#jean rené binet

[jgmail]

Orígenes del concepto la “Gran Sustitución”

Por Nicolas Lebourg

Traducción de Juan Gabriel Caro Rivera

La “Gran Sustitución” es el nombre de un pequeño libro publicado por Renaud Camus en el 2011, aunque el concepto solo resonó en el gran público a partir del año 2000 debido a una polémica donde se atacaba el gran número de judíos al interior de France Culture. Pero no fue sino hasta que Brenton Tarrant, el terrorista de Christchurch (51 muertos), publicó un manifiesto con ese nombre que el concepto adquirió fama internacional. Hoy en día seis de cada diez franceses creen que la “Gran Sustitución es real” y el 67% dice sentirse preocupado por ello. Sin embargo, el temor de las poblaciones europeas frente a una transformación demográfica y cultural producida por la inmigración de africanos y asiáticos no es algo nuevo. De hecho, el término francés “racisme” (racismo) fue acuñado por Gaston Méry, un discípulo Drumont, en 1892 para reclamar la protección de los franceses, de estirpe gala, frente a la marea invasiva de latinos. El nacional-populismo siempre ha usado este imaginario demográfico como, por ejemplo, durante el 2007 en la última candidatura de Jean-Marie Le Pen , donde se afirmaba que el objetivo de la política “antifamiliar” francesa era “sustituir a las poblaciones de origen francés por medio de una política proinmigrante”.

De hecho, el éxito del término la “Gran Sustitución” proviene de dos dinámicas que hasta ahora habían permanecido separadas: el “neopopulismo” y el “nacionalismo blanco” (que no se preocupa sino por la segregación racial). La intensificación de las políticas coloniales suscitó el temor de una colonización inversa que fue la base del famoso “peligro amarillo” denunciado en 1895 por Guillermo II. Este movimiento coincido con la globalización demográfica que llevó a 180 millones de inmigrantes chinos en 1840 y 1940 a abandonar sus hogares, lo que causó que Australia y Estados Unidos implementaran medidas con tal de frenar la llegada de estos a sus territorios. Sin embargo, la unidad de la raza blanca no era el objetivo de tales debates, como queda claro en el arianismo nazi que veía a los eslavos como infrahumanos. Además, Hitler, a pesar de que sí abordó el tema en su libro de Mein Kampf, donde atacaba el uso de soldados negros por el ejército francés para ocupar la Alemania de Weimar como parte de un complot judío cuyo objetivo final era promocionar el mestizaje en la “raza blanca” y establecer su dominación, no le dio tanta importancia. No obstante, esta línea fue la que siguieron los colaboracionistas franceses (como René Binet, un extrotskista que se alistó en las Waffen SS, Maurice Bardèche, cuñado de Robert Brasillach, y el suizo pronazi Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, pionero en la negación del Holocausto) y el escritor estadounidense Francis-Parker Yockey que reformularon la ideología nazi entre la segunda mitad de los años cuarenta y los cincuenta, dando lugar a un esquema en el que la mezcla étnica era sinónimo de un complot antiblanco: los judíos usaban a los Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética para destruir la Europa blanca, organizando la llegada en masa de negros y asiáticos con tal de llevar a cabo su destrucción y poner en práctica su proyecto “globalista”; la inmigración era un “verdadero genocidio”, mientras que el exterminio de los judíos europeos era un mito promocionado entre los blancos con tal de evitar su despertar. Aunque estos mitos surgieron dentro de movimientos marginales terminaron por extenderse a todo el resto de la extrema derecha, ya que la cuestión migratoria terminó por convertirse en el caldo de cultivo de los grupos nacionalistas. El nacional-revolucionario François Duprat, viendo los efectos producidos por el “discursos de los ríos de sangre”, pronunciado por el diputado conservador británico Enoch Powell en 1968, profetizaba una guerra civil racial como consecuencia de la inmigración no blanca y a partir de allí concibió e impuso una retórica antinmigrante dentro del Frente Nacional.

En la década de 1970 los grupos radicales estadounidenses comenzaron a usar términos como ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government, Gobierno Sionista de Ocupación) y “Genocidio Blanco” (llevado a cabo por intermediación del aborto, la homosexualidad y el mestizaje) que terminarían por extenderse por todo el mundo anglosajón. Cuando Breton Tarrant definió la “Gran Sustitución” como “el Genocidio Blanco”, estaba influido por estas ideas. El hecho de que un atentado terrorista contra la sinagoga de Pittsburgh en 2018, que dejó 11 muertos, confirma la vertiente de odio al judaísmo en estas acciones. Sin embargo, la popularización de este tema se ha producido sin tomar en cuenta su dimensión antisemita, ya que de momento la extrema derecha considera que el Islam es su principal enemigo. Después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre las teorías conspiracioncitas en contra de la globalización han retomado temas como el “Eurabia”, donde las élites europeas facilitan la “colonización” árabe-musulmana de todo el continente. Actualmente, los partidos de extrema derecha están experimentando una transformación “neopopulista”, abriéndose paso en Europa como paladines de la libertad y la defensa de las minorías religiosas o sexuales frente a un fascismo islámico que esta arrasando al mundo. El éxito de esta estrategia reside en articular las representaciones clandestinas de los más radicales con las preocupaciones dominantes neopopulistas de las mayorías.

No obstante, tal formula no ha conseguido grandes éxitos electorales. En las elecciones europeas de 2019 se presentaron dos listas a favor de la “reconquista” de Europa y en contra de la “Gran Sustitución” que solo obtuvieron 6147 votos, muy por debajo de las votaciones a favor de la Agrupación nacional. Por otro lado, este tema es usado como un medio para radicalizar a la gente: dos de los grupos franceses desmantelados por preparar acciones terroristas en contra de la “Gran Sustitución”, el grupo neofascista Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) en el 2017 y el movimiento populista radical Action des forces opérationnelles (AFO) en el 2018, que apoyaron la idea popularizada por Éric Zemmour de que los atentados del 2015 eran una continuación de la Guerra de Argelia, seguían esta línea. Zemmour ha sido el primero en intentar articular el nacionalismo blanco con el neopopilismo usando como tema central la “Gran Sustitución”, siendo este un intento de llenar tal espacio político de cara a las elecciones presidenciales del 2022.

[athenenoctua9]

Pile à lire :

- Mythologie du monde Celte (Claude Sterckx)

- Le Pendule de Foucault (Umberto Ecco)

- La Métamorphose (Kafka)

- Un conte de deux cités/villes (Charles Dickens)

- Les Quarante-Cinq (Alexandre Dumas)

- L'art d'avoir toujours raison (Schopenhauer)

- Les mémoires d'Hadrien (Marguerite Yourcenar)

- La bête humaine (Emile Zola)

- Le ventre de Paris (Emile Zola)

- La Dame de Monsoreau (Alexandre Dumas)

- Croc Blanc (Jack London)

- L'assommoir (Emile Zola)

- L'oeuvre (Emile Zola)

- Pot Bouille (Emile Zola)

- La conquête des Plassans (Emile Zola)

- La Dame aux camélias (Alexandre Dumas fils)

- L’Iliade (Homère)

- Rebecca (Daphné du Maurier)

- Les Rois Maudits (Maurice Druon)

- Lancelot et le Chevalier de la charrette (Chrétien de Troyes)

- Perceval et la quête du Graal (Chrétien de Troyes)

- Yvain et le chevalier au lion (Chrétien de Troyes)

- Les lettres persanes (Montesquieu)

- Les liaisons dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos) <- j’ai seulement étudié des passages en français au lycée

- La Chartreuse de Parme (Stendhal)

- Le nom de la rose (Umberto Eco)

- La promesse de l'aube (Romain Gary)

- Guerre et paix (Tolstoï)

- Les Chouans (Balzac)

- Aurélien (Louis Aragon)

- Sur la photographie (Susan Sontag) <- c'est un essai… sur la photo.

- Un hussard sur le toit - Jean Giono

- À l'est d'Eden - John Steinbeck

- Le Capitain Fracasse - Théophile Gautier

- Le Bossu - Paul Féval

- Une colonne de feu - Ken Follett

- Le passeur - Lois Lowry

- Scaramouche - Rafael Sabatini

- Maleville - Robert Merle

- La mort est mon métier - Robert Merle

- Le loup des steppes - Hermann Hesse

- HHhH - Laurent Binet

- Michel Strogoff - Jules Verne

- La nuit des temps - René Barjavel

- L'attrape-cœurs - Salinger

[stillellensibley]

Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances

Involuntary Drawing

DAVID LOMAS

Examining the idea of being ‘machine-like’ and its impact on the practice of automatic writing, this article charts a history of automatism from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the intersections between physiology, psychology, poetry and art.

Philippe Parreno’s The Writer 2007 (fig.1) is a video, played on a screen the size of a painted miniature, of the famous eighteenth-century Jaquet-Droz automaton recorded in the act of writing with a goose quill pen. Zooming in on the automaton’s hand and face, Parreno contrives to produce a sense of uncertainty as to the human or robotic nature of the doll. It is an example of a contemporary fascination with cyborgs and with the increasingly blurred dividing line between machine and organism. In a manner worthy of surrealist artist René Magritte, Parreno plays on the viewer’s sense of astonishment. As the camera rolls, the android deliberates before slowly writing: ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ The ‘Écrivain’ is one of the most celebrated automata that enjoyed a huge vogue in Enlightenment Europe. In a lavish two-volume book, Le Monde des automates (1928), Edouard Gélis and Alfred Chapuis define the android as ‘an automaton with a human face’.1 A chapter of this book, which supplied the illustrations for an article in the surrealist journal Minotaure, is devoted to drawing and writing automata.2 The oldest example Gélis and Chapuis cite was fabricated by the German inventor Friedrich von Knauss whom, they state, laboured at the problem of ‘automatic writing’ for twenty years before presenting his first apparatus in 1753.3

Fig.1 Philippe Parreno The Writer 2007 Photographic still from DVD 3:58 minutes Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison, London © Philippe Parreno

The graphic trace

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, recording instruments became vital tools in the production of scientific knowledge in a range of disciplines that were of direct relevance to surrealism. Such mechanical apparatuses, synonymous with the values of precision and objectivity, quickly became the benchmark of an experimental method. The inexorable rise of the graphic method has been intensively studied by historians of science and visual culture, but surrealism has not yet been considered as partaking of this transformation in the field of visual representation. In what follows, recording instruments are shown to have helped to underwrite surrealism’s scientific aspects and bolster its credentials as an experimental avant-garde.

The graphic method inaugurated a novel paradigm of visual representation, one geared towards capturing dynamic phenomena in their essence. It was the product of a radically new scientific conception of the physical universe in terms of dynamic forces, a world view that is doubtless at some level a naturalisation of the energies, both destructive and creative, unleashed by industrial capitalism.5The proliferation of mechanical inscription devices in the life sciences coincided with the displacement of anatomy, as a static principle of localisation, by physiology, which analysed and studied forces and functions. Étienne-Jules Marey, known today as an inventor of chronophotography, was one of the main exponents of the graphic method in France, and he personally devised a number of instruments whose aid, he wrote, made it possible to ‘penetrate the intimate functions of organs where life seems to translate itself by an incessant mobility’.6 As an apparatus for visualisation, the graphic method carries implications for how to construe figures of the visible and invisible. It was not simply a technology for making visible something that lay beneath the human perceptual threshold (like a microscope), but rather a technology for producing a visual analogue – a translation – of forces and phenomena that do not themselves belong to a visual order of things.7

At its simplest, a frog’s leg muscle is hooked directly to a pointed stylus that rests on a drum whose surface is blackened with particles of soot from a candle flame (fig.2). An electrical stimulus causes the muscle to contract, deflecting the stylus and thus producing on the revolving drum a typical white on black curvilinear trace. Fatigue of the muscle produces an increased duration and diminished amplitude of successive contractions, as shown in the figure at the bottom. A more sophisticated device pictured by Marey consisted of a flexible diaphragm, a sort of primitive transducer, connected by a hollow rubber tube to a stylus, which inscribed onto a continuous strip of paper. At the heart of the graphic method is the production of a visible trace.8 A stylus roving back and forth on a rotating cylinder or a moving band of paper translates forces into a universal script that Marey regarded as ‘the language of the phenomena themselves’ and which he proclaimed is superior to the written word.9 In an era where quantitative data gradually became the common currency of scientific discourse, Marey considered written language, ‘born before science and not being made for it’, as inadequate to express ‘exact measures and well-defined relations’.10 The incorporation of a time axis owing to the continuous regular movement of the drum lends a distinctive property to the graphic trace. The historian Robert Brain remarks that ‘the graphic representation is not an object or field like that of linear perspective, but a spatial product of a temporal process, whose order is serial or syntagmatic’.11 Units of time are marked off at the bottom of the myographic trace as regular blips on a horizontal axis; additionally, the passage of time is registered in the palimpsest-like layering of successive traces.12

Fig.2 Simple myograph (top) and trace of repeated muscular contractions (bottom) From Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris 1875, p.194

From its initial applications in physiology, the graphic method soon made inroads into areas such as medicine and psychology, eager to prove their scientific legitimacy. The familiar chart of a patient’s temperature, pulse, and respiration had become standard fare in hospital wards by the mid-nineteenth century.13 Marey went so far as to predict that the visual tableau comprised of such ‘medical curves’ would replace altogether the written record. The growth of medical specialties saw doctors attempting to justify their status and claims to authoritative knowledge by adopting the tools-in-trade of an experimental science. The Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, was at the forefront of these developments, and graphic traces are liberally interspersed among the better-known photographs, engravings, and fine art reproductions of Charcot’s book Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1878). Employed first for the investigation of muscular and nervous disorders, the myograph was subsequently applied by Charcot to the study of hysteria. By enabling the hysterical attack to be objectively recorded in the form of a linear visual narrative, the graphic trace performed an invaluable service in conferring a semblance of reality upon a condition that was widely dismissed as mere playacting or simulation (fig.3).

Fig.3 Epileptic phase of an hysterical attack From Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, Paris 1885, p.40.

Nearer in time to the surrealists, the hysteria problem was revived with particular urgency in the guise of shellshock, and there again physicians placed their faith in the graphic method as a means of reliably excluding simulation where clinical observation alone was of no avail. Evidence of the surrealist André Breton’s first-hand acquaintance with such devices is not hard to find. Soon after his arrival at the neuro-psychiatric centre at St Dizier in August 1916 he writes excitedly to Théodore Fraenkel, a fellow medical student, saying that all his time is devoted to examining patients. He details his technique for interrogating his charges and in the same breath adds ‘and I manipulate the sphygmometric oscillometer’.14 The instrument to which Breton refers gives a measure of the peripheral pulses and would have been used by him to detect an exaggerated vascular response to cold that was held to be a diagnostic feature of reflex nervous disorders. There is a reasonable likelihood that Breton also came in contact with the use of a myograph for the same purpose, either at St Dizier or the following year when he was attached as a trainee to neurologist Joseph Babinski’s unit at the Pitié Hospital in Paris. Breton possessed a copy, with a personal dedication from the authors, of Babinski and Jules Froment’s Hystérie-pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d’ordre réflexe en neurologie de guerre (1917), a textbook profusely illustrated with myographic traces.

As a newly formed discipline, psychology was also quick to integrate the paraphernalia of experimental physiology.15 Alfred Binet, one of the pioneers of psychology in France, employed the graphic trace as an instrument more sensitive in his opinion than automatic writing for revealing a dissociation of the personality in cases of hysteria. ‘In following our study of the methods that enable us to reveal this hidden personality’, Binet writes, ‘we are now to have recourse to the so-called graphic method, the employment of which, at first restricted to the work-rooms of physiology, seems, at the present time, destined to find its way into the current practice of medicine’.16 The definition of psychology as experimental is seen to be closely tied with the use of a measuring instrument. Binet’s goal appears to be an almost paradoxical exclusion of the subject, with its nigh infinite capacity for dissimulation, from the scientific investigation of that subject’s own subjectivity. Coinciding with the introduction of quantitative forms of measurement, introspection rapidly fell into disrepute as a method of inquiry. Robert Brain’s observation that in the field of psychology ‘the graphic method served both as a research tool and a source of analogies for investigating mental activities’ is certainly to be borne in mind with regard to surrealism.17

Alongside mainstream science, recording devices also made incursions into psychical research. The use of such apparatuses to restrict the latitude for fraud contributed to the general air of scientific enquiry. The historian Richard Noakes has shown that the intractable problems of researching mediums, their notoriously capricious and untrustworthy nature, led some experimenters to suggest that sensitive instruments alone could replace the human subject as a means of accessing the spirit world.18 In the 1870s, William Crookes, a respected chemist and a pioneer in the application of measuring instruments to spiritualist research, devised an apparatus for recording emanations from the body of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, as a result of which he claimed to have discovered a mysterious new form of energy, which he termed ‘Psychic Force’ (fig.4).19 A Marey drum was used to make physiological recordings of the medium Eusapia Palladino, who had been often exposed for cheating in the past, during a highly publicised series of séances conducted under controlled experimental conditions at the laboratories of the Institut général de psychologie in Paris.20

Fig.4 Apparatus for recording the emanation of psychic force from a medium. From William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London 1874.

Modest recording instruments

It would appear that surrealism was not indifferent to the lure of the graphic method. The particular aspect to foreground here is the promise of objectivity. The graphic method offered the prospect of bypassing altogether the human observer who was increasingly liable to be viewed as a source of error in scientific experiment. With precision and objectivity the yardsticks of science by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the historian Peter Galison remarks that ‘the machine as a neutral and transparent operator … would serve as instrument of registration without intervention and as an ideal for the moral discipline of the scientists themselves’.21 Addressing the graphic trace in these terms, Marey strikingly adumbrates the language of surrealism in remarking that ‘one endeavoured to write automatically certain phenomena’.22 The surrealists spoke of their art and literary productions as objective documents and advocated an objective stance that sidelines the authorial subject who was meant to be as near as possible a passive onlooker at the birth of the work. Or, in Breton’s words, a modest recording device: ‘we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments not mesmerised by the drawings we are making.’23 Closely allied with this imperative to become akin to a machine is a metaphorics of the trace and tracing: ‘here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing’, Breton insisted in the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’.24

The accent on objectivity is consonant with surrealism’s avant-gardist ethos of experiment, stemming ultimately from science. In fact, Breton contended that by the time the manifesto had been published, five years of uninterrupted experimental activity already lay behind it.25 Around the time of the manifesto, the surrealists set about creating a research centre of sorts, the short-lived Bureau of Surrealist Research, testifying to the earnestness of their experimental impulse. However, it was no ordinary laboratory that opened to the public at 15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. The surrealist playwright and poet Antonin Artaud recalls that a mannequin hung from the ceiling and, reputedly, copies of the crime fiction volume Fantômas and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams framed with spoons were enthroned on a makeshift altarpiece. The second issue of the house journal La Révolution surréaliste, the cover of which was modeled on the popular science magazine La Nature, carried an announcement of its purpose:

The Bureau of Surrealist Research is applying itself to collecting by all appropriate means communications concerning the diverse forms taken by the mind’s unconscious activity. No specific field has been defined for this project and surrealism plans to assemble as much experimental data as possible, without knowing yet what the end result might be.26

Asserting a parallel with science, as Breton was fond of doing, was a way of implying that surrealism was dedicated to finding practical solutions to vital problems of human existence, and of distancing it as far as possible from a posture of aesthetic detachment. The statement above identifies the unconscious as the privileged object of surrealist research. Automatism, from this point of view, could be understood as a research method, a set of investigative procedures that organise and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. The openness of scientific inquiry is something that may have been especially attractive to surrealism; the final clause above insists upon their refusal to define goals – a programme – which would have run the risks of a reductive instrumentalism or empty utopianism. At the same time, however, bearing in mind the extreme animosity towards positivism that Breton notoriously gives vent to in the 1924 manifesto, the dangers for surrealism of too close a proximity to science should not be overlooked. Perhaps for this reason, Artaud, in a report on the bureau carried in the third issue of the journal, argues warily for the necessity of a certain surrealist mysticism. A survey of the terms ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ in the period would reveal that much the same vocabulary was utilised in the marginal, pseudo-scientific world of spiritualism and parapsychology as by mainstream science, and it is notable that surrealist experimentation happily straddles these seemingly contradictory currents. The hypnotic trance sessions, one of the main experimental activities engaged in by the nascent surrealist group, are illustrative of this cross-over between science and the occult. 543 pages of notes and drawings obsessively documenting the sessions, which took place nightly between September and October 1922, were preserved by Breton and included among a list of artworks, books and other objects housed in the bureau.

While Salvador Dalí did not partake of the ‘birth pangs’ of surrealism, as Breton ruefully observed, his overheated imagination provides a vivid if fanciful evocation of this first phase of surrealist experiment. In an essay written in 1932, Dalí conjures up an improbable scenario of hypnotic subjects wired to recording devices like the unfortunate frog in Marey’s illustration, though in this case it is the trace of poetic inspiration that is expectantly awaited:

All night long a few surrealists would gather round the big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by thin though opaque mechanical slats on which the blinding curve of the convulsive graphs would appear intermittently in fleeting luminous signals, a delicate nickel apparatus like an astrolabe being fixed to their necks and fitted with animal membranes to record by interpenetration the apparition of each fresh poetic streak, their bodies being bound to their chairs by an ingenious system of straps, so that they could only move a hand in a certain way and the sinuous line was allowed to inscribe the appropriate white cylinders. Meanwhile their friends, holding their breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention, would lean over the recording apparatus and with dilated pupils await the expected but unknown movement, sentence, or image.27

Dalí clearly took to heart Breton’s exhortation to his fellow surrealists that they should make themselves into ‘modest recording instruments’. Inspired by extant photographs that afford a rare glimpse of the legendary bureau, Dalí conjures up a fantastical laboratory with pliant subjects hooked to a plethora of arcane recording devices.

Beyond a serviceable metaphor employed by Breton, what evidence is there for the graphic method as having any bearing on the actual practice of automatic drawing? While scattered instances of direct citation of graphic traces can be demonstrated, what is more significant is that this novel regime of visuality, beginning as a style of scientific imaging and becoming by the time of surrealism a widely circulated and understood visual idiom, was a necessary historical antecedent in order that the automatist line might be imbued with meaning as the authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies (in its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms). With the precedent of the graphic trace available to them, it was possible for surrealist artists to imagine how they might square the circle by integrating temporal duration within a static visual medium.

‘Could it be that Marcel Duchamp reaches the critical point of ideas faster than anyone else?’, wondered Breton. It is a question that can profitably be asked in examining the impact on avant-garde artists of an avowedly scientific visual idiom. Duchamp, and his artistic collaborator Francis Picabia, around 1912 to 1913 rejected traditional painterly techniques, along with extreme subjectivism that had reached a zenith in the neo-symbolist circles both artists had been involved with up until that point, and turned instead to technical drawing and scientific illustrations as alternative, non-artistic sources of inspiration. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages 1913–14 (fig.5) is evidence of his search for what art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson calls ‘the beauty of indifference, the counterpart to his painting of precision’.28 For this work, one-metre lengths of thread were allowed to fall from a height of one metre, and the random configurations formed as they came to rest on the ground were fixed and recorded. Displaying the resultant shapes as curved white lines on a long horizontal black strip of canvas would have rung bells with viewers familiar with the then standard repertoire of scientific imaging practices. The typical format of the graphic trace served as a convenient shorthand by means of which Duchamp encoded the desired values of precise measurement and objectivity. Not for the first (or last) time did Duchamp appeal to forms of visual competency that had begun to creep into the common culture, as art historian Molly Nesbitt’s pioneering study relating his use of technical drawing to reforms in the French school curriculum shows.29 The creation of wooden templates or stencils based on the resultant curves is also significant: these were utilised to transfer the curves to other works, notably Network of Stoppages 1914 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the capillary tubes in the Large Glass 1915–23 (Tate T02011), but in addition they provide a measure of the area beneath the curve which, as every student of basic calculus knows, is equal to the integral of the curve.

Marcel Duchamp 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913–14, replica 1964 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Of the surrealist artists, links between art and science run deepest in the work of Max Ernst, who attended lecture courses on psychology while he was a student at university in Bonn.30 Scientific illustrations and tables are frequent source materials for Ernst’s collage, among which are examples of graphic traces, most notably the illustrations to the book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), a collection of collages and automatic poems produced collaboratively with the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Between the Two Poles of Politeness is one of at least two collages in the book to utilise a graphic trace, which functions as a ground for the image and a springboard for the artist’s imagination. The typical white-on-black format is exploited by Ernst to evoke a night sky against which the solid white line of the trace stands out starkly. He embellishes the horizontal x-axis marked on the graph by a dotted line with a distant polar landscape that appears to echo the peaks and troughs of the graphic trace. At the left-hand edge of the image, the lines of the graph are extended so they appear to converge towards a vanishing point; the net effect of these hand-drawn additions is to produce incongruities of scale as well as an ambiguous play between the flat space of the diagram and an illusory perspectival space. Accentuating the horizon serves to foreground the idea of a horizon of vision, beyond which normally one cannot see, and thus implies the existence of an invisible realm to which surrealism affords access.    

From 1919 through to the manifesto of 1924 – a period of intense experiment with automatic writing and other means for penetrating the unconscious, including hypnosis – Breton’s poetry is replete with imagery of electric currents and magnetic fields, to which the title of Ernst’s collage may allude. Ernst’s deployment of a graphic trace in the context of this book can be seen as mounting a polemic in favour of collage as an equivalent to automatic writing. Breton, who the following year in his poem ‘Sunflower’ penned the exquisitely apposite phrase, ‘the white curve on a black ground that we call thought’, would have understood that the graphic trace in Ernst’s collage offers itself to be read as an indexical equivalent to thought, in no ways inferior in this respect to the automatic text on the facing page.31Ernst’s painting North Pole 1922 is contemporaneous with the collage and closely related to it.32 A distinctive fine wavy pattern across the upper half of the canvas, the result of dragging a fine comb or something similar across the black oil paint so as to expose the white support, is highly suggestive of a seismographic or magnetic trace. There is a direct connection between this work and Ernst’s use of frottage and other automatic procedures in the 1920s. Between 1927 and 1928 Yves Tanguy produced a number of quite distinctive automatist paintings in which undulating lines are scratched into a black ground. Of even greater significance than such isolated examples of the direct citation of graphic traces, however, is to recognise that the novel regime of visuality it inaugurated made possible a mindset that saw the automatist line as an authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies. In its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms. The surrealists were not alone in choosing to regard the unconscious as a repository of imperceptible, yet powerfully active forces. Sigmund Freud commonly spoke of the unconscious in terms of an energetics of instinctual cathexes and circuits.33 But what has been lost sight of is that these were never any more than metaphorical descriptions or analogies, a way of talking. The mistake is to think that the wavy lines in an Ernst painting are actually a trace of anything, least of all Ernst’s unconscious, rather than a polemical mobilisation of the idea (or metaphor) of the indexical trace.

Re-inscriptions of automatism

It comes as a surprise to learn that, notwithstanding the seemingly intractable difficulties posed by the Bretonian concept of ‘pure psychic automatism’, a considerable number of more recent artists and poets have not been deterred from taking up such practices, often in the context of an overt re-engagement with the historical avant-garde.

In the main, the aleatory and automatic practices to be surveyed here no longer purport to be indexical traces or expressions of the unconscious. These recent examples prompt the question afresh: is surrealist automatism expressive, and if so what is it expressive of? This question is inseparable from another concerning the status of chance in surrealism.34 Here, it is necessary to make a distinction between Breton’s objective chance (‘hasard objectif’) and true randomness.35 Freud maintained that seemingly chance events, slips of the tongue and so forth, are actually governed by a strict order of psychic determinism: nothing in the mind, he believed, is arbitrary or undetermined.36 This alone is what assures the validity of dream interpretation. Without the supposition of unconscious causation, the whole hermeneutic project of psychoanalysis would be pointless. Automatism, from this angle, registers an unconscious level of determination, that is to say, of meaning. But what if it turned out that surrealist automatism had been all along simply a method for generating randomness?

Between October 2003 and June 2005 the musician and composer Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finer was artist in residence in the astrophysics department at OxfordUniversity, where Roger Penrose, nephew of the surrealist artist Roland Penrose, had conducted pioneering work in theoretical physics on black holes and the early conditions of the universe. Finer’s Everywhere, All the Time 2005 (fig.6) comprised part of a larger sculptural project arising from the residency. As Finer explains:

A chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, its source the electrical fluctuations of a detuned radio. The universe is permeated by radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background, which contemporary cosmology concludes is the cooled remnant of the Big Bang. Everywhere, all the time, it’s visible in the snow between channels on a television, the hiss of static on a radio, the rattling pen of the chart recorder, like a spirit hand.37

Fig.6 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Chart recorder, transistor radio and paper Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

The automatic messages that are of concern to Finer – ‘an unreadable communication with its own inner sense’ – are of an impersonal, non-human nature (fig.7). Rendering literal the Bretonian metaphor of a simple recording instrument, Finer bypasses altogether the artist as expressive origin of the message: ‘Endless gyres, overwriting, obliterating, annihilating any pretence of analysis, the chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, the universe the invisible hand.’38

Fig.7 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Graphic trace from chart recorder Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

It is fruitful to think about Finer’s practice in terms of a tension between noise and message as theorised by communication theory. Random noise can be understood as interference within a system of meaning production. In this respect, it might be understood to be quite similar to a Freudian slip, which manifests as an interruption or distortion of the intended message. However, the apparently chance or accidental nature of the latter turns out to be illusory and the lapsus is, in fact, subject to a strict psychic determinism. True randomness, which is the arena of contemporary practitioners’ interest, implies a breach in causality and hence ought not to be confused with the surrealist notion of objective chance, though it is compatible with the surrealists’ interrogation of the author function. The ratcheting-up of randomness undercuts the expressive paradigm of a subject who is the putative origin of a message.

Finer’s reference to a spirit hand resonates with surrealist automatism, whose derivation from mediumistic writing and drawing Breton acknowledged in his essay ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933). It also recalls a passage from the philosopher Roland Barthes’s famous text ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) that implicitly appeals to the precedent of automatic writing: ‘the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.’39 Barthes conceives of the writer not as expressive origin but rather as a kind of radio antenna picking up and remixing messages randomly absorbed. Tuning in to white noise instead of the overt communicative content of their chosen medium, postmodern artists perpetuate as well as update the historical avant-garde’s engagements with chance. In an essay on Cy Twombly, Barthes made an explicit analogy to white noise, writing of the picture Panorama 1955 (private collection) that: ‘The whole space is crackling in the manner of a television screen before any image appears on it.’40 Twombly reinterpreted an automatist practice in a manner contrary to the expressive paradigm that had dominated in the previous generation of artists. It is thus comparable to other gestures of cancellation, such as his friend Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The artist in the abstract expressionist mould was not only masculine, he was also stridently hetero-normative, a factor that art historian Jonathan Katz has argued lay behind the next generation of artists’ wish to distance themselves.41 Barthes refers to a new technological analogy for an automatist procedure in the television set, which, by the mid-1950s, had become nigh ubiquitous in American households. The origins of information theory in the immediate post-war period narrowly preceded the arrival of this new medium of mass communication. The white on black of Twombly’s Panorama evidently reminded Barthes of the cathode ray screen.

The experimental filmmaker Peter Rose explains that his sixteen minute film Secondary Currents 1982 is about the relationships between the mind and language: ‘A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language.’42 In the course of the film, words – white on a black ground – gradually decompose into constituent letters that jostle in a random, Brownian motion, such that the screen becomes an almost literal representation of white noise (fig.8). Rose’s work relates to concrete poetry but also draws upon his mathematical training. In communication theory, the concept of entropy is closely related to randomness. As expounded by engineer John R. Pierce in his book Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961): ‘entropy increases as the number of messages among which the source may choose increases. It also increases as the freedom of choice (or the uncertainty to the recipient) increases and decreases as the freedom of choice and the uncertainty are restricted.’43

Fig.8 Peter Rose Secondary Currents 1982 Still from film 16 minutes, 16 mm, black and white, sound Courtesy the artist Photograph © Peter Rose

Might it be possible to consider Rose’s language experiments as offering a route in to the final automatic text of Breton and Éluard’s ‘The Possessions’, the ‘attempt at simulating schizophrenia’ (‘démence précoce’), which plots a similar stepwise dissolution of language and sense? Under the guise of emulating the language of the insane, Breton and Éluard can be understood as exploring in an intuitive vein the relationship between a poetic or creative use of language and entropy. The act of collaboration seems to have been one means for interrupting the smooth flow of logical sense, an express aim of automatic writing being to divert language from its communicative function. In a manner not dissimilar to Rose, the schizophrenic treats words as things; their language was described in the kinds of manuals to which Breton and Éluard had access as propagating on the basis of chance associations or incidental resemblances between words. One can point to numerous examples of this in Breton and Éluard’s text. Within certain limits, an increase in randomness is experienced as poetic indeterminacy. However, the final paragraph of their exercise in simulation presses way beyond this threshold:

Fils de Judas rondève, qu’A Linné pasteur hippomythe U vraïli ouabi bencirog plaïol fernaca gla …lanco. U quaïon purlo ouam gacirog olaïama oual, u feaïva zuaïailo, gaci zulo. Gaci zulo plef. U feaïva oradarfonsedarca nic olp figilê. U elaïaïpi mouco drer hôdarca hualica-siptur. Oradargacirog vraïlim…u feaïva drer kurmaca ribag nic javli.44

Extraordinarily, this was among the texts that Samuel Beckett chose to translate.

The fact that The Magnetic Fields (1920), the true ur-texts of surrealist automatic writing, were composed jointly by Breton and Philippe Soupault (most obviously the texts called ‘Barrières’ (Barriers) which take the form of a dialogue or conversation) demonstrates that believing automatic writing to be the outpouring of a single unconscious is a misconception. In these texts, the writing subject makes use of an interlocutor in order to interrupt the flow and continuity of his discourse; a systematic interference with communicative language is thus built in to the procedure. It is a device that maximises incongruities. This can also be seen in the long distance collaboration of Ernst and Éluard in Les Malheurs des immortels. In his later comments on The Magnetic Fields, Breton placed great value on the speed of execution as the guarantor of the authenticity of a message that was to be as far as possible an uncorrupted record of unconscious thought. It is necessary to consider that the factor that comes increasingly into play as the speed of writing increases is not the unconscious but sheer randomness, which beyond a certain point manifests as a lexical decomposition.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, and other artworks utilising chance, the New York conceptual artist William Anastasi began creating Pocket Drawings on folded sheets of paper while he was at the cinema in the 1960s. These led on to Subway Drawings that started as he was travelling to and from daily chess games with his friend, the composer John Cage, and which he has continued to produce (fig.9). Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the backrest, Anastasi surrenders to a random process. His body operates likes a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train – its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations – to be transmitted onto the sheet of paper. In a 1990 interview, Cage talked about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis-à-vis surrealist automatism, insisting that: ‘It’s not psychological; it’s physical.’45

Fig.9 William Anastasi Subway Drawing Courtesy Gering & Lopez Gallery, New York

It is instructive to compare Anastasi’s Subway Drawings with another work that references the movement of a train and its effects on the human body, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train 1911–12 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).46 For Anastasi and the other artists in Cage’s circle, Duchamp was a cardinal reference point. The picture depicts the pipe-smoking artist on a train journey between Paris and Rouen. It is, Duchamp explained, a painting of ‘two parallel movements corresponding to each other’, that is to say, the forward velocity of the train together with the sideways rocking motion of the man standing in the crowded carriage.47 The passivity of a body acted upon by external mechanical forces is certainly akin to Anastasi’s Subway Drawings. The painting’s multiple registrations of a single figure, comparable to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), reflects Duchamp’s preoccupation with Marey’s chronophotography. Moreover, the picture might be said to represent a quirky response to the futurist cult of machines and the dynamism of speed. Slightly perplexing is the undress of the solitary figure, who, it has been suggested, is depicted in a state of sexual arousal. What the picture represents, then, is a bachelor machine: the kinetic energy of the train transformed via the onanistic rhythms of a swaying body into libidinal energy. A helpful commentary on this state of affairs comes from faraway Vienna. Asserting that ‘mechanical agitation must be recognised as one of the sources of sexual excitation’, Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), specifically relates the pleasurable effects of this mechanical stimulus to train travel:

The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at an age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensation of movement.48

Freud contends that any physical stimulus to the body releases a quota of energy and this release of (libidinal) energy is felt as pleasurable. He instances the rocking of a child in order to put it to sleep. Duchamp wrote enigmatically of the period immediately preceding the First World War: ‘The machine, motion and eros were things which touched me in a poetic way. They were in the air and I felt I could use them for my art.’

Anastasi is well aware that his drawing could be seen as a displacement of a forbidden act. He says as much when he explains that he began making the Subway Drawings instead of the Pocket Drawingsbecause he was concerned about what fellow passengers might think he was doing with his hands in his pockets. The drawing is done on a sheet of paper that rests directly on the artist’s lap. For a near equivalent, one must look to surrealism’s disreputable left field, to the sole example of what Salvador Dalí dubbed ‘espasmo-graphisme’. An inscription on the etching, purpose-made as a frontispiece to a collection of poems by Georges Hugnet titled Onan (1934), forthrightly confesses: ‘“ESPASMO-GRAPHISME” OBTAINED WITH THE LEFT HAND WHILE MASTURBATING WITH THE RIGHT HAND UNTIL BLOODUNTIL BONE UNTIL SCAR!’ The image harks back stylistically to some tentative experiments by Dalí with an automatic technique in the late 1920s, quickly abandoned as he evolved his more characteristic illusionism. The jagged, staccato rhythms of the compulsively repeated doodles mime the action believed to have been carried out with the artist’s other hand. There is a crucial distinction to be drawn between illustrating the act of masturbation, which Dalí plainly was not reluctant to do, and producing a non-representational, so to speak, automatic trace of the activity, as he does here. Using his left hand to engrave the plate – Dalí was right-handed – eliminates at one stroke any semblance of manual skill or virtuosity. One is reminded that for Freud the solitary vice of masturbation was a frequent cause of neurosis. If this opinion, oddly indebted to Victorian prudery, is accepted for a moment, then Dalí chooses the shortest possible route between the supposed forbidden activity and its unfettered, automatic expression.49 But in doing so, it seems that he short-circuits the whole Freudian apparatus of the unconscious and repression. An area of staining across the centre of the sheet raises other questions for the inquisitive critic: does it merely simulate what it purports to be, or is it the forensic evidence one is searching for, the veridical trace that authenticates the automatic message? Granted, the work is parodic in intent, tossed off in a matter of minutes, but it is nonetheless a wry, amusing commentary on the discourse and practice of surrealist automatism.

Rebecca Horn Pencil Mask 1972 Tate © DACS, 2018

Finally, Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask 1972 (fig.10) is a sort of mechanical prosthesis that transforms the artist into a drawing machine. It is a sinister and disturbing piece, more autistic than artistic. Horn describes its operation thus: ‘All the pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions … I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of the white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’50Strapped around her face, the harness turns the wearer into a blind automatic drawing instrument. There is not space here to do justice to this arresting work, nor to tease out its relation, on the one hand, to her robotic painting machines or the pseudo-expressivity of her later Artaud-like drawings.51 The key point, however, is the way it encircles the artist’s head, interposing a physical barrier between the artist and the sheet of paper. The ‘unconscious’ is simply bracketed off from whatever is going on. Horn and the other contemporary artists discussed here point to ways of understanding surrealist automatism beyond the impasses of the assumption that such works are, or ever were, the expression of such a thing.

Source

[monetstudy]

As we’re in the middle of summer and a lot of us have time to read, I thought it would be great to list all the great french books I know and I’ve read if you want to practice french or read french books!! (or just if you don’t have books to read now) note : the list is faaar from being complete !

POETRY

Apollinaire - Alcools, Calligrammes André Breton & Philippe Soupault - The Magnetic Fields Charles Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal), Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris) Paul Éluard - Capitale de la Douleur, Les Mains Libres Paul Verlaine - Poèmes Saturniens, Romances Sans Paroles Arthur Rimbaud - Illuminations Victor Hugo - The Contemplations Stéphane Mallarmé - Poésies Comte de Lautréamont - The Lay of Maldoror Louise Labé - Poésies Pierre de Ronsard - Les Odes Marceline Desbordes-Valmore - Elegies et romances Alphonse de Lamartine - The Meditations

NOVELS

Albert Camus - The Stranger, The Plague, The First Man Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea, The Words Annie Ernaux - The Years, The Possession, Shame, Happening, A Woman’s Story Stendhal - The Red and the Black Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Les Misérables Madame de La Fayette - La Princesse de Clèves Madeleine de Scudéry - Clélie Honoré de Balzac - The Unknown Masterpiece, Old Goriot Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education George Sand - Story of my Life Alfred de Musset - The Confession of a Child from the Century Laurent Binet - HHhH, The Seventh Function of Language Jean Teulé - The Suicide Shop, Eat Him if You Like, Monsieur Montespan, Charly 9 Voltaire - Zadig, Candide Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain, The Knight of the Lion + Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart Marguerite Duras - The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Night Flight, The Little Prince, The Wisdom of the Sands Jean de la Fontaine - The Fables Émile Zola - The Beast Within Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time André Gide - The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, The Vatican Cellars, The Pastoral Symphony François-René de Chateaubriand - René, Atala, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave Aragon - Aurélien Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Reveries of a Solitary Walker

PLAYS

Albert Camus - Caligula, The Just Assassins Jean-Paul Sartre - No Exit, The Flies, The Chips Are Down Bernard-Marie Koltès - Return to the Desert, The Night Just Before the Forests Jean-Luc Lagarce - It’s Only the End of the World Alfred de Musset - Lorenzaccio Jean Giraudoux - The Trojan War will not take place, Amphytrion 38, Ondine Eugène Ionesco - The Lesson, The Bald Soprano, Exit the King, Rhinoceros Voltaire - Zaïre Pierre de Corneille - La Place Royale, Le Cid, L’Illusion Comique Jean Racine - Bérénice, Phèdre Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

[aamjp]

Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language

Bibliography

Roland Barthes

A Lover's Discourse > "a bible for the under-twenty-fives" (3) 

Writing Degree Zero (3)

Mythologies "decodes the contemporary myths erected by the middle class to their own glory" (4)

Camera Lucida (37)* Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics > "a science that studies the life of signs within society" (5)

Raymond Picard, New Criticism or New Fraud, René Pommier, Enough Decoding, Rambaud and Burneir. _Roland-Barthes Made Easy _(20) > Are these even real?

François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (36)

Roman Jakobson, Essays in General Linguistics (38, 105) > brief explanation of the functions of language on pages 105-8

Ovid, Metamorphoses (41)

Bernard-Henri Levy, _Barbarism with a Human Face _(48)

François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (72)

Plato, Phaedo (148)

Jean Baudrillard, The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence (214)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (215)

Georges Mounin, Have You Read René Char, Marie-Henri Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare, Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn, Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel,_ _Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano, John Milton, Paradise Lost, François Rabelais _Gargantua and Pantagruel _(216)

François de Sales, Introduction to the Pious Life (226)

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (227)

Umberto Eco, Lecture in Fabula (233)

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (239)

Jacques Derrida

Of Grammatology (243) > "We don't need Derrida, we have Jimi Hendrix!" (245)

Cogito and the History of Madness, in which it's suggested that Foucault misunderstood Descartes (250) * Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (248)

Roger Vitrac, Connaissance de la Mort; Única Zurn, Dark Spring; Desnos, La Papesse du Diable (264) 

James Bond

the number 7 is "traditionally one of the most elegant numbers, a magical number charged with history and symbolism; but in this case, it complies with two criteria: it is an odd number, of course, like the number of roses we give to a woman, and prime [...] in order to express a singularity, a uniqueness, an individuality that confounds the whole expression of interchangeability suggested by an identification number." (27)

"Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary..." (28)

Cervantes

"among them [in the battle of Lepanto] the son of a debt-ridden dentist also here to see glory, as well as riches, a Castilian hidalgo, an adventurer, a penniless sword-wielding nobleman: the young Miguel de Cervantes." (302, chap. 84)

is shot in the chest and the left hand and "from now on will be known as the 'one-armed man of Lepanto' and some will mock his handicap. Incensed and wounded in body and soul, he will make this clarification in his preface to the second volume of Don Quixote: 'As if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see.'" (318) 

tomb of Sebastiano Venier, hero of the battle of Lepanto (312) 

Twombly, Lepanto series

Other

Plato's allegory of the cave "in reverse" (4)

Umberto Eco, "the wise man of Bologna" > "the wheel, the spoon, the book...perfect tools, unimprovable in their effectiveness" (6)

Eric Buyssens defines semiology as "the study of communication processes; in other words, means used to influence others and recognised as such by the others in question" (9)

"signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues." (10)

"Don't forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word's meaning never runs dry. And the same's true even for a letter, you see." (29)

"Always to love, to suffer, to expire", Corneille (72)

"After all, it's all a question of method, and I know how to proceed: interrogate the witnesses, corroborate [etc.], confront these partial memories with the reality of history. And then, if need be... You know what I mean. There is more to be done with that day. 25 February has not yet told us everything. That's the virtue of a novel: it's never too late." (149-50)

Re: Derrida’s criticism of Austin and Searle, pages 271-275, chap. 75 > seems relevant to me.

Typing error on page 355 

[tadorsa]

Genève, parc des Eaux-vives.
Centenaire de l'école Privat, 6 mai 1914.

Sont représentés: Paul Appia, André d'Arbigny, Abraham Aubert, Georges Audéoud, Edouard Audéoud, Jean Audéoud, Charles d'Auriol, Jean Bader, Edmond Barbey, Charles Barde, Edmond Barde, Edouard Barde, Monsieur Andreae, Maurice Battelli, André Boissier, Fernand Boissier, Jacques de Beaumont, Maurice Bedot, Gustave Boissier, Antoinette Boissonnas, Edmond Berchet, Bonna, Jean Billon, Edmond Binet, Edmond Bordier, Edouard Bordier, Guillaume Bordier, Jacques Bordier, Pierre Bordier, Jacques Borel, Marcel Bory, Louis Blondel, Raymond Burnat, Henri Chauvet, Jacques Chauvet, Casimir de Candolle, Chenevière, Jean-Louis Cayla, du pasteur Charles Cellérier, Fernand Chenevière, Albert Choisy, Eugène Choisy, Jean Choisy, Edouard Chapuisat, A. de Couries, Alec Cramer, Auguste Cramer, Marc Cramer, F. Delarue, Deriaz, Georges Dériaz, Fernand Dominicé, Frédéric Dominicé, Max Dominicé, Albert Du bois, Georges Duchêne, Dunant, Adolphe Dunant, Marcel Dubois, André Fatio, Pierre Favre, William Favre, Guy Durant, Maurice Duval, Raymond Duval, Ferrier, Henri d'Espine, Maurice d'Espine, Pierre Forget, Charles Freundler, André Firmenich, Frantz Fulpius, Furchsy, jean Gallopin, Raymond Gallopin, Eugène Gaulis, Louis Goudet, Jean Hilaire, John Gignoux, Jean de Haller, Siegfried Horneffer, Amé Pictet, Aymon Pictet, Charles Pictet, Walter Jeheber, Jules Johannot, Fernand Jordan, Michel Julliard, Jean Lander, L'Hardy, Jean Lullin, Edouard Lemke, Jean Lombard, Pierre Lombard, Gérard de Loriol, Ed. de Marignac, Ernest de Marignac, André Martin, Eric Martin, Léon Martin de Gustave Martin, Charles du Pan, Maunoir, Albert Maunoir, Henri Maunoir, Jacques Maunoir, John Maunoir, Jean-Louis Micheli, Alfred Mercier, Raoul? Montandon, Frédéric de Morsier, Gaston de Morsier, Georges de Morsier, Mottu, Gab. van Muyden, Ernest Muret, Harold Necker, du colonel Odier, Edmond Odier, Henry Odier, Jean Olivier, André Patry, Eugène Patry, Georges Patry, Henry Patry, Michel Patry, Raymond Patry, Roger Perrot, Philippe Privat, René Privat, Willy Privat, Roch, Maurice Roch, Alfred Privat, Edmond Privat, Emile Privat, Madame Emile Privat, née Luscher, Gaston Privat, Camille Rochette, Henri Reverdin, Isaac Reverdin, Horace Revilliod, Jean de Saussure, Arthur Sautter, Jean Sautter, Henri Sarasin, Paul-Emile Schazmann, Auguste Rilliet, Emile Thomas, Paul Tournier, Rivier, Raymond Rivier, Jean Trembley, Vallette, Arnold Vallette, Edmond Turrettini, René Turrettini, Veillon, Verdier, Vernet, Albert Vernet et de Westerweller. Photo: François Frédéric dit Fred Boissonnas

[78682homes]

Quelle filiation pour la PMA ? 78682 homes

http://www.78682homes.com/quelle-filiation-pour-la-pma%e2%80%89

Quelle filiation pour la PMA ?

La bioéthique en débat (3/5). À l’occasion de la révision des lois de bioéthique, La Croix organise le débat entre des personnalités engagées. Aujourd’hui, entretien entre Jean-René Binet, professeur de droit privé à l’Université de Rennes 1, et Daniel Borrillo, maître de conférences à Paris 10 et chercheur associé au CERSA/CNRS.

homms2013

#Informationsanté

[reseau-actu]

Insémination artisanale, escroquerie à la gestation pour autrui, coup de théâtre judiciaire… Deux couples se livrent à une bataille féroce devant les tribunaux pour être reconnus comme parents d'un enfant né d'une mère porteuse en France. Récit d'un jugement de Salomon moderne.

C'est l'histoire d'un enfant qui pourrait avoir cinq parents. L'histoire rocambolesque d'une mère porteuse qui a vendu son bébé à un couple avant de le confier à un autre. Depuis 2013, ces deux couples se disputent le petit garçon aujourd'hui âgé de 5 ans, né à la suite de cette gestation pour autrui. Une pratique illicite en France. Le «scénario», improbable, aurait pu inspirer un de ces romans-feuilletons du XIXe siècle, peuplés de bâtards cachés à la naissance et dont la filiation mystérieuse se révèle au fil de l'intrigue. Devant les tribunaux, c'est un nouveau jugement de Salomon qui se joue. Mais la parabole biblique a été réécrite au masculin. Car la question est de savoir qui, de l'homme qui élève l'enfant ou de son géniteur, doit être reconnu comme le père?

À l'origine de cette affaire, une petite annonce postée sur Internet en 2012. Celle de «Petite Cigogne», une habitante de Loir-et-Cher, déjà mère de quatre enfants, qui propose de porter un enfant pour autrui. Elle est contactée sur le forum par un couple homosexuel toulousain, Alexandre Lerch et son compagnon. Contre 15.000 euros, Petite Cigogne accepte de réaliser une insémination artisanale avec le sperme d'Alexandre. Elle est enceinte. Contacts réguliers, suivi des échographies… Les deux hommes tissent des liens avec la mère porteuse et veillent attentivement sur sa grossesse. Mais peu avant le moment tant attendu de la naissance, cette dernière cesse de donner des nouvelles. Elle rappelle finalement le couple pour lui expliquer que le bébé est mort-né.

«La mère m'appelait tous les jours. Elle disait à quel point le bébé me ressemblait à la naissance»

En fait, Petite Cigogne a confié le nourrisson à un autre couple, également contacté sur la Toile, M. et Mme R. Ce couple stérile de Seine-Maritime s'est vu refuser un agrément pour l'adoption. Se gardant bien de leur dévoiler toute l'histoire, la mère leur raconte qu'elle veut abandonner le nouvel enfant qu'elle porte car son mari est atteint d'une maladie grave. À eux aussi, elle réclame une somme de 15.000 euros en échange du bébé. En mars 2013, peu après l'accouchement à la clinique de Blois et un dernier versement effectué sur le parking d'un supermarché, le couple rentre chez lui avec le nouveau-né. Une «indemnisation», selon Me Nathalie Boudjerada, l'avocate de M. et Mme R., qui conteste par ailleurs l'exactitude du montant.

Arnaques en série

De son côté, Alexandre Lerch, commence à douter. «La mère m'appelait tous les jours. Elle disait à quel point le bébé me ressemblait à la naissance. Elle parlait de la crémation, nous disait qu'elle allait nous envoyer le certificat de décès… J'ai fini par apprendre par la clinique qu'il n'était pas mort étranglé par le cordon ombilical, comme elle a tenté de ne nous le faire croire. J'ai déposé plainte. Elle m'a dit: “Si tu me fais tomber, je vous fais tous tomber.” Mais je voulais avant tout voir mon fils, savoir avec qui il était», confie-t-il.

«J'ai mis un prix sur moi, sur les risques que je prenais pendant la grossesse. J'ai mis un prix sur mon ventre»

Au pénal, l'affaire se corse. Petite Cigogne n'en est pas à son premier abandon d'enfant, ni à sa première «arnaque». Cette femme dont l'enfance a été marquée «par de la maltraitance et des agressions sexuelles», rappelle le tribunal correctionnel de Blois, a déjà confié en 2008 un nouveau-né qu'elle ne voulait pas élever à un couple parisien. Sans recevoir de contreparties financières. Bien que très douloureux, ce «don» l'amène à considérer autrement ses grossesses. En 2010, elle effectue deux tentatives d'implants d'embryons en Grande-Bretagne pour un couple stérile. Sans succès. Une nouvelle expérience éprouvante. Puis en 2011, une première fois, elle propose à un couple homosexuel de faire un enfant pour eux avant de le «revendre» à un autre couple. «À aucun moment je n'ai mis un prix sur un bébé. Un bébé a une valeur inestimable. Mais j'ai mis un prix sur moi, sur les risques que je prenais pendant la grossesse. J'ai mis un prix sur mon ventre», a-t-elle témoigné dans une émission diffusée en 2017 sur France Culture.

» LIRE AUSSI - Les incroyables clauses des contrats de mères porteuses

En 2016, le tribunal correctionnel de Blois la condamne pour «escroquerie» à un an de prison avec sursis. Les couples «commanditaires» écopent pour leur part de 2000 euros d'amende avec sursis pour «provocation à l'abandon d'enfant né ou à naître». Un jugement qualifié d'indigne par Me Adeline Le Gouvello, avocate de l'association Juristes pour l'enfance, qui s'est portée partie civile. «Celle qui a été le plus lourdement condamnée, c'est finalement la mère, car elle a trompé les “acheteurs”. Et elle a été condamnée pour escroquerie, une atteinte aux biens, alors qu'il s'agit d'un enfant et que la gestation pour autrui est une pratique illicite. C'est comme si un drogué se retournait contre son dealer devant la justice parce qu'il s'est fait avoir!, s'insurge l'avocate. Cette affaire est vraiment emblématique de la gestation pour autrui, car elle montre bien comment cette pratique exploite la misère humaine et porte atteinte aux droits des enfants.»

Au civil, c'est l'inextricable question de la filiation et de la garde de l'enfant qu'il a fallu trancher. Les deux couples se livrent à une bataille féroce. M. et Mme R. mettent en cause les activités de «charlatans» d'Alexandre Lerch et de son compagnon, voyant et magnétiseur. Ils produisent également l'expertise d'un psychiatre qui indique que le petit garçon, alors âgé de 4 ans, vivrait «comme un véritable abandon» un changement de famille. Ce dernier porte par ailleurs le nom de famille du couple, M. R. l'ayant reconnu en mairie. Alexandre Lerch fait quant à lui valoir que le couple R. s'est vu refuser un agrément d'adoption et émet des doutes sur leur faculté à élever un enfant.

«La décision, quelle qu'elle soit, sera facteur de souffrance pour cet enfant, privé dans les deux cas d'une partie de son histoire personnelle»

Faut-il maintenir la filiation actuelle du petit garçon avec le couple R. «au mépris de ses origines» ou «voir établie sa filiation biologique, en contradiction avec les repères parentaux qui sont les siens depuis sa naissance?», interroge le tribunal de grande instance de Dieppe. «La décision, quelle qu'elle soit, sera facteur de souffrance pour cet enfant, privé dans les deux cas d'une partie de son histoire personnelle, par l'effet dévastateur des actes illicites de ceux qui se réclament aujourd'hui de son bonheur et de son éducation», souligne le jugement. In fine, en mars 2017, le TGI de Dieppe donne raison à Alexandre Lerch.

Sa paternité doit être reconnue, l'autorité parentale lui revient. «Il n'est pas envisageable de les priver lui et son fils d'une vie commune», indique le jugement qui prévoit «un transfert de résidence progressif» de l'enfant chez son géniteur. Mais le couple R. fait appel et l'enfant reste chez eux alors que la procédure se poursuit jusqu'à un spectaculaire retournement de situation. Le 31 mai dernier, la cour d'appel de Rouen, selon un arrêt révélé par Le Parisien, juge irrecevable la demande d'établissement de la paternité d'Alexandre Lerch. La «vérité biologique» ne permet pas de passer au-dessus de la loi si des principes fondamentaux «comme celui de la prohibition de la marchandisation de la procréation et de la filiation» ont été transgressés, indique l'arrêt que Le Figaro a pu consulter. Au nom de «l'intérêt de l'enfant», les époux R., malgré une «fraude à la loi sur l'adoption» conservent la garde du petit garçon qu'ils élèvent «depuis sa naissance dans d'apparentes excellentes conditions».

«C'est mon fils quoi qu'il arrive»

«On voit bien que les problèmes soulevés par la GPA sont difficilement solubles et que l'enfant risque d'être ballotté au gré du bricolage juridique et filiatif des parties»

Alexandre Lerch, jusqu'à présent, n'a jamais vu son fils autrement que sur une photo glissée dans le dossier de la procédure. Aujourd'hui, il veut continuer à se «battre pour lui». «C'est mon fils quoi qu'il arrive. Je l'aime. J'ai le droit de le connaître et il a le droit d'avoir accès à ses origines», affirme-t-il. Avant la fin du mois de juillet, il formera un pourvoi en cassation. «J'espère être reconnu en tant que père. Que feriez-vous à ma place si on vous enlevait votre enfant? De plus, la filiation avec le père biologique est reconnue en France quand la GPA a eu lieu à l'étranger», lance-t-il. Le couple R., lui, ne répond pas aux sollicitations des médias «pour préserver leur enfant», indique son avocate, Me Boudjerada.

» LIRE AUSSI - «La GPA consacre l'inégalité entre les êtres humains»

Quelle leçon tirer de cette sordide affaire? Pour Me Caroline Mécary, avocate qui a défendu de nombreux dossiers de GPA, elle montre la nécessité de légiférer. «En dehors de tout cadre légal, on arrive à des situations tragiques pour tous les protagonistes, et en premier lieu pour l'enfant, déplore-t-elle. C'est pour cela qu'il faut légaliser la GPA en France selon nos valeurs et selon des critères qui peuvent être éthiques.» À l'inverse, ce drame «illustre parfaitement ce qu'est la GPA», relève Jean-René Binet, professeur de droit civil à l'université de Rennes et spécialiste du droit de la bioéthique.

«Toutes les situations de GPA ne sont pas identiques, mais elles soulèvent ce genre de conflits. C'est notamment le cas quand la mère porteuse ne veut plus donner l'enfant à la naissance. On voit bien que les problèmes soulevés par la GPA sont difficilement solubles et que l'enfant risque d'être ballotté au gré du bricolage juridique et filiatif des parties.» Cette pratique, quelles que soient les conditions dans lesquelles elle est effectuée, «met toujours en danger toutes les parties prenantes», renchérit Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, membre du Collectif pour le respect de la personne (CoRP). «Si la pratique est réglementée, les risques augmenteront de façon exponentielle. On ne pourra jamais dire que c'est un geste altruiste car la mère porteuse espère toujours une récompense, qu'elle soit financière ou morale. Et cette pratique ne pourra jamais être éthique car elle ne prend pas en compte l'intérêt supérieur de l'être à naître.»