Кристин Анго: Incest

Other points of view

Gisela: Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little bit.

Marie-Christine: You’re making me crazy. You’re pushing me to the limit.

Nadine: It’s extremely perverse, the way you present your suffering to others, telling them afterward that, in any case, there’s nothing they can do. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to call Marie-Christine tonight and give her clearance. Under these circumstances, I’m no longer interested. You can’t say what you’ve just said and then play innocent, as if you hadn’t said anything, telling me it was just so I would know how you’re suffering.

Yvon Kermann: You have a sado-masochistic relationship with the public.

But most of all, during the night from the 1st to the 2nd, Marie-Christine had wept in my arms, telling me: I love only you, I’ve never loved any one but you, you’re the first and only one, but you don’t want me so I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to disappear, you won’t hear of me ever again, not ever. You can’t stop me, because I’ll do it when you’re not here.

The last few days (flashback)

Saturday, November 28th, in the evening, there’s a party at Nathalie’s, in the end I accept the invitation. I don’t watch Marie-Christine dance, I don’t dance, I pout, I tell everyone that I’m tired, exhausted, I’m told “not me, I spent the whole day kayaking and I’m not tired…” Or “drink a little whisky, it will wake you up.” Red wine makes you sleepy, and whisky wakes you up. Or “I’m sorry I told you the other day that you were overreacting. —Well, it’s your point of view. —No, I shouldn’t have said it. —It doesn’t matter.”

It was horrible.

The key moments:

We make love. My fantasies are often of humiliation. Marie-Christine humiliating a girl, who is such an idiot, she doesn’t notice that I’m there, I know what Marie-Christine is thinking, I get off on this. Marie-Christine doesn’t give a shit, while the other one would lay siege to her house for eight days just for a chance to sniff her. Marie-Christine will take advantage, will tell her “since you’re here, go ahead, lick me, you won’t have come here for nothing.”

Another element, a Freudian slip while writing yesterday, that encapsulates my sadistic and sadomasochistic disorders, instead of ‘vaginal penetration’ I wrote ‘vaginal, sodomization.’ And you see, the comma comes in, the virgule , the little verge , little penis, it’s starting all over again. As if my head, mounted on a pivot, had two faces always present, I connect, I associate, everything relates, that’s what I call my incestuous mental structure. Which I’m trying to lessen a bit, like a fracture and a facture. A digression on fracture-facture, on puns:

Puns, jokes

On multiple occasions, Freud used Witz as much to make fun of himself as to show those around him that he could laugh about the most dire realities. A joke is an expression of the unconscious. Like human sexuality, it has infantile and polymorphous aspects. Freud studied joke-techniques and the mechanisms of pleasure they generate. There are inoffensive Witze and those that are tendentious, motivated by aggression, obscenity or cynicism . When they hit the mark, jokes, which require at least three people, the author, the recipient and the spectator, render suppressed desires more bearable by giving them a socially acceptable mode of expression . According to Freud there is a fourth motivation, one more terrible than the other three: skepticism . Jokes in this register bring absurdity into play and instead of targeting a person or an institution, they attack the certainty of our common sense . They lie when they tell the truth and tell the truth with a lie. Jokes produce pleasure. If they rely on condensation and displacement, they are characterized primarily by the playfulness of language. Humor, the comic, and jokes, all three bring us back to an infantile state, because “the euphoria we try to reach along these routes is nothing other than the temper of our childhood, a time when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making a joke and had no need of humor to feel happy in life.” Freud did not consider his book on jokes to be very important, he viewed it as a psychoanalytical essay applied to literary creativity. The book was not received with much enthusiasm, the first edition of a thousand copies took seven years to sell out. Jacques Lacan was the first, in 1958, to raise Witz to the level of a concept.

A few examples: Crêpe : Flip like a crêpe. Marie-Christine wanted to spend Christmas with me, Nadine calls her, sheds three tears over the phone, she lets herself be flipped like a crêpe with a little butter. Butter, Vaseline, tears. Sodomy, the body is flipped. Practical, you end up with a body that has no vagina and no breasts, at an age when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making jokes, and had no need of humor to feel happy in life. Still, jokes about Toto, lemons, carrots. There, no lemon, no vagina, a carrot.

Other examples: Folle : A gay man with a limp wrist. I often let my wrist go slack, my father used to. Elisabeth (my father’s wife’s name): bête , animal. The reason why I don’t like animals, not even the poor Baya, Marie-Christine’s dog. Another example: The mark : I am marked, the mark, and also the D-mark , to the point, my father’s wife was German, he deeply admired Germany and its culture. I’m trying to keep things more or less in order, not too cluttered. I reached a point of no return, the word associations were threatening, incestuous ideas were filling my head: always experienced as a tragedy by those who engage in it. There is no partition, everything touches, nothing is untouchable. It’s disapproved of by social opinion and always experienced as a tragedy caused by irrationality or leading to madness or suicide. I’m not making this up. The brain cannot be divided into separate parts. It’s not that I’m missing something upstairs, as the saying goes, it’s a house without walls, like those lofts that are very fashionable these days, I had some press in September, you hear all the noises, from the kitchen and the bedroom, and the radio, and the TV, and the telephone, the fridge kicking in, the doorbell ringing yesterday, one o’clock in the morning, Marie-Christine wanting to tell me she loves me, and the bathroom, you’re never alone.

Lacan turned the joke into a signifier, that is a sign through which a trace of truth emerges. Like Freud, he had a biting sense of humor. He often used the technique of figuration through the opposite as evident in “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” As to vaginal sodomization, I agree completely with Melanie Klein’s theses in which she considers female homosexuality as the use of a sadistic penis. In my case it’s undeniable. I don’t have a dick, but I still sodomize you, not in the ass, but I sodomize you anyway. We have nothing, we have nothing for ourselves, and our head is fucked. Fucked, pulled out, of the cunt, that is, unblocked. Our head is fucked, you understand, it’s pulled out of the cunt, our head is, but where should it go? Rome? You want it to go to Rome? We canceled the tickets, there’s no more flight, no more hotel. Seville? It’s two weeks before Christmas, you know we won’t find any rooms at this date. In Egypt, the pharaohs of Egypt and the mummies, there are no rooms at this date.

(My old reflexes set in again on this page, I’m not working well, in fact, I don’t feel well, as I’m writing I want to cry and that’s not normal. I’d promised Léonore we’d go see Kirikou and the Sorceress today, Sunday, at eleven. Marie-Christine came and rang the doorbell in the night, I’d just fallen asleep, to tell me she wanted to stay together. I said no. Maybe I’ll add the intermediate phases later. After Kirikou . I told her no. I repeated it. She asked her question again several times. I said “you woke me up” in any case the answer is no. It’s not a question of whether I want to or not, it’s that I don’t want to. She left at a run, she ran away, her dog running behind her, not even on a leash. She’d tried to choke me before. She got down on all fours above me, I was lying down, I was in bed in my nightshirt. She was fully dressed, in the outfit she wore to that dinner and her leather jacket. She straddled me, she took my throat, my neck, in her hands and pushed with all the strength in her arms. I grabbed her wrists to make her stop, she could have killed me. She sat on the ground next to the bed and started squeezing my arm very tight and shaking it. I let my arm go limp, completely, I let it go. I was exhausted. Of course I still am. She slammed the door and stumbled down the stairs, running down the street to disappear from my sight as quickly as possible, I was at the window, I was calling to her, I think I’d have liked her to come back, complete nonsense, ridiculous, overdone, disproportionate, again I took the usual dose before going to bed. This morning my tongue is swollen, doughy, I’m thirsty, nothing matters anymore.)