121). This is not to say that we should
consider Anne and her company as “zombies”; rather, it is to insist that the horrify-
ing persistence of “life after death” in the new wounded has indeed been theorised
by psychoanalysis. It is therefore true that, as Malabou proposes, “a new chapter in
the history of the death drive (Todestrieb, pulsion de mort) writes itself ” (2013: 224),
but at the same time – I would add – this chapter, Malabou’s project, is not without
precedent.
 Trauma without a subject 37

Notes
1 This is a particular bone of contention between Malabou and not only psychoanalysis
but also neuroscience: a point raised by Dr Diana Caine of the National Hospital
for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London, in an intervention at the Psychoanalysis
and Science conference, University of Tallinn, 15 March 2015. She noted that many
neurological disorders do not present such radical disconnection from the patient’s past
(e.g. Caine 2009).
2 “First, the tuché, which we have borrowed (…) from Aristotle, who uses it in his search
for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real” (1977: 53).
3 Johnston makes a comparable point when he connects tuché and automaton to Lacan’s
coin toss game in the Postface to the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” to suggest
that Malabou’s model points to an instance where the coin is lost or destroyed, leaving
the subject without “enough coin for analysis” but which does not mean the “complete
bankruptcy of analysis” (2014: 290).
4 See The Making of Amour (Montmayeur, 2012).

References
Caine, D. (2009) Reflecting on Mirror Self-Misrecognition. Neuropsychoanalysis 11(2):
211–26.
Coulthard, L. (2011) Interrogating the Obscene: Extremism and Michael Haneke. In
T. Horeck and T. Kendall (eds.) The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe.
Edinburgh: EUP.
Fink, B. (1995) The Real Cause of Repetition. In R. Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (eds.)
Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Freud, S. (1955a) The Uncanny (1919). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud,Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Ed. and
trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1955b) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). SE XVIII (1920–1922): Group
­Psychology and Other Works.
Freud, S. (1958) SE V (1900):The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams.
Goriely, S. (2010) Pieces of Truth for Moments of Death in Michael Haneke’s Cinema.
In A. Ornella and S. Klauss (eds.) Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Michael Haneke’s Cinema. Eugene: Wipf and Stock.
Haneke, M. (2012) Amour. Available from: www.sonyclassics.com/awards-information/
amour_screenplay.pdf. [Accessed 10 March 2014].
Johnston, A. (2014) Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary
­Thinkers. Edinburgh: EUP.
Johnston, A. and Malabou, C. (2013) Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and
Neuroscience. New York: Columbia UP.
Lacan, J. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
­Psychoanalysis. Ed. J-A Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
Malabou, C. (2008) What Should We Do with Our Brain? Trans. S. Rand. New York: Fordham
UP.
Malabou, C. (2012a) The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. S. Miller. New
York: Fordham UP.
Malabou, C. (2012b) The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Trans.
C. Shread. Cambridge: Polity.
38 Ben Tyrer

Malabou, C. (2012c) Post-Trauma:Towards a New Definition? In T. Cohen (ed.) T ­ elemorphosis:

Essays in the Era of Climate Change,Volume 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Phillips, A. (2013) Seminar on Beyond the Pleasure Principle. University of York. 14 February.
Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London:Verso.
Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View. London,Verso.
Žižek, S. (2010) Living in the End Times. London:Verso.

Filmography
Amour (2012) Directed by Michael Haneke. France/Germany/Austria: Les Films du Losange.
Caché (2005) Directed by Michael Haneke. France/Austria/Germany/Italy: Les Films du
Losange.
Benny’s Video (1992) Directed by Michael Haneke. Austria/Switzerland: Bernard Lang.
Funny Games (1997) Directed by Michael Haneke. Austria: Wega.
The Making of Amour (2012) Directed by Yves Montmayeur. France/Germany/Austria: Les
Films du Losange.
The Seventh Continent (1989) Directed by Michael Haneke. Austria: Wega.
The White Ribbon (2009) Directed by Michael Haneke. Germany/Austria/France/Italy: Les
Films du Losange.
3
A possible way to represent
the unrepresentable
in clinical trauma

Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

On fascination with a traumatic event: A psychoanalytic

psychodynamic approach
I will not talk here about the “unrepresentable” in just any representation: that is
to say, the constitutive gap between the word and the object, between the word
and its referent. These are important issues but not within the specific terms of my
approach, which concerns clinical trauma. Nor will I discuss the trauma of birth,
but rather psychological trauma related to specific traumatic events, here linked to
murder or attempted murder.
Civility and politeness in an individual accused of a crime against humanity
never cease to amaze, as if an assassin were supposed to be always busy killing and
murdering. One remains surprised that a criminal can sometimes be gentle and
considerate, yet it is perhaps one of the criminal’s most powerful weapons that he
or she does not always act in a destructive manner. Articles from newspapers, born
from this fascination of intermittently monstrous criminals, can for example talk of
the “tender hubby” that a war criminal could be with his wife or with his children.
It seems that those articles do not so much reflect the complexity of murder as
mitigate our indignation, presenting this data as if it were an unsurpassable finding.
These images represent the intrinsically fascinating dimension of a traumatic real. It
has a dreadful ability to spread by creating disarray in our ethical landscape: it seems
to suggest to people, because he seemed to be a good husband, that reciprocally, any
good husband could once resemble him.1
On the contrary, clinical trauma forces us to break this fascination with trauma:
not only is fascination incompatible with any therapeutic work, but also, it regularly
threatens therapeutic work itself. Thus, the ethic underlying this kind of clinical
approach starts from similar observations to those of the articles, but brings about
40 Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

almost opposite conclusions. In my opinion, Hannah Arendt’s thesis can help to

encourage vigilance against the fascination with the “banality of evil” (2005) and,
at the same time, warns us not to overlook the significant number of people who
suffer from psychological trauma. One of Arendt’s goals can be to prevent society
(which here mainly means potential bystanders and witnesses of traumatic events)
from falling into routine and insensitivity to this kind of banality of evil, thus con-
tributing to it. Otherwise, we return to the previous situation in which fascination
prevails. There, the risk of being locked, in spite of oneself, in “doublethink” is very
high. Described by George Orwell in 1984 (1949), and omnipresent in totalitarian
systems, it is not foreign to the cleaved reasoning of a man who is a father at home
and commits crimes against other children out of his home.
This said, I will talk about people having experienced traumatic events, manifest-
ing more or less decipherable symptoms, acting out what they fail to say and show-
ing what they cannot think. I will try to delve into the available clinical resources,
to see whether the unrepresentable is definitively so for everyone, or whether it
is possible to move towards some kind of representation. This will allow me to
point out how the unrepresentable can find a mode of representation initiating
self-reconstruction after psychological trauma.

On the representable and unrepresentable

The unrepresentable, whose presence does not refer to any link with anything, refers
to absolute inadequacy and questions the limits of language and words that reach
it neither literally nor metaphorically. Words and things are de facto disconnected.
Thus, it consists in an active obstacle, preventing word and thing from being linked
or existing for one another. There is no immediate equivalent between what is
representable and what is unrepresentable.What kind of links can be made between
representation and what is unrepresentable? Indeed, the problem would seem to
be: how to move from the traumatic real to a symbolic register? Therefore, we can
assert first that the unrepresentable is what can only be shown without being seen,
what can be said without being clearly understood.2
A survivor of a massacre or ruthless fighting might say, while still alive: “I’m not
alive”, “I am no longer myself ”, “I am dead”. What did Wilfred Ruprecht Bion –
who received the Distinguished Service Order after World War I – mean when he said
he had “died – on August 8th 1918” (1982: 265)? Was it “just a metaphor”, a “figure
of speech”? A sentence pronounced by a war survivor such as, “I could never flame
with life again after James, Ernest, Charles and I were extinguished at Cambrai”
(Bion 1991: 150), indeed talks about the violent death of his fallen comrades, whom
he could not protect, who could not survive.
These words also introduce us to the ghostly omnipresence of dead people,
haunting their survivors. In other words, Bion partly lives in a world he shares
with dead people. How can anyone still be alive and also have died on certain days,
 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable 41

at certain places? This sentence says something “impossible”, and thus refers to
something unrepresentable. These words mean and express that the universal law
separating dead and living humans in ordinary life has been warped and destroyed
by a “massive psychic trauma” (Laub and Auerhahn, 1993). It is possible, drawing
on the reflexes of our defense mechanisms, to look for a metaphor. But broadly
speaking, wouldn’t it express an unconscious attempt to preserve our selves from
the events signified by the violence of the terms used, hence abandoning a lis-
tening position, and by extension, our position as a therapist? Dori Laub warns
us against the professional reflex of listening to a patient’s speech as if he were
always talking about his fantasy; it “is effective when applied to non-victims, but
disastrous with victims who can neither use trauma defensively nor playfully”
(ibid.: 300).

Clinical trauma
Description without any affects
For the first time during a therapy session, a man refers to having been hit by a car
and left for dead in the street. He talks without any apparent emotion or affect and
indeed describes his problem as feeling nothing and wanting nothing. He seems
very detached from this traumatic event, as if it had happened to someone else. He
is the survivor of an attempted homicide, first involuntary (the drunk driver had not
planned to run over him) which then became voluntary (after having been dragged
several meters, he was abandoned on the road). At this early stage of his therapy, he
can only talk about the events without feeling any affect, with a distance that, all
things considered, preserves both the patient and the therapist (see Searles 1981: 69).
This distance shows the “frozen reality” of trauma (Laub and Auerhahn 1993: 295)
in its space and time dimensions.
Here, we can see that the therapeutic starting point for clinical trauma is some-
thing that exceeds speech – something that cannot be represented – because the
trauma is, by definition, not immediately in the sphere of representation but in the
sphere of presentation.

“Remember your dead”

A woman came to see me because her nephew, whom she saw as a surrogate son,
had died from a medication overdose. There had been no investigation concerning
his demise, which was of a kind that could happen after decades of heavy treatment,
though not to a young man in his early twenties.To this patient, a crime of medica-
tion overdose had been committed and had remained unpunished. In the course of
our sessions, she repeatedly brought up the mistakes and inconsistencies of the doc-
tors she consulted for various symptoms, which they never succeeding in curing.
42 Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

She was very upset because of their contradictory diagnoses and prescriptions, and
she suffered from multiple side effects caused by medication. Pharmacists also had
once delivered medications other than those specified; their subsequent apologies
meant nothing to her.
After a few sessions, I realized that the woman was wearing one watch on
each wrist; I then learned that she owned a lot of watches. “I don’t know why,”
she just said, however pointing out that some of them sounded the hours, and
others didn’t. I felt that the nature of this “not knowing” needed to be elucidated
(cf. Laub and Auerhahn 1993); that is to say, they both needed to understand to
which “un-presentable” what was shown needed to be attached. My remark con-
cerning the watches was soon followed by the story of the murder of the woman’s
grandfather.
This woman had lived in Paris for decades but didn’t feel Parisian “at all”. She only
came to find work. Nevertheless, she had remained; although she hadn’t worked for
several years. She much preferred the city where she grew up. Her parents came from
an Eastern country. She then tells me that her grandfather died there under dramatic
circumstances. She recounts the death of her grandfather, who belonged to a religious
minority and was beaten to death one evening as he was closing his shop. Her parents
had left the country a few months earlier, shortly after her birth. She explained, how-
ever, that the reason for their emigration had been a transfer obtained by her father
at that time. The family knew very little about France. The mother never spoke to
her children about her own father’s violent death. No story had ever been told, and
neither had there been any reference to the grandfather’s life, as if this man had never
existed at all. It was her grandmother (the murdered man’s widow) who spoke to the
patient one day, when she was a teenager, without any preparation. “What good is it
to talk about it? It is in the past”, said the patient once.
It was the beginning of a process whereby the watches seemed to be used as
indicators of a time that does not pass, or more precisely could only pass when
a “catastrophic area” (Davoine and Gaudillière 2004: 29), cut off from any given
time and place, was identified and would start having an assigned time and place.
Broadly speaking, the proliferation of watches shown in the sessions,3 constituted a
link between “presentation” and something “unrepresentable”. It presented a frozen
moment in time: the time of a murder she only managed to evoke 50 years after it
had occurred. Obviously, the family trauma had remained intact; it had never been
possible to talk about it within the family.
Yet, justice has not been done; the murder was still unpunished, as this sort of
thing could happen in that country, at that time. According to the grandmother,
the mother’s relation to the grandfather had been warm. The patient, then, started
to put into words what, for the mother, had been unrepresentable. She needed to
dis-“encapsulate” certain inherited traumas:4 that is to say, to explore in therapy
its effects on her own life, in order to recover from her depression, which had
become chronic. She started looking for scattered clues and gathered them with
 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable 43

me. We built together a specific story, which was a testimony of traumatic events
and of a distress not immediately attached to it, but to which it nevertheless
belonged. In this research, I had a more active position, which differed from
benevolent neutrality. In this case, such neutrality would have been inadvisable
because it would create a loneliness, which could have echoed the absolute lone-
liness felt by the patient facing the psychic traumas she had inherited (see Danieli
1984; Herman 1992).
This kind of clinical work brings us to the waves of violence and killings that the
community to which the patient belongs had been exposed in her home country.
I have been explicitly sensitive to the gravity of the situation and wish to express
to her clearly my disapproval of such abuses.5 I named things bluntly: for instance,
using the word “assassination” instead of “death”. In other words, I felt involved
with her, not through an empathy that is so often reduced to over-sentimental
compassion, but as a person fighting for the recognition of certain facts and the
ability to feel adequate affects (of rebellion, anger, sadness, for instance) that are
linked to crime.6 According to Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, this
is the attitude of person they call a “therapôn” (2004: 249), someone who agrees to
second another in a specific fight, which is therapeutic.7
It turns out that, like a lot of therapists, I have many books in my office. Among
them there are history books that relate the histories of different countries, includ-
ing those from where some of my patients come, and of course including some that
concern the countries of my own origins. I started to read these kinds of books
after taking the measure of the impact of history on individual history. I was then
more able to analyze the traumatic heritage that I was carrying. It had, over the
years, been underestimated in the same way as Arthur Blank explains it, saying to
Cathy Caruth: “I went over it in detail – with non emotion, with no affect. And
the analyst, bless his heart, who was a wonderful person, didn’t know any better. –
So you let it go. – And he let it go. And I let it go. And we went on by” (Caruth
2014: 279). Some clinical and historical books did explain it and give useful thera-
peutical directions. For example, in History Beyond Trauma, Françoise Davoine and
Jean-Max Gaudillière gave clinical examples of the transmission of trauma through
silence. They showed the great importance it had for their patients: to know more
about the way their history had been penetrated, without their awareness, by a war
in which their grandparents were involved, or by a political event that had hap-
pened in their birth country, etc. (2004: 47). In other terms, they showed how help-
ful it was to acknowledge the official information history books could give. Indeed,
it constituted a precious, further matter for consideration, which would have been
missed, leaving instead a painful lack. Broadly speaking, I realized that history could
give shape to something that was shapeless and open a space where subjectivity
could better reappear.
In Lost in Transmission (Gerard Fromm, 2012), Dori Laub explained how his
own analyst told him something about reactions of denial in concentration camp
44 Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

inmates: something, that, at this period of time, he didn’t himself know. Because he
was Swedish, he “taught” him something concerning what “he knew” of concen-
tration camp experiences:

I have to tell you something. It was the Swedish Red Cross that liberated
Theresienstadt and took depositions from women inmates in the camp.
Under oath, some of these women declared that conditions in the camp
were so good that they received each morning breakfast in bed brought by
SS officers.
(Laub 2005: 51)

Thanks to that, Laub could think further in his own therapy. He gave him the
ability to leave a position of denial. Due to this specific involvement of his own
psychoanalyst, Laub was able to work through his psychoanalysis, including his
own massive psychic traumas. He then shows us how it is also necessary, in clinical
trauma, to become more involved – accepting the need to speak, ask, express the
feelings that you feel – in order to give back to the patient that which he himself is
not able to tell, to think, to feel, because of traumatic experiences: experiences that
they first have to approach together.
Returning to the clinical situation of the woman mentioned above, why did I
take from my library the history book about the historical context of this patient’s
family? This patient was born in the same area as some of my ancestors. I “knew”
that this minority group underestimated, in conversations, the traumatic impact
of the persecution they had suffered and of the exile into which they had been
forced, and I had started to learn more about it. Concerning my patient, I learned
how historians had retraced a pogrom she had told me about – in vague terms,
almost unreal – and in which her grandparents were involved. During the next
session, I talked to her about what I had read, reading to her some parts of this
book. This investment enabled her to find more pride in what she had started to
tell me, and also to realize that “even” historians had related the violence to which
her community had been exposed, including the pogrom her grandparents had
survived. This official recognition made ​​a great and encouraging impression on
her: she was no longer the only depositary of an “isolated” family disaster. Other
people also knew something about these traumatic events and had described
them in uncompromising terms. This book symbolized the evidence that non-
hostile third parties actually existed. For someone who had always read many
books, trying to find answers to questions she could only sense but not enunciate
with words, the existence of this specific book was very important. She bought
this history book about her birth country and told me she had talked about it
with her mother.
This patient had also bought a book I had written (I hadn’t mentioned to her
I had written a book) and started to use it as a sort of transitional object, with
 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable 45

therapeutic value, which permitted her to project and develop some psychic
issues.8 It talks about the impact that the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had on
Elizabeth Princess Palatine, and how Rene Descartes, with therapeutic concepts,
like “body and soul union” and “contentment”, helped her to heal her somatiza-
tions. She wondered how, “with all that she had suffered”, the Princess philo­
sopher could pull through. She was wondering, while reading it, if ­Elizabeth
would be cured or not. I simultaneously heard a questioning about her own
chances to get better.
Returning to the patient’s watches, she told me, as if it were obvious, that she
had stored some of the watches in drawers; in sessions, she was now wearing a single
watch.9 For the therapist, that was an indication that some of the events had found
their right place and time. The watches no longer needed to exhibit the “pieces of
time” hitherto hidden in their semblance of an indefinite present, as she had now
found an appropriate time and place for those “pieces”. Historical facts opened a
space for dialogue, where an aspect of the “unrepresentable” could be described.
Henceforth, an official recognition existed of the murders of and riots against this
religious minority, of the bullying and the oppression that they suffered as second-
class citizens. In an interesting manner, a book containing facts, “real” events, was
helping a deep process of symbolization. Until then, third parties who had wit-
nessed these traumatic events have been active accomplices or tacitly endorsed
them with their passive neutrality.
The patient’s description of her mother’s overprotection and of her father, wor-
rying if she came home from school just a little later than expected, could be seen
in a new light. She admitted her parents never left their two children alone and
had stayed too close to them, even after their adolescence. She was then able to
sense a link between the murder, the psychic trauma passed from one generation to
another, and the possible consequences of this murder in their everyday lives, start-
ing with her mother’s constant worrying.
In a nutshell, this patient needed to grasp the impact of her grandfather’s murder,
after having spent years without “knowing” it, without thinking about the impact
it had left on both generations. Involved in this research, I held a specific position.
I was brought to ask questions that the patient couldn’t ask herself and sometimes
to express feelings the patient couldn’t feel (see Davoine 1994). I behaved this way
in order to “empower” this woman to ask questions and to feel these kinds of emo-
tions, this time, in a safe environment (Herman 1992: 133). A silent position would
have duplicated the feeling of absolute loneliness felt when facing the inherited
psychic trauma. As Judith Lewis Herman notes,“The moral stance of the therapist is
therefore of enormous importance. It is not enough for the therapist to be ‘neutral’
or ‘nonjudgmental’. The patient challenges the therapist to share her own strug-
gles with this immense philosophical question” (ibid.: 178). One of the purposes
of this part of the therapy we described was to decipher the trauma of the murder
and to produce a less fragmented narrative of it. The accumulation of watches was
46 Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

significant as the accumulation of time: that is to say, the compactness of the time
of the trauma, which accumulated the unrepresentable in a silent transmission over
the generations. They seemed to mean: “remember your dead”.

Technical aspects of this clinical trauma and

the representation of the unrepresentable
The unrepresentable is what can be shown without knowing to what it refers.
It is a presence to be found in reality, indicating the failure of identification and
sending patient and therapist on a quest for meaning. In this chapter, we have pre-
sented a piece of therapeutic work on the traumatic real. In a repetition that doesn’t
“know” what it represents, its traumatic content “doesn’t stop not being written”
(Lacan 1998: 94). This work is done in a specific way, and we need to specify its
formalization.
In the context of psychoanalytic psychotherapy of clinical trauma, we have to
take into account the fact that knowing some precise information may be use-
ful and important. Faced with traumatic reality, one needs to find a way to build
images, to follow its course to symbolization, which means acquiring the ability
to move slowly out from the absolute loneliness experienced during the trauma.
Herman states that it is important to find as much information as possible about
how a traumatic event took place, and simultaneously, on how each element was
experienced, precisely in order not to project the therapist’s own fantasies on what
the patient has lived and therefore miss the specificity of what he experienced.10
With the help of historical research, re-placing the existence of a traumatic
event in its specific context may better allow us to take into account its specific-
ity. Both the therapist and the patient can take some objective information that is
shared with society, which is to say with other people, who may or may not have
lived the same traumatic events. Subjectivity and personal fantasy can then appear
instead of the unrepresentable of the trauma, which was formerly expressed only
by a threatening feeling of emptiness. The question must be asked, however: Is the
disposition to take into consideration the family’s historical context and the inter-
generational transmission of trauma only a rationalist reflex? I hope I have shown
that in a first step, it is not a matter of rationalization. The information gathered by
such consideration can initiate an active position for those who were devastated by
psychic traumas. It can contribute to the emergence of words and the ability, to use
an orientation shared by Hannah Arendt, “to tell a story about them” (1998: 175).
In this kind of therapeutic context, in which a traumatic transference occurs,
the therapist has to listen to her traumatic countertransference (see Herman 1992;
Searles 1981). Of course, the therapist needs to know more about her therapeutic
investment so that it does not impede the progress of the patient’s train of thought.
But not only this: she also must go further in deciphering this countertransfer-
ence. In Bionian terms, the therapist may be led to recognize “a thought without
 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable 47

a thinker” (1997: 27), to think this thought-without-a-thinker in order to find to

whom and to what it is linked. People working on clinical trauma frequently speak
of this particular commitment, even in spite of themselves. They discover more
about the traumatic experience that has led them to hear the psychic trauma of
their patient, in order to work with it, and not in spite of it. Broadly speaking, patients
often ask: “Who are you to listen to my traumatic experience?”, or “Who are
you to help me think about traumatic experiences I couldn’t reach?” If Bion had
“died in 1918” during World War I, then he also listened to catastrophic experiences
because of this war experience from which he never hid himself. Davoine’s parents
were involved in Resistance; she grew up feeling the great risks that they under-
took. She never tried to put this experience aside, but to use it as an enlightening
point. She understood that she could better work on traumatic experiences with
her patients if she used it as a therapeutic resource because she had succeeded in
thinking and symbolizing it.
As we see, patients and therapist are led to think together. Furthermore, the
therapist can be led – occasionally – to submit hypotheses that put the patient in a
position to think more deeply and to gain a sense of “empowerment” over what
has happened. This main therapeutic principle helps the survivor to regain his
active subject position. Otherwise, the therapist may indeed repeat, involuntarily
and discreetly, what aggressors and murderers accomplished by seeing their vic-
tim and descendants as objects undergoing inner destruction, leaving them alone
with their trauma.11 Then, if a patient says: “I had never thought of it that way”,
it doesn’t necessarily mean that the therapist wants to influence him in a specific
way. Wouldn’t it be possible to consider it as a hypothesis that the patient can
accept or not, without feeling threatened if he refuses it, but which, at this point
in time, he couldn’t find himself because of traumatic symptoms? The patient can
be, as Bion said, a “thinker” who has no access to specific “thoughts” but that he
nonetheless tries to find some. The patient can live “without” the thought that
he needs to think, because his thoughts have been frozen on a specific level. But the
­therapist – thanks to her analysis of the transference and the ­countertransference –
can, at that moment, be the depositary of a “thinking without a thinker” that
needs to be returned.12 Then, a patient adds: “things seen in this light are more
understandable”, “I realize now how important it was”. And he also adds, almost
for the first time, a free association he hadn’t been capable of before.
These clarifications require a final one, which is always present when consider-
ing any evolution and change in relation to clinical trauma. Important therapeu-
tic moments are not isolated, unique. On the contrary, symbols need to be built
after having been destroyed: thus, repetition of some communications needs to be
repeated and repeated. To put it all in a nutshell, my patient – the woman whose
grandfather was murdered – didn’t think the conclusions that she had reached after
having read the history book, “once and for all”. Therapeutic evolutions are only
possible because we are able to think about them several times.
48 Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu

Notes
1 See, for example, reactions concerning Heinrich Himmler and his wife’s
correspondence (Wildt 2014).
2 In French, we can refer to the word “monstration”, an action to show something, which
is etymologically linked to the “monsters” (“monstres”, in French, which were “shown”,
“monstrés”, in the foires).
3 In French, the language this patient speaks during the sessions, there is a homonymy
between a watch, “une montre”, and to show, “montrer”.
4 See Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn (1993: 289).
5 Such an intervention doesn’t mean that one abandons a therapeutic position, but
precisely succeeds in keeping it.
6 See also Lionel Bailly (1996). If a therapist avoids this kind of explicit ethical
involvement, she may come across as indifferent, and the patient may just stop the
therapy. When a patient stops therapy, we can say that the transference wasn’t there, but
this isn’t the only reason.
7 See also Gregory Nagy’s The Best of the Achaeans, where he defines the word “therapon”
(1979: 32–33). I also use this concept in my book about Rene Descartes and Elizabeth,
Princess Palatine (2012: 22).
8 The book is Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu, Une liaison philosophique (2012).
9 Cf. Joël Pommerat’s Cendrillon (2013). This piece of theatre helped us understand
the link between mourning and the tyrannical use and place of a watch: as Cendrier
(Cendrillon) fears forgetting her dead mother, she sets an alarm clock in order to think
about her.
10 Judith Lewis Herman explains that, “As the therapist listens, she must constantly remind
herself to make no assumptions about either the facts of the meaning of the trauma
to the patient. If she fails to ask detailed questions, she risks superimposing her own
feelings and her own interpretation onto the patient story. What seems like a minor
detail to the therapist may be the post important aspect of the story to the patient”
(1992: 179).
11 As Judith Lewis Herman states, “Recovery can take place only within the context of
relationships (…) The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the patient.
She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery” (1992: 133).
12 W. R. Bion: “If a thought without a thinker comes along, it may be what is a ‘stray
thought’, or it could be a thought with the owner’s name and address upon it, or it
could be a ‘wild thought’. The problem, should such a thought come along, is what to
do with it … What I am concerned with at the moment is the wild thoughts that turn
up and for which there is no possibility of being able to trace immediately any kind of
ownership or even any sort of way of being aware of the genealogy of that particular
thought. First of all, it seems to me to be simplest to try to tackle the problem by
considering what this strange thought is. We might get a clue to it by wondering in
what frame of mind of in what conditions this wild thought turned up and became
enmeshed in our method of thinking” (1997: 27).

References
Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition (1958). Chicago: Chicago UP.
Arendt, H. (2005) Eichmann in Jerusalem. London: Penguin Classics.
Bailly, L. (1996) Les catastrophes et leurs conséquences psycho-traumatiques chez l’enfant. Descriptions
cliniques et traitements. Paris: ESF éditeur.
Bion,W. R. (1985) The Long Week-End, 1897–1919: Part of a Life. Abingdon: Fleetwood Press.
Bion, W. R. (1991) A Memoir of the Future. London: Karnac Books.
 A possible way to represent the unrepresentable 49

Bion, W. R. (1997) Taming Wild Thoughts. Ed. F. Bion. London: Karnac.

Caruth, C. (2014) Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of
Catastrophic Experience. Baltimore: JHU Press.
Danieli, Y. (1984) Psychotherapists’ Participation in the Conspiracy of Silence about the
Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Psychology 1 (1): 23–42.
Davoine, F. (1994) La folie Wittgenstein. Paris: E.P.E.L.
Davoine, F. and Gaudillière, J.-M. (2004) History Beyond Trauma. Trans. S. Fairfield. New York:
Other Press.
Fromm, G. (2012) Lost in Transmission. London: Karnac.
Gampel,Y. (2005) Ces parents qui vivent à travers moi, Les enfants des guerres. Paris: Fayard.
Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London:
Pandora.
Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973. Ed. J-A. Miller.
Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton.
Laub, D. (2005) Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization: A Death Instinct
Derivative. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 41 (2): 307–26.
Laub, D. and Auerhahn, N. (1993) Knowing and Not Knowing – Forms of Traumatic
­Memory. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74: 287–302.
Nagy, G. (1979) The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pommerat, J. (2013) Cendrillon. Paris: Actes Sud, Babel.
Searles, H. (1981) Le Contre-transfert. Trans. B. Bost. Paris: Gallimard.
Sibony-Malpertu,Y. (2012) Une liaison philosophique. Paris: Stock.
Wildt, M. (ed.) (2014) Himmler privat. Briefe eines Massenmörders. München: Piper.
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Part II

Sense and gesture

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4
(Un)representing the real
Seeing sounds and hearing images
Thomas Elsaesser

Digital cinema, sound and embodiment: A paradigm

shift in the film experience?
Lacanian film theory of the 1970s limited itself to vision and based itself primarily
on the specular relation of the imaginary to subjectivity as, famously, illustrated and
enacted by the mirror stage.This theory, in conjunction with the Renaissance pers­
pectival image, constructed the look as all-powerful, conferring upon the (impli­
citly male) film spectator an all-perceiving/not perceived (that is, voyeuristic) status.
Yet, this initial theory of the look (as a function of the imaginary) already by the
time it became widely discussed and applied in film theory, had been superseded
in Lacanian psychoanalysis (specifically, with Seminar XI) by the theory of the gaze,
the gaze as objet petit a. As Lacan stated, “The objet a in the field of the visible is the
gaze” (1977: 105)1 and as Todd McGowan reminds us:

The objet petit a is (…) a lost object, an object that the subject separates itself
from in order to constitute itself as a desiring subject. It is the loss of the
object that inaugurates the process of desiring, and the subject desires on the
basis of this loss. The subject is incomplete or lacking because it doesn’t have
this object, though the object only exists insofar as it is missing. (2007: 6)

To the extent that it is constituted by desire – a desire, ultimately, for the lost
object – vision is not all-perceiving but is deficient, for it is (like all symbolic
systems) based on lack; the object resists mastery; it is unachievable. Whereas the
imaginary look seemingly conferred visual mastery on the perceiving subject by
making everything visible, the gaze (as what is lacking in the image, as objet petit a)
introduces the unseen into the field of vision. McGowan again: “The gaze compels
54 Thomas Elsaesser

our look because it appears to offer access to the unseen, to the reverse side of the
visible. It promises the subject the secret of the Other, but this secret exists only
insofar as it remains hidden” (ibid.). The gaze is constituted on the invisible, or,
more accurately, the unrepresentable, which exists in the realm of the Real. It is
what the symbolic is structured around, without being able to represent.
The voice, like the visual, is similarly structured around desire: and therefore lack
and unrepresentable. Traditionally conceived in psychoanalysis as “full speech”, the
voice is the realm through which the analyst gains access to and therefore mastery
over the patient’s symptoms (psychoanalysis as the talking cure). But Lacan dismissed
this theory of the voice and reconceived it, too, as objet petit a. Just as the gaze is
structured around what cannot be seen, the voice is structured around what cannot
be said. In other words, vision is constituted on the invisible, and voice is constituted
on silence. Psychoanalytic theories of cinematic voice and vision need to begin not
with full speech and the omnipotent look, but with silence and the invisible.
Such apparent contradictions are common in critical theory quite generally,
and they only seem to proliferate in cinema’s digital age. Anyone who pursues the
question, “what has changed with the introduction of digital production ­methods
in film and the widespread acceptance of the digital media?” should be prepared
for some contradictory answers.2 I single out just one such contradiction, namely,
that, since the arrival of digital code for image, sound and text, there has been a
remarkable turn towards the body and the senses. It is tempting to suggest that the
more abstract the code, the more sensuous the experience will be. The contradic-
tion is only apparently resolved if we assume that the increasing abstraction – think
of the mathematical basis for generating images and sound – has induced a kind
of compensatory counter reaction, as if we intuitively sensed something uncanny
about these abstractions and therefore sought closer contact: significantly, however,
not with what is being depicted or represented, but rather with the process of
self-reference, in other words, with ourselves as recipients, as if – in the face of the
digital – we felt we had to reassure ourselves that we still possess a body: a body
now conceived as a total perceptual surface. As we shall see below, this something
uncanny is itself an effect of the objet petit a. The “loss of reality” (­reference, indexi-
cality) associated with the digital must register on a different plane, and this dif-
ferent plane happens to be our own bodies. The paradox here is that the digital
medium – in the broadest sense of the term – seems particularly apt to invoke
physi­cal embodiment or at any rate to generate effects of “bodiliness”. A further
consequence of this contradiction would be the question whether the cinema
allows us to experience this sense of bodily presence because it is essentially a
medium of emulation, of mimi­cry and simulation (i.e. functions as the Lacanian
“mirror”), and thus has always serviced the needs and desires that the cinema itself
has awake­ned, or whether its ability to engender a phantom body intensifies ten-
dencies that have always been latent within the technical media and digital cinema
has merely brought to the fore.
 (Un)Representing the real 55

Both possibilities raise a further question: why has attention in film studies and
among filmmakers shifted in recent decades towards the tactile, the skin and the
sense of touch and also, to an equally great extent, towards the ear and sound? Why
are these “turns” in turn representative of the trend of placing “embodiment” at
centre stage for the cinema experience in general, and how does it not only refer-
ence the psychic relation between body and voice/silence, but how does it also shift
the balance between visible and invisible, the represented and the unrepresentable?
Voice and gaze as objet petit a, signifying a loss of mastery and control over vision and
voice, it would seem, play a determining role in both these “turns”.
While it is a truism that cinema always involves more than one sense at a time,
the exact function of the individual senses and their interaction or “division of
labour” relative to one another within the cinema experience remain controversial.
This no doubt also underlies the subtitle of this chapter “Seeing sounds and hear-
ing images”, which refers not only to the potential reversibility of the relationship
between sound and image; it also suggests that there are certain hierarchies of our
perceptual senses – for example, the culturally conditioned prioritisation of the
sense of distance, i.e. the eye over the sense of closeness, such as the hand – of which
we are not always aware. These hierarchies, identified, for instance, by Norbert Elias
as part of the “civilization process” (2000),3 would seem to have entered, with the
digital turn, into a process of reversal or a re-orientation, in which the ear plays
something like a mediating role.
It would of course be possible to argue in the opposite direction: why has our
watching of films been dominated for so long by the eye and vision, to the exclu-
sion of all the other properties, agencies and effects inherent in the moving image?
Without going into this question in detail – there are specific historical reasons
relating to film theory and its institutional legitimacy (film semiotics, psychoanaly-
sis, gender studies, the idea of the cinema as an instantiation of Plato’s Cave) – it is
worth recalling at least one historical factor: the eye–vision paradigm was dominant
for such a long time because, from the turn of the 20th century, the cinema has
opened to the eye previously unknown or unattainable worlds and has done so by
offering a single point of view. Cinema made sight mobile and canny, prying and
penetrating, as the camera permitted the viewer to break and enter into prohibited
or closed worlds. In other words, the original “attraction” of the cinema was indeed
varied and polymorphous and could not even then be reduced to one sense alone,
given that the silent cinema was rarely silent and that attention in dimly lit halls
(prior to wholly blacked-out theatres) was free to wander and stray, yet it was none-
theless very much about a field of action for the eye, i.e. about visual pleasure in and
for itself, across the mastery of the camera (at once summoned and deconstructed
in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera [1929]).
There is a second point worth recalling. Even if it is true that in its early days
cinema was first experienced as a stage, as a special kind of interaction or exchange
between the physically present auditorium space and the imaginary screen space
56 Thomas Elsaesser

(the two had not yet merged into one another as they would in classical “illusionist”
cinema), the turn to linear narrative and suspenseful storytelling soon transformed
this stage into a window on the world and a door into the lives of others. The fact
that art cinema in Europe after WWII tended to render this transparency opaque
and reflexive, turning the screen into a sometimes baleful and lugubrious mirror of
the existential self, did little to disrupt this primacy of the eye.

Causes for the paradigm shift

The paradigm shift – if this is what it is – away from the eye and towards the other
sense organs and the body should therefore be considered in a broader context, of
which the rapid implementation of digital technologies is a factor, but one with
implications that go beyond the usual argument about loss of indexicality, and also
concerns the psychoanalytic dimension of vision and hearing and in particular of
the senses in relation to partial objects:
1. To recapitulate the case concerning indexicality: In the transition from the
analogue medium of photography to the digital post-photographic image, it is
said that there has been a loss of indexicality, meaning that the physical bond that
exists between the image and that of which it is an image is no longer given.
Indexicality is based on physical light passing through an optical lens, trans-
forming a light-sensitive surface, which is then chemically developed. In digital
cinematography, the light is transformed into pixels, a digital code that can be
manipulated, as well as used to simulate. That is, to generate a photorealistic image
one does not require an original source of light passing through a lens: the digital
image can simulate the visual-optical-chemical relationship, thereby losing part of
the truth claim on which almost all theories of realism are based. Such a loss of
evidence, which is both technologically guaranteed and ontologically anchored,
clearly constitutes a crucial turn, especially with regard to the ethics and aesthetics
of the documentary film. No longer anchored to its referent, the digital image can
circulate as a signifier in different contexts, where it signifies a multitude of con-
notative meanings: each of which can make truth claims. But such claims about
the reality, authenticity and truth of the photographic image are associated at least
as much with convention, with rhetoric and performance, as with the “ontology
of the photographic image”.4 The resulting loss of faith in indexicality (however
problematic this term ultimately is) conjures up the gaze as objet petit a, i.e. the
desire for the lost referent, while the simulated photorealism can conjure up the
opposite; it can produce an uncanny effect by claiming truth and authenticity for
something that does not exist (such as the digital dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic
Park movies).5
2.The digital camera is more hand than eye. First, the way digitally produced films
often seem closer to the object creates an impression of touch. Second, as depth
of field and close-up can be combined in a single image, and as the digital image
 (Un)Representing the real 57

can, in general, present visual surfaces and pictorial compositions in appearances

that are unfamiliar to the human eye, the brain must process this ambiguous visual
information either according to familiar templates (and thus reduce the pleasure of
unfamiliar sensations) or switch to a different sense, in order to attune itself and dis-
ambiguate the resulting perceptual-cognitive uncertainties. For instance, the once
again popular concept of “haptic seeing”, the interest in empathy and synaesthesia,
or the concept of “the skin of the film”, can also be explained with reference to the
different distribution of sensory signals generated by the digital image.
At the same time, our idea of what a screen is has changed. On one hand, the
size of screens has increased, extending beyond the human field of vision, as in the
case of IMAX, to create a feeling of immersion and envelopment. On the other
hand, screens are now also monitors and user interfaces, small enough and mobile
enough to no longer be located in front of the user’s field of vision but in our hands
and controlled with our fingers. A touch-screen requires tapping, pinching and spreading.
The image comes towards me, I grasp it; I no longer immerse myself in it or allow
it to wash over me.
This also relates to an anthropologically significant change observable through-
out the 20th century. Put far too briefly, one could argue that during the first
half of the last century, the muscle strength of the body was gradually replaced in
the industrial production processes by machines, which in turn had to be closely
observed by the eye, making the body obsolete for social production: to the point
where sports and fitness began to re-fetishise first the male and then the female
body, with the gym almost literally mimicking the factory floor. By the end of the
second half of the century, however, it was the eye that was beginning to become
obsolete, reduced to monitoring and surveillance functions in front of a screen,
with the machines themselves supervised and guided by computer programs. At the
same time, new uses were being opened up for the hand via keyboard and mouse,
touch screens and texting. The films of German director Harun Farocki (As You
See [1986], Eye/Machine [2000], Serious Games [2010]) have been documenting this
process as it affects piece work on the assembly line and is reflected in weapons
technology,6 but obviously such momentous changes in human motor coordina-
tion also have an unconscious dimension with respect to the subject’s self-image,
i.e. ego’s relation to its ideal ego and ego ideal.
3. The digital image gives rise to a new concept of the moving image especially
because we are no longer dealing with a succession of individual images, but rather
the refreshing (and re-arrangement) of a single surface and frame. In principle, this
already applies to the video image and was anticipated long ago in the history of
art. One need only think of Conceptual Art, Pop Art or Minimalism: all of which
challenged (or played with) the finally artificial convention of an image having to
mimic an aperture in the wall, such as a window. But the idea that an image is no
longer primarily a framed view or prospect has gathered momentum only in recent
decades; instead, we now have a much broader concept of what an image is.7
58 Thomas Elsaesser

This means that our ideas of what an image can be have changed to such an
extent that it is no longer defined by framing or even by a frontal, upright ori-
entation of the spectator. The concept of the image as “an open window” – with
the dominant direction of view from inside to outside, arranged according to the
principles of the central perspective to create the illusion of a three-dimensional
representation on a two-dimensional surface, which has predominated since the
Italian ­Renaissance – no longer sets the norm. A completely different feeling of
space applies, where the image can surround us, but where it can also even look at
us (as Lacan famously pointed out, when distinguishing the look from the gaze),
or where it becomes a pure surface or is encountered in three-dimensional depth,
as in ­installation art.
Because this window metaphor of the image was transferred more or less seam-
lessly to cinema – at least to classical narrative cinema – thus reinforcing the notion
of the viewer as a voyeur, these changes in the nature of the image will also affect
psychoanalytical theories of the cinema, so strongly predicated on fetishism and the
look, on suture and disavowal.

Setting the tone with sound

Voice and the gaze are linked to the extent that each is an objet petit a; they cannot
be mastered or appropriated by the subject and are predicated on lack, and there-
fore instigate desire. The voice as objet petit a means that it “is part neither of lan-
guage nor of the body” (Dolar 2006: 73). The voice, which points to but does not
disclose a bodily interior, is not coterminous with articulated language, but neither
is it pure sound emanating from a physical body. The voice is in between abstract
signification and physical sound. Mladen Dolar argues that the voice conceived as
objet petit a does not coincide with the voice that is heard; it is aphonic. The voice
is therefore uncanny because it is both familiar and unfamiliar, existing somewhere
between the known symbolic structures and the unknown Real.
But where does the broader category of sound enter into this discussion of
the aphonic voice as objet petit a? First, sound (including the voice) cannot be
contained in the way that space is contained in a frame. Second, sound cannot
be eliminated as easily as light: one cannot close one’s ears to sound the same way
we close our eyes to light. Yet the reason for sound having become the critical
tone-determining factor in cinema may not, in the first instance, be due to the psy-
chic make-up of its spectators. It is to be located primarily outside the cinema and
in fact also outside the world of images per se. As Emily Thompson shows in her
study, The Soundscape of Modernity (2003), sound concerns the day-to-day experi-
ence of our environment in itself and has a social as well as a psychic dimension,
which can now be seen as symptomatic for a certain concept of urban modernity
itself, in contrast to ­Benjamin’s ocular-centric notion of the metropolis. One of
the features of modernity, then – according to Thompson’s argument – is the
 (Un)Representing the real 59

degree to which sound, noises and background noise decisively shape our life-
world. People did not try to escape from this stress on the ears by insulating their
walls with cork panels like Marcel Proust or by retreating to the silence of the
forest. Instead, we have been surrounding ourselves increasingly with music, that
is, sound articulated (composed and designed), which is to say, with an attempt to
tame the unrepresentable real, by taking it into the register of the symbolic, the
imaginary and the social. Whether in the concert hall, at home with the radio and
gramophone or in the cinema, the response to sound throughout the 20th c­ entury
has been more sound, not less. Sound in the cinema is therefore revealed in all
its contradictoriness. On the one hand, the realism claim of the motion picture
demands a carpet of sound that corresponds to lived reality filled as it is with noises
and sounds – even silence in a film must be signalled by ambient sound – yet on
the other hand, the film theatre is like the concert hall to the extent that both
promise the spectator a filtered, orchestrated and carefully modulated counter-
sound, known either as “music” or as “sound design”.
Since the invention of the Walkman (personal stereo) and especially since the
introduction of the miniaturised, ultra-portable digital MP3 player, our visual envi-
ronment is accessible to us not only through a technologically generated sound
space; it has become an individually programmed environment. The so-called
“auditory experience of self and place” associated with the personal stereo involves
a visual field that is always already experienced together with an auditory space, into
which are projected the associated affective, cultural and psychic associations, in a
kind of montage effect that can be either wholly enveloping, soothing and calming
or borderline schizophrenic. At any rate, it is highly a-social, as the beat between
my ears translates itself into body, gesture and motor-mimicry. Thus, even before
Wi-Fi hotspots and interactive buildings we have been inhabiting an “­augmented
reality”, in which internal and external space are combined and synchronised
with one another differently than was the case when street noise and concert hall,
or muzak and a film’s sound design functioned as each other’s rival, complement
or compensation.
Traditional limits around identity, as psychoanalysis reminds us, such as the
boundaries between inside and outside, active and passive, centre and periphery,
private domain and public domain, are questioned if not entirely obliterated by the
MP3 player.8 Sound has become something we produce in our own heads, because,
through the mobile sound medium, we become the (acoustic) centre-point of
the world, however peripherally we might be positioned geographically or even
socially.This entails a kind of personal empowerment, an augmentation of self-esteem
and reflexive self-reassurance, but also a level of aggression that feeds directly into
youthful rebellion or outsider anomie.
Given this different “sound mix of subjectivity”, every perception tends to
become an “image” that, in turn, makes the expanded idea of the image (already
mentioned in relation to video and digital images, conceptual art and IMAX screens)
60 Thomas Elsaesser

mutually reinforcing through sound and thus also anthropologically ­plausible.

To cite media commentator Dieter Wenk:

Paradoxically, with the video sphere [a term coined by Regis Debray],

we experience the primacy of hearing. (…) [I]t is sound, ambience, the envi-
ronmental, in short, the end of the contemplative, the distanced, which has
led and continues to lead to the realisation that we now no longer live in a
“society of the spectacle”. (2003)

Wenk elaborates:

Vision has become an appendage, a modality of hearing, “the sound of the

eyes”. (…) Now that we have come to the end of the subject-object divide,
perhaps it is the video sphere that returns us to the feedback loop of sound,
in which the embryo feels so comfortably protected. (ibid.)

A similar observation is made by the musicologist Michael Schmidt, who asks if

the media-driven ubiquity of music – as a “murmuring drone” – in everyday life
means that:

music [is] once again close to the murmuring of water and wind, those omni-
present sounds of nature? Or is it rather that the media has made music a part
of the noise characteristic of our technical world, whose ubiquitous acoustic
signals drown out nature altogether, making it inaudible? (2015)

Could it be that a kind of handover has taken place, from the metropolitan experi-
ence of modernity, which for Walter Benjamin was centred on vision and the eye
to a more general, and effectively electronic experience of (post)modernity focused
on the ear? At approximately the same time as Benjamin formulated his shock-and-
trauma theory of the eye, Paul Valéry noted “the ear is the preferred sense of atten-
tion. It watches at the frontier, beyond which the eye no longer sees” (1974: 934).
But if, instead of the built city, we now imagine our own urban environment and
even our private homes as one big data-space of flows, it would stand to reason that
the register of sound is a more fitting metaphor for these flows than even the mov-
ing image including in Hans Belting’s anthropological sense of “picture, medium,
body”? The relation of the visible to the invisible is then not simply a question of
presence and absence in the field of vision and not even about hearing in itself, but
rather about a different modality of seeing and being. That is, through listening, it
is possible to map one’s spatio-temporal co-ordinates, and thus experience self-
presence without this being anchored in sight (with all the miscognition and asym-
metrical power-relations this implies, according to Lacan and Michel Foucault).
Media theorist Friedrich Kittler has traced the logic of this shift away from the
 (Un)Representing the real 61

eye to hearing all the way back to the Greeks (2015: 3–20), and if we follow what
architect Rem Koolhaas has to say, we do indeed need a non-visual vocabulary in
order to describe the contemporary urban environment, which he calls the generic
city, that is, typified by shopping centres, airports, industrial zones, overpasses and
tenement housing, for which he prefers to use the metaphors of scratch-video and
sampling, drawn, that is, from DJ practice, and hip-hop music (2001).
It suggests that we now live in a world of continuous becomings: a world of
liquidity (­Zygmunt Bauman), of viscosity (Jean Paul Sartre), of the informe (Georges
Bataille) and the abject (Julia Kristeva). Each of these terms refer us back to Lacan’s
notion of the Real; the eye cannot keep pace, is overstretched, so that the ephemeral,
volatile sound of our current way of living is in fact what “grounds” us, which is to
say, what provides the fantasy frame that situates us in the Imaginary. In other words,
sound now epitomises our affective and psychic relation to each other, but also
determines our sense of being in the world. Sound – the muzak of the super­market,
the beat in the fashion boutique, the TV on all day as audio wallpaper, the car
stereo, the MP3 player – all of them separate and together have become the social
glue that binds us together even as it isolates us in bubbles or burbles of an audi-
tory amniotic fluid. Could it therefore be the case that the paradigm shift reversing
the image-sound hierarchy in favour of the latter, often noted for contemporary
­cinema, is merely catching up, mimicking or tracking these changes in everyday life?
As it happens, these observations, namely that “vision is a modality of hearing”
and, in the case of Rem Koolhaas, that “sound is a modality of seeing”, can also be
found in contemporary film theory and resonate with the history of cinema. Three
aspects, which relate to the spatial dimension, the somatic-subjective dimension and
the material dimension of the cinema experience, are worth highlighting in this
context. First, a general proposition: central for the role of sound in film is the capa-
bility for (three-dimensional) sound to give a body to (two-dimensional) image.
This fact was familiar even in silent film, which, as already mentioned, was never
really silent. Before the advent of synchronised sound in the late 1920s, the cinema
was characterised by an enormous diversity of tonal materials and variations: from
film lecturer to symphony orchestra, from cinema organ to sound-effects artist.
However, these were often present in the mode of counterpoint or separate com-
mentary, because the individual film as a self-contained sense unit (that is, as “text”
or a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end) was less stable until the general
introduction of the sound film after 1927–28 and because the accompanying sound
always promised or threatened to give another meaning to the image.9 Image and
sound were not only independent from each other at source, but they also occupied
two quite different types of space.
The source of sound emanated from and was physically present in the audi-
torium, i.e. in the same space as the audience; the image emanated from and was
contained within the imaginary space of the screen. Only with synchronised sound
film did both sound and image seem to come from the screen, creating the illusion
62 Thomas Elsaesser

of “full bodies” so to speak, an impression reinforced by the emerging techniques of

cinematic storytelling, with shot-reverse shots, eye-line matches and cuts on action:
all of the techniques aimed at “suturing” the spectator into the image-flow and
carrying him/her along in a linear direction. Furthermore, the result of synchro-
nised sound was to supplement the pyramid of light emanating from the projector
(located behind the audience) with an inversely oriented auditory cone (located in
the front of the audience).
Looking at the history and even pre-history of cinema, one notes that there were
countless attempts at synchronising recorded sound and moving image well before
1927.10 Thomas Alva Edison, whose Kinetoscope is considered a precursor of the
Lumière Brothers cinematograph, originally developed his invention as a supple-
ment to his phonograph. His claim that the Kinetoscope was designed “to do for
the eye what the phonograph does for the ear” has become legendary. Thus, even
at the very beginning of a media-history of film, we find the idea that sound sup-
plements the image, and even more strongly that the image is merely a supplement
to the sound, and not vice versa. In a sense, it was only with the emergence of the
Hollywood feature film in its “classical” form, from around 1917 onwards, that the
image was deemed to “lead” the sound, so that the rule and very soon the norm
became that the sound asked the question “where” and the image answered “here”.
Hierarchy and delay remind us of Echo and Narcissus, with all the mythological,
as well as psychoanalytical and gender-specific ramifications that these two figures
imply. Furthermore, as already mentioned, this principle of spatialised or delayed
synchronisation is generally optimised in Hollywood in order to facilitate narrative
progress and intelligibility.
With the massive improvements of sound technology in the 1970s, Hollywood
began rethinking image-sound relationships. Earlier, I argued that this ran in paral-
lel to the sound revolution initiated by the personal stereo and that Hollywood
was merely catching up with societal developments at large, which created entirely
new kinds of subjectivity whose imaginary ground was in sound rather than vision.
However, such an argument would seriously underestimate both the changes and
the challenges faced by Hollywood feature films in the 1970s. Movies like ­Nashville
(1975, Robert Altman), Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg), Star Wars (1977, George
Lucas) or Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) not only managed to libe­
rate themselves from the traditional hierarchies of giving the image the lead over
sound.These four films are in fact a turning point in film history, because each tried
in its own way to bring about radical change in the cinema experience by means of
new sound-recording, sound-spaces and sound-playback techniques.
Yet their techniques, aesthetics and effects on the audience experience and ulti-
mately also their influence on the direction taken by film history could not have
been more different. Altman, for instance, multiplied the sound sources – as in the
documentary film – with clip-on microphones and portable Nagra equipment and,
instead of separating them and hierarchising them in postproduction, superposed
 (Un)Representing the real 63

them and allowed them to overlap, so that viewers almost had to lean forward
and push themselves into the sound, in order to follow the dialogue. By contrast,
Lucas concentrated on redefining the auditorium space, using Dolby technology
(an electronic noise-reduction system) in order to redesign, almost from scratch,
the viewers’ audio experience, as if he were returning to the days of the early
cinema, now supercharged with directional loudspeakers and amplifiers borrowed
from rock concerts; on the other hand, of course, he was connecting the imaginary
image space of the big screen even more closely with the newly equipped audi-
torium. Retaining the classical separation of different sounds, but developing fur-
ther the multi-layering and differentiation of soundtracks, Lucas’ surround-cinema
achieved a plasticity, directional specificity and spatial fullness of sound hitherto
unknown. The loudspeakers, placed strategically in the cinema auditorium and
playing back different soundtracks, help to transcend the screen, so that the film no
longer unfolds exclusively on the screen but spreads into the auditorium. As Barbara
Flückiger remarked “the complete liberation of the screen through the surround
technique released a suggestive effect (…) Orientation within the room, which had
previously been transparent because of the coherence of screen and sound source,
was now dissolved. Sounds piled in on the viewer from all sides simultaneously”
(2001: 56).Via the ear, the spatial structure of the film experience, which had previ-
ously been oriented forwards towards the filmic image, as with a peephole camera,
supported by a single sound source located in the same position, had been radically
changed: casting doubt on (if not challenging altogether) the psychoanalytic theory
of the voyeuristic look developed that same year by Laura Mulvey (1975).
In Apocalypse Now, Coppola adopted a similar approach – who can forget the
helicopters in the opening scene, which hover to and fro directly above us? But he
placed more emphasis on the idea that, through sound, we should experience the
interior world of the protagonists as an exterior world or that, through the level of
sound, the exterior world immediately has a subjective, hallucinatory or nightmarish
presence, which, to some extent, imports the Walkman experience into the ­cinema
auditorium and produces it as a collective experience to be shared: the iconic bad
acid trip, which has come to symbolise not only the portrayal of the Vietnam War,
but probably also our image of every modern war. The key person for Apocalypse
Now in this respect was Walter Murch, perhaps the single most important figure in
bringing about the transformation of film sound in contemporary cinema.11
A striking confirmation would come some 30 years later, with Waltz with Bashir
(2008, Ari Folman), where the nightmare of war, with its constant fear of death,
aggravated by an invisible enemy, is doubled by the trauma of (perpetrators’) guilt:
all of it in large part generated by a sound design that, while strikingly original in
its own terms, was nonetheless evidently inspired by Apocalypse Now. Designated an
animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir begins with a scene in which a subjective
camera is pursued by a pack of bloodthirsty dogs, but the camera runs with the
pack like another “dog”. Only later does it become apparent that this was a dream
64 Thomas Elsaesser

sequence, which a man in a bar recounts to the director. The uncertainty about
whether this relates to an external action or a purely internal experience depends
critically on the music and the soundtrack, in which hyper-realistic animal sounds
are underscored with electronic music and a strong beat (which it is tempting to
describe as a disco beat). As Ari Folman explains:

one of the basic ways I envisage it [the war in the film] is as a bad acid
trip. (…) Everyone talks about visions when they talk about LSD, but really it’s
more about sound, and rarely do you see that truth expressed in filmmaking.
(Gullen 2009)

Folman elaborates:

In the 10–12 minute Mardi Gras scene in Easy Rider (…) it’s all about sound,
nothing about visuals. I felt that I had to take the audience immediately into
that dimension, to strike them with the opening sequence, shock them, and
then let them fly into the film. (ibid.)

Sound in Waltz with Bashir – at once disorienting and re-focusing the viewer – has
strongly psychoanalytic connotations, not only by shocking the spectator into being
him/herself traumatised by the aural assault doubled by those fearsome-looking
dogs, but by mimicking the trauma-logic of dissociation and psychic fugue, com-
bining an insistent sense of presence with the terror of not being able to locate
oneself. This is further underscored by Max Richter, a composer from the school
of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whom Folman hired precisely to create the kind
of repetition compulsion we associate with trauma, guilt and obsessive behaviour.
Folman even claimed to have listened to Richter’s music while he was writing the
script, which shows how powerfully even a documentary film can be shaped by the
primacy of sound: at every level, from conception to production to reception.12

Body and voice: the acousmêtre and the ventriloquist

The primacy of sound has both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic dimension.
From an ontogenetic perspective, for example, hearing is more primary than seeing
for our orientation and stabilisation in space, and this also applies in the physiologi-
cal sense. Our first contact with the world takes place through sound, as the embryo
grows surrounded by the body and voice of the mother. Sound is our primary
medium, and for quite some time even after birth, all the horrors of life, such as
dependency, abandonment and helplessness, but also all the pleasures of immer-
sion and nurture are associated with sound. Walter Murch himself pointed out that
the resonating enclosure of the womb (through the mother’s voice, breathing and
heartbeat) is the environment in which we develop before birth. “We begin to hear
 (Un)Representing the real 65

before we are born, four and a half months after conception. From then on we
develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds. (…) Throughout the second
four-and-a-half months, sound rules as solitary queen of our senses” (1994: vii).
It is the memory of this wholeness, of this nurturing but also hermetically enclosed
environment, that accompanies us for the rest of our lives.
The phylogenetic, evolutionary aspects of sound are also significant. At the most
basic level, as already mentioned, we cannot close our ears the way we close our eyes.
Our ears “watch” over our sleep and they do this for sound [sic] survival reasons:

Animism and paranoia have more survival value than equanimity. Of the two
creatures who might have wondered whether that low rumbling they just
heard was really the growl of a tiger or just distant thunder, the one disposed
to hear the noise as an animal voice is more likely still to be among us than
the one displaying a more relaxed and philosophical attitude.
(Connor 2014: 8)

Therefore, the regressive-immersive aspects of sound stand in some tension to the

active stance of listening, but both raise the question of agency with respect to
sound. Because sound is usually thought of as active, as a transmitter, even the
person making sound might under certain circumstances be thought of as a mere
instrument of transmission. Sound emanates from an object, it has an origin, and
this in contrast to colour, for instance, which we imagine to be the property of an
object and associated with its substance. In the case of sound, we always try to locate
a provenance, a place of origin, a source, because we experience it as travelling, as on
the move.
In other words, we regard sound as a force, a power or a special carrier of
authority, and this is the presupposition upon which French musicologist and film
theorist Michel Chion bases his theory of the “acousmêtre”, his term for the dis-
embodied voices in cinema, which apparently have no origin but are omnipresent.
Chion derives the neologism from acousmatic and être, where the first part refers to
something that is heard but whose origin is not seen, while the second part means
“master” (maître), “measure” (metre) as well as the infinitive of the verb “to be”
(être). Chion uses this idea to show that sound is ontologically tied to being and
existence, that it has the power of agency and that it is not just a volatile breath
that can be blown away by the wind.13 The power of the acousmêtre resides in its
apparent omnipresence, omniscience and invisibility, in other words, its origin is to
be found neither within the film nor outside of it, but in the dimension or space
where omnipresence joins invisibility, a point where the Real, the Symbolic and the
Imaginary intersect: the realm of the Almighty Himself, as Chion also implied.14
Hence the acousmêtre, the master (-signifier). The most famous examples of the
acousmêtre cited by Chion are the wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939,Victor ­Fleming),
the mother in Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), the computer voice Hal in 2001:
66 Thomas Elsaesser

A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick) and Mabuse in The Testament of Dr Mabuse
(1933, Fritz Lang). In all four films, the power of these uncanny voices must be
tracked down, exposed and broken at the end, in order to restore the (world-) order
they threaten, yet once uncovered, they reveal themselves as shams, empty shells or
mere mechanical contraptions, thus keeping intact, as it were, the imaginary dimen-
sion that lent them their power in the first place. But one can also find examples for
the power of the acousmêtre from the daily news: some time ago when celebrated
golfer Tiger Woods had receded into the twilight because of his extramarital acti­
vities, his sponsors at Nike believed that he could prove his readiness to show remorse
through a TV spot in which his (deceased) father appeals to his conscience.15
It could be a scene out of a David Lynch film, for this director’s entire oeuvre
presents extreme and extremely unsettling cases of the acousmêtre as the source of
power, in situations where the imaginary encounters the real without any media-
tion by the symbolic.16 Think, for instance, of Lost Highway (1997) and the scene
of the Mystery Man face to face in physical space, while his voice is present at the
other end of a mobile phone call. Even as we watch what appears to be a tense,
but ordinary encounter, some ontological ground gives way right under our feet
(or seats). Lynch demonstrates what Rudolf Arnheim had already remarked in the
1930s, namely, that, on the one hand, the sound gives the film a “body” by creat-
ing a third dimension, but, on the other hand, it always also threatens the integrity
of the body.17 Lynch takes us back to the very origins of synchronised sound and
the psychoanalytically very intriguing sleight of hand on which it is based. Being a
technical operation that matches a separate image with a separate sound, synchro-
nisation acquires its added value of “realism” and of the third dimension at a price:
the fusion, blend or alloy of the two is basically unstable and can be rent apart at
any moment. And since we expect sound to emanate from an object, and a voice
from a body, disembodied sound or a voice without its appropriate body instantly
evokes an entire array of negative emotions of dread and danger. It lets surface the
uncanny nature of all cinematic representation, over which hovers the anxiety of a
breakdown of its fragile amalgam of heterogeneous elements.
These deep-rooted anxieties over the integrity of the body and voice, whose
sources in repression and disavowal Lacan was at pains to analyse, are most vividly
mobilised by instances of ventriloquism, whether in real life or on film. When a
voice emerges not from the face or mouth but apparently from a different part of
the body, or when a wooden doll takes on a life of its own, we feel the cold chill of
death brush over us. Such is the case in Dead of Night (1945, Alberto Cavalcanti and
Charles Crichton), where the dummy functions as the acousmêtre of repressed feel-
ings and of murderous intent, and likewise, in The Exorcist (1973,William Friedkin),
the words in the young girl’s mouth are not hers but those of the devil.18
Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) contains several scenes in which voice and body
lead their own separate lives, reinforcing the basic conceit of the film, namely the
arbitrarily interchangeable identities and infinitely pliable personalities of the two
 (Un)Representing the real 67

female protagonists. Not least thanks to the film’s soundscape, the viewer becomes
attuned to the perceptual oscillations in the image, while trying to find his/her
bearing within the multiple time-frames and layered narrative spaces. With a direc-
tor like Lynch one can cope with a considerable amount of disorientation in the
image, mainly because the sound is so precise and hard and feels so solid. It acts as
an anchor, becoming a mediator between space (general) and place (local). But it
would not be Lynch if such assurance did not itself prove deceptive. Most famous
among such scenes (suggesting the solidity of sound only to whisk away the ground)
is the visit of the two women to Club Silencio, where a singer by the name Rebekah
gives a rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” in Spanish, during which
she faints and collapses into a lifeless doll, while her voice – and the song – carry
on, revealing the mechanical sound system beneath the passionate and plaintive
voice, once more demonstrating the uncanny power of the acousmêtre – here the
“master” of ceremonies – over life and the machines, but especially over the life of
women, treated as machines.
In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) Slavoj Žižek briefly discusses the scene,
arguing that here we “confront [in the female voice] this nightmarish dimension
of an autonomous partial object”. It turns the Club Silencio performance into an
allegorical mirror, held up to the two women, so desperate to believe in the reality
of their imagined Hollywood stardom. To them apply the MC’s words: “there is no
band; there is no music”, even though we hear it and may even be moved to tears
by it, as are the women. The voice as “partial object” i.e. as objet petit a here stands
once more for the unobtainable object of desire, a narcissistic desire directed at the
self or that version of the self that each of the women wants to become, in relation
to the men whom they imagine hold the key to their success as stars. The collapsed
body of the singer is then a kind of “fainting into reality”, turning the sustaining
fantasy frame of the women into nothing but a “recording”, the mechanic rehearsal
of a predefined role: with the typical Lynchean twist that such knowledge in no
way destroys the fascination emanating from the spectacle of Club Silencio, where
the Imaginary encounters the Real on the empty stage of the Symbolic.
Rarely has a filmmaker let us see so clearly how the power and impotence of
sound are the recto and verso of each other, as if Lynch wanted to prove that the
Hollywood hierarchy, where sound finds itself subordinated to image, is not a sign
of sound’s weakness as a signifier, but on the contrary, its subordination was so
strictly enforced during the classical period, because it has always been a matter of
taming sound’s disruptive power and keeping it under control.

Aural objects and the materiality of sound

On the one hand, sound possesses tactile and haptic qualities, because sound is
a phenomenon of waves and therefore of movement. In order to generate and
propagate a sound, an object must be touched (the string of an instrument, the
68 Thomas Elsaesser

human vocal cords, the wind in the trees), while in turn, sound puts a body into
­oscillation, makes it vibrate, including the fact that it touches, envelopes and agi-
tates the ­viewer’s body. Sound acts on the medium (air), which it requires for its
transmission and thereby gives it body and presence. When powerful bass notes are
resounding, we can feel the draft of air from the deep notes on our bodies. It is the
same with high-hats, which set the rhythm. We also think that a sound fills a space
like water fills a glass. Along with the feeling of centeredness already discussed,
according to which we immerse and surround ourselves with sound in order to
imagine ourselves to be in the centre of it, sound also makes us feel our body mass
as “gravity” and our body surface as “skin”.
On the other hand, as already suggested, sound (and especially the voice) is also
something volatile, fluid and transparent and therefore escapes the urge to hold
it. Sound eludes the sense organ that tries to fix or freeze it, making it the partial
object at once necessary for our identity as subjects and frustrating that identity by
slipping from our grasp. If it is possible to reproduce the traditional film image via
stills or frame enlargements, sound – even when recorded – can only be reproduced
in time and not condensed or compressed into the moment. Sound, therefore,
invariably reminds us of the irreversibility of time, it is an index of loss and a mes-
senger of transience: another reason for sound being charged with fear and associ-
ated with mortality – the dying fall.
If sound is therefore a prominent part within today’s cinema experience, it is
not only because our everyday lives have become more and more filled with
noise, to which we respond with more music and more sound, but also because
of sound’s inherently ambiguous status in the cinema, with its multiple valences
as signifier of both embodiment and disembodiment, as both tactile and invisible,
resolved in the digital era by making sure that a film is an audio event before it
is a visual event. Especially in action movies – a genre that relies strongly on the
material properties of bodies and the weight of objects – movements and gestures,
say, a push, a shove, a collision or a body walking, an object falling, are commu-
nicated primarily via sound. The post-apocalyptic landscape at the beginning of
James Cameron’s Terminator II (1991), for instance, is given contour and shape
through the sound of crunching under the terminator’s boots. It is the sound that
causes something that looks like dusty rubble to be experienced as human skulls
or as Chion remarked, explaining his term synchresis: “it’s the ear that makes the
skulls visible” (2012), once more confirming that the subordinate or supplemental
position of sound effectively determines the visibility of the image, while adding a
new materiality to the (digital) image. For Chion, the idea of the “rendu” (in the
sense of both “rendered” and “applied”) becomes one of the key features of digital
sound, because (like the digital image itself) it is perceived as a “substance”, per-
haps like a filling compound or clay, which must be formed, contoured or kneaded
into shape.19
 (Un)Representing the real 69

Sound: signifying loss or compensating for loss?

This pseudo-materiality of the acoustic helps the impression of “seeing with the
ear”, as if today it required a medium of “invisibility” to make the world (once
more) “visible”. It suggests a possibility with which I want to end: If indeed there is
a sense that sound can compensate for our loss of faith in the image and the power
of vision in the digital age (for the many different reasons I have discussed above),
does this signifier of loss and transience nonetheless – inadvertently, and for the
viewer unconsciously – serve as the paradoxical “anchor”? The digital image, so
the argument would go, needs sound in order to lend it the discernible truth of the
trace and the ontological bond of the index. Sound surrounds us and its material
waves physically “touch” us in the enclosed space of the movie theatre, so perhaps
the vivid clarity and mastery once enjoyed by the eye transfers itself to the body
itself, now experienced as a total perceptual surface and organ.
However, if the “loss of indexicality” means we can no longer trust the image
and our eyes (if ever we could), why should we have any greater confidence in
sound and our ears (surely even more easily deceived by special effects than the
eye)? The fact is, we ought not to need to trust either eye or ear, since the very
notion of trust in this context (as a pledge to truth, reference and evidence) is prob-
ably misconceived. Rather, it is obvious that we need both, image and sound: not to
synchronise each other, or each to verify and testify for the other so that together
they can project the phantasm of the body whole (as in classical cinema) and also
not to counterpoint and war with each other (as in avant-garde films of the 1970s),
but to mutually dis-orient each other, in the sense of generating an oscillation that
directs our attention to and fro, making us experience a cognitive-dissonant mode
of reception as the default value of the new “realism”.
This would be an appropriate note to end on, were it not for a small, but sig-
nificant, detail: in psychoanalytic terms, “seeing with our ears” does not stand in
exact mirror relation to “hearing with our eyes”. For instance, Slavoj Žižek – who
agrees with Chion that, as a partial object, voice (and by extension sound) has lit-
tle to do with “hearing” and nothing to do with listening – nonetheless maintains
that the relationships seeing/ear and hearing/eye are not equivalent but asymmet-
ric. Discussing their dynamics in the films of Hitchcock, Kieslowski and Lynch,
Žižek maintains that “seeing with our ears” refers to the enlivening curiosity of
the “look”, while “hearing with our eyes” refers to the mortifying power of the
Lacanian “gaze”.20
Assuming that Žižek is right, he is so only within the particular paradigm of
Lacan’s theory of the gaze, which, as pointed out in the beginning, is still heavily
dependent on the Euclidian geometry of representation, typified by the double
cone, with which Lacan diagrammatically represents the place of look and gaze,
as well as the dynamics of the objet petit a. It has been one of the purposes of this
chapter to challenge, via the discussion of the relation between sound and image,
70 Thomas Elsaesser

the invisible and the visible precisely this geometry and its projective mechanism,
as also embodied in Renaissance perspective. If in the traditional Hollywood hier-
archy of subordination, sound supported the image as the stabiliser for our sense of
balance, it did so also in order to further reposition and re-centre vision within the
geometry of perspectival space. However, as also argued in the introduction, this
pictorial space of Renaissance perspective now exists only as the memory of its for-
mer normative self-evidence; thanks to the MP3 players, touchscreens and mobile
phones that have become the supplements of the body (and in typical supplement
fashion, have taken over the body that they were meant to supplement), both sound
and image now contribute to the perpetual mobilisation of our senses, while we
nonetheless remain subject to the irreversible arrow of transient time. “Seeing with
our ears” and “hearing with our eyes” together do form the new coordinates of our
reconfigured self-presence, making us the protagonists of a new drama: at one and
the same time active and passive, central and peripheral, exalted and mortified, we
are fated to experience with our bodies and expose to our senses the intensities
but also the agonies of the world once more remade: in the “image” (and thus also
sound) of our technological supplements.

Notes
1 In English there is a potential confusion about the distinction between look and gaze,
insofar as “the male gaze” is the term used by Laura Mulvey to describe what in Lacan
would be the (imaginary) “look” rather than the “gaze”, which – as argued below –
is situated between the symbolic and the real and therefore can function outside the
realm of the visible (and thus be associated with hearing, i.e. with sound and voice).
2 See Elsaesser (2013), 13–44.
3 Originally published in German in 1939, The Civilizing Process tries to chart structural
changes in Western societies by focusing on the consequences of the division of labour,
the resulting specialisation of tasks and the increased mutual dependence in Western
societies of members on each other. The psychological implications are increased self-
restraint and self-control, which in Freudian terms would explain the formation of the
modern “Super-Ego”, as well as a redistribution of functions among the senses.
4 For an inspired commentary on Bazin’s essay, “Ontology of the Photographic Image”,
within a film challenging this ontology, see Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and in
particular, the scene with Caveh Zahedi, called The Holy Moment (https://vimeo.
com/56075178).
5 See Buckland (1999).
6 See Elsaesser (2004).
7 See Belting (2014).
8 The Walkman was the harbinger of a development that has continued through
MP3 players, mobile telephones, laptops, W-LAN and other innovations: the increasing
mobilisation of the media experience, which is associated with an opening of the
private sphere into public space. It has had countless intended and unintended
consequences, relating to the status of work or the meaning of intimacy.
9 See Abel and Altman (2001) and Altman (2004).
10 The German scholar Michael Wedel has written a 476-page book on sound, music and
synchronisation, of which more than half is about sound before sound film (2007).
 (Un)Representing the real 71

11 The term “sound designer” originated in the 1970s as a job description that replaced
that of “sound engineer”. Walter Murch, who also worked as a cutter, is certainly
the key figure here: for Apocalypse Now he was first honoured with the term “sound
design” and named in the credits before the film. For an informative discussion, see
Ondaatje (2002).
12 Together with Aviv Aldema, who was also nominated for an Academy Award, Max
Richter became for Folman what Walter Murch was for Coppola, namely the maestro
of Sound Design, a job description that hardly even existed before Murch, at least not
in such a prominent position in the nominations or as a winner of an Oscar.
13 For a very suggestive anthropological analysis of the relation of recorded sound,
invisibility and mastery, see Michael Taussig’s chapter on “His Master’s Voice” (1993),
212–235.
14 It may be worth pointing out that in Lacan’s version of the Borromean knot, the point
where the three rings of the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary intersect is also
where Lacan puts the objet petit a.
15 See http://skew.dailyskew.com/2010/04/tiger-woods-nike-commercial-tigers-dead-
father-speaks.html.
16 In this context, it is not surprising that both Chion (1995) and Žižek (2000) have
written on Lynch.
17 “The acoustic supplements the illusion in such a manner that it becomes complete.
And immediately, the edge of the image ceases to be a frame, but becomes the
boundary of a hole. (…) However, one of the special attractions of film is that a film
scene is always a competition between subdivision of image and two-dimensional
movement on one hand, and plastic embodiment and movement in three-dimensional
space on the other. Audio film eliminates this aesthetically important double-play
almost without trace” (Arnheim 2004: 68).
18 On a slightly lighter note, the accepted form of ventriloquism in many countries is
dubbing, a habit so repugnant to me that I cannot actually watch a post-synchronised
film, because it turns even a comedy into a horror film.
19 A homology in German is thus particularly suggestive: the word for clay (Ton) is the
same as the word for sound (Ton).
20 “An image can emerge as the placeholder for a sound that doesn’t yet resonate but
remains stuck in the throat. Munch’s Scream, for example, is by definition silent: in front
of this painting, we ‘hear (the scream) with our eyes.’ However, the parallel is here by
no means perfect: to see what one cannot hear is not the same as to hear what one
cannot see.Voice and gaze relate to each other as life and death: voice vivifies, whereas
gaze mortifies” (Žižek 1996: 93–94).

References
Abel, R. and Altman, R. (eds.) (2001) The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Altman, R. (2004) Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press.
Arnheim, R. (2004) Die Seele in der Silberschicht. Medientheoretische Texte. Photographie – Film –
Rundfunk. Ed. H. Diederichs. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2004.
Belting, H. (2014) An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Buckland, W. (1999) Between Science Fact and Science Fiction: Spielberg’s Digital ­Dinosaurs,
Possible Worlds, and the New Aesthetic Realism. Screen 40(2): 177–92.
Chion, M. (1995) David Lynch. London: BFI.
Chion, M. (2012) Graduate and Faculty Seminar on Sound. IKKM Weimar. May.
72 Thomas Elsaesser

Dolar, M. (2006) A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process – Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Elsaesser, T. (ed.) (2004) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
­University Press.
Elsaesser, T. (2013) Digital Cinema – Convergence or Contradiction? In C. Vernallis and
A. Herzog (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media, Vol. 2: Sound. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Flückiger, B. (2001) Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films. Marburg: Schüren.
Gullen, M. (2009) Waltz With Bashir – Interview With Ari Folman. Twitch. Available: http://
twitchfilm.com/2009/01/waltz-with-bashirinterview-with-ari-folmon.html. [Accessed
23 October 2015].
Kittler, F. (2015) The God of Ears. In S. Sale and L. Salisbury (eds.) Kittler Now. London:
Polity Press.
Koolhaas, R. (2001) Junkspace. Available: http://www.cavvia.net/junkspace/. [Accessed
23 October 2015].
Lacan, J. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI:The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho­
analysis. Ed. J-A Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
McGowan, T. (2006) The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16(3): 6–18.
Murch, M. (1994) Foreword. In M. Chion, Audiovision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Ondaatje, M. (2002) Die Kunst des Filmschnitts – Gespräche mit Walter Murch. München, Wien:
Carl Hanser Verlag.
Schmidt, M. (2015) Biography. Available: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/michael-schmidt/
biography/. [Accessed 23 October 2015].
Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.
Thompson, E. (2003) The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of
Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Valery, P. (1974) Cahiers, vol II. Paris: Gallimard.
Wedel, M. (2007) Der deutsche Musikfilm: Archäologie eines Genres 1914–1945. Munich: edition
text + kritik.
Wenk, D. (2003) Rückkopplungs-Stadien [review of Regis Debray, Vie et Mort de l’Image].
Textem. Available: http://www.textem.de/index.php?id=251. [Accessed 23 October
2015].
Žižek, S. (1996) I Hear You with My Eyes, or The Invisible Master. In R. Salecl and S. Žižek
(eds.) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Durham: Duke University Press.
Žižek, S. (2000) The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle:
Walter Chapin Centre for the Humanities.

Filmography
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA/UK: MGM.
Apocalypse Now (1979) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: Zoetrope Studios.
Dead of Night (1945) Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and Charles Crichton. UK: Ealing
Studios.
The Exorcist (1973) Directed by William Friedkin. USA: Warner Bros.
 (Un)Representing the real 73

Jaws (1975) Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal Pictures.

Lost Highway (1997) Directed by David Lynch. France/USA: October Films.
Mulholland Drive (2001) Directed by David Lynch. France/USA: Canal+.
Nashville (1975) Directed by Robert Altman. USA: Paramount Pictures.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) Directed by Sophie Fiennes. UK/Austria/Netherlands:
Amoeba Films.
Psycho (1960) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Shamley Productions.
Star Wars (1977) Directed by George Lucas. USA: Lucasfilm.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) Directed by James Cameron. USA/France: Carolco
Pictures.
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) Directed by Fritz Lang. Germany: Nero-Film AG.
Waltz with Bashir (2008) Directed by Ari Folman. Israel/France/Germany/USA/Finland/
Switzerland/Belgium/Australia: Bridgit Folman Film Gang.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) Directed by Victor Fleming. USA: MGM.
5
On touching and speaking
in (post) (de) colonial
discourse – from Lessing to
Marechera and Veit-Wild

Agnieszka Piotrowska

Introduction
Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal book on the body and its significance in history of
philosophy Corpus makes a point that the body and the discussions about it ought
to be open. He says that in reflecting on it he did not want to:

produce the effect of a closed or finite thing, because when we talk about the
body we talk about something entirely opposed to the closed and the finite.
With the body, we speak about something open and infinite, about the open-
ing of closure itself, the infinite of the finite itself. (2008: 122)

This particular reflection came upon him whilst walking through the streets of Paris
to give a lecture on the body. Suddenly, he heard about the atrocities in B­ osnia and
felt compelled to abandon his well-prepared talk and instead find an open space to
talk about the links between the body, the soul and our place in the world. He says
in his book, “Body is certitude shattered and blown to bits” (ibid.: 3), a phrase that
in the age of terrorist attacks sounds particularly ominous.
In this chapter I will focus on voice and touch in colonial and post-colonial
encounters as a site of loss, representing the unrepresentable collapse of ordinary
human communications, reclaimed gradually in the de-colonial period. The work
discussed in this chapter is “touching” something that is indeed very difficult, if pos-
sible at all, to talk about. This chapter is by no means anything definitive: as our
world is continuously finding that its post-coloniality is not a history lesson but
rather a living daily occurrence, sometimes painfully violent, the connections of
the body, the language and the touching are worth considering from a different
perspective.
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 75

Here I will look at Doris Lessing’s seminal novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) and
Dambudzo Marechera’s excerpt from a larger work called Choreodrama, entitled
The Portrait of a Back Artist in London (1980) (and published for the first time in
Veit-Wild’s Sourcebook in 1992). These read together, as if speaking to each other,
thus form another “body” of work. Their work boldly addresses a painful legacy of
colonialism through fiction and not a factual report. They offer a rare insight into
the trauma involved in emerging from colonialism and finding a voice with which
to express the pain.
It is worth recalling here Jacques Derrida’s essay “Demeure”: attending to “the
context of relations between fiction and truth which is also to say, between lite­
rature and death” (Blanchot and Derrida 2000[1994]: 15). In it he reminds us that
it is often only through fictional stories, which offer a distance to the unrepre-
sentable pain, that we can express the essence of the matter in an ethical way.1
Derrida ­echoes here Jacques Lacan’s notion of truth having a structure of fiction
(2006: 684); it is often simply too painful and impossible to deal with facts just as
sheer facts. In order to avoid the “ethical violence” that accompanies any attempt at
“­giving an account of oneself ” to the Other (Butler 2005), it is sometimes necessary
to fictionalise that account to make it “representable” at all, however imperfectly.
This is what I believe takes place in Marechera’s and Lessing’s pieces of literature:
they represent something that still remains largely unspeakable in the (de) colo-
nial context: namely (non) touching and (non) speaking with the Other. I will
also in connection with this briefly mention here Flora Veit-Wild and Dambudzo
­Marechera’s personal relationship and her unexpected confession of the nature of
this relationship, which took place in early 1980s but was only accounted for in
2012; I will return to this below.

Testimony and the academy

The word “demeure”, which means “remains” (but also in fact “home”), and its
various derivations and forms dominate Derrida’s whole essay: to give a testimony
of one’s experience of unbearable suffering is also in some way to want to combat
it, to defy death itself and to “remain” against the inevitability of time. In order
to be able to attempt that at all, one has to find a voice the Other can hear – and
Derrida despaired due to the unknowability of the response of the Other to one’s
pronouncements elsewhere, in particular in The Ear of the Other (1982).
Derrida, himself a victim and triumphant survivor of colonialism (he was born
Jewish Algerian in French Algiers, discriminated against both there and later in
France)2 was a proponent of the personal and “high theory” in one space. In his
controversial statement below Derrida asks for greater freedom in the academy,
precisely in order to be able to approach the “unrepresentable”. In his provocative
lectures and seminars in Montreal more than 30 years ago (1982) Derrida focused
on the connection between one’s experience and one’s work. To put it differently,
76 Agnieszka Piotrowska

Derrida enters a difficult place in which “the scholarly” might need to share space
with “the emotional”: an almost prohibited move in the academy even today. That
means an acceptance of a certain sense of fragmentation of the presentation. This is
what Derrida says:

I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and the subser­
vience that always accompany the classic pedagogical procedures of forging
links, referring back to prior premises or arguments, justifying one’s trajec-
tory, method, system, and more or less skillful transitions, reestablishing conti­
nuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy
with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all.Yet, if you were
to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence,
tauto­logy, and tiresome repetition. (1988: 3–4)3

This chapter, as with most of my other work, attempts to enter such an open space
in which the scholarly and the emotional co-exist, even if I accept that some links
will have to be forged and some references to premises and arguments made.
I start by presenting a psychoanalytical reading of Lessing’s the novel which is
in some way in the opposition to interpretations advanced over the last 20 years by
literary scholars. In particular I take issue with some of the notions presented by Joy
Wang (2009) in her article “White Postcolonial Guilt”, which also sums up a num-
ber of other scholarly interpretations.The paper offers Mary’s complex relationship
with Moses as a classic “interracial romance” and a kind of reparation, putting The
Grass Is Singing in the same context as a number of other seminal, post-colonial
works, thereby framing Mary’s desire as “abject” within the colonial discourse. Here
is what Wang says:

This historical portrayal of white female desire for the black man as an abject
and indirect form of apology is entrenched within landmark texts such as
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul Scott’s depiction of Daphne
Manners in The Raj Quartet (1966–73) and J. M. Coetzee’s character Lucy in
Disgrace (1999).
If abjection can be broadly defined, as Anne McClintock argues, as an
act of expulsion, casting away, and social exclusion, then these relationships were,
for white women in Lessing’s apartheid South Africa, descriptively to be
labelled as abject simply by virtue of their social unacceptability. (2009: 38;
my emphasis)

I take issue with interpreting Mary’s drama as a form of abjection and suggest here
instead that it might be more productive to reflect on the issues of touching and
the voice in the novel and the (linguistic, political, affective) limits within which
Lessing’s unreliable narrator is capable of addressing these issues. In other words,
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 77

the pain and trauma and desire felt by the protagonists remain “unsymbolised”:
“unrepresented” and therefore doomed. The violence that follows fits in well with
Ranjana Khanna’s contention that unsymbolised loss will lead to violence (2003):4
in a post-colonial context in particular but also in any other traumatic situation.5
I will return to this later in this chapter.
The issue of symbolisation and representation can perhaps offer a response to
various critics’ confusion over Moses’s murder of Mary. Having been told repeatedly
“don’t speak English to me” (ibid.: 41) Moses is banned from “metaphorisation”,
a ban especially fraught as Lessing’s narrator actually has no idea what it is that he
might want to say: “what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded
human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge,
it is impossible to say” (ibid.: 206).
There is something else here too, though. Derrida in his discussion of Nancy’s
work called Corpus makes some important points regarding touching in Descartes’
Six Meditations, in which Derrida stresses the point that to touch means “to ­tamper
with, to change, to displace, to call into question; thus it is invariably a setting in
motion, a kinetic experience” (Derrida 2000: 25). This is in direct and hard oppo-
sition to the colonial and post-colonial notions of ideas being set in stone, what
Edward Said in his discussions of colonialism called “frozen, fixed” (2006 [1978]: 27)
and deeply patriarchal and conservative.The touching, Derrida reminds us here, is a
harbinger of change: it can be a good change or bad, but it’s a movement, and when it
is accompanied by a voice and language it can become explosive and revolutionary.
It is for these reasons that it is prohibited in any situations in which difference is a
marker of danger: as it is in the contemporary world today, too. To define a female
desire in this context as “abjection” is to miss its political dimension; it is a big move
away from a separatedness always evoked by the patriarchal authority.
Here in Lessing’s novel the touching takes place, and silent in its threat. Taking
this voicelessness and the power-relations it signifies as a point of departure, I am
interested here in reading Marechera’s work in the context of searching and finding
the voice that Moses, the black protagonist of the novel, never has. To oversimplify
my project here, if Moses could express his rage in Lessing’s novel, might he not
say what Marechera says in his poem? Could one therefore read the two pieces of
work as entering into dialogue with each other, a dialogue the apparent impossi­
bility of which still haunts the contemporary relations between races and genders
in Southern Africa?

The novel
To repeat then: The Grass Is Singing deals with colonial relationships in R­ hodesia
in the late 1940s. As a direct result of the absence of either means or ability to
articulate pain by the white woman and the black man at the heart of the story, vio-
lence ensues.That absence is clearly created by the systematic abuses of colonialism,
78 Agnieszka Piotrowska

but the incident is still a local and private matter: Mary, the white woman, is
­murdered by Moses, the black man. Instead of exploring the incident’s evident
political significance I will reflect here on the implicit and actual prohibition of
touching in colonial times as evoking desire and despair. Derrida and more recently
Emma Wilson (2012) have spoken, in their reflections on the image and absence,
about a longing for the embodied presence of the beloved Other who is no more.
Derrida again talks movingly about any desire aroused by absence, and I am bor-
rowing the quote from him:

The desire to touch, the tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by

its very frustration, summoned to come back [appelé à revenir], like a ghost
[un revenant], in the places haunted by its absence.
(Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 115)

Wilson too talks about “images yielding a trace of embodied experience, of sen-
suousness, of engagement with the world, up to and beyond death (…). I look at
the ways in which the dead still touch us and the ways in which we may respond
to their demands with love” (2012: 6). If we read Lessing’s and Marechera’s works
in this context, namely the context of longing, loss and melancholia rather than
abjection and guilt, the readings might lead to more conciliatory outcomes, both in
the academy and elsewhere. Lessing and Marechera in their fiction evoke images of
desire and despair over the absence of embodied encounters in colonial and post-
colonial Zimbabwe: an absence aggravated or perhaps even created by the absence
of actual physical touching as well as verbal communications.
Lessing was a white Zimbabwean, or rather a white Rhodesian, as Zimbabwe
only gained independence in 1980. I suggest here that this absence of a clear voice
on the part of the protagonists in her novel is connected to the issue of “mourning
and melancholia” and trauma linked to the period of colonialism, on the part of
the white and black participants of the era alike. The physicality of an encounter
with the Other and an actual prohibition of engaging with that Other was thrown
into sharp focus during pre-independence times in almost all countries subjected
to colonisation. As my field work in recent times has been taking place in Southern
Africa and particularly in Zimbabwe, my experience of its legacy is both first hand
and in some ways unexpectedly painful: touching is still an awkward thing in con-
temporary Zimbabwe. In my documentary film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t
Get Arrested in Harare (2015), my lead actor Michael Kudawashe admitted in an
interview that the touching in public, an innocent touching, was still an area of
contention.
In former Rhodesia prior to independence, a physical encounter with the black
Other was a taboo that was heavily sexualised, but it was also illegal and used as
a way of discouraging any physical contact, however casual or innocent, with the
indigenous population: touch, just ordinary touch between members of different
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 79

races, was discouraged, even if it was not per se against the law. I will first briefly
recall here the notion of touch as connected to voice and its importance in Judeo-
Christian art and literature. It is from that tradition I argue that the prohibition of
touch in colonialism comes, closely linked to the missionary work with the
so-called “savage” populations.

Touching and not touching

In an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Point of View, British novelist Will Self speaks about
the importance of touch in human relationships (2015): here he focuses on the
topic in connection with our contemporary over-reliance on technology and its
emphasis on a disembodied means of communications, through social media such
as Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp. He evokes Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel
from 1957 The Naked Sun in which, in a world entitled Solaria, all human contact
is mediated through technology and any form of touching or embodied encounter
is forbidden: people are not allowed to be in one room together for the fear of
what might ensue. Touching is dangerous as it invites proximity the consequences
of which are not clear to envisage or control.
Self reminds us that in Christianity the dualism of body and soul over the cen-
turies had been translated in the Middle Ages into a reticence over a physical touch,
in case that might turn into a dangerous sexualised encounter leading in its turn to
Sin. Self evokes in his article the phrase “Noli me tangere” – Latin for “don’t touch
me” or “don’t tread on me” – the words attributed to Christ in St John’s Gospel
when Mary Magdalene recognises him after the resurrection and wants to touch
him. Christ is delighted that she can see him but doesn’t let her touch him: “Noli me
tangere” i.e. “don’t touch me for I am not of this world any more, I am just a briefly
embodied spirit – already assigned for greater travel”.
In the Gospel Christ’s bodily existence is already over but the “don’t touch” as
a dictum became an important way of living in medieval times – one could argue
also in some way affecting and affected by two dimensional art, which avoided
representing the body as it actually was – a state of affairs only changed in the
­Renaissance with its return to the celebration of human form coming from anti­
quity and therefore a different approach to touching. It is worth, however, recalling
that touching and voice also in fact have a vital role in Christ’s life according to the
Gospels: he touches those who need healing (in Mark we have a clear evocation
of this: “lay hands on the sick and they shall recover” [Mark 16: 18]); he touches
Lazarus and tells him to “rise” and of course he famously defends Mary Magdalene
(“May he who is without sin cast the first stone” [John 8: 7]) before letting her
touch him quite intimately in fact – namely washing his feet (Luke 7: 36–50). The
“don’t touch me” dictum only comes when Christ’s bodily existence is in fact over.
That touch, the healing mysterious touch, was in the Middle Ages reserved
for those who assumed the roles of representatives of God on earth, such as the
80 Agnieszka Piotrowska

Pope and the royalty: in more contemporary times famously John Paul II would
­physically lift people from the ground when they kneeled in front of him, also say-
ing to them “do not be afraid!”6 Princess Diana too in her work drew from the
notion that a touch can have a divine healing power, including working with AIDS
victims and the underprivileged in the developing world.7
In contemporary society the divine power of touch has lost some of its signifi-
cance because of the overwhelming power of technology that attempts to replace it.
Self ’s reflection interrogates the contemporary position of communicating through
machines rather than embodied encounters.There is something curiously attractive in
the contemporary detachment from the actual troublesome Other. Self goes on to say:

Mass industrialised society developed, in part, by inculcating us with rigid

taboos - not only “noli me tangere”, but also “don’t talk to me, jostle me, or
even acknowledge my physical presence”. (2015)

In other words, Self argues that we have fallen into our relationships with machines
so very easily because we are culturally very familiar with the non-touching rela-
tionships and the safety they might offer. However, despite our near obsession with
it, technology does not satisfy our actual deep need to be with another human
being in an embodied fashion.
It is in this context that Self suggests further that sometimes the desire to touch
and inability to do so can spill over into violence of various kinds in which one
touches the other in a violent gesture – when men wrestle and tug in order to get
close – he suggests, as, for instance, in a rugby match:

I sometimes wonder if what a rugby forward is really seeking, as he pushes his

head between the straining haunches of his teammates, is not some abstract
notion of excellence or achievement, but the very concrete experience of
another man’s being. (2015)

In the biblical story recounted above, Christ of course uses language to stop Mary
Magdalene from touching him but he speaks to her kindly. We must bear in mind
that Mary Magdalene is traumatised by Christ’s crucifixion and the loss of her
beloved mentor, and so the vision of Christ apparently alive and speaking must offer
a great relief. They don’t touch physically but he does touch her through his address
to her, which one can interpret also as a plea for patience and peace and not just a
prohibition: the time for bodily contact and indeed bodily sacrifice is over; the time
for communicating through voice and language is upon us.
In a post-colonial context the issue of voice, language and also the desire to
touch clearly is deeply complicated as it evokes the legacy of colonial prohibi-
tions regarding bodily encounters brought in by the missionaries and the secular
adminis­trators of the provinces. Khanna in her influential book Dark Continents
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 81

uses the psychoanalytical term “melancholia” to describe “colonial melancholy”

as a mechanism dealing with a profound sense of loss – here a loss of independ-
ence, identity, sense of national belonging, innocence and freedom – on the part of
the colonised subject (2003: 21). Khanna evokes Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia
and Abraham and Torok’s reworking of it as two different “responses to a loss”:
a mourning constitutes a state of “natural” sadness over the loss of a loved object,
which will abate with time. Melancholia, on the other hand, can be a paralysing
state that lasts. Khanna stresses that “what distinguishes melancholia is a state of
dejection, and a form of critical agency that is directed toward the self ” (ibid.).
She also reminds us of the difference between mourning as “assimilating [the lost
object] – and melancholia – swallowing the lost object as whole” (ibid.). And as
I have mentioned elsewhere (Piotrowska 2014a), it is important to bear in mind the
recent research (e.g. Straker 2013), which points to the sense of loss of the part of
the white and black population alike, for a number of different reasons: the whites
mourn their dominance and the blacks their pre-colonial sense of identity, never
to be re-gained.
Khanna borrows Freud’s concept of the critical agency in melancholia and uses
the term in particular to denote “forms of critical nationalism that emerge as mel-
ancholic remainders”; she says, “And if Freud would eventually transfer the criti-
cal agency found in melancholia into the normalizing function of the superego,
I would salvage it, putting the melancholic’s manic critical agency into the unwork-
ing of conformity, and into the critique of status quo” (Khanna 2003: 21–22, my
emphasis).8
Khanna further advances that, drawing from the work of Abraham and Torok,
“demetaphorization” is often a symptom of melancholia: always induced by a loss
but also by some kind of pain and trauma. In essence, this “demetaphorization” is
an inability to symbolise, that is indeed to “represent”, suffering and anger through
language. Khanna ventures that this kind of “demetaphorization” can be a par-
ticular problem in post-colonial encounters and can lead to violence: in her work
she focuses on those who have been colonised, but the sense of loss and alienation
might also be present in those who have inherited both the guilt, on the one hand,
and a sense of loss of their power, on the other. Khanna stresses the notion of a secret
loss that is in some way “unrepresentable”: “For Abraham and Torok the cause of
melancholia is an underlying secret carried by the analysand from previous genera-
tions” (ibid.: 25). Khanna’s crucial move here is to think of the critical agency of
melancholia as engendering actions and not just passivity. If you cannot represent
your pain through language or creativity or embodied encounter with the other
that will offer comfort, you might become violent. I argue that it is indeed what
takes place between Mary and Moses in Lessing’s novel and that the notion of
mourning the loss on both sides works better here than the concept of the abject,
which in the end does not explain the violence that concludes the book. I will
return to it later in the essay.
82 Agnieszka Piotrowska

It is not completely obvious perhaps to connect the an inability to “metaphorise”

to actual physical violence and that, in its turn, to a sense of loss and mourning over
a desire to touch the other, and yet, on the other hand, it is also not that hard to see
the connections: the notion of a sexual closeness with a black person was before
independence not only against the law but also a matter of shame and despair on
the part of the white colonisers (and one could argue that Christianity was very
much a part of the project of keeping the races apart, through the introduction of
the notion of obedience in the missionary teachings). A physical closeness between
people of different races and cultures therefore was an important political gesture
and perhaps still is. It represented something not just unrepresentable but actually
deeply frightening, i.e. a possibility of change.
Let me repeat then: the touching – any touching – was pretty much forbidden
in colonial countries in order to avoid the temptation of the prohibited sexual
encounter. And that prohibition, however much dressed up as a moral and C ­ hristian
stance vis-à-vis the world, was also simply connected to a desire to keep the white
race white9. Conversely, Frantz Fanon, in his seminal Black Skins, White Masks, con-
troversially writes about the black man’s unconscious desire to have sex with a
white woman as representing an unconscious (and sometimes conscious) wish to
become empowered by her whiteness and perhaps to begin to create “whiter” off-
spring (Fanon 1975: 63) As with many other rules and prohibitions, it was simply
easiest for the missionaries to say, as they did in the Middle Ages in Europe, “do not
touch” each other, do not get close, just in case your desire to get close to the Other
will transform itself into a dangerous actual bodily connection in which two people
become one.

Desire and lack in The Grass Is Singing

The Grass Is Singing depicts life in the rural countryside of then Rhodesia.The n
­ ovel’s
main character, Mary Turner, is enslaved by the system she lives in as well as her
own prejudice and inability to withstand the pressures of the narrow-minded white
community of which she is a part. She finds herself an outsider also because of
her inability to form lasting bonds with women. Lessing draws Mary’s childhood
as a deeply traumatic experience with her alcoholic father who, we discover later
in the novel, may have actually sexually abused her. Her mother struggled to hold
on to a semblance of normality against the background of deeply perverse and
dysfunctional race relations in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s in which black
people were treated as sub-human and referred to by a number of abusive terms,
“the native” being the least demeaning (but because of its historical connotations is
deeply despised now in southern Africa). Mary is able to escape her family life and
achieve a limited independence through her secretarial education, which enables
her to get an office job. Lessing points out that Mary could have gotten a flat but
chooses not to: she lives in a hostel for unmarried young women until she is 30.
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 83

It is then that she overhears her friends commenting that “there is something miss-
ing” in Mary; she probably will never marry, they say, because “she is not like that”
(­Lessing 2013: 40).The phrase “not like that”, which is neither completely explained
nor spelled out at the time or later in the book, is nonetheless an important indi-
cator as it signifies Mary’s lack – perceived and actual – of sexual potency. Lessing
describes Mary’s revulsion at her first fiancé’s attempt at physical contact, which
resulted in the engagement being broken off: “Next morning, she was horrified at
her beha­viour; she, who was always in command of herself, and who dreaded noth-
ing more than scenes and ambiguity. She apologized to him, but that was the end
of it” (ibid.: 42). But marry she must as convention demands, her sexuality, though,
remains locked up entirely: “if a man kissed her (…) she was revolted” (ibid.: 44).
Isolated through her unthought-through marriage, precipitated by social con-
vention and the demands it put on her, Mary ends up with an unsuccessful if honest
farmer, Dick, her agency and life itself slowly stripped away from her. In terms of
Lacanian “don’t give up on your desire”, this is a tragic example of a compromise
stifling a development of an awareness of that desire. But, in addition, Mary lives in
a patriarchal, racist society in which one’s embodiment forever defines one’s ate –
destiny – as Lacan would say in Seminar VII after Sophocles.10
Mary is almost literally gagged, bound and tied down by her own inability to
question the white male supremacy, despite knowing that it is wrong. If the black
workers have no voice, she too has none. She questions the detail of it (why is
her husband unsuccessful? why couldn’t they farm tobacco? why can’t she have a
ceiling in her house?) without challenging the systematic issue with the society in
which she lives. I argue that her voice is in fact never heard until the black houseboy,
Moses, listens to her plea. The very white men she wants to imbue with power and
authority are impotent in their inability to offer her solace, never mind jouissance.
Her own unspoken desire for the exotic Other is rising at the same time that anger
and a sense of hopelessness over the rigidity of her situation set in. Unfortunately
for her, and for Moses – although in some way unavoidably because of her limited
education and the systematic ideological brainwashing – Mary is also a racist.
Mary’s contact with black people is very limited, but Lessing makes sure the
reader realises that on a conscious level Mary has never questioned the systematic
racism that surrounds her, mixed with limited Christian religiosity that controls
“the natives” on a most basic level, attempting to regulate their desire, including a
desire to question authority, and repressing their sexuality. Perhaps her refusal to see
the black “natives” as people also offers her the safety of a boundary, defining who
she could be but also fending off her sense of fear of her own unconscious sexual
desire. The colonial “de-metaphorization” is in full swing here; nobody is able to
express anything that actually might matter and would get close to expressing pain
and inexpressible trauma. Nobody touches each other physically either: it is pro-
hibited. Except Mary and Moses do, eventually, in fear and despair, with no words
to accompany this touching as to give it meaning. This touching – the absence of
84 Agnieszka Piotrowska

and dread of it, as well as the inexpressible longing for it – drives Lessing’s novel.
This, then, (the touching and the lack of speech to frame it) I argue, is ultimately
the source of Mary’s death, and that of Moses, too.
What happens between Mary and Moses is unclear, perhaps “unrepresentable”:
there is a suggestion that Mary’s slow descent into insanity is accompanied by her
physical relationship with Moses. It is crucial to remember that their first bodily
contact begins with an act of violence on the part of Mary: she hits Moses across
the face with a whip, drawing his blood, for no reason at all (ibid.:119). It is worth
pausing to see why she hit him: he asked for water in English. In a passage just a
couple of pages earlier Lessing describes Mary’s fury at the black workers’ con-
versations in the local language she could not understand. Now she hits Moses
for speaking the language she could understand: “Don’t speak English” she says
(ibid.: 119), meaning do not make me hear your pain, your need or your desire.The
gesture of hitting Moses with a whip creates not just a moment of actual physical
pain inflicted on the young man, but also offers a point of reference in terms of
power structures echoing the colonial legacy: given that at the time of the incident
it was already illegal to use a whip in labour relations in Rhodesia, her transgres-
sion is a critical moment in their relationship. She hits him, and his body is hurt.
He does not complain; he contains her anger. He does not respond in violence then
either, although she is afraid he might. But that whip and that hurt are between
them forever.
The asymmetrical power relationship so characteristic of colonial relations is
therefore reversed in the novel. There comes a point where power rests with the
black man and not the white boss, for Moses is the holder of secret knowledge,
one that is often also present in melancholia: he knows the lady of the house,
Mary, is needy and not powerful, just like the master of the house, the utterly
hopeless Dick. He knows Mary wants him and not her husband, and he knows
they tolerate his power silently as if to admit and anticipate an inevitable change
in the political structures of the land. Initially, Moses does not abuse this power,
or rather he uses it to enter into a human relationship with Mary, which we
do know involves touching and perhaps more. Mary is distraught by her own
desire, cannot accept it, even in dreams; Moses is forever the Other, desirable
in a way that is threatening, not ever comforting. In reality Moses tries to help
her and her husband when Dick gets sick. He takes over the care of them both,
including encouraging her to drink more water. He tells her to drink it and then
suggests she lie down. When she fails to move, “He put out his hand reluctantly,
loathe to touch her, the sacrosanct white woman …” (ibid.: 211). Allowing herself
to be touched and “propelled across the room toward the bedroom,” Mary feels
she is living a nightmare “where one is powerless against horror: the touch of
this black man’s hand on her shoulder filled her with nausea; she had never, not
once in her whole life, touched the flesh of a native” (ibid.: 211, my emphasis).
He touches her, things change, bearing in mind Nancy’s and Derrida’s points
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 85

made earlier: the touching changes everything, it always does, which is why it
is frightening.
I venture that what happens in between Mary’s whipping of Moses and
Moses’s killing of Mary is an attempt to communicate – mostly through non-
verbal ­gestures – through touching and possibly through an actual physical intimate
encounter: “possibly” as this is never spelled out. Arguably, it is this humanity of the
black man – his powerful beauty embodied – against her faltering whiteness that is
a contributing factor to her breakdown. She wants him too much to be able to resist
it, but she is not able to “metaphorise” that either. Nobody talks about feelings,
desires and fears: they remain a forbidden topic. Mary realises they must talk – too
late – just before he kills her with a sharp blade, repeating her initial act of violence
against him: with the intimacy “in between” these acts of violence forgotten, as not
underscored by the words, and therefore losing its healing power. In part, Moses
kills because he is jealous – but it is a complete tragic Lacanian “misrecognition”:
in truth he has nothing to be jealous of. The famous passage where Mary wants to
talk to Moses just before he kills her but is still unable to enunciate the words is
painful to read, even more than 65 years after they were written and 35 years after
Zimbabwe’s independence:

She could see his great shoulders, the shape of his head, the glistening of his
eyes. And, at the sight of him, her emotions unexpectedly shifted, to create
in her an extraordinary feeling of guilt, but towards him, to whom she had
been disloyal, and at the bidding of the Englishman. She felt she had only to
move forward, to explain, to appeal, and the terror would be dissolved. (ibid.: 204,
my emphasis)

To my mind, this passage, more than any other, confirms the notion of the inability
to metaphorise (to represent the pain in words) spilling into violence: they can-
not speak, they cannot communicate and so their final touch is a violent embrace.
­Incidentally, the drama of the book is totally internalised, and its translation to
the film would have been very difficult in any event. Michael Raeburn is a white
Zimbabwean now living mostly in Europe attempted it immediately after inde-
pendence; his adaptation of the film (1982) is interesting because of the decisions
he made, filling the gaps by attempting to “flesh out” Moses and “clarify” what goes
on, by writing more lines for him to enunciate. In other words, he tries to give
Moses more of a voice. To my mind this strategy fails completely as it also takes
away that space of the uncanny mystery in which the viewer can herself symbolise
the unrepresentable. Possibly inadvertently, the attempt to resolve the ambiguities
ends up being more patronising to all involved. Mostly though, Raeburn is in no
position to speak on Moses’s behalf: he is a white Zimbabwean man, and however
“nice” and liberal he might be, it can never be his place to write Moses’s lines.
He cannot find his voice for him. The voice has to be found in a different way.
86 Agnieszka Piotrowska

Dambudzo Marechera
What would Moses sound like if he could express himself in Lessing’s novel? It is
of course a provocative question: nonetheless, the quest for the voice in post (de-)
colonial literature has been an overwhelming consideration for scholars as well
as artists. Gayatri Spivak famously framed it in terms of structures and systems in
which the subaltern is allowed to speak (1988). This is not the place to discuss it in
detail, but the systematic restraints notwithstanding, the role and place of an indi-
vidual voice is what is at stake here. One could argue, as I have done, that in part
Lessing’s novel is an example of how a system gags individuals. How then in due
course will the previously gagged individual find a voice with which to express the
anger and trauma of her/his colonial loss and melancholia?
Iconic Zimbabwean writer and poet Dambudzo Marechera was born a couple
of years after The Grass Is Singing was written, and one could argue that his whole
oeuvre was engaged in just that: looking for the voice, finding it, struggling with
its legacy, developing a way of expressing the pain. Some of his important books
were published before Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 and many after
that. He died too young in 1987. In contemporary Zimbabwe, Marechera is not
taught at schools, despite his stature amongst scholars of the post (de-) colonial lite­
rature as well as the youngsters of the country who see him as a symbol of freedom
and radical thinking. He is still considered too dangerous perhaps, too outrageous.
Marechera’s English is difficult, angry, violent, often obscene. It upset Zimbabwean
and international readers alike at the time of publication and still does. However, its
quality is also unassailable. Marechera became the first black author to receive the
prestigious Guardian prize for literature in 1979.
He was, and arguably still is, the most important voice of his generation. I sug-
gest that he fits into the category of Deleuzian “minor literature” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986), in which a writer – coming from a colonised context, like Kafka
in the Deleuzian essay – chooses to write in the language of the coloniser in order
to make it his own and in order to begin to come to terms with multiple traumas.
Marechera spent his short life advocating for the European literary traditions to
be embraced by the African writers, rather then rejected:

From early in my life I have viewed literature as a unique universe that has no
internal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole it by race or language or nation (…)
That Europe had, to say the least, a head start in written literature is an advantage
for the African writer: he does not have to solve many problems of structure –
the have already been solved. (…) The writer is a vampire, drinking blood – his
own blood – a winged creature who flies by night, writing his books.
(Marechera in Veit-Wild [1992] 2004: 366–367)

But he too was painfully aware of the physical non-touching legacy of the colonial
times as well as the issue of which language one was allowed to speak and what
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 87

Figure 5.1 Ery Nzaramba and Sonja Wirhol from a shoot of Flora and Dambudzo
(2014) Dir/Prod A.Piotrowska. DoP. Joe Njagu.

Figure 5.2 Shooting Flora and Dambudzo. Agnieszka Piotrowska and Joe Njagu.
©Agnieszka Piotrowska.
88 Agnieszka Piotrowska

was allowed to be said at all. As discussed, in The Grass Is Singing Moses’s attempts at
speaking to Mary are thwarted by her: his using her language, English, is perceived
as invasive, penetrating. “Don’t speak English,” she says to him repeatedly, which
amounts to telling him not to speak at all.
In Marechera’s work, in the poem below as much as in his prose, the taboo against
speaking English is manifest by its inversion: a veritable cascade of words – poetic and
obscene, slangy and literary – opens the floodgates, but their very force and urgency are
powerful signs of the dam they first had to break. It is interesting here to consider that
Marechera is attempting to overthrow the colonial legacy of “don’t touch!” through
the very means mentioned by Self and Khanna: by violence. It touches the reader too;
you cannot be unmoved by the work. As Marechera is a writer, an artist, this violence
is in his work indeed metaphorical. However, there is evidence that he was violent at
times in his actual life (see Veit-Wild [1992] 2004: 175–176) and his early demise can
be interpreted as being violent towards himself, abusing his body so systematically.
The poem below deals therefore with the familiar colonial prohibition “don’t
touch” and “don’t speak”. It is from Marechera’s unpublished work Choreodrama.
The section Portrait of a Black Artist in London was written in the Africa Centre in
London in the early 1980s and published first in 1992. Marechera’s “metaphorisa-
tion” here is indeed perhaps close to abject – the expulsion of the unbearable – angry
here at the notion of a “distinct culture”, which is somehow ethnic and therefore
researchable outside the simple human norms. We know (Veit-Wild [1992] 2004)
that British author David Caute found the manuscript after the author’s death in
Harare in 1987 and submitted it to Heinemann who turned it down repeatedly for
publication. It was eventually published for the first time in a collection of inter-
views and contributions gathered, collated and edited by German scholar Flora
Veit-Wild in 1992, who also was instrumental in having the work performed in
Harare in 1992 as a performance of poetry, prose and music.11
The encounter with the Other that Marechera refers to here is heavily ­sexualised.
He accuses the colonisers of over sexualising the touching but then he himself
uses sexual metaphors to describe his anger: for example, of nearly ejaculating as a
way of describing the sense of never quite succeeding in the post-colonial world.
He can never feel at home – anywhere. He is always “fucked out of house and
country”. But, despite the despair, or because of it, he writes. He metaphorises: for
us to read, analyse, remember, understand, to be touched by. The words full of rage
have a potential healing power because they are also the holder of the truth enunci-
ated, as Spivak would say, by the subaltern. Marechera demands to be heard as he
ridicules the white colonial ‘don’t touch me’ which he cites once more:

Sure I’m bollocking off like I’m

always being fucked out of house
and country
Christ, don’t touch me.
What the shit, I’m beating a hasty
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 89

retreat like I’ve always done in

your fucking history
I’m always going off somewhere but
you pigs always make sure I never
arrive
I’m always on the point of
ejaculation but you fucking bitch
of a country just fall dead asleep
snoring
You talk of culture that I come
from you know I got a distinct
culture and know too
But I don’t want to know
You say I’ve got it this authentic
ethnic balls
But you don’t give much room you
define it so small I can’t get
in. …

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a close reading of the text above.
The poem’s extraordinary power lies in the attempt at naming both the very fear of
the Other (a white coloniser’s offensive assumption regarding the black people) and the
rage of the poet who tries and fails to get through the polite consciousness of the
white European culture. The poem’s phraseology and imagined iconography is deeply
­offensive – he calls Britain ‘you fucking bitch of a country’ for example which can be
seen as a desperate gesture and an attempt to reclaim some kind of control over the way
the sublatern never “arrives” anywhere – another sexualised image. Marechera’s work in
its entirety is characterised by its violent and evocative imagery and expression of rage,
which bursts out in the language of the coloniser, to touch the readers and change them.

Flora Veit-Wild and concluding remarks

I have tried in this chapter to present some ideas regarding touching and the voice
in the colonial and post-colonial encounter, looking in particular at the relationship
between Mary and Moses in Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and Dambudzo ­Marechera’s
poetry. I have suggested that the work’s fictional nature can perhaps teach us more
than any factual accounts of the pain and despair surrounding the near prohibition of
any human communications between the colonisers and the colonised.
There is perhaps something else worth adding here: Prof. Flora Veit-Wild was a
friend of Marechera in the early 1980s in Harare and went on to become his major
academic advocate throughout the 1990s, editing his work and organising inter-
national conventions to promote it in her capacity as the full professor of African
Literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Only a couple of years ago she
90 Agnieszka Piotrowska

revealed the fact that she and Marechera were more than friends: they were lovers
for a time in early 1980s in Harare and friends forever (Veit-Wild 2012). She was
the only person by his bedside when he was dying in 1987. Veit-Wild then went
on to do her doctorate and proceeded to publish work on Marechara’s novels and
poetry, including the Sourcebook ([1992] 2004), which has become the invaluable
resource for any scholar researching the poet.
In her personal essay of 2012 she states:

While I have generally come to be known as “The Marechera Authority”,

there have always been two narrative strands behind this persona: the public
and the private. While the public one has stood out as strong and clear, my
private life has been interlaced with love and passion, loss and pain, with ill-
ness and the threat of death. Yet, what I have gained is so much more than
what I have endured that I am filled with gratitude and, I might add, with
laughter. My personal involvement with Dambudzo Marechera has affected
my professional life in a way I would never have expected. The many ironic
twists, the tricks that Dambudzo played on me even posthumously, make our
story an immensely rich and funny one, one that I now, more than twenty-
five years after I came to know him, want to tell. (1)

Why did she reveal the intimate nature of their relationship, which after all she had
kept secret for more than 25 years? When I asked her in person and by email in
2014 and in person in 2015, she said simply “it was the right thing to do”.
To my mind, there is something quietly beautiful and bold in her gesture of
reclaiming the secret passion that she had for this iconic Zimbabwean writer, one
of the first clear voices of the post-Independence period. The relationship was very
complex, according to Veit-Wild’s writings, and the challenges of dealing with the
(post) colonial legacy ever present in their very intimate relationship. There was
an illicit element to her romance as she was married at the time. Her revelations
aroused incredulity on the one hand amongst the academic community and a sense
of disapproval on the other amongst the Zimbabwean community, whom I inter-
viewed in early 2014 and 2015. And yet it was very clear to me why Flora Veit-Wild
was disclosing the romance, perhaps to her own detriment as a scholar, as academics
are meant to be objective, detached, fair handed, rather than passionate and emo-
tionally and physically involved with the subjects of their research.
In some ways, for me Veit-Wild’s announcement at last redeems the tragedy of
Mary Turner and Moses, which in Lessing’s book had to remain partially secret and
unexplained to the public: a forbidden mystery, as the truth would have been impos-
sible to accept by the general public, and too subversive. It is here that the notions
of trans-generational loss and trauma, which translate themselves into challenges in
everyday private relationships, could be considered again. Emma Wilson in her book,
Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012), which I referred to above, draws from
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 91

the seminal work of Barthes (1980 and 2002) but takes it elsewhere, towards the
notion of touching and the notion of the language of mourning. She writes about
artists, photographers and filmmakers who have created works involving words and
images, still and moving, of their loved ones as a kind of “amorous relation to the
dead. Art is imagined here as a form of pain management, offering the living a
mode of absorption and distraction” (2012: 3).Wilson sees the process of creating as
an attempt at an embodied encounter with the dead: a form of touching, if you like.
More, she calls the endeavour “palliative care”, which she proceeds to define as fol-
lows:“there is a wish to create a living relation to the dead one in memory work and
commemorative acts” (ibid.: 11). For a writer, the process of writing is not dissimilar
to that. The embodied encounter – the touching of the lost ones through the writ-
ing and through images, through a metaphorisation of the pain, through a profound
re-narrating of the loss – is perhaps what both Lessing and Marechera were doing:
in their different ways reclaiming the unrepresentable pain of the absence in the
colonial encounter. It is also perhaps what Veit-Wild is doing, and perhaps in the
de-colonial context, which is not just about systems but about personal pain, her
bold statement is particularly important.
Wilson in her interrogation invites us to embrace an occasional need to make
grief public and, through doing it, she invites us to be touched by the work.Wilson
herself embraces the challenge: “I am opened up to what I cannot ever touch or
hold. I am anxious about the act of looking, its violence, and its desire. I am led
to imagine a longing for connection, a wish to touch, and to be held in return”
(ibid.:141, my emphasis). It is that loss of an ordinary human interaction with
which perhaps inter-race relationships are still coming to terms in Zimbabwe and
elsewhere; it is that sadness and that longing, to my mind, that are being expressed
in both Doris Lessing’s and Dambudzo Marechera’s work.
In addition, I wonder whether Flora Veit-Wild has agreed to my making a fic-
tion film of her relationship with Marechera in order to try and hold onto his
presence and their passion a little longer. As previously mentioned, Lacan says truth
has always a structure of fiction, in the clinic and elsewhere; the pain is never rep-
resentable in language but telling and writing stories and making films might help
us get closer to metaphorising that pain and eventually to working through the loss.

Notes
1 Derrida focuses on Blanchot’s story “The Instant of My Death” in which he recounts
in a fictionalised way a moment when he was almost shot by a firing squad. Derrida
said he had been talking about it for decades before writing the short story.
2 The details of his complex childhood can be found, for example, in Benoit Peeters’s
biography of the philosopher entitled Derrida (2012).
3 Here “la pédagogie”could be perhaps more elegantly translated as “education” or
“scholarship” rather than “pedagogy”.
4 I have used her concept extensively in my article (Piotrowska 2014a).
5 See Muzondidya (2005: 202) and the section on interracial marriages in Wang
(2009: 206).
92 Agnieszka Piotrowska

6 For cases of touching and healing see, for example, Zinter (2007).
7 See a discussion of the touch also in Stibbe (2011).
8 Azzedine Haddour, for example, in a talk given at UCL on 19th September 2015
during a seminar on Frantz Fanon took vociferous issue with Khanna’s linking post-
colonial violence to the issue of trying to find a voice. The talk has not yet been
published.
9 For further discussion of whiteness as a signifier of dominance it is worth consulting
Richard Dyer’s classic White.
10 I have offered a thorough discussion of the Lacanian notion of “not giving up on one’s
desire” in my article (2014b) on Zero Dark Thirty (2012). That desire of course has
nothing whatever to do with conscious wanting of material or other things; it is rather
an unconscious element of our structure that makes us who we are and the denial of
which constitutes a betrayal of a fundamental sense of the self.
11 This detail was confirmed by Veit-Wild in private correspondence on 20th December
2015.

References
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Trans. T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. Trans. R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, R. (2002) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. R. Howard. London:Vintage.
Blanchot, M. and Derrida, J. (2000) The Instant of My Death. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.
Trans. E. Rottenberg. Paolo Alto: Stanford UP.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:Verso.
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. D. Polan.
­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1988 [1985]) The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans.
P. Kamuf and A. Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, J. (2001) Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London & New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (2002 [1967]). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
Derrida, J. (2005 [2000]) On Touching. Jean-Luc Nancy.Trans. C. Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002) Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. J. Bajre.
London: Wiley.
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Furlong, P. (1983) The Mixed Marriages Act: An Historical and Theological Study. Cape Town:
Centre for African Studies.
Ibrahim, H. (1990) The Violated Universe: Neo-Colonial Sexual and Political Consciousness
in Dambudzo Marechera. Research in African Literatures 21(2): 79–90.
Khanna, R. (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke UP.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP.
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits. Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton.
Lessing, D. (2013 [1950]) The Grass Is Singing. London: HarperCollins.
Marechera, D. (2004 [1992]) The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature.
In F. Veit-Wild (ed.) Dambuzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work. London:
Africa World Press.
McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather. London: Routledge.
 On touching and speaking in (post) (de) colonial discourse 93

Muzondidya, J. (2005) Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community
of Zimbabwe. New York: Africa World Press.
Nancy, J. L. (2008) Corpus. New York: Fordham UP.
Peeters, B. (2012) Derrida. London and New York: Polity.
Piotrowska, A. (2014a) Mourning and Melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the
Arts. The Journal of African Media Studies 6(1): 111–30.
Piotrowska, A. (2014b) Zero Dark Thirty – ‘War Autism’ or a Lacanian Ethical Act? New
Review of Film and Television Studies 12(2): 143–55.
Roberts, S. (1993) Sites of Paranoia and Taboo: Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and Lessing’s
July’s People. Research in African Literatures 24(3): 73–85.
Said, E. W. (2006 [1978]) Orientalism. New York:Vintage Books.
Scully, P. (1995) Rape, Race, and the Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the
Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa. The American Historical Review 100(2):
335–59.
Self,W. (2015) A Point of View: Does Technology Make People Touch Each Other Less? Avai­
lable from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31026410. [Accessed 15 ­September
2015].
Spivak, G. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture. Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Stibbe, M. (2011) One Touch from the King Changes Everything. Milton Keynes: Authentic
Media.
Stoler, A. (2000) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Berkeley: U of California P.
Straker, G. (2013) Unsettling Whiteness. In G. Sevens, N. Duncan and D. Hook (eds.) Race,
Memory and the Apartheid Archive. London: Palgrave.
Veit-Wild, F. (ed.) (2004 [1992]) Dambuzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work.
London: Africa World Press.
Veit-Wild, F. (2012) Me and Dambudzo. Wasafiri 27(1): 1–7.
Wang. J. (2009) White Postcolonial Guilt in Doris Lessing’s “The Grass Is Singing.” Research
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Filmography
The Grass Is Singing (1982) Directed by Michael Raeburn. Zambia/Sweden: Chibote/SFI.
6
Pointing at the other

Goran Vranešević

If we are content with simple beginnings, this chapter could be summarized with
the question: why are people inclined to point with their finger? It seems a mar-
ginal topic where we could easily be content with a simple description of exter-
nal features (movement of hand, outstretched finger) and/or inner motivations.
However, the gesture of pointing is also pervaded by a certain discrepancy, where
it seems that the above question doesn’t sufficiently articulate the problem. The
intended meaning of pointing is framed by the overlapping of language and body.
It could be interpreted as neither one nor the other, but something that emerges
in the junction of both, in the movement from one to the other. The focus will
therefore lie in establishing an overview of this peculiar habit and in unravelling
its basic characteristics, but let’s begin with a detour: a commentary on a classical
work of art.
Commissioned as a fresco sequence on the public part of the Vatican apart-
ments, Raphael’s Scuola di Atene is considered, together with Michelangelo’s fresco
La creazione dell’uomo in the Sistine Chapel, as the pinnacle of the Renaissance era.
And perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that both are designed around a certain gesture
of habit.The center of the first fresco (its vanishing point) is conveniently occupied
by two prominent central figures of ancient philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, who are
commonly associated with two opposing modes of knowledge. Both are embodied
in their gestures: one pointing at the sky’s limitlessness and the other pointing at
the physicality of presentness. We are thus confronted with a split in knowledge:
a fissure between ideas (ἰδέα) where our heads can quickly get entangled in clouds
of error and thus miss the truth of heaven and potentialities (entelécheia) of logic
that are ultimately structured as dirty empirical jokes to be repeated by whoever
coincidentally stumbles upon them.
 Pointing at the other 95

This is the standard approach to interpreting the painting, but there is also a
more interesting perspective, a slight speculative refocus of the theme. While the
emphasis is usually on the meaning that permeates the gestures, a more formal look
at the image reveals that Aristotle is pointing towards the ground, while Plato is
pointing at the pointing gesture itself. But why is there a need for such an elabo-
rate explanation? Wouldn’t a simpler approach produce the same, or at least similar,
results? Lacan articulated one part of the answer with his bon mots through which
he formulated his fundamental theoretical insights. In one such moment, he delibe­
rated on the question of what does one think with and adamantly maintained that
“thinking is above all a thing of the feet” (Roudinesco 1999: 489), as they are the
only point to touch the ground. Contrary to common sense, it is not an easy feat or
a natural endeavor, if one is ready to conceive it as the “locus of both thought and
touch” (Dolar 2008: 79). The idea behind Aristotle’s downwardly directed hand is
thus based on the difference created by touching: a topic that has been scrupulously
interpreted by Mladen Dolar.1 Meanwhile, the act of pointing itself, utilized spe-
cifically by Plato, remains mostly obscured.
There are ways of showing or elaborating on things: by description, thinking,
using sense, or in some cases, by pointing. While the goal is to make the object of
interest tangible, the natural inclination is to view these approaches as interchange-
able. Although the act of pointing is present in every society, it is nevertheless the
least conventionalized means of communication. It is incidentally also treated as a
simple task with immediate implications: namely, highlighting the desired subject
matter. However, its inherent aporias tell another story. Even though it requires a
minimum of understanding, it is a highly complex operation. It is “dialogic, since it
is used for someone else’s interest; it serves to single out an entity which the recipi-
ent understands to be the referent; and it defines the direction of the referent as
being away from the pointing hand, along an axis defined by it” (Tallis 2010: 17).
Furthermore, it is inseparable from its social function. If we follow certain universal
manners, then we shouldn’t directly point at the matter at hand or even translate
it into discursive signs. Simply put, it is not polite to point, as the pointed finger
accuses the person of being guilty of something, if nothing else of being the right
person. In this sense, there appears to be a clear transition from intention or moti-
vation to the object of interest. The conclusion would therefore be that, unlike in
speech, nothing is lost while pointing. And so, the simplest approach would then
be to identify (with) the scope of Cratylian theory of communication and reject
the idea that words are always in flux and thus unable to sufficiently render their
intended meaning. We will proceed differently.
Our analysis will remain attached to the initially illustrated disjunction embed-
ded into philosophy. If there is an inner junction between thought and touch, what
does the pointing finger represent? And more significantly, what does one have in
common with the other? A distance is present in both, so they are clearly related.
If touching is something clearly tangible as a sensible experience that is even too
96 Goran Vranešević

near to us, pointing is immanently ostensible, unable clearly to grasp its object of
interest. It is something infinitely distant and evades any palpable sense, even though
it functions as one. It seems that a touch cannot miss, while the pointing gesture
has to take a chance. But on the other hand, touching is a very delicate procedure,
which can hardly be said about pointing.You can point at a general direction, and
its meaning will nevertheless be clear by the context. Undoubtedly, there is an
unexpected coincidence between touching and pointing, as if one triggers a reac-
tion in the other and vice versa. However, it is not clear how this is possible.
Even if we are touching a surface with our finger, let’s say our forehead, we are
still performing a pointing gesture. It is in this sense that they are coupled, but also
furthest apart. While touching makes an incision into the symbolic and then takes
the same tools and stitches it together, pointing does the exact opposite.The move-
ment highlights the subject’s self-referentially—a recognition of oneself—whilst
simultaneously exposing its nothingness. In this sense it is no surprise that touch
was used as a magic proxy in analytical practice by Freud.2 In the moments when
words fail, touch produces a supplementary cure in analysis. With pointing, things
are turned upside down. The subject foresees the impossibility of solely articulating
a situation and uses the finger to separate itself from its closeness. But thereby it
also produces an attachment that is symbolically registered as an empty space. This
is why the pointing gesture (as a silent act) is always accompanied by words. It is a
sort of double fixation: first on the lack of essence and then to the singularity of the
situation that is pointed out. And contrary to what it seems, our pointed finger at
the Other points to something in us.The connection between the two will be dealt
with in greater detail later on, but the general idea is that pointing is an imaginary
function that leaves a trace of the link between language and body. The cut-off
finger in von Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein testifies to this. Tossed into the midst
of two families gathered around the murdered bodies, it functioned as a clue to hid-
den entanglements. Our task will hence be quite straightforward: to show the inner
tension that permeates the gesture of pointing, analyze the limits of language and
body, and expound its relation to the Other.

A remark
So far, the argumentation is in line with one of Hegel’s rarely mentioned insights,
which is incidentally his basic discursive strategy: to begin in an inappropriate
manner, not with the “thing itself ” or methodological background but a remark.
As such, it is not an aimless act as it leaves a mark behind, a trace indicating significa-
tion and with it the question: what kind of signification? All respective attempts to
capture the truth behind such endeavors change the latter, as it is not separated from
knowledge. We could linger on the implications of this prescription, but it is para-
doxically also a prerequisite for establishing a systematic insight into the thematic
field of pointing. And isn’t the pointed finger in the last instance just that, a remark?
 Pointing at the other 97

A few centuries ago, the Pope issued a Papal Bull announcing that the Jews had
to convert or be expelled from Rome. Because of a huge outcry from the Jewish
community, the Pope called in the chosen representative of the Jews, Rabbi Moshe,
but was beforehand warned that he didn’t speak Latin, while the Pope didn’t speak
Yiddish. As a solution, the Pope decided to communicate with the Rabbi by ges-
tures. When the latter came into his chamber, the Pope showed three fingers. The
Rabbi responded by pointing up to the ceiling with his middle finger. The Pope
looked back and made a circle in the air. Rabbi Moshe pointed to the ground
where he sat. The Pope then brought out communion water and a chalice of wine.
So Rabbi Moshe pulled out an apple. As a result of this interchange, the Pope tore
up the Papal Bull and permitted the Jews to stay. Later that day, the Cardinals met
with the Pope asking what had happened. The Pope said, “First I held up three
fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up one finger to remind
me that there is still only one God common to both our beliefs. Then, I waved
my finger to show him that God was all around us. He responded by pointing to
the ground to show that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the wine
and water to show that God absolves us of all our sins. He pulled out an apple to
remind me of the original sin. As a result of this, I tore up the bull.” Meanwhile the
Jewish community was gathered around Rabbi Moshe. “How did you convince the
Pope to let us be?” they asked. Moshe explained: “First he said to me that we had
three days to get out of Rome, so I said to him, “up yours!” Then he tells me that
the whole country would be cleared of Jews and I said to him, “we’re staying right
here.” “And then what,” asked a woman. “And then” said Moshe, “He took out his
lunch so I took out mine.” There are numerous variations to this joke, but what
they all have in common is a general misunderstanding, and a joke is clearly a fit-
ting solution to this unsolvable problem as it renders visible that there is something
inherently uncertain in the act of pointing. Even if the interaction in the joke seems
straightforward, the outcome couldn’t be resolved by means of rational debate, but
rather with the joke’s “surplus-sense that was produced from that very failure or
nonsense” (Zupančič 2008: 119). So, it was saved by a slightly different approach:
by an insight that even a carefully gestured point points the wrong way, although
producing an excess of content.
A joke is thus a perfect transitional point for expounding the cunningness of the
gesture of pointing.3 It does its work without effort, as a sort of automated genera-
tion of speech that is perturbed by a surprise pleasure when a symbolic signifier
(spirit, thought, idea) suddenly emerges and retroactively rearranges the meaning
of the situation at hand. When we point at an accused person in an argument, we
immediately feel the impact of the act. Not by validating some arbitrary presuppo-
sitions but in the uneasiness, joy, or anxiety of the person who is pointed at.4 It’s as
if the finger is directing our attention elsewhere, away from the (accompanying)
rational narrative of the situation. The question is, where are we supposed to look
for its meaning?
98 Goran Vranešević

The pointing act functions by materializing an image out of nothing; this is

why it is interwoven with a kind of spectrality. There is nothing to see but the
gaze itself. There is nothing to hear but the words uttered with the pointing. But
it nevertheless produces a satisfactory outcome. Still, it is not clear why this extra
layer of symbolization persists in everyday relations? Pointing could be easily
reduced to a medium with which it is unambiguously possible to present the
object of knowledge or desire, but we will try to outline a certain impasse in its
realization. In the same manner as a joke short-circuiting two mutually exclud-
ing realities, pointing discloses the distortion between the trauma of being and
the nothingness of signification, an expression of the relationship between body
and language.
While Freud does not elaborate a theory on pointing, there are certain clues
present in his work that could give us an idea how to think this form of declaration.
In Aus der Geschichte einer Infantilen Neurose (1918), he mentions two events, one
fleetingly and the other more precisely.
The first example is the Wolfman’s hallucination of the cut finger (see Freud
1966), which was accompanied not by pain, but with a sense of castration anxiety.
The finger, a sort of enabler of touch, was mutilated, castrated, disabled, and unable
to execute its function of inserting a cut into the social fabric. Because “the touch
as cut is what defines the social, and hence the properly human dimension” (Dolar
2008: 90), such an act doesn’t just present an inscription of the modern impasse, the
impossibility of touch into the flesh (don’t touch), but also a facet of pointing (don’t
point). It is a curious case, where even Lacan remains reluctant while interpreting it.
In short, the whole scenario is predicated on a rejection of access to castration and
therefore the access to the symbolic order: an act which is based not on a radical
foreclosure but rather on the excess of signifiers that were not incorporated into
the meaning of speech. Even though the surplus is usually interpreted as that which
“is refused in the symbolic order [and] re-emerges in the real” (Lacan 1993: 13) or
through a psychotic frame, this was not the case here as the “hallucination was the
perception of the traumatic representation of castration as real” (Vergote 2003: 71).
In this sense we could say that certain degraded symbolic leftovers become the pri-
mary fixating points that cannot be uttered, and this is also the reason the ­Wolfman
was unable to recount this episode in speech. The aim was thus to establish some
certainty. The proposition “what can be shown, cannot be said” (Wittgenstein
2001: 31) should therefore be slightly reformulated: that which cannot be said, can
be shown. In this manner, we are operating with immediacy where we are caught
in the here and now, where the positive moment of nowness (or hereness) is always-
already negated with its disappearance. A (pristine) certainty is therefore irreversibly
lost, but as such it produces the condition of possibility of speech. Such a detour
through a seemingly psychotic landscape was needed to highlight how the inhibi-
tion of the finger, a failure to touch but also to point, unveils its embeddedness into
the symbolic field.
 Pointing at the other 99

Then there is also a more explicit example of pointing present in the ­aforementioned
text. In the course of therapy, the Wolfman recalled a forgotten dream:

He saw himself riding on a horse and pursued by a gigantic caterpillar.

He recognized in this dream an allusion to an earlier one (…) In this earlier
dream he saw the Devil dressed in black and in the upright posture with
which the wolf and the lion had terrified him so much in their day. He was
pointing with his out-stretched finger at a gigantic snail. The patient had
soon guessed that this Devil was the Demon out of a well-known poem, and
that the dream itself was a version of a very popular picture representing the
Demon in a love-scene with a girl.
(Freud 1966: 101)

Freud’s own interpretation of the dream is exactly what one can expect from him.
While the snail is presented as a symbol of female genitals, the demon’s finger points
to the last missing piece of the puzzle, which is sexuality. It is an intriguing approach,
but the analysis will follow a different lead. I will inquire into the vagueness of the
patient’s explanation of his dreams that is left behind by Freud. He doesn’t bother
to explain the role of the central figure, the demon, who is in literature usually
appropriated as a foreign body inherent to self-awareness. In pointing at the snail,
the demonic finger not only expounds an inner kernel of the symbolic sphere, but
also produces a disruptive effect in the symbolic, or rather bends it. The demon is
also an intermediary between dreams and reality, the middleman that holds together
the universality of the dreamland and the materiality of the picture. And following
Freud’s phrase that interpretation of dreams (or a deviation) is the royal road to
knowledge about the unconscious (1961),5 which is by Lacan’s account structured
like language, the out-stretched finger is thus clearly pointing to an impasse in the
discursive universe (between being and nothingness).

Why must we talk while pointing?

There are no predefined situations that would encapsulate a meaningful codex of
pointing.This is, in one form or another, evident in Hollywood films.They contain
a curious imperative of self-censorship in regard to the suitability of issues such as
sexual content, violence, substance abuse, and naturally, language (profanity, impu-
dence, or other types of mature content). However, there is a gesture that is notice-
ably absent or just habitually overlooked from such lists, namely, the act of pointing.
There is a long-lasting silent pact, which is a reflection of social preconditioning,
to remove such acts from the film medium, not through unconditional suppression
but by delimiting its role to certain genres and situations.6 For this reason, it is only
in the context of peril, danger, comedy, and exceptional situations, such as moments
of demonstrating love or when a witness is obliged to point to the defendant in
100 Goran Vranešević

courtroom that the gesture appears. One could even argue that it is the camera itself
that assumes the function of pointing. Such considerations lead us to the impres-
sion that there is a correct use of the pointing motion, usually permissible in strictly
defined situations or uncanny scenarios.
It might seem that this is merely a dilemma of costumes. For example, Filipino
tradition explicitly uses another medium: instead of pointing the forefinger to an
object, one will shift his or her eyes towards the intended object, or “purse the lips
and point with the mouth” (Morrison and Conaway 2006: 388). But the problem
itself appears to lie elsewhere. In the fact that these acts cannot be articulated or
reproduced by means of language, yet are nonetheless symbolically (linguistically)
structured.7 At the same time, it seems clear that the circumstances become compli­
cated at the moment when we arbitrarily point at someone or thing, as a direct
engagement with the sensual world clearly misses the point because there is a need
to further articulate the intended purpose. Pointing is inadequate. That is why it
appears one is always inclined to speak when pointing at something.
So, even if the medium of pointing is non-lingual, it is structured like language,
as it always misses a pure desired outcome. The topic of pointing is thus inherently
linked to language.8 Or, to go a step further, as Lacan liked to put it, “the very foun-
dation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding” (1993: 163). Even a casual talk
is never just a straight conversation, there is also the presence of the Other. That is
to say, just like in dreams, we produce something that wasn’t intended.
When using language we are not aware of the impact of our own words, and
pointing similarly raises the question: what does it actually produce? In the vein of
Heinrich von Kleist’s reformulation of the French saying,“appetite comes while one
eats (l’appétit vient en mangeant)”, which he parodies and says, that “an idea emerges
as one speaks (l’idee vient en parlant)” (see 1986), we could similarly say that speech
is produced when one points. Being structured like language, this bodily movement
also involves linguistic operations such as metaphor, which interrupts, suspends, or
even cuts the consistency of the world, and metonymy where the meaning is end-
lessly postponed in the next signifier.9 In both cases, we create an irreparable split
between the imaginary experience and the field of inter-subjective symbolic net-
work. Consequently, we have to ask ourselves what is then the specific function of
pointing, if it is not capturing the reality itself? Where does it inscribe itself ?

The pointed other

A long-lasting series of studies by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology has proven that the act of pointing is (un)surprisingly an inher-
ent human characteristic while its meaning remains vague. Infants use such a
gesture to refer to various space-time categories and practices (future, past, pre-
sent, absent, etc.). They are able to grasp the relevance of complex gestural mean-
ings and in such manner constitute a shared experience of the world with other
 Pointing at the other 101

subjects. In contrast, primates are fixated solely on the gaze, tracking where another
­individual is looking; they are incapable of performing pointing gestures, although
they have the ability or physical flexibility to perform the gesture (Tomasello 2006:
506–524). Whereas a primate can “discern simple signalization of the location of
objects, thus, partaking in an imaginary construction of the image” (Lacan 2005:
19–20), human communication is subjected to the symbolic dimension. While the
role of language is unique to homo sapiens’ construction of the world, the need
for it to be complemented by pointing is puzzling. Even if we envision pointing
in its simplified mode that precedes the practice of formed language constructions,
its existence is possible only through language. It has to be thought of as immersed
in this symbolic edifice. Children are born into a preformed linguistic universe,
which is in psychoanalysis commonly referred to as the big Other. The essence of
the latter can be deduced from the very end of Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined
Letter”, where he famously declared that “a letter always arrives at its destination”
(2005: 30). It is necessary to bear in mind that true addressees are never flesh-and-
blood others, but the Other, the symbolic order itself. “The moment the sender
‘externalizes’ his message, delivers it to the Other, is the moment the Other takes
cognizance of the letter and thus disburdens the sender of responsibility for it”
(Žižek 2007: 10). One could argue that the act of pointing is no exception, as it is
embedded into the same logic.
We can elaborate the Other’s willingness to be pointed at more precisely if we
delineate its dual nature. First, the functioning of the Other is paramount to the
subject but cannot be directly interacted with. Strictly speaking, the Other is not
another name for the symbolic order as it is upholding this very realm, functioning
as the guarantor of signification: a necessary supposition without which the sub-
ject would fade away. As such, it produces effects even if we don’t judge ourselves
against it and ignore it. It inconspicuously lingers in the background and constantly
addresses our inner kernel of being, never leaving us be. Consequently, the subject
seems to be lost to the necessity of predetermined and all-encompassing network of
rules, costumes, and habits, which permanently presuppose a meaning. In this way,
it affects or even dictates our every movement and speech, operating as a Godly
ventriloquist, simultaneously compelling us to disavow it.
Yet the Other is nothing more than a presupposition, a fiction working only
insofar as individuals believe in it and therefore functions according to pre-­
established practices. Irrespective of its ubiquity, we as speaking beings are bound to
the appearance of its non-existence. Hence Lacan’s guide to understanding its anti-
nomical role: L’Autre manque or the Other does not exist, though it still functions.
Even though its omnipotence is real, it is a broken one. But, and this is essential, this
flaw is in the last instance the structural principle of the Other. In failing, it reveals
a gap, a dwelling of the unconsciousness, which is where the structure slips. It is also
the place where desire is born (see Lacan 2005: 287).There is a convenient example
concerning the oblique nature of these concepts.
102 Goran Vranešević

In one of the most famous propaganda posters from the early twentieth century,
the image of Uncle Sam addressed the passers-by and demands they must uncon-
ditionally respond to the call: “Your country needs YOU”. This message is intensi-
fied with his extended pointed finger. Observers being addressed by the poster,
regardless of their will and/or intention, are enchained by its signification, while the
pointing gesture misses them. If everything is already present in the slogan, why is it
then necessary to add the image of pointing? Even though the attempt to capture
the positive patriotism of the masses fails, it does not lead into its opposite state of
treachery, but into the sublation of the immediate “here and now” through n ­ egation
and thus returns to the starting position that no longer has the same character as in
the beginning. What initially expresses the spirit of the time (“Your country needs
YOU”) exposes in the next moment its perverse side (“I Want YOU”). “We can see
that the demand is actually based on a desire, while its truth articulates itself in the
very distortions of the ‘factual accuracy’ of my speech” (Žižek 1997: 148).
It may seem that such a maneuver is meant to signal an idea that the subject
is merely an afterthought of a symbolic process: a view mostly associated with
Althusser’s concept of interpellation introduced in his essay “Ideology and Ideo­
logical State Apparatuses” (2001). Simplified to the utmost, the theory presup-
poses an interaction between an individual and a subject who embodies the social
injunctions of the Other. The sole purpose of the latter is to address the individual
with a simple “Hey you”. By answering or turning around, the individual acknow­
ledges this call. Knowing its meaning, he or she recognizes him/herself as a subject
(“It is I”). This is only possible because the subjectivity was always-already present
in the symbolic. The subject’s emergence is thus preceded by a structural necessity
that substantiates it, a process of which the subject is not aware.
There is also another reading, closer to the topic of pointing. In his eleventh
seminar, Lacan introduces the well-known parable of the dream of a butterfly
(1977: 76). In it, the ancient Chinese skeptic Choang-tsu poses the question of
how, after waking from a dream of being a butterfly, he can’t tell whether he is
Choang-tsu who has woken from the dream of being a butterfly or the butterfly
now dreaming he is Choang-tsu. Althusser’s model solves this riddle by essentially
assuming that there must be a material background in which we believe. This is
paradoxically achieved by repetitive praxis and not true inner belief: “Kneel down
and you will believe!” (cf. Pascal 1958: 250).
The solution to the aforementioned quandary of self-recognition is therefore
supposed to be entailed in a gesture of subjectivization. Yet, there is something
amiss here. As already elaborated, the subject presupposes that it has to respond
and recognize itself with the calling. What is missing is that the subject must first
assume the Other’s existence. In doing so, the formal gesture of belief is not merely
directed at a pre-established medium but is a gesture that enables the emergence
of the Other. It is such a supposition to which the subject addresses his discourse.
While the subject gains a certain independence from recognition, he or she
 Pointing at the other 103

posits an existence anterior to him/herself, which is lost but also never existed.
­Consequently, self-identity is never fulfilled, always lacking its being. Something
can fail in the mechanism of interpellation and in this way incapacitates the sub-
ject’s ability to be whole.
The failure of the subject to accept unquestioningly the Other’s call by sur-
rendering his/her own being points to a blind spot in signification or meaning.
While such a conceptualization irreversibly leads to the loss of self-sufficiency, psy-
choanalysis inversely embraces the tradition of the cogito but not without due
consideration. In psychoanalysis, the issue of subjectivity is not tied to the question
of (mis)recognition (or the philosophical consciousness) that is inherently a product
of the Imaginary dimension. Undeniably such an approach to subjective genesis
has its merit, but it is rather Lacan’s insistence on the symptomatic point of non-­
recognition—the declaration “this is not me”, as an integral part of ­subjectivity—
which is relevant for understanding the act of pointing. The moment we recognize
ourselves as the addressees of the call of the ideological Other (state, religion,
nation, money, and so forth), when this call “arrives at its destination” in our inner
being, we spontaneously misrecognize the fact that it is only in the act of recog-
nition that we become that as which we have recognized ourselves. It is essential
to keep in mind that one doesn’t recognize oneself in the call because one is its
addressee, one becomes its addressee the moment one recognizes oneself in it. This
is also the reason a letter always reaches its destination: “because one becomes its
addressee when one is reached” (Žižek 2007: 12). It is in this context that we have
to read the pointing gesture. By pointing we do not just address the Other, because
the Other also addresses us. It is the one pointing and thereby binding the sender
to follow. The letter was not alone; it was accompanied by a slip, a slip of the finger.

A slip of the finger

So far, I have formulated different aspects of the pointing maneuver. However, it is
only now that I come to the crux of the matter. The nearest proxy for expound-
ing the inner mechanism of the relationship between the pointed finger and the
Other is Freud’s case of the Fortsein game in Jenseits des Lustprinzip (1968). In the
standard reading of the game, the thrown object (spool)—which is retrieved by a
thread—is supposed to simplify the trauma of the mother’s absence and reappear-
ance. The anxiety of the disappearance is thereby corrected or sublated. Such a
reading contains seeds of truth, but the real problem revolves around the cause of
desire,10 the thing that the mother desires in him: as such it is a piece of external-
ity in the subject that ties him to the m(Other), more commonly labeled as object.
The structure of the game is subverted; it is a method by which the subject escapes
the suffocating confines of the mother’s jouissance. In a way, the child stages his own
disappearing act. By throwing the object, the child constructs a pathway to his own
desire. “The thrown spool belongs neither to the mother nor to the child (…) it is
104 Goran Vranešević

an intersection of the two sets” (Žižek 2003: 59) but something more as the sum
of both. In short, the demand to circumvent the mother’s desire is not realized as a
successful separation but as a surplus in the form of a speech act (Fort! Da! ).
Reading this great cultural achievement in terms of pointing, the logic appears
to coincide. Isn’t the outstretched finger just a re-enactment of this game of sub-
jectivity? In throwing the spool, the child is working out the impasse of his being.
He resolves it only through a bypass: with an externalization and a return to himself
(identification) effectuated as “its own straying away from itself ” (Dolar 2013: 230).
The spool represents, or rather functions, as a sort of a prerequisite of the child’s
symbolic world, by evoking the difference of his being. In a similar sense, the finger
pointing maneuver reiterates this act of alienation in the realm of the Other.
By reaching out into the world, one doesn’t just encapsulate a piece of reality
but rather brings to light a lapse in causality (in one’s own being). The extended
finger fails to grasp directly the intended object, as it impossible to make an explicit
correlation between the intention, the pointing move, and the desired object itself
located in the certainty of the tactile and visual field. Something slips in the process,
but it nevertheless evokes the Other. This slight touch—which is archived in the
form of condensation and displacement and is incidentally the ground whereon
dreams operate—incurves the Other and touches upon a basic insight.
One could easily argue that the pointed finger just coincidentally slips and
touches upon an impasse. Rather, the gesture itself is the slip. We view the pointed
finger as a mechanism for a simplified interpretation of circumstances, while in
fact the procedure is plagued by a self-induced imbroglio. As such, it is of the same
fabric as the demon from the Wolfman’s dream, unhinging the symbolic edifice
and thus bending the realm of reality. In a way it could also be said that there is a
speculative dimension present: the pointing finger is a slip that enables the subject
to peek behind the curtain of its own subjectivity, where it can behold its own lack
and the Other’s desire, foreign to its user. Hence, one has to compensate and repeat
the intention with speech, respond and recognize oneself and thereby construct a
fantasy: the truth of the Other.
This is something that demonstrates very well the ambiguity of the Other. It is
simultaneously the bearer of existence and its reaper. However, the problem is not
the existence of the Other but our own existence. And pointing is practically a
repe­tition of this impasse which produces jouissance.11 In pointing, the finger slips
and misses the intended target and simultaneously produces a repetition in the
guise of speech. The interaction could be summed up in the following manner:
the subject shamelessly asks the Other, “What do you want from me?” Although
the answer is returned, it is not an expected one. It replies with a question “What do
you want?” and thereby pushes the subject towards its own desire. The interaction
does not end there, as the subject stubbornly continuous: “What do you want from
me?” Given that the subject’s desire is the desire of the Other, the question posed is
directed/pointed at the object of desire or a lack in his being.
 Pointing at the other 105

In a certain sense, the act of pointing can be understood as a backwards

­movement. While the desired object—at which one can point—seems like a neu-
tral entity, there is of course a twist present. We cannot point at something without
its pointing back at us. At first, the gesture necessarily fails, touching upon a lack
inherent in the Other. Subsequently, the failure itself demands a repetition in the
guise of speech, which points back at our own desire. The pointed finger enables
a brief traversal of the fantasy, a slight bend, which is enough to produce a speech
effect, a verbalized repetition that retroactively establishes a certain meaning. The
subject aims at a preconceived image and misses it but hits the inner core of its own
subjectivity. Strictly speaking, it becomes apparent that pointing is an effect that
retroactively posits its own cause. It doesn’t matter what is intended with pointing,
as this “will have been determined”; what comes afterwards gives meaning to what
happened beforehand. Between one and the other, there is a cut, a reshaping of
previous events, and an emergence of meaning.The latter is therefore not grounded
in some material or idea, but on a practice of retroactive denotation. This also
confirms the argument that the pointing gesture is an integral part of subjectivity:
the reason being that the pointed finger itself is already inscribed into the pointed
object, functioning as a slip. As such, it is an effect of the Other but not an unneces-
sary one. Quite the opposite: it is an indicator of the minimal difference on which
the symbolic structure of reality is premised.
Let us summarize: what is the point of pointing? Ultimately there shouldn’t
be any doubt left that pointing cannot be explained with regard to intentions or
natural inclinations. It is a curious function. Taking into consideration the con-
cretization of the concept of pointing, we saw that the truth of pointing (at a
certain phenomenon) resides in the intersection of two interpretations: on the one
hand, pointing as a retroactive activity of self-differentiation and, on the other, as
a curvature of the symbolic edifice. The point is to think of their manifestations
together, a cut and a swerve. When pointing at a thing, we do not try to touch its
pre-­established meaning, because meaning is not prefabricated. Meaning is in this
case only grasped through a misunderstanding and post facto formation based on
the gesture of pointing. To point is, therefore, not to point at a meaning grounded
on some substantial image (Urbild ) that fills the entire canvas of reality, but on a
practice of retroactive denotation.12 It is as if the repetition of this gesture requires
subsequent confirmation of intentions.This sets in motion a continuous affirmation
of a failed encounter. Although every signifier is destined to signify nothing, this
consequently doesn’t presuppose a state where nothing is signified. On the contrary,
the more pointing (or words) miss and signify something unintended, the more the
subject’s own being is solidified.
Pointing can therefore be understood through a literal reading of the pirate motto
“Take what you can, give nothing back”, made famous by the Pirates of the ­Caribbean:
The Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski, 2003), which can be best summed up in
psychoanalytic terms: interpret, look for clues, little slips of tongue, metaphors, and
106 Goran Vranešević

symptoms, but do not touch the nothing that is my being. It is the lack, or bend, in the
Other ( jouissance) that institutes the relation to one’s own body. And isn’t the whole
point of pointing already evident in the title of Freud’s classical work T­ raumdeutung,
where Dreams (Traum) are coupled with pointing (Deuten), with dreams structured
around a navel or a gateway to the unknown (Unerkannt)13 and the finger bending
the fantasy, which gives consistency to what is usually referred to as reality?

Notes
1 Thought can be only touched through a mediation of an object, and inversely thought
is possible with a touch of an object. For a detailed interpretation of touching, see
Dolar (2008) and Nancy (2008).
2 See Freud (1961: 97). He thereby enabled the analytic community to think about its
practical role: as a material act of performing thoughts and desires for the observers; as
a stage in the libidinal development, acting as an all-pervasive power of thought; or as
a mediatory in the form of “touch, called in at the point where the word fails” (Dolar
2008: 97).
3 See Hegel on “cunning” (1986: 190).
4 It is clear that pointing is not an innocent function, as explicitly depicted in the Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978), where the extraterrestrial beings alert others
that a human is among them by pointing at her or him and emitting a shrill scream.
5 Dreams are not merely a neutral process of translating thoughts, because something is
constantly added: a desire that dislocates, deforms, and transforms the content without
having an original appearance. The role of interpretation is therefore not to grasp some
real meaning behind dreams and words but to read the analysand’s discourse in the
same manner as if reading a text.
6 For instance, the pointing finger is often used by children as a sign for a gun. The
most famous example is Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). After the
climatic shootout, his last act is to motion with his forefinger to his bloody forehead
and trigger it. The symbolic field he occupied broke down, so there was nothing else to
point at but himself.
7 Belonging to a society imposes on us certain norms and practices, such as love for our
parents, but also aims to uphold the appearance of free choice. In reality, there is none.
We must blindly oblige.
8 The related German words Deuten (to explain, interpret, but also to point) Deutbarkeit
(interpretability) and Bedeutung (meaning, importance) clearly attest to this.
9 Pointing doesn’t have to be understood in the context of immediate physical
consideration, as it has an extent as wide as the metaphorical use of the phrase “to
illustrate this point”.
10 As mentioned, desire is not to desire a certain thing but the impossibility for a word
to work as a word. Cf. Lacan on desire in “The Direction of the Treatment and the
Principles of its Power” (2005).
11 The child establishes an object that represents a signifier that is always-already missing.
His response is to try again; maybe the second time he will be successful. The spool is
thrown again and again, the child always finding some enjoyment in failing, but thereby
also playing with his own constitution.
12 In this context, it becomes clear why the psychoanalytic trauma is not conceptualized
as a reflection of a shocking and unexpected event that shakes the stable everyday
picture of the world, but as an inconsistency of meaning, which is usually constructed
several years after the actual experience.
 Pointing at the other 107

13 More precisely, the navel to the dream is an intertwined cobweb of the symbolic realm,
where the hard kernel of the Real (the object cause of desire hidden in the Other) and
the surplus signifier touch.

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­Atlantic Books.
Tomasello, M. (2006) Why Don’t Apes Point? In N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson (eds.) Roots
of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford & New York: Berg.
Vergote, A. (2003) Freud and Lacan on Neurosis and Psychosis. In J. Corveleyn and
P. ­Moyaert (eds.) Psychosis: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytical Approaches. Leuven:
­Leuven ­University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2001) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (1997) Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge. Umbr(a) 1: 147–52.
Žižek, S. (2003) The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Žižek, S. (2007) Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge.
Zupančič, A. (2008) The Odd One in: On Comedy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Filmography
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Directed by Philip Kaufman. USA: Solofilm.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) Directed by Gore Verbinski. USA:
Walt Disney Pictures.
Taxi Driver (1976) Directed by Martin Scorsese. USA: Columbia Pictures.
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Part III

Impossible poetics
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7
Is poetics a fiction about
truth – in a poem? Some
remarks about Paul Celan

René Rasmussen

This text is an attempt to examine the relationship between poetics and poems
regarding four poems by Paul Celan and some ideas about truth.

What is truth?
First a few words about how we may understand truth. We must not understand
truth in the way positivism does, namely, as a positive, present and available fact
connected to a given thing or phenomena. We can of course talk about a certain
objective truth connected to given things or phenomena: for example, gravity, the
existence of trees, or of black and white people. However, the problem, as we know
it with regards to gravity, is that the referent included in such an objective truth is
never unequivocal. The law of gravity only exists under certain circumstances, and
as a law it makes no sense if we do not include at least a globe and a body. But
where is gravity: in the globe, in the body or in their relationship? And do body
and globe know the law of gravity? There is no simple answer to these questions.
It becomes even more confusing when talking about blacks and whites, in so far as
the words black and white belong to a code of colours, not to mention all the pos-
sible racist or biological discourses connected to various colours of skin.
Hence, the referent is never unequivocal, and the objective truth can hardly be
distinguished or separated from a given discourse. Such a discourse can be physi-
cal, biological or racist, but in any case a given discourse excludes some statements
and opens towards others. Talking about gravity, we do not talk about a god in the
apple, which Newton saw falling from a tree, or about a god on earth, on to which
the apple falls. When some Danes proclaim “Danishness”, because they are born
and raised in a country named Denmark, they do not talk about the somewhat
112 René Rasmussen

fictive correlation between a nationality and a birthplace. The power connected to

their nationalistic discourse excludes a further look at the fictive aspect associated
with it. Such a fictive aspect is both a created as well as a creative element, which
is not guaranteed by any positivistic idea about a so-called objectivity. Every kind
of discourse contains a certain power, a certain inclusion and exclusion of possible
statements; and its possible consistency is built on at least one element that is not
included in such statements. Such an element is considered unnecessary to debate
in the discourse. So a given discourse may perhaps be consistent, at a certain level,
but is also incoherent at another level.
Furthermore, if a subject meets a so-called given truth, it often becomes con-
fused. Being a passenger in a car accident, where the car falls off a bridge, or being
black and surrounded by members of a violent nationalistic group of white men
gives rise to such confusion or even anxiety or anger. At the moment the car falls
or when a violent attack occurs, any discourse collapses.The situation has no words,
or the subject meets the Real, as Jacques Lacan calls it.
Connected to the Real we also have fiction. Whatever we may say about the
Real, it is never the truth, but just an (impossible) representation of the Real.We can
only represent or imagine the Real, because it never can be grasped or understood
in any discourse. Such a representation – imagination – is also fiction about or of
the Real, but a rather different kind of fiction compared to the inherent incohe­
rency connected to a given discourse. Language can never describe the Real. The
trauma connected to meeting the Real will forever shake language, although it may
shake less, the more distant the trauma is.
On the other hand fiction in a discourse is something preventing the discourse
from shaking too much or something that gives the discourse a certain stability.
Fiction in the discourse is linked to the idea of a word saying something true about
something different from itself. This is a specific fiction, which makes us believe in
the words we hear, although we may know that the person uttering them is lying.
Fiction makes the semblance of word, a semblance connecting for example a name
to that which is named, while fiction about the Real is an impossible attempt to
represent: what cannot be represented and what is unbearable in the life of the sub-
ject. Fiction in a discourse prevents language from shaking too much. Fiction about
the Real is fiction about what shakes any discourse.
Hence there exist two kinds of fiction: the first is the (impossible) attempt to
grasp the Real and the second is connected to the incoherency of a given discourse.
Fiction connected to poetics is different from fiction connected to poems: in so
far as poems (also) are “representations” of the Real, while poetics is a discourse,
although such a discourse may contain some poetical aspect. Hence, the answer
to the question “Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem?” is that of course
poetics is fiction (linked to a discourse) about truth in poems, which are about
the Real. But we can never say everything about the Real, the truth about it. We
can never express the truth, because there are not enough words, as Lacan says in
 Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? 113

Télévision (1973: 9). This is why we are forced to read or write poems or to see
a ­psychoanalyst, so we can elaborate or change our fiction about the Real and
thereby hopefully reduce the weight or the trauma of the Real in our life.

Paul Celan
Celan was born in 1920. His parents were German-speaking Jews in ­Czernowitz in
the Romanian region Bukovina. In the 1930s, this region of Romania was strongly
anti-Semitic, and in 1941 Germany invaded. Celan was in a working-camp in
Romania in 1942–43. His parents died in another working-camp, Michailowka
(Ukraine), in 1942; his father died of typhus, and his mother was shot. The death
of his mother (with whom he often spoke German) marked him very much, and
Celan saw himself as “the child of a dead mother” (see Maulpoix 2009: 33). In 1945
he wrote the very famous poem: “Todesfuge” (“Fugue of Death”).
In 1948, Celan emigrated to Paris and later became a French citizen but wrote
most of his poems in German. He married a French painter, Gisèle de Lestrange,
in Paris. Even though they stayed together until the very end of Celan’s life, it was
not an easy marriage. From 1965 Celan was struck by many crises of delirium, and
he attempted suicide in 1967 (ibid.: 34). On the night between the 23rd and 24th of
November 1965, he tried to stab and kill his wife. Shortly after, he was committed to a
psychiatric hospital in Paris for about six months. For the rest of his life, he was in and
out of psychiatric wards. Not only did he have problems with his wife, but he was also
accused of plagiarism by the widow of his friend Ivan Goll, who was a poet as well.
These accusations, which were not true, were repeated twice by the widow, in 1953
and in 1960, and Celan felt he was being persecuted. He committed suicide, around
the 20th of April, 1970, by drowning in the Seine, Paris, where he was found days
later. The intention of these few biographical remarks is not to say whether his stays
at psychiatric wards and his suicide were determined by his psychotic structure or by
the Holocaust (although they were probably shaped by both) but to underline that
there is no doubt that the Real plays an important role in his life and in his poems.

The Meridian and four poems

Let us first take a look at his poetics in The Meridian and then at four poems. The
poetics of Celan, as he develops it in his famous speech The Meridian, can be seen
as an essay on anti-metaphoric resistance. Here Celan talks about art as being child-
less, although he insisted on writing his poems in German. Is a childless child also a
homeless child? I am not sure what the answer may be to this question, but at least
there is not much home in poetry as such. Rather his poems seem to be a home for
the homeless, for that which stays homeless.
Furthermore, Celan underlines, that art is also a problem, an “eternal” problem
(2003: 38). This problem is connected to a retreat from the canny (das Heimliche)
114 René Rasmussen

and a journey towards das Unheimliche, the uncanny, which turns away from human
beings.“The Unheimliche, the estrangement, is the estrangement of the human given
the meaning. It hence affects existence. It derealizes it” (Lacoue-Labarthe 2004: 71).
Art is connected to a strangeness, and thereby it seems to exclude the I or to create
an alienated I (Celan 2003: 46). The subject is fundamentally alienated in poetry.
However, the poem talks: it talks on behalf of itself and only on behalf of itself.
But doing this, it is not so much a question about talking about strangeness, but that
the poem talks about something different, something other than itself. Poetry talks on
behalf of something totally different.A poem hence creates a different world, not only
a strange world, but an irreducible otherness (which also constitutes an alternative to
the homogeneity in Nazism, where there was no place for a heterogeneity including
the Jews). Celan uses the word Das Andere in the original text to stress this otherness,
which can be translated both as the other (the other subject) and as the opposite of
the same, namely otherness (I am using both possible translations or connotations).
The poem screams and stretches out to move from an already-no-more to its still-
here. The poem exists between an already-no-more and a becoming still. For example,
a poem – this is an obvious example in Celan’s poems – may talk about the dead
of the Holocaust, but, of course, without mentioning it, and these dead are already-
no-more, and still (still-here); they are there, in so far as the poem attempts to give life
to them (ibid.: 49).
This movement between an already-no-more and a still-here is also an attempt to
meet the radical otherness, which explains why Celan talks about the loneliness
of the poem (ibid.). The poet, the writer, follows the poem to the meeting – the
unsayable or secret meeting – with the totally different, with the other. Everything
and every human in a poem is a shaping or an elaboration of this Other. A poem,
including such a meeting with the otherness, constitutes a conversation with the
otherness, but often a despairing conversation.
Here the I meets a “you”, if we understand the “you” as the absolute other.
This meeting between the I and you, in the absolute otherness, may explain the
emerging of the often rather strange “we” in many of Celan’s poems.1 Or the I, this
strange I, which is neither an imaginary I or a shifter, meets or is presumed to meet
the Real incarnated in a you (although Celan does not use the words “the Real”).
The meeting between the I and the Real – for example, the dead – constitute the
“we” in many of his poems. For example in “Blume” from Sprachgitter (1959), the
I speaks to an unnamed person evoked by the eye. Together they create darkness,
but they also find the word “flower”, while their eyes give for or “take care / of
water” (quoted in Szondi 2003: 110). The word “flower” seems to be created out
of the meeting between the seeing eye (I) and the blind eye. The I meets the Real
(represented by the blind eye or the stone), and out of this meeting we get “flower”,
which also can be seen as a metaphor for the poem. Hence, the poem is also created
out of this meeting. Celan’s poems search, according to his poetics, the strange place,
or this absolute other, where the I meets the Real. This is not possible, according to
Celan’s ideas, if the poems use figures and tropes.
 Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? 115

Although a poem that really may create a meeting with the Real does not exist, a
poem avoiding figure and trope seems to be close to the idea of giving existence to a
non-existing place for absolute otherness. This explains the resistance to tropes and
figures in The Meridian (cf. Räsänen 2007). But what about his famous “­Todesfuge”
from Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), where there seem to be many tropes or figures?
Here “a grave in the air” is literally the ashes from the dead in the gas chamber
(quoted in Felstiner 1995: 31). On the other hand, Celan’s idea also insists that, for
example, “black milk” is not a metaphor (ibid.), which however leaves us with the
question about this black milk: Was the milk in concentration camps black? And
furthermore: Did the man in the camp have a snake? And is death really a master
from Germany? These words cannot escape a metaphorical interpretation, although
Celan’s idea in The Meridian is that, in a poem, “the words mean to be untransferable,
untransportable, unmetaphorizable” (Räsänen 2007: 174).
Furthermore, it is also possible to understand them as living metaphors: to use a
metaphorical distinction between living and dead metaphors, where living meta-
phors are new, un-expected metaphors, and dead metaphors are metaphors we
meet all the time. However, nearly all words, at least all nouns, are metaphors or
semblances: they are substitutes for something outside themselves.The word “snake”
in this poem is a semblance; the word is a linguistic reference to something outside
itself, either an undefined snake or the snake with which the man in the camps
actually plays. When Celan stresses the necessity of avoiding metaphors, it must
be understood as an attempt to avoid (too) living, transferable and transportable
metaphors.This resistance against tropes and figures also assures that poetry exists or
comes forth to a non-existing place. Celan can thus talk about a utopia connected
to the poem: a u-topia connected to a non-existing place. Here the I meets itself
in a meeting with the Real. This is the only moment where such a meeting can be
localised. It is a kind of homecoming to non-existing places: “None of these places
can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist, especially
now, and … I find something else” (Celan 2003: 54).
It is easy to understand this resistance to metaphors (and other figures and tropes)
as an attempt to give existence to someone dead – for example a mother who died
in a working-camp – who you at the same time never will be able to meet. It could
be understood as a meeting with the absolute otherness to such a dead mother,
who does not exist any longer but still has to exist in the poem. In this sense poems
contain what does not exist any longer and what still has to exist. Confronted with
the Real, Celan’s poems, according to this poetics, have to recreate what is forever
lost or out of reach. The only way to name the nameless (the Real is only a para-
dox name for that which is without a name) is to avoid living and transportable
metaphors: in so far as metaphors, which give birth to linguistic associations, bring
the reader away from the Real. However, we can only imagine the Real or only
represent it in a language that is different from the semblance normally connected
to words. Such a “representation” can be without metaphors, but it can also be with
metaphors, as is the case with poets other than Celan.
116 René Rasmussen

Nevertheless, Celan’s poetics underlines that the Real cannot be named (although
he never use the words “the Real”), but only evoked in a language that cannot grasp
the Real.That is the main paradox of literature and its “truth”: not only are there not
enough words, but words fail to grasp and maintain the Real. Even so, every poet tries
in his/her own language to grasp and maintain that which cannot be understood.
A poet develops his/her own style by reducing common and public language to his/
her own language, to his/her mother tongue or lalangue, as Lacan calls it in Encore.
Celan’s mother tongue or lalangue is German, which he spoke with his mother and in
which he wrote his poems, but it is also a language in which he develops a style avoid-
ing (too) living metaphors, so the I – the subject in the poem – can meet the other.
However poetics is fiction – linked to a discourse – about truth in poems, which
is about the Real. Hence, Celan’s poetics is not the truth about the Real, which his
poems also fail to represent; neither is it the truth about his poems. Nevertheless,
this shall not exclude us from using his poetics to open towards some of his poems.
So let us briefly look a two of his shorter poems, the first one from Zeitgehöft (1976).
In “All Those Sleep Shapes”, it is possible to see “you” as the Other or the radical
otherness, which the I attempts to meet, but only in so far as the I leads its own
blood to “the language shadow” (quoted in Carson 2002: 70), which may mean that
the I has to give up his/her present life. Hence the I has to become a stranger to
itself, has to be alienated, and the blood is “the place where a poet’s understanding
takes place (Erkenntnis)” (ibid.). Furthermore he/she loses his/her grief in meeting
the Other or the “language shadow”, or the I gives its grief to the Other. Such a
“language shadow” does not exist outside the poems but may be understood as an
attempt to grasp that which is without a name.The “language shadow” should not –
according to Celan’s poetics – be understood as a metaphor, but as speech reduced
to language’s material form of which the poem consists.
A last poem from Atemwende (1967) can underline this material form. In “No
More Sand Art”, we see even more clearly the material form of language with the
triple reduction of (the unwritten but presumed) “deep in snow”: “­Deepinsnow, /
eepinnow, / e-i-o” (quoted in Felstiner 1995: 220), where spaces between the word
and consonants disappear, whereby the material reduction of the letters themselves
also disappears deep in nothing or in “e-i-o”. But what does the song know deep
in the snow? Is there knowledge in the snow? Or is this a metaphor for know­ledge
of non-knowledge? “No more sand” can be seen as no more urns of sand, no more
­Holocaust, no more Nazism (cf. Carson 2002: 114). Sand is metonymically con-
nected to urns of sand. It is also possible to understand “no m ­ asters” – no more
­masters – as a reference to the masters of the Holocaust evoked by “­Todesfuge”:
no more death in camps. On the other hand, it can be read as a criticism of the met-
aphors in “Todesfuge”: no more metaphors or “Death is a master from Deutschland”.
“Dice” may be a reference to Stephanie Mallarmé’s famous poems about dice,
“A Throw of the Dice” (“Un coup de des”), while such a throw can be seen as
a naming or a metaphor and thus a too-obvious approach to what has no name.
 Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? 117

No more throw of dice, of metaphors. Snow seems to be connected to death, mostly

the death of his mother, in other poems (cf. ibid.). “Seventeen” could be seen as a
reference to the Jewish eighteenth prayer, which is thanks to God and the miracle
of life. However, we never come to this thanks: language becomes mute. Or das
Andere, the non-existing place, evoked by the poems exists only deep in the snow
or in the (reduced) material of words or of letters. But this reading, which attempts
to follow Celan’s poetics, cannot avoid the existence of metaphors (knowledge in
snow) or the metonymy (“no more sand” instead of “no more urns of sand”).

Summary about Celan

Celan’s poetics is a discourse, although containing lyric elements, and as such is
different from his poems, which break with any discourse. This is especially clear
regarding his resistance to figures and tropes, which his poetics wants to avoid,
whilst the poems do not. It is also clear that something else or more is going on in
his poems than is explained in The Meridian, which the material reduction of “Deep
in the snow” to “e-i-o” in the poem “No More Sand Art” manifests. The radical
otherness is not only a meeting with a strange unnamed Other, or it is only such a
meeting if this other includes a space where language stops. Or the reduced letters
(“e-i-o”) are only an indication (or an epitaph) of that which no longer has a space
in the poems. But although his poetics does not tell the (full) truth about his poems,
it opens for an examination of the truth searched by the poems: a truth about the
Real, which escapes any true representation.

Note
1 The idea about such a meeting is inspired by Martin Buber’s considerations about
I and you in a religious context, but as James K. Lyon underlines (1971), Celan is not
occupied with God.

References
Carson, A. (2002) Economy of the Unlost. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Celan, P. (2003) The Meridian (1960). In Collected Prose. Trans. R. Waldrop. New York:
Routledge.
Felstiner, J. (1995) Paul Celan. Poet. Survivor. Jew. New Haven:Yale UP.
Lacan, J. (1973) Télévision. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1975) Encore. Paris: Seuil.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (2004) La poésie comme expérience. Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur.
Lyon, J. K. (1971) Paul Celan and Martin Buber: Poetry as Dialogue, PMLA 86(1): 110–20.
Maulpoix, J-M. (2009) Commente Choix de poèmes de Paul Celan. Saint-Amand: Folio/
Gallimard.
Räsänen, P. (2007) Counter-Figures. An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan’s Poetry
and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality. Available: https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/­
handle/10138/19366/counterf.pdf?sequence=2. [Accessed 20 August 2015].
Szondi, P. (2003) Celan Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP.
8
Presenting the unrepresentable
in presentable ways

Pia Hylén

Donne
Interanimating Souls
I am not done with John
and Donne is not done with me
for his Ecstasy
runs around with me
’til the mixture of things make one

PART I
Desire in the poetry of John Donne
In the beginning of Séminaire VI, Le désir et son interprétation, Lacan says that the use,
transmission and function of the word “desire” are particularly well illustrated in
poetry, although not in all kinds of poetry (2013: 14).
My chapter is an observation of John Donne’s structural approach to desire.“John
Donne is Shakespeare’s heir, muscular, theatrical, and metaphor-ridden. Donne fills
even devout religious poems with flamboyant sexual personae and eccentric trans-
position of gender” (Paglia 1991: 228).

History
John Donne is considered one of the greatest poets of the English language. He was
born late in the reign of Elizabeth I, a time when Britain turned Protestant. It was
also the time of the great transformation of ideas. The world vision evolved from
a concrete and self-centered state, to the expansive and enriched outlook with
 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 119

broader and more eloquent views so characteristic of the Renaissance. The phe-
nomenal discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe but revolved
around the sun was established.
Times were tumultuous and violent. Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII
and Anne Boleyn, his second wife. For Henry VIII to marry Anne, he had to free
himself from the Catholic Church because the Pope would not grant the annul-
ment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry VIII therefore turned to
Protestantism. Three years after marrying, in 1536, Queen Anne was accused of
adultery, incest and witchcraft.These accusations appear to be false, but gave enough
coverage to Henry VIII to order her execution and then marry Jane Seymour.
Elizabeth was at the time two and a half years old.
Before the reign of Elizabeth I, Henry VIII attempted to annul his marriage to her
mother, Queen Anne, which was temporarily canceled, and Elizabeth was for a while
declared illegitimate. Once Elizabeth became Queen, she properly severed the ties
with the Catholic Church and became famous for establishing the Protestant Church
of England. She was known as the “Virgin Queen” and the “Queen Warrior”.
It was during these hectic times that John Donne lived. So why is this impor-
tant? John Donne lived in an era very different from ours. Major political and
scientific events were structuring Renaissance England. Radical changes took place
regularly, with effects upon daily life—both concerning stability of life and congru-
ency of thought—affecting the symbolic and the imaginary.The real was very close.
The symbolic is a construction of our understanding of the outside world. As
long as our understanding rests in itself, life can go on undisturbed.When our world
perception is stirred, such as when the Earth goes from being the center of the uni-
verse to being an element in motion, or when the king has his queen executed, we
are shaken by the real. These events change the subject’s perception of the outside
world: the symbolic is shaken by the real and then reconstructed.

The Petrarchan conceit

The most characteristic style in Elizabethan poetry, a particularly prolific period,
is the Petrarchan conceit, forming clichéd comparisons between closely related
objects, such as rose and love. The writing style in the second half of the sixteenth
century is furthermore characterized by an extensive allusion to classical myths.
There is a revival of Greek and Roman theater, and poetry is guided by ideals and
platonic romance. The regularity of prosodies and trochees is applied to build very
precise traditional pentameters. Melodic and conventional beauty reigns, and this
period, characterized by literature of exceptional quality, is generally referred to as
The Nest of Singing Birds (see Norbrook 2002).
During the reign of Elizabeth I, both contents and form were confined to a
smaller place than Donne considered suitable to express his desires in poetic form.
They had so been constrained that metaphors became very extraordinarily banal
and hardly evoked any true feelings. Limitations were imposed by religion and
120 Pia Hylén

confined by rhymes which diminished the content: in short reduced by what grew
to become the Petrarchan conceit.This rigid structure, which during the second half
of the sixteenth century had helped so many poets and writers to write, was unac-
ceptable to Donne. He broke the rules when possible. It was a revolution in poetry.
Donne broke out; he broke free. Even if keeping certain clichés, he challenged
rhymes to be able to speak of his devotion, his desires and his sexuality. Donne was
a poet who began his writing in the Elizabethan era; his creative inspiration was,
however, of a different cantor than most of his contemporaneous poets. He is more
blunt; in highly religious times he names a poem “Ecstacy” and he goes on:

This ecstasy doth unperplex,

We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex, (1974: 54)

Donne speaks rather freely about sex when other poets prudently mention roses
as a metaphor for love, and Donne ventures into the more physical aspects of
love and sex saying it straight out, which was considered highly inappropriate at
the time.
Shifting basic values in society is part of the evolution of times. Thomas Kuhn
speaks about shifting paradigms: theories endure a certain time until they can hold
no longer. When there is political pressure, scientific discovery or social movement
it branches out into the arts, strong reactions are formed and, as in Kuhn’s theorem
(1975), the rules that govern the system break up and new rules are laid down,
which begin to structure according to new theorems. A different theoretical system
is created with new structures and new references. When the real breaks through, a
new symbolic structure has to be erected.
One could argue that the rigidity of Elizabethan poetry was too much for
Donne. Something had to give. Donne broke out; he defied all and started to talk
openly about his desires and openly about sex.What Donne did was to break down
the norm of an epoch; he changed the norms of a society; he changed the para-
digms. He did this by demolishing the walls of the literary system and making room
for his individualized access to desire through new metaphors and metonymies.

The metaphysical conceit

Donne is the most prominent of the metaphysical poets; they are characterized by
their use of metaphor, which is fundamentally different from that of their contem-
poraries. The poetic style is called metaphysical because the metaphors do not have
much in common with the romantic metaphors that the other poets used. The
metaphysical poets use vivid images and a strong visual power, which easily stir the
mind.Their use of metaphors is furthermore particular in that they combine images
and ideas that are hardly related in either form or content and that under normal
circumstances would never be thought of as being even remotely related.
 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 121

Donne often used intellectual metaphors, which can be either complex or subtle
and in some cases offensive; in this construct a link is established between a feeling
or a desire and a seemingly inappropriate physical object and brings the symbolic
and the imaginary together by a daring and often metaphysical image. This creates
an unusual context because associating two things that do not appear to have any
connection with each other, this unexpected circumstance, stirs the reader.
An example can be observed in Donne’s poem “The Flea”: the word “flea”—far
from the things of love—allows the lovers to unite: rather unorthodox and quite
paradoxical. The noble transcendence, created by Donne, induced via the flea, con-
sists of the fact that as they both have been bitten by the same flea their blood is
already mixed, therefore the sexual act is only a confirmation of something that has
already taken place: the two souls are already united. The originality of the meta-
phor gives love strength. The desire escapes, escapes metonymically, from confine-
ment to a particular object via the smooth gliding transformation to another object.
Metonymically sliding from one object to the next, as when you kiss the hand and
then the cheek, you kiss the cheek and then the mouth, you kiss the mouth and
then.…

Ecstasy in Donne’s philosophy of love

Donne is known mainly for his erotic poetry, but paradoxically also for his religious
devotion. What may have joined these two elements—sex and heavenly matters—
which both appear harmonious and natural to the poet, elements that ordinarily
are not associated? One way to answer this question is to say that it was neither sex
nor deity that created Donne, but his symptoms, his (poetic) know-how concern-
ing ecstasy.
What is ecstasy? The poem of that title by Donne concerns not only a natural,
sexual impulse, but the outcome of a struggle of the union of organs, souls and
minds. Donne’s philosophy of love does not differ much from the ideal described by
Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, where elements that appear to be linked by nature
are associated only in an illusory way (1955: 44). Both take the sublime starting point,
the unification of subject and object. The difference lies in their use of style; their
desire is what makes it possible to transcend the bleak loneliness of the subject.

Desire
In “Ecstasy” Donne clearly states that desire is not just sexual.There is no doubt that
the man desires the woman, but in the poem the woman is above all an occasion for
Donne to launch his long and arduous riddles of love and passion. However, as his
desire is not only to focus on the carnal, his desire also hits the spiritual. At the end
of the battle, he feels that something escapes both the winner and the loser.
Let us therefore assume that sexuality for Donne is not merely physical; it is also
an entrance to an elevated mental residence where lovers for a while share a space.
122 Pia Hylén

But as neither the physical nor the mental lasts—we are dealing with momentary
visits—another step follows. It is like the waves of the sea: when one comes in,
another is moving out. Here again we are dealing with the metonymic sliding. How
does Donne do this? Brodsky explains that “while reading Donne you measure not
the number of syllables but time” and compares this to Mandelstam “drawing out
the caesura”, which entails:

holding back an instant, stopping … for something which seems wonderful

to the poet for one or another reason. Or the other way around, like in his
“Voronezh Notebooks”, there you have unevenness, jumps, and truncated
feet, truncated meter, feverish haste – so as to hasten or eliminate the instant
which seems terrible. (2013)

On the other hand we have Chater who says that Donne is too close to that which
moves, and that he is unsuccessful in gaining control. In a kind of psychoanalytical
analysis she states that Donne:

depicts the agony of a man who has lost the once-cherished physical contact
of his lover and instead of humbling himself, is using manipulative passive-
aggressive behavior.We sense that the poet knows the feel of the lover’s touch
and craves to feel it again. And not gently. He’s so desperate to regain the sen-
sation that he longs for the touch to be violent and masculine and even pain-
ful. He wants the touch to convince him beyond a doubt that he is in contact
with his beloved: that he’s under the power and coercion of God to the point
of being sadistically victimized, maltreated, even persecuted to the extent of
physical abuse. He’s begging for the return of something he once had. But
how did he lose the one thing he loved the most in the first place? (2004)

Here we maintain the idea that Donne’s ideal—his perfection of love, which in
“Ecstasy” is a woman—is combined with a loss, which is not only on-going but
structural. Donne desires the woman, he worships her, but he never manages to get
her: she is lost forever. It is his own desire that drives him, and therefore she can
continue to exist as the unattainable.

Lacan
Lacan introduces the word “desire” into psychoanalysis. It does not exist in post-
Freudian theories; nor does Freud talk very much about desire. Before Freud spoke
about “Wunsch” in The Interpretation of Dreams, the concept of desire was evoked
better by philosophers and poets. In philosophy, Lacan highlights Spinoza and Hegel.
And in poetry, he talks about the metaphysical poets, whose highest exponent is John
Donne. Lacan sets the metaphysical poetry of Donne up against the figurative poetry.
 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 123

When describing desire, the latter calls immediately upon the senses, while the meta-
physical poets create a new poetic language and introduce a new poetic form.
Metaphysical poetry does not eliminate the body but returns to the body
through language, soul and intelligence. What is new about it is not the concept of
love—which is still stuck in the Platonic sphere, in the primeval androgyny—but
the way that it is said. In other words, the descriptive poets place themselves in
a duality with the object. For instance, love becomes a rose: beginning with one
object, love, which, via a simple metaphor, is named a rose, whereby the second
object is introduced. The metaphysical poets, on the other hand, invest themselves
in the underlying relationship the subject has with the symbolic, more precisely
with the signifiers.
An illustration is in the second line of “Ecstasy” where Donne talks about
“A pregnant bank swell’d up” (1974: 53), referring to the meaning and the conse-
quence of his desire, that she falls pregnant. “Ecstasy” is one of Donne’s later poems.
He has a classical structure of verse (stanza, rhythms and rhymes, abab/cdcd). It is in
this literary space that Donne introduces the conflict among body, soul and intel-
ligence, and he solves the conflict in perfecting this new poetic form. Instead of
saying that he desires the woman, or that her body evokes feelings in him, he instead
refers to the effect his desire has, as if it were already a fait accompli.
Donne speaks of a “pregnant bank”: we not only get a visual image of the bulg-
ing riverbank, but also understand that Donne desires the woman and wants her to
become bulging, to fall pregnant.The signifier “pregnant” requires a whole series of
actions, the first of which is sex; but he will not stop here—he takes it further—he
desires the woman, but he does not stops with the physical action, he continues
in a metonymic way S1, S2, S3… and ends up with a family. As Lacan says in
­Séminaire VI, desire is the fruit of the passage of all, which is considered natural in an
individual (instinct, needs, tendencies, etc.), via the structure of language. But not all
desire is language; something escapes, the alienation of the signifier, what Freud calls
“the lost object”, a loss that Lacan assigns a metonymic character. A desired object
continually escapes the individual, who therefore can continue to desire.
Donne tries to catch the flight of what escapes with a network of signifiers that
are his poems. The ideal object, not real, should then be women. The hope of love
is the re-unification with the lost woman. The metaphorical process of substituting
one signifier for another seems apt to give access to this idealized object, but the
terrible metonymy imposes itself by sliding away from what the metaphor sought
to achieve.The metonymic movement is an active process. It is above all that which
allows Donne to continue writing throughout his lifetime in a different way than
the usual, using the most prolific forms.This inspiration sustains not only the desire,
but also the fantasy of a greater proximity to the object that causes it, that Lacan
calls petit a. As no one ever reaches his or her object of desire, as it is lost in the
structure, Donne continues his quest on the road of metaphysical poetry. From the
clearance of this path, we now know, we are all left enriched.
124 Pia Hylén

PART II
The role of poetry in the disturbance of the symbolic order in the
twenty-first century
Le Poème
La forme en elle même déjà dérange comme elle peut être sans forme –
sans forme conforme à la forme d’un langage.
Le fond également ne fait pas comme les fonds forcement font –
alors avec ce fond et cette forme non conforme le sujet peut inscrire et s’inscrire dans un
discours hors comme-une –

The Poem
The form already disturbs
since it can be without form
conform with the form of language.
Neither does the content do
what contents usually do –
so with this form and this content non-conform
the subject can inscribe and be inscribed in a discourse out of the norm –

Lacan mentions in Séminaire VI that desire is hard to access but that Donne paves us
a very fruitful way (Lacan 2013: 12, 14) and illustrates that poetry can break paths
and pave roads. Daniel Tutt, following Judith Balso, confirms that poetry creates a
new space for thought and imagination and that it lends its frame for a new onto-
logical capacity of thinking (2011). In this sense, poems are so much more than
mere artistic events of aesthetic contemplation; they are a forum for thought, for
new kinds of thinking. Poetry is a discourse in which the subject establishes itself
and has the power to establish new capacities and new avenues of thinking (2011).
The other side is that poetry becomes more dangerous than thought because it
exists in concrete terms and can therefore be disclosed; it is not just imaginary, but
it is part of a token, a portion of the structure to which we are subjected, part of the
symbolic order. Poetry can be viewed as dangerous because it cannot be limited; it is
not subject to the same structural standards as prose. It flows into and is flooded and
penetrated by the real and consequently cannot be contained, cannot be controlled
and you cannot trust it. It produces a singularity; it can even create a new ontology.
A poem produces something unique; it is a unique place, where things can happen
that cannot happen elsewhere.
Poetry is a structure, a collection of words chosen by the poet and composed
in exactly the way she/he wishes. There are no limits, and there are no restrictions,
there are only consequences. Poetry creates order where none was—an order that
might be a disorder—an order that inscribes itself in a discourse out of the ordi-
nary, an order out of something that comes from the real. Poetry structures and
 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 125

de-structures because the situations for desire are riveted to a specific function in
the language, exactly where subject’s relation to the signifier is concerned.
A more recent example of poetry breaking the norms is the American poet
Allen Ginsberg, who felt restricted and oppressed by society’s limiting moral
­standards. In 1957 legal action was taken against him: one of his poems, “Howl”,
was accused of being obscene because it explicitly described hetero- and homo-
sexual sex. G­ insberg won his lawsuit; the judge proclaimed that it was not for the
law to enforce bland and innocuous euphemisms (see Morgan and Peters 2006).
In a recent film Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013), Daniel Radcliffe plays
Ginsberg. It is a portrait of Ginsberg who tears down the walls of conventional
literary norms in society, just as Donne did 250 years earlier, and both do so in
order to make room for their personal desires, expressed through new metaphors
and metonymies. This has immediate reverberations in the social world. Ginsberg
broke the sexual taboos prevalent in America in the 1950s (see Morgan and Peters
2006). He felt the hypocrisy of society offensive, and for him there was nothing
more natural than talking about what was so important to him: namely his desires,
his sexual desires and specifically his homosexual desires. Many felt offended and
outraged and could not accept that such “vulgarity” should be available in print.
When the symbolic order becomes too narrow, the real breaks through and breaks
down part of the existing symbolic system. Donne and Ginsberg are examples of
poets at the forefront of the symbolic: where the symbolic meets the real.
The use of metaphors and metonymies can change the ontology, as what is said
lies beyond the immediate meaning of the words’ nominal sense. When metaphors
and metonymies are used, there is a parallel impact at another level. Something
can be said, without its actually being written. The symbolic importance may go
beyond the norm and make something understandable without its actually appear-
ing. The poetic context allows for such expression because of its freedom of form.
This freedom makes it possible to touch issues that cannot be addressed directly.
The content of a sentence is limited to what the words mean, and the specific use
of the words in a grammatical context defines it. Once the structure is no longer
restricted, the content is not either. Because poetry has a much looser structure than
prose, poetry can get around where prose does not reach.
Donne and Ginsberg are two examples in the history of poetry where poets
break not only with the linguistic structure, but also with the normative structure,
that is, with the symbolic as such. Because desire desires desire, and it is not the
object that is the driving force, the symbolic must be restructured to be accom-
modative anew.

To represent the unrepresentable

After the Holocaust it was said that about this matter poetry could not be written
(Adorno 1997: 34). A description of the Holocaust is doomed to fail because it will
be a violation not only of moral character, but also of epistemological character: an
126 Pia Hylén

offense that moves away from what Wittgenstein states can be talked about in this
world. To nominate the real is not possible. This was disproved because poetry also
represents a truth outside that which can be said. Paul Celan was able to do it and in
German, which was not his native language but the language of the enemy. He was
able to go further and to symbolize that which is considered unsymbolizable and
unrepresentable: namely horror. With Celan we learn that one can represent the
unrepresentable. It can be presented in a poem. Experiences too cruel for words can
be said, but in a poem. That which is not accessible to language can be accessed in
a poem. Where language ceases to be sufficient, the poem becomes viable, because
the poem, as a form, goes beyond the symbolic.

Poetic structure
Poetry is difficult to understand because of its structure, which is a lack of structure,
that is to say its lack of conformity to the standards of grammatical rules. Poetry is
written in words, but written in a style that does not conform to common writing
style. A poet can use language in the way she or he wishes. Poetry may appear as
lalangue, a personalized colloquialism, a language full of idiosyncrasies, a space of
pleasure defying normality. Poetry can be personalized words understood only by
the individual who writes them, and it can be confused with lalangue, as common
language structure can be overridden, words can be created and shaped as the poet
wishes.Therefore, poetry can appear as private inaccessible thoughts, but the differ-
ence between lalangue and poetry is precisely that poetry is understood by others:
poetry transcends lalangue.
The freedom that makes it possible for poetry to break with the structure, to
break our limitation by the symbolic, this freedom is present because poetry has
access to the real. Ginsberg is an example of how a poet’s work can start restruc-
turing an era, breaking down and building back up the symbolic. Ginsberg writes
about desire and touches signifiers that are taboo. He creates a scandal—far from
the first one—but one that starts a re-structuring of the symbolic of the time. This
poem, “Howl”, challenges society’s norms and begins to celebrate the individual.
The father is now sitting on the edge of the chair and is sliding downwards.
Ten years later Naked Lunch is published. I will not describe Naked Lunch as an
epic poem, but more like an odyssey: a journey through a trip that lasted 15 years.
William S. Burroughs portrays a world beyond the symbolic, a world where drugs,
violence, suffering, death, addiction, hallucinations, killings, sarcasm, fear, torture
and manipulation, all of which are real, track him down. And when this happens,
well-being in the symbolic world ceases to exist. Ginsberg uses his poems to reach
out: to reach outside. He destabilizes the symbolic world, and just after him comes
Burroughs, doing more of the same. But Burroughs goes further, he undermines
the symbolic. Many poets before him had represented the unrepresentable without
its having had drastic structural consequences. But Burroughs, after Ginsberg, opens
 Presenting the unrepresentable in presentable ways 127

up for the abject—breaks down the boundaries between subject and object, creates
havoc—and the symbolic world is in full slippage.
Kristeva coins the term “abject”, which epistemologically refers to a place in
language where opinions cease to exist: it is outside the realm of the symbolic:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being,
directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or
inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.
(1980: 9)

The outbreaks of the real, which are usually only seen on the fringe of our lives in
phenomena such as death, break down the boundary between subject and object
and consequently degrade meaning. Poetry can touch this because poetry is a place
where the language can be reconciled with that which is more than miserable,
with the abject. Burroughs lived on the edge of society and took the law into
his own hands; he always carried a gun and he did—accidentally—kill his wife.
His world was not nicely ordered within a respectful frame, within a recognized
symbolic order as most of us know it. His taste, his desire for that which lays above
and beyond characterizes his writings: where you encounter the abject, clashing
encounters with violence and death, with the real, which according to Kristeva
(1980: 13) shows the recognition of a basic lack of any solid foundation, the lack of
sense in our lives.

On our way – but where to?

By treating the abject as a privileged signifier, by dealing with that which inten-
tionally destroys us, drugs, violence, decay and death, by elevating it as if it were
something sublime, something worth striving for as the worthwhile value in life,
the crisis in the twenty-first century is well engaged. The symbolic consists of a
structure through which the values of our society are maintained.The real, however,
is without structure and is located in a parallel universe, to which we have access
now and again. Poetry is closer to the real than prose, and through its access to the
real it can break down the symbolic. Because of outbreaks from the real the borders
of the symbolic are damaged. When the metonymies are driven so far out that the
signifiers become real, the symbolic falls apart. While Ginsberg is talking about
different kinds of sex, Burroughs addresses violence, abuse and murder: he roman-
ticizes decadence, and he smashes the symbolic, as he reaches through to the real.
The order of our society governed by a legal system and functioning in a demo-
cratic spirit based upon certain moral and ethical aspects is what carries our society,
is what makes it possible to maintain our culture. When respect for this structure
ceases to exist, there can be a breaking of the structure, which can begin in the arts.
And if what begins in art, which is a transgression of norms, becomes so strong
128 Pia Hylén

that it takes to the streets—if breaking down the structure no longer is limited to
the arts but turns into a provocation that everyone wants to take a go at—then the
established order will no longer be upheld, the structure holding up our society
breaks down.
Oedipus has mythically laid a basic structure for our society, but centuries have
passed and borne witness to his passage; not even he cries any longer from his
gouged-out eyes. The paradoxical pleasure of our plus-de-jouir is getting closer and
closer to the abject, and in that sense desire is getting closer to perversion. If we
desire the abject, then we lose the connection to the object, to the Other, to a struc-
ture defined by the symbolic, and we fall out somewhere, where meaning ends.The
symbolic structure is normative for the values the subject has.Where we have major
changes (consisting of many smaller parts that amongst themselves are unrelated)—
when, for instance, homosexuality is no longer illegal—then fundamental values
have shifted; and, in addition, where substance abuse is becoming commonplace
and violence is on the menu every day, we can talk about slippage of the symbolic.
Naked Lunch is not only an odyssey through Burroughs’ excesses; it is our odyssey
out of the symbolic. Ginsberg fucks the father, and Burroughs kills him, and today
we are without.
In the seventeenth century Donne broke with the contemporary values of
­Elizabethan standards; he broke with the prevailing symbolic structure, where love
was defined as sweet as a rose and a sense of religious awe was dominating so
that desire had to be cultivated within these frames. Donne distinguishes himself
­twofold: le fond et la forme. First he spoke quite openly about sex, and second he used
language that did not appeal directly to the senses, but to the fundamental relation-
ship that exists between a subject and its signifiers.
Donne’s strength was that he took the step all the way out; he broke with tradi-
tion by rejecting limiting symbolism—rose-love—and going straight to the signi-
fiers, which he related openly in his poetry. He broke with the prevailing symbolic
order; he named the signifiers and thus initiated a paradigm shift; he helped to
change the way poetry is written, the way desire is expressed. There is a shift, in
which one symbolic order collapses and another one is built. I wanted to show how
Donne through his poetry was creating a new order. Poetry is an entrepreneur, the
instigator, because it is closer to the real than prose; because poetry has more access
to the real it instigates a passage between the real and the symbolic. Poetry is at a
permeable point in the symbolic.

References
Adorno, T. (1997) Cultural Criticism and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bailey, J. (1920) The Sermons of a Poet. Quarterly Review 463: 317–28.
Brodsky, J. (2013) On Donne,The Poet Is Engaged in the Translation of One Thing into Another. Avai­
lable: http://www.rferl.org/content/Brodsky_on_Donne_The_Poet_Is_Engaged_In_The_
Translation_Of_One_Thing_Into_Another/2051105.html. [Accessed 6 November 2015].
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Burroughs, W. (2008) Naked Lunch. London: Harper Perennial.

Chater, V. (2004) John Donne: Bulimic Bore? Absinthe Literary Review, Winter. Available:
http://www.absintheliteraryreview.com/archives/chater.htm. [Accessed 6 November 2015].
Donne, J. (1974) The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J. Smith. London: Penguin.
Eliot, T. S. (1921) The Metaphysical Poets. Times Literary Supplement October: 669–70.
Flinker, N. (1999) John Donne and the ‘Anthropomorphic Map’ Tradition. Applied Semiotics
3(8): 207–15.
Ginsberg, A. (1986) Howl. New York: HarperCollins.
Haven, C. (2013) Brodsky and Donne in the Arctic: “the image of a body in space.” Available:
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2013/01/john-donne-in-the-arctic-the-image-of-a-
body-in-space/. [Accessed 6 November 2015].
Kristeva, J. (1980) Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Kristeva, J. (1987) Soleil noir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lacan, J. (1966) Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2013) Seminaire VI, Le désir et son interprétation. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière.
Miller, J. A. (2013a) L’Autre sans Autre. Congrès de la NLS. Available: http://www.amp-nls.
org. [Accessed 6 November 2015].
Miller, J. A. (2013b) Une réflexion sur l’Oedipe et son au-delà. Congrès de la NLS.
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Morgan, B. and Peters J. N. (2006) Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco:
City Light Books.
Norbrook, D. (2002) Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University
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Filmography
Kill Your Darlings (2013) Directed by John Krokidas. USA: Killer Films.
9
Duras and the art of the
impossible

Carin Franzén

Marguerite Duras’ writing is constituted by a paradox.Throughout her work, which

to a large extent is autobiographical, a prerequisite seems to be the impossibility of
telling her story, the story of her life. In our own time, when the subject’s intimacy
is exposed and made public by new media practices, it is rather astonishing to return
to Duras’ literary work and its undermining of the confessional imperative that has
been dominating Western subjectivities for centuries.1 In the following I will try to
relate the negative affirmation, the “story of my life doesn’t exist”, to a fundamental
necessity of writing that is also articulated throughout Duras’ work. One of the
main points is that her writing demonstrates that the borderlines of subjectivity
are delineated by an impossibility of representation that tends to be foreclosed in
aesthetics in recent years.2 In other words, I will argue that the relation between
the impossibility to tell the story of her life and the necessity to keep on writing is
a very good illustration of a more general impossibility.
Actually, Duras’ writing, which has often been described in terms of a feminine
desire or as an expression of a specific feminine melancholia (Kristeva 1989: 234),
can more thoroughly be assessed as a specific form of arrangement of the unrep-
resentable within a symbolic practice. The point of departure for the assessment of
this more general impossibility in Duras’ art of writing is taken from Lacan: “the
path of the subject passes between the two walls of the impossible” (1977:167). In
his 1964 seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan explains
that the Real constitutes one wall and that the other designates the impossible ful-
fillment of drives and desire. When Duras writes that there is “no path, no line” in
the story of her life, the statement could be understood as an approach to these two
impossibilities that Lacan identifies as constituent for the subject: the fundamental
lack at the core of subjectivity and its relation to the real.
 Duras and the art of the impossible 131

To be sure, the real is an evasive term in Lacan’s theory. It stands out as a limit of
the human being’s symbolic and imaginary relation to reality, which for the sake of
self-awareness and autobiographical writing implies that subjectivity is anchored in
something unknown, or more correctly put, in something that cannot be known.
By emphasizing the category of the impossible and by forging the concept of the
Real, Lacan takes Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as the fundament of the
human being a step further.Today however, we seem to live in a world dominated by
a reality-based aesthetic or an imaginary belief that the Real can be totally grasped
and mastered, in particular through writings that claim to be ‘the true story’ of a per-
son’s life, or by the exposition of personal intimacy by other media technologies such
as reality TV shows or the expanding sphere of networking platforms. If this trend is
revealing of the relation between the late capitalist order and subjectivity in our soci-
ety, psychoanalytic experience could be used as “a hindrance, a stumbling block, a
point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (Foucault 1998: 101),
based on the insight that the impossible is an essential part of the human condition.3
This impossibility has to do with the fact that language defines human life in a
specific way, or as Lacan describes the consequence of the infant’s entrance into a
symbolic order: “The ready-to-speak that was to be there (…) disappears, no longer
being anything but a signifier” (2006: 713). The speaking subject is someone that
forever has lost something of its primary being. Thus, the subject is decentered and
split between a symbolic order where it has to find its place and the Real “that was
to be there”. Civilization has always tried to arrange itself according to or rather
against this human condition, not least with ideas that aim at reconstituting the cen-
trality and wholeness of the self, as for example Cartesian rationalism or romantic
ideas of love. However, in art and literature as well as in science and philosophy we
also find articulations of the limits of the subject and an acceptance of the forces
that supersede it. Furthermore, in present-day artistic practices the divide between
the nostalgia for wholeness and ‘the real thing’ on the one side and the acceptance
of loss on the other, is negotiated against the backdrop of a social order dominated
by a neoliberal ideology preaching the supremacy of the individual and the maxi-
mization of self-interest. A reminder of some central aspects of the modernist aes-
thetics of which Duras’ writing is part can be an illuminating contribution at least
to some of the impasses in that negotiation.
Against a short backdrop of the general historical context of Duras’ writing, I
argue that her art of the impossible reveals the imaginary illusions in contemporary
trends reflective of late capitalist and neoliberal subjectivity that share a belief in
individual freedom supported by the slogan that everything is possible.

A crisis of representation
The major experiences from the 20th century have all been connected to catastro-
phes and crises, such as the two World Wars and the new weapons of destructions
132 Carin Franzén

that came with technological evolution. Progress and a radical questioning of the
values of modern civilization seemed to go hand in hand. It has been argued that
“Europeans especially felt anguish in regard to their existence, since some per-
ceived that they were entering times of meaninglessness” (Salecl 2004: 2).The post-
World War period has moreover been seen as affected by a “crisis of representation”
(Kristeva 1989: 221). This description is relevant also for Duras’ minimalist aesthet-
ics, which nevertheless bear clear subjective and autobiographical traits. Through
Duras’ work one can actually follow a history of the subject from the depiction of
the traditional bourgeois family in her first novel Les impudents from 1943 to its
bankruptcy in the 1960s and the 1970s. During this time, Duras’ writing changes
from a realistic narration to her famous elliptic style. However, the need to elaborate
her “Familienroman” seems to follow her through her writing, which at the same
time becomes more openly political and critical of contemporary society and its
capitalist order. This critique goes hand in hand with a reflection on her own writ-
ing, and she has on various occasions underlined that literature must be set free
from moral constraints, not in the name of individual freedom but in response to a
demand that seems to come from the symbolic practice itself. However, I think that
this modernist credo of the autonomy of art in Duras’ case is based on an experience
of the limits of subjectivity that I will try to highlight in the following.
In the short text “Solitude” from the 1980s published in the French film magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma and reprinted in Green Eyes, Duras describes the writing of a book as
a kind of submission in the sense that it has a life of its own and furthermore a life that
is unknown.The writer can only subject her self to its force: “You have to go through
this journey with the book you are giving birth to, this hard labor, the whole time of
its writing. One acquires a taste for this wonderful misery” (1990: 69). A “misery” that
she in the same context also describes as a kind of fundamental unawareness – “You
don’t know.You know nothing about what you’re doing” (ibid.: 7) – which can also be
seen as a certain relation to the Real or a will to represent the unrepresentable without
reducing it to some presumed translatable essence or hidden truth.
In addition, when Duras talks about her writing she often underlines the integ-
rity of the creative process itself. Even if the product, the finished book, is inevitably
part of the logic of the market, the editorial or commercial business, it’s writing is
not. The becoming of a literary book for Duras is not negotiable by the fact that
writing is tied to the unknown. Could it be predicted, the act of writing would not
be necessary, or as she puts it in a reflection on her writing from 1993: “it’s impossible
to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book
one is writing” (2011: 17).
Thus, the integrity of the book is linked to the impossibility of speaking of its
becoming. This may sound as a romantic and even mystic view of literature, but
it can also be based on the acceptance of the impossibility of filling up the lack at
the heart of the subject’s being. A revealing example of this acceptance is formu-
lated in Duras’ novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein from 1964, when the narrator tries
 Duras and the art of the impossible 133

to understand the protagonist Lol V. Stein’s enigmatic character. The narrator talks
about her silence and believes that it is due to a specific lack, namely the absence of
a unique word – a word that could precisely tell the story of her life.This word does
not exist, but if it did it would be an absence-word, a kind of black hole in which
all other words would have been buried (1966: 38) Like Lol’s silence, Duras’ writing
is driven by something unrepresentable that risks burying her words, but unlike Lol,
the writer concedes to continue writing in a vain attempt to put the absence-word
into words. This paradox is at any rate characteristic of how Duras describes her
writing: “Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one
is about to write” (2011: 44). This, in fact, makes her art transgressive in the sense
that it goes beyond any mimetic representation of the already-known.
Even though Duras’ work seems to be part of a more general crisis of repre-
sentation in the post-World War period, her expressed trust in the force of writing
indicates a specific adherence to the symbolic order in contrast to the imaginary
search for the real thing or the real story in today’s aesthetics.4 Duras’ acknowledge-
ment of the unknown – “writing is the unknown” – could be seen as a parallel to a
psychoanalytic experience, to quote Lacan again: “since the opposite of the possible
is certainly the real, we would be led to define the real as the impossible” (1977:
167).Transposed into literary writing, and in particular into Duras’ writing, this idea
of the Real as a limit for what can be articulated by the symbolic is nevertheless
expressed through a poetical sensibility based on an absence-word, a hole-word,
whose center is the subject’s constitutive lack. This poetical arrangement of the real
impossibility of the symbolic does not mean that silence or resignation is at the basis
of Duras’ aesthetics.
In her reading Kristeva suggests that Duras’ writing gives expression to a spe-
cific feminine melancholia through a refusal of linguistic proficiency that “absorbs
political horror into the subject’s microcosm” (Kristeva 1989: 234). But it could
also be argued that Duras’ art of the impossible gives literary writing a specific
implication that transgresses both a singular feminine desire and a given historical
crisis of representation in a re-configuration of its elements into a critical opera-
tion of the traditional representation of subjectivity and politics (see Rancière
2010: 211).

Subject to truth
Kristeva describes Duras’ style as deriving from an aesthetic that imitates and repro-
duces an experience that can be tied to a feminine melancholia but also to the
major events from the 20th century. Her main point is that the aesthetic refusal or
minimization of literary devices that characterized art and literature in the post-
World War period was directed by a desire to stay true in the face of exterior as
well as interior traumas as if pain were the only faithful expression of these crises.
However, the force of this pain and the breakdown of ideologies that followed the
134 Carin Franzén

Second World War did not imply that Duras gave up her belief in the necessity to
write or political change, even though her style becomes more and more naked
and her adherence to a political party no longer seems to be an option, as she says
looking back to the 1960s:

We are sick with hope, those of us from ’68.The hope is the one we placed in
the role of the proletariat. And as for us, no law, nothing, no one and no thing,
will ever cure us of that hope. I’d like to join the Communist Party again. But
at the same time I know I shouldn’t. (2011: 26)

In one perspective the crisis of representation and the theme of melancholia that
Kristeva wants to discern in Duras’ writing could seem to reflect a political failure as
well as a personal experience. Motifs, such as the crazy mother, the colonial experi-
ence, the Second World War, are recurrent through her work and could easily be
related to her biography.5 However, the autobiographical narrative in Duras’ work
is at the same time undermined by negative affirmations such as the one quoted at
the beginning of this essay.
If the story of Duras’ life does not exist, then what does exist is writing and
through this symbolic practice an articulation of experiences that cannot be fully
represented.6 Furthermore, Duras’ underlining of the unrepresentable is tied to a
specific exigency of her aesthetics. In a revealing passage in her novel The Lover,
she talks about writing as something that has lost its meaning. For writing to regain
importance, she says, it needs to confront to things: on the one side, an inexpressible
essence, and on the other a basic offensiveness (Duras 1997: 8). Thus, for the author
of The Lover, writing on the late capitalist market has turned into nothing at all,
which could be read as a description of the consequences of a reification of literature.
When writing The Lover, this great public success in 1984, Duras was 70 years
old. To be sure, the autobiographical themes – childhood and the drama of grow-
ing up, the drama of sexual desire – have captivated the public and made the book
into material for perhaps an even more successful film. At the same time these
captivating themes are articulated as something beyond reach. Duras’ description of
contemporary literary writing as nothing at all could also be read as an indication
of a literary institution conditioned by the liberty to say everything and to say it in
the way one wants. Nevertheless, Duras insists here that this nothing, or absence of
literary moral constraints, must be directed by something that it is not possible to
express in public. If this quality is lacking, writing is nothing but advertisement (1997:
8), a sentence to which I will return. Thus, even though writing is no longer a
moral occupation, Duras points to the necessity of some sort of protection against
the actual exposure of literature, not least in regard to the autofictive and autobio-
graphical trend that dominates it today.
Differently put, if writing shall be something other than a more or less auto-
matic response to the demands of the market, then it must obey something essen-
tially unrepresentable. This exigency of Duras’ aesthetics is also apparent in the
 Duras and the art of the impossible 135

configuration of a kind of primal scene of writing at the beginning of The Lover.

Duras talks here about her childhood as an area where silence begins. As a literary
author she can only watch it from a distance, but that is also why she continues
writing, as if writing actually could bridge this distance of time and death that
separates the writer from her past. In the novel Duras also talks about her writing as
a continuous waiting outside the closed door of childhood (1997: 25). This impos-
sibility at the core of autobiographical writing also distinguishes Duras’ project
from the proliferation of the autofictive and autobiographical genre today, which
can be seen as part of a new regime where storytelling has become a central part
of a neoliberal “narrative order” (see Salmon 2010). Duras’ art of the impossible
can therefore also be assessed as a counter-discourse to that order. Furthermore, the
subjective and singular experience articulated in her writing is made general by a
juxtaposition of passion and politics, and it is often done in ways that are unseemly
in a politically correct sense. In The Lover, for instance, she compares the French
collaborator during the Second World War with her own political engagement in a
way that points to a kind of solution that tries to escape the impossibility at the core
of every personal identity. Collaboration and resistance or political engagement is,
says Duras here, based on a lack of judgment that consists of believing in political
solutions to personal problems (1997: 68). It could be this somewhat cynical decla-
ration that leads Kristeva to her conclusion that Duras “scrutinize[s] only the spec-
trum of suffering” (1989: 236). Nevertheless, in Duras’ work the “personal problem”
is also transformed into a radical stance going against the compromises of social life
and the resignations following the failures of ideologies, which I will demonstrate
by considering her configurations of love and the political consequences that one
can draw from them.

Subject to love
When Duras writes about passion – drives and desire – she often seems to criti-
cize a conception of romantic love as a dream about an everlasting relation where
two become one. Against this traditional representation of love that is still rather
dominant in our culture, her art reveals a dissymmetrical configuration of the sexual
relation with a bearing even for a radical conception of a social community, and
it comes as no surprise that it should reverberate in thinkers on subjectivity such
as Lacan and Blanchot. Lacan tried to assess main traits of her art of love in his
famous “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on ‘Le ravissement de Lol V.Stein’” from
1965 (Lacan 1987: 122–129), and it still echoes in his famous declaration regarding
the impossibility of the sexual relationship to which I will return. Blanchot also
made appreciative comments on Duras’ short fiction The Malady of Death one year
after its publication in 1982 in his work The Unavowable Community (1988).
In Duras’ condensed novella about a man, a woman and their sexual relation, the
man is constantly referred to as “you” and the woman as “she”. By its specific narra-
tive form it illustrates love not only as a force – in the story love is also represented
136 Carin Franzén

as a specific power structure, underlined by the fact that the man pays the woman
to spend her time with him, and is therefore something absolutely dissymmetrical.
Blanchot sums up the main theme with the following question:

What then is the difference between these two destinies, one of which pur-
sues a love refused to him while the other, through grace, is made for love,
knows everything about love, judges and condemns those who fail in their
attempts to love, but herself only offers herself to be loved (under contract)
without ever giving any sign of her ability to go from passivity to limitless
passion? (1988: 40)

Blanchot admits that he cannot answer his question and concludes that the dissym-
metry between the man and the woman remains “an inscrutable mystery” (1988:
40). I will not go further into Blanchot’s comment here, but I want to underline
the link that exists between his own conception of an unrepresentable and impos-
sible core in every community – that he calls “the unavowable community” (1988:
53) – and Duras’ configuration of love.
For Duras, love is aligned with a passion that cannot be mastered by will as
Descartes once thought.7 In her writings she often points to a profound incompat-
ibility between passion and will, an impossibility at the heart of every community
and a fortiori, the one that lovers dream of, as for example in these lines from the
already quoted text “Solitude” in Green Eyes:

Most people marry to get out of solitude. (…) Solitude is blurred but not
defeated. (…) A lover’s couple is shortlived. It never survives marriage. (…)
One cannot do anything from within the couple but wait for that wonder,
the days of love, to run out. (1990: 66–67)

Thus, in love we seek to transgress solitude, but this blessing is not a secure basis for
a community of two, but rather a consecration of “the always uncertain end inscribed
in the destiny of the community” to quote Blanchot (1988: 56).
In Duras’ representation of love as incompatible with the couple we can find
an obvious parallel to the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference and love that
Lacan developed in Encore, the twentieth Seminar, from 1972–1973. Furthermore,
even though Lacan here states the impossibility of a union of the two sexes (1998: 9),
he also points to the fact that there have always been different ways of compensat-
ing for this failure, with for example the imaginary dream of completion as a union
with one’s “other half ”, as we find it in Aristophanes’ discourse in Symposium, or the
creation of an object of desire that is inaccessible, as in the code of courtly love for
instance.8 A more truthful approach to this absence of sexual relation or impossible
union of two into one is to be found in the experience that goes beyond the imagi-
nary solutions and which Lacan designates in terms of a jouissance. In Encore Lacan
 Duras and the art of the impossible 137

illustrates this thinking by a reference to female mystics such as Saint Teresa and the
Beguine Hadewijch d’Anvers who, as he claims, experience a jouissance that transgresses
the symbolic order (1998: 76).This experience has also been related to Duras’ writing
(see David 1996), which can be qualified as supported by a jouissance that operates as
a corrosive force that undermines every romantic idea of love as a unifi­cation of two
into one. Nevertheless, this experience is articulated through the ­symbolic – through
her literary work – which is why Duras can also be said to write the unrepresentable
without relating it to an imaginary idea such as God in the mystical wordless experi-
ence. By letting the experience of jouissance be transformed into writing, Duras not
only destabilizes the Symbolic, leading “to an aesthetics of awkwardness” according to
Kristeva (1989: 225), she also puts an hegemonic imaginary of love into a process,
thereby making the impossible Real a ground for its representation.
A short passage in The Lover highlights this process in a tangible way.The scene is
zooming in on the narrator as a young girl just after her meeting with the Chinese
man, the lover. She expresses her desire for him, but he wants her to wait and
criticizes her for loving love more than him (1997: 42). The idea of being in love
with love can be traced back to Augustine’s amans amare,9 as well as to the tradition
of courtly love where idealization makes of the beloved woman an abstract entity
for the male subject’s narcissistic desire.10 When Duras lets the lover in this story
inscribe the young girl in these traditional discourses on love she nevertheless also
turns them around and deconstructs their idealization of passion. Beyond a psycho-
logical reading of the passage, where the lover’s anticipated jealousy points to the
sexual dissymmetry as a recurrent theme in Duras’ work, I would like to underline
that Duras’ account of the girl’s desire in this passage indicates the author’s fidelity
to the unrepresentable Real. Through the symbolic and the imaginary dreams of
union Duras reveals the impossible ground as a condition for every community, be
it a couple or a social group, and by doing so she also shows the political potentiality
of aesthetics in terms of dissensus, to use Rancière’s term.
Even though Rancière seems to criticize a notion such as the Lacanian Real for
being a “strange contemporary figure of apophatic dogmatism”, his description of
the function of dissensus as the political core of the community is as far as I can see
also applicable to Duras’ art of the impossible and its undermining of any “polic-
ing of domains and formulas” (Rancière 2010: 216–218). Duras’ writing moves
between an always-deceiving symbolic order and the Real that can only be sensed
as “an absence-word”, but her art transforms this narrow path into a dissensual
practice that therefore becomes a necessity that transgresses private life.

Coda
Duras’ description of love and writing is in many aspects inscribed in an actual
literary institution conditioned by the liberty to say everything and to say it in
the way one wants. Nevertheless, Duras insists that the modern absence of literary
138 Carin Franzén

moral constraints must be directed by something that is not possible to express in

public. If this quality is lacking, as is said in The Lover, then writing is nothing but
advertisement. Differently put, if writing is to be something other than a more or less
automatic response to – or mimicry of – the demands of the neoliberal market, then
it must obey a counterforce that disrupts the coherence of narratives and precludes
any attempt at totalizing a story of one’s self. One such counterforce is constituted
by Duras’ specific arrangement of representing the unrepresentable, which corre-
sponds to the analytical observation regarding the impossibility of fulfilling desire
and grasping the Real. In other words, in Duras’ writing the path between the
two walls of the impossible that Lacan pointed out for the subject is transformed
into an art preventing the aesthetic practice, as well as love, from being reduced to
the consensus dictated by the ruses of power, which resonates in the late capitalist
imperative of storytelling.

Notes
1 For a genealogy of confession and its relation to subjectivity, see Foucault (2014:
102–103, et passim).
2 Anselm Kiefer gives a clear-cut description of this trend in an interview: “The formerly
subversive expression ‘l’art c’est la vie’ is being perverted into a pure mimicry. The war
in the head – the long way from the first idea, from the concept until the result – is
reduced to one point. Everything is possible while art actually resides in the fact that
almost nothing is possible”, “Pour survivre, je crée un sens, et c’est mon art”, Le Monde
August 3rd, 2005.
3 Even though Foucault in his work on the history of sexuality from 1976 sees
psychoanalysis as part of a more general bio-power, this essay is inspired by the
thought that his analysis of the techniques of the self opens up for a radical view of the
subversive function of psychoanalysis in actual societies.
4 I have especially in mind the current trends toward autofiction that can be analyzed
in the light of the imperative of storytelling in the neoliberal “narrative order”
(see Salmon 2010).
5 See for example Adler (2000). When Adler’s biography was published in France in 1998
it became a bestseller, which once again indicates the actual interest in the “true story”.
6 With Rancière it could be argued that it is only possible to conceive of the
unrepresentable within an aesthetic regime where “everything is representable”
(2010: 208), which of course is characteristic for Duras’ defense of the autonomy of art.
7 In his treatise The Passions of the Soul from 1649, Descartes states that “even those who
have the weakest souls could acquire a quite absolute dominion over all their passions if
one employed enough skill in training and guiding them” (1988: 49).
8 From a psychoanalytic point of view love can be understood as a specific solution
to the constitutive lack in every subject formation, which the other is supposed to
fulfill, and this imaginary wish for plenitude is manifest in dreams as well as in literary
configurations. In his seventh seminar, on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960),
Lacan first illustrates this idea by referring to the structure of courtly love where the
impediments to sexual union can been seen as a way of making up for its absence.
Lacan returns to this topic in the twentieth seminar Encore (1972–1973).
9 See the third book in the Confessions written in Latin between 397 and 400 AD where
this experience is depicted as a state before the conversion into a true Christian who
only loves God: “I came to Carthage, where a caldron of unholy loves was seething and
 Duras and the art of the impossible 139

bubbling all around me. I was not in love as yet, but I was in love with love; and, from
a hidden hunger, I hated myself for not feeling more intensely a sense of hunger. I was
looking for something to love, for I was in love with loving” (2002: 31).
10 Drawing on Lacan, Slavoj Žižek argues that the courtly love code’s “elevation of
woman to the sublime object of love equals her debasement into the passive stuff or
screen for the narcissistic projection of the male ego-ideal” (1994: 108).

References
Adler, L. (2000) Marguerite Duras: A Life. Trans. A-M. Glasheen. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Augustine, A. (2002) The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. A. C. Outler. New York: Dover.
Blanchot, M. (1988) The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. New York: Station Hill
Press.
David, M. (1996) Marguerite Duras: une écriture de la Jouissance. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
Descartes, R. (1988) The Passions of the Soul. Trans. S.Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Duras, M. (1966) The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Trans. R. Seaver. New York: Pantheon Books.
Duras, M. (1990) Green Eyes. Trans. C. Barko. New York: Columbia UP.
Duras, M. (1994) The Malady of Death. Trans. B. Bray. New York: Grove Press.
Duras, M. (1997) The Lover. Trans. B. Bray. New York: Pantheon Books.
Duras, M. (2011) Writing. Trans. M. Polizzotti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1998) The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality: 1. Trans. R. Hurely.
London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. (2014) On the Government of the Living. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–
1980. Trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia UP.
Lacan, J. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psy-
choanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1987) Homage to Marguerite Duras, on “Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein.” In Mar-
guerite Duras. Trans. P. Connor. San Francisco: City Light Books.
Lacan, J. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. D.
Porter. London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore. Trans. B. Fink. New York:
Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company.
Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics.Trans. S. Corcoran. London: Continuum.
Salecl, R. (2004) On Anxiety. New York: Routledge.
Salmon, C. (2010) Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. Trans. D. Macey. London:Verso.
Žižek, S. (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London:
Verso.
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Part IV

Without words
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10
Representation without
language
Freud and the problem of the image
Annie Hardy

Psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a practice, is intertwined with language. At a

bare minimum, the pragmatics of conducting analysis require the presence of two
people who are able to exchange ideas through speech.Theoretically, Freud took lan-
guage beyond a practical necessity: his creation of a metapsychology to accompany
his psychoanalytic practice saw him developing intricate and sophisticated views of
the role of language in psychic functioning, presenting it as the archetypal vehicle
of representation for the conscious, reality-oriented thinking (see Freud 1961: 20).
Freudian metapsychological models are dynamic, rather than static, systems in
which thoughts that are represented in different modes are able to influence and
communicate with one another (see Freud 1957: 190). In what follows, I will con-
sider the relationship between linguistic and imagistic thought in Freud, with par-
ticular emphasis on philosophical issues this can raise for psychoanalysis.
Mental imagery, interestingly, is one of two exceptions that Freud gives to his
rule that human consciousness is linguistic (see Freud 1961: 20). As the other is
affect (Freud 1957: 177), visual thought is the only exception to this rule with an
inherently representational character. Unlike language, which Freud affords a defi-
nite structural position as the representational vehicle of conscious thought, mental
images are presented as part of neither the conscious nor unconscious mind. In con-
trast to other forms of non-verbal representation, such as a conversion hysteria, an
act of visual thought does not achieve the status of psychopathology, yet Freud nev-
ertheless states that it is incapable of reaching the level of “full consciousness”, which
in turn involves the ability to make connections between ideas (Freud 1961: 20).
The fact that Freud makes an exception of the image, I hope to show, potentially
betrays some of the key philosophical influences on Freudian metapsychology. Jean
Paul Sartre, in his early work The Imagination, argues that the relationship between
the image and thought in both Western philosophy and early empirical psychology
144 Annie Hardy

is highly important because it is indicative of the philosophical assumptions (for

instance, assumptions about how the mind relates to the body) that each theory
adopts (see Sartre 1936: 20). In Freud’s case, I will argue, the fact that his presenta-
tion of visual thought is shifting and indeterminate throughout his work indicates
an underlying metaphysical ambiguity at the heart of psychoanalytic theory.
Before continuing, it is worth clearing up the use of certain terms. Freud falls
victim to a natural ambiguity in his use of the term “thought”, at times using it
to denote the totality of psychological processes and at other times reserving for
a certain type of psychological process: namely one that is conscious, minimally
rational and reality oriented (see Holt 2009: 3). As Robert Holt has noted, “Freud’s
theory posits two antithetical forms of cognition, a more primitive form sometimes
called ‘ideation’ and a more sophisticated form worthy to be known as ‘thinking’”
(ibid.). This confusion in terminology should be acknowledged upfront: whether
certain forms of mental activity warrant the label “thought” whereas others (such
as imagistic experience) do not is precisely what is at stake in this argument. For
clarity, where the term “thought” or “thinking” is used to denote a specific kind of
mental activity it will be presented in quotation marks.
I will also occasionally use the term “imagination” in the place of “mental
images” or “visual thought”. This is because several of the philosophers discussed –
including Descartes, Sartre and Kant – opt for it as a preferred term for “visual
thinking”. It is vital to note, however, that they do not intend to imply a sense of
creation or fantasy that can accompany the term “imagination” and so these quali-
ties should not be assumed for the sake of the current argument.

Language and the mental image

It could be argued that a “psychoanalytic” way of thinking was born when Freud
realised that linguistic mental representations had the potential to become divorced
from other forms of mental activity. Although psychoanalysis has been said to have
truly begun with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1901, many
important features of Freud’s uniquely psychoanalytic approach to the mind were
present in his creative insights into the language disorder aphasia, which he pub-
lished as a monograph in 1891. Writing strictly as a neurologist, Freud aimed to
challenge contemporary accounts of aphasia, which tried to explain the loss of lin-
guistic ability in aphasic patients by uncovering localised lesions in specific areas of
the brain designed for generating and comprehending language (see Freud 1891: 1).
He argued instead that aphasia was a disease of function, a whole-person phenomena
that could not be reduced to the presence or absence of neurological lesions but
instead reflected the fact that linguistic mental representations can be divorced from
other forms of mental representation, creating problems in expression and under-
standing (see Freud 1891: 78). The dichotomy forged in “On Aphasia” between
language and other forms of mental activity continued to define Freud’s division
between conscious and unconscious psychic representations throughout his career,
with the ability to reclaim lost ideas by articulating them in speech forming the
 Representation without language 145

backbone of psychoanalytic therapy and the representation of an idea in “word-

presentations” a defining feature of consciousness (see Freud 1957: 200).
The idea that conscious thought and language are interdependent, despite enjoy-
ing popularity in philosophy and psychology throughout the twentieth century,
has been drawn under increasing scrutiny in recent years. In many psychological
sciences it has been common practice since “the cognitive revolution” to consider
some species of animals and non-human infants as “thinkers” despite the fact that
they are not language users (see Bermudez 2003: 3). This paradigm shift is slowly
making its presence felt in philosophy of mind, with Jose Luis Bermudez arguing
in his recent work Thinking without Words that a sufficient amount of empirical evi-
dence has now been accrued demonstrating that non-linguistic thought is possible,
and the task ahead is to fine tune our understanding of the nature of non-linguistic
thought, rather than questioning its existence:

Relatively little work has been done on elucidating the types of thinking that
are being attributed to different types of non-language using creatures. The
consequences of this basic assumption have been far more deeply explored
than its theoretical background. This, of course, is how science proceeds.
Niceties of conceptual framework are not at the fore when there is a major
paradigm shift. But the new paradigms in ethology, development psychology,
and the study of hominid prehistory are sufficiently well established for the
more theoretical questions now to demand attention. (2003: 5)

As non-linguistic thought is often taken to be visual in nature (see Gauker 2011),

the shift of emphasis towards non-verbal thinking that Bermudez describes has
brought with it a wealth of new work on the subject of mental imagery. Contem-
porary philosophers such as Christopher Gauker and Colin McGinn have argued
that the image has mistakenly been cast by philosophers as a form of sensory, bod-
ily activity, when in reality it would be more appropriately seen as a different kind
of thinking with a greater span of cognitive abilities than previously assumed (see
Gauker 2011: 158–159; McGinn 2004: 5). In June 2015, 124 years after Freud’s
publication of “On Aphasia”, a new form of psychological disorder was proposed
by Adam Zeman et al. called “Aphantasia”, which could be considered the visual
counterpart to aphasia. Sufferers of “Aphantasia” undergo a form of visual agnosia
that manifests as blindness in “the mind’s eye”, preventing them from either conjur-
ing or experiencing mental imagery (see Zeman et al. 2015). The phenomena that
this diagnostic category targets (imageless mental experience) is not a recent discov-
ery; psychiatric textbooks have described such patients for decades, with Anderson
and Trethowan’s 1973 publication of Psychiatry, for instance, describing a patient
who reports:

I cannot even imagine what my husband or children look like. When I look
at something I know what it is, but as soon as I put it away it is completely
gone. It is as if you asked me to imagine what air looks like. (1973: 17)
146 Annie Hardy

The creation of a new diagnostic category at this point in time could therefore be
significant, potentially reflecting the growing interest in mental imagery as a topic
worth further investigation.
Recent years have also seen an increased effort to unite classical Freudian
theory with empirical neuroscience (see Hopkins 2012). I would like to sug-
gest that the two go hand in hand: the developments in perceptual neuroscience
that form the back bone of emerging disciplines such as neuropsychoanalysis are
the same as those that re-evaluate the idea that linguistic thought is different in
kind to mental imagery. Following Sartre’s claim that the relationship between
thought and the image sets the tone for an overall philosophical worldview, it
makes sense that a shifting view of the mental image comes alongside a shifting
view of psychoanalysis.
In order to explore this further, I will divide the relationship between mental
imagery and language into two broad camps. The first derives from a philosophical
tradition that understands linguistic, conceptual thought as fundamentally different
in kind from visual thinking, which in turn is cast in the role of a sensory experi-
ence. According to this view, rational, conceptual thought is the hallmark of the
“mental” (as opposed to the physical) and the bearer of free will in an otherwise
causally determined universe. Freudian psychoanalysis has been considered open to
similarities with this philosophical worldview, as its concept of personhood includes
both a biological, psychically determined unconscious and a rational ego that can
freely bring about change in the mind.
The second considers linguistic thought and mental imagery as the exercise of
conceptual capacities: the automatic organisation of neural stimuli according to the
concepts that an individual possesses. According to this view there is no difference
in kind between words and images; both are constituted from the same represen-
tational building blocks. As mentioned above, this account owes great debt to the
growing field of perceptual neuroscience, where advances in our understanding of
the mechanisms that underlie perception have shown that even bare sensory expe-
riences are “cognitively penetrated” (subject to influence and distortion by higher-
order brain mechanisms) (see Raftopolous 2009).

The image in metaphysics and metapsychology

Freud’s notion of a linguistic consciousness was developed in the context of his
“topographical model”, which centres on three distinct mental systems: the sys-
tem unconscious, the system preconscious and the system conscious (1957: 173).
According to this model, an idea is dynamically unconscious (or repressed) if it
resides within the system unconscious, which represents mental activity in “pri-
mary process” thought structures. The “primary process” is a mental event that
predates conceptual thought and continues to exist unconsciously in the adult mind
throughout life. It only rises to the level of awareness in dreams, psychosis and to a
 Representation without language 147

smaller extent in jokes and slips of the tongue. In “The Unconscious” Freud sums
up the features of the primary process as follows:

These instinctual impulses co-ordinate with one another, exist side by side
without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual con-
tradiction … there are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees
of certainty. … To sum-up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary
process (motility of cathexis) timelessness and replacement of external by
psychical reality. (1957: 185)

The “primary process” is a different Freudian construct from visual thought. Despite
a natural resonance between the irrational unconscious and mental imagery, which
comes out in particular through hallucinations and dreams, Freud’s theory of
unconscious thought could not be summed up simply as “visual”; as not only does
this fail to incorporate the descriptively unconscious aspect, but Marcia Cavell has
shown that a close reading of Freud’s writings on unconscious “primary processes”
reveals that they presuppose a capacity for rationality and language almost as often
as they disavow it (see Cavell 1996). The secondary process represents according to
language (the word presentation), tolerates causal and temporal relationships, does
not tolerate contradiction and can contain negations (see Freud 1957).The fact that
the secondary process is a linguistic thought process underpins Freud’s assertion
that human consciousness is linguistic; the conversion of an idea from dynamically
unconscious to preconscious involves the addition of a linguistic element:

We now seem to know all at once what the difference is between a conscious
and an unconscious presentation. The two are not, as we supposed, differ-
ent registrations of the same content in different psychical localities, nor yet
different functional states of cathexis in the same locality; but the conscious
presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of
the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presenta-
tion of the thing alone. (ibid.: 200)

Even if we allow for the fact that the primary and secondary processes may rep-
resent two ends of a spectrum rather than a binary distinction (see ibid.: 190), it is
hard to give mental imagery a place within them. Freud acknowledges this in his
1923 paper “The Ego and the Id” where he states:

We must not be led, in the interests of simplification, perhaps, to forget the

importance of optical mnemic residues, when they are of things, or deny that
it is possible for thought-processes to become conscious through a reversion
to optical mnemic residues, and that in many people this seems to be the
favoured method. (1961: 20)
148 Annie Hardy

Freud’s treatment of the mental image as “outside” the standard metapsychologi-

cal framework has conceptual similarities with Sartre’s “problem of the image”:
the failure of Western metaphysical systems properly to assimilate visual thought
into their models of the mind. In terms resonant with Freud’s contrast between
“word” and “thing” presentations, Sartre argues that philosophers of the early mod-
ern period cast the mental image as a “thing”: inert and deterministic, comparable
to a passively received piece sensation.

In these three solutions, the image remains an identical structure. It remains

a thing. Only its relations to thought change according to the point of view
that one has taken on the relations of man to the world, of the universal to
the particular, of existence-as-object to existence-as-representation, of the
soul to the body.
(Sartre 1936: 20)

Sartre argues here that the manner in which a philosophical model characterises
the interaction between imagery and “thought” is indicative of the fundamental
metaphysical commitments it embodies. His analysis is particularly striking because
he shows that philosophers who otherwise adhere to radically different worldviews,
such as empiricists and rationalists, nevertheless use the same strategy in regards to
the mental image. Throughout the rest of the work, Sartre proceeds to show how
the treatment of the mental image in early modern philosophy came to impact the
treatment of the imagery in early empirical psychology (ibid.: 21–76): an intellec-
tual climate in which Freud would have been immersed when he was forging the
beginnings of psychoanalytic theory. Although it is beyond the scope of this chap-
ter to investigate this period of intellectual history, the relationship between early
modern philosophy and early empirical psychology is worth noting for two reasons.
For one, it justifies the focus on this particular period of philosophy when drawing
conceptual parallels with Freudian metapsychology, as there is some evidence that
there are direct currents of influence and not just wide thematic similarities. On a
more fundamental level, it demonstrates how empirical studies are susceptible to
inheriting implicit philosophical assumptions, allowing these assumptions to shape
their general form. Arguably, Freud takes two distinct but interrelated lessons from
philosophical theories of the mental image: that imagination is not part of the
“thinking” mind (but is closer to a bodily act) and that it cannot be a representa-
tional vehicle for acts of reflection. He comments on both of these qualities in the
same passage from “The Ego and the Id”:

We learn that what becomes conscious in it is as a rule is only the concrete

subject-matter of the thought, and that the relations between the various
aspects of this subject matter, which is what specially characterises thoughts,
cannot be given visual expression. Thinking in pictures is, therefore, a very
 Representation without language 149

incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to

unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably
older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. (1961: 20)

The idea that the image is closer to the body because it cannot be the vehicle of
rational reflection can be found in the rationalist metaphysics of René Descartes.
For Descartes the radical dichotomy between thought and sensation parallels several
other philosophical dualisms: that between body and soul, rationality and animal
instincts, freedom and determinism. His approach gives rise to the classic version
of the mind-body problem: asserting that “thought” and the mind are radically
different from physical phenomena makes it difficult to account for the ability of
thought to integrate or interact with the body or other physical phenomena. In
creating this dichotomy of thought and sensation, mind and body, Descartes places
the imagination closer to the material body than the rational mind: rather than
being a mental activity in the strict sense, the imagination is a mechanism of the
body that mysteriously traverses the abyss between the mind and the brain and
excites “innate” ideas so that they are experienced as conscious intellectual activity
(see Sepper 1996). Descartes justifies this by appealing to the second quality of the
image that Freud identifies: its inability to form rational links or reflect back upon
itself. Descartes argues that visual thought “differs from pure intellection only in
this respect, that the mind in conceiving turns in some way upon itself, and consid-
ers some one of the ideas it possesses within itself; but in imagining it turns toward
the body, and contemplates in it some object conformed to the idea which it either
of itself conceived or apprehended by sense” (1637: 113) A Cartesian mental image,
as Sartre describes it, is “an object by the same right as external objects. It is exactly
the limit of exteriority” (1936: 9).
Although Cartesian Dualism has lost popularity over the years, the idea that
imagistic thought differs from its linguistic counterpart because it cannot act
as a representational vehicle for reflection persists to this day. Bermudez argues
in Thinking without Words that linguistic, conceptual thoughts can be differenti-
ated from non-linguistic thoughts according to their ability to have “intentional
ascent” (2003: 151), a psychological function that implies reflective capacity.
Reflective thought requires not only thinking about the content of the thought
but also its “vehicle” or representational structure. It could be possible to explain
Bermudez’ reasoning as follows: a linguistic thought can take an imagistic thought
or another linguistic thought as its object, but an imagistic thought cannot take a
linguistic thought as its object. This is presumably because it is not possible for a
mental picture to have a linguistic statement as its representational content with-
out transforming into a linguistic representation itself; words describe images in
a way that images cannot describe words. Linguistic thoughts have the built-in
potential to be metarepresentations (thoughts about thoughts) whereas imagistic
thoughts do not.
150 Annie Hardy

Freud’s comments on the differing natures of verbal and visual thought can
therefore be placed within an established and continuing tradition. This does not
necessarily commit him to a metaphysical or functional dualism but it does, arguably,
reinforce his own claim that acts of visual thought cannot act as vehicles for rational
thinking in virtue of their pictorial nature.This insight can then be helpfully woven
into the seemingly paradoxical statement that the conscious experience of a visual
thought is not “fully” conscious (1961: 20). In asserting this, Freud is not denying
that we have phenomenally conscious experiences of mental images but is drawing
attention to the fact that the image’s lack of linguistic structure necessarily limits
the mental operations it can perform. In this regard, Freud’s theories of the con-
scious and unconscious minds are concerned as much with the functional ability of
thoughts and ideas as with the awareness that accompanies them.
Freud, arguably, differed from the philosophers Sartre discusses by positing that
the mind has two distinct ways of relating to the body and the outside world: the
unconscious primary process and the conscious secondary process. As Alfred Tauber
has argued in Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher:

Basically, Freud divided the mind between the unconscious grounded in the
biological and thus subject to some natural causation, and a rational faculty,
which lodges itself in consciousness and exists independent of natural cause.
(2010: 117)

If Freud’s conception of linguistic consciousness shares similarities with the

­Cartesian model of rational thinking, his portrayal of both imagistic thought and
the primary process (in other words, all psychic activity that is not linguistic con-
sciousness) may be better compared with Hume’s empiricism. Hume operated at
the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from Descartes: a staunch ­empiricist,
he denied the possibility of a difference in kind between psychological processes,
allowing only for differences in degree, claiming that mental images, which in turn
are the building blocks of thought, are simply a dimmer version of sensory percep-
tions (Hume 1739: 56).
It is important to note that while Hume does re-establish an equality between
imagery and “thought”, he achieves this by showing that both are ultimately a
variation on sensory activity. Rather than the image being recognised as a form
of mental activity that disrupts the traditional dualism of “thought” and sensation,
“thought” itself is revealed as an illusion. What the Cartesians perceive as “rational”
or “reflective” connections between ideas are in fact associations formed by habit
after repeated exposure in experience:

Whenever any object is presented to the memory or senses, it immediately,

by the force of custom, carries the imagination to conceive that object which
is usually conjoined to it.
(Hume 1777: 31)
 Representation without language 151

Freud’s theory of “primary process” thinking adopts a similar style of associationism.

In the system unconscious, chains of ideas form associatively through the mecha-
nisms of “condensation” and “displacement”, which connect ideas that have an
affective resonance with one another. Consider, for instance, his famous example
of Little Hans, whose phobia of horses was formed through the unconscious asso-
ciation between horses and Hans’ father (see Freud 1955). Psychic symptoms are
formed through primary process mechanisms, and “cured” through the transforma-
tion of associative ideas into secondary process thoughts. Freud, in this sense, can
be seen as creating a model that pulls elements from empiricism and rationalism. As
neither creates a satisfactory account of the mental image, it may be no surprise that
it is also an underdeveloped area in Freud’s work.

Freud and Kant: dynamic mental systems

The problem with seeing Freudian theory as a hybrid between empiricism and
rationalism is that it forces a more drastic split between the conscious and uncon-
scious minds than Freud intended. In other words, it denies that dynamic aspect of
the mental functioning: the fact that different forms of representations are capable
of influencing and interacting with each other, albeit imperfectly. One answer to
the rationalist-empiricist debate in the late eighteenth century was the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant, who proposed a “transcendental” solution to the question of
how our minds are able to know anything about the world. Kant and Freud, it
can be argued, share a certain kinship: both are responsible for generating massive
upheavals in our view of our own minds by showing, in distinct ways, how the
mind is capable of affecting its own contents. It is therefore through a compari-
son with Kantian metaphysics that it is best seen how the “problem of the image”
manifests for Freud.
Kant’s relationship to Freud is explicitly picked up by Tauber, who argues that
Freud’s later concept of the ego takes on the role of a Kantian rational regulator,
one that is able to act freely in the face of a deterministic biological unconscious
and steer the path of the individual:

The critical distinction resides in Freud’s acceptance, as a psychologist, of a

functional mind-body dualism, and in the higher functions of the mind, he
places the repository of interpretative reason. This is essentially a Kantian
construction, whereby reason assumes an independent character that allows
for a detached scrutiny of the natural world.
(Tauber 2010: 117)

The functionalist dualism that Tauber attributes to Freud has ramifications for the
possibility that psychoanalytic theory could be consistent with empirical findings
in neuroscience, because (like the Cartesian) it introduces an element of mental life
that cannot be characterised by physical description alone. Strangely, empirically
152 Annie Hardy

oriented readings of Freud such as those presented in neuropsychoanalysis can also

be traced back to Kantian insights, although the interpretations of his metaphysics in
each case differ widely. George Makari, noting the vast range of readings to which
Kant is open, has quipped, “Reading the history of post-Kantian philosophy tempts
one to conclude that the history of philosophy is a history of misreadings” (Makari
1994: 553). This accusation could just as well have been levelled at Freud: the fact
that Tauber’s reading of Freud lies at odds with that of neuropsychoanalysis repre-
sents just one tension amongst a vast tradition of Freudian scholarship, which tugs
him in various ideological directions. In what follows there will be no attempt to
canvass the range of interpretation, theory and thought that Freud and Kant have
inspired. Rather, to return more directly to the problem of the mental image, I
will match two divergent approaches to Kantian philosophy with two divergent
approaches to reading Freud. In both cases, the emphasis will be on drawing out the
shared philosophical approaches and how this naturally brings with it a conception
of the image as a kind of sensory experience or a kind of “thought” respectively.
Although it is far beyond the scope of this argument to give a satisfactory
account of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and as a result many subtleties will
be missed, it is worth noting how Kant’s treatment of the image evolved from the
philosophers discussed so far. If one had to nail down a starting point to Kantian
metaphysics, it would be the question of how mental representation is possible at
all: what capacities must be present in our minds in order to allow us to represent
the external environment in the way that we do? To explain the features of human
consciousness, most notably its unity, Kant creates a set of transcendental arguments
that demonstrate the necessary features of cognitive experience. He operates from
the starting point that we cannot know things as they are in themselves but only as
they appear to us. As such, he was overtly opposed to Cartesian metaphysics, argu-
ing that Descartes mistook his subjective experience for objective reality. Descartes,
Kant argued, was in the grip of a “transcendental illusion”, an act of mistaking the
experience of oneself (or the world) for its “reality”, as though a truly external van-
tage point were possible. Kant equally rejected “naïve” empiricism: Patricia Kitcher,
in her work Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, has argued that he is best understood
as implicitly replying to deep problems in Hume’s philosophy of mind by showing
that association alone could not possibly account for how we have the stable, uni-
fied experience of objects (see Kitcher 1990). As discussed above, Hume attempted
to explain how we have the consistent experience of objects in our environment
using the “Law of Association” (see 1777: 31), but Kant shows that this is problem-
atic: if habit alone were responsible for the combination of certain sets of sensations
into objects, then our constant exposure to a match being struck and catching fire
should, in theory, cause us to see the match and the flame as the same object, but
this does not happen. We do, however, consistently see different parts of the same
telephone as the same object (see Kitcher 1990). Teasing out the difference in kind
between these two cases requires us to look at the ways in which our minds use
certain principles to synthesise sense data.
 Representation without language 153

Kant begins by acknowledging the rudimentary fact that to represent an object

a set of cognitive states must be consistent and coherent. I cannot have the (accu-
rate) representation of a book in front of me as both red and blue at the same time;
the sensory stream must be united into an overarching representation that remains
consistent. Although unity is necessary for representing objects, we cannot derive
it from objects because the unity itself is not given in perception. The unity of
conscious experience is achieved by the synthesis of the manifold of sensory data
in the “productive imagination”. A key aspect of Kant’s metaphysical project is
his assertion that there are two forms of imagination: the reproductive imagina-
tion and the productive imagination. The former, in a comparable manner to the
philosophical theories of the image outlined so far, consists of the rebirth of inert
sensory experiences that occur in the mind but are nevertheless “thoughtless”. The
productive imagination, in contrast, consists of the same representational building
blocks as thought.
The productive imagination, importantly, is a “transcendental” faculty of the
mind. The term “transcendental” should not be confused with “transcendent”:
Kantian metaphysics is not concerned with what goes beyond experience but what
is constitutive of experience itself. When Kant argues in the “Transcendental Aes-
thetic” that whatever we perceive in the world we necessarily perceive as occurring
within space, he is not trying to establish a relationship between the individual
and the world where one asserts something about the other in a primarily one-
directional manner. Rather, his idea is that a certain kind of being is open to reality
in a way that is shaped by the kind of being it is. Due to its status as a transcendental
faculty of the mind, the exact notion of the productive imagination is incredibly
complex. It is also of paramount importance to the current discussion, as whether
one views Kantian philosophy as compatible with empirical data depends, in part,
upon the interpretation of the productive imagination that one adopts. On the one
hand, the productive imagination may be considered as a metaphysical construct
that allows for the possibility of organised knowledge that is nonetheless grounded
in experience. On the other, it can be read as a naturalistic theory: a description of
the mechanisms that the human brain puts to work when creating experience.
Kitcher argues that current empirical evidence demonstrates that the constitu-
tion of our minds may influence knowledge in very basic ways, in a manner that
can be directly derived from Kant. More specifically, she sees him as responsible for
drawing attention to effects of contemporary assumptions about synthesis, which
have re-emerged in experimental psychology as “the binding problem”: an area of
research that attempts to explain how shape, colour, luminance and other properties
of objects can be brought under one consistent representation. The fact that this
kind of “binding” must occur has been established by studies that demonstrate that
we erroneously engage in binding in certain experimental conditions. For example,
participants will often combine features of shape and colour in separate pictures
that are shown quickly one after the other, despite the fact that the various features
belong to different objects (see Kitcher 1990).
154 Annie Hardy

The existence of an active combining mechanism was acknowledged in neuro-

science from the time that Freud was developing the roots of psychoanalysis. Most
notably, Hermann van Helmholtz and Theodore Meynert, both of whom worked
closely with Freud, argued that Kant had hit upon fundamental truths about brain
operations in his attempt to create a transcendental metaphysics (see Makari 2008).
This, Makari has argued, could have been derived in turn from Schopenhauer’s
interpretation of Kant in which he argued that Kant “showed everything that makes
real perception possible, namely space, time and causality, to be brain function. He
refrained however, from using this physiological expression, to which our present
method of consideration necessarily leads” (Makari 2008: 554; Schopenhauer 1844:
285). This reading of Kant flattens out the transcendental aspect of his metaphysics,
seeing him less as philosopher in the strict sense and more as a thinker who intui-
tively pre-empted later scientific findings.
Once again, the same could be said of Freud as a pioneer of psychoanalysis.
Much of the recent work in neuropsychoanalysis has argued that Freudian theories
of mind should be seen as providing a subjective account of objective neurophysi-
ological brain processes. In some cases, Freud is seen as actively pre-empting later
empirical conclusions (see Hopkins 2012).The theoretical claims of neuropsychoa-
nalysis are grounded in the same model of perception that Freud would have been
exposed to via Helmholtz and Meynert, which it has been shown was inspired by
Kant. As Jim Hopkins explains in his recent paper “Psychoanalysis, Representation
and Neuroscience: the Freudian Unconscious and the Bayesian Brain”:

Helmholtz wrote in a tradition founded by Immanuel Kant (1781). His neu-

roscientific work partly embodies Kant’s idea that we can see our basic con-
cepts (Laurence and Margolis, 2011)—that is, our basic but everyday ways of
thinking of space, time, substance, objects, events, and the relation of cause
and effect—as performing an unconscious synthesis of the “manifold” of sen-
sory intuition (…) This philosophical perspective, at once straightforward and
profound, has been carried forward via Helmholtz, Hinton, Friston, and oth-
ers, into the conception of the Bayesian brain.
(Hopkins 2012: 7)

While Helmholtz’s models have been expanded on over the course of the last
century, the basic Kantian assumptions have remained the same. These may be nec-
essary for establishing the fact that we play an active role in “warping” our own
experience, a premise to which all psychoanalytic models of the mind adhere in
one form or another. Within neuropsychoanalysis in particular, the “face-house
experiment” is often used to provide an example of how the Bayesian brain can
act as an empirical cradle for Freudian theory. In this experiment, a picture of a
house is projected onto a participant’s right eye and a picture of a face is projected
onto his or her left eye, with the result of the phenomenological impression of a
 Representation without language 155

face gradually turning into a house, and then gradually back into a face again. This
occurs because the brain “knows”, from experience, that there is no such thing
as a “face-house”, so it uses the visual data available in the right eye to conclude
that it is looking at a face and suppresses the contradictory data coming in from
the left eye. This succeeds momentarily, but there is so much contradictory data (it
makes up half of the visual field) that the brain is forced to change its hypothesis,
and concludes that it is seeing a house. The cycle repeats, creating the undulating
image for the participant. This experiment may explain why individuals appear to
act with unified intentions despite the fact that they experience mental conflict,
because it demonstrates how conflicting information can be suppressed outside of
awareness, compelling us to conclude that the mind engages in the repression of its
own contents (see Hopkins 2012).
This experiment, alongside other interpretations that link Kantian philosophy
with cognitive psychology or neuroscience, relies heavily on a naturalised account
of the productive imagination. It solves “the problem of the image” by appealing to
empirically realised mechanisms that define all mental activity, from perception to
rational thought, as an exercise of “top-down” conceptual capacities. Philosophi-
cally, what is lost in such theories is a place for the unmediated sensory “given”, a
direct access to the world that is not shaped by conceptual capacities (see McDowell
1996). This dissolves the difference in kind between image and thought by trans-
forming the image, along with all visual experiences, into a rudimentary form
of thinking.
Although there are theorists who argue that non-conceptual sensory experience
is compatible with the findings of contemporary neuroscience, these claims tend
to be based upon admittedly speculative experimental interpretation (e.g. Gauker
2011) or have such a limited scope (for example, by applying only to a minute
portion of the most primitive perceptual mechanisms) that they have no impact on
the wider philosophical issues (e.g. Raftopolous 2009). In other words, it seems less
than hopeful that contemporary neuroscience is compatible with a metaphysical
worldview in which the image is a form of sensory mental activity that is different
in kind from conceptual thought. This represents a drastic reversal of dualist meta-
physics, which appeal to the difference in kind between the thought and the image
in order to preserve the possibility of freedom of reflection. If both visual and verbal
thought are considered an exercise of conceptual capacities, in a manner consistent
with scientific interpretations of the Kantian “productive imagination”, many of
the salient differences between the two collapse.

Conclusion: the image as a psychic symptom

The two diverse readings of mental imagery in Freud, traced through two diver-
gent understandings of Kant, therefore deliver up two very different psychoanalytic
models. To characterise this division in the form of a question could be to ask: is a
156 Annie Hardy

“thinker” simply a range of connected mental states, produced by in-built neuro-

logical organising mechanisms, or an agent that connects those states in virtue of
reflecting on itself as a thinking being?
Although the former option may serve up a viable and empirically testable solu-
tion to Sartre’s “problem of the image”, this comes at a price: where “thought” is
seen as different in kind from other mental processes, it allows space for thought to
turn back on itself and for rational reflection to play an active role in shaping mental
contents. Although this is by no means impossible in a naturalised reading of psy-
choanalysis, the need for it is greatly diminished. The “organising” force becomes
the brain, rather than the mind, as it constantly creates new perceptual experiences
of the world. This, nothing more, can act as a guiding principle for a discipline that
is potentially entering a time of great change.
If this work has had one aim above others, it has not been to support or discour-
age attempts to marry Freudian theory with the neurosciences but, like Sartre, to
emphasise that it is impossible to have a descriptive model of mental functioning
that is free from underlying philosophical assumptions of the nature of thought
and its relationship with the external world, the body and the senses. The fact that
Freud and Kant can be interpreted so diversely by scholars from different intel-
lectual backgrounds only serves as testament to this. To finish with an analogy, the
mental image in Freud could be compared with a psychic symptom: not because it
is inherently pathological, but because it is in fact a solution in the guise of a problem.
The fact that the image is not integrated into “thought” can be seen as a side-effect
of the need to preserve the sui generis nature of linguistic and rational thinking, a
free sphere of the mind that is defined in contrast to all other kinds of deterministic
mental activity and that can meaningfully act as a free agent.

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Freud, S. & Stengel, E (1891). On Aphasia: A Critical Study. USA: Literary Licensing.
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Herman, A. (2014) The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul in
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Hopkins, J. (2012) Psychoanalysis Representation and Neuroscience: the Freudian Unconscious
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Makari, G. (2008) Revolution in Mind:The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins.
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11
Understanding without words

John Miller

Some 20 years ago, I was conducting a psychoanalytic session when it suddenly

felt to me as if I were experiencing a heart attack.Violent shooting pains occurred
in my arms and my chest. I felt uncontrollable spasms and could hardly breathe.
By using yoga breathing techniques I was somehow able to manage my symptoms
until they abated, and the patient on the couch was not aware of what I was going
through. After the session medical checks revealed no signs of anything the mat-
ter with my heart and circulation. I then realised that the session had been the last
one before a holiday break with an emotionally, extremely disconnected patient
whose father had suddenly died of a heart attack during a holiday when she was a
child. The patient was massively insulated, against taking anything in or expressing
any genuine emotion, by a chronic state of manic defence. She also had an eating
disorder, which had resulted in her being morbidly obese, so that she was physically
insulated from the world around her. I have since come to believe that my “heart
attack” was a spectacular countertransference phenomenon where the patient pro-
jected into me the inexpressible feelings about a father who died of a heart attack
during a holiday break by somehow making me feel that I was the father dying at
the beginning of the holiday break.
Although she was an intelligent and educated woman with a university degree,
which enabled her to get a responsible job in industry, she had been completely
unable to process the disastrous experiences in her childhood, which had left her so
unable to cope with the emotional pain of life. Being unrepresentable, it could not
be communicated symbolically and so was only available to me because the psy-
choanalytic relationship enabled her to communicate to me in the same non-verbal
ways in which the baby makes the mother understand its distress.
A woman colleague of mine had a similar experience with a young male patient
who had come for an initial consultation. A few minutes into the consultation my
colleague suddenly found that she had a desperate urge to empty her bladder so
 Understanding without words 159

extreme that she was really worried she might wet herself. She excused herself
from the session with some embarrassment and when she returned, the young
man was in tears. It transpired that a core issue in the difficulties for which he had
come for analysis was the abrupt way in which his mother had abandoned him
when he was very small, as a result of which his childhood had been plagued by a
history of enuresis. The un-representable – perhaps unspeakable and unthinkable –
experience could not be put into words, but it could nevertheless be communicated
to someone who was receptive or “tuned-in” enough to pick it up.
These may seem to be mysterious and unusual examples, which might even bor-
der on the paranormal, but in fact they are simply rather dramatic demonstrations
of countertransference.This is a fundamental aspect of psychoanalytical practice and
refers to the emotional experience the analyst has of the patient. This is generally
recognised as taking two forms: neurotic countertransference, where the analyst
projects his or her own unconscious material onto the patient, and syntonic coun-
tertransference, where the analyst picks up unconscious communications from the
patient. The only way in which these examples are unusual is the extent to which
the repressed mental pain had been compressed, so to speak, into such a tangle of
pain and confusion that all its components had to be emotionally projected into
the analyst en bloc. Consequently, I had to feel that I was the father dying of a heart
attack, and my colleague had to be made to experience herself as being the enuretic
child while simultaneously being forced to behave like the abandoning mother.
We only sit up and take notice when examples are as dramatic as this – and even
then the tendency is to dismiss meaning on the grounds of coincidence or fanciful
thinking – but the truth of the matter is that all human beings (as well as animals)
send and receive vital complicated communications all the time in ways that are
seldom dependent on words.
Let us start with the communication between mother and baby. In the cru-
cial, formative, early weeks and months of life, the baby is incapable of expressing
or understanding articulate language. Nevertheless, within a few days of life, the
mother starts to be able to interpret the baby’s cry as well as its expression, and the
baby similarly begins to interpret both the expression in mother’s voice and on her
face. When it comes to auditory communication (notice I am carefully avoiding
anything as specific as the notion of “verbal”), it is the music of mother’s voice –
what is known technically as the prosody – to which the baby responds. A simple
demonstration of this is the way in which, if the mother of a small baby starts to
have a quarrel or an argument with someone in the baby’s hearing, the baby is
very likely to become immediately distressed and start crying. This response to the
prosody is a fundamental factor in verbal communication throughout adult life. At
the crudest level this is demonstrated by the importance of emphasis, as illustrated
by the very different meanings of the following three statements:

I don’t believe you!

I don’t believe you!
I don’t believe you!
160 John Miller

In subtler ways, the music of a person’s speech is something upon which we uncon-
sciously rely continually in order to know what he or she is “really” saying and
generally to get a feel for his or her attitude and point of view.
There seems to be no doubt that the development of music in the course of
civilisation antedates language just as poetry antedates prose. This is because music
and poetry involve a living emotional experience whereas the prose of both spoken
and written language is, strictly speaking, a code that can convey messages that can
be completely devoid of personal or emotional content or even meaningless.
In the 500 years since the invention of printing, written and spoken prose has
gradually come to dominate human activities, reaching its apogee in the second
half of the nineteenth century with the advent of universal education. During this
process, the emotional and relational experiences that used to be mediated by music
and poetry have gradually become buried, disguised and in some cases distorted.
The general consequence has been a gradual increase in focus on the objectiv-
ity and logos of the masculine principle with the gradual loss of contact with the
feminine principle of subjectivity and relatedness. As a consequence, humankind
has become progressively more advanced technically at the same time as it became
more and more disconnected emotionally.The net result is that there has been more
and more of the human condition that has become un-representable, which at ear-
lier times in history would have had a voice, a medium or a means of expression.
Consequently, it is no accident that the Unconscious was discovered, and psy-
choanalysis originally developed, as a result of research into hypnosis and the
treatment of hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1955). Although hysterical states involve
dissociation and dramatised simulation of suffering, they nevertheless constitute
serious defence mechanisms against unbearable mental pain. The phenomenon of
hysteria in the nineteenth century can therefore be thought of as a kind of instinc-
tive, acted-out protest against a chauvinist, paternalistic culture that repressed not
only women but everything to do with emotionality and spontaneity. One of the
principal driving forces in the development of Jung’s psychology was his concern
about the ultra-rationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, which he felt,
was reflected in Freud’s desire to make psychoanalysis “medical” and “scientific”.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, probably C. G. Jung’s most celebrated colleague, herself
grew up in the region Freud came from and observed that it was probably the
most ultra-paternalistic and chauvinist area in that part of Europe at the time. Jung
himself came from another bastion of bourgeois artificiality, Zurich, which almost
certainly played its part in his developing such unconventional and radical ideas
about psychosis. Bourgeois respectability is exclusively concerned with appear-
ances and requires anything embarrassing or irrational to be repressed and denied.
A polemical comment on this can be found in the autobiographical book Mars by
Fritz Zorn ([1976] 2000). Zorn is a pseudonym (it is the German for “anger”), and
the book is all about the fact that the author is dying of cancer, which he believes
to have been caused by the stifling effect of bourgeois Swiss culture he experienced
as concentrated in his family.
 Understanding without words 161

Psychoanalysis came into being in response to the neuroses and existential angst
caused by the widening gap in the human psyche as humankind got progres-
sively out of touch with itself. The historian Norman Davies, in his 1300 page
history of Europe is only able to devote one paragraph to psychoanalysis, summa-
rising the essence of Freud’s and Jung’s theories. He concludes with the observa-
tion that by 1938 “psychoanalysis (…) had established a new, uneasy dimension
in people’s perception of themselves: ‘the Ego is not master in its own house’”
(Davies 1997: 861). This is, indeed, the heart of the matter in a nutshell. The real,
ground-breaking realisation of psychoanalysis, however, is that the only remedy
lies in promoting understanding of the unconscious forces at work and learning to
cooperate with them. Simply reinforcing the Ego to enable it to impose its will on
the unconscious forces, regardless, is an intra-psychic version of trying to crush a
mutiny or an insurrection without any attempt to understand what gave rise to it
in the first place.
It is here that psychoanalysis finds itself on the horns of the ultimate dilemma.
The principal – almost the only – medium of communication of the “Talking
Cure” is that same written and spoken language that is so big a part of the problem.
Words in their logical, lexical form can prove black is white, confound meaning and
generate confusion, just as much as the reverse. Freud was acutely aware of this, and
whatever aspirations he may have had for psychoanalysis to be “scientific”, he was
always clear that the essence of it was a human relationship, as opposed to a medi-
cal procedure as evidenced in his letter to Jung in 1916 in which he defined it as
essentially “a cure through love” (McGuire 1974: 12–13). Central to this, too, was
his realisation about the “dangerous method” that led to the crucial discovery of
transference: that setting up a situation where the patient apparently fell in love with
the doctor was actually the re-experiencing or recreating of the unresolved Oedipal
dynamic, which was usually at the heart of emotional dysfunction. There was no
way around this if real emotional development was to occur. Theoretical discussion
or mind games would not only fail to have any impact on the underlying problems
but were actually likely to exacerbate them by creating an illusion of understand-
ing. Real learning and maturation could only occur to the extent that the patient
could recognise and abandon the attempt to control the analyst/parent by seduc-
tion. Only through a genuine appreciation of the parent’s love and resources could
the child start to develop them himself/herself.
The other key issue in the question of representing the un-representable is the
difficult issue of symbolisation. It is important, here, to be very clear at the outset
about there being two somewhat conflicting (even diametrically opposite) uses of
the word “symbolic”. At the everyday level, anything that stands for something else
can constitute a symbol, and words are probably the most common example. The
basic principle here is summed up by the expression “Let X equal the unknown
quantity”, which underscores the arbitrary nature of this use of symbols. When
­traffic lights were first invented, an administrative decision was taken to use the
colour amber to alert the road-user to the fact that the lights were about to change.
162 John Miller

By contrast, the use of the word symbol in Object Relation theory and
­particularly in Jungian psychology, concerns attributes, characteristics and truths
about the nature of the world, which are connoted or inherent in human being’s
perception of their environment. So, for example, the colour red has always been
the colour of blood and fire and has consequently had lively or stimulating con-
notations. The sky and sea are only blue when the weather is calm, and hence blue
has a universal connotation of stillness or calm. If the blueness is excessive this may
extend to the experience of being becalmed, “having the Blues”: in other words
being depressed. If any human being from any culture or ethnic group is made to
contemplate a pure red screen, his or her pulse will speed up perceptibly, and the
opposite will occur with a pure blue screen. Art therapists who work in hospices
and people like me who have studied colour symbolism are familiar with the way
in which seriously ill adults and children will reflect in the spontaneous choice of
colour in their artwork both their emotional experience and unconscious aware-
ness of their medical conditions.
All the cultural achievements of civilisations down the ages make use of this
sort of symbolism in the way that they express profound truths and aspirations of
the human condition, which, by their very nature, cannot be precisely defined or
summed up.They can only be symbolically connoted.The symbols are packed with
meaning that can only be partially accessed. It can never be definitively explained
or translated. This is how a play by Shakespeare, a piece of music by J. S. Bach or
a picture by Leonardo da Vinci has an almost unlimited scope for reinterpretation
and being re-experienced.
In the personal experience of individuals, the same is true of the symbolism
of dreams. The dream mind expresses itself mostly in visual images that cannot
be explained or translated, only contemplated. Perhaps the most serious of all
Strachey’s mistranslations of Freud into English was the title given to his key work
The Interpretation of Dreams.The German word Traumdeutung was actually coined by
Freud and derived from the word Sterndeutung which means Astrology, or strictly
speaking “scanning the stars in search of meaning”. According to Bettelheim, Freud
wanted to evoke in his reader’s mind the idea of the possibility of extracting some
important meaning from mysterious data (Bettleheim 1985). When an analyst
interprets a patient’s dream he or she is not explaining or reproducing it in words,
like someone interpreting from one language to another, but trying to enable the
patient to access what is locked up in the symbols. This is much more akin to the
interpretation of a piece of music where there is a correct sequence and value to
the notes involved but most of the effect of the music comes from the way it is played.
Insight is seldom, if ever, achieved as a result of intellectual understanding. More-
over, intellectual understanding is very prone to lending itself to an illusion of
insight. A woman social worker patient of mine came one day to a session in a
completely distraught state. She explained tearfully how she had begun to realise
how damaging it must have been for her children to ship them off to be looked
 Understanding without words 163

after by relatives for long periods when they were very small. Part of her distress
was caused by the fact that she felt she had no excuse for being so psychologically
unaware because she had studied Attachment Theory and vividly remembered see-
ing the films made by the Robertsons about the effects of brief separations. I was
able to console her that she had at least learned something very important, namely
the uselessness of purely intellectual understanding of a psychological issue.
The mixed blessing of logical thinking and intellectual understanding has a
very long history and dates back beyond the Enlightenment to the point where
Descartes sought the proof that he existed in the act of thinking rather than the
experience of feeling. There is, however, a much more serious threat to emotional
insight and real understanding, which has massively increased in the last 50 years
and that is the menace of fraudulent and delusional thinking. The problem here is
that the un-representable becomes misrepresented.
In the 1960s, long before the concept of Virtual Reality was coined or even
conceived of, pioneers in widely different schools of psychoanalytical thought were
all beginning to recognise and describe an increasing tendency towards chronic
self-deception. Winnicott produced his seminal paper on the aetiology of the False
Self (1979), Meltzer produced his paper on Projective Identification (1966), and von
Franz her book of lectures on the Problem of the Puer Eternus (1970). All three
were, from their different perspectives, addressing the problem that more and more
people who – despite being intelligent and sane (from a psychiatric point of view) –
were living in a delusional, fantasy world that completely disconnected them from
emotional reality, despite apparently functioning in the outside world. The spec-
tacular impact all three of these publications had on their respective readerships tes-
tified to the fact that they were all vividly identifying (and in some way, managing
to represent) a phenomenon of vital importance. It was, however, the Kleinian tra-
dition with its detailed understanding of the developmental processes in the Inner
World – through the work of Bion, and elaborated by Meltzer – that was ultimately
to provide a comprehensive understanding as to what was going on. Winnicott’s
object relations approach places little emphasis on the infant’s unique individuality
and temperament with the resultant implication that children are somehow cre-
ated or formed entirely by the mother’s treatment and attitudes. Consequently the
False Self problem tends to be presented almost as a product of conditioning rather
than something the patient is unconsciously keeping going. By contrast, Jung had
absolutely no interest in early infantile development and consequently offered no
account of how the early emotional development of the infant might be affected
by the relationship with the parents.1 By taking psychoanalysis back to the starting
point of birth (and even before) Melanie Klein focused attention for the first time
on how mental and emotional functioning develops. It was only as a comprehen-
sive picture began to be formed of how the baby develops its mind through the
relationship with that of the mother that it began to be possible to see how the
Virtual Reality phenomenon of projective identification resulted from a kind of
164 John Miller

pathological simulation of healthy developmental processes. It is important to rec-

ognise here that what we are talking about is nothing less than the core processes
through which knowledge qua relationship and knowledge qua understanding the
world takes place. Mother’s mind constitutes a kind of start-up disk, which the baby
has to be able to access in order to “download” its own capacity for thinking and
relating. If this process is seriously obstructed – mother is physically or emotionally
unavailable, or her own mind is seriously disturbed – the baby may have no option
but to fabricate a fantasy mother on which to base its understanding. The result,
in varying degrees, is likely to be that the individual that results is someone who is
play-acting being a person and has little in the way of authentic feelings, beliefs or
even understanding about the way the world works.
Bion provided further understanding of the way this process could work and
also how it could malfunction (see 1984). He conceived of the infant having men-
tal and emotional experience, which at the start of life it was completely unable to
process. He labelled the content of this experience, Beta elements. He suggested
that good interaction with the mother’s mind gradually provided the baby with
the capacity to process its experience, a facility he called Alpha function. Bion’s
account has a number of advantages. First, it provides a way of understanding how
normal development takes place in the mother-baby interaction. Second, it offers
an account of how the baby’s emotional capacity develops and also how difficulties
with that can continue to occur in adult life.
Perhaps Bion’s most inspired and revolutionary contribution to our understand-
ing is his concept of Love, Hate and Knowledge (L, H and K) (Bion 1984). The
basic premise is that knowledge of the world, as well as knowing another person,
results from a state of total engagement where maximum feelings of Love and Hate
are experienced. The degree of true knowledge possible is seen as proportional to
the degree of engagement. Bion’s stroke of genius was to conceive of a negative
version of this – minus Love, minus Hate and minus Knowledge – all of which
centred round avoidance and non-engagement. Thus, minus Love is not Hate, but
the avoidance of Love and desire: perhaps characterised by puritanism. Similarly,
minus Hate is not Love, but the avoidance of Hate as is found in sanctimony. The
more minus Love and minus Hate are present, the more there is likely to be minus
Knowledge: avoidance of understanding, the “don’t-want-to-know mentality” such
as we see in the denial of critical issues like climate change or indifference to pov-
erty and famine.
Donald Meltzer, with whom I worked for over 20 years, not only managed
to digest the dense and difficult writings of Bion (whose supervision groups he
attended), but also elaborated the whole phenomenon of projective identification
further. He realised that the model on which the psychic retreat of projective iden-
tification was unconsciously based was the fantasy of the inside of mother’s body as
imagined by the baby, according to the perception it had of different parts of her.
Thus, the eyes and the breast are the source of a blissful and exhilarating experience
 Understanding without words 165

so that the illusion (through projection) of being inside that part of the mother
produces “heady” delusions of being infinitely wise, inspired and “above it all”.Thus
someone in this state of mind is described as “living in the Head/Breast” (Meltzer
1992: 72). Secret fantasies of being an undiscovered genius, or the new Messiah,
usually occur and flourish when people are in this state. If the experience of the
Head and the Breast are Heaven, then Hell and the Underworld are to be encoun-
tered at the other end: mother’s Rectum. Life in this state is vividly described by
Kafka, especially in The Trial. Life seems to go on, but there is no escape from the
unspoken accusations and persecution of an invisible police state where everything
and everyone is corrupt and the only relationships are sleazy, sexual fumblings.
The paranoid experience of Kafka’s world arises from a deeply buried awareness
that the manoeuvre of projective identification is essentially an illicit one in that it
involves a kind of stowaway operation to get inside the Object and thereby magi-
cally acquire its qualities. The beauty of mother’s smile and the blissful experience
of her breast, as portrayed in thousands of paintings of the Madonna, is a representa-
tion of heaven, but it can only be genuinely experienced through a real, dependent
relationship with a Mother.
It seems likely that more often than not when people are diagnosed with
depression – particularly when they are suicidal – what is actually happening is
that they have unconsciously fallen into the Rectum, psychically speaking. Genu-
ine depression is characterised by a feeling of unworthiness and humility, whereas
people in suicidal states are usually insisting that life must go the way they want
it or else they will take themselves hostage and kill the hostage. In the Middle
Ages, evidently, there were epidemics of people getting into this mind-set as whole
monastic communities were affected. There were even specialist monks – sort of
mediaeval, group analysts – who were called in to deal with the problem. The way
it was viewed suggests that the mediaeval Church had a better grasp on psychology
than modern psychiatry, as the diagnosis that was usually made was Acedia, one of
the Seven Deadly Sins that is usually defined as Pride, in the form of denial of the
Love of God (Norris 2008). In other words, they realised that what was happening
was not that the brothers were being mysteriously afflicted by something happen-
ing to them but that they were indulging in a sinful attitude that was making them
feel they were in Hell.
The key to all of this lies in the recognition that the main problems occur when-
ever someone creates an illusion of being someone or something else by using the
mechanisms of projection. Once there is confusion about the boundary between
internal fantasy and external reality of emotional experience it is literally true to
say that all hell breaks loose in the mind. A vivid, visual portrayal of the kind of
hell that threatens can be seen in the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by
­Hieronymus Bosch, where one detail portrays the Prince of Hell simultaneously
eating people and excreting them. A more modern portrayal of the confusion of
zones and boundaries is that which occurs in Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the
166 John Miller

Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) where a Mafia Godfather-style figure presides
over torture scenes in a kitchen that somehow seems to be also a bathroom-cum-
toilet while an angelic choirboy sings in the background. What is being so vividly
represented here is both the conflicting images of heaven and hell as well as the
geographical and zonal confusions into which is the viewer is plunged.
Meltzer’s detailed description of the various forms of Virtual Reality into which
people unconsciously plunge themselves, which he called the Claustrum (Meltzer
1992), is of vital importance in understanding the most common psychological and
relational problems that take up most of the time of the helping professions. Prob-
ably one of the most paralysing and debilitating forms of this is anxiety states (often
referred to under the generic heading of “Stress”), which in the analytical consult-
ing room almost invariably turn out to be caused by the strain of the patients’ trying
to keep up the chronic performance of pretending to be what they are not. They
feel as if they are undercover agents who are permanently terrified that they are
going to forget their cover story and reveal their fraudulent identity.
Over the last 20 or 30 years psychoanalysis has produced a massive amount of
evidence that this is what actually lies behind most problems of panic, phobias and
particularly claustrophobic states. I have come to believe that a significant factor in
global warming is the claustrophobic anxiety behind the millions of frantic, unnec-
essary airline flights and car journeys by which people are actually trying to escape
from the fantasy safe-house in their head which has become a prison.This explains,
too, why it is so common for people to be endlessly trying to fit themselves into
some kind of preconceived idea of what they ought to be or what ought to be hap-
pening, rather than to respond spontaneously to life. Clearly when this is operating
in supposedly personal relationships there can be no emotional contact, only play-
acting and delusion.
This was, of course, anticipated by Ibsens’s play Et Dukkehjem (The Doll’s House).
Helmer is in the Claustrum where he does not see that he is play-acting being a
husband. Nora is no longer in the Claustrum. She is in touch with her feelings and
sees their marriage is a farce – but it could change! If only they could both change!

Nora: Da maate baade du og jeg forvandle os saaledes at… [Then both you and I
would have to change ourselves so that …]
Helmer: Nevne det! [Name it!]
Nora: At samliv mellom oss to kunne bli et ekteskap. Farvel. [So that the relationship
between us to could be a marriage. Adieu!] (Ibsen 1962: 114)

To my English ears, the Danish word for marriage – ekteskap – is particularly rel-
evant since it is made up of two words: ekte which means “real” or “actual”, and skap
which means “creation”.Thus, the word for marriage literally means something like
“the real thing” or “the genuine article”. In a more everyday and much less surreal
manner than Hieronymus Bosch’s painting or Greenaway’s film, Ibsen’s drama man-
ages to represent vividly the misrepresentation of a relationship.
 Understanding without words 167

Finally, there is another form of representing that plays a central part in

­psychoanalysis and that concerns the way in which the analyst represents something
for the patient in the sense of being a representative. In this kind of representation the
demands of the contributions of one person or group of people cannot be directly
expressed unless they have a representative to act for them. In society and in politics
we are familiar with the idea of a particular interest group or minority needing
to be represented. This kind of situation is almost always present in psychoanalysis
in the way in which either the patient’s real interests have never had a voice that
was heard, or else the patient has not encountered representatives from the world
of good parenting. In such cases, the efficacy of the analyst depends on how far he
or she can be a satisfactory representative, either in giving a voice to the un-heard
emotional needs of the patient or being an authentic representative of parental
concern and reliability, which the patient may not even be able to imagine. It often
seems to be necessary – perhaps particularly in Jungian circles – to establish the
fact that the world is not peopled by mothers and fathers, devils and angels, but by
ordinary human beings through whom it is possible to have angelic or diabolical
experiences. Thus, the analyst is always representing something, but the resultant
experience the patient can have is nonetheless potentially a real one. The analyst
sitting in the chair behind the patient’s head is just an ordinary person, probably a
bit older than the patient, who is simply listening and trying to understand. Patients
can know this but nevertheless have a genuine emotional experience of the analysts
as if they were actual, loving parents.
Returning for a moment to the question of the limitation of language, it has
often been observed that what the analyst actually says is probably far less important
than is popularly supposed. As with the child’s experience of its actual parents, it
is their character and what they genuinely stand for that has the most influence.
Having talked to hundreds of children about the adults in their lives, I have often
been struck by how acutely aware children are of the true nature of their parents
and teachers. A super-efficient adult who is basically cold and calculating is going
to have a far more negative effect on the child than a genuine, warm-hearted parent
who is a bit disorganised. In the case of psychoanalysis it is impossible for someone
to have the undivided attention of another person two or three times a week for
years without being able to form a pretty definite impression of what his or her true
character is and be influenced by it.
What distinguishes psychoanalysis from virtually every other therapy is that it
is essentially about core values. It has no agenda, magical solutions, quick fixes or
messianic message. As far as I can see, it inevitably shares the basic truth of Christi-
anity about the centrality of love and the capacity for concern. In order to develop
and cultivate this, the destructive part of the personality must be recognised and
the battle joined to keep it in check. Therapies that are preoccupied with feeling
better, coping or success do not have this. The spiritual father of psychoanalysis
I have always believed was not Freud, but Socrates who summed it up by saying
“the unexamined life is a Life not worth living” (Plato 1960: 132–133).
168 John Miller

Note
1 In a personal communication (1994) to me shortly before he died, Michael Fordham
described how he had had a conversation with Jung’s wife, Emma, in which she said,
“The trouble with Carl is he doesn’t understand anything about children. He is only
interested in archetypes”.

References
Bettleheim, B. (1985) Freud and Man’s Soul. London: Fontana Paperbacks.
Bion, W. R. (1984) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Davies, N. (1997) Europe a History. London: Random House.
Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1955) Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895). The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria.
Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Ibsen, H. (1962) Et Dukkehjem. In Nutidsdramaer (1877–99). Oslo: Gyldendal.
Kafka, F. (1984) Der Prozess. Berlin: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
McGilchrist, I. (2012) The Master and His Emissary. New Haven and London:Yale University
Press.
McGuire,W. (ed.) (1974) The Freud/Jung Letters:The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and
C. G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Meltzer, D. (1966) The Relation of Anal Masturbation to Projective Identification. Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 47: 335–42.
Meltzer, D. (1992) The Claustrum: An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena. Strathay: Cluny
Press.
Norris, K. (2008) Acedia and Me: Marriage, Monks and a Writer’s Life. New York: Riverhead
Books.
Plato (1960) The Apology. London: William Heinemann Ltd.
Von Franz, M-L. (1970) The Problem of the Puer Eternus. New York: Spring Publications.
Winnicott D. W. (1979) Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational
Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth.
Zorn, F. ([1976] 2000) Mars. Frankfurt: Fischer.

Filmography
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) Directed by Peter Greenaway. UK: Allarts
Cook, Erato Films, Films Inc.
Part V

Wounds and suture

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12
Rethinking the primal wound,
trauma and the fantasy of
completeness
Adopted women’s experiences of meeting their
biological fathers in adulthood
Elizabeth Joyce

Introduction
This chapter draws from an in-depth qualitative interview with a female subject to
give a psychoanalytic and discursive reading of adoptive women’s experiences of
meeting their biological fathers in adulthood. It relates the narrative data to three
principle discursive constructions of the “reunion” experience: first, the themes
of “truth”, subjectivity and belonging in relation to notions of loss and wounded
subjectivity; second, discourses of eroticism and desire; and finally, the entangle-
ments of cultural and familial politics in respect to “selfhood”. I argue that adoptive
subjects have been widely constituted by an irreparable “primal wound” caused
by the trauma of maternal separation (Verrier 1993). The figure of the wounded
adoptee is bound up in discourses of erasure and repression, loss and longing and
the idealisation of “real” parents rooted in biology (see Freedgood 2013; Schuker
2013; Schwartz 2013). As Andrew Cooper puts it, “The emotional realities of abuse,
neglect and abandonment experienced by so many of the children who are placed
for adoption are almost unthinkably painful” (2008: xiii). The adoption experience,
symbolised by the “unthinkably painful” trauma of disconnection, then raises com-
plicated questions about representing the “unrepresentable”.
The construction of the adoptive subject as being immersed in a fantasy of
incompleteness and longing for the birth mother closes down the space for imag-
ining the birth father’s role. It is only in juxtaposition to the all-encompassing
maternal that his figure is brought into being. Indeed, as Tabitha Freeman writes,
“psychoanalytic theory recreates the fundamental paradoxes of patriarchy by giv-
ing central place to the father as a symbolic figure of authority while eclipsing
men’s relationships with their infants under the shadow of the omnipresent nurtur-
ing mother” (2008: 115). The peculiar tension between the “symbolic presence and
172 Elizabeth Joyce

substantive absence of fathers evident in patriarchal thought” more broadly raises

questions significant to this research about the absent presence of the birth father
in adoption (ibid.). That he has hardly been spoken about directly does not imply
that he is invisible. Rather, it would seem that his absence shores up the potenti-
ality of biological discourses that reinforce normative conceptions of belonging.
The birth father is often uncharted territory and can therefore only vaguely be
imagined. This gap, which defines his position, arguably reflects the lack that con-
stitutes the wounded adoptee and biological father alike. Something is missing that
cannot be named. The missing biological father might then become symbolic of a
deeper notion of loss associated with adoption overall. This implies that the dearth
of knowledge surrounding the biological father may perpetuate an already present
deficit within the adoptee, which is linked to the original grief. Lifton illustrates
this point when she says:

An adopted daughter who looks in the mirror hoping to see her birth
mother’s face has no way of knowing if it is her father who looks back at her.
She is linked to her mother through fantasy and longing, but her father is lost
in the void with no mooring. (1994: 193)

From this perspective, then, the story of the adopted subject begins with the story
of an internal split between the adoptee and her “real” mother, as well as the
adoptee and her “real self ”. The “outside” figure of the birth father remains the
“shadowy figure” of adoption (see Clapton 2008), his indiscernibility marking a
non-place within adoption theory and practice. By interrogating these construc-
tions, this research attempts to set up a discussion about how we might bring the
“shadowy” father into focus and how, by representing the predominantly unrepre-
sented, we might challenge static ideas about adoption trauma and the possibility of
ever recovering an essential self. In creating space for thinking through the father’s
position, this work undermines culturally normative representations of the mater-
nal bond, asking instead questions about what the birth father represents; why he
has widely remained overlooked; and how this thinking can challenge essentialist
ideas and allow new stories and subjectivities to emerge.

Trauma culture
Before moving on to analyse the narrative material, it is worth passing comment
on a wider cultural discourse onto which the notion of the traumatised adoptive
subject can effectively be mapped. If we interpret the primal wound idea in isola-
tion, apart from general discourses of self, we might assume that the issue of trauma
uniquely determines adoptive subjectivity. But if we interrogate wider discourses,
then we find a range of accounts of trauma, which in some ways construct all human
subjects as wounded. Indeed, Fassin and Rechtman argue that “trauma has become
 Rethinking the primal wound 173

a major signifier of our age” (2009: xi). Against this backdrop, one could think about
the wounded adoptee in terms of our cultural fascination with what Mark Seltzer
names as “suffering, states of injury and wounded attachments” (1997: 4). Invoking
the intersection between private desire and the public sphere, the primal wound
could be contextualised temporally as a product of trauma culture, responding to
collective internal fantasy and desire, emotional damage and psychic pathology, as
well as being located outside with the exposition of confession and vulnerability.
“The notion of trauma”, Seltzer argues, has “come to function as a switch point
between individual and collective, private and public orders of things” (ibid.: 5).
This idea that “the wound” is everywhere in Western culture has been taken up by
other theorists, notably, Roger Luckhurst, whose influential essay “Traumaculture”
puts forward the thesis that “a new kind of articulation of subjectivity emerged in
the 1990s organised around the concept of trauma” (2003: 28). Following Seltzer,
he recapitulates the notion that “the wound opens the inside to the outside (and
vice versa), eliding boundaries and confusing subject and object” (ibid.).
In a world in which pain is eroticised and “the torn and exposed individual” has
become a “public spectacle” (Seltzer 1997: 3–4), trauma and loss, stress and pain are
now widely accepted terms in the language of everyday life. It is possible then to
construe a relationship between these discourses and suggest that the primal wound
is a product of trauma culture. But this analysis would be inadequate. Throughout
adoption discourses, adoptive subjects are widely constituted by a different kind of
trauma: something that goes beyond the trauma capturing our cultural imaginary and
outlined in the above text. It is a complex, developmental trauma, resulting in deep-
rooted attachment problems and requiring a particular understanding and approach
in order for its victims to be healed. The Reverend Keith Griffith, quoted widely
across websites and popular adoption literature, summarises, “Adoption loss is the
only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society
to be grateful” (2013). Here again we are reminded not only that adoption implies
loss, but also that there is no way out of this loss. The complexities of lived experi-
ence are reduced to narratives of suffering, and its subjects are located in immovable
positions of permanently repeating psychic pain. Referring to the trauma con-
troversy, Lambek contends, “Trauma lays out unambiguous victims and villains; it
thus serves as a morality play […] a kind of local and contemporary witchcraft sce-
nario” (2009: 255). If we look at the language used in this discourse, we find terms
such as “healing”, “reunion”, “homecoming” and “closure” being attributed to the
adoption experience, giving readers the sense that adoptive subjects are “survivors”,
engaged in a trajectory of recovery. Equally, we find accounts of on-going trauma
that resist notions of restoration and in doing so bring into existence the definitive
victim bound by “lifelong expense/ pain/ torture …” (Athan 2010).
Here I shall touch briefly on a critique made by a biological mother in her blog,
Adoptioncritic.com. The author levels her charge against the idea that adoptees
can ever gain “closure” from the “continually compounding” loss in which “every
174 Elizabeth Joyce

birthday apart, every moment separated, all the years and minutes apart… and the
ties that are not ties, family that is not family”. Recalling Lambek’s (2009) notion of
the “morality play” of trauma culture, adoptive subjects and their “natural parents”
become the victims of exploitative adopting families and societal institutions and
are rooted in subject positions of “unresolved grief, ongoing pain” and “ongoing
loss”. They are the walking wounded, permanently disturbed by their psychic pain.
It was Freud who “cemented the idea of psychic trauma” (Hacking 1996: 76), and
the limits of giving it expression are tied up with Freud’s notion that it manifests
as “an experience which within a short period of time presents the mind with an
increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way”
(Freud 1963: 275). This raises questions about the authority we allow ourselves in
attempting to represent the unrepresentable. Turning now to the narrative of one
female adoptee, which has been drawn from a larger sample of 15 interviews, the
following analysis seeks to rethink well-documented notions of maternal separa-
tion trauma (see Horowitz 2013) and the primal wound, by creating space for an
exploration about the marginalised paternal figure.

The participant
Mary, a 45-year-old white American female subject, made contact with me by
responding to an advertisement I placed on an online adoption forum seeking
to recruit volunteers to take part in research on adopted women’s experiences of
meeting their biological fathers in adulthood. I chose Mary’s account from the pool
of other stories because of the ways in which it relates to the limits of representa-
tion. She had been in contact with her biological father for about a year at the time
of our two interviews, which were both conducted via Skype. She was adopted in
infancy by a couple who had lost one baby during childbirth, and another two of
their biological children had been institutionalised due to severe disabilities. Mary
was a biological mother herself, having given her son up for adoption 24 years
prior to the interview. Around the time she placed him for adoption, she obtained
papers from the court regarding her own biological history. These records detailed
the name of her birth mother and a short commentary about her birth father. This
information enabled her to find her birth mother quickly as well as offering her
clues about the identity of her birth father. She initially established contact with her
birth mother for about a year and a half. She learnt that her birth mother had been
married to her birth father when she was born and that she had siblings on both
sides, but they had since separated, and her mother never remarried. Her biological
siblings had been led to believe that they all came from the same parents, so her
mother had kept Mary’s birth a secret. In Mary’s words:

[My mother] wasn’t able to tell anybody about me and so eventually she
wrote and said she couldn’t have contact. She wasn’t able to have contact. It
was just emotionally too hard for her, and it was the second worst decision
 Rethinking the primal wound 175

she’d ever made in her whole life, umm, ’cause she’d walked out on my
brothers when I would’ve been about seven years old, and so, umm, that was,
I mean that was a very hard rejection at that point, and, umm, I have not had
any contact with her since.

Speaking to the difficulties of representing the silence and shame surrounding

exclusion and the politics of stigma, a similar story emerged in relation to her bio-
logical son, whom she had put up for adoption then met during adulthood. Main-
taining that she had felt adoption “was the proper thing to do” at the time because
“nobody had stepped up and said I’ll help you take care of him” and she “didn’t
want the influence of his father”, she said her attempts to prevent her son’s father’s
involvement had since “backfired” on her, angering her son and turning him against
her. Stressing the fluidity and complexity of these relations, she said that when she
had first met her son, she “went through the whole, umm, regression thing with
him where he regressed back and contact was incredible”. Describing an intoxicat-
ing period in which she was in contact with her son all the time, she explains,“I was
on the phone with him for over sixty hours a week and made seventeen or eighteen
hundred text messages and he still, he said he still wasn’t getting enough of my time
and attention”. This ended when “one day he just walked away”. Although still
maintaining a link with Mary’s husband and other children, and most significantly
with his own birth father, he refused to engage with her at all. Her son’s adoptive
father was in prison, and so she said, “the adoptive family has put the birth father
in more of a fatherly position – they don’t care if he has contact, he’s not a threat
to them. And, umm, they look to me as more of a threat to the mother, so, umm,
they pretty much told me to take a hike.” Set against this narrative of alienation
with regard to her position in these kinship structures, it seemed that Mary initially
found consolation in the figure of her biological father, accrediting him with the
ability to say exactly what she needed in order to “make [her] feel okay”.
But this was complicated terrain. Mary had only known her biological father
for a year at the time she gave her account and as with the story she told about her
birth mother and son, the narrative could not be read as static or fixed. Indeed, shifts
can be traced between the first and second versions, given only a month apart, in
which her experiences were initially described as “really healing” and in the latter
account became “confusing”. As she said in her second interview, “I’m still trying
to wrap my brain around it all,” saying that she could provide an outline of the
story but had trouble filling in the gaps or reconciling “the whole disconnection
around my emotions”. Following Freud’s analyses of trauma, Cathy Caruth links
the difficulty of representing psychically overwhelming experiences with the idea
that “the experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not
in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known; but in an inher-
ent latency within the experience itself ” (Caruth 1995: 8). The “disconnection” in
Mary’s text emphasises a failure to make sense of her reality and put it into words.
This raises ethical issues about the researcher’s role in the narrative construction of
176 Elizabeth Joyce

another’s experience and the ways in which it speaks to temporality. Setting up a

dialogue about the complex dimensions of multiplicity that form the layers of the
adoption “reunion” experience, I want to reinforce Jones’ idea that the “interviewer
as writer/storyteller emerges later in the (narrative inquiry) process through his/her
retelling of the story as a weaver of tales, a collage-maker or a narrator of the nar-
rations” (Jones 2003: 61). This also opens up a space for thinking about the licence
we give ourselves to speak for the other and how this relates to the problem of rep-
resenting the unrepresentable. I will turn now to the themes of “truth”, subjectivity
and belonging that are interspersed throughout Mary’s account.

“Truth”, subjectivity and belonging

The theme of the relevance of biological fatherhood is fundamentally linked to
positionality: namely, his position within the discursive framework and the adoptee’s
position in relation to that. Here the theme of belonging, which permeates Mary’s
discourse, is discussed in relation to “truth” and subjectivity. Returning briefly to
the source of data from which this narrative has been drawn, it is notable that, in
some accounts, the biological father was constructed as presenting a challenge to
the adoptee’s feeling of security and belonging; whilst in others his position was
hailed as aiding self-acceptance and an experience of being genealogically linked
to the world. A few narratives pointed to a longing for connection that was not
formed, whilst some emphasised the importance of belonging to wider networks
such as culture, religion and myriad kinship groups. Taking as a starting point the
idea that the birth father is constituted as a potential challenge to the female adop-
tee’s subjectivity and belonging, Mary related as an example the notion that her
birth father was the first person she ever felt accepted by just for being herself. But
she followed this with an admission of fear that he would one day abandon her:

… but in the back of my head I’m always, you know like when am I going
to say something, you know when is something going to happen and he’s just
going to walk away, and you know that’s my fear because I feel like a lot of
times you know I’m just walking on eggshells because I’m scared something’s
going to happen even though he’s given me no reason to.…

Crediting her biological father with the power to both “make [her] feel okay” and
deprive her of security indicates a paradox in relation to what the encounter can offer.
Suggesting that narrative is constantly on the move and that there is no end
point to be reached, the tension between the instability of this flow and the subject’s
desire to “know”, to “understand” and by implication, to fix, is developed when she
talks about her fear of the uncertainty of where her relationship with her biological
father will lead. Relating this uncertainty back to the biological father’s lack of defi-
nition or place within existing discourse, we can make links to the possible wider
 Rethinking the primal wound 177

ramifications of his absence and its influence on the creation of adoptee subjectivity.
Here the birth father’s presence evokes anxiety about his imagined absence, which
is always imminent, and which dismantles the notion of “reunion” as being some
kind of harmonious, uninterrupted state. The fear of loss that is fundamental to
Mary’s account of finding her biological father also invites us to think about the
ways in which the theme of loss is organised in adoption “reunion” discourse gen-
erally. If we understand the dominant discourse as that which formulates adoption
in terms of trauma created by the child’s loss of the biological mother, then we get
an idea about how the “healing” process is mapped. Loss then produces its counter-
position of gain, but the initial gain – of the child’s adoptive parents – is overlooked
in favour of a future imagined gain, that is “reunion” with the lost mother and the
achievement of psychic integration.This discourse then raises questions about what
it does to the adoptive subject who inhabits the space of loss or lost space. Config-
ured by loss, the adoptive subject is divided within this binary field of loss and gain,
real and unreal, biological and social, and thus the “healing” which is imagined by
“reunion” is somehow always unreachable and the “self ” unknowable. The sense of
gain that comes from finding is constantly vulnerable to the threat of losing and the
subject continually in danger of coming apart, or as Mary puts it, her foundation
reduced to “eggshells”.
But before coming to the conclusion that Mary’s story should be read as an
account of a split subject that reinforces the pervasive trope of the adoptee’s abnor-
mality, it is important to rethink the ways in which dominant discourses of adop-
tive life function to produce notions of psychic disturbance. Mary’s narrative draws
attention to the complexity of ‘adoption trauma’, as her fear of loss raises questions
about how this experience might differ in a subject who has been brought up by
her parents or with full knowledge of who her parents are. To contextualise the
subject’s anxiety that ‘something’s going to happen’ and that her father will leave,
simply within the framework of her adoption, is to give too much significance to
the kinship system in which she is located. As the text suggests, she is fearful that
something is going to happen, even though she has been given no reason to be so
concerned. While this might be interpreted as a form of attachment anxiety rooted
in the original parental separation and unconscious wounding, this forecloses other
possible readings about the limits of certainty and stability in all relational processes
and the fragmentation of subjectivity. The introduction of the biological father also
marks a radical departure from the normalising discourse of the mother-child bond
and the idea about trauma resulting from this moment of separation. As I argue, he
is still constituted as the unknown and forgotten figure of adoption. Mary’s nar-
rative troubles this by opening up a space, not just creating new possibilities for
thinking about him but also disrupting the power surrounding naturalising notions
of mother-child unity. Naming their “reunion” experience as “pretty amazing” and
“healing” produces a portrait of the idealised father, far removed from the indeter-
minate, neglected “shadowy figure” constructed by leading discourses. Her narrative
178 Elizabeth Joyce

enters into questions concerning fatherhood generally and the potential for com-
parisons between adoptive and biological fathers. For Mary, her adoptive father was
“very caring, very attentive”, the “polar opposite personality of [her] natural father”.
But this was not imagined by her as a good thing. She aligned herself more with her
“opinionated, strong-willed” biological father and attributed difficulties in forming
a bond with her adoptive father to these personality differences: “I have this very
strong-willed personality, and [until I met my birth father] I didn’t have anybody to
sort of help me process it or deal with it in any way”.
This example of reciprocity in their personalities might be flatly interpreted as
an affirmation of her sense of being seen and valued by her birth father and the idea
of belonging to blood, as opposed to “fictive” kin. But a deeper reading emphasises
ambiguities and uncertainties, as her descriptions of not knowing who her father
is or how he and she might fit into each other’s lives, along with her fear of what
might happen, signify the fluidity of “reunion” as not just a singular event as the
word implies, but a relation that is open-ended and complex: challenging to restrain
or pin down. Peppered throughout her story we find traces of anxiety, turmoil and
the feeling of being overwhelmed, as well as a longing for meaning and perhaps
certainty. In Mary’s words:

Like if I don’t keep busy then my anxiety levels will go up and I’ll start being
very, you know, tense and, umm, scared, you know it’s that whole, umm, baby
in me again saying “oh he’s gone again” or he’s umm, you know, he can’t do
this anymore, you know the emotions are just too hard, and so then it’s a lot
about dealing with the emotions myself, reassuring myself, and, you know,
talking to myself about, you know, he’s been very clear he’s not going, but
you know this is all very new and raw and so, what does not going anywhere
look like?

The anxiety and rawness sketched out in Mary’s text speak to the limits of repre-
sentability. Apparently seeking to give form and certainty to the uncertain: ‘what
does not going anywhere look like?’ leads to questions about eroticism and desire,
roles and expectations which will be unpacked in the following section.

Discourses of eroticism and desire

Developing the point about Mary’s identification with her birth father’s tempera-
ment, she also noted a likeness with his appearance: “[Before meeting him] we got
his pictures and I looked at him, he was, umm, he looked so familiar to me, and
it was very, umm, soothing, it was like I already knew him”. Although this text
could be tied in with any theory of the unconscious desire of daughters vis-à-vis
their fathers, what makes adoption stories unique is the subject’s experience of
holding two fathers in mind. This narrative has recourse to genetic discourses of
 Rethinking the primal wound 179

comparison but also to a magnetic appeal he represented, which she extended to

the allure of men generally who reminded her of her birth father: “the men I’ve
been attracted to […] are very similar to my father”. Indeed, she was straightfor-
ward about the connection between what her biological father meant to her and
erotic discourse but unsettled this with reference to other people’s construction of
what was going on between them: “I mean, it looks a lot like an affair, because my
age and the amount we communicate and the interaction between us, you know
because we don’t, to the outside, depending on the eyes that you look at the rela-
tionship through. Does that make sense?” Her account of the ambiguity of other’s
perceptions of their relationship seemed to motivate her to close down any poten-
tial concerns as she said firmly:

… the relationship is, well, it is a love relationship, I mean, that’s what it is, I
mean, it must look so weird to the rest of the world now, because you know,
I’m an adult now, because, and what I say to people is consider what you feel
about an infant and you know, how hard it is to leave, you know, what it feels
like to leave that child, and you know, just having him hold me is a beautiful
thing, you know, it just kind of calms me, because I’m like, I just want a hug,
I just want him to hold me, just hold my hand, you know, just hold me, and
umm, he just wants to be with me. …

The regressive imagery within the discourse of her biological father’s capacity to
soothe her may be interpreted as being homogenous with the notion of the mother-
child union presented in the Primal Wound theory. But more than that I think
there seems to be a strong sense of rationalisation and eroticism here. This raises
pertinent questions about representability and the licence I give myself to inter-
pret differently the respondents’ intentions, since despite Mary’s protestation, her
description of longing to be held by her birth father does on some level read like an
erotic encounter. Affirming her position as an adult forming an adult (as opposed to
a parent-child) relationship with her father, she remarks on the particularity of
their bond, which she acknowledges looks unusual through a societal lens. But it is
perhaps this distinctiveness that gives it unique and compelling significance.
This point, which will be expanded upon in the next section, also lays the
ground for another dimension about her role – or lack of – within his field. She
suggested that her biological father expected her to be nothing other than herself,
and more than that, enabled her to surrender any performance of a “self ” role.

I think the other thing I’ve realised is all my relationships, well, all’s not quite
the right word, in most of my relationships, umm, I have a job to do, […]
whether it’s with my adoptive parents and fulfilling the role of the daughter
they couldn’t have, and, you know, and he’s the first one who has just loved
me because I’m me, you know, just because I’m his child, you know, he
180 Elizabeth Joyce

claimed me, he wanted me, he came to see me, […] so the fact that he is able
to speak my love language and be able to just be there for me has been pretty
amazing to me, because, he’s just kind of known what he needed to say and
do just to make me feel okay, without knowing it.

Here Mary’s narrative puts into question the normative assumptions around the
natural, caring mother, as it was her birth father who seemed to possess these instinc-
tive qualities; mothers, on the other hand were portrayed as “Needy… needy… you
know, the world revolves around them, it’s not about me”. Her biological father’s
ability to speak her “love language” can be interpreted as her experience of having
formed an intimate connection with him, which validates her, enabling her to feel
safe and cared for. But this reading again pushes up against the limits of representa-
tion since her account of being fully “met” by her birth father conflicts with her
portrayal of the newness of their relationship, her anxiety that it will fall apart, and
the difficulties she expresses about locating her “self ” in relation to others. It is to
this latter point that I will now turn.

Cultural and familial politics in respect to the “self”

As has been suggested, Mary’s story raises some compelling questions about truth,
subjectivity and belonging, eroticism and desire, and their representability. In all of
this, however, her narrative reveals paradoxes as she grappled with the uncertainty
around what the relationship was to her and to others, and how it could be defined:
“but what is everybody else thinking? You know, I still can’t get past what every-
body else thinks. […] you know, it’s not a natural kind of relationship”. In order to
avoid jealous reactions from his wife, Mary said he would only contact her when his
wife was away from the home: “but, he still calls me a couple of times a day. Umm,
he just chooses to do it, around, when she’s not home. So in that regard it feels like
that whole affair thing… you know, like you’re the other woman”. Following pop-
ular scientific theories such as the notion of Genetic Sexual Attraction (Greenberg
1993), Mary’s text might be used to set up a discussion about the erotic symbolism
of the father. She was the “other woman” involved in an illicit “love relationship”.
But I think an alternative reading would shift the lens away from Mary’s desire and
focus instead on the implications this has for the social.
The relationship, she says, is not “natural”. It is something society views with sus-
picion. In all her other relationships, she has “a job to do,” in that their function has
been naturally determined and transmitted. Naming and speaking about the bio-
logical father thus challenges our assumptions about what is natural, offering instead
a quite radical position in relation to normative kinship dynamics. So whilst on the
surface Mary presents a portrait of an idealised and eroticised father figure, she asks,
“what does everybody else think?” In some ways, the notion of mystery surround-
ing her relationship and the questions she raises about how others perceive it could
 Rethinking the primal wound 181

be part of the erotic excitement. We may take her uncertainty as a representation

of the greater drama about what the biological father-daughter bond might entail.
For Mary, her relationship was hidden from the world, and that closed, secretive
space offered a sense of danger and intoxication. Her intrigue about what others
were saying and thinking about her intensifies the particularity of her exclusive
involvement with him. Together, they were cut off from the world, defying certain
norms and arousing suspicion and jealousy in others. But equally by bringing the
birth father out of the shadows in this way she raises important questions about
what this relationship, which is not recognised or valued by the social order, might
be when it has not been essentialised or fixed. Similarly, it asks us to think about
whether it is this non-foundationalism that makes the birth father in this case so
apparently compelling. The biological determinist ideas about original trauma that
have been socially and culturally impressed upon us are therefore being subverted,
and the most peripheral figure of adoption is no longer an empty category. Trou-
bling sociocultural notions of binding and relationality, this discourse implies that
the “reunion” relationship with the father is sometimes experienced as something
novel and co-constructed through a mutual engagement that is not recognised or
validated by the social world.
This analysis recovers various subjects and voices, all of which may be inter-
preted as unique and singular, but also constitutive of the multiplicity of prac-
tices, discourses and conditions determining them.The tension between singularity
and plurality generates a set of questions about how these different strands can
be brought together. I suggest that in some ways these questions are unanswer-
able since what they do instead is to expand the boundaries of what the adoptive
female’s encounter with her birth father might be about. In this sense, rather than
close this inquiry down to limiting endeavours of finding cohesive and universal
“truths”, it complicates what can be known about this experience and opens up a
space for more voices to emerge. In relation to their functionality, narratives such
as this help redefine the boundaries of normative ideologies concerning the natu-
ralised maternal bond by foregrounding the hitherto overlooked position of the
father and presenting detailed accounts about what he meant to them. For some
in the data sample, meeting the father was framed as a transformative, even erotic
experience: one that has been misconceived or discounted by the social world but is
nonetheless supported by powerful discourses about ideal love and “rescue” fantasy.
For instance, when Mary remarks that the kinds of men she has been attracted
to are very similar to her father, and the post-“reunion” relationship she has built
“is a love relationship”, that “must look so weird to the rest of the world” she is
producing statements that recast the power of the object under study, creating room
for saying what has previously remained unsaid. This throws new light on the lim-
ited existing body of literature on birth father “reunion”, going beyond the binary
constructions of the visible and longed-for mother and invisible/ignored father.
And it articulates notions of eroticism as well as the idea of falling in love with the
182 Elizabeth Joyce

father and how to cope with disappointment.That these issues rarely get discussed –
the biological father-daughter relationship “must look so weird to the rest of the
world” – illuminates the capacity of the participants’ discourse to disrupt ­existing
power relations and add new content to our understanding. This links in with
the first function performed by this analysis, which relates to the notion of
“truth”. In speaking about that which has previously been silenced, this work
exposes some of the “regimes of truth” that pattern forms of thought about the
birth father’s role. Through finding him – which in various cases implies a pro-
cess of “self ”-­transformation, falling in love with him, rejecting or being rejected
by him – accounts emerge that pertain to ideas of “truth” and “self ”-discovery,
resisting dominant models of what the adoptive subject’s “reunion” experience is.
This points instead to a process of unfolding rather than drawing a line under the
­adoptee’s experience and shutting it down.

Summary
Intersecting between registers of the internal and external, private and social, Mary’s
complicated and nuanced narrative makes trouble for the kind of totalising identity
politics that gives rise to fixed and static notions of wounded adoptive subjects
traumatised by the broken mother bond. Focusing instead on the neglected figure
of the birth father, her representations of their emerging relationship are often dis-
jointed, emphasising their precarious subject positions and lack of recognition from
others about how they both “fit” in the order of things. Questions about “truth”
and meaning are interwoven between notions of belonging and the limits of know-
ing. And notions of eroticism and love come up against problems surrounding the
representation of desire and the impossibility of imposing an integrated totality.
The difficulty of adequately speaking for another’s experience raises questions, fol-
lowing Butler (1993), about giving an account of oneself. Oscillating between the
poles of loss and gain, within or outside of which the fantasies of fragmentation
and wholeness seem continually to play out, this story interrupts the dominant
narrative of the primal wound, giving us a new sense of how we might read and
understand adoptee subjectivity in the present time. Opening up the connection
between subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, the account invites us to pay attention
to the fractional and multiple representations of addressing the question of what it
could mean for an adopted female to meet her biological father for the first time in
adulthood.This is a question that takes in ideas about finding “truths”, filling “gaps”
and engaging in quests for identity, relationality and meaning.
And going beyond this, it is also an issue about kinship and what it means to
have a family. It speaks for an indistinct family system, constituted by disunity and
indeterminate domestic roles. The fractures that symbolise this ill-defined kinship
form might also reflect the fractured subjectivity that purportedly characterises the
adoptee’s internal world, as she deals with issues of loss, a quest for belonging and
 Rethinking the primal wound 183

the desire to return to a different time and place. Thinking about this within the
wider context of postmodern family discourses – telling the story of a shifting form
marked by discontinuity and splits – we can recognise the production of different
groups, subjectivities and identities co-existing in various contexts throughout his-
tory. The adoptee-biological father “reunion” then raises a range of issues about
space and temporality, in that what may be spoken about in the present (the central-
ity of the maternal bond and the notion of the primal wound) and what remains
largely unsaid (the secrecy surrounding the biological father as well as the durability
or “success” of adoption as a family form), is continually in flux. Thus the kinds of
adoptee subject positions that may be taken up are in part constituted by disparate
methods of erasure, made complex by the introduction of new narratives. What
we are left with is a multiplicity of stories about adopted women’s experiences of
meeting their biological fathers, which problematise taken-for-granted ideas about
the adoptee’s need to find her “original” mother in order to fill the gaps created by
separation and become a unified whole. On the one hand these narratives unfold
within a family discourse suggesting that kinship is important to the participants in
terms of the ways in which it offers a sense of biological continuity, identity and a
feeling of belonging. But they also exceed this framework in their descriptions of
disconnection, disappointment, alienation and the perpetual quest for something
apparently out of reach. It is here that a new conversation is needed about the limits
and potentialities of kinship identification and how “selves” emerge beyond the
boundaries of these already unstable dimensions.

References
Athan, L. (2010) Adoption Critique. Available at: http://adoptioncritic.com/tag/adoption-
separation-trauma/. [Accessed 14 January 2012].
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.
Caruth, C. (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press.
Clapton, G. (2008) Birth Fathers and their Adoption Experiences. London: Jessica Kingsley,
Publishers.
Cooper, A. (2008) Forward. In D. Hindle and G. Shulman, The Emotional Experience of Adop-
tion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. New York: Routledge.
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Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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tional Point of View. Psychoanalytic Perspectives 10(1): 20–41.
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tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XV-XVI (1916–1917):
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Greenberg, M. (1993) Post-Adoption Reunion – Are We Entering Uncharted Territory?
Adoption and Fostering 17(4): 5–15.
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Griffith, K. C. (2013) Adoption Healing. Available at: http://www.adoptionhealing.com/

Trauma/Chapter%200.html. [Accessed 7 November 2013].
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Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge.
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oping Selves of a Birthmother. Psychoanalytic Perspectives 10(1) 10–19.
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Research 8(1): 60–71.
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(eds.) The Trauma Controversy. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Luckhurst, R. (2003) Traumaculture. New Formations 50: 28–47.
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lytic Perspectives 10(1): 139–48.
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Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 80: 3–26.
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13
Embodying traumatic
griefscapes

Per Roar

Over the last decade, in the artistic research project Docudancing Griefscapes (Roar
2015), I have explored choreographic strategies for embodying traumatic contexts
of grieving by using ethnographic tools and documentary material in order to
construct performances relating to such socio-political realities. Hence, I have dealt
with issues that are often claimed to be unrepresentable. In this chapter, I will look
at one of these projects, entitled An Unfinished Story (2006), which was developed
based on my enquiries into the socio-political reality of loss and grieving brought
about by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War.1 Without going
into the larger discussion about the unrepresentable quality of trauma, or the details
and conflict leading up to the Bosnian War, I will mainly focus on my approach to
addressing the lived experiences of this socio-political context of grieving and how
I dealt with representing its unrepresentable matters in this project.
In an interview in Vagrant, Hal Foster argues that terms such as “experience”,
“the lived” and the “experiential” have “come back with a whole other mean-
ing” in the arts at the turn of the twentieth century. These concerns with “the
real” have returned “in an absentee way,” that is, fuelled “by the authority of the
traumatic” (Foster, French et al. 1997: 5–6), which he states “throws over any
simple scheme of before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition” (Foster
1996: 29). Foster refers to this move within the arts as a “the return of the real” by
drawing on psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic concept of “deferred action”
and its complex relay in which “one event is only registered through another that
recodes it” (ibid.).2 This psychoanalytic understanding, even though not always
explicitly made, fundamentally and implicitly shapes my strategies and reflections
here on embodying traumatic griefscapes. By drawing on this understanding and
insights from psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s reading of Levinas (Butler 2004),
186 Per Roar

I will end this article by discussing the relationship between trauma and per-
formance and hence reconsider the notion of what it means to represent the
unrepresentable.

Griefscape and communal grieving: from organized violence

to a socio-political wound
Trauma is here understood as a historical embedded discourse and experience,
which, I consider, despite its being perceived experientially and subjectively, can
be intersubjectively understood and shared (Cvetkovich 2003; Gordon 1997;
Taylor 2006). The concept of griefscape evolved from a visceral intuition to become
a research-based construct through my artistic research enquiry and can ethno-
graphically be seen as a “messy text” (Marcus 1994; Denzin 1997; Heaton 2002),
that is, being composed of several and disparate, often incommensurable, sources
of information. Here it included ethnographic fieldwork, choreo-somatic explora-
tions, psychoanalytical thinking combined with a focus on trauma and traumatisa-
tion and post-traumatic stress syndromes, to issues related to Human Rights and
the struggle against impunity and for political justice. In sum, these issues brought
about fundamental and existential questions related to body and identity, loss and
grieving, memory and historical narrative. Through the multiple voices and the
aesthetical-ethical paradoxes I encountered, my understanding of this specific com-
munal griefscape was refined and defined.
For me the notion of “communal” does not necessarily refer to the numbers
of casualties involved, but rather to the social impact of a traumatic event on a
community or a large group of individuals.3 For me the concept of communal
grieving therefore relates to the spectral and affective nature of these collective
experiences, that is, the raw feelings of aggregated grieving, which are not to be
confused with mourning, the publically shared rituals we may apply for mourning
traumatic events, often administered by the religious communities and the funeral
industry (Hope 2007: 172). Nevertheless, I assume that there is certain correlation
between the scale of the traumatic event – in terms of lives lost and/or damage
­suffered – and the socio-political importance that shared mourning rituals may play
in a situation of communal grieving. However, I think that there is substantial and
qualitative difference when the trauma is a result of a premeditated action and, as
in the context of communal grieving here, brought about by organized violence
on the level of states, or groups of equivalent coherence and level of organization
(Schauer, Neuner et al. 2005: 7; Sveaass 1994: 54–61). In addition to having to con-
front their losses, these circumstances force the bereaved also to face the horror that
the suffering endured was deliberately intended and committed. As stressed by both
Maggie Schauer and Nora Sveaass, the deliberate intention to inflict pain on the
civil society has severe traumatic consequences. The impact of such organized vio-
lence will not end with its operations, as Anita Schrader McMillan demonstrates in
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 187

her case study on the maltreatment of children in post-war Guatemala (2005), but,
as Schauer points out, “reach far into the future of a society” (Schauer, Neuner et al.
2005: 7). In situations of impunity, like many in Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced,
this impact becomes especially exacerbated, because the survivors have to live on
in a constant fear of having to face the perpetrators of the organized violence and
their informers – and sometimes without even knowing who they were (HCHRS
2005; Fischer 2007). Even in cases where lawsuits have been filed to hold the
perpetrators responsible, the traumatic impact might be further amplified.4 These
ordeals however are often needed for re-establishing any sense of social order and
justice. As Piotr Kuhiwczak poignantly observed, with regards to developments in
Poland after communism and South Africa after apartheid: “the ghosts of the past
will not be properly buried until those responsible for breaking the law are brought
to justice” (1999: 176). In this way grieving becomes not only a matter of the grief
stricken in a traumatised culture, but it enters the complex economy of body poli-
tics.This trajectory adds layers of political overtones and mistrust, from which there
is no easy way out; they rather complicate the process of grieving and can often
result in prolonged and complex grieving processes (Herman 1997 [1992]: 119).
Through looking at the Bosnian griefscape as a context of communal grieving, I
wanted to investigate the consequences of living under such conditions. With a
socio-political perspective on trauma, my aim here was to construct a performance
that could embody and thereby convey a sense of this context, its embedded cul-
tural memory, as an inter-subjective reality that could be shared with others and
communicated across socio-political divisions.

The Bosnian War (1992–1995)

Bosnia-Herzegovina was known as the most ethnically diverse of the former Yugo-
slavian republics – where different ethnic groups lived side by side as in a composite
mosaic (Judah 2000: 293, 344). When the war broke out, after Bosnia-Herzegovina
declared independence from the former Yugoslavia in March 1992, warmongers
targeted their geo-political and cultural assets. This had dramatic and tragic con-
sequences. When the war ended in December 1995 nearly half of the popula-
tion was on the run, fleeing from their homes, and close to 100,000 people had
been killed, this is, without including the many who died of secondary reasons,
like starvation, exhaustion, or illness due to lack of medicine etc. during the war.
Eighty-three per cent of the civilian victims were Bosniaks, that is, Bosnians with
a Muslim background (RDC 2007: 91–95). According to the census of 1991 for
Bosnia-Herzegovina, this percentage is nearly double what the demographic statis-
tics would suggest, whereas the opposite is the case for civilian victims with a Ser-
bian Orthodox and a Croatian Catholic background. This statistics testifies to the
dark and grim horrors of the Bosnian War: a civil war fuelled on xenophobic fear
and mistrust, ideas of religious and cultural superiority that resulted in pogrom-like
188 Per Roar

situations of ethnic cleansing, culminating with the genocide in Srebrenica where

more than 8000 young boys and men were killed in July 1995.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), there
were still 17,000 people unaccounted for and considered “missing” in 2008, 13
years after the war had ended (ICRC 2008). This situation alone produces what
can be called “the conditions for an unfinished work of mourning” in a soci-
ety (Azoulay 2001: 4). Even though the destinies and experiences hidden in these
numbers are hard to comprehend – as they seem to slip into a void, which seems
to resist containment and reductive summaries, the accumulated effect of these
numerous absences retains both a painful void and the dead weight of the loss suf-
fered. The impact of these absences is a social figure that for me constitutes what
Avery F. Gordon (1997) calls ghostly matters, which can traumatically haunt both
society at large and the individual on a personal level for decades.5

Figure 13.1 Audience watching. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica, Sarajevo 2006.
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 189

On a personal level, I find this succinctly expressed in the eyewitness accounts of

Emir Suljagić, a survivor from Srebrenica.When writing about the thousands killed,
he simply states: “There is no difference between their death and my survival, for I
remained to live in a world that has been permanently and irreversibly marked by
their death” (Suljagić 2005: 11).
Many in Bosnia-Herzegovina are, like Suljagić, caught up in a painful and affec-
tive loop where they repeatedly have to face the return of the real, the seething
presence of the multiple losses and blows that this brutal and ethnically driven war
caused. (In addition to Suljagić, see, for example, accounts by Drakulić 1996, 2004;
Ugrešić 1998, 1999; and by Warsinski 1998; Woodhead 1999; Zbanic 1997, 2006).
This haunting experience ruptures the temporal divides of past, present and future
and leaves them in a state of trauma. As Suljagić alludes, the war disrupted all aspects
of life. It tore up the very fabric of civil society and divided people according to
cultural and ethnic affiliations;6 this contributed to blurring the borders between
private and public spheres and making the grieving process far more complex and
indecipherable. The high figure of missing people further exacerbated this situation
by depriving large numbers of individuals and families of a closure. Altogether, this
creates a messy composite of intersected grieving processes that is hard to contain,
emotionally as well as politically.The grieving seemingly seeps out and affects society
as such – as a traumatized culture – not only within the national borders of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, but also in the diaspora of Bosnians at large.7 This contextual complex-
ity of grieving is what I address as a communal griefscape here. I call it “communal,”
simply because I believe that the impact of this embodied non-verbal grieving on
society at large is more than the sum of the individual pain experienced. Like Barbie
Zelizer stresses in her photo-journalistic study of the trauma of the Holocaust: “No
single memory reflects all that is known about a given event, personality, or issue.
Instead, memories resemble a mosaic, where they generate an authoritative vision in
repertoire with other views of the past” (1998: 3–4). By using the notion of a mosaic,
Zelizer points to the way shared memories are formed and built in a society. I find
this viewpoint especially relevant with respect to my project of embodying com-
munal grieving as a griefscape here, even though this griefscape, its mosaic, is not
of a fixed or static character, but constituted in a state of flux, like the ever-shifting
formations of migrating birds in the sky, or the somatic state of a living organism.
In my attempt to grasp this griefscape, as what Marita Sturken would call “cul-
tural memory” (1997), I approached trauma from a bodily and socio-cultural angle,
like Ann Cvetkovich (2003) does in her book An Archive of Feelings, by treating
it “as a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of
grappling with psychic consequences of historical events.” Hence, like Cvetkovich,
I sought to hold on to trauma’s historical embeddedness as a historical ­phenomenon
(2003: 17–18).
This included taking into account my role as an “outsider” and the fact that
I worked in the stretch between the Bosniak and Serb dominated areas, which
190 Per Roar

added additional layers of challenges to the project. Issues I have discussed at lengths
elsewhere (Roar 2015) and will leave aside here, but in short, the context offered
no even ground to dance on in this project, rather an emotional minefield, which
intrinsically was a part of the griefscape itself.
I constructed the performance An Unfinished Story based on the multifaceted
pool of data collected from ethnographic fieldwork and background research about
the war and the social reality in the region.8 In collaboration with the perform-
ers involved, the collected inputs were processed through bodily speculations and
imaginary questioning. In essence, the artistic challenge was about how to explore,
intertwine and merge such multiple sources of information we faced about this
socio-political and traumatic reality and, with the help of an imaginary speculation,
turn this insight into a choreographic body.
In her article “The Site of the Memory,” Toni Morrison expands on what such
an imaginary speculation leaves open for her to do artistically by stating: “My job
becomes how to rip that veil over proceedings too terrible to relate” (1990: 302).This
challenge resonates with my struggle here to embody what resists being silenced and
forgotten but silently “speak” through traumatic reminders that evoke past horrors.
According to dance scholar Mark Franko, this traumatic and psychoanalytic dimen-
sion is largely left untouched in dance studies, despite the fact that it “opens onto
memory and how the body remembers,” as well as how it forgets (2006: 13).

Constructing an unfinished story

An Unfinished Story was devised in collaboration with performers and artists from
Oslo, Belgrade and Sarajevo and produced on location in the area of the former
Yugoslavia, partly in Belgrade and mainly in Sarajevo where the performance also
had its premiere at Viječnica, the former national library. It lasted approximately
50 minutes and was made to fit any larger assembly or congregation hall where
the audience could share the floor with the performers: Slaven Vidak (Sarajevo),
Peder Horgen, Kristianne Mo, Terje Tjöme Mossige (Oslo), and Marija Opsenica
(Belgrade).9
The performance was developed with the performers over a period of nearly five
months from June 2005 to September 2005 and built on my extensive background
in the region, which included first-hand experiences of the former Yugoslavia, the
Bosnian War in 1993 and the post-war situation in Kosovo and Serbia after 1999
with the decline and fall of Slobodan Milošević. The turning point in the artistic
research process was the participation in the annual commemoration of the vic-
tims of the Srebrenica Genocide, the worst war crime committed in Europe since
the Second World War, at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery in July
2004. On 11th July each year, since 2003, the remains of newly identified victims,
found in mass graves all over the area, have been buried there.The ceremony gathers
tens of thousands of people and is broadcasted nationally in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 191

In 2004, 380 caskets were buried, each in its individual grave, by the effort of family
and friends present. The practical effort involved in organizing these burials mani-
fested in itself the scale of this communal griefscape. The impact of witnessing this
traumatic event made it clear to me that the performers involved in my artistic-
research project, and then especially those from outside the region, had to experi-
ence this event first-hand. In 2005 I returned with the performers to this traumatic
epicentre of communal grieving and witnessed 610 caskets being buried.The burials
release a flood of pain, raw and unbearable. For the performers and me, these experi-
ences gave the Bosnian griefscape and communal grieving a body – composed of
a tactile mosaic of personal encounters with survivors and the remains of the war
in the landscape where the horrors once were committed. These encounters left a
multitude of imprints of faces, expressions, voices, smells, sounds and other sensuous
observations (for more about our encounters, see Roar 2011, 2015).
When my collaboration with performers started, the damages caused by the war
were visible everywhere; these physical scars made me wonder about the extent of
the invisible wounds that the survivors of this traumatic horror might have and led
to the core question of this artistic enquiry: What does it take to maintain a sense
of equilibrium and balance under such circumstances – on such an uneven psycho-
logical ground? Through the fieldwork in this composite artistic research process,
I hence also identified the physical or corporeal approach to the traumatic in this
project by probing into movement explorations of the physiological functions of
the vestibular system, that is, our physical sense of balance and the psychobiological

Figure 13.2 Circle. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica, Sarajevo 2006.

192 Per Roar

or somatic strategies for coping with post-traumatic stress. The outcome of this
exploration provided the base for the choreographic material used in the construc-
tion of the performance, and also explains the subtitle of the performance: “a study
in the neurology of grieving.”

Probing into the bodily consequences of trauma

Since falling is the ultimate consequence of losing one’s balance, our investigation
of balance expanded to include a more detailed physical study of the mechan-
ics of falling from an upright position to lying on the ground. I expanded our
explorations by introducing the element of will or willpower, the ability to control
one’s impulses and actions, which augmented our probing. Because the falling is
conditional on the dynamic range of the willpower in play within us, the pull of
gravity will meet various degrees of resistance or compliance affecting it (Plevin
2007: 107). At this point in our enquiry, we were exposed to an upsetting video
shot during the war. The video had circulated in closed circles as part of heroic
memorabilia among the hard-core nationalists but surfaced as evidence in the trial
of Slobodan Milošević in The Hague in 2005 (Judah and Sunter 2005).10 Its release
had aroused international attention and caused a public outrage in Serbia after it
was broadcast on national television.11 The video depicts how a group of young
Bosniak men, bruised and beaten with their hands tied behind their backs, are
ordered off a truck and summarily shot from behind. To view the unedited video
was horrifying, but the close-up footage also revealed bodily states of falling not
normally seen; the images of falling, dying bodies added crucial insights into what
we were physically exploring. They brutally demonstrated for us the mechanics of
mass surrendering to the pull of gravity, that is, how the body without willpower
to keep it upright succumbs to the laws of physics.Whereas the violent intent caus-
ing the final surrenders captured in the video speaks of a brutality that is difficult
to comprehend, the bodily mechanics of its consequences are conceivable in part
and can be conveyed bodily. Concretely, in deconstructing the physical mechanics
involved in falling movement-wise, I found a tool for approaching the wounds that
the war had inflicted.This was not a mimetic but a physical task for the performers:
to kinaesthetically explore and re-explore falling and surrendering to the pull of
gravity by probing into its inherent logic. With this approach and in collaboration
with the performers, I wanted to embody some core aspects of this communal
griefscape that we together strived to grasp and convey in our performance work.
By this time in the process, I had already used the diagnostic criteria of post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)12 as raw material for our movement explora-
tions of the bodily consequences of trauma. Here, I focused on the most common
­categories – or clusters – of the symptoms of PTSD: intrusive recollections, avoid-
ant/numbing symptoms, and hyper-arousal symptoms (Friedman 2010: 1).13 I was
particularly interested in looking at their bodily consequences, the physicality pro-
duced by these traumatic reactions.
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 193

In this way I tried to devise a physical approach to deconstruct highly emotional

states that also enabled the performers to keep a critical distance from the material,
without confusing it with the intoxicated seduction that a narcissistic mirroring
or “reductive over-identification” could produce (Foster 1996: 203). This strategy
became important as the totality experienced from meeting people, visiting places,
being exposed to mass graves, watching documentary films, attending seminars and
talks, and so on, was simply too much to contain and comprehend. Though this
distress was simultaneously what made the process of rehearsal profound for the
performers, it also created a strong need amongst them to connect their “personal
journeys” to the process of making the performance itself; they literally wanted to
utilize their personal stories and their own associations in the development of the
movement material. In contrast, I was convinced that these emotions were better
channelled into the sensorial and neurological psychobiological investigation of
bodily balance and reaction-patterns related to PTSD symptoms and traumatic
experiences. I therefore based the choreographic work on a succession of small
tasks questioning the basic conditions for our being in the world, like “falling” as I
already have discussed. In this way, the choreography was pushing forward a whole
series of highly existential issues to be explored. They appeared nearly as Zen-like
koans,14 that is, as paradoxical tasks: the action of transferring weight and falling
into walking, running, floating in a vertigo of off-balance or struggling between
surrendering or fighting against the pull of gravity, all while exploring the combi-
nations of willpower and the “fight”, “flight” or “freeze” impulses in the body.These
concrete tasks might at first seem removed from the complexity embedded in the
communal griefscape we constructed. However, in developing a higher degree of
precision concerning the psychobiological and physical premises for executing
these movement tasks, I will argue that such an approach offered a tool for conjoin-
ing the personal and the interpersonal interests of the performers.15
Consequently, a large part of the remaining choreographic work process was
spent on clarifying the bodily specificity and the foundational physical premises
underlining the movement tasks used in the choreography. From my point of view, it
became important to stress that we did not work with the traumatic event itself but
with its post-traumatic manifestations – the tension levels in these traumatic reaction
patterns and their deposits – through addressing how such traumatic experiences are
embodied physically and kept alive long after the traumatic incident itself.

From traumatic reaction patterns to choreographic structure – in

search of a common ground
An example of this post-traumatic perspective can be seen in the use of latex gloves
in the performance, which in this respect became a minor but important gesture
to highlight this temporal perspective here. The fortuitous accident that led to this
usage stemmed from the old varnished floor at our first rehearsal space in Belgrade,
which was difficult to clean and therefore felt sticky and dirty.This made one of the
194 Per Roar

performers touch the floor rather unwillingly and gingerly.This particular cautious-
ness fascinated me, and I decided to try solving the performer’s issues with the dirt,
as well as enhancing the quality of cautiousness added through accentuating this
touch with the help of a visual marker; I therefore introduced the gloves as an auxil-
iary tool. However, as I noted after our first public work-in-progress showing for an
audience in Belgrade in December 2005: “The clinical touch of the surgical gloves
provided a minor gesture, which allowed us a visual reading that drew attention to
the past in the present through establishing a ‘now’ that clinically deals with the emo-
tional scars and the consequences of the past on our present flux. Thus, the gloves
served as visual reminders of the temporal factor involved in our performance.”16 In
triggering images known from forensic investigators in television crime series, the
gloves signalled and hence indicated that we entered the story from a post-traumatic
position, as someone dealing with the debris left behind. They provided a clinical
touch and a distance from the trauma we were dealing with that made it clear that
we were recalling something that had already taken place. The tragedy had already
happened; the performers were just tracing the ghostly but affective remains – the
griefscape.The gloves were redirecting the focus towards the present-day challenges
and hence reminding the performers of their entrance point.17
Another example of this retrospective perspective in the staging can be seen in the
entrance of the last performer, who first enters the centre stage in the second half of
the performance, after having spent its first half in the role as an audience member in
a wheelchair. His first actions after rolling to centre stage were to put on latex gloves,
step out of the wheelchair and push it over to the other side of the stage, where he
resumed his role as a paraplegic sitting in the wheelchair but now as a performer start-
ing a duet with one of the other performers on stage. For me, not only did his entrance
mark a shift in the performance, but his actions also pointed to the difference between
the “real-real” and the “stand-in” in our staging, as his actions created a Brechtian
alienation effect. His actions literally freed me as a viewer – and the general audience
as well – from a more sentimental bonding of pity or identification of the paraplegic
character as a “victim.” Instead, his actions as a performer allowed us as viewers to stay
focused on grieving while critically questioning the definition of victimhood: as a role
as well as how we can all feel paralyzed at times, regardless of our physical condition. In
this state, we might feel left without a clue about how to move on, enmeshed between
roles assumed and ascribed – whether as a survivor or as a bystander – overwhelmed
with a feeling of shame or guilt for what one did or did not do.18

Trauma and performance: unrepresentable and ephemeral, or

repetitious and citational
In my attempt to embody the performance of trauma, both on an individual level
and on a societal level as in the example above, I mainly tuned in to the presence
of the dead among the living and thereby the presence of what is absent. This focus
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 195

made me question the divide between the living and the dead19 and recall the
possibility that Butler in her reading of Lévinas points to when discussing what it
might entail to face the other. She states,

the human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identi-
fied with the unrepresentable, it is, rather, that which limits the success of any
representational practice. The face is not “effaced” in this failure of represen-
tation, but is constituted in that very possibility.
(Butler 2004: 144)

What Butler identifies with this possibility has for me a parallel potential in this
study of representing the unrepresentable: it illuminates for me what is at stake
when I try to pursue both the presence of the absent and how to make choreog-
raphy through embodying griefscapes.20 However, as a choreographer-researcher,
it is challenging to grapple with this possibility she describes. Butler’s emphasis
on “that which limits the success of any representational practice,” calls therefore
on conceptual and critical attentiveness. Here, in part, this relates for me to how
juxtapositions can create coimpossible situations and frictions compositionally,21
which in their “failures” can constitute the very possibility of facing the other, like
in the example above with the use of the wheelchair. In exploring a connection
between my interest in this potential and my questioning of the divide between
the living and the dead, as also articulated in the quote of Suljagić that I mentioned
earlier, I find Tracy Davis’ notion of performative time necessary and useful (2010:
153). Her notion harbours this failure in its cross-temporal perspective, in contrast
to the notion of theatrical time that is framed by a beginning and an end, precisely
because performative time “recognizes the simultaneity, difference, separation, over-
lap, and pretences of citation through, as, and across temporalities to build upon and
multiply the experience of theatrical time’s doubling of represented and durational
time” (ibid.). This also means as Davis stresses “performative time may reverberate
indefinitely” (ibid.). This cross-temporal perspective allows me to conceptualize
how artistic works or interventions, like trauma, can rupture the continuum of lin-
ear time and transgress the theatrical time frame through entering the economy of
circulating representations, while revealing also their failures. In this way, the artistic
works (as interventions) may continue to have an impact (cross-temporally) as long
as new readers are reimagining them. Moreover, as Davis argues, I also believe that
this “[c]itationality … complicates [Peggy] Phelan’s contention (…) that perfor-
mance is ephemeral,” and that trauma is unrepresentable. Likewise does this cita-
tionality open up for new questions, such as: “What gets to count as citational, and
for how long?” (Davis 2010: 155). From this perspective, “performative time [also]
calls attention to who has agency to convey history, as well as how evidence for
history is generated, and gives a rationale of what, by other criteria, is vulnerable to
accusations of missampling” (ibid.: 161). Without going further into historiography,
196 Per Roar

Figure 13.3 Crawling. Photo by Fuco Fuoxos – Vijećnica, Sarajevo 2006.

my main point here is to draw attention to how an artistic intervention or perfor-

mance can in a performative time frame have a cross-temporal impact that resem-
bles how a traumatic event can live on in an individual or a society as a trauma.
For as long as an event can be re-evoked, through traumatic reminders as in the
case of trauma, it calls into question what constitutes the present. In this interstice,
trauma and performance are communing, and the presence of what is absent blurs
the divide between past and present, living and dead. This possibility constitutes for
me a potential for addressing grieving and being human.
In paying attention to the performance of trauma with its traumatic repeats in
this project, I have experienced it at times as if I was listening to the past in the
present while engaging with futurity. For me this is about an empathetic tuning
in to “rememories” of those absent and dead. As Phelan poignantly remarks in
her Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories: “We bury more than bodies” (1997:
19). In the performance An Unfinished Story, I wanted therefore to listen to what
this surplus might have to convey to me and about us as a society. This meant to
be attentive to what emerged from these “unclaimed experiences” and how those
absent and dead might perform through the living in the present. In the process of
making An Unfinished Story, relating to the context of communal grieving and the
Bosnian war, I experienced that the dead may still arrest us, the living, in unresolved
dilemmas or disputes related to the political and social responsibility caused by their
deaths. In the context of the Balkans, Sophocles addressed this arrest already in
his tragedy Antigone at 442 BC through pointing to the dilemmas and difficulties
that the dead’s claim on the living might bring upon us (2003).22 As his Antigone
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 197

demonstrates, listening to the dead performing in the present is not necessarily

pleasant but may challenge the listener to the core of his or her being. However, the
challenge of perceiving this presence of absence and how it impacts the present is at
the heart of what I tried to pursue artistically in embodying this griefscape.
In a cross-temporal perspective, I perceive our history of “improperly buried
bodies” (Gordon 1997: 16) as a continuum of cries, wounds and losses that stretches
from the past into our time. This includes unknown destinies, such as those behind
Sophocles’ story about Antigone to the many who vanished unaccounted for in
Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec (Gilbert 1987)23 and more recent losses like those
voiced by the members of the association called the Women of Srebrenica or by
the faceless refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. These cries are
haunting, but as Gordon stresses, such haunting can draw us affectively into “a
transformative recognition” of a reality of experience (Gordon 1997: 8). In paying
attention to the particular way of knowing that haunting is, this “can lead to that
dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” Hence, it can transform
our recognition of what constitutes social life.
Through constructing and embodying contexts of grieving like griefscapes, I
attempted, “to enact and mimic the losses that beat away within them,” and as
Phelan adds here: “In this mimicry, loss itself helps to transform the repetitive force
of trauma and might bring about a way to overcome it” (Phelan 1997: 12). For
me, this potential can come about with the help of a transformative recognition
(Gordon 1997: 8).
In a theatrical time frame, performance is by many scholars defined as an act
of disappearance and, like trauma, it is considered as an inaccessible and unclaimed
experience of the past. In contrast, in a performative time frame trauma and per-
formance can both be viewed as performative acts, which through reiteration and
citationality can transgress and have an impact beyond the definite boundaries set
by theatrical time. I will conclude this article in this intersection of perspectives in
which I identify a framework for reviewing trauma and a potential for choreog-
raphy as a critical and socio-political aesth/ethical practice.24 With the support of
Butler’s reading of Levinas, I believe as Cathy Caruth: “By carrying that impossibil-
ity of knowing out of the empirical event itself, trauma opens up and challenge us
to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely of impossibility” (Caruth 1995:
10, original emphasis). This outlook situates both my artistic aim and my approach
as I constructed and embodied this griefscape of communal grieving.

Notes
1 The article builds on my doctoral thesis Docudancing Griefscapes: choreographic strategies for
embodying traumatic contexts of grieving in the trilogy Life & Death at the University of the
Arts Helsinki (2015).
2 In unpacking this claim, Foster advocates for another reading of the avant-garde than
those raised by disparate arts critics such as Peter Bürger (see 1996: 29). In short, as the
art scholar Charles Harrison renders it: “Foster’s argument is that the traumatic effect of
198 Per Roar

avant-garde activity is only fully registered in subsequent workings out” (Harrison 1996:
1). Hence, the expression “the return of the real”, which also is the title of Foster’s book.
For me this argument is pertinent and grounds my outlook as an artist-researcher here.
3 As Ann Cvetkovich has pointed out, can the experience of traumatic events create
“‘trauma culture’– public cultures that form in and around trauma” (2003: 9).
4 Not only because the court proceedings themselves can easily draw out in time, and
often are intertwined with the mesh of political agendas involved in any liability claims,
but also because they come with the need to go into minute details about the atrocities
committed again.
5 Gordon especially discusses the haunting quality of the legacy of slavery in the
contemporary United States. Her arguments have been picked up among others by
the performance studies scholar André Lepecki in his discussion of the relationship
between colonialism and choreography, which he understands as “predicated on a
politics of the ground [that] reveals those movements initiated by ‘improperly buried
bodies of history,’” by referring to Gordon and how she views those bodies “as
haunting epistemology, as powerful ethical and critical forces” (Lepecki 2006: 18).
My reasoning in this project builds on a similar understanding of Gordon’s “improperly
buried bodies of history.”
6 As in the case of Mostar, see reports by Daria Sito-Sucic (2012) and Ian Traynor (2004).
7 The many Bosnians living in exile that I met during my fieldwork – either while they
visited Bosnia or in their new countries – told me more or less the same story. The
situation seemed, however, to be hardest for those who had reached adulthood prior to
1992 and remembered everyday life before the war began, as adults.
8 In this process I combined my knowledge of choreography and somatics with my
background from social sciences and history with a tacit knowledge about qualitative
research and from performance studies the emphasis on the performative and a socio-
cultural understanding of trauma.
9 In addition to the sound artist Jørgen Larsson (Bergen), the composer/producer
Ivan Vrhunc and the costume designer Samina Zajko (Sarajevo). Other central
collaborators and partners included Hamo Muhommod (Sarajevo) for his compilation
of traditional folk dances from Sarajevo – taught us by Mersiha Zembo and Kolo
Bosansko at Bosnian Cultural Centre (Sarajevo); the local project coordinators Dušica
Parezanović (Belgrade) and Sandra Sandbye (Oslo); set designer Silje Kiise (Bergen);
movement advisor Ingunn Rimestad and Gindler practitioner Gro Torgersbråten
(Oslo). The project was co-produced with the Dansens Hus – the national stage for
dance in Norway, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Rex cultural centre in
Belgrade, and the MESS in Sarajevo. Funded by the Arts Council Norway, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde, the Programme for artistic research
Norway, and the Intermedia at the University of Oslo.
10 Recorded by members of the infamous Scorpions, a feared paramilitary unit that
operated during the war. For excerpts of the video, see United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum’s interview with Nataša Kandić: http://www.ushmm.org/
confront-genocide/cases/bosnia-herzegovina/bosnia-video-gallery/eyewitness-
testimony-natasa-kandic [Accessed 6 September 2015].
11 The video was shown on Serbian television on 1st June 2005 and caused an outrage
(Judah and Sunter 2005).
12 On PTSD and diagnostics, see Friedman (2010), APA (2000), and Foa et al. (2009) and
the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (www.istss.org) and Psychiatry
Online (www.psychiatryonline.com) [Accessed 10 May 2015].
13 Therefore, the criticism and discussion concerning details and functions of these
diagnostic criteria had less relevance for my uses of the clusters of symptoms of PTSD
in this project. For more about this discussion, see Herman (1997: 31–32), Spitzer et al.
(2007) and Summerfield (1999).
 Embodying traumatic griefscapes 199

14 Koans are paradoxical statements or tasks given by a Zen master to his student that
transcends rational thought. Hence, they are used for opening up to new insights
(see Kadowaki 1989: xi). In this case, I refer to the paradoxical in focusing on simple
physical tasks as a way to address complex socio-political issues.
15 Trained dancers and plastic performers may through their bodily insights and tools
consciously access and work with the unconscious layers (the deposits of movements
accumulated through living) within us and at times even make art out of this
complicated mesh with skilful precision.
16 Source: Fieldnotes 21 December 2005 in Belgrade. Here, our first test audience picked
up on and commented on this use of gloves in the Q&A session after our first work-
in-progress showing.
17 That is, they were not representing the totality of the traumatic event personally, but
just retrospectively exploring aspects of its psychobiological consequences in being
receptive and paying attention to the bodily reverberations they might experience
as they executed the physical tasks in the choreographic construction. While
leaving me as the first viewer feeling as if “bumping into a rememory that belongs
to somebody else” (cf. Toni Morrison’s notion of “rememory” [1987: 35–36] and
Gordon [1997: 164–5]).
18 Based on my fieldwork observations in combination with support from trauma studies
and clinical research, I decided that I did not want to spend time on “fetishizing” the
perpetrator. Leaning on Hannah Arendt (1994 [1965]) and her telling description of
“the banality of evil” and supported by the accounts of Drakulić (2004) and Seierstad
(2004), I decided to leave the perpetrator as a closed category that I would not spend
time speculating on here.
19 A phenomenon common among mourners: see Walter (1999: 17–116) about “Living
with the dead.”
20 For me choreography can at its utmost a/effectively induce permeable and
transmutable propositions in which sensory awareness, aesthetic sensibility, and
traumatic repeats blend together in a contextual setting that engage my bodily
and cognitive memory. This impact might ripple beyond the delineation of its
temporal theatrical framework.
21 Cf. Lepecki (2004: 137).
22 In Antigone, Sophocles portrays through his characters and the plot how the dead may
impact the living. When the play is experienced as relevant today, it demonstrates how
it across centuries and in different socio-political contexts has been able to speak to
involved actors and audiences. According to Loraux (2002), the play was written in a
time of imperialistic ambitions and extensive wars, which emphasized civic duties at
the expense of loss and mourning suffered by the citizens.
23 To name some of the extermination “camps” made by the Nazi regime, made solely for
killing Jews and other “unwanted.” Few stayed alive here more than a few hours upon
arrival, hence leaving few stories behind (Gilbert 1986: 425).
24 As a choreographer, I work primarily to meet the challenges imposed by theatrical
time, but as a choreographer-researcher I do this with an awareness of the coexisting
multiple temporalities that are set in motion with any choreographic project.

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Filmography
After After (1997) Directed by J. Zbanic. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Deblokada.
Crime and Punishment:Witnessing the Massacers in Srebrenica (1998) Directed by M. F.Warsinski.
Norway: Speranza Film.
A Cry from the Grave (1999) Directed by L. Woodhead. UK: BBC2/PBS.
Grbavica:The Land of My Dreams (2006) Directed by J. Zbanic.Austria and Bosnia Herzegovina:
Coop 99 / Debolkada / Jadran Film.
14
Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk

Richard Rushton

One of the striking things about Gus Van Sant’s 2009 film on the life of charismatic
gay political activist Harvey Milk (Sean Penn)—the film is called Milk—is that it
is not an overtly gay or queer film. Rather, the film focuses primarily on political
struggles and aspects of political life, of campaigns for political office and legislation
in San Francisco during the 1970s.The film raises questions like:What strategies are
necessary for gaining political office? Or, In what practical ways can social change
be brought about? Or, How can political alliances be forged? From such a perspec-
tive, Milk can be considered a film that sidesteps questions of gay relationships and
gay sex to instead focus on aspects of politics.
In doing so, what does this film achieve? I would like to propose that what Milk
achieves is something that psychoanalysis has for a long time called suture. This
approach entails re-thinking the notion of suture as it has primarily been theorized
in Film Studies and psychoanalysis more generally.1 As a point of departure, I want
to begin with three propositions that will guide my approach to the notion of
suture.

1. Cinema has the potential to tell stories that suture audiences. Suture, therefore,
is less a matter of cinema technology, technique or apparatus and much more
a matter of constructions of subjectivity at the level of narrative and story
situations. For the spectator, then, suture functions in order that the spectator
can be positioned in relation to the story of a film, as well as to the characters,
situations and events that are part of that story.
2. Processes of suture occur by way of what Film Studies has for a long time
called identification. More specifically, suture occurs as the articulation of a situ-
ation or set of relations. Thus, for example, a spectator, when sutured, identifies
204 Richard Rushton

less with a specific character than with a set of relationships between characters.
At the cinema, therefore, the spectator identifies less with characters than with
what characters do in relation to other characters, with decisions characters
make or actions they perform in relation to other characters and to the story
world more generally.
3. As a result, these positions of identification will be constantly shifting and
changing throughout a film. If suture was for many years defined as a way of
“fixing” the attitude of the spectator or of producing the spectator as a “total”
or “unified” subject, then these conceptions have to be rejected. Rather, suture
will fix the spectator at certain points in the unfolding of a film’s story—suture
is, after all, a matter of freezing or arresting the subject—but such fixing will
never be definitive or totalizing. It will instead always be temporary and will
adapt from moment to moment.

These, then, are the three points I wish to set out from. There will be differ-
ent processes of suture—Stephen Heath convincingly argued such a point (1981:
100)—so that it is both impossible and unproductive to point to a definitive, “one
size fits all” account of suture. I want to set out from two historically important
approaches to suture in the cinema. Each of these approaches adapts, in its own
way, the fundamental conception of suture first theorized by Jacques-Alain Miller:
that psychoanalysis gives us a conception of the human subject in which a “zero”
assumes the status of a “one” (1977/8: 30). For the traditional conception of suture
and cinema—first put forward by Jean-Pierre Oudart (1977/78), and then strongly
backed up in an essay by Daniel Dayan (1985)—this sutured human subject who
assumes the status of a “one” is utterly fraudulent. The unified conception of the
sutured subject, exemplified by the unified view of the spectator at the cinema, is
explained famously by way of classical cinema’s typical use of shot/reverse-shot set
ups: the absence (and thus the zero) indicated by the first shot of an alternating cou-
plet is “filled in” and unified by the second shot, thus giving rise to a conception of
suture in which a one (the answering shot) takes the place of a zero. Suture, from this
perspective, merely produces a unified subject in ways that go hand-in-hand with
conceptions of cinema’s ideological apparatus, especially the apparatus articulated
by Jean-Louis Baudry (1985). Thus, this conception of suture, prominent during
the 1970s and 1980s (see Silverman’s brilliant summation [1985: 194–236]) was a
key element in explaining the ways in which cinema spectators were duped by the
imaginary operations of the cinema and the psyche.
Slavoj Žižek has, since the 1990s, offered a convincing alternative version of
cinematic suture. He is satisfied that suture produces a one in place of a zero, but he
accepts this formulation only on the proviso that the zero will never be completely
covered over: the one is never unified or self-contained. Rather, a remainder or
leftover is produced by any and every suture (see Žižek 2012: 587). Žižek provides
a range of cinematic examples, from Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) (see Žižek 2001:
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 205

38–39), Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993) (Žižek 2001: 169–71) and others,
before delivering a summative declaration: “We can see how”, he writes, “in this
precise sense, suture is the exact opposite of the illusory self-centred totality that
successfully erases the decentred traces of its production process”.To which he adds,
“Suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible, that the
excluded externality always leaves traces within” (Žižek 2012b: 157). Suture can
never fully be closed; it always leaves an excess or remainder, and it is this excess
that is most fundamental to it.
What does Žižek’s analysis allow us to achieve? For a film like Milk the answer
might appear obvious: if, in this film, suture occurs at the level of the political, then
the excess or remainder that is left out of this political suture is rather obvious: what
is ejected is sex. As countless commentators argued, the film’s logic, as well as the
faithfulness of its representation of Harvey Milk, was compromised by the avoid-
ance of gay sexuality (see Erhart 2011: 158–60). And yes, we can surely accept such
a criticism: Milk manages to suture the political field only insofar as it excludes
issues of gay sexuality.
But might there be something more to be said other than simply admitting
that “what is included will always contain what is excluded”, that “the excluded
externality always leaves traces within”—such are Žižek’s claims—with the result
that there can never be a full or unified totality, that any totality can never be fully
closed? I certainly believe we can say a good deal more than that. Therefore, I want
to examine several ways in which the topic of suture might be expanded, with the
overall aim of considering how such a theory of suture might contribute to an
understanding of the politics of cinema.
What is missing in the traditional theory of cinema and suture put forward by
writers like Oudart and Dayan, but also elided in the process of suture proposed
by Žižek? What is missing is a way out: either one is trapped by suture, or one can
merely endlessly confront the repressed remainder that is produced by suture. In
contrast with these theories, I would like to propose something of a way out, for I
believe this is what a film like Milk shows us.
I’ve never been entirely convinced by the Lacanian focus on subjective lack, of
a subject defined by a lack that consigns humanity to a life of misery and frustra-
tion. From that perspective, the only overcoming of the subject’s definitive lack
will be a fraud, an illusion, and this is pretty much what the traditional theory of
suture tells us: there can only ever be subjective consistency if that consistency is
based on an imaginary that is mired in illusion.2 And this is the conclusion posed
by the commentaries on cinema and suture put forward by Oudart and Dayan. An
alternative, proposed by Žižek, is to declare that for the subject there will always be
a remainder, a blind spot, a gap or lack; whatever the term, the subject is destined
to fail and will do so repeatedly. Any victory will invariably be shallow and illusory,
a mere construction—a fantasy—that covers over the true Real lurking beneath it.
At the end of the day, this offers no way out, as though the definitive conclusion
206 Richard Rushton

to be drawn from psychoanalysis is that human existence is inherently unsatisfying

and disappointing.
I remain unconvinced by such constructions, and there are places in Lacan where
notions of suture and the Imaginary are not merely matters of covering over a lack, nor
of the potential remainders that will spill out of that covering over. As Lacan claimed
in Seminar XI, “Only the subject – the human subject, the subject of desire that is the
essence of man – is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary cap-
ture. He maps himself in it” (1977: 107). Lacan thus argues that the human subject can
and often will be caught up in imaginary capture but also that the subject is capable
of mapping herself in this imaginary: the Imaginary does not automatically lead to
illusion or ideological distortion. Following up on the ramifications of all of this for a
theory of suture will require going beyond Lacan to some degree.What follows, there-
fore, is a three-part inquiry that proposes another theory of suture.The models for this
theory are based on the psychoanalytic notions of sublimation and the “joke-work”
as well as the notion of “hegemonic suture” taken from the field of political theory.
Lacan’s concise definition of sublimation, “the raising of an object to the dig-
nity of the Thing (das Ding)”, can immediately bring us onto the terrain of suture
(1992: 112). Sublimation takes an object that is nothing, a zero—Lacan tells us that
“in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative” (ibid.: 130)—and raises
it to something, a something that brings with it a transcendent allure. “The Thing”,
Lacan writes, “will always be represented by emptiness precisely because it cannot
be represented by anything else” (ibid.: 129). The sublimated Thing will be empty,
“nothing”, but it is precisely in this emptiness that it thereby attains the capacity to
act or stand in for something. This superimposition of something in place of noth-
ing can provide the subject with a certain promise of consistency, with a project
that can be considered potentially fulfilling and worthwhile. Most pointedly, the
example of sublime allure is related by Lacan to the medieval rituals of courtly
love, and there should be no need to declare here that the ritual of courtly love is
futile, a quest that will end in nothing; rather, the satisfaction lay in the pursuit of
the beloved ideal, in the project of possible love. It is here that sublimation provides
its promise, and Lacan assures us that sublimation is nothing less than a “way out”:
“One thing only alludes to the possibility of the happy satisfaction of the instinct
and that is the notion of sublimation” (1992: 293). While there is certainly no
promise of satisfaction here, Lacan goes so far as to acknowledge its possibility.
Why, however, might this notion of sublimation have anything to do with the
theory of suture? I believe we can place suture and sublimation in the same general
orbit by virtue of the ways they articulate the relationship between nothing—
emptiness, zero—and a something that will enter into the place of that nothing in
order to fill it, to give it consistency. Traditional theories of suture will declare that
this “something” will be illusory or fraudulent; Žižek too will tell us that even if
something enters the place of nothing in this function, it will nevertheless leave a
remainder, that a repressed leftover will invariably return. By contrast, the notion
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 207

of sublimation gives us an object and a form in which there is, according to Lacan,
“satisfaction without repression” (1992: 293).
Crucial here in Lacan’s approach to sublimation is the transformation of the aim
of the drive. Typically (as with Freud) this is conceived in terms of a transformation
of the drive from a sexual aim to a non-sexual one. And yet, as Lacan makes clear,
any aim of the drive will always-already be a transformation, for there can never be a
“pure” drive. Additionally, Jean Laplanche in his seminar on sublimation emphasizes
that it is difficult if not impossible to clearly separate a sexual aim from a non-sexual
one in cases of sublimation (1980: 111).What is ultimately at stake for the theory of
sublimation expressed here is a satisfaction of the drive without repression.
If, therefore, we can consider sublimation as providing a way in which the sub-
ject can find satisfaction in the pursuit of an object—such as the pursuit of the
idealized object of courtly love—and if additionally we can consider the hypothesis
that suture can likewise be considered to operate in such a manner—as positing for
the subject a relation to an object that can deliver “satisfaction” or “happiness”—
then we can at least begin to chart some of the events of Milk in these terms.
First and foremost, we can consider the film’s shift from the sexual to the non-
sexual, from sexuality to politics. Following a prologue in which we are shown the
assassination of Harvey Milk and the then Mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone
(Victor Garber)—thus delivering to us the event towards which the remainder of
the film will build (and noting too that Van Sant here follows the structure of Rob
Epstein’s documentary on The Times of Harvey Milk [1986])—the film focuses on
the preceding years of Harvey’s life. He is something of a drifter, and on his 39th
birthday we see him pick up a younger man, Scott Smith (James Franco), in a New
York subway station. This sexual fling quickly turns into a relationship and, in the
hope of giving his life new direction, Harvey moves with Scott to San Francisco
where they open a photographic store. Harvey soon becomes something of a com-
munity organizer: he sets up a mailing list of customers and provides a meeting
place and safe haven for homosexuals in the area around Castro Street.
Many in the community tolerate the gay subculture, and the businesses there
appreciate the additional trade that the gay community brings. Some members of
the public actively support the work Harvey does, but there is still a widespread
intolerance and antipathy towards the gay community. Such intolerance very much
applies to the police whose tactics are oppressive and often violent. The film charts
these tensions in clear ways that make the opposition between pro-gay and anti-gay
the centerpiece of the film’s plotting. It is specifically in response to police oppres-
sion that Harvey turns to politics: he decides to run for election as a city supervisor
(i.e., a member of the city council) and is adamant that the gay community needs
a leader and organizer in order that the discrimination and violence perpetrated
against the gay community can be addressed.
What thus happens in the first 20 minutes or so of Milk is a transformation from
sexuality to politics. What the film offers is a process analogous to sublimation.
208 Richard Rushton

(To be clear, the film does not sublimate nor does it represent sublimation; rather, it
provides a shape or process akin to sublimation.) Certainly, we could argue that
Harvey himself transforms his sexual passions into political striving. But I would
also want to declare that this is what the film’s “drive” does: the film itself changes
its emphasis from sexuality to politics.
This movement from sexuality to non-sexuality, from a life of drifting and trying
to find one’s feet to a life that discovers something akin to a purpose or project is,
as I have tried to insist, analogous to sublimation. But I would also like to insist that
it can be conceived in terms of suture. In his passing comments on suture Lacan
effectively refers to it as a process that freezes movement, as something that “arrests”
the subject, especially of a subject fixed by the gaze of another (or the Other)
(1977: 117–18). And so too might the situation Harvey finds himself in be seen as
something akin to an arrest, but only insofar as this arresting or fixing can be seen
as fixing on a project. The Harvey we have seen so far in the film is restless and
ungrounded; he looks for brief, evanescent encounters; he shifts from New York to
San Francisco until he finally fixes on a political quest. He discovers something—an
aim, no less, that, as Lacan would say, will put him in a relationship with the Thing
(see 1992: 119). This might even be a sure way of defining suture: the invention or
discovery of a something that fixes one’s life or actions in a particular direction, as
that which imbues life with a substance and outside of which life would be imbued
with a kind of nothingness. And it will come as no surprise that Lacan’s theoriza-
tion of the gaze—it is there that he mentions suture—is very much a reconfiguring
of many of Sartre’s points from Being and Nothingness. And perhaps that is all the
theory of suture is concerned with, the conviction that there can be something rather
than nothing.
Notions of sublimation can tell us a good deal more about what is at stake in
Milk. Those who fail or refuse to sublimate their sexuality come off rather badly
in Milk: Harvey’s long-term lover, Scott, eventually walks out on him because he
feels Harvey is spending too much time and energy on politics: their sexual life has
been smothered by Milk’s political obsessions. The other lover depicted in the film,
the flamboyantly over-emotional Jack Lira (Diego Luna), goes so far as to commit
suicide, again because Milk’s political commitments have led him to neglect their
relationship. Harvey Milk, we might say, is himself a model of political sublimation:
he knows how to transform his sexual drives into political practice.
But such a conclusion is rather too hastily made. The issue of sublimation will
need to be considered in a little more detail. Jean Laplanche, in a long seminar
devoted to the topic, was led to question the all-too-easy dismissal of sublima-
tion as the transformation of sexual libido into a non-sexual aim. First of all, as
Laplanche makes clear, the object of sublimation will always be imbued with sexual
energy. And what are the political aims of Harvey Milk if they are not also sexual?
His campaign is ultimately one that aspires to champion the right for gays to have
sexual relations freely and equally. Thus, in Milk, politics is not so much a refusal
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 209

or denial of sexuality as it is a way of achieving sexual satisfaction in a free and

safe way. The aim changes from sex to politics, but in the end, politics is a way of
achieving the goal of sexual freedom. Sublimation here is more a matter of giv-
ing consistency to a “something” that can imbue a life with a purpose or project.
It is a way of potentially satisfying the drives, that is, of finding or discovering or
inventing something in conscious life that will provide satisfaction for drives that
are otherwise unconscious.
Sublimation is not capitulation or repression. For Harvey, no criticism is strong
enough of those in the gay community who wanted to fly “underneath the radar”:
there are several meetings in the film between Harvey and two other San Francisco
gay rights power-brokers, David Goodstein (Howard Rosenman) and Rick Stokes
(Stephen Spinella), who try to counsel Harvey against running for public office on
the grounds that a gay man running for office will be too public and open and that
it will incite hatred towards the gay movement. Milk rejects such a strategy and
instead urges his fellow homosexuals to make their sexuality public. Here, privacy,
playing politics behind the scenes and staying in the closet are declared enemies.
Repression is not an option.
Sublimation is not suture, and yet, as I have tried to argue here, sublimation can
provide human subjects with projects that are worthwhile and can offer the possi-
bility of “satisfaction without repression”.The conception of suture I am proposing
here offers a similar possibility of satisfaction.With this in mind, does psychoanalysis
posit other modes of experience in which, like sublimation, there is a translation of
impulses from the unconscious into the system of consciousness, which gives rise
to a satisfying outcome? Freud certainly posits such a process in his 1905 book on
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1976). Jokes, Freud argues, rely on the
effect of transforming something that is unconscious into a form that is at one
and the same time acceptable to conscious thought but also satisfies the uncon-
scious in one way or another. Methods of condensation and displacement come
to the fore as unconscious material is reworked—by the “joke-work”—in order
to be acceptable to conscious thought, but also to give some access to the kind of
unconscious wish-fulfillment similarly performed by dreams under the influence of
the “dream-work”. In writing specifically of what he calls tendentious jokes (those
that have an “aim”), Freud writes that, “They make possible the satisfaction of an
instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way”
(1976: 144). Thus, like sublimation, the joke functions in such a way as to subject
unconscious drives to conscious revision but achieves this in a way that does not
amount to repression. On the contrary, these processes provide modes of expression
of unconscious drives, the “satisfaction of an instinct”.
These formulations allow the process of suture to be approached from a some-
what different angle. Again here, as was achieved above with sublimation, it is not
a matter of declaring that jokes work in the same way as suture, but rather that the
form or process of jokes functions in a way that is analogous to suture. If traditional
210 Richard Rushton

suture theorists proposed suture as an illusion of unity that covered over and thus
repressed a hidden truth, while Žižek, for his part, emphasizes the repressed or
excluded remainder that always accompanies suture, then examining the logics of
sublimation and jokes instead focuses on modes of transformation that express the
unconscious in some way. Might it be possible to conceive of suture in such a way?
Freud emphasizes that tendentious jokes are particularly designed to combat
social restrictions and moral codes in a manner that can induce a psychical dis-
charge. What is normally repressed in everyday life can be accorded a conscious
outlet by way of jokes. In short, jokes offer a feeling of freedom from repression
(1976: 145). At another point Freud argues that the best jokes happen spontane-
ously; we can’t see them coming: “We have an indefinable feeling, rather, which
I can best compare with an ‘absence’, a sudden release of intellectual tension, and
then all at once the joke is there – as a rule ready-clothed in words” (ibid.: 225).The
mechanism here is one in which there seems at first to be a nothing—an absence,
Freud tells us—only for that nothing to suddenly be replaced with a “something”:
the punch-line of the joke. It is this sudden filling up of the absence that creates the
satisfaction of the joke, and I don’t think I am going too far to suggest that the fill-
ing up of the absence is precisely a functioning of suture: the punch-line “sutures”
the joke, as it were.
If we examine closely the propositions on suture put forward by Jacques-Alain
Miller, then we will see that what is essential to suture is what he calls the “identity
function”. Miller argues that, in order to be an identity, a “one”, any identity must
therefore distinguish itself from that which is not identical: a zero. “It is this decisive
proposition”, he writes, “that the concept of not-identical-with-itself is assigned by the
number zero which sutures logical discourse” (Miller 1977/8: 29). The zero is thus
that which is “ejected” from identity: the zero is definitively outside the terrain
defined by the one, and it is only by drawing that border that the identity of the one
is established. However, Miller then takes an additional step: the zero is not nothing.
Rather, in order to be effective—and thus to enable the possibility of identity—the
zero must be taken for a one: it is a non-representable that must nevertheless func-
tion in the guise of a representation. Why? Because a zero is not nothing; rather, it
is part of the series of numbers without which the notion of number, beginning
with one, would not be possible. To continue the rhetoric, Miller then goes on to
tell us that the notion of the “zero as one” is a fundamental logical proposition of
psychoanalysis: it is a non-identity that functions as an identity, a non-truth that
functions as a truth. Such a non-identity, Miller will finally tell us, is none other
than what psychoanalysis calls the subject (ibid.: 33).
A zero that is taken for a one: might we not see here, alongside a logic desig-
nated as suture, also those processes of sublimation and jokes that I have alluded to?
Sublimation takes something sexual from the unconscious and transforms it into
something intellectual or artistic (or political, as occurs in Milk). Laplanche puts it
more forcefully: sublimation is a matter of the symbolization of objects that would
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 211

otherwise have no symbolic existence—nothing less than a transformation of a

“nothing” into “something” (1980: 60–61). And do not jokes also transform some-
thing forbidden and unspoken into a discourse that is spoken? “What these jokes
whisper”, Freud tells us, “may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have
a right to make themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality”
(1976: 155). In short: what should have remained a zero can, by way of sublimation
or jokes become not nothing; what should have remained silent can be said aloud.
A further step is necessary. By far the most significant re-theorization of suture
occurred in the field of political theory.This interjection is of course that of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s conception of “hegemonic suture”, as defined in their
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985: 47). Perhaps what is most remarkable about
Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation is that it conceives of suture from both the inside
and the outside. This means suture has to be approached in a dual manner. First,
from the inside, what are the processes that enable a suture to be produced; how is
a social field brought together or “sutured” in such a way as to form a totality or
identity? Second, from the outside, what is it that is excluded from the identity that
suture produces? That is, if suture brings together certain elements of a social field
in order to form an identity, upon what exclusions is this identity formed?
For Laclau and Mouffe, one final determinant is necessary, and that is to answer
the question, What is politics? Laclau and Mouffe offer a very clear definition of
what politics is: it is “a type of action whose objective is the transformation of a
social relation which constructs a subject in a relationship of subordination” (1985:
153). Where a group or community fights against its subordination: there we have
politics.
If the conditions of hegemonic suture are to be met, then, two operations need
to occur. The first, which Laclau and Mouffe call articulation, involves the bringing
together—the suturing, no less—of a social field. What this means in straightfor-
ward terms is that, if disparate groups of scattered individuals are in positions of
subordination—if they are exploited, discriminated against, and so on—then some
expression of that subordination must be articulated in order for it to be acted
upon. In short, if an exploited community is fragmented and powerless—say, a
group of factory workers has been asked to work longer hours with no increase in
pay, and none of the members of the workforce quite knows how to express his or
her feelings of subordination at such a request—then a way must be found to bring
together and articulate those feelings of subordination. Only then can political
action begin to take place. Articulation is the prime mover: it is only by articulating
the concerns, hopes, needs and desires of a subordinated social field that a suturing
of that field can emerge. “The social is articulation”, Laclau and Mouffe declare,
“insofar as ‘society’ is impossible [without such an articulation]” (1985: 114).
In Milk, what the character of Harvey Milk expresses above all are the articula-
tions that make the suturing of a social field possible. He unites the gay community
of San Francisco, many of whom had not wanted to be involved in politics and
212 Richard Rushton

political activism. In doing this, Milk then makes it possible for a social field to act
with a view to the transformation of the political field. And such is the major con-
cern of the film: to chart the political transformations that are achieved as a result of
the political activism Harvey Milk inspires. Perhaps the key character in this respect
is Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch). Jones is initially skeptical of political activism; he
considers politics vacuous and dismisses elections as shallow, bourgeois sideshows.
Jones, by contrast with the notion of hegemonic suture, offers a prime example of
how potential members of a social field can be defined by fragmentation and differ-
ence: in this instance, by a monistic individualism that prioritizes private enjoyment
(sexuality, no less) above public issues. As the film makes clear, however, in the end,
Harvey was eventually successful in rallying Jones to the cause, and Jones becomes
one of his chief allies throughout the film. Jones thus becomes an excellent example
of the way in which what was previously not a social field comes to be articulated
as a social field, for Jones becomes sutured into the social field defined by Milk’s
political activism.
At one point, Milk hits upon a masterful tactic of articulation: “dog shit”. When,
having been elected to the San Francisco board of supervisors, Milk proposes a gay
rights ordinance for the city that will protect homosexuals from discrimination in
the workplace, he tries to conjure up a way that he can garner more general support
from the electorate. He figures that if he wins the general favor of the people of the
city, then they will be more likely to support his gay rights ordinance. Therefore,
he comes up with the idea that it will be a prosecutable offence if an owner fails to
clean up the “dog shit” left by his or her dog. Milk and his aides decide this issue is
the number one problem for most people living in the city. The signifier “dog shit”
here performs perfectly the operation of articulation that brings about a suturing of
the social field: it is something that brings together a range of different interests in a
community and “articulates” those interests as a matter of defining a community. In
this instance, it matters little whether those who are enraged by dog shit are similar
or even sympathetic to issues of gay rights. The fact that these different fields are
brought together—sutured—is precisely what is at stake in political formations. It
also matters little here what the contents of this articulation are: it can be any manner
of things, as it is, here in Milk, a matter of dog shit. This articulation brings about a
suturing of the social field, so that those who are incensed by dog shit might also
come to be allied with those seeking gay rights: this demonstrates quite precisely
how hegemonic suture operates.
We will recall that this notion of hegemonic suture has a second dimension.
If the first of these dimensions shows us suture from the inside—that is, of how a
social group or community is brought together—then the second aspect shows us
suture from the outside: it is a matter of what is excluded from the social field in
order that it may operate as a unity or identity (even if such unity or identity can
only ever be temporary). Laclau and Mouffe call this second dimension antago-
nism. “Dog shit” performs this second function, and thus it demonstrates the two
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 213

dimensions of hegemonic suture. Dog shit clearly comes across as being a bit of a
joke in the film, and Milk hams up the publicity opportunities by stepping in some
dog shit in full view of television cameras while campaigning. But it is by way of
this joke that the similarities between jokes and suture can be pinpointed.
Jokes, Freud tells us, perform a social function, especially tendentious jokes. Such
jokes require three people: a first who tells the joke; a second at whom the joke is
directed; and a third who “gets” the joke (Freud 1976: 143). Suture could be said to
function in a similar way: the teller of the joke and the third person who gets the
joke are, by way of the joke, sutured in such a way that joins them together; they
“share” the joke, as it were. This is analogous to what above I have called suture
“from the inside”: those who are “in” on the joke are sutured, brought together.The
second person in the joke—the butt of the joke—is akin to that which is excluded
in the operation of suture, and Freud tells us that such jokes are often fueled by
antagonism and a desire to demean the object of the joke. Thus, the person who is
the object of the tendentious joke functions in a similar way to the excluded object
of antagonism in operations of suture.
For “dog shit”, therefore, the butts of the joke are those citizens of San Francisco
who fail to clean up after their dogs; they are the “enemies” of the suture invoked
by the dog shit joke/law. And the community is thus brought together by their
united disapproval of such enemies. Dog shit thus achieves both functions of suture:
it brings a community together from the inside—those who are “in” on the joke—
while at the same time constructing a barrier against those who are excluded from
the suturing process, the enemies who are left “outside” the suture.
This enemy from the outside that is necessary for the operation of hegemonic
suture is defined very clearly by Laclau when he declares that “it is through the
demonization of a section of the population that a society reaches a sense of its own
cohesion” (2005: 70). Politics—and suture—requires the construction of an adver-
sary that is opposed to and thus excluded from the society that is being articulated.
In politics, not everyone can win, nor is it desirable that everyone win. Rather, poli-
tics is essentially a matter of division, argument, difference. Thus, for one identity
to be formed, other identities must be excluded from that identity-formation. For
Milk, the stakes of such antagonism are clear: one cannot be both pro-gay and anti-
gay.Thus, those in favor of gay rights find their antagonistic adversaries in a range of
anti-gay lobbyists and politicians: Christian campaigner Anita Bryant, conservative
politician John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) (he introduces “Proposition 6”)3 and also
one of the other members of the San Francisco board of supervisors, Dan White
(Josh Brolin): the only member of the board to vote against the gay rights ordi-
nance, and furthermore the figure who will eventually murder both Harvey Milk
and George Moscone. What these figures represent are exclusions from the field of
“gay rights supporters”, and they are thus external to the community of supporters
that Milk manages to suture.That group of supporters is, by being brought together,
also actively placed in opposition to these external antagonists. Just as the process of
214 Richard Rushton

articulation is essential to suture, so too is the process of antagonism fundamental to

the political stakes of hegemonic suture.

What can the notion of suture contribute to Film Studies? As we have seen, dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s processes of suture were most often allied with modes of
subjective, ideological illusion at the level of the Imaginary. Since the 1990s, Žižek
has attempted to realign notions of suture with the Lacanian Real, thus making an
“excluded remainder” central to a new notion of suture. By way of contrast with
each of these approaches, by following a different path of investigation on the
notion of suture, I have here relied on psychoanalytic conceptions of sublimation
and the mechanism of jokes, while I have also taken a great deal from Laclau and
Mouffe’s theorization of hegemonic suture. I have done this in order to propose an
unashamedly positive notion of suture, one that provides a “way out” of the dead-
locks proposed by previous notions of suture.
By way of conclusion, I will return to the three propositions with which this
paper began. First of all, that cinema has the potential to tell stories that suture audiences.
Thus, it is less the cinematic techniques employed by films—such as shot/reverse-
shot—that are important for conceptions of suture in the cinema. Rather, suture is a
matter of the story world evoked by film. If a film like Milk focuses on the suturing
of a social field in support of gay rights, then it is assumed it will also be attempting
to suture cinematic spectators into a similar social field, one that is sympathetic to
gay rights issues. In this way, processes of spectatorship are central to operations of
suture in the cinema.
Second, processes of suture occur by way of identification. Identification is crucial to
Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of hegemonic suture (see Laclau and Zac 1994),
but I would also claim that identification is central to a theorization of cinematic
suture. What the cinema spectator identifies with, however, are not specific charac-
ters in a cinematic fiction (what Metz termed “secondary identification”). Rather,
what is identified with are sets of relations between characters; that is, what the spectator
identifies with is akin to what Laclau and Mouffe call a “social field”. (The origins
of such a conception of Film Studies go back to Elizabeth Cowie’s classic formula-
tion of “Fantasia” [1997].) Thus, identifications in Milk are not solely a matter of
identifying with Harvey Milk. Rather, identification will be a matter of identifying
with the procedures and actions—as well as the dreams and hopes—undertaken by
Milk and other characters in relation to one another. Thus, it will be the relation-
ships between Milk and Scott Smith, between Milk and Cleve Jones, between Milk
and Dan White that come to articulate a position or positions of identification in
the film.
Finally, positions of identification shift and change throughout a film. Signifi-
cantly, too, functions of suture will always be shifting and changing. These positions
 Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 215

of identification shift and change in Milk. For example, early in the film, Cleve
Jones rebukes Milk, while later he is sympathetic: the relationship between them
changes, and so too will our spectatorship of these relationships change. First of
all, Jones is something of an enemy, a person who seems to be excluded from the
hegemonic suture; while later he accepts and joins Harvey’s campaign, and thus
the dimensions or emphasis of the suture change. Conversely, Dan White at first
befriends Milk only later to turn against him, and these changes can be considered
functions of suture whereby spectators shift and change their sympathies. This is
one way of saying that there can never be any stable or permanent position of iden-
tity that any spectator will adopt. Any identification and thus any suture will only
ever be temporary and thus always open to the possibility of change. Such processes
of identification and identity will also never be fully totalizing. Rather, they are
contingent and always open to the possibility of further transformations.
Milk provides a rather too convenient explication of these modes of suture,
and I fully admit that a film that advocates the political coming together of an
oppressed community will offer a rather convenient example of “the political com-
ing together of an oppressed community”. And if this might be a definition of
suture or hegemonic suture, then I would like to believe that it could also offer a
starting point for a definition of cinematic suture. Such a definition fits with some
films I have written about in the past (Rushton 2013)—such as Marked Woman
(Bacon and Curtiz, 1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, 1939) or On the
Waterfront (Kazan, 1954)—but it might also open up possibilities for future research
on other films (such as Norma Rae [Ritt, 1979] or the Dardenne brothers’ recent
film, Two Days, One Night [2014]).4 In short, I would like to believe that there is a
future for the notion of suture.

Notes
1 I have gone same way towards trying to redefine suture in The Politics of Hollywood
Cinema (Rushton 2013: 108–129).
2 See Robert Samuels (1993: 59–74).
3 This was a 1978 ‘name and shame’ proposition for the state of California that would
have allowed homosexuals (and anyone who supported them) to be fired from teaching
in State schools. The battle against Proposition 6 provides one of Milk’s key episodes.
4 I delivered a paper on this topic at the Radical Film Network conference at Birmingham
City University in February 2015.

References
Baudry, J.-L. (1985) Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. In
B. Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cowie, E. (1997) Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan.
Dayan, D. (1985) The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema. In B. Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods
Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.
216 Richard Rushton

Erhart, J. (2011) The Naked Community Organizer: Politics and Reflexivity in Gus Van
Sant’s Milk. Auto/Biography Studies 26(1): 156–70.
Freud, S. (1976) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. J. Strachey. Ed. A. Richards.
London: Pelican.
Heath, S. (1981) Questions of Cinema. London: Macmillan.
Lacan, J. (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. A.
Sheridan. London: Hogarth.
Lacan, J. (1992) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Ed. J.-A.
Miller. Trans. D. Porter. London: Routledge.
Laclau, E., and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics. London:Verso.
Laclau, E., and Zac, L. (1994) Minding the Gap: The Subject of Politics. In Laclau (ed.), The
Making of Political Identities. London:Verso.
Laplanche, J. (1980) Problématiques III: La sublimation, Paris: PUF.
Laplanche, J. (1984) To Situate Sublimation. Trans. R. Miller. October 28, 7–26.
Metz, C. (1982) Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Trans. C. Britton et al.
London: Macmillan.
Miller, J.-A. (1977/8) Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier). Trans. J. Rose. Screen
18(4): 24–34.
Oudart, J-P. (1977/8) Cinema and Suture. Screen, 18(4): 35–47.
Rushton, R. (2013) The Politics of Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political
Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Samuels, R. (1993) Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan’s Reconstruction of Freud.
­London: Routledge.
Silverman, K. (1985) The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, S. (2001) The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory.
London: BFI.
Žižek, S. (2012a) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London:
Verso.
Žižek, S. (2012b) “Suture,” Forty Years Later. In P. Hallward and K. Peden (eds.) Concept and
Form,Volume Two: Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. London:Verso.

Filmography
Marked Woman (1937) Directed by Lloyd Bacon and Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros.
Milk (2009) Directed by Gus Van Sant. USA: Focus Features.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Directed by Frank Capra. USA: Columbia Pictures.
Norma Rae (1979) Directed by Martin Ritt. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.
On the Waterfront (1954) Directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Columbia Pictures.
The Times of Harvey Milk (1986) Directed by Robert Epstein. USA: Black Sand Productions.
Two Days, One Night (2014) Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Belgium/France/
Italy: Les Films du Fleuve.
Part VI

Auto/Fiction
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15
UNNAMEABLE

Anna Backman Rogers

You asked me once

What it is that I fear
The inchoate endless
Drip drip drip of something
That wracks my brow
And shakes my right palm …
The tremor your brain, and your father before you
Gave to me.
I can tell you now that
It is your obliteration that troubles me.
The secretive and insidious ways
That you have
Seeped out of
This moth eaten and inadequate
Brainhole of mine.
The way that you have become
A character in a narrative
That makes no sense at all.
That I speak around you
Because I cannot reach you.
I recall all the details.
The red birthmark on
The little toe of your right foot.
The meatiness of your hands.
The way you say
220 Anna Backman Rogers

“As they say”,

When they never do.
The cold clayness of your clasp
As you gripped my hand
And they wheeled you backwards
Down the corridor
Like a film in reverse.
Transformed in your hospital gown,
Your mouth hemorrhaged anger
That I never heard you speak before.
And your disregard for all
The tiresome rules
And the people who follow them.
Because around all of that,
We drew the curtain.
With all of these things,
I am left with nothing to navigate the distance
Between us.
Or to understand
The imprint you so fervently
Squashed down into
My heart that all too often
Pulsates with pain.
The minutes
The hours
The weeks
The months
The years
That now separate us.
A time frame I cannot fathom.
When even did you die?
It was when I wore
Red sandals in the Scottish rain …
And you said
“You never will dress appropriately, will you”.
With all of these things,
That are left after you …
What am I to do?
I often see you
Standing on that bridge
And waving to me
Beneath the dark, sunken and sodden skyline
 Unnameable 221

Of Durham.
You had come across Europe
To tell me
That there are things in life that
I cannot control.
And I was only twenty one.
Perhaps you already knew
About the things I have in me
That make me graze up against the
Bodies and brains
That trouble me
In order to feel anything at all.
And to make those things
A part of me.
You taught me then already
That I could not steal your death from you,
However much I wanted to.
So, years later
When your words cut through the stale air
Of the last room you slept in
To ask me if you were dying,
I knew it was because you
Feared that it would not end.
And I have always shared that fear with you.
16
Each day at a time – a daily
intervention into loss1

Myna Trustram

When something seemingly unbearable happens

a person is told to take each day at a time,
as though their future has been washed clean away.

On 2 August 2012, I started to write a diary. I was at Vejle in Denmark, and on that
day I took a walk to Jelling, an ancient Christian place, and passed along a straight
road edged by verges of wild flowers; beyond these lay sweeping fields of wheat and
barley. I was bored with the landscape; it was too much like the English scenes of
my childhood. Only the style of the houses and their particular yards and gardens
told me I was in this country called Denmark.
I focused on the flowers rather than the terrain, and I had the idea that each
day for a year I would pick and describe a different flower. My hope was that the
rhythm of doing this would bring me back to keeping a diary. It was an experiment
in how to recover my impulse to write. This was something I had lost two years
before when a disaster made my life un-writable. I could no longer find the words
to say it (cf. Cardinal 1975). The grief of each day was seemingly unbearable and so
un-representable in a diary; flowers are bearable, and they repeat each year.
I grew up knowing the names of flowers in the fields, woods and water-­meadows
of the chalk plain of Wiltshire in the south of England. My mother grew more
­flamboyant flowers than these in her garden and turned them into stiff arrange-
ments in our house. There were jars of wilting wild flowers on the tables at my
infant school after a nature walk, and this division between garden and wild was
repeated at the church fair and the Women’s Institute competition where you could
submit an arrangement of one or the other but not the two together. And now
I grow both garden and wild and on the grave of the one I lost in the disaster.
 Each day at a time 223

I faced the hazard of sentimentality and whimsicality, but from that day, every
day, I looked for a flower, picked it and described it in a diary. August was the easiest
month; March the hardest.
I call it Each day at a time because the common advice to those who have suf-
fered a great loss, when nothing more can be said, is to “take each day at a time”. As
though it is too much to consider the future without the lost one, in our case a lost
child. I suppose I took the advice, despite feeling contempt for the giver: have you
nothing more than clichés for me?
I set myself a task that risked becoming a punishing small feat of endurance. Perhaps
that was the point: to punish myself for living on. Equally, it was an assumption of the
responsibility of the living to live and record life through small acts that notice what
simply exists. I don’t normally set myself tasks or tests. Was it a denial of what I really
needed to do, a roaming around the surface of grief looking for beauty, rather than
a mining into it? There’s little to be gained from mechanical acts of will that remove
one from desire and imagination. This was no Olympic feat of emotional or botani-
cal stamina in either intention or actuality, though I did begin during the London
Olympic fever of summer 2012. In fact, I failed since there were a few days when I for-
got to look for a flower and one when I could not find one. I didn’t pick 365 flowers.

Monday 3 September 2012

A pink lychnis from a self-seeded clump in the garden. It has a long grey stem and
delicate, simple pink flowers. The petals are shrivelled, ragged. The sepal is fluted with
high ridges.Two tiny leaves an inch or so from the bottom. Rabbits ears – the grey, furry
stem and leaves remind me of a plant from childhood called rabbits ears that I never
liked much.The petals are sad, floppy and torn.

I picked the flowers whilst moving about the day: in my own and in neighbours’
gardens, in public parks, in allotments, on waste ground, in the countryside, in
cities. In England, in Wales and in Scotland, Denmark and Norway. In Stock-
port, Manchester, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria, Cornwall, London, Llangollen,
Yorkshire, Shetland. I made the diary entries in the evening, often the last thing at
night when I was tired, so some are reports of a dutiful mourner rather than studied
descriptions of the flower or my mood.

20 November 2012
This is becoming mechanical: the search in the daytime for the flower and in the even-
ing coming up here to record it.There’s satisfaction in the slow accumulation. I’ve done
118 now. Today’s flower is tree mallow (lavatera or malva) from a garden on Palatine
Road. It’s an inch and a half long the flower, with a double calyx and pink veined
petals in a trumpet.The ends of the petals are turning inky blue-black.
224 Myna Trustram

In her introduction to the new Penguin translation of Freud’s Mourning and Melan-
cholia, Maud Ellman says, “In order to be lost the object must be looked for; it is the
seeking that establishes its absence”. She goes on to say, “Art is the means by which
we lose the object in order to call it back in a new form” (Ellman 2005: xxii). I
think she means that the loser needs to look for the lost object, not to find it but to
establish its loss.This is mourning: looking and then knowing the loved one is gone.
The diary was in part a melancholic response to loss in that it was a repetitive
search for beauty and its decay. Mourning’s longevity means it has plenty of scope
for tipping into melancholia. But an absolute distinction between the two, as in the
title of Freud’s classic text (2005 [1917]: 201–218) isn’t helpful. The mourner can
rarely be absolutely distinguished from the melancholic.
Freud writes, “In mourning the world has become poor and empty, in melan-
cholia it is the ego that has become so” (2005 [1917]: 205). The daily search and
collecting of a flower was a kind of re-entry into the world: an attempt to make it
once again rich and satisfying. And it helped to prevent my lapsing into a poor and
empty ego; by which I mean it buoyed me up, gave me a job to do. For Freud “the
disorder of self-esteem” distinguishes melancholia from mourning (2005 [1917]:
204). Certainly at times my self-esteem was in disarray. It was in part to confound
the emotional disorder that my life fell into that I embarked on the diary: a set of
simple instructions in sympathy with my inner life (the need for order) and there-
fore likely to be achievable. If it isn’t to drift into melancholia mourning requires
one to find not what has been lost but what has been lost within oneself. The loss
of the object must be established in order to integrate it into oneself in a new form.
Hence the paradox that in losing you find something, a new circumstance, a new
object. And in losing you make something: a collection, a garden, a diary, a grave.
The shortcoming of the flower diary was when it held me in a mere list of flow-
ers like a curator’s catalogue or a naturalist’s species list, rather than the resonance of
a particular beauty internally. It did have the air of a punishment, a year’s sentence, a
collusion with an instinct for atonement. But then again, like punishment it contained
seeds of rehabilitation in its daily reminder of beauty and love, or what simply exists.
I was living in the same place with the same things around me, but each thing
had a new resonance. I breathed disaster and knew of things I didn’t want to know.
I was surrounded by what I had lost, although there was no actual evidence: no
bombed city, no flooded plain, no fallen trees, no mangled bodywork. I want to say
that the flowers I picked trembled with this knowledge. Of course they didn’t. I
simply projected the trembling I felt inside onto those sweet things. Here flowers –
you feel and show it, not me!

Sunday 13 January 2013

I think this is chaenomeles speciosa (Japanese quince). It’s from the car park by the
swimming pool. Cup shaped red flowers. Five petals from a substantial almost suc-
culent calyx.Yellow stamens untidily inside. Just one living flower on this stalk and a
dead one. I like it when the flowers come before the leaves on deciduous shrubs.
 Each day at a time 225

The diary felt like a rather literal act, a move to root myself in each day, rather than
a poet’s giving in to not knowing what might be found (see Heaney 2002: x). It
came from a curator’s impulse to find and record: curating used to be my trade.
Though I was inconsolable and didn’t want to be part of a literature of consola-
tion, I was seeking consolation as well as insight. I wasn’t gathering specimens for a
museum’s herbarium. I was aligning myself with a living beauty in the hope that it
would revive a taste for living. There was a pathos in the act of collecting whereby
I speeded the decay of each flower, put it in a box with the others and made a col-
lection of dried and dead flowers. Each flower in a herbarium is laid out on a piece
of paper, identified and dated, whilst my flowers are tangled up in boxes.

Sunday 24 February 2013

If we “dream ourselves into existence” (Christopher Bollas, Being a Character 1992),
what am I trying to dream into existence in this diary? I walked around the garden this
afternoon. The only things in flower are witch hazel, pulmonaria, kerria, polyanthus
and winter-flowering jasmine. I have attachments to all these plants, good and bad, but
my rule is to find a different one each day. I haven’t done that. Nothing.

Figure 16.1 Collection of flowers. Photographer: Mary Stark.

226 Myna Trustram

The diary is no blithe “take each day at a time”. The flowers wither and bring to
mind each day’s dying; they will continue to fade, like the artist Anya Gallaccio’s
gerberas in her gallery installations. As one critic of her work has said, “Discrete
experiences of beauty and art are pinpricks in large areas of time. Flowers are slowly
grown, and then, in one quick moment, cut – and at their very prime” (British
Council 2009). They then add, “the ‘unbearable’ nature of beauty [as Albert Camus
describes it] is the offer of ‘for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should
like to stretch over the whole of time’” (ibid.).
The narrator of Ali Smith’s Artful (2012) has lost her lover but nevertheless talks
to them and asks, what will happen next? The diary told me what would happen
next. Each day I would find a flower and describe it. It was a holding on to what’s
known. Ali Smith describes giving in to loss, lying down with it and allowing it
to do what it wants, allowing the imagination to work. I wanted the diary to be a
recovery of imagination. This imagination thing is where it faltered because some
entries were perfunctory, more fitting for a herbarium catalogue than poems. The
flowers lost their symbolic power when the diary became simply the last thing
I did at night. I chose a pedantic form to release something more flowing. The
diary’s formula is its attraction. Each day a job is done. But it’s the recovery of the
capacity to imagine another kind of life that signals development. The dreaming
of the lost one in imagination is the work that the diary performed. Later, I came
to read in Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure that it wasn’t the splendour of nature that
cured his depression but the imaginative acts he undertook in his exploration of
it (see 2006: 224).

When something seemingly unbearable happens

a person is told to take each day at a time,
as though their future has been washed clean away.
The days go by and the suffering settles in.

Saturday 1 June 2013

After a week away I open the kitchen door and the garden overflows. Pink campion
and aquilegia are adrift, pouring over the edges. And there’s a promise of more to come,
forgotten plants wait to appear in this glorious spring and summer. I hate the ivy-clad
sycamores that lour over the garden but someone pointed out that they are habitats for
birds, and the birds do sometimes sing and sing throughout the day as though there is
no past, no lost hovering thing.

I was nervous of becoming bound up in the cliché of flowers as symbols of loss and
dying. It seemed to work, though. Just think of the simplicity of this: in Herman
Hesse’s unfinished novel, Haus der Traume an old man removes himself into his gar-
den to tie up his roses and prepare to die (see Lindqvist 2012: 9). I call upon a canon
 Each day at a time 227

in order to turn this common experience into something greater. I open Roland
Barthes’ Mourning Diary (2011) and find:

July 18, 1978 To each his own rhythm of suffering.

(…)
July 20, 1978 suffering … it’s an essential, an intimate part of yourself …
(2011: 162, 163)

And Margaret Atwood:

not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing,
is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a
desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or
someone back from the dead. (2003: 140)

My diary wasn’t a risky meditation on suffering but a keeping on through a daily

recording of beauty that actually entailed a shortening of that beauty. It was a daily
intervention into loss. If an intervention is a coming between, then I was squeezing
something in between my self as the subject of grief and the object of my grief.
I had lost the one who came between me and my own death. Loss demands ritual
and daily practices.The diary was a kind of slow, controlled collecting, an enactment
of the impulse to search and find.
I chose a device for writing about loss, a diary, that has time at its heart. David
Grossman’s book about parental loss is called Falling Out of Time (2014) and Denise
Riley’s book about losing her son is called Time Lived,Without Its Flow (2012). Our
daughter fell out of our time, or rather she shot out of it. I have to get it accurate,
these metaphors and verbs, and make the links with others but preserve the excru-
ciating exactitude of what happened in our particular case. I lost a unique part of
my life and so attempt to keep what makes me like no other one on Earth.

When something seemingly unbearable happened

I was told to take each day at a time,
as though my future had been washed clean away.

Postscript
Following the accident one of my earliest thoughts was: but this happens all the
time to people across the world, how can something so common be so obliterating?
And besides, the psychoanalysts say that every one of us is in mourning (or perhaps
melancholic) because as infants we all felt a profound loss of attachment to our
mothers. The answer to my question of course is that you have to feel loss and
death for yourself; there is no preparation. But I still turned to others’ presentations
228 Myna Trustram

of death in literature and music, for a link to the wider human experience, for some
preparation after the event. In my performance of this text, I presented these two
things – my personal response interspersed with others’ reflections. And here was
my difficulty: how to present the unpresentable and have it heard, without simply
appealing to a sympathy vote.
I’ve been asked by listeners to the text: what kind of response do you want? For
these people it seemed to hang somewhere, to be in a kind of suspension between an
evocation of suffering and a narrative examination of that suffering. The one being
raw and not much mediated and the other an analysis, or art even. When I perform
the text, it’s interlaced with my emotional embodiment. It’s different if I give it to
you as a piece of writing to read.
So how to present both my experience, something I am deeply connected to
and that might therefore engender compassion, anxiety, tears, and an intellectu-
ally and artistically driven enquiry? How might these two go hand in hand? One
answer seemed to be to align myself in some way with art and with nature. When
I cry at Schubert or the moonlight on the sea I cry with the ache of the beauty, I
am not suffering. Perhaps something similar could go for my audience – not suf-
fering but waving recognition. The flowers are presentable and representable; they
are not suffering.
When I write I sometimes have D. W. Winnicott’s deceptively simple question
in the back of my mind: what makes life worth living (1988 [1971]: 76)? And in
my case I have to add again. What makes life worth living again? In her book Dust,
Carolyn Steedman says that Winnicott is “trying to understand those situations in
which people are free, in a kind of suspension between the constraints of external and
interior compulsions and dictates” (2001: 81, my italics). I think there is no actual
freedom, just a greater access to spontaneity and creativity. Accidents cast one adrift
from such things. Winnicott’s answer to his question is “creative apperception”
(1988 [1971]: 76). I think he is talking about what Patricia Townsend has called the
endowment of “the outside world with elements of our own experience” (2013:
154). Perhaps I was loading onto the flowers my sorrow but mingling it also with
elements of the flowers, their commonplaceness, their charm, their Latin name.
In The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto the authors quote Jorge Luis Borges: “I think we
can only allude; we can only try to make the reader imagine” (Coessens, Crispin,
and Douglas 2009: 156). My piece was an allusion to an experience, not a represen-
tation but an allusion and a presentation. I’m looking for my lost object and making
something new, something that isn’t the lost one but that contains elements of her.
And then repeating that over and over again.
This thing I am experiencing isn’t actually mourning, melancholia, grief, sadness,
trauma. It’s death. Those other things suggest a passing state. This state I am in will
never pass, this knowing of death. It doesn’t need to be graced by ritual, it is simply
here with me now. The flower diary was divorced from conventional ritual because
I wanted to stay with the knowing of death, I didn’t want to move into an easier
 Each day at a time 229

state of mind. It was a settling into a new state, the repetition of everyday life, rather
than a working through. It was an attempt to organise the chaos of mourning and
to move into the “preliminary chaos” (Milner 2013: 169) of the creative process.

The point is that this wasn’t the usual order of things:

In the usual order of things, lives run their course like rivers. The changes
and metamorphoses of a life due to vagaries and difficulties, or simply the
natural unfolding of circumstance, appear as the marks and wrinkles of a
continuous, almost logical, process of fulfilment that leads ultimately to death.
(Malabou 2012: 1)

So begins Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident. Our young daughter’s pro-
cess of fulfilment was halted by an accident. To use these words of another, of a
philosopher, to describe her death is strangely and alarmingly exhilarating. I am
drawn to this book because it links her accidental death to some wider philosophi-
cal enquiry; it elevates a stupid failing of attention into something else. It was an
accident. Blame can be apportioned, but I cannot place my grief within some larger
narrative of warring humanity, psychotic episodes or natural destruction. So I am
left with a narrative of vulnerability, of death and life; it is this that flowers lend
themselves to, exquisitely.

Note
1 This is a slightly revised version of a text (without the postscript) that I first performed
at the Nordic Summer University in Ulsteinvik, Norway, 2013. I later performed it at
the Month of Performance Art in Berlin, May 2014, and it is the basis of a sound-art
piece (with Helka-Maria Kinnunen) made for the Finnish Broadcasting Company
(http://www.helkamariakinnunen.fi/aaniuniversumi.html).

References
Atwood, M. (2003) Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. London:Virago.
Barthes, R. (2011) Mourning Diary. London: Notting Hill Editions.
Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge.
British Council (2009) Preserve Beauty (New York). Available from: http://­visualarts.british-
council.org/collection/artists/gallaccio-anya-1963/object/preserve-beauty-new-york-
gallaccio-19912003-p7871. [Accessed: 19 August 2015].
Cardinal, M. (1975) The Words to Say It. London: Picador.
Coessens, K., Crispin, D., and Douglas, A. (2009) The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Ghent:
Orpheus Instituut.
Ellman, M. (2005) Introduction: Bad Timing. In On Murder, Mourning and Melancholy. Trans.
S. Whiteside. London: Penguin.
Freud, S. (2005 [1917]) Mourning and Melancholia. In On Murder, Mourning and Melancholy.
London: Penguin.
Grossman, D. (2014) Falling Out of Time. London: Jonathan Cape.
230 Myna Trustram

Heaney, S. (2002) Finders Keepers. London: Faber and Faber.

Lindqvist, S. (2012) The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu. London: Granta.
Mabey, R. (2006) Nature Cure. London: Pimlico.
Malabou, C. (2012) Ontology of the Accident. Cambridge: Polity.
Milner, M. (2013) Winnicott: Overlapping Circles and the Two Way Journey. In J. Abram
(ed.) Donald Winnicott Today. London: Routledge.
Riley, D. (2012) Time Lived,Without Its Flow. London: Capsule Editions.
Smith, A. (2012) Artful. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Steedman, C. (2001) Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Townsend, P. (2013) Cultural Experience and Creativity: An Introduction. In A. Kuhn (ed.)
Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience. London: IB
Tauris.
Winnicott, D.W. (1988 [1971]) Playing and Reality. London: Pelican.
17
The scent of philosophy

Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen

Suddenly I could smell the same scent as in my grandmother’s house.

I have been at the summer school a few days. When I entered my hotel room the
scent was intense, and I was torn back to wonderful holidays. In my grandmother’s
home I was allowed to read books, and she gave me books to enjoy during her
afternoon nap.
The scent is a bridge to my past, a bridge to my early beginnings, to my desire
and to my emotions. The days at the summer school provide a sense of belonging
and freedom and open me up to the underlying sources of emotions and a state of
well-being.
The bridge leads me over a swamp where no emotions exist and where the core
of well-being is drowned in rough seas. From this the only flight available is into
nothingness. Under the bridge is the shame over my family’s neglect and failure.
In my mother’s home I was not allowed to read.
…
I have studied philosophy for 13 years now.
I didn’t tell my mother until half a year ago.
Her reaction was, “What will you use that for?”
I told her, I want to do research about what knowledge is important when you
bring up children. Immediately she started a story that was meant to tell me that
the only important thing is to be stiff and tough. Otherwise the children will not
know the difference between right and wrong, she said.
232 Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen

She only noted herself and was not interested in anything about my study and
me. She didn’t mention anything about herself or what she meant, but then she was
only arguing to justify her own abuse and neglect of my siblings and me.
I lost myself while she spoke.
Perhaps that was the main reason I had not told her before. I could not bear to
see that she is not interested.That the feelings of other people are simply beyond her.
Early in my childhood I learned that I had to hide my feelings and my need to
avoid activating her anger. Now that she is older, her anger does not turn on so
easily any longer.
Previously she would have belittled me and ridiculed me, even in front of the
other people. My experience was that if I caused her anger, it would bring about
her rage. She would be unable to control herself; sometimes she locked one of us in
a dark room for half a day or more.
Now I understand her anger and neglect were due to her inability to see and
understand other people. It depends neither on my feelings nor on me.

The face
Her small feet entered into the grass
The straws touched her hands
The seeds flew through her fingers
The wind gently touched her cheek
The sound of the grasshopper’s tingling reached her ears
And the song of the lark
All of it was like mother’s gentle voice
Summer went
Autumn and winter
The small feet were cold in the snow
Always looking for mother’s voice
She heard the sound of it
in the sky above and in the earth below
Her steps became stronger
Her body stretched up
She is walking on her father’s fields
Her mind made up, as nothing else matters
A desire
Every breath is pushed in with mother’s breath
Every word is spoken with mother’s voice
Every question is answered with mother’s words
 The scent of philosophy 233

Even “Yes” in the church

Is mother’s “yes”
The divorce was a shame against mother
The cows had made the path
It leads to the far corner of father’s field
Clouds gather in the sky
It darkens
Nothing can stop her steps
The wind blows on her back
The lake appears ahead
The meadow grass cuts the feet
And the earth is flooded with water
She jumps from tuft of grass to tuft of grass
Not to touch the water
The surface of the lake gathered
The wind made ripples on the water
The thunder rolled across the sky
The water in the lake is rough
Gathered to be shaped as her mother’s face
Mother’s face was all over the lake
Enticing and intimidating
It will leave nothing behind
Suddenly she stopped
Her soundless scream went into one with the thunder
She gave up
Hanging between the thunder and the face
As a soap bubble
Without an inner life
And without an outer

It is not possible to study without an inner life and without an outer.

Your ability to learn and your way to knowledge are linked to your emotions
and your senses.
My feeling of being nothing, the emptiness of the inner life has followed me
everywhere. It had made it difficult to form my own life, think my own thoughts
and speak my own words.
However, the scent in the hotel room gave me a connection to my senses and
to my inner world, where the capacity to recognise senses, emotions, desires and
234 Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen

intellect can take place. At the summer school I was in a safe place, where I was
accepted and recognised for the person I am, and I’m given a common interest.
It gave me a connection to my outer life. The summer school gave me possi-
bilities to manage my fear of what would happen, if I speak out, and if I share my
feelings and emotions.
I decided to give a presentation at the summer school.

The trial
Actually this is not a presentation it is a picture.
In fact it is not only a picture it is a bit of a film.
Come to that, it’s not a film either it is a part of…
Well, you will see.
It is about all that stuff about resolution of feelings.
It is about all that stuff about construction, how we make our understanding
of the world.
It is about all that male and female power.
And it’s about the necessity to be in contact with your emotions to be able to
break through to knowledge.
My picture:
We are in a courtroom. A man is on trial.
There are a number of chairs along the wall at the back.
I arrive first. I go to the far corner.
The prosecutor comes in.
She is a beautiful young woman with long blond hair.
She is wearing a thin and fine silk shirt, elegant black trousers and small
tiptoe shoes.
Her movements are easy, and she has a pretty smile.
The accused comes in, and his lawyer. They are both men.
The lawyer is wearing the typical formal clothing of a lawyer with heavy
shoes.
The accused looks down at his feet.
Two men sit in the back in the other corner.
“Don’t go there”, they had texted the day before.
“If you do anyway. It will only be for your own amusement”.
When the judge enters, everybody stands up. It’s a female judge.
The trial starts.
The young woman is full of words. She speaks and speaks,
 The scent of philosophy 235

shows pictures.
All those words.
All these things, which had been done.
People come and go.
A lot of words.
The accused just sits there. His clothes are simple, and dirty, his hair is long.
He is overweight and unkempt.
His face closed.
After the first session he looks around and catches my eye. He looks shifty.
Every word was meant to judge him
and they did.
Then during the session a transformation of him begins to occur.
It is as if he is collapsing into something else. A kind of breaking down.
His movements, his attitude, his words, all of him.
Slowly he begins to look like my father.
Suddenly he points at me.
“She is my sister, she was the only one who helped me, when I needed
somebody to stop all this.”
Now I couldn’t remain hidden anymore. It is my brother.
He got two years in prison for sexually molesting his stepdaughter
….…….….…….….…

All this is my family.

Now, the transformation of my brother in the court scene was exactly what
I experienced happening with my father during my childhood. My mother
was the beautiful young judge.
All her words damaged my father until he ended up humiliated and
accused.
It didn’t amuse me being there
as my brothers had said it would.
It had been the explanation I always have had in my head, but never spoke
aloud.
Now the court has announced it,
the judgement had been pronounced on my family.
Now I’m free.
I’m free to speak.
My mother’s words are not in my mouth anymore.
236 Birthe Tranberg Nikolajsen

This is one of the pillars supporting the bridge between my early beginnings and
my being able to study, to speak, a beginning of new life as a free human being.
This is my possibility to study philosophy.
If it had been left to me to judge my family, I would have done the same as
my mother: only judging.
This has been my picture. My picture presented in words.
Now it is yours, and you can read into it what you like.

What is it about, describing the worse part of my life?

To tell my story:
To obtain so much courage.
To sit face to face with people that I admire and respect for their intellectual
capacity and then tell them the most shameful part of my life and my family.
This was a struggle.
My struggle against the effect of my coping mechanisms in my family life.
This was a kind of redemption
from a single idea
that my only possible way to live in the world was to be silent
whilst hiding and supressing my emotions.
Now I’m free to speak.
Index

abjection 61, 76–7, 127 art of the impossible 130–8

Abraham, N. 81 The Artistic Turn: A manifesto 228
accidents 24–8, 222–9 Asimov, Isaac 79
Acedia 165 assassination 43
“acousmêtre” 64–7 As You See 57
adoptee-biological father reunion 171–83 Atemwende 116
Adoptioncritic website 173 “A Throw of the Dice” 116
affects 41, 143 Attachment Theory 163
aggression, youthful rebellion 59 Atwood, Margaret 227
“All Those Sleep Shapes” 116 “auditory experience of self and place” 59
Alpha function 164 aural objects, materiality of sound 67–8
already-no-more 114 Aus der Geschichte einer Infantilen Neurose 98
Althusser’s model 102 automaton 29–30
Altman, Robert 62 awkwardness, aesthetics of 137
Alzheimer’s disease 21, 22, 26, 34
amans amare 137 Bach, J.S. 162
Amour 20–36 bad acid trip 63
An Archive of Feelings 189 Balso, Judith 124
“an idea emerges as one speaks” 100 Barthe, Roland 227
Antigone 196–7 Bataille, Georges 61
An Unfinished Story 185, 190–2, 196 Baudry, Jean-Louis 204
A Passage to India 76 Bauman, Zygmunt 61
“Aphantasia” 145 Beckett, Samuel 23
aphasia 144–6 Beguine Hadewijch d’Anvers 137
Apocalypse Now 62, 63 Being a Character 225
“appetite comes while one eats” 100 Being and Nothingness 208
appreciation, victims showing 173 belonging, adoption 176–8
Arendt, Hannah 40, 46 Belting, Hans 60
Aristotle (philosopher) 29, 94, 95 Benjamin, Walter 58, 60
Arnheim, Rudolf 66 Benny’s Video 24, 26
Artful 226 Bermudez, Jose Luis 145
articulation 211–12 Beta elements 164
238 Index

Bettelheim, B. 162 parental sexual abuse and incest 13–15;

Beyond the Pleasure Principle 27, 36 Play Room 12, 14; relationship with
big Other 100–1 mother 165; true nature of parents/
binding 153, 181, 223 teachers 167
biological father reunion Child Sexual Behavior Inventory 11
experience 171–83 Chion, Michel 64, 68, 69
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht 40, 46–7, 163–4 Choang-tsu (Chinese skeptic) 102
The Birds 204 Choreodrama 75, 88
birth father’s role 171–83 choreographic structure 193–4
“black milk” 115 Christianity, centrality of love and
Black Skins,White Masks 82 concern 167
blame 229 Christ Jesus 79, 80
Blanchot, M. 135, 136 cinema 53–6, 203–15; see also Hollywood
Blank, Arthur 43 cinematograph 62
“Blume” 114 “civilization process” 55
body and voice 64–7 claustrophobic states 166
Boleyn, Anne 119 Claustrum 166
Borges, Jorges Luis 228 Coetzee, J.M. 76
Bosch, Hieronymus 165, 166 cognitive penetration 146
Bosnian war 187–90 cognitive states 153
Bourgeois respectability 160 colonialism 1, 75, 77–9; see also touching
brain injury: Amour 23–8; madness vs. and speaking
pure void 33–4; unrepresentable 22 colonial period 74–8, 80–4, 86, 88–9, 91, 134
Brechtian alienation effect 194 colour symbolism 162
Brodsky, J. 122 commentary 61
Brolin, Josh 213 communal grieving 186–7
Bryant, Anita 213 communication: medium is part of the
burning child, dream of 29–30 problem 161; mother and baby 159–60,
Burroughs, William S. 126–7 164; through gesture 97
Butler, Judith 185, 195, 197 concentration camps 44; see also Holocaust
butterfly dream 102 The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her
Lover 165–6
Caché 24 Cooper, Andrew 171
Cahiers du Cinéma 132 Copenhagen symposium 1
camera, function of pointing 100 Coppola, Francis Ford 62, 63
Cameron, James 68 Corpus 77
Camus, Albert 226 Coulthard, Lisa 20
Cartesian Dualism 149 countertransference 46, 158–9
Cartesian model 150 Cowie, Elizabeth 214
Caruth, Cathy 43, 175, 197 Cratylian theory of communication 95
casting away 76 Crichton, Charles 66
castration anxiety 98 critical agency 81
Catholic Church 119; see also papacy culture: and hysterical states 160; with
Caute, David 88 respect to the “self ” 180–2; superiority
Cavalcanti, Alberto 66 of 187–8; trauma, in adoption 173–4
Cavell, Marcia 147 cut finger 98–9
Celan, Paul 111–17 Cvetkovich, Ann 189
Chater V. 122
children: child sexual abuse 11–12; Damsio, Antonio 22
communication between mother and Dark Continents 80–1
baby 159–60, 164–5; dream of burning das Ding 206
child 29–30; infantile sexuality 9–11, das Heimliche 113–14
15–17; maltreatment in post-war das Unheimliche 36
Guatemala 187; mother’s neediness 180; Davies, Norman 161
 Index 239

da Vinci, Leonardo 162 Elizabeth (Princess Palatine) 45

Davis, Tracy 195 Ellman, Maud 224
Davoine, Françoise 35, 43 empiricism 150
Dayan, Daniel 204, 205 Encore 116, 136
Dead of the Night 66 Entwurff 17
death 20, 26, 219–21, 222–9 epilepsy 26
death drive 36 Epstein, Rob 207
“deferred action” 185 estrangement 114
delayed expression of trauma 8–9 Et Dukkehjem 166
de Lestrange, Gisèle 113 ethical violence 3
Deleuzian “minor literature” 86 ethnic cleansing 187–90
delusion and play-acting 166 Euclidian geometry 69
“demetaphorization” 81 The Exorcist 66
Demeure 75 expulsion 76
depression 165 Eye/Machine 57
Derrida, Jacques 2, 75–7, 78
Descartes, Rene 45, 77, 144, 149, 152 “The face” 232–3
desire 82–5, 118, 121–2, 178–80 “face-house experiment” 154–5
destructive plasticity 21, 24–5, Falling out of Time 227
30, 35–6 False Self 163
Deuten 106 “Familienroman” 132
Diana (Princess) 80 family, meaning of 182
diary 222–9 Fanon, Frantz 82
“Dice” 116 “Fantasia” 214
Die Familie Schroffenstein 96 fantasy of completeness see adopted
digital cameras 56–7; see also film women-biological fathers reunion
experience, paradigm shift experience
“disconnection,” adoption 175 fantasy vs. reality 8–9
Disgrace 76 Farocki, Harun 57
dissensus 137 Fassin, D. 172
Distinguished Service Order 40 “Fear of Breakdown” 8
Docudancing Griefscapes 185 Felman, Shoshana 2
dog shit 212–13 fiction: relationship to truth 111–12; vs.
Dolar, Mladen 58, 95 truth 8–9
Dolby technology 63 fictionality 23
The Doll’s House 166 film experience 53–70;
Donne, John 118–28 see also Hollywood
“doublethink” 40 Fink, Bruce 29
dreams: of burning child 29–30; pointing “The Flea” 121
98–9, 102, 106; primary process 147; Fleming,Victor 66
trauma 28–30 Fliess, W. 8
Duras, Marguerite 130–8 flowers 222–9
Dust 228 Flückiger, Barbara 63
dynamic mental systems 151–5 Folman, Ari 63–4
form: annihilation of 21; destroying/erasing
The Ear of the Other 75 21; form of 22–4; plasticity 22
Easy Rider 64 Forster, E.M. 76
Echo 62 Fortsein game 103
“Ecstasy” 121–2, 123 Foster, Hal 185
Edison, Thomas Alva 62 Foucault, Michel 60
Ego 8, 161 The Four Fundamental Concepts of
“The Ego and the Id” 147–9 Psychoanalysis 130
Elias, Norbert 55 Franco, James 207
Elizabeth I (Queen) 118–19 Franko, Mark 190
240 Index

Franzén, Carin 130–8 Haus der Traume 226

Freeman, Tabitha 171 healing touch 79–80
Freud, Sigmund: aphasia 144; child sexual “hearing with our eyes” 70
abuse 17; critical agency 81; death Heath, Stephen 204
drive respresentation 36; der Traum and heaven/hell 165–6
das Trauma 29; desire 122; difference Hegel, G. 96, 122
of conscious 3; dream of burning hegemonic suture 212–13
child 29–30; dynamic mental systems Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 211
151–5; Fortsein game 103; hysterics and Henry VIII (King) 119
abandonment of the theory of seduction Herman, Judith Lewis 45
8–9; jokes 209; meaning from mysterious Hesse, Herman 226
data 162; mourning and melancholia 81, hierarchy and delay 62, 70
224; Nachträglichkeit 25; pointing 98–9, “high theory” 75
106; primary process 146–7, 150–1; Hirsch, Emile 212
problem of the image 143–56; psychic History beyond Trauma 43
trauma 174; Schreck 28; sexuality Hitchcock, Alfred 66, 69, 204
and sexual trauma 7–8; topographical Hollywood 62, 70, 99; see also specific movie
model 146; trauma 27, 174, 175; the Holocaust 114, 125–6, 189
unconscious 131, 147 Holt, Robert 144
Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher 150 “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on ’Lol
Friedkin, William 66 ravissement de Lol V.Stein” 135
“Fugue of Death” 113 homosexuality 125, 126; see also Milk
function, disease of 144 Hopkins, Jim 154
Funny Games 24, 26 Horgen, Peder 190
horse phobia 151
Gage, Phineas 21–2 “Howl” 125, 126
Gallaccio, Anya 226 Hume, D. 150, 152
Garber,Victor 207 hysterical states 8–9, 160
The Garden of Earthly Delights 165
Gaudillière, Jean-Max 35, 43 Ibsen, H. 166
Gauker, Christopher 145 identification 163, 203–4, 214–15
“gaze” 53–5, 69, 101 ideological Other 103
generalized seduction 11–12 “Ideology and Ideological State
Genetic Sexual Attraction 180 Apparatuses” 102
genocide 187–90 images: concept of moving 57–8;
Ginsberg, Allen 125, 126, 127, 128 metaphysics and metapsychology
Glass, Philip 64 146–51; psychic symptom 155–6;
global warming 166 representation without language 143–56;
gloves 193–4 and sound relationship 62
Goll, Ivan 113 imagination 143–56
Gordon, Avery F. 188, 197 The Imagination 143
Goriely, Serge 20, 26 impossible 130–1, 133, 136
The Grass is Singing 76–9, 81–5, 86, 88, 89 “improperly buried bodies” 197
Greenaway, Peter 165–6 indexicality 54, 56, 69
Green Eyes 132, 136 infantile sexuality 9–11, 15–17
griefscapes 185–97; see also mourning intellectual understanding 162–3
Griffith, Keith 173 International Committee of the Red Cross
Grossman, David 227 (ICRC) 188
Guardian prize for literature 86 The Interpretation of Dreams 17, 122, 144, 162

hallucinations 98–9, 104, 147 Jaws 62

Haneke, Michael 20, 25 Jenseits des Lustprinzip 103
“haptic seeing” 57 Jewish community 97
 Index 241

Johnston, Adrian 22 L’Autre manque 101

jokes 34, 97, 147, 209–14 “Law of Association” 152
Jokes and Their Relation to the Lazarus 79
Unconscious 209 Le désir et son interprétation see Seminar VI
“joke-work” 206, 209 Le Poème 124
Jones, K. 176 Les impudents 132
jouissance 83, 103–6, 136–7 Lessing, Doris 74–81
Joyce, Elizabeth 171–83 Levinas 185, 195, 197
Jung, Carl 162–3 “life drives” 36
Jurassic Park 56 Lifton, B. 172
limiting symbolism 128
Kafka, F. 165 liquidity 61
Kant, Immanuel 144, 151–5 listening to listening 17–18
Kant’s Transcendental Psychology 152 living dead 36
Khanna, Ranjana 77, 80–1, 88 living figures of death 36
Kieslowski, K. 69, 205 “living in the Head/Breast” 165
Kill Your Darlings 125 loss: of reality 54; signifying or
Kinetoscope 62 compensating for 69–70; unattainable
kinship issues 182 love 122; unsymbolised 77
kissing 121 Lost Highway 66
Kitcher, Patricia 152, 153 Lost in Transmission 43
Kittler, Friedrich 60 love: being in love with love 137; central
Klein, Melanie 163 to Christianity 167; denial of God’s love
koans 193 165; subject to 135–7
Koolhaas, Rem 61 Love, Mortality and the Moving Image 90
Kristeva, Julia 61, 127, 133–5 The Lover 134–5, 137, 138
Kubrick, Stanley 66 Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested
Kuhiwczak, Piotr 187 in Harare 78
Lucas, George 62, 63
Lacan, Jacques: desire 118, 122, 124; Luckhurst, Roger 173
destiny 83; difference of conscious 3; Lumiére Brothers cinematograph 62
“irruption” of the Real 27–58; Luna, Diego 208
Lacanian Real 22, 137, 214; language Luria, Alexander 22
failure 1; pointing 95, 101; the Real Lynch, David 66–7, 69
as impossible 130–1, 133; subjective
lack 205, 206; sublimation 206; Mabey, Richard 226
suture 214; the Thing 208; truth Madonna (religious figure) 165
having a structure of fiction 75, Magdalene, Mary 79, 80
91, 111–12 Makari, George 152, 154
Laclau, Ernesto 211, 213, 214 Malabou, Catherine 20–36, 229
La creazione dell’uomo 94 The Malady of Death 135
Lambek, M. 173 Mandelstam (poet/essayist) 122
Lang, Fritz 66 Man with a Movie Camera 55
language; see also speaking: aphasia 144; and Marechera, Dambudzo 74–5, 86–9
conscious thought 145; failure 1; mental Mark (biblical) 79
image 144–6; of mourning 90–1; poetic Marked Woman 215
structure 126; and pointing 99–100; marriage 166
representation without 143–56; taboo Mars 160
against English 86, 88 “massive psychic trauma” 41, 44
“language shadow” 116 masturbation 15–17
Laplanche, Jean 9–12, 207, 208 Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary
latex gloves 193–4 Anthropology 100
Laub, Dori 2, 43–4 McClintock, Anne 76
242 Index

McGinn, Colin 145 “new blessed ones” 34

McGowan, Todd 53 new Messiah 165
McMillan, Anita Schrader 186–7 Newton, Isaac 111
meaninglessness 132 The New Wounded 20–2, 29–30, 32, 34
melancholia 81, 133–4, 224, 228 Nike 66
Meltzer, D. 163, 164 Nobus, Dany 2
mental image and language 144–6 “Noli me tangere” 79
The Meridian 113–17 “No More Sand Art” 116, 117
“messy text” 186 non-conceptural sensory experience 155
metaphysical conceit 120–1 non-existing place 117
metaphysical poetry 123 “the non-realized” 3
metapsychological models 143 Norma Rae 215
Meynert, Theodore 154
Michelangelo (artist) 94 object petit a 53–5, 56, 58, 67, 69
Milk 203–15 Object Relation theory 162
Miller, Jacques-Alain 2, 204, 210 Oedipus/Oedipal dynamics 128, 161
Milošević, Slobodan 190, 192 O’Hare, Denis 213
Mo, Kristianne 190 “On Aphasia” 144, 145
Mohn and Gedächnis 115 “Only the Lonely” 67
moment of accident 24–6 On the Waterfront 215
“morality play,” adoption 174 The Ontology of the Accident 32
Morrison, Toni 190 Ontology of the Accident 229
Mossige, Terje Tjöme 190 “open window,” images as 58
mothers: adoptee-biological father reunion Opsenica, Marja 190
174–8; being needy 180; communication Orbison, Roy 67
with baby 159–60, 164–5; conflict with Orwell, George 40
231–3; relationship with 165; sexual other’s perceptions 180–2
abuse and incest 13–15 other’s suffering 34–5
Mouffe, Chantal 211, 214 “other woman” feeling in adoption 180
mourning 81, 224, 228; see also griefscapes Oudart, Jean-Pierre 204, 205
Mourning Diary 227 over-identification 193
Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories 196 overprotection 45
moving images, concept of 57–8
MP3 player 59 Palatine, Elizabeth (Princess) 45
Mr. Smith goes to Washington 215 panic states 166
Mulholland Drive 66–7 papacy 80, 97; see also Catholic Church
Mulvey, Laura 63 paradigm shift, film experience 53–8
Murch, Walter 63, 64 The Parallax View 36
murder 45 pathological perverse seduction 11–12
music 59–61; see also sound performance, trauma and 194–7
personality 22, 167
nachträglich 8–9, 14, 17 The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 67
Nachträglichkeit 25, 34 Petrachan conceit 119–20
Nagra equipment 62 Phelan, Peggy 195–6, 197
Naked Lunch 126, 128 Phillips, Adam 23
The Naked Sun 79 phobias 166
Nancy, Jean-Luc 74 pinching, touch screens 57
Narcissus 62 Pirates of the Caribbean:The Curse of the Black
Nashville 62 Pearl 105
naturalistic theory 153 plasticity 21, 22, 29–30
Nature Cure 226 Plato (philosopher) 94, 95, 121
neediness 180 Plato’s Cave, instantiation 55
The Nest of the Singing Birds 119 play-acting 166, 180
neurosis 3 Play Room 12, 14
 Index 243

The Poem 124 Rechtman, R. 172

poetics 111–17, 126–7 the Rectum 165
pointing 94–106 “reductive over-identification” 193
Point of View 79 refreshing of images 57
Poland, after communism 187 Reich, Steve 64
politics, familial 180–2; see also Milk religious superiority 187–8
Pope see papacy remembering the dead 41–6
pornography 15–17 “rememories” 196
Portrait of a Black Artist in London 75, 88 Renaissance era and perspective 70, 94
post-colonial period 3, 74, 76–7, 80–1, representing and representation:
88, 89 analyst as representative 167;
“Post-Trauma” 29–30 crisis of 131–3; problem of the
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 192–3 image 143; the unrepresentable
pregnancy 123 1–4, 40–1, 46–7, 125–6, 161;
pretense and play-acting 166, 180 without language 143–56
Pride 165 “reunion” experience, adoptee-biological
Primal Wound theory 179; see also adopted father 171–83
women-biological fathers reunion Richter, Max 64
experience Riley, Denise 227
primary process 146–7, 150–1 rituals 227
Problem of the Puer Eternus 163 Riva, Emmanuelle 26
process of fulfillment 229 Rosenman, Howard 209
productive imagination 153, 155 rugby matches 80
Projective Identification 163
Proposition 6 213 Sacks, Oliver 22
Protestant Church 119 sadism/masochism 36
Proust, Marcel 59 Said, Edward 1, 77
psyche, surviving its own St John’s Gospel 79
destruction 20–36 Saint Teresa 137
Psychiatry journal 145 Salpêtrière hospital 25
psychic symptom 155–6 sampling metaphor 61
Psycho 65 Sartre, Jean Paul 61, 143–56, 208
“Psychoanalysis, Representation and scent as bridge 231
Neuroscience: the Freudian Unconscious Schauer, Maggie 186–7
and the Bayesian Brain” 154 Schmidt, Michael 60
Schopenhauer, A. 154
Radcliffe, Daniel 125 Scott, Paul 76
Raeburn, Michael 85 scratch-video metaphor 61
The Raj Quartet 76 Scuola di Atene 94
Raphael (artist) 94 “seeing with our ears” 70
The Ravishing of Lol Stein 132 Self, Will 79–80, 88
reaction patterns to choreographic “self ” role, performance 179
structure 193–4 Seltzer, Mark 173
reading 231 Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” 101
reality vs. fantasy 8–9 Seminar VI 118, 123
the Real: cannot be named 116; Seminar VII 53
destructive plasticity 35; dream of Seminar XI 3, 53, 206
burning child 30; fantasy covering the sense of gesture: pointing 94–106; touching
true 205; as impossible 130–1, 133; and speaking 74–91; (un)representing the
meeting with 114–15; poems and poetry real 53–70
116; returning in an absentee way 185; Serious Games 57
suture and 214; truth relationship to Seven Deadly Sins 165
fiction 111–12; (un)representing 53–70; “Seventeen” 117
voice and body 65 The Seventh Continent 20
244 Index

sexuality and sexual trauma: child sexual “Take what you can, give nothing
abuse 11–12, 234–6; expression of back” 105
15–17; hysterics 8–9; infantile sexuality tapping, touch screens 57
9–11; Laplanche’s theory 12–15; listening Tauber, Alfred 150, 151–2
to listening 17–18; relevance of Freud’s Telévision 113
dilemma 7–8 tendentious jokes 213
Seymour, Jane 119 Terminator II 68
Shakespeare plays 162 The Testament of Dr Mabuse 66
Shreck 28 testimony issues 3
Sistine Chapel 94 theory of seduction, abandonment of 8–9
“The Site of the Memory” 190 therapies, focus of 167
Six Meditations 77 “therapôn” 43
“skin,” body surface 68 the Thing 148, 206
“skin of the film” 57 thinking vs. feeling 163
Smith, Ali 226 Thirty Years’ War 45
snow 116–17 Thompson, Emily 58
social exclusion 76 Three Colors: Blue 205
social function, jokes 213 Three Essays on Sexuality 9
“Solitude” 132, 136 Time Lived,Without the Flow 227
solution in guise of a problem 156 The Times of Harvey Milk 207
sound 53–70 “Todesfuge” 113, 115, 116
The Soundscape of Modernity 58 tone, setting with sound 58–64
“sound is a modality of seeing” 61 “top-down” conceptual capacities 155
South Africa, after apartheid 187 Torok, M. 81
speaking 74–91, 99–100; see also language touch, digital cameras 56–7
Spielberg, Steven 56, 62 touching and speaking 74–91; see also
Spinella, Stephen 209 language
Spinoza, B. 122 touch screens 57
Spivak, G. 88 Townsend, Patricia 228
spool game 103 traffic light symbolism 161–2
Sprachgitter 114 “Transcendental Aesthetic” 153
spreading, touch screens 57 “transcendental illusion” 152
Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and transcendental vs. transcendent 153
Cemetery 190 Traum 106
Star Wars 62 The Trauma Symptom Checklist for
Steedman, Carolyn 228 Children 11
Sterndeutung 162 trauma: bodily consequences of 192–3;
still-here 114 body locked by a lack of meaning 7–18;
stroke see Amour break-in 26–8; cerebral 21; clinical 41–7;
Studies on Hysteria 7 containing influx of disturbing energy
Sturken, Marita 189 21; culture in adoption 173–4; delayed
subjectivity and belonging 176–8 expression 8–9; dreams 28–30; “frozen
sublimation 206–10 reality” of 41; griefscapes 185–97;
succession of images 57 intersubjective nature 31; as passing
suicidal states 165 state 228; and performance 194–7;
Suljagić, Emir 189 psychoanalytic psychodynamic approach
suspension 228 39–40; reaction patterns 193–4; refusal
suture 203–15 of psychic binding 23; representing the
Sveaass, Nora 186 unrepresentable 39–47; trauma-qua-Real
symbolism: arbitrary nature of 161–2; 28; without a subject 20–36
limiting 128; and representation 77 “Traumaculture” 173
symbol of void 32 Traumdeutung 106, 162
Symposium 121, 136 “The trial” 234–6
 Index 245

truth: defining 111–13; poetics 116; “vision is a modality of hearing” 61

subjectivity and belonging 176–8; visual agnosia 145
subject to 133–5; vs. fiction 8–9 visual thought 143, 144
tuché 27, 29–30 voice 54, 58, 64–7, 77
Tutt, Daniel 124 Von Franz, Marie-Louise 160, 163
Two Days, One Night 215 von Kleist, H. 96, 100
2001: A Space Odyssey 65–6
Walkman (player) 59, 63
The Unavowable Community 135–6 Walter Murch 63, 64
The Uncanny 36 Waltz with Bashir 63–4
Uncle Sam poster 102 Wang, Joy 76
“The Unconscious” 147 way out, missing 205, 206
“Un coup de des” 116 Wenk, Dieter 60
undead (“zombies”) 36 What Should We Do with
undiscovered genius 165 Our Brain? 21
Unerkannt 106 wheelchair performer 194
“unexamined life is a Life not worth “White Post Colonial Guilt” 76
living” 167 The White Ribbon 20
unity, cognitive state 153 Wilson, Emma 78, 90–1
“unknowability” 22 Winnicott, D.W. 8, 163, 228
unrecognizability 31–4 The Wizard of Oz 65
unrepresentable: presenting 118–28; the real Wolfman’s dream/hallucination
53–70; representable and the 40–1, 46–7; 98–9, 104
representing 125–6, 161; thinking the 36; Women of Srebranica 197
trauma and performance 194–7 Woods, Tiger 66
unsymbolised loss 77 working-camps 113; see also Holocaust
unthinkable, representing 36 wrestling 80
Urbild 105 writing is nothing but advertisement
134, 138
Vagrant 185 “Wunsch” 122
Valéry, Paul 60
van Helmholtz, Hermann 154 “you” 102, 114
Van Sant, Gus 203–15
Veit-Wild, Flora 75, 88, 89–91 Zeitgehöft 116
ventriloquism 64–7 Zelizer, Barbie 189
Vertov, Dziga 55 Zeman, Adam 145
victims being grateful 173 Zen-like koans 193
Vidak, Slaven 190 zero and zero-level 33, 36, 206, 210
violent gestures 80 Žižek, Slavoj 32–6, 67, 69, 204–6, 210
Virtual Reality 163, 166 “zombies” (the undead) 36
viscosity 61 Zorn, Fritz 160