Cixous with her children Anne-Emmanuelle and Pierre-François, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Olivier Morel and Hélène Cixous.
In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader.
Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true.
We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.”
***
Let’s move from the child on the floor to another scene, one given by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: a holdup at gunpoint. The perpetrator says to his victim: “Your money or your life!” Of course, everyone hands over their money. Yet there is an important logical error, for while you assume you have made the choice to escape scot-free, in handing over your money you have not escaped a loss of life, you’ve paid a price to live. Even as the price is worth paying, you live at a cost. Lacan used this example to demonstrate what he called a “forced choice.” Seemingly presented with options, you lose either way. There is only one choice, and you are being forced into it. In Seminar XI, Lacan thus depicts the alienating vel of subjectivity, the either-or logic that is present as soon as the modern subject is brought into language and meets the Other in a system of representation.
To be a recognizable and representable person is a forced choice, enacted in enormous angst, and which brings with it a heavy price. Psychoanalysis calls this price neurosis, and neurotics live with a loss at the heart of their being. They have neither their money nor their life but rather this price. And they have this as alienated subjects. On the other side of this threat to life, alienation awaits you. While we might envy those for whom this loss isn’t the obscured center of their being, who seem to possess access to a different kind of plenitude, those who weren’t captured at gunpoint cannot access civilized life in the same way a neurotic does. Civilized life—as Freud was ever so keen to tell us—is built by and for neurotics. Even if you can’t readily choose between one or the other, which one would you choose if you could? Being or having? Alienation or marginalization? Psychosis or neurosis?
Surviving annihilation, escaping the labyrinth of madness, a subject will always long for the other side of this cutoff. That, or death. Before this forced choice, you were closer to life. We, psychoanalysts, link psychosis and childhood. Not because psychosis is necessarily more primitive or more infantile (a tired moralism), but in terms of the way a child or a psychotic can speak to a world behind the veil of neurotic alienation. Life with greater immediacy, abundant forms of satisfaction, a feeling for the body and its wild, fragmented states, and that ecstatic-horrific pulsing of the world’s energies. This feeling is certainly closer to excess than loss, but it is a plenitude that is unbearable, incompatible with the costs of life that are expected of you. It is its own alienation. There, you were you, but you were also no one. Pay the price and you can be someone, among others.
Everyone accepts, refuses to accept, half accepts, is not able to accept, this forced choice. Meaning, we all fight with or against it. Some may identify with it completely, which may be its own form of resistance. A more masculine protest might suggest you could beat the robber by force or by law and recoup what was taken. Another strategy emphasizes the necessity in civilization that everyone pay, so we feel less alone in the cost we have taken—though at some point we realize this is a lie. You could seek to be an exception to the rule, through rewrites of the tale that cast you as omnipotent or immune—magical powers, supernatural forces, resurrection. Or you could spin a hysterical lament, more melancholic than protest, like Nina Simone in her song “Either Way I Lose,” where she becomes the loss itself: “If I stay, I know that I must share your love and that I couldn’t take / If I go, we’ll be apart and I know my heart would surely break /So, what difference does it make, which one I choose? / Either way I lose.” The point is you lose. We are faced with a kind of radical severance any way we turn.
Let’s call the forced choice the traumatic encounter: the gun, the words of a madman that become decisive, the loss of innocence, the theft, the threat to your body and integrity, leaving your child. The forced choice gathers around the tears that speak of trauma from knowledge of sexuality (the gun!), especially sexual difference and the sudden realization that sexuality makes you less at home. There is the assimilation of language from the Other (the gunman’s words), and all those signifiers, their traumatic knots, and the way you had to swallow them whole. Then there is the loss (the price!) that is giving up the primordial object—one’s motherland, one’s first home—as you were forced to move on and accept paltry substitutes, assimilation into foreign territory. “Lose your mother,” as Saidiya Hartman put it, speaking of and to so many enslaved ancestors who couldn’t know where they came from, neither their mother nor their mother tongue.
Then there’s paying a price for one’s enjoyment, a flesh price of edged-in disappointment, dissatisfaction, or ennui. This price is held up against a psychotic push for absolute enjoyment, total immanence, those electrifying waves that make knowing anything both impossible and all too certain. The scenario is completed by the downloading of patriarchy into your soul, as a phantasmatic kernel that is at once an encrusted pustule of self-hatred. You’ve survived death. It can only come soon enough.
Angst restages Lacan’s forced choice, together with other trajectories described by psychoanalysis—the stages of psychosexual development or mourning. Cixous rewrites the alienating cut from the side of women, from the lived experience of angst in a body, the twists and turns of finding out from where one is still able to love and desire, feel life, and speak for oneself. The forced choice appears not as a gunman but as the mother who does not return, a male lover who departs whenever his presence is desired, moments when inside and outside collapse and now there is no place, no arrival, no return, only an outside, without any reasons to give for this anguish.
All my glances in your mouth. And now banished. God herself doesn’t know why. There’s been an accident of belief. No rights, no wrongs. It’s something in your head that’s damaged. A nothing. A misprint. Letters are so fragile. When I meant to write “I love myself,” the fabric tore. The lines stumble. It’s anguish. Meaning drains down one side. Down to the final drop. The tongue talks pell-mell in my mouth, what I want to say is blocked. I would so like to say the names that bring life in, that reassure it, that swear their love for it. “Be sure.” What is “sure”?
Cixous’s writing shows the vel not as abstract law, or even as the incorporation of language, but as forces at play in a feminine scene of waiting where the truth is. We never really do manage to leave. We don’t make it to the other side. We don’t rest there. Better that we live to tell this tale, investigating those small pockets of oxygen, the violent crisscrossing, meaning drip, drip, dripping, and pell-mell blockages, backed by so much felt desire.
Cixous insists on the physical, bodily texture of this loss: “Despite my humming, a hand is ripping my feet off, a hand tears off my wings, the pain isn’t killing me, my body is shriveling; out the window and no land for crash-landing.” What Lacan figures as structural alienation, Cixous writes as bodily anguish. In that writing, she gives voice to the cries, the mutilations, the scraps of flesh and time that theories of psychoanalysis usually abstract away. Language is not simply prohibition; some rarified “No.” It is closer to the effects of words pronounced by the one who suddenly leaves, or who withholds the rhyme or reason for their actions. A voice that says at three in the morning: “I won’t come. I haven’t one minute.” Or, after soliciting your desire, whispers “Shame on you,” and vanishes.
This isn’t a simple move from mother to father, because a lover abandons like the mother, and anguish is redoubled.
That was my mother’s voice. I was sure of it. She’d recognized me. Who else could have understood me? I’d so have liked to recognize her, but her voice wasn’t familiar. “Who do I have the honor of speaking to?” I stammered. Forgott, do not obscure my names! Words flew out of my mouth, I didn’t know what they were saying. Which saint to call? Which mother would answer? Hello? My mother’s voice from far away. “Forgotting will have me confined to bed!” I say. My mother hangs up. Silence. Cut off. I feel I’ve already heard this silence. It’s someone I adore no longer talking to me. I fear horribly that it’s my mother. If it isn’t her, it is her silence, how could I miss that? As if she had answered: “Your name is Shame, and your second name, Horror.”
Forgetting, shame, a perverse feeling of falseness, folly, blame—these markers of alienation do not offer shelter, comfort, or even complacency. We want to move away from them, as we do from anguish. I love this vision of our relentless attempt to find the way to continue wanting. I want this restlessness to be true of all of us. Is it?
How you once located yourself—whatever flesh-feeling you could retrain, whatever ambient, illusory memory of security, or even in that strange state of angst-ridden love where you feel the power of meeting and its disappearing—was to be pulverized as you moved across the divide to the Valhalla of neurosis. They exist as a kind of false nostalgia. The psychoanalysts said you can only work to describe these fragments of memory (if they even are memories) as best you can to someone who wants to listen. Describe them in their impossibility; this is the nature of desire as lack. Is this really the best we can do?
Meanwhile, Lacan insists that this experience at gunpoint explains certain psychoanalytic phenomena that are palpable to the analyst. Like the strange choice—never really made—between neurosis and psychosis, as well as perversion. Or the rampant and unending difficulties we have with separation. Or the particularly male problem of living a fantasy of exemption. Lacan would also like this scene to speak to persistent problems of our civilization. The fantasy that technology will save us as it continues to plunge us into greater violence and derealization. How it can be that all those men in charge believe everyone should be rescued into the reality that is solely their own, defined at will. Exclusionary by logic, inclusive only fantastically. They are the ones with the gun.
In the case of neurosis, what you gain is so full of loss, denial, and compromise. And Lacan still wonders who would choose the suffering of psychosis, which is absolute and barely mitigable … I might, he even said he wishes he was more on that side … Separation promises that we exit the quandaries of enmeshment, suffocating connection, anguish, and the failure to distinguish our love from our rage. But separation means solitude. There will never again be idealized love, only knowledge of the fact that all love comes from hate and hate will forever follow any figure of love. The fantasy of exemption works in reverse to the figure of separation, such that the one who thinks he can “get away with it,” forgets that life with others—just one among them—is a life of relation, and that isn’t so bad. Humility offers a lot. Human connection also.
I feel I live these human conundrums every day as an analyst, as if to help patients live and move across this divide, fielding the disappointments that seem to come with every inch won in psychoanalysis. Freud’s dictum of aiming for “ordinary human unhappiness” always rings in my ears. What a thing to sell! Perhaps I am Lacan’s gunman, holding patients up: “Your money or your life!” Now I’m the one with the gun I never wanted to hold.
Truth be told, something always happens to me when I think hard about this Lacanian holdup. I start asking questions. Why does Lacan care about money so much? Has anyone noticed all Lacanian examples turn around money? What does this gunman want the money for, anyway? Is he trying to say something about capitalism? The gun itself is so annoying. Why is that the main operator of force? What about a world with no guns? There have to be better ways of talking about patriarchy. Haven’t we moved on, by now, from Lacan and the phallus?
Really, you ought to just give up your life; that would be the more direct, perhaps more honest choice. At least you don’t hand everything over to the captor, presumably male. Do they even actually kill you, if they were just trying to get a buck? Don’t they often give up if you don’t give in? If you are a woman, is the question of rape an issue? That would be a whole other story, one Lacan certainly doesn’t tell, at least not when inventing this story about the “name of the father.”
From the standpoint of a woman, we would have to offer the possibility of a story where she bests the gunman. The price is very different after that attempt, successful or not. She knows something about moving from one side to the other, like Tiresias. In Lacan’s male-coded story, everything is all or nothing, which may be how it is between men. I’ve long wanted, like Freud’s Hungarian contemporary Sándor Ferenczi, the whole edifice of psychoanalysis to be rewritten from the side of women. This is why I’m stuck going on and on. Asking and asking these questions about what hasn’t stopped not being written.
But here it is: Angst by Hélène Cixous.
In saying that the choice is alienation or worse, Lacan can sound conservative. He’s been taken to task for this by Deleuze and Guattari, by Jacques Derrida. By Cixous, who starts with, “The worst is happening.” It is always happening. This has already been spoken about by so many women, women who certainly are not children, nor psychotic, nor nostalgically or overly attached to their mothers. This is what we read in Angst—the richness of the worst. Its slow burn, quickened pulse, and countlessly circled dead ends. This is what remains to be written. Stop moving across the divide and declaring one side paradise lost! “Paradise is not lost. It is discovered, only too late. When one’s stopped imagining it.”
I do think Lacan is less patronizing than he seems. At this dark historical moment in the twenty-first century, I’m concerned in similar ways to Lacan. Wishing we made better choices, wishing others were more willing to pay the price for what it means to live in common. Lacan follows Freud’s wish that we be a bit more sober about what is possible. It turns out that Lacan’s critics rearticulate the logic of the forced choice. Like life as schizoanalysis in an enjoying body without organs that refuses patriarchy’s gambits: against the moneyless life of the organized alienation of neurotic misery, mitigated into communal unhappiness. Which is more ethical? Tough call. For Cixous the choice is less binary and stark. All possibilities are lived by women confronting life, attempting to reverse a negation that marks her.
Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound that is not grievance (such a masculine affectation). Unlike the phallic economy which posits gain, possession, and mastery, the feminine is marked by the cut, by a place that cannot be closed or sutured, where something can be known, but certainly not all. This is not exactly the surplus I spoke of with psychosis, but there is a more. Like the rush of speech, decidedly one’s own, arising from dispossession. In this sense, Cixous’s writing is not a response to Lacan but a continuation of the loss he stages by pressing it into flesh, dream, and the dynamism of loving.
Even as there is a before to alienation, or what she calls at one point being “called-up,” there were never any of the consolations of wholeness. Where did this idea come from? Not from a woman. Her subject has always known that the letter will not come, the mother will not return, that time is broken. This knowledge cannot be undone. “Now I am on the other side of love, the side where it is impossible to love … I am separated from myself by this knowledge.” She must represent herself to herself through absence, through writing, not from self-possession but from the unending collapse of possession of either self or other. The price, the money paid, is something very different; it redoubles the pain of abandonment, moves between passive and active suffering.
This happened at the Absolute. Only when lost can one accede there. Having forgotten everything. Lost: ordinary life, time, sight. Goods. Possessions. Bodies. When nothing can be recalled ever again. No one there manages to leave it now; not starting out from a land; from a ground; from a city; from a desire. That can’t be decided here. You were called up … I’d paid. Liquidated. Killed. Lost. Link upon link sliced by knife, by soul, by teeth each detached from the human tongues. I no longer spoke my own. I was listening to the other language, I could understand from far off, it was spoken only for me, I knew that. I didn’t know the language. I received it. It announced. It questioned. I gave my blood in answer. It reached me, touched me, I gave myself to it where it wished. Without holding back. All the time. In one leap to infinity with every instant. And in each instant, what distress, a leap, falling, such effort, a misfire, such ambition. I could never respond fast enough, fly high enough, and this inadequacy was the proof: my pain and my reward.
I love Cixous’s reconfiguration of the terrain of becoming a subject. Cixous does not counter Lacan with another law, another gain, another landscape, but infinite reversals in the scene of love. I also know these passages as a psychoanalyst. I may be holding a gun, but I am also a figure of transference love, there to allow my analysand the chance for this kind of presence with themselves. If Lacan shows the forced choice as law, Cixous shows it as life itself: to be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.
This is an adapted excerpt from the foreword to Hélène Cixous’s Angst, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, to be published by Silver Press in March.
You can read The Paris Review’s Art of Criticism interview with Cixous here.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of On Breathing and Disorganization and Sex. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute.