Prelude 17, Colette Soler

Desire caught by …

While I was busy with other things, I had the crazy thought that desire “caught by the tail” does not take us very far – apologies to Picasso from whom I have borrowed the phrase. Not much further than the bed, the space of the embrace. For whoever wishes to go further, it must be caught in a different way. Mais comment? [But how?] “Just like that: “mécomment”.[1] This “mécomment” calls up speech and its topology, and entirely refutes any attempt at organo-dynamism, past or present, that of Henri Ey or that of neuroconductivism. Organo-dynamism is precisely what takes man in general by his organism and thus desire in particular by the tail, believing that it is “by the organ that the Eternal feminine lures you upstairs” as Lacan says pricelessly. This organ was sung, even bellowed, in the staffrooms of Lacan’s time. Those were still good times for psychiatrists who, since then, have lost their organ, I mean their voice, and for all I know the staffrooms don’t sing much any more. This is because the new organo-dynamism, even worse than yesterday’s, does not sing nor does it concern itself with desire but rather with what keeps every organ and everyone in good order.

Psychoanalysis is alone in still caring about desire and we are proud of this. Only, to desire is to be in “imminence” of castration. Whence the alternation of phases between the pleasure of the quest that contributes so much to the feeling of life, and the anxiety that brings back the real. Who then will deserve the name of “desiring par excellence”? Not the neurotic in any case.

Translated by Susan Schwartz


[1] L’étourdit, Scilicet 4, p. 27. Translator’s note: “mais comment” and “mécomment” are homophones in French. “Mécomment” is not a word, although the prefix “” denotes the negative. The emphasis here seems to be on the nonsense of what is heard in what is said.