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The Wager of the Analysand
“Toute Pensee emet un Coup de Des”
Mallarme “Un Coup de Des”
To write about the position of the analysand is to write
about the role of writing in the analytic act itself. What I
propose to highlight is that particular form of writing which we
call the poetic.
The significance of the poet, the poetic text, and the poetic
act are crucial reference points for both the experience and
transmission of psychoanalysis. Freud’s oeuvre returns to
three inexhaustible reference points, the hysteric, the father
and the poet.
If we take the Freudian father to be the dead father, the
father of the transmissible, we can propose that this father
encounters the narrator of his failures in the form of the poet.
For Freud the poet attempts to subvert the stability of the
father and also gives a new life to the symbolic. The poet is a
partner to the hysteric, a eulogizer of the hysteric, and like the
hysteric can make the claim to be the only one to see the world
as it is – the beautiful soul.
In his seminar The Psychoanalytic Act Lacan links the
psychoanalytic act with the poetic act. I don’t think his
reference is exclusively to the act of the analyst. I hope I can
articulate the way in which a form of poetic act makes possible
the two different forms of analytic act, that proper to the
analysand and that of the analyst.
The position of the analysand, I would propose, is that of
the poet who does not know that the poem that they have
before their eyes was a poem that they wrote. This is an effect
of writing itself, the most intimate experience of writing, is that
experience – that moment of astonishment and the uncanny –
when one says “did I write that?”
I’m not sure that we can go on with this metaphor if we
don’t try to ask the question what is a poem? Is it only a
function of language, metaphor and metonmy? The essential
French author Raymond Queneau, in collaboration with the
writers of the Oulipo group conceived the idea of long sonnet
sequences ( completely in the tradition of the great sonnet
sequences of the early modern poets, such as Petrach, Spenser,
Shakespeare) that was automatic, programmable, produceable
as pure functions of establishing poetic and linguistic rules.
What such an effort and production does not, in my view,
register is the role of an operator within the poetic production
The operator in the analysand is angst. In order to give voice to
the poetics of the analysand we need to make a difference
between the literary conception of the poetic and the way in
which the jouisance of the anlysand works with both metaphor
and metonmy in an angst directed act of both poetic
destruction and creation.
What Queneau’s sonnet sequence, and the tradition to
which it refer’s lacks is a place for the destruction of the poem
without which the analysand cannot read their own poem, and
through which can emerge a new metaphor or signifier.
I would propose to consider one dimension of the angst of
the analysand, which is the effect of the encounter with the
desire of the Other, also to be the angst of a destruction. The
angst of the destruction of that poetic text with which the
analysand has constructed a symptom, a symptom written in
the place of the Other’s lack.
The cultural concept of the poem, central as it is to any
appreciation of the work of art, and indicator of the on going
transformation of the significance of the work of art to the
human, has a locus classicus that I would like to briefly
mention.
If I refer to the concept of the poetic given by Aristotle it
is certainly not to enter into any form of erudite debate. My
own reading of the Poetics is certainly influenced by the work
of the classicist Steven Halliwell. Where I differ is that I would
say that in Aristotle we discover not only the immensity of
Aristotle’s passion for theory, but the inexhaustible insight that
Aristotle makes that the study of poetry is essential for the
understanding of the nature of the human. Given this
Aristotle’s conception of poetry is also uncanny.
As we learn in highschool, Aristotle’s theory has three
main insights, “poeisis” is an act of making, it gives a particular
form of satisfaction, a satisfaction given by “mimesis”, a term
that Halliwell investigates and which he feels is inadequately
translated as “imitation”. This “imitation” or representation is
of human action, and the action most proper to the human is
the tragic act, and therefore, for Aristotle, the highest or most
accomplished form of poetry is tragic.
Learning it, admiring it, witnessing it we have not
necessarily, I would say, encountered how crucial it is for
subjectivity. Aristotle’s tells us that it’s effect – the cathartic
effect – is in no small part the experience of a relief that this
tragedy is witnessed in the semi-mythological story that we
listen to and leave behind at the end of a tragic drama.
Aristotle’s account remains one of the greatest models of
theoretical endevour but because it is a theory what it cannot
provide us with is the way in which the poetic emerge. This is
an act ex-nihilo. The engendering of the poem is not the desire
to “imitate”, or represent, but rather a creation of the
potentiality for poetry which exists in, beyond and perhaps
prior to what we consider to be a language, a common tongue.
Psychoanalysis, as Freud tells us cannot give an account
of poetic desire, but I think that the potentiality in language
both for the poetic and for its destruction is central to both the
position of the analysand and the analyst. The making of the
analysis can be considered as the encounter between the
analysand’s desire to read the unread or unknown poem of
their subjectivity and the desire of the analyst, conceived in
this instance as a desire sustained by the desire to read a poem
whose production the analyst’s desire engages, reads,
punctuates, but whose writing is not their’s.
A desire to be presenting the blank page on which the
analysand will both destroy a poem and ex-nihilo write a
poem. In this way the position of the analysand is a wager on
the act of poetic destruction, sustained by the desire to read a
poem, and the act of creation sustained by the desire to write a
poem. Not to become a poet, but to come into a new existence
through the poem. An act that I would propose brings attention
to the relation between the poetic act and the act of translation,
and deconstructs any idealization of the genius of creation.
There is I think a poem, written in 1897, in the same year
that Freud was beginning his own analysis ( through his
correspondence with Fleiss) that I would like to use as as a
reference for the link between the poet and the analysand. The
relevance of this particular poem is that astonishingly it
materializes in the typography of the poem, the practice of the
printed letter, the de-creative and re-creative action of the
poem. The poem emerges through the dis-articulation of that
which we would anticipate as the form proper to poetry. The
poem is Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des”. If from the point of view
of criticism I sound naïve it is because I have stayed away from
the mountains of commentary that have been written on what
is unquestionably one of the great works of European art and
the source of modern poetry. An untranslatable work of
inexhaustible beauty.
In his preface to the poem Mallarme evokes his angst
about his own creation which appears to refuse and reject the
classical tradition of poetics to which he was deeply attached.
But the dis-articulation of this tradition is an act of belief in the
possibility, for Mallarme, of returning poetry to its place as
“source”
In the famous first line “Un coup de des/jamais n’aborila
le hazard”, that stretches typographically from the opening
page to the penultimate page he creates a remarkable
suspension of the reader’s desire to either anticipate the
moment of lyric closure or to localize meaning or reference.
This first line is itself a roll of the dice, and evokes the
encounter with an impossible – “jamais” whose equivocal
quality – the French is both “never “ and “ever” that eludes
translation.
There where the reader might find in the lyric the
experience of the evanescent re-claimed through the art of the
poet, the poet introduces a falling out of time, neither moment
nor infinity.
This radical gesture, of using different sizes of type for
different lines within the poem, creates a new kind of blank
space on the page of the poem itself, that is intrinsic to the
achievement and significance of the poem.
The size of the letters, the recursive quality of the first
line, allows other lines in the poem to be arranged in waves,
that rise and fall. Visually and sonorously the poem enacts the
central motif of the poem – a shipwreck.
This experience of the dice and the utter exposure to the
contingent can be read within the context of Mallarme’s central
pre-occupation in his poetry with the impossibility of
restoring, for either himself or in the collective , the lost faith,
or spiritual reality. Instead each subject with thought itself
encounters the homelessness of the spirit. An exposure which
reveals only poetry as a ‘source”.
The roll of the dice invokes a shipwreck, which the
shifting waves of poetic lines depict, but part of that shipwreck,
emerging from within it is the figure of “The Master”, whose
presence transforms the outcome of the roll of the dice. The
transformation occurs in some lines that I will quote but
metaphorically we could read it as the transformation of the
dice itself ( dots on a blank surface) to a representation of the
stars in their constellations. This transmutation of the dice
into the fixed stars, who themselves evoke the infinite
extension of space, enables a passing through the storm, and
the emergence of a new signifier “that it doesn’t number/on
some vacant and superior surface, the successive shock/in the
way of stars/of a total account in the making” – which is in
French “d’un compte total en formation”
I discovered that the only way that I could write about the
position of the analysand ( without attempting a different kind
of writing of my own experience of analysis) was to write from
what I consider a third position, and this third position has
been possible to articulate, for me, only with reference to the
metaphorical and metonymical practices of the poet.
But before writing the text I had written a title – The
Wager of the Analysand, and I want to say something about the
relevance that I think Pascal’s Wager has to the question of the
poetic. As you all know Pascal’s astonishing text “The Wager” is
included in the collection “Pensees” and is one of the most
famous references points in the Christian faith and its theology.
I imagine that many of you know the context of Pascal’s
writing and the impact that it has had on conceptions of belief
much better than I . I think we are all also aware of the
importance Lacan attached to Pascal as both a mathematician (
his famous triangle) and as a religious thinker. He is a member
of the triumvirate, the two others being Augustine and
Kiekegaard, who Lacan deeply respects.
My reading of Pascal is I suspect naïve, but it is as follows.
The only exit from the uncertainty of finding any knowledge
that would justify belief is to accept that the foundation of a
belief is a probabilistic foundation. Belief can only be founded
by wagering upon an outcome, and while in any ordinary roll
of the dice the outcome is either a gain or a loss, the
catastrophe for Pascal is not the outcome, but not to roll the
dice. For Pascal belief is a belief in something, the revelation,
but the fiction or truth of revelation can paradoxically only be
registered by an operation that mathematical writing reveals.
Pascal discovered that a new form of mathematical
writing, has made possible both a new writing of the
mechanical laws of nature, but also necessitates a new way of
writing the subject. Galileo and Descartes gave respectively
the objective infinite universe and the subjective cogito, but it
is Pascal who marks the end of theory of subjectivity that the
medieval and early modern philosophers derived from
Aristotle.
For Pascal, as he writes in the opening of the wager the
subject is to be found in the relation of the finite to the infinite,
a reference Freud also makes in “Analysis Finite and Infinite”.
The mathematical ground of Pascal’s wager is a rejection of
the search for any visible truth. Pascal’s belief is co-relative to
the invisibility of that which is believed. In the subject’s
division between the finite and the infinite ( rather than the
mind and the body) what is confronted is not the true, but the
place of truth. Knowledge and truth are dis-articulated and
truth does not have an intrinsic relation to the subject but
rather the existence of truth has to be wagered.
If any wager requires a loss, then truth can only be
present through the idea of what truth requires us to lose.
Sewn into his clothes were found after his death various words
that Pascal has written on scraps of paper after his mystical
and ineffable encounter with his own truth. With his attempt to
write the effects of this ineffable experience Pascal inaugurates
what Lacan will name the subject of science, from whom
analysis will emerge, as a symptom of the structural emptiness
of that subject.
In concluding I remembered that I had before giving the
title the wager of the analysand been thinking that the
metaphor of the desert and the mirage could provide a
reference point to the dialectic of visibility and invisibility that
is, I think, proper to the position of the analysand. I think this
experience of the desert returns most particularly in the
relation between Pascal’s mystical or ineffable experience and
the attempt to write this in the Wager.
But what I had completely forgotten was a much earlier
attempt to write about the position of the analysand by taking
as a point of departure the analysand’s encounter with their
infantile neurosis. To discover as a consequence of own’s own
analysis that one had been ill, crazy, neurotic and had
completely forgotten this corner-stone of one’s own subjective
formation appeared to me to be the third position from which
I could write about the position of the analysand. But I was
discouraged from presenting on this subject because the
description was felt to be rather extra-territorial to the overall
idea of what such a working day would involve.
Writing about the poetic work of the analysand , the first
association made between the phrase “position of the
analysand” and infantile neurosis had been completely
forgotten, but it didn’t stop wanting to be written. So this
conclusion is a humble proposal both to myself and to the
association to explore the nature of the infantile neurosis as
inevitable and readable through Lacan’s crucial concept of
“lalangue”.
Recently A. Michel’s gave a presentation on transmission
in psychoanalysis that for me was both astonishing and also
incomprehensible because of the conviction with which he
made an equivalence between the psychoanalytic act,
transmission and lalangue. Lalangue he said is transmission.
I don’t know this, but I believe it to be true. In light of
what I have tried to write here I would propose that Lalangue
is that which the poet in some way retains or reserves for
another use, regardless of the dis-equilibrium and rejection of
a certain demand of the symbolic that lalangue be renounced.
With this reserve of lalangue the poet counters the deadening
effects of the cultural necessity to produce a symbolic order
that can be both exchanged and altered. The poet choses the
dangers, the chaos, the blindness , that lalangue retains, but
threw an act of translation with this reserve of lalangue
tempers the super-egoical injunctions of the symbolic, and
works to creatively lift the excesses of its repressive capacity.
The work that each infantile neurosis reveals is the the
struggle and impasses of an unfinished poetic act, one which
the wager of the analysand can use as an initial draft inorder to
begin another poem.