Body and Sign–Pinning
I want to pick up on the Body and Sign exchange with parodycenter but from a slightly different perspective. I’ve been re-reading a non-clinical text from 1998 by Hélène Cixous, herself no stranger to the ambivalences and complexities of psychoanalysis. Savoir is a relatively short text in which Cixous articulates not only new ways for pinning word to place but, and more importantly, new ways in which a word can be made to pin different places to one another. Cixous deploys autobiography, religion, theory, and poetic imagination to articulate a myopia that passes, which is to say a myopia that does not register with the fully sighted, and a myopia that is subject to surgical intervention and correction. She, Cixous, the myopic, could see that she could not see; her myopia was the “little nail stuck in the gap” (6) between the worlds of vision and blindness, the nail that is simultaneously the cause for much pain as well as an occasion for the pinning and concurrence of two otherwise incommensurable worlds. As Cixous writes, myopic living is a state of alert where seeing is a “tottering believing” and everything is “perhaps” (6). Myopia is such that it cannot be seen by the seeing who, when confronted with it, are incredulous: “I would not have guessed;” doubting “but you manage so well;” and hence unwilling to come to terms with their own inability to see that they cannot see. As “the mistress of error” (7), myopia reigns supreme over one and all; as much as the invisible divider between the non-seeing and the seeing, it is the invisible connector that exposes our universal myopia.
Still, myopia for Cixous is a site/sight not only of ambivalence, uncertainty, and fear, but also of that possibility from which the limits and ossifications of certainty and its myopia have been expelled. Indeed, if not-to-see is a deficit and a thirst, not-to-see-oneself-seen is a strength, an independence, and a lightness (12), and hence a freedom from the constraint of the image of oneself that one sees in the eye of the other, that very same freedom that analysts invite analysands to explore, know, and cite through the use of the couch, that very same freedom that analysts often cherish for themselves as their analysands lie on that couch. Unwittingly, psychoanalysis participates in a practice that abstracts from myopia as a physiological limitation its virtue as an opening onto a site/sight and a citing that reconfigure the customary and conscious pinnings of self and other as well as of those of word and place and of mind and body.
As a result, myopia is brought forth as neither an object nor a condition but as the mark of a complex set of relationships that one enters into while dealing with oneself and the world. Its psychological significance lies much less in its status as a pathology or deficit and more in the ways in which it is deployed and the purposes it is made to serve, some of which may very well indeed be “pathological”. While at times a handicap, myopia is potentially a tool that opens onto the possibility of a pinning that is the analytic transference fraught with ambivalence and unpredictability, a transference governed by a sight/site, a citing, and a knowledge that are forever in the making.
That, in at least one of its registers, psychoanalysis is an inherently myopic practice should come as a surprise to no one. The dynamic is in fact at the heart of one of its most inspiring of precedents. Indeed, and while a punishment to his incestuous and parricidal crimes, Oedipus’s self-inflicted blindness, with pins no less, was also the opening onto that most sacred and untimely of sights/sites through which he could access a truth that would radically and forever redefine for him what it means to be worldly and knowledgeable. Presumably, and whether real or phantasized, his crime, guilt, punishment, and subsequent redemption are often set up as the successive stages of our own analytic passages. What remains to be seen is the extent to which the pursuit of a psychoanalytic treatment nowadays is confined to a retracing of its hero’s pilgrimage from the gates of Thebes to the woods of Colonus; the extent to which such a pursuit is propelled by, or producing of, the unconscious phantasy of an Oedipal culpability as well as of a demand for an absolution or at the very least an alleviation of its accompanying guilt; and the extent to which the use of the couch is a reenactment of the Sophoclean script, its recapitulation and re-inscription into a world that has presumably given up on the very idea of myth, eternity, and absolution; the extent to which, in other words, the couch is deployed as an instrument of the analysand’s exoneration by a blind or blinding but merciful analyst.
As much as none of this can be adequately articulated and worked through except in the context of a specific individual at a specific moment in his or her analysis, the following question needs to be raised: how much of this dynamic is still the outcome of a counter-transferential implantation and a pinning that, in the manner of a retrograde analysis, extrapolate from a punishment and a redemption, from a couch and an insight, the presence of a preceding crime and guilt; how much is the nature of the crime incestuous and parricidal; and how much of the guilt is indeed an offering and an appeasement? Put differently, how much is the individual analytic experience pinned onto the content and structure of a representation that has already been declared paradigmatic; and how much is such a representation, qua representation and regardless of its content, limiting of the pinning and its possibilities?
