Psychoanalysts, unlike gender studies, distinguish between the enjoying father and the symbolic law. Rose-Paule Vinciguerra details it precisely in this newsletter. She reminds us that : « Lacan did not confuse father and patriarch. The symbolic law is not as such patriarchal. »
Besides, no matter how much we want to deconstruct the patriarchal system responsible for all evil today, Schreberian-like fathers and mothers who let to be will not evaporate.
Sorj Chalandon whose work and life are crossed by the attempt to free himself from the imprint of his father’s lies, walled in perpetual fabrications testifies to this in his last two books. This father, whom as a child he loved so much, believed so much and whom he absolutely wanted to please, we discover him over the pages written in a sumptuously stripped-down language. The extent of the brutality of the despotic father, his ferocious punishments, the suffocating atmosphere of bullying and humiliation attest to a toxic jouissance that makes the son an insignificant object, a little soldier blinded by paternal insanity. To put it in author’s words : « He was a general, and I was at his feet. »[1] And yet, for S. Chalandon, the important thing seems less there than in the impossibility of finding one’s way in the words of the father. Since always, the lie reigns supreme so that the writer – whether war reporter, journalist, or novelist – will never stop bringing out the truth.
We find him in the character of Émile, the little boy in Occupation of the Father [Profession du Père in French], stunned by the more implausible versions of his father’s past : he would have been a pastor, soldier, parachutist or even professional footballer and even a secret agent. Émile doesn’t have a father like any other, but at school, in the box « father’s occupation », he no longer knows what to write. The child is amazed, but we are here in the register of fascination, and not in that of the father as the one who will amaze (é-pater) his family[2], Lacan’s formula that Éric Laurent deploys in the text of this new newsletter ; it follows the one you were able to discover last week.
It is in the book Enfant de salaud (Bastard’s child), which the author situates during the trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon, in 1987, which he had moreover followed for Libération, that he can name the effects of this fascination : « You tried to dazzle me while you blinded me. »[3]
However, the father’s filth left its mark : « Yes, I am a bastard’s child. But not because of your messy wars, Dad, your German boots, your pride, that madness that has accompanied you everywhere. […] No. The bastard, it’s the man who threw his son into life as into the mud. Without traces, without landmarks, without light, without the slightest truth. »[4] And yet, was it not in the absence of light that S. Chalandon’s taste for writing arose ?
Reading these two remarkable and moving books leaves us « tired of the father » to say it with Kepa Torrealdai Txertudi that you can discover in this newsletter.
Let us add however, that in this story, the mother, submissive, fearful, even complacent, is of no aid. She says nothing, except this tirelessly repeated sentence : « Do you know your father ? »[5]
Translation : Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading : Aurélie Solliec
Picture : ©Fabien de Cugnac
[1] Chalandon S., Profession du père, Paris, Grasset, 2015, p. 33. (French edition), unpublished in English.
[2] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, …or Worse (ed. Miller J.-A., trans. Price A.), Cambridge and Medford, Polity Press, p. 184. É-pater italicised in English translation of text.
[3] Chalandon S. Enfant de salaud, Paris, Grasset, 2021, p. 260. (French edition), unpublished in English.
[4] Ibid., p. 260.
[5] Chalandon S., Profession du père, op. cit., p. 25. (French edition), unpublished in English.
