The Passion of Death A Free Associative Reading of Freud and Marguerite Duras

The Passion of Death A Free Associative Reading of Freud and Marguerite Duras François Peraldi A t th e b eg in n in g , th e r e IS THE THING. Let us start from this proposition. After all, we can almost find it in Freud. The Freud of the beginning of psychoanalysis, the author of the Projectfor a Scientific Psychology.1 Freud names the Thing I wish to present, das Ding. DasDing in Ger­ man, and as opposed to die Sache, another word to say “a thing,” is the thing which is no part of human affairs, which has no name. Freud introduced das Ding in the chapter of the Project entitled “Remembering and Judging.” At that time he was studying in detail the first encounter of the subject-to-be with an altogether unknown aspect of the outside world. He named this aspect the Nebenmensch', it has been somewhat unsuccessfully translated in English by: “a fellow creature.” What is it? Let us say that it is not necessarily a totally alien person, but, rather, an unknown aspect of a well-known person “of a similar kind,” says Freud, of the mother for instance, but of the mother in a very unusual appearance: “In this case,” Freud writes, “the perceptual complexes arising from this Nebenmensch will in part be new and non-comparable —but other visual perceptions will coincide in the subject with his own memory of quite similar impressions of his own body.” Freud then pro­ ceeds to give a more precise example: “If the Nebenmensch screams, a memory of the subject’s own screaming will be aroused and will conse­ quently revive his own experience of pain. Thus the complex of the Nebenmensch falls into two portions. One of these gives the impression of being a constant structure and remains a thing (Ding) that stands as a whole (and cannot be understood); while the other can be understood by the activity of memory” (Freud, Project 331). That Thing is that which remains outside, the locus of which is the outside (the Real, as Jacques Lacan called it), since it is both alien and painful, bad, for the subject. That Thing (Ding) is that which is radically alien to the subject, it is the absolute Other and it is so because it has destroyed the symbiotic oneness of the child and the mother by expelling Vol.XXX, No. 1 19 L ’E sprit C réateur him from it. It may be seen as something that exists only because it is lost from the start, because the only trace it has left is the trace of its dis­ appearance, of its absolute otherness, which can only be actualised by a movement of the body and/or by the memory of pain associated with its screams which woke up the memory of the child’s own screams of pain. Das Ding is the pre-condition of all possible object relations since for an object to be named is for it to be replaced by a signifier when it is miss­ ing. Thanks to dasDing, which opens the gap to the outside, objects can fall in this gap and be named in their absence. An object is always at first a lost object, and desire is the endless quest for this lost object that always remains to be found. It will be looked for through a long series of signifiers, the sum of which constitutes our reality (as opposed here to the above mentioned Real). And this is about all Freud said about das Ding, as if he had com­ pletely forgotten it in his subsequent writings, although it reappears, though very discretely, in a short but crucial paper written 30 years after the Project: On Negation—but without being developed any further. Most psychoanalysts, sharing Freud’s forgetfullness, have also for­ gotten to pick it up and see if it could be of some use for their cogita­ tions. All of them—in fact—except for Jacques Lacan who put dasDing at the very core of his most remarkable seminar on the ethics of psycho­ analysis.2 But for some obscure reason, it befell Marguerite Duras to...