The Death´s Place in the Unconscious Topography

YANKELEVICH Hector

In April 1915, only six months after the beginning of the war, Freud wrote two conferences and he read them in his loggia, B´nai Brith. They were titled, "Current considerations about war and death". In the second of these, "Our relationship with death", the one where he himself had recognized that the inclination of victory was towards the German speaking powers, he then wrote, instead, that that war had produced a "disturbance in our relationship with death (...)". And he added, "(inasmuch as) this relationship was not sincere, (kein aufrichtiges)" (1). (Before the war) we were naturally willing to accept death as the inevitable outcome of all life, that each one owed a death to Nature and had to be prepared to settle that debt, in short, that death is something natural, undeniable (unableugbar) and inevitable ."(2)

We must acknowledge that Freud, in the second of these essays, does not speak to us of the horror that the war provoked in him; of the insupportable spectacle of death that became daily and omnipresent, nor of the anxiety caused by the news from the front where he had two sons. Rather, Freud writes thanks to the unexpected and brutal change in the frame of everyday life, of the profound commotion that this produced in him. He discovered in himself, that is, in the unconscious structure, an un-analyzed layer (Stuffe), a stratum that until that moment was unreached, which disproves what he thought, or almost, and it deceived him, since he presumed to firmly maintain (festgehaltenen Verhältnisses) his relationship with Death.

It is for this that the words he uses to introduce his purpose are aomewhat abrupt: "we feel so far from this world, formally so beautiful and intimate (3)(" ...daß wir uns so befremdet fühlen in dieser einst schönen und trautren Welt").

In truth, explains Freud, we had a tendency to put death to one side ("beiseite zu schieben"). to eliminate it from life. We believed ourselves to be willing, up to here, to settle that debt, unquestionable ("unableugbar"(4) ). But if it was not always like this, the idea is that " our own death would not be not representable" ("unvorstellbar")

This relationship to death, our death, has, however, a strong efficacy ("hat aber eine starke Wirkung") over our lives. That it impoverishes and loses interest when, in the games of life it is not permitted ("nicht gewagt werden darf") to venture the highest bid ("der höchste Einsatz"): precisely, life itself. The inclination to exclude death from the accounts of life has as a consequence many other renouncements and exclusions.
In other words, it puts death out of the accounts of life, out of our own small shopkeeper accounts, death is that which is out of all accounts and consequently that which permits that, on the side, even the smallest things count. So, by not counting it, the pleasure that we get out of that which we count on is impoverished, to the point of not being worthy of being considered; as if that which was, for the first time and forever, excluded from the account will be in charge of taking on itself, behind the scenes, all the courage, but without this being representable for us. Because it is that which nobody counts. Finally, Freud, the good accountant, simply shows us that that which we count, that which is inscribed on the column "Have", from the very beginning, cannot not have its corresponding equivalence in the column "Owe". Finally, the whole question is summarized in the statute that we give to that simple vertical line, that bar that separates the two columns, to the distance and to the nature of the distance put between the two. As if we did not want to know something that belonged to us, if we were told, suddenly, incontestable, unableugbar, without considering the possibility of disproving it, even if we were left surprised for a short instant: that the contribution of funds in the beginning, in principle being of the Other(5) , is written twice, as in all account writing. Once accompanied by the + sign and the other by the - sign.

Would it not be then, that from this moment one could read the phrase that closes the "the I and the It": "death is an abstract concept of negative content, for which you cannot find a corresponding unconscious?" If the Unconscious is the meticulous and frowning accountant of our lives, if it that which establishes the exhaustive list of successes and defeats in a careful manner, of prices paid and those to pay, is it not by chance because it is itself in correspondence with the other side of the vertical bar, there where it is inscribed forever and far beyond each one the negative cipher of our original debt? We know, thanks

to Freud, the structure of the discourse of the Unconscious (that which makes it sprechend, speaking) lies in the no-inscription of our own death as an unconscious representation. This allows to set forth the reciprocal as pertinent to the abstract concept of negative content, incontestable and thus disproves that our own death has the Unconscious as a correspondent ("ent/ sprechend") as such.

Not being able to fill this abstract concept by experience, or formal - inasmuch as it is not given to us to live our own death - only by giving it a negative content(6) is how we arrive, without our representing it, to think of death. Negative content means a simple supression, or privation, of life. It is this same impossibility of being filled by experience that will allow only that the Unconscious could come near to being representable(7) of this hole to which no experience is permitted to acceed.

Lacan versus Freud?

May the reader allow us to jump a century or more to listen to one of the echos of this essay by Freud.

In 1972, in the University of Lovaina, Lacan started a conference pointing out the following abjectives to his audience : "death (...) belongs to the domination of faith (...) You are right in believing that you are going to die (...) this sustains you (...) if you did not believe this, could you support life? (...) solidly supported in the certainty (...) however it is only an act of faith (...) inasmuch as we are not sure (...) By chance... is there not someone who lived one hundred and fifty years? (...) It is there that faith takes on strength (...) "(8)

On reading, or hearing these words nobody could stop from feeling a sudden and tremendous fright, inasmuch as a more than famous phrase of Freud is immediately suggested to the memory, written in an essay that we commented on at an earlier opportunity, and that we deliberately did not cite until now, because of the strange resonance that the words of Lacan take concerning it. The phrase says: "Nobody, deep down, believes in their own death ("Im Grunde, glaube niemand an seinen eigenen Tod.") or, what is the same, that in the Unconscious each one of us is persuaded of his own immortality. "(9)

It is clear that Lacan constructed his own purposes to disconcert us; more so, we can see ourselves assaulted by doubt: Lacan is opposing Freud in a theme that is a nodal point of psychoanalysis, and is if this is so, why?

To begin with, Lacan places death in the order of discourse: "dominion of faith" making reference here to the monotheistic religions, and in particular to christianism. However, his enunciation, and it is audible, is totally ironic. As from that which slips from "faith" to "belief" passing by that which is directed to the Other - faith, the fidelities, - to what stays at the side of the subject - belief -. Belief in one´s own death, that is what allows life to be supported. But then without warning, Lacan introduces a Freudian term, though little used, certainty, "Gewifsheit" to pass immediately to a Lacanian sintagma "act of faith" and return to fall blandly back into uncertainty: "we are not sure". Later, with a slight movement of the head faith makes a nuevosu retorno.

There are word couples that always go together, for example ´believe´/´we are not sure´. Their link is incontestably...the disproof (the Verleugnung). "What I believe is, I am going to die, and well... should there not be at least one that...? After all, I am not sure." The subject cannot maintain itself in the certainty(10), it cannot support itself solidly, prove itself, except in the psychosis, it is certain, but with a different status. On the other hand, the internal relation of the couple faith/belief - that does not exist in German, only has the term Glauben - is also commanded by the functioning of the disproof. It is for this that Lacan creates a new significant, the act of faith, that comes to occupy the place in time of which certainty cannot sustain: a permanent freeing of the dividing bar that separates the
"Have" from the "Owe" of our accounts with life. The act of faith would seem to be the best translation that Lacan has found for the Freudian devise "Believe in the Unconscious". Impossible permanent manner.

So, this double relationship: not to believe in that which you know and uncertainty in that which you believe puts death in a priviledged place as much in the local of Freud as in the logic of Lacan. This knowledge disproven that is the priviledge of death - one¨s own - gives it at the same time a structural parentship with the differences of the sexes and castration, but also with the enigmatic appearance of the dead father.
It is in here that an invisible re-knotting is born in the travels of Freud´s work and at the same time knitted with red string that, passing by the primodial identification, will find its end in the work about the Ichspaltung, on the division of the subject. It is right here,

concerning the irrepresentability of our own death, that it is necessary to find the logical argument in the origin of the earthquake that disturbed the first local prepared, with the appearance of the death of the father, the arrival of the death drive. That which, because of the violence of its arrival on the theoretical scene hid the metapsychological instruments that prepared the arrival in a lasting way.

We have to conclude, at least temporarily, that except for the eristic surprise, Lacan does not oppose Freud, even though it is correct that he introdices a novelty: in the interpretation of the dream, that closes the "Formulations about the two Principles..."(11) "I was dead...but I did not know it", Freud inserts " depending on his desire" founding the psychoanalysis of the Dead Father. Lacan reads the "It", the implied subject that begins the phrase as the only way that the speaking subject has to designate the place from where it speaks, without being able to ever recognize it as such. (12)

1. Sigmund Freud, Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod (1915), Studienausgabe, IX, Fischerverlag, page 49.
2. Sigmund Freud, Of War and Death. Current themes (1915). Complete Works, Volume XIV. Amorrortu Editores. We did not faithfully follow the translation. Each time we modify it we will become aware of the term with the use of the German term
3. The Spanish translation of traut as familiar, anticipating the introduction of the Disquieting Strangeness, of that Sinester. Inasmuch as Freud uses that word, let´s give it its specification. That which is intimate is not only the obverse of the world, but also that which we allow ourselves to invest in it.
4. This term, which means undeniable, unquestionable, is formed from the root leugnen, which would mean, literally translated, "not disavowable".
5. There is another contribution of funds, that of the subject,; but this is to him, inprinciple and in general, much more opaque to the neurotic in analysis. One life, from this point of view, is the reading done as much from the interpretations of acts, as from the debt that one has contracted with oneself. The analytical experience proves that many times it is indespensible to re-contract that debt towards the Other.
6. We believe it to be probable that by implimenting this formula, so well known later, Freud used words that come directly from the philosophy of Kant, particularly from his opuscule of 1763. "Essay to introduce into philosophy the concept of negative magnitude". There Kant showed the difference between logic opposition and real opposition, He writes, for example " I call displeasure a negative pleasure, hate a negative love...all death a negative birth.""pages 32 & 42, Vrin. Paris, 1980-
7. Whose representations are not representable.
8. "Lacan parle" Conférence á l´Université de Louvain du 13 octobre 1972. "Lacan en Bélgique", AFI. The translation is ours HY.
9. Freud, Of war and death, ibidem
10. While he is the certainty, the subject of the Unconscious has it, if, but for nothing=0. This compels the means of the belief to be a obliged passage. The latter makes up for that of certainty not being able to have as object.
11. In Résultats, recherches, problémes, volume I, PUF, Paris. Studienausgabe, III. Pages 12-24. Complete Works, XII, Amorrortu, Buenos Aires.
12. It is impossible that anyone can sustain himself - the time of a dream? - in the structure of the language recognizing himself at the same time in the place of death, the necessary place to be able to speak, but unrecognizable, fairly, by the act of speaking. In general we build a wall, sometimes unsurmountable, between the knowing produced by the incorporation of the language and the impossible certainty. We would have to say, also, that we do not produce enough knowing from our surmounting the wall, on the side of certainty.