J-L Bouttes 2, 'Diamond Lightning'
"Do Werthers still kill themselves"
Introduction: Jean-Louis Bouttes, then a twenty-something-year-old graduate student, gave “Diamond Lighting” as the final presentation at a conference held in honor of Roland Barthes in 1977. A member of Barthes’ circle of intimate students/friends/lovers, Bouttes was cited several times in A Lover’s Discourse, published by Barthes earlier that same year. “Diamond Lightning” is a sort of commentary on, or response to, Barthes’ text. It uses a similar fragmentary style, and shifts between what might be called a pseudo-scientific register of technical language (or Theory-ese), and more intimate or poetic registers. In that sense, it reads in French like many ‘post-structuralist’ texts of this era (by figures like Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.), with a particular ‘intensity’ (a key-word of Bouttes) and, often, unclarity.
Bouttes refers to A Lover’s Discourse’s fragmentary quality as well as the ‘figures’ around which the fragments are organized (micro-chapters under such headings as ‘I love you,’ ‘Waiting,’ etc.), and to the marginal notes by which Barthes directed readers either to literary sources (e.g., The Sorrows of Young Werther) or to the living interlocutors who had inspired him (such as Bouttes himself). Bouttes works toward something like an appraisal of Barthes’ concept of the ‘not-wanting-to-grasp,’ which is posited in A Lover’s Discourse as an ethic for loving, without stifling or being stifled by, the other—a concept that, for Bouttes, is bound up with the act of writing A Lover’s Discourse, and with writing as such.
Bouttes also gestures to the biographical origins of the book: Barthes’ unhappy obsession with another member of his entourage, a student in psychoanalysis. A Lover’s Discourse draws heavily, but with distinct reservations, on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan that was then becoming predominant in French intellectual circles—and which the object of Barthes’ enamorment had encouraged him to familiarize himself with (Barthes would in fact undergo a few sessions with Lacan in an unsuccessful attempt to cure himself of his passion). Bouttes draws on such Lacanian concepts as the distinction between ‘big Other’ and ‘little other’, and among the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Psychoanalysis (and linguistics, another field that inspired Barthes) is however for Bouttes not something to be taken seriously, but rather a repertoire of ideas to be used, and mocked, in the course of writing.
I do not entirely understand what Bouttes is up to in this difficult text—so a familiarity with the historical, intellectual and biographical context, I suspect, isn’t sufficient to clear up all of its ambiguities (although I’m sure some of what I experience as the latter are in fact just my not understanding!)—which is part of my interest in working on it. I hope that, in translation, it can be neither falsely clear nor entirely or uninterestingly opaque.
What can we bring to God, to language? The observations of a lover on the imperfections of discourse. In a surging stronger than psychoanalytic slosh, I come to my own way of speaking the subject.
Everyone moreover knows that only mysticism can analyze the soul. That’s what the new psychology will be, futile like every other science. Which just leaves writing.
“In the lethargy of the lover, something is ceaselessly departing.” Love brings the endless spread of images into a second infinity, one always threatened by the code, the narrative, the novel, and thus always, at the same time, brought back to what is finite and finicky in the image.
The imaginary of the lover extends, with no end in view, over a field of varied intensities. “We two,” in mystic marriage.
In this mise en abyme transference comes to nature, to God, to everything going wrong in the world, wholly other than, but not eliminating, the other; the problem is turned inside out: not ‘what is true Love?’ but, ‘given Love’s infinite power, how can it avoid eliminating the other?’ This is what makes the two motions of effusive expansion and descriptive retraction so important, without even mentioning the other motions referenced in the margins (the hateful motion of the symbolic).
…with a childish earnestness, this text brings to life, hallucinates, the unlikely possibility of tasting pleasure in this world, as if it would be enough to withdraw into it (and not from it). The text is true because it pitilessly links the intensity of the unconscious-conscious subject to the intensity of emotion, fixing upon the surface of the book-mirror the vibrating glimmers of a mortal energy that binds together the ego, death, and the imaginary. You find yourself nowhere, except in the exhilarating crevices of the lover’s language, bent into the love of language.
…
We start with the childish voice, we go through the voice of masks, we touch on philosophy, argue in discursive comedy, abandon the novel (let sleeping dogs etc.), just manage to avoid the new psychology, even though it’s very necessary (we don’t have to give a lecture), return to poetry, lose our way in the immensity and find our way back, completing the ellipsis of the figure, one pole to the other, silent love and speaking subject, gathering a sprig of lover’s language…
But since we cannot return to the era of ravishment, by which I would mimic in the mortal creature abductions of the ancient gods… I myself will live in my own cursive structure, the only force compatible with it.
Do Werthers still kill themselves? What else can they do, except hope for the world to be made safe for love, or rather for leaps and spins to reunite the eternal adoration of language (the discursive position) with the beloved himself, the gods and choruses rutting like goats in the grand horny-plenty pasture of the imaginary.
This rhythm of coming and going is the manipulation of emotion (the lover is such a coquette!) that seems to sometimes work for the subject’s benefit, and sometimes to his detriment: it has no other purpose than to turn around itself. Everyone manipulates, knows they do, and the beads of the mystic rosary slip through their hands. And so we come from love to the not-wanting-to-grasp.
…
The teller of the story dwells in the place to which someone who has felt this feeling inside him escapes, and, to avoid dying from it, huddles inside language, shaping it to his own design, as if what remained to him after this insane experience were the airy lair of a stylite.
Taking emotion for truth means thinking that truth is external form. When there is such a knot of feeling as love, how can you act without destroying yourself and others: solitude, not-wanting-to-grasp, even as you give the other what the most loyal friendship would give, that is if he accepts it, as you hope, if not for universal love, at least to live together, without hurting anyone you love, if you do manage to love anyone else again. If the other doesn’t understand, then your need for the book is dire; what could you give him that’s clear but not constraining? This is the question he answered: the non-wanting-to-grasp is the absolute gift and it’s connected to writing.
…
The art of living love, even the catastrophe, the set of stratagems created by ‘I love you,’ fable or ineffable, gives way to an overflowing, candid cunning at the far reaches of the infinite horizon of figures constituted by manipulation, the most sidewinding, the most unworldly, mystical comedy. Its effect on the memory is in immediate connection with the seeds of time (apart from any story, from any Proustian novel).
“Love makes me think too much”: the lover’s discourse drifts inevitably towards philosophy. But we must not let thinking too much become saying too much. Unlike other discourses, that of the lover can exist only at the margins of discursivity (of signs?). And when it becomes mere suffering, what it schemes is not quite a book or text but a typical thoughtless manipulation.
…
A psychic nebula bursts from life into text and from text into life. Literature, previously, was sometimes didactic, daring to project imitations of the real. Then, in retreat from philosophy and the sciences, writing was confined to representation... And then began new dreams: what if, tired of endlessly bowing before the symbolic battered by the scientific censors, finding as it were an ancient ontological power, it took back from reality the exclusive right to merge with machines and made itself imaginary engines following with a light touch the sinuous forms of Hermes the loosener of knots, the thief, who knows nothing of having or being but only of simulation?