Translation by me, with the invaluable help of Nico, Willy and Fela.
One is that which one desires.
But we have no idea of what is desired. None of us chose this desire — whose composition we don’t know, although we suffer it as the most singular trait of our “I” — to inhabit us. It is “written”. It precedes us. We enter in its field by the way of language.
Even before birth we are destined, for better or for worse, to become one day its steward.
Hence the problem.
Because the desire that structures us is not ours. It is, through language, desire of the Other, desire of a desiring Other.
So, beings of desire, our destiny is accessible only to the lack-of-being.
When I was five, I used to paint. At fourteen, I dreamed of growing old. Being old was going to be very pleasant for me. The passing of each day would bring me closer to total mastery, that enigmatic instant in which the creators of genius finally access the intensity of pure colour to penetrate, on the edge of death, the absolute heart of its vibration.
When I was twenty-five, one evening in November, between the turmoil of phone calls, the staccato from the Remington and cigarettes’ mist, by a fulminating separation, I suddenly became a self-spectator and I “saw” myself with the cigarette on my lips, an appalling mountain of papers on my desk and a telephone at each ear in order to hear, without listening, the persons whose identities I ignored. A question drilled me: “Where was I?”
In a news paper office. To do what? The so-called “chroniques parisiennes.”
What a nonsense, I was a painter. What the heck was going on?
The unconscious doesn’t write itself in a straight line.
My father, to enrich what he used to call my “cultural background” (that which prevents the advance when one moves), dreamed for me a universal knowledge.
One morning, he told me this weird sentence:
“Maybe you should learn stenography.”
“Why? I’m a painter.”
“One never knows. If one day you want to become a journalist...”
Our conversation only lasted ten seconds. I forgot it completely. Fifteen years later it came back to me when the secret desire of my father, through me — he becoming an other as well — was already accomplished.
This was the fatum of the Greeks, to live in the reality of the Other’s unconscious. His discourse. In Delfos, between men and gods, in the name of Apollos, the Phytia was a mere transmitter. But the oracles she transmitted, supposedly after her stay in Olympus, were no more than a word coming back to its emitter. Since then my trajectory became so foreseeable that when I was seventeen I obtained my first pay publishing drawings in a news paper. In such a way it was elaborated the provisional synthesis of two antinomic desires, painting and journalism: by way of compromise, drawing + news papers.
But ruptures are more exigent.
To comply with my unconscious aims, soon I ended up making Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet say the contrary of what they actually said. The young poet asks: “How to be sure that I am a poet?” Reply: “If you are deprived of poetry, will you die?” “No.” “Then — Rilke concludes — you do not deserve to be a poet.”
Exactly what I believed to have read. I swear for my life, I transferred the dialog into a vital interrogation: “If you are deprived of painting, will you die?
Ashamed, I gave the same answer: no.
And like that, I decreed myself not worthy of being a painter: my colours then became words.
My brushes a Smith Corona.
Twenty years later I read again the Letters: no traces of what I assumed to have found. In the epistolary fiction of Rilke — answers to imagined questions — I imagined, for my own use, a dialogue which does not exist. Error’s function in the subconscious field: to live the discourse of the Other, I went as far as to invent a fake cause to conceal my own aspirations.
Three weeks after my first visit to rue de Lillle, I met the Fatty in the swimming pool. I was so absorbed with myself that I almost forgot about his existence. Since the day he remitted me to the trio Clavreul-Perrier-Lacan, he had had no news from me.
“Where were you?”
“I started an analysis.”
“With whom?”
“With Lacan.”
He looked at me incredulously.
“Has he accepted you?”
“What’s extraordinary about that?”
He shook his head perplexedly.
“I thought he didn’t accept people anymore.”
“You have some nerve! Who gave me his phone number?”
His amazement amazed me. Not because I thought I had received a favor — the price of the sessions certainly had to do with the matter — but because it seemed normal to me that a practitioner accepted any patient. I had not yet heard of Lacan’s reputation, neither that his time was not extensible. I was eager to tell the Fatty about our first sessions.
Immediately I noticed his reluctance. Why did he try to deviate the conversation? Suddenly, when because of him I was in the heart of the matter, he feigned disinterest. Without even giving me time to ask for a reason, arguing an urgent meeting, he mumbled a few excuses and left.
That Monday, I saw Lacan again and, in my view, there was a subtle change in his attitude. I was not able to define what it was at that moment. In fact, I didn’t want to inquire further. Lacan was always friendly, attentive, warm. Maybe his silences were a bit longer? Indifferently, they transformed our dialogue into a monologue: I talked. Intoxicated by my own words, I redoubled their flow to avoid any interruption.
At that time, I still hadn’t learned to listen.
Later, I was going to beg for a wink of acceptance, a grimace of disapproval.
It is nevertheless remarkable, that despite me being too busy hearing myself to be able to listen to my own words, certain of his interventions were engraved in my memory. There are a few studies on the parrots’ brain. It’s only known that they can repeat just the signifier, in other words, that they can “repeat” the sounds. I shared with them their acoustic gift. But, as them, I did not have the privilege of, starting from sounds, having access to the signifier, that is, to its meaning [sense].
It was hardly my tenth session when Lacan afforded himself a phrase out of my reach, precisely because he knew that I was not able to understand it. As usual, I should have been in some big metaphysical drift when I sharply fell into a question where the statement addressed more me than him, and made me silent once I posed it:
“Does the soul exist?”
At best, I was waiting for a smile.
Instead I deserved a reply:
“The psyche, is the fracture, and that fracture, the tribute we pay because we are speaking beings.”
I had not yet arrived to the algorithms, nor to the metonymy, nor to the mathemes — Algorithms? Mathemes? Metonymy? — but I confusedly perceived that behind this formulation an enigma was hidden.
Sadly, I lacked the clues to decipher it.
Of which fracture was he talking? What relation between a tribute and language? And how come the notion of “a being of language” implied as a corollary the notion of “tribute”?
A tribute to pay what? Which debt? Which guilt?
I pondered the sentence suspiciously, without making special efforts to retain it.
If I can cite it after so long, it is maybe because it foreboded the density of sense that certainly would be revealed to me when I would be able to decipher it — so faith binds us to the one who is “supposed to know”.
In fact, it contained various main themes of Lacanian elaboration: the line that forever separates signifier and significant; the relation of that cleavage to the unconscious “structured as a language”; spliting of the subject already divided in search of a transcendence which makes him erect, against all odds, the statues of his gods and invent a soul for himself.
One gladly refrains from evoking one’s own faults.
But how to silence the “innocence” of my debut concerning the analysis?
The alphabet has twenty-six letters. Yet to know it, it’s necessary not to ignore the existence of the alphabet itself.
Without knowing, I perceived the first effects in the form of an immense shadow, unknown, the shadow of the letter “A”.
It’s like that. Why not say it?
Thereafter I discovered that every displacement on a field of knowledge implies as its preamble a difficult confession of its flaws.
“See you tomorrow”, said Lacan.
“I cannot”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I have no money”, I added.
“See you tomorrow”, he repeated, opening me the door.
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