Lacan with Parra, or Badiou's weakness

El laberinto no tiene salida.

El Occidente es una gran pirámide
Que termina y empieza en un psiquiatra:
La pirámide está por derrumbarse.

(The maze doesn't have an exit.

The west is a big pyramid

That starts and ends in a psychiatrist:

The pyramid is about to collapse.)

Nicanor Parra, Siegmund Freud

KNOWLEDGE

To begin with: Badiou's thought is not strong enough to cope with Parra and has to keep the impossible just as far as portugal, in Pessoa's heteronyms, which albeit multiple, are finite. Parra's voice desintegrates, contradicts, dance, takes a crap, cries, and gets drunk. But now, why Lacan? Why Badiou? Because the question to ask always is: where X don't go far away enough, what lacks X, where misses the point? And I think the answer is Europe.

If Lacan is the antiphilosopher of the twentieth century, Parra is the antipoet. If the unconscious is structured like a language, Parra speaks that language. Where Pessoa multiplies in an ordered way the voices, the beings, the worlds, Parra dances and strikes everywhere. "Alo Alo? Conste que yo no soy el que habla." (Hello Hello? Let's state that is not me who speaks.) Read Parra is in a way get into a fight against yourself, against the tricks that language makes to itself.

Now, why Lacan and Badiou are so in love with mathematics? I know that the answer is because they are Europeans, but I guess I should argue about that. Parra made physics but understood that that wasn't the way. Why? I think because he lives in Chile. In a way, this text is not about Lacan or Parra, is about me and how I will decide where I will live and for whom I will write, with whom to talk. If history is a football game, latin america is the gallery, looking at the game once in a while, drinking wine.

Lets go into the poem that opens this text: "The maze doesn't have an exit. The Pyramid is about to collapse." The poem is called Siegmund Freud. We already know from Cradles Symphony that one letter in Parra changes everything. Que la mate el auto, que la pise el tren. The secret is unveiled with a letter, in the latter case, with an a. The dispositive in use here is analogous to the one of the famous artifact of 1972, "El mundo es lo que es, y no lo que un hijo de puta llamado Einstein dice que es." (The world is what it is, and not what a son of a bitch called Einstein says it is.) In this case, the poetic subject is an old grumpy man who attributes Einstein the very absolutisms that Einstein theory breaks apart, the same Einstein that told god what to do or not to do. In the poem Siegmund Freud, the poetic subject tells us about the psychiatrist who relates everything with the phallus. Cars are phallic symbols, pants are phallic symbols, Mao Tse-Tung es un símbolo fálico. In his misreading of Siegmund, the artist find his truth: everything is related to the sexual act, but the act in itself.

But Lacan. Otherwise the title just would be there to be a first hit in google. Lacan says, in the english translation of encore: "My sole presence -at least I dare believe it- my sole presence in my discourse, my sole presence is my stupidity. I should know that I have better things to do than to be here (être là)." To what the translator adds a note: Être-là is the French for Dasein. So Lacan has better things to do than Dasein. Me too. And what could be that? Antipoetry.

Now Badiou: "Proposition 1: The All has no Being. Or: the concept of the universe is inconsistent." Parra at least is funnier: "Porque a mi modo de ver, el cielo se esta callendo a pedazos." (Because from my point of view, the heaven is falling in pieces.) I imagine, cause I cannot yet explain it with words, Badiou's way of thinking, let's say the one he applies in Wittgenstein, to Parra's work. "There are seven points on Parra's poetry: the first is related to the absence of a single voice in the poems. The second has to do with the use of misprints. The third, is the articulation of contradictions though the syntactic web of his work." And so on. The inability of grasp Parra in this way is self evident, as he would write: "Inmune a la argumentacion logica, vacunado contra toda forma de religion." (Immune to logic argumentation, vaccinated against every kind of religion.)

The question, then, remains the same: where to locate our parcel? It is not possible in Europe, neither in Latin America.

I have better things to do than Dasein. A mysterious sentence from wherever you look at it.

Better things to do than Dasein. As if Heidegger had better things to do than thinking. Fuck maybe. And then latter: "tu ne sauras jamais combien je t'ai aimé - with é instead of ée." Then Lacan puts the accent on the fact that he loves a man, or a woman without sex, or that when you love sex does not matter, and we almost don't realize what a truism he's telling us. You'll never know how much I loved you. Please, for real? I would say, you Lacan, don't have anything better to do than Dasein.

Solo De Piano

Ya que la vida del hombre no es sino una acción a distancia,
Un poco de espuma que brilla en el interior de un vaso;
Ya que los árboles no son sino muebles que se agitan:
No son sino sillas y mesas en movimiento perpetuo;
Ya que nosotros mismos no somos más que seres
(Como el dios mismo no es otra cosa que dios)
Ya que no hablamos para ser escuchados
Sino que para que los demás hablen
Y el eco es anterior a las voces que lo producen,
Ya que ni siquiera tenemos el consuelo de un caos
En el jardín que bosteza y que se llena de aire,
Un rompecabezas que es preciso resolver antes de morir
Para poder resucitar después tranquilamente
Cuando se ha usado en exceso de la mujer;
Ya que también existe un cielo en el infierno,
Dejad que yo también haga algunas cosas:

Yo quiero hacer un ruido con los pies
Y quiero que mi alma encuentre su cuerpo.

(Piano Solo

Since man's life is nothing but a bit of action at a distance,
A bit of foam shining inside a glass;
Since trees are nothing but moving trees;
Nothing but chairs and tables in perpetual motion;
Since we ourselves are nothing but beings
(As the godhead itself is nothing but God);
Now that we do not speak solely to be heard
But so that others may speak
And the echo precede the voice that produces it;
Since we do not even have the consolation of a chaos
In the garden that yawns and fills with air,
A puzzle that we must solve before our death
So that we may nonchalantly resuscitate later on
When we have led woman to excess;
Since there is also a heaven in hell,
Permit me to propose a few things

I wish to make a noise with my feet
I want my soul to find its proper body.

translated by William Carlos Williams)

DEATH

"Solo la muerte dice la verdad." Only death says the truth. A whore called reality. Again then, the subconcious has the structure of a language. I mean is not a language, but his, or rather her, structure is the one of a language. Yesterday I saw for the first time Vertigo. In a kind of homework after reading around 1000 pages of Zizek. Art as experience. To have an experience.

But let's talk about death, about love. She sent me a mail once, with Hegel on it. "Liebe heißt überhaupt das Bewusstsein meiner Einheit mit einem anderen, sodass ich für mich nicht isoliert bin, sondern mein Selbstbewusstsein nur als Aufgebung meines Fürsichseins gewinne und durch das Mich-Wissen, als der Einheit meiner mit dem anderen und des anderen mit mir." Love as consciousness. I strongly disagree. But death. I cannot have consciousness of death, and nevertheless is there, at the cross of the river. I remember now this song, by a german composer whose name I already forgot long ago: it is a mumble, called "of the crossing of the river". The river that takes us to death, life. A mumble that moved me in a way that few things have done since.

To not die. To not to kill myself. Write. Live. When life means the creation of a new beauty. As I said, this was supposed to be about Badiou and Parra, but I need to get the counts right with myself first, so please forgive me. Death enters here as the negative cause of a writing, of a living. Since I wrote, I'm alive, said Lihn. Because I wrote, I almost die, said Bolaño. Et moi? We can read Wittgenstein, and I should insist that the proper way to read him is been 18 and feeling that your life is already over, that you already have seen everything, that the chair est triste et t'a lu tout le livres. And not once but twice.

Here I must to do a reflexive comment. How are we supposed to read these texts? Why are the quotes all around? Is it just a postmodern style or really the author pretends to say something quoting like a mad? Of course the Author wants to say something: the role of the poet is to give a cosmology. In Zizekean, to create a new master signifier, maybe with capital letters, but for me they have to be umbrellas so I write it like that. The problem being that language is already wasted, the only way to show what I want is by metonym. In other words, the general title over which these texts can be grouped should be "Reading Exercises". Let's take again the case of love. Are you serious about this shit of the two looking to a third point? Yes, I am. I believe that in the same way that an art that is not revolutionary (for the lack of a better word, and yes, I think of Badiou's theses here) is ideological, and only reproduces what is already present in the capitalistic system. So all this bullshit of I enjoy what life gives me day by day, I want love to be the most important thing in my life, etcetera etcetera, are just enacting the imperative of society. To take Parra once again: "Hay que cambiarlo todo de raiz. En serio señor profesor? En serio & en broma." (We must change everything from the root. Really mister teacher? For real & joke. -The wordplay here is not translatable.) Maybe here we can risk a Derridarean turn and say that since we start to live, to live in another way, we must love in another way, and that, and this is our work hypothesis, can be achieved by a work of re-reading of reality. This re-reading searches for the creation of a new beauty. Here we maybe should recall the example of the physics student, who after her course on continuum mechanics, water never became the same again: the way it flows, her waves, the sound when you are in it. A new beauty appears that is only due to the fact that a new re-reading of reality is done.

SEX

In letters from a poet that sleeps on a chair, Parra tells us: "Fornicar es un acto literario." (to fornicate is a literary act). For Lacan; "faire l'amour, as the very expression indicates, is poetry." What does this imply? If we look at one of the Artefactos from "Obras Publicas" (Public Works), where the heart is drawn without umbrella between the text "what would you do to a naked woman? Dress her, so she doesn't catch a cold", we don't go anywhere. At least I don't.

Again.

On the one hand, literature, on the other hand, poetry. Poetry is part of literature. Love making is a part of fucking. A literary act is not necessarily a poem, a text. It has to do with the fact that it is inscribed on a discourse, I think. An act is literary when it talks back with the canonical tree, with history, with other texts. Love poetry. From the dictionary: "Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", a "making"). Noun. Literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature: he is chiefly famous for his love poetry." Act is just action, work has a purpose. Does this imply that I understand that love making for Lacan has a purpose while for Parra it is done for the sake of it? "Fuck more and love less," as TV on the Radio likes to say. Back to the artefact: the subject doesn't see any purpose in a naked woman, he just sees the lack of clothes that, considering the temperature, can give her a cold. How empathic is he. Back to the words: Fornicate is not Fuck. Fornicate is the sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other, what reminds us, "amor amor amor amor y x favor que no se formen parejas en la pareja hay solo derrota." (love love love love and please don't form couples in the couple there is only defeat). The use of distinctive style and rhythm, what makes sexual intercourse, that which runs in between man and woman, poetry. We cannot here avoid remembering Bolaño's Savage Detectives and his literary classification of poets in mainly fagots and pussies. Walt Whitman is a fagot, while Neruda is a pussy. Pablo de Rokha had lightnings of queerness that could have made Lacan goes crazy. But no femme. Until the end. When someone, someone whose voice is not recognized asks (someone that's, you realize, you, asking all the time while reading): "And Cesarea Tinajero?" "Cesarea Tinajero is the horror."

"But there is a world between poetry and the act." There is a world. Between the act and poetry, a world is. But as Zizek would say, "...for a true philosopher, there are more interesting things in the world than sex." And for Lacan, there are better things to do than Dasein. And for me? This is just a way to get her in my bed, to produce the love encounter that already has being. To not to die. Because I cannot do otherwise. I stand here, waiting. I stand here, trying to make up for the lack of a word, of a world I wanted to say. In order to develop my own style and rhythm. A style and rhythm that envelopes the silence.

Every word asks for an answer, even in the form of silence. And silence has always an owner, as the silence of which Alfredo Jaar talks about: "I will never forget his silence. The silence of Nduwayezu." The world was made in darkness. But darkness is not silent. It seems to be the light, the one that bears the weight of silence, the sound of silence. And then, the seventh day, there was light. And then, a few years later, matter became transparent, and there was light. It starts with Chaos, in darkness. The world. The world that is between the act and poetry.

In a way we could say that Badiou lives in the naturals while Parra inhabits the reals. Here we should remember the example Badiou uses in regard to the "il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel": when you divide 8 by 4, the result is still in the naturals. While if you look for the rapport between 7 and 3, the result is not part of the naturals, of the world, donc, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. Parra says it clearly, "la matematica aburre, pero nos da de comer. En cambio la poesia, se escribe para vivir" (mathematics is boring, but we make a living with it. On the other hand, poetry is written to live.) And it's not the same to write to live than to write to not to die.

That is the subtle difference between a physicist and a mathematician. Physicists know that they don't know, and they live with that. I don't know and I don't care, look how beautiful this wave is. Look at the sand that flows between my fingers, but if I walk on the beach, she can support me. Live in the naturals, subjected to the rule of Cantor and Gödel, two of the greatest worthless thinkers ever.

And there we are: "La palabra dios es una interjeccion, da lo mismo que exista o que no exista." (the word god is an interjection, it gives the same whether it exists or not). I would even say that it is here where all the work of Parra can be condensed. So why is it important for Badiou that god, by the name of mathematics, exists? I cannot answer that. That would be equivalent to answer what it means to be European, and time is needed to find that out. And here we could jump to Duchamp. In one of Parra's artefacts, a picture of the Mona Lisa is turned upside down. Below it, the inscription "no need for a painted mustache, 180 degree turn is enough."

The boundaries are blurry. In Parra, La femme n'existe pas. Of course it does. But it is not a femme, it is an angelorum. Or better: The impossible woman, the woman who walks, the woman who doesn't want to get naked, the one who only sleeps with her dog. All these immortal walkirias will end up making me crazy. Bien sur, la femme n'existe pas, but the secretary, the teacher, they exist and they will make me crazy.

CODA

In the same way that there is no sexual relation, there is no la femme. There are women. And I've made love with some of them. And language goes until where love starts, builds the trail for it. Builds what is not. Because there, there is silence. There is love.

There is love.

Photo by Marco Avetta