🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I apologize if, in this place open to all, I ask those who are united by the same friendship to turn their thoughts for a moment to a man who was their friend, my friend, Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, who was taken from us last Wednesday, on the evening of my last seminar, in an instant, whose death was announced to us a few hours after that moment. We received it straight to the heart.

Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY was following his path, pursuing his research which was not the same as ours. We had started from different points, we had different aims, and I would even say that it is from wholly opposed aims that we both found ourselves in the position of teaching.

He had always wanted and desired to teach, whereas I can say that it is truly despite myself that I occupy this chair. I can also say that time failed us, due to this mortal fate, to bring our formulas and statements closer together. His place, in relation to what I teach you, has been one of sympathy. And I believe after these eight days, during which, believe it, the effect of this profound mourning that I felt made me question the level at which I can fill this place, and in such a way that I can question myself before myself, at least it seems to me that from him, through his response, his attitude, his friendly words each time he came here, I gather this help, this comfort, that I believe we had in common—the idea of teaching—which puts aside as far as possible any conceit of principle, and to say it all, any pedantry.

You will therefore excuse me if today what I have to say to you—and where I intended to finish with this detour, the reasons for which I told you last time, this detour by way of a contemporary tragedy by CLAUDEL—you will therefore excuse me if today I do not push things further than I will be able to. In fact, you will pardon me because no doubt I had to subtract from the preparation I usually devote to you.

We left things last time at the end of L’otage and at the emergence of an image: the image of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE who says “no.” That is, this “no” at the very place where a tragedy—which I will provisionally call a Christian tragedy—drives its heroine: one must pause over each of these words.

I have spoken to you enough about tragedy that you know that for HEGEL—when he situated it in the Phenomenology of Spirit—it is conceivable that these words “Christian tragedy” are in some sense bound up with reconciliation, the Versöhnung implied by redemption being, in HEGEL’s eyes, what at the same time resolves the conflict of tragedy or the fundamental impasse of Greek tragedy, and consequently, does not allow it to establish itself on its own plane; at most, it establishes the level of what one can call a “divine comedy,” one in which the threads are ultimately all held by Him in whom every bond, even beyond our knowledge, is reconciled.

No doubt, experience goes against this noetic apprehension where the Hegelian perspective no doubt founders in a certain partiality, since after this human voice, that of KIERKEGAARD is reborn, bringing it a contradiction. And likewise the testimony of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—which you know we spent a long time on two years ago—is there to show us something else, another dimension that remains, which at the very least does not allow us to say that the Christian era closes the dimension of tragedy.

Is Hamlet a tragedy? Surely! I believe I have shown it to you. Is it a Christian tragedy? That is precisely where Hegel’s question would meet us, for in truth, as you know, in this Hamlet there does not appear the slightest trace of reconciliation. Despite the presence on the horizon of the dogma of Christian faith, there is in Hamlet, at no moment, any recourse to the mediation of any redemption. The sacrifice of the son in Hamlet remains pure tragedy.

Nevertheless, we absolutely cannot eliminate this—which is no less present in this strange tragedy—this which I called earlier the dimension of the dogma of the Christian faith, namely that the father, the ghost—the one who beyond death reveals to the son that he was killed, and how, and by whom—is a damned father.

Strange, I said, is this tragedy—in which I have certainly not exhausted before you in my commentary all its resources—strange then this further contradiction, on which we have not dwelt, which is that it is not in doubt that it is from the flames of hell, of eternal damnation, that this father bears witness. Nevertheless, it has been said that it is as a skeptic, as a pupil of MONTAIGNE, that this HAMLET questions himself: “to be or not to be… to sleep, to dream perhaps…” : does this beyond of life deliver us from this accursed life, from this “ocean of humiliation and servitude” that is life?

And similarly, we cannot fail to trace the scale established by this range, which, from ancient tragedy to Claudelian drama, could be formulated as follows: at the level of OEDIPUS, the father already killed without the hero even knowing it, “he did not know” not only that it was by him that the father died but even that he was dead, and yet the basis, the framework of the tragedy, implies that he already is; at the level of HAMLET—the father—damned.

What does this mean for us, beyond the fantasy of eternal damnation? Is this damnation not connected, for us, to the emergence of this: that here the father begins to know? Certainly, he does not know all the mechanics, but he knows more than one might think, at any rate he knows who killed him and how he died.

I have left for you—in my commentary—this mystery open, left gaping by SHAKESPEARE, by the playwright, of what is meant by this “orchard” in which death surprised him, the text tells us, “in the blossom of his sins,” and this other enigma: that it was “by the ear” that the poison was poured into him. What enters through the ear if not a word, and what is, behind this word, this mystery of pleasure?

Is it that, in response to the strange iniquity of maternal enjoyment, some ὕβρις [hubris: wordplay on Greek for “excess” or “outrage”] answers here, betrayed by the form the ideal of the father takes in HAMLET’s eyes, this father about whom, in Hamlet, nothing else is said except that he was what we could call “the ideal of the knight of Courtly Love”: this man who “lined with flowers” the path of the queen’s walk, this man who, the text tells us, “kept from her face the slightest breath of wind.”

Such is this strange dimension where remains, and only for HAMLET, the eminent dignity, the ever-boiling source of indignation in HAMLET’s heart. On the one hand, nowhere is he evoked as king, nowhere, I would say, is he discussed as an authority. The father is here a kind of ideal of man, and this no less deserves to remain for us as a question, for at each of these stages we can hope for the truth only from a subsequent revelation.

And also, in the light of what seems to us—as analysts—natural to project through history as the question repeated from age to age about the father, pause for a moment to observe to what extent, before us, it was never in some way at its core that this function of the father was questioned. The very figure of the “ancient father,” insofar as we have called it in our imagery, is a “figure of a king.” The figure of the divine father poses, through the biblical texts, the question of a whole research: From when does the God of the Jews become a father? From when in history? From when in prophetic elaboration?

All these things stir thematic, historical, exegetical questions so deep that merely to evoke them is not even to pose them. It is simply to point out that there must have come a time when the thematics of the problem of the father, of Freud’s “what is a father?” became singularly narrowed so that it took for us the obscure form of the knot, not only mortal but murderous, under which for us it is fixed in the form of the Oedipus complex.

God, Creator, Providence—this is not what is at stake for us in the question of the father, although all these harmonics form its background. If they form its background, what we have questioned is whether this background, by what we have articulated, will be illuminated afterward. From then on, is it not appropriate, necessary—whatever our tastes, our preferences, and whatever for each of us this work of CLAUDEL may represent—is it not imposed upon us to ask what can be, in a tragedy, the thematics of the father, when it is a tragedy that appeared at a time when, through FREUD, the question of the father had profoundly changed?

And similarly, we cannot believe it to be a coincidence that in the Claudelian tragedy it is only a matter of the father. The last part of this trilogy is called The Humiliated Father, completing our series: earlier, the father already killed, the father in the damnation of his death, and now The Humiliated Father. What does this mean, what does CLAUDEL mean by this term of the humiliated father? And first, the question could be posed in Claudelian thematics: this humiliated father, where is he?

“Find the humiliated father,” as one says in the riddle postcards “find the thief” or “find the policeman.” Who is the humiliated father? Is it the Pope insofar as—always “PIUS” as he is—there are two in the play, in the space of the trilogy: the first, fugitive, less than fugitive even, abducted, to the point that here too, with the ambiguity always surrounding the terms of the titles, one may wonder if it is not he who is The Hostage. And then the PIUS at the end, in the third drama, the PIUS who confesses, an eminently moving scene well suited to explore the entire thematics of a certain feeling properly Christian and Catholic, he who is Servant of the servants, who makes himself smaller than the small, in short, this scene that I will read to you in The Humiliated Father, where he goes to confess to a little monk who himself is but a goose keeper, or a swineherd, it matters little, and of course, who carries within him the ministry of the deepest and simplest wisdom.

Let us not linger too long over these all too beautiful images where it seems that CLAUDEL rather yields to what is exploited infinitely further in an entire English dandyism where catholicity and Catholicism are, for English authors, starting from a certain date now going back about two hundred years, the height of distinction. The problem lies elsewhere. The humiliated father, I do not believe it is this Pope; there are many other echoes of fathers, it is nothing but this throughout these three plays.

And indeed
– the father whom we see the most,
– the father in a stature bordering on a kind of obscenity,
– the father in a stature, properly speaking, shameless,
– the father about whom we cannot fail to note some echoes of the gorilla-like form in which, everywhere on the horizon, Freud’s myth makes him appear to us,
– the father is clearly here: Toussaint TURELURE, whose drama and whose murder will become not only the pivot but, strictly speaking, the object of the central play Le pain dur.

Is this the humiliation of the father shown to us in this figure who is not simply impulsive or simply disparaged—I will return to this and show you—but who goes so far as to the form of the most extreme derision, a derision even bordering on the abject?

Is this what we can expect from an author professing to be Catholic and to revive, to reincarnate before us traditional values?

Is it not even strange that there was not a greater outcry over a play which, when it appeared alone three or four years after L’otage, claimed to hold, to captivate our attention with this episode in which I found that a kind of sordidness with Balzacian echoes is redeemed only by an extremity, a paroxysm, a surpassing there too, of all limits?

I do not know if I should ask those who have not read Le pain dur since last time to raise their finger. I think it is not enough that I put you on a track for all of you to rush there at once. I believe I am obliged, briefly, to summarize, to remind you what it is about. Le pain dur opens with the dialogue of two women. Surely more than twenty years have passed since the death of Sygne, on the day of the baptism of the son she gave to Toussaint TURELURE.

The man, who was already no longer very fresh at that time, has become quite a sinister old man. We do not see him; he is hidden in the wings, but what we see is two women: one, SICHEL, who was his mistress, and the other, LUMÎR, the mistress of his son. The latter returns from a land which has since acquired some topicality: Algeria, where she left Louis de COÛFONTAINE, for his name is Louis, of course, in honor of the restored sovereign.

Let the opportunity not be lost to slip in here a little jest, a small remark which I do not know if anyone here has ever made to themselves. The origin of the word “Louis” is Ludovicus, Ludovic, Lodovic, Clodovic of the Merovingians, and it is nothing else—once you write it, you see it better—than CLOVIS with the C removed: which makes CLOVIS the first Louis. One can wonder if everything would not have been changed if Louis XIV had known he was Louis XV! Perhaps his reign would have changed style, and endlessly. Well, with this little jest meant to amuse you, let us move on.

Louis de COÛFONTAINE is still—at least so it is thought—on Algerian soil, and LUMÎR, the person who returns to Toussaint’s house, his father’s house, comes to claim some money she lent. It is this story that so amused the two authors of famous books of pastiches: pastiching CLAUDEL, it is this scene of the claim made to old Toussaint that served as the theme for the famous “In the style of…” It is in this context that the famous, truly dignified reply, truer than CLAUDEL himself, attributed to the parodic character when he is asked to return the sum he allegedly despoiled from a poor woman, is commented on for future generations: “there are no small savings.”

The “savings” in question are not at all the savings of the girl who comes to claim them from Toussaint TURELURE; they are nothing less than the fruit of the sacrifices of Polish emigrants. The sum of ten thousand francs—it is more than ten thousand francs, even—that was lent by the young woman—whose role and function you will see next—this is the object of her request.

LUMÎR comes to claim from old Toussaint, not that it was to old Toussaint that she made the donation or the loan, but to his son; the son is now insolvent not only for these ten thousand francs but for another ten thousand. It is a question of obtaining from the father the sum of twenty thousand of those francs from the middle of the last century, that is to say, from a time when a franc was a franc, I assure you, and it was not earned in an instant.

The young woman who is there meets another, SICHEL. SICHEL is the official mistress of old Toussaint, and the official mistress of old Toussaint is not without some thorns. It is a position that entails a certain harshness, but the person occupying it is up to the task. In short, what very quickly arises between these two women is the question of how to “skin the old man.” If it were not, before skinning him, a matter of getting something else, it seems the question would be resolved even more quickly. This is to say that the style is not at all one of tenderness, nor of the highest idealism. These two women, each in her own way—as you will see, I will come back to this—can well be described as “ideal,” but for us, the spectators, they certainly embody one of the singular forms of seduction.

I must point out to you all that is woven of calculations and extreme calculations in the positions of these two women, faced with avarice: “this avarice which is matched only by its disorder, which is surpassed only by its dishonesty,” as SICHEL herself says, speaking of old TURELURE.

The person of the Polish woman LUMÎR, “pronounced Loum-yir” as CLAUDEL expressly tells us her name should be pronounced, is ready to go, in order to win back what she considers as property, as a sacred law for which she is responsible, which she has alienated but which she must absolutely restore to those to whom she feels loyal and uniquely bound: all the emigrants, all the martyrs, even the dead of that eminently passionate, passionate, fascinating cause that is the cause of divided Poland, of partitioned Poland, the young woman is determined to go as far as one can go, even to offering herself, to yielding to what she knows of old TURELURE’s desire.

Old TURELURE, she knows in advance what can be expected of him, it is enough for a woman to be his son’s woman for her to be sure—far from it—that she is not for him a forbidden object. We find here another trait that has only recently been introduced into what I might call “the common theme of certain functions of the father.” The other, the partner in the dialogue: SICHEL—I mentioned her earlier—an astute woman, is well aware of these components of the situation.

Moreover, this is a novelty, I mean something that, in the play of this singular game we call the Oedipus complex, CLAUDEL adds to it. SICHEL is not the mother, notice. The mother is dead, out of the game, and no doubt this arrangement of the Claudelian drama is perhaps something that favors, that makes appear the elements likely to interest us in this path, in this topology, in this fundamental dramaturgy, insofar as something common to the same era links one creator to another: a reflected thought to a creative thought.

She is not the mother, she is not even the wife of the father, she is the object of a tyrannical, ambiguous desire. SICHEL underlines quite clearly that if there is something that ties the father to her, it is something that is a desire very close to the desire to destroy her, since he has made her his slave, and he is capable of speaking of the attachment he has for her as having its origin in some charm that emerged from her talent as a pianist and from a little finger that struck the note on the keyboard so well. That piano, indeed, since she has been keeping old Toussaint’s accounts, she has not been able to open it. This SICHEL thus has her own idea.

This idea, we will see it bloom in the form of the sudden arrival of one Louis de COÛFONTAINE at the point where the drama will be tied. For this arrival, which is not without provoking a real gut reaction, a real collapse of abject fear in the old father: “is he coming?” he suddenly cries out—letting go of the beautiful language which, a minute before, he had used to describe the poetic feelings that unite him to SICHEL, to the young woman I have just spoken about—“is he coming?”

He is indeed coming, and he comes, brought back by a backstage maneuver, by a little warning letter from SICHEL. He comes to the center and the play will culminate in a kind of singular square game, one might say, if it were not for the addition of the character of SICHEL’s father, old Ali HABENICHTS—not habenichts: who has nothing, it is a wordplay [habenichts = “have nothing” in German]—the old moneylender who is a sort of double of Toussaint TURELURE, who is the one through whom he traffics this complicated operation which consists of taking back, piece by piece and bit by bit from his own son, the COÛFONTAINE assets which Louis had the misfortune to claim from him by stamped paper for the inheritance, as soon as he came of age.

You see how everything closes in on itself. It is not for nothing that I evoked the Balzacian theme. The circulation, the metabolism, the conflict at the level of money, doubled well the affective rivalry. Old Toussaint TURELURE sees in his son precisely that something on which the Freudian experience has drawn our attention: that other himself, this repetition of himself, this figure reborn from himself, in whom he can only see a rival.

And when his son tenderly tries at one moment to say to him: “am I not a true TURELURE?” he replies harshly: “yes, no doubt, but there already is one, that’s enough. As for TURELURE, I suffice well to fill the role.” Another theme where we can recognize something introduced by the Freudian discovery.

Nor is that all, and I would say that what comes to a climax after a dialogue in which LUMÎR, the mistress of Louis de COÛFONTAINE, must rouse him with every lash of insult aimed directly at his self-esteem, at his narcissistic virility as we would say, reveals to the son what proposals she is the object of from the father, from this father who, by his schemes, wants to push him to that point of bankruptcy where he is cornered when the drama begins, and who not only is about to snatch his land, which he will buy back cheaply through his usurious intermediaries, but is also about to snatch his wife from him. In short: LUMÎR arms the hand of Louis de COÛFONTAINE against his father.

And we witness on stage this murder so well prepared by the stimulation of the woman herself, who is here not only the temptress but the one who plots, who arranges all the artifice of the crime around which the advent of Louis de COÛFONTAINE himself to the function of father will take place. And this murder that we see unfold on stage—another scene of the murder of the father—we will see it carried out in the following way where the two women, all in all, have collaborated. For, as LUMÎR says somewhere: “It was SICHEL who gave me this idea.”

And indeed, it is during their first conversation that SICHEL brings up in LUMÎR’s imagination this dimension, namely that the old man who is there, animated by a desire which, for the character CLAUDEL places before us, of this scorned father, if I may say of this “played” father. This played father who is the fundamental theme of classical comedy, but here one must understand played in a sense that goes further still than trickery and derision, he is played—so to speak—at dice, he is played because, in the end, he is in the game a passive element.

As is expressly mentioned in the text about the lines that end the dialogue between the two women, after having mutually opened up their thoughts to the very depths, one says to the other: “Come, now each of us plays her game against the dead man.”

It is precisely at this moment that Toussaint TURELURE returns: “What are you talking about?” “We are talking about last night’s game of whist, about that game where we discussed the strong and the weak.”

And thereupon the old Toussaint, who moreover does not doubt what is really at stake, replies with that very French elegance to which allusion is constantly made: “He is a real Frenchman, SICHEL said to LUMÎR, oh! He is incapable of refusing anything to a woman, he is an authentic Frenchman, except for money, money, ugh!”

…making a few jokes about what was left to him in this game, namely, of course, the honors.

This image of the “square game”—in another sense—which is that of whist, the one I have alluded to several times myself to designate the structure of the analytic position: is it not striking to see it reappear? The father, before the scene of the drama plays out, is already dead or almost. All that remains is to blow on him. And this is indeed what we are about to see after a dialogue whose co-dimensionality of the tragic and the comic would deserve for us to read it together.

For, in truth, it is a scene that deserves in world literature to be regarded as quite unique of its kind, and the twists and turns also would deserve attention, if we were here simply to do literary analysis—unfortunately, I must go a bit faster than I would like if I were to make you savor all these detours. Be that as it may, it is quite something to see one of these detours.

The son begs the father to give him those famous twenty thousand francs, which he knows—and for good reason, since the whole affair he has plotted for a long time through SICHEL—he has in his pocket, that they make a bulge on him, to leave them to him, to give them to him to allow him, in short:
– not only to meet his commitments,
– not only to pay back a sacred debt,
– not only not to lose what he, the son, possesses,
– …but not to see himself reduced to being nothing more than a serf on the very land where he has invested all his passion.

For this land near Algiers at stake, it is there that Louis de COÛFONTAINE went to seek the rejection—in the sense of something that has sprung back and that rejects, in the sense of the offspring—the rejection of his being, the rejection of his solitude, of that abandonment in which he has always felt himself, he who knows that his mother did not want him, that his father, he says, only ever watched him grow up with anxiety. It is about the passion for a land, it is about returning to that something from which he feels himself cast out: from all recourse to nature, it is that which is at stake.

And, in truth, there is here a theme that would well be worth recalling in the very genesis, historically, of what is called colonialism.

It has its source in an emigration that not only opened colonized countries but also virgin lands. The resource provided by all the lost children of Christian culture is truly something that would be worth isolating as an ethical motive, one that it would be wrong to neglect at the moment when we are measuring its consequences.

It is at the very moment when this Louis finds himself—at the point where this trial of strength between his father and himself—reduced to despair, that he draws the pistols. The pistols with which his hand has been armed, and his hand has been armed by LUMÎR. These pistols are two. I ask you also to pause for a moment over this refinement. It is the dramaturgical device par excellence, it is the trick, the refinement: what he has been armed with are two pistols, two pistols—I tell you at once—which will not go off, even though they are loaded.

It is the opposite of what happens in a famous passage of the sapper CAMEMBER. They give the soldier PIDOU a letter from the general: “Look,” he says, “this letter, it’s not loaded, it’s not that the general doesn’t have the means, but it’s not loaded, well, that won’t stop it from going off all the same!”

Here it is the opposite. Even though both are loaded by LUMÎR’s hand, the pistols do not go off. And that does not prevent the father from dying. The poor man dies of fear, and that is exactly what was always expected, since it is expressly for this reason that LUMÎR had handed one of the pistols, the small one, to the hero, Louis de COÛFONTAINE, saying to him:

“This one is loaded, but with a blank, it will only make noise and maybe that will be enough to make the other one go ‘pop.’ If that’s not enough, then you’ll use the big one—that one has a bullet.”

Louis has learned his lessons on the field of land being cleared, but also land that is not acquired—this is clearly indicated in the text—without some rather harsh dispossession maneuvers, and surely, on the second try, there is no fear that the hand of whoever pulls the trigger will tremble more than on the first.

As Louis de COÛFONTAINE will say later: he does not like procrastination. It is not light-heartedly that he will go that far, “but since we’re here,” he says, both pistols will be fired at the same time. Now, as I told you, loaded or not, neither one goes off. There is only noise, but this noise is enough, as the stage direction describes very nicely in the text: the old man stops, his eyes bulging, his jaw dropped. It’s very nice [sic]. We spoke of some grimace of life last time; here, the grimace of death is not elegant and, indeed, the matter is done.

I told you, and you see, that all the refinements are there, as for the imaginary dimension of the father, very well articulated in the sense that even in the order of effectiveness the imaginary can be enough. It is demonstrated to us by the image. But to make things even better, LUMÎR makes her return at this moment. Of course, the boy is not entirely calm. He has no kind of doubt that he is indeed a parricide, because first he fully intended to kill his father and, all in all, he did so.

The terms and the style of the concluding remarks exchanged at this point are well worth stopping over, I ask you to refer to them, they do not lack a great harshness, a great savor [sic]. I have noticed that to certain ears—and not the least, and not without merit—Le pain dur, like L’otage, may seem somewhat tedious plays. I confess that I do not find that at all, not at all boring, all these twists and turns [sic].

It is rather dark, what confuses us is that this “dark” operates exactly at the same time as a kind of comedy whose quality, it must be said, may seem a bit too acidic. But nevertheless, these are no minor merits. The question, all the same, is: where are we being led? What is it that fascinates us in all this?

I am quite sure that in the end this kind of demolition of the puppet father, slaughtered in the comic style, is not something likely to arouse in us very clearly localized, localizable feelings [sic].

What is nonetheless rather nice is to see what this scene ends on, namely that Louis de COÛFONTAINE says “stop!” halt: once the cross has been made over the deed, while the girl slips the wallet from the father’s pocket… “one minute, a detail, let me check something”: he turns the little pistol over, fiddles with it using those things used at the time to load such weapons, and sees that the little pistol was loaded too, which he points out to the fascinating person who found herself arming his hand. She looks at him and has no other answer than a gentle laugh.

Does this also not have the capacity to raise some problems for us? What does the poet mean? We will certainly know in Act III, when we will see confessed the true nature of this LUMÎR whom, after all, we have seen here only in features neither dark nor fanatical. We will see what is the nature of LUMÎR’s desire. That this desire could go so far for her, who considers herself destined, and with certainty, for the supreme sacrifice… to the hanging by which she will certainly end and by which the continuation of the story indicates she does indeed end… does not exclude that her passion for her lover—the one who is truly her lover for her: Louis de COÛFONTAINE—may go so far as to want for him a tragic end, for example, the scaffold.

This theme of love linked to death and, strictly speaking, of the sacrificed lover, is something which… on the horizon of the story of the two La MOLE: – that of La MOLE decapitated, whose head a woman is supposed to have gathered, – and that of Julien SOREL, whom a Mademoiselle La MOLE, imaginary in this case, will also join in death… is there to shed literary light on this theme. The extreme nature of LUMÎR’s desire is indeed what should be retained.

It is along the path of this desire, of this love that seeks nothing but to be consumed in a single extreme moment, it is toward this horizon that LUMÎR calls Louis de COÛFONTAINE. And Louis de COÛFONTAINE, a parricide, inasmuch as he has entered, through the murder of his father, into his inheritance and into another dimension than the one he has known until then, will from then on become another TURELURE, another sinister character of whom CLAUDEL will not spare us, in the sequel, the caricature. And pay close attention: he becomes an ambassador. You would be wrong to think that all these reflections are given by CLAUDEL without his being, deep down, in some kind of ambivalence. Louis therefore refuses to follow LUMÎR and it is because he does not follow LUMÎR that he will marry his father’s mistress, SICHEL. I pass over the end of the play; it is about how this sort of recovery, of transmutation operates, which makes him not only put on the dead man’s boots but also get into the same bed as him.

It is a matter of dark stories of acknowledgment of debts, of all sorts of shenanigans, of all kinds of precautions that the father, always cunning, had made or taken before his death to ensure that those who would be linked to him, and namely if it was LUMÎR, would not have too much interest in his disappearance. He had arranged things so that his property would appear to be owed, to be listed in the debt book of his obscure associate, Ali HABENICHTS. It is to the extent that SICHEL returns him this claim that she acquires from him this truly self-renouncing title: he abdicates—as Paul VALÉRY used to say—his title by marrying her. And this is how the play ends: the engagement of Louis de COÛFONTAINE and SICHEL HABENICHTS, the daughter of his father’s usurious partner.

One can question even more, after this ending, what the poet means, and specifically at the point where he is in himself, in his thought, when he forges for us what can rightly be called—now that I have told you the story as I tell it—this strange comedy.

At the heart of the Claudelian trilogy, just as at the beginning there was a tragedy that burst through the canvas, that exceeded everything as a possibility, as a demand imposed on the heroine and on the place occupied, at the end of the first play, by her image, at the end of the second, there can be nothing but the total darkness of a radical derision, going so far as something whose echoes in the end may seem quite unsympathetic to us, insofar as, for example, the Jewish position finds itself—in we do not really know why—implicated.

For the emphasis is placed on SICHEL’s feelings. SICHEL articulates what her position in life is. We must advance without further reluctance [resistance] into this element of Claudelian thematics. For in fact, I do not know that anyone has ever attributed to CLAUDEL, on this point, feelings that we could qualify as suspect in any way. I mean that the greatness—by him more than respected, exalted—of the Old Law has never ceased to inhabit the smallest characters who, in his dramaturgy, may be connected to it. And every Jew, by essence, for him is connected to it, even if it is a Jew who precisely finds himself—this Old Law—rejecting it and saying that it is the end of all those old laws that he desires, and to which he aspires, that what he moves toward is the sharing by all of that something which alone is real and which is enjoyment.

It is indeed the language of SICHEL, and it is thus that she presents herself to us before the murder, much more so after, when she offers Louis de COÛFONTAINE the love with which it turns out she has always been animated for him. Is this not yet another problem put to us in this strange arrangement?

I see that, in having let myself be carried away—and it had to be done—into telling you the central story of Le pain dur, I will do little more today, all in all, than to propose this: a play that perhaps will be staged again, that has sometimes been staged, and of which one cannot say: neither that it is poorly constructed, nor that it fails to captivate us.

Does it not seem to you that, seeing it close after this strange twist, you find yourself before a figure—as one says, a figure of ballet, of scenario—of a pattern that essentially presents itself to you in a truly unprecedented form by its opacity, by the fact that it calls for your interest only on the level of the most complete enigma.

Time does not allow me—in any way at all—to address what would enable us to solve it, but understand that if I present it to you… or if I simply note that it is impossible not to acknowledge such a construction in, I will not say the century, but the decade of the emergence of our thinking on the Oedipus complex… understand why I bring it up here and what, with the solution I think I will provide, justifies my lingering over it so long, in such detail, before your attention: the father.

If the father has appeared at the beginning of analytic thought in this form, whose comic side is precisely suited to bring out all the scandalous traits, if FREUD had to articulate as at the origin of the law a drama and a figure which, if you see it played out on a contemporary stage, lets you measure not just the criminal aspect but the possibility of caricatural, even abject, decomposition as I just mentioned. The problem is: – in what way has this been necessitated by the only thing that justifies us in our research, and which is also our object, – what makes it necessary that this image emerged on the horizon of humanity, if not its consubstantiality with the highlighting, the implementation, of the dimension of desire?

In other words, this: that we tend to push always further from our horizon, even to deny in our experience, paradoxically more and more, we analysts, the place of the father. Why? Simply because it fades away to the extent that we lose the sense and direction of desire, where our action toward those who trust us tends to put on desire—I don’t know what gentle halter, I don’t know what soporific, I don’t know what way of suggesting that brings it back to need. And that is precisely why we see always more, and more and more, in the depths of this Other we evoke in our patients: the mother. There is something that, unfortunately, resists, it is that this mother we call castrating. And why, by what means is she so? We know very well from experience, and this is the thread that keeps us in contact with this dimension that must not be lost, it is this—from where we are and from the simultaneously narrowed perspective that is ours—that the mother is all the more castrating as she is not occupied with castrating the father.

It is in the measure—and I ask you to refer to your clinical experience—where the mother is wholly occupied with castrating the father, that exists, whether we see it or not—or else there is none to castrate, but from that moment there would be no need to make the mother function as castrating—if there were not this possibility, even neglected or absent, the maintenance: – of the dimension of the father, – of the drama of the father, – of this function of the father …around which, as you see, turns for us, for now, what interests us in the position of transference.

We know very well that we cannot operate in our position as analysts as FREUD did, who took in analysis the position of the father. And that is what amazes us in his way of intervening. And that is why we no longer know where to put ourselves, because we have not learned to rearticulate, from that point, what our own position should be. The result is that we spend our time telling our patients: “you take us for a bad mother,” which is not, after all, the position we should adopt.

What I seek before you, the path on which—with the help of Claudelian drama, as you will see—I try to bring you back, is to return castration to the heart of the problem. – Because castration and its problem are identical with what I would call the constitution of the subject of desire as such: not the subject of need, not the subject of frustration, but the subject of desire. – Because—as I have already pressed before you—castration is identical with that phenomenon which makes the object of its lack, for desire—since desire is lack—is, in our experience, identical with the very instrument of desire: the phallus.

I say indeed that the object of its lack, for desire—whatever it is, even on a plane other than the genital plane—to be characterized as an object of desire, and not as an object of some frustrated need, it must come to the same symbolic place as that filled by the very instrument of desire, the phallus, that is, this instrument, insofar as it is put in the function of signifier.

That is what I will show you next time as having been articulated by the poet, by CLAUDEL, whatever he may have thought… though, of course, he could have had no idea in what formulation his creation might one day come. That makes it all the more convincing. Just as it is quite convincing to see FREUD, in The Interpretation of Dreams, state in advance the laws of metaphor and metonymy.

And why is this instrument brought to the function of the signifier? Precisely to fill this place I have just mentioned: the symbolic place. What is this place? Well, it is precisely the place of the dead point occupied by the father as already dead: I mean in that, by the mere fact that he is the one who articulates the law, his voice can only falter behind. For just as well: either he is lacking as a presence, or, as a presence, he is all too much there. It is this point where everything that is stated passes back through zero between yes and no. It is not I who invented this radical ambivalence between “le zist et le zest” [French wordplay: “the this and the that”]—not to speak Chinese: between love and hate, between complicity and alienation.

The law, to put it simply, in order to establish itself as law, requires as its antecedent the death of the one who upholds it. That at this level the phenomenon of desire occurs, it is not enough simply to say it. That is why I strive before you to foment these topological schemata [graph] which allow us to pinpoint this radical gap. It develops, and completed desire is not simply this point, but is what one can call “a set” in the subject.

This “set” whose topology I am trying to mark for you not only in a para-spatial sense—the thing that is illustrated—but also the three stages of this explosion, stages of appeal to the first, at the end of which the configuration of desire is realized. And you can see it marked in generations. And that is why there is no need, to situate the composition of desire in a subject, to go back in endless recurrence, up to Father ADAM: three generations are enough.

– In the first, the mark of the signifier. This is what is pushed to the extreme and tragically illustrated in the Claudelian composition by the image of Sygne de COÛFONTAINE, brought to the destruction of her being for having been totally torn from all her ties of word and faith.

– In the second stage, what results from it. For even on the poetic level, things do not stop at poetry. Even characters created by the imagination of CLAUDEL, it leads to the appearance of a child. Those who speak and who are marked by speech engender: something slips into the interval which is at first infans. And this is Louis de COÛFONTAINE, in the second generation the totally rejected object, the unwanted object, the object as not wanted.

– How it is composed, how it is configured in our eyes, in this poetic creation, what will result in the third generation, that is to say, the only true one—I mean that it is also at the level of all the others, the others are of course artificial decompositions, they are antecedents of the only one in question—how desire is composed between: the mark of the signifier, and the passion for the partial object, that is what I hope to articulate for you next time.