Hatred and Forgiveness by Kristeva Julia; Herman Jeanine;

Author:Kristeva, Julia; Herman, Jeanine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

2. Perversion or Sublimation?

A calmer self emerges, after La Maison de Claudine (My Mother’s House, 1922), which will culminate in the writing of Break of Day (1928) and Sido (1929). Incest is revisited, contemplated, illuminated by the work of writing; culpability is expressed and traversed.

Colette’s unconscious knows that the phantasmatic source of her osmotic style, the coalescence of sense and sensibility, language and pleasure, words and things, and what she calls a “monogram of the inexorable,” is now unveiled: this source is nothing other than control over the object (the mother, every partner) and the outside (the world), beyond prohibitions, without limits, borders, or taboos.

Apollinaire thought it apt to describe Colette as “perverse,” then retracted the adjective and replaced it with “mischievous” (“a soul more mischievous than perverse”); he did not hesitate to compare the writer’s provocative audacity to the tragic immodesty of the first Christians: “It was thus that Roman martyrs entered the arena, freed from a sense of propriety.”

You might expect a psychoanalyst to answer the question: “Colette, perverse?” My answer: “Certainly, a little, not at all.” Colette writes, where the pervert seeks to climax: this is her success, beyond the pain she complains about, which exhausts the pervert. From Willy by way of Missy to Bertrand de Jouvenel, perverse acting out punctuates Colette’s life. But she transforms it: first by using acting out as a self-analysis, by living-and-meditating on it in her writing, where it takes on a definitive reality, a fictive neoreality, at a distance from the real, untrue, and sublime. Writing then seems to be a substitution for erotic desire, a transference of pleasure from sexuality into all sensations and, simultaneously, all words.

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