The beginning of a molt

  

 

 

 

While Sang Chaud begins his molt, Lucian has gone to see his supervisor, Félix. It was not truly a deliberate choice, but rather an evidence to which he knew he could not escape. As he speaks to him about one of his patients, named Igniatius, he has the unpleasant impression that what he says is not heard by Félix in the same way he himself means it. It unsettles him somewhat, but until now nothing abnormal. He could manage it.

What he cannot manage—because it is, by essence, unknown to him—is what he will later call “the insurrection,”bodily, political, and symbolic, of Sang Chaud.
Certainly, he knows very well that the expression is, epistemologically speaking, incorrect.
Was it—if one dares use such grand words—a return to chaos, a threat to “civil peace”?
Nothing and a little of everything…
Nothing, or almost, because it concerns only a secondary character in a story entirely invented as a crude imitation of another story, a famous one…
And yet a little of everything, because symbolically it speaks…

Igniatius brings to his sessions drawings that he claims to have found in a gallery.
These drawings, both clear and enigmatic, depict mainly the story and adventures—set in a volcanic, wild, deserted archipelago, lashed by the forces of nature—of a certain Don Carotte (Don Quixote), and Sang Chaud, his companion (Sancho Panza).
In this archipelago, the islands that compose it are mutable.
They appear and disappear just like the circus that is set up and dismantled every day.
A circus that, judging by the drawings, seems to destroy itself or be destroyed (the nuance matters) rather than dismantled.
This circus appeared to have been the home (in both senses) of Don Carotte when, as a child, he lived there with his donkey.

These drawings are annotated and signed with an illegible script.
All continues normally between Lucian and Igniatius until Lucian realizes that the drawings may come from various sources.

First hypothesis:
— They might be the work of Igniatius himself, brought under the pretext of having been “found” in a gallery.

Second hypothesis:
— They might be by Igniatius… without his knowing it.
Which would imply that Igniatius no longer has full possession of his mind, that he might not know what he does during portions of his time.

Third hypothesis:
— These drawings might be the work of Don Carotte or Sang Chaud… that is, creatures of Igniatius.

Félix’s Notebook — Notes after the portrait scene
Grey notebook, section “supervision — anomalies of transference”

Tonight again, after speaking with Lucian, I laid out on the table the drawings Lucian brought me… those Igniatius brought to him, as well as the portrait Lucian showed me.
I looked for a long time at the figures within them—these silhouettes with the same way of inclining the torso, the same sharply trimmed beard, the same line of the brows, the same tension of the hands.

In one drawing in particular, the figure seated on a large red armchair—so similar to Lucian in his posture of attentive reserve—turns his head toward a scene where another man, likewise similar, struggles against coils, tendrils, undulations.
It looks like a theatre where analyst and analysand are enacted within the space of the drawing itself.

And in the other piece, a sort of diptych where two identical silhouettes, on either side of an armchair, seem to emerge or retreat, as if one is reading a book while the other dodges a breath rising from the seat itself—again, the resemblance is so strong one could believe in a double, a splitting, a symbolic duplication.

I note this as an essential clinical fact:
The two figures—the seated one, the struggling one, the one reading, the one recoiling—bear such a striking resemblance that it becomes impossible to say which is Lucian, which is Igniatius.
It is the same face, the same torso, the same enigma.
Not a copy: an oscillation.
A shared face.

What I now call “the blind spot” is precisely this:
Lucian does not see this resemblance, though it is visible at first glance to anyone outside their bond.

This non-seeing is more important than the seeing.
For if Lucian does not see what I see, it is not from voluntary denial: it is structural.
He cannot yet recognize himself in the image Igniatius hands to him.

Here something absolutely fundamental is taking place:
Igniatius, in seeking the author of his own image, has projected onto Lucian not only a figure of knowledge but a figure of origin.
And the place where he houses this origin… is the drawing.
A drawing whose writing is illegible, but whose gesture of line resembles that of Lucian—something Lucian cannot admit.
If he did, he would have to recognize that something of himself already circulates within the work of the other.

Let me write it clearly:
Igniatius increasingly believes that Lucian is the author of the drawings.
Not out of paranoia—too poor a word—but out of a kind of ontological intuition:
“What touches me comes from you.”

When Igniatius looks at these images, he does not see alterity: he sees an emitter.
And what he perceives as “trace of Lucian” is perhaps only the projection of a figure he has sought since childhood, a face that might give contour to his lack.

The fascinating thing is that Lucian, in turn, does not see what Igniatius sees.
The same drawing, before him, is blind.
The face is familiar without being recognizable.
As if something of himself—something buried, pre-verbal, something from before his own gaze—appeared in these lines yet remained invisible to him.
An image from a time that, for him, never had an image.

Here lies the blind spot:
Lucian cannot see himself where Igniatius sees him,
because that would mean admitting that he too has a missing place of origin.
The same hole, the same gap, the same whiteness.

That whiteness which the drawings outline, as one traces a contour around an absence to give it form.

Thus I perceive this:

It is not only Igniatius who sees Lucian in the drawing.
It is the drawing that uses Igniatius to reveal to Lucian a part of himself he has never been able to face.
The hand that drew it is not important.
What matters is that the drawing has become the space where their two figures superimpose without either being able to say who precedes the other.

A primal scene without a primal scene,
a mirror without a source.

Finally, this:

The more Igniatius becomes convinced that Lucian is the author,
the more Lucian will be forced to confront what in him authorizes the drawing.
Not in the sense of having physically drawn it,
but in the sense of having become the figure from which the other invents his own face.

It is a rare link, dangerous, magnificent.
A meeting of abysses.

If Lucian does not see the resemblance, it is precisely because it speaks too true. And such truth cannot yet be looked at.