When we ask why Freud's great psychosis, in which he claimed that the secrets of dreams had been granted to him (metempsychosis of the great "judged" Daniel), (which was for so long, if not foundational to the Western symptom, or even viewed as entirely lacking in peculiarity, then at least conformed well enough to the discursive rules of the time (always Freud was concerned with Wissenschaft) to be labeled, if a psychosis at all, at least nothing in need of discipline) lost its respected status, quickly becoming the "bad child," more accurately rendered in french as "l'enfant sauvage," we discover we are asking two related questions:
a. Why the psychotic allegory of psychoanalysis stopped being able to mirror the "prevailing narrative" (the whispers of the shadowy presence Kaczynski refers to as "the System").
b. Why, how, and to what end, the judge becomes the accused.
In keeping with biblical tradition, we begin with the latter and follow with the former.
Like any great artist must, and only a great artist can, Krzyztof Kieslowski has already layed out very clearly in the dream-language of Trois Couleurs the very map we are looking for, and all that is left to us is to perform the interpretation. Trois Couleurs: Rouge is concerned above all with the very issue at hand here: the asymmetrical relation of the judge to the accused, at the very moment that this asymmetrical relation becomes reflexive. When the judge judges the judge, when the judge is judged. There is a liminal space opened up when the structure of facticity becomes folded under its permutations, whether this space is shelter from a storm or covers for lovers to hide under, and this liminal space is just what Kieslowski is so interested in showing us, above all because that liminal space is Love. The three colors in the trilogy correspond to the three colors of the French flag: liberte (blue), egalite (white), fraternité (red), and each film approaches its transcendental target through the oscillations of an asymmetrical relation.
- Blue: Liberte (eros) arises from the oscillations of the detachment relation (I have the right to leave you).
- White: Egalite (ludus) arises from the oscillations of the Sadean relation (I have the right to enjoy your suffering).
- Red: Fraternité (storge) arises from the oscillations of the judicial relation (I have the right to judge you).
If it's not already clear, this tripartite structure is reflected in the traditional classification of psychic structures: neurosis, perversion, psychosis. Perversion is the easiest to understand, so we can start with egalite as an example.
The subject (S) of Trois Coleurs: Blanc unites with his love/oppressor (a), actualizing himself (a'), and achieving equality (A), by reversing the direction of repression (and thereby "universalizing" the law of repression). Since this film is a comedy, there is no reason to avoid referring here to the classic didactic joke: "Q: What is capitalism? A: The oppression of one man by another. Q: And socialism then? A: The opposite..."
Trois Coleurs: Rouge proceeds along similar lines: the subject unites with the judge in fraternité by reversing the judicial relationship and achieving a mutual reconnaissance (recognition). If you haven't seen the movie yet, suffice it to say that the judge sits at the center of a panoptical web, where he is able to practice hobby espionage against his neighbors, folding open their various secrets and mundanities. Already before the film begins, the judge has become destitute by the power of his own authoritative gaze turned inwards, but without another to displace his gaze, there is no hope for salvation.
Freud inherits a judicial place from Daniel, and as such becomes the premier subject of psychoanalysis, rather than merely its father, although of course we know that analysis starts with the name of the father, and here that name is Polybus. Always we turn back to Freud, and turn on him, just as Freud turns back to his analysands. It’s not surprising, then, to find the psychoanalytic institution on trial; what is more surprising is that it is still on trial, or, in other words, that there is no fraternity to be found for the psychoanalytic judgement, since in the contemporary setting this judgement is judged guilty due to its very form as a judgement.
Read (temporally) backwards, Lolita is a chronicle of the history of psychoanalysis, and likewise a chronicle of the trajectory of post-Victorian culture. That is to say, that in the beginning of the book, which is the end of the story, we find the birth of psychoanalysis as a self-disciplining psychosis.
Read forwards, Lolita is a story of the unification of objects of desire into a single object. It is telling that the terminal point of this unification is self-disciplining psychosis, which is recognized by John Ray Jr. in the foreword which lampoons the “foreword” to Ulysses written by Hon. John M. Woolsey.
Here we have to confront the core issue that lies beneath what I jokingly call “atilolation,” the inverted Lolita process, by which a harmonious desire (reflected by harmony in the Other/Name-of-the-Father) becomes split, fragmented into its various material “selfish genes,” or partial objects.
Via atilolation, the psychotic becomes the pervert, and desire itself becomes a Guernica horrorshow of disembodied limbs. But to truly understand both the process of atilolation and the mind of the pervert we must separate the pervert’s fantasy from the real mechanism of perversion. What we are hinting at is exactly the point of Lacan’s Kant with Sade: this destruction of the Other through fragmentation is the pervert’s fantasy, but only because the destruction of the Other is the pervert’s singular desire. This is why perversion is at its core always sterile and with Kantian flavor: the wholeness of his desire is always reasserted through the denial of this very wholeness.
This fact is presented very clearly in Lolita: Humbert Humbert’s perversion arises as an attempt to efface the singularity of Annabel: a process that only (somewhat/allegedly) succeeds when this love is eventually transmuted again in all of its singularity to the Lo’ he beheld:
I remember her [Annabel’s] features far less distinctly than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita.
This evolution of what we call with puffed chests and tight elbow-pads psychic structure, from psychotic to perverse and to psychotic again, never is interrupted in its holistic coherence, except through the fantasy-experience.
At the risk of offending hasty readers, I’d like to end by inviting a look at the journey of Jacques Alain Miller from Suture to Humpty-Dumpty, from psychoanalyst to hysteric (critics claim), and (he suggests) the journey of the field of therapy from “docile to hysterics” to “docile to trans.” We already sense in the permutations of these terms the underlying reflections/rotations of symbolic reality, so what more is there for me to say, than to warn Miller that the doctor who sits on a wall (all the better to see the philosopher with his “nightcaps and tatters of his dressing gown”) may very well not be able to perform his own surgery, should he fall.