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Featured Publication - Infancy and Nonresistance

(The following essay was presented as a keynote address at a conference entitled “Encountering Infancy: The Infant Figure in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy” at Emory University in 2004.)

Not long after I returned to the question of infancy for the conference held here in memory of Jean-François Lyotard two years ago, the question presented itself to me in a dramatically new form. I joked at the time that since I had now finished the speculative work, the real empirical research could begin. I’m sure that every new parent traverses the moment when they sense that everything they thought they knew was now moot, but the anxiety behind my joke was undoubtedly redoubled by the fact that I had always maintained that my speculative turn proceeded from a quite insistent experience, something quite real. It was that commitment to the reality of the experience, which I understood to be comparable to Freud’s devotion to uncovering the reality behind the dream of the wolves in his case of 1915, and perhaps to Wordsworth’s desperate return to what he took to be his poetic origins in “The Prelude,” that was to be tested. Would I be able to recognize the experience I had described? Would I recognize the silence of the infans and thereby know in some way that moment in the relation of father and son that Cathy Caruth helped us to understand as profoundly ethical? Would I have to throw the whole thing out the window? I’m sure you can imagine my nervousness.

Well, let me acknowledge candidly that after two years I still don’t have an answer to these questions. Perhaps it is already too late (and always was, as Cathy’s work might suggest). Perhaps the event is too dispersed or too furtive to admit of any observation and any kind of construction that is not a further act of supposition. In any case, I carry on gamely. And despite some better judgment and some urgent advice from friends, I do want to report one incident that I will take as a starting point for reflection which I hope can recall and perhaps even advance, a little, the line of thinking I pursued in Infant Figures. What I offer will really be no more than an enigmatic hint to which I will respond quite indirectly. I promise to keep it short and to spare you any pictures.

The incident is the following. Late last summer, in the silence of the early morning hours, my son, then 15 months old, experienced what I have heard described as a “night fright.” He had been sleeping on the bed next to me when suddenly he began to cry out and raced over the edge of the bed. I don’t recall how many times he repeated the fall in all the confusion, perhaps it was just once. But his movements remained desperate and precipitous even after I recovered him from the floor. Once he would allow me to, I held him closely, and then let him rest on his own. The ripples of confusion settled down, and then three or four minutes after the silence had regathered, I heard him utter, quite distinctly, “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh,” is, of course, a common enough phrase for children his age, and I’ve heard that it is a kind of signature phrase for a children’s television program. Gabriel had been using it on almost any occasion when he spilled something, knocked something over, or found that something didn’t work to his satisfaction. But his use of it was distinctive this time because he did not refer to some situation he had caused or observed and was describing in an infantile way. This time, the accident involved him, and I think I could even say that he was the accident. He had precipitated from sleep into a kind of fall, a state of falling almost, and was speaking, after the fact, from that fall. Al least, that’s how I heard it. His “uh-oh” said, “I’ve fallen,” or better, I’ve been falling,” because the delay in his utterance gave expression to a temporal factor. He was not reporting on some now past event with this “uh-oh,” and while he had recovered considerably, he wasn’t speaking in the comfort of a regained security or at any reflective distance. His “uh-oh” said, once again,” I’ve been falling” Perhaps there was apprehension in this expression, even a kind of distress; in any case, its manner of echoing the event so long after its occurrence was profoundly haunting. And he said nothing more. I would have to say that I have never been quite as gripped by an utterance as by that one.

Did I hear a metaphysical “Uh Oh”? Was Gabriel giving expression to a discover of thrownness?

I can only suppose such a thing, but my experience was strong enougb to prompt me to follow the implications of this supposition for this occasion. It led me back to Heidegger, of course, but it also led me to read Heidegger from Blanchot once again, and ultimately it leads to something Blanchot calls “the exigency of another relation”--a motif to which I turned at the end of my polylogue when I took up the theme of Blanchot’s “yes.” My aim today will be to present my course of reflection and to fly to reach again that thought of ‘another relation.”

So what would it mean to suppose that I heard in Gabriel’s “uh oh” an expression of Geworfenheit?As it happens, the supposition is not far-fetched since Heidegger speaks metaphorically on several occasions of the Dasein’s “birth” when he evokes what he terms “the facticity of thrownness” (see, for example, paragraph 72). When the Dasein resolves authentically upon its utmost possibilities, it carries up into its project the whole of its existence, from its “birth” to its “death,”—it carries into its “being-toward-death” the irreducible fact of its having been thrown into existence and the fall into the world that is inseparable from this thrownness. Much of the existential analytic of Beingand Time could in fact be described as presenting the conditions for this transposition of the discovery of thrownness into a futural projection. Indeed, I would say that thrownness is given to us almost only in transposition, since Heidegger seems to translate much of this experience into terms he draws from his description of the Dasein’s relation to its death. Thrownness is, for all practical purposes, always already left behind, and this by reason of the futural character of the Dasein’s assumption of its being. But there are, nevertheless, a few intriguing points of reference. So let me begin with “the facticity of thrownness.”

Heidegger defines this phrase for the first time in Being and Time in the context of a discussion of the first form of disclosure that is proper to the Dasein’s existence. He calls this the Dasein’s Befindlichkeit (translated in English as “state of mind”), and tells us that we experience it on an everyday basis in our moods (Stimmungen). From an ontological basis, he says, this is the “primordial” form of disclosure wherein the Dasein is disclosed to itself pr to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure (BT 175/136). In moods, the Dasein is brought before its thrown being as “there.” Virtually all moods effect this disclosure by means of a kind of flight from what they disclose (anxiety is of course the singular exception upon which Heidegger will focus in Being and Time), but in every mood there is this disclosure of the being of the there in its “that it is” (Erschlossenheit des Seins in seinem ‘Dass’), Here is how he speaks of this disclosure:

This characteristic of Dasein’s Being--this ‘that it is’--is veiled in its “whence”and “whither,” yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the “thrownness’ of this entity into its “there”; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the “there.” The expression “thrownness” is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.. The fact ‘that is it is and has to be’ which is disclosed in Dasein’s state-of- mind is not the same ‘that-it-is’ which expresses ontologico-categorially the factuality belonging to presence-at-hand. This factuality becomes accessible only if we ascertain it by looking at it. The “that-it-is” which is disclosed in Dasein’s state-of-mind must rather be conceived as an existential attribute of the entity which has Being-in-the-world as its way of Being. Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something present- atl-hand but a characteristic of Dasein’sc Being—one which has been taken up into existence, even if proximally it has been thrust aside. The “that-it-is” of facticity never becomes something that we can come across by beholding it. (BT 174/135)

Heidegger’s insistence that the “that” is not something factual that might be observed like intraworldly “facts” is critical for the issue I evoked at the outset in speaking of the reality of infancy. When infancy is somehow given, it is not given in the mode of a thing as we normally think of it. Indeed, of infancy we have to say, “es gibt,” not “es ist.”

As Heidegger continues to define what is discovered in Dasein’s state-of-mind, he offers us one of the few descñptions of the there. He says that the (bare) mood “brings Dasein before the ‘that it is’ of its ‘there,’ which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma” (BT 175/136). The enigma of the Dasein’s origin is a kind of “abyss” that defies further definition. And indeed, we should note that in Being and Time there is no further speculative step back to what the experience of the opening of the there might be, which is of course the level at which Blanchot and Lyotard approach the question of infancy. Of birth, in the existential analytic, we can only say that we know we have been delivered over to being-there.

In a moment, I will turn to a further dimension of this knowledge, but I want to pauseover Heidegger’s insistence in the passage from which we have been reading (paragraph 29) that this disclosure of being-there in state of mind is the condition of any affect:

Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted existentially by the attunement of state of mind. And only because the senses belong ontologically to an entity whose kind of Being is Being in the world with a state of mind, can they be ‘touched’ by anything or “have a sense for” something in such a way that what touches these shows itself in an affect. Under the strongest pressure and resistance, nothing like an affect would come about, and the resistance itself would remain essentially undiscovered, if Being-in-the-world, with its state-of-mind, had not already submitted itself to having entities within-the-world “matter’ to it in a way which its moods have outlined in advance. (BT 177/137)

Later, expressing this “temporally,” Heidegger says: “Only an entity which, in accordance with the meaning of its Being, finds itself in a state-of-mind—that is to say, an entity, which in existing, is as already having been, and which exists in a constant mode of what has been—can become affected…. It remains a problem in itself to define ontologically the way in which the senses can be stimulated or touched in something that merely has life, and how and where the Being of animals, for instance, is constituted by some kind of ‘time’ (BT 396/346). For “animals,” we could well read “infancy,” though there we would want to talk about an affect proper to the originary opening of the world as such. In any case, we see once again that the existential analytic is passing over, so to speak, the experience of infancy.

Heidegger gives another description of thrownness in paragraph 58 in the context of his discussion of guilt and the call of conscience. There, he tells us that when Dasein assumes its thrownness (something that does not happen once and for all, but is constantly there, and must constantly be assumed), it also encounters the limits of its power to be the ground of its being. “In being a basis,” he writes, “that is, in existing as thrown, Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus, “Being a-basis” means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up. This “not” belongs to the existential meaning of “thrownness.” It itself, being a basis, is a nullity of itself [Nichtigkeit seiner selbst] (BT 330/284). Dasein must be a nothingness of itself (I’ll let that phrase resonate a little.) “It has been released from its basis, not through itself, but to itself [an es selbst entlassen], so as to be as this basis” (BT 330/285). So there is, in the powerlessness of being thrown, an entlassen, a dismissal to, or a releasing to. And thus we could say that the Dasein must in effect “catch itself up” from a “being-released” in its powerless ground as it is thrown to its being- possible. Gabriel’s “uh oh” was perhaps a little short of that point.

Now, the powerlessness known here by the Dasein through that forbidding “never” is immensely difficult to think in light of the fact that the existential analytic remains within the horizon of a thougbt of production and possibility. Part of what Heidegger names the “turn” in his thought involves leaving that metaphysically determined horizon behind him. In a text still written from within that horizon, however, we find another significant reference to the theme of the powerlessness of thrownness. I refer here to the very conclusion of “The Essence of Ground,” where Heidegger describes what he terms the “primordial” movement of freedom by which the Dasein is given to itself and is given to understand that its abyssal character, the “nothing” of its foundation, can never be eliminated. He notes here that this notion of freedom allows us to recognize that the earthly Dasein subject to attunenient in moods must be understood as freely so attuned, and then concludes:

That the Dasein] should be potentially a “self” and that it should be so each time proportionally to its freedom; that transcendence temporalizes itself as a proto-historial act; all of this is not in the power of this freedom itself. But such a powerlessness--the fact that it finds itself thrown, abandoned--is not simply the result of the encroachment of being on the Dasein; this powerlessness determines the being of man as such. (VW 158)

Powerlessness, therefore, is not a function of the “material” weight of the worldly surroundings to which the Dasein finds itself abandoned, as we saw earlier, The facticity of thrownness must be thought from the primordial movement of freedom; and to this thrown being, there belongs, as an essential trait, a powerlessness.

Now, throughout the passage from which I have extracted my last citation, Heidegger insists on the possibility of the Dasein knowing the abyss that opens in it, and therefore the powerlessness that “determines its Being” (“it is given to understand,” he says). The statement seems straightforward in its way, but it is challenging, as I have noted, because Heidegger defines understanding in terms of possibility, projection, and power. Wouldn’t understanding of the abyss in the Dasein entail a relation that would be prior to production or any “act” of understanding (and “prior” here in a logical or pre-temporal sense, since it is related to the opening of temporality itself)? Wouldn’t it have to enfold, at least, a “knowledge” of powerlessness that exceeds it (ie., exceeds its own capacity as understanding)?

Being and Time deals with this problem effectively and quite beautifully by arguing that in transcending toward itself in the manner described in “The Essence of Ground,” the Dasein assumes the nullity or powerlessness of its thrown being from the assumption of nullity that is the Dasin’s authentic projection upon the possibility of its death; it knows the powerlessness of thrownness in and from the “superior power” that arises from its assumption of its possible impossibility (its death). This is the “transposition” of Dasein’s birth to which I referred earlier. Anxious being-toward-death “translates” for Dasein the powerlessness known in and before the fact that it is into an enabling condition of possibility. Indeed, we could even say that it translates the “call of conscience” that summons the Dasein to the facticity of its thrown Being into the Dasein’s own call through the individuating confrontation with death that it entails, making the Dasein the source of its own possibility and thereby sacrificing its exposure to the other. As we have seen, this also implies a foreclosure of any relation to the Dasein’s infancy. Again, we have seen that understanding must enfold in its circular structure an exposure to a “nullity” over which it has no hold and upon which it cannot project. It can hold itself--somehow--in this exposure (that would be the condition of “knowledge”), but it cannot hold it or get it into its power. It must suffer this exposure, and pass through it (but not over it if there to be authentic understanding). This is the Dasein’s most fundamental experience. But how is this suffering assumed if it is not immediately converted (“directionally”) in the tragic pathos of being-toward-death? Must this suffering not hold in it an acquiescence of some kind, a yes? And is it possible that such an acquiescence is in fact what enables understanding--not by empowering, but by allowing or releasing? Would it be, as a form of reception, the most primordial form of disclosure (ex-posure) and perhaps what releases something like a “Being-possible” and even any being-toward-death? To translate this suggestion in Heidegger’ s own (later) terms: musn’t the assumption of finimde be already a form of Gelassenheit?

In the powerful concluding pages of his Kantbuch, Heidegger makes precisely such asuggestion, returning from the ground of fundamental ontology to the analytic of care and the definition of anxiety as that fundamental state of attunement that places the Dasein before the Nothing. The Being of beings can only be understood, Heidegger reiterates, if the Dasein, in the ground of its essence, “holds itself’ in the Nothing. In a footnote to this point, Heidegger asserts that the nihilating comportment is grounded in Gelassenheit. (KPM 167/239). “Nihilating” is grounded in a “letting” that is at least an acquiescence, perhaps a yes.

This early appearance of a notion of Gelassenheit strikes me as critically important because it does indeed seem immediately linked to Heidegger’s later development of the term. There again, we find a notion of powerlessness or in-capacity linked to the essence of the human. I don’t want to test your patience too much by jumping to another period of Heidegger’s work, with all the attendant strangeness of its language. But I would like to cite a key portion of the dialogue entitled “Gelassenheit” for this point regarding incapacity.

The passage I want to read follows the assertion that if Gelassenheit (which I hesitate to translate without further discussion--the published translation gives “releasement”) constitutes the essence of thinking, then it must be thought from that which gives thought to its Gelassenheit. Thought must therefore approach what is irreducibly prior to it, that from which the essence of thinking and thereby the essence of the human, takes its stamp--obviously nothing human. Of course, such a step can only take the form of a speculative supposition. But Heidegger’ interlocutors insist that the language of their conversation leads them in this supposition, and they come thereby to the assertion that truth needs what the human, by essence, lends to it (this is Heidegger’s notion of “usage,” der Brauch). As the scholar puts it (I take the liberty of paraphrasing slightly); “Evidently the essence of humankind is released to truth because without the human essence truth cannot essence in the way it does.” The teacher then pushes things farther and declares that the essence of humankind is used by truth and thereby “gelassen” because “Man, for himself has no capacity over truth, which remains independent of him” [der Mensch für sich selbst über die Wahrheit nights vermag und diese unabhängigkeit bleibt von ihm] Truth remains independent in its need and use of humankind--there is thus difference, we might say--because humankind offers to truth an in-capacity. The opening of its there in the event of truth remains an im-possible for the Dasein and is assumed in Gelassenheit as the very condition of truth.

Now, I note that there is little or no talk of death in this dialogue. A releasement from willing and releasement to the prior use of the human for the advent of truth does not require any shattering of the will against impossibility or even any resignation. It does not even require failure (a missing word, for example). Gelassenheit does not take its composure from a relation to death. It takes form in a waiting, Heidegger tells us, but it temporalizes out of the past and finds the heart to open to the event from an unfolding experience of engagement that has always already happened. Only from this “assumption” of the event, an assumption that supposes only that there is relation, leaving the terms of this relation radically indeterminate, could there be something like an authentic opening to that certain possibility of the Dasein’s impossibility, and from here death itself must be rethought. Heidegger declared at the time of the famous Kehre that everything had to be turned about. The notion of usage to which I have been alluding articulates this turn, and indicates that even where death is concerned, thought must perhaps learn to think from its origin, perhaps its infancy.

This is where I am prompted to turn to texts by Blanchot that I attempted to read in Infant Figures--two texts in which a capacity for death is evoked in terms that strike me as potentially an important commentary on the notion of Gelassenheit. The first of these, of course, is the first “primal scene” of The Writing of the Disaster, which appears to stage what Blanchot describes on the preceding page of this text as “the death of the infans. This “death” is the opening of thought in and to language, the origin of thought, if you will. I have commented on these pages at very long length in Infant Figures, but I would like to return briefly to them in order to bring them to everyone’s mind. What I want to underscore is that the terrible passage Blanchot describes (you will remember that Blanchot does not hesitate to use the term “murder”) is a contraction of relation with something immemorial, a relation that is itself a singularity, though it is in some sense ongoing. The phrase, “on tue un enfant” divulges this relation, though only by way of a kind of dying murmur, an indication that draws us back from language into what Blanchot calls “a relation of impossibility with the other.” “On tue un enfant” effaces its own enunciation in order to say the effacing inscription that is the gift of relation with the impossible.

Blanchot’s statement here is so dense that it defies representation (quite purposively), and seems to leave little space for fiction. But Blanchot hints very strongly that this passage marks the opening of the imaginary for a desiring subject. Each of these terms, “imaginary,” and “desire,” have to be reconceived from the basis of Blanchot’s long work with them. Indeed, I think one could, and one should, read the two primal scenes of The Writing of the Disaster (and there are two) in relation to Blanchot’s thought of the two versions of the imaginary, in the essay by that name, or the two slopes of the imaginary, as he describes them in “Literature and the Right to Death.” From there, we have, potentially, a way of thinking the problematic of infancy and mimesis. (I wish I could have done this at least a little today, though it did not take me long to discover in my preliminary work just how hard such a project might be--even though I could have worked with far more extensive empirical material; anyone who lives around a child knows about their extraordinary mimetism.) But for this occasion, I just want to note that Blanchot’s reference to a “relation de singularité qui s’établirait fictivement” seems to provide the ground for the writing that immediately follows his meditation on the phrase, “on tue un enfant.” There, in the “primal scene” (I can’t say “proper” because of the question marks), Blanchot opens the space of fiction for the reader who is called to suppose and unfolds there a child’s elaboration, après coup, of a relation with the impossible. The affect for the child who suffers this event, is a form of jouissance that is sealed, with the experience, in what Blanchot terms a “secret.” The experience, as you remember, is exposure to the Nothing, to “such an absence that everything has been forever and always lost there, to the point that the vertiginous knowledge is affirmed and dissipated therein that nothing is what there is, and first of all, nothing beyond.”

The secret, Blanchot tells us later, is exposure to an avowal, acceptance of an avowal that cannot be brought to language. It is in fact a “secret” only to those who refuse it (ED 177), though of course no conscious subject can receive it, It is comparable, we may presume, to the saying for which the phrase, “on tue un enfant” offers a kind of figural expression. So who might accept it? Blanchot phrases this question in dialogical fashion as follows:

The always suspended question: being dead of the ‘power to die’ [pouvoir mourir that gives him joy and ravishment: did he survive, or rather, what does surviving mean then, if not living through an acquiescence to the refusal, in the drying up of the emotion, in withdrawal from self-interest, dis-interested, extenuated to the point of calm, awaiting nothing?—consequently waiting, and waiting up, because suddenly awakened, and, knowing this henceforth, never sufficiently awakened.

The child has died, Blanchot’s interlocutors tell us, of a capacity to die. Seeing the spectacle of the murder that gives him the silence of speech, the child knows now the power of the negative, the concept, we might rush to say, except that here the “concept” involves a knowledge of radical immanence (“that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond”), knowledge that necessarily refuses itself even as it forms inasmuch as it cannot be seized or held in the Begriff, conceived in a Hegelian sense. How does the child appropriate this power if it is also revelation of an ungraspable immanence, or what Blanchot elsewhere terms an immediate for which there is no mediation (“The Great Refusal”)? Blanchot tells us only that the child has acquiesced to a knowledge that must of necessity refuse itself to any appropriation--as though, in the event, there has emerged something like a power of assent in relation to that over which the child has no power. It has gained assent and a strange transcendence of self in its waiting upon nothing-- something like Gelassenheit.

Is this the ground of a capacity to die, this acquiescence, this waiting?

In The Madness of the Day, the second text by Blanchot to which I referred a few minutes ago, this acquiescence surfaces in a kind of affirmation that extends even unto death. In the first paragraph, we read, “When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure.. this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.”

The immeasure upon which the narrator insists points back to the fact that he speaks from an experience of a disaster not unlike that recounted in the primal scene from which we have just been reading. In this case, the “primal scene” has been suffered in a kind of blinding, though it is linked to a strange vision concerning a mother and a child. Thus, when he restates his joyful certainty in a perversely Cartesian intonation a couple lines later, he begins by declaring, “I am not blind, I see the world—what extraordinary happiness! I see the day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it-- a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me [Ce jour s’effaçant, je m’effaçerai avec lui].”

I have spent a long time thinking about this line, and I still can’t quite get over it. I’m taken, first, with the enigmatic trace of reflection, for death is assumed here as a willed evanescence: “Ce jour s ‘effaçant,je m ‘effacerai avec lui.” The narrator doesn’t say simply that he will fade with the day, as though it were some kind of condition of his being. He says that with the effacement of the day, he too will efface himself--his joy lies in that transcendence, which is both a yes to the day and a yes to death. There, I would say, is a “pouvoir mourir.” Barely a reflection (because the day too “s’efface”--”je m’efface” is of the same grammatical construction), and certain by reason of little more than an inevitability, the assumption of mortality is nevertheless a form of freedom.

But what is really assumed in this way if not a giving over that has already occurred, and, as Heidegger would insist, must have occurred for the day to be given in this way? How would the narrator be capable of afflirming this giving over were he not in fact re-affirming a prior abandon--were he not acknowledging, in other words, that his being is of the day, that he has been given over to the day and has abandoned himself, acquiesced to this usage? The yes to death is not a sacrifice that honors the day, for that would presuppose that the subject of this declaration could be thought as standing somehow outside the day, apart from the world. No, this subject’s stance, however much he parodies Descartes, is radically immanent--he says explicitly that beyond the world there is nothing, Thus the narrator can only be re-affirming in his declaration the very condition of his being which is a prior acquiescence to the knowledge of immanence, itself a kind of prior effacement that has occurred with and for the advent of the day. The loss of the day is itself an unthinkable event, just as unthinkable as its emergence; it is an apocalypse of sorts (I think that any reading of the passage must lend to that phrase, “ce jour s’effaçant” all its strangeness and eschatological weight). But the narrator can affirm it because he is saying yes to his own yes, or saying yes to being delivered again to the yes that truth (or the day) required in order to come about—to the event in which he was given to himself and to the day as “capable of death.” The same affirmation is at the heart of the relation to mortality that the narrator claims to find almost only in women. “Men want to escape from death,” he says, “strange beings that they are.” “And some of them cry out ‘Die, Die,” because they want to escape from life…. Yet I have met people who have never said to life ‘Quiet,’ who have never said to death, ‘Go Away!’ Almost always women, beautiful creatures.” Thinking the latter affirmation is perhaps even harder than thinking the messianic one (at least for a man, as far as I know), but I believe such a yes to existence is where this thought can take us.

Jean-François Lyotard envisioned, from a comparable experience of infancy and a comparable yes-saying, a capacity for opening to the event, a capacity for encounter. Such an assumption of exposure is what I referred to much earlier with Blanchot’s reference to “the exigency of another relation.” One can understand this exigency in both ontological and socio-political terms, as Lyotard demonstrated in The Inhuman. I won’t take that important path at this point. I’ll try to end more modestly by noting that the exigency of another relation is also the ethical exigency to which Cathy Caruth pointed so strongly in Unclaimed Experience. It is the requirement to which the analyst must answer and the responsibility into which the parent is cast inasmuch as they embrace the event that comes upon them. In fact, I have wondered recently whether these last two forms of relation do not share certain crucial traits, as for example the opening of something some analysts call “another” or “third” ear. Thus, when I reread recently the paragraphs from Serge Leclaire that I cited in Infant Figures, I was moved to wonder whether the greatest challenges in parenting (one of them anyway) does not lie in something like re-learning what it means to speak and thereby offering a “non-resistance” to the powerlessness known by the infant. Perhaps we can only truly hear something like an apprehensive “uh-oh” in the middle of the night from such a non-resistance. Let me read Leclaire’s beautiful paragraphs again by way of conclusion and as an opening to our discussion, He is speaking of an encounter with an analysand who is also an analyst:

It is in my oedipal age that she would have wanted to know me; before the image of me at four which she has reconstructed and projects, I cannot resist. Letting the last shards of my doctoral respectability fall to the ground, I rediscover, in a smile without a mask, the seriousness of that age where one understands avidly what it is to desire out of love and what it is to suffer. Through that smile, whether it is brightening the eye or the voice, there opens another ear to which there can finally be said, before the pathetic mode, and in a voice of truth, the affliction of being, of being born, from never anything but nothing. Between two traits, two words, what says not a word --infans, rather than adorable cherubin--gives a place, finally, to what could not be said. That is where the transfer takes form. Sygne says it figuratively: your smile on your face, my pain on your face, your pain on my face, my smile on my face.

I don’t believe in the neutralizing illusion of the impassive mask, and I find no need to defend myself in this regard from what might be imputed to me in the way of seduction. Analytic listening passes by way of the putting into play of this point of silence that constitutes the site of the transference; what is given there is the space of a real act of intelligence regarding the logic of exclusion, the space for a passage beyond the weave of representatives, a path for traversing the mirror. Presence, goodness, neutrality, the silence of the analyst; all of these are inadequate or approximate ways to mark this point of non-resistance which the psychoanalysis of the analyst must confront him/her with sans retour. Whether we call it, paradoxically, a becoming conscious, whether we describe it as the advent of the subject or as recognition of castration, what is absolutely to be required of an analyst is that he or she have the experience of what speaking means. (cited at IF 83)

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