the archive of the mouth, the museum of the breath
Circulation, respiration. We keep coming back around. Marx coughs. Freud sneezes. His jawbone comes undone and Europe gets a cold. Mouths and noses. The breath, the appetite. One might be suppressed. The other, not. The end of breath is the end of appetite, the end of desire, though never the end it was looking to find; the end of the breath is the end of the body or the body and its respiration, which is not the same thing as the end of the thing, which is never the thing at all, but most of us will come to subsist on this gruel; most of us think it is close enough for rhyme.
Respiration, circulation, valorization, growth; there is the hope, though it is not for us. We cannot recoup what has been stolen. We are never not becoming some kind of sick. The body, the mind, an infinite loop; the labor of the body, the labor of the mind, never distinct. Like corpuscles, we repeat, we scribble. We must breathe to go on. We turn away from the world. We foment this carapace. We are all Bartelby, subsisting off food that is stale and turned, breathing the rank air of these dim little offices, buried within these hideous cubes.
These will be an echo of the train car. These will be an echo of the container. These strange dark rooms someday will fill our terrible museums. Those corners in which we have been made to hide and to choke. Those places we go to go mostly unnoticed, and we breathe our shallow breaths, we cough our slight coughs. These things will be on display so those of the future will know the shape of our loneliness. These things will sit aside piles of chicken bones and plastics and cans of old soda. They will sit aside mounds of ring lights and cameras and old Kodachromes. There will be sighing and gnashing and old folks will moan.
Fanon referred to the breathing of the oppressed as an observed breathing, a combat breathing, another instance of the body of the colonized under systems of control. He referred to the wine of the French and the body ripened, praised. What we consume, what we ingest. Without wine and the radio, the colonizer says in Algeria, we would have come native long long ago. Waterboarding and the choking, the torture of water and electricity. Ali Le Pointe holding his breath, waiting for the gendarme to pass, knowing most certainly that they will not.
There will be no conclusion there will be no direction there is only agglomeration which is what we mean when we say hysteria, the compacted accumulation of language in the body which can no longer bear it that can only hope to shuffle it off like so many sequences, so many random misfirings. There can be no finished product because there is no assembly line, just an accumulation of differences small and large by which we build together without malice or shame. Endings are not resolutions. I am still too big for the room we are in and I am always the monster, longing for fire. There is never such a thing as closure or surcease. There is only burning. There is crisis upon crisis until the crisis of the crisis, the crisis of the world that will never end; this modernity, this thing, this capitalism this excremental remainder, this ruination and doggerel. This mongrel empire of imperfect breath.
Freud knew the struggle. The length of the analysis was troublesome from the beginning. If only Irma had accepted his diagnosis, her pains would have been relieved. He wanted to go faster than anyone could hope; he needed to go fast; the cure had to work, and it had to work quickly. At least, that was the wish that pressed upon him, one of many that seemed to plague him, to announce themselves in the form of his dream. “I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it is really your own fault.’” He had to go fast and his patients had to believe him because the question as always was about the reliability of ends: of symptoms relieved, disorders alleviated, the beginning and end of hysterical structures. “In earlier days I treated quite a large number of patients, who, as was natural, wanted to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Of late years…[t]here was no question of shortening the treatment; the purpose was radically to exhaust the possibilities of illness in them and to bring about a deep-going alteration of their personality.”
Writing about his work in training analyses, near the end of his career Freud was willing to admit to some of these things–that the cure may never be complete but always elliptical, the disease sly and intransigent, the symptoms recurrent and deadly–but not without some grave manner of equally tedious equivocation of the beginning of ends, some characteristically late stylistic reflection upon ends coming at the end that he was beginning to suspect was coming, the end of the world as he had known it, the end of Vienna, the end of Austria, the end of his secularized applications of Judaism, the end of his life as a function of his disease. Freud’s cancer was severe, and painful, all consuming. His jawbone inflamed, like Marx, he had difficulty breathing, or chewing, or to pursue his avocation in the joy of smoking; one wonders if he became a better listener when he could no longer speak, when he could barely trouble the air. “Experience has taught us that psycho-analytic therapy–the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and abnormalities of character–is a time-consuming business…I have subsequently employed this fixing of a time limit…” In 1937, time for Freud was increasingly precious. He could barely afford those brief fifty minutes, or all the time it would take him to pack up his rugs.
Desire has no end until it ends, until all is left behind. Until then we are looking. We are searching. All ends are not ends but surrogates for what is just beyond. A climax is not a conclusion and both are deeply unsatisfying. As soon as we come, we want to go again, or go away, so we might try again, so we might come back come over come to our senses come out come with. The story can only ever be retold.
Freud dealt in retellings, which is a way of saying he dealt with retellings as repetitions, and repetitions as revisions; and this is a way of saying he dealt with history, though never history as simple as the history of events, each event a pearl on a string, a rosary leading somewhere and nowhere, but history as sediment, history as soil, rhizome and root, root and branch, bone and stone. Freud dealt in history as a series of endings, of ellipses, less continuity or evolution than a concatenation that was also a cancer, the debris left after any number of accidents that were also choices, but choices that betrayed no sense of design or plan. Freud, like Zweig, like Europe itself, was haunted by endings, haunted by the fact that they kept on coming, the end of one war begetting yet another, the end of the old world arriving finally with the end imposed by the New. At the end of the world was America, and America would be the end of all the old things. “Rank’s argument was bold and ingenious; but it did not stand the test of critical examination. Moreover, it was a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post-war misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life.” Castigating Otto Rank’s theory of the experience of childbirth as primal fixation and primal repression, Freud saw in Rank only the debased end of his work, the end of a process that was recursive and unrelenting, an end that betokened an American pace that, for Lacan, was the pace of ahistoricism. For Lacan, America “is where history is denied with a categorical will that gives enterprises their style…a cultural ahistoricism…[that] defines the assimilation required for one to be recognized there…Europe,” he writes, “seems rather to have faded from the concerns and style–if not the minds–of those who life, along with the repression of their bad memories.”
At the end of the world is America, where we will all be sucked into the future, improperly prepared to receive our past.
I will not pity you for having been forgotten…
They do not realize we are bringing them the plague.
These were Freud’s words to Jung, as reported by Lacan, upon sighting the State of Liberty. Again we return. The end at the beginning at the end of the beginning. We are here and come all over again. With circulation, recollection, repetition, revision; psychoanalysis as perilous mingling of airs, of vibrations and sounds and half-hearted meanings; a plague to the houses and all of their pieties, the temple of freedom exposed as corrupt. Nothing more unconscionable than the unconscious to the colossus of Liberty, the delectation of freedom through the annihilation of self, the assimilation, the loss, of all one holds but is forced to swallow, to purge, to excrete, to leave behind, so that one might arrive and get lost. The point of debarkation for generations of immigrants, Liberty holds the languages they must swallow, the names they must eat, opening their mouths to the cruelty of new forms, new bodies, new streets, and new airs. “Freud’s discovery,” Lacan writes, “calls truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally concerned by truth…[by] rediscovering the power of truth in ourselves and in our very flesh…” What, again, is lodged in our flesh, and what have we been compelled to ignore of the stories of the flesh, which is to say truth, which is to say history and the bitterness of all the airs we breathe, all that which is sedimented within the things we inhale, exhale, vomit, excrete?
What has America asked me to forget? What did I lose when I lost Lebanon? The words, above all. A way of talking that will drag me to tears.
TfaDDal.
Lesh la?
3njad?
Bonjourain.
Au revoir.
Good bye.
Why didn’t you say goodbye?
Freud dealt in words, in words and in mouths, the oral and the aural, the mouth and the ear. He dealt in mouths and what sounds they made, what secrets they held, the things that escaped, and all that was shut up inside, all the breath that one held, all the air that released. Between them was language and all it contained, the uncertainty, the ubiquity, the excrescence of meaning. The mouth was the site of the first instance and the first instinct, the first site of pleasure, the first stirrings of desire; the orifice of ingestion, the orifice of command. Inhale, exhale, speak unearthly words in the form of a cry; learn to cry on command because one begins to understand that one needs to eat. The mouth is the site of incalculable pleasure and unbearable terror: one never knows what might go in or what might come out, or whether one might be happy with either, the distance between all that one needs and all that one wants. These fears, these anxieties, will never quite leave us, even as they get buried, wrapped up in silken tales and sparkling ritual enactments, ceremonies, scenes. We will eat, we will speak, we will meet the flesh of the other, and we will become lost in the ecstasy of our agony all over again, uncertain of where it might take us, uncertain where the breath and the tongue, the tongue and the lips, might eventually guide us, where all this mindful flesh and its slippery interaction, might eventually take us, where we might end up. And despite all our misgivings, we know will return. Come again. And again. To wherever we may eat. Recurions of desire and the pitiful emptiness of the unfillable stomach, the orifice of our unquenchable longing for the other. We think in our mouths and give ourselves over to all the possibilities they contain. The sensual, the explicit, what James Baldwin called the “disastrously explicit medium of language” and all the things we think we can say.
Freud dealt in words, in words and in mouths, but he was also a writer, so he lived in the graphic, which is where he hid much of himself, the technique by which he chose to command. Freud, like Marx, was a literary stylist, a scientist and a technician, but also an artist; though also, as for Marx, the artistry was always something of a ruse, an incomplete promise, an opening and a hope of something like more than an opening, a mode of improvisation adequate to the complexity of life, the playfulness of the self, yet nonetheless still the setting for an inauspicious demand. Like Melville, like Marx, Freud delighted in language, letting it speak without taking him over, moving it along, giving it shapes that were not its own shape, asking it to do things it could never have done, pushing it and pushing it like the shape of the mouth, the air and the tongue. But he needed to be read because he needed to be heard, he needed to command the shape of how the words would be read, how the stories would be interpreted; he needed to place himself between the word and the world, the world and the text, lest he be misunderstood, or misconstrued, disavowed or otherwise forgotten. He needed to make himself the master, he needed to make himself the father. His writing was a castration, an imposition upon the potency of the other, with all of the other’s slippery insistence on becoming something other than itself, something other than he wanted or needed or hoped to create. In writing, Freud became Vater, became Vader, moving further from Wasser, which is where many of his children believed we began and where we belonged. Back to the water, back to the mother, absorbed by the other, and transformed along the way. Freud wrote as the Father, the denial of Mother, the arch-protector of his discovery, and of the children who could not be left alone in his house.
Another word for this is castration. And, of course, in Freud, castration is a certain kind of pleasure; an anxiety, to be sure, but a source of some kind of enjoyment, nonetheless. Thus digestion, thus the excremental, the joy of the rectum and anal stimulation, pleasure in the control over the meaningless gift; all that is compacted, condensed, all that is withheld.
In general, we do not talk about any of these things.
In the dream of Irma’s injection the mouth is foreclosed, as are Irma’s words, which Freud cannot hear because he cannot bring himself to believe them. “Pains in the stomach were among my patient’s symptoms but were not very prominent; she complained more of feelings of nausea and disgust. Pains in the throat and the abdomen and constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness….I was alarmed that I had missed an organic illness.” Nausea and disgust, a sense of being constricted, Irma’s symptoms in Freud’s dream speak of upset stomachs and uneasy digestion, but also of withholding, a muteness born of a withholding that is registered in the body, manifest in the body, the speech of the unconscious registered in the throat. Confronted by the possibility, in the dream, that Irma’s symptoms are something other than hysterical, Freud entertains the notion, in waking life, that he might be hoping that she is correct, and that, in being correct, he is not, which frees him of the guilt of his inability to cure her, to correctly interpret her symptoms and make them make sense, to himself or to others.
Freud wishes he could hear her because her speech is foreclosed, and he wants to hear her because he wants her to be right so he can be wrong, so he can go back to his biological self, to the laboratory not the clinic, to the neuropathy of organic systems that are less immediately troubling than the neuropathology of the always imminently disordered, disorderly self. This, in addition to alleviating himself of the burden of his imminent guilt, relieves whatever anxiety he might as yet entertain about having set psychoanalysis upon the world, about having brought the plague into the world and given it free reign among mortals, among otherwise healthy mortals blithely unaware of all they do and all they say, confident in the eminence of reason, in the mind as the seat of morality and of conscience, of the will as the overwhelming capacity dedicated to the mastery of the self. He wants to be wrong so he can be free; free of the anxiety of paternity, whether that of the new science he has borne or that of the children he cannot fully control or for whom he has no account. In the dream, Freud moves to examine her throat, but Irma is recalcitrant, “like [a] woman with false teeth…[who on] opening her mouth…had taken measures to conceal her plates.” There is, in the dream, something that hangs about the mouth, something false, something that must remain hidden, a message that must be stowed away, bitten back, clenched and ground and swallowed. “Irma seemed to me foolish because she had not accepted my solution. Her friend would have been wiser, that is to say she would have yielded sooner. She would have opened her mouth properly…”
An almost unseemly betrayal of a seemingly unacknowledged desire for the erotic availability of his girl patient and her friend, Irma appears, in this instance from Freud’s dream, as both a reluctant lover and a recalcitrant child, a partner who refuses the various delights implied by the applications of the mouth, as well as an unruly infant, a child who denies itself in denying its parent, masochistically asserting its dominance by stubbornly refusing to eat. In this instance from the dream, through the figure of Irma, masochism is transmogrified as sadism, while the consubstantial appearance of infantile sexuality and adult eroticism evokes the unyielding lability of the unconscious, its refusal to be disciplined or understood, categorized or dissected. Irma resists Freud’s treatment, but Freud resists his own discovery. He is the child who throws his food on the floor. The unconscious is too disordering, too troubling a problem for him to confront. What does it mean to accept the unconscious, which behaves erratically, offering neither design nor map; a thing, a space, a crevasse that nonetheless holds in reserve the whole of the history of the patient, of the analyst and its relation to the other, such that the patient–much less the analyst or the intimation of cure–can ever be adequate to itself, to the depth of its need, the scope of its wants? Everyone thinks they want to get better, but what if, it turns out, they do not? The cure may not be quick; indeed, it may never come. And even if it does, we may not appreciate what it means for who we have been. Moreover, it may lead us away from all that has been for most of us certain; it may turn out to be yet another application of plague.
Freud dealt in words, and in mouths, in what comes out, what goes in, and what is meant to remain outside. These points are underscored by Freud’s reference, in his self-analysis, to “a tragic event” in his practice, during which he had “produced a severe toxic state in a woman patient by repeatedly prescribing what was at that time regarded as a harmless remedy,” and his desire, in the dream, that Irma should be co-examined by another doctor so that he might be relieved of the guilt that accompanied the irresponsibility of his treatment. Following immediately upon his brief discussion of his friend, the physiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose applications of cocaine–taken at Freud’s insistence–had hastened his death from addiction only four years before, the reference to the toxicity Freud induced in his patient, as well as the overall setting of the dream around the theme of injection–the fear of “infiltration,” of contaminated needles, of infection, or the induction of phlebitis–brings us back around to the problem of both diagnosis and cure, the impracticality of language as a mechanism for gleaning the mechanics of symptoms, much less its utility as a matter of restoration or exchange, the possibility of the latter betokening the potentiality of the former. In the face of his discovery, Freud here is confronted with uncertainty, which is another way of saying that he is confronted with childhood, both the childhood of his which he can and cannot remember, and the childhood of the children that are now scattered about him, whether in the form of his patients, or his disciples, his sycophants, or his literal children, who will appear, when they do, as mysteries to be unraveled. Being inexorably linked to himself, they are also hideous collisions of uncountable influences, unknown as much to their parents as to themselves. As if rehearsing for those acolytes who will follow in his wake, only to rise in defiance against him, Freud’s daughter, Mathilde, appears in the analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection, in which she is referenced in relation to the mouth. “What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them. The white patch reminded me of diphtheritis and so of Irma’s friend, but also of a serious illness of my oldest daughter’s almost two years earlier and of the fright I had in those anxious days. The scabs on the turbinal bones recalled a worry about my own state of health. I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time…[and I feared developing] an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane.”
In this passing reference to his daughter and to her friend with diphtheria, to the turbinal bones and the scabs, to his own fears of ill health given his casual use of cocaine, Freud’s analysis of his own dream-images condenses a range of anxieties attendant the doctor at the scene of treatment, but also another set of anxieties attendant the family, anxieties that followed from the cramped intimacy of the domestic space he shared with his family, about bodies pressing upon bodies and about need and want and all the consequences of being closed in upon one another in a tiny set of rooms on a claustrophobic street. Anxieties, in other words, clustering around questions of home, as well as fatherhood and failure and what parents can and cannot provide for their children and what they own to each other; but also most certainly of the necrotic openings riven through the drawing rooms and parlors of the bourgeois home, the consulting rooms and the bedrooms of an unprepossessing apartment in Vienna. Children appear, in moments like these, as little more than so many unbidden instances of cancerous lesions, bodies that are of the body but ineluctably other, forms and figures that, in defiance of all sense of propriety or sapience, grow and expand and reproduce beyond all limits or capacities of space to contain. Substituting his patient Mathilde for his daughter Mathilde, “this Mathilde for that…an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Freud inadvertently stumbles upon an image of infanticide or abortion, the passage from Exodus to which he refers providing, as it does, a formula for the restitution of an expectant mother who has been robbed of her child. “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” (Exodus 21:22 KJV) Nurturing his patients, Freud kills his darlings; or he imagines that he may be yet killed by them. Like Oedipus, he curses them on account of their indifference. Like the children of Thebes, like the children of Egypt, the children of Freud will be made to suffer the plague.
In its myriad ellipses and evasions, the innocent omissions, the unpracticed censoriousness perpetrated by Freud in the written account of his self-analysis, questions of illness and mortality stalk the dream of Irma’s injection, whether the mortality of patients, the mortality of children and infants, the mortality of mothers, or the mortality of fathers. This is not, in itself, particularly unusual. An awareness of morality, of oneself and of those others upon which one depends, is endemic to the linguistic gamesmanship that constitutes the texture of what it is to be human; yet, for Freud and his contemporaries, the irremediable fact of one’s physical evanescence was hideously augmented, heightened and compressed, by the events of the age through which they found themselves living, an age–as Walter Benjamin put it–that began with young boys being driven to school on horseback by sledge, only to die, in foreign lands, on the field of battle, under bombs dropped from planes, targeted to strike motorized tanks. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has indicated, Freud and his contemporaries were shrouded by a widely shared sense of the “deathliness of modern life,” a sense that the modern world into which they had tumbled was redolent with the stench of some bleak miasma, some pervasive sense that the air had changed, that life and the water had been irrevocably corrupted; that something, in short, was ending, and ending in fire, sulfur, and amyl. “How little [we] knew,” Stefan Zweig would write, “stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort, that life can also mean excess and tension, constant surprise, can be turned upside down; how little [we] guessed…that every new day dawning outside the window could shatter human lives.”
A new day, a shattering, the exuberant frailty of glass; we have come around again. A breath; a word; the world and its bellows. It will breathe. It will swallow. It will shit us out.
In the dream of Irma’s injection, death lives in mouths. In mouths and throats, throats and noses, colons and bones. It lives by ingestion, and elimination. Respiration is figured, again and again, as the excremental: as turbinal excrescences, as swollen glands, inflamed trachea, and mysterious white patches, nauseous growths. Laid prone before four doctors, the body of their patient is all but opaque; they can easily identify the symptoms from which she is suffering, but they cannot agree upon their origin or cause, or what underlying condition might have been their motivating force. Perhaps she has been poisoned, perhaps she is faking it; perhaps she refuses to take her medicine. Freud, as Jamieson Webster points out, could not abide Rank’s theory of birth as foundational trauma, could not accept that the drawing of breath and the amputation of the mother was the first, fundamental moment in the history of the psyche; and so, in his analysis of his dream, the mouths are there, but they are mute. The noses appear, but buried deep in the throat, skeletal abnormalities and a discharge of mucus, a membrane of the erotic, now swallowed and barred. We breathe, we inhale, we take in the presence of the other as a physical body; in breathing we become cannibals, connoisseurs of the anthropophage, feasting together over the even the less than delectable remains of the other’s excrement. We are never not learning to digest. In life, Freud argued that Irma had succeeded in producing “an imitation of a tuberculosis,” a hysterical facsimile of a bacterial infection; but no worry, his dream companion, Dr. M., would declare. “‘It is an infection, but no matter. Dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.” “There seemed to be some remote theoretical notion,” Freud concludes, “that morbid matter can be eliminated through the bowels.” That which is poison might be turned into pleasure, or at the very least a form of relief; that which is ingested will be expelled. It may also bear the fate of becoming compacted, and tear at your bowels. It may go on living in your lungs, in your throat, in your jaw.
Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw around April 1923, just before his sixty-seventh birthday. Presenting himself at the clinic of the Viennese rhinologist, Marcus Hajek, Freud was subjected to an initial examination, which led to what was expected to be a comparatively minor surgery. “The patient had a group of hard, smooth white spots on the inside of the jaw; expecting a trivial operation, he had not mentioned the visit to his family. But the operation went badly—the growth proved cancerous.” When Anna Freud arrived at the clinic, shortly thereafter, she found her father “seated on a kitchen chair” and covered in blood. A second operation was performed, more invasive than the first. “First, a carotid artery was tied off, and glands beneath the upper jawbone (some of them already suspiciously enlarged) were removed. In the second stage of the operation, after slitting the lip and cheek wide open, the surgeon removed the whole upper jaw and palate on the right side, which threw the nasal cavity and mouth into one.” The operation, Ernest Jones notes, was performed while Freud was awake, his face and jaw numbed under the influence of a local anesthetic. Following the surgery, in order to be able to speak or eat, Freud was forced to wear a large, extraordinarily uncomfortable prosthesis, a “magnified denture,” that caused his speech to slur, become thick and distorted, and that prompted an eruption of sores along his gums. If he hoped for some relief from the irritation of the thing, he would loosen its valves and hold its mechanism in place with his thumb. If he wished to smoke, he would pry his mouth open with a clothespin so he could fit a cigar inside. Over time, his family would come to call his prosthetic “the Monster,” and it would become a source of undying torment for much of the rest of their lives. As an effect of these early surgeries, Freud would go deaf in his right ear. He had the couch in his consulting room moved from one wall to another so he could still “see” patients while listening from his left. Barely able to hear, barely able to speak, tongue-tied like Moses, Freud turned to writing to set forth his law; Freud turned to writing to make clear his command.
Freud did not write about his illness but his illness was nonetheless much written about. “On July 16, we got the report from Erdheim that this time it was definitely a malignancy. Pichler and Erdheim studied all the slides of the excised specimen for hours. Because in one area the malignant tissue reached close to the edge, Pichler decided on another operation, for which he was prepared to use general anesthesia….He therefore began the operation under local and regional block anesthesia, but had to stop several times because Freud’s pain was unbearable….Pichler had to remove another part of the underlying bone and extensively coagulate all the surrounding tissue.” Of the thirty-three operations to his jaw Freud endured in the sixteen years between his initial diagnosis and the time of his death, in Max Schur’s description, this procedure is easily one of the most harrowing, as it brings together questions of physical morbidity and bodily pain with more properly psychoanalytic questions of trauma and castration, the dissolution of the body as it prefigures the collapse of the material substance which supports the fantasy of the self and the indominability of the mind. Here we have Freud, the domineering Father, reduced by his illness to the shape of a bone, a burst of skin and blood. Freud, the bone, must be excised, because it is rotted; Freud, his skin and blood, must be staunched. The Father will be awake because he will know the procedure; but for this intransigence he will most certainly suffer. He would take up the pain rather than give up command. “Am I to be the only one who doesn’t cooperate and lets his family down?” Freud would lament. “My wife…remains healthy and undaunted.” Freud’s ill health would dog him most relentlessly in the final years of his life, the slow tempo of age and infirmity matching the pace of the inexorable march of the terror and the prison in which he found himself enmeshed. After escaping Vienna for London, Freud found himself plagued by new complaints–cardiac arrythmia and an irritable bowel–yet his jaw continued in its despotic reign. “Only Anna Freud and I knew how insidious was the onset of each new lesion….[T]he latest…were high up in the oral cavity and hard to reach. There was hardly any normal lining left, and Freud was by now 82! The possibility of further surgery was limited.” By the time of his death, so much of Freud’s jaw had been removed that, of what remained, the ligaments and the bone were so thoroughly rotted that the smell of necrosis overpowered even those remaining stalwarts who attended to his sick room. “My bone is still content to stay with me,” he wrote to Marie Bonaparte, “but not I with it. Schur is very good, but cannot help.” Somewhere near the outskirts of London, Azrael would groan, and beat his black wings.
In the end, it would be Schur, for Freud, who would come to play the part of the deliverer. God was less help than the doctor would prove. “When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated this dose after about twelve hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again.” Psychoanalysis had begun with the dream of an injection; Freud’s life would be brought to an end with an injection and a dream. Having requested that Schur honor a decades old covenant–that he would allow Freud the dignity of a death unfettered by agonizing pain–on September 21, 1939, Freud commended himself not to the Lord of the House of Israel and the abundant peace of His heaven, but to the absorbing embrace of the voracious phage Morpheus, son of the Darkness and of the Night. Brother of the god of Sleep and the lord of Death, Oneiric sigil of chaos and all of our dreams, around 3AM on September 23, Morpheus would come at last to claim him, guiding him toward his “next incarnation,” toward whatever iteration his organic matter might take, toward whatever words might be come in the thrill of his wake.
Jawbone and mouth, a monster with teeth. Like Samson, he slays these philistine hordes. A repetition, a rhythm, an unlikely recurrence. A refrain, a requiem, a mass without chorus. Dies irae and da capo al fine. Adagio and pianissimo. Rage, staccato. Now. Now. Rest. Rest. Four beats, a measure. Slowly, slowly. Diminuendo until the bar.
The bar. The bar. The next whisky bar. I tell you we must die. We now must say goodbye.
Fade and fade out. Fine.
A seemingly unremarkable end to a wholly remarkable conversation, a discussion about the deepest and most intimate aspects of the person that was also intended as a means of surcease, Freud’s suicide was less a victory over death than a victory for the continuity of psychoanalysis, for the concept of death drive, a victory over death drive as the not-quite-primordial drive governing the disposition of life as an insistently regressive movement toward earlier stages of development, toward a diminution of tension characteristic of the end of metabolism and respiration characteristic of multicellular organisms, understood, typically, through the linguistic contrivance generally described as death. It was an act; or, as Lacan might have put it, a nudge, a way of moving the conversation, of changing directions, of making the language say things it otherwise could not, spilling over and out into new directions, down paths otherwise unthinkable and thus untrodden. “One can certainly give oneself over completely to a particular line of thought, and follow it through to wherever it leads, out of sheer scientific curiosity, or out of a desire to act as devil’s advocate–without signing oneself over to the devil,” Freud wrote of the drive. Yet, for Freud, to give up on treatment and elect for death way of illustrating a point about the seductions of the death drive, of the compulsions that attend the manifestations of what Lacan would come to call jouissance: If even our best efforts at staying alive might unwittingly become means of ensuring the timeliness of death, of maintaining the tension of being alive past the point of all reasonable purpose or scheme, perhaps the only means we have for the ensurance of our lives as common denizens of the symbolic order is the radical dedication of ourselves to the imminence of death in the real. To bring the conversation to an end was the only way to be sure that it would survive. Let the body go, so the voice may live.
For Freud, the concept of death drive was broadly indicative of the range of forces at work in the psyche that bent otherwise life sustaining drives toward a range of ostensibly destructive purposes: the compulsion to repeat, the compulsion to repeat that which is most unpleasurable, the compulsion to return and reenact moments of trauma, narcissist self-regard, sadist expressions of control, masochistic self-annihilation, melancholia and dread, those expressions of negative affect that have no proper object and thus overwhelm the capacity of libido as a mechanism of engagement with the other and the Other, a means of entrance into the world. While Freud was careful to qualify the irresolvability of the question of death, turning toward the notional “immortality” of single celled organisms and the effective transference of the vitality of ostensibly inert cellar matter into the metabolic potency of other forms, the deathliness he sought to explore through the concept of death drive accorded with the manifestations of deathliness he saw all around him–the first world war, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the rise of a newly modern and hysterical anti-Semitism, the question of mass death and the problem of grief–as well as the strange play of deathliness and liveliness attendant a variety of movements for the sustenance of life through the pursuit of its destruction; through amputation and cauterization, through the remaindering of people as just so many cells, cancerous blights which were best extracted and disposed before their parasitic dominion might be established. “It is generally accepted that the coming together of numerous cells to form a single animate unit–the multicellularity of organisms–became a means of extending their lifespan. Each cell helps to preserve the life of the others, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die off.” For Freud, libido was a mechanism for the manifestation of a multicellular, multimodal complicity that was necessary for the sustenance, preservation, and extension of life beyond the prison of the ego; the deathliness of modern life consisted, fundamentally, in the implicitly narcissistic demand that such erratic mutuality be forsworn in preference of modes of affiliation predicated upon the curtailment of tension, the return to the prior state of some fanciful ease. Death drive named a range of not entirely legible processes by which the tendency to regression overwhelmed the movement toward life, rendering the maintenance and continuity of certain, circumscribed forms of life adjutant to the movement toward an inconspicuous death.
Much of Freud’s work betrays such regressions. Driven by an illimitable curiosity for the inexhaustibly mutant curiosities Auden referred to as “the fauna of the night,” Freud revisited and revised, reacted to and reconsidered, abreacted and absorbed, different aspects of his work over the long course of his life, leaving behind a body of literature, a body of theory, that was, as often as not, at odds with itself; or, at least, generally open to the possibility of the forms of creativity that would contribute to the eventuality of its transformation or the imminence of its erasure. The digest as form is a figure of the drive, and Freud was forever digesting and regurgitating old bits of himself. “[T]he protozoa die after a period of senile decay just as the higher animals do….If, at a point before they exhibit signs of senescene, two animalcules are able to coalesce with each other, to ‘conjugate’–after which in due course they separate again–they remain unaffected by age….One is reminded of the famous experiment undertaken by Loeb, who by the use of certain chemical stimuli induced segmentation in the eggs of sea-urchins…” Feeling his way toward the death drive, and the proof necessary to sustain his otherwise unwieldy, admittedly untenable metapsychological hypothesis, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle–as elsewhere throughout his work–Freud returns to himself as a physician, as a neurologist and a researcher, dedicated to the investigation of the organic dimensions of neurological disorder. Even as he declaims organic theories of traumatic neurosis as stemming from the literal impact of a physical trauma upon the immediate functioning of the nervous system, Freud finds himself again swimming with eels, mucking about with protozoa and theories of embryology, speculating on the ways in which morphological adaptations are replicated–repeated and restored–at ostensibly higher levels of multicellular organization. He turns, that is, back to himself, back to the scientist he once wished he could be, back to the man who once had faith in the body, in nature, in the physical sciences and all they revealed. He turns back, to himself, and the philosophy of Plato, but back even from Plato and a philosophy he abjured. Citing Aristophanes’ description, from the Symposium, of the origins of love in the history of primordial man once united in body then cloven in two, Freud seats himself again at the banquet of the ancients, seeking solace in what the boy must once have believed; in certainty, in evidence, in the consolation of myth.
Freud’s speculations on cellular evolution are perhaps best read as clinical descriptions of what is most reasonably understood as an unfolding metaphorical, metabolic process, attempts at nailing down the never less than inscrutably lyrical dynamics of a mind that is never more opaque than it is to itself, as well as the relationship between the mind and the body, and the bodies and things it encounters in the world. Documenting regression within the space of the text, they register, as a matter of form, the dynamics of mind Freud hoped to elucidate, a mode of regression that proffered both a diminution of tension as well as a means of its sustenance, a means of maintaining the tension endemic to the continuity of life at a level suitably muted for the purposes of ongoing enjoyment, tuned neither to the depths of despair or the heights of joy. Inasmuch as the drive operates not to meet any particular overwhelming need, yet pursues its enjoyment in the continuity of its operation, death drive pursues the attenuation of pain in as much as it allows for the continuity of life as a continuation of suffering, an ongoing battle, inevitably lost, which is waged for the satisfaction of nothing and no one except for itself. Much of the final years of Freud’s life might be described in similar terms, as he fought, with those around him, to sustain and prolong his life, in defiance of his cancer, well past the point where there was any hope of recovery, even as the Nazis closed in around him, even as the tumors began to threaten to consume what was left of his eyes. Confronted by the cruel antisemitism of the Viennese in the wake of the Anschluss, Freud had been defiant when his daughter suggested they might contemplate taking their own lives. Why should we, he demanded. “Because they would like us to?” Yet, at little more than a year after arriving in London, he would do no less than this: in defiance of his family, in defiance of his friends, in defiance of the drive to continue on in defiance of his myriad foes, Freud chose death and, in choosing death, laid claim to his life. He would destroy all effigies of Moses; he would destroy what was left of himself. Just as his ersatz children could not be allowed to defeat him, neither cancer nor Nazis would lay claim to his corpse.
Fort, da. Here, gone. I am the hand, my word is the string, everyone else, just so many tops.