Troubling

Félix’s Notebook

The Supervisor’s Disturbance

I catch myself tonight turning the drawings over once more under the light of my desk. I have laid them out carefully in front of me, without mixing them, trying to find an order that makes sense, as if the position of each one mattered, as if moving them might blur something I had sensed—more sensed than understood—this afternoon.
One fact struck me, and the more I think about it, the more it troubles me: how could I say, with that almost insolent confidence that perhaps characterizes me too much, that these drawings were his, Igniatius’s drawings, when he presented them as coming from a gallery, bought and signed by an illegible hand?
Why did I state this as though it were self-evident?
And what troubles me even more: how did I slide from “they are his” to “they could be yours, Lucian,” without feeling the slightest internal resistance?
I wonder whether I too was caught in that vortex, in that magnetic field where identities are no longer fixed properties but resonant surfaces, where each borrows from the other part of his face—one sees it—part of his hand—one feels it—and part of his memory—one imagines it…
I have just looked at the signatures. Indeed, they are illegible. But yes, I must write this without evasion: they look, strangely, like Lucian’s handwriting. Not directly in the shape of the letters—that would be too crude—but in the gesture itself, the way a line is rounded, another extended, that way of letting the pen or pencil hesitate before settling. A handwriting that keeps, like a scar, the movement of thought.
And yet, I know—or I believe I know, because he told me—that Lucian has never set foot in that gallery, has never met that artist, has never touched this paper before the session.
So why this resemblance?
I find myself facing three possibilities, each dizzying:
— the “unknown artist” shares a gesture with Lucian;
— Igniatius lies or forgets, which, in his case, would be less a lie than a displacement of truth…
— … or else, and this is the most unsettling possibility, the drawings were made by someone who does not know he made them.
I write this and already feel the slippery slope such a hypothesis might lead the mind down. It would be too easy, too novelistic, too tempting: the “forgotten” artist, the “amnesiac” creator, the divided subject drawing without knowing it. No, that is likely not the case.
But the disturbance remains. I welcome it, for it tells something about the dispositif.
Here is what I observe:
The drawings seem to circulate between the two of them without passing through a fixed origin. They occur in an in-between, a floating space from which each draws a part of truth.
Perhaps this double face, this profile both of Lucian and of Igniatius, was drawn by a hand that, symbolically, already belonged to both.
I return to the Lacanian principle: the signifier never belongs to the one who utters it. It circulates. It settles where the subject lacks.
And these drawings resemble precisely that: embodied signifiers.
Not made by an individual, but by a common zone, that zone where Lucian and Igniatius recognize each other before they even know one another.
Perhaps that is the most troubling truth: that I did not doubt for a second because the very form of the drawing carried something of the two of them, and that I merely perceived, intuitively, what neither of them had yet been able to say to himself.
It is not the signature that convinced me.
It is the resemblance.
A resemblance too exact to be chance, and too double to be an identity.
What emerges in these drawings therefore has no author:
it is a point of junction.
A point where two stories, two absences, sought a figure through which to speak.
I feel myself, in turn, enveloped by this mystery. Not anxious—the mystery is disturbing only when one tries to extinguish it—but lucid. Something is happening between them that has no name yet. Something that escapes ordinary categories.
And I, in all of this?
I must remain vigilant, yes, but also… listen to what this mystery tells me about the clinic itself: it is never a face-to-face, but a crossing.
Something is taking shape between the two of them—literally.
And that something is looking at me.