9. Vertiginous Sexuality: Schreber' Commerce with God

The use of the proper name exemplifies the way in which the tensor both dissimulates and is dissimulated within the semantic Field. This concerned Frege and Russell, and it remains problematic for the logician because it point' in principle to a specific reference, and does not appear to be exchangeable will" other terms in the logico-linguistic structure. The proper name has no intra-systematic equivalent, since, in pointing toward exteriority, like the deictic, it has no connotation of its own, it is interminable. Logicians (having scant choice of means) solve this problem with a concept: the existential predicate. Hegel was already quite aware of this: the Meinen, as well as the obstacle that is posed by the supposition of existence (i.e., by flesh and blood, as Husserl would say in turn) could be opposed to the systematic ordering of signs. Thus, when asked: what about Flechsig? We might answer: there is at least one existing individual who could be called Flechsig—Schreber's doctor — and who would be referentially maintained as an anchor point. But the name of this same individual tends to dissolve when it is seized upon by Schreber's madness. It produces a multitude of incompatible propositions about the same compatible "subject.' Flechsig will be predicated simultaneously as cop, God, a lover seduced by Schreber's feminine charms, someone who prevents the president from shitting and a member of a noble family which has known the Schrebers for a long time In what sense is that mad? Only in what it states.

This is the same madness as Proust's, the latter scarcely more prudent for having interposed a narrative subject between himself and his text — naming it Marcel—much the same madness having to do with the proper name Albertine.

It is the same as Octave 's madness about the proper name "Roberte;" whorish legislator, virtuous libertine, undecidable-body-offered-refused, she is the very embodiment of dissimulation in two distinct senses. On the one hand, the Huguenot and the tart can operate as signs within the equally intelligible networks of respectability and sensuality. On the other hand, each of these assignations hide something: not the other as such, i.e., insofar as it belongs on the side of the regulated network. Rather, what occurs is that each assignation dissimulates the sign in its function as tensor, not just as sensible sign. The tensor-sign consists in the fact that Roberte's name covers a region where two "orders" (at least two, there must be others) are not two, but are indistinguishable; where the name Roberte is like a disjunctive bar turning quickly around some point— around, for example, the look, the vulval slit, the gloved hand, an intonation— and which changes place with the segment that forms the bar. If "Roberte" is a tensor, it is not because she is both a harlot and a capable woman, but because she exceeds, goes beyond the one and the other of the respective assignations. This takes place in the vertigo of an intensity where, if the skirt slips up over the inner thigh, if the fat thumb is raised before the seducer's mouth, if the nape of the neck turns under his teeth, it is most certainly through authentic prudery and sincere sensuality. But over and above any reasonable explanations it is through an instinctual formation (figure) that the impulses are arranged and dispensed, impulses which do not belong to Roberte, or to anyone. Roberte is not someone's name (an existential predicate), even as a double. Rather, it is the name of the unnamable, the name of the Yes and No, of neither Yes nor No, of the first and second. If the proper name is a good example of the tensor-sign, this is not because its singular designation is problematic when one thinks conceptually, but because it covers a region of libidinal space given over to the open-endedness of energy impulses, a region ablaze.

The above would apply to Schreber as well. In taking account of the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, we see just how much vertigo is fixed, so to speak, on the name of Flechsig. It is necessary, Schreber thinks, that l become a woman so that God can impregnate me, and, by my giving birth to a new race of men, accomplish humanity's salvation through me. This sex change is miraculous: but for Schreber ail bodily modifications are miraculous and must be imputed to an uncommon power, in any case, to the remarkable decision of a power (in this regard Schreber's religion is entirely Roman, akin to that penetration of divine instances in the simplest, most commonplace events; it would be the secularization of the sacred or the sacralization of the secular.) Thus the mystery of defecation: it gives substance to dissimulation, which spreads to Flechsig (through God). If we can describe these perpetual ambivalences of the instinctual objectives, then the important thing nonetheless remains the indiscernability of contradictory terms, e.g., giver and retainer of shit, Flechsig protector and…