After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious

12. Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword

Chapter 12 Violence inWorks of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword DANIELLE BERGERON Violence inWorks of Art Some works of art so profoundly move the spectator that they arouse a sort of vertiginous fascination, a kind of insidious anxiety, or else seize the spectator in the shock of true horror. In such instances, the aesthetic impression is registered with a violence that is all the more powerfully felt in that it is impossible to describe or to represent at the moment of its greatest force. Something unspeakably alien is glimpsed in these paintings, sculpture, stories, films, and plays, something that cannot be expressed in words, so that the full impact of the work of art is experienced only in the body, which expresses its turmoil along paths traced in the early unconscious history of the subject. In distinction from those works of art that feed fantasies of a reunification with the neurotic’s narcissistic object, or those that reflect the cultural values of a society, the works we are concerned with in the present chapter do not meet with popular assent and must be defended for a long time by avant-garde or critical circles before they are finally found tolerable. 181 This chapter was presented, in different form, at the conference for the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, at George Washington University, in Washington DC, November 1997. One might say that the artist of such a work has found an original way to process the real and has approached what Freud called “das Ding,” the Thing. From the various histories of the letters of the artist’s own body, a radically new mode of apprehension of das Ding is created. One thinks, by way of example, of Hieronymus Bosch, Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, or Egon Schiele. Anyone who is faced with such works must learn to tame them by linking the overwhelming emotion, the alarm which signals the entrance into the field of das Ding, with words that evoke what had, until that moment, remained in the sphere of the unsuspected . Mishima’s SpecificViolence Yukio Mishima, novelist, screenwriter, actor, and sportsman, is for many among the most famous Japanese of his day.1 Flamboyant, original , and prolific, he left an impressive collection of works and was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, had he not “prematurely” put an end to his life in 1970 by committing public suicide through seppuku, at the age of forty-five. It is generally said of his writings and of his tragic death that they give an impression of inordinate violence. Some find them provocative in their staging of scenarios that are seen as perverse, intriguing or strange, while some others find in them a senseless aggression . The uncomprehending westerner may be inclined to see manifested in Mishima’s writing—as in the theatrical radicalism of the samurai’s seppuku, in the unwavering determination of the kamikaze, or in the practices of the yakuza—Orientalist clichés of a Japanese predisposition to gratuitous cruelty said to lurk beneath that nation’s refinement and courtesy.What shocks westerners is that these manifestations make no sense for them. Having studied Japanese culture for many years, we have learned to recognize in these positions the form taken by the ethics of Japanese masculinity, according to which each man is the only person responsible for his debt and the only conceivable bearer of his obligations, of his giri or bushido. But beyond such cultural traits, one must ask where the violence comes from in Mishima’s life and works.What was it that structured his unconscious and that found its solutions—at least in part—in the memory of his culture?To address this question, the present chapter will look at some well-known historical elements of his life and at two of his autobiographical novels: Confessions of a Mask, published when he was twenty-our, and Sun and Steel, published at age forty-three, just two years before the tragic death whose ritual he had been planning and rehearsing for so long. 182 After Lacan The Production of theThing in Language In the average person . . . the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all.Then . . . came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words . . . Any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their...