🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

You know it, this year I am trying to once again bring into focus the fundamental question posed to us in our experience by transference, by steering our thinking toward what must be, in order to respond to this phenomenon, the position of the analyst in this matter.

I am striving to indicate this position at the most essential level, at the point that I designate—in response to this call from the patient’s most profound being at the moment they come to ask us for our help and our support—as what… in order to be rigorous, correct, impartial, and as open as is called for by the nature of the question posed to us… what the desire of the analyst must be.

It is certainly not—in any way—adequate to simply think that the analyst, by virtue of his experience and his knowledge, by the doctrine he represents, is something that would in some way be the modern equivalent, the authorized representative by virtue of a research, a doctrine, and a community, of what might be called ‘the right of nature’, something that would once again indicate to us the path of a natural harmony, accessible in the detours of a renewed experience.

If this year I started out again before you from the Socratic experience, it is essentially to focus you, from the outset, on this point by which we are questioned as ‘knowers’, even bearers of a secret, which is not the secret of everything, which is a unique secret, and which yet is worth more than everything that is unknown and that will continue to be unknown. This is given from the very outset of the condition, the establishment, of the analytic experience.

However obscurely, those who come to find us already know… and if they do not know it, they will soon, through our experience, be oriented toward this notion… that this secret, which we are supposed to possess, is just as I say: ‘more precious than everything that is unknown and that will continue to be unknown’, in that this secret has to answer for the partiality of what one knows.

Is this true, is it not true? This is not the point at which I have to settle it. This is how the analytic experience presents itself, offers itself, how it is approached. This is how, in a certain aspect, one can define what it introduces as new into the horizon of a human being, who is the person we are, along with our contemporaries.

At the bottom of each of us who attempts this experience—from whichever side we approach it, as analysand or analyst—there is this supposition, that at least at a level that is truly central—more: essential!—for our conduct, there is this supposition… when I say ‘supposition’ I can even leave it marked with a doubtful accent: it is like an attempt with which the experience can be taken up, with which it is most commonly taken up by those who come to us… supposition that the impasses due to our ignorance may perhaps in fact be determined only because we are mistaken about what could be called ‘the relations of force of our knowledge’ [wordplay: rapport de forces = balance of power, rapport de savoir = relation of knowledge]: that in sum we pose false problems for ourselves.

And this supposition, this hope I would say, with what it contains of optimism, is encouraged by what has become common awareness: that desire does not present itself openly, that it is not even only in the place where the centuries-old experience of philosophy—to call it by its name—has designated it in order to contain it, in order to exclude it, in a certain way, from the right to govern us.

Far from it, desires are everywhere and at the very heart of our efforts to master them. Far from it, even by fighting them we do little more than satisfy them. I say ‘satisfy them’ and not ‘the desires’, for to satisfy the desires would still be to consider them graspable, to be able to say where they are. To ‘satisfy them’ here is said, as one says, in the opposite sense: to cut off from them or not to cut off from them, precisely according to a fundamental aim, precisely to cut off from them. Well, ‘one does not cut off from them’, and so little, that it is not enough to avoid them for us not to feel more or less guilty about them.

In any case, whatever we can bear witness to regarding our project, what analytic experience teaches us above all is that man is marked, troubled, and troubled by everything called a symptom, insofar as the symptom is that, is—of those desires of which we can define neither the limit nor the place, always in some way satisfying them, and what is more, without pleasure.

It would seem that such a bitter doctrine would imply that the analyst is the holder—at some level—of the strangest measure. For if the emphasis is placed on such an extensive range of fundamental misrecognition… and not, as was done until now, in a speculative form from which it would in some way arise along with the question of knowing, and in a form—which I do not believe I do better than to call at least for the moment as it comes to me—textual, in the sense that it is really a misrecognition woven from personal construction in the broadest sense… it is clear that in making this supposition, the analyst should have overcome—and for many is supposed if not to have, at least to have to overcome—the source of this misrecognition, to have in himself, to have broken through this stopping point, which I indicate to you as that of ‘Che vuoi? What do you want?’ Where the limit of all self-knowledge comes up against a wall.

At the very least, this path of what I will call ‘one’s own good’, insofar as it is ‘self’s accord with itself’ on the plane of the authentic, should be open to the analyst for himself. And at least, on this point of particular experience, something of this nature, of this naturalness, of this something that would be sustained by its own naivety, could be grasped, this something that you know elsewhere than in the analytic experience—I do not know what skepticism, not to say what disgust, I do not know what nihilism, to use the word by which the moralists of our time have named it, has seized the whole of our culture in what can be designated as ‘the measure of man’.

Nothing is further from modern, precisely contemporary, thought than this natural idea, so familiar for so many centuries to all those who, in whatever way, tended to move toward a ‘just measure of conduct’, for whom it did not even seem that this notion could be discussed.

What is supposed of the analyst at this level should not even be limited to the field of his action, should not have merely local reach insofar as he practices, as he is there, hic et nunc as they say, but should be attributed to him as ‘habitual’ if you give this word its full meaning, that which refers
– more to ‘habitus’ in the scholastic sense, to that integration of oneself to the constancy of act and form in one’s own life, to what constitutes the foundation of all virtue [ἦθος, ethos↔ἔθος, ethos] [wordplay: Greek ethos as habitus/character],
– more than to ‘habit’ insofar as it is oriented toward the simple notion of imprint and passivity.

Do I need to discuss this ideal before we cross it out? Certainly not that one cannot evoke examples in the style of ‘pure heart’ in the analyst. Does one think, then, that it is conceivable that this ideal could be required at the outset from the analyst, could be sketched in any way, and if it were attested, let us say that it is neither the ordinary nor the reputation of the analyst. We could just as well easily designate our reasons for disappointment with those feeble formulas that escape us at every moment whenever we try to formulate in our magisterium something that reaches the value of an ethics.

It is not for pleasure, believe me, that I dwell on this or that formula of a supposedly analytic characterology to show its weaknesses, its nature as a false window, of puerile opposition, when I try before you to weed out the recent efforts, always meritorious, to identify the ideals of our doctrine. I can see well enough that this or that formulation of the ‘genital’ character at the end of analysis, of an identification of our aims with the pure and simple lifting of impasses identified at the pregenital, would be enough to resolve all the antinomies, but I ask you to see what is implied, what consequences are involved, in such a display of powerlessness to think the truth of our experience.

It is in a quite different relativism that the problem of human desire is situated. And if we are to be, in the patient’s search, something more than mere companions in this quest, let us at least never lose sight of that measure which makes the subject’s desire essentially, as I teach you, the desire of the Other with a capital O. Desire is such that it can only be located, placed, and thereby understood in this fundamental alienation that is not simply linked to the struggle of ‘man with man’, but to the relation with language.

The desire of the Other, this genitive is both subjective and objective: desire in the place where the Other is, so as to be—that place—the desire of some otherness, and to satisfy this quest for the objective, namely: ‘what does this other who comes to find us desire’, we must there lend ourselves to this function of the subjective, so that in some manner we may for a time represent, not the object as is believed—as, admit it, would be quite derisory, and also how simple-minded we might be—not the object at which desire aims, but the signifier.

It is at once much less, but also much more, to think that we must occupy that empty place where this signifier is called, which can only be by cancelling all the others, this Φ whose position, whose central condition in our experience I am trying to show you. In our function, our force, our power is certain, and all its difficulties are summed up in this: one must know how to fill one’s place in so far as the subject must be able to locate there the missing signifier. And thus, by an antinomy, by a paradox which is that of our function, it is precisely in the place where we are ‘supposed to know’ that we are called to be and to be nothing more, nothing other, than the ‘real presence’ and precisely insofar as it is unconscious.

At the final term—I say ‘at the final term’ of course, at the horizon of what our function is in analysis—we are there as ‘It’, ‘It’ precisely which is silent and which is silent in that it lacks to be. We are, at the final term, in our presence, our own subject at the point where it fades away, where it is barred. That is why we can fill the same place where the patient as subject himself fades, subordinates himself, and subordinates himself to all the signifiers of his own demand.

This occurs not only at the level of regression, at the level of the ‘signifying treasures’ of the unconscious, at the level of the vocabulary of the Wunsch insofar as we decipher it during the analytic experience, but ultimately at the level of the fantasy. I say ultimately insofar as the fantasy is the only equivalent of the discovery of drive through which it is possible for the subject to designate the place of the response: the S(A) he expects from the transference, for this S(A) to make sense. The fantasy in so far as the subject seizes himself there as failing before a privileged object, [S◊a] imaginary degradation of this Other at this point of failure.

The question is whether—in order for us, in the transference, to ourselves enter, for the passive subject, into this fantasy at the level of S—this supposes:
– that in a certain way we really are this S,
– that we are ultimately the one who sees little (a), the object of the fantasy,
– that we are capable, in whatever experience, and even in the one most foreign to ourselves, of being in the end this ‘seer’, the one who can see the object of the desire of the Other, at whatever distance this Other may be from himself.

It is precisely because it is so, that you see me [sic]—throughout this teaching—questioning, going over, through all the aspects where not only experience but also tradition can be of use to us, this question of what man’s desire is. And you see me, along the path we have traversed together, alternating
– from the scientific definition, I mean in the broadest sense of this term science, which has been attempted since SOCRATES,
– to something quite opposite, insofar as it can be grasped in monuments of human memory, its tragic experience, whether it is: as two years ago, the journey I had you make through the original drama of modern man, of HAMLET or as last year, that perspective I tried to give you of what it means at that point ‘ancient tragedy’.

It seemed to me, for a meeting I had—it really is the case to say: by chance—of one of the formulations—neither better nor worse than those we commonly see in our circle—of what fantasy is, having come across in the latest Bulletin de Psychologie an articulation—which I can say once again made me jump by its mediocrity—of this function of fantasy… but after all, the author—since it is the very one who once wanted to train a large number of mediocre psychoanalysts—will not, I think, be too offended by this appreciation… that it is indeed this that gave me back—I cannot say courage, it takes a bit more—a kind of fury, to go back once again through one of those detours whose path I hope you will have the patience to follow, and to see whether in our contemporary experience there might not be something onto which what I am trying to show you can latch, which must always indeed be there, and I would say more than ever, in the time of analytic experience which, after all, cannot be conceived as simply a miracle arisen from I do not know what individual accident that would have been called ‘the Viennese petit bourgeois FREUD’.

Certainly, and of course for a whole set of reasons, there are in our time all the elements of this dramaturgy that should allow us to set the drama of those we deal with, when it comes to desire, on its proper level, and not be content with a true story, basically a medical student’s anecdote.

One can, in passing, pick up here the theme I cited earlier to you of fantasy identified with the fact, certainly mendacious on top of everything, because you can see it clearly in the text: it is not even a case that has been analyzed, it is the story of a traveling merchant who, all of a sudden, from the day he was told that he had only twelve months left to live, would have been freed from what is called in this text ‘his fantasy’—namely, the fear of venereal diseases—and who, from that moment on—as the author puts it, whose vocabulary one wonders where he picked it up, since it is hard to imagine even on the lips of the subject in question—from that moment on, the one whose story is being told ‘lived it up’.

Such is the uncriticized level, to a degree that should render it more than suspect for you, at which the level of human desire and its obstacles is set. Is it anything else that leads me to make you take another turn toward tragedy, insofar as it touches us, and I will immediately tell you which one, since I will also tell you by what chance it is this one to which I refer.

In truth ‘modern tragedy’—I mean truly contemporary this time—there is not just one example of it, yet it is not exactly running the streets, and if I intend to have you take a tour of a trilogy by CLAUDEL, I will tell you what decided me. It has been a long time since I reread this trilogy, the one composed of: L’otage, Le pain dur, and Le père humilié.

I was brought back to it a few weeks ago by a chance whose accidental aspect I share with you, because, after all, it is amusing at least for the personal use I make of my own criteria.

And since—as well, I told you—in a formula, the interest of formulas is that one can take them literally, that is, as stupidly as possible, and that they must lead you somewhere. This is true for mine as much as for the others. What is called the operational aspect of formulas, that is it.

I do not claim to be operational only for others.

In such a way that, while reading the correspondence between André GIDE and Paul CLAUDEL, which is a correspondence, between us, not ‘bug-bitten’ [wordplay: French expression “piqué des hannetons” means ‘crazy’ or ‘off the wall’], I recommend it to you. But what I am going to tell you has nothing to do with the subject of this correspondence, from which CLAUDEL does not emerge with his stature enhanced, which does not prevent me from here placing CLAUDEL at the very first rank he deserves, that is, as one of the greatest poets who have ever existed.

It happens that in this correspondence, where André GIDE plays his role as director of the Nouvelle Revue Française, I mean: not only of the Review but of the books it published at that time, at a time before 1914. It is precisely a matter of the publication of ‘L’otage’. And, pay attention, not regarding the content but concerning the role and the function I have given it—for this is truly the efficient cause of the fact that you will hear, for one or two sessions, talk of this trilogy as of no other—it is that one of the problems discussed for two or three letters, and this to print ‘L’otage’, is that it will be necessary to cast a character that does not exist, not only at the printing house of the Nouvelle Revue Française, but in no other: the ‘Û’ with a circumflex accent. For at no point has the French language ever needed a ‘Û’ with a circumflex.

It is Paul CLAUDEL, who, by naming his heroine ‘Sygne de COÛFONTAINE’—and at the same time, by his poetic discretionary power—with an accent on the Û of COÛFONTAINE, proposes this small difficulty to the typographers for introducing the lines in a correct, readable edition of what is a play. Since the names of the characters are written in capital letters, which at a pinch would not pose problems with the lowercase ‘û’, actually does pose one at the level of the capital letter. At this sign of the ‘missing signifier’ I said to myself that there must be something fishy here, and that by rereading ‘L’otage’ at least, it would lead me much further. It led me to reread a considerable part of CLAUDEL’s theater. I was, as of course you would expect, rewarded for it.

I would like to draw your attention to this: ‘L’otage’, to begin with this play, is a work about which CLAUDEL himself… at the time when he wrote it and when, as you know, he was an official at the Foreign Affairs, Representative of France with I do not know what title, let’s say something like Counselor, probably more than Attaché, anyway it does not matter, he was ‘Civil Servant of the Republic’ at a time when that still had meaning… wrote to André GIDE:

‘It would be worth it all the same, considering the all too reactionary tone—it is he himself who puts it this way—of the thing, that it not be signed CLAUDEL.’

Let us not smile at this prudence, prudence has always been considered a moral virtue. And believe me, we would be wrong to think that, because it is perhaps no longer in season, we should therefore despise the last to have shown it.

It is certain that, reading ‘L’otage’, I would say that the values agitated there, which we will call ‘values of faith’… I remind you that it is a somber story that is supposed to take place at the time of Emperor NAPOLEON I: a lady who is starting to be a bit of a spinster, do not forget, given how long she has devoted herself to a heroic work, which is that… Let’s say it has lasted ten years since the story is supposed to take place at the height of Napoleonic power, and that what is involved, which is naturally arranged, transformed for the needs of the drama… it is the story of the constraint exercised by the Emperor over the person of the Pope. This puts us at a little more than ten years from the time from which the trials of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE begin.

You have already perceived, by the resonance of her name, that she is one of the ‘former ones’, of those who, among other things, were dispossessed of their privileges and their property by the Revolution. And so since then, Sygne de COÛFONTAINE, remaining in France while her cousin emigrated, has devoted herself to the patient task of reassembling the elements of the COÛFONTAINE estate.

This in the text is not simply the fact of a miserly tenacity, this is represented to us as consubstantial, co-dimensional with that pact with the land which, for the two characters—for the author as well who has them speak—is identical to the constancy, to the value, of nobility itself. I ask you to refer to the text, we will continue to talk about it. You will see the terms, moreover admirable, in which this bond with the land as such is expressed, which is not simply a bond in fact, but a mystical bond, which is also the one around which an entire order of allegiance is defined, which is the properly speaking feudal order, which unites in a single bundle this bond which may be called ‘the bond of kinship’ with a local bond around which everything that defines lords and vassals, birthright, bond of clientage is organized. I can only indicate all these themes to you in a few words. This is not the proper object of our research. I think moreover that you will have enough, if you refer to the text.

It is in the course of this undertaking then… founded on the dramatic, poetic exaltation, recreated before us, of certain values which are values ordered according to a certain form of speech… that the event interferes constituted by the fact that the emigrated, absent cousin—who moreover, in the previous years, has several times appeared to Sygne de COÛFONTAINE, clandestinely—once again reappears accompanied by a character whose identity is not revealed to us and who is none other than the Supreme Father: the Pope, whose entire presence in the drama will be for us defined as that to be taken literally as the representative on earth of the Heavenly Father.

It is around this fugitive, escaped person—for it is with the help of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE’s cousin that he finds himself thus removed from the power of the oppressor—it is around this person that the drama will unfold, since here a third character appears, the one called Baron TURELURE, Toussaint TURELURE, whose figure will dominate the entire trilogy. Of this Toussaint, the whole figure is drawn in such a way as to make us abhor him, as if it were not already nasty and evil enough to come torment such a charming woman, but in addition to come and blackmail her:

‘Mademoiselle, I have long desired and loved you, but today that you have this old eternal papa at your house, I will corner him and wring his neck if you do not give in to my request…’

It is not without intention, as you see, that I connote this knot of the drama with a shadow of puppet-show. As if it were not nasty enough, not evil enough, old TURELURE is presented to us with all the attributes not only of cynicism but of ugliness:
– It is not enough that he is evil, we are also shown him as: lame, a little twisted, hideous.
– Moreover, he is the one who had all the members of the Sygne de COÛFONTAINE family beheaded in the good days of ‘Ninety-Three’, and in the most open manner, so that he still has to make the lady go through that as well.
– What is more, he is the son of the sorcerer and of a woman who was the nurse, and therefore the servant of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE who, when she marries him, will marry the son of the sorcerer and her servant.

Will you not say that there is, after all, something here that goes a bit too far in a certain sense to move the heart of an audience for whom these old stories have nonetheless taken on a rather different relief, namely that the French Revolution, after all, through its consequences, has shown itself to be something not to be judged only by the measure of the martyrs suffered by the aristocracy.

It is very clear that it is not by this aspect that it can in any way be received as, I believe, ‘L’otage’ is received by an audience. I cannot yet say that this audience is very widespread in our nation but one cannot say either that those who attended the performance—besides, a late one in history—of this play, were composed solely by, I cannot say ‘the partisans of the Count of Paris’ because as everyone knows the Count of Paris is very progressive, let us say: those who regret ‘the time of the Count of Chambord’. Rather, it is an advanced, cultured, educated audience who, before CLAUDEL’s ‘L’otage’, feels the shock—let us call it ‘tragic’ for the occasion—that the sequence of events entails.

But to understand what this emotion means, namely that not only does the audience go along, but also, I promise you, on reading you will have no doubt that this is a work having in the tradition of the theater all the rights and all the merits belonging to what is presented to you as greatest: where indeed can the secret lie of what makes us feel it through a story which appears with this aspect of a challenge pushed—I insist—to a kind of caricature?

Let us go further: do not stop at the thought that it is simply what the suggestion of religious values always evokes in us, for it is precisely here that we must now stop. The driving force, the major scene, the accentuated center of the drama is that the one who is the vehicle of the request to which Sygne de COÛFONTAINE will give in is not the horrible character—and you will see, not only horrible, but central, for the entire rest of the trilogy—who is Toussaint TURELURE, but it is her confessor, namely a kind of saint, Father BADILON.

It is at the moment when Sygne de COÛFONTAINE is not only as the one who, through thick and thin, has carried on her work of maintaining, but who, moreover, at the moment when her cousin has come to find her, has just learned at the same time from him that he has just experienced in his own life, in his own person, the most bitter betrayal.

He realized after many years that the woman he loved had been for him only the occasion to be duped for many years—he alone not knowing it—that she was, in other words, the mistress of the one called in Paul CLAUDEL’s text ‘the Dauphin’—there never was an émigré Dauphin but we are not concerned with that, what matters is to show, in their disappointment, their truly tragic isolation, the major characters: Sygne de COÛFONTAINE and her cousin.

Things did not stop there, some measles or whooping cough swept away not only the interesting character of the cousin’s wife, but young children, his descendants. And so he arrives there, deprived of everything by fate, deprived of everything except his constancy to the royal cause. And in a dialogue which is in sum the tragic starting point of what will follow, Sygne and her cousin are engaged to each other and before God. Nothing, neither in the present nor in the future, allows them to bring this commitment to act. But they have committed themselves beyond all that is possible and impossible: they are vowed to each other.

When Father BADILON comes to request from Sygne de COÛFONTAINE not, in sum, this or that, but that she consider this: that by refusing what the vile TURELURE has already proposed to her, she finds herself, in sum, to be herself the key to this historic moment when ‘the Father of all the faithful’ will or will not be delivered to his enemies. Certainly the saintly BADILON imposes on her, strictly speaking, no duty. He goes further, it is not even to her strength that he appeals, he says—and CLAUDEL writes—but to her weakness.

He shows her, opened before her, the abyss of this acceptance by which she will become the agent of an act of sublime deliverance, but where, notice it well, everything is done to show us that in doing so she must renounce in herself something that goes further, of course, than any attraction, any possible pleasure, even any duty, but what is her very being: the pact that has always bound her to her fidelity to her own family.

She must marry the exterminator of her family, renounce the sacred commitment she has just made to the one she loves, something which properly speaking brings her not to the limits of life—because we know that she is a woman who would readily, as she has shown in her past, sacrifice her life—but to what for her, as for any being, is worth more than her life, not only her reasons for living but that in which she recognizes her very being.

And here we are, through what I call provisionally this ‘contemporary tragedy’, brought, strictly speaking, to the limits, which are those whose approach I taught you last year with Antigone, to the limits of ‘the second death’, except that here it is required of the hero, the heroine, to cross them.

For if I showed you last year what tragic destiny means, if I was able, I think, to have you locate it in a topology we called Sadian, that is, in that place which has been baptized here, I mean by my listeners, the ‘between-two-deaths’ [wordplay: entre-deux-morts], if I showed that this place is crossed by passing, not as is said in a kind of refrain: ‘beyond good and evil’, which is a fine formula to obscure the issue, but ‘beyond the Beautiful’ properly speaking, if the second death is that limit which is designated, and which is also veiled, by what I have called the phenomenon of ‘beauty’, that which bursts forth in the Sophoclean text at the moment when ANTIGONE having crossed the limit of her condemnation not only accepted but provoked by CREON, the chorus bursts forth in the chant Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν [Erôs anikate makhan], Eros unconquerable in battle—I recall these terms to you to show that here, after twenty centuries of the Christian era, it is beyond this limit that the drama of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE carries us.

Where the ancient heroine is identical with her destiny, Ἄτη [Atè], with that law—for her, a divine law—that bears her in the ordeal, it is against her will, against all that determines her, not in her life but in her being, that the other heroine—by an act of freedom—must go against all that pertains to her being, down to its most intimate roots.

Life is here left far behind for, do not forget, there is something else, and it is accentuated by the dramatist in all its force, it is that, given what she is—her relation of faith to human affairs—accepting to marry TURELURE could not be merely yielding to a constraint. Marriage, even the most execrable, is an indissoluble marriage—which is not yet everything—implies adherence to the duty of marriage insofar as it is a duty of love.

When I say ‘life is left far behind’, we will have proof at the point of resolution to which the play leads us. Things are as follows: Sygne has yielded, she has become the Baroness of TURELURE. It is the day of the birth of little TURELURE, whose fate—as you will see—will occupy us next time, that the event, acme and ending of the drama, will take place. It is in Paris, under siege, that Baron TURELURE, who comes there to occupy the center, the historical figure of all this great puppet show of marshals—whose oscillations we know from history: faithful and unfaithful, around the great disaster—it is on this day that TURELURE must, under certain conditions, hand over the keys of the great city to King Louis XVIII. The ambassador for this negotiation will be, as you expect and as is fitting for the beauty of the drama, none other than Sygne’s cousin himself.

Of course, everything that could be more odious in the circumstances of the encounter is not missing from being added. That is to say, among the conditions, for example, that TURELURE sets for his good and profitable betrayal—the thing is not presented to us in any other way—there will be in particular that the estate of COÛFONTAINE, that is to say the last of what remains, I mean the shadow of things, but also what is essential, namely the name of COÛFONTAINE, will pass to this misallied offspring.

Things, of course, having been brought to this degree, you will not be surprised that they end with a little pistol attack. Namely that, once the conditions are accepted, the cousin, who moreover is far from not having haggled, is getting ready and is determined to ‘settle his account’, as one says, with the aforementioned TURELURE, who of course, being equipped with all the traits of cunning and malice, has foreseen the move, and he too has his little revolver in his pocket: while the clock strikes three, the two revolvers go off, and naturally, it is not the villain who is left on the floor.

But the essential point is that Sygne de COÛFONTAINE throws herself in front of the bullet that is about to strike her husband and she will die, in the moments that follow, from having in sum saved him from death. Suicide, we will say—and not without justification—since everything in her attitude shows us that she drank the cup without finding in it anything but what it is, absolute dereliction, the very experience of abandonment by divine powers, the decision to carry through to its end what, at this degree, scarcely deserves the name of sacrifice.

In short, in the final scene, before the gesture where she receives death, she is presented to us as agitated by a facial tic, and in a way, thus signing the poet’s intention to show us that this ending, which last year I indicated to you as being respected even by SADE himself: that beauty is insensitive to outrage, here is, in a way, surpassed, and that this grimace of suffering life is in a way more of an affront to the status of beauty than the grimace of death and the tongue sticking out that we might imagine on the face of ANTIGONE hanged when HÆMON discovers her.

Now what happens at the very end? On what does the poet leave us hanging at the end of his tragedy? There are two endings and this is what I ask you to retain. One of these endings consists in the entry of the King.

A buffoonish entry where Toussaint TURELURE, of course, receives the just reward for his services, and where the restored order takes on the aspects of that kind of caricatural fair, all too easy to have the French public accept after what history has taught us of the effects of the Restoration. In short, a kind of ‘Épinal image’ [French: cliché popular print], truly derisory, which leaves us with no doubt as to the judgment the poet can make about any return to what is called the Ancien Régime…

The interest lies precisely in this second ending, it is—bound by an intimate equivalence with that image on which the poet is capable of leaving us—namely the death of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE—not, of course, that it is eluded in the first ending. Just before the figure of the King, it is BADILON who reappears to exhort Sygne, and who cannot, until the end, obtain from her anything but a ‘no’, an absolute refusal of peace, of surrender, of the offering of herself to God who is about to receive her soul.

All the saint’s exhortations, he himself torn by the ultimate consequence of what he has been the agent of, fail before a final negation. Sygne, who cannot find, by any means, anything to reconcile her with a fate which, I ask you to notice, goes beyond everything one can call ἀνάγκη [ananké] in ancient tragedy, what Mr. RICOEUR, whom I found was studying the same things as I was in Antigone at about the same time, calls ‘the function of the wicked god’.

The wicked god of ancient tragedy is still something that connects to man by the intermediary of Ἄτη [Atè], of this named, articulated aberration, of which he is the organizer, which is linked to something, to this Ἄτη [Atè] of the other as ANTIGONE properly says, and as CREON says in the Sophoclean tragedy, though neither of them ever attended the seminar… This Ἄτη [Atè] of the other has a meaning in which the destiny of ANTIGONE is inscribed. Here we are beyond all meaning. The sacrifice of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE leads only to the absolute derision of its ends.

The old man who was to be snatched from the claws of the usurper, until the end of the trilogy will be presented to us—as Supreme Father of the faithful as he is—only as a powerless father who, in view of the rising ideals, has nothing to offer them but the vain repetition of traditional words, but without force. The so-called restored legitimacy is only lure, fiction, caricature, and in reality prolongation of the subverted order.

What the poet adds in the second ending is this device where, as it were, his challenge is again encountered, to have Sygne de COÛFONTAINE exhorted with the very words of her arms, of her motto, which for her is the meaning of her life: COÛFONTAINE Adsum, COÛFONTAINE here I am, by TURELURE himself who, before his wife incapable of speaking or refusing to speak, tries at least to obtain some sign from her, even if only consent to the arrival of the new being, a sign of acknowledgment of the fact that the gesture she made was to protect him, TURELURE.

To all this, the martyr responds, until she fades away, with nothing but a ‘no’. What does it mean that the poet brings us to this extreme of lack, of the derision of the signifier itself as such? What does it mean that something like this is presented to us? For it seems to me that I have made you traverse enough the degrees of what I will call this enormity. You will say that we are toughened, that after all, you are shown so many things of every sort that nothing amazes you anymore, but still.

I know well that there is something in common in the measure of CLAUDEL’s poetry with that of the surrealists, but what we cannot doubt, in any case, is that CLAUDEL, at least, imagined that he knew what he was writing. Be that as it may, it is written: such a thing could come to the light of human imagination.

For us, the listeners, we know well that if it were only a matter of presenting to us in an illustrative way a thematic, about which we have also been battered with talk of ‘the sentimental conflicts of nineteenth-century France’, we know well that it is something else, that it is not that which moves us, which holds us, which suspends us, which binds us, which projects us from ‘L’otage’ toward the subsequent sequence of the trilogy.

There is something else in this image before which words fail us. What is presented to us there, according to the formula I gave you last year: δι᾽ἐλέου καὶ φόβου [di’ eleou kai phobou]—to use ARISTOTLE’s terms… that is to say, not ‘by terror and by pity’ but ‘through all terror and all pity crossed’… puts us here even further.

It is an image of a desire for which only the Sadian reference, it seems, still has value. This substitution of ‘the image of the woman’ for ‘the sign of the Christian cross’, does it not seem to you that it has not only been designated here… you will see it in the text in the most explicit way for the image of the crucifix is on the horizon from the beginning of the play and we will find it again in the next play… but also, does not the coincidence of this theme, as properly erotic, strike you, with what here is explicitly named, and with nothing else, no other thread, no other point of reference to allow us to pierce through all the intrigue and the whole scenario, that of surpassing, of the breakthrough made beyond any value of faith.

This play, apparently ‘of a believer’, and from which believers—and among the most eminent: BERNANOS himself—turn away as from a blasphemy, is it not for us the sign of a new meaning given to human tragedy?

This is what next time, with the other two parts of the trilogy, I will try to show you.