Читать книгу In Defense of Secrets - Anne Dufourmantelle - Страница 18

Genesis

We are born feeling the strangeness of the world more or less strongly. We might think that each of the mother’s caresses would lessen the anxiety of the child’s body a little and that in this way she would continue putting the child into the world—that each word, each sung syllable, each cradling would relieve the weight of this strangeness and come to put the child back into the world in a very ancient and vital way. The mother envelops the newborn in a familiar shell, in another body made of resonances that might be the first codes transmitted to help decode the unfamiliar language of the world, its irrational sonority. Winnicott has spoken of a “safe space” to designate that space of security between the imaginary and the real. The child’s first thoughts are not spoken; the first acts they dissimulate and the first thoughts they fail to share are crucial steps on the path to individuation. They permit the child, as the child comes to face the world, to constitute a first reserve guarded within themselves, protected from the “totalizing” gaze of the mother or from their entourage. These things are treasures in the child’s care and will be confided to the chosen, who will know how to receive them.

If we pay such great attention to the events that take place during the first years of childhood, it is not only because they give us the origin of the sensory, emotional, and psychic marks that the human being encounters and that will come to determine them in the future—but because the time of childhood is contemporary with the most recent event in dreams, slips of the tongue, affects. We do not “rediscover” a memory from childhood; it has always been there, embedded but alive. The body itself remembers deep in the folds of its skin, in a disregarded memory that can awaken an involuntary touch, an abrupt movement of fright, jouissance, tears. When we manage to catch the accents of the language of the unconscious, we find evidence everywhere. At a certain level of the being—a certain level that Lacan, paradoxically, called the “real”—various moments of time coincide. In order to cross these times, co-present but staunched in us, a go-between is needed: a being whose listening not only eases but allows us to risk being connected back to this out-of-time (which we deem neither original nor final) from which flows the chaos of drives. In the last of Artaud’s writings there is a magnificent prefiguration of this movement, at the very moment he loses footing in what would take the figure of a delusion.