I’m not sure I quite understand Serge Leclair’s dense but beautiful book A Child is Being Killed, and I’m not sure I want to. It fascinates me because it remains out of reach, and this is why, perhaps, I have begun to write about it several times without ever satisfying myself I have anything to say about it nor even the means to say it. I remain hesitant about treating a text that answers to the experience of psychoanalysis as I would a theoretical work since I lack this experience. Nevertheless, reflecting on Leclair’s work will allow me to return to the theme of childhood.
Leclair focuses on what he calls “primary narcissistic representation” as it is incarnated in the infans. In the later Freud, primary narcissism structures the first stage of life, preceding the formation and consolidation of the ego. As such, it is once again the “subject” of an experience to which the child cannot oppose itself or overcome since it is undifferentiated or “objectless.” In Leclair, the child becomes the primary narcissistic representation who must be killed not just once but over and again if there is to be the lack of an object required for desire and speech.
Leclair draws on Freud’s “On Narcissism,” agreeing with Freud that the affectionate parent lavishes the attention on their child that they would themselves have liked to receive. In this way, they feed the primary narcissism of the child with their own primary narcissism. The ascription of perfection to the child, the dream that he or she will enjoy a happier and more fulfilled life than his or her parents, that he or she will resist illness, death, suffering and restrictions on his or her will repeats and re-enacts the primary narcissism of the parent who, all along, wanted to be “the center and core of creation”. Freud invokes “His Majesty the Baby” – the image of ourselves that the parent bears as the narcissistic object of their parental love.
Drawing on Freud’s analyses, Leclair underlines the importance of the primal phantasy “a child is being killed” as the attempt to overcome this self-sufficient tyrannical child who is unable to speak and desire insofar as he is without lack. Leclair makes the programmatic claim that psychoanalytic practice must aim at exposing the ongoing labor on the part of the subject to “kill” this wonderful child whom, as he writes, “from generation to generation, bears witness to parents’ dreams and desires”. The psychoanalyst must understand that “there can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone’s birth is inscribed”.
In a phrase that draws Blanchot’s attention, Leclair invokes the “impossible but necessary murder” that permits life to refer to the putting to death of the returning “wonderful child”. The primal phantasy to which Leclair refers echoes Blanchot’s own account of the companion who comes forward in us to experience what cannot be endured in the first person. It recalls the passages on Levinas where Blanchot writes of the “unbearable,” referring to a pre-originary affection – a receptivity to the Other that occurs before the organization of the subject.*
In his fragments on Leclair in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot refers to the infans as a “silent passive,” a “dead eternity” from which we can only separate ourselves by “murdering” it. This murder, Blanchot notes, liberates our desire and our speech: it is also the condition of the capacity to murder. In this sense, the infans is, he writes, a companion “but of no one”; the one who we seek to particularize as an absence that we might live upon his banishment, desire with a desire he has not, and speak through and against the word he does not utter – nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed)” (71-72).
It appears that Blanchot concurs with Leclair: in one sense, the child is being killed; the experience of absence annihilates the child by turning upon him a capacity to negate that grants him an apparent freedom. But Blanchot concurs because he allows the child to stand in for the companion and the murder of the child to figure the movement from the first to the third person. The child becomes a name for an asymmetrical and non-reappropriable reserve harbored by the “I” which suspends the possibility of its ever achieving self-presence, of a stable being-there in the first person.
The return of the child is the return of “il” in the place of the “I” as the bearer of the experience in question. Yes, the “I” will regain the power that is proper to it, but in the instant to which Blanchot refers, there is no “I” there to detach itself from the experience who could recollect it or who could synthesize it into a sequence of other instants.
In this sense, Blanchot reads Leclair just as he reads Freud: he points to an alteration – a primary event that is the repetition of a “first time” without anchorage in what is properly individual about our histories, any of us, each of us. A child is being killed: what returns, for Blanchot, is not a tyrannical child but the “il” that disperses or disarranges the power of the “I” – the neuter as refusal. But the attributive function of this phrase, the reference it makes to being, to the positing of the “is,” is itself suspended. The “murder” that the “I” seeks is a murder of the companion, the “il” that would refuse to allow itself to become negated and to be particularized in this negation. This refusal prevents the “is” of the phrase fixing an event in place and time, of assigning a discreet point, a single experience to the origin. The origin is originarily repeated in an experience that undoes the self that is unified under the sign of the “I.”
What is important for Blanchot in his reading is the role Leclair allows the phrase “a child is being killed” to assume, repeating it until its strangeness becomes apparent, until it resonates outside a psychoanalytic context, rejoining his meditation on language. The figure of the child bears no absolute privilege in Blanchot’s writings; in happily acceding their places to the “il,” the children in the fragment are a figure for the words like witnessing in which Blanchot opens a dissension. This is what Blanchot does with words like "work,” “death, “inspiration,” “fascination,” “the "night,” “insomnia,” “vigilance,” “communism,” “community,” “the companion,” “friendship,” in order to name whilst declaring the inadequacy of that and any other act of naming, thereby indicating a heterogeneity borne by the conventional meaning of the name in question. Thus the “other” work is not binary opposite of work, just as the “other” friendship is not enmity. To use formulations of the kind, “a communism without communism,” the “other” night, “daytime insomniac,” etc. is simply to make each word the locus of an impersonal naming.
In this sense, the word neuter, like the figure of the child, has no absolute value in Blanchot’s work; it is a placemarker, the empty, infinite strangeness of the “il” as it resists the attributive function of language, the spacing that unfolds and refolds in speech. The neuter indicates the enigma of nomination, uprooting ostension in the repetition, the flux and reflux of a speech that is the faltering of language, of speech, of reason. It yields its place to the “il”, the "he" or the "it" that hollows out an infinite gap in language whilst remaining empty, rendering intercalary any word that would fill in this initial caesura. The phrase to which Blanchot points in his reading of Leclair is a sign less of the respiration of language than its asphyxiation, less what Levinas might call Saying than smothering, less the wisdom of love of Otherwise Than Being than the madness of a foreword that unravels every word in advance.
Leclair’s child becomes for Blanchot the word that speaks the neuter, the “il” whose interminable repetition says over and again the displacement of the speaking “I.” Perhaps this is what speech would mean in Blanchot – it is not the response to Autrui that Levinas calls Saying, but a response to the impersonal other, to l’autre as it is incarnated in the experience of the excess of language over the power of the speaker, in the void that absents itself in the “I” such that an impersonal language, the rustling and murmuring of a language without a subject, can reverberate in its place.
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