Настроение:	sleepy
Entry tags:	deutschland, doku, frankreich, literatur, poesie

Le “non” du père
German prefixes and suffixes (ab-, ent-, -los, un-, ver-) are particu-
larly well suited (far better than in French) for expressing the specific
forms of absence, hiatus, and distancing which are indispensible for
the psychotic construction of the father's image and the weapons of
virility. It is not a question of seeing in the father's "no" either a real or
a mythical orphanage; nor does it imply the eradication of the father's
characteristic traits. Hölderlin's case is apparently straightforward,
but it becomes extremely ambiguous if examined in depth. He lost his
father at the age of two and his mother was remarried to Gock, the
burghermaster, two years later. After five years, Gock died, leaving
the child with delightful memories that were apparently unaffected
even by the existence of a half-brother. On the level of Hölderlin's
memories, the father's place was occupied by a distinct and positive
figure, and only through death did it become partially disturbed. Un-
doubtedly, the idea of absence will be found not in this interplay of
presences and disappearances but in a context where speech is linked
to a particular speaker. Jacques Lacan, following Melanie Klein, has
shown that the father, as the third party in the Oedipal situation, is not
only the hated and feared rival but the agent whose presence limits
the unlimited relationship between the mother and child, and whose
first, anguished image emerges in the child's fantasy of being de-
voured. Consequently, the father separates; that is, he is the one who
protects when, in his proclamation of the Law, he links space, rules,
and language within a single and major experience. At a stroke, he
creates the distance along which will develop the scansion of pres-
ences and absences, the speech whose initial form is based on con-
straints, and finally, the relationship of the signifier to the signified
which not only gives rise to the structure of language but also to the
exclusion and symbolic transformation of repressed material. Thus, it
is not in alimentary or functional terms of deficiency that we under-
stand the gap that now stands in the Father's place. To be able to say
that he is missing, that he is hated, excluded, or introjected, that
his image has undergone symbolic transmutations, presumes that he
is not "foreclosed" (as Lacan would say) from the start and that his
place is not marked by a gaping and absolute emptiness. The Father's
absence, manifested in the headlong rush of psychosis, is not regis-
tered by perceptions or images, but relates to the order of the signifier.
The "no" through which this gap is created does not imply the ab-
sence of a real individual who bears the father's name; rather, it im-
plies that the father has never assumed the role of nomination and
that the position of the signifier, through which the father names him-
self and, according to the Law, through which he is able to name, has
remained vacant. It is toward this "no" that the unwavering line of
psychosis is infallibly directed; as it is precipitated inside the abyss of
its meaning, it evokes the devastating absence of the father through
the forms of delirium and phantasms and through the catastrophe of
the signifier.

Friedrich Hölderlin: Ein radikaler Künstler | ARTE