byAmandine Jayet
“We, later civilisations now know we are mortal. We have long heard of whole worlds that have disappeared, whole empires gone down with all their men and their machines; gone down into the unexeplorable depths of the centuries alongside the gods and their laws [---].
But, these wrecks had nothing to do with us. And, we now see that the abyss of history is large enough for all of us. We feel that a civilisation has the same fragility as a life.” (Paul Valery : The Crisis of Spirit; The Pleiade, 1919).
Why war? Einstein asks Freud this question who discovered the Other scene, who has shown us that man is more intent on running after his losses rather than building brick by brick something to hold on to for his existence. This observation had already been made clear in 1915 – in a Europe torn by war. In his response to Einstein, Freud proves once again to be of supreme importance, extraordinary, in looking at the war not as a moraliser to cut into the ideology of good and evil or to discuss the political motives of the generalised horrors of the killings of the First World War. In looking at war straight in the eye as the madness that it is he is, interested in the specificity of being, because of the fact that being links man with the death drive no matter to which camp he belongs. War is therefore a question about how to live together, an open political question of the relationship between man and woman, of becoming sexed through and in the love relation. This theme will lead us to a question: on what abyss is aggressivity, the power of desire to fight, to destroy, founded?
Das Ding
How do we distinguish the life drive from the death drive? Especially in its most subtle combinations, at the exact place to which the subject aspires, that is to say incestuous chaos, an inaccessible place for the subject, which is also the compost of his desire, a part which can definitely lead him to it. Here it seems to me is the paradox of desire. We have to distrust all abrupt change which is often only the sign of an inexorable deja’ vu, felt, known, which we force ourselves to refind. A place of suffering, thrown into failure, met with in the primitive experience with the helpful other, with whom the potential subject is anxious; without defence.
Will the child yield, weary of war, to an incestuous wave which he nearly had to bury with love, as a smothered object? Or will he take out arms to occupy a place of object from which he cannot deliver himself except by killing this love, this subjugated thing which he was himself? Each according to his own, according to the construction of his sex.
He will take his Excalibur, symbol of the father who names him son and who tempers the hole of the drive. So as not to stay dumb. In danger of death. To stamp The Thing on the solid ground of the country of the Name of his father. And, from the trace left by the Thing, cut by the sword, starts again with an object of substitution with regard to his desire, which is objet (petit) a.
It’s the Real which has always been the source of malaise in Civilisation, as Freud located it, but which has existed forever. Let us remember that Neandeteral man has not disappeared because he wasn’t as war hungry as homo sapiens. The little girl organises her signifiers in a declension of the grammar of her drive, to create a knowledge and why not with a rose perfume on the organisational principle of the mother’s desire; this intolerable, plausible look-alike from all that is different, especially with regard to the fantasmatic framing of the hysterical mother on the femininity of her daughter. To kill what has been loved in order to separate from it, to become a subject emerging from the first Other, to differentiate from him, is the issue of the bar posed by the word, for the girl, as for the boy. This is doubled in the boy’s case with a hatred of the father, who could make him leave this first rapport with the Other.
In Drives and their Vicissitudes Freud says :
“Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli” (P. 139, Vol. 14).
It’s therefore through hate that the phallus changes course and material, marking the passage from an incestuous lover, mother, to a loved mother taken by the father. Something which is not done sometimes, without a disagreement with the analyst.
This reaction inevitably follows from a time of distress, where the infant thinks of dying, the day his ideal of what he believed he was for the other is buried. A mourning which he will relive at adolescence. Is this not the awareness of an impossible; of an unsurpassable limit? The Name of the Father is also the apprenticeship of finitude, the fact of being touched by the signifier and therefore not to believe oneself immortal. This confronts him with an eternal and unchangeable void. What destiny for the pain of separation, from the pain of the gap, from what has always been there?
Is it not a destiny of omission of suffering? A destiny of unsatisfied, whining? A destiny of self-accusation as in melancholy, where the object as a source of persecution is introjected at the deepest level of oneself - asking for death? A destiny of hateful paranoia, blinding the structure of normality in the mirror of misrecognition but which sinks in the projection of the object of persecution on the culprit – finally found out demanding him to be put to death. His own therefore. It takes time, but how much time? To go through this war against oneself so that the extraordinary level of jouissance in helping misrecognition may be named.
We can link this with narcissism with alterity but also with one’s fellow, one’s similar, which provokes the desire to efface the other. Was the first world war not a family war between 3 German cousins, George V, the king of England, Nicolas II the Tsar of Russia and William II the German Emperor?
The Psychical State in War in a Couple
War therefore takes its seat in the psychical state. If it is a structural element of the human condition to deliver from incest, which demands the death of the subject, how does one at the very least avoid enjoying ones hatred, enjoying that which menaces him? In other words, how to avoid retracing our steps in the marks of first aggressivity, every time desire approaches too close, reactivating the burning of Das Ding? Is it not a radical rejection in a form of a kind of repetition, to respond to a declaration of love by an allergy, where the ills, the affects, which are at play could only be the repetition of a prehistory, a morbid jouissance, where the loved one is put precisely in the situation of replaying that which could not be symbolised?
Is the love of war between the sexes irresistible? How does a rerouting of opposition, of aggression and the wish to destroy to which the subject is condemned at the very core of his own person but also turned towards the other sex – how could it be possible before this implementation, in the Real as madness – yet without an apparent causality? How do we avoid war?
The phallus is first, in the relationship in the writing of the word. To each one his own style – sexed. Our first wound, unfathomable, between a man and a woman of our distress as an infant, linked to the vertiginous hiatus between the word and the Thing, never stops to win over and over the face of the scene in the torment of the impossible of the meeting between the sexes. Let us not forget that love can be war in an irresistible refrain “Even war is daily” Marguerite Duras tells us in her novel Whole Days in the Trees.
The faces disfigured by the war
The totalitarian system of the love ideal
To speak about the hell of the ideal I’m going to use a painting of Hyacinth Collin of Vermont – in the museum at Grenoble entitled Roger arriving in the Alcine Island. This painting illustrates what is not shown in his passion and yet will come back in a sensational way. Roger, a valorous knight travels the world on the back of his horse, in search of his fiancée. When he arrives on the island all that he sees seems to him to be marvellous – the palace, the music, the flowers. In allowing himself fall prey to an hallucination brought on by a woman, Alcine, the obscure face of a witch, he allows himself to turn away from his route, bewitched, he left his sword – contrary to the little boy mentioned earlier, his shield, his suit of armour carried courageously until now. He forgot his fiancée, his memories, his marks inscribed in the symbolic Other. He is happy to be treated as a king, he believes in it – he believes it, so that the brave knight, Roger is guided, driven, treated without regard, as the pure object of jouissance and at the whim of Alcine. He enters into a real totalitarian system as the history of the 20th century shows. The bar of language posed by the Other is lifted, leaving him prey to an ideal which has no other name except hell. A beautiful fixed image, may pass through the smallest possible door in the trap she weaves. As Freud writes in why War? “When we read of the atrocities of the past, it sometimes seen as though the idealistic motives served only as an excuse for the destructive appetites” (P. 210, Vol. 22)
The knights story ends better. He refinds his memories thanks to a magic ring of his fiancée, a symbolic token, which wakes him up from his dream. He was lost in this idyllic relationship with all the little refound objects, his body lost. The headlace of flowers, soft with colours with an exquisite smell, was only the greyness of Chrysanthemums. Behind this primary bewitchment is there not a masochistic return, a precipitation on the accomplishment of a frisson of the body, the phantasy of a life which confounds itself with death?
Let us take another example of a love what would not be included in the logic of desire. A woman could be touched, valorised, even electrified by another woman or a man and vice versa, by what he or she really lacks. The loved object would be a weakened object, sad, fragile, lacking a phallic support. But, this love could hide a certain ambiguity by turning it around and turning it into hate. In this passage from what provoked love, this adored privation, a being could suddenly surge up in this place of a real lack. This objectivisation will now find itself detested, abhorred. With this will to destruction going as far as murder sometimes, in order to make absent from the field of reality this being who should not be found there. With regard to the logic proper to desire, this is posed on a little trait of being which hides this object cause of desire and which is ready to attract to the horizon a burst of light. An inaccessible aim because it cannot be caught. We shall come back to this.
The War in the Trenches
It’s in fact infantile distresses which can take, through repetition, a hateful turn. Freud underlines how much the deep reproaches of a woman with regard to her husband is a replaying of that towards the mother in the past; the man will achieve complex feelings which go from hatred to the most intense demand for love from he who represents authority.
Under the noise of bombs they can bury themselves in the trenches deeper and deeper, enclosed by the signified which wants to gain ground on the other one, thereby undoing the evocative function of a lack by the signifier “To die for ideas” the stupid monstrosity of conjugal war is at the place of a refusal of alterity. All hatred is therefore hatred of the other, a death wish projected on to him, which everyone feels with regard to he who has in him a radical otherness and with whom he is unable to make a pact. This hatred can be put into action, which aims at the destruction of the other, of oneself.
In these three examples of the relationship between man and woman, what factor starts up the war machine? There is no longer any measure, the phallus no longer makes a limit through the effect of primary repression. Difference is erased in a unisex which masks the polymorphism demanded by the drives where the object cannot absent itself. It should always be present in reality. Because it lacks in the Real, it becomes a witness to a desexualised Real.
Change of Mind
The psychoanalyst does not respond to the demand for satisfaction, so as not to fix the subject like a statute of a victim of the other, but prefers to question him with regard to his psychical complex movements. Because hatred is not the opposite or the contrary of love. They do not touch the same registers of the word. Hatred does not need symbolic love. On the other hand, is symbolic love not fabricated without hatred? Hate does not like words. It is against desire, against the symbolic. It holds with its object a frozen relationship which cannot be made absent until death. Love, in its movement of words, is alive. A symbolic love, linked to the two other dimensions of the word brings us to the highest human experience. Hatred, necessarily confronted with the Real, is perilous. It is only hatred of the cut. It aims to make a being appear to rise up so as to be able to better imprison it, oppress it within its failure, pin it together in an insult towards which the subject may find a masochistic way of momentarily identifying with it as refuse.
Love, attached through the lives of the desire of the Other appeals to the subject, at this point where he misrecognises himself, to be able to take this void into account, to there build a place, “A nothing makes us speak” Lacan tells us. Love dresses the want in being, its mystery, its sacred pact with a beauty which makes it live. “The I is not a being, it’s supposed by the one who speaks. He who speaks has only solitude” as Lacan says. (Lacan. Encore 15th May 1973, P. 109 Seuil). There is no need in general to put a division in the Other to make subjective division live!
Lack comes after being. Hatred is therefore first. The sexed “I” is a symbolic construction, which requires a lot of patience. Here is the place of culture, to take account of this negativity which the signifier brings, which demands us to be patient.
Freud tells us that “An unpleasant picture comes to one’s mind of mills that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their flour.” (Why War P?)
We may add that contemporary man would prefer to reverse his symbolic debt by preferring to pay it to the other.
The most unquestionable true love is transference love, which is brave. It helps us to have other loves. Especially voracious love which stays enclosed in the mouth of teeth, demanding in a drowning repetitive way, the impossible guarantee of love.
To speak about this love helps one to grow up, beyond its real origin, to be able to live beyond the ego refound in the other, (hainamoré).
These two loves, demanded, linked to the drive and with a mirror effect, pass, erase themselves, pass away, do not count in a life. Whereas true love, that which counts, is inscribed in what escapes, through that which is unobtainable, that which radically lacks and is plotted, at the level of the signifier. This lack, which I will go looking for in the Other, which attaches me to him, makes me love him in an extreme way with a symbolic power.
Hatred is first, whereas our love is a signifying construction, after the fact of humanisation. Culture is only a world of words. The distance which the signifier imposes in its peremptory boundaries, allows the new, creation, the return of a reviled being, which we had been for the Other, because of desire. This has been sewn by the Real, and because of that desexualised. This changes our lives forever.
Let us continue with two Freudian breakthroughs on the unconscious.
Chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams makes us aware of so many contradictions. Freud writes: “Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations, just as though there were no contradiction between them” (Freud, S. E., Vol. 5, P.596).
The other breakthrough is from Thoughts on War and Death. Freud writes: “With the exception of only a very few situations there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love – relations a small portion of hostility, which can excite an unconscious death wish” (Freud, S. E., Vol. 14, P. 298).
Life, according to the chance of words in their movement of love and hate can succeed at a lively speed by surging up unexpectedly. At worse, they can rip us apart or at best bring us closer together. We make our destiny with them, because it’s we who twist them as such in the fragility of our metaphors.
Let us remember The Rat Man and his attempt at cancelling out the Real which hurt him in a hateful way and which he singularly displaced, in a metonymical way on the stone, raised it, then left it in the middle of the road, thinking that, in a few hours, the car of the lady, in passing this way could have an accident. Freud says: “All through his life moreover he was unmistakably victim to a conflict between love and hatred in regard both to his lady and his father” (Freud, S. E. Vol. 10, P. 237).
The hatred for the father, repressed, makes at the same time the refined distinction of this neurosis. But in this obsessional hostility, the difficulty in accepting his own hostile feelings about the other, appeared with an unexpected violence; not only under the whips of denial but which furthermore would not be accepted as something subjective by the one who experiences it. Such that probably, in its place, hatred prevails, which seeks to expel the other, the carrier of the dimension of difference. He will pay the price – through the atrocity of his obsessions.
There is a corresponding refusal to know something about this, which is proportionate to the intensity of the degree of hatred engaged in, reinforced by a moralising guilt in not being able to love one’s neighbour. An analysis of hatred is the cornerstone of an advance in the treatment.
But, this, death drive concerns all of us, because it’s at work in all of us.
The unveiling of this death drive during a treatment, this point of truth could perhaps make this less virulent in our destructive masochism, which is highly erotic, with regard to our relationship to others.
How do we take into account the unknown of the unconscious as a condition for the pacification of a good number of human relations? – just how far do we go?
It’s everyone’s responsibility. As Freud tells us “most preferences (of men) proceed from the same object which they most abhor” (Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. 14, P. 150).
This division of the subject is fragile contrary to the ego, which is ridiculously coherent and stable. But, it’s this division which can lead, in its fecundity with the desire to live. A real change, by the grace of humour and lightness.
To end, if the question of Why War? has not been taken into account in my work, it paradoxically permits the recognition of our gap, an acceptance of the Law of speech as a superior Law which faces us with an unsettling dissonance. From what makes alterity for us, otherwise, from what returns from the Other and about which we know nothing and will never know anything, if we are happy to try and let it disappear. The feeling of hatred, put at the centre of psychoanalytic exploration, allows that for which for a woman implies the way in which the other sex will include her.
This is a difficult task made all the more so because the support from the social discourse is impossible and it prefers war to psychoanalysis. War to Eros.
