[THE SCENE: Think Waiting for Godot. A vintage French bar, clean and in good repair, dimly lit, no windows. It could be any time of day or night. Smoke visibly wafts through the confined air, although the room is empty of bartender, patrons, and furniture except for three tall barstools that stand before the empty counter. The walls, the floor, and the shelves behind the counter are all bare. So is the counter itself, except for a large white bowl filled with unshelled, unsalted peanuts.]
[Enter LACAN, DERRIDA, AND FOUCAULT, one at a time. Each walks with a distinctive gait to his respective stool and sits down.]
FOUCAULT [breaking the silence]: Who would have expected that the three of us would ever be in the same room together?
DERRIDA: I thought you two were dead. Actually, I thought I was dead too.
LACAN: I don’t remember ever coming here before. I don’t even remember how I got here now. Where are we?
FOUCAULT: Hell if I know. Are those peanuts?
DERRIDA: [Lifts the bowl and passes it to FOUCAULT. A sheet of paper underneath it, hidden until now, floats to the floor. He stands up, bends over, and picks it up.] It’s a poem. The title is “The Flea,” but no author is given.
FOUCAULT: Three literary theorists, one poem, and no drinks. What else are we going to do? Let’s read it. [DERRIDA hands it to him. FOUCAULT reads “The Flea.” See appendix for text.] Don’t worry; although you two are both good-looking men, and I am a homosexual, and I just read you a seduction poem, it means nothing. [Laughs.]
DERRIDA [to FOUCAULT]: Are you done reading? [Chuckles.]
LACAN: [Gets up.] Excuse my absence; I’ve never been one to flee from a literary discussion, but I have to use the john. [Leaves.]
DERRIDA: Absence… john… and notice that the first word of this poem is “Mark.” It is significant, Michel, that you are not Donne reading. The author of this poem is, in the most literal sense, absent. That is because he is, in the most literal sense, dead. All we have left of him are his traces, marks on paper. Yet “if one admits that writing (and the mark in general) must be able to function in the absence of the sender, the receiver, the context of production, etc., that implies that this power, this being able, this possibility is always inscribed, hence necessarily inscribed as possibility in the functioning or the functional structure of the mark.”
FOUCAULT: Samuel Beckett said, “What does it matter who is speaking?” Remember, Jacques, that the author is dead in a figurative sense as well. For ‘author’ does not mean ‘writer.’ “An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” The death of the author is simply the discovery that he never truly existed in the first place—that he is a social construction, a creation of discourse.
DERRIDA: What do you mean by the “author function”?
FOUCAULT: Like all discursive functions, the author function is an exercise of control: not a simple and spontaneous event but “a series of specific and complex operations.” Historically, the invention of the author “constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.” First, it controls what can be said or written. The importance of attributing words, texts, ideas to specific individuals arose in the Middle Ages “to the extent that authors became subject to punishment”—that is, it arose out of the need to control what was said. Even then, discourse was not a thing to be owned but an act to be performed. But with the rise of capitalism, texts began to be seen as property, which by the beginning of the nineteenth century brought into a being a new form of control: copyright laws. Second, the author function controls which texts are privileged. “It has not always been the same types of texts which have required attribution to an author.” In ancient times, and in the Middle Ages, ‘literary’ texts were valued even if anonymous, “since their ancientness was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status.” ‘Scientific’ texts, however, were authoritative only when they were attributed to an authority, such as Aristotle or Ptolemy. By the eighteenth century, this situation had reversed itself. An epistemological break, shift, or rupture had taken place. The new ‘scientific method,’ which (in its own words) emphasized ‘reason’ and ‘observation,’ had ousted the old practice of deferring to the ancients on questions of nature. Scientific texts were now seen as valid by virtue of the universality and repeatability of their findings. But literary texts…
DERRIDA: If I may interrupt, and bring the discussion back to the poem at hand, you mentioned repeatability, and I think that it’s this structure of repeatability, or what I call ‘iterability,’ that both extends and limits the power of signs. “No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation.” That is, it is the nature of a sign that can be repeated in different contexts, but since the context is different each time, the meaning of the sign will be different each time as well. We can see this in “The Flea” with, for example, the word ‘this.’ It’s used several different ways: “this flea” (line 1), “mark in this” (end of line 1), “this cannot be said” (line 5), “this our marriage bed” (line 12). You may be thinking that this is not a startling discovery, for this shifting of reference is the nature of a pronoun. But still, from the fact that no two instances of ‘this’ are ever identical—that it never means the same thing twice—it follows that the meaning of ‘this’ can never be fully present to us. Not even for the author-speaker-writer. “Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements.” To put it another way, the supplement can never fill the void; it will always itself require a supplement. Consider what happens when we try to pin down the meaning of, say, the ‘this’ at the end of the first line. Immediately when it is uttered, it has no reference at all. It is a ‘this’ of anticipation. Its content is suspended, deferred to the next line. Yet the next line reads, “How little that which thou deniest me is.” Once again the meaning is deferred: how little is that ‘little’? Indeed, for the rest of the poem the speaker tries to answer this question. But as he does so his analogy-argument raises metaphysical, moral, even biological questions, and like Tantalus, the further he follows it the further it recedes, endlessly. This endlessness characterizes all texts. So it was half in jest that I asked you earlier, “Are you done reading?”
FOUCAULT: And, as I was about to say earlier, it is this elusiveness of meaning and consequent proliferation of interpretation that is the enemy of power, that society cannot tolerate, that the author function was meant to stop. [Puts the poem down on the counter and places the bowl of peanuts on top of it.] So the third way the author function exercises control is by fixing meaning, by limiting interpretation. The ‘author’ is “a constant level of value”—all of his texts must meet a standard of ‘quality.’ He is “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence,” meaning that his ideas hang together without contradiction. He is a “stylistic unity” and “a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events.” Of course, “these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.” So the author function is what keeps me from attributing “The Flea” to Walt Whitman.
DERRIDA: Or reading it as a speech by one Tibetan Buddhist monk to another.
FOUCAULT: Exactly. And it’s what causes you to read it as ‘poetry’ rather than prose, as a ‘work’ with inherent value, as a unity, and so on. It lumps it into that discursive formation, the category of ‘literature.’
DERRIDA: I would have to agree. “There is no such thing as a literary essence or a specifically literary domain strictly identifiable as such… this name of literature perhaps is destined to remain improper, with no criteria, or assured concept or reference, so that ‘literature’ has something to do with the drama of naming.”
[Suddenly FOUCAULT chokes on a peanut. LACAN returns just in time, puts his arms around him from behind, and thrusts his knuckles into FOUCAULT’s solar plexus until the peanut in question rockets across the room.]
DERRIDA: Who taught you the Heimlich maneuver?
LACAN: Who taught me everything I know? Sigmund Freud.
FOUCAULT: It’s uncanny that you got back right when you did. That peanut could have killed me!
DERRIDA: Heimlich… Freud… kill… uncanny... That reminds me an essay that Freud wrote in 1919, called “The Uncanny.” ‘Uncanny’ is the English translation of the German word unheimlich, which is of course the opposite of heimlich, and Freud spends several pages listing dictionary definition after dictionary definition, trying to convey the sense of the latter word. (It means, roughly, ‘familiar.’) But at the end of this section, something very curious happens: the meanings of heimlich and unheimlich begin to shade into one another. “Heimlich comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to unheimlich.” Freud tries to explain the significance of the shift this way. Heimlich has another meaning, ‘hidden’; perhaps the connection is that both the familiar and the hidden are very close to us, very private. That which “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”—that is, become familiar—is strange and frightening to us, both heimlich and unheimlich at once. My point is that this phenomenon, which I sometimes playfully call “the heimlich maneuver,” in which a word comes to mean both itself and its opposite, is quite common in language. We see it in “The Flea” with the word ‘kill’ in line 16. It has its current meaning, of course, but the speaker is punning on a second meaning: in the seventeenth century ‘die’ was slang for sexual intercourse. Why would this same word refer both to the act of destroying life and the act of creating it? Because, as I have always said, every word is inscribed into its opposite. Bringing a new life into the world also brings a new death into the world that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, since everyone who is born will one day die. And everything depends for existence on the non-existence of the other. Creating this particular life excludes the possibility of creating other lives.
LACAN: Everyone knows that, Jacques. You’ve always been good at stating the obvious. But in the unconscious we find a much more profound connection between sex and death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud wrote that the psyche has two drives: Eros, the pleasure principle, and Thanatos, the death drive. ‘Drive’ is not the same as ‘instinct’; it organizes our thoughts and actions, it underlies all of our strivings but can never be satisfied, it keeps us always in motion, always in tension, always chasing after that indefinite missing something (what I call the ‘objet petit a’) but never catching it, always seeking to fill the void but always remaining empty.
FOUCAULT: When are our drinks going to come?
LACAN: Keep waiting, my friend. Freud was right about the drive, and about Eros and Thanatos as motivating factors. But he was wrong in making a sharp distinction between them. I’m surprised you didn’t point out another connection between sex and death in the poem. The speaker in the poem wants what the flea has—the mistress’s body—even though the flea dies in the third stanza. Unconsciously, at least, he wants both sex and death. In fact, “every drive is sexual in nature and at the same time every drive is a death drive.”
FOUCAULT: How do you mean?
LACAN: To explain this, I’ll need to take a long detour through my theory of the unconscious, the imaginary and symbolic orders, and jouissance. I hope you’re both comfortable.
DERRIDA: Well, considering that we’re not in France.
LACAN: When I was in the lavatory a few minutes ago, washing my hands, I looked up and saw a handsome Frenchman staring straight back at me. For me, seeing my own reflection in the mirror was not a very significant event. But for the infant such an experience is decisive. When he comes to recognize the image in the mirror as himself, he begins to grasp the distinction between himself and the world. At the same time, seeing himself from the outside, as other people see him, he appears unified, in control. The infant at this stage is still in the ‘imaginary order’ because he still identifies himself with images, not yet with symbols. This misrecognition, this illusion of the unity of the self, of ‘identity’ (Latin for ‘sameness’), that disguises the psyche’s inner fragmentation, brings the ego into being. Mediated through the other’s gaze, the ego is forever alienated from itself. What brings our infant—let’s call him ‘Jackie’…
DERRIDA: That was my given name, you know.
LACAN: Was it? Then it should help you to identify with him. As I was saying, what brings little Jackie out of the imaginary order and into the ‘symbolic order’ is the intrusion of a third party, the ‘Name-of-the-Father.’ You both know Freud’s story of the Oedipus complex; I don’t think it’s literally true, but I like to use it as an allegory. Because of the father, Jackie comes to realize that his mother’s desire is not only for him, and that he cannot have her all the time. He experiences lack, absence. He begins to learn language, which is founded on absence: we speak of things that are not there, and words only have meaning because of difference, by not being other words. And there is a more profound sense in which language is always lacking. You were on to something, Jacques, when you spoke of the logic of supplementarity, the impossibility of full presence. The relation of the signifier to the signified is always arbitrary. (That is why, on my trip to the bathroom earlier, I saw two identical doors, behind which were, I assume, two identical rooms, but one was marked ‘Ladies’ and the other ‘Gentlemen.’) But the process of signification can never cross the bar between signifier and signified; the signifier only ever refers to other signifiers, in an endless chain, and there is “an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.” We can never access the real, that which is behind the play of symbols. I call this feature of human existence ‘separation.’ But I digress. The other sense in which the entrance of the father pushes Jackie into the symbolic order is by defining him in a predetermined differentiated role in the symbolic structure of social relations. Jackie, as his mother’s son, cannot be fulfill his desire to be her lover (thus the father, as Law, enforces the incest taboo), and as his father’s son, he must submit to his authority.
FOUCAULT: That’s all very fascinating, but weren’t we talking about “The Flea”?
LACAN: Yes, I’m getting to that. If I am right that the speaker wants what the flea has, then the “suck’d … sucks” in line 3 and “pamper’d” in line 8 give the situation obvious Oedipal overtones. Speaker and mistress take on the symbolic positions of mother and child. What gives occasion to the poem—an instance of speech, of language, of the symbolic order—in the first place is the speaker’s unfulfilled and never fulfilled sexual desire for his mistress. The reason he cannot have her, and why the union he describes in words (the signifier) never comes to pass in fact (the signified) is because of a third party in the background, “though parents grudge,” the Name-of-the-Father, the imposition of Law, of prohibition, which is because of their symbolic status as unmarried. The mistress’s sole desire is not for the speaker; she desires to please this father-figure as well. The number “three” is everywhere in this poem, from the three stanzas with nine lines each to the allusions to the Christian trinity. But for the third party of the father, the speaker substitutes the third party of the flea. Having penetrated the mistress, having united its blood with hers, the flea represents the phallus—that ‘transcendental signifier’ of lack—and in the speaker’s mind it has finally attained jouissance—that ending point of signification, that which we never reach but always think the other has.
DERRIDA: All of that gives me an idea. This poem could be read as an attempted deconstruction of the married/unmarried opposition, but we’ll save that for another time. Instead, I’d like to focus on how the flea, as you described it, provides an interesting starting point for a deconstruction of sexual difference. What do I mean by deconstruction? Many structuralist thinkers have shown how our thinking forms a system of binary oppositions; a deconstruction seeks to dismantle these oppositions, to “demonstrate how one term of an antithesis secretly inheres within the other” (Eagleton 115). Some people misconceive of it as the Fishy business of making a text say whatever you want it to say; actually, the goal is carefully to draw out the inherent contradictions. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel performed the first deconstruction, or at least the most famous one, by showing how the master actually depends upon the slave for his identity. The master is a parasite, like a flea. Historically, the man/woman opposition coincides with a number of other oppositions, each of which is hierarchical and privileges the former term: master/slave, independent/dependent, active/passive, culture/nature, reason/passion, and so on. As the speaker compares himself to the flea, however, he subverts all of them. Though man has represented himself as independent and self-sufficient, the giver and provider, the speaker admits, perhaps unwittingly, that he is a parasite: he needs her to satisfy his desire, while she does not appear to need him. Indeed, man is, from conception, from birth, dependent upon woman, as the reference to sucking in line 3 suggests. Though, as the only one speaking in the poem, the speaker appears to be the master, the one in power, the mistress is in fact fully in control of the situation. In a stunning reversal, he becomes associated with an insect, the realm of nature, while in her chastity she represents the authority of cultural institutions. And his semblance of a logical argument thinly disguises an irrational passion.
LACAN: Speaking of disguises, let me continue from where I left off earlier in describing the formation of the psyche. As I explained, the ego is a creation of the imaginary order. The subject (Latin for ‘thrown under’), on the other hand, is a creation of the symbolic order. As we come to inhabit the symbolic order, we are subjected to a system that existed before us and will exist after us, that we did not create and that we cannot substantially change. It limits the ways we can think and the ways we can express our desire. You’ll notice that “The Flea” is written in first person. The pronoun ‘I,’ the necessity of thinking of ourselves as singular and unified, disguises the fragmentation of the self, the fact that “there is always a disjunction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance; in other words, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken.”
FOUCAULT: This plurality of reference of ‘I’ is even truer of writing. We commonly distinguish between the author and the speaker of a poem, but “all discourses endowed with the author function,” even mathematical textbooks, “possess this plurality of self.” Changing the subject, though, it’s disappointing to me that both of your interpretations have remained in the realm of abstract speculation about language or about the psyche, and that you’ve neglected the poem as material, socially embodied communicative act. What does the fact that the male is the sole speaker and the female is denied a voice tell us about the relations of power in seventeenth-century England? How is the speaker constructing the situation for the mistress with his discourse? How do the institutions to which the poem refers—the church, the family structure—exercise control? How does the poet perceive and present sexuality? These, to me, are far more interesting questions. [Yawns.] But they are questions for another time. Enough speaking about writing—I’m thinking about drinking. Where is that bartender?
DERRIDA: Like the messiah, like democracy, always coming, never arriving.
[Very long, Beckett-like pause. The walls begin to collapse.]
LACAN: You know, there’s something more than a little odd about what’s been going on right now, and I’ve just realized what it is. We’re all speaking in English! Using American idioms, no less! And our understanding of our own theories has been at the pathetic level of, say, a college sophomore. What is going on?
[In a mighty crash, the entire building caves in, leaving only the three theorists on their barstools, and revealing a dark, barren moonscape. Minos, the administrative demon of Dante’s Inferno, appears.]
LACAN: I get the feeling we’re not in Paris any more.
MINOS [in a thin and ghastly voice]: Well, this isn’t all that different, is it? You three certainly didn’t qualify for Heaven, or even Purgatory, and Plato decided he didn’t want your eternal company in Limbo either.
LACAN: It’s all your fault, Jacques!
MINOS: Here in the underworld we like to make the punishment fit the crime. Having your texts misread, having your ignorant successors put words in your mouths, having two other poststructuralists for company… it seemed so exquisite! Enjoy your stay.
[Fade to black.]
"Hide and Seek"
