Repetition again
I feel as if I’ve written about this before, but I just had to. Talking about tradition in an interview, Derrida says this lovely thing in a quite personal way: “I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech–one which has not yet been allowed to speak”. He talks about repetition in terms of speech and speaking, parole and parler, and of course psychoanalysis has to do with that too. When you come to analysis or psychotherapy, you have to talk, and you find that this talking is really something. You start to experience talking to someone as a thing and it has all kinds of non-verbal and yet-to-be-described experiences going with it. Some of them can happen fine and others seem to meet with interesting forms of hesitation or pleasure or other strangenesses of feeling. Psychoanalysis is an archive of writings as well, of course, and by now also a formidable configuration of institutions but when you are doing it, it’s about talking. And Derrida brings the whole of repetition into focus by invoking speech as what might have the future waiting inside it, waiting to be figured out, de-ciphered—kept quiet so far, but really having something necessary to say. If there is one thing that’s necessary, it is the future.
It brings to mind the recent events in a London court, where five climate crisis activists were on trial for a protest that blocked traffic on the M25. As Damien Gayle reports: “The judge, Christopher Hehir, had ruled that information about climate breakdown could not be entered into evidence, and could only be referred to by defendants briefly as the ‘political and philosophical beliefs’ that motivated them – which he would tell the jury were in any case irrelevant to their deliberations.
But the defendants had other plans. They sought to turn Hehir’s court into a ‘site of civil resistance’ causing as much disruption as necessary to ensure that if the jury could not see their evidence on climate breakdown, then the jurors could at least be in no doubt it was being kept from them” .
The activists felt they had to find a way to say what they weren’t permitted to say, what simply had to be repeated. Édouard Glissant talks about “arts of mixture, of adjustment to situations” and these have always been needed. Sometimes things need to be said, and imagined and we lack the cultural instruments to go to and find the words or other forms of expression. It becomes essential to be able to improvise. The climate protestors face prison for persistently improvising from the motorway gantry to the court room, finding ways to speak, without being allowed to do so, for the earth and the living beings who were, or are, or will be, living here. When Glissant thinks about history, he talks about memory and repetition and reminds us of what is enciphered in music: “The Africans had lost everything; they had nothing, not even a song. In jazz, black Americans had to recompose, through memory and through extraordinary suffering, the echo of what Africa had for them. Jazz came about not through a book but through a flight of memory. That’s why jazz is valid for everybody, because it’s a reconstruction within a distraught memory of something that had disappeared and had now been regained. It required a terrifying effort.”
There are many situations, psychotherapy included, where speech can be at times a strangely terrifying effort but on the other side of that effort are necessary “arts of mixture, of adjustment to situations.” The improvisations of life, a life not one’s own but multiple, that’s the discovery. That there is change. Glissant talks about “the voyage in which, from intuition of the world to intuition of the world, we try to see how humanities transform themselves—I say ‘humanities,’ never ‘humanity.’“
Could psychoanalysis come to recognise itself part of this transformation? Could the very smallness of the session—two people talking for a limited time, with ethical restrictions on how they interact—be a resource in this?
Last word to Glissant: “I myself like the idea that I can change through exchanging with the other without losing or distorting myself. It’s only recently that it’s been possible to believe this, and i think it is one of the truths of the present world.”