Phrase by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Author:Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Phrase XVIII

(The Curse)

Just days, not even that, just hours before

she died, distraught but lucid, from what I was

told, with that icy fury which for so very long

had been her usual attitude but which she was so good at dissembling,

she uttered three lapidary and peremptory phrases

for each of her three sons. The first, since I

am the eldest, announced my imminent destitution, my

collapse into that title of Apollinaire’s. It’s

heredity, she prophesied, in her role of false maenad,

the mourning of old left unspoken, all the fault of the other

family. In any case, I was unstable, ungrateful,

evasive; deficiencies had been hidden from me,

but with exaggerated indulgence, as if

I had been normal, when the weight of dead

generations weighed down upon my incapacity quite simply to live. I would not even

make the gesture that from childhood

she had demanded of me: Peer Gynt’s return to the bedside of

his dying mother. As for the other two, my brothers, I don’t know

what on earth she may have said, nor what contempt she may

have shown towards the pitiful one she had enslaved.

She was obviously right. Madness is not only

this terrifying lucidity. It is

not merely oracular either. It’s a self-fulfilling

prophecy. It is its pure act,

malevolence itself. The decline seemed

irreversible: apathy, absence, confusion;

stupidity and rage, melancholia

without end; tricks and lies; disinterest

and not the slightest joy any more. A body voided of all.

The most worrying thing, when my father deteriorated,

was the aggravated resemblance: with barely twenty-four years difference

I too had become unrecognizable. He

haunted me exactly, even in his vague gestures

and his distant gaze. He seemed to be saying to me:

“There you are, stop blinding yourself.” I was at last

the victim of the prohibition whom they had desired

so much. I suddenly had the clear intuition

of the hell for which I was responsible, these ravages as close

to me as possible that exceeded all measure. All that remained

were the last dying moments, effacement without protest.

But it sometimes turns out that hatred transforms itself into pure love.

(Hatred here stands for disappointment, neglect, abandonment, even betrayal.)

Whoever knows this will understand. There is something indestructible,

and never is a decision entirely without consequence:

clarity suddenly regained.

“To hold on to what has been achieved.” It’s almost impossibility

itself, but hold on, we must: that means yielding,

giving up only supposedly being oneself, walled in.

No character amounts to destiny,

every curse is vulnerable.

It is the role of catastrophe to be necessary.

(March 6, 2000)

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