🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

« COÛFONTAINE, I am yours! Take me and do with me as you will. Whether I am to be a wife, or whether already farther than life, where the body is no longer of use, our souls are fused to each other without any alloy! »

I wanted to point out to you, throughout the text of the trilogy, the recurrence of a term in which love is articulated. It is to these words of Sygne, in The Hostage, that COÛFONTAINE immediately responds:

« Sygne, found last, do not deceive me like the others. Will there be at last something solid for me outside my own will? »

And indeed, everything lies there. This man whom everything has betrayed, whom everything has abandoned, who lives, as he says, “this life of a hunted animal, without a single hiding place that is safe” remembers:

« …what the Indian monks say, that all this wretched life is a vain appearance, and that it stays with us only because we move along with it, and that it would suffice for us to sit and remain still for it to pass from us. But these are vile temptations. At least I, in this fall of everything, remain the same, honor and duty, the same. But you, Sygne, think about what you are saying. Do not fail as the others have, at this hour when I am reaching my end. Do not deceive me… »

Such is the beginning that gives weight to the tragedy. Sygne finds herself betraying the very one to whom she has committed herself with all her soul.

We will find this theme of the exchange of souls, and the exchange of souls concentrated into a single moment, later on, in The Hard Bread, in the dialogue between Louis and LUMÎR—Loum-yir as CLAUDEL expressly tells us the Polish name should be pronounced—when, the parricide accomplished, the dialogue unfolds between her and him, where she tells him she will not follow him, that she will not return with him to Algeria, but that she invites him to come consummate with her the mortal adventure that awaits her.

Louis—who at that moment has just undergone the metamorphosis that is consummated in him through the parricide—Louis refuses. Yet there is still a moment of oscillation during which he addresses LUMÎR passionately, telling her that he loves her as she is, that there is only one woman for him. To which LUMÎR herself, captivated by this call of death which gives the meaning to her desire, replies:

« Is it true that there is only one for you? Ah, I know it’s true! Ah, say what you will! There is still in you something that understands me and that is my brother! A rupture, a weariness, a void that cannot be filled. You are no longer the same as any other. You are alone. Forever you cannot undo what you have done, (softly) parricide! We are alone, both of us, in this horrible desert. Two human souls in the void who are capable of giving themselves to each other. And in a single second, like the detonation of all time annihilated, of replacing all things with each other! Isn’t it good to be without any perspective? Ah, if life were long, it would be worth it to be happy. But it is short and there is a way to make it even shorter. So short that eternity could fit inside! »

LOUIS: I have no use for eternity.
LUMÎR: So short that eternity could fit inside! So short that this world could fit inside, this world we want nothing of and this happiness people make such a fuss about. So small, so tight, so strict, so shortened, that nothing else but the two of us could fit inside! »

And she goes on further:

« And I, I will be the Homeland in your arms, the Sweetness once left behind, the land of Ur, the ancient Consolation! There is only you with me in the world, there is only this one moment at last when we shall have seen each other face to face! Accessible at last to that mystery we contain within. There is a way to draw the soul from the body like a sword, loyal, full of honor, there is a way to break through the wall. There is a way to make an oath and to give oneself entirely to that other who alone exists. Despite the horrible night and the rain, despite this nothingness that surrounds us, Like the brave! To give oneself and to believe wholly in the other! To give oneself and to believe in a single flash! Each of us to the other and to that alone! »

Such is the desire expressed by the one who, after the parricide, is pushed aside by Louis from himself and to marry, as it is said, “his father’s mistress”.

This is the turning point of Louis’s transformation, and it is what will now allow us to question the meaning of what will be born from him: Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, a feminine figure who, at the dawn of the third part of the trilogy, responds to the figure of Sygne and around whom we will ask ourselves what CLAUDEL intended to express there.

For, after all, it is easy and customary to dismiss any statement that is articulated outside the paths of routine by saying: “it is Untel’s,” and you know that people do not hesitate to say this about someone who, at the moment, is speaking to you. It seems that no one even thinks to be surprised about the poet, that—in this case—one is content to accept his uniqueness. And faced with the strangeness of a theatre such as CLAUDEL’s, no one thinks any longer to question, faced with the improbabilities, the scandalous elements into which he leads us, what in the end his aim and his intention might have been.

Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, in the third play, The Humiliated Father, what does she mean? We are going to question the meaning of Pensée de COÛFONTAINE as if she were a living character. It is about the desire of Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, the desire for thought, and in the desire of Pensée, we will of course find the very thought of desire.

Of course, do not think that this is, at the level where Claudelian tragedy takes place, an allegorical interpretation. These characters are symbols only insofar as they operate at the very level, at the heart of the impact of the symbolic on a person. And this ambiguity of names, which are conferred, given to them by the poet, is there to indicate to us the legitimacy of interpreting them as moments of this impact of the symbolic on the flesh itself.

It would be easy enough to amuse ourselves by reading in the spelling given by CLAUDEL to this singular name “Sygne”, which begins with an S, which is really there as an invitation to recognize a “sign” [signe, wordplay], with, furthermore, precisely in this imperceptible change in the word, this substitution of “y” for “i”, what this superimposition of the mark means, and to recognize in it, by I don’t know what convergence, a kind of cabalistic mater lectionis, something that comes to meet our S by which I showed you that this imposition of the signifier on man is at once what marks him and what defines him.

At the other end: PENSÉE. Here the word is left intact. And to see what this thought of desire means, we must go back to what “passion” endured by Sygne means in The Hostage. What left us breathless at the end of this first play of the trilogy, this figure of the sacrificed woman who makes a “no” sign, is indeed the mark of the signifier brought to its highest degree—a refusal carried to a radical position—which we must probe. By probing this position, we rediscover the very term that belongs to us, by our experience, at the highest degree, if we know how to question it.

For, if you remember what I taught you in due time here and elsewhere, in the seminar and at the Society, and on several occasions, if I asked you to reconsider the use made today in our experience of the term “frustration”, it is to encourage you to return to what, in FREUD’s text—where this term frustration is never used—the original term Versagung means, insofar as its emphasis can be placed well beyond, much more deeply than any conceivable “frustration”, the term Versagung insofar as it implies “the failure to keep a promise”, and the failure to a promise for which everything has already been renounced.

This is the exemplary value of the character and the drama of Sygne, it is that what she is asked to renounce is what she has already committed all her strength to, to which she has already bound her whole life: to what was already marked by the sign of sacrifice. This second-degree dimension, at the deepest level of refusal—which by the operation of the verb can both be required and open to an abysmal realization—this is what is posed for us at the origin of Claudelian tragedy, and it is also something to which we cannot remain indifferent. It is something that we cannot simply consider as the extreme, the excessive, the paradox of a kind of religious madness, since on the contrary, as I am going to show you, it is precisely there that we, people of our time, are placed, insofar as this religious madness is lacking in us.

Let us carefully observe what is at stake for Sygne de COÛFONTAINE. What is imposed on her is not simply a matter of force and coercion. She is compelled to commit herself, and freely, to the law of marriage with the one she calls the son of her servant and the sorcerer QUIRIACE. To what is imposed on her, nothing can be attached for her but what is cursed. Thus Versagung, the refusal from which she cannot release herself, truly becomes what the structure of the word implies: versagen, the refusal concerning what is said.

And if I wanted to equivocate to find the best translation: “per-dition” [perte/dit, wordplay]. Here all that is condition becomes perdition, and that is why here “not to say” becomes “to say no”. We have already encountered this extreme point, and what I want to show you is that here it is surpassed. We encountered it at the end of the Oedipus tragedy, in the μή ϕῦναι [mè phunai] of Oedipus at Colonus, this “may I not be” which really means “not to have been born”, where—as I remind you in passing—we find the true place of the subject as subject of the unconscious.

This place is the μή [mè], or this very particular “ne” of which we grasp in language only the vestiges, at the moment of its paradoxical appearance, in terms like: “je crains qu’il ne vienne” (“I fear he may come”) or “avant qu’il n’apparaisse” (“before he appears”), where it seems to grammarians like an expletive, whereas it is precisely here that the point of that desire appears, which designates not the subject of the statement—the “I,” the one who is speaking now—but the subject from which the enunciation originates. μή ϕῦναι [mè phunai], this “ne sois-je,” or more closely: “ne fus-je,” this “not to be,” which equivocates so curiously in French with the verb for being born, that is where we stand with OEDIPUS.

And what is designated here except that, through the imposition on man of a destiny, of a burden of parental structures, something is thereby covered over which already makes his entrance into the world an entry into the relentless game of a debt. In the end, it is simply from this burden—which he receives from the debt, from the Ἄτη [Atè] that precedes him—that he is guilty. Since then something else has happened, the Word has been incarnated for us, it has come into the world, and—contrary to the word of the Gospel—it is not true that we did not recognize it. We did recognize it and we live with the consequences of this recognition. We are at one of the points of one of the phases of the consequences of this recognition.

This is what I would like to articulate for you. It is that for us the Word is not simply the law into which we insert ourselves to each bear our share of this debt that constitutes our destiny, but that it opens for us a possibility, a temptation, from which it is possible for us to curse ourselves, not only as particular fate, as life, but as the very path in which the Word engages us and as an encounter with the truth, as the hour of truth. We are no longer merely within reach of being guilty by symbolic debt, it is having the debt upon us that can be— in the closest sense the word indicates—reproached to us.

In short, it is that the debt itself, where we had our place, can be taken away from us, it is here that we may feel totally alienated from ourselves. The ancient Ἄτη [Atè] no doubt made us guilty for this debt, for giving in to it, but in renouncing it as we now can, we are burdened with an even greater misfortune, that this destiny no longer means anything.

In short, what we know, what we touch through our everyday experience, is the guilt that remains to us, the one we touch with our finger in the neurotic. It is precisely this that must be paid for the fact that the God of destiny is dead. That this God is dead is at the heart of what is presented to us in CLAUDEL. This dead God is here represented by this outlawed priest who is no longer present for us except in the form of what is called—the hostage, which gives its title to the first play of the trilogy, figure, shadow, of what ancient faith was, and the hostage in the hands of politics, of those who want to use him for purposes of Restoration.

But the reverse of this reduction of the dead God is that it is the faithful soul that becomes the hostage, the hostage of that situation in which, truly, beyond the end of Christian truth, the tragic is reborn, namely that everything slips away from her if the signifier can be captive. Of course, only one who believes can be a hostage: Sygne, and because she believes, she must bear witness to what she believes. She is precisely thereby taken, captivated in this situation for which it suffices to imagine, to forge it for it to exist: to be called to sacrifice herself to the negation of what she believes, she is held as hostage in the very negation—suffered—of what she has of best.

Something is proposed to us that goes further than the misfortune of JOB and his resignation: JOB is reserved all the weight of misfortune he did not deserve, but the heroine of modern tragedy is asked to assume as a kind of enjoyment the very injustice that horrifies her.

Such is what the fact of being the support of the Word opens as a possibility before the speaking being, at the moment when the Word is required of him, to guarantee it. Man has become the hostage of the Word because it has been said of him—or also so that it may have been said—that God is dead. At this moment is opened that gaping void where nothing more, nothing else can be articulated than what is nothing but the very beginning of “ne fus-je,” which would no longer be being, but a refusal, a “no,” a “ne,” this tic, this grimace, in short, this bending of the body, this psychosomatic symptom which is the term where we have to encounter the mark of the signifier.

The drama, as it unfolds through the three acts of the tragedy, is to know how from this radical position a desire may be reborn, and which desire. It is here that we are brought to the other end of the trilogy, to Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, to this unquestionably alluring figure, manifestly offered to us as spectators—and what kind of spectators, we will attempt to say—as the object of desire properly speaking.

And one need only read The Humiliated Father. One need only listen to those themselves whom this story repels—for what could be more repellent. What harder bread could be offered us than that of this challenge, of this father who is promoted as a figure of obscene old age and whose murder enacted before us alone brings the possibility of the pursuit of something transmitted and which is nothing but a figure—that of Louis de COÛFONTAINE—the most degraded, degenerate form of the father figure.

One need only hear—as anyone may have felt—the ingratitude represented by the appearance, during a night festival in Rome at the beginning of The Humiliated Father, of the figure of Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, to understand that she is presented to us there as an object of seduction. And why, and how? What does she balance? What does she compensate?

Is anything going to come back upon her from Sygne’s sacrifice? Is it in the name of her grandmother’s sacrifice that she will deserve any consideration, to say it all? Certainly not!

If it is alluded to at any moment, it is in the dialogue of the two men—who will represent, for her, the approach of love—with the Pope, and the allusion is made to this old family tradition as to an old story that is told. It is in the Pope’s own mouth, addressing ORIAN, who is the stake in this love, that the word “superstition” appears on this subject: “Are you going to yield my son to this superstition!”

Is PENSÉE herself going to represent something like an exemplary figure, a rebirth of faith for a moment eclipsed? Far from it! PENSÉE is a free-thinker, if we can use such a term here that is not Claudelian, but that is indeed what is at stake. PENSÉE is animated only by a single passion: That—she says—of a justice that for her goes beyond every requirement, beyond beauty itself.

What she wants is justice, and not just any justice, not the old justice, that of some natural right to distribution or retribution, this justice in question—absolute justice, justice which animates the movement, the noise, the secret train of the Revolution that forms the background of the third drama—this justice is the reverse of everything in reality, in life, which, by the Word, is felt as offending justice, felt as horror of justice. It is a matter of absolute justice, in all its power to shake the world, that is at stake in the discourse of PENSÉE de COÛFONTAINE.

You see, it is truly the thing that can seem furthest from the sermonizing we might expect from CLAUDEL, a man of faith. It is precisely what will allow us to give meaning to the figure toward which the whole drama of The Humiliated Father converges. To understand it, we must pause for a moment at what CLAUDEL has made of PENSÉE de COÛFONTAINE, represented as the fruit of the marriage of Louis de COÛFONTAINE with the one who was, in sum, given to him as a wife by his father, by the sole fact that this woman was already his wife, the extreme point, so to speak, paradoxical, caricatural, of the Oedipus complex.

The obscene old man presented to us forces his sons—this is the extreme point, the boundary point of the Freudian myth that is proposed to us—forces his sons to marry his wives, and precisely as he seeks to take theirs from them. Another more accentuated, and here more expressive, way to stress what comes to light in the Freudian myth. This does not produce a better quality of father, it produces another scoundrel, and this is exactly how Louis de COÛFONTAINE is represented to us throughout the drama.

He marries the one who wants him as the object of her pleasure. He marries this singular figure of a woman, SICHEL, who rejects all these burdens of the law, and especially her own, of the Old Law, of the holy wife, the figure of the woman as far as she is that of patience, the one who finally brings forth her will to embrace the world.

What is going to be born of this? What is going to be born of this, singularly, is the rebirth of that very thing which the drama of Hard Bread showed us was excluded, that is to say, that same desire in its absoluteness that was represented by the figure of LUMÎR. This LUMÎR… a singular name, we must pause at the fact that CLAUDEL, in a little note, tells us to pronounce it “Loum yir”… we must relate this to what CLAUDEL tells us about old TURELURE’s whims of always bringing to each name this little ridiculous modification which makes him call Rachel: SICHEL, which, as the text tells us, means in German “the sickle,” this name being that which in the sky is figured by the crescent of the moon. A singular echo of the figure which ends Hugo’s Ruth et Booz. CLAUDEL continually plays this same game of alteration of names, as if he himself here assumes the function of old TURELURE.

LUMÎR is what we will find again later in the dialogue between the Pope and the two characters ORSO and ORIAN, as the light—the cruel light! This cruel light illuminates for us what the figure of ORIAN represents, for all his faithfulness to the Pope, this cruel light that is in his mouth makes the Pope startle: “The light,” says the Pope, “is not cruel.” But there is no doubt that ORIAN is right when he says so. The poet is with him.

Now, the one who will come to embody the light, obscurely sought without her mother even knowing it, this light sought through patience, lending itself to everything, accepting everything, is PENSÉE. PENSÉE, her daughter, PENSÉE who will become the incarnate object of the desire for this light. And this thought in flesh and blood, this living thought, the poet can only imagine her as blind, and represent her to us as such.

I believe I should pause for a moment. What might the poet wish with this incarnation of the object, the partial object, the object inasmuch as it is here the resurgence, the effect, of the parental constellation: a blind woman? This blind woman will be paraded before our eyes throughout this third play, and in the most moving way. She appears at the masked ball which figures the end of a moment of that Rome on the eve of its capture by the Garibaldians. It is also a kind of ending that is celebrated in this night festival, that of a Polish nobleman who, driven to the end of his solvency, must see the bailiffs enter his property the following day.

This Polish nobleman is also here, for a moment, to remind us, in the form of a figure on a cameo, of a person we have heard about so many times, and who died very sadly. Let us draw a line over her, let us speak of her no more. All the spectators clearly understand that it is the one named LUMÎR, and also this nobleman, all weighted with the nobility and romanticism of martyred Poland, is nevertheless that type of nobleman who always, inexplicably, seems to have a villa to liquidate.

It is in this context that we see the blind PENSÉE walk as if she could see. For her astonishing sensitivity allows her, in a single moment of preliminary visit, through her fine perception of echoes, of approaches, of movements, just by crossing a few steps, to locate the entire structure of a place. If we, the spectators, know that she is blind, for a whole act those with her, the guests at this party, can ignore it, and especially the one on whom her desire has fallen. This character, ORIAN, deserves a word of introduction for those who have not read the play.

ORIAN, doubled by his brother ORSO, bears this thoroughly Claudelian name, which seems, by its sound and that slightly distorted construction, accented in its signifier by a strangeness that is the same as we find in so many characters of Claudelian tragedy, remember Sir Thomas POLLOCK NAGEOIRE, HOMODARMES. It has just as lovely a sound as there is in the text about André BRETON’s armors in Le peu de réalité.

These two characters, ORIAN and ORSO, are at stake:
– ORSO is the good fellow who loves PENSÉE.
– ORIAN, who is not quite a twin, who is the older brother, is the one towards whom PENSÉE has directed her desire. Why towards him, if not because he is unattainable.

For, in truth, for this blind girl, the Claudelian text and myth tell us that it is hardly possible for her to distinguish them by their voice, to the point that, at the end of the drama, ORSO, for a moment, can sustain the illusion of being ORIAN, dead. Clearly she sees something else, so that it is ORIAN’s voice, even when it is ORSO who speaks, that can make her falter.

But let us pause for a moment with this blind girl. What does she mean? Does it not seem—if we look first at what she projects before us—that she is thus protected by a kind of sublime figure of modesty which rests on this: that, being unable to see herself being seen, she seems sheltered from the only gaze that unveils. And I do not think it eccentric to bring in here that dialectic I once showed you around the theme of the so-called exhibitionist and voyeuristic perversions.

When I pointed out to you:
– that they could not be grasped simply by the relationship of one who sees and who shows himself to a simply other partner, object or subject,
– that what is engaged in the fantasy of the exhibitionist as of the voyeur is a third element which implies that in the partner a complicit consciousness [of Φ, wordplay] may arise which receives what is given to be seen,
– that what flourishes in its apparently innocent solitude offers itself to a hidden gaze,
– that thus it is desire itself which supports its function in the fantasy, which veils from the subject his role in the act,
– that the exhibitionist and the voyeur in some way enjoy themselves as seeing and showing, but without knowing what they see and what they show.

For PENSÉE, there she is, who cannot be surprised, so to speak, by the fact that nothing can be shown to her that would subject her to the little other, nor can she be seen without the one who would spy on her, like ACTAEON, being struck with blindness, beginning to go to pieces under the bites of the pack of his own desires.

The mysterious power of the dialogue that occurs between PENSÉE and ORIAN…
ORIAN, whose name differs by just one letter from that of one of the hunters whom DIANA transformed into a constellation…
this mysterious confession with which the dialogue ends: “I am blind,” has, by itself, the force of an “I love you,” by avoiding any awareness in the other that “I love you” has been said, to go straight to placing itself in him as a word.

– Who could say “I am blind” except from where speech creates the night?
– Who, on hearing it, would not feel that depth of night being born within?

Because this is where I want to lead you.
It is to the distinction, to the difference, that exists between the relation of “seeing oneself” and the relation of “hearing oneself.”

Of course it is noticed, and it has long been observed, that it is characteristic of phonation to resonate immediately in the subject’s own ear as it is uttered, but this does not mean that the other, to whom this speech is addressed, has the same place or the same structure as that of visual revelation, precisely because speech itself does not provoke “seeing” and because it is, in itself, blind. One sees oneself being seen—that is why one shies away from it—but one does not hear oneself being heard. That is to say, one does not hear oneself where one hears oneself, that is to say, in one’s head, or more exactly, those who do—there are indeed those who hear themselves being heard and these are the mad, the hallucinated, this is the structure of verbal hallucination—they could only hear themselves being heard in the place of the Other, where one hears the Other return your own message in its inverted form.

What CLAUDEL means with PENSÉE as blind is that it is enough for the soul… since it is the soul in question… to close its eyes to the world… and this is indicated throughout the dialogue of the third play… to be able to be what the world lacks, and the most desirable object in the world.

Psyche [Psyché, wordplay] who can no longer light the lamp, pump, so to speak, draws to herself the being of EROS who is lack. The myth of Poros [Πὀρος] and Penia [Πενία] is reborn here in the form of spiritual blindness, for it is said that PENSÉE here embodies “the figure of the Synagogue” itself, as represented on the portal of the Reims cathedral, with her eyes bandaged.

On the other hand, ORIAN, who is in front of her, is indeed the one whose gift cannot be received precisely because it is overabundance. ORIAN is another form of refusal. If he does not give PENSÉE his love it is, he says, because he owes his gifts elsewhere, to everyone, to the divine work.

What he fails to recognize is precisely what is asked of him in love, it is not his Poros [Πὀρος], his resource, his spiritual wealth, his overabundance, nor even as he puts it: his joy, it is precisely what he does not have. That he is a saint, certainly, but it is quite striking that CLAUDEL shows us here the limits of sainthood. For it is a fact that desire here is stronger than sainthood itself, for it is a fact that ORIAN, the saint, in the dialogue with PENSÉE, falters and yields and loses the match, and to put it plainly, to call things by their name: he does indeed kiss little PENSÉE. And that is what she wants. And throughout the drama and the play she has not lost half a second, not a quarter of a line, to act in this direction, by ways we would not call the shortest, but certainly the straightest, the surest.

Pensée de COÛFONTAINE is truly the rebirth of all those fatal necessities that begin with debauchery, continue with a mortgage drawn on honor, with a misalliance, abjuration, Louis-Philippism—which someone called “the second but worse”—to be reborn there, as before sin, as innocence, but not for all that as nature.

That is why it matters to see on which scene the whole drama culminates. This scene, the last, is where PENSÉE confines herself with her mother who spreads over her her protective wing, and does so because she remains pregnant by the works of one called ORIAN. PENSÉE receives the visit of the brother, ORSO, who comes to bring her the last message from the one who is dead, but which the logic of the play and the whole previous situation have created, since ORIAN’s entire effort has been to get both PENSÉE and ORSO to accept one enormous thing: that they marry.

ORIAN the saint sees no obstacles to his good and brave little brother, for his part, finding his happiness, it is on his level. He is a good man and a courageous one. And moreover, the fellow’s declaration leaves no doubt, he is able to ensure the marriage with a woman who does not love him: you always get by in the end. He is courageous, that is his affair.

He first fought on the left, they told him he was mistaken: he fights on the right. He was with the Garibaldians, he joined the Pope’s Zouaves, he is always there, steady as ever, he’s a reliable guy. Don’t laugh too much at this fool, it’s a trap. And we will see in a moment why and how, for in truth in his dialogue with PENSÉE we no longer think of laughing at him.

What is PENSÉE in this final scene? The sublime object, certainly. The sublime object, since we have already indicated its position last year as substitute for the Thing, you heard in passing, the nature of the Thing is not so far from that of woman, if it were not true that, in any case, when we try to approach this Thing, woman turns out to be something else entirely.

I say the least woman, and in truth CLAUDEL no more than anyone else shows us that he has the final idea of her, far from it. This heroine of CLAUDEL, this woman he concocts for us, is the woman of a certain desire. Still, let us do him justice that elsewhere, in Partage de Midi, CLAUDEL did give us a woman: YSÉ, who is not so bad, she closely resembles what woman is. Here we are in the presence of the object of a desire. And what I want to show you, which is inscribed in her image, is that it is a desire which, at this level of bareness, has nothing left to separate it but castration, but which separates it radically from any natural desire.

In truth, if you look at what happens on stage, it is quite beautiful, but to situate it exactly, I would ask you to remember the anamorphic cylinder—which I actually presented to you here: the tube on this table—that is, the cylinder on which a figure by RUBENS, that of the crucifixion, was projected by means of a kind of formless drawing cleverly inscribed at the base of this cylinder. I made this the image for you of this mechanism of reflection of this fascinating figure, of this beauty raised up as it projects itself at the limit, to keep us from going further, to the heart of the Thing.

If it is the case here that the figure of PENSÉE, and the entire line of this drama, is meant to bring us to this slightly more distant limit, what do we see, if not a figure of a woman divinized to be, still here—this woman—crucified? The gesture is indicated in the text, as it comes back insistently in so many other points of Claudel’s work, from the princess of Tête d’Or to Sygne herself, to YSÉ, to the figure of Doña PROUHÈZE.

What does this figure carry within her? A child, doubtless, but let us not forget what we are told, that for the first time this child within her is coming to life, to move, and this moment is the moment when, she says, she came to take within herself the soul of the one who is dead. How is this capture of the soul represented to us, figured?

It is a true act of vampirism, she closes herself up, so to speak, with the wings of her cloak over the basket of flowers sent by the brother ORSO, these flowers which rise from a soil that the dialogue reveals to us—a macabre detail—contains the eviscerated heart of her lover, ORIAN. This is what, when she rises, she is supposed to have taken back into herself as the symbolic essence, it is this soul which, along with her own, she says, she presses to the lips of this brother who has just pledged himself to her to give a father to the child, while saying he will never be her husband.

And this transmission, this singular realization of this fusion of souls which is that to which the first two quotations I gave you at the beginning of this lecture point, from The Hostage on one hand, from Hard Bread on the other, is indicated to us as the supreme aspiration of love. It is this fusion of souls for which ORSO, who is known to be going to join his brother in death, is the designated bearer, the vehicle, the messenger.

What does this mean? As I said a moment ago, this poor ORSO, who makes us smile even in this function where he ends, as a fake husband, let us not be mistaken, let us not be taken in by his ridiculousness, for the place he occupies is exactly that, in the end, in which we ourselves are called to be held captive here.

It is to our desire, and as a revelation of its structure, that this fantasy is proposed which reveals to us what is this malevolent power which attracts us into woman, and not necessarily, as the poet says, from on high, that this power is third, and that it can only be ours by representing our loss.

There is always in desire some delight in death, but a death that we cannot inflict upon ourselves. Here we find again the four terms which are represented, if I may say so, within us:
– as in the two brothers: a-a’,
– ourselves, the subject S, insofar as we understand nothing of it,
– and the figure of the Other incarnated in this woman.

Between these four elements, all sorts of varieties are possible of this infliction of death, among which it is possible to enumerate all the most perverse forms of desire. Here it is only the most ethical case, insofar as it is the true man, the accomplished man who asserts and maintains himself in his manliness, ORIAN, who pays the price through his death. This reminds us that it is true: he always pays the price in every case, even if from the moral point of view it is more costly for his humanity, if he swallows that price at the level of pleasure.

Thus ends the poet’s design. What he shows us is, finally, after the drama of subjects as pure victims of the λόγος [logos], of language, what desire becomes in it, and for that, he makes this desire visible to us.

The figure of the woman, of that terrible subject who is Pensée de COÛFONTAINE, is the object of desire. She deserves her name: PENSÉE, she is thought upon desire. The love of the other, this love that she expresses, is precisely where, by becoming fixed, she becomes the object of desire.

Such is the topology in which a long journey of the tragedy ends. Like any trial, like any progress in human articulation, it is only after the fact that one perceives what converges in the lines drawn in traditional history and heralds what one day comes to light.

When throughout the tragedy of EURIPIDES we find, as if it were a sort of yoke that wounds him, as a gap that exasperates him, the relationship to desire and more especially to the desire of woman. What is called the misogyny of EURIPIDES is this sort of aberration, this madness that seems to strike all his poetry. We can only grasp and understand it from what it has become, from how it has been elaborated through all the sublimation of the Christian tradition.

These perspectives, these extremes, these points of tearing apart of terms, whose intersection for us necessitates effects with which we have to deal, those of neurosis, inasmuch as in Freudian thought they assert themselves as more original than those of the just mean, than those of the normal, it is necessary that we touch them, that we explore them, that we know their extremes, if we want our action to be situated in a directed way, not captive to such mirages, always within our reach: of “good,” of “mutual aid,” but of what there may be to reveal—even under the darkest forms—in the other whom we have the audacity to accompany in transference.

“Extremes meet,” as someone once said. We must at least for a moment touch them to be able to see what is here my goal: to locate exactly what our place must be at the moment when the subject is on the only path where we must lead him, the one where he must articulate his desire.