How long gone are the times when Blake, in the heat of the Revolution, yearned for the end of his father’s kingdom ! His Nobodaddy[1], jealous god, lurked from the clouds, farting and burping. His anger against all happiness that did not comply with his dark laws triggered the massive sacrifice of war or the personalized hanging. For this he had terrestrial incarnations in kings and bishops.
Years before, the Count de Sade, libertine father of the famous marquis, père-versely[2] educating his son, advised : « give yourself up to everything that comes your way : that makes you more worthy of being loved »[3]. He himself had married Donatien’s mother to get closer to the current object of his greed : the dissatisfied wife of the Prince of Condé, dean among libertines. From the end of this adventure – Voltaire used to laugh with the clan[4] – Sade’s mother would seclude herself in the Carmelites on rue d’Enfer[5]. That count, it is not that he made one woman the cause of his desire, a condition according to Lacan of père-version worthy of love.
With his father dead and an ominous announcement of the future, Parliament intervened in 1768 in the « Affaire d’Arcueil »[6], Donatien’s first journey sanctioned by a new anti-aristocratic sensibility. End of an era.
From the father of obscure jouissance, whose secrecy, according to Blake, earned the « loud applause » of women, Joyce extended his domination by recognizing him as a symptom – which not even a revolution can eliminate. In Ulysses, his Allfather new avatar instills in each one, through Jesus Christ, the suffering of the Logos « who suffers in us at every moment »[7].
It is the time of the sleepless father. Deposed from his place among the clouds and also from his power over the language that speaks to us, therefore making us suffer. Little remains of him to denounce and, in any case, he lacks feminine applause. Logos itself is subject to depuration.
The trace of the old father is in the arcana of the power of the name, with the attribution of naming « man » or « woman », imposing a sexual destiny that, embedded in the flesh, only science could cure. His Other would lack dark desire, or so the propaganda says, applauded with the enthusiasm of emancipation.
The hypermodern individual, presumed owner of his body of enjoyment[8], refuses to be the altar fire and the sacrificial butter in which the Joycian Stephen recognized himself. Although some regret the fire of testosterone in his body and lament the wound, now visible and nothing immaterial, of the sacrificed flesh. The new officiants, who say they ask for nothing, have never enough.
Faced with new revolutions that are sought as such, psychoanalysis recalls with Lacan that the fundamentals of the father reside in the unconscious. Also that its failure does not make it less symptomatic and therefore residually effective. Attending without amazement the promotion of père-versions that, after the expiration of the father’s, are offered to fill the void of the old education.
Meanwhile, the violence of the male leaves out very well the father.
Translation : Belén Vigil Mendoza
Proofreading : Aurélie Solliec
Picture : © Dake25 – https://www.instagram.com/dakedoscinco/
[1] Blake, W., « To Nobodaddy », « Fayette », Poetical Works, https://www.bartleby.com/235/108.html.
[2] Lacan, J., Seminar, book XXII, « RSI », lesson of January the 21st 1975, Ornicar ?, n°3, 1975.
[3] Sade, Comte de, «Letter to Mrs of Raymond», Bibliothèque de Sade (I), The reign of the Father, Fayard, 1995.
[4] Voltaire, Correspondence, Gallimard, La pléiade, t. I, p. 385-386, 433 & 1393.
[5] Street of Hell. In French in the original text.
[6] « Case of Arcueil » (name of a french town). In French in the text.
[7] Joyce J., Ulysses, available online, http://m.joyceproject.com/chapters/oxen.html and http://m.joyceproject.com/chapters/scylla.html.
[8] Jouissance in lacanian vocabulary.
