Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture

323 Pages·1994·12.02 MB·English

by  Catherine Clement

SYNCOPE
The Philosophy of Rapture
Catherine Clement
Translated by Sally O’Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney
Foreword by Verena Andermatt Conley
I
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1
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
SFU LIBRARY
Copyright 1994 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Originally published as La Syncope: Philosophic du nivissement. Copyright 1990 Editions
Grosser & Fasquelle, Paris
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from the following works:
The Baechae of Euripides, translated by Donald Sutherland, published by the University
of Nebraska Press, 1968; “Complaint of Time and Her Crony Space," from Poems of
Jules Laforgue, translated by Peter Dale, copyright 1986 by Peter Dale, reprinted by per­
mission of Anvil Press Poetry; ‘’Eventail de Mademoiselle MallarmiS," from Stephane
Mallarmi: Selected Poetry and Prose, copyright 1982 by Maty Ann Caws, reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; Friedrich Holderiin: Poems and
Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger, copyright 1980by Cambridge University
Press, reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press; “Lost His Head;"
from Friedrich Nietischc, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Krmfrnann, copyright
1974 by Random House, Inc., reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55401
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Confess Catalojpng-in-Publication Data
Clement, Catherine, 1939-
[Syncope. English]
Syncope: the philosophy of rapture / Catherine Clement : translated by Sally
O'Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney: foreword by Verena Andermatt Conley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-1977-8 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-8166-1978-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. I. Title.
B243O.C633S9613 1994
194—dc20 94-7610
Tire University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
farj£r&me

Contents
Foreword: East Meets West Verona Andermact Conley ix
Translators’ Preface xix
Author’s Note XX
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction
Where Am 1? 1
1
Choosing Night 23
2
Philosophers and Their Daemons 36
3
Depriving the City of Spices: Plato Purges the Republic 52
4
The Owl and the Nightingale: Hegel and Hslderlin 62
5
Loves Me, Loves Me Not; or, The Love of Dialectic 73
6
Of Young Girls as Thought: Kierkegaard the Seducer 85
7
Abraham, and a Roasted Lamb's Head 94
vii
Gmlcnls viil
8
The Great Attack 106
9
The Birth of Identity and die Syncope of the Imago: Lacan 118
10
“Inter faeces et urinas”: Tantrism Between Feces and Urine 131
11
Thought Burned Alive: Indian Philosophies 146
12
Syncope Leaves for the Forest: The Renounces 166
13
Educational Love at First Sight: The Lady, the Guru,
and the Psychoanalyst 179
14
Jouissances: Between the Angel and the Placenta 200
15
Ego Orgasm and the Indolence of the Subject 217
16
Syncope’s Strategies: The Creative Act and the Un-Governing
of the World 235
Conclusion
Deceiving Death and Embracing God 251
Notes 263
Index 297
Foreword
East Meets West
Verena Andcrmatt Conley
How to think the syncope, a word designating an eclipse, interval, absence,fob
lowed by a new departure, is the topic of this book by an author known for her
provocative and diverse writings. These include Levi-Strauss ou la swucture et le
malheur, "La coupable" (The guilty one), in The Newly Bom Woman (her
dialectical, collaborative effort with Hfilene Cixous), Opera, or the Undoingof
Women, and The Life and Legends of Jacques Lacan, among many others.
A philosopher with a pedigree academic degree (the French agregation),
Catherine Clement became a journalist and founded a politically correct and
influential newspaper, Liberation, that crystallized the utopian spirit of May
1968. She then acted as art coordinator for the socialist government and,
more recently, spent extensive time in India. Clement infuses her present
book with the practice and knowledge gained from these spheres of her own
activities.
The style has journalistic traits, the writing being both serious and ambiva­
lent, even sarcastic. Clement lashes out at some Western philosophers, who
"often spend their time plugging the holes in reality with the hems of their
dressing gowns." After having impugned class structures in the early seventies,
Clement now calls into question intellectual traditions, all the while knowing
those traditions well. She does not write out of the sweet bliss of ignorance,
and her critique is not that of a quasi-fondamentalist censorship with its bina­
ry mechanism of thumbs up, thumbs down. It constitutes a search for an open­
ing and for reestablishing connections lost between India and the Occident.
If Clement summons an occidental philosophical tradition, she herself
writes out of one. Formed during the days of structuralism, the French coun­
terculture of 1968, Clement pays tribute to I -evi-Srran« and justly rehabili­
tates the scope of his writings that many scholars readily dismissed when he
entered the French Academy in 1974. Continuing her feminist teachings and
expanding their scope, Clement targets the century-old philosophical West­
ern practice of establishing a full subject in philosophical terms one with the
ix
x Foreword
advent of metaphysics, the division between subject and object, and the
demise of woman as well as nature. This practice eliminates from its purview
anything that approaches even in the slightest a vanishment, a gap, or a swoon
of meaning that Clement calls the syncope. This term, which applies to symp-
toms as diverse as sneezing, laughing, asthma, or epileptic seizure, is borrowed
from music: “Tire queen of rhythm, syncope is also the mother of dissonance; it
is the source, in short, of a harmonious and productive discord.... Attack and
haven, collision; a fragment of the beat disappears, and of this disappearance,
rhythm is bom."
From one embassy to the other, from Marguerite Duras's Calcutta to
Catherine Clement's New Delhi the critique of the Western subject shifts
from focus on the gap, the lack, to a tiny interval from which the subject
emerges. Like Duras, Climent focuses on an absence of mastery, on an emo­
tion necessary for all creation. And to create is to resist. But Clement—“a
woman of the nineties"—is more affirmative. A simulation of death through
syncopation constitutes a political gesture—at the level of politics as well as
that of aesthetics—that is less tuned in to the past than oriented toward open­
ings and the future.
Both ethnologists and psychoanalysts have recently challenged the occi­
dental concept of the foil subject that, on our side of the Atlantic, has found
its apogee in a utilitarian American ego psychology, one with the American
way of life. By fortifying the ego, the psychologist opens the human condition
to violence and endless power reversals. Clement begins her critique of the
Western subject by quoting Lacan from the Ecrits: "It is clear that the promo­
tion of the Ego today culminates, in conformity with the utilitarian concep­
tion of man that reinforces it, in an ever more advanced realization of man as
individual, that is to say, in an isolation of the soul ever more akin to its origi­
nal dereliction." And she continues to comment on Lacan: “At each step,
Lacan stresses the loss of ritual in modem societies. Without seeming to touch
upon it, but with an insistence that continues to address on the sly the ‘cultur­
al ahistoricism* that he attributes to the United States.
“Modernity is the ‘increasing absence of all those saturations of the super­
ego and ego ideal that are realized in all kinds of organic forms in traditional
societies, forms that extend from the rituals of everyday intimacy to periodical
celebrations in which the community manifests itself."*
To the Western promotion of the self, one fraught with cultural ahistori-
cism, C16ment opposes the syncope that she theorizes by borrowing from Lacan
and IZ-vi-Strauw. To a lesser degree, she appeals to Freud—the latter being, for
her, still too much of a prestructuralist concerned with filling holes—and, of
Foreword xi
course, to the 1968 champion philosopher, Georges Bataille. She also finds
the structure of the syncope in Indian thought, in the guise of the renonpmt (or
“renouncing" subject) who leaves the village to go to the forest. This move­
ment is already central to Lfvi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques. Social prestige
among Amerindian tribes, Lfivi-Strauss observes, is determined by excess
exerted upon the body. A youth seeks extended isolation in the mountains.
Exposed to min, wind, and cold, for days and weeks he or she deprives him or
herself of food. The spiritual and somatic exercise leads to syncope. “It is all a
pretext for provoking powers beyond: extended baths in glacial waters, volun­
tary mutilations" that lead, once the Indian reaches a state of dumbfounded­
ness, or delirium, to the encounter with a “magical animal” that responds to
prayers. In the midst of the ravishment, “a vision reveals to these youths the
one that will hereafter become their guardian spirit at the same time as the
name by which he or she will be known, and the particular power, held by the
protective animal, that will give the youth his or her privilege within the
social group.”1 The Indian figure who renounces is quite similar. Clement
retrieves an archaic process that produces social cohesion in Indian customs,
but like Ldvi-Strauss himself, she also reenacts a passage—a departure—and a
return in her travel to the East.
Some parallels with E. M. Forster's Passage to India may become clear. Cle­
ment's experience of the structural condition of the tropical movement and its
effects on the subject stands as an extraordinary companion piece, explana­
tion, and sequel to Forster's novel. Written from the standpoint of a person
who has not lived through the colonial experience of a British subject and who
has no part in staging the United Kingdom’s reactions in the twentieth centu­
ry to the legacy left by the empire of the preceding decades, the concept of
syncope allows Clement to renew ties between India and Europe. She sees the
breakage over which they are knotted far beyond Britain and the nineteenth
century. The ruptures are diverse, reaching to the Crusades and the contact
with Islamic traditions. To emphasize syncope does not mean to abdicate life
and open oneself to passivity. Rather, it has a political thrust and engages a
kind of nonagency of agency. By not wanting to control, by not simply revert­
ing to reversals of power relations, the syncopated Indian person acquires
political and ecological advantages over the dominant Western technocrat.
As is her tactic, Cltaent writes a history of philosophy, a negative history
of sorts, that deals with what Western philosophers, from rhe Greeks to Hegel
and the contemporary scene, have repressed or excluded. The excluded part is
precisely the syncope, which had been perceived as something dangerous by
Western philosophers until recently, at least until the advent of Kierkegaard,
xil Rirewiml
Hiilderlin, and their French avatars Bergson and then Bataille. In addition to
philosophers, psychoanalysts rehabilitate the syncope via the unconscious and
the minor stage that dislocates linear time through notions of anticipation
and retrospection. Yet, argues Clement, the real lesson comes from the East.
After having stated that it would be too easy to interpret syncope as if it were
a lapsus, or simply reject it as a production of the unconscious, she writes:
“Neither of these two interpretations would be wrong; I do not exclude meet­
ing Freud, even less encountering Lacan, but it is not enough—or rather, it is
no longer enough for me." And after giving a quick overview of her intellectu­
al formation from romanticism, structuralism, the avant-garde of the 1970s
with Tel Quel and without forgetting surrealism, she asserts that she has found
a common moment of “inspiration" (in a strong sense) in direct rapport with
the syncope, or a kind of simulated death. She discovers the real art of syncope
during her stay in the East. It is in India that she finds the beauty of percussion,
the familiarity of death, the charm of amorous poetry, ravishing dancers whose
spectacle made her tremble, then imposed an image of, and finally the word,
syncope. Readers may wonder whether they are dealing with a travelogue
exulting in exoticism or a philosophical treatise. But Clfment's conclusion
leaves no doubt about the telegraphic genre she has chosen: “I wanted to study
this eclipse of thought, this game of following death. A limited rebellion; the
political idea is on the edge of weakness."
The book is a turning point in element’s intellectual trajectory, one that is
doubled by a physical displacement to India—a place that, after Mao’s China
and Reagan's America, has recently struck the fancy of Parisians. There is C14-
ment's previous book, Gandhi, athlite de la libertd (1989), or Hdlbne Cixous
and Ariane Mnouchkine's play production, L'Indiade ou I'lnde de lewrs rives
(1987), also about Gandhi. Yet interpretations shift and the message differs
from one work to another. Clement tries to show the ultimate pragmatism—
or action—that does not oppose but goes hand in hand with a philosophy of
renoncement (renouncing), whereas Cixous/Mnouchkine link Gandhi’s ges­
ture to the space of an “impossible dream.” Where Cldment writes of Gandhi
as a person who makes possible, and brings about, social change in a postcolo­
nial space, Cixous/Mnouchkine turn the leader into an anachronism, a figure
hopelessly lost in a contemporary world of technology and violent politics.
But they all declare a need for a link through nature instead of an abstract sim­
ple construction of individual subjectivities. This link they find in India more
than in Europe. In a period of what geographers and demographers call an
extreme compression of time and space and loss of habitat, they haste recourse