6. The Institution of Rot
During the night [ ] one single night, the lower God (Ariman) appeared [ ] his voice resounded in a mighty bass as if directly in front of my bedroom Windows [ ] What was spoken did not sound friendly by any means: everything seemed calculated to instill fright and terror in me and the word "rotten person" (Luder) was frequently heard an expression quite common in the basic language (Grundsprache) to denote a human being destined to be destroyed by God and to feel God's power and wrath. Yet everything that was spoken was genuine, not phrases learnt by rote [ ] For this reason any impression was not one of alarm and fear, but largely one of admiration for the magnificent and the sublime: the effect on my nerves was therefore beneficial, despite the insults contained in the words [...]
Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Don't write on the shitters, shit on writing.
Graffiti in the bathroom of a Paris movie theater, 1977
Michel de Certeau
Interspace: Psychoanalysis and Mysticism
Î speak neither as an analyst nor as a mystic. I am accredited by neither of these two experiences, which have constituted, one after the other, inaccessible authorizations of discourse. To begin, I have only Saint-John Perse's Friday to invoke as my muse: the savage, transported to the kitchens of London, whose parlors his master Robinson Crusoe frequents, plays the soup spoiler and flirt. Mysticism, especially, can only be dealt with from a distance, as a savage in the kitchen. Its discourse is produced on another scene, it is no more possible to conceptualize it than it is to dispense with it. Like Schreber's "basic language," it is "somewhat antiquated," "but nevertheless powerful "' It is like the phantom that returns to the stage.
The remoteness of this "basic" thing that returns in the form of mysticism, a hallucination of absences, is a mark of age, or a first death (the separation between its time and ours), and of a modesty to be retained (our distance from the place where this thing was written). The remoteness is also internal to me: I am divided by uncertainty when speaking of that [ça], of this relation between signifiers and an unknown. of this discourse, foreign yet near at hand, that is perhaps haunted by a maternal indeterminacy. This binds me even though I cannot believe to be in it, or what is worse, cannot pretend to have it. But after all, this is not unlike what psychoanalysis, along its borders and on its thresholds, tells to those who are determined not to he a part of it (of its institution), not to speak from that place, precisely because of what comes from it. There is thus, from the outset, a cleavage between the fact of being invested (captured?) in it, and the fact of not being there (neither in nor of that place).
It seems to me that Schreber's revelation, which is close to mysticism in so many respects, offers an approach to outlining the articulation between these two experiences, as well as their relation to the institution. In the course of that "unique night" in 1894, there rang forth a "mighty bass voice," not "friendly by any means," yet "beneficial" and "refreshing," and it said to the President: Luder, in other words, "harpy," 'filth," "slut," or rather, since there is a certain familiarity to the insult, "rotten person." I propose to meditate upon this word, and that, according to Madame Guyon, means swallowing it. It appears in the interspace of mysticism and psychoanalysis, and demands attention even though it has nothing to justify it other than what it produces here and there: a "formula" that is heard, a "small fragment of truth" a splinter of what?
A few global analogies can provide a framework, an admittedly fragile one, for Schreber's enactment of this word that is the archive of the subject (its corrupt document) and the saying of the subject's non-identity. I will mention only three points of convergence between psychoanalysis and mysticism. First, the distinction between a statement and a speech-act, a corpus and an act by the subject: that this distinction is central in Lacan does not alter the fact that it was precisely the mystic discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that first established it."
Second, Lacanian theory entertains relations of "separation" and "debt" with the mystics (Meister Eckhart, Hadewijch of Anvers, St. Teresa, Angelus Silesius, etc.); or, what amounts to the same thing, it rejects their goods, corpses of truths, and recognizes itself in the lack from which they received their name: something should be written about the return of these Christian phantoms at strategic points in analytic discourse, a movement that is homologous to the relation of "contestation" (absprechen) and "belonging" (angehören) that links the Freudian text to the Jewish tradition; something should be written about ita zebrine patterning and labor of absences to bide the time until what is written can be said in re-presentations of those strangers, who share responsibility for making Lacanian theory possible.'
Finally, in the mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is a desire analogous to that which Philippe Lévy discerned in Freud: a will to be done with, a death drive. With the mystics, a wish for loss is directed both toward the religions language in which the trace of their walk is imprinted and the course of their itinerary itself. Their voyages simultaneously create and