17. Pathologies to being
While speaking of “being”, I do not write it with a capital letter, because you know that, for the mediationists, there does not exist “being” in oneself. If the Theory of Mediation is truly a theory of reason, this theory is non-philosophical, and this is why it can maintain only a bad relationship with the tradition of the “philosophies of the self”. You know that for Aristotle The being is a substance (a “hypokeimenon”) subject to the accidents of becoming, while remaining coextensive: to say “the short dog”, is to actually say, “the dog” (substance) is short” (accident). For Aristotle, but also for Descartes, To be is the centre of everything. It is what one calls the substance and the accidents, to reuse the vocabulary of the scholars. But this privilege granted to Being is perfectly illusory, and it is however it which fed philosophy from Aristotle until Husserl and Heidegger and which had the immense merit to have founded phenomenology, i.e. to break with the essentialism to privilege the existence (the dasein, i.e. our “being-of-the-world”). To tell the truth, the essence has never been, since our Renaissance, only the persistence of a theology in a philosophy which has never been able, epistemologically, to emerge from science.
But it is a permanent temptation of our culture that of reifying concepts, in general, and, in particular, those which make it possible to take a distance compared to the existence: we speak therefore of “being”, of “substance”, “essence” etc.. But where do they come from? Greek thinkers, of course, but these Greeks expressed themselves in Indo-European a language known as “flexional”, i.e. which had a syntax. And they were trapped, as we are (since we come down from them) by the words, and when I say “the words”, I should say the language which we use (which is at the same time spoken and doxa). Admittedly, we cannot think without the words, but it is also appropriate, as I often say, to think against them. Terrible thing to do! For example we have, ourselves, that which we call, syntactically, the function “subject”. Automatically, we speak, philosophically, of the Subject. Take the famous Cartesian “subject”. Descartes was responsible, not only for substantialism, but of subjectivism. When he said: “I think, therefore I am”, in what was he interested? With “I”, this “I” being a substance (a “hypokeimenon”, as said Aristotle). Well that makes neither head nor tail quite simply because it is grammar, (I will return there immediately). I benefit from it, in passing, to denounce in the “cogito ergo sum”, the definition of To be by the thought. You see spiritualism, or rather the angelism! It is distracting. You understand, always in passing, that, considering the other-worldliness to which Descartes condemns man, the animal cannot be, for him, but a well assembled machine. In other words Descartes reduces the animals to automats, in order to give to the man the privilege To be!
Here is what the philosophers do, i.e. they permanently make myths, insofar as, as you know it, rhetorically, the mythical function consists in confusing the world with words which we have to say. And then as we have them, as each one knows, a complement known as “the object”, well the Object exists! You see from which this false pair comes that we Occidentals, created Subject and Object, Subjectivity and Objectivity, etc… But they are nonsense. I discussed one day with psychiatrists, mornings of psychoanalysis, and which ran off a chorus on the Subject, and I said to them: “But how can you explain that with a Japanese or an Chinese person, where it does not have grammatically our “function subject”?”. That means what they said was not idiotic, except that they spoke about the Subject like a universal one and true transcendent (there is, in the psychoanalysts a fantastic idealism). However, you know that there exist languages without syntax (in the sense that us, Westerners understand it), and those one calls the “insulating” languages, to which belong, in particular Chinese. Then we say: “Well yes, but it is because the Chinese are underdeveloped! They only have to make a small effort to resemble us!”. Of course, since we represent the paragon of humanity! And notice well, the time when I did my studies, someone presented to us, then, the things in this way: there were initially the “insulating” languages, then, by making a small effort, certain people reached the “agglutinant” languages, and finally, at the top of the scale, there were the “flexional” languages, i.e.: us. I assure you! And if were for us to make a small effort to reach the Chinese thought! Not being a sinologist (alas!), I advise you to read, on the question a small work which has just appeared with the Grasset editions: “Quiet transformations”, written by François Julien, a sinologist philosopher, and to draw your attention, in particular, to the pages which treat existing difference between languages like the old Greek and the Chinese language. These pages are absolutely enthralling!
However, if we want to leave the thought of being, to know what is a man, all the difficulty comes from what we have with the verb “to be”. Consequently, we have the function “attribute”. To again use my example: “the dog” (prone grammatical) is “current” (attribute)”. In addition, which says “prone”, known as “substantive”, “substance” and “substrate” (i.e. the “hypokeimenon” of Aristotle). You see our handicap, and the difficulty which we have to think things differently! I spoke about the verb “to be”, but, I was going to say “unfortunately”, we have also the verb “to have”. Then, of course, we say: “It is not the same thing”. To be and to have, still a false pair (as the prone object, etc), false couple which feeds, here the philosophical discussions to never finish moreover and which resurface, today, because of the economic crisis. But there is no better a non-problem than this one.
Aristotle had felt it, or rather the Greek language had felt it through him, since, in old Greek the same word (“ousia”) indicates the being and the goods. Then see Aristotle’s easy way: in good philosophy, he exploited a fact of semiology suitable for the language which he spoke, and it came just right (you see that mythical thought is truly a thought). He said to himself: “If it is the same word, then it should be conceived that the access to the person and the access to the property are in-dissociable”.
I say to you immediately that if you admit that the being includes, in a certain manner, its goods (movable, women, horses, etc), at the same time, you understand that, in the worship of death, made, for example in old Egypt, and insofar as these Egyptians believed in a life in the beyond, the death chamber of the Pharaoh could be only encumbered of odds and ends baptised “funerary furnishings”, an expression which, actually, does not say much, except if one considers that the being and its goods are only one. And one can say as much as the presence of, in the burial chambers of the Chinese Emperors, the terra cotta effigies of their armies. Or, still, the presence, in certain Celtic burials, of the horses of the late person. One speaks then about ritual “sacrifices”. Not at all: these are the goods which accompany the dead person in the beyond. Take, in India, the tradition which engages the wife of the dead person to be thrown on the blazing inferno which consumed the ashes of her husband: it is exactly the same explanation (it is only a very short time ago that this so-called “sacrifice”, actually completely voluntary, was prohibited). All that should be understood, because, simply, it is human. You see, therefore, the enrichment that such a theory of the person represents who does not dissociate the being and their goods, because it makes it possible to understand a crowd of cultural phenomena of which one can seize nothing, if one remains with our narrow design of the person, in our modern Occident, reduced, very often, to the organic individual. Perhaps you will say that everyone does not have all these goods. Admittedly, but everyone has, even if this be only shoe laces, a name, a language, etc… You perhaps have a family, i.e. a social environment (brothers, sisters, children, etc), i.e. a medium that you have culturally created while absenting from the species. Finally, all this has a social skin, say the word, a certain stability, but a very provisional stability, which has nothing to do with any timeless being, but disappears, culturally, with you.
It is with this coincidence of the being and of its goods that the model of the person elaborated by Jean Gagnepain, on the basis, no longer of philosophical considerations, but of the experimental private clinic. I will not reconsider the way in which we reach, to the ess and the prodesse, as said in Latin, in other words “to be” and with “being-for” defining, ontologically and deontologically, the person, by the acculturation of the reproduction function which we share with the animal, under the two aspects, actually inseparable, of our sexuality and our genitality. I do not like to quote myself, but I sufficiently tackled the subject in my “Introduction…” to which I return you, and in which, under the title of “the society without fathers”, I tackle the problems of pathologies of “being-for”, in other words disorders of the relation to others (schizophrenia and paranoia). Well, today, I will supplement the picture while speaking to you about the disorders of the relation to the “other”. Note well that it is a distinction made necessary for purely didactic reasons. I.e. one is, at the obliged bottom, to clearly see there (i.e. to build our object scientifically) or reifier, despite everything, the concepts, was this only the time of a short presentation, the essential being not easily deceived of this provisional reification.
It should be conceived that to emerge with the esse, which is a principle of being, it is to emerge to the order (in the pascalian sense) of the ownership. To say: “I am not you” or: “it is mine”, is to say exactly the same thing. Never an animal will say to its congeneric: “I am not you”, nor ever, he will say: “it is mine”. I return you, on this point to that I said when I spoke about the linguistic exchange (“Of the language”), of the relationship of the animal to “his” territory, “his” burrow or “his” females (it is the possessive adjective, here which misleads us). Admittedly, certain animals mark their territory, (by urinating on it), i.e. they occupy it. They are there. And for an animal, what is the limit of its territory? These limits are not the same ones for a lion as for a bee, it is clear, but one can say that, generally, “its” territory, for an animal, is its pantry, i.e. the area which enables it to live. Thus you see that occupation is not possession. The animal occupies a territory, i.e. it incorporates it, but one cannot speak about “his” territory, without discussing La Fontaine. But us, as French citizens, we are in France, from Irun to Strasbourg, because, as one says, it is of the same “country”. But what does that mean, “country”, if not precisely the space of the citizen, which is not the space of the subject. At this time, it is no longer an affair of material occupation, it is a business of purely cultural borders, i.e., of suitable space. In the same way, the animal has a burrow, if you want, but this burrow belongs to him subjectively (as a subject): it does not own it, since it cannot alienate it. It cannot negotiate it, it will not be able to go to the notary and say: “I wish to return my home to my boyfriend”. Thus it does not have it; it does not have it in the social sense, (and thus human) of the term: it occupies it. Even so, I say to you, acting as one of his females, one has never seen an animal that practices exogamy nor see the mayor!
If, therefore, the opposition of to be and to have nourishes, even today, many false philosophical debates, it is that we quite simply forgot that our goods – to start with our body and its environment – belong to our person, i.e. the things also, insofar as we adapt to them, emerge with another reality, with this other mode of existence which is that of culture. For this reason the distinction of the public and private is an invention of man, an invention which does not accept the difference between people and their goods: the possibility of home-ownership is the introduction of privatisation, i.e. the fact of creating a border which makes that the being includes in a certain manner what it adopts: body, language, knowledge, objects, money, means of production, etc
Take decency, for example: one often makes a question of morals of it. Not at all! It is a question of borders: up to where is my body mine, and from where is it no longer mine? That depends on civilizations: there are some where the women veil the face, and others where they show their buttocks (you see that there are no universals, here neither). Even in a society where the women are used to “walking in the manner of Eve”, will know well that to want to make them carry a sex mask will be a true offence to their decency. Why? Quite simply because to wear this sex mask will be seen as a means of attracting the glances of the men to what we Occidentals still called, not long ago, the “shameful parts”. In other words, these women feel quite simply their skin as being their clothing and the hairs of their pubis like a loincloth. You see the arbitrarity of things! And the same, of the veiled woman. Perhaps you know that among people of Semitic origin, the face reveals much about the person (more so than here), but in a different way: while the masculine face tends to be a mask, i.e. a kind of petrification where is read a whole history, the features of the female face tend to always preserve a plasticity, a malleability and an instability such as they reflect the most fleeting emotions. Under these conditions, you understand that the Moslem women, in public, often keeping their eyes lowered, veil more readily the face than the navel, and even feel that their private life has been insulted if they are photographed with their face uncovered. That the men exploit this female decency to the ends of domination does not explain anything: they did nothing but exploit what was exploitable! Here, in any case, what a civilization like ours does not understand is where the cultural border between the public and the private tend to grow blurred, decency is perceived more as the result of a vexation inflicted on the women by this or that society, and of which they have “to be released”. But if it is true that the animal cannot be impudic, and if is to be civilized, for a human being (male or female), to be a social being in particular by marking a border (whatever it is) between the public and private, I wonder who are the barbarians!
But decency, except when it becomes prudery, does not have anything pathological, which is not the case with what one calls “perversions” which are more correctly pathologies which are specific to the culture and the person (that I call the pathologies of being), and which are always brought back to an infraction of the property, i.e. an infraction of a border, not of nature, but of culture. It is the case of the exhibitionist and the voyeurist. What do they seek both? Infraction of the property: you deny the intimacy of the other, and at this time, you are a Peeping Tom; or, on the contrary, you deny your personal intimacy, and, at this time, you are an exhibitionist. In both cases it is about an impudicity, i.e. of an infraction of the property of the body which defines decency. In other words, what one calls “perversion” supposes an acculturation of sexuality. Even insofar as it is a question of abolishing the border (to practise the infraction of intimacy), it is certain that this infraction is not possible but with the human being: the animal, passionately make fun of looking at the other. No interest! Whereas, with the man, it is the infraction, which is pathological: in fact the body is in question, but the property of the body. And therefore many exhibitionists run away if they happen to find a partner, because it is not that they seek.
See, again, the donjuanism. What is in question in donjuanism? What does Don Juan seek especially (whatever the “primitive wound”), it is to be seduced, i.e., according to the Latin etymology of the word, “to bring” (ducere) “to the variation” (the prefix “”) all those which should not be there because they are already “in manu”, i.e. “in hand”, with the legal meaning of the term. It is because these women are “in hand” that he wants them, leaves, possibly, without benefit from it. It acts, indeed, here again, of an infraction of the property, or, more exactly, of a cuckolding of the owner. Incidentally, why doesn’t cuckolding appear in any handbook of psychiatry? And, why are the women never concerned in it? You see at which point the dominating social system plays in the nosography. One could say that there are illnesses for the men and illnesses for the women! You point out hysteria: that was good for the women. But I assure you that I have met completely hysterical men! And, in addition, there is no reason speaking about donjuanism without mentioning exchangism. One hears about it less since the appearance of the AIDS, but that exists (at all times, to tell the truth). However, what is exchangism? It is this freedom within couples which means that a husband says to you: “Go, take my wife!”. Well, exchangism, it is exactly the reverse of donjuanism: in the donjuanism, one takes, in the exchangism, one has taken. In other words, between donjuanism and exchangism you have exactly the same relationship as between voyeurism and exhibitionism. It would be necessary to reflect on all these concepts, concepts which, of course do not have anything universal, but take varied aspects according to the societies and the concepts that these societies have concerning property.
You will understand the bond which exists between the robbery and the rape. It was a while ago that the psychiatrists noticed the bond between perversion and kleptomania, but without being able to clarify, in a convincing way, the nature of this bond, because they put “Eros” in it, whereas it acts quite simply. In the case of kleptomania, one takes something belonging to someone else. And you understand that what one calls “fetishism” does not have anything to do, either, with the “Eros” (or the libido) contrary to what was said by Freud. In fact, if you admit, as it is defined, the being including their goods: no problem! Because it is not the object, nor its qualities, which are in question, but, precisely, the fact that the object belongs to someone else: it is the ownership which makes “fetishism”, in other words the bond with the person. You understand what all the psychoanalytical or different speeches are worth on so-called fetishism. What one likes, in the other, is the whole of what they are. But on this account, it is indeed fetishism, still, in the strictest form of the term, when somebody becomes widowed and he keeps clothing of the other. In other words, clothing of the dead, the house of the deceased, the autograph of the star, here is fetishism, which is, as you see it, a manner of being with the other one. Is this, strictly speaking, a pathology? The question remains open, because fetishism has not been sufficiently observed. Its study has to be entirely re-examined! But also that of avarice, prudery, prodigality, rape, and so on. You see that research is perfectly open!
But there is, now, thanks to the clinical Anthropology of Jean Gagnepain, a means of suggesting a nosographic articulation of all these pathologies of being, turbid in the study of which reigns still a beautiful disorder! You see, for example that there exists a very narrow relationship between selfishness and avarice (even prudery), on the one hand, and between what one usually calls altruism and prodigality, in other words between what I will call the auto-centrism (or “ego-centration”) and the heterocentrism (or alterocentration). Why invent such a terminology? Quite simply because it is necessary for us to gather under the same heading what arose, in our language, and with the being, and to have to be able to render account, then, of the two aspects of the disorders which one baptizes perversions, in other words, which are the disorders of the relationship to the other.
And I will finish by drawing all your attention to a paramount point: it should be seen that all the disorders which we quickly reviewed together do not absolutely relate to morals, insofar as it is not a question, here, of the libido and its acculturation by the normal standard. Of course, the “Eros” can be invested in our social being (it is everywhere, if you look for it) but it is not definitive of this social being that we confer ourselves by the acculturation of our constitution to be sexual. One should not, with Freud and so many of the others, to confuse our sexuality with the desire which it can inspire, just as one should not confuse your stomach with your craving for sauerkraut or sardines! One should not confuse constitution and appetite, castration and auto-castration, power of the person and control of the desire. However sexuality and desire remain still confused in the mind of the majority of people.
It is really poisoning!