Lamella

I Am Going to Talk to You about the Lamella...

Let us begin by taking a closer look at the mysterious wound which prevents Amfortas from finding peace in death. This wound, of course, is another name for its opposite, for a certain surplus of jouissance. To delineate more precisely its contours, let us take as our starting point a new book on Lacan, Richard Boothby Death and Desire. 27 Its central thesis, although ultimately false, is deeply satisfying in the sense of a demand for symmetry: it is as if it provides the missing element of a puzzle. The triad Imaginary-Real-Symbolic renders the fundamental coordinates of the Lacanian theoretical space; but these three dimensions can never be conceived simultaneously, in pure synchronicity, i.e., one is always forced to choose one pair at a time (as with Kierkegaard's triad of the aesthetical-ethicalreligious): the Symbolic versus the Imaginary, the Real versus the Symbolic. The hitherto predominating interpretations of Lacan tended to accent either the axis Imaginary-Symbolic (symbolization, symbolic realization, against imaginary self-deception in the Lacan of the fifties) or the axis Symbolic-Real (the traumatic encounter of the Real as the point at which symbolization fails in the late Lacan). What Boothby offers as a key to the entire Lacanian theoretical edifice is simply the third, not yet exploited axis: the Imaginary versus the Real. That is to say, according to Boothby, the theory of the mirror-stage is not only chronologically Lacan's first contribution to psychoanalysis but designates also the original fact which defines the status of man: the alienation in the mirror image, due to man's premature birth and his / her helplessness in the first years of life, this fixation on imago interrupts the supple life-flow, it introduces an irreducible béance, gap, separating forever the imaginary ego -- the wholesome yet immobile mirror image, a kind of halted cinematic picture -- from the polymorphous, chaotic sprout of bodily drives -- the real Id. From this perspective, the Symbolic is of a strictly secondary nature with regard to the original tension between the Imaginary and the Real: its place is the void opened up by the exclusion of the polymorphous wealth of bodily drives. Symbolization designates the subject's endeavor, always fragmentary and ultimately doomed to fail, to bring to the light of the day, by way of symbolic representatives, the Real of bodily drives excluded by imaginary identification; it is therefore a kind of compromise-formation by way of which the subject integrates fragments of the ostracized Real.

In this sense, Boothby interprets the death-drive as the reemergence of what was ostracized when the ego constituted itself by way of imaginary identification: the return of the polymorphous impulses is experienced by the ego as a mortal threat, since it actually entails the dissolution of its imaginary identity. The foreclosed Real thus returns in two modes: as a wild, destructive, nonsymbolized raging, or in the form of symbolic mediation, i.e., "sublated" (aufgehoben) in the symbolic medium. The elegance of Boothby's theory turns on interpreting the death-drive as its very opposite: as the return of the life-force, of the part of Id excluded by the imposition of the petrified mask of the ego. Thus, what reemerges in the "death-drive" is ultimately life itself, and the fact that the ego perceives this return as a death threat precisely confirms the ego's perverted "repressive" character. The "death-drive" means that life itself rebels against the ego: the true representative of death is ego itself, as the petrified imago which interrupts the flow of life.

Against this background, Boothby also reinterprets Lacan's distinction between the two deaths: the first death is the death of the ego, the dissolution of its imaginary identifications, whereas the second death designates the interruption of the pre-symbolic life-flow itself. Here, however, problems begin with this otherwise simple and elegant construction: the price to be paid is that Lacan's theoretical edifice is ultimately reduced to the opposition which characterizes the field of Lebensphilosophie, i.e., to the opposition between an original polymorphous life-force and its later coagulation, confinement to the Procrustian bed of imagos. For this reason, Boothby's scheme has no place for the fundamental Lacanian insight according to which the symbolic order "stands for death" in the precise sense of "mortifying" the real of the body, of subordinating it to a foreign automatism, of perturbing its "natural," instinctual rhythm, thereby producing the surplus of desire, i.e., desire AS a surplus: the very symbolic machine which "mortifies" the living body produces by the same token the opposite of mortification, the immortal desire, the Real of "pure life" which eludes symbolization.

To clarify this point, let us turn to an example which, in a first approach, may seem to confirm Boothby's thesis: Wagner Tristan und Isolde. What precise effect does the philtre provided by Isolde's faithful maid Brangäne have on the future lovers? "Wagner never intends to imply that the love of Tristan and Isolde is the physical consequence of the philtre, but only that the pair, having drunk what they imagine to be the draught of Death and believing that they have looked upon earth and sea and sky for the last time, feel themselves free to confess, when the potion begins its work within them, the love they have so long felt but have concealed from each other and almost from themselves." 28 The point is, therefore, that after drinking the philtre, Tristan and Isolde find themselves in the domain "between the two deaths," alive, yet delivered of all symbolic ties. Only in such a subjective position are they able to confess their love. In other words, the "magical effect" of the philtre is simply to suspend the "big Other," the symbolic reality of social obligations (honors, vows...). Does this thesis not fully accord with Boothby's view of the domain "between the two deaths" as the space where imaginary identification, as well as the symbolic identities attached to it, are all invalidated, so that the excluded Real (pure life-drive) can emerge in all its force, although in the form of its opposite, the death-drive? According to Wagner himself, the passion of Tristan and Isolde expresses the longing for the "eternal peace" of death. The trap to be avoided here, however, is conceiving of this pure life-drive as a substantial entity subsisting prior to its being captured in the symbolic network: this "optical illusion" renders invisible how it is the very mediation of the symbolic order that transforms the organic "instinct" into an unquenchable longing which can find solace only in death. In other words, this "pure life" beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus which escapes it? By conceiving of the symbolic order as an agency which fills out the gap between the Imaginary and the Real opened up by the mirror-identification, Boothby avoids its constitutive paradox: the Symbolic itself opens up the wound it professes to heal.

What one should do here, in the space of a more detailed theoretical elaboration, is to approach in a new way the Lacan-Heidegger relationship. In the fifties, Lacan endeavored to read the "death-drive" against the background of Heidegger's "being-toward-death" (Sein-zum-Tode), conceiving of death as the inherent and ultimate limit of symbolization, which accounts for its irreducible temporal character. With Lacan's shift toward the Real from the sixties onward, it is the indestructible life sprouting in the domain "between the two deaths" that emerges as the ultimate object of horror. Lacan delineates its contours toward the end of chapter 15, of his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis where he proposes his own myth, constructed upon the model of Aristophanes' fable from Plato Symposium, the myth of l'hommelette (little female-man -- omelette 29 ):

    Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.

   The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something...that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal -- because it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention. And it can run around.

   Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep...

   I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ...is the libido.

   It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures. The breast -- as equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the placenta for example -- certainly represents that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object. 30

What we have here is an Otherness prior to intersubjectivity: the subject's "impossible" relationship to this amoebalike creature is what Lacan is ultimately aiming at by way of his formula & ◇ a. 31 The best way to clarify this point is perhaps to allow ourselves the string of popular-culture associations that Lacan's description must evoke. Is not the alien from Ridley Scott 's film of the same title "lamella" in its purest? Are not all the key elements of Lacan's myth contained in the first truly horrifying scene of the film when, in the womblike cave of the unknown planet, the "alien" leaps from the egglike globe when its lid splits off and sticks to John Hurt's face? This amoebalike, flattened creature, which envelops the subject's face, stands for the irrepressible life beyond all the finite forms that are merely its representatives, its figures (later in the film, the "alien" is able to assume a multitude of different shapes), immortal and indestructible (it suffices to recall the unpleasant thrill of the moment when a scientist cuts with a scalpel into a leg of the creature which envelops Hurt's face: the liquid that drips from it falls onto the metal floor and corrodes it immediately; nothing can resist it). 32

The second association which brings us back to Wagner is a detail from Syberberg film version of Parsifal: Syberberg depicts Amfortas's wound as externalized, carried by the servants on a pillow in front of him, in the form of a vaginalike partial object out of which blood drips in a continuous flow (as, vulgari eloquentia, a vagina in an unending period). This palpitating opening -- an organ which is at the same time the entire organism (let us just recall a homologous motif in a series of science fiction stories, like the gigantic eye living a life of its own) -- this opening epitomizes life in its indestructibility: Amfortas's pain consists in the very fact that he is unable to die, that he is condemned to an eternal life of suffering; when, at the end, Parsifal heals his wound with "the spear that smote it," Amfortas is finally able to rest and die. This wound of Amfortas's, which persists outside himself as an undead thing, is the "object of psychoanalysis." 33