The Hysteric and the Poet: 360 degrees of the sublime

(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.