trace of death or give death (2)
Within the field of thought, free field, in partnership with the Society of Philosophy Breton held in Rennes, in late January 2010, a series of lectures around the theme: "Thou shalt not kill."
Philippe Réfabert, psychoanalyst was reached Jan. 30. The second and final part of his presentation. RZ .
*
... the child has an opportunity to escape and capture a singularity son, s'intriquent position where continuity and discontinuity. It is one and the same time different and similar.
*
brings me to soul murder. Reducing the fundamental paradox is a possible definition of soul murder. She is the one I propose today. Reduction therefore, whether the parent formula instead to support, whether he means to the child by his actions and his words - there are words which are acts, is well known [1] - he denies the possibility of being like him or otherwise do not be like him, in which case he denies any duplicity: he wants and denounces "innocent."
Kafka's text entitled "The Verdict," Das Urteil , stages, unlike the story of Genesis and brilliantly, reducing the paradox I call the "paradox of Freud "where this time Father-of the story - denies his son the opportunity to be like him. A father denounces, radically, the first proposal of paradox: "Be like me." In other words, the Father is the antithetical figure of Abraham.
"The Verdict" is constructed in two parts that revolve around a point of disaster on which the action switches to project Georg Bendemann in the river where it runs to enforce the sentence that the father imposed on him.
In the first part, Georg "by a very beautiful Sunday spring morning "thinking of the fate of a friend he has just written to announce her engagement. This friend, exiled, lonely and ill, was "clearly misled" by going abroad and Georg has long been reluctant to write him the happy news because he was afraid of hurting him. At the urging of his fiancée, he it is resolved, and now he has to tell her old bedridden father with whom he has lived since the death of the mother.
But the father, to the astonishment of the son, does not hear it that way. He first diversion "How's it going to St. Petersburg? ", Before insinuating that he doubts such a friendship of her son:" Do you really want a friend in St. Petersburg? "Soon to accuse his son of wanting to deceive, because he says now, the truth" you never had a friend in St. Petersburg. " Georg first tries to divert the conversation, he takes care of his father, carries in her bed and waits for the right moment to return to the office and ask again to verify its memory: - "Is not that you remember him now? "But the father responds with another question and asks his son if he is well covered . The son reassures him: "Be quiet you are well covered . "
At this moment and on this word, Kafka place what Hölderlin called a caesura anti-rhythmic Celan and a" failure of breath, "where time is suspended before rushing to the denouement:
" - No! cried the father by chaining the response on the issue, rejecting coverage (Decke) with such force that she hovered a moment all deployed and standing upright in the bed with just one hand rested lightly on the ceiling. 'You wanted me covered [2] (zugedeckt) I know, darling, but I'm still not covered. And even if these are my last ounce of strength they be enough for you, they will be too much for you. Yes I know your friend. It would be a son after my own heart. That's why you did wrong all these years ... But fortunately a father does not need anyone to pierce his son to date. When you believed to have crashed, so overwhelmed that you could sit behind the top and it would not move, then sir my son decided to marry '. "
In a few words that fall upon him like the roof of the house, George was stripped of his father, his friend, his mother and his work:
"-I'm still the strongest by far. Only maybe I'd have been forced to retreat, but it turns out that your mother gave me strength, that with your friend I found a wonderful alliance, and that your customers I have there in the pocket . "
Georg is faced with the monstrous vision of a combined parent who intends not to cede its authority. He grasped that it no longer has anything of their own. He also understands that his father watched him for many years, awaiting the moment to denounce his evil character of "innocent child" and then pronounce the verdict: death by drowning.
Georg, at this moment, descends the stairs, rushed outside, crosses the bridge parapet and falls into the water "crying in a low voice: 'Dear Parents, however, I've always loved'. "
the night he spent in a state of jubilation contained, to write the story of a soul murder, Kafka has changed Subject . In the act of writing it has caused the death of a young man caught in the tide of black hatred of himself, a young man drowned in the confusion of a destiny imposed from outside. At the same time it gave birth "to a full opening of the soul and body "A new subject.
" I wrote this story in one go, from ten o'clock to six o'clock in the morning, the night of 22 to 23 [September 1912] . I stayed sitting so long that hardly if I withdraw my legs under the table stiff ... "
" This story came out of myself, as in a birth rule, covered with dirt and mucus, and there is only me who's hand can penetrate up at body who feels pleasure. "
Kafka knew the next day he became a writer and nothing could make him deviate from this road that was opened before him that night:
"My terrible fatigue and joy, how the story unfolded before my eyes, I walked by splitting the waves. "
Six months later, June 21, 1913, he noted in his diary that his destiny is to write:
"The world prodigious in my head. But how free myself and free myself without tearing. And a thousand times rather be torn remember that in me or bury [cover] . I'm here for that, I fully appreciate. "
one who is so familiar indecision has ruled. He has noted its difference from his own and took the leap. In a flash, he will have known that neither his father nor his mother had given birth to a child with them free to invent an original score ( "Das Urteil" the title in German Verdict , could translate "the original score), but they offered him a figure imposed.
In this act that took place the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka put to death an image of him that her parents had not considered but pressed on him. Topic yesterday that belonged to the imaginary world of his parents is symbolically killed. After crossing events where the interview is dead, he wins another world where he wears the attributes of man. Here the attributes Franz conquers are not weapons but a pen that opens access to the community of writers.
But Kafka is not only a writer - Max Brod is also - it is also light and from this point of view, "The Verdict" can be read as a variant of the Oedipus tragedy where the hero, before the truth has no alternative but to leave the world of his parents. He himself sang his death and there objected. There will be a poet, witnessed the murder, herald of those who have suffered like him, a soul murder, as Hölderlin, as Pessoa, as Beckett and others.
Thus "a beautiful Sunday morning in spring," Georg asks his father to remember his friend sick, broke, lonely and exiled in a foreign country. But who is this friend?
For us, this figure is that of the battered child that the father was, he can not recognize the host and he objected in his son. In doing so, he objects to his own death and repeats the objection that in expelling his son. Instead of objecting to the death for his son, he expels his son wounded child he carries. (Recall that this friend's beard "can not hide the features that he has known since childhood.") This child bruised, Georg wants household, protect and deal with all the respect he is capable. The son who would be brazen enough to cover de- death that the father wanted to conjure by giving birth to this disaster that he wanted to expel, walnut, giving the day, this son would be justly condemned to die .
Such a father did not give life without condition, it is not a "parent unconditional, and life, he made it through the mandatory condition that the child consents to ally with him to cover the soul murder that child, himself was a victim. When the son of mine would reject this alliance coverage, to deny this limitation [3] who based his paternity, he would become an enemy and should undergo per contropasso punishment identical to the crime he reveals.
When Abraham holds his arm, he gave the trace of the son's death because he took his own death upon him. The gift of signs of death is in the signs that mean to the child that the parent has taken him on his death. Then he gives life to the son, accepts the course of time and pays his debt to the symbolic order, which means he pays his release from the potential space, abandoned the plan at all or nothing, takes up the temporality. He paid his debt for having a son who will one day cover the .
Abraham, because he sacrificed to the being-time interrupts the monstrous Nature where there is no temporality, where there is no third party absent, where there are only "things" present, and where a powerful being at liberty to remove her children before she do not kill the day, became too small, it can no longer deal with them.
With Kafka and Freud we still read in the text when a father, Abraham here, give up to remove the child in distress, that this child was. [In a midrash [4], it is said that when Abraham was about to seize the knife, let his eyes sink tears and tears of the father fell into the eyes of the son]. He would not kill his son with him and eliminate the pain blind he would have charged. He would open his heart and would pledge his memory.
Reading the "Verdict" and the story of Abraham we do understand that the guarantee that the father gives the child is also that this opening to the plight to which a child, he himself itself was exposed. The parent would engage in the relationship to the child, to respond to suffering, and sometimes by the disaster, which was place. Can only cover his son one whose memory is not bankrupt. Not because it is failing but because she pledged would also mobilized to contain, to foreclose a disaster.
The parent, when his debt to a third away is not honored because his memory is all employed to hinder the return of this disaster, then that parent can not take the death on him, but because it is encysted, as advocated in a safe. When the time for him froze on a cut of breath, a death-threat psychic, he can not give evidence because the soul murder that he has suffered, in the dispossessed.
The father of the "Verdict" can not pledge his memory because he can not answer for the murder of the soul that has suffered. Forgetting the murder is for him the founder. This is an event that did not happen . Today, denial of the crime of which he was the object, it does not allow his son to open the back door of the virtual room where rests asleep and bruised, the child he was.
Back to the main theme of the coverage which is the "verdict" as of Atonement. In Chapter XVI of Leviticus - which was read on the day of (Great) Pardon, Yom Kippur - the protocols of the sacrifice of the bull and the goat are described expiatory [5]. One and one is sacrificed to ask God coverage of misconduct by the high priest, and by the people [6]. The three-consonant root word that PRK Kippur is formed, giving, as Jerome Lindon recalls in his book Jonas Kapar the words, "he covered," he has forgiven, but Kaper, this "rendering" which means the substance that covers the inner and outer sides of the Ark of Noah, and finally KaPoReT, the table gold which covers the Ark of the Covenant and on which, and before which, the high priest sprinkled the blood of sacrifice on Yom Kippur [7].
There is still question coverage in the book of Jonah which is also read during the day of Yom Kippur, which incidentally took place on the eve of the memorable night writing the "verdict". Tarshish Jonah chose to join - that is, according to Talmudic commentator, the city of his father - rather than answering the call of God, who instructed him to go to Nineveh to urge residents to return to his ways. Jonah is thrown overboard to calm the storm. Swallowed by the monster he spent time in her womb before being washed ashore and Nineveh to win when he accomplishes his mission. But Nineveh acknowledge their crimes and give them God's forgiveness. Jonah expresses his anger against God who shows such leniency. God raised up a phenomenon for to make clear to Jonas that man can endure when a coverage is withdrawn. It will dry out the tree in one night (a gourd) that he had grown the day before to give shade to Jonah.
When I related this episode to Bernard Maruani text behind the Talmudic study group I'm involved, this story made him recall the ritual immersion in the ritual bath (the Miqveh). To purify the impurity acquired, for example in contact with the dead, the whole body is submerged so that mouth and nose are necessarily closed. This occlusion is related with the section of the esophagus and trachea in ritual slaughter [8]. Immersion symbolizes killing and rebirth of one who has been in contact with a dead man, who was defiled by death.
I think that Franz Kafka was not in contact with a dead but the living dead, certainly. These undead he mentions in his book Third in octavo, October 20, 1917 - but we do not know the year, Kafka knows :
" There are many shades of the departed who are working only to lick the waters of the river of death ... The river rises in disgust, began to sink down and rejects the dead in life. However they are happy, they sing thanksgiving and caress the rebel [9].
Who are the dead who rise up the river of life in disgust. Would that not even those who have suffered a soul murder and that lead their boat to go-as-j'te rickshaws that since the entry of the Styx hit on the rudder will be confused. Thus, for the Father Georg like that of the hunter Gracchus [10]. Such a parent, undead, owes his life to his child and can not be erased. Unlike the good enough mother, he expects the child to take him on his death, gives him a face, give him a shadow, one that has failed him. It never ceases to repeat the crime he ignores have suffered.
Abraham supports the paradox and gives the trace of the death of her son. Father Georg Bendemann him, reduces the paradox of Being by refusing to support, in silence, the position where it means the child "be like your father and do not be like your father." The soul murder is that Kafka describes a scene of a father's desire to resolve the fundamental paradox of life. Paradox which can not be reduced throughout the existence and not only during the period of foster care, as Winnicott says in the postscript he wrote at the end of Game and Reality :
I hypothesize an essential paradox, we must accept and is not intended to be solved. This fundamental paradox in this concept, we must authorize and permit during the period in which care is provided to the child. "
What echoed by Wittgenstein:
" The masks and various mid-pleasing paradox of logic are of interest only because they remind everyone that a serious form of the paradox is that we need to clearly understand its function. "
The function of this figure of the paradox is to provide a background to be. A foundation, one that, in the urgency of the founding of the theory that he was inventing, Freud had given universally to children, which was to say that Winnicott had assumed the issue resolved.
*
Notes :
[1] See, for example, JL Austin, When that is done (1962), trans. fr. 1970, repr. Seuil, coll. "Points Test", 1991. RZ.
[2] Without stress, recall that the couple "cover / uncover", emerging with a strong gender dimension after Adam and Eve ate the fruit "of the tree of knowledge of good and bad "(" And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked ... " Genesis 3, 7) , was "necessarily" related party with castration as the episode called "Noah's drunkenness," narrated by Genesis 9, 20-27, indicates. RZ.
[3] According to J. Lacan, which is barred symbol (that is to say not "allowed" in the network of unconscious signifiers) reappears in the Real (in the form of delusions or hallucinations). RZ.
[4] Midrash: Rabbinic exegesis, commentary by one or more Bible verses. RZ.
[5] Leviticus XVI, 5-11: 5. [Aaron] shall receive from the congregation of the children of Israel two male goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. 6. Aaron shall offer the bull as the sin offering and make atonement for himself and his house. 7. He will take the two goats and present them before the LORD at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 8. Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats, one lot for the LORD and the other lot for Azazel. 9. Aaron shall bring the goat on which the lot fell for Jehovah, and offer it as a sacrifice of atonement. 10. And the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the LORD, that he used to make atonement and be released into the wilderness to Azazel. 11. Aaron shall offer the bull as the sin offering and make atonement for himself and his house ...
[6] Leviticus XVI, 16: And he shall make atonement for the sanctuary from the uncleanness of the children of Israel , their faults and all their sins ...
[7] Jerome Lindon, Jonas , Paris, Minuit, 1955, p. 61.
[8] The Jewish ritual slaughter (or ch'hita ) requires that the animal is slaughtered with a very sharp blade so that it does not suffer and be completely emptied of its blood. RZ.
[9] F. Kafka Notebooks T. VII, trans. Marthe Robert, Paris, Precious Book Club, 1957.
[10] F. Kafka, The Hunter Gracchus , and a Hybrid Bridge (With two drawings of Max Ernst), Paris, Editions Guy Levis Mano, 1970.
Giving evidence of the death or commit suicide (2) © copyright 2010 Philip Réfabert
