(41) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“Speech does not belong to the one who speaks it. It belongs no more to him than to the one who hears it. It passes between them, it goes from one to the other, and this passage is perhaps what is most essential. For to speak is not to transmit something one possesses, it is to let oneself be traversed by what does not belong to us, by a speech that precedes us and exceeds us. Thus, the one who speaks is never the master of what he says. He is rather its provisional host, or the place where something comes to be said, without ever remaining there.”

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Gallimard, 1969

 

 

 

Continuation of Félix’s letter to Lucian

The Child Moon believes he is a prisoner of the book.
But what he does not yet see is that this prison is the very condition of his speech.
For if he were not caught in the book, he would not speak. If he were not written, he could not read. If he were not read, he would not exist as a subject.

That is why the question is not how to get out of the book. I tell you this plainly: that is a dead end. The question is to know what place he occupies within this book. Is he merely a character? Is he the place where something is written? Is he, as you so finely suggest, the one through whom the book becomes readable?

You see that a transformation is at stake here.

It would be excessive to speak of liberation… in the naïve sense… but a displacement would not be.
The subject ceases to believe he is origin. He recognizes himself as effect. And in that very movement, somewhere, something of his desire may come to pass.

Now it is here that insolence reaches its highest significance. For to recognize oneself as effect does not mean consenting to be nothing but a docile effect. It means being able to inhabit differently the place where one is written. To introduce a torsion into it. To respond without being entirely absorbed by the expected response.

Insolence, then, is no longer imaginary revolt. It becomes the very style by which a subject, without leaving the structure, nonetheless ceases to be perfectly soluble within it.

For what this child touches, in this opening of the pages, in this gaze he cannot see but feels, is this: he is seen where he does not see himself.

And it is precisely there that the subject is constituted.

But this child adds something precious: he does not merely wish to be constituted. He does not merely wish to hold his place where he is read. He introduces into it a hesitation, an oblique resistance, a way of not becoming accustomed. That is his insolence. Not to destroy the book, but to prevent it from closing completely upon him as an obviousness.

Thus I would say, to conclude in my own name: this child is not the one who seeks the origin of language. He is the one who discovers that he is caught in language as in a destiny. And if there is a way out, it is not in a return to pre-language, but in the traversal of this dependency, in sustaining it, reading it, and perhaps, in turn, inscribing within it something that leaves a trace.

In this sense, he is not merely written.
At the limit, he becomes the very place where it is written.

And I add: he becomes insolent there, in the deepest sense. Not one who lacks respect, but one who fails to comply with habituation. One who undoes, by the mere manner of being spoken, the illusion that language goes without saying. One who introduces, into the sentence that contains him, a slight dissymmetry through which something else appears.

This is not nothing.
It is perhaps, for a subject, the only way not to disappear entirely into what precedes him.

In other words, the insolence of this child is that he shows us that the book is not the world, but the form in which the world is given to him. And that by sensing this form, by disturbing it, by not becoming accustomed to it, he opens a breach.

That is why this insolence is ambiguous. It may be nothing more than a narcissism of refusal. It may indulge in empty dissidence. It may content itself with biting the hand of discourse without producing anything but a sterile wound. But it may also be—and this is the case that concerns us—the mark of a subject who cannot manage to forget that he is caught within the structure.

This child does not fully respect the real as it is presented to him. And he is right. Not in the sense that he would possess immediate access to a prior truth. But in the sense that his failure to become accustomed reveals that the presented real is never anything but naturalized symbolic.

Here I once again distance myself from any temptation to return to a full origin. For what the child calls the “first world” is not an intact, prior world that one could recover. It is the irruption of the real into the symbolic. It is what, in language, resists language.

In other words, this “once” that emerges is not the past. It is what, in the present, never ceases to make a hole.

And this is also why the insolence of this child produces a vertigo. You put it very well: one might almost hear in habit a kind of ground, a stable terrain, tacitly assumed. The insolent one, then, would be the one who removes this ground, or who walks as if it did not hold. That is exactly it. He does not walk where others place their feet without thinking. He makes one feel that the ground is symbolic. And thus, the one who listens to him wavers.

This wavering may be experienced as an offense. It often is. Not because the child would be violent. He may be very gentle. But his very gentleness displaces. It does not attack frontally; it disorganizes. It introduces, into the regulated fabric of exchanges, an irregularity that forces one to hear that something is off in what seemed self-evident.

This is what makes his insolence so close to analytic truth. Analysis itself is not polite in the social sense. It is not, because it does not reproduce exchange according to imaginary proprieties. It allows the cut, the slip, the equivocation, the unassimilable to return. It is, in its own way, insolent toward the fictions of mastery through which the ego reassures itself.

And now, allow me to formulate the essential point.

This child believes he is a prisoner of the book… and… to my great regret… I must add… I sincerely believe that you might be a prisoner of him…