The point of reversal

 

Perhaps we need to return to the nature of the courage implied by the imaging operations that constitute the desiring subject.
This courage has nothing of a warlike or heroic virtue.
The imaging subject is not an epic hero.
I prefer to introduce it by standing in the shadow of a great voice, that of Walter Benjamin.
The question Benjamin poses is the following, and it is, in my view, also ours:
What constitutes the poetic core of the work, that which gives it its accomplished form by determining in a purely formal way what the poet’s task is, independently of any content, any communication — that is, in what way does it construct the freedom of the one it addresses?
This explicit question is precisely what we ask of the image when we inquire:
What is the task of the producer of images when he gives to the image he creates the form of the freedom of the one to whom it is addressed?
Here is what Benjamin writes:
“The two poems are linked in their poetic core, that is to say in a certain attitude towards the world. This is courage which, the more deeply it is understood, becomes less an individual character trait than a relation of man to the world and of the world to man. […] Courage is the giving of oneself to the danger that threatens the world. […]
The courageous man is aware of the danger, but he does not take it into account. For he would be cowardly if he did take it into account; and if he were unaware of the danger, he would not be courageous. The solution to this strange relation is that the danger does not threaten the courageous man himself but the world. Courage is the feeling for life proper to the one who delivers himself up to danger. […]
The greatness of danger arises in the courageous one. Only in that the danger reaches him — in his total abandonment to danger — does it also reach the world.”
And a little further on Benjamin quotes Schiller, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man:
“The true secret of the master artist thus consists in destroying the matter by means of the form. The soul of the spectator and of the listener must preserve intact its full freedom; when it leaves the circle of enchantments wrought by the artist, it must be as pure and perfect as when it came from the hands of the Creator.”*

Marie-José Mondzain, Homo spectator, Bayard, pp. 68–69

* Cf. Walter Benjamin, Œuvres I, Folio essais, Gallimard, “Deux poèmes de Friedrich Hölderlin”, pp. 117–124.

Lucian had begun to interpret a sketch he had made in his notebook and had not finished explaining it when Félix, his supervisor — whom he now visited regularly since accepting that he was caught in a kind of latent conflict with Igniatius, alias Don Carotte — who until then had remained attentive and silent, suddenly raised a finger, as if to catch a signifier mid-flight.
— Stop.
He leaned forward.
His eyes sparkled with sharp, almost mischievous intelligence — a way of being joyful without ever being complacent.
— You say he saw your notes and your sketches… he murmured. But above all you say that you left your notebook open. Or rather… that you “left it for him.” Do you see the difference?
Lucian drew a long breath.
— Certainly… but it wasn’t intentional.
— Intentional? Félix laughed. A short, almost Lacanian laugh. There is no “intentional”. There is only desire, which arranges things so that we forget the lids we’ve left open.
Then, without warning, Félix took one of Igniatius’s drawings — the one of a “twisted” volcano — and set it beside a page of the notebook where Lucian had, absent-mindedly, sketched a similar form.

The two images answered each other like two slightly distorted mirrors.
Félix narrowed his eyes.
— You see? he said. You see the way he sees.
Lucian turned pale.
He wanted to speak, to defend himself, but Félix continued before a single sound could come out:
— And Igniatius saw that. He saw it before you did. He thinks you are the author of these drawings. Or rather, he thinks you could be. It’s not a question of identity, it’s a question of… how shall I put it… the signature of the gaze.
He tapped the drawing with his finger.
— When two lines resemble each other too closely, the subject looks for the author. And since you were the nearest, he chose you.
Lucian closed his eyes.
— He told me he recognised something in those drawings…
— Yes, said Félix. He recognises the Other. And the Other, for him, right now… is you.
He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head — a falsely relaxed position that always preceded one of his decisive analyses.
— You don’t realise what has happened. For him, these drawings are fragments of himself. He thought he recognised himself in the image. And suddenly he recognises that same image in your notebook. This is not interpretation: it is symbolic filiation. You become the place from which the drawings come. In other words: you become, for him, the origin he never had.
Lucian flinched.
Félix went on:
— The child without parents seeks an author. It’s mechanical, inexorable. He looks for the one who writes what he feels. The one who knows before him what he is in the process of saying. The one who hears the storms before they begin to speak. And there… what you did… this open notebook…
He smiled in an almost cruel way.
— It’s a gift. A trap. A sign. Call it what you like. But in any case, it’s an invitation to enter your backstage. Yet in the analytic relationship, the backstage is precisely what you must keep closed.
Lucian clenched his hands and murmured:
— I… I didn’t want him to read it.
— I believe you, said Félix. But your unconscious did want him to find it. Because you need, just as much as he does, that someone should read what you don’t dare to say.
Félix straightened and fixed his gaze in Lucian’s.
— If Igniatius thinks you are the author of the drawings, it’s because you saw them with the same gaze. You recognised something in his archipelago. And that something… is yourself. You can’t play “I-don’t-know” here. The subject is not fooled. He knows from whence come the lines that have drawn him.
Lucian felt a confused heat rise in his throat.
— But I never drew those volcanoes…
— That, my dear, is your factual reality. But he doesn’t care about that. He sees something else: your capacity to draw through him. That is, to project yourself. To feel before there are words. To sense what he will say before he says it. For an abandoned subject, this is both unbearable and vital.
He laid a hand on Lucian’s shoulder — a rare, almost solemn gesture.
— You have become the scribe of his origin. That doesn’t mean that you are the origin. But in his imaginary, and therefore in the transference… it’s equivalent.
Félix stood up, walked a few steps across the room, then came back toward him:
— You must accept the idea that you are caught in the gap. The gap between what he asks of you and what you can give. The gap between what he has lost and what you represent. The gap between what you write and what you reveal about yourself without meaning to.
Then, gently:
— That gap… that’s where the work is being done. That’s where it burns. That’s where you are, one for the other, in a relationship that is no longer neutral — and must not become fusion.
He gathered the drawings and placed them between them.
— The question now, Lucian, is no longer: “Why does Igniatius think I drew this?”
The question is not that… or not only that. The questions should be:
What do these drawings awaken in you that you have never seen?
And: Why, at the precise moment when he is looking for an author, is it me… I mean, you… that he chooses to be that author?
He concluded, with great gentleness:
— You left your notebook open. Now you’re going to have to accept opening something in yourself.