by Elsa Duverneuil
My eyes go as far as they can see. Beyond that, my body falls.
Digging underground tunnels and running fast, dodging the bombs. Once the war is over, it will be time for her to accept to return to the surface. There to the field of ruins, where the only thing that grows now is that which needs nothing to survive. The world is built on the most lifeless of foundations: it rises from the ashes of what is closest to death. Run fast if you want life to hold you tightly in its grasp. Scratches and welts, the words of your skin, the words from what you said all remained there. But you know how to pass under them, and over them.
I lay down to sleep on the rim of your eyes.
Ruins
War is inscribed in human history; it’s an intrinsic part of our nature and heritage. Each time it strikes it acts as a watershed to drain us of our acts of cruel violence, brutality and savagery. We are dehumanized by war to an unspeakable and indescribable degree, in a way that’s so close to when the Thing hasn’t yet been integrated into the Symbolic. And yet this place of horror that is the Thing, the very definition of unbearable in that it escapes all representation, is also where our humanity lies. That horrific and unbearable absence of representation is part of our human make-up, whether we’d like to admit it or not. And is this not what makes it impossible for us to identify with the ‘little other’, whereby we no longer recognize that it’s a fellow being facing us on the battlefield?
There are wars over borders and territory, civil wars, religious wars, warring couples and gender wars. It’s all about getting the war prize, grabbing it from the hands of the other side. But when you strip it down, is this notion of owning, attacking or defending territory a question of cruelty or savagery? Cruelty and savagery don’t need war to express themselves, and yet they’re an intrinsic part of warfare. War allows the destructive drive to run riot, unleashing the death drive. When the death drive is disconnected from the life drive, to which it’s attached in the subjective construction of the speaking being, its aim becomes absolute negativity by destroying the other, destroying our fellow beings, our neighbours, and specifically, that part within us all that is the most intimate but also the most radically foreign to us: the structural hole.
Freud and Einstein
Freud accepted Einstein’s invitation to begin a correspondence, which amounted to only two letters, published under the title Why War?, sent 17 years after he wrote his two essays in 1915 named “Thought for the Times on War and Death”. A tormented Freud expressed his disillusionment at the time with the following words: “People commit acts of cruelty, betrayal, treachery and barbarity despite their education and civilized environment[…] Psychoanalytical research shows that the very deepest essence of human nature is made up of instinctive drives which are elemental and aimed at satisfying certain primal needs. These selfish and cruel impulses count as primitive drives.”1Freud goes on to introduce the notion of our capacity as human beings for regression, for going backwards. By the late twenties, that repetition, that regression he refers to becomes the death drive. He also adds that people’s lack of judgment can only be explained by the close correlation between intelligence and one’s emotional life.
“The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ confirms to us that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose urge to kill was in their blood, as it is still perhaps in ours.”2
At the end of Why War?, Freud answers Einstein regarding the question of hate and destruction being active components operating within humans. “There are only two kinds of human drives: on the one hand those that seek to preserve and unify, what we call erotic or sexual drives […] and on the other hand those that seek to destroy and kill, called the aggressive or destructive drives. These two instincts are always connected. Human actions are a combination of Eros and destruction.”3
A journey back into prehistoric times
Melanie Klein took Freud’s theories and developed them even further by going back upstream to an even earlier and more primal stage where the drives have not yet been intertwined together, before the body is engaged in identifying with the mirror, the process that gives the body its sense of unity. That unity, which admittedly can be fragile depending on the subject, stems from what Lacan calls consistency. Melanie Klein was the one to discover and name the early Oedipal complex, drawing on Freud’s work, which Lacan would later formalize with the concept of the mirror stage, thus tracing the watershed moment from the body as fragmented, dissembled parts, to becoming a unified whole thanks to the image and in the words of the Other. But it’s an image that we need to let go of to turn towards the other speaking to us. It’s an image that I will identify with, and yet, it’s the image of the other. This passage marks a highly complex phase, and one that enables an infans between 6 and 12 months old, on the threshold of speech, to experience his initial loss.
Before the image dawns, there’s a magma of independent drives: a hot, bubbling pulsating mass racing through the body. Every orifice is busy looking after its own interests. All the body functions are working with all the organs engaged in gear. There is no ‘One’ original starting point. As soon as a newborn enters the world, lack is there, making himself heard, screaming out loud and clear. These overflowing drives and the capacity of the primal Other to make assumptions to interpret what that scream is asking for, is what enables the infans to count himself amongst the living.
His existence hangs by a thread.
During this phase when the very first instances of symbolization appear, the infant fantasizes about what he is lacking. At this point, pleasure fantasies and destructive fantasies come into play alongside the satisfaction of the Real Order and start to mark out the hole of demand.
A child starts to move its body to attain what can never be fully attained. To that end, given the child’s neurological immaturity, it has to go via the Other and formulate a demand. The subject is a being destined to forever be incomplete. Nothing can ever complete him due to the hole created by language. The hole is bored where extimacy is located (extimacy is a word coined by Lacan, combining the word ‘intimacy’ with the notion of being ‘exterior from which’, extimacy) and will never bring the subject a sense of completion. Life itself springs from this notion of movement, thrusting forward from the subject’s state of immaturity. And that initial movement heads straight for the mother’s body, as if it were a treasure chest, full of signifiers held inside. When the drives are set in motion, their thrust is fully carried by the body, and the direction of that thrust moves from a state of immaturity towards future maturity. In the first instance, the child is succumbed by an urge to hold and possess, to lunge forward and seize the object that is lacking in the grip of its hands and its mouth.
This is where we find the first metaphors, those that will go on to transform men and women into sexual beings, meaning the only beings able to use words of love to denote what they lack in terms of needs. J. Berges, a French psychoanalyst, articulates that for the signifier to be inscribed, the Thing (das Ding) needs to be torn from its support, its base. The process of coming into language is by definition a form of tear, a wrench, but it’s the very thing that makes us human.
By initially accepting to be the object of the Other, the child is put in a position whereby it must later extricate itself from the imaginary grasp of that very Other, its entrapment, and do so using aggressive impulses. This form of sadism, which is aimed at appropriating the contents of the mother’s body, is what is called epistemological sadism, and this is what will later support the sexual knowledge drive.
Image and movement
“The role of the libido is to make the death drive harmless by diverting it outwards with the help of a system: body muscles. […] Motor functions are what metabolize the death drive.” Jean Berges Body Image in Neurology and Psychoanalysis.4
Motor skills derive from the death drive, from all that focuses on destruction. Yet the same motor skills can transcend the death drive and its destructive goals when they are supported by the mother’s assumptions, in other words the hole in terms of knowledge.
Jean Berges maintains that the operation of the mirror stage creates two perceptual dynamics, or components in the child, and he bases his argument on Freud’s theory as presented in Project for a Scientific Psychology. The first of those components is perceptual stability, the image, whose origins are rooted in the mother’s face, in her features. The second perceptual component is described as mobile and is related to motor skills – perceptual motor skills. This is what provides the frame to the mirror. It’s not a specular movement; it doesn’t belong to the image. But the image is created through the action of the body in relation to space and objects. The action of movement only creates the image if it’s recognized by the signifiers of the Other. What makes the difference is the movement in this perceptual motor development. This movement produces a series of objets petit a, on the periphery, on the edge of the body. Aggressive drives are simply turbulently random and disordered movements, which manage to organize and structure themselves through the signifier in the demand.
This means that movement brings three things: what pulls away from the Image, what constitutes and creates the living being and also what brings destruction into the equation. This instinct for mastery, sexualizing the action of movement, is only transformed into aggressivity through the words of the Other, in feedback. Those words then convey a specific style to how the child moves, bringing him into contact with a structure that is rooted in gesture.
Aggressive drives that are directly connected to the system commanding the orifices then become intertwined with each other and switch to the Symbolic Order, via the image. When an objet petit a is produced, it stabilizes the structure. The mother goes beyond the Imaginary Order to open the way to the Symbolic. The objects produced in the demand have no tangible value as such, other than their very absence, and the marks that they leave on the body.
Therefore, when these two perceptual components are disassociated when the image is formed, it divides the image from the movement through erotization. If the image stays stable and can therefore act as a fixed point to be firmly gripped onto, then it’s the living, pulsating, aggressive part of the movement that is the factor that generates the change.
This operation where the mirror leads the subject to the “I” and to the subjective division is also accompanied by an instance of méconnaissance, misrecognition, because it’s thanks to and in the body of the other that I’m able to form a notion of unity for myself, wholeness.
The fate of aggressivity and misrecognition
Our language distinguishes between aggressivity and hate. We as humans need that linguistic distinction to gain a precise definition of the world we live in. So how do you define that leap from aggressivity to hate? Aggressivity stems from our primitive instinctive drives which are located in relation to the mother’s body when the child is brought face to face with lack. These aggressive outbursts are therefore also an expression of life, the outward manifestation of a vital dynamic. We know when we are behaving aggressively and we know that we can refuse to do so, refrain. This aggressivity can lead to fantasy and sexuality when it’s linked to the erotic dimension and has been caught up in the net of language. So when aggressivity rears its head on the surface, if it’s attached to speech, something is shifted. The symbolic forcing that operates in the tearing away of the Thing places this aggressivity in the hands of words of sex and love.
The same cannot be said for hate. In Love, hate and reparation, Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere wrote: “Aggressivity and sexuality are integral parts of human sexuality, and can only manifest themselves, in both their best and worst light, as long as life lasts. The moment you try to deny their rights and exclude them for good from taking part in life, they must find another outlet, flowing through the channels of hate and destruction.”5 “Without aggressivity and sexuality, man would cease to exist”6
Then repressed aggressivity, meaning that it hasn’t passed through words, can end up turning against the subject and invading the body. At that juncture, hate is flooded with vast quantities of unsymbolized aggressivity, which has taken up residence in the Real. And the subject runs the risk of falling ill.
We’re all aware of our own aggressivity, we know and recognize it, but it’s the total opposite with our own hate. We misrecognize it in ourselves, but yet we hear it in the other. The hate of the other is not caught up in a movement. It’s attached to the image, stuck in a position that is just short of the threshold into the Symbolic realm. In structural terms, it’s an enclave cut off from the rest, unaltered and untouched by division. The “I”, the ego, misrecognizes its own hate as it’s a part of one’s aggressivity that hasn’t been symbolized.
Whereas aggressivity belongs to the realm of vitality and movement, hate is anchored in stability, and as such operates in an area that lurks beneath, in the underbelly of the structure. Hate has let go of Eros’ hand. Could this misrecogntion hold the key to helping us understand what makes human beings flip over to savagery, that place where we’re no longer able to identify with the suffering little other?
Total destruction of the other is only made possible by our shared destructive primitive drives, that common ground, our common battleground. However, perhaps the only hope of neutralizing that battleground is through love and desire of the Other in its symbolic realm. Maybe that is the balm needed to dismantle and defuse our human tendency to harbour a hateful enclave within us, an isolated pocket we neither see nor hear and which in its wake robs us of our ability to identify.
If our aggressive drives were not left in the hands of repression but rather put to work in sexuality anchored in the Real Order, then possibly that might break down the walls of the hate enclave and erode it. The path towards castration and the repetition of that initial loss are processes that both involve parts of the body being alienated and distanced through speech.
What is said, words themselves, shed letters, and those letters harm us. The only way for us to get through and integrate the mirror stage is through letters. The image therefore sheds its harmful destructive dimension to make way for creating our erotic remains, the scars of desire.
This leaves aggressivity, which Eros can then take into his hands and put to good use for the purposes of making love beyond the limits of the principles of the Law, on the edges of the Real Order.
RSI – Real, Symbolic and Imaginary
In Thoughts for the Time of War and Death Freud alludes to: “Keeping love fresh and alive to safeguard against hate lurking close behind.”7
In Why War? he concludes: “Whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war.”8
However, as history has shown, culture may indeed work to temper our primitive drives, but it turns out that neither culture nor science acts as a safeguard against hatred being unleashed. As for identification, it takes care of securing the place of the other, yet it also leads to a general state of blindness. But accepting a state of solitude, there where the loss has occurred, makes room for an otherness.
Yet love emerges as the product transformed from what remains when everything else has been stripped away, the rubble of little fallen letters and transformed signifiers.
Aggressivity expresses itself in the body through movement, circulation, displacement and transformation. Hate expresses itself in the body through stasis, stability, the impossibility of renewing cells, the notion of death that gnaws away in the absence of the tight ring and grip of the three dimensions. Both are related to the body.
If we were to approach this question through the prism of the Borromean knot, as represented by Lacan in his 1974 conference “the Third” when he outlined the three interconnected categories – the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic – could we not locate hate and aggressivity in there together within the Imaginary Order, where it can draw near to the Symbolic Order by tightening the connecting line between the two?
1 S. Freud, « Considérations actuelles sur la guerre et la mort », Essais de psychanalyse, Payot, 1981, p. 19.
2 Ibid., p. 41.
3 S. Freud, Pourquoi la guerre ?, Payot-rivages, 2005, p. 54.
4 Jean Berges, Le corps dans la neurologie et la psychanalyse, Eres, 2005, p. 294.
5 M. Klein, J. Riviere, L’amour et la haine-Le besoin de réparation-Etude psychanalytique, Payot, 1972, p. 65.
6 Ibid., p. 67.
7 S. Freud, « Considérations actuelles sur la guerre et la mort », Essais de psychanalyse, Payot, 1981, p. 45.
8 S. Freud, Pourquoi la guerre ?, Payot-rivages, 2005, p. 65.