Jacques LACAN (1901-1981). Autograph manuscript, Ποιησις Poé - Lot 188

Jacques LACAN (1901-1981). Autograph manuscript, Ποιησις Poésie Psychiatrie, [ca. 1958]; 18pages in-4. Draft, with erasures and corrections, of a fascinating reflection on poetry, which appears to be unpublished, but some elements of which can be found in the seminar Le désir et son interprétation (1958-1959). Here are just a few extracts. "We make the mentally ill out of language. We classify him. [...] To confuse an eminent activity with a field of collapse - poetry and psychiatry - you have to start from a certain historical background - there seems to be a tradition that goes back a long way [...] The idea of inspired delirium is the common denominator. [...] No disorder is in itself creative. [...] Poets curse. [...] Poetry, creation. Psychiatry, the production of psychopathological m. [maladies]. [...] It's ridiculous to attribute an Oedipus complex to "Hamlet", the protagonist of Hamlet. Does the author have one? It depends. Is it possible to have an Oedipus complex before Freud discovered it? It's not an "idealistic" question. There was plutonium before it was discovered. [...] It's clear that radioactive irradiation wasn't recorded before there were Geiger machines. There are the real effects of the Oedipus complex, which are only counted as such under the conditions of psychoanalysis. [...] Poetry makes the poet - it makes him - he is made. Certainly not. The fact of making poetry. A carpenter makes a ship. That is to be poet. That is to be poet. [...] As far as poetry is concerned, we'll start from the fact that the Greeks in the Ποιησις recognized the creation to which they felt proper, without privileging it over all that there can be, Ποιουμενα, of things made by the operation of language. They don't seem to have been any more anxious than they should have been to specify why of these things made, the highest to reveal the power of language was the one where language was the object of first care. [...] But here it must be remembered that the philosophers whose grip only fell from the corner that Socrates put on it, expressed themselves in poems. Judge for yourself what remains in the great fragment of Parmenides. Socrates' corner, what he knows, is nothing other than his desire; he proclaims himself to know nothing else, and this desire is alienated, since it is his voices (or his demon, as you will) that command it. [...] In contrast to the poetry of Hesiod's thought of destiny, it was a psychiatric issue that inspired the detour from which we now find ourselves questioning the poetry of our science. This psychiatric incidence has been translated more by guessing than by reading, by recourse to the foolish idea of decadence. Freud himself has given in to this fatality, wanting to distance the drama of Hamlet from Oedipus, which he describes as a "repressed fold". It's a false step. [...] For we must not be led astray by the image of the cursed poet. Poets curse, that's nothing new. See Dante"... Etc. And he concludes: "That's why you can't stick to Hölderlin without remaining, when you miss it, a dried fruit - even with the anguish of having shown that you already were. And our dear Ella Sharpe, whose single dream case interpreted by her kept us busy for over two months, seems to us to have withered away simply by having tried to reduce the work that inspired her to the alternating phasing of a cyclothymia."