POWERS OF HORROR
An Essay on Abjection

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES:
A Series of the Columbia University Press

POWERS OF
HORRORAn Essay on Abjection
JULIA KRISTEVATranslated by
LEON S. ROUDIEZ

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESSNew York

1982

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kristeva, Julia, 1941Powers of horror.
(European perspectives)
Translation of: Pouvoirs de l'horreur.
1. Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 1894-1961 —Criticism and interpretation.
2. Horror inliterature.
3. Abjection in literature.
I. Title.
II. Series.
PQ2607.E834Z73413
843'.912
82-4481
ISBN 0-231-05346-0
AACR2

Columbia University Press
New York
Guildford, Surrey
Copyright © 1982 Columbia University Press
Pouvoirs de l'horreur © 1980 Editions du Seuil
AD rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Clothbound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smythsewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Contents

Translator's Note
Approaching Abjection
2. Something To Be Scared Of
3- From Filth to Defilement
4- Semiotics of Biblical Abomination
5- . . . Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi
6. Celine: Neither Actor nor Martyr •7- Suffering and Horror
8. Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite
9- "Ours To Jew or Die"
12 In the Beginning and Without End . . .
11 Powers of Horror
Notes
I.

vii
i

32
56
90
113
133
140
157
174
188
207
211

Translator's Note

When the original version of this book was published in
France in 1980, critics sensed that it marked a turning point inJulia Kristeva's writing. Her concerns seemed less arcane, her
presentation more appealingly worked out; as Guy Scarpetta
put it in he Nouvel Observateur (May 19, 1980), she now introduced into "theoretical rigor an effective measure of seduction."
Actually, no sudden change has taken place: the features thatare noticeable in Powers of Horror were already in evidence inseveral earlier essays, some of which have been translated in
Desire in Language (Columbia University Press, 1980). She herself pointed out in the preface to that collection, "Readers will
also notice that a change in writing takes place as the work
progresses" (p. ix).
One would assume such a change has made the translator's
task less arduous; in one sense it has, but it also produced adifferent set of difficulties. As sentences become more metaphorical, more "literary" if you wish, one is liable to forgetthat they still are conceptually very precise. In other words,
meaning emerges out of both the standard denotation(s) andthe connotations suggested by the material shape of a given
word. And it emerges not solely because of the reader's creativity, as happens in poetic language, but because it was put
there in the first place. For instance, "un etre altere" means
either a changed, adulterated being or an avid, thirsty being;
mindful, however, of the unchanged presence of the Latin root,
alter, Kristeva also intends it to mean "being for the other."This gives the phrase a special twist, and it takes a reader more
imaginative than I am to catch it.
As Kristeva's writing evolves, it also displays a greater variety

viii

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

in tone. In this essay it includes the colloquial and the formal,
the lyrical and the matter-of-fact, the concrete and the abstract.
I resisted the temptation to unify her style and tried as muchas possible to preserve the variety of the original. Only in a few
instances, when a faithful rendition would in my opinion havesounded incongruous (e.g., translating petard, which she borrows from the text of a Celine novel, as "gat" or "rod"), did
I consciously neutralize her prose.
A particularly vexing problem stems from the nature of theFrench language and its limited vocabulary as compared toEnglish; words tend to point in a greater number of different
directions. Usually, in expository prose, the context removes
the ambiguities that poetic language thrives on. Kristeva is notaverse to using polysemy to her advantage, as other French
theorists like Derrida and Lacan have also done. The French
word propre, for instance, has kept the meaning of the Latin
proprius (one's own, characteristic, proper) and also acquired
a new one: clean. At first, in Powers of Horror, the criteria of
expository prose seemed to apply, but in several instances I
began to have my doubts about this. When I asked Kristeva
which meaning she intended the answer was, both. As a result
I decided to use the rather cumbersome "one's own clean andproper body" to render the French corps propre, sacrificing elegance for the sake of clarity and fullness of meaning.
Examining my translation carefully, one is apt to notice anomalies in the text of the quotations. There are two reasons forthis. When the original is not in French, Kristeva cites a published French translation and I refer to a published English one
when available. Discrepancies are inevitable and for the mostpart inconsequential. In the case of Freud's Totem and Taboo,
however, the French version, in the excerpts quoted here, contains a couple of mistranslated words: Inzestscheu becomes"phobie de l'inceste" instead of the more accurate "incest
dread," and Genussgefahig gets afflicted with the connotationof "objets comestibles" that belongs to Geniessbar instead of themore general and accurate "capable of enjoyment" of the English version. While this has required some vocabulary adjustment, it does not affect Kristeva's argument. Where Hegel's

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

works are concerned the situation is even more troublesome,for discrepancies between French and English translations are
considerable. Referring back to the German text of Vorlesungentiber die Philosophic der Religion I find that the English text isfaithful to it. What apparently happened is that the French translation was made from an earlier version of the Lectures, which,like Saussure's famous Cours de linguistique generate, was published by Hegel's students after his death. The second edition,
on which the English version is based, is presumably an improved one—but that need not concern us here. In the excerpts
quoted by Kristeva, the meaning is essentially the same eventhough the wording differs and in one instance a metaphoricaldevelopment has been eliminated.
When several translations are available, as they are for Sophocles, I used the one that seemed closest to the one used by
Kristeva. For the Bible, I relied on the King James version;
minor differences between biblical and anthropological terminology should pose no problem, and the reader will readily seethat the latter's pure/impure distinction corresponds to the biblical contrast between clean and unclean.
For an original quotation from the French, I have also usedavailable published translations. Working with Celine's novels,
however, translators have endeavored to produce effective English-language fiction. As a result they were occasionally led tostray from a literal version of the text—and rightly so. On theother hand, for the purpose of Kristeva's analysis, there aretimes when close attention to material details of the text isessential. I have therefore, in a number of instances, had tomodify the published translation—but that should not be seen
as a reflection on their quality. On a few occasions, though,especially where the early novels are involved, translators havetended to be squeamish; thus, in Journey to the End of the Night,
the statement pertaining to women in wartime, "la guerre porte
aux ovaires," becomes, "war goes straight to their tummies."
I naturally put the ovaries back in.
Throughout this essay, Kristeva plays with the titles of
Celine's novels (and a few others: Robert Musil's The Man
Without Qualities makes a fleeting appearance toward the end).

ix

x

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Journey to the End of the Night is easily recognizable; the title
From Castle to Castle, in this connection, needs to be changed
to the more literal, "From One Castle to an Other," which
produced the title of an earlier essay, "From One Identity toan Other" (collected in Desire in Language); I have rendered theuntranslated Feerie pour une autrefois as "Enchantment for Some
Other Time." For some features of her terminology, readers
should consult the "Notes on the Translation and on Terminology" that appeared in Desire in Language. Here, however,instead of invariably rendering "ecriture" as "writing," I haveattempted to distinguish between the weak and the strong
meanings of the French word. For the latter I used the term
"scription," which I had introduced in my French Fiction Today(Rutgers University Press, 1972). There are in Powers of Horrora few additional items of Lacanian vocabulary that the context
should clarify. The object a is mentioned twice, and it could
be puzzling. A few lines from Stuart Schneiderman's Returning
to Freud (Yale University Press, 1980) might prove helpful: "Forthe psychoanalyst the important object is the lost object, theobject always desired and never attained, the object that causes
the subject to desire in cases where he can never gain the satisfaction of possessing the object. Any object the subject desires
will never be anything other than a substitute for the object a."
I should like to thank those who have given assistance inareas I am less familiar with: Stuart Schneiderman for the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Robert Austerlitz for that of linguistics, Marvin I. Herzog for Hebrew terms, Robert D. Cumming for philosophy, and of course Julia Kristeva herself forclarifying a number of difficulties. I should point out, however,that while I sought assistance whenever I realized I had met
with a problem, there may well have been problems I did not
identify and on which I foundered. In such instances and in allothers where mistranslations occur the responsibility is minealone.

POWERS OF HORROR
An Essay on Abjection

I

APPROACHING ABJECTION
No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles

NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanatefrom an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scopeof the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, andfascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhereas tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places theone haunted by it literally beside himself.
When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects
and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly
speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing
me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness
ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject
is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone orsomething else as support, would allow me to be more or lessdetached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality ofthe object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however,through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of

2

APPROACHING ABJECTIONa desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes meceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on
the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded anddraws me toward the place_where meaning collapses. A certain"ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven
it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem toagree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its placeof banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.
Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion,a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject.
It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, notthe translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that,"I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits itto the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endureit, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive
and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But notnothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as athing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The
spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, theretching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away fromdefilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of
being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads
me toward and separates me from them.
Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touchthat skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet ofcigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging

APPROACHING ABJECTION

sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, thebelly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears andbile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.
Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk atthat milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who
proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire;"I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel
it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am onlyin their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself
within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish
myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one thatthey ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside
out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in theprocess of becoming an other at the expense of my own death,
During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself
amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, isinscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either
wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer
to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets evenmore violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious
chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smellof sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence ofsignified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would
understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without
makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, thisdefilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and withdifficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of
my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as
being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might
live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and myentire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dungsignifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not
and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening ofwastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is

3

4

APPROACHING ABJECTION

no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become
an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that
I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I
might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is
now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived ofworld, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that nolonger matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I
behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders:fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside ofscience, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.
Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part,from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.
Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us andends up engulfing us.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection
but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respectborders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, thecomposite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is asavior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because theyheighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality
is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even incrime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles,*a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter
instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend whostabs you.*. . .
In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remainsof Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something
like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a
Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection ofNazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case,kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among otherthings.

APPROACHING ABJECTION

THE ABJECTION OF SELF
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced
at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless
attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds theimpossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes
its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjectionof self would be the culminating form of that experience of thesubject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merelyon the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being.
There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being,
meaning, language, or desire is founded. One always passes tooquickly over this word, "want," and today psychoanalysts are
finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized product, the "object of want." But if one imagines (and imagine
one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself_as logically preliminary to being and object—to the being of theobject—then one understands that abjection, and even more so
abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none
but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection ofself into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness
Elizabeth of Hungary who "though a great princess, delighted
in nothing so much as in abasing herself."1
The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time,that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is
termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse
dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as themost precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own
right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analysis can leadus there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights ofmasochism.
Essentially different from "uncanniness," more violent, too,abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin;nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine
a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, "all by himself," and, to save

5

6

APPROACHING ABJECTION

himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him—
all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject.
Even before things for him are—hence before they are signifiable—he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, andconstitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacredconfiguration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has
swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather
a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father;that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace
does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father,
existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy bratwould probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject,
he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects thatare always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified byabjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, hethrough whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body ofthe mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from theirobjects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze hecauses, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The
phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word,"fear"—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it
cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates allwords of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory,
ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse
will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness,a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memorythat is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.
BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained bydesire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on
exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic, articulated by negation and its
modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation. Their dynamics

APPROACHING ABJECTION

challenges the theory of the unconscious, seeing that the latteris dependent upon a dialectic of negativity.
The theory of the unconscious, as is well known, presupposesa repression of contents (affects and presentations) that, thereby,
do not have access to consciousness but effect within the subject
modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body
(symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc.). As correlative to thenotion of repression, Freud put forward that of denial as a meansof figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a meansof situating psychosis. The asymmetry of the two repressions
becomes more marked owing to denial's bearing on the object
whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud's thought, interprets that as "repudiation of theName of the Father").
Yet, facing the ab-ject and more specifically phobia and thesplitting of the ego (a point I shall return to), one might ask
if those articulations of negativity germane to the unconscious(inherited by Freud from philosophy and psychology) have not
become inoperative. The "unconscious" contents remain here
excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow
for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet
clearly enough for a defensive position to be established—one
that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if
the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, inmore archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. As if suchan opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious, elaborated on the basis of neuroses.
Owing to the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside—an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but
uncertain—there are contents, "normally" unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in "borderline"
patients' speeches and behavior. Such contents are often openly
manifested through symbolic practices, without by the same
token being integrated into the judging consciousness of thoseparticular subjects. Since they make the conscious/unconscious
distinction irrelevant, borderline subjects and their speech constitute propitious ground for a sublimating discourse ("aesthetic" or "mystical," etc.), rather than a scientific or rationalist
one.

7

8

APPROACHING ABJECTION

AN EXILE WHO ASKS, "WHERE?"
The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places(himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore
strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or
refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laughter—
since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection. Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaean, he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his
abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, heincludes himself among them, thus casting within himself thescalpel that carries out his separations.
Instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so
concerning his place: "Where am I?" instead of "Who am I?" For
the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one,nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages,
works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose
fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, theabject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start
afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is ona journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding.
He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object!1
attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking therisk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more
he strays, the more he is saved.
TIME: FORGETFULNESS AND THUNDER
For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws
his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly
remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must havebeen a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance.
The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up
suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation

APPROACHING ABJECTION 9

that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together
the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a timeof oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment
when revelation bursts forth.
JOUISSANCE AND AFFECT
Jouissance, in short. For the stray considers himself as equivalent to a Third Party. He secures the latter's judgment, he actson the strength of its power in order to condemn, he grounds
himself on its law to tear the veil of oblivion but also to set up
its object as inoperative. As jettisoned. Parachuted by the Other.
A ternary structure, if you wish, held in keystone position by
the Other, but a "structure" that is skewed, a topology ofcatastrophe. For, having provided itself with an alter ego, theOther no longer has a grip on the three apices of the triangle
where subjective homogeneity resides; and so, it jettisons theobject into an abominable real, inaccessible except throughjouissancey It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject toexist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it,
one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.
And, as in jouissance where the object of desire, known asobject a [in Lacan's terminology], bursts with the shatteredmirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate
itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal
to the abject. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the
Other, having become alter ego, drops so that "I" does notdisappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeitedexistence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed
up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject fromfoundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why
so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if notits submissive and willing ones.
We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity.
Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off thesubject from what treatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also because ab-

10

APPROACHING ABJECTION

jection itself is a composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves
what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in theimmemorial violence with which a body becomes separated
from another body in order to be—maintaining that night inwhich the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only
the imponderable affect is carried out. To be sure, if I am
affected by what does not yet appear to me as a thing, it isbecause laws, connections, and even structures of meaning govern and condition me. That order, that glance, that voice, thatgesture, which enact the law for my frightened body, constituteand bring about an effect and not yet a sign. I speak to it invain in order to exclude it from what will no longer be, formyself, a world that can be assimilated. Obviously, I am only
like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or
experience jouissance—then "I" is heterogeneous. Discomfort,
unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that, throughthe violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of whichsigns and objects arise. Thus braided, woven, ambivalent, aheterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own
because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out
to me through loathing.
This means once more that the heterogeneous flow, which
portions the abject and sends back abjection, already dwells ina human animal that has been highly altered. I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what
will be "me." Not at all an other with whom I identify andincorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and_through such possession causes me to be. A possession previous
to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father mightor might not embody. Significance is indeed inherent in thehuman body.
AT THE LIMIT OF PRIMAL REPRESSION
If, on account of that Other, a space becomes demarcated,
separating the abject from what will be a subject and its objects,
it is because a repression that one might call "primal" has been

APPROACHING ABJECTION

11

effected prior to the springing forth of the ego, of its objects
and representations. The latter, in turn, as they depend on another repression, the "secondary" one, arrive only a posteriori
on an enigmatic foundation that has already been marked off;
its return, in a phobic, obsessional, psychotic guise, or moregenerally and in more imaginary fashion in the shape of abjection,
notifies us of the limits of the human universe.
On such limits and at the limit one could say that there is no
unconscious, which is elaborated when representations and affects (whether or not tied to representations) shape a logic.
Here, on the contrary, consciousness has not assumed its rights
and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet
unstable territories where an "I" that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying. We are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious but at the limit of primal repression that, nevertheless,has discovered an intrinsically corporeal and already signifying
brand, symptom, and sign: repugnance, disgust, abjection.
There is an effervescence of object and sign—not of desire butof intolerable significance; they tumble over into non-sense or
the impossible real, but they appear even so in spite of "myself'(which is not) as abjection.
PREMISES OF THE SIGN, LININGS OF THE SUBLIME
Let us pause a while at this juncture. If the abject is already awellspring of sign for a non-object, on the edges of primal
repression, one can understand its skirting the somatic symptom
on the one hand and sublimation on the other. The symptom:
a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a nonassimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening
devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject
is huddled outside the paths of desire. Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing else than the possibility of naming the prenominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal. In the~symptom, the abject permeates me,
I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control.
The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same momenton the journey, but the same subject and speech bring theminto being.

12

APPROACHING ABJECTION

For the sublime has no object either. When the starry sky,a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple
beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, ofwords, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me
beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The "sublime"
object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It issuch a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point,
remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I strayin order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it,
the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spreeof perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly.
I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed
to a secondary universe, set off from the one where "I" am—delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and throughperception and words, the sublime is a something added that
expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as
dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an
impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.
BEFORE THE BEGINNING: SEPARATION
The abject might then appear as the most fragile (from a synchronic point of view), the most archaic (from a diachronic one)
sublimation of an "object" still inseparable from drives. The
abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears
only within the gaps of secondary repression. The abject would
thus be the "object" of primal repression.
But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the
speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide,
reject, repeat. Without one division, one separation, one subject/
object having been constituted (not yet, or no longer yet). Why?
Perhaps because of maternal anguish, unable to be satiatedwithin the encompassing symbolic.
The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile
states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by
way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise

APPROACHING ABJECTION

13

area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.
The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this timewithin our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts torelease the hold of maternal entity even before_ex-isting outsideof her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent,clumsy breaking away,"\with the constant risk of falling backunder the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling". The
difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm—in other words, the problem
she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands
for—is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural
mansion. The child can serve its mother as token of her own
authentication; there is, however, hardly any reason for her toserve as go-between for it to become autonomous and authentic
in its turn. In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third
party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future
subject, the more so if it happens to be endowed with a robust
supply of drive energy, in pursuing a reluctant struggle against
what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting.
In this struggle, which fashions the human being, the mimesis,by means of which he becomes homologous to another in order
to become himself, is in short logically and chronologicallysecondary. Even before being like, "I" am not but do separate,
reject, ab-ject. Abjection, with a meaning broadened to take insubjective diachrony, is a precondition of narcissism. It is
coexistent
with it and causes it to be permanently brittle. The more orless beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests
upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, theconstant watchman, is relaxed.
THE "CHORA," RECEPTACLE OF NARCISSISM
Let us enter, for a moment, into that Freudian aporia called
primal repression. Curious primacy, where what is repressedcannot really be held down, and where what represses always

14

APPROACHING ABJECTION

already borrows its strength and authority from what is apparently very secondary: language. Let us therefore not speakof primacy but of the instability of the symbolic function in its
most significant aspect—the prohibition placed on the maternal
body (as a defense against autoeroticism and incest taboo). Here,drives hold sway and constitute a strange space that I shall
name, after Plato (Timeus, 48-53), a chora, a receptacle.
For the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives, whether
life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that "not yet" egowith an "object" in order to establish both of them. Such a
process, while dichotomous (inside/outside, ego/not ego) andrepetitive, has nevertheless something centripetal about it: itaims to settle the ego as center of a solar system of objects. If,
by dint of coming back towards the center, the drive's motion
should eventually become centrifugal, hence fasten on the Otherand come into being as sign so as to produce meaning—that
is, literally speaking, exorbitant.
But from that moment on, while I recognize my image assign and change in order to signify, another economy is instituted. The sign represses the chora and its eternal return. Desire
alone will henceforth be witness to that "primal" pulsation. But
desire ex-patriates the ego toward an other subject and accepts
the exactness of the ego only as narcissistic. Narcissism thenappears as a regression to a position set back from the other,a return to a self-contemplative, conservative, self-sufficienthaven. Actually, such narcissism never is the wrinkleless imageof the Greek youth in a quiet fountain. The conflicts of drives
muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything
that, by not becoming integrated with a given system of signs,
is abjection for it.
Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness
to the ephemeral aspect of the state called "narcissism" withreproachful jealousy, heaven knows why; what is more, abjection gives narcissism (the thing and the concept) its classificationas "seeming."
Nevertheless, it is enough that a prohibition, which can bea superego, block the desire craving an other—or that thisother, as its role demands, not fulfill it—for desire and its sig-APPROACHING ABJECTION

15 )nifiers to turn back toward the "same," thus clouding the watersof Narcissus. It is precisely at the moment of narcissistic perturbation (all things considered, the permanent state of the
speaking being, if he would only hear himself speak) that secondary repression, with its reserve of symbolic means, attempts
to transfer to its own account, which has thus been overdrawn,
the resources of primal repression. The archaic economy isbrought into full light of day, signified, verbalized. Its strategies(rejecting, separating, repeating/abjecting) hence find a symbolic existence, and the very logic of the symbolic—arguments,
demonstrations, proofs, etc.—must conform to it. It is thenthat the object ceases to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust
aside: it appears as abject.
Two seemingly contradictory causes bring about the narcissistic crisis that provides, along with its truth, a view of theabject. Too much strictness on the part of the Other, confused with
the One and the Law. The lapse of the Other, which shows
through the breakdown of objects of desire. In both instances,
the abject appears in order to uphold "I" within the Other. The
abject is the violence of mourning for an "object" that has
always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on
the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has
broken away—it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, anddeath. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death(of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive intoa start of life, of new signifiance.
PERVERSE OR ARTISTIC
The abject is related to perversion^ The sense of abjection that
I experience is anchored in the superego. The abject is perverse
because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule,or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them,takes advantage of them, the better to deny them. It kills in thename of life—a progressive despot; it lives at the behest ofdeath—an operator in genetic experimentations; it curbs theother's suffering for its own profit—a cynic (and a psychoan-

16

APPROACHING ABJECTION

alyst); it establishes narcissistic power while pretending to reveal
the abyss—an artist who practices his art as a "business." Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. Thatis the socialized appearance of the abject.
An unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary
if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in andthrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppressive, rather more thanless; laboriously prevailing, more and more so.
Contemporary literature does not take their place. Rather,it seems to be written out of the untenable aspects of perverse
or superego positions. It acknowledges the impossibility of
Religion, Morality, and Law—their power play, their necessary
and absurd seeming. Like perversion, it takes advantage ofthem, gets round them, and makes sport of them. Nevertheless,it maintains a distance where the abject is concerned. The writer,fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into
it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language—styleand content. But on the other hand, as the sense of abjection
is both the abject's judge and accomplice, this is also true ofthe literature that confronts it. One might thus say that withsuch a literature there takes place a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin,
Morality and Immorality.
For the subject firmly settled in its superego, a writing of thissort is necessarily implicated in the interspace that characterizes
perversion; and for that reason, it gives rises in turn to abjection.
And yet, such texts call for a softening of the superego. Writing
them implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see
oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of thedisplacements of verbal play. It is only after his death, eventually, that the writer of abjection will escape his condition ofwaste, reject, abject. Then, he will either sink into oblivion or
attain the rank of incommensurate ideal. Death would thus be
the chief curator of our imaginary museum; it would protect
us in the last resort from the abjection that contemporary literature claims to expend while uttering it. Such a protection,
which gives its quietus to abjection, but also perhaps to theAPPROACHING ABJECTION

bothersome, incandescent stake of the literary phenomenon itself, which, raised to the status of the sacred, is severed fromits specificity. Death thus keeps house in our contemporary
universe. By purifying (us from) literature, it establishes our
secular religion.
AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED
Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears,
to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse.
Several structurations of abjection should be distinguished, eachone determining a specific form of the sacred.
Abjection appears as a rite of defilement and pollution in the
paganism that accompanies societies with a dominant or surviving matrilinear character. It takes on the form of the exclusionof a substance (nutritive or linked to sexuality), the executionof which coincides with the sacred since it sets it up.
Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) inmonotheistic religions, Judaism in particular, but drifts over tomore "secondary" forms such as transgression (of the Law)
within the same monotheistic economy. It finally encounters,with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration, as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening otherness—but
always nameable, always totalizeable.
The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with thatcatharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near sideof religion. Seen'from that standpoint, the artistic experience,
which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token
purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity. Thatis perhaps why it is destined to survive the collapse of thehistorical forms of religions.
OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTENIn the contemporary practice of the West and owing to thecrisis in Christianity, abjection elicits more archaic resonancesthat are culturally prior to sin; through them it again assumes

17

18

APPROACHING ABJECTION

its biblical status, and beyond it that of defilement in primitive
societies. In a world in which the Other has collapsed, theaesthetic task—a descent into the foundations of the symbolic
construct—amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking
being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless "primacy" constituted by primal repression. Through that experience, which
is nevertheless managed by the Other, "subject" and "object"push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and startagain—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain: Dostoyevsky, Lautreamont,
Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine.
DOSTOYEVSKY
The abject is, for Dostoyevsky, the "object" of The Possessed:
it is the aim ,and motive of an existence whose meaning is lostin absolute degradation because it absolutely rejected the moral
limit (a social, religious, familial, and individual one) as absolute—God. Abjection then wavers between the fading away ofall meaning and all humanity, burnt as by the flames of a conflagration, and the ecstasy of an ego that, having lost its Other
and its objects, reaches, at the precise moment of this suicide,the height of harmony with the promised land. Equally abject
are Verkhovensky and Kirilov, murder and suicide.
A big fire at night always produces an exciting and exhilarating effect;
this explains the attraction of fireworks; but in the case of fireworks,
the graceful and regular shape of the flames and the complete immunity from danger produce a light and playful effect comparable tothe effect of a glass of champagne. A real fire is quite another matter:
there the horror and a certain sense of personal danger, combined withthe well-known exhilarating effect of a fire at night, produce in the
spectator (not, of course, in one whose house has burnt down) a
certain shock to the brain and, as it were, a challenge to his own
destructive instincts, which, alas, lie buried in the soul of even themeekest and most domesticated official of the lowest grade. This grimsensation is almost always delightful. "I really don't know if it ispossible to watch a fire without some enjoyment."2

APPROACHING ABJECTION

There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is
nothing earthly. I don't mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his
earthly semblance can't endure it. He has to undergo a physical change
or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable. It is as though you
suddenly apprehended all nature and suddenly said: "Yes, it is true—
it is good." [. . .] What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly
clear and such gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, thesoul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live
through a lifetime, and I am ready to give my life for them, for it's
worth it. To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have toundergo a physical change. I think man ought to stop begetting children. What do you want children for, what do you want mental
development, if your goal has been attained? It is said in the gospelthat in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,
but are the angels of God in heaven. It's a hint. Is your wife giving
birth to a baby?3
Verkhovensky is abject because of his clammy, cunning appeal to ideals that no longer exist, from the moment when
Prohibition (call it God) is lacking. Stavrogin is perhaps less so,for his immoralism admits of laughter and refusal, somethingartistic, a cynical and gratuitous expenditure that obviously
becomes capitalized for the benefit of private narcissism but
does not serve an arbitrary, exterminating power. It is possible
to be cynical without being irremediably abject; abjection, on
the other hand, is always brought about by that which attempts
to get along with trampled-down law.
He's got everything perfect in his note-book, Verkhovensky went on.
Spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and he is
obliged to inform against them. Everyone belongs to all the others,
and all belong to everyone. All are slaves and equals in slavery. In
extreme cases slander and murder, but, above all, equality. To begin
with, the level of education, science, and accomplishment is lowered.
A high level of scientific thought and accomplishment is open only
to men of the highest abilities! Men of the highest ability have always
seized the power and become autocrats. Such men cannot help being
autocrats, and they've always done more harm than good; they are
either banished or executed. A Cicero will have his tongue cut out,
Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be

19

20

APPROACHING ABJECTION

stoned—there you have Shigalyov's doctrine! Slaves must be equal:
without despotism there never has been any freedom or equality, but
in a herd there is bound to be equality—there's the Shigalyov doctrine
for you! Ha, ha, ha! You think it strange? I am for the Shigalyov
doctrine!4
Dostoyevsky has X-rayed sexual, moral, and religious abjection, displaying it as collapse of paternal laws. Is not theworld of The Possessed a world of fathers, who are either repudiated, bogus, or dead, where matriarchs lusting for power
hold sway—ferocious fetishes but nonetheless phantomlike?
And by symbolizing the abject, through a masterful deliveryof the jouissance produced by uttering it, Dostoyevsky delivered himself of that ruthless maternal burden.
But it is with Proust that we find the most immediately
erotic, sexual, and desiring mainspring of abjection; and it iswith Joyce that we shall discover that the feminine body, thematernal body, in its most un-signifiable, un-symbolizable aspect, shores up, in'the individual, the fantasy of the loss inwhich he is engulfed or becomes inebriated, for want of theability to name an object of desire.
PROUST
Abjection, recognized as inherent in the mellow and impossible alteration of the ego, hence recognized as welded to narcissism, has, in Proust, something domesticated about it; without belonging to the realm of "one's own clean and proper"
or of the "self evident," it constitutes a scandal of which one
has to acknowledge if not the banality at least the secrets of atelltale snob. Abjection, with Proust, is fashionable, if not social; it is the foul lining of society. That may be why he furnishes
the only modern example, certified by dictionaries, of the useof the word "abject" with the weak meaning it has (in French)at the end of the eighteenth century:
In those regions that were almost slums, what a modest existence,
abject, if you please, but delightful, nourished by tranquillity andhappiness, he would have consented to lead indefinitely.5

APPROACHING ABJECTION

Proust writes that if the object of desire is real it can only
rest upon the abject, which is impossible to fulfill. The objectof love then becomes unmentionable, a double of the subject,similar to it, but improper, because inseparable from an impossible identity. Loving desire is thus felt as an inner foldwithin that impossible identity, as an accident of narcissism,ob-ject, painful alteration, delightfully and dramatically condemned to find the other in the same sex only. As if one accededto the truth, to the abject truth of sexuality, only through homosexuality—Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities of the Plain.
I had not even cause to regret my not having arrived in the shop until
several, minutes had elapsed. For from what I heard first at Jupien's
shop, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine thatfew words- had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were soviolent that, if one set had not always been taken up an octave higher
by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was strangling another within a few feet of me, and that subsequently themurderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away
the traces of the crime. I concluded from this later on that there isanother thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure, especially when
there is added to it—failing the fear of an eventual parturition, which
could not be present in this case, despite the hardly convincing example
in the Golden Legend—an immediate afterthought of cleanliness.6
Compared to this one, the orgy in Sade, meshing with agigantic philosophy, be it that of the boudoir, had nothing
abject about it. Methodical, rhetorical, and, from that point ofview, regular, it broadens Meaning, Body, and Universe but
is not at all exorbitant: everything is nameable for it, the wholeis nameable. Sade's scene integrates: it allows for no other, no
unthinkable, nothing heterogeneous. Rational and optimistic,
it does not exclude. That means that it does not recognize asacred, and in that sense it is the anthropological and rhetoricalacme of atheism. Proustian writing, to the contrary, never gives
up a judging prerogative, perhaps a biblical one, which splits,
banishes, shares out, or condemns; land it is in relation to it,with it and against it, that the web of Proust's sentence, memory, sexuality, and morality is elaborated—infinitely spinning
together differences (sexes, classes, races) into a homogeneity

21

22

APPROACHING ABJECTION

that consists only in signs, a fragile net stretched out over anabyss of incompatibilities, rejections, and abjections. Desire andsigns, with Proust, weave the infinite cloth that does not hidebut causes the subdued foulness to appear. As lapse, discomfort,
shame, or blunder. As permanent threat, in short, to the homogenizing rhetoric that the writer composes against and withthe abject.
JOYCE
How dazzling, unending, eternal—and so weak, so insignificant, so sickly—is the rhetoric of Joycean language. Far frompreserving us from the abject, Joyce causes it to break out inwhat he sees as prototype of literary utterance: Molly's monologue. If that monologue spreads out the abject, it is not because there is a woman speaking. But because, from ajar, thewriter approaches the hysterical body so that it might speak,so that he might speak, using it as springboard, of what eludes
speech and turns out to be the hand to hand struggle of one
woman with another, her mother of course, the absolute because primeval seat of the impossible—of the excluded, theoutside-of-meaning, the abject. Atopia.
the woman hides it not to give all the trouble they do yes he camesomewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its not or hed be off
his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those night women
if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he made up apack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did 1 meet ah
yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me seethat big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting witha young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned my back on him when
he slinked out looking quite conscious what harm but he had theimpudence to make up to me one time well done to him mouth
almighty and his boiled eyes of all the big stupoes I ever met and thats
called a solicitor only for I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else
if its not that its some little bitch or other he got in with somewhereor picked up on the sly if they only knew him as well as I do yes
because the day before yesterday he was scribbling something a letter
when I came into the front room for the matches to show him Dignam's death6

APPROACHING ABJECTION 23

The abject here does not reside in the thematic of masculine
sexuality as Molly might see it. Not even in the fascinatedhorror that the other women, sketched out in back of the men,imbue the speaker with. The abject lies, beyond the themes,
and for Joyce generally, in the way one speaks; it is verbal
communication, it is the Word that discloses the abject. But at
the same time, the Word alone purifies from the abject, andthat is what Joyce seems to say when he gives back to themasterly rhetoric that his Work in progress constitutes full powers
against abjection. A single catharsis: the rhetoric of the puresignifier, of music in letters—Finnegans Wake.
Celine's journey, to the end of his night, will also encounterrhythm and music as being the only way out, the ultimate
sublimation of the unsignifiable. Contrary to Joyce, however,Celine will not find salvation in it. Again carrying out a rejection, without redemption, himself forefeited, Celine will become, body and tongue, the apogee of that moral, political,
and stylistic revulsion that brands our tide. A .time that seems
to have, for a century now, gone into unending labor pains.
The enchantment will have to wait for some other time, always
and forever.
BORGES
According to Borges the "object" of literature is in any casevertiginous and hallucinatory. It is the Aleph, which appears,
in its transfinite truth, at the time of a descent, worthy of
Mallarme's Igitur, into the cellar of the native house, condemnedto destruction—by definition. A literature that dares to relate
the dizzying pangs of such a descent is no more than mediocre
mockery of an archaic memory that language lays out as muchas it betrays it. The Aleph is exorbitant to the extent that, within
the narrative, nothing could tap its power other than the narration of infamy. That is, of rampancy, boundlessness, the unthinkable, the untenable, the unsymbolizable. But what is it?
Unless it be the untiring repetition of a drive, which, propelledby an initial loss, does not cease wandering, unsated, deceived,
warped, until it finds its only stable object—death. Handling24 APPROACHING ABJECTION

that repetition, staging it, cultivating it until it releases, beyond
its eternal return, its sublime destiny of being a struggle withdeath—is it not that which characterizes writing? And yet, dealing with death in that manner, making sport of it, is that not
infamy itself? The literary narrative that utters the workings ofrepetition must necessarily become, beyond fantastic tales, detective stories, and murder mysteries, a narrative of the infamous (A Universal History of Infamy). And the writer cannot but
recognize himself, derisive- and forfeited, in that abject character, Lazarus Morell, the frightful redeemer, who raises his
slaves from the dead only to have them die more fully, but not
until they have been circulated—and have brought in a return—like currency. Does that mean that literary objects, our fictional
objects, like the slaves of Lazarus Morell, are merely ephemeral
resurrections of that elusive Aleph? Does this Aleph, this impossible "object," this impossible imagination, sustain the workof writing, even though the latter is merely a temporary haltin the Borgesian race toward death, which is contained in thechasm of the maternal cave?
The stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another werebarely more than a digression in Morell's criminal career, but they
foreshadowed the method that now assures him his rightful place ina Universal History of Infamy. This method is unique not only forthe popular circumstances that distinguished it but also for the sordidness it required, for its deadly manipulation of hope, and for its
step by step development, so like the hideous unfolding of a nightmare. [. . .]Flashing rings on their fingers to inspire respect, they traveled up
and down the vast plantations of the South. They would pick out awretched black and offer him freedom. They would tell him that if
he ran away from his master and allowed them to sell him, he would
receive a portion of the money paid for him, and they would thenhelp him escape again, this second time sending him to a free state.
Money and freedom, the jingle of silver dollars together with his
liberty—what greater temptation could they offer him? The slave
became emboldened for his first escape.
The river provided the natural route. A canoe; the hold of a steamboat; a scow; a great raft as big as the sky, with a cabin at the pointor three or four wigwams—the means mattered little, what counted

APPROACHING ABJECTION

was feeling the movement and the safety of the unceasing river. The
black would be sold on some other plantation, then run away again
to the canebrakes or the morasses. There his terrible benefactors (about
whom he now began to have serious misgivings) cited obscure expenses and told him they had to sell him one final time. On his return,they said, they would give him his part of both sales and his freedom.
The man let himself be sold, worked for a while, and on his final
escape defied the hounds and the whip. He then made his way backbloodied, sweaty, desperate, and sleepy. [. . .]The runaway expected his freedom. Lazarus Morell's shadowy
mulattoes would give out an order among themselves that was sometimes barely more than a nod of the head, and the slave would befreed from sight, hearing, touch, day, infamy, time, his benefactors,
pity, the air, the hound packs, the world, hope, sweat, and himself.
A bullet, a knife, or a blow, and the Mississippi turtles and catfish
would receive the last evidence.
Just imagine that imaginary machine transformed into a social
institution—and what you get is the infamy of fascism.
ARTAUDAn "I" overcome by the corpse—such is often the abject inArtaud's text. For it is death that most violently represents thestrange state in which a non-subject, a stray, having lost its
non-objects, imagines nothingness through the ordeal of abjection. The death that "I" am provokes horror, there is achoking sensation that does not separate inside from outside
but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely. Artaud isthe inescapable witness of that torture—of that truth.
The dead little girl says, I am the one who guffaws in horror inside
the lungs of the live one. Get me out of there at once.9
Once dead, however, my corpse was thrown out on the dunghill, andI remember having been macerated I don't know now many days or
how many hours while waiting to awaken. For I did not know at firstthat I was dead: I had to make up my mind to understand that before
I could succeed in raising myself. A few friends, then, who had completely forsaken me at first, decided to come and embalm my corpse
and were joylessly surprised at seeing me again, alive.

25

26 APPROACHING ABJECTION

I have no business going to bed with you, things, for I stink morethan you do, god, and going to bed does not mean getting soiled but,to the contrary, clearing myself, from you.11
At that level of downfall in subject and object, the abject isthe equivalent of death. And writing, which allows one torecover, is equal to a resurrection. The writer, then, finds himself marked out for identification with Christ, if only in orderfor him, too, to be rejected, ab-jected:
For, as ball-breaking as this may seem, I am that Artaud crucified on
Golgotha, not as christ but as Artaud, in other words as complete
atheist. I am that body persecuted by erotic golosity, the obscenesexual erotic golosity of mankind, for which pain is a humus, theliquid from a fertile mucus, a serum worth sipping by one who has
never on his own gained by being a man while knowing that he was
becoming one.12
These different literary texts name types of abjects that areanswerable to, this goes without saying, different psychic structures. The types of articulation (narrative and syntactic structures, prosodic processes, etc. in the different texts) also vary.
Thus the abject, depending on the writer, turns out to be named
differently when it is not merely suggested by linguistic modifications that are always somewhat elliptic. In the final part ofthis essay I shall examine in detail a specific articulation of theabject—that of Celine. Let me just say at this point, as an
introduction, that contemporary literature, in its multiple variants, and when it is written as the language, possible at last,of that impossible constituted either by a-subjectivity or by
non-objectivity, propounds, as a matter of fact, a sublimationof abjection. Thus it becomes a substitute for the role formerly
played by the sacred, at the limits of social and subjective identity. But we are dealing here with a sublimation without consecration. Forfeited.
CATHARSIS AND ANALYSIS
That abjection, which modernity has learned to repress, dodge,
or fake, appears fundamental once the analytic point of view

APPROACHING ABJECTION 27

is assumed. Lacan says so when he links that word to the saint1
liness of the analyst, a linkage in which the only aspect of humor
that remains is blackness.13
One must keep open the wound where he or she who enters
into the analytic adventure is located—a wound that the professional establishment, along with the cynicism of the times andof institutions, will soon manage to close up. There is nothing
initiatory in that rite, if one understands by "initiation" theaccession to a purity that the posture of death guaranteed (as in
Plato's Phaedo) or the unadulterated treasure of the "pure signifier" (as is the gold of truth in The Republic, or the pure
separatism of the statesman in the Statesman). It is rather aheterogeneous, corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness: a "gaping," "less One." For the unstabilized subject who comes out of that—like a crucified person opening up
the stigmata of its desiring body to a speech that structures only
on condition that it let go—any signifying or human phenomenon, insofar as it is, appears in its being as abjection. For what
impossible catharsis? Freud, early in his career, used the sameword to refer to a therapeutics, the rigor of which was to comeout later.
WITH PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The analyst is thus and forever sent back to the question that
already haunted Plato when he wanted to take over where
Apollonian or Dionysiac religion left off.14 Purification is something only the Logos is capable of. But is that to be done in themanner of the Phaedo, stoically separating oneself from a bodywhose substance and passions are sources of impurity? Orrather, as in the Sophist, after having sorted out the worst fromthe best; or after the fashion of the Philebus by leaving the doors
wide open to impurity, provided the eyes of the mind remain
focused on truth? In such a case, pleasure, having become pureand true through the harmony of color and form as in the caseof accurate and beautiful geometric form, has nothing in common, as the philosopher says, with "the pleasures of scratching"(Philebus 51).

28

APPROACHING ABJECTION

Catharsis seems to be a concern that is intrinsic to philosophy,
insofar as the latter is an ethics and unable to forget Plato. Even
if the mixture seems inevitable towards the end of the Platonic
course, it is the mind alone, as harmonious wisdom, that insurespurity: catharsis has been transformed, where transcendental
idealism is concerned, into philosophy. Of the cathartic incantation peculiar to mysteries, Plato has kept only, as we all know,
the very uncertain role of poets whose frenzy would be usefulto the state only after having been evaluated, sorted out, andpurified in its turn by wise men.
Aristotelian catharsis is closer to sacred incantation. It is theone that has bequeathed its name to the common, esthetic concept of catharsis. Through the mimesis of passions—ranging
from enthusiasm to suffering—in "language with pleasurable
accessories," the most important of which being rhythm andsong (see the Poetics), the soul reaches orgy and purity at the sametime. What is involved is a purification of body and soul bymeans of a heterogeneous and complex circuit, going from"bile" to "fire," from "manly warmth" to the "enthusiasm"
of the "mind." Rhythm and song hence arouse the impure, theother of mind, the passionate-corporeal-sexual-virile, but theyharmonize it, arrange it differently than the wise man's knowledge does. They thus soothe frenzied outbursts (Plato, in theLaws, allowed such use of rhythm and meter only to the motherrocking her child), by contributing an external rule, a poetic
one, which fills the gap, inherited from Plato, between bodyand soul. To Platonic death, which owned, so to speak, the stateof purity, Aristotle opposed the act of poetic purification—in
itself an impure process that protects from the abject only by.
dint of being immersed in it. The abject, mimed through soundand meaning, is repeated. Getting rid of it is out of the question—
the final Platonic lesson has been understood, one does not get
rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second
time, and differently from the original impurity. It is a repetition
through rhythm and song, therefore through what is not yet,or no longer is "meaning," but arranges, defers, differentiates
and organizes, harmonizes pathos, bile, warmth, and enthusiasm. Benveniste translates "rhythm" by "trace" and "conca-

APPROACHING ABJECTION 2Q

tenation" [enchainement]. Prometheus is "rhythmical," and wecall him "bound" [enchaine]. An attachment on the near and far
side of language. Aristotle seems to say that there is a discourseof sex and that is not the discourse of knowledge—it is the only
possible catharsis. That discourse is audible, and through the
speech that it mimics it repeats on another register what thelatter does not say.
PHILOSOPHICAL SADNESS AND THE SPOKEN DISASTER
OF THE ANALYST
Poetic catharsis, which for more than two thousand years behaved as an underage sister of philosophy, face to face andincompatible with it, takes us away from purity, hence from
Kantian ethics, which has long governed modern codes andremains more faithful to a certain Platonic stoicism. By meansof the "universalizing of maxims," as is well known, the Kantof the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Ethics or of the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue advocated an "ethical gymnastics"
in order to give us, by means of consciousness, control over
our defilements and, through that very consciousness, making
us free and joyous.
More skeptical and, from a certain point of view, more Aristotelian, Hegel, on the contrary, rejects a "calculation" thatclaims to eliminate defilement, for the latter seems fundamental
to him. Probably echoing the Greek polis, he conceives of noother ethics than that of the act. Also distrustful, however, of
those fine aestheticizing souls who find purity in the elaborationof empty forms, he obviously does not hold to the mimetic andorgiastic catharsis of Aristotle. It is in the historical act that Hegelsees fundamental impurity being expended; as a matter of fact,
the latter is a sexual impurity whose historical achievement
consists in marriage. But—and this is where transcendental
idealism, too, sadly comes to an end—here it is that desire{Lust), thus normalized in order to escape abject concupiscence(Begierde), sinks into a banality that is sadness and silence. How
come? Hegel does not condemn impurity because it is exterior
to ideal consciousness; more profoundly—but also more craf-

30 APPROACHING ABJECTION

tily—he thinks that it can and should get rid of itself throughthe historico-social act, If he thereby differs from Kant, henevertheless shares his condemnation of (sexual) impurity. He
agrees with his aim to keep consciousness apart from defilement, which, nevertheless, dialectically constitutes it. Reabsorbed into the trajectory of the Idea, what can defilement become if not the negative side of consciousness—that is, lack ofcommunication and speech? In other words, defilement as reabsorbed in marriage becomes sadness. In so doing, it has notstrayed too far from its logic, according to which it is a borderof discourse—a silence.15
It is obvious that the analyst, from the abyss of his silence,brushes against the ghost of the sadness Hegel saw in sexual
normalization. Such sadness is the more obvious to him as his
ethics is rigorous—founded, as it must be in the West, on theremains of transcendental idealism. But one can also argue that
the Freudian stance, which is dualistic and dissolving, unsettles
those foundations. In that sense, it causes the sad, analytic silence to hover above a strange, foreign discourse, which, strictly
speaking, shatters verbal communication (made up of a knowledge and a truth that are nevertheless heard) by means of adevice that mimics terror, enthusiasm, or orgy, and is moreclosely related to rhythm and song than it is to the World.
There is mimesis (some say identification) in the analytic passage
through castration. And yet it is necessary that the analyst's
interpretative speech (and not only his literary or theoreticalbilingualism) be affected by it in order to be analytical. As
counterpoise to a purity that found its bearings in disillusioned
sadness, it is the "poetic" unsettlement of analytic utterance
that testifies to its closeness to, cohabitation with, and "knowledge" of abjection.
I am thinking, in short, of the completely mimetic identification (transference and countertransference) of the analyst withrespect to analysands. That identification allows for securingin their place what, when parcelled out, makes them sufferingand barren. It allows one to regress back to the affects that canbe heard in the breaks in discourse, to provide rhythm, too,
to concatenate (is that what "to become conscious" means?) theAPPROACHING ABJECTION 31

gaps of a speech saddened because it turned its back on its abject
meaning. If there is analytic jouissance it is there, in the thoroughly poetic mimesis that runs through the architecture ofspeech and extends from coenesthetic image to logical and phantasmatic articulations. Without for that matter biologizing language, and while breaking away from identification by meansof interpretation, analytic speech is one that becomes "incarnate" in the full sense of the term. On that condition only, itis "cathartic"—meaning thereby that it is the equivalent, forthe analyst as well as for the analysand, not of purification butof rebirth with and against abjection.
This preliminary survey of abjection, phenomenological on
the whole, will now lead me to a more straightforward consideration of analytic theory on the one hand, of the history of
religions on the other, and finally of contemporary literaryexperience.

-%-

SOMETHING TO BE
SCARED OF
A regal soul, inadvertently surrendering to the crab of lust, the octopus
of weakmindedness, the shark of individual abjection, the boa of absent morality, and the monstrous snail of idiocracy!
Lautreamont, Les Chants de Maldoror

THE OBJECT AS TRIMMING OF ANGUISH
When psychoanalysts speak of an object they speak of the objectof desire as it is elaborated within the Oedipian triangle. According to that trope, the father is the mainstay of the law andthe mother the prototype of the object. Toward the mother
there is convergence not only of survival needs but of the first
mimetic yearnings. She is the other subject, an object that guarantees my being as subject. The mother is my first objectboth desiring and signifiable.
No sooner sketched out, such a, thesis is exploded by its
contradictions and flimsiness.
Do we not find, sooner (chronologically and logically speaking), if not objects at least pre-objects, poles of attraction of ademand for air, food, and motion? Do we not also find, in thevery process that constitutes the mother as other, a series ofsemi-objects that stake out the transition from a state of indifferentiation to one of discretion (subject/object)—semi-objects
that are called precisely "transitional" by Winnicott?1 Finally,
do we not find a whole gradation within modalities of separation: a real deprivation of the breast, an imaginary frustrationof the gift as maternal relation, and, to conclude, a symbolic

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

33

castration inscribed in the Oedipus complex; a gradation constituting, in Lacan's brilliant formulation, the object relation
insofar as it is always "a means of masking, of parrying thefundamental fund of anguish" (Seminar of 1956-1957)?
The matter of the object sets in motion, or implicates, theentire Freudian structure. Narcissism—beginning with what, or
when, does it allow itself to be exceeded by sexual drive, which
is drive toward the other? Repression—what type of repression
yields symbolization, hence a signifiable object, and what othertype, on the contrary, blocks the way toward symbolizationand topples drive into the lack-of-object of asymbolia or the
auto-object of somatization? The connection between the unconscious and language—what is the share of language learningor language activity in the constitution of object relation andits transformations?
It is with respect to the phobia of Little Hans that Freudtackles in the clearest fashion the matter of the relation to theobject, which is crucial for the constitution of the subject.2
From the start, fear and object are linked. Can that be by accident? The unending and uncertain identifications of hysterics
did surely not throw light on Freud's work on this topic. Thisobsessional rumination—which ceaselessly elaborates signs so as
better to protect, within the family vault, a sacred object thatis missing—was probably of greater avail to him in dealing
with the question. But why is it phobia that best allows one
to tackle the matter of relation to the object? Why fear andobject?
Confronted with states of distress that are evoked for us by
the child who makes himself heard but is incapable of making
himself understood, we, adults, use the word "fear." Birthtrauma, according to Otto Rank, or the upsetting of the balanceof drive integration elaborated by the maternal receptacle(Wilfred R. Bion) in the course of uterine life and by "goodmothering," are theoretical artifacts: they rationalize a "zerostate" of the subject, and also probably a zero state of theory
as confronted with what the child has not uttered. Fear, therefore, in a first sense, could be the upsetting of a bio-drive balance.
The constitution of object relation might then be a reiteration

34

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

of fear, alternating with optimal but precarious states of balance.
Fear and object proceed together until the one represses theother. But in which one of us is that fully successful?
HANS IS AFRAID OF THE UNNAMABLE
And yet, the fear of which one can speak, the one therefore thathas a signifiable object, is a more belated and more logicalproduct that assumes all earlier alarms of archaic, non-representable fear. Spoken fear, hence subsequent to language andnecessarily caught in the Oedipus structure, is disclosed as thefear of an unlikely object that turns out to be the substitute foranother. Another "object"? That is what Freud believes when
he hears the story of little Hans who is afraid of horses. He
detects the fear of castration—of his mother's "missing" sexualorgan, of the loss of his own, of the guilty desire to reduce thefather to the same unmanning or to the same death, and soforth.
This is astonishingly true, and not quite so. What is striking
in the case of Hans, as little as he might be, what Freud does
not cease to be astonished by, is his stupendous verbal skill: heassimilates and reproduces language with impressive eagerness
and talent. So eager is he to name everything that he runs into
the unnamable—street sounds, that ceaseless trade activity involving horses in front of the house, the intensity with which
his father, a recent convert to psychoanalysis, is interested in
his body, his love for small girls, the stories and fantasies thathe (the father) sexualizes to the utmost; the somewhat elusive,
somewhat frail presence of his mother. All of this, which has
already considerable sense for Hans without having found its
significance, is doubtless distributed, as Freud says, between narcissistic conversation drive and sexual drive. It all becomes necessarily crystallized in the epistemophilic experience of Hans
who wants to know himself and to know everything; to know,
in particular, what seems to be lacking in his mother or could
be lacking in himself.
More generally, however, the phobia of horses becomes ahieroglyph that condenses all fears, from unnamable to namable.

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

From archaic fears to those that accompany language learning,at the same time as familiarization with the body, the street,animals, people. The statement, "to be afraid of horses," is ahieroglyph having the logic of metaphor and hallucination. Bymeans of the signifier of the phobic object, the "horse," it calls
attention to a drive economy in want of an object—that conglomerate of fear, deprivation, and nameless frustration, which,properly speaking, belongs to the unnamable. The phobic object shows up at the place of non-objectal states of drive3 andassumes all the mishaps of drive as disappointed desires or as
desires diverted from their objects.
The metaphor that is taxed with representing want itself (andnot its consequences, such as transitional objects and their sequels, the "a" objects of the desiring quest) is constituted under
the influence of a symbolizing agency. That symbolic law is
not necessarily of the superego type, but it can also seep into
the ego and the ideal of the ego.
PHOBIA AS ABORTIVE METAPHOR OF WANT
Metaphor of want as such, phobia bears the marks of the frailtyof the subject's signifying system. It must be perceived thatsuch a metaphor is inscribed not in verbal rhetoric but in theheterogeneity of the psychic system that is made up of drive
presentations and thing presentations linked to word presentations. The infancy of little Hans does not entirely explain thefrailty of the signifying system that forces metaphor to turninto drive and conversely. One must also conclude, and phobic
adults confirm this, that within the symbolic law accruing to
the function of the father, something remains blurred in the
Oedipal triangle constituting the subject. Does Hans' father notplay a bit too much the role of the mother whom he thrusts
into the shadows? Does he not overly seek the surety of theprofessor? If phobia is a metaphor that has mistaken its place,forsaking language for drive and sight, it is because a father
does not hold his own, be he the father of the subject or thefather of its mother.
Freud understands this perfectly. After the first accounts by

35

36

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

Hans' father, he suggests to such a Hermes that he remember
himself to his son and try, if only by means of his mustacheand pince-nez, to take the horses' place.
The treatment obviously succeeded, up to a point at any rate,for Hans plays along and ventures to produce other metaphorsof his fear of the unnamable in the framework of a rhetoric thaton occasion clears itself of drive or, better, hysterizes it. Fear,as a matter of fact, retreats to the benefit of a loathing for raspberry syrup, the color of which alone evokes the edge of a gash.
But has phobia really disappeared? It does not seem to have.
For at least two reasons.
First, the Freudian treatment, by referring to the apices ofthe family triangle what we have seen to be a fear of the unnamable—fear of want and of castration?—actually revives thephobia. The treatment justifies the phobic child. Freud tells Hans
that he is right; you cannot not be afraid of castration, and upon
your fear I found the truth of theory. In so doing, he rationalizes
that fear and, even though such a rationalization is also, in effect,and because of transference, an elaboration, it remains in partan anticathexis of phobia. A certain handling of the analytic
cure runs the risk of being nothing else but a counter-phobic
treatment, if that cure remains at the level of fantasy and does
not enter, after having traversed the latter, into the more subtle
workings of the metaphoric elaboration constituted by the statement and the phobic "object," to the extent that this "object"is the representative of drive and not of an already present
object. Indeed, as Freud is first to admit, the analytical apparatus
is no match for that phobic condensation, for it cannot open
it out:In the process of the formation of a phobia from the unconscious
thoughts underlying it, condensation takes place; and for that reason
the course of the analysis can never follow that of the developmentof the neurosis.4
Obviously such an acknowledgment does no more than establish the difference between the analytic process and the neurotic condensation process. But one could also understand it
as neglecting, through the linear, transferential approach of

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF 37

analysis (the more so as analysis is often undertaken on the levelof the imaginary and even of the superego), the processes ofcondensation that oversee phobic work. In order to deal withsuch processes, it would be necessary to revive the work of
introjection as well as to pay particular attention to displacements and condensations within the signifying chain.
On the other hand, taking that metaphoricalness into accountwould amount to considering the phobic person as a subject
in want of metaphoricalness. Incapable of producing metaphorsby means of signs alone, he produces them in the very materialof drives—and it turns out that the only rhetoric of which heis capable is that of affect, and it is projected, as often as not,by means of images. It will then fall upon analysis to give backa memory, hence a language, to the unnamable and namablestates of fear, while emphasizing the former, which make up
what is most unapproachable in the unconscious. It will also
fall upon it, within the same temporality and the same logic,
to make the analysand see the void upon which rests the playwith the signifier and primary processes. Such a void and thearbitrariness of that play are the truest equivalents of fear. But
does it not amount to diverting the analytic process towards
literature, or even stylistics? Is this not asking the analyst to be
rhetorical, to "write" instead of "interpreting"? Does this notalso imply holding up a fetishist screen, that of the word, before
a dissolving fear?
The fetishist episode peculiar to the unfolding of phobia is
well known. It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a subject
confronts the factitiousness of object relation, when he stands
at the place of the want that founds it, the fetish becomes a life
preserver, temporary and slippery, but nonetheless indispensable. But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable
fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial("I know that, but just the same," "the sign is not the thing,but just the same," etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking
beings. Because of its founding status, the fetishism of "language" is perhaps the only one that is unanalyzable.
One might then view writing, or art in general, not as the
only treatment but as the only "know-how" where phobia is

38

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

concerned. Little Hans has become stage director for an opera
house.
Finally, and this is the second reason why phobia does notdisappear but slides beneath language, the phobic object is a
proto-writing and, conversely, any practice of speech, inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear. I mean alanguage of want as such, the want that positions sign, subject,and object. Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages
or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, ofthe fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges. The one
who tries to utter this "not yet a place," this no-grounds, canobviously only do so backwards, starting from an over-masteryof the linguistic and rhetorical code. But in the last analysis herefers to fear—a terrifying, abject referent. We encounter this
discourse in our dreams, or when death brushes us by, depriving
us of the assurance mechanical use of speech ordinarily gives
us, the assurance of being ourselves, that is, untouchable, unchangeable, immortal. But the writer is permanently confronted with such a language. The writer is a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being frightened
to death; instead he comes to life again in signs.
"I AM AFRAID OF BEING BITTEN" OR "I AM AFRAID
OF BITING"?
Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that
returns to its source, its sign having been inverted? What wasthere in the beginning: want, deprivation, original fear, or theviolence of rejection, aggressivity, the deadly death drive? Freudabandoned the vicious circle of cause and effect, of the chicken
and the egg, by discovering a complex being completely aliento the angelism of the Rousseauistic child. At the same time as
the Oedipus complex, he discovered infantile, perverse, polymorphic sexuality, always already a carrier of desire and death.
But, and this is the master stroke, he accompanied that "given"
with a completely symbolic causality that not only balances it
but destroys it as fundamental determinism. I refer to the mod-

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

eling and, in the final analysis, determining role of symbolic
language relation. From the deprivation felt by the child becauseof the mother's absence to the paternal prohibitions that institutesymbolism, that relation accompanies, forms, and elaborates
the aggressivity of drives, which, consequently, never presents
itself in a "pure" state. Let me say then that want and aggressivity
are chronologically separable but logically coextensive. Aggressivity appears to us as a rejoinder to the original deprivation
felt from the time of the mirage known as "primary narcissism";
it merely takes revenge on initial frustrations. But what can be
known of their connection is that want and aggressivity are
adapted to one another. To speak of want alone is to repudiate
aggressivity in obsessional fashion; to speak of aggressivity
alone, forgetting want, amounts to making transference
paranoidal.
"I am afraid of horses, I am afraid of being bitten." Fear andthe aggressivity intended to protect me from some not yet
localizable cause are projected and come back to me from theoutside: "I am threatened." The fantasy of incorporation bymeans of which I attempt to escape fear (I incorporate a portionof my mother's body, her breast, and thus I hold on to her)threatens me none the less, for a symbolic, paternal prohibition
already dwells in me on account of my learning to speak at thesame time. In the face of this second threat, a completely symbolic one, I attempt another procedure: I am not the one thatdevours, I am being devoured by him; a third person therefore(he, a third person) is devouring me.
PASSIVATION
Syntactical passivation, which heralds the subject's ability to
put himself in the place of the object, is a radical stage in theconstitution of subjectivity. What a fuss was made over "AChild Is Being Beaten," what efforts exerted to write passive
sentences in those languages that have such a mood. I should
point out here that the logic of the constitution of the phobic
object also requires such a procedure of passivation. In parallel
fashion to the setting up of the signifying function, phobia,

3940 SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

which also functions under the aegis of censorship and repression, displaces by inverting the sign (the active becomes passive)
before metaphorizing.
Only after such an inversion can the "horse" or the "dog"become the metaphor of my empty and incorporating mouth,
which watches me, threatening, from the outside. Overdetermined like all metaphors, this "horse," this "dog" also containspeed, racing, flight, motion, the street, traffic, cars, walking—an entire world of others towards which they escape and where,
in order to save myself, I try to escape. But rendered culpable,
abashed, "I" come back, "I" withdraw, "I" meet with anguishagain: "I" am afraid.
Of what}This sort of question appears only at that moment, ladenwith all the meanings of object and pre-object relations, withall its weight for a correlative "ego," and not as an empty sign.
This means that an object that is a hallucination is being madeup. The phobic object is a complex elaboration, already comprising logical and linguistic workings that are attempts at drive
introjection outlining the failure to introject that which is incorporated. If incorporation marks out the way toward theconstitution of the object, phobia represents the failure of theconcomitant drive introjection.
DEVOURING LANGUAGE
The phobia of a little girl, discussed during Anna Freud's seminar,5 gives us the opportunity to measure the importance oforality in this matter. The fact that it is a girl who is afraid of
being eaten up by a dog is perhaps not without importance inthe emphasis on orality and passivation. Moreover, the phobia
followed upon a separation from her mother and a reunion
when the mother already belonged to another. Curiously, themore phobic Sandy got, the more she spoke: the observer noted,
as a matter of fact, that she spoke with a rural accent, that she
was talkative, that at the age of three and a half "she talks a lot,has an extensive vocabulary, expresses herself with ease andenjoys repeating strange and difficult words."

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of mymother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaboratethat want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying.
It turns out that, under the circumstances, oral activity, which
produces the linguistic signifier, coincides with the theme of
devouring, which the "dog" metaphor has a first claim on. But
one is rightfully led to suppose that any verbalizing activity,
whether or not it names a phobic object related to orality, is
an attempt to introject the incorporated items. In that sense,
verbalization has always been confronted with the "ab-ject"that the phobic object is. Language learning takes place as an
attempt to appropriate an oral "object" that slips away andwhose hallucination, necessarily deformed, threatens us fromthe outside. Sandy's increasing interest in language, in proportion as her phobia grows, the verbal games in which she indulges, are on a par with the intense verbal activity of little
Hans, which I discussed.
One might contrast with this relation between phobia andlanguage in the child the commonplace observation on adultphobic discourse. The speech of the phobic adult is also characterized by extreme nimbleness. But that vertiginous skill is
as if void of meaning, traveling at top speed over an untouched
and untouchable abyss, of which, on occasion, only the affectshows up, giving not a sign but a signal. It happens because
language has then become a counterphobic object; it no longer
plays the role of an element of miscarried introjection, capable,in the child's phobia, of revealing the anguish of original want.
In analyzing those structures one is led to thread one's way
through the meshes of the non-spoken in order to get at themeaning of such a strongly barricaded discourse.
The child undergoing a phobic episode has not reached thatpoint. His symptom, because he utters it, is already an elaboration of phobia. By means of the logical and linguistic work
he undertakes at the same time, his symptom arrives at a complex and ambiguous elaboration. The phobic hallucination thenstands halfway between the recognition of desire and counterphobic construction: not yet a defensive, over-coded discoursethat knows too much and manipulates its objects wonderfully

41

42

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

well; nor is it a recognition of the object of want as object ofdesire. The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it
tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from adecision; this is not done through a superego blocking of symbolization or through asymbolia, but to the contrary througha condensation of intense symbolic activities that results in theheterogeneous agglomeration we call phobic hallucination.
HALLUCINATION OF NOTHING
It is, I said it earlier, a metaphor. And yet more than that. For
to the activity of condensation and displacement that oversees
its formation, there is added a drive dimension (heralded by fear)that has an anaphoric, indexing value, pointing to somethingelse, to some non-thing, to something unknowable. The phobic
object is in that sense the hallucination of nothing: a metaphor thatis the anaphora of nothing.
What is "nothing"? The analyst wonders and answers, after"deprivation," "frustration," "want," etc.: "the maternal phallus." That, from his point of view, is not false. But such a
position implies that, in order to bring fear to the surface, theconfrontation with the impossible object (the maternal phallus,
which is not) will be transformed into a fantasy of desire. On
the trail of my fear I meet again with my desire, and I bindmyself to it, thus leaving stranded the concatenation of discourse with which I have built my hallucination, my weakness
and my strength, my investment and my ruin.
It is precisely at such a point that writing takes over, within
the phobic child that we are, to the extent that we speak onlyof anguish. It is not into a fantasy of desire that writing transforms the confrontation with the ab-ject. It unfolds, on thecontrary, the logical and psycho-drive strategies that make up
the hallucination metaphor improperly called "the object ofphobia." If we are all phobics in the sense that it is anguish thatcauses us to speak, provided that someone forbids it, we are
not all scared of large horses or biting mouths. Hans has quite
simply written earlier than others, or rather he has been stage
director within a scription that encompassed his living space

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

with all its extras, putting into flesh (a horse) those logicalconstructs that set us up as beings of abjection and/or as symbolic beings. He was a "writer," a precocious one, and also afailure. The mature writer, whether a failure or not (thoughperhaps never losing sight of those two alternatives), neverstops harking back to symbolization mechanisms, within language itself, in order to find in a process of eternal return, andnot in the object that it names or produces, the hollowing outof anguish in the face of nothing./
PHOBIC NARCISSISM
Phobia literally stages the instability of object relation. The
lability of the "object" within the phobic "compromise"—which may also be seen in some psychotic structures—can lead
us to consider the formation in question from the point of viewnot of object relation but of its opposite correlative, narcissism.
There, too, we come up against difficulties of analytic theory
that are linked, this time, to its postulating a primary narcissism
following upon autoeroticism and to what amounts to a forcingof thought—the assignment of a subject to archaic, pre-linguistic
narcissism, taking us back, in short, to the mother-child symbiosis. Freud accepted that difficulty: in postulating the existence of two kinds of drives, sexual drives directed toward
others and ego drives aimed at self-preservation, he appears tohave granted, in the phobic symptom, preponderance to thelatter.
But however clear may have been the victory in Hans's phobia of theforces that were opposed to sexuality, nevertheless, since such an illness

is in its very nature a compromise, this cannot have been all that the
repressed drives obtained.6
Thus, even if sexual drives gain the upper hand again withHans, and this with the obsessed and obsessive help of the father
and the psychoanalyst, we are witnessing a victory of "theforces that were opposed to sexuality." Such a narcissism presents us with at least two problems. How can one account for
its strength, which hands over the object drive? How does it
happen that, dominating as it may be, it does not lead to autism?

43

44

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

A particular biological makeup, imaginable although enigmatic, could provide a partial answer to the first question. And
yet it is the failure of the triangular relationship, which alone
posits the existence of an object, that seems to be implicatedhere. In the final analysis, the so-called narcissistic drive dominates only if instability of the paternal metaphor prevents the
subject from finding its place within a triadic structure giving
an object to its drives. That means that the object relationshipof drives is a belated and even nonessential phenomenon. And
it is not by accident that Freud subordinates the question of thedrive object to the smoothing, if not the quenching, of thedrive.
The object of a drive is the thing in regard to which or through which
the drive is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable abouta drive and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned toit only in consequence of being particularly fitted to make satisfaction
possible.7
This is easy enough to understand if one takes the word
object in its strongest acceptation—as the correlative of a subject
in a symbolic chain. The paternal agency alone, to the extent
that it introduces the symbolic dimension between "subject"(child) and "object" (mother), can generate such a strict object
relation. Otherwise, what is called "narcissism," without always or necessarily being conservative, becomes the unleashingof drive as such, without object, threatening all identity, including that of the subject itself. We are then in the presenceof psychosis.
THE "OBJECT" OF PHOBIC DESIRE: SIGNSThe point, however, of the hallucinatory metaphor of the phobic is precisely that, while displaying the victory of "the forcesthat were opposed to sexuality, " it finds a certain "object."Which one? Not the object of sexual drive; the mother, or her
parts, or her representatives; no more than some neutral referent
or other, but symbolic activity itself. If the latter is often eroticized,
and if the phobic, in that case, cumulates with the obsessive,

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF 45

this does not detract from the originality of the structure, which
consists in the following: symbolicity itself is cathected by adrive that is not object-oriented in the classic sense of the term
(we are not dealing with an object of need or desire), nor is it
narcissistic (it does not return to collapse upon the subject or
to cause its collapse). Since it is not sex-oriented, it denies thequestion of sexual difference; the subject that houses it can
produce homosexual symptoms while being strictly speaking
indifferent to them: that is not where the subject is. If it is truethat such/cathexis of symbolicity as sole site of drive and desire
is a means of preservation, it is obviously not the specular ego—
the reflection of the maternal phallus—that sees itself thus preserved; on the contrary, the ego, here, is rather in abeyance.
Strangely enough, however, it is the subject that is built up, tothe extent that it is the correlative of the paternal metaphor,disregarding the failure of its support—the subject, that is, as
correlative of the Other.
A representative of the paternal function takes the place ofthe good maternal object that is wanting. There is language
instead of the good breast. Discourse is being substituted formaternal care, and with it a fatherhood belonging more to therealm of the ideal than of the superego. One can vary the patterns within which such an ascendency of the Other, replacing
the object and taking over where narcissism left off, produces
a hallucinatory metaphor. There is fear and fascination. The
body (of the ego) and the (sexual) object are completely absorbed in it.
Abjection—at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion—shares in the same arrangement. The loathing that is
implied in it does not take on the aspect of hysteric conversion;
the latter is the symptom of an ego that, overtaxed by a "badobject," turns away from it, cleanses itself of it, and vomits it.
In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the beingof language. Contrary to hysteria, which brings about, ignores,
or seduces the symbolic but does not produce it, the subject ofabjection is eminently productive of culture.. Its symptom is therejection and reconstruction of languages.,''f3$&t

46

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

AIMING AT THE APOCALYPSE: SIGHT
To speak of hallucination in connection with such an unstable"object" suggests at once that there is a visual cathexis in thephobic mirage—and at least a speculative cathexis in the abject.
Elusive, fleeting, and baffling as it is, that non-object can be
grasped only as a sign. It is through the intermediary of arepresentation, hence a seeing, that it holds together. A visual
hallucination that, in the final analysis, gathers up the others(those that are auditory, tactile, etc.) and, as it bursts into asymbolicity that is normally calm and neutral, represents the
subject's desire. For the absent object, there is a sign. For thedesire of that want, there is a visual hallucination. More thanthat, a cathexis of looking, in parallel with the symbolic domination taking the place of narcissism, often leads to voyeuristic"side effects" of phobia. Voyeurism is a structural necessity inthe constitution of object relation, showing up every time theobject shifts towards the abject; it becomes true perversion only
if there is a failure to symbolize the subject/object instability.
Voyeurism accompanies the writing of abjection. When thatwriting stops, voyeurism becomes a perversion.8
A FORTIFIED CASTLE
Whether it be projected metaphor or hallucination, the phobic
object has led us, on the one hand, to the borders of psychosis
and, on the other, to the strongly structuring power of symbolicity. In either case, we are confronted with a limit that turns
the speaking being into a separate being who utters only byseparating—from within the discreteness of the phonemic chain
up to and including logical and ideological constructs.
How does such a limit become established without changing
into a prison? If the radical effect of the founding division isthe establishment of the subject/object division, how can one
prevent its misfires from leading either to the secret confinementof archaic narcissism, or to the indifferent scattering of objects
that are experienced as false? The glance cast on phobic symptom has allowed us to witness the painful dawning, splendid

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

47

in its symbolic complexity, of the (verbal) sign in the grip ofdrive (fear, aggressivity) and sight (projection of the ego ontoI
the other). But analytic reality, mindful of what is called the"unanalyzable," seems to cause experience to arise from anothersymptom, one that emerges from the same very problematic
separation subject/object—but now seemingly at the opposite
end of phobic hallucination.
The constituting barrier between subject and object has here
become an unsurmountable wall. An ego, wounded to the pointof annulment, barricaded and untouchable, cowers somewhere,
nowhere, at no other place than the one that cannot be found. /Where objects are concerned he delegates phantoms, ghosts,"false cards": a stream of spurious egos and for that very reason
spurious objects, seeming egos that confront undesirable objects. Separation exists, and so does language, even brilliantly
at times, with apparently remarkable intellectual realizations.
But no current flows—it is a pure and simple splitting, an abyss
without any possible means of conveyance between its twoedges. No subject, no object: petrification on one side, falsehood on the other.
Letting current flow into such a "fortified castle" amounts
to causing desire to rise. But one soon realizes, during transference, that desire, if it dawns, is only a substitute for adaptation to a social norm (is desire ever anything else but desire
for an idealized norm, the norm of the Other?). On the way,
as if hatched by what, for others, will be desire, the patientencounters abjection. It seems to be the first authentic feelingof a subject in the process of constituting itself as such, as it
emerges out of its jail and goes to meet what will become, but
only later, objects. Abjection of self: the first approach to a selfthat would otherwise be walled in. Abjection of others, of theother ("I feel like vomiting the mother"), of the analyst, theonly violent link to the world. A rape of anality, a stifled aspiration towards an other as prohibited as it is desired—abject.
The outburst of abjection is doubtless only a moment in thetreatment of borderline cases. I call attention to it here becauseof the key position it assumes in the dynamics of the subject's
constitution, which is nothing other than a slow, laborious

48

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

production of object relation. When the fortified castle of theborderline patient begins to see its walls crumble, and its indifferent pseudo-objects start losing their obsessive mask, thesubject-effect—fleeting, fragile, but authentic—allows itself tobe heard in the advent of that interspace, which is abjection.
It is not within the scheme of the analytic setup, probably
because it does not have the power to do so, to linger over thatblossoming. Emphasizing it would lead the patient into paranoia or, at best, into morality; now, the psychoanalyst does notbelieve he exists for that purpose. He follows or diverts thepath, leading the patient towards the "good" object—the objectof desire, which is, whatever may be said, fantasized according
to the normal criteria of the Oedipus complex: a desire for theother sex.
That, however, is not where we stand with respect to abjection in the case of the borderline patient. It had barely begun
to slide the bolt of narcissism and had changed the walls behind
which he protected himself into a barely pervious limit—andfor that very reason, a threatening, abominable one. Hence
there was not yet an other, an ob-ject: merely an ab-ject. Whatis to be done with this ab-ject? Allow it to drift towards thelibido so as to constitute an object of desire? Or towards symbolicity, to change it into a sign of love, hatred, enthusiasm,
or damnation? The question might well remain undecided,
undecidable.
It is within that undecidable space, logically coming before
the choice of the sexual object, that the religious answer toabjection breaks in: defilement, taboo, or sin. In dealing with such
notions, rehabilitating them will not be the point. My aim will
be to bring to light the variants of the subject/object relationthat religions implied, avoiding the nonexistence of separation
just as much as the rigidity of the splitting. In other words, I
shall need to look into the solutions given for phobia and psychosis by religious codes.
POWERLESS OUTSIDE, IMPOSSIBLE INSIDE
Constructed on the one hand by the incestuous desire of (for)his mother and on the other by an overly brutal separation from

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

49

her, the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified
castle, is nevertheless an empty castle. The absence, or the failure, of paternal function to establish a unitary bent between
subject and object, produces this strange configuration: an encompassment that is stifling (the container compressing the ego)
and, at the same time, draining (the want of an other, qua
object, produces nullity in the place of the subject). The egothen plunges into a pursuit of identifications that could repair
narcissism—identifications that the subject will experience as
in-significant, "empty," "null," "devitalized," "puppet-like."
An empty castle, haunted by unappealing ghosts—"powerless"outside, "impossible" inside.
It is worth noting what repercussions such a foreclosure of
the Name of the Father have on language. That of the borderline
patient is often abstract, made up of stereotypes that are boundto seem cultured; he aims at precision, indulges in self-examination, in meticulous comprehension, which easily brings tomind obsessional discourse. But there is more to it than that.
That shell of ultra-protected signifier keeps breaking up to thepoint of desemantization, to the point of reverberating only as
notes, music, "pure signifier" to be reparcelled out and resemanticized anew. It is a breaking up that puts a check on freeassociation and pulverizes fantasy before it can take shape. It
is, in short, a reduction of discourse to the state of "pure"signifier, which insures the disconnection between verbal signs
on the one hand and drive representations on the other. And
it is precisely at such a boundary of language splitting that theaffect makes an imprint. Within the blanks that separate dislocated themes (like the limbs of a fragmented body), or throughthe shimmering of a signifier that, terrified, flees its signified,the analyst can perceive the imprint of that affect, participating"in the language cluster that everyday usage of speech absorbs
but, with the borderline patient, becomes dissociated and collapses. The affect is first enunciated as a coenesthetic image of
painful fixation; the borderline patient speaks of a numbedbody, of hands that hurt, of paralyzed legs. But also, as a motion
metaphor binding significance: rotation, vertigo, or infinite
quest. The problem then, starting with transference, is to tap
these remainders of signifying vectorization (which the paternal

50

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

metaphor makes fast and stabilizes into "normal discourse" inthe case of the normative Oedipus triangle, which is here absent)
by giving them a desiring and/or deathly signification. In short,
one unfailingly orients them toward the other: another object,perhaps another sex, and, why not, another discourse—a text,
a life to relive.
WHY DOES LANGUAGE APPEAR TO BE "ALIEN"?
Finally, foreclosure of paternal function affects what, in thesign, stems from condensation (or metaphor), that is, the abilityof the sound-trace to maintain and go beyond (in the sense ofan Aujhebung) the signified, which always involves a relation
to the addressee as a perception, as well as coenesthetic representation of object relation and of the relation to the discourse of
the other subject. With the borderline patient there is a collapseof the nexus constituted by the verbal signifier effecting thesimultaneous Aujhebung of both signified and affect. A consequence of that disconnection, involving the very function of
language in its psychic economy, is that verbalization, as hesays, is alien to him. More so than with the neurotic, it is bymeans of the signifier alone that the unconscious meaning of
the borderline patient is delivered. Only seldom is metaphor
included in his speech; when it is, more than with anyone else,
it is a literal one—to be understood as metonymy for unnamabledesire. "I displace, therefore you must associate and condense
for me," says such an analysand, who, in short, is asking theanalyst to build up an imagination for him. He is asking to be
saved like Moses, to be born like Christ. He is asking for arebirth that—the analysand knows it, he tells it to us—will
result from a speech that is recovered, rediscovered as belonging
to him. Lacan had perceived this: the metaphor retraces within
the unconscious the path of paternal myth, and it is quite deliberately that Victor Hugo's metaphor in Booz endormi is chosen, in Ecrits, as illustration of all metaphoricity.9 But with theborderline patient, sense does not emerge out of non-sense,
metaphorical or witty though it might be. On the contrary,non-sense runs through signs and sense, and the resulting ma-

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

51

nipulation of words is not an intellectual play but, without any
laughter, a desperate attempt to hold on to the ultimate obstaclesof a pure signifier that has been abandoned by the paternal
metaphor. It is a frantic attempt made by a subject threatenedwith sinking into the void. A void that is not nothing but
indicates, within its discourse, a challenge to symbolization.
Whether we call it an affect10 or link it with infantile semiotization—for which pre-signifying articulations are merely equations rather than symbolic equivalents for objects,11 we must
point to a necessity within analysis. This necessity, emphasized
by that type of structure, consists in not reducing analytic attention to language to that of philosophical idealism and, in its
wake, to linguistics; the point is, quite to the contrary, to posita heterogeneity of signifiance. It stands to reason that one can say
nothing of such (effective or semiotic) heterogeneity without
making it homologous with the linguistic signifier. But it isprecisely that powerlessness that the "empty" signifier, the dissociation of discourse, and the fully physical suffering of thesepatients within the faults of the Word come to indicate.
THE "SIGN" ACCORDING TO FREUD
It is necessary, therefore, to go back to the Freudian theory oflanguage. And, returning to the moment when it starts off fromneurophysiology,12 one notes the heterogeneity of the Freudian
sign. This sign is articulated as establishing a relation between
word Presentation and object Presentation (which becomesthing Presentation as early as 1915). The former is already aclosed heterogeneous set (sound image, reading image, written
image, spoken motor image), as is the latter, but this one isopen (acoustic image, tactile image, visual image). Obviously
privileged here, the sound image of word presentation and thevisual image of object presentation become linked, calling tomind very precisely the matrix of the sign belonging to philosophical tradition and to which Saussurian semiology gave
new currency. But it is easy to forget the other elements belonging to the sets thus tied together. They are what constitutes
all the originality of Freudian "semiology" and guarantee its

52

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

hold on the heterogeneous economy (body and discourse) of
the speaking being (and particularly on the psychosomatic"disturbances" of speech).
One might think that Freud's later concern with neurotic
discourse had centered his thought solely on the relation between sound image and visual image.13 But there are two things
that allow me to say that Freud's research constantly left open
the hypothetical suture of the "pure signifier" that an overly
philosophical reading, in a word a Kantian one, might compel;these are, on the one hand, the discovery of the Oedipus complex and, on the other, that of the splitting of the Ego and thesecond topography, together with, precisely, the very heterogeneous (involving both drive and thought) importance of thesymbol of negation.14 Although a reductiveness of this sort
amounts to a true castration of the Freudian discovery, one
should not forget the advantages that centering the heterogeneous Freudian sign in the Saussurian one afforded. Essentially,
they can be summed up in the explicit statement of a questionthat has haunted Freud ever since the discovery of the Oedipus
complex.
THE SIGN—A CONDENSATION
What is it that insures the existence of the sign, that is, of therelation that is a condensation between sound image (on the sideof word presentation) and visual image (on the side of thingpresentation)? Condensation is indeed what we are dealing with,and the logic of dreams testifies to it when it brings together
elements from different perception registers or when it engages
in ellipses. The figure of speech known as metaphor merely
actuates, within the synchronic handling of discourse, the process that, genetically and diachronically, makes up one signifying
unit out of at least two (sound and sight) components. But the
speaking subject enjoys the possibility of condensation because
it is inscribed in the Oedipal triangle. By means of that inscription, not only beginning with the so-called Oedipal stage but
from the time of its advent into the world, which is always
already a world of discourse, it finds itself subjected to paternal

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

function. Thus, when Lacan posits the Name of the Father as
the keystone to all sign, meaning, and discourse, he points tothe necessary condition of one and only one process of the signifying unit, albeit a constitutive one: the process of condensing
one heterogeneous set (that of word presentation) with another(that of thing presentation), releasing the one into the other,and insuring its "unitary bent." Such a statement of the problem
enables one to avoid all the metaphysics, not to mention thearbitrariness, that underlies, in the wake of John Stuart Mill,to whom Freud alludes, the Freudian notions of "presentation."
The stress shifts from the terms (images) to the functions thattie them together (condensation, metaphoricalness, and morestrongly yet, paternal function), and ultimately to the space,
the topology that emerges out of them (unitary bent).
Nevertheless, when the condensation function that constitutes the sign collapses (and in that case one always discovers
a collapse of the Oedipal triangulation that supports it), oncethe sound image/sight image solidarity is undone, such a splitting allows one to detect an attempt at direct semantization of
acoustic, tactile, motor, visual, etc., coenesthesia. A language
now manifests itself whose complaint repudiates the common
code, then builds itself into an idiolect, and finally resolves itself
through the sudden irruption of affect.
THE HORROR WITHIN
The body's inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate
for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is
as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed theintegrity of one's "own and clean self" but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its
contents. Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up inorder to reassure a subject that is lacking its "own and clean
self." The abjection of those flows from within suddenly become the sole "object1' of sexual desire—a true "ab-ject" whereman, frightened, crosses over the horrors of maternal bowels
and, in an immersion that enables him to avoid coming face
to face with an other, spares himself-the risk of castration. But

53

54

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

at the same time that immersion gives him the full power ofpossessing, if not being, the bad object that inhabits the maternal
body. Abjection then takes the place of the other, to the extent
of affording him jouissance, often the only one for the borderline patient who, on that account, transforms the abject into
the site of the Other. 15Such a frontiersman is a metaphysician
who carries the experience of the impossible to the point ofscatology. When a woman ventures out in those regions it isusually to gratify, in very maternal fashion, the desire for theabject that insures the life (that is, the sexual life) of the man
whose symbolic authority she accepts. Very logically, this isan abjection from which she is frequently absent; she does notthink about it, preoccupied as she is with settling accounts(obviously anal) with her own mother. Rarely does a woman
tie her desire and her sexual life to that abjection, which, coming
to her from the other, anchors her interiorly in the Other. Whenthat happens, one notes that it is through the expedient ofwriting that she gets there, and on that account she still has
quite a way to go within the Oedipal mosaic before identifying
with the owner of the penis.
CONFRONTING THE MATERNAL
But devotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not ceaselooking, within what flows from the other's "innermost
being," for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body. For,in the misfire of identification with the mother as well as withthe father, how else are they to be maintained in the Other?
How, if not by incorporating a devouring mother, for wantof having been able to introject her and joy in what manifests
her, for want of being able to signify her: urine, blood, sperm,
excrement. Harebrained staging of an abortion, of a self-giving
birth ever miscarried, endlessly to be renewed, the hope forrebirth is short-circuited by the very splitting: the advent of
one's own identity demands a law that mutilates, whereasjouissance demands an abjection from which identity becomes
absent.

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF 55

This erotic cult of the abject makes one think of a perversion,
but it must be distinguished at once from what simply dodges
castration. For even if our borderlander is, like any speaking
being, subject to castration to the extent that he must deal withthe symbolic, he in fact runs a far greater risk than others do.
It is not a part of himself, vital though it may be, that he isthreatened with losing, but his whole life. To preserve himself
from severance, he is ready for more—flow, discharge, hemorrhage. All mortal. Freud had, in enigmatic fashion, noted inconnection with melancholy: "wound," "internal hemorrhage," "a hole in the psyche."16 The erotization of abjection,and perhaps any abjection to the extent that it is already ero- ;ticized, is an attempt at stopping the hemorrhage: a threshold
before death, a halt or a respite?

3

FROM FILTH TO
DEFILEMENT| Abjection [. . .] is merely the inability to assume with sufficientstrength the imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act
establishes the foundations of collective existence).
[. . .] The act of exclusion has the same meaning as social or divine
sovereignty, but it is not located on the same level; it is precisely
located in the domain of things and not, like sovereignty, in thedomain of persons. It differs from the latter in the same way that anal
eroticism differs from sadism.
Georges Bataille, Essais de sociologie

MOTHER-PHOBIA AND THE MURDER OF THE FATHERIn psychoanalysis as in anthropology one commonly links thesacred and the establishment of the religious bond that it presupposes with sacrifice. Freud tied the sacred to taboo and totemism,1 and concluded that, "we consider ourselves justified in
substituting the father for the totem animal in the male's formula of totemism."2 We are all familiar with that Freudianthesis as to the murder of the father and, more specifically, withthe one he develops in Moses and Monotheism: in connection with
Judaic religion the archaic father and master of the primeval
horde is killed by the conspiring sons who, later seized witha sense of guilt for an act that was upon the whole inspired byambivalent feelings, end up restoring paternal authority, nolonger as an arbitrary power but as a right; thus renouncing thepossession of all women in their turn, they establish at one
stroke the sacred, exogamy, and society.
There is nevertheless a strange slippage in the Freudian argument, one that has not been sufficiently noticed. Relying on

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 57

numerous readings in ethnology and the history of religions,more specifically on Frazer and Robertson Smith, Freud notesthat the morality of man starts with "the two taboos of totemism"—murder and incest.3 Totem and Taboo begins with an
evocation of the "dread of incest," and Freud discusses it atlength in connection with taboo, totemism, and more specifically with food and sex prohibitions. The woman- or motherimage haunts a large part of that book and keeps shaping its
background even when, relying on the testimony of obsessional
neurotics, Freud slips from dread (p. 23: "His incest dread"; p.
24: "the incest dread of savages"; p. 161: "The interpretationof incest dread," "This dread of incest") to the inclusion ofdread symptom in obsessional neurosis. At the same time heleaves off speculating on incest ("we do not know the originof incest dread and do not even know how to guess at it," p.
162) in order to center his conclusion in the second taboo, theone against murder, which he reveals to be the murder of thefather.
That such a murderous event could be as much mythical asendowed with founding properties, that it should be both the
keystone to the desire henceforth known as Oedipal and a severance that sets up a signifier admitting of logical concatenation,
analytic attention now knows only too well. Divergences fromand even contradictions with this Freudian thesis4 are finally nomore than variants and confirmations. What will concern mehere is not that aspect of the Freudian position, which I shallconsider to have been logically established. I shall attempt toquestion the other side of the religious phenomenon, the onethat Freud points to when he brings up dread, incest, and themother; one that, even though it is presented as the second
taboo founding religion, nevertheless disappears during the final
elucidation of the problem.
THE TWO-SIDED SACRED
Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two-sided formation? One aspect founded by murder and the social bondmade up of murder's guilt-ridden, atonement, with all the pro-

58

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

jective mechanisms and obsessive rituals that accompany it; andanother aspect, like a lining, more secret still and invisible, nonrepresentable, oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the fragility—both threatening and fusional—of the archaic dyad, toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no hold but one woven offright and repulsion? One aspect is defensive and socializing,
the other shows fear and indifferentiation. The similarities that
Freud delineates between religion and obsessional neurosis
would then involve the defensive side of the sacred. Now, tothrow light on the subjective economy of its other side, it isphobia as such, and its drifting toward psychosis, that one
would need to tackle head on.
"
That, at any rate, will be my point of departure. For we shallsee, in a large number of rituals and discourses involved in
making up the sacred—notably those dealing with defilement
and its derivations in different religions—an attempt at coding
the other taboo that the earliest ethnologists and psychoanalysts
viewed as presiding over social formations: beside death, incest.
Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology has shown how all systems of knowledge in so-called primitive societies, and myths
in particular, are a later elaboration, within stages of symbolicity, of the prohibition that weighs on incest and founds thesignifying function as well as the social aggregate. What willconcern me here is not the socially productive value of the sonmother incest prohibition but the alterations, within subjectivity
and within the very symbolic competence, implied by the confrontation with the feminine and the way in which societies code
themselves in order to accompany as far as possible the speaking
subject on that journey. Abjection, or the journey to the endof the night.
PROHIBITED INCEST VS. COMING FACE TO FACE WITH
THE UNNAMABLE
What we designate as "feminine," far from being a primeval
essence, will be seen as an "other" without a name, which
subjective experience confronts when it does not stop at the

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

appearance of its identity. Assuming that any Other is appended
to the triangulating function of the paternal prohibition, what
will be dealt with here, beyond and through the paternal function, is a coming face to face with an unnamable otherness—the solid rock of jouissance and writing as well.
I shall set aside in this essay a different version of the confrontation with the feminine, one that, going beyond abjection
and fright, is enunciated as ecstatic. "The light-suffused faceof the young Persian god" Freud refers to, and similarly, in amore secular fashion, Mallarme's claim to be that "startled
hero," "merry" for having overcome the "dishevelled tuft"—both point to another manner of coming to terms with theunnamable. That kind of confrontation appears, where our civilization is concerned, only in a few rare flashes of writing.
Celine's laughter, beyond horror, also comes close to it,
perhaps.
NARCISSUS AND MURKY WATERS
Freud had strongly emphasized, at the outset of Totem andTaboo, "man's deep aversion to his former incest wishes" (p.
24). He had reminded us of the properties of the taboo: it is"sacred, consecrated; but on the other hand it means uncanny,dangerous, forbidden and unclean" (p. 26); as to the object oftaboos, "The prohibition mostly concerns matters that are capable of enjoyment" [Genussgejahig] (p. 31), they include the"unclean" (p. 32). The contact avoidance that he observes in
it nevertheless makes him think only of compulsion and its
rituals, while the ambivalent hostility it harbors suggests to him
paranoid projection. The two structures cause the threat thatwould be hovering over the subject to converge on the paternal
apex—the one that prohibits, separates, prevents contact (between son and mother?). This hypothesis would suggest an
idyllic dual relationship (mother-child), which, to the extent
that the father prevents it, changes into an ulterior aversion toincest. The idea of such a soothing dual relationship crops up
again when Freud draws up the hypothesis of a transition between the primeval horde and civilized society, transition in

59

60

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

which the sons, out of "maternal love,"5 and/or supported by"homosexual feelings and activities" (p. 186), would renounce
mothers and sisters and set up an organization based at first on
matriarchal law, and ultimately on patriarchal law.
Nevertheless there are other thoughts of Freud, from which
he will not draw any conclusions, that allow one to progressin another direction. He first appears to refer states of fear andimpurity to primary narcissism, a narcissism laden with hostility and which does not yet know its limits. For we are dealing
with imprecise boundaries in that place, at that moment, where
pain is born out of an excess of fondness and a hate that, refusing
to admit the satisfaction it also provides, is projected towardan other. Inside and outside are not precisely differentiated here,
nor is language an active practice or the subject separated fromthe other. Melanie Klein will make of this area her privileged
field of observation; it is well known that Winnicot found in
it a fruitful terrain for the etiology of psychoses and "false
selves" as well as for creation and play. But it is Freud indeed
who blazes the trail. Let us read more carefully the following
passages, which can be understood in another way than as preludes to the obsessional or paranoid structure.
Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes canbe projected outwards in the same way as sense perceptions; they arethus employed for building up the external world, though they shouldby rights remain part of the internal world. This may have some
genetic connection with the fact that the function of attention was
originally directed not towards the internal world but towards thestimuli that stream in from the external world, and that that function's
only information upon endopsychic processes was received from feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. It was not until a language of abstract
thought had been developed, that is to say, not until the sensory
residues of verbal presentations had been linked to the internal processes, that the latter themselves gradually became capable of being
perceived. Before that, owing to the projection outwards of internal
perceptions, primitive men arrived at a picture of the external world
which we, with our intensified conscious perception, have now totranslate back into psychology.6

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

61

And further along, in a footnote:
The projected creations of primitive men resemble the personifications
constructed by creative writers; for the latter externalize in the formof separate individuals the opposing instinctual impulses struggling
within them.7
INCEST AND THE PRE-VERBAL
Let me sum up. There would be a "beginning" preceding theword. Freud, echoing Goethe, says so at the end of Totem andTaboo: "In the beginning was the deed."8 In that anteriority
to language, the outside is elaborated by means of a projection
from within, of which the only experience we have is one ofpleasure and pain. An outside in the image of the inside, madeof pleasure and pain. The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would thus be unnamable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. Naming the latter, hence differentiating them, amounts to introducing language, which, justas it distinguishes pleasure from pain as it does all other oppositions, founds the separation inside/outside. And yet, there
would be witnesses to the perviousness of the limit, artisans
after a fashion who would try to tap that pre-verbal "beginning"
within a word that is flush with pleasure and pain. They areprimitive man through his ambivalences and the poet through thepersonification of his opposing states of feeling—but also perhaps through the rhetorical recasting of language that he effects
and over which Freud, who says he is heedful and fascinated,never tarries. If the murder of the father is that historical event
constituting the social code as such, that is, symbolic exchange
and the exchange of women, its equivalent on the level of thesubjective history of each individual is therefore the advent oflanguage, which breaks with perviousness if not with the chaosthat precedes it and sets up denomination as an exchange of
linguistic signs. Poetic language would then be, contrary tomurder and the univocity of verbal message, a reconciliation
with what murder as well as names were separated from. It
would be an attempt to symbolize the "beginning," an attempt

62 FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

to name the other facet of taboo: pleasure, pain. Are we finallydealing with incest?
Not quite, or not directly. When Freud again speaks, still in
Totem and Taboo, "of the first beginnings in childhood" oflibidinal trends, he asserts that "from the very first" "they are
not yet directed toward any external object." As he did in Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he calls autoeroticism thephase which gives way to object-choice. Nevertheless he inserts
between the two stages a third one that will hold our attention.
In this intermediary stage [. . .] the sexual impulses which formerly
were separate have already formed into a unit and have also found an
object; but this object is not external and foreign to the individual,
but is his own ego, which is formed at this period.9
Fixation at this stage will be called narcissism. Let me try topoint out the latent meanings of the definition. Narcissism ispredicated on the existence of the ego but not of an external
object; we are faced with the strange correlation between an
entity (the ego) and its converse (the object), which is nevertheless not yet constituted; with an "ego" in relation to a nonobject.
Two consequences seem necessarily to follow from such astructure. On the one hand, the non-constitution of the (outside) object as such renders unstable the ego's identity, which
could not be precisely established without having been differentiated from an other, from its object. The ego of primarynarcissism is thus uncertain, fragile, threatened, subjected justas much as its non-object to spatial ambivalence (inside/outside
uncertainty) and to ambiguity of perception (pleasure/pain). On
the other hand, one has to admit that such a narcissistic topology
has no other underpinning in psychosomatic reality than themother-child dyad. Now, though that relation has always been
immersed in language, it allows the latter's inscription in the
future subject only when biophysiological preconditions andthe conditions of the Oedipus complex permit the setting up
of a triadic relationship. The subject's active use of the signifier
truly dates only from this moment. By stressing the inherenceof language in the human state, by overestimating the subject's

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 63

having been the slave of language since before his birth, one
avoids noting the two moods, active and passive, according towhich the subject is constituted in the signifier; by the same
token one neglects the economy of narcissism in the elaborationand practice of the symbolic function.
That having been said, the archaic relation to the mother,
narcissistic though it may be, is from my point of view of nosolace to the protagonists and even less so to Narcissus. For the
subject will always be marked by the uncertainty of his borders
and of his affective valency as well; these are all the more determining as the paternal function was weak or even nonexistent, opening the door to perversion or psychosis. The edenic
image of primary narcissism is perhaps a defensive negationelaborated by the neurotic subject when he sets himself under
the aegis of the father. On the other hand, patients who haverecently come to the couch (borderline cases, false selves, etc.)
reveal the horror of that dual war, its terror, and the ensuingfear of being rotten, drained, or blocked.
DEFILEMENT AS RITUAL RESCUE FROM PHOBIA
AND PSYCHOSIS
This abjection, which threatens the ego and results from thedual confrontation in which the uncertainties of primary narcissism reside—is it such as to motivate, if not explain, theincest dread of which Freud speaks? I believe so. If it be true,as Claude Levi-Strauss has demonstrated, that the prohibitionof incest has the logical import of founding, by means of thatvery prohibition, the discreteness of interchangeable units, thus
establishing social order and the symbolic, I shall maintain thatsuch a logical operation is carried out owing to a subjective
benefit derived from it on the level of libidinal economy. Incest
prohibition throws a veil over primary narcissism and the always ambivalent threats with which it menaces subjective identity. It cuts short the temptation to return, with abjection andjouissance, to that passivity status within the symbolic function,
where the subject, fluctuating between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, word and deed, would find death, along with

64

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

nirvana. Phobia alone, crossroad of neurosis and psychosis, andof course conditions verging on psychosis, testify to the appealof such a risk; as if, with regard to it, the taboo barring contact
with the mother and/or primary narcissism suddenly
disintegrated.
A whole facet of the sacred, true lining of the sacrificial,
compulsive, and paranoid side of religions, assumes the taskof warding off that danger. This is precisely where we encounterthe rituals of defilement and their derivatives, which, based on
the feeling of abjection and all converging on the maternal,
attempt to symbolize the other threat to the subject: that ofbeing swamped by the dual relationship, thereby risking theloss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living
being. The function of these religious rituals is to ward off thesubject's fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into
the mother.
THE POVERTY OF PROHIBITION: GEORGES BATAILLE
The logic of prohibition, which founds the abject, has beenoutlined and made explicit by a number of anthropologists
concerned with defilement and its sacred function in so-calledprimitive societies. And yet Georges Bataille remains the only
one, to my knowledge, who has linked the production of theabject to the weakness of that prohibition, which, in other respects,
necessarily constitutes each social order. He links abjection to"the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative
act of excluding." Bataille is also the first to have specified thatthe plane of abjection is that of the subject/object relationsip (andnot subject/other subject) and that this archaism is rooted inanal eroticism rather than sadism.10
In the following, my point will be to suggest that such anarchaic relationship to the object interprets, as it were, the relationship to the mother. Her being coded as "abject" points tothe considerable importance some societies attribute to women(matrilineal or related filiation, endogamy, decisive role of procreation for the survival of the social group, etc.). The symbolic"exclusory prohibition" that, as a matter of fact, constitutes
collective existence does not seem to have, in such cases, suf-

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 65

ficient strength to dam up the abject or demoniacal potentialof the feminine. The latter, precisely on account of its power,
does not succeed in differentiating itself as other but threatens
one's own and clean self, which is the underpinning of any organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies.
But before outlining the weakness of prohibition and finally thematrilineal order that can be perceived in those communities, let
us return to the anthropological delineation of the logic of exclusion that causes the abject to exist.
THE FUNDAMENTAL WORK OF MARY DOUGLAS
Anthropologists, since Sir James George Frazer, W. Robertson
Smith, Arnold van Gennep, and Alfred Reginald RadcliffBrown, or Rudolf Steiner, have noted that secular "filth,"which has become sacred "defilement," is the excluded on thebasis of which religious prohibition is made up. In a numberof primitive societies religious rites are purification rites whosefunction is to separate this or that social, sexual, or age groupfrom another one, by means of prohibiting a filthy, defilingelement. It is as if dividing lines were built up between society
and a certain nature, as well as within the social aggregate, on
the basis of the simple logic of excluding filth, which, promoted
to the ritual level of defilement, founded the "self and clean" ofeach social group if not of each subject.
The purification rite appears then as that essential ridge,
which, prohibiting the filthy object, extracts it from the secularorder and lines it at once with a sacred facet. Because it is
excluded as a possible object, asserted to be a non-object ofdesire, abominated as ab-ject, as abjection, filth becomes defilement and founds on the henceforth released side of the "selfand clean" the order that is thus only (and therefore, always
already) sacred.
Defilement is what is jettisoned from the "symbolic system."
It is what escapes that social rationality, that logical order onwhich a social aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals and,in short, constitutes a classification system or a structure.
The British anthropologist Mary Douglas begins by con-

66

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

struing the "symbolic system" of religious prohibitions as areflection of social divisions or even contradictions. As if thesocial being, coextensive with a "symbolic system," were always present to itself through its religious structures, whichtransfer its contradictions to the level of rituals. And yet, at asecond stage of her thinking, Mary Douglas seems to find in
the human body the prototype of that translucid being constituted by society as symbolic system. As a matter of fact, theexplanation she gives of defilement assigns in turn different
statuses to the human body: as ultimate cause of the socioeconomic causality, or simply as metaphor of that socio-symbolic being constituted by the human universe always present
to itself. In so doing, however, Mary Douglas introduces willynilly the possibility of a subjective dimension within anthropological thought on religions. Where then lies the subjective
value of those demarcations, exclusions, and prohibitions that
establish the social organism as a "symbolic system"? The anthropological analysis of these phenomena was for Mary Douglas essentially syntactic at first: defilement is an element connectedwith the boundary, the margin, etc., of an order. Henceforth
she finds herself led to semantic problems: what is the meaningthat such a border-element assumes in other psychological,
economic, etc., systems? At this moment of her thinking there
emerges a concern to integrate Freudian data as semantic values
connected with the psychosomatic functioning of the speaking
subject. But a hasty assimilation of such data leads Mary Douglas naively to reject Freudian premises.
Finally, such a conception disregards both subjective dynamics(if one wishes to consider the social set in its utmost particularization) and language as common and universal code (if one wishes
to consider the aggregate and the social aggregates in theirgreatest generality). Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology had
one advantage among others; it linked a classification system,that is, a symbolic system, within a given society, to the orderof language in its universality (binary aspects of phonology,
signifier-signified dependencies and autonomies, etc.). In thus
attaining universal truth, it nevertheless neglected the subjective
dimension and/or the diachronic and synchronic implication of
the speaking subject in the universal order of language.

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 67

Consequently, when I speak of symbolic order, I shall imply
the dependence and articulation of the speaking subject in theorder of language, such as they appear diachronically in theadvent of each speaking being, and as analytic listening discovers them synchronically in the speech of analysands. I shallconsider as an established fact the analytic finding that different
subjective structures are possible within that symbolic order,
even if the different types presently recorded seem subject todiscussion and refinement, if not reevaluation.
One might advance the hypothesis that a (social) symbolic
system corresponds to a specific structuration of the speaking
subject in the symbolic order. To say that it "corresponds" leaves
out questions of cause and effect; is the social determined by
the subjective, or is it the other way around? The subjectivesymbolic dimension that I am introducing does not therefore
reinstate some deep or primary causality in the social symbolic
system. It merely presents the effects and especially the benefits
that accrue to the speaking subject from a precise symbolicorganization; perhaps it explains what desiring motives are required in order to maintain a given social symbolics. Furthermore, it seems to me that such a statement of the problem has
the advantage of not turning the "symbolic system" into asecular replica of the "preestablished harmony" or the '"divineorder"; rather, it roots it, as a possible variant, within the only
concrete universality that defines the speaking being—the signifying process.
IN THE SAME FASHION AS INCEST PROHIBITION
We are now in a position to recall what was suggested earlier
concerning that border of subjectivity where the object nolonger has, or does not yet have a correlative function bonding
the subject. On that location, to the contrary, the vacillating,fascinating, threatening, and dangerous object is silhouetted as
non-being—as the abjection into which the speaking being ispermanently engulfed.
Defilement, by means of the rituals that consecrate it, is perhaps, for a social aggregate, only one of the possible foundingsof abjection bordering the frail identity of the speaking being.

68

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

In this sense, abjection is coextensive with social and symbolicorder, on the individual as well as on the collective level. By
virtue of this, abjection, just like prohibition of incest, is a universal
phenomenon; one encounters it as soon as the symbolic and/or
social dimension of man is constituted, and this throughout thecourse of civilization. But abjection assumes specific shapes anddifferent codings according to the various "symbolic systems."
I shall attempt to examine some of its variants: defilement, foodtaboo, and sin.
Socio-historical considerations can be brought in at a second
stage. They will allow us to understand why that demarcating
imperative, which is subjectively experienced as abjection, varies according to time and space, even though it is universal. I
shall nevertheless stick to a typological argument. Prohibitions
and conflicts that are specific to a given subject and ritualized
by religion for a given type of body will appear as isomorphic
with the prohibitions and conflicts of the social group within
which they happen. Leaving aside the question of the priority
of one over the other (the social does not represent the subjective
any more than the subjective represents the social), I shall positthat they both follow the same logic, with no other goal than
the survival of both group and subject.
My reflections will make their way through anthropologicaldomains and analyses in order to aim at a deep psycho-symbolic
economy: the general, logical determination that underlies anthropological variants (social structures, marriage rules, religious rites) and evinces a specific economy of the speaking
subject, no matter what its historical manifestations may be
In short, an economy that analytic listening and semanalytic
deciphering discover in our contemporaries. Such a procedure
seems to me to be directly in keeping with Freudian utilizationof anthropological data. It inevitably entails a share of disappointment for the empirically minded ethnologist. It does not
unfold without a share of fiction, the nucleus of which, drawn
from actuality and the subjective experience of the one whowrites, is projected upon data collected from the life of othercultures, less to justify itself than to throw light on them bymeans of an interpretation to which they obviously offer
resistance.

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 69

THE MARGIN OF A FLOATING STRUCTURE
Taking a closer look at defilement, as Mary Douglas has done,
one ascertains the following. In the first place, filth is not aquality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary
and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out ofthat boundary, its other side, a margin.
Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuffof the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears
by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body.
[. . .] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all othermargins.11
The potency of pollution is therefore not an inherent one; itis proportional to the potency of the prohibition that foundsit.
It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not
likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social,are clearly defined.12
Finally, even if human beings are involved with it, the dangers entailed by defilement are not within their power to deal
with but depend on a power "inhering in the structure ofideas."13 Let us posit that defilement is an objective evil undergone by the subject. Or, to put it another way, the danger offilth represents for the subject the risk to which the very symbolic order is permanently exposed, to the extent that it is a
device of discriminations, of differences. But from where andfrom what does the threat issue? From nothing else but anequally objective reason, even if individuals can contribute toit, and which would be, in a way, the frailty of the symbolicorder itself. A threat issued from the prohibitions that foundthe inner and outer borders in which and through which the
speaking subject is constituted—borders also determined by thephonological and semantic differences that articulate the syntax
of language.
And yet, in the light of this structural-functional X-ray ofdefilement, which draws on the major anthropological works
of modern times, from Robertson Smith to Marcel Mauss, fromEmile Durkheim to Levi-Strauss, one question remains unan-

70 FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

swered. Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent—like a metaphor that would havebecome incarnate—the objective frailty of symbolic order?
One might be tempted at first to seek the answer in a typeof society where defilement takes the place of supreme danger
or absolute evil.
BETWEEN TWO POWERS
Nevertheless, no matter what differences there may be among
societies where religious prohibitions, which are above all behavior prohibitions, are supposed to afford protection fromdefilement, one sees everywhere the importance, both socialand symbolic, of women and particularly the mother. In societies where it occurs, ritualization of defilement is accompanied by a strong concern for separating the sexes, and this means
giving men rights over women. The latter, apparently put inthe position of passive objects, are none the less felt to be wily
powers, "baleful schemers" from whom rightful beneficiaries
must protect themselves. It is as if, lacking a central authoritarian power that would settle the definitive supremacy of one
sex—or lacking a legal establishment that would balance theprerogatives of both sexes—two powers attempted to share out
society. One of them, the masculine, apparently victorious,
confesses through its very relentlessness against the other, thefeminine, that it is threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational,
wily, uncontrollable power. Is this a survival of a matrilineal
society or the specific particularity of a structure (without theincidence of diachrony)? The question of the origins of such ahandling of sexual difference remains moot. But whether it bewithin the highly hierarchical society of India or the Lele in
Africa14 it is always to be noticed that the attempt to establish
a male, phallic power is vigorously threatened by the no lessvirulent power of the other sex, which is oppressed (recently?
or not sufficiently for the survival needs of society?). That othersex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil thatis to be suppressed.15

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

Let us keep that fact in mind; I shall return to it later on for
the interpretation of defilement and its rites. In the meantime
I turn to the particulars—the prohibited objects and the symbolic devices that accompany those prohibitions.
EXCREMENTS AND MENSTRUAL BLOOD
While they always relate to corporeal orifices as to so many
landmarks parceling-constituting the body's territory, polluting
objects fall, schematically, into two types: excremental andmenstrual. Neither tears nor sperm, for instance, although they
belong to borders of the body, have any polluting value.
Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease,corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes fromwithout: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatenedby its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary,stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social
or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes withina social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity ofeach sex in the face of sexual difference.
MATERNAL AUTHORITY AS TRUSTEE OF THE SELF'S
CLEAN AND PROPER BODY
What can the two types of defilement have in common? Without
having recourse to anal eroticism or the fear of castration—one
cannot help hearing the reticence of anthropologists when confronted with that explanation—it might be suggested, by meansof another psychoanalytic approach, that those two defilements
stem from the maternal and/or the feminine, of which the maternal is the real support. That goes without saying where
menstrual blood signifies sexual difference. But what about
excrement? It will be remembered that the anal penis is also thephallus with which infantile imagination provides the feminine
sex and that, on the other hand, maternal authority is experienced first and above all, after the first essentially oral frustrations, as sphincteral training. It is as if, while having been forever immersed in the symbolics of language, the human being

71

72

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

experienced, in addition, an authority that was a—chronologically and logically immediate—repetition of the laws of language. Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority
shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points andlines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of masteryand neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improperdirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. It isa "binary logic," a primal mapping of the body that I callsemiotic to say that, while being the precondition of language,
it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that oflinguistic signs nor of the symbolic order they found. Maternal
authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self s clean andproper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within
which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, thedestiny of man will take shape.
If language, like culture, sets up a separation and, startingwith discrete elements, concatenates an order, it does so precisely by repressing maternal authority and the corporeal mapping that abuts against them. It is then appropriate to ask what
happens to such a repressed item when the legal, phallic, linguistic symbolic establishment does not carry out the separationin radical fashion—or else, more basically, when the speaking
being attempts to think through its advent in order better toestablish its effectiveness.

DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE
BORDERLINE PATIENT?
The structuralist hypothesis is well known. Basic symbolic institutions; such as sacrifice or myths, expand on logical processes
inherent in the economy of language itself; in doing so theyrealize for the community what makes up in depth, historicallyand logically, the speaking being as such. Thus myth projects
on contents that are vitally important for a given community
those binary oppositions discovered at the level of phonematicconcatenation of language. As for sacrifice, it solemnizes thevertical dimension of the sign: the one that leads from the thing

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

that is left behind, or killed, to the meaning of the word andtranscendence.
Following that line, one could suggest that the rites surrounding defilement, particularly those involving excremential
and menstrual variants, shift the border (in the psychoanalytic
meaning relating to borderline patients) that separates the
body's territory from the signifying chain; they illustrate theboundary between semiotic authority and symbolic law. Throughlanguage and within highly hierarchical religious institutions,
man hallucinates partial "objects"—witnesses to an archaic differentiation of the body on its way toward ego identity, whichis also sexual identity. The defilement from which ritual protects
us is neither sign nor matter. Within the rite that extracts itfrom repression and depraved desire, defilement is the translinguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self's
clean and proper body. In that sense, if it is a jettisoned object,
it is so from the mother. It absorbs within itself all the experiences of the non-objectal that accompany the differentiation
mother-speaking being, hence all ab-jects (from those the phobic shuns to those that hem in split subjects). As if purification
rites, through a language that is already there, looked backtoward an archaic experience and obtained from it a partialobject, not as such but only as a spoor of a pre-object, an archaic
parceling. By means of the symbolic institution of ritual, thatis to say, by means of a system of ritual exclusions, the partialobject consequently becomes scription—an inscription of limits,
an emphasis placed not on the (paternal) Law but on (maternal)
Authority through the very signifying order.
There follows something quite particular for the ritual device
itself.
A SCRIPTION WITHOUT SIGNSFirst, those rites concerning defilement (but perhaps also any
rite, defilement rite being prototypical) effect'an abreaction of
the pre-sign impact, the semiotic impact of language. In any
event it is thus that one can underpin anthropologists' definitions, according to which rites are acts rather than symbols. In

73

74

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

other words, rites would not be limited to their signifying
dimension, they would also have a material, active, translinguistic, magical impact.
In the second place, the strong ritualization of defilement,
which may be observed, for instance, within the castes of India,
appears to be accompanied by one's being totally blind to filthitself, even though it is the object of those rites. It is as if one
had maintained, so to speak, only the sacred, prohibited facetof defilement, allowing the anal object that such a sacralization
had in view to become lost within the dazzling light of unconsciousness if not of the unconscious. V. S. Naipaul points outthat Hindus defecate everywhere without anyone ever mentioning, either in speech or in books, those squatting figures,
because, quite simply, no one sees them.16 It is not a form ofcensorship due to modesty that would demand the omission
in discourse of a function that has, in other respects, been ritualized. It is blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects
from conscious representation. A split seems to have set in
between, on the one hand, the body's territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between motherand nature, and on the other hand, a totally different universeof socially signifying performances where embarrassment,
shame, guilt, desire, etc. come into play—the order of thephallus. Such a split, which in another cultural universe would
produce psychosis, thus finds in this context a perfect socialization. That may be because setting up the rite of defilementtakes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing thetwo universes of filth and of prohibition to brush lightly against
each other without necessarily being identified as such, as object
and as law. On account of the flexibility at work in rites ofdefilement, the subjective economy of the speaking being who
is involved abuts on both edges of the unnamable (the nonobject, the off-limits) and the absolute (the relentless coherenceof Prohibition, sole donor of Meaning).
Finally, the frequency of defilement rites in societies without
writing leads one to think that such cathartic rites function likea "writing of the real." They parcel out, demarcate, delineate
an order, a framework, a sociality, without having any otherFROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 75

signification than the one inhering in that very parceling andthe order thus concatenated. One might ask, proceeding inreverse, if all writing is not a second level rite, at the level oflanguage, that is, which causes one to be reminded, throughthe linguistic signs themselves, of the demarcations that precondition them and go beyond them. Indeed, writing causes
the subject who ventures in it to confront an archaic authority,
on the nether side of the proper Name. The maternal connotations of this authority never escaped great writers, no morethan the coming face to face with what we have called abjection.
From "I am Madame Bovary" to Molly's monologue and to
Celine's emotion, which does injury to syntax before opening
on to music, the ballerina, or nothing.
POLLUTION BY FOOD—A COMPOUND
When food appears as a polluting object, it does so as oral object
only to the extent that orality signifies a boundary of the self sclean and proper body. Food becomes abject only if it is aborder between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary
between nature and culture, between the human and the nonhuman. This may be noticed in India and Polynesia, for instance, in the case of cooked foods whose vulnerability to impurity is characteristic.17 In contrast to a ripe fruit that may beeaten without danger, food that is treated with fire is polluting
and must be surrounded with a series of taboos. It is as if fire,
contrary to what hygienist conceptions posit, far from purifying, pointed to a contact, to organic food's meddling withthe familial and the social. The virtual impurity of such foodcomes close to excremential abjection, which is the most striking example of the interference of the organic within the social.
The fact remains nevertheless that all food is liable to defile.
Thus the Brahmin who surrounds his meal and his food withvery strict regulations is less pure after eating than before. Foodin this instance designates the other (the natural) that is opposedto the social condition of man and penetrates the self s clean andproper body. In other respects, food is the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic relationships between the human being

j6

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

and the other, its mother, who wields a power that is as vitalas it is fierce.
THE REMAINDER: DEFILEMENT AND REBIRTH
The nature of the repulsion aroused by food remainders in Brahmanism is very significant from that point of view. More defiling still than any other food, they do not seem to be so on
account of that ambivalence, duplicity, or permanent or potential compound between same and other that all nourishment
signifies, as I have just shown. Remainders are residues of something but especially of someone. They pollute on account ofincompleteness. Under certain conditions, however, the Brahmin can eat remainders, which, instead of polluting him, makehim qualified to undertake a journey or even accomplish his
specific office, the priestly act.
That ambivalence of residues (pollution and potential for renewal, remainder and fresh start) can also be seen in domains
unrelated to food. Some cosmogonies represent the remainder,
after the flood, in the shape of a serpent that becomes the supporter of Vishnu and thus insures the rebirth of the universe.
In similar fashion, if what remains of a sacrifice can be calledabject, in another connection consuming the leavings of a sacrifice can also be the cause of a series of good rebirths and caneven lead to finding salvation. The remainder is thus a strongly
ambivalent notion in Brahmanism—defilement as well as rebirth, abjection as much as high purity, obstacle at the sametime as incentive toward holiness. But here is perhaps the essential point: the remainder appears to be coextensive with theentire architecture of non-totalizing thought. In its view there
is nothing that is everything; nothing is exhaustive, there is a
residue in every system—in cosmogony, food ritual, and evensacrifice, which deposits, through ashes for instance, ambivalentremains. A challenge to our mono-theistic and mono-logicaluniverses such a mode of thinking apparently needs the ambivalence of remainder if it is not to become enclosed within
One single-level symbolics, and thus always posit a non-object
as polluting as it is reviving—defilement and genesis. That is

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 77

why the poet of the Atharva Veda extols the defiling and regenerating remainder (uchista) as precondition for all form.
"Upon remainder the name and the form are founded, uponremainder the world is founded . . . Being and non-being, bothare in the remainder, death, vigor."18
FEAR OF WOMEN—FEAR OF PROCREATION
Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear ofher generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, thatpatrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing. It is thus not
surprising to see pollution rituals proliferating in societies where
patrilineal power is poorly secured, as if the latter sought, bymeans of purification, a support against excessive matrilineality.
Thus, in a society where religious prohibitions correspondto the sexual prohibitions intended to separate men fromwomen and insure the power of the former over the latter, it
has been possible to note—as with the Gidjingali in Australia—
the considerable sway of maternal authority over the sons. On
the other hand, with the neighboring Aranda, where paternal
control is much more important than with the Gidjingali, there
is no connection between sexual and religious prohibitions.19
The instance of the Nuer, analyzed by Evans Pritchard andagain by Mary Douglas, is very significant in that respect. It
involves a society that is dominated, at least among the aristocrats, by the agnatic principle and in which women are adivisive factor; essential for reproduction, they neverthelessendanger the ideal norms of the agnatic group, the more so as
cohabitation with maternal relatives seems common. Menstrual
pollution, as well as prohibition of incest with the mother,
considered the most dangerous of all, can be interpreted as the
symbolic equivalent of that conflict.20
A loathing of defilement as protection against the poorly
controlled power of mothers seems even clearer with the
Bemba. Ritually impure and contaminating, menstrual defilement wields with them, in addition, a cataclysmic power suchthat one is led to speak, under the circumstances, not only of
ritual impurity but also of the power-of pollution. Thus, if a woman

78

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

undergoing her period touches fire (a masculine and patrilineal
symbol), food cooked on that fire makes her ill and threatens
her with death. Now, among the Bemba, power is in the handsof men, but filiation is matrilineal and residence, after marriage,
is matrilocal. There is a great contradiction between male ruleand matrilocal residence; the young bridegroom is subjected tothe authority of the bride's family, and he must override it
through personal excellence during his maturity. He remains
nevertheless, because of matrilineality, in conflict with the maternal uncle who is the legal guardian of the children especiallywhen they are growing up.21 The power of pollution (the threatof illness or death through the conjunction blood-fire) thustransposes, on the symbolic level, the permanent conflict resulting from an unsettled separation between masculine andfeminine power at the level of social institutions. Non-separation would threaten the whole society with disintegration.
Here is a significant fact. Again as protection against thegenerative power of women, pollution rites arise within societies that are afraid of overpopulation (in barren regions, forinstance). One thus finds them, as part of a whole system ofrestraining procreation, along with incest taboo, etc., among
the Enga of New Guinea. On the other hand, with their Foreneighbors, the desire to procreate, encouraged for opposite
ecological reasons, entails, one might say symmetrically, thedisappearance of incest taboo and pollution rites. Such a relaxation of prohibitions among the Fore, for the sake of a single
objective—reproduction at any cost—is accompanied by sucha lack of the "clean and proper" and hence of the "abject" thatcannibalism of the dead seems to be current practice. Contrariwise the Enga, heedful of pollution and subjected td fear of
procreation, are not acquainted with cannibalism.22
Is that parallel sufficient to suggest that defilement reveals,
at the same time as an attempt to throttle matrilineality, anattempt at separating the speaking being from his body in orderthat the latter accede to the status of clean and proper body,that is to say, non-assimilable, uneatable, abject? It is only atsuch a cost that the body is capable of being defended, protected—and also, eventually, sublimated. Fear of the uncon-

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 79

trollable generative mother repels me from the body; I give up
cannibalism because abjection (of the mother) leads me toward
respect for the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother.
DEFILEMENT AND ENDOGAMY IN INDIA
It is of course the hierarchic caste system in India that provides
the most complex and striking instance of a social, moral, andreligious system based on pollution and purification, on thepure and the impure. It is worth confronting, as Louis Dumont
has done, this hierarchic system with the regulation of marriage.23 Dumont concludes that the endogamy in castes is only
a consequence of the initial hierarchic principle based on the
opposition pure/impure. Without going into the details of his
demonstration or into the numerous infractions to endogamy—
which are moreover inscribed naturally within the hierarchic
order, complicating it and strengthening it—I shall, for my
purpose, note the following.
The endogamic principle inherent in caste system amounts,
as everywhere else, to having the individual marry within his
group, or rather to his being prohibited from marrying outsideof it. Endogamy, in Indian castes, implies in addition a specificfiliation: the passing on of membership in the group by bothparents at the same time. The result of such a regulation is in fact
a balancing, symbolic and real, of the role of both sexes withinthat socio-symbolic unit constituted by caste. The highly hierarchical nature of Indian society does not come into play between the sexes, at least not where filiation is concerned—amajor criterion of power in those societies. One could say that
caste is a hierarchic device that, in addition to professional specializations, insures, in the passing on of group membership,
an equal share to the father and to the mother.
Starting from there, the question as to whether the pure/
impure opposition determines the hierarchic order, or whether
caste endogamy is the initial principle, appears in a different
light. Let us put aside the debate over cause and effect, thechicken and the egg. Let me note only that in an organization
like this one, without classic exogamy, social order is not elab-

80

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

orated on the basis of clear-cut oppositions represented by men
and women as tokens of "one's own" and the "foreign," the"same" and the "different" (sex, group, clan, etc.). Nevertheless, as though making up for that lack of differentiation, meticulous rules of separation, rejection, and repulsion are introduced. Subjects and objects have only, on that basis, the status
of ab-jects for one another. In short, when one avoids the binarism of the exogamic system, that is, the father/mother, man/woman strangeness at the level of the matrimonial institution,
then, at the ritual level, one multiplies abjections between thesexes, between subjects and objects (essentially borderlanders,a point to which I shall return), and between castes.
Beside that general rule, there are specific situations that confirm the impression that the strong caste hierarchy compensates
for the man/woman balance introduced by Indian endogamy.
Let me take note, among other matters, of the various formsof marriage, often challenged and contradicted, that some havebeen able to interpret as dual filiation, paternal and maternal.
Thus, for M. B. Emenau,24 there is in southern India a dual
unilineal descent, while for Louis Dumont the two unilineal
principles are found separately, even if paternal and maternal
traits can interfere in several ways within the same group.25 In
another connection, certain cases of hypergamy (the possibility
for the daughter to marry into a family superior to her own
without affecting the status of her children or excluding endogamy), while they may amount to a promotion for the
woman, are valid only for her, since the marriage is of no
account for the husband. That very particular search for a father
having a higher status is interpreted as maintaining "matrihneal
filiation in a patrilineal environment."26
Ethnologists could multiply and specify examples. The conclusion that I shall draw is as follows. If any organization isnecessarily made up of differences, separations, and oppositions, the caste system, by reason of the endogamy that goeswith it and the balance between the two sexes that the latterinstitutionalizes, seems to translate a difference elsewhere bymultiplying it; that difference, in exogamic societies, is one andacts fundamentally between the two sexes as representatives andFROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 81

the two entities that are territorial, economic, political, ethnic,etc.
It is as if the more the balance between the two sexual powers
was maintained by endogamy, the greater was the need to haveother differences come into play. That inseparability, one mighteven say that immanence to endogamy, of the hierarchic principle, like the cloth and lining of a single organization, perhaps
explains why marriage (the rite of joining, of maintaining theidentity and balance of the two) is the only rite of passage that"is not accompanied by any impurity."27 It gives the Hindu theimpression that he is "symbolically and temporarily raised fromhis condition (which is hierarchical, governed by the pure/impure) and assimilated to the highest, that of prince or Brahman
for a non-Brahman, god for a Brahman."28 Everywhere else
the principle of separation holds sway, one that Bougie likens
to a repulsion.
MARRIAGE OR LOATHING?
Dumont's distrust for Bougie's term and the logic that it conveys, the preference he gives to the hierarchical principle, do
not appear to invalidate my reasoning. I shall simply conclude
that the hierarchic principle is jointly based on two logical principles—the separation exemplified by the dichotomy of the pureand the impure, and the maintaining of a balance between the twosexes through endogamy.
As I have pointed out, it is Celestin Bougie who has evoked,
along with the socio-logical principle ruling the caste system("hierarchy, hereditary specialization"30), the one he calls "repulsion"31 or "loathing";32 a principle that seems more psychological but is in fact linked to the logic of the sacred. Particularly, he dwells on the question of "food loathing": is castea "matter of marriage" or a "matter of meals"? Skirting thepsychological or psychoanalytical archeology of repulsion, thiscontroversial anthropologist seeks its anchorage in family organization on the one hand, in the economy of sacrifice on theother. As to family organization, he restricts himself to references to "far away memories of earliest family practices" or to

82

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT"relics of family religion" (as opposed to the demands of industry); these would account for the traits that cause guild system to resemble caste system.33 The notion of repulsion is studied neither by Dumont nor by Bougie, even when Bougie
mentions it in connection with Brahmans and has it spring fromthe taboo that surrounds sacrifice in any society, and which India"merely carried to its highest power." He mentions that thesacrificer is surrounded by taboos because he channels "fromthe profane world to the sacred world fluid, ambiguous forces,that are at the same time the most dangerous and the mostbeneficial of all."34
HIERARCHY AND NONVIOLENCE
If, on the other hand, one reestablishes Bougie's outlook in thelight of the precise details given by Dumont, one no longer sees
the pure/impure opposition that governs Indian hierarchic order
as merely encompassing; one also sees it as correlative of marriage rules and religious customs (sacrifices and their evolution).
One is then led to conceive of the opposition between pure andimpure not as an archetype but as one coding of the differentiation of the speaking subject as such, a coding of his repulsion
in relation to the other in order to autonomize himself. The
pure/impure opposition represents (when it does not function
as metaphor) /the striving for identity, a difference. It appears
instead of sexual difference (and in that sense it may seem, as incaste system, parallel to the institutionalizing of bisexuality
through endogamic marriage). On that basis, it acts as a separating value peculiar to the symbolic function itself (sacrificer/
sacrifice/God; subject/thing/meaning). The hierarchy foundedon the pure and the impure displaces (or denies) the difference
between the sexes; it replaces the violence of sacrifice with the ritualof purification.
In the final analysis, the pure/impure opposition would not
be a datum in itself but would stem from the necessity for the
speaking being to be confronted with sexual difference and thesymbolic. The Indian caste system would allow that confrontation to take place smoothly. It would manage it without being

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 83

pre-emptive—in the manner of monotheism, for instance—andwith the greatest of care, protecting the subject who, fromabjection to abjection, is confronted with them systematically.
The cost is social immobility and an identification of that which
is elsewhere autonomous subjectivity with the rules of abjectionthat pattern the socio-symbolic territory. Hierarchy is indeed
constitutive of Hindu man (and perhaps of any speaking being
if he does not erase his participation in the symbolic), but it isrooted in two prime shifts: the sign (solemnized by sacrifice),sexual difference (regulated by marriage). If it be true that thepure/impure opposition takes in the area that, with us, is governed by the good/evil opposition, the boundary at issue isrelated, through the hierarchy of caste and matrimonial regulations that accompany and secure it, to a very deep logic of
the speaking being as separated by sex and language. India has
the incomparable advantage of laying bare the ab-ject logic ofthat separation and resolving in its nonviolent fashion theasymptotic relation between sexuality and symbolism, balancing differences where sexuality is concerned, multiplying andgrading divisions to the utmost in the case of symbolism.
OEDIPUS THE KING OR INVISIBLE ABJECTION
The tragic and sublime fate of Oedipus sums up and displaces
the mythical defilement that situates impurity on the untouchable "other side" constituted by the other sex, within the corporeal border—the thin sheet of desire—and, basically, within
the mother woman—the myth of natural fullness. To be convinced of this, we would have to follow Sophocles' Oedipus theKing and above all his Oedipus at Colonus.
A sovereign on account of his knowing how to unveil logicalenigmas, Oedipus the king is nonetheless ignorant of his desire,He does not know that he is also the one who kills his father
Laius and marries his mother Jocasta. Had they remained veiled,that murder as much as that desire would onlybe the obverse,
quite obviously solidary, of his logical and consequently political power. Abjection breaks out only when, driven to distraction by a desire to know, Oedipus discovers desire and death84 FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

in his sovereign being; when he assigns them to the same, full,knowing, and responsible sovereignty. In Oedipus the King thesolution remains nonetheless wholly mythical; it proceeds bymeans of exclusion, as we have seen it at work in the logic ofother mythical and ritual systems.
There is, first of all, a spatial exclusion. Oedipus must exile
himself, leave the proper place of his sovereignty, thrust defilement aside so that the boundaries of the social contract may
be perpetuated at Thebes.
At the same time, there is an exclusion from sight. Oedipus
blinds himself, so as not to have to suffer the sight of the objectsof his desire and murder (the faces of his wife, mother, andchildren). If it be true that such blinding is equivalent to castration, it is neither eviration nor death. In relation to them,
it is a symbolic substitute intended for building the wall, reinforcing the boundary that wards off opprobrium, which, because of this very fact, is not disavowed but shown to be alien.
Blinding is thus an image of splitting; it marks, on the very
body, the alteration of the self and clean into the defiled—thescar taking the place of a revealed and yet invisible abjection.
Of abjection considered as invisible. In return for which citystate and knowledge can endure.
PHARMAKOS THE AMBIGUOUS
Let us emphasize again the tragic development of Oedipus theKing: does it not sum up the mythic variant of abjection? Entering an impure city—a miasma—he turns himself into agos,
defilement, in order to purify it and to become katharmos. He
is thus a purifier by the very fact of being agos. His abjectionis due to the permanent ambiguity of the parts he plays without
his knowledge, even when he believes he knows.35 It is precisely
such a dynamics of reversals that makes of him a being of
abjection and a pharmakos, a scapegoat who, having beenejected, allows the city to be freed from defilement. The
mainspring of the tragedy lies in that ambiguity;36 prohibition
and ideal are joined in a single character in order to signify thatthe speaking being has no space of his own but stands on a

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible
demarcation. If such is the logic of Oedipus as pharmakos katharmos, there is no alternative but to note that Sophocles' playderives its effectiveness not only from that mathesis of ambiguity but also from the wholly semantic values it endows opposing terms with. But what "values"?
Thebes is a miasma on account of sterility, disease, and death.
Oedipus is agos on account of his having, through murder ofthe father and incest with the mother, interrupted the reproductive chain. Defilement is the stopping of life; (like) sexuality
without reproduction (the sons born out of Oedipus' incest will
perish, while his daughter will survive only within anotherlogic, that of the contract or symbolic existence, as will be seenin Oedipus at Colonus). A certain sexuality, which does not havein Greek tragedy the meaning it has for modern man, which
does not even adorn itself with pleasure but with sovereignty
and knowledge, is the equivalent of disease and death. Defilement
blends into it: practically, it amounts to tampering with themother. Defilement is incest considered as transgression of theboundaries of what is clean and proper.
Where then lies the border, the initial phantasmatic limit that
establishes the clean and proper self of the speaking and/or social
being? Between man and woman? Or between mother andchild? Perhaps between woman and mother? The replica of
Oedipus-pharmakos on the woman's side is Jocasta; she is herself
Janus-like, ambiguity and reversal in a single being, a single
part, a single function. Janus-like perhaps as any woman is, tothe extent that any woman is at the same time a desiring being,that is, a speaking being, and a reproductive being, that is, onethat separates itself from its child. Oedipus has perhaps done
nothing more than marrying the splitting of Jocasta—the mystery, the enigma of femininity. At the limit, if someone personifies abjection without assurance of purification, it is awoman, "any woman," the "woman as a whole"; as far as heis concerned, man exposes abjection by knowing it, andthrough that very act purifies it. Jocasta is miasma and agos—that goes without saying. But Oedipus alone is pharmakos. He
knows and bounds the mythic universe constituted by the ques-8586 FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

tion of (sexual) difference and preoccupied with the separationof the two powers: reproduction/production, feminine/masculine. Oedipus completes that universe by introducing it into
the particularity of each individual who then unfailingly becomes pharmakos and universally tragic.
But for such interiorization to take place, a transition wasneeded; from Thebes to Colonus, ambiguity and reversal ofdifferences become contract.
PURIFICATION AT COLONUS
Oedipus at Colonus is therefore completely other. The locale haschanged. And while divine laws have not lost their harshness,
Oedipus, for his part, has modified his stance with respect tothem. In point of fact, a transformation of political laws actually
took place between the writing of the two plays. Between 420(Oedipus the King) and 402, when Oedipus at Colonus was first
performed (after Sophocles' death in 406-405), there was a transition from tyranny to democracy. But if in the work of Sophocles' old age the democratic principle appears to hold sway,that is perhaps only one of the reasons that explain such a changewith respect to divine laws in the dynamics of Oedipus at Colonus. In opposition to the sovereign Oedipus, overcome, destroyed, shattered through and within opprobrium, we havehere an Oedipus who is not king, in other words an Oedipus
who is a subject, who proclaims his innocence. Not without
hesitations. Having first thought of shaking Theseus' hand andembracing him, he comes to think that he is impure althoughirresponsible:
But what am I saying? Unhappy as I have become, how could I wish
thee to touch one with whom all stain of sin hath made its dwelling?
No, not I, nor allow thee, if thou wouldst. (lines 1134 ff.)
And yet he had cried out at the very beginning of that closing
in of his fate:• • ■ mine acts, at least, have been in suffering rather than doing (1.
268)

stainless before the law, void of malice have I come unto this pass!
(1- 348)37

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 87

Let us stop with this acknowledgment. Neither a confessionof guilt nor an entreaty of innocence consequent to the sufferingthat was undergone, that statement marks the slipping from
Oedipus the king to Oedipus the subject. "I am innocent before
the Law" signifies first, / do not know the Law, the one who solves
logical enigmas does not know the Law, and that means, I who
knows am not the Law. Thus a first estrangement is introduced
between knowledge and Law, one that unbalances the sovereign. If the Law is in the Other, my fate is neither power nor
desire, it is the fate of an estranged person: my fate is death.
The abjection of Oedipus the king was the irreconcilable inknowledge and desire, both all-powerful in man's being.
The abjection of Oedipus at Colonus is the not known of the
speaking being who is subject to death at the same time as tosymbolic union.
For it is on the threshold of death, while he is making a pactwith a foreigner, that Oedipus says he does not know the Law.
Exile, first desired, then refused by his sons, has become rejection
before being transformed, for Oedipus, into choice and symbolic
handing down. For it is on foreign soil, and to a foreign hero,
Theseus, a symbolic son, that he bequeaths, at the same time
as his daughters, the secret of his death. A death that, also inand of itself, without being in any way expiatory or redeeming
for Oedipus, is meant for the benefit of others, of foreigners—
Theseus and the Atheneans.
Within such a context, it is Ismene, the daughter so often
silent but who speaks in order to object to the very Oedipean
quarrels of the sons, who also heralds his salvation through thegods: "Yea, for the gods lift thee now, but before they were
working thy ruin" (1. 390). Such a lifting will be explained by
the innocence of Oedipus before the Law (1. 548); but to makeit concrete, he will undergo the purification rites at Colonus(11. 466-491), rites that provide us with one of the most detailed
descriptions of purification in classical literature.
A CHALLENGE TO ABJECTION: THE SYMBOLIC PACTAt Colonus, therefore, the fate of abjection was changed. Neither excluded nor blindly other, it finds its place as his not known

88 FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

within a "subject on the verge of death." Abjection is nothing
more than a flaw in Oedipus' impossible sovereignty, a flawin his knowledge. If rituals are called upon to purify it, it isnevertheless in the sayings of Oedipus concerning divine Law
as well as Theseus that it is assumed. It has nothing to do withconfessing a sin; abjection, in a Greece in the process of becoming democratic, is taken over by the one who, throughspeaking, recognizes himself as mortal (so much so that heleaves no male issue) and subject to the symbolic (one will notethe purely nominal handing down of his mortal jouissance tothe foreigner, Theseus).
A bridge has been built toward another logic of abjection:
it is no longer defilement to be excluded ritually as the otherfacet of the sacred (social, cultural, one's own) but transgression
due to a misreading of the Law.
Oedipus the King handed over to Freud and his posterity thestrength of (incestuous) desire and the desire for (the father's)
death. However abject these desires may be, which threaten the
integrity of individual and society, they are nonetheless sovereign. Such is the blinding light cast by Freud, following Oedipus, on abjection, as he invites us to recognize ourselves in it
without gouging out our eyes.
But after all, what saves us from performing that decisive
gesture? The answer can perhaps be found in Oedipus at Colonus,
and yet that play does not seem to have preoccupied Freud.
The border between abjection and the sacred, between desire
and knowledge, between death and society, can be facedsquarely, uttered without sham innocence or modest self-effacement, provided one sees in it an incidence of man's particularity as mortal and speaking. "There is an abject" is henceforthstated as, "I am abject, that is, mortal and speaking." Incompleteness and dependency on the Other, far from clearing adesiring and murderous Oedipus, allow him only to make his
dramatic splitting transmittable—transmittable to a foreign
hero, and hence opening up the undecidable possibility of a few
truth-effects. Our eyes can remain open provided we recognize
ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic—by language. Provided we hear in language—and not in the other,

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 89

nor in the other sex—the gouged-out eye, the wound, the basic
incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying
concatenations. That amounts to joying in the truth of selfdivision (abjection/sacred). Here two paths open out: sublimation and perversion.
And their intersection: religion.
Freud did not need to go to Colonus for that. He had Moses,
who preceded him in this reversal of defilement in subjection
to symbolic law. But it may be that Oedipus at Colonus shows,in addition to other modifications of Greek culture, the pathby which Hellenism could meet with the Bible.

4

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICALABOMINATION
Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.
Exodus 23:19
See now that I, even I, am he and there is no god with me.
Deuteronomy 32:39
ludei mente sola unumque numen intellegunt.
Tacitus, Histories, 5:5

THE BIBLICAL NEUTRALIZATION OF DEFILEMENTInterpretations of biblical impurity are, roughly speaking, divided along two lines of persuasion. The first, following up on
the ideas of W. Robertson Smith (The Religion of the Semites,
1889), considers biblical impurity as a condition internal to Jewish monotheism, intrinsically dependent on divine will, since
the impure is what departs from divine precepts. Far from beinga demonic force alien to divinity, impurity would then be akind of neutralization of taboos (peculiar to rites of defilement),
owing to the fact that it is subordinate to the will of God.1 The
other interpretation, represented by Baruch A. Levine,2 considers impurity to be indicative of a demonic force, threatening
the divinity, acting independently of it and analogous to theautonomous power of a spirit of evil.
I shall try to demonstrate that those two contrary positions,in fact, do no more than unilaterally emphasize the complex
dynamics of biblical thought concerning impurity. As I see it,biblical impurity is permeated with the tradition of defilement;

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

91

in that sense, it points to but does not signify an autonomous
force that can be threatening for divine agency. I shall suggestthat such a force is rooted, historically (in the history of religions) and subjectively (in the structuration of the subject's
identity), in the cathexis of maternal function—mother, women,
reproduction. But the biblical test—and therein lies its extraordinary specificity—performs the tremendous forcing that consists in subordinating maternal power (whether historical orphantasmatic, natural or reproductive) to symbolic order as
pure logical order regulating social performance, as divine Law
attended to in the Temple. To the extent that the Temple is theLaw, one is biblically pure or impure only with respect to social
order, that is, with respect to the Law or the cult (as Neusner
would have it). If, on the other hand, one tries to go backfurther into the archeology of that impurity, one indeed encounters fear in the face of a power (maternal? natural?—at any
rate insubordinate and not liable of being subordinated to Law)that might become autonomous evil but is not, so long as thehold of subjective and social symbolic order endures. Biblicalimpurity is thus always already a logicizing of what departs fromthe symbolic, and for that very reason it prevents it from being
actualized as demonic evil. Such a logicizing inscribes the demonic in a more abstract and also more moral register as a potential for guilt and sin.
Purity or impurity are thus situated in relation to cult because
the latter represents or serves a logic of distribution and behavior
on which the symbolic community is founded: a Law, a reason.
That is what Maimonides says, within a definition of impurity
that gives considerable weight not only to reason but also to
the subject's initiative:. . . one who sets his heart on cleansing himself from the uncleannesses
that beset men's souls . . . becomes clean as soon as he consents in
his heart to shun those counsels and brings his soul into the watersof pure reason.3
When Mary Douglas defines impurity as that which departs
from symbolic order and Neusner sees in it what is incompatible
with the Temple, they are talking about the same thing according

92

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

to two points of view. The anthropologist must discover social
order while studying societies that observe it unconsciously,
while the historian of religions stands before that order, which
is not only exhibited but isolated in itself and celebrated as anagency of the Law by that colossal revolution—Hebraic
monotheism.
But the question for the analyst-semiologist is to know how
far one can analyze ritual impurity. The historian of religions
stops soon: the cultically impure is that which is based on anatural "loathing."4 The anthropologist goes further: there isnothing "loathsome" in itself; the loathsome is that which disobeys classification rules peculiar to the given symbolic system.5
But as far as I am concerned, I keep asking questions. Why thatsystem of classification and not another? What social, subjective,
and socio-subjectively interacting needs does it fulfill? Are there
no subjective structurations that, within the organization ofeach speaking being, correspond to this or that symbolic-social
system and represent, if not stages, at least types of subjectivity
and society? Types that would be defined, in the last analysis,
according to the subject's position in language, that is, by themore or less partial use he can make of his potentialities?
A STRATEGY OF IDENTITY
The pure/impure distinction, tahor/tame, shows up in the biblical episode of Noah's burnt offerings to the Lord after theflood. "And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of
every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt
offerings on the altar."6 That recognition of the pure/impure
difference apparently forces the Lord to defer his judgment—
and that entails clemency on the one hand, time on the other.
I will not again curse the ground any more for men's sake; for theimagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I againsmite any more every thing living, as I have done.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat,and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.7
Neither Cain, although at fault, nor Adam, although wandering (nad, and that brings him close to feminine impurity,

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 93

niddah), are defiled. Tahor/tame8 seems to be a specific relationthat pertains to setting in order, dependent on a covenant with
God. That opposition, even though it is not absolute, is inscribed in the biblical text's basic concern with separating, withconstituting strict identities without intermixture. The distance
between man and God will be at issue in the elaboration of thetheological corpus. One can observe, however, along the complex course followed by Yahwist and Elohist, how that fundamental difference in fact subsumes the others—life and death,vegetal and animal, flesh and blood, hale and ill, otherness andincest. Keeping to the semantic value of those oppositions, one
can group them under three major categories of abomination:i) food taboos; 2) corporeal alteration and its climax, death;and 3) the feminine body and incest. Topologically speaking
such variants correspond to one's being allowed to have accessor not to a place—the holy place of the Temple. Logically,
conformity to the Law is involved, the Law of purity [cleanliness] or Law of holiness, particularly as it is summed up in
Leviticus 11-16 and 19-26.
"MATERIAL" OR "ALLEGORICAL" OPPOSITIONS
Commentators have noted that if biblical impurity is from theoutset tied to the religious cult since the impure is that whichis excluded from the Temple, it deals with matter (food, menses, leprosy, gonorrhea, etc.) having no immediate relation to
the sacred place. It is thus in secondary fashion, through ametaphor, that impurity concerns the relation to the Temple,
just as, consequently, what is excluded from it—idolatry inparticular. Although the pure/impure distinction was alreadyposited earlier, and especially with Isaiah (36-66), it is in fact
only at the time of the second Temple, after the return fromexile, after Ezekiel, that it becomes fundamental for the religious
life of Israel. Nevertheless, and without for that matter
undergoing any great change, it now appears even more allegorical or metaphorical, for henceforth there is less stress on
the cultic center of purity than on impurity, which has becomea metaphor for idolatry, sexuality, and immorality.9

. 94

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

It would thus seem that even when the Temple was destroyed, the Temple's function remained as far as the Jews wereconcerned, and it organized, in "metaphorical" fashion—butwhat does that mean?—a number of oppositions. I shall try todemonstrate that there is no opposition between material abomination and topo-logical (holy place of the Temple) or logical(holy Law) reference. The one and the other are two aspects,
semantic and logical, of the imposition of a strategy of identity,
which is, in all strictness, that of monotheism. The semes thatclothe the process of separation (orality, death, incest) are theinseparable lining of its logical representation aiming to guarantee the place and law of the One God. In other words, theplace and law of the One do not exist without a series of separations
that are oral, corporeal, or even more generally material, andin the last analysis relating to fusion with the mother/The pure/
impure mechanism testifies to the harsh combat Judaism, inorder to constitute itself, must wage against paganism and its
maternal cults. It carries into the private lives of everyone thebrunt of the struggle each subject must wage during the entire
length of his personal history in order to become separate, thatis to say, to become a speaking subject and/or subject to Law.
In this sense I shall posit that the "material" semes of the pure/
impure opposition that mark out the biblical text are not metaphors of the divine prohibition resuming archaic, material customs, but are responses of symbolic Law, in the sphere of
subjective economy and the genesis of speaking identity.
As the introduction of the pure/impure opposition coincides,
as we have seen, with burnt offerings, this sets up at once theproblem of the relations between taboo and sacrifice. It would
seem as though God had penalized by means of the flood abreach of the order regulated by taboo. The burnt offering set
up by Noah must then reestablish the order disturbed by thebreaking of taboo. Two complementary motions are thus
involved.
TABOO FORESTALLS SACRIFICE
The taboo implied by the pure/impure distinction organizes
differences, shaping and opening an articulation that we must

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 95

indeed call metonymic, within which, if he maintains himself
there, man has a share in the sacred order. As to sacrifice, it
constitutes the alliance with the One when the metonymic orderthat stems from it is perturbed. Sacrifice thus operates between
two heterogeneous, incompatible, forever irreconcilable terms.
It connects them necessarily in violent fashion, violating at thesame time as it posits it the semantic isotopy of each. Sacrificeis thus a metaphor. The question has been raised as to whichcame first, metonymic taboo or metaphoric sacrifice.10 All
things considered, as sacrifice merely extends the logic of taboo
when the latter is perturbed, the anteriority of taboo over sacrifice has been asserted. It seems to me more tenable to say thatsome collections of religious texts, by stressing taboo, seek
protection from sacrificial interference or at least subordinate
the latter to the former. Biblical abomination would thus bean attempt to throttle murder. Through sustained abomination,
Judaism parts ways with sacrificial religions. And to the extent
that religion and sacrifice overlap, biblical abominations perhaps
constitute the logical explicitation of the religious (without proceeding to murderous acts—which become unnecessary when
the rules of taboo are disclosed and observed). With biblicalabomination religion is probably wending its way toward
fulfillment.
THE MAN/GOD DISTINCTION: A DIETARY DISTINCTION
From its very beginning, the biblical text insists on maintaining
the distance between man and God by means of a dietary differentiation. Thus the Lord (Genesis 3:22), after noting that"man is become as one of us, to know good and evil," decides
to prevent this pretentious "scholar" from also becoming immortal. He thus prohibits certain foods by banishing him fromthe garden of Eden, "lest he put forth his hand, and take also
from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever." If a certain
kind of eating, that of the apple of knowledge,'could not havebeen held back from Adam, who was tempted by Eve, herself
tempted by the Serpent, another food will be absolutely banned,in order to forestall the chaos that would result from the identification of man with the immortality of God. One should note

96 SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

that it is a feminine and animal temptation that is concealed
under the first dietary trespass; for we shall encounter the reference to woman only fortuitously in the later abominationsof the Levites.
Thus, as J. Soler points out,11 food effects an initial division
between man and God; to God belong living beings (by way
of sacrifice), to man vegetable foods. For, "Thou shalt not kill."
In order to understand, after that first dietary apportionment,
the introduction of meat diet, one must assume a cataclysm—
for instance, a violation of divine rule and subsequent punishment. It is indeed only after the Flood that authorization is granted
to eat "every moving thing that liveth" (Genesis 9:3). Far frombeing a reward, such permission is accompanied by an acknowledgment of essential evil, and it includes a negative,
incriminating connotation with respect to man: "For the imagination of man's heart is evil" (Genesis 8:21). As if there had
been an acknowledgment of a bent toward murder essential tohuman beings and the authorization for a meat diet was therecognition of that ineradicable "death drive," seen here under
its most primordial or archaic aspect—devouring.
And yet, the biblical concern with separating and ordering
encounters further on the supposedly previous distinction between vegetable and animal. In the postdiluvian situation sucha distinction is brought out again under the guise of the flesh/blood opposition. On the one hand there is bloodless flesh(destined for man) and on the other, blood (destined for God).
Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the "animal" seme ofthe previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murderof which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads,
the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity,
murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together. "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood
thereof, shall ye not eat" (Genesis 9:4).
Such is the Elohistic covenant agreed upon with Noah for
the whole of mankind. The Yahwist, setting up the agreement
between Moses and God, valid for a single nation, applies him-

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 97

self to making that system of differences both more rigorousand more precise. "I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people. Ye shall therefore put difference
between clean beasts and unclean ..." (Leviticus 20:24-25).
The dietary domain will then continue to be the privileged
object of divine taboos, but it will be modified, amplified, andeven seem to become identified with the most moral, if not themost abstract, statements of the Law. We shall attempt to tracethat evolution in chapters 11 to 18 in Leviticus.

LEVITICUS: A PURITY OF PLACE, A PURITY OF SPEECH
Dietary instructions crop up after the burnt offering presented
by Moses and Aaron to the Lord Yahweh (as they do after
Noah's burnt offering to the Lord Elohim). Two officiants atthe sacrifice, having "offered strange fire" to the Lord Yahweh,
become "devoured" by the sacred fire (Leviticus, 10:1-2). At
that moment, a communication from the Lord seems to indicatethat the sacrifice "in itself cannot assume the status of a divine
covenant, unless that sacrifice is already inscribed in a logic of
the pure/impure distinction, which it would consolidate andenable one to hand down.
Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee,when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shallbe a statute for ever throughout your generations:
And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, andbetween unclean and clean;
And that ye may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which
the Lord hath spoken into them by the hand of Moses. (Leviticus
10:9-11)The sacrifice has efficacy then only when manifesting a logic
of separation, distinction, and difference that is governed byadmissibility to the holy place, that is, the appointed place forencountering the sacred fire of the Lord Yahweh.
A spatial reference is thus called forth, in a first stage, as
criterion of purity, provided that the blood of the expiationalgoat not be brought in (Leviticus 1o:18). But such prerequisites

98

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

for purity (holy space, no blood) seem to have been deemed
insufficient, for the following chapter modifies them. The pure
will no longer be what is restricted to a place but what accords
with a speech; the impure will not only be a fascinating element(connoting murder and life: blood) but any infraction to a logicalconformity. Thus,
And the Lord spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying unto them,
Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which
ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.
Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth thecud, among the beasts, that ye shall eat.
Nevertheless these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, orof them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth thecud, but divided not the hoof; he is unclean unto you. (Leviticus
11:1-4)And so forth.
The list of the occasionally specious prohibitions that makeup this chapter becomes clear when it is understood that there
is a strict intent of establishing conformity with the logic of thedivine word. Now such a logic is founded on the initial biblicalpostulate of the man/God difference, which is coextensive withthe prohibition of murder. As J. Soler has shown,12 what is
involved, as in Deuteronomy 14, is the establishment of a logicalfield preventing man from eating carnivorous animals. One needs
to preserve oneself from murder, not incorporate carnivorous
or rapacious animals, and there is only one prescription for that:eating herbivorous, cud-chewing animals. There are ruminants
that do not follow the general rule as to hoofs, and they willbe thrust aside. The pure will be that which conforms to an
established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder. The example offish, birds,
and insects, normally linked to one of three elements (sea,heaven, earth), is very significant from that point of view; theimpure will be those that do not confine themselves to one
element but point to admixture and confusion.
Thus, what initially appeared to us as a basic opposition between man and God (vegetable/animal, flesh/blood), following

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 99

upon the initial contract, "Thou shalt not kill," becomes a complete system of logical oppositions. Differing from burnt offerings, this system of abomination presupposes it and guarantees its efficacy. Semantically controlled, initially at least, by
the life/death dichotomy, it becomes in course of time a codeof differences and observance of it. It goes without saying thatthe pragmatic value of those differences (the function of thisor that animal in everyday life possibly affecting the pure/impure designation), like their sexual connotations (I shall returnto this point), does not detract from the remarkable fact of
having a system of taboos constituted like a true formal system—a taxonomy. Mary Douglas brilliantly emphasized thelogical conformity of Levitical abominations, which, without
a design of "separation" and "individual integrity," would beincomprehensible.
FOOD AND THE FEMININE
A brief and very important chapter of Leviticus, chapter 12, isinserted between those dietary prohibitions and the expansionof their logic to other domains of existence. Between the themeof food and that of the sick body (Leviticus 13-14), the text
will deal with the woman in childbed. Because of her parturition
and the blood that goes with it, she will be "impure": "according
to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she beunclean" (Leviticus 12:2). If she gives birth to a daughter, thegirl "shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation" (Leviticus
12:5). To purify herself, the mother must provide a burnt offering and a sin offering. Thus, on her part, there is impurity,
defilement, blood, and purifying sacrifice. On the other hand,
if she gives birth to a male, "the flesh of his foreskin shall becircumcised" (Leviticus 12:3). Circumcision would thus separate one from maternal, feminine impurity and defilement; itstands instead of sacrifice, meaning not only that it replaces it
but is its equivalent—a sign of the alliance with God. Circumcision can be said to find its place in the same series as foodtaboos; it indicates a separation and at the same time does awaywith the need for sacrifice, of which it nevertheless bears the

IOO SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

trace. Such a comment on circumcision within a text on feminine and particularly maternal impurity, illuminates the rite in
fundamental fashion. I agree that it concerns an alliance with
the God of the chosen people; but what the male is separated
from, the other that circumcision carves out on his very sex,is the other sex, impure, defiled. By repeating the natural scarof the umbilical cord at the location of sex, by duplicating andthus displacing through ritual the preeminent separation, whichis that from the mother, Judaism seems to insist in symbolic
fashion—the very opposite of what is "natural"—that the identity of the speaking being (with his God) is based on the separation of the son from the mother. Symbolic identity presupposes the violent difference of the sexes.
Let me take a further step. The terms, impurity and defilement, that Leviticus heretofore had tied to food that did notconform to the taxonomy of sacred Law, are now attributed
to the mother and to women in general. Dietary abomination
has thus a parallel—unless it be a foundation—in the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body(menses, childbirth). Might it be that dietary prohibitions area screen in a still more radical separating process? Would thedispositions place-body and the more elaborate one speech-logic
of differences be an attempt to keep a being who speaks to his
God separated from the fecund mother? In that case, it would
be a matter of separating oneself from the phantasmatic powerof the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess who actuallyhaunted the imagination of a nation at war with the surrounding
polytheism. A phantasmatic mother who also constitutes, inthe specific history of each person, the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) place anddistinct object, meaning a signifiable one, so that such a person
might learn to speak. At any rate, that evocation of defiled
maternality, in Leviticus 12, inscribes the logic of dietary abominations within that of a limit, a boundary, a border between
the sexes, a separation between feminine and masculine as foundation for the organization that is "clean and proper," "individual," and, one thing leading to another, signifiable, legislatable, subject to law and morality.

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

After that confrontation with the boundary between thesexes, the biblical text continues its journey fully within theimage of the body and its limits.
BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND
PROPER BODY
Chapters 13 and 14 of Leviticus locate impurity in leprosy: skintumor, impairment of the cover that guarantees corporeal integrity, sore on the visible, presentable surface. To be sure,
leprosy does objectively cause serious damages in a people witha strong community life and, moreover, an often nomadic one.
But one may note furthermore that the disease visibly affects
the skin, the essential if not initial boundary of biological andpsychic individuation. From that point of view, the abomination of leprosy becomes inscribed within the logical conceptionof impurity to which I have already called attention: intermixture, erasing of differences, threat to identity.
The shift taking place between chapters 12 and 13 seems
significant to me; it goes from within the maternal body (childbirth, menses) to the decaying body. By means of what turnabout is the mother's interior associated with decay? I havealready noted that turning among split subjects (see pp.
53-55)- It is reasonable to assume that the biblical text, in its
own way, accurately follows the path of an analogous fantasy.
Evocation of the maternal body and childbirth induces theimage of birth as a violent act of expulsion through which thenascent body tears itself away from the matter of maternal
insides. Now, the skin apparently never ceases to bear the tracesof such matter. These are persecuting and threatening traces,by means of which the fantasy of the born body, tightly held
in a placenta that is no longer nourishing but devastating, converges with the reality of leprosy. One additional step, and one
refuses even more drastically a mother with whom pre-Oedipal
identification is intolerable. The subject then gives birth to himself by fantasizing his own bowels as the precious fetus of which
he is to be delivered; and yet it is an abject fetus, for even if hecalls them his own he has no other idea of the bowels than one101

102 SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

of abomination, which links him to the ab-ject, to that nonintrojected mother who is incorporated as devouring, and intolerable. The obsession of the leprous and decaying body
would thus be the fantasy of a self-rebirth on the part of a
subject who has not introjected his mother but has incorporated
a devouring mother. Phantasmatically, he is the solidary obverse of a cult of the Great Mother: a negative and demanding
identification with her imaginary power. Aside from sanitaryeffectiveness, that is the fantasy that Levitical abominations aim
at cutting back or resorbing. Possibly, one could link to thesame rejection of nonconformity with corporeal identity theabjection brought about by physical defect:
For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach;a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing
superfluous,
Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, .....................................
............................................ he shall not come nigh to offer the breadof his God. (Leviticus 21:18-21)
The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must
be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic. In order toconfirm that, it should endure no gash other than that of circumcision, equivalent to sexual separation and/or separationfrom the mother. Any other mark would be the sign of belonging to the impure, the non-separate, the non-symbolic, thenon-holy:
Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar
the corners of thy beard.
Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print
any marks upon you . . . (Leviticus 19:27-28)
Chapter 15 confirms that view: this time it is flow that is
impure. Any secretion or discharge, anything that leaks out of
the feminine or masculine body defiles. After a reference tosacrifice (chapter 16), we again have a designation of the impurity of blood:
For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof:
therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of:%■...

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off. (Leviticus 17:14)
After the path we have followed, it is easier to understandthe various connotations of blood impurity. It takes in the following: prohibition of meat diet (following upon the prohibition against killing), the postdiluvian classification of meatas in conformity or nonconformity with the divine word, theprinciple of identity without admixture, the exclusion of anything that breaks boundaries (flow, drain, discharge). From
food to blood, the loop of prohibitions has no need of being
looped, for we are still and from the beginning within the same
logic of separation. But we are again led back to the fundamental
semanticism of that logic, which persists in positing an agency
that is other than that of the nutritious, the sanguine, in short,the "natural" maternal.
FROM SEXUAL IDENTITY TO SPEECH AND FROMABOMINATION TO MORALS
After that firm and clear reminder, the text proceeds anew andhenceforth will translate the logical motion of blood and foodabomination into contents further removed. In chapter 18, it
will be concerned with defining a sexual identity. For that purpose, intercourse between same and same will have to be prohibited—neither promiscuity within families nor homosexuality.
Nor can there be contact with another group as constituted bylaw (human or "natural," that is, always divine): no adultery,no zoophilia. Likewise, in verse 19 of chapter 19,
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender witha diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither
shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
The same condemnation of hybrids and migrant beings canprobably be read in the prohibition against leavened bread andthe recommendation that azyme be eaten on certain occasions
in order to renew ties with the original food of the patriarchs;
without the adding of leaven, the elements of such bread have
only their own, proper qualities.-

103

104

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

We then encounter one of the extreme points of that logic,
which masterfully states, after having thus established theirfoundations, the bases of those separations. It is nothing otherbut the One God:
Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any oneof these abominable customs, which were committed before you, andthat ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 18:30)
And more clearly still, with that emphasis on the divine word
as word that is quoted, transmitted, always already prior:
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall be holy:
for I the Lord your God am holy. (Leviticus 19:1-2)
Henceforth, confronting the "future perfect" of a discoursethat is One and transmitted, impurity moves away from thematerial register and is formulated as profanation of the divinename. At this point in the trajectory, where the separating
agency asserts its own pure abstract value ("holy of holies"),the impure will no longer be merely the admixture, the flow,
the noncompliant, converging on that "improper and unclean"place, which is the maternal living being. Defilement will now
be that which impinges on symbolic oneness, that is, sham,substitutions, doubles, idols. "Turn ye not unto idols, nor maketo yourselves molten gods: I am the Lord, your God" (Leviticus
19:4). Similarly,
Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a
standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in yourland, to bow down unto it: for I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus
26:1)

It is moreover in the name of that "I," with whom, throughthe intermediary of Moses, an entire nation complies, that moral
prohibitions, according to the same logic of separation, will
follow—those concerning justice, honesty, and truth (LeviticusI9ff).

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 105

INCEST TABOO
Deuteronomy takes up again and varies Levitical abominations(14, 22, 32), which in fact underlie the whole biblical text. But
the recurrence of a specific trope should be noted; it embodies
the asserted logic of separation, and in my view it points to theunconscious foundation of such a persistence: "Thou shalt notseethe a kid in his mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19, 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21).
A dietary prohibition, therefore, in which there is no questionof blood, but in which abomination seems to proceed fromanother flow that mingles two identities and connotes the bond
between the one and the other: milk. A medium that is common
to mother and child, a food that does not separate but binds,
milk, on account of economic and vital necessities, is nevertheless not prohibited. What is implicated is not milk as foodbut milk considered in its symbolic value. Abomination does
not reside in nourishing but in seething, that is, cooking theyoung goat in its mother's milk; in other words, it amounts
to using milk not in terms of a need for survival but according
to cultural culinary fancy, which sets up an abnormal bond
between mother and child. I agree with J. Soler that thisamounts to a metaphor of incest. Such a dietary prohibition
must be understood as prohibition of incest, by the same token
as prohibitions that enjoin one from taking from a nest themother with the young or eggs (Deuteronomy 22:6-7), or sacrificing on the same day the cow or ewe with their young(Leviticus 22:28).
Later, when rabbinical legislation strengthens the rules by
expanding relations between morals and impurity, the meaningof incestuous impurity seems to subsist. Thus, when we findin the Midrash Tanhumah the statement, "In this world I abhor
all nations for they are issued of impure seed," the phrase "impure seed" should be understood as "incestuous."
We are thus led to conclude that dietary prohibition, just as
the more abstract expressions of Levitical abominations in a
logic of differences ordained by a divine "I," are based upon theprohibition of incest. Far from being one of the semantic values

106

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATIONof that tremendous project of separation constituted by thebiblical text, the taboo of the mother seems to be its originating
mytheme. Not only because psychoanalytic discourse on the
one hand and structural anthropology on the other have discovered the fundamental role of incest taboo within any symbolic organization (individual or social); but also and especiallybecause, as we have seen, the biblical text, as it proceeds, comes
back, at the intensive moments of its demonstration and expansion, to that mytheme of the archaic relation to the mother.
Biblical abjection thus translates a crucial semantics in which
the dietary, when it departs from the conformity that can be
demanded by the logic of separation, blends with the maternal
as unclean and improper coalescence, as undifferentiated power
and threat, a defilement to be cut off.
THE PROPHETS, OR INESCAPABLE ABJECTION
If reminders of dietary abomination persist in the Yahwist text,
while the Elohist strengthens sociological and moral aspects,
this does not prevent the originating "mytheme" from being
present everywhere. And yet it is the prophetic strand thatcarried that "mytheme" into full blossoming. Particularly,
through Ezekiel, who inherited from Leviticus the positing of
the Law of purity and the Law of holiness, and who wends his
way toward a theological distinction between pure and impure.
And it is upon the return from exile that the distinction, as
Isaiah formulates it, will thoroughly rule the life of Israel. The
impure is neither banished nor cut off, it is thrust away but
within—right there, working, constitutive.
For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; . . . (Isaiah 59:3)
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are
as filthy rags. (Isaiah 64:6)
A people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face; thatsacrificeth in gardens, and burneth incense upon altars of brick;
Which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments,

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 107

which eat swine's flesh, and broth of abominable things is in theirvessels; . . . (Isaiah 65:3—4)
Abjection—dietary, sanguine, and moral—is pushed backwithin the chosen people, not because they are worse thanothers, but because in the light of the contract that they alone
have entered into, abjection appears as such. The existence anddegree of abjection are thus predicated on the very position of
the logic of separation. Such at least is the conclusion one candraw from the prophets' insistence upon abjection. As far as
the concept of a subjective interiorization of abjection is concerned, that will be the accomplishment of the New Testament.
The logical complicity, the economic inseparability of pureand impure in the Bible, become clear, if need be, thanks to
the very word that, in Isaiah, indicates impurity: t'bh, to'ebah,
an abomination that is also a prohibition (1:13). Henceforthsuch a notion permeates the entire Bible. On could notice,moreover, as early as Leviticus, for instance, that there was notrue opposition between tahor and tame since "impure" (seeLeviticus 11:7-8, 10, 20) already signified, "impure to you, thefaithful to Yahweh" or, "they will make you impure because
they are an abomination to Yahweh."13
Here we can interpret biblical abomination as the agency ofa demoniacal reproduction of the speaking being, whom thecompact with God points to, causes to exist, and banishes.
Biblical impurity could be "a realized form of demoniacal
forces"14 only to the extent that the prophetic leaven transformed the dietary abomination of earlier texts into an inseparable
lining, an inherence in the contract or the symbolic condition.
Such a demoniacal force (thus not at all autonomous but only
intrinsic to and coiled within divine speech) is in fact the impure,from which the Temple and the separating divine Speech want
to differentiate us, and which appears to the Prophets as nonrejectable, parallel, inseparable from the clean and proper andthe identical. What is the demoniacal—an inescapable, repulsive, and yet nurtured abomination? The fantasy of an archaic
force, on the near side of separation, unconscious, tempting us
to the point of losing our differences, our speech, our life; tothe point of aphasia, decay, opprobrium, and death?

108

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

One must add, to the prophetic mutation of abjection, thelot the subsequent life of the Jewish nation assigned to it. I shallnot go into the details of a history that Neusner has analyzed,
particularly in his work on Mishnaic Law.15 Let me simply
recall that the destruction of the Temple transformed rites andbeliefs: dietary taboos became even more strict, their moral
meaning was strengthened, and the holiness of the Temple
extended to the whole of inhabited space. "As long as the Temple remained, the altar was expiatory for Israel, but now each
man's table is expiatory for him" (Berakoth).
WASTE-BODY, CORPSE-BODY
Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goesout of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to theinfinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. Fecalmatter signifies, as it were, what never ceases to separate froma body in a state of permanent loss in order to become autonomous, distinct from the mixtures, alterations, and decay that run
through it. That is the price the body must pay if it is to becomeclean and proper. Psychoanalysis has indeed seen that anal dejections constitute the first material separation that is controllable
by the human being. It has also deciphered, in that very rejection, the mastered repetition of a more archaic separation (fromthe maternal body) as well as the condition of division (highlow), of discretion, of difference, of recurrence, in short thecondition of the processes that underpin symbolicity.I6 The
biblical abominations, of which we have just seen the oral,
dietary anchoring, and which Isaiah (6:5) calls attention to bymeans of a strikingly condensed statement, "I am a man of
unclean lips," are often carried over to waste, dirt—human or
animal decay. But allusion to excremental abjection is not lacking either; it is even explicitly mentioned by the Prophets. Thus,
Zechariah (3:1-4) presents the high priest Joshua as "clothedwith filthy garments" that the Angel orders to be taken awayfrom him, saying, "I have caused thine iniquity to pass fromthee"; the word for "filthy" is here so'im, excrementious. Or
in Ezekiel (4:12), "And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, andSEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION 109

thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in theirsight." A mouth attributed to the anus: is that not the ensignof a body to be fought against, taken in by its insides, thus
refusing to meet the Other? Hence, logically, if the priests do
not listen to God, "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spreaddung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts;
and one shall take you away with it" (Malachi 2:3).
But it is the corpse—like, more abstractly, money or the
golden calf—that takes on the abjection of waste in the biblicaltext. A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whoselife is undistinguishable from the symbolic—the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without soul, a non-body,disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God's territory as
it is from his speech. Without always being impure, the corpse
is "accursed of God" (Deuteronomy 21:23): it must not be
displayed but immediately buried so as not to pollute the divine
earth. Connected nevertheless with excrement and impure onthat account ('erwat davar, Deuteronomy 24:1), the corpse is toan even greater degree that by means of which the notion of
impurity slips into that of abomination and/or prohibition, to'ebah.
In other words, if the corpse is waste, transitional matter, mixture, it is above all the opposite of the spiritual, of the symbolic,and of divine law. Impure animals become even more impure
once they are dead (Leviticus 11:24-40), contact with their carcasses must be avoided. The human corpse is a fount of impurity
and must not be touched (Numbers 19:13ft). Burial is a meansof purification: "And seven months shall the house of Israel beburying of [Gog and all his multitude], that they may cleanse
the land" (Ezekiel 39:12).
Corpse fanciers, unconscious worshipers of a soulless body,are thus preeminent representatives of inimical religions, identified by their murderous cults. The priceless debt to great
mother nature, from which the prohibition of Yahwistic speech
separates us, is concealed in such pagan cults.
And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar
spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter: should not a

IIO

SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? (Isaiah 8:19)
Or again:[People] which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments, which eat swine's flesh, and broth of abominable things is in
their vessels (Isaiah 65:4)
Worshiping corpses on the one hand, eating objectionable
meat on the other: those are the two abominations that bringabout divine malediction and thus point to the two ends of thechain of prohibitions that binds the biblical text and entails, asI have suggested, a whole range of sexual or moral prohibitions.
ABOMINATION OF CORPSES WARDS OFF DEATH WISH.
TAXONOMY AS MORALSWith the taboo on corpses the assortment of biblical taboos
returns to what we have seen was its point of departure. One
remembers that dietary taboos had been spelled out after Noah'sburnt offerings to God and that, particularly throughout Leviticus, prohibitions accompanied the requirements of sacrifice.
The two logical strands that run through the biblical text to bejoined together at the time of burnt offerings or separated lateron, sacrifice and abomination, reveal their true interdependence
at the moment when the corpse topples from being the objectof worship over to being the object of abomination. Taboo appears
then as a counterbalance to sacrifice. Strengthening the systemof prohibitions (dietary or other) becomes more and more important to the spiritual scene, and that constitutes the true symbolic covenant with God. Prohibiting instead of killing—such is
the lesson of the proliferation of biblical abominations. Separation at the same time as union; taboo and sacrifice partake ofthe logic that sets up symbolic order.
But one must stress what differentiates those two currents
beyond their similarity. The killed object, from which I am
separated through sacrifice, while it links me to God it also sets
itself up, in the very act of being destroyed, as desirable, fascinating, and sacred. What has been killed subdues me and' brings me into subjection to what has been sacrificed. To theSEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

contrary, the abjected object from which I am separated throughabomination, if it guarantees a pure and holy law, turns me
aside, cuts me off, and throws me out. The abject tears meaway from the indifferentiated and brings me into subjection
to a system. In short, the abominate is a response to the sacred,its exhaustion, its ending. The biblical text does away withsacrifice, particularly human sacrifice: Isaac is not offered toGod. If Judaism remains a religion due to the sacrificial act,
which persists in order to insure the metaphorical, vertical relation of the officiating priest to the One Alone, that foundationis largely compensated by the considerable expansion of theprohibitions that take over from it and transform its economy
into a metonymic, horizontal concatenation. A religion ofabomination overlays a religion of the sacred. It marks the exitof religion and the unfolding of morals; or leading back the
One that separates and unifies, not to the fascinated contemplation of the sacred, from which it separates, but to the very
device that it ushers in: logic, abstraction, rules of systems andjudgments. When the victim is changed into an abomination,a deep qualitative change takes place: the religion that ensues,even if it continues to harbor sacrifice, is no longer a sacrificial
religion. It tempers the fascination of murder; it gets aroundits desire by means of the abomination it associates with any
act of incorporation and rejection of an ob-ject, thing or living
being. What you sacrifice by swallowing, like what you suppress by rejecting, nourishing mother or corpse, are merely
pre-texts of the symbolic relation that links you to Meaning.
Use them to give existence to the One, but do not make themsacred in themselves. Nothing is sacred outside of the One. At
the limit, everything that remains, all remainders, are abominable.
Contrary to accepted interpretation, Rene Girard maintains
that Christian religion breaks with sacrifice as the condition of
the sacred and the social contract. Christ, far from being ascapegoat, indeed offers himself to a death-and-resurrection thatcauses sin to be visited on all members of the community andon each individually, instead of absolving them; it thus preparedthem for a (phantasmatic?)-society without violence.17 Whatever interest that argument might or might not have, one thing
'

/

III

112 SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

is clear: it is the Bible, particularly through its emphasis on
abominations, that starts the process of going beyond a sacrificial concept of the social and/or symbolic contract. Not only
shall you not kill, but you shall not sacrifice anything withoutobserving rules and prohibitions. The tenth chapter of Leviticus
brings in as clear consequence all the regulations concerning
dietary taboo. The law of purity and holiness that ensues iswhat replaces sacrifice.
As a lay person, I might ask what that Law is. It is whatcurtails sacrifice. The law, in other words what restrains thedesire to kill, is a taxonomy. Even if it is only after the periodof exile, and in place of earlier tribal rules, that homicide becomes the object of a sacred law that changes murder into defilement for Israel and establishes rules for atonement, the very
idea of homicide as an offense to God is present throughout thebiblical text.18 "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
blood be shed" (Genesis 9:6); "So ye shall not pollute the land
wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot
be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the bloodof him that shed it" (Numbers 35:33).
Death drive, in such an adjustment, does not disappear onthat account. Checked, it becomes displaced and builds a logic.
If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, "I" amtherefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always
potentially condemnable. I am from the very beginning subject
to persecution as well as to revenge. The infinite meshing of
expulsions and hazings, of divisions and inexorable, abominablereprisals is then thrown into gear. The system of abominations
sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume theplace of the victim in order to justify the purification that willseparate me from that place as it will from any other, from allothers. Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly
build a victimizing and persecuting machine at the cost of which
I become subject of the Symbolic as well as Other of the Abject.
"Ye shall be holy and made holy, separate (pureshim) from thenations of the world and their abominations" (the Mekhilta on"And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holynation"—Exodus 19:6).

5. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA
MUNDI
To breed out of mankind a self-contradiction, an art of self-defilement,
a will to lie at any cost, a revulsion, a scorn for all good and upright
instincts! [. . .] I call Christianity [. . .] the immortal defiling ofmankind.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist

INSIDE/OUTSIDE
It is through abolishment of dietary taboos, partaking of foodwith pagans, verbal and gestural contact with lepers, as wellas through its power over impure spirits that the message ofChrist is characterized and, as is well known, compels recognition in a most spectacular manner—superficial perhaps but
striking. Those indications should not be construed as simply
anecdotal or empirical, nor as drastic staging of a polemic with
Judaism. What is happening is that a new arrangement of differences is being set up, an arrangement whose economy will
regulate a wholly different system of meaning, hence a wholly
different speaking subject. An essential trait of those evangelicalattitudes or narratives is that abjection is no longer exterior. It
is permanent and comes from within. Threatening, it is not cut
off but is reabsorbed into speech. Unacceptable, it endures
through the subjection to God of a speaking being who is innerly divided and, precisely through speech, does not cease
purging himself of it.
Such an interiorization of abjection, before being effected
through the assumption of Christie subjectivity within the Trinity, is brought about through an expedient that takes over Lev-

114

• • ■ QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

itical abominations but changes their location. That expedientis oralization, which the New Testament will try to rehabilitate,render guiltless, before inverting the pure/impure dichotomy
into an outside/inside one.
The New Testament texts of chapters 15 in Matthew and 16
in Mark compress the event that opens out on a new logic.
After having noted that the Pharisees' faith is completely centered in appearances (too strongly tied to orality?)—"This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far fromme" (Mark 7:6)—Jesus affirms, "Not that which goeth into themouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth,
this defileth a man" (Matthew 15:11); and also, "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him:
but things which come out of him, those are they that defile
the man" (Mark: 15).
Other instances give evidence that the emphasis is henceforth
placed on the inside/outside boundary, and that the threat comesno longer from outside but from within. "But rather give almsof such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean untoyou" (Luke 11:41); "Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first thatwhich is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them
may be clean also" (Matthew 23:26); "Woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are withinfull of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye
also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye arefull of hypocrisy and iniquity" (Matthew 23:27-28). While itis true that reminders of Levitical positions are not lacking (thus,
in 2 Corinthians 6:17 to 7:1, "Wherefore come out from among
them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not theunclean thing, and I will receive you," and so forth), the interiorization of impurity is in progress everywhere: "For, when
we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but wewere troubled on every side; without were fightings, withinwere fears" (2 Corinthians 7:5).
But let me go back to texts by Matthew and Mark who takemore time with that reversal. The already quoted Christie
speech, "There is nothing from without a man, that entering

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him,those are they that defile the man," and so forth, is in each casepreceded by the reproach, directed at the Pharisees, for honoring God too much and their fathers and mothers too little.
It is thus an appeal to the recognition not so much of a Law
as of a concrete, genetic, and social authority—a natural one,
so to speak—that leads to the interiorization of impurity.
Through re-cognition of your parents, that which is external
threat to you will appear as internal danger. The verses that
follow are even more definite in the invitation to mend theinitial filial relationship.
FROM FOOD TO EARS: A MOTHER
A woman who was "a Syrophenician by nation" (Mark 7:26)
or else a "lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 15:24)
asks for help in order to "cast forth the devil out of her
daughter" (Mark 7:26). "But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's breadand cast it unto the dogs" (Mark 7:27). And it is only after themother answers, "the dogs under the table eat of the children's
crumbs," that Christ will acknowledge the recovery of her
daughter, the devil having gone out of the child's body. It is
as if the mother had to agree to "fill" her child, give her aprivileged food, distinct from the "crumbs" for dogs, before
the devil would go away and the woman open her heart to thewords of Christ.
The nutritive opening up to the other, the full acceptance ofarchaic and gratifying relationship to the mother, pagan as it
might be, and undoubtedly conveying paganistic connotationsof a prolific and protective motherhood, is here the condition
for another opening—the opening up to symbolic relations,true outcome of the Christicjourney. For after the reconciliation
between mother and daughter through the agency of satisfying
nourishment, it is a deaf-mute whom Christ relieves: "And hetook him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his
ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; And looking up to
heaven, he sighed, and said unto, him, Ephphatha, that is, Be

115

Il6

... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

Opened. And straightaway his ears were opened, and the stringof his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain" (Mark 7:33-35).
As in analytic process, the reader of the New Testament isled, by elaborating on the archaic relation to his parents, particularly the oral relation to his mother, to introject the drivequality attached to archaic objects. Now, without that introjection, pre-objects and abjects threaten from without as impurity, defilement, abomination, and eventually they trigger
the persecutive apparatus. Nevertheless, that introjection, aiming to salve, is not trouble free. For evil, thus displaced into thesubject, will not cease tormenting him from within, no longer
as a polluting or defiling substance, but as the ineradicable repulsion of his henceforth divided and contradictory being.
One can find an exemplary tale of such an interiorization of
impurity in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus number 840.' Accusedby a Pharisee of having entered the Temple without taking abath, while the Pharisee considers himself pure because hebathed, Jesus answers: "... you have cleansed that outer skin,
the skin that whores and flute players also anoint, bathe, cleanse,and adorn in order to arouse men's lust, whereas inside they arefilled with scorpions and all kinds of wickedness. As for me (andmy disciples), who did not bathe, according to you, we did bathein the running (and pure?) waters that come from the Father (whois in heaven?). But woe unto them ..."THE INTERIORIZATION OF BIBLICAL SEPARATION
Through the process of interiorization, defilement will blend
with guilt, which already exists on a moral and symbolic levelin the Bible. But out of the merger with the more material,
object-like abomination, a new category will be established—
Sin. Swallowed up, one might say reabsorbed, Christian defilement is by that token a revenge of paganism, a reconciliation
with the maternal principle. Freud moreover stressed the point
in Moses and Monotheism, revealing that Christian religion is acompromise between paganism and Judaic monotheism. Biblical logic remains nevertheless, even though it is inverted (theinside is to blame, no longer the outside): one uncovers it in

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

the persistence of processes of division, separation, anddifferentiation.
But this time that logic functions exclusively in the signifying
universe of the speaking being, rent between two potentialities,
demoniacal and divine. Maternal principle, reconciled with thesubject, is not for that matter revalorized, rehabilitated. Of its
nourishing as much as threatening heterogeneity, later texts,
and even more so theological posterity, will keep only the ideaof sinning flesh. On that pivotal point, the New Testament willpropose a subtle elaboration of the splitting that contemporary
analytic listening discovers in so-called split subjects: the boundary between inside and outside. Before any relation to an otheris set up, and as if underlying it, it is the building of that archaic
space, the topological demarcation of the preconditions of a
subjectivity, qua difference between a sub-ject and an ab-ject
in the be-spoken being itself, that takes over from earlier Levitical abominations. "Kill, and eat," says God to an astonishedPeter at Joppa (Acts 10:9-16). But that permission, far frombeing a liberalization, will lead the subject who complies withit to seek no longer his defilement but the error within his own
thoughts and speech.
DIVISION AND MULTIPLICATION
It is equally remarkable that Jesus' pronouncement concerning
man's defilement by what emanates from him, rather than bywhat enters, is preceded and followed by two tales of multiplication of bread and fishes (Mark 6:38ff. and 8:i4f£). The
word for "bread," artos, is repeated seventeen times in thissection, as if to provide it with unity. Several lines of thought
appear to converge on that article of multiplication. If there is,on the one hand, a concern for "satisfying" the hunger of thegreatest possible number, it is, once again, to the spirit that the
food seems destined, for Jesus does not cease calling upon understanding to decipher the meaning of his action. Satisfied
physiological hunger gives way to unsatiable spiritual hunger,a striving for what "it could possibly mean." Ultimately, does
not the multiplication of the food, miraculous though it may

117

Il8

•

• • QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

be, show how petty excessive fixation on one object of need canbe, that object becoming the single, obsessive goal of existence?
Even more so, does not that multiplication of dietary objects
also constitute (taking into account the inward displacement ofemphasis) a sort of invitation to multiply, if not relativize,
conscience itself? It is no longer one but polyvalent, as is theentirely parabolic, fictional meaning of the miracle. The interiorization of abomination as sin, in the New Testament, would
thus be not only a centering but even more so the condition,on the basis of that center, of pluralizing the object as well as
the subject.
The tie between the multiplication of loaves and the Eucharist
is well known; it is established by another of Christ's statements, this time bringing together body and bread, "This is
my body." By surreptitiously mingling the theme of "devouring" with that of "satiating," that narrative is a way of
taming cannibalism. It invites a removal of guilt from the archaic relation to the first pre-object (ab-ject) of need: themother.
FROM ABOMINATION TO LAPSE AND LOGIC.
FROM SUBSTANCE TO ACTION
Through oral-dietary satisfaction, there emerges, beyond it, alust for swallowing up the other, while the fear of impurenourishment is revealed as deathly drive to devour the other.
A primal fantasy if ever there was one, that theme unremittingly
accompanies the tendency toward interiorizing and spiritualizing the abject. It acts as a pedestal for it; man is a spiritual,
intelligent, knowing, in short, speaking being only to the extent
that he is recognizant of his abjection—from repulsion to murder—and interiorizes it as such, that is, symbolizes it. The division within Christian consciousness2 finds in that fantasy, of
which the Eucharist is the catharsis, its material anchorage andlogical node. Body and spirit, nature and speech, divine nourishment, the body of Christ, assuming the guise of a natural
food (bread), signifies me both as divided (flesh and spirit) andinfinitely lapsing. I am divided and lapsing with respect to my. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

119

ideal, Christ, whose introjection by means of numerous communions sanctifies me while reminding me of my incompletion.
Because it identified abjection as a fantasy of devouring, Christianity effects its abreaction. Henceforth reconciled with it, theChristian subject, completely absorbed into the symbolic, is nolonger a being of abjection but a lapsing subject.
In consequence of this placement of subjective space, judgment
henceforth prevails over the preestablished dichotomy between
pure and impure: "But let a man examine himself, and so let
him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eatethand drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation tohimself, not discerning the Lord's body" (1 Corinthians
11:28-29). A spiritualization of both the purity/impurity distinction and the inside/outside division of subjective space isthus effected. The understanding of the disciples is being appealed
to, in order to have them comprehend that the outside of man
cannot possibly defile him: "And are ye so without understanding
also? Do ye not perceive that whatsoever thing from without
entereth into the man, it cannot defile him" (Mark 7:18). The
culmination of that interiorization doubtless lies in the proposition that impurity is a matter for the subject himself to decide:"I know, and I am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there isnothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth any thing
to be unclean, to him it is unclean" (Romans 14:14). Thus
subordinated to judgment and dependent upon the subject, theimpure (or impious) assumes the status not of a substance thatis cut off but of an action that is indecent. Sin is an action;
theologians speak of "peccaminous" acts.
And yet, if it is true that the notion of sin carried that spirituality far, it is nevertheless upon a body that its highest development rests: the body of Christ. Purifying, redeeming allsins, it punctually and temporarily gives back innocence bymeans of communion. To eat and drink the flesh and blood of
Christ means, on the one hand, to transgress symbolically theLevitical prohibitions, to be symbolically satiated (as at thefount of a good mother who would thus expel the devils fromher daughter) and to be reconciled with the substance dear topaganism. By the very gesture, however, that corporealizes or

120... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

incarnates speech, all corporeality is elevated, spiritualized, andsublimated. Thus one might say that if the inside/outsideboundary is maintained, osmosis nevertheless takes place between the spiritual and the substantial, the corporeal and thesignifying—a heterogeneity that cannot be divided back into
its components.3
A HETEROGENEOUS BODY—CHRIST
Christ alone, because he accomplished that heterogeneity, is abody without sin. What others must do, because of their fault,
is to achieve that sublimation, confess the part of themselvesthat rebels against divine judgment, a part that is innerly
impure.
Because the unrivaled existence of Christ is nevertheless thevanishing point of all fantasies and thus a universal object offaith, everyone is allowed to aspire to Christie sublimation andby the same token know that his sins can be remitted. "Yoursins will be forgiven," Jesus keeps telling them, thus accomplishing, in the future this time, a final raising into spiritualityof a nevertheless inexorable carnal remainder.
Sin then remains the only token of difference from the sublimity of Christ. In a universe where differences are resorbed
through the effort of an ideal identification with the experienceof Christ—an impossible one from the very start—Sin, even
if its remission is always promised, remains the rock where one
endures the human condition as separate: body and spirit, body
jettisoned from the spirit; as a condition that is impossible,
irreconcilable, and, by that very token, real.
SIN AS DEBT, HOSTILITY, AND INIQUITY"Confessing sins," "remitting sins"—such phrases are probably
liturgic in origin, but in themselves they already define sins as
inherent in speech and slated for release; one encounters in them
the notions that bespeak the sin-laden act: amartia, debt, andanomia, iniquity.
Clearly Judaic in spirit, debt points to a ruthless creditor and. .

. QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

121

assigns the subject to the place of the debtor whose infinite
payment will fill the distance that separates him from God only
by means of a faith indefinitely maintained. The parallel between the sins against the Father and our debt to our neighbors
is well known. The verbal use of the term is also corroborated.
In Matthew 18:21-22 the verb atnartenein is used to refer to a"sin" against one's brother man, while Paul (Acts 25:8) asserts
he has "offended" (emarton) "neither against the law of the Jews,
neither against the temple, nor yet against Caesar"; and in 1
Corinthians 8:12 he avers that "when ye sin (amartanontes) soagainst the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin
against Christ (eis Christon amartanete)."Especially with Matthew, or it so seems, there is a more
specific use of the word anomia when referring to sin as general
hositility to God. This meaning, peculiar to the Qumran scrolls,
often directly refers to the Biblical text itself (Psalms 6:8, 9 for
instance). "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity" (Matthew
7:23); "And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many
shall wax cold" (Matthew 24:12), and especially: "Even so ye
also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye arefull of hyprocrisy and iniquity" (Matthew 23:28).
John also wrote that "sin is the transgression of the law" (IJohn 3:4), and even if many commentators note that a-nomia,
in this instance—as elsewhere in the New Testament—should
not be connected with nomos, it is indeed a transgression of
divine jurisdiction, akin to that of the Torah, that is involvedin that definition. Is not the sinner the one who places himself
under the rule of Satan, by virtue of his breaking away fromthe new "commandments" (entole) of Christ (1 John 4:21)?
On the level of debt and iniquity, even more so than that of
impurity, sin is set forth as constitutive of man, coming to himfrom the depth of his heart, thus recalling the original sin of
Adam. "O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak
good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth
speaketh" (Matthew 12:34). As debt and iniquity, breach of duty
or injustice, sin is an act and is proven to be within man's
jurisdiction, within the scope of his own responsibility. Herethen is the list of sins according to the Gospels, which Paul will122... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

expand: "For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed
evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness" (Mark 7:21-22; in Matthew 15:19
the number of sins is down to seven).
Now it is precisely the sinner and not the righteous whom
Christ addresses, and his major role is to drive out evil spirits
and devils, to remit sins. The heterogeneity of Christ, Son ofboth Man and God, resorbs and cleanses the demoniacal. Suchheterogeneity does not cease revealing the moral and symbolic
existence of infamy; nevertheless, as it is communicated to thesinner by means of his very being, it saves him from the abject.
THE DOORS OF THE INQUISITION
Based in large part on the idea of retribution, the notion of sin
doubtless leads one to adopt a behavior and speech of conformity, obedience, and self-control under the ruthless gaze of the
Other—Justice, Good, or Golden Mean. Basis of asceticism at
the same time as it is coiled in judgment, sin guides one along
the straitest paths of superego spirituality. It holds the keys that
open the doors to Morality and Knowledge, and at the sametime those of the Inquisition.
But what will now hold our attention is that sin is also therequisite of the Beautiful. On that plane, through an additional
twist, the Law of the Other becomes reconciled with Satan. As
a result, the Christian self-contradiction that Nietzsche denounced, once its inimical parts have been reconciled, constitutes the requisite for jouissance. The episode of Christ and therepentant sinner, the woman who "stood at his feet behind him
weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipethem with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed
them with the ointment" (Luke 7:38) conveys that meaning.
Contrary to the prophet who, according to the Pharisee, would
have recognized impurity in this woman and withdrawn fromher, Christ gives himself up to it, deluged with a kind of overflowing—of sin or love? It is, at any rate, the overflow of aninterior flux and its ambiguity bursts forth in that scene. Sin,

. . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

turned upside down into love, attains, on account of the ambivalence, the beauty that Hegel tells us is displayed right here
for the one and only time in the Gospels. "Wherefore I say
unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved
much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little"(Luke 7:47).
SIN AS REQUISITE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL
Neither debt nor want, sin, as the reverse side of love, is a stateof fullness, of plenty. In that sense, it turns around into living
beauty. Far from advocating solely a doctrine of limitation andconformity to divine speech, the Christian conception of sin
also includes a recognition of an evil whose power is in direct
ratio to the holiness that identifies it as such, and into which
it can convert. Such a conversion into jouissance and beauty
goes far beyond the retributive, legalistic tonality of sin as debt
or iniquity. Thus it is that, by means of the beautiful, thedemoniacal dimension of the pagan world can be tamed. And
that the beautiful penetrates into Christianity to the extent of
becoming not merely one of its component parts, but also probably what leads it beyond religion.
AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE
The idea of "want" tied to sin as debt and iniquity is therefore
coupled with that of an overflowing, a profusion, even an unquenchable desire, which are pejoratively branded with words
like "lust" or "greed." Pleonexia, greed, is etymologically thedesire "to possess always more"; it connotes an appetite thatcannot possibly be sated, and that links it, in the writings ofPaul for instance, to sexual transgressions and flesh in general;
for the cause of this appetite resides in idolatry as disobedience
to divine speech. "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour
their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truthof God into a lie [ ... ] For this cause God gave them up unto

123

124

• • • QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

vile affections" (Romans 1:24, 26). "Lust," or epithumia, depending directly on the biblical text, also covers sexual desires
while relating, particularly in the Old Testament, to food aswell as to various material goods.
At any rate, those various descriptions of sin converge on theflesh or rather on what might be called, by anticipation, an
overwhelming release of drives, unrestrained by the symbolic.
"This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill thelust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and theSpirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to theother: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would" (Galatians
5:16-17). The outcome, the telos of this carnal overflow canonly be death ("For the wages of sin is death," Romans 6:23;"For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, whichwere by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit
unto death," Romans 7:5), which is what sin leads to.
One of the most complex nodes of Christian or at least Pauline theory is precisely centered in that matter of the flesh. For
on the one hand, the flesh is plainly marked, echoing later Greek
thought, as that from which one should be separated ("Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after theflesh," Romans 8:12). Whereas, elsewhere, we have the following: "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after theflesh" (II Corinthians 10:3), and "The life which I now live inthe flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me,
and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). Displaying morethan lack of univocity, it is a heterogeneous conception of the\flesh that is being set forth.
In opposition to the peaceful Apollonian (not Dionysiac)
Greek corporeality, flesh here signifies according to two modalities: on the one hand, close to Hebraic flesh (basar), it points
to the "body" as eager drive confronted with the law's harshness; on the other, it points to a subdued "body," a body thatis pneumatic since it is spiritual, completely submersed into
(divine) speech in order to become beauty and love.
These two "bodies" are obviously inseparable, the second("sublimated") one unable to exist without the first (perverse

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

125

because it challenges Law). One of the insights of Christianity,
and not the least one, is to have gathered in a single move
perversion and beauty as the lining and the cloth of one andthe same economy.
MASSA DAMNATA AND METANOIAThe two currents of sin interpretation that have buffeted the
Church for centuries appear to have been centered in that particular ambiguity of the flesh. Was Adam a sinner to begin
with, or did he become one of his own "free will"? Does not
sin have a mortgage on the power of the spirit and grace? If
God can grant remission of sin, can a man, a priest do the same?
What is meant by the sin of angels? Is sin original and hereditary?
And so forth. It is a long story, and if it has officially beenbrought to a close in the institutions that rule society in ourtime, it is brought to life again every time a man touches on
those areas, those nodes, where symbolicity interferes with his
corporeality.
Above all, one will recall Augustine's stance, according towhich, man, born blind and ignorant, is unable to observe thelaw after it has been revealed, "because of some unaccountable
constraining resistance due to carnal concupiscence."4 A createdbeing that is always already evil, even if free will gives it responsibility for sin, such would be the ambiguity of the speaking being. Permanence of sin, existence but restriction of thepower of free will—these will fit into a different pattern in thelater Augustinian writings: man is good, but his offense turns
human beings into a massa damnata. It is not absurd to consider
that such traces of Manicheism doubtless make of Augustinea precursor of Protestantism but especially the first psychological writer (see the Confessions). Through his writing, he follows
the delightful interlacing of this inextricable heterogeneity, of
this seesawing between the excesses of the flesh and the sternthough merciful demands of absolute judgment. In so doing,
he shows how damnation, because it depends on spirituality,
turns not only into humiliated consent but above all into en-

126... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

raptured conversion or, as he writes, into a metanoia, ajouissance.
SIN: OWING TO GOD OR TO WOMAN?
The brimming flesh of sin belongs, of course, to both sexes;
but its root and basic representation is nothing other than feminine temptation. That was already stated in Ecdesiasticus: "Sinoriginated with woman and because of her we all perish." Thereference to Eve's enticement of Adam is clear, but in otherrespects it is certain that Paul stigmatizes a much more physical
corporeality, one closer to Greek notions of it, when he implants
the power of sin within the flesh. And yet, the tale of Adam's
fall opens up two additional channels of interpretation throwing
light on the ambivalence of sin. The one locates it in relation
to God's will and in that sense causes it to be not only original
but coexistent with the very act of signification; the other places
it within the femininity-desire-food-abjection series.
Let me pause and consider the first point of view, which
Hegel calls a "marvelous, contradictory feature."5 On the one
hand, according to the narrative, man before the fall, man inparadise, was to live eternally; since it is sin that leads to death,
man without sin was in a state of immortality. On the other
hand, however, it is stated that man would be immortal if he
ate from the tree of life—the tree of knowledge—hence if hetransgressed the prohibition, in short if he sinned. Man would
thus accede to divine perfection only by sinning, that is, by
carrying out the forbidden act of knowledge. Now, the knowledge that would separate him from his natural, animal, andmortal state, enabling him to reach, through thought, purity
and freedom, is fundamentally sexual knowledge. It takes only
one further step to suppose that the invitation to perfection is
also an invitation to sin, and conversely; perhaps official theology does not take that step, but the mystic grants himself thefathomless depravity of doing so. That is so true that only after
having sinned does the mystic topple over into holiness, andhis holiness never ceases to appear to him as fringed by sin.
Such is the cognitive aspect of the narrative of the fall. In that

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

instance, the fall is the work of God; founding knowledge andthe quest for consciousness, it opens the way to spirituality.
WOMAN OR ABJECTION RECONCILED
Seen from a different viewpoint, the story of the fall sets up
a diabolical otherness in relation to the divine. Adam is nolonger endowed with the composed nature of paradisiac man,
he is torn by covetous desire: desire for woman—sexual covetousness since the serpent is its master, consuming desire forfood since the apple is its object. He must protect himself fromthat sinful food that consumes him and that he craves. We know
how the more material, more organic trend of thought of Levitical texts protects itself from abomination; against revulsion—
abjection. Christian sin, tying its spiritual knot between flesh
and law, does not cut off the abject. No more than the sinnerbrought by the Pharisees will the adulterous woman be stoned
to death: "He that is without sin among you, let him first casta stone at her" (John 8:7): "Neither do I condemn thee: go andsin no more" (John 8:11). Meant for remission, sin is what isabsorbed—in and through speech. By the same token, abjection
will not be designated as such, that is, as other, as something
to be ejected, or separated, but as the most propitious place forcommunication—as the point where the scales are tipped towards pure spirituality. The mystic's familiarity with abjection
is a fount of infinite jouissance. One may stress the masochistic
economy of that jouissance only if one points out at once that
the Christian mystic, far from using it to the benefit of a symbolic or institutional power, displaces it indefinitely (as happens
with dreams, for instance) within a discourse where the subject
is resorbed (is that grace?) into communication with the Other
and with others. One recalls Francis of Assisi who visited leproseries "to give out alms and left only after having kissed
each leper on the mouth"; who stayed with lepers and bathedtheir wounds, sponging pus and sores. One might also thinkof Angela of Foligno.
A source of evil and mingled with sin, abjection becomes therequisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh

127

128

... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

and the law. "It is at once what produces the disease, and thesource of health, [it is the poisoned cup in which man drinks
death and putrefaction, and at the same time the fount of reconciliation; indeed, to set oneself up as evil is to abolish evil in
oneself.]"6
LAW AND/OR GRACE
Thus, the Gospel's conception seems to distinguish sin from
Adam's downfall. For sin, here, subsuming biblical abjection
but more closely associated with the passions of the flesh, mustcarry out the fearsome process of interiorization and spiritualization that I have just discussed. Paul, who was the first to set
forth a coherent doctrine of sin as lust and separation from God,
seems to distinguish sin from Adam's transgression (see Romans 5:12-21). Was he held back by the paradox of the primitive human condition, as it has just become manifest to us in
the narrative concerning Adam? Or by the fully logical conception of that downfall according to the Bible, distinct fromabomination? Or is it because there can be no remission for theoriginal misdeed, because no biblical grace has been promised?
Christian doctrine, to the contrary, carries the ambiguity to thepoint of defining sin through its possible remission: "For until
the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there
is no law" (Romans 5:13) and "Moreover the law entered, thatthe offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace didmuch more abound" (Romans 5:20).
One could say, in fact, that sin is subjectified abjection. For,
always already determined ad unum as Thomas Aquinas submits, the created being, subordinated to God and at the sametime separated from him by free will, can commit sin only
through willful nonobservance of the rule. It is true that Thomism leads to a spiritual, logical excess, subjectifying the doctrine of sin and taking away its Augustinian delights. And yet
one must acknowledge that Aquinas goes back to and develops
the notion of logical necessity and freedom of knowledge ascoextensive with sin—a notion found in the very first narrativeof the fall (what I have called its first aspect; see p. 126). Sin

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

129

as action—as action stemming from will and judgment—iswhat definitively integrates abjection into logic and language.
Thomist considerations on the sin of angels is one of themasterly demonstrations of such a consequence. If an angel cansin because it is a created being and does so, for instance, byloving its own natural perfection, sin does not reside in theobject (which cannot here be an abject) but in "the inordinate
willing of a thing good in itself."7 Neither desire nor abjection,
sin is a logical unruliness, an incongruous act of judgment. If
defilement was what is impossible within a system, if Leviticaltaboo was what is excluded from a Law, sin, on the other hand,is a defect in judgment. The biblical conception remained closer
to the concrete truth of the sexed and social being. The conception stemming from the New Testament resorbs the guiltof the previous one and, at the risk of cutting itself off fromthe coarse and intolerable truth of man that Judaism discloses,
offers displacements of it that are perhaps elaborations—communital, logical, esthetic ones. On the one hand, we find thetruth of the intolerable; on the other, displacement throughdenial for some, through sublimation for others.

AVOWAL: CONFESSION
Omologeo and martireo, I acknowledge and I bear witness: in thoseterms Christians confess, hence avow their faith in Christ, as
they will later their trinitary faith. Already Christ had "confessed" in this way before Pontius Pilate. The avowal of faith
is thus from the very start tied to persecution and suffering.
This pain, moreover, has wholly permeated the word "martyr," giving it its basic, ordinary meaning, that of torture rather
than testimony. Speech addressed to the other, not sinful speech
but the speech of faith, is pain; this is what locates the act oftrue communication, the act of avowal, within the register ofpersecution and victimization. Communication brings my mostintimate subjectivity into being for the other; and this act of
judgment and supreme freedom, if it authenticates me, alsodelivers me over to death. Is this to say that my own speech,

130... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

all speech perhaps, already harbors in itself something that ismortal, culpable, abject?
No dogma predicates it. One will have to wait for Freud tobring out the heterogeneous aspect of drives, or simply thenegativity to which any discourse is prey. But the practice ofconfession, upon the whole, does nothing else but weigh down
discourse with sin. By having it bear that load, which alone
grants it the intensity of full communication, avowal absolves
from sin and, by the same stroke, founds the power of
discourse.
We owe that invention, the whirling wherein the Christiancleavage is resolved in the order of discourse, to an Egyptian
hermit, Anthony the Abbot—the same one who fascinatedFlaubert. In 271, while preaching to his brethren, he declared:"Let everyone of us take note of and write down his acts andfeelings, as if he were to apprise other people of them . . . Just
as we shall never fornicate in the presence of witnesses, if wewrite down our thoughts as if to make them known to others,
we shall abstain from obscene thoughts for fear of being foundout." Foundation of asceticism and very explicitly of sexual
repression, the speech addressed to the other ushers in judgment, shame, and fear. Pachomius (290-346) took up the same
point: "It is greatly wrong not to let the state of one's soul
immediately be known to a man practised in spiritual discernment." Following on bewailing, prayer or atonement, confession, which is often integral to them—especially in the earlydays of Christianism or in its fervent practices—nonethelessdisplaces the stress of the act of penance to the needs of an other,a wise man. Consequently, the necessity of speaking in orderto topple sin into the Other becomes more obvious.
First set aside for monks, later spread to Celtic and Frankishlands, the practice is extended to the laity only in the thirteenth
century, by decision of the Fourth Lateran Council. There werediscussions, divergences, sectarianism. How does one confess?
Who may do it? What is forgiven? And so forth. Such questions
will not detain me. But I am concerned with the ultimate interiorization of sin within discourses, by the final postulate that
does away with an offense because of its enunciation before theOne. An enunciation that amounts to a denunciation.

. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

13 I

FELIX CULPA: SPOKEN SIN. DUNS SCOTUS
Little by little, acts of atonement, of contrition, of paying one's
debt to a pitiless, judging God, are eclipsed by the sole act ofspeech. One slides over from the judicial to the verbal. Duns
Scotus, the logician, is at the heart of this shift, which amounts
to a spiritual revolution, as important no doubt as Christ's
verdict to the effect that the impure was not outside but insideof man. Acknowledgment and absolution count for everything,sin has no need for actions in order to be remitted. Duns Scotus
writes: "One who . . . wishes to receive the sacrament. . . andwho at the moment when those words are spoken wherein lies
the efficacy of the sacrament (in quo scilicet est pis sacramenti istius)offers no obstacle on account of willing a mortal sin, that one
shall receive penitential grace, not by virtue of merit . . . but
by virtue of the covenant with God who resolved to be present
at his sacrament."8 An acknowledgment, a covenant with theone who absolves, thanks to the words of an other in the nameof the Other—and lust, erroneous judgment, fundamental abjection are remitted—not suppressed, but subsumed into aspeech that gathers and restrains.
Is this harassment? Or jubilation? It is owing to speech, at
any rate, that the lapse has a chance of becoming fortunate; felix
culpa is merely a phenomenon of enunciation. The whole black
history of the Church shows that condemnation, the fiercest
censorship, and punishment are nonetheless the common realityof this practice. For only on the fringes of mysticism, or in rare
moments of Christian life, can the most subtle transgressionof law, that is to say, the enunciation of sin in the presence of
the One, reverberate not as a denunciation but as the glorious
counterweight to the inquisitorial fate of confession. This marginal potentiality of spoken sin as fortunate sin provides ananchorage for the art that will be found, resplendent, under all
the cupolas. Even during the most odious times of the Inquisition, art provided sinners with the opportunity to live, openly
and inwardly apart, the joy of their dissipation set into signs:
painting, music, words. "And these signs shall follow themthat believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shallspeak with new tongues" (Mark 16:17; emphasis added).

132... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

On this peak of discourse, power no longer belongs to thejudge-God who preserves humanity from abjection while setting aside for himself alone the prerogative of violence—theviolence of separation as well as of punishment. Power henceforth
belongs to discourse itself, or rather to the act of judgment
expressed in speech and, in less orthodox and much more implicit fashion, in all the signs (poetry, painting, music, sculpture) that are contingent upon it. If such signs do not do awaywith the necessity for confession, they do spread out the logicof speech even to the most inaccessible folds of significance.

6

CELINE: NEITHER ACTORNOR MARTYR
To be mistaken about the rhythm of a sentence is to be mistaken about
the very meaning of that sentence.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The world of illusions—the world of religions—brings to lightor embodies the prohibition that has us speak. Thus, it gives
legitimacy to hatred if it does not invert it into love. Embodying,legitimizing—today we are too aware of their techniques toyield to them. The worlds of illusions, now dead and buried,
have given way to our dreams and deliriums if not to politics
or science—the religions of modern times. Lacking illusions,
lacking shelter, today's universe is divided between boredom(increasingly anguished at the prospect of losing its resources,
through depletion) or (when the spark of the symbolic is maintained and desire to speak explodes) abjection andpiercing laughter.
Conclusively and publicly—for a broad audience—Celine
anchors the destiny of literature in the latter territory, not thatof the Death of God but a reassumption, through style, of whatlies hidden by God.
We are thrown into a strange state when reading Celine.
What is involved goes beyond the content of the novels, thestyle of the writing, the author's biography or his indefensible
political stands (fascist, anti-semitic); the true "miracle" ofCeline resides in the very experience of one's reading—it isfascinating, mysterious, intimately nocturnal, and liberating bymeans of a laughter without complacency yet complicitous.
Nearly twenty years after his death, close to half a century after

134

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

the publication of Journey to the End of the Night, how, where,
and why does this Celinian universe challenge us so vigorously?
I do not find within it the delightful interlacing of Proustiansentences, which unfold my memory and that of my language's
signs down to the silent, glowing recesses of an odyssey ofdesire deciphered in and through the fashionable wordliness of
his contemporaries. I do not come out of it shaken to the pointof exaltation, of dizziness (a torment that some flatten intomonotony), as happens when the Sadean narrative machine
unveils, beneath the power of terror, the playful reckoning of
sexual drive coiled up in death. I do not draw from it thestainless, serene, nostalgic beauty of Mallarme's always alreadyantiquated arabesque; of Mallarme who could convert the paroxysms of a funereal psalm into the elliptic markings of a
convoluted language. I do not encounter in it the black, romantic rage of Lautreamont who chokes classicism in a fiendish
laugh; nor the volleys of Artaud's rhythmical suffering wherestyle performs its function of metaphysically transporting the
body to the place of the Other, both being ransacked, butleaving a trace, a gesture, a voice.
Celine's effect is quite other. It calls upon what, within us,
eludes defenses, trainings, and words, or else struggles against
them. A nakedness, a forlornness, a sense of having had it;
discomfort, a downfall, a wound. What people do not acknowledge but know they have in common; a base, mass, or; anthropological commonality, the secret abode for which alli masks are intended. Celine has us believe that he is true, that
he is the only authentic one, and we are ready to follow him,
deeply settled in that end of night where he seeks us out; weforget that he can show it to us only because he stands elsewhere—within writing. Actor or martyr? Neither one nor theother, or both at the same time, like a true writer who believes
in his wiles. He believes that death and horror are what being
is. But suddenly, and without warning, the open sore of hisvery suffering, through the contrivance of a word, becomes
haloed, as he puts it, with "a ridiculous little infinite"1 as tenderand packed full of love and cheerful laughter as it is with bitterness, relentless mockery, and a sense of the morrow's im-

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

13 5

possibility. Even your cherished abjection belongs to the realmof a puppet show's gang [guignol's band] and the enchantment is
postponed until some other time . . . [f eerie pour une autrefois]
As for jouissance, be it of language, meaning, or transcendence
grasped from within, in pure literary style, you are barking up
the wrong tree . . . All that remains is the tune, without notes. . . Not even the worship of Death . . . The three dots . . .
Less than nothing, or more . . . Something else . . . The con-?
suming of Everything, of Nothing, through style . . . The
greatest homage to the Word that was not made flesh in orderto hoist itself up into Man with a capital letter but to join, body!
and language being mingled, those intermediate states, those,
non-states, neither subject nor object, where you is alone, singular, untouchable, unsociable, discredited, at the end of a nightthat is as particular as it is incommensurable.
When reading Celine we are seized at that fragile spot of our
subjectivity where our collapsed defenses reveal, beneath theappearances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin; neither inside nor
outside, the wounding exterior turning into an abominable interior, war bordering on putrescence, while social and family
rigidity, that beautiful mask, crumbles within the beloved
abomination of innocent vice. A universe of borders, seesaws,
fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of the subject andits objects, fears and struggles, abjections and lyricisms. At theturning point between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.
We have already traveled through such areas—with defilement, abomination, and sin—beneath other skies, under otherprotections. For the contemporary reader, they seem morepoignant in Celine than in the reminiscences, archaeologicalupon the whole, that I cited earlier; this is due no doubt to thefragility, with Celine, of the ideal or prohibiting judging
agency, which, in other times and cultures, borders on abjection
or indeed causes it to come into being. Here, that agency becomes ambiguous, grows hollow, decays, and crumbles; it isa fleeting, derisory, and even idiotic illusion, which is yet upheld. Neither divinity nor morality, it is the watermark thatremains in the darkness and horror of night, allowing such a136

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

night, nevertheless, to be written. Agency of exploded, thunder-blasted meaning, and yet sparkingly there: a scription.
Neither revolutionary challenge, which would assume belief in
a new morality, class, or humanity; nor skeptical doubt, which
always takes shelter, in the last resort, within the self-satisfaction of a critical stance that leaves the doors of progress open.
It is rather a black explosion, having the power of a devastating
implosion, an anarchic one if you wish, provided one rectifies
at once: there is no anarchy of writing, since writing orders,regulates, and legislates. What? Nothing, perhaps, and perhaps
not. What object? Could it be the ab-ject?
Is it vice? Is it playacting or possibly perversion? Better thanthat. A yearning after Meaning together with its absorption,
ingestion, digestion, and rejection. Power and sin of the word.
Without God, without any One other than that which lies under
the polylogue of the Celinian symphony—a music, a web, alacework. A whirl of abjection that can be borne, that can be
written only if it can also provide itself with objects, hateful ofcourse, the most stable ones, the most archaic, ensuring themost precise, the most certain jouissance.
His adhering to Nazism, ambivalent and paltry as that action
was, is not one that can be explained away. It becomes integrated as an internal necessity, as an inherent counterweight,
as a massive need for identity, a group, a project, meaning;
thus it crystallizes the objective and illusory reconciliation between,on the one hand, an ego that drowns in the whirl of its objects
and its language and, on the other, the identifying prohibitions—an unbearable, untenable, disintegrating one, whichcauses him to be. His fascination with Jews, which was full of
hatred and which he maintained to the end of his life, the simpleminded anti-Semitism that besots the tumultuous pages of thepamphlets, are no accident; they thwart the disintegration ofidentity that is coextensive with a scription that affects the mostarchaic distinctions, that bridges the gaps insuring life andmeaning. Celine's anti-Semitism, like political commitment,for others—like, as a matter of fact, any political commitment,
to the extent that it settles the subject within a socially justified

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR 137

illusion—is a security blanket. A delirium, to be sure, but one
whose social unfolding and multiple rationalizations are wellknown; a delirium that literally prevents one from going mad,for it postpones the senseless abyss that threatens this passing
through the identical, which is what scription amounts to.
His novels are realistic out of social constraint and, to someextent, out of hatred;2 or rather they are legends, but also music,
dance, emotions, notes edged with silence—Celine's texts, andthis has been said only too often, are in bad form. Obviously,
one could read them by following the meanderings of the narrative, which, similar to those of well-known storytellers, ispicaresque or biographical at the beginning (Journey to the Endof the Night, Death on the Instalment Plan), then bursts its shelland veers toward the polyphony of North and Rigadoon after
going through the carnival of Guignol's Band and he Pont de
Londres ["London Bridge"]. And yet a more specifically
Celinian feature is the drowning of narrative in a style, which,from the Journey to Rigadoon, is gradually decanted; more andmore incisive, precise, eschewing seduction in favor of cruelty,
it is nevertheless haunted by the same concern—to touch theintimate nerve, to grab hold of emotion by means of speech,
to make writing oral, in other words, contemporaneous, swift,
obscene. If that scription is a struggle, it is not won throughthe expedient of Oedipal identifications generated by narrative
but through much deeper, more remote, and riskier probes.
Such probings, which tamper with vocabulary and syntax, relate the Celinian experience not to the novelist's verisimilitude
but to the inhumanity of the poet. An inhumanity that resides
in his very words; it is hence most radical, affecting mankind's
ultimate guarantee—language. In the wake of a black lineage
where Lautreamont or Artaud is inscribed, inhumanity discovers its appropriate themes, contrary to all lyrical traditions,in horror, death, madness, orgy, outlaws, war, the feminine
threat, the horrendous delights of love, disgust, and fright.
Those are the themes, then, that I am, seemingly, going todeal with in Celine. My reading, however, will not be a thematic one, first because of the very themes involved, but mainly

138

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

because, with Celine, such themes always assume at least a
double stance between disgust and laughter, apocalypse andcarnival.
Any fictional theme is, by definition, a challenge to the single
signified since it is a polyvalent signified, a "blasting of selfhood" (Georges Bataille). This is no doubt so because the fantasies that nourish such a theme converge on that impossible
focus, that unthinkable "origin" constituted by the scene ofscenes, the so-called primal scene.3 In another connection,
Bakhtin has shown that there is a fundamental dialogism, abasic bivalence in any speech, word, or utterance in novels
stemming from carnivalesque tradition (Dostoyevsky's novels,
for instance).4 Celine brings to its paroxysmal climax this technique, which constitutes a way of being. Can one tell whether
the bombing of Hamburg, as written by Celine, represents theheight of tragedy or the most cavalier mockery of mankind?
Does Titus van Claben's combination of orgy, murder, and fire
express the horror of a sickening human condition, or is it an
extravagant farce about a few cookies who are more or lesssmart? To the carnival's semantic ambivalences, which pair thehigh and the low, the sublime and the abject, Celine adds themerciless crashing of the apocalypse. And end-of-the-world flavor exudes from that disgust for mankind in the midst of theSecond World War—and this with or without politics. An invisible sword of judgments weighs on Celine's universe moreheavily than God (a permissive one, upon the whole) did on
medieval carnival and its altogether Christian sequels, Dostoyevsky included. It is the invisible sword of a non-existent God—neither transcendency nor Man, no capital letters, save the place,"Nothing shall have taken place but the place" (Mallarme). A
sword that is perhaps not even an instance but a distance—anideal and a superego, a being-removed, which cause horror toexist and at the same time take us away from it, grip us withfear and by that very fright change language into a quill, a
fleeting and piercing one, a work of lace, a show of acrobatics,
a burst of laughter and a mark of death.
• • • one has to be more than somewhat dead in order to be truly a wisecracked.
That's it! You have to have been removed from the spot.5

CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

As for me, alas, all I have is a kind of cavalier outlook on instincts
and life—I am neither overindulgent nor sensual. I am "removed,"
serious, classic in my delirium—constructive—That is perhaps where
I come close to the great—but that's all . . .6

139

7

SUFFERING AND HORROR
One can be a virgin with respect to Horror as one is virgin toward
Voluptuousness. *Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

THE NARRATIVE AS CACHE FOR SUFFERING"In the beginning was emotion . . . ," Celine often repeatedin his writings and interviews. Reading him, one has the impression that in the beginning was discomfort.
Suffering as the place of the subject. Where it emerges, where
it is differentiated from chaos. An incandescent, unbearable
limit between inside and outside, ego and other. The initial,
fleeting grasp: "suffering," "fear," ultimate words sighting thecrest where sense topples over into the senses, the "intimate"
into "nerves." Being as ill-being.
Celine's narrative is a narrative of suffering and horror, notonly because the "themes" are there, as such, but because hiswhole narrative stance seems controlled by the necessity ofgoing through abjection, whose intimate side is suffering andhorror its public feature.
This much is becoming known after so much "Russian formalism" but also after so many biographies confided on the
couch: a narrative is, all in all, the most elaborate attempt, next
to syntactic competence, to situate a speaking being between
his desires and their prohibitions, in short, within the Oedipal
triangle.
But not until the advent of twentieth-century "abject" lit*On est puceau de l'Horreur comme on est puceau de la Volupte.

SUFFERING AND HORROR

I4I

erature (the sort that takes up where apocalypse and carnival
left off) did one realize that the narrative web is a thin film
constantly threatened with bursting. For, when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject andobject is shaken, and when even the limit between inside andoutside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is challenged
first. If it continues nevertheless, its makeup changes; its linearity is shattered, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts,
incompletion, tangles, and cuts. At a later stage, the unbearable
identity of the narrator and of the surroundings that are supposed to sustain him can no longer be narrated but cries out or
is descried with maximal stylistic intensity (language of violence,of obscenity, or of a rhetoric that relates the text to poetry).
The narrative yields to a crying-out theme that, when it tends tocoincide with the incandescent states of a boundary-subjectivity
that I have called abjection, is the crying-out theme of sufferinghorror. In other words, the theme of suffering-horror is theultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative
representation. If one wished to proceed farther still along theapproaches to abjection, one would find neither narrative northeme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary—the violenceof poetry, and silence.
"DECAY IN ABEYANCE . . . "Everything is already contained in the Journey: suffering, horror,
death, complicitous sarcasm, abjection, fear. And the pit where
what speaks is a strange rent between an ego and an other—between nothing and all. Two extremes that moreover change
places, Bardamu and Arthur, and give an aching body to that
endless synthesis, that journey without end; a narrative between
apocalypse and carnival.
It all began just like that. I had said nothing. I hadn't said a word. It
was Arthur Ganate who started me off. (J, 3)
Everything was mine that evening; it all belonged only to me. I had
the moon to myself and the village and a tremendous sense of fear.
J. 34).

.

142 SUFFERING AND HORROR

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.(J,11)
Did none of them [the letters from the general to the colonel] containthe order to put an immediate stop to this abomination? Was he notbeing told by HQ that there was some misunderstanding,, some abominable mistake? (J, 10; emphasis added in all four excerpts)
Obviously the atrocities of war are given as the true causeof fear. But its violent, quasi-mystical permanence raises it fromthe level of political or even social contingency (where it would
be due to oppression) to another level; fear becomes a token ofhumanity, that is, of an appeal to love.
Don't imagine it's as easy as all that to fall asleep once you have begun
to disbelieve everything, mostly because of all the times you havebeen frightened. (J, 199-200). . . you'll surely finish up by finding out what it is that frightens allthese bloody people so, and it's probably somewhere at the farther
end of the night. (J, 218-219)... an emotion of exceptional trust, which in timid people takes theplace of love. (J, 227)
And also:
Fear can't be cured, Lola, (f, 61)
Just as,When one's in this world, surely the best thing one can do, isn't it,
is to get out of it? Whether one's mad or not, frightened or not. (J,56)
Or the mother who is nothing but sorrow stuffed with fear:
It was as if she was afraid of this cause for sorrow; it was full of sinister
things that she did not understand. (J, 93)
And finally, quite as expected, this definition of outmoded art,
the kind that Celine breaks away from in order to assert thetruth of art as unacknowledged fear:
Happiness on earth would consist of dying with pleasure, in the midst

SUFFERING AND HORROR

of pleasure . . . The rest amounts to nothing at all, it's a fear one
daren't confess to, it's just so much Art. (J, 378)
In the beginning was a war that caused me to be in a stateof fear. In that original state, "I" am weak, frightened in theface of awesome threats. Are there any means of defense? Scouring is the only one; by a reduction, not a transcendental but amystical one. Mystical: a word that Celine uses (in connection
with Lola's body he speaks of "a mystical adventure in anatomical research" (J, 50); as to the people one fears, "Theiractions no longer have that foul mystical power over you,weakening you and wasting your time" (J, 59)). It amounts
to setting up not a bevond but two terms, face to face, eachjudging the other, in turn, and both reducing in the end to thesame abjection. On one side, what is base; on the other, thespeech that I hold forth and that has me in its hold. Nature, thebody, the inside. Facing the spirit, others, appearances. Truth
being on the base side; a barren side, without makeup, without
seeming, rotten and dead, full of discomfort and sickness,horror.
And the truth of this world is to die. (J, 199)
. . . but she [his mother] remained a good deal short of the dog's level
because she believed what they told her when they took me away.
The dog at least believes only what it knows by sense of smell. (J,92)

Entirely naked, all you have in front of you is really only a wretched,pretentious beggar swollen with conceit, with difficulty getting out
its inane babble in one style or another. (J, 334)
It didn't matter that it was really Nature; she considered me just as
disgusting as Nature herself, and that's what was such an insult toher. (J, 395)
And this, about a writer:... a man, whether he's a relation of theirs or not, is nothing but
arrested putrescence. (J, 425)
And yet what brings into existence this truth of horror and143

144 SUFFERING AND HORROR

sickness, of weakness and downfall, is its confrontation withthe other term—the powerful, rich, and feared: "There are twoof you together."
But when one's weak, the thing that gives one strength is stripping
those one fears of the slightest prestige that one may still tend toaccord them. One must teach oneself to see them as they are, as worse
than they are, that is. One should look at them from all points ofview. This detaches you, sets you free and is much more of a protection than you can possibly imagine. It gives you another self, sothat there are two of you together. (J, 59)
Nevertheless, in this fascinating confrontation during a merciless war, both end up on the same side, united in abomination;then language turns into slobber, conversation into defecation,
it is the end of the night.
When you consider, for instance, the way in which words are formed
and uttered, human speech fails to stand up to the test of all theseappalling trappings of spittle. The mechanical effort we make in speaking is more complicated and arduous than defecation. (J, 334-335)
Is there not some solution, some salvation on account of thisequal sign between the elevated and the base? Celine's universe
is provided, in spite of it all, with an outside, intermittently andheld in compassionate mockery. Sometimes women are theones who, for their part, do not experience repulsion, but only
imagine it, perhaps. Another solution sometimes crops up—
impossible, condemned, and just as antiquated—which would
amount to keeping to the Idea, a single idea, guarantee andcounterweight to overbearing abjection. And finally, the paththat Celine chose for himself; to stay within horror but at avery slight distance—an infinitesimal and tremendous one,which from the very heart of Celine's essential abomination,
distinguishes and inscribes sublime love for a child or, in a spacebeyond sexuality and analogous to it, writing as sublimation.
The brink: women.
Women are all housemaids at heart. But perhaps she imagines thisrepulsion rather than feels it; that is my remaining consolation. Perhaps
all that I suggest to her is that I am filthy. Perhaps I am an artist inthat line. (J, 74)

SUFFERING AND HORROR

Redemptive Unity: an Idea that is one, picayune, and impossible.
My own ideas, the ideas I had, roamed loose in my mind with plentyof gaps in between them; they were like little tapers, flickering andfeeble, shuddering all through life in the midst of a truly appalling,awful world. [. . .] but even so there was never any chance of mymanaging, like Robinson, to fill my head with a single idea, somereally superb idea that was definitely stronger than death ... (J,504-505)

Finally the sublime, with its two modest faces. On the one
hand:
Clearly Alcide could rise to sublime heights without difficulty, could
feel at home there; there was a fellow who hobnobbed with the angels
and you would never have guessed it. . . . Almost without noticing
he had given three years of hardship, the annihilation of his wretchedlife in this tropical monotony, . . . (J, 160)
On the other, the musical sublimation that most people missand that Celine will aim at throughout his writing:
There was nothing left for him to sublimate; he just wanted to go
away, to take his body somewhere else. There was no harmony inhim, so that to be through with it all he had to upturn everything likea bear. (J, 426)
Being sorrowful isn't all; there ought to be some way of starting up
the music again, of discovering a further poignancy ... (J, 504)
ACCOUNTS OF DIZZINESS
But the most normal solution, commonplace and public at thesame time, communicable, shareable, is and will be the narrative. Narrative as the recounting of suffering: fear, disgust,and abjection crying out, they quiet down, concatenated intoa story.
In the shooting sharpness of his suffering, Celine will look
for a story, a verisimilitude, a myth. That is how we get the
famous story of his head wound suffered during the First World
War, a wound whose gravity, most biographers agree, wasgreatly exaggeratedly Celine who lays stress on it both when145146 SUFFERING AND HORROR

speaking to newspapermen and in his writings. Aching in his
head, his ear, his arm. Dizziness, noises, buzzings, vomitings.
Even attacks, the onslaughts of which make one think of drugs
or epilepsy. Already in Death on the Instalment Plan:
I've had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trail ... no
exaggeration . . . for twenty-two years. That's quite a package. She's
tried a million different noises, a tremendous hullabaloo, but I raved
faster than she could, I screwed her, I beat her to the tape. [. . .] My
great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots . . .
it never stops scolding ... [. . .] I am the organs of the Universe... I provide everything, the ham, the spirit, and the breath . . .
Often I seem to be worn out. My thoughts stagger and sprawl . . .
I'm not very good to them. I'm working up to the opera of the deluge.
[. . .] I am the Devil's stationmaster. [. . .] The gate of hell in yourear is a little atom of nothing.1
Suffering speaks its name here—"madness"—but does notlinger with it, for the magic of surplus, scription, conveys thebody, and even more so the sick body, to a beyond made up
of sense and measure. Beyond the narrative, dizziness finds its
language: music, as breath of words, rhythm of sentences, andnot only as metaphor of an imaginary rival where the voice ofthe mother and of death is hiding:
A beautiful shroud embroidered with tales—that's what the Pale Ladywants. (D, 41)
The narrative, on the other hand, is always umbilicated to
the Lady—fascinating and abject object of the telling.
Triggered by the mother, moreover, on the rough seas of
the English Channel, one of literature's most abominable scenesof abjection or nausea is unleashed. We are far removed here
from buzzing pain that rises musically. The body is turned
inside out, sent back from deep within the guts, the bowels
turned over in the mouth, food mingled with excretions, fainting spells, horrors, and resentments.
Mama collapses against the rail . . . She vomits herself up again, all
she's got... A carrot comes up . . . a piece of fat. . . and the wholetail of a mullet . . . (D, 124)

SUFFERING AND HORROR 147

We're half drowned in the flood. We're squashed into the toilet bowl
. . . But they never stop snoring . . . I don't even know if I'm deador alive. (D, 126)
Human beings caught flush with their animality, wallowing
in their vomit, as if to come closer to what is essential for
Celine, beyond all "fancies": violence, blood, and death. Neverperhaps, not even with Bosch or the blackest aspect of Goya,
have human "nature," on the other side of the "sensible," the"civilized human," or the divine been opened up with so much
cruelty, and with so little satisfaction, illusion, or hope. Thisis the horror of hell without God: if no means of salvation, no
optimism, not even a humanistic one, looms on the horizon,then the verdict is in, with no hope of pardon—the sportfulverdict of scription.
Le Pont de Londres ("London Bridge") is no less revealing ofthat war with the bowels, promoted this time to manly rank
(general Des Entrayes has already appeared in Journey), of suffering within:
It's a dizzy spell! ... A sickly feeling! ... I am a prey to fever!
... I sit down! ... I close my eyes hard ... I can still see . . . red
and white . . . colonel Des Entrayes! . . . raised on his stirrups! . . .
That's a show from my memories ... I am back in the war! . . .
Jesus! . . . I'm a hero again! ... So is he! Aren't memories beautiful!
. . . Just for that I stretch out on the sofa . . . I'm having my attack!
. . . Again I see Des Entrayes, my beloved colonel! . . . Mad he surewasn't! . . . He was raised on his stirrups!... his cavalry sword readyfor action . . . raised! . . . flashing in the sun . . .2.'
In short a Schreberian suffering, which only humor and stylecause to tilt out of the accounts of the Freudian neuropath into
one of the most suggestive pages of contemporary literature.
SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY
There is no glory in this suffering; it is not an ode: it opens up
only onto idiocy. Debility is that ground, a permanent one with
Celine, where "intimate" suffering, both physical and psychic,
joins with sexual excesses. There, is nothing pornographic,

148

SUFFERING AND HORROR

nothing attractive or exciting in such a baring of instincts.
Caught on the black slope where desire founders in drive oraffect, where representations are blurred, where significations
vanish, this form of sex is an inebriation, another word for
debilitated suffering.
I had reached the limits . . . [. . .] Mimine!. . . no more hallucinations
for me ... I knew how they got to me ... I had some experience
now . . . just a small bit of liquor . . . just a small glass was enough. . . and then a friendly discussion . . . there's someone who contradicted me ... I'd get excited . . . and that was it! . . . Always on
account of my head, it was written on my deferment card! . . . (P,335)
All my aches are catching up with me . . . piercing me through andthrough! . . . my forehead, my arms, my ears ... I hear the trainsthat are heading for me! . . . filling my head with whistling and roars!
. . . I've had it, fuck that shit! . . . I'm going down! . . . I've got holdof the railing . . . Just a bit dizzy . . . And here I am, quaking, infront of her . . . Oh what a scare! . . . what a thrill! ...[•••] Does
she love me a little? . . . I'm asking myself. . . I ask myself again andagain when I'm with her . . . I'm getting so emotional! ... I really
don't know where I'm setting my feet! . . . I'm stumbling all over... I can't see where I'm going . . . neither store windows or people. . . not even sidewalks, I trip and bump ... I pick myself up, I am
ecstatic ... in the enchantment of her presence ...[...] I don't see
the GI who's hollering at me 'cause I'm stamping all over his plates... or the conductor who's shaking me . . . who's pestering me in
my day-dream . . . (P, 137-138)
SCATOLOGY TURNED COMMONPLACE
The no man's land of dizziness that links suffering and sex gives
way to a disgust for decay or excretion; Celine talks about itin the same neutral tone, in the same seemingly natural fashion,as when he describes suffering or debility. Granted that his
medical practice has something to do with it. But one detects
a cold glee, an aloof taming of abjection that remind one lessof (sadomasochistic) perversion than of certain moments in thepainful life of the fortified castle (see above, pp. 53-55) as well
as of the most "borderly" rites of basic religions.

SUFFERING AND HORROR

It is as if Celine's scription could only be justified to theextent that it confronted the "entirely other" of signifiance; as
if it could only be by having this "entirely other" exist as such,in order to draw back from it but also in order to go to it as
to a fountainhead; as if it could be born only through such a
confrontation recalling the religions of defilement, abomination,and sin. As for the narrative, put out of joint by the workingsof that device, it is both shattered and punctuated in its simply
biographical and logical continuity by such clusters of fascination; what is disconnected regains its coherence in the permanence of abjection.
That obsession refers back to decay, whether it be recallingthe excrement discovered by the unhappy father as the otherside of his child's success in school (D, 76) or else the anal
dirtiness that fixates Ferdinand's interest in the swarming interior of a body, about which he will not have to ask whether
it is male or female.
I never wiped myself properly, I always had a sock coming to me. . . and hurried to avoid it ... I left the can door open so as to hearthem coming ... I shat like a bird between two storms . . . (D, 69)
Decay: privileged place of mingling, of the contamination oflife by death, of begetting and of ending. Its high point may
perhaps be found in an apocalyptic description of earth rottedaway by the maggots of the scholar Courtial des Pereires: thescientific experiments of the inventor of Genitron, far fromperpetuating life, succeed only in transforming a food, potatoes,
into an unbearable stench ("corpses or potatoes"), and in rotting
the very stones.
One big desert of rot! . . . f. . .] OK, OK, the spirit's fermenting!
[. . .] You want to know what putrefaction is? You want me to tellyou? It's all the shit we have to put up with . . . (D, 515-516)
And yet it is the human corpse that occasions the greatest
concentration of abjection and fascination. All of Celine's narratives converge on a scene of massacres or death—the Journey,
beginning with the First World War, had pointed the way,
Rigadoon and North, spread out over a Europe laid waste by theSecond, deepen and sustain the fixation. It is true that contem-

149

150

SUFFERING AND HORROR

porary times are conducive to such representations, rife withslaughter as they are, and Celine remains the greatest hyperrealist of the period's massacres. But we are far removed fromnews accounts of war, even of the most horrible kind. Celine
tracks down, flushes out, and displays an ingrained love fordeath, ecstasy before the corpse, the other that I am and will
never reach, the horror with which I communicate no morethan with the other sex during pleasure, but which dwells inme, spends me, and carries me to the point where my identity
is turned into something undecidable. There is a vertiginous,
apocalyptic, and grotesque evocation of ecstasy before deathin one of the final scenes of Death on the Instalment Plan. Father
Fleury, having become mad, dismembers Courtial's corpse:
He sticks his finger into the wound . . . He plunges both hands into
the meat ... he digs into all the holes ... He tears away the softedges . . . He pokes around . . . He gets stuck . . . His wrist is caught
in the bones . . . Crack! . . . He tugs ... He struggles like in a trap
. . . Some kind of pouch bursts . . . The juice pours out... it gushes
all over the place ... all full of brains and blood . . . splashing . . .
(D, 560)
INGRAINED CARNAGE
The scription of Celine draws its night and its ultimate support
from death as the supreme location of suffering, from the aggressivity that provokes it, from the war that leads to it. Abjection is edged with murder, murder is checked by abjection.
Men don't have to be drunk to make havoc of heaven and earth. With
them carnage is ingrainedl It's a miracle they survive when you consider
the time they have spent cutting themselves down to nothing. They
think only of nothingness, lousy customers, future criminals! They
keep seeing red everywhere! Might as well skip it, or that would be
the end of poetry . . . (P, 406)
Certainly, but not of Celine's texts, quite the contrary.
One is reminded of attempted murders, of many killings—of the old Henrouille, of Robinson (in the Journey); of constantbrushes with death in "London Bridge" where "scientific" ex-SUFFERING AND HORROR

periment is mixed, as in a baleful carnival, with deadly risks
and murderous violence in taverns, orgies, and subways. Thinkof Titus' death rattle in Guignol's Band; the heinous outcries
over his dying body, struggling between the bodies of two
women, the customer and the maid, tokens of an impossibleorgy that has shifted into murder:
He's lying there in his silks full of his filth ... his vomit. . . he's still
gurgling! ... his eyes are swiveling . . . they get rigid . . . revulse. . . Ah! it's horrible to watch! . . . and then poof! He turns crimson!
So livid just a second ago! . . . He's swelling up with big gobs . . .
his mouth's full ... he makes an effort . . .3
Like a crisis in his illness, his asthma.
When that got him! what a panic! . . . Should've seen his eyes then!
. . . the horror that seized him! (G, 155)
The apocalyptic murder scene reaches its climax when drugs
are added to the orgy, as in the fire sequence of Guignol's Band.
I see a big battle scene! . . . It's a vision! ... a movie! . . . Ah! it's
going to be something out of the ordinary! ... in the darkness above
the tragedy! . . . There's a dragon munching them all! . . . tearing
their behinds out . . . their guts . . . their livers [. . .] I can see you,
you pain in the ass! [. . .] I'm going to slit the skunk's nostrils! . . .
I don't like homos! . . . What if I cut off his organs? ... ah, that'dbe something! I'm thinking about it! . . . I'm thinking about it! . . .
(G, 172-173)
And then the vision of murder turns sublime, the murderous
apocalypse shows its lyrical side before everything founders
into vomit, money swallowed as ultimate food, reincorporated
excrement; and fire, actually apocalyptic, devastates everything,after Claben's murder by Boro and Celine-the-pain:. . . and everything starts turning around the globe! like a merry-goround ... the water lamp . . . I'm seeing things inside it! I see garlands. . . I see flowers! I see daffodils! [. . .] I tell Boro! ... He belches
at me! . . . He's between Delphine and the old^guy! . . ■ They're stillat their dirty game! . . . there in the big bed! ... They're making mesicker! . . . The guy who guzzled all his dough! ... He doesn't feel
sick! ... all the money "in his bag! . _ he's satisfied . . . (G, 178)

151

152

SUFFERING AND HORRORFERDINAND THE PAIN: A MURDERER
Ferdinand the Pain, the one who speaks in the first person, ishere one of the main protagonists of the murder. It is he again,"I," who, in Guignol's Band, throws his persecutor, Matthew,
under the subway. That scene sets in motion the merry-goround of persecutor and persecuted and changes the previous
sequence's visionary representation of murder into a more dynamic X-ray of the murderous process. A true undergroundkingdom ruled by death drive finds its natural place in thebowels of the subway, the Celinian equivalent of Dante's hell.
Murder as underground lining of the unclean-thinking being.
My blood turns! ... I stop breathing! ... I stop moving! ... I standthere hypnotized ... he looks at me! ... I look at him! Ah! but I'm
thinking! . , . I'm thinking fast! . . .It's the midget! there against me!
. . . It's him! [. . .] It's getting ready by itself! . . . my scheme . . .
I concentrate . . . concentrate . . . Not a word . . . calm and collected...[...] We hear the train roaring . . .it's coming! . . . there in thedarkness ... in the hole ... at my right . . . Good! . . . Good!
. . . Good! . . . the train's approaching. It's roaring fiercely, crashingin, swelling up . . . Brrr! Brrroom . . . Good! Good! Good! . . . It's
near ... I look at Matthew opposite ...[...] Bop! I hit him withmy ass! the midget! up in the air! . . . The thunder lets loose, passes
over him! (G, 219-220)
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
It is in war, however, that the apocalyptic unfurling of aggressivity and death matches and goes beyond what is foundin Goya or Bosch. An abominable war in the Journey but one
soon traveled through; a sinister and carnivalesque war in"London Bridge" and Guignol's Band.
I'm the murderer, doc! ... I killed ten of em! ... I killed a hundred!
... I killed a thousand! . . . I'll kill all of 'em next time! . . . Doc,send me back! ... I belong at the front! . . . a-off to war! (G, 229)
Without the war it is hard to imagine a Celinian scription;
the war appears to trigger it off, to be its very condition; it
plays the role of Beatrice's death, which leads to the Vita Nuova,

SUFFERING AND HORROR

or of Dante's avoidance of death, which initiates the first cantoof the Divine Comedy. The trilogy in which the Second World
War's horror unfolds, From Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon,
best captures the wound that Celine never ceases to palpate,from the individual's to society's. In the political and social
fresco, overflowing with rejections and sarcasms directedagainst a political position that in other respects Celine seems
to endorse (a point I shall return to), with betrayals, escapades,
massacres, bombings, and destruction, the most destructive
aggressivity suddenly shows its abominable, sickly side, within
an infernal jouissance—History's abject motive. The site of
Celine's scnption is always that fascinating crest of decomposition-composition, suffering-music, and abomination-ecstasy.
. . . let them rot, stink, ooze, end up in the sewer . . . they keep
wondering what they can do in Gennevilliers . . . easy! fertilize thefields! ...[...] the true sense of History . . . and what we've cometo! jumping this way! . . . whoops! and that way!. . . the death dance!
impalements! purges! vivisections! . . . twice tanned hides, smoking. . . spoiled, skulking voyeurs, let it start all over again! guts rippedout by hand! let's hear the cries, the death rattles ... a nationalorgasm!4
Let me recall, in connection with the apocalyptic music of
the trilogy, the bombing of Hamburg where, amidst the din,the stench, and the chaos, the frenzy of abjection turns into
sinister beauty:
these green and pink flames were dancing around . . . and around. . . and shooting up at the sky! . . . those streets of green . . . pink
. . . and red rubble . . . you can't deny it . . . looked a lot morecheerful ... a carnival of flames . . . than in their normal condition. . . gloomy sourpuss bricks . . . it took chaos to liven them up... an earthquake ... a conflagration with the Apocalypse coming
out of it! (R, 130)
I've told you what it was like, three four times the size of Notre Dame...[...] the light came from up top ... the crater hole ... theeffect, I repeat, was like an enormous nave of solid clay •-.[...]
Hamburg had been destroyed with liquid phosphorus ... the Pompei
deal ... the whole place had caught fire, houses^, street, asphalt, and

15 3

154 SUFFERING AND HORROR

the people running in all directions . . . even the gulls on the roofs...(R,191)
The sacred and history, Notre Dame and Pompei, meaning
and law, in the tremendous unveiling of suffering and death of
the Second World War, give birth to their gruesome hidden
side. And the all-powerful obverse of a fragile culture is, in theeyes of Celine, the truth of the human species; for the writer,
it is the point of departure of scription as the laying bare ofmeaning. Granted that Celine's vision is an apocalyptic one,that it bears mystical strains in its fixation on Evil as the truthof impossible Meaning (of the Good, of the Law). And yet, if
apocalypse means, etymologically, a vision, it must be understood as the contrary of revelation of philosophical truth, as thecontrary of aletheia. There is no apocalyptic being, scored, fainting, forever incomplete, and incapable of setting itself up as abeing, bursting among the flames or reverberating amid theclamors of universal collapse. Celine does not exhibit a philosophical "evil." Moreover, no ideological interpretation can bebased on his revelation: what principle, what party, what side,
what class comes out unscathed, that is, identical to itself, fromsuch a thorough critical conflagration? Suffering, horror, andtheir convergence on abjection seem to me more adequate as
marks of the apocalyptic vision constituted by Celine's scription.

A NARRATIVE? NO, A VISION
It is indeed a vision, to the extent that sight is massively summoned to play a part in it, broken up by the rhythmic soundof the voice. But it is a vision that resists any representation,
if the latter is a desire to coincide with the presumed identityof what is to be represented. The vision of the ab-ject is, bydefinition, the sign of an impossible ob-ject, a boundary anda limit. A fantasy, if you wish, but one that brings to the wellknown Freudian primal fantasies, his Urfantasien, a drive overload of hatred or death, which prevents images from crystalizing as images of desire and/or nightmare and causes themto break out into sensation (suffering) and denial (horror), into

SUFFERING AND HORROR

a blasting of sight and sound (fire, uproar). Apocalyptic vision
could thus be the shattering or the impossibility not only of
narrative but also of Urfantasien under the pressure of a drive
unleashed by a doubtless very "primal" narcissistic wound.
When Celine locates the ultimate of abjection—and thus thesupreme and sole interest of literature—in the birth-giving
scene, he makes amply clear which fantasy is involved: something horrible to see at the impossible doors of the invisible—themother's body. The scene of scenes is here not the so-called
primal scene but the one of giving birth, incest turned inside
out, flayed identity. Giving birth: the height of bloodshed andlife, scorching moment of hesitation (between inside and outside, ego and other, life and death), horror and beauty, sexuality
and the blunt negation of the sexual.
. . . and I've delivered babies, fascinated, I might say, by difficult
passages, visions of the narrows. . . those rare moments when naturelets you observe it in action, so subtle, the way it hesitates, then makes
up its mind . . . life's critical moment, as it were ... all our theaterand literature revolve around coitus, deadly repetition!. . . the orgasm
is boring, the giants of the pen and silver screen with all the ballyhoo
and the millions spent on advertising . . . have never succeeded in
putting it across . . . two three shakes of the ass, and there it is . . .
the sperm does its work much too quietly, too intimately, the wholething escapes us . . . but childbirth, that's worth looking at! . . .
examining! ... to the millimeter! (R, 195-196)
At the doors of the feminine, at the doors of abjection, as I
defined the term earlier, we are also, with Celine, given themost daring X-ray of the "drive foundations" of fascism. For
this indeed is the economy, one of horror and suffering in theirlibidinal surplus-value, which has been tapped, rationalized, andmade operative by Nazism and Fascism. Now neither theoretical reason nor frivolous art, stirred by epiphenomena of desire
and pleasure, has been able to touch that economy. Such desiring art could only offer a perverse negation of abjection,
which, deprived in other respects of its religious sublimation(especially considering the state of bankruptcy of religious codes
between the two wars, most particularly in Nazi and Fascist
circles), allowed itself to be seduced by the Fascist phenomenon.

155

I56 SUFFERING AND HORROR

Drieu La Rochelle provides us with the very epitome of sucha literature. Its solidary reverse is an art of the repressed, traditionally versified and patriotic, that of moral resistance, resolute and limited at the same time. But is any realist (or socialistrealist) literature up to the horrors of the Second World War?
Celine, for his part, speaks from the very seat of that horror,
he is implicated in it, he is inside of it. Through his scription
he causes it to exist and although he comes far short of clearing
it up, he throws over it the lacework of his text: a frail nettingthat is also a latticework, which, without protecting us fromanything whatsoever, imprints itself within us, implicating us
fully.

8

THOSE FEMALES WHO CANWRECK THE INFINITE
It would be hard to find a woman who is neither a bitch nor a ninny—
if so, she will be witch and fey.
Celine, Letter to Milton Hindus

THE TWO-FACED MOTHER
The mother takes up her place, so it goes once again, at thecentral location of the writer's feminine showroom. But here,
explicitly and in very significant fashion, she is split in two.
Ideal, artistically inclined, dedicated to beauty, she is, on the
one hand, the focus of the artist's gaze who admits he has taken
her as a model.
I am the son of a woman who repaired ancient lace. It so happens that
I have a collection of it, quite rare, the only thing that I have left, andI am one of the rare men who can tell cambric from Valenciennes,
Valenciennes from Bruges, and Bruges from Alen^on. I can tell finequality very well. Very very well. I don't have to be trained. I know.
And likewise I recognize the beauty of women and also that of animals.
Very well. I am an expert in this.1
Or, in more allusive fashion, but still linking writing, women,
and lace:
I am not an artist but I have a good memory for flowers . . . Janine. . . Marie-Louise ...[•••] what's written plain, that isn't much, it'stransparency that counts ... the lace-work of Time as they say
2

And yet, neither mother nor grandmother, as Celine's novels

I58

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

conjure them up, are characters whose splendor is without shadows. Writing, for instance, originates in the grandmother—"she taught me to read a little," "she herself wasn't very goodat it," and even, "I can't say she was tender or affectionate, but
she didn't talk much, and that was really great" (D, 63). Thelove that he bears her is an awkward, modest love, tinged witha chaste and guilt-laden reserve, contrasting with the excess andhorror characteristic of Celinian feeling. Moreover, it is at the
moment of death that, embarrassed by his childlike clumsiness,he dares to manifest his love.
We felt kind of ashamed . . . kind of guilty . . . We didn't dare to
move . . . for fear of spoiling his grief . . . Mama and all of us criedwith our heads on the table . . . (D, 100)
The other maternal image is tied to suffering, illness, sacrifice,and a downfall that Celine, so it seems, readily exaggerated.
This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who neverstops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject.
As long as it was lousy work, as long as there was plenty of sweat
and heartache, she was satisfied . . . That was her nature ...[...]She was really attached to her horrible fate . . . (D, 295)
We had already encountered that in the Journey:
It was as if she was afraid of this cause for sadness; it was full ofsinister things which she did not understand. She believed really that
small fry like herself were meant to suffer all the time, that that was
their role on earth, ... (J, 93)
It is a wretched representation, degraded even by the relentlessness with which her limping leg was emphasized, "It was
my mother's legs, the skinny one and the fat one" (D, 54), andby the exceeding poverty Celine would have us believe prevailed in Passage Choiseul. To what end is castration embodied
in the mother? Is it the representation of an abiding blame, theappeasement of a precocious narcissistic wound? Or a way of
expressing a love that only the weak can receive without those
who utter it being threatened?
The theme of the two-faced mother is perhaps the representation of the baleful power of women to bestow mortal life.

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

159

As Celine put it, the mother gives us life but without infinity:
She did all she could to keep me alive, I just shouldn't have been born.
(D, 55). . . those females can wreck the infinite . . . (D, 46)
I have already mentioned that birth-giving is, for Celine, theprivileged object of scription. In its miscarriage, too, in abortion, the writer discovers, quite naturally, the basic fate andabominable tragedy of the other sex. He evokes this insuperable
drama in the Journey when sexual pleasure is drowned in a poolof blood during a confrontation between the sensual daughterand her jealous, deadly mother (J, 259ft).
LIFE? A DEATH
Let me recall that Celine devoted his doctoral dissertation (1924)
on Ignaz Semmelweis to the infection that develops duringchildbirth—puerperal fever. Very much unlike what one would
expect in a medical treatise, quite novelistic, this work can be
deciphered as Celine's identification with the Hungarian doctor
practicing in Vienna. A foreigner, a solitary, on the fringe ofthe profession, insane in the end, persecuted by everyone, theinventor of obstetric hygiene had what it takes to fascinate not
only those suffering from obsessions but, more deeply, those
who fear decay and death at the touch of the feminine. He
advocated that a doctor wash his hands after having been incontact with corpses in order not to contaminate the womenwhose deliveries he might be attending to—and this during the
Napoleonic era, before the discovery of microbes. Semmelweis
noted, in fact, that puerperal fever is the result of the female
genitalia being contaminated by a corpse; here then is a feverwhere what bears life passes over to the side of the dead body.
Distracting moment when opposites (life/death, feminine/masculine) join in order to constitute what is probably more thana defense fantasy against the persecuting power of the mother:a panic hallucination of the inside's destruction, of an interiorization of death following the abolishment of limits and dif-l60

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

ferences. The remedy?—Once more it involves separating, nottouching, dividing, washing. The third party, the doctor, must
be an agent not of communication but of isolation, thus providing the lay counterpart to religious abominations, excisions,and purifications. It is an impossible role: prey to violent hallucinations, Semmelweis rushes to a corpse, cuts, cuts himself,and becomes infected. Like a woman giving birth? The agent
turning victim? The doctor failing to escape the fate of the sickmother, pledged to death? Celine follows step by step the painful experience of the doctor poet who was, too, the author ofa dissertation written in quite literary style ("The life ofplants"—"twelve pages of poetry"); he comments, as if he were
not referring to the Viennese doctor but to himself, the novelist
to be, "the world and dance were leading him to femininity."This dissertation is in fact a journey to the dark portals of life,
where the woman in childbed succumbs to infection, life todeath, women's fever to the delirious hallucinations of man,reason to enigma. What attracts Celine, of all the old enigmas
of science, is the one lying at the way out or the way in for
woman, confusing inside and outside, life and death, feminineand masculine—and that is certainly more than a metaphor. His
dissertation is a preparation for the Journey to the End of the Night
in that it discusses in nearly explicit fashion, although within
the constraint of "scientific" repression, the enigma constituted,
for reason, by the feminine. It will have been necessary, so it
seems, for Celine's reason to come up against that obstruction
to make it possible, beyond the foulness of abjection, for his
two unyielding protagonists to appear—death and words.
The Celinian universe remains dichotomous; without a third
party, or because of the latter's failure, two terms rise up, facing
each other, Woman and Lover, Sex and Corpse, Woman inchildbed and Doctor, Death and Words, Hell and the Writer,
the Impossible and Style.
Beyond those few colorful embellishments, there were on the pathof infection only death and words . . .3
• • • hell begins at the doors of our Reason.4

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

One does not explain everything with facts, ideas, and words. Thereis, in addition, everything we do not know and shall never know.5
As for the writer, his task is to be more than a doctor—heis to be not only the one who separates, a father, as it were,
but also the one who touches, the son and the lover, even taking
the place of the feminine. The One and the Other and by thatvery token neither the One nor the Other, a person Removed.
This is a very particular solution to the Oedipal situation; thesubject does not become normalized through triangulation of
the neurosis; he does not appear in the dual fear of narcissistic
relationship in the absence of a third party; he covers the threepositions at the same time—trinity, three dots, from one identity the other, no identity, rhythm, rotation, rigadoon.
Giving life—snatching life away: the Celinian mother is
Janus-faced, she married beauty and death. She is a conditionof writing, for life given without infinity aspires to find its
supplement of lacework within words; she is also the black
power who points to the ephemeral nature of sublimation andthe unrelenting end of life, the death of man. The paranoid
woman, another Celinian character, is perhaps a projection of
the danger of death prompted within the speaking being by his
perception of that part of himself he fantasies as maternal andfeminine. Let me point out that the double aspect of the motherin Celine's writing defines it as scription of death on the one
hand, and as revenge on the other. It is a being pledged to death
who narrates stories to the Lady, but by the same token herehabilitates his mother. For everyday reasoning, things seemreversed; but in Celine's text, it is she who wants him dead,he who causes her to live.
A beautiful shroud embroidered with tales—that's what the Pale Ladywants. (D, 41)
My teeth are gone! but I remember a few ditties . . . mother! A tiny
second all life long ... a lustful woman mother wasn't ... it passed
her by . . . like myself, her son . . . what a sacrifice! [. . .] Oh but
I'll write, I will, full of hatred as I am, I'll avenge everyone, ass riven
to my seat, their historical names engraved in gold ... in the Sainte

l6l

162

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

Chapelle! . . . the writer's power is so weak! weak poet, weaker thananything! Look out, all you bulky Herculeses wearing togae! I'll seethat your names are written in gold! (F, 301)
COURTLINESS AFFRONTED
There is courtly code in the amorous code of Celine. Explicit
at times, it is above all constantly present in the backgroundas modesty and lyricism. Without it abjection could not exist,
could not be spoken as our other, as the nocturnal reverse of
the magnificent legend. The enchantments of the Celinian ballets ("without music, without anybody, without anything" as
the subtitle [to Feerie pour une autre fois] makes clear) are an
ineffectual attempt at staging an archaizing idealization where
the feminine ideal persists, no matter what the personality of
the female characters, in the sublime body of the ballerina. But
one remembers, more abruptly yet, those pages in Death on the
Instalment Plan where Ferdinand confesses to Gustin Sabayot his
intention of writing a thoroughly chivalrous legend about theadventures of Gwendor the Magnificent. Immediately afterward he relates that enchanted knightly romance to a perverted
minor, Mireille, before she becomes the object of his hardly
courtly pornographic and sadistic desires. (D, I36ff). This episodic character and the isolated sequence set apart from thethread of a narrative without continuity are nevertheless symptomatic. The conjunction of opposites (courtliness-sadism) isagain encountered in all of Celine's feminine characters. To
varying degrees, such ambivalence seems to show that genital
fear can be kept within bounds by idealization as well as by theunleashing of partial drives (sado-masochistic, voyeurist-exhibitionist, oral-anal).
Molly, the most sublime, does not escape such a pattern.
Doubtless a prostitute, dispensing her charms in a "clandestine
whorehouse," she nevertheless has none of the destitution thatis the lot of Joyce's Molly Bloom—one without illusions andcommonplace to the point of sickly obscenity. To the contrary,
Celine's Molly benefits from angelic idealization; the modesty
and lyricism of his writing endow her with the enchanted ex-

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

istence of the great white-draped priestesses of ancient Phallic
myths. Could the devalorization of sex, dissociated, parcelized,
marginalized, and in the final analysis degraded, as we saw itin the theme of suffering-horror, be the condition for a phallic
idealization of Woman? There is at any rate in Celine a precise
place where abjection vanishes and becomes veneration:
Good, admirable Molly, I should like her, if she ever reads these lines
of mine, to know for certain that I have not changed towards her,that I love her still and always shall, in my own way; that she cancome to me here, whenever she may care to, and share my bread andmy furtive destiny. If she is no longer beautiful, ah, well, no matter!
The more's the pity, we'll manage somehow, I've kept so much ofher beauty with me still, so warm, so much alive, that I've enoughfor both of us, and it will last another twenty years, long enough to
see us through. (J, 235)
Elisabeth Craig, to whom the Journey is dedicated, seems to be
the main referent for that confession touched with emotion;
Celine wrote Milton Hindus about her:
What a genius that woman had! I never would have amounted toanything without her. What a mind! what subtlety . . . What pantheism, at the same time painful and mischievous.6
MY CHILD, MY SISTER
The aura of amorous idealization seems to appear as soon as
one can ward off the fear aroused by the sexual desire thatwomen are assumed to have for a man. This perhaps explains
why those the writer allows himself to win over, or even to
love, are either lesbians or women playing the role of a sister.
Molly is probably the most dazzling representation of a sisterly
friendship-love. A variant of it, more openly incestuous orperverse, is provided by Virginia in "London Bridge." But
Guignol's Band already gave us an angelic foretaste of it, to arhythm of dancing harlequins:
Pert brisk little girl with golden muscles! . . . Keener health! . . .
whimsical leap from one end of our troubles to the other! At the very
beginning of the world the fairies must have been young enough tohave ordained only extravagance . . . The world at the time was all

163

164

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

whimsical marvel and peopled with children, all games and trifles andwhirls and gewgaws! A spray of giggles! . . . Happy dances! . . .
carried off in the ring! (G, 33)
A carnivalesque counterpart to Lewis Carroll's Alice, Virginia is the child who enables one to imagine angels in thefeminine. This has the phantasmatic advantage of deferring theabject encounter with feminine sex, for in the body of a childdancer thus presented to one's gaze, touch, hearing, and scent,the sexual component being everywhere is actually nowhere.
I'd like to talk to her about quicksilver again ...[...] She can't stay
put . . . she leaps, pirouettes like an imp ... in the room all aroundme . . . What beautiful hair! . . . what gold! . . . what a filly! . . .
[. . .] She speaks to me . . . it's bird-language ... I don't understandeverything ...[...] I wouldn't have eaten! ... I would have dieda dainty person! . . . preferring it all for Virginia's sake! ... (P, 36)
Even more significant is this paradisiacal vision in the midstof a world of vagrants and orgies, of drunken revels anddemons:... I touch, I brush against the fingers of my pixie! of the adoredmarvel . . . Virginia! ... I no longer dare, everywhere about us... a thousand flakes of fire are flying . . . flitting . . . graceful firestreamers all over the trees! . . . from one branch to the next . . .
Joyful sparkling daisies, corollas showing . . . blazing camellias . . .
scorching wistaria ... to be tossed to the skies! . . . among the blastsof music . . . the fairies' chorus . . . the tremendous humming of their
voices . . . the secret of the smiles' charm . . . That's the way of thefeast of fire in Paradise! (P, m)That mischievous child evocation is also a link between Ferdinand and the girl's uncle, a character both feared and cheatedby the narrator; one can thus locate within denied homosexuality the giddying reality of the relation to the girl whereFerdinand, from one identity to another, from one sex to theother, ends up losing his mind.
I'm a bit dizzy ... I am again in front of her, shaking all over . . .
Ah, what a fright! . . . what a thrill . . . (P, 138)• • • before childplay is swallowed up in a loving embrace, in the rain

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

165... I cover her 'with caresses, I lick her like a dog ... I lap her up... I suck the water from the tip of her nose ...[...] from time
to time there's an awful taste! A behavior worthy of a lout! Hooligan's
jumble, obscenity! . . . debauchery! I would've layed my Virginia!
(P, 163)
The pixie's loving brother is on the verge of becoming anincestuous father; all that holds him back is the fear of others
and the circumstances, always somewhat persecutive.
One will note the twisted aspect of incest: the sister becomes
her brother's daughter, and that allows the man, in this context,
to be a brother or father but to keep his mother untouched andto continue his war with the other man, the real brother of theobject of his desire. Finally, pregnant Virginia obviously proffers the very image of the undecidable situation within such acarnivalesque world. A feeling of compassion and a desire toescape henceforth accompany, for the narrator, a paternity thatis as magical as it is grotesque. "I am in the cage of her happiness" (P, 367) contrasts with "I was fed up with my destiny!
[. . .] Stolen destiny! Another name for God" (P, 290). And
now it turns out that the "satyr for little girls" behaves like ahero. "My pregnant daughter, my angel! my cherub! my life!
Oh I wouldn't want them to touch her! ... I would kill them
all! shit!" (P, 466). Next he surrenders to another character,female this time, a Delphine out of the London slums. She takes
up the end of the novel, conjuring up Lady Macbeth and murder, while all the participants in the carnival sail off on an
indefinite journey, in a book that abruptly comes to an end at
London Bridge with the confession of the brother-father's buffoonery: "I'm the buffoon at present! A whole way of life! Me
that's got care and circumspection!" (P, 490). Carnival covers
up incest. From one identity to an other, unfinished like thenovel itself, abjection is resorbed in the grotesque: a way ofliving it from the inside.
THE PHALLUS* VOYEUR
Idealization of the child's form is in fact only one aspect of
Celine's pagan enthusiasm for femininity separated from rea-

166

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

son, language, and the symbolicity that, in his eyes, alters,socializes, and sexualizes it. If he is fond of women on occasion,
he is so as sensualist-voyeur of a pure form, a beauty that lets
itself be conquered only by the gaze, one made up of lines,
muscles, rhythm, and health. A ballerina is the most perfect
example of it, preferably a foreigner—the opposite of themother language, without language if need be, all sensitivity
and acrobatics.
And a pagan on account of my absolute adoration of physical beauty,of health—I hate sickness, penance, morbidity—[. . .] madly in love—
I say, in love—with a four-year-old girl at the height of gracefulness
and blond beauty and health—[. . .] America! the feline nature of its
women! [. . .] I would give all of Baudelaire for an Olympic swimmer!
There's not a penny's worth of the rapist in me—but I am a voyeurto the death!7
And again:
I have always liked women to be beautiful and lesbian—very pleasing
to look at, I wouldn't get tired out by their sexual summonses!
[. . .] me, a voyeur—that suits me! [. . .] and an enthusiastic consumer, just a bit but very quiet.8
American dancers, who find their clearest phantasmatic
expression in the comedy L'Eglise, best embody that absolute
phallus of unaltered beauty: a feminine body in the purest stateof nature, free from any other (man or language). L'Eglise isa play with neither stylistic nor dramatic value, but it is interesting in that it stages the Celinian fantasy of feminine nature,
which is here the object of a strong endorsement and contrasts
with the extreme poverty of blacks and the bureaucracy of theJews. "Long live American women who despise me"—suchis the basic message of that feminine worship, which is lesssuggestive of satyrism than of morbid relish.
There remains for the playwright confronted with the enchantment of dance the jouissance of being the waste cut off
the phallus. Janine performs that transposition of parts thatallows Bardamu to be more than passive, threatened with death:
she shoots at him with a revolver while the splendid Elizabeth
is dancing.

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

167

It is not reason but phallic instinct that writes the law; Woman
is its representative in a life where henceforth, in spite of enchantment, murder dominates. The end of religion is no doubt
worship of Woman, and also penal colony. "Life, kiddo, is nota religion, Janine [. . .]: it's a penal colony! Mustn't try to deck
the walls like a church."9CARNIVAL—IN HYSTERICAL FASHION, SOCIETY—IN
PARANOID FASHION
After it has forsaken the veil of childhood and femininity without other (sex), beauty is no longer pleasing in Celine's eyes.
An unbridled woman then arises, eager for sex and power,
nevertheless a grotesque and sorry victim in her raw violence
that extends from drunken revels to murder. As early as the
Journey, Celine displayed her colors by means of a seemingly
harmless series of women who turned into farce the tragedy
experienced by soldiers in the war. One remembers Lola andher apple fritters, Musyne and her violin, tough and bloodthirsty nurses—"War goes straight to their ovaries ..." (J, 87).
But it is especially with prostitutes and nymphomaniacs, who
are nevertheless tackled with fascination if not with a certain
amount of sympathy, that we are presented with a wild, obscene, and threatening femininity. Their abject power is none
the less kept in the background owing to a shift in the narrator'svision, which simultaneously gives of that power an image ofdownfall, abject poverty, and senseless masochism. One willrecall Sosthene's wife, in "London Bridge," nymphomaniac
and battered. Even though demoniacal, such femininity is nonetheless in the position of a fallen demon who finds being onlywith reference to man:
War! war! always war! There was nothing except bang bang bang that
could awaken them just a bit . . . It had to keep going, the wholeshebang, shaking heaven and earth . . . so as to open up their peepers
again ... a whore without men is a flabby thing. (P, 428)
The pinnacle of this compound of abomination and fascination, sex and murder, attractiori and repulsion, is probably

168

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

Gioconda, the prostitute in Guignol's Band, who makes gooduse of her name by defiling it in her hysterical spells, with the
bleeding sore of her loving body reduced to a wound in theass.
Ah, it's a big challenge! . . . And stamps her heel! . . . she's a fury!
. . . it's a dance! ... a trance! . . . her fingers all nerves! . . . her
hands quivering all over! crackling, spluttering! . . . small . . . small. . . tiny . . . still smaller . . . [ . . . ] The devil's tail! ... the tail's
caught! . . . trr! . . . rebounds! (G, 82-83)
She trips! . . . Tumbles! sprawls! It's Gioconda! in a package! ... inher cotton . . . bandages! . . . she gets up, she screams, she's awful!
. . . starts blaming right away! . . . there it goes . . . she hoists herself
up, clings to the bar! ... A fury! She's choking with effort. . . she's
suffocating . . . she ran through the whole neighborhood . . . looking
for us! (G, 114)
She was pulling at her dressings, she was chucking them all around,
all over the floor, cotton, bandages, shreds . . . Boy, what laughingin the joint! (G, 115)
A dark, abominable, and degraded power when she keeps
to using and trading her sex, woman can be far more effective
and dangerous when socialized as wife, mother, or career
woman. The unbridling is then changed into crafty reckoning,hysterical spells turn to murderous plots, extreme masochistic
poverty becomes a commercial triumph. While hysterical
woman is merely a carnival puppet, under a law she perversely
attempts to get around, the paranoid woman becomes successful
by making of herself the expression of a murderous sociality.
The whole procession of wives, or, better still, of more or lessoverbearing widows, controlling the circulation of wealth, children, and loves, in the Journey or in Death on the Instalment Plan,
contributes to such a view of the feminine. And yet we findin the two Henrouilles, the daughter-in-law murdering her
mother-in-law (through an intercessory man, of course) andthe mother-in-law profiteering until the end of her unscathedlife, the best embodiment, in the Journey, of calculated abjection;
they represent the feminine that saves, hoards, foresees, settles

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

169

down wretchedly, living from hand to mouth, but doing it all
through extreme measures of hatred and murder. One would
have to rate the two Henrouille women close to Lady Macbeth—who, under the apparent narcissistic essence of the feminine, bares death drive. They are derisive and ghoulish representations of a feminine paranoia that is the more unbridled,
the more coldly calculated, as they have given up on all sexual
satisfactions.
Gioconda and Henrouille, in brief, are shown as the two
facets of an otherness that cannot be sublimated—the sexualand the repressed, the marginal and the social. They are theprototypes of an abject femininity that, for Celine, is capableof neither music nor beauty; instead, mistress and victim, it
breaks out into the world of instincts where, as a naturally
successful paranoid, it craftily rules the social institutions (fromfamilies to small businesses) where puppet-men, shabby men
are living.
The capable woman, the intellectual, does not escape being
grotesque either. If she does not share in the sordid craftinessof an Henrouille or an Henrode, she is fated to prove the absurdity of reason (a masculine element) when it is sheltered ina body that is feminine to boot. Such is the woman inventor,
the railroad company accountant; an unusual person who "decomposed water from the Seine with a diaper pin" (D, 423),
but in fact she thought only of getting married—and got fleecedby fancied suitors. There is thus only decay in this fallen, heartrending, murderous, dominating, and derisive femininity.
Women, you know, they wane by candle-light, they spoil, melt,
twist, and ooze! [. . .] The end of tapers is a horrible sight, the endof ladies, too, . . . (F, 16)
And there you have the muse just as she is after two thousand
years of art and religion. A muse in the true tradition of thelowly genres—apocalyptic, Menippean, and carnivalesque. The
pitiful power of the feminine, however, be it drive or murder,
is in fact unleashed only with the help of masculine degradation
or bankruptcy—a bankruptcy of the father and manly authority. Does that mean that this is the feminine from which scrip-

170

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

tion withdraws? Or, if you wish, is it from this feminine, defined as the other of sublimatory area, that scription, in a more
ambiguous fashion, draws its inspiration?
A CARTOON-LIKE FATHER
Auguste, the father, emerges out of a conjuring up of the primal
scene at the beginning of Death on the Instalment Plan, and all
through the novel he stands out as both the opposite and theother self of the writer.
Later they closed the door . . . the door to their bedroom ... I sleptin the dining room. The missionaries' hymn came in over the walls. . . And in the whole rue Babylone there was only a walking horse. . . clop clop . . . that late cab . . . (D, 54)
Family quarrels, the most intimate and doubtless essential
elements in Celinian family life, reveal a petty clerk embitteredby unfulfilled dreams of becoming a merchant marine captain;
an artist on occasion, he draws, but he also tells stories in amanner both fierce and harping. When mother and son argue
over the father's values, the polarity of this tragicomic figureof a clown is clearly stated: "He was an artist at heart," and"There was no lousier bastard in the whole universe" (D, 46,
47). Overwhelmed with fear ("He was building up to the next
outburst, the Deluge that wouldn't be long in coming," D,
64-65), obsessed with the passing of time ("He was always ina temper anyway, because the time wouldn't pass," D, 62-63)
and with cleanliness (see D, 75-76), Auguste actually possesses
Clemence by beating her up (D, 67), demonstrates his manhoodby shooting off his revolver (D, 77), and cannot help imagining
persecutions and plots directed at himself in his mother-in-law's
talk (D, 79). While none of all that is basically alien to Ferdinand,
what brings them closest together is probably the art of storytelling. Auguste can describe the enchantment of the World's
Fair (D, 82), but he also keeps them breathless when telling
about the journey to England (D, 129-130).
My father had style, elegance came natural to him. (D, 54)

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

But also:
My father distrusted his imagination. He talked to himself in corners.
He was afraid of being carried away . . . He must have been steaming
inside . . . (D, 59)
In the context of this ambivalent portrait, which definitely
leans toward caricature, it is quite significant that Celine would
ascribe to Auguste anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic feelings while
seeming to repudiate them (if only through the Oedipal context
of Death on the Instalment Plan) and accept responsibility forthem later on.
. . . he'd be stringing the beans . . . why wouldn't we turn on thegas and all commit suicide? . . . My mother just sat there ... Heblamed it all on the Freemasons . . . and Dreyfus! . . . and all theother criminals who were out to get us. (D, 101-102)
He was being persecuted by a whole carnival of demons ... He really
revved it up . . . He dragged everybody into it. . . Jews . . . schemers. . . social climbers . . . And most of all the Freemasons . . . (D, 152)
Auguste-Laius reaches the utmost in degeneracy during his
scrap with Ferdinand, the violent andjerky description of whichis almost explicitly sexual:
He starts trembling again, his whole carcass is quaking, he's besidehimself. . . He clenches his fists. . . His stool is creaking and dancing. . . He's winding up, he's going to lunge ... He comes back blowing
up my nose . . . more insults . . . more and more of them ... I feelthings coming up in me too . . . And the heat besides [. . .] I lift up
the big heavy machine ... I lift it way up. And wham! ... I giveit to him full in the face! . . . [ . . . ] I stumble, I charge with it . . .
I can't contain myself anymore . . . That does it, I've got to finish thestinking bastard! (D, 316)
Is not this tale of the father's murder what Ferdinand is daydreaming about as he lifts his eyes to the ceiling and attempts
to find his way through a very personal narrative?
I see Thibaud the Minstrel . . . He's always in need of money. He's
going to kill Joad's father . . . Well, at least that will be one father

171

172

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

less in the world ... I see splendid tournaments on the ceiling . . .
I see lancers impaling each other . . . (D, 44)
If the murder of the father provides a key to enchantment,
it is accompanied not only by guilt but also by a tremendous
sense of panic before a woman thus freed of any curb, hold,or master. One of the sources of Celinian abjection no doubt
lies in the bankruptcy of the fathers. They represent a seemingof power barely sufficient for the frightened son who is writing
to rise up against a universe forsaken by infinity, which only
thus appears true to him. The writer-son does not spare Auguste, including even his illness—attacks, nightmares, exhaustion, delirious states, cold towels wrapped around his head; thereader knows that Ferdinand, too, is going through the samehell. The father, moreover, is from the beginning a mixture ofchildishness and ridiculous manhood:. . . with a chubby round nose like a baby's over an enormous mustache. He rolled his eyes ferociously when he was angry. He neverremembered anything but vexations. (D, 53)
The ideal figure is nevertheless not completely absent; it is
the uncle—the maternal one, of course; it is Edouard, the devil's
own Luck, the hope of righteous families. But the positive
glimmer that filters in, ironical as it may be, among men thatare mere marionettes, is not without danger. There we have
Courtial des Pereires, who solidly embodies manhood, paternity, and science combined; identifying the paternal with therational, he leads them together to the pinnacle of grotesqueness, to the heart of catastrophe. A universalist, familialist,
collectivist, and rationalist, Des Pereires, as his name suggests,
speaks to the "Anguished Fathers of France" and establishes the"Renovated Familistery for the Creation of a New Race" (D,989). He is, of course, a disciple of Auguste Comte in whose
wake he founds "The Friends of Pure Reason"; for fairgound
carnivals he substitutes the "Agricultural Revolution"; he even
includes astronomy in his "Explanations for Families"; he is aninventor, to be sure, and head of a Genitron, a genetic research
institute, as it were, before anything of the sort existed; he isa Utopian on occasion, having devised his Polyvalent Cottage,

FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE

173

a house that is flexible, expanding, adapted to any size family;
with all this, Des Pereires clearly represents the modernistic,socializing, and rationalistic excesses of social conformism,
which, in the final analysis, is always familial. In less sociologicalfashion, he embodies the castration of modern man, of thetechnocratic father, universal dummy and ultimate token of aworld lacking in jouissance and able to find being only in abjection. In this sense, Des Pereires and Gioconda, like the Henrouille women, are perhaps the privileged representations ofcontemporary post-Catholic destiny for mankind bereft ofmeaning. Representations of the paternal and the maternal, of
the masculine and the feminine, in a society on the thresholdof fascist totalitarianism.

9"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"
Enthusiasm involves a lot of mad raving—Alas! Freud certainly raved
a great deal—but our ravings now seem to involve solely political
fanaticism—that's even more ridiculous—I know. I was caught up
in it.
Celine, Letter to Milton Hindus

LOGICAL OSCILLATIONS: AN ANARCHISM
Doubtless contradictory, hotheaded, "raving" if you wish,
Celine's pamphlets (Mea Culpa, 1936, Bagatelles pour un massacre,
1937, L'Ecole des cadavres, 1938, Les Beaux Draps, 1941), in spiteof their stereotyped themes, carry on the wild beauty of his
style. Isolating them from the whole of his writings constitutes
a defense or a claim on the part of the political left or right; it
is at any rate an ideological stance, not an analytic or literary
position.
The pamphlets provide the phantasmatic substratum on
which, in another connection and another place, the novelistic
works were built. Thus, very "honestly," the person who signs
novels and pamphlets with his grandmother's first name,
Celine, remembers his father's name, the one on his birth certificate, Louis Destouches, in order to acknowledge the thoroughly existential, biographical paternity of the pamphlets.
Where my identity is concerned, "I" have no other truth to tellsave my delirium: my paroxysmal desire under its social guise.
Where that other who writes and is not my familial ego isconcerned, "I" go beyond, "I" shift, "I" am no longer, for theend of the night is without subject, rigadoon, music, or enchantment. Destouche and Celine: biography and thanatogra-

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"

I75

phy, delirium and scription—the distinction surely exists, but
it is never complete; like Janus who avoids the trap of an impossible identity, the texts, novels or pamphlets, also display
two faces.
Celine can thus at the same time attack the collapse of ideals andthe reduction of the masses to the satisfaction of their basest needs while
extolling those who foster such a situation, beginning with Hitler.
For instance, he writes in Les Beaux Draps:
The masses have no ideals, all they have is needs. And what are thoseneeds? [. . .] It's a platform with nothing but material things, a swell
feed, and a gold brick. They're an embryonic bourgeoisie that hasn't
yet negotiated its contract.1
Or else:The downtrodden of the earth on the one side, the bourgeois on theother, they have basically only one idea, to become rich or to stayrich, it's the same thing, the lining has the same value as the cloth,
the same currency, the same coin, no difference in their hearts. It's
all guts, incorporated. Everything for the belly. (BD, 89)
And in L'Ecole des cadavres:
Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. / Who has done themost for the working man? the USSR or Hitler? / Hitler has. / All
you have to do is look, keeping all that red shit away from your eyes.
/ Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but
Hitler!2
This does not prevent him from attacking Hitler violently—
though after the war, it is true:
Hitlerite clamors, that howling neo-Romanticism, that Wagneriansatanism, always seems to me obscene and unbearable—I am for Couperin, Rameau—Jaquin [. . .], Ronsard . . . Rabelais.3
Backing Hitler there was nothing, or almost nothing, I mean fromthe spiritual point of view, a horde of petty bourgeois, greedy swine
rushing in for the spoils.4(And that, as Celine saw it, is what made the Nazis unfit for
Nazism.)176 "OURS TO JEW OR DIE"
He can lash out at and inveigh against Freemasons, academics, andother secular elites, and at the same time attack no less violently, with
Nietzchean overtones, the Catholic church. Thus, on the one hand:France is Jewish and Masonic [. . .] It's the Hydra with a hundred andtwenty thousand heads! Siegfried can't get over it! (BD, 78)
The French Masonic Republic is no longer anything but a very disgusting electoral rip-off, a fantastic organization for gulling very naive
Frenchmen. (EC, 31)
The profligate Masonic Republic, so-called French, which is completely at the mercy of secret societies and Jewish banks (Rothschild,Lazare, Baruch, etc.), is feeling the pangs of agony. More gangrened
than one would think possible, it is rotting away scandal by scandal.
All that's left are puss-laden scraps from which, in spite of all, theJew and his Freemason dog tear away a few new goodies each day,cadaverous snatches; they stuff themselves, what a blow-out! thriveon them, gloat, exult, they go delirious on carrion. (EC, 31)
And on the other:
Having spread to the manly races, to the hated Aryan races, "Peterand Paul's" religion performed admirably; as early as the cradle it
reduced to beggars, to a lower form of man, the subjected people,
the hordes intoxicated by Christianic literature; it hurled them, bewildered and besotted, to the conquest of Christ's Sindon, the magic
hosts, forever forsaking their Gods, their exalting religions, the Godsof their blood, the Gods of their race. (BD, 81)
The most shameless gambling joint for corn-holed Christianese thekikes have ever laid hands on . . . [ . . .] Christianic religion? JudeoTalmudo-communism? A gang! The apostles? Jews. All of them!
Gangsters all! The first gang? The Church! The first racket? The firstpeople's commissariat? The Church! Peter? Al Capone of the Canticles! A Trotsky for Roman muzhiks! The Gospel? A code for racketeers . . . (EC, 270)
The Judeo-Christian connivance serves as prelude to the great JudeoMasonic rushing for the spoils . . . (EC, 272)
He can shoot down in flames communism and the "Middling Revolution," but he can do the same to Charles Maurras. Thus, forinstance, in Mea Culpa or in other texts:

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE" I 77
Communism without poets as it is practiced by Jews, scientists, rational reasoners, materialists, Marxists, bureaucrats, skunks, louts, at
the rate of six hundred kilos per sentence, is a very boring process of
prosaic tyranny, absolutely unable to take wings, an absolutely atrocious, Jewish satrapal imposture, unedible and inhuman, a very sickening forcing house for slaves, a hellish wager, a remedy worse thanthe disease. (EC, 133)
And at the same time on the other side:
But what is Maurras getting at? I don't understand a thing about thecunning, the dosulage, the high-sounding hare and hounderies of his
most Latin doctrine. (EC, 252)
And his style! His famous style! Sticky, stumbling, tendentious, fake,Jewish . . . (EC, 189)
And against the bourgeois:
As for the Bourgeois, he doesn't give a damn, what he wants is tokeep his lettuce, his "Royal Dutch" stock, his privileges, his situation,and the Lodge where he meets such fine people, the kind who havea pipe-line to the government. In short he is Jewish, seeing that the
Jews have got the gold . . . (BD, 70)
In similar fashion, he flies into a black rage against the schools,
which are reductive of animal spontaneity and are based on abstract,paternal reason, a reason that constrains and maims (A "hatcherof symbols,"5 the school, in Les Beaux Draps, is a "devourer"of the "mischievous liveliness" of children; by means of reason,
it inflicts false and fake values upon them, as opposed to spontaneous, innate, animal beauty), and he feverishly defends the truefamily, the solid dictatorship of the father ("I go by another Family
code, one that is much hardier, more ample, a lot more generous, not a code for shrivelled up argumentative preservers.
Of course not! Not at all! A real code, one that would include
everything, animals, goods and people, children and the aged,
all of France in the same family, Jews excluded of course, asingle family, a single dad, dictator and respected" BD, 172).
One has to admit that out of such logical oscillations there
emerge a few striking words of truth. Such words present uswith harsh X-rays of given areas of social and political experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the mo-178 "OURSTOJEWORDIE"
ment when reason attempts to globalize, unify, or totalize. Thenthe crushing anarchy or nihilism of discourse topples over and,as if it were the reverse of that negativism, an object appears—
an object of hatred and desire, of threat and aggressivity, of
envy and abomination.
That object, the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied. The function of the Jew
in the economy of Celinian discourse will perhaps be better
understood after I have called attention to at least two common
features that structure the fluctuations of the pamphlets.
AGAINST THE SYMBOLIC LAW: A SUBSTITUTE LAW
The first is rage against the Symbolic, which is represented here
by religious, para-religious, and moral establishments (Church,
Freemasonry, School, intellectual Elite, communist Ideology,etc.); it culminates in what Celine hallucinates and knows tobe their foundation and forebear—Jewish monotheism. When
one follows his associations of ideas, his anti-Semitism—virulent and stereotyped but impassioned—appears as the simple
outcome of a fully secular rage; anti-Semitism would be a diehard secularism sweeping away, along with its number one
enemy, religion, all its secondary representatives: abstraction,
reason, and adulterated power, considered emasculating.
The second is the attempt to substitute another Law for theconstraining and frustrating symbolic one, a law that would be
absolute, full, and reassuring. The wishes of Celine, as Fascist
ideologue, call for that law, seen as mystic positivity:
There is an idea that can lead nations. There is a law. It stems froman idea that rises toward absolute mysticism, that rises still without
fear or program. If it flows in the direction of politics, that is the endof it. It falls lower than mud and we with it [. . .] we need an idea,a harsh doctrine, a diamond-like doctrine, one even more awesome
than the others, we need it for France.6
Beyond politics, and yet taking it into account, material positiuity, a full, tangible, reassuring, and happy substance, will beembodied in the Family, the Nation, the Race, and the Body.
The novelist Celine has only too deeply explored the abomination that such entities are prey to. But the pamphleteer wants

"OURSTOJEWORDIE" 179
them; he fantasies them as capable of being full, without other,
without threat, without heterogeneity; he wants them harmoniously to absorb their differences into a kind of samenessthat would be obtained by means of a subtle drifting, a scansion,a punctuation that would relay but without interrupting—areplica of primary narcissism. Without Master, this universe
has rhythm; without Other, it is Dance and Music; without
God, it has style. Against the ternary economy of a Transcendence, Celine proclaims the immanence of substance and meaning, of the natural/racial/familial and the spiritual, of the feminine and the masculine, of life and death—a glorification of
the Phallus that does not speak its name but is communicatedto the senses as Rhythm.
One should again learn to dance. France remained happy up to therigadoon. One will never dance in the factories, nor will one ever singagain. If one no longer sings, one passes away, one no longer conceives
children, one locks oneself up in a movie theater just to forget that
one exists. (BD, 148)
Oh, what delightful impertinence! Caught in the whirlwind [. . .] For
heavens' sake! amid a thousand flippancies! cat-like, on their toes, byfits and starts! they're making fun of us! Ta! ta! ta! . . . [. . .] where
the melody has led us ... a summons in F!. . . everything evaporates!
. . . two trills again! ... an arabesque! ... an echappee! Good Lord,
here they are! . . . F . . . E . . . D . . . C . . . B! . . . Saucy girls ofheaven enchant us! Since we are to be damned anyway, what's thedifference! (BD, 221-222)
Celine's style shows that such a dual enchantment between
the "not yet one" and the "not quite another" can be written.
He convinces us that the jouissance of so-called primary narcissism's immanence can be sublimated in a signifier that has;been recast and desemanticized into music (see p. 188).
Furthermore, it is impossible not to hear the liberating truthof such a call to rhythm and joy, beyond the crippling constraints of a society ruled by monotheistic symbolism and its
political and legal repercussions.
And yet, both the enchantment of the style and libertarian
spontaneity bear within themselves their own limit; at the very
moment that they seek to escape the oppression of the thinking,i8o "OURSTOJEWORDIE"
ethical, or legislative Unity, they prove to be tied to the deadliestof fantasies. The negated and frightened desire for the One aswell as for the Other produces a symptom of destroying hatreddirected toward both.
At that point the image of the Jew will concentrate negatedlove become hatred for Mastery on the one hand, and on theother and jointly, desire for what mastery cuts out: weakness,
the joying substance, sex tinged with femininity and death.
Anti-Semitism, for which there thus exists an object as phantasmatic and ambivalent as the Jew, is a kind of parareligious
formation; it is the sociological thrill, flush with history, that
believers and nonbelievers alike seek in order to experienceabjection. One may suppose, consequently, that anti-Semitism
will be the more violent as the social and/or symbolic code isfound wanting in the face of developing abjection. That, at any
rate, is the situation in our contemporary world, and it is also,
for more personal reasons, that of Celine. Do not all attempts,
in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the JudeoChristian compound by means of a unilateral call to return towhat it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so
because, as I have tried to explain earlier (see pp. 9off.) thewritings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the mostdetermined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen
as symbolic fact—which constitutes abjection.
In this sense, Celine's pamphlets are the avowed delirium outof which the work emerges to venture into obscure regions at
the limits of identity. If delirium is indeed involved, and Celine
himself suggests that it is,7 that is also the nature of all antiSemitism, the daily banality of which surrounds us; Nazi excesses or Celinian outbursts, which are cathartic upon thewhole, give us a warning while we thirst for sleep andjouissance.
BROTHER ...
What fantasies can the Jew thus precipitate in Celine, in order
to be the exemplar of all hatred, of all desire, of all fear of the
Symbolic?

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"

All powerful at first, he stands as a hero. Not so much as
father than as preferred son, chosen, availing himself of paternal
power. Freud had noted that every hero is a patricide. Celine
does not go so far perhaps as to think of that kind of heroism,
although he implicitly takes it for granted when he deems that,beyond comparison, over all other sons, "the Jew is a man
more than anyone else" (BM, 270).8
Such a brother, superior and envied, is essentially active as
opposed to the "grotesque unconcern" of the Aryan (BM, 128).
Such a one is Yubelblat, in Bagatelles pour un massacre:
He's a top-notch go-getter . . . Not a minute of interruption . . . Hepromises . . . Promises . . . flatters while delineating . . . rousingardor or hatred . . . that tarry, weaken, become lost. . . He goes andbadgers them again! What a hustle . . . Looking out for squalls! Skimming through! . . . Skimming through [. . .] pirouettes, nimble
dodges, acrobatics . . . stealthy conferences, international mysteries
and legerdemain, the frail Yubelblat. (BM, 102)
And what is more, contrary to accepted stereotypes, Celine
depicts him as fearless, "The Jew, he's afraid of nothing..." (BD, 136) as long as he can reach his goal—power. "Healways has to be the pne who gives orders" (BD, 141).
It is by means of full anal mastery ("the future is his, he's
got the dough," BM, 327), which involves having the primordial
object, that the Jew makes certain of being, of being everything
and everywhere, totaling the world as a flawless unity under his
absolute control.
The Jews, you know, they're all camouflaged, disguised, chameleonlike, they change names like they cross frontiers, now they pass themselves off for Bretons, Auvergnats, Corsicans, now for Turandots,
Durandards, Cassoulets . . . anything at all . . . that throws people
off, that sounds deceptive. (BM, 127)
He's mimetic, he's a whore, he would have dissolved long ago, after
assimilating to others so much, if it weren't for his greed, his greed
saves him, he has worn out all races, all men, all animals, the earth
is now done with [. . •] He's still hassling the universe, heaven, God,
the Stars, he wants everything, he wants more, he wants the Moon,
he wants our bones, he wants our guts .as hair-curlers to celebrate the
Sabbath, to deck the Carnival. (BD, 142)
>

l8l

182

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"

Secretive, privy to mystery ("The Jew is mysterious, he hasalien ways ..." BD, 119), he holds elusive power. His ubiquity
is not limited to space, he is not only on our land and under
our skin, the very closest neighbor, the nearly same, the one
we do not differentiate, the dizziness of identity, "we don't knowwhat mugs they have, or could have, what manners they'vegot" (BM, 127); it also takes in the totality of time, he is heir,scion, enhanced by issue, by a kind of nobility that guarantees
him the opportunity to amass traditions as well as goods of thefamily and social group:
Any little Jew, at birth, finds in his cradle all the possibilities of a finecareer . . . (BM, 127)
Blessed by the father and by reliable families, he artfully
manipulates the networks of social reality, and he does it evenbetter if he can be accepted by the aristocracy.
And yet, this position of power has nothing in common withthe cold and majestic mastery proper to classic domination. In
the anti-Semitic fantasy, Jewish power does not arouse respect
as does paternal authority. Edged with fear, to the contrary,
it unleashes the excitement brought on by sibling rivalry; theAryan who engages in it is then swept into the fire of deniedhomosexual passion. Indeed, this chosen brother displays toomuch weakness (concerning him Celine calls to mind the small
size and features indicative of crossbreeding, when he does notrefer directly to the circumcised foreskin: "Lenin, Warburg,
Trotsky, Rothschild, they all think alike in this. Not a foreskinof difference, it's one hundred percent Marxism" BD, 103),'ambivalent lack—which can just as well cause surplus or evenjouissance—for one to be satisfied with obeying him or defying
him. Is it possible to give in to a being whose behavior signifies
he is an emanation of the Everything Everywhere, if he is so
obviously weak and sensual? His weakness will be held against
him—he will be considered a usurper, but very soon one will
admit that his jouissance is what grates. As if he were thatunique being, so different from the pagan, who draws his aura
out of his weakness, that is, not out of a full and glorious bodybut out of his subjectivation to the Other.

"OURSTOJEWORDIE" 183
It is indeed for an incomprehensible jouissance that Celine
upbraids that favored brother by means of a sadomasochistic ' .
language that is openly sexual, or homosexual: "Fifteen million
Jews will corn-hole five hundred million Aryans" (BM, 127).
"He just couldn't care less, he comes, he's old enough, he's
having fun" (BD, 31), is said about Roosevelt but in the context
it also applies to Jews. "The Jews, Afro-Asiatic hybrids, quadroons, half-negroes, and Near-Easterners, unbridled fornicators, have no reason to be in this country" (EC, 215); or thisletter signed "Jewish Salvador" and addressed to the "repulsive
Celine," where one reads, among other fantasies, "The kikes
stick it up your ass and if you want to be corn-holed just let
us know" (EC, 17). The anti-Semite who comes up against it
finds himself reduced to a feminine and masochistic position,
as a passive object and slave to this jouissance, aggressed,
sadisticized.
The fantasy of a Jewish threat, weighing against the Aryan
world ("we are in the midst of Jewish Fascism," BM, 180) in
a period when, to the contrary, persecutions against the Jews
are beginning, cannot be explained in any other way; it emanates
directly out of that vision of the Jew as a being of having, as
issuing from the All in which he joys, and especially from theimmediate sexualization of that jouissance.
They do you no personal wrong? . . .—They get my goat . . .
[. . .] they feel me out in order to corner me . . . they come to size
up the crap, at each turn of the page . . . each minute ... to see howmuch more I have softened, grown weaker . . . (BM, 319)
Please condescend, my darling monster! too discreet crucifier! too
seldom as I see it! I adore you! Grant all my wishes! You are keeping
me on tenterhooks! You can see that I am weeping! overcome withhappiness at the thought that I am at least going to suffer still a lot
more . . .(BM, 134)
There's always a little Jew there in the corner, crouching, mocking,thinking it over . . . watching the goy, who's seething . . . now
heartened he comes closer . . . Seeing the object so fully aflame . . .
runs his hand over that lovely cunt! . ._ . (BD, 124)

184 "OURSTOJEWORDIE"
Through the crescendo of the phantasmatic build up, the Jew
ends up becoming a despotic tyrant to whom the anti-Semite
submits his anal eroticism, explicitly with Celine, elsewhere in
more or less underhanded fashion. Celine describes himself, as
he faces this imaginary aggressor, as a "corn-holed figure,""the kikes shit in your kisser" (EC, 17); he often seems "thegood Aryan [. . .] always ready to make his Jew come" (BD,125).

And yet, if jouissance is something the Jew is supposed tohave knowledge of, he appears anxious not to spend (himself)
for it. He is master of jouissance, but not an artisan, not an
artist. That tyrannical brother thus places himself under thepurview of a law that is paternal, in the nature of the superego,
dominating drives, the opposite of natural, childish, animal,
and musical spontaneity. Anxious to commit himself to a bitof "direct humanity," the Jew "immediately becomes more andmore tyrannical" (BM, 194). A domineering person, he firstgains mastery over himself through cold reason, which deprives
him of any access to talent. The Jew is the prototype of theintellectual, the superintellectual, so to speak (the utmost in
intellectual frigidity is reached when the university man happens
to be Jewish, like Ben Montaigne, the professor in Les Beaux
Draps); he is incapable of art but he has invented "technix"(which ushers in the artificial world of "flies without pricks!
soft sphincters! falsies, all the filthy trickeries" {BM, 177)). If he
is a writer, he is like the bourgeois writer author of "patchedup borrowings, things seen through a windshield ... a bumper
or simply stolen from the depths of libraries . . ." (BM, 166).
Thus identified with Law, Mastery, Abstraction, and Home,he will drift from the position of desired and envied brotherto that of impregnable father against whom all the quite Oedipal
attacks of Celine's scription, claiming Emotion and Music as
the other of Law and Language, will unceasingly be directed.
At this far point of "delirium" the anti-Semite unveils his
denied but fierce belief in the Absolute of Jewish Religion as
religion of the Father and of the Law; the anti-Semite is its
possessed servant, its demon, its "dibbuk" as someone has said,9
who provides a contrario proof of monotheistic power of which

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"185

he becomes the symptom, the failure, the envier. Is that why
he expresses the traumatic topoi of that religion—like those of
abjection—which religion, to the contrary, elaborates, sublimates, or masters? All of which, without being its truth, atleast constitutes for the subject its unconscious impact?
... OR WIFE
A third step needs to be taken now as I construct anti-Semitic
discourse, which is frightened desire for the inheriting brother.
If he joys in being under the Law of the Other, if he submits
to the Other and draws out of it his mastery as well as hisjouissance, is not this dreaded Jew an object of the Father, apiece of waste, his wife as it were, an abjection? It is on accountof being such an unbearable conjoining of the One and the
Other, of Law and Jouissance, of the one who Is and the one
who Has that the Jew becomes threatening. So, in order to beprotected, anti-Semitic fantasy relegates that object to the placeof the ab-ject. The Jew: a conjunction of waste and object ofdesire, of corpse and life, fecality and pleasure, murderous aggressivity and the most neutralizing power—"What trow I? I
trow that it is 'ours to Jew or die!'" (BD, 57), instinctively then,and uncompromisingly! The Jew becomes the feminine exalted
to the point of mastery, the impaired master, the ambivalent,the border where exact limits between same and other, subject
and object, and even beyond these, between inside and outside,and disappearing—hence an Object of fear and fascination.
Abjection itself. He is abject: dirty, rotten. And I who identify
with him, who desire to share with him a brotherly, mortal
embrace in which I lose my own limits, I find myself reduced
to the same abjection, a fecalized, feminized, passivated rot:"the repulsive Celine."[. . .] dirty bastard, loafer [. . .] Flushed out by Moses he holds his
rank of big shit de luxe, pally with none but the other flushed-outs,
within the realm of Moses, of the Eternal! He is nothing but decay,
decaying. He has but one authentic thing deep in his shitty substance,
and that's his hatred for us, his scorn, the fury with which he wants
to have us crumble, deeper and deeper, into potter's field. (BD, 113)

186 "OURS TO JEW OR DIE"
The Aryan, lacking the symbolic power of the Jew, is no
more than "experimental flesh," a "flesh in the state of decay"(BM, 316). The French Republic is "gangrened," the Jews cantear from it only "purulent scraps," "goodies," and "cadaverous fragments" (EC, 30). We are now far removed fromLouis XIV or Louis XV, to whom Celine compared himself,
in an interview after the war, when he tried to account for,even to criticize, his anti-Semitism ("But to the extent that they
[theJews] constituted a sect, like the Templars, or the Jansenists,
I was as categorical as Louis XIV [. . .] and Louis XV when
he got rid of the Jesuits . . . So, there you have it: I mistook
myself for Louis XV or Louis XIV, that was obviously a serious
error").10. Unless such a megalomania, like Majesty itself, isthe final mask behind which is concealed the empty, dilapidated
castle of a foul, putrid, crisis-ridden identity.
The anti-Semite is not mistaken. Jewish monotheism is not
only the most rigorous application of Unicity of the Law and
the Symbolic; it is also the one that wears with the greatest
assurance, but like a lining, the mark of maternal, feminine, orpagan substance. If it removes itself with matchless vigor fromits fierce presence, it also integrates it without complacency.
And it is probably such a presence, other but still integrated,that endows the monotheistic subject with the strength of another-directed being. In short, when a scription on the limits ofidentity comes face to face with abjection, it enters into competition
with biblical abominations and even more so with prophetic discourse.
Celine alludes to biblical texts, mentions the prophets, vituperates against them. Nevertheless, his text follows their trajectory, jealously and yet differently. For he lacks the Law thatbelongs to prophetic stance; the abjection that he stages, contrary to that of the prophets, will not be relieved, not throughany Name; it will merely be inscribed in enchantment, not forsome other time, but here and now, in the text. If Celine, too,like the wandering people, undertakes a journey—the abjection
inherent in the speaking being having been duly noted—what
is involved for the novelist is a journey without project, withoutfaith, to the end of the night. And yet is it not obvious that for
Celine Scription and Style fully occupy the place left vacant by

' 'OURS TO JEW OR DIE " 187
the disappearance of God, Prophet, and Faith? It remains for
us to examine how such a scription, as Celine understands andpractices it, rather than replacing displaces and therefore modifies transcendence and also reshapes the subjectivity that stirs
within.

10

IN THE BEGINNING ANDWITHOUT END . . .
You know, in the Scriptures it says, "In the beginning was the word."
No! In the beginning was emotion. The Word came later, replacing
emotion like trot replaced gallop, while the natural law of the horse
is gallop; it is forced to break into trot. Man was removed fromemotional poetry and pushed into dialectics, in other words, splattering, isn't that so?
"Louis-Ferdinand Celine vous parle"

FROM CONTENT TO SOUND
If we let Celine's text ring, if we read his professions of faith
as a writer, we discover, toward the end of that night of narratives and historical contentions, Celine the stylist.
I am not a man of ideas. I am a man of style. Style, well, everyonestops before that, no one really reaches the thing. Because it's very
hard work. It involves taking sentences, as I was saying, and having
them fly off their handle . . -1
Toward the end or in the beginning? Undoubtedly a metaphysical question, it is one that worries Celine and precisely in
relation to his confrontation with language.
For his "work" is a struggle, if not full of hatred at least
fascinated and loving, with the mother tongue. With andagainst, further, through, beneath, or beyond? Celine seeks toloosen the language from itself, to divide it and shift it from
itself "but ever so slightly! ever so slightly! because in all that,
if you.are heavy-handed, you know, it's putting your foot in
it, it's a howler. "2 Such loving auscultation is imagined essen-IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END ...

tially as probing a hidden inside, a buried authenticity. For
Celine, that is where the unnamable truth of emotion lies; there,
too, is the void that he sometimes points to, in a less naturalor substantial fashion, and where the rhythm of a music or the
gestures of a dance are being woven. Let us first listen to him
worshiping the French language at the very moment when hetries to have it "fly off its handle":
Oh, how happy we shall be there together! thousands and thousandsof us over there! together and speaking French! Joy! Joy! Joy! how weshall embrace! my own depravity, I confess my only one: the French
way of speaking! If my executioner were to speak French to me, I
should forgive him almost everything . . . how I hate foreign languages! hard to believe that such gobbledygook exists! What humbug!
(F, 95)The French language is regal! What crappy gobbledygook surrounds
it! (F, 154)
I loathe English [. . .] In spite of everything France is doing to me I
cannot break away from the French language. It's got me. I can't freemyself of it.3
Such loving dedication leads the one who writes to an incursion the outcome of which he does not visualize as addition
or creation but quite simply as revelation; the point is to bring
the depths to the surface, carry emotional identity as far as
signifying appearances, raise neural and biological experience
up to social contract and communication.
To tell the truth I do not create anything—I clean up a sort of hidden
medal, a statue buried in loam—[. . .] Everything is already written
outside of man in the sky.4
The following definition of style should also be read as worship of the depths, as resurrection of the emotional, maternal
abyss, brought up flush with language: "In my emotional subway! I don't leave anything on the surface."5 Or in more naturalistic fashion:
Not simply to his ear! . . . no! . . . in the intimacy of his fibers! rightin his nervous system! in his own mind.-6

189

190

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

Carried to the extreme, this takes on aspects of reverse racism:
politics, speeches, bullshit! . . . only one truth! biology! ... in halfa century, maybe sooner, France will be yellow, black around theedges . . . (R, 107)
The dizziness Celine gives way to and binds himself to inorder to tap emotion from the inside is, as he sees it, the fundamental truth of scription. Such dizziness leads him to thefulfillment of a kind of challenge to abjection; it is only thusthat he can, by naming it, both have it exist and go beyond it.
"Vulgarity" and "sexuality" are merely stepping stones on theway to the ultimate unveiling of the signifier; at the limit, suchthemes scarcely matter:
Neither vulgarity nor sexuality have anything to do in this business—
They are nothing but stage properties.7
His project is toresensitize language, to have it throb more than reason—SUCH WAS
MY AIM . . .8
Even though that search for the emotional depths is describedin terms of a substantial plunge into the "very intimacy ofthings," Celine is the first to realize that melody alone reveals,
and even holds, such buried intimacy. The worship of emotion
thus slips into glorification of sound:That doesn't happen without imparting to thought a certain melodious, melodic twist, a subway track [. . .] a minor harmonic feat.9
I know the music from deep inside of things—I could if need be havealligators dance to the tune of Pan's pipe.10... so that once written [. . .] IT SEEMS to the reader that someoneis speaking to his ear.11
At the precise point where emotion turns into sound, on that
articulation between body and language, on the catastrophefold between the two, there looms up "my great rival, music":
I am the organs of the Universe . . . [ . . . ] I'm working up the operaof the deluge [. . .] The gate of hell in your ear is a little atom ofnothing. (D, 40)

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

iyf

In the final analysis, however, that slippage of emotion toward music and dance actually opens out on the void. Ultimately, at the end of the journey, there stands revealed thecomplete trajectory of the mutation of language into style under
the impulse of an unnameable otherness, which, passional to
begin with, then acquires rhythm before becoming empty:
I am comfortable only in the presence of the nothing-at-all, the void.12
WRITING HATRED
Before reaching such a hollowing out, and perhaps precisely
on purpose of getting there, emotion, in order to make itself
heard, adopts colloquial speech or, when it acknowledges its
hatred straightforwardly, slang.
Slang is a language of hatred that knocks the reader out very nicely. . . annihilates him! . . . completely in your power! . . . he just lies
there like an eightball!13
The vocabulary of slang, because of its strangeness, its very
violence, and especially because the reader does not always understand it, is of course a radical instrument of separation, of
rejection, and, at the limit, of hatred. Slang produces a semantic
fuzziness, if not interruption, within the utterances that it punctuates and rhythmicizes, but above all it draws near to thatemptiness of meaning at which Celine seems to aim.
The "spoken" outcome of emotion is more diversified; it isboth semantically and melodically more musical. I must emphasize that the colloquialism of Celine's prose does not only
express an ideological position, it is also a stylistic strategy. It
allows the signifier itself to hold the overflow of emotion that
Celine wishes to exhibit on the plane of language. Thus, when
he rebels against "ideas," it is in order to allow the appearance"of spoken language's emotion through writing";14 "emotion
can be tapped and transcribed only through spoken language";15"emotion is encountered in spoken language alone."16 Even if"in fact there are few flashes in spoken language." "I attempt
to tap them ...[...] lam cornering the market of the living
diamonds of spoken language."17

I9'2

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

.

Celine's plan to smuggle spoken language into writing thus
becomes the meeting place of a thematic, ideological commitment with an enunciation that attempts to downgrade the logical or grammatical dominant of written language. The strong
counterattack (producing what semioticians would call a "secondary modeling system") of what is, for him, an emotion andis marked in language by the abundance of prosodic and rhetorical operations, accomplishes that downgrading, that reversal.
Such an enunciation strategy obviously entails deep transformations in syntax. In Celinian language they are characterized by two basic devices: sentence segmentation (with preposing
or postponing), which is typical of the early novels; and syntactic
ellipsis, more or less recoverable, which appears in the later
novels. Thus Celine's music is composed through the work ofa syntactician; Celine the musician turns out to be a specialistin spoken language, a grammarian who reconciles melody andlogic admirably well.
SEGMENTATION: INTONATION, SYNTAX,SUBJECTIVITY
The particular, colloquial segmentation of the Celinian sentence
has been noticed and commented upon by Leo Spitzer.18 Whatis involved is cutting up the syntactic unit and displacing oneof its constituents, postponing and preposing it. As a consequence, the normally descending modulation of the sentence
melody is transformed into an intonation having two centers.
There are countless examples of this in the early novels of
Celine, particularly in the Journey.
I had suddenly discovered, all at once, what the war was, the wholewar. I'd lost my innocence. You need to be pretty well alone withit, face to face, as 1 was then, to see it properly, in the round, the filthy
thing. (J, 10)
Grief had come to her, in fact, when her words came to an end; she
did not seem to know what to do with it, with that grief of hers; shetried to wipe it away with her handkerchief, but it came back into her
throat, her grief did, and tears came too, and she began all over again.
<J> 275).

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

The item displaced from the statement is, in the first instance,
postposed ("the filthy thing'), while in the second quotation it isfirst preposed ("grief). The displaced element is represented in
the statement by an anaphoric one ("to see it properly"; "whatto do with it . . . that grief"; "it came back . . . her grief").
In such cases of reentries, the displaced item does not have aprecise syntactic function in the statement.
If one analyzed those same statements within another framework, not as syntactical structures but as messages in the enunciation process between a speaking subject and an addressee, one
would note that the purpose of the displacement is to thematicize
the displaced item; the latter then gains the status not of a theme(in other words, that about which the speaker is talking) but
of an emphasized rheme (that is, information pertaining to thetheme). In such a contrast, the filthy thing and grief convey themain information, the essential message the speaker stresses.
From this point of view also, the displaced element has been
desyntacticized.19
In short, the informative nucleus is by means of various displacement devices emphasized to the prejudice of the normativesyntactic structure. It is as if the logic of the message (theme,
rheme, support/addition, topic/comment, implied, stated, etc.)
modeled, in the last analysis, that of the syntax (subject-verbpredicate). Indeed, the end figuration of the rheme (according
to the two possible modalities, assertive or interrogative) indicates that the modality of enunciation is in the most fundamental manner based on it. The preponderance of this figuration, coupled with the theme/rheme bipartition, especiallyduring syntax learning by children, or in the emotional, relaxed
speech of everyday or colloquial discourse is additional evidenceof its being an organizer of enunciation far more deep-seated20

than syntactic structurations.
Another Celinian phrase betrays similar processes. I refer tothe sentence auxiliary c'est followed by or not by qui or que; in
French, this provides a possibility of syntacticizing, by meansof an identifying predicate, a particular value of the message
that selects one of its-constituents in an emphatic manner.21
Thus, with Celine: "C'est bien irrieux paye et plus artiste leschceurs que la figuration simple" (They're better paid and more

i 94

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

.

artistic in the chorus line than those who are just extras). "C'est"
identifies and emphasizes the entire predicate ("bien mieux paye
et plus artiste"); at the same time the subject constituent "leschoeurs" is, owing to the emphasis on the predicate, displaced
but chosen in relation to "la figuration simple." A strictly syntactic analysis could not account for such a turn; one would
obviously have to take into account the speaking subject's
emotive and logical intent, which imbues the usual syntactic
structure subject/predicate with a deeper logic. In a similar fashion, "C'est tres comprehensible les gens qui cherchent du boulot" (It's very understandable that people be looking for a job).
The sentence auxiliary "c'est" here introduces an inclusive predicate, "tres comprehensible," which refers to "les gens qui cherchent du boulot." In this case the determinative item precedes
the determined one, the information (or rheme) precedes theobject (or theme).
Such a remodeling of normative syntax brings the spoken
sentence (and the Celinian sentence closer to those languages
whose normal syntactic order is modifier/modified (Hungarianand classical Chinese, for instance). There is a tendency in themto give the main information first rather than start with the lessinformative element; in other words, they prefer the rheme/
recall scheme over the theme/rheme scheme.
This turn, which Spitzer called a "binary turn," is accounted
for by the predominance of a logic of the message or of the enunciation (with a taking into account of the intention or desire of
the speaking subject within the communication act) over the
logic of the statement (with, in French, the so-called normativesyntax Subject-Verb-Object). It is distinguished, in addition toits segmentations, preposings, displacements, or repetitions foremphasis, by successive surges of the intonational curve; the latter,
instead of being smoothed out in "classic" descending fashion,is slightly delayed, either raised or remaining at mid-intensity,
at every boundary between theme and rheme, support and addition. The resulting rhythm in Celine's enunciation is generally
a binary one, and in the longer sentences it is often staccato.
These starts are, it should be noted, in addition to those marked
by commas; as if, with colloquial segmentation, Celine pro-)

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

. 195

cured, in addition to punctuation, new means of shaping his
sentences and imparting rhythm and music to them. "A coted'Alcide, /hen qu'un muffle impuissant/moi, epais, et vain/j'
etais ..." (Compared with Alcide, I was just a helpless cad,that's what I was, dense and conceited, that's me). "Le printemps qu'ils/les oiseaux/ne reverront jamais dans leurs cages,
aupres des cabinets, qui sont tous groupes/les cabinets, la, dansle fond de l'ombre ..." (Spring, which they, the birds I mean,
will never see again in their cages, near the toilets, which are
all close together, the toilets I mean, there, way back in the
shadows . . .). At every virgule (/) there is a slight tremolo,
less than a punctuation, more than a simple linking, and it gives
Celine's writings that very particular thrill that connotes what
is musical or intimate—in short, what is desirable, sexual.
Finally, what could be the psychological value of such a technique? Spitzer notes that preposing information testifies to toomuch self-confidence or overestimating the addressee, while
repeating the displaced constituent indicates adjustment, a supplement of information that was needed because what was said
was not self-evident. From this he concludes, "The two contrary forces that are competing in this writer's segmented sentence are self-assurance and nihilistic self-observation. "22There
would be uneasiness, with Celine, over narrating what he is,blunt, quick, and impulsive, in the face of the other. Consciousness of the other's existence would demand repetition forthe purpose of additional clarity and thus lead to segmentation.
In that type of sentence the speaking subject would, in short,
be in two places: that of his own identity (there he goes straightto the information, the rheme), that of objective expression,for the other (when he goes back, repeats, clarifies). Such a
psychological interpretation has the advantage of clarifying certain of Bakhtin's positions with reference to dialogism in a
number of novelistic writings, particularly those of
Dostoyevsky.23
I shall on the other hand take into consideration the prevalenceof that type of construction (theme/rheme) in children's first
sentences during syntax learning.24 For this binomial, whichis both intonstional and logical, coincides with a fundamental

196 IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

.

stage in the elaboration of the subject—autonomization withrespect to the other, establishment of his own identity. If saying
no, according to studies by Freud and by Rene A. Spitz, marks
man's entry into the symbolic and his distinguishing between
pleasure principle and reality principle, one might also positthat the binarity of the message (rheme/theme and conversely)
represents one step further, a fundamental step, in the symbolic
integration of negativism, rejection, and death drive. One mighteven call it a decisive step, for with message binarity and before
the establishment of syntactic structure, the subject not only
differentiates between pleasure and reality, but, quite close tothat painful and upon the whole impossible distinction, he asserts, "I state while presupposing" and "I state while making
clear," that is to say, "I state what matters to me" and "I statein order to be clear," or again, "I state what pleases me" and"I state for you, for us, so that one might understand one
other." The binary message thus effects a shift from the / ofpleasure to the you of the addressee and to the impersonal one
that is necessary for the establishment of a truly universal syntax. It is thus that the subject of enunciation is born. By calling
this trajectory back to mind he may rediscover, if not his origin,
at least his originality. Celine's "spoken" writing accomplishes
such a remembrance.
The important, integrating, and logico-syntactic role that
intonation plays here confirms the hypothesis according towhich an archaic structure would be involved. Indeed, recent
investigations have demonstrated that intonation, at the sametime as being a token of emotivity close to drives, is a syntacticorganizer both very precocious and very profound. It allows
one, before solid syntactical categories have been established,
and wherever there is ambiguity, to identify the true semanticological value of the constituents.25 Straddling two categories ina way, the emotive and the syntactical, intonation produces thelanguage system before the latter can be made explicit as such.
Before being in his statement, the subject is manifested in theintonational figuration of his enunciation, and such an anteriority is as logical as it is chronological.
One should not conclude, however, that a style where in-^IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END ...

tonation prevails as a factor of logical and syntactic organization
and where the structure of the message (theme/rheme or conversely) overshadows that of the sentence (subject-verb-object)corresponds to a simple regression of the speaker to childish
stages or to the domain of the id. When such strategies turn up
in adult usage, in colloquial speech, for instance, and above allintentionally in Celinian style, they operate not on the near side
but on the far side of syntactic processes; we are dealing notwith a "less" but with a "more" of syntax. The syntactical
capacity that is already there, to which "regressive" strategies
are superadded, may only be a competence (not necessarily
explicit in the performance) of vulgar speakers. It is on the other
hand actualized, present, and effective with a writer like Celine,
for whom writing "like the common people" is a contrivance,
an unwritten provision, the result of stubborn work with andthrough syntax aimed at "having sentences slightly fly off theirhandle." "Speak straight out, child"—that seems to have been
the message of Celine's grandfather, a famous rhetorician, if
we are to believe what his grandson says in Guignol's Band.
"I do follow emotion with words, but I don't give it time todress up in flowery language."26 But this flight of the sentence
is in short an over-syntacticism. Enunciation devices, usually
repressed, by means of which subject and addressee, in theirmutual combat and fascination, discover logical (theme/rheme),
spatial (preposing, displacing), and intonational means of revealing themselves in the statement, show up here as an additional charging of syntactical processes. The emotion so dearto Celine is not uttered in any other way except by a return ofrepressed enunciative strategies; added to normative syntax,
they make up a complicated mental machine in which two
programs are meshed (enunciation and statement), just as a
piano performance results from conjoined playing by two
hands.
ELLIPSES: THREE DOTS AND A SUSPENSIONIn the later novels, From Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon,
Celine's sentence, while maintaining the spoken devices of ear-197

I98 IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

Her ones, is especially striking on account of its concision. The
famous "three dots," or points of suspension, as well as theexclamation point, already present in previous texts, proliferate
here; they assert themselves as external tokens of a staccato
rhythm, of syntactical and logical ellipsis. Less pronounced inCastle to Castle, the device is accentuated in Rigadoon, in keeping
no doubt with the apocalyptic and strident theme of a continentand culture that are falling into ruins.
Let us take a closer look at Celine's sentence in Castle to Castle.
Very frequently the three dots come at the end of complete
clauses where no ellipsis is involved. It seems then that theirfunction is to signal that, while the syntactical structure is normallycomplete, the enunciation, on the other hand, is not; it continues,
becomes displaced, concatenates other clauses. Far from being
the mark of a lacuna in the clause, the three dots rather point
to the overflowing of the clause into a higher unit of enunciation,that of the message; this unit is marked out, in formal terms,
by the paragraph, and within it by the lack of capital letters at
the beginning of each new clause following the three dots. This
technique brings into being a full sentence, very often half apage long, sometimes extending to a page or more. In opposition to the variability of Proustian sentences, Celine's avoid
subordination, do not present themselves as logico-syntactic
units, and proceed by means of brief statements; clauses thatcan be uttered in one breath, cutting, chopping, imparting
rhythm. Here is an example:
She doesn't know, she doesn't care . . . she turns over . . . she's asleep. . . I'll look all by myself! . . . I've got to tell you that in addition
to being a voyeur I'm a fanatic about the movement of harbors, about
everything that goes on on the water . . . everything that sails or
floats or docks ... I was on the jetties with my father ... a week's
vacation in Le Treport. . . Christ, the things we saw! . . . the fishingboats' entrances and exits . . . whiting at the risk of their lives! . . .
the widows and the kids imploring the sea! ... the emotion of thosejetties!.. . .the suspense! . . . make the Grand Guignol and the billiondollar thrillers from Hollywood look like a kindergarten! . . . Well,down there the Seine ... oh, I'm just as fascinated . . . just as nuts
about everything connected with water and boats, the way they move,IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . .

. 199

their comings and goings, it's for life . . . there aren't many fascinations that last a lifetime [. . .] either you've got the bug ... or you
haven't ...[...] a measly little yawl puts into shore and down I go
. . .on the run! ... I used to run . . . I don't any more . . . nowadays
I'm satisfied with the spyglass . . .27
Next to complete clauses that are nonetheless concatenated by
the three dots, one notes two kinds of ellipses. On the one
hand, the points of suspension cut off a constituent from themain clause or from the predicate; thus isolated, the constituent
loses its identity as object phrase, for instance, and while it does
not gain a truly autonomous value it still floats in a syntactic
irresolution that opens a path to various logical and semantic
connotations, in short, to daydreaming. Thus, "I'm a fanatic
about the movement of harbors, about everything that goes on
the water . . . everything that sails or floats or docks." Acomma in the place of the three dots would simply have linked"I'm a fanatic" to "everything that sails or floats or docks."
Instead, Celine's scription gives to the object phrase ("everything that sails or floats or docks") a relative independence fromsubject and predicate ("I'm a fanatic"), thus inviting the reader
to link it to another subject, another predicate, both indefinite
and perhaps more subjective.
The technique of making a constituent autonomous withrespect to the basic structure, subject/predicate, leads us to thesecond type of ellipsis in the Celinian sentence: noun phrases.
For instance, "a week's vacation in Le Treport. . . [. . .] fishingboats' entrances and exits . . . whiting at the risk of their lives!
..." Two modalities can be distinguished here: the suspensive
noun phrase [. . .] and the exclamatory noun phrase (!). In bothcases the predicate relationship has been omitted: "(there was,or, we spent) a week's vacation in Le Treport"; "(we could see,or, there were) the fishing boats' entrances and exists"; "(theywent out for) whiting at the risk of their lives!" One could alsointerpret these statement as themes whose rhemes are suspended. It is as if the main information that these descriptions
contain were hushed up. What replace^ it, what thus plays thepart of the verb, or what assimilates the attitude of the subjectof enunciation is intonation. Suspensive intonation stresses incom-

200 IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

.

pletion and invites the addressee to include himself in the daydream. The exclamatory intonation shows the enthusiasm, thesurprise, the fascination of the speaker. As a result, the rheme
being included in and impressed upon the theme as intonation
does not become detached; on the other hand, the theme issubjectivized. The noun phrase, "a week's vacation in Le
Treport," not only gives information concerning the length andthe place of my vacation, it also points to my saying it, since
it indicates—without making clear—my place, my emotional
and logical attitude as a subject who remembers, with melancholy or delight.
The coalescence of theme and rheme, objectal informationand strongly subjective information in exclamatory noun phrases
is more powerful yet: "the widows and the kids imploring thesea! . . . the emotion on those jetties! . . . the suspense! ..."
Whether actual noun phrases or not, those exclamatory utterances carry, through their signification, a deeper meaning thatis not lexicalized; they reveal an intense, passionate attitude,
through which the speaking subject displays his desire and calls
upon the reader to embrace it, beyond words, through thearchaic configuration of melody—the original mark of syntax
and subjective position. "(I am delighted, I am telling you, see
how extraordinary it is to watch) the widows and the kids
imploring the sea!"
One notices here, contrary to the binary practice of the earlynovels, a condensation of the two terms of the message. Theme andrheme become superposed in a statement that is more and more
elliptic, a statement whose lexical precision is matched only by
the sparingness of the description. Commentary and logical or
psychological expliciting become unstated and are merely indicated, present but allusive in intonation alone. Avoiding signification, the speaker chooses not a sign (lexeme), even lessa sentence (syntacticological structure), but a token: intonation,
which bears both affect and subjective position (to be dressed up
semantically later or never).
Celine has compared his style to that of impressionist painters. It is indeed possible to liken to color dots statements inwhich the binary turn of the early novels is condensed in short

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

units that the blank spaces of the three dots place side by side
to form a halo not of descriptions but of subjective impressions.
You know, three dots, the impressionists made three dots. Take Seurat, he would put three dots everywhere; he thought it let air into his
paintings, made it fly about. The fellow was right. It didn't start muchof a school [. . .] It's too hard.28
Rigadoon fully makes use of this device, leading to the greatest
condensation where the noun phrase—or simply the missing
phrase of an omitted syntactic structure—attains to the eruptive
value, as descriptive as it is subjective, of onomatopeia. Competing with comic strips, Celine in his writing used onomatopeia more and more frequently. According to Celine himself
the infernal rhythm of war was the major cause of his utterly
particular style, which thus meshes in its very musicality witha kind of realism, since it reverberates with the war, and adefinite contemporariness, since it echoes comic strips.
From this moment on, I warn you, my chronicle is a little jerky, I
myself, who lived through what I'm telling you, have trouble getting
it straight ... I was talking about "comics" . . . even in the comics
you'd have a hard time finding a sudden break like that in the continuity, balloons, and characters . . . a double-barreled shambles. . . take my word for it! . . . so brutal that all of a sudden nothing
was there . . . and I myself . . . I hem and haw, I'm all balled up. . . too many bits and pieces! . . . you'll have to forgive me . . . (R,138)

It is indeed in connection with the bombings that the condensed scription of Rigadoon finds its privileged expression.
The whole earth jumps! worse! like it was broken in two! . . . andthe air . . . this is it! Restif hadn't been lying . . . boom! and another!
. . . further away ... we can see it! the flashes of their cannon! . . .
red! . . . green! no! shorter! howitzers! ... all on the station! ... I
can see them now . . • Oddort! . . . an ocean of flame, as they say• • ■ big flames from all over, the windows, the doors, the cars . . .
and boom! another! . . . another! . . . they'll never get out of thatstation, not one of them! . . . Restif hadn't been lying . . .but where
can he be? and those people we'd followed . ■ ■ where'd they go?
... I won't bore you with the shelling . . . dead center ... all on the

2QI

202

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

.

.

station . . .a furnace! . . . now we can see it plainly . . . the howitzers
and the gunners . . .weird . . . short barrels ...[...] their Messerschmidt ... we know the sound . . . rat-tat-tat! rat-tat-tat! ... inbursts . . . like grinding coffee by hand ... I say to Lili ... I don't
need to say, she knows . . . down! flatter! and wham! . . . crash!
... a bomb! and flying fragments . . . the death blow! ... {R,125-126)

The narrative goes on, nevertheless, through these real
"flying fragments" of the sentence; characters, crowd, setting,the plan and vicissitudes of the journey—all are there, stated,narrated if you wish, but barely suggested, in succinct fashion,
to be reconstructed in their duration or their logical clumsinessby those who will have world and time. Here, on that page,in that war, which is both the era and the style of the writer,
exclamation marks turn up to score the sentence and punctuate
object noun phrases with affect ("the flashes of their cannon!""howitzers!"); they do the same for determinatives ("red!
. . . green!"), subject noun phrases ("and the air!"—and the air
also jumps), elliptic adverbial complements ("all on the station!"—we can see it all on the station, or they have all zeroedin on the station), noun clauses ("a furnace!"), and complete
sentences ("The whole earth jumps!" and "they'll never get outof that station, not one of them!"). Let me note that the binary
turn of this last colloquial sentence, with the stressed, elliptic
recall, "not one of them," integrates the dualism of the early
Celinian writings and their exclamatory and elliptic scription
with the shortened statements bearing affects without commentary of the later novels.
One thus reaches that extreme Celinian situation where themost objectal, the most sparing description is blended with themost intense affective charge, which, deprived of comment,
holds the unsaid but effective meaning of the text. In short, abarren description of the objectal world, which practitionersof the new novel that was to follow should have recognized as
their.antecedent. But also—and thereby going beyond the reifying or sexological technocratism of some new novelists—an
overflowing subjectivity that does not identify itself, painfullymodest, that cries out or sings, passionately sure of its right.

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

. . 203

If the early novels' binary seesawing is now avoided andreplaced with the terseness of noun phrases or clauses, exclamatorily suspended, a certain amount of duality persists nevertheless. Such a duality accounts for the constant tension thatmakes up Celine's scription, its very being. It specifically involves the inscription of affect, on the near and far side ofwords, in the movement of the voice as signaled by punctuation
signs. Children's holophrases also hold in abeyance, in the
motion of the hand or of the entire body, as well as in theintensity or modulation of the voice, the judgment that, later,
will signal the position of the speaker with respect to the objectof enunciation. But in the later texts of Celine, as in the binary
turn of his early ones, what is involved is not simply a regression
to the holophrastic level. As they reappear in adult discourse,
holophrastic operations emphasize a strategy that comes as asupplement to normative syntactic competence and performance; they perform as markers of a "return of the repressed"
at the level of the statement itself (and not at the thematic levelthat I have discussed in previous chapters).
Once more, the Celinian music proves to be "written affect,"
thanks to a syntactico-logical overcompetence and to an additional complication of linguistic operations. It is now easier tounderstand Celine's statements concerning the considerable
work that is demanded, in his view, for the elaboration of astyle.
Style is a certain way of doing violence to sentences [. . .] of having
them slightly fly off the handle, so to speak, displacing them, andthus making the reader himself displace his meaning. But ever soslightly! ever so slightly! Because in all that, if you are heavy-handed,
you know, it's putting your foot in it, it's a howler [. . J Often people
come to see me and say, "You seem to write easily." On the contrary!
I don't write easily! Only with great difficulty! And writing bores me,
on top of that. And it has to be done very shrewdly, very delicately.
That means 80,000 pages in order to produce 800 pages of manuscript,
where work has been obliterated. One doesn't see it.29
In Rigadoon the work of the writer is compared to the ant's
clever patience, "scurrying around in the filings" (R, 29).
An absorption of work, a withholding of effort, a deletion

204

IN THE

BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

of abstraction, so that thanks to them but without stating them,and through them, an affect bursts out, in sound and outcry,
bordering close on drive and abjection as well as fascination.
Bordering on the unnamable.
THE LAUGHTER OF THE APOCALYPSE
The trans-syntactic inscription of emotion as inherent in theelementary structures of enunciation is probably the most subtle
manifestation of what we have called abjection in connection
with Celinian contents, themes, and myths.
For exclamatory suspension reveals, as I have said, an intense
subjective attitude, but an indeterminate, ambivalent one. Being
fluid, it can easily occupy both ends of the drive scale, fromacceptance to rejection. Excitement and disgust, joy and repulsion—the reader deciphers them very fast on these lines
pitted with blank spaces where emotion does not allow itself
to be dolled up in flowery sentences. Descriptions of absurdity,
stupidity, violence, sorrow, moral and physical degeneracy locate them, as a result, and also informal fashion, in that interspace
between abjection and fascination signaled by Celinian
exclamations.
Such an affective ambivalence, enclosed in the intonation andmarked by suspension or exclamation, enables us to put a finger
on one of Celine's essential peculiarities, flush with his style—his horrified laughter: the comedy of abjection. He ceaselessly
renders the sound and the image, or even the causes, of the
apocalypse. Never anything resembling treatise, commentary,or judgment. Confronting the apocalypse, he exclaims with ahorror close to ecstasy. Celinian laughter is a horrified andfascinated exclamation. An apocalyptic laughter.
We are familiar with the genesis and the catastrophic rhetoricof the apocalyptic genre in the Greek oracles, Egyptian or Persian sources, but especially the Hebrew prophets. The great
Palestinian apocalyptic movement (between the second century
B-c. and the second century A.D.) encodes a seeingness that,
contrary to the philosophical revelation of truth, imposes
through a poetic incantation that is often elliptic, rhythmic, andIN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

. . 205

cryptogrammic the incompleteness and abjection of any identity, group, or speech. Such a seeingness asserts itself as thepremise of an impossible future and as a promise of explosion.30
Considering only the New Testament and what is known
as the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, whom Celine mentions among his masters ("Everything is in Saint John," Feerie
pour une autre fois ["Enchantment for Some Other Time"], p.
54), it is around the time of the Christian era that the apocalyptic
genre is established; it is broadly inspired by Jewish prophetic
literature and other Middle-Eastern ones as well, immersed ina flow of cataclysms, catastrophes, deaths, and ends of theworld. An identical sacred horror for the feminine, the diabolical, and the sexual are expounded therein, by means of an
incantation whose particular prosody confirms the name of thegenre: a discovering, a baring of truth. A vision through sounds
hallucinated as images. In no case, thus, is there philosophicalunveiling or reasoning demonstration of the hidden.
Carnival, to the contrary, does not keep to the rigid, that is,
moral position of apocalyptic inspiration; it transgresses it, sets
its repressed against it—the lower things, sexual matters, whatis blasphemous and to which it holds while mocking the law.
We are familiar with the sublime laughter, the astral laughterof Dante's comedy in which the body, joying in a "successful"incest, is fully celebrated in the delight of the word incarnate.
We are envious of the renascent mirth of Rabelais who gives
himself up, trustfully, to the pleasures of a palate where mankind becomes intoxicated, thinking it has found guiltless flesh,mother, and body. We follow attentively Balzac's human comedy, knowing that its monstrous sufferings or absurdities are
only freakish and that they establish, a contrario, the truth of
divine harmony and the luminous project of a mind or providence in which Balzac says he believes.
With Celine we are elsewhere. As in apocalyptic or evenprophetic utterances, he speaks out on horror. But while theformer can be withstood because of a distance that allows for
judging, lamenting, condemning, Celine—who speaks fromwithin—has no threats to utter, no morality to defend. In thename of what would he do it? So his laughter bursts out, facing

206

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END .

. .

abjection, and always originating at the same source, of which
Freud had caught a glimpse: the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure, be it sex or death.
And yet, if there is a gushing forth, it is neither jovial, nortrustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony.
It is bare, anguished, and as fascinated as it is frightened.
A laughing apocalypse is an apocalypse without god. Black
mysticism of transcendental collapse. The resulting scription
is perhaps the ultimate form of a secular attitude without morality, without judgment, without hope. Neither Celine, who
is such a writer, nor the catastrophic exclamation that constitutes his style, can find outside support to maintain themselves.
Their only sustenance lies in the beauty of a gesture that, here,on the page, compels language to come nearest to the humanenigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiencesjouissance all at the same time. A language of abjection of which
the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple. Toppling into what? Into nothing more than the effervescence of
passion and language we call style, where any ideology, thesis,
interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope becomedrowned. A brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse ofa radical nihilism that can disappear only in "those bubbling
depths that cancel our existence" (R, 261). Music, rhythm,
rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

POWERS OF HORROR
All the great monstrosities, all of them are in Saint John! Kirghiz
librarians can cook up the damnest tricks!
Celine, Feerie pour une autrefois, I

Throughout a night without images but buffeted by blacksounds; amidst a throng of forsaken bodies beset with no longJng but to last against all odds and for nothing; on a page where
I plotted out the convolutions of those who, in transference,
presented me with the gift of their void—I have spelled out
abjection. Passing through the memories of a thousand years,
a fiction without scientific objective but attentive to religious
imagination, it is within literature that I finally saw it carrying,
with its horror, its full power into effect.
On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the
apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline
cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only
barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.
The work of Celine, which draws on the contemporary forits destructive, if not analytical, obstinacy, and on the classicalfor its epic capability together with its plebeian, if not vulgar,
breadth, is upon the whole only one possible example among
others of the abject. Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Kafka, Georges
Bataille, Sartre (Nausea), or other contemporaries could haveguided, each in his own way, my descent into the hell of naming, that is to say of signifiable identity. But perhaps Celine isalso a privileged example and hence a convenient one to deal
with. For his coarseness, issuing from the global catastrophe

r

208

POWERS OF HORROR

of the Second World War, does not, within the orb of abjection,
spare a single sphere: neither that of morality, or politics, or
religion, or esthetics, or, all the more so, subjectivity or language. If in that process he shows us the ultimate point thatcan be reached by what a moralist would call nihilism, he also
testifies to the power of fascination exerted upon us, openly or
secretly, by that field of horror. I have sought in this book todemonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its
power, is based. By suggesting that literature is its privileged
signifier, I wish to point out that, far from being a minor,
marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems
to have it, this kind of literature, or even literature as such,
represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power,"the great darkness" (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continualcompromising: "Literature and Evil" (Georges Bataille). Hence
also its being seen as taking the place of the sacred, which, tothe extent that it has left us without leaving us alone, calls forththe quacks from all four corners of perversion. Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred
power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate
resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, adischarge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisisof the Word.
If "something maternal" happens to bear upon the uncertainty that I call abjection, it illuminates the literary scriptionof the essential struggle that a writer (man or woman) has toengage in with what he calls demonic only to call attention toit as the inseparable obverse of his very being, of the other (sex)that torments and possesses him. Does one write under any
other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an in£.
definite catharsis? Leaving aside adherents of a feminism thatis jealous of conserving its power—the last of the power-seeking ideologies—none will accuse of being a usurper the artist
who, even if he does not know it, is an undoer of narcissism
and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included.
And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point ofemphasizing the horror of being?

POWERS OF HORROR 209

Perhaps those that the path of analysis, or scription, or of apainful or ecstatic ordeal has led to tear the veil of the communitarian mystery, on which love of self and others is set up,
only to catch a glimpse of the abyss of abjection with which
they are underlaid—they perhaps might be able to read thisbook as something other than an intellectual exercise. For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious,
moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes areabjection's purification and repression. But the return of theirrepressed make up our "apocalypse," and that is why we cannot
escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises.
In the end, our only difference is our unwillingness to havea face-to-face confrontation with the abject. Who would want
to be a prophet? For we have lost faith in One Master Signifier.
We prefer to foresee or seduce; to plan ahead, promise a recovery, or esthetize; to provide social security or make art not
too far removed from the level of the media.
In short, who, I ask you, would agree to call himself abject,subject of or subject to abjection?
Nothing preordains the psychoanalyst to take the place ofthe mystic. Psychoanalytic establishments seem even less suited
to this, so much does their intrinsic perversion consign themto mummifying transference in the production of mini-paranoids if not merely stereotyped besotments. And yet, it would
perhaps be possible for an analyst (if he could manage to stayin the only place that is his, the void, that is, the unthinkableof metaphysics) to begin hearing, actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascinationthat bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being but,because it is heard as a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of thefeminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the humanadventure. For, facing abjection, meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one. "Divine," "human,"or "for some other time," the comedy or the enchantment canbe realized, on the whole, only by reckoning with the impossible for later or never, but set and maintained right here.
Fastened to meaning like Raymond Roussel's parrot to its

210

POWERS OF HORROR

chain, the analyst, since he interprets, is probably among therare contemporary witnesses to our dancing on a volcano. If
he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine; provided that, in his
or her capacity as a man or woman without qualities, he allow
the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst
out. Would he then be capable of X-raying horror without
making capital out of its power? Of displaying the abject without confusing himself for it?
Probably not. Because of knowing it, however, with aknowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter, an abject
knowledge, he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal) that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking
place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which
is Judeo-Christian monotheism. In the meantime, let others
continue their long march toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,wars that will necessarily be holy.
Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside formyself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushingaside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; thehorror thatthey seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I
rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration,and hollowing—probably the only counterweight to abjection.
While everything else—its archeology and its exhaustion—is
only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses
in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and "that cancels ourexistence" (Celine).

NOTESi. APPROACHING ABJECTION
i. Francis de Sales, Introduction to a Devout Life, Thomas S. Kepler, tr.
(New York: World, 1952), p. 125. [Modified to conform to the French text,
which reads, 'Tabjection de soy-mesme."]
2. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils, David Magarshack, tr. (London:
Penguin Books, 1953), p. 512.
3. Dostoyevsky, pp. 586-587.
4. Dostoyevsky, pp. 418-419.
5. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, tr. (New York:
Random House, 1922), 2:141.
6. Proust, Cities of the Plain, Frederick A. Blossom, tr. (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 9.
7. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), pp. 738-739.
8. Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Norman Thomas Di
Giovanni, tr. (New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 23-25.
9. Antonin Artaud, "Suppots et supplications," in CEuvres Completes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978), 14:14.
10. Artaud, p. 72.
n. Artaud, p. 203.
12. Artaud, p. 15513. Jacques Lacan, Television (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 28.
14. In connection with catharsis in the Greek world, see Louis Molinier,
Le Pur et I'impur dans la pensee des Grecs (Paris: Klincksieck, 1952).
15. See A. Philonenko, "Note sur les concepts de souillure et de puretedans l'idealisme allemand," Les Etudes Philosophiques (1972), 4:481-493.
2. SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF
1. See particularly D. W. Winnicot, The Maturation Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), andPlaying and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
2. Sigmund Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, in The
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press,

212

2.

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

1953-1974), 10:83. Later, when he referred to "the enigmatic phobias of earlychildhood," Freud explicitly defined them as "reactions to the danger ofobject loss." He suggests that the reactions are (phantasmatically?) very archaic
when he considers the possible connections between childish phobia of small
animals or storms, for instance, and "the atrophied remainders of congenital
preparation for real dangers that are so clearly developed in other animals."
He nevertheless concludes that, "in the case of man, the only portion of thatarchaic inheritance to be appropriated is what pertains to object loss" (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in Complete Psychological Works, 20:160). Thatclearly locates the reflection on phobia within the problematic scope of object
relation. What remains to be clarified is the latter's dependency on symbolic
function, particularly on language, on which rest not only its very existence
but all of its variants.
3. "It may well be that before its sharp cleavage into an ego and an id, andbefore the formation of a super-ego, the mental apparatus makes use ofdifferent methods of defense from those which it employs after it has reachedthese stages of organization." Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, p.
164. To begin with, Freud had pointed out that the word "defense," inopposition to the more precise term "repression," included all the protective
devices of the ego against the demands of drives; with the statement I havejust quoted, Freud seems to proceed to areas where, without the ego existing
as such, modalities of defense other than repression are at work. Does thishave to do with defensive capabilities that are elaborated along with primal
repression? With the power of the symbolic alone, always already present but
working within its pre-sign, pre-meaning (trans-sign, trans-meaning) modality, which I call "semiotic"? Would not the phobic "object," and the abject as well, be located on that trail, which was blazed by Freud?
4. Freud, Analysis of a Phobia, p. 83.
5. See Anneliese Schnurmann, "Observation of a Phobia" (contribution
to Anna Freud's seminar, 1946), in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 3/
4:253-270.
6. Freud, Analysis of a Phobia, p. 139.
7. Freud, Papers on Metapsychology, in Complete Works, 14:122. Emphasismine.
8. "Voyeurism is a normal moment of evolution during pregenital stages;
if it remains within limits, it allows a very sophisticated approach to the
Oedipal conflict. Paradoxically, it becomes a perversion as a result of its
failure to provide assurance against the possible destruction of the object."Michel Fain, "Contribution a l'analyse du voyeurisme," Revue Francaise de
Psychanalyse (1954), 18:177-1929- Jacques Lacan, EcritsIA Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), pp.
156-157.
10. Andre Green, he Discours vivant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
x
973).

3-

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT 213

11. Hanna Segal, "Notes on Symbol Formation," International Journal of
Psychoanalysis (1957), 38:381-397.
12. See Freud's first book, Aphasia (Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 1891).
13. See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; New York: Random House,1950).
14. See Negation (1925), in volume 19 of the Complete Works.
15. One might compare that definition with what Andre Green says concerning the trauma-object: "Thus, within the series, precocious trauma-defense (this set establishing fixation)-latency-breaking out of neurosis-partial
return of the repressed, I should like to emphasize the confusion between drive(represented by affect) and object, for the danger stems from the violence done
to sexuality in the Ego as well as from violence done to the object. Consequently it will be understood that the problem involving relationship between
Ego and object is that of their limits, their coexistence. [. . .] When I speakof trauma-object 1 basically refer to the threat that the object holds for theEgo, to the extent that it forces the Ego to modify its operation through its
presence alone." Andre Green, "L'Angoisse et le narcissisme," Revue Francaisede Psychanalyse (1979), 1:52-53 and 55.
16. Freud, "Draft G. Melancholia" (1895), in vol. 1 of Complete Works; ].B. Pontalis comments, "not a lacuna but a hole, not a want but an overflow,"in Entre le rive et la douleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 248.
3. FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT
1. In Totem and Taboo (1913), in vol. 13 of Complete Works. References will
be to the Vintage Book edition published by Random House.
2. Totem and Taboo, p. 170.
3. Totem and Taboo, p. 185.
4. See Rene Girard, Des Choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde (Paris:
Grasset, 1978).
5. Freud quoted from T. W. Atkinson's Primal Law, Totem and Taboo(London, 1903); see p. 184m
6. Totem and Taboo, pp. 85-86—although the translation used is that of
the Complete Works, 13:64.
7. Totem and Taboo, p. 86n; quoted from the Complete Works, 13:65.
8. Totem and Taboo, p. 207.
9. Totem and Taboo, pp. 115-116.
10. See Georges Bataille, "L'Abjection et les formes miserables," in Essais
de sociologie, (Euvres completes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 2:2i7ff.
11. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), P- 121 ■12. Douglas, p. 11313. Douglas, p. H3- .
14. See Douglas, pp- I49ff-'

214

3-

FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

15. "For the Lele evil is not to be included in the total system of the world,
but to be expunged without compromise" (Douglas, p. 171).
16. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Deutsch, 1964), as quoted
by Douglas, p. 124.
17. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), pp. I39ff.
18. See Charles Malamoud, "Observations sur la notion de "reste" dansle brahmanisme," Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde Siidasiens (1972), 16:5-26.
19. See K. Maddock, "Dangerous Proximities and Their Analogues,"
Mankind (1974), j(3):206-2i7.
20. See K. Gouph, "Nuer Kinship: A Re-examination," in T. O. Beidelman, ed., The Translation of Culture (London: Tavistock, 1971), p. 91.
21. See L. N. Rosen, "Contagion and Cataclysm: A Theoretical Approachto the Study of Ritual Pollution Beliefs," African Studies (1973), 32(4)^29-246.
22. See S. Lindenbaum, "Sorcerers, Ghosts, and Polluting Women: An
Analysis of Religious Belief and Population Control," Journal of Geography(1972), n(3):24i.
23. Dumont, pp. 137-138.
24. M. B. Emenau, "Language and Social Forms. A Study of Toda KinshipTerms and Dual Descent," in Language, Culture, and Personality, Essays inMemory of Edward Sapir (Menasha, Wis.: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund,
1941), PP- I58-I7925. Dumont, "Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South India Kinship,"Occasional Papers of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1957), 12:22.
26. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. 120.
27. Dumont, p. 53.
28. Dumont, p. 53.
29. Dumont, p. 120.
30. Celestin Bougie, Essai sur le regime des castes (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1969), p. 3.
31. Bougie, pp. 3, 25, etc.
32. Bougie, p. 18.
33. Bougie, pp. 36-3734. Bougie, p. 64.
35. J.-P. Vernant has analyzed that logic in "Ambigui'te et renversement.
Sur la structure enigmatique d'CEdipe roi," in J.-P. Vernant and P. VidalNaquet, Mythe et tragedie (Paris: Maspero, 1973), pp. ioiff.
36. See Vernant and Vidal-Naquet and also the publications of L. Gernet.
37. R. C. Jebb's translation has been used; it comes somewhat closer thanmore recent ones to the French translation by Jean Grosjean quoted by Julia
Kristeva [trans.].
4- SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION!• See Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill,1973). p. 9.

5-

.

.

. QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI 215

2. Baruch A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord. Aspects of Ritual in Ancient
Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
3. The Code of Maimonides. The Book of Cleanness, Herbert Danby, tr.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 535.
4. Neusner, p. 12.
5. Mary Douglas, "Critique and Commentary," in Neusner, pp. 138-139.
6. Genesis 8:20.
7. Genesis 8:21-22.
8. There are other words, with different origins and semantic variants, thatare used to signify purity and impurity at various points and stages of thebiblical text. See H. Cazelles, "Purete et impurete dans l'Ancien Testament,"in Supplement au dictionnaire de la Bible (Paris: Letaizey et Ane, 1965), pp.
491-508.
9. See Neusner, "The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism," fournal of theAmerican Academy of Religion (1975), 43(I);i5-26.
10. See E. M. Zuesse, "Taboo and the Divine Order," fournal of theAmerican Academy of Religion (1974), 42(3):482-504.
11. See the excellent article, J. Saler, "Semiotique de la nourriture dans la
Bible," Annates, July-August 1973, pp. 93ff.
12. Ibid.
13. See Cazelles, Supplement.
14. According to B. Levine, as quoted in Ncusner's "The Idea of Purityin Ancient Judaism."
15. Jacob Neusner, A History of the Mishnah Law of Purities (Leiden: Brill,1974)16. See Melanie Klein, "On the Importance of Symbol Formation in theDevelopment of the Ego," in Contributions to Psychoanalysis ig2i-ig^ (London: Hogarth Press, 1948).
17. Rene Girard, Des choses cachees depuis le commencement du monde, pp.
203 ff.
18. See H. McKeating, "The Development of the Law on Homicide inAncient Israel," Vetus Testamentum (1975), 25(i):46-68.

5. ... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI
1. See J. Jeremias, Les Paroles inconnues de fesus (Paris: Cerf, 1970), pp.
SO-62.
2. "If Man is not by nature what he should be, then he is implicitly rational,
implicitly Spirit. [. . .] in the state of nature he is not what he ought to be";"it is reflection of knowledge which makes him evil"; "knowledge or consciousness is just the act by which separation [. . .] comes into existence";"Man regarded in accordance with his conception or notion [. . .] is consciousness, and consequently he enters into this state of disunion"; G. W. F.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon
Sanderson, tr. (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 3:5°. 52, and 55.

216

5.

... QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI

3. Such osmosis of separate terms, such heterogeneity, appears to havebeen glimpsed by Hegel when he considered "sin" as inseparable from "remission of sins" and concluded, "Between sin and its forgiveness there is as
little place for an alien thing as there is between sin and punishment. Life has
severed itself from itself and united itself again." The Spirit of Christianity
and its Fate in Early Theological Writings, T. M. Knox, tr. (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1948), p. 239.
4. De libero arbitrio, 3, 19, 53, col. 1,256.
5. The Speirs translation of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion reads,"This is the extraordinary combination which directly contradicts the Understanding" (3:76). It corresponds to the text of the Samtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1959), 16:286: ". . . diese ungeheure Zusammensetzung ist es, die dem
Verstande schlechthin widerspricht." See "Translator's Note" in this volume.
6. The passage within brackets appears neither in the Speirs translation(3:53) nor in the Samtliche Werke (16:265). See "Translator's Note."
7. Jacques Maritain, The Sin of the Angel, William L. Rossner, S. J., tr.
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1959), p. 50.
8. Sententia 4, 14, 4, 7. Duns Scotus indeed posits "the absolution of
penitent man accomplished by certain words," Sententia 4, 14, 4, 2. See
Joseph Turmel, Histoire des dogmes (Paris: Rieder, 1936), pp. 449-450.
6. CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR
1. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night, John H. P.
Marks, tr. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), p. 213. Subsequent references tothis work, abbreviated as J, will appear in the body of the text.
2. Letter to Milton Hindus, dated May 29, 1947, in Louis-Ferdinand Celine
II, Les Cahiers de I'Herne (1965), 5:76.
3. See Julia Kristeva, "L'Experience et la pratique," in Polylogue (Paris:
Seuil, 1977), pp. 107-136.
I 4. s,See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (Ann Arbor,Mich.: Ardis, 1973) and Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,
1968).
5. Celine, Entretiens avec le professeur Y. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 67.
6. Letter to Hindus, March 31, 1948, L'Herne, 5:107.
7. SUFFERING AND HORROR
1. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Death on the Instalment Plan, Ralph Manheim,tr. (New York: New Directions, 1966), pp. 39-40. Subsequent references tothis work, abbreviated as D, will appear in the body of the text.
2. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Le Pont de Londres ("Guignols's Band II"; Paris:
Gallimard, 1964), p. 137- Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated asP, will appear in the body of the text.

9-"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"

217

3. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Guignol's Band, Bernard Frechtman and Jack
T. Nile, tr. (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 135. Subsequent references
to this work, abbreviated as G, will appear in the body of the text.
4. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Rigadoon, Ralph Manheim, tr. (New York:
Dell, 1974), p. 179- Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated as R,
will appear in the body of the text.
8. THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE
1. "Entretiens avec A. Zbinden," in Celine, Romans II (Paris: Gallimard,1974), P- 9452. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Feeriepour une autrefois (Paris: Gallimard, 1952),
p. 144. Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated as F, will appear in
the body of the text.
3. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, La Vie et I'ceuvre de Philippe Ignace Semmelweis(Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1936), p. 588.
4. Celine, Semmelweis, p. 617.
5. Celine, Semmelweis, p. 621.
6. On September 10, 1947, L'Herne, 5:96.
7. Letter to Hindus, August 23, 1947, L'Herne, 5:92.
8. Letter to Hindus, February 28, 1948, L'Herne, 5:104.
9. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, L'Eglise (Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1933), p. 488.
9. "OURS TO JEW OR DIE"
1. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Les Beaux Draps (Paris: Nouvelles Editions
Franchises, 1941), p. 90. Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated asBD, will appear in the body of the text.
2. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, L'Ecole des cadavres (Paris: Denoel, 1938), p.
140. Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated as EC, will appear in
the body of the text.
3. Letter to Hindus, September 2, 1947, L'Herne, 5:94.
4. Letter to Hindus, April 16, 1947, L'Herne, 5:72.
5. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Bagatelles pour un massacre (Paris: Denoel, 1937),
p. 144. Subsequent references to this work, abbreviated as BM, will appear
in the body of the text.
6. From an interview with Ivan-M. Sicard published in L'Emancipation
Nationale, November 21, I9417- It would not only seem that, to the end of his life, he never clearlyrenounced anti-Semitism ("I disown nothing at all ... I have not at allchanged my mind ... I simply put in a modicum of doubt, but people will
have to prove that I was wrong rather than me showing that I was right"—"Entretien avec A. Zbinden," Romans II, p. 940), but even when he entertains
the idea of a reconciliation with Jews (he specifies, "not a Defense of the Jews

)

218

9-

"OURS TO JEW OR DIE"

but a Reconciliation") he is led to advocate a new racism, a decidedly permanentfeeling of love/hatred for the other: "We must create a new racism upon
biological bases" (letter to Hindus, August io, 1947, L'Herne, 5:90).
8. Catherine Francblin has presented a very lucid analysis of Celine's antiSemitism in an unpublished master's essay entitled "Celine et les Juifs." I am
indebted to her for the following development.
9. See A. Mandel, "D'un Celine juif," L'Herne (1963), 3:252-257, and"L'Ame irresponsable, ou Celine et le Dibbouk," L'Herne (1965) 5:207-209.
10. "Entretiens avec A. Zbinden," Romans II, p. 939.
10. IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .
1. "Louis-Ferdinand Celine vous parle." in Romans II, p. 934.
2. "Celine vous parle," p. 933.
3. Quoted in Pierre Monier, "Residence surveillee," L'Herne (1963), 3:76.
4. See letter to Hindus, December 15, 1947, L'Herne, 5:103.
5. Entretiens avec le professeur Y., p. 104.
6. Entretiens, p. 122.
7. See letter to Hindus, May 15, 1947, L'Herne, 5:76.
8. Same letter, p. 75.
9. Same letter, p. 75.
10. Letter to Hindus, March 30, 1947, L'Herne, 5:72.
11. Letter to Hindus, May 15, 1947, L'Herne, 5:75.
12. Letter to Hindus, May 29, 1947, L'Herne, 5:76.
13. Entretiens avec le professeur Y. p. 72.
14. Entretiens, p. 23.
15. Entretiens, p. 28.
16. Entretiens, p. 35.
17. Letter to Hindus, October 17, 1947, L'Herne, 5:99.
18. Leo Spitzer, "Une Habitude de style, le rappel chez Celine," Le Francais
Moderne (1935), 3:193-208; reprinted in L'Herne, 5:153-164.
19. With respect to segmentation in contemporary French, see Jean Perrot,"Fonctions syntaxiques, enonciation, information," Bulletin de la Societe deLinguistique de Paris (1978), 73(i) :8 5l Mario Rossi, "L'Intonation et la troisieme
articulation," BSLP (1977), 72(i):55-68; Claude Hagege, "Intonation, fonctions syntaxiques, universaux," BSLP (1977), 72(I):I-47.
20. See Ivan Fonagy, "Prelangage et regressions syntaxiques," Lingtia(I97S), 36:163-208.
21. See Jean Perrot, "Fonctions syntaxiques."
2,2. Spitzer, L'Herne, 5:162.
23. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics.
24. See Fonagy, "Prelangage et regressions syntaxiques."
25. See Rossi, "L'Intonation et la troisieme articulation, and Hagege, "Intonation, fonctions syntaxiques, universaux."

IO.

IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END 219

26. Letter to Hindus, April 16, 1947, L'Herne, 5:73.
27. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Castle to Castle (New York: Delacorte, 1968),
p. 80.
28. "Louis-Ferdinand Celine vous parle," in Romans II, p. 934.
29. Ibid., pp. 933-93430. See H. Sterlin, La Verite sur VApocalypse (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1972);
R. P. Boismard, "L'Apocalypse ou les apocalypses de Saint Jean," Revue
Biblique, October 1949; J. Levitan, Une Conception juive de I'apocalypse (Paris:
Debresse, 1966); etc.