Lacan's take on excommunication is interesting, specifically his feeling that he himself has been excommunicated from some grand great old intellectual community, some Church, because his teaching method had been censured by the I.P.A.: "What it amounts to is something strictly comparable to what is elsewhere called major excommunication" (page 3). Here he compares the psychoanalytic community to a religious bureaucracy, whilst comparing himself to that Flying Dutchman of Modern Thought, Spinoza, particularly correlating his (Lacan's) censure with the kherem Spinoza received from Amsterdam's bigwig rabbis in 1656. According to poor Jacques, his blacklisting "was precisely that which Spinoza was condemned to."
Whenever a person of privilege is silenced or attacked—especially when that person is a white male who holds a powerfully erudite position in a capitalist, patriarchal, and intellectual subculture—history has been made. Send for the scribes, we've got a goddamn dialectic to uncover! Though I try not to love Lacan, I must admit I do sympathize with him in that, because of my own white-male privilege, I really don't deserve a poetic voice, just like he doesn't deserve a scholarly one, even though, like Lacan, I work hard and take that work, however praxis-less and self-centered it is, very seriously (I don't count Lacan as Scientist or Philosopher, but he is a groundbreaking lecturer with a fresh avant-garde spirit and some gnarly riffs on Freud). And for me, someone who, like Lacan, thinks his industry--the Poetry Industry--doesn't welcome his style—regardless of whether the power's that be in said industry are aware of it or not—I feel ostracized and ineffective.
Lately I've been working on a series of poems entitled "White Male Monologues." This series explores, through the dramatic monologue form, public and/or private downfalls of infamous white men. For my blog, and in the spirit of Lacan's lectures, I've composed a piece written from poor Jacques perspective, set at the time he started beefing with the I.P.A. In my poem, I allude to the lives of Spinoza, Lacan, and myself, and, when it fits, I try to employ the language of psychoanalysis, with hints of Electracy peppered in for relevance. I may also suggest the censor Lacan's received caused in him a total and complete mental, physical, and emotional breakdown, unlike what it really yielded: a long, lucrative career on the international lecture circuit.
Excommunication
Excommunication
I
am that wretch comparable with mirrors
that
can reflect but cannot see
—Louis Aragon
At
4 AM I gaze into the Marriot’s bathroom mirror,
practicing
my lecture on the Essence of Comedy.
In
a sweat I’d awoken, after dreaming the worst dream
in
which my penis disappeared, then reappeared,
then
disappeared again. Per usual, Freud was in the dream,
before
me, looking coked. He told me to desire,
then I awoke.
At
the mirror, I recite: “Each of us at any moment or at any level
may
be traded off. Politics is a matter of
trading.”
Since
the censoring, I haven’t slept well.
Sleep’s become a record
of
failure put on repeat, a record spun by some twisted synchrony.
And
it’s most twisted when I travel, in hotel rooms
like
this one, where dreams enter from the castration abyss,
reeking
like the unsolved funk of me. Consider
Spinoza,
the
Dutchman whose public life ended at 23; I know how he feels.
These
images I sleep with, like his wild theorems, are bubbles
of
enigmatic gas, and I can feel them in my stomach. 
No comments:
Post a Comment