(Blogger General's Warning: although much reduced from a larger piece, this post is still longer then you'd expect. Pour yourself something in a glass or a mug, put your feet up and get hysterical!)
Open wide and the language comes, in time, like a divination, an
evocation, an impression. Sometimes a sentence resonates so forcefully, it has
to be hang, like a Rothko, on its own wall, in its own room. Like a hysteric,
intensely present, yet separate, rhapsodically somatic, in the face of her
forced exile from mainstream cultural psychology. Real.
Let me suggest the hysteric is not a woman who swoons, as she has
often been depicted, pale, iron deficient, overcome by the unbearable, writhing
in some lost state gone beyond the normal, the prescribed normal she is expected to
represent at all times. The hysteric is not at mercy of others, as the medical
establishment would like to have it. She is a woman who wants everything. She
is potent, has colour splashed on her face, she is fierce in her desire, and
when she can find the right moment, she dances out to her jouissance, she leaps
in the air. It is a movement, a force that upsurges from the core, the hunger,
the longing, all desire, all want, an essential, ontological state of seeking,
expanding, pushing. It is an un-utterable birthing, un-utterus...
Hysteria is an element
that disturbs the predictable arrangements of patriarchal master narrative.
This involves the body, fully fleshed and somarticulate, articulated. The
hysteric is inevitably caught up in desire, the eros, the libido, which is the
source of her strength, as well as her pathology, as defined in clinical
psychoanalysis. In a roundabout, abstract way, psychoanalysis really talks
about the body, its ravaging viscerality, its pleasures and its absences, while
caught in the theoretical discourse of psyche which remains under the spell of
platonic idealism, Cartesian dualism and the notion of Symbolic order, the
primacy of language. The hysteric is exiled as a pathology for daring to
disrupt the seamless pristine space of the master discourse by signifying
difference in her corporeality as well as her oral/linguistic refusal to
conform, to complete herself as object. This foreshadows already the notion of
agency and power the hysteric can bring to writing, where both verbal and
non-verbal signs/actions not only communicate but are an inextricable part of
the physical, material experience of the kinesthetically engaged individual.
The woman and her desire remains an enigma even as her sexuality is determined
within the phallic system. Without having to recount the theoretical
underpinnings of the Oedipal complex and the entire pathology of neuroses that
plague our unconscious, let’s bracket the hysteric within the notion of jouissance,
the pleasure beyond the symbolic.
Psychoanalysis, Freudian and Lacanian, have assigned jouissance beyond language. True that in most
cases, when one attempts to describe ecstasy, there are not many words
available, that haven't been repeated to oblivion...bursting, explosion,
volcanic etc. There seems to be no language where a woman can speak her jouissance. Therefore it has been concluded that jouissance does not exist. If we cannot speak it,
describe, categorize and formulate in language, it does not exist. It resides
simply the edge of the imaginary of a woman, and has to be cured... Slipping along the edges of mainstream discourse,
the hysteric must assert her disruption of it by demystifying the theoretical
orientations that privilege the abstract, the ideal, the concrete, the whole,
the absolute.
Sometimes,
the hysteric, an artist who writes, is the poet. The poet, released into the
realm of the imaginary, prior intertwining self with language, manifests the
catharsis, like the hysteric, through the body. Here, the self, contained in
conscious comportments of culture, in logos, within the symbolic, the master
discourse, can step into a lacuna full of potentialities and self-re-form,
returning back to the symbolic in the act of reflective re-reading. The process
is repeated in sequences in time and space, in the gesture modality of writing
proprioceptively, prior reflection, where the movements generating cognition
prior co(i)gniting consciously inform the e-motive, libidinal and somatic
flesh-knowing in words that are released. In surrendering to the knowledge
stored in the flesh, in the ancient stirrings, before language, before the
solidifying of subjectivity’s boundaries blur, this process of blurring is a
breaking apart, a kind of dissolving into everything.
The
breaking up of the hysteric speaks of the dynamic process of dissolution and
re-materialization, the surrender to jouissance, that will take the journey of not knowing, of no language, no speech.
This place of breaking up, of surrendering fully, is a real place of material
and psychic tensions of immeasurable strength, it is a part of the process that
the self must go through while processing information and emotions that orient
its being and becoming. The release of this tension is the experience of
dissolving. The moment of breaking up and re-assembling, of containment and
release, opening and closing, surrendering to the words stored in the midden of
flesh, occurs in the recesses of experience that is beyond language, within the
transitional mode between moments of parabolic spatio/temporal pause of falling
into a void that aspires toward everything. There is power in the
re-assembling, an agency for self-definition, for self-fashioning, for
becoming, for coming forth. The hysteric carries within her both the symbolic and
imaginary, the illusion of unbroken subjectivity to give power to the status
quo and the power of disruption,
the return to pre-logos, pre-reason, pre-language. The twinning of powers, when
released in the hysteric, has a potential as a poetic as well as a
philosophical generative source. This moment becomes a transition where the
hysteric is joined by ambiguity of the physical language of the flesh, and becomes
a poet.
I write from the hysteric in me. My text is guided by eros, the
proprioceptive motivator. We all come from that place of primal heaving and
flow, from the joining of, swimming in, the human fluids, and then are exiled from the
amphibian existence at the point of birth, deprived of the permeability between
the body and the fluid world outside. We land on earth, and seek from then on
to merge again, to blend fluids with one another, but also with the rest of the
world. This world for me includes language, and I am forever in search of the sublime in it. There is pleasure in language even if it cannot be described or framed by its plotline. She, the pleasure, resides in him, the language, nevertheless.
It
is casting a new shape, tracings unknown textures, discovering delightful
contours inside my skin, capricious vitality swells here and there, still
tentative, knowing that it could crumble. I am inevitable.
I
cast a spell, archive its touch.
A sublime moment not to be framed.
Jana - this is a bright commotional treatise on, i feel, the true Nature of Hysteria, (the Earth-based Kosmic chaotic tendency towards expressive release, and then some) very worthy of it's own textbook or novel. How would you engage this in a story form, among it's living characters? What about a story of You? (Richard at the local bookstore).
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