- Daisy : “ A new litigation is really one proof more of the evanescence of nature. We learn through Rick Weiss, from the Whashington Post, that the Agribusiness giant Monsanto Co is sueing a certain number of farmers in central Canada that want to keep re-using the seeds of canola without paying the firm every year its percentage. From the farmer's point of view : “ As farmers have done for thousands of years, he has saved some seeds from each year's harvest to replant his fields the following season. ” From the Monsanto point of view “ the company must strictly enforce the "no replant" policy to recoup the millions of dollars spent developing the seeds and to continue providing even better ones ”. To be sure that farmers don't re-use their genetically transformed seed, not only Monsanto sends private investigators into farmer's fields, but “ sponsors a toll-free "tip line" to help farmers blow the whistle on their neighbors and has placed radio ads broadcasting the names of noncompliant growers caught planting the company's genes ”. ”

- Dick : “ Not only Nature has vanished but it has been brutally privatized, that's the new development “ Until about a decade ago,crop and seed development in the US and abroad was mostly a government business ... Under the system, patents were infrequently pursued and rarely enforced. That began to change in the 1980's when Congress adopted legislation that encouraged federal agencies to cooperate more closely with the private sector ... Today, a handful of American and European agricultural companies control a major portion of the world's certified food seed supply ”. ”

- Daisy : “ How will we call this effect ? What sphere is this, surely not the "aletosphere" ! Could it be the "geneasphere" ? Solon would be surprised of this distribution of the world according to gene. ”

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- Daisy : “ The law is now dragged everywhere on the political ground. Wether it be in the US with the Clinton trial, in France with the political trial about the decisions concerning blood products and trhoughout Europe with the legal approach to youth exactions. ”

- Dick : “ About the American contribution to the new configuration of the Law within our Culture, we find an interesting contribution of Kenneth Anderson, law professor, in january 29's TLS. Under the name of "prosecutorial state", he considers that the US are producing “ innumerable, largely unfathomable laws, laws that are distinguished by being simoultaneously vague, standardless and yet hyper-technical ”. By these characteristics, they leave the interpretation of the law not so much in the hands of the judges that could limit the scope of investigations, but in the hands of prosecutors and lawyers. The sexual harrasment law that allowed the whole thing to start is just one of these laws that “ allows private litigants as well as prosecutors virtually unlimited licence not just to go prowling through the lives of the people involved in a court case, but also to investigate third parties ... the civil liberties of a potential criminal defendant are no longer secured by the constitution or by a judge, but merely by the unaccountable conscience of the prosecutor. This is so in a system dominated by the prosecutor's control of plea bargains, vague laws which will always allow indictments for something ... Starr, in this ligh, is not an aberration who has gone outside the system, but the faithful representative of a judicial system gone mad ”. ”

- Daisy : “ This critique is made from a rather conservative point of view, but the liberals who advocated for such vague laws as the sexual harrassment one turned out to be, will have to think it over. The criminalization of symptoms is not an easy way out, whatever the good will. ”

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- Daisy : “ Did you read ? Monica Lewinsky managed to make the austere Senate laugh. She made a joke and it worked. The best report on her testimony was made by the Whasington Post. We have an echo of it in Brian Knowlton's IHT column. “ Ms Lewinsky, 25, maintained her composure throughout the session Monday and was in clear command of details, to the point where she sometimes corrected her questionner, Representative Bryant ... Several people in attendance were struck with her now-honed skills as a witness ... Ms Lewinsky's lawyers objected several times to Mr Bryant's questions, sources said. Once when he appeared to be asking about details of her sexual encounters with the president, her lawyers cried foul. And repeatdely they complained that he was asking two or more questions at once. ”

- Dick : “ Where is the joke ? ”

- Daisy : “ Don't be in such a hurry ! Here it comes ! “ After several such clashes, Mr Bryant himself took back a question "See ? I'm making my own objections." ... "Sustained !" Ms Lewinsky called out, prompting laughter. ” ”

- Dick : “ In such atmosphere, that's a good one ! It's a nice Freudian laugh, they are with her ! ”

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- Daisy : “ In "Ornicar ? digital" nˇ 74 we commented upon the report about the consequences of the use of a word of scandinavian roots "niggardly" in a racially tense context. The homophony with "niggerly" provoked the resignation of an appointee of the Mayor of Whashington Office. Now, things have got a new twist. Melinda Hennenberger, from the "New York Times" tells us in saturday's, January 30 IHT. “ Now the incident has captured national attention, divided some black leaders, incensed conservatives and outraged the gay community, where there is feeling that the Mayor should have given the appointee, his first openly gay appointee, a minute to explain before sending him on his way ... In a letter to the mayor, 22 local gay activists furious on his behalf wrote "The facts have to count. If we fail to distinguish between decent people and bigoted people we send a poisonous message to the people in this city" ”. ”

- Dick : “ Is shows how difficult it is to define a simple context of interpretation for a message. We not only have significations fighting against one another, but also contexts and communities. It rather advocates for the “ stratification of the Other ”, as Jacques-Alain Miller's called the phenomena. ”

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- Daisy : “ The letters are now published. ”

- Dick : “ Which one ? ”

- Daisy : “ The letters between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Hermann Heidegger, son and editor chose to release them before the originally intended deadline in next century. George Steiner reviews them in the january 29 issue of the TLS. We knew since Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's biography “ Hannah Arendt : For love of the world ” that the period of the most intense love coincided with the genesis of “ Sein und Zeit ”( 1924/25). We see precisely now how the love atmosphere was drowned in Augustine's commentary by Heidegger. In these love letters, “ Heidegger's love of Hannah, his unconcealed hunger, are interwoven with articulations and allusions seminal to the work in progress "Amo heisst volo, ut sis, sagt einmal Augustinus" ... Heidegger's commentary on Augustine's words will appear in the forthcoming Volume Eighty one of the Collected Works. The tautology "I love/it is my will" will have its explication in the Nietzche-seminars of the early 1940s ... It was very likely this exegesis and commandment of love which directed Arendt to her choice of a thesis topic. When “ Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin ” was republished, its close intertextual connections with Hannah's liaison with Martin became undeniable ”. ”

- Dick : “ What Steiner does not underline is that we can see the difference in man and woman's love life. He points out the phallic signifiance this liaison had for Heidegger. From Hannah's point of view, we see how the shadow of the dead father looms tall. She chose to conclude on April 22, 1928 “ with a quotation from Elizabeth Barett Browning's "Sonnets from the portuguese" in Rilke's translation “ and, if God choose/I shall but love thee better after death ”. ”

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- Daisy : " If we turn to the formalized languages of science we find a problem to adjust the unique code-naming that is needed to ordinary language. "The Economist", december 19th, has an interesting piece about this. " No matter how meticulous and logical they are in their methods for making discoveries, scientists can be surprisingly whimsical when it comes to naming them. In fields from astronomy to zoology, names have as much to do with scoring political points, maintaining arcane traditions, settling scores, and making bad jokes as they do with labelling things in an unambiguous manner, which is supposedly their purpose. " "

- Dick : " In chemistry, the nomenclature committee of the international Union of pure and Applied Chemistry wrangles in political battles over priority of discoveries. Compromises have to be elaborated in subtle negociations. " If the problems in chemistry are political, those in astronomy tend to be historical. Pluto, for example, is historically considered a planet, even though many astronomers argue that it is really just a large asteroid. This is an example of yet another source of inconsistency in nomenclature : despite scientists' best efforts to fit things into well-defined categories, there are always exceptions and special cases. " In biology, " various schemes have been canvassed to try to clean up the mess (of the Linnean binomial system) and make life easier for those trying to merge botanical and zoological data bases ... (they have) failed to get off the ground ". "

- Daisy : " Conclusion : " The chaos of naming and the repeated rejection of more logical approaches is a reflection of the fact that scientists are scientist second and homo sapiens first. To err is human. " Let's rather say that the desire of the scientist, rejected in his science, returns in this naming through inconsistency and errancy. That's the sense in which naming is impossible. "

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- Daisy : “ In his January 28 IHT column called “ American Topics ”, Brian Knowlton brings up an interesting case of what he calls “ guilt by phonetic association ”. “ The new Whashington mayor has accepted the resignation of a staff lawyer because of complaints that he used a racial epithet. But even as he stepped down, David Howard, who is white, said that the word he used -"niggardly" - has no racial connotation. Mr Howard "didn't say anything that was in itself racist", Mayor Anthony Williams said, while adding, "Good judgment is required in executive positions". Mr Howard said that he had used the word in referring to a fund he administers. He said it means "miserly". Webster's dictionnary concurs, noting that the word is of Scandinavian origin, unlike the similar-sounding racial epithet, a word that comes from the Spanish or Portuguese for black ... The mayor, who is black, was the subject of a recent opinion article in The Whashington Post by a local man who asked whether Mayor Williams was "too white" to govern a predominatly black city. ” ”

- Dick : “ This example shows how difficult it is to separate any word of the linguistic code from the context in which it will be heard. In the conflicting issue of what will be the meaning of this added homophony, we see how the Mayor plays the function of the agency that accepts or not a slippery use of any word defined in the linguistic code within a message. “ Meaning is use ” does not avoid the begging question of this agency. That is precisely the point of Lacan's Seminar on the formations of the Unconscious, if we follow Jacques-Alain Miller's clue. ”

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- Daisy “  Let's have a joke for a change. Susan Sachs from the New York Times, tells us in yesterday's IHT about some Russian Jewish jokes that keep their sting in Brooklyn. “ Three men are on an airplane. In this joke they are a Communist, a Fascist and a Russian Jew. God tells tem he will grant each one a wish. The Communist wishes that all Fascists would disappear from the earth. The Fascist wishes the same for all Communists. The Jew says, "If you are going to grant their wishes, I'll just take a cup of coffee". ” That's a good one in its structure that tells us a lot about wishing. ”

- Dick : “ That's because it says a lot about what is the “ no thing ” when onewishes nothing. It can just occupy the place of the “ thing ”. ”

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- Daisy : “ Behind every great cause you find another one. Take for instance the Animal rights cause. As you know there are two main sources of the moral case for animal rights in Western thought. The first one can be traced back to St Thomas Aquinas as Mark Rowlands points out in tne TLS (January 22), reviewing Hilda Kean's book “ Animal Rights, Political and social change in Britain since 1800 ”. “ The argument is based on the idea that cruelty to animals is a barbaric act indicative of a depraved moral character. We should be kind to animals, because we thereby become better human beings ... it was this concern that explains why early animal campaigners were likely to find themselves in a close working relationship with the temperance movement. ” The second source is the extension of Darwinian ideas “ the fact that many animals share with us ceratin relevant features, most notably the capacity to suffer, ought, morally, to lead us to treat them in a humane way ”. In the name of the kinship argument, animal welfarists found themselves working with “ the militant campaigners of the twentieth century, including socialists and suffragette feminists ”. ”

- Dick : “ Beyond kinship, you also find terror. If we consider the present battle against animal testing, you'll have “ Clandestine organizations that have taken a passion long associated with England and trasnformed it into a ski-masked movement with absolutist notions and the tactics of terror ... a number of its members are serving long prison terms for bombing campaigns against corner drug stores, laboratories, woolen mill shops, kennels, slaughterhouses, refrigerator trucks, fishmongers, butchers and animal breeding farms ” (New York Times, January 11). There are terrorists groups as such, ready and willing to kill for animal welfare. In Lacan's terms (Ornicar? 49), let's say they strongly vindicate the continuing efficiency of British Police. ”

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- Daisy : “ At last we are having a new translation in modern japanese of the tenth century novel by Lady Murasaki, “ The Tale of Genji ”. Kaori Shoji tell us about it in the IHT, 23-24 january 99 : “ Up to now, a "Genji" reader was hindered by two things : the sheer volume of the thing (more than 2.000 pages) and Murasaki's style - an almost total absence of nouns. To read it was to wade into a sea of disconnected verbs. (In addition, among scholars of the book, the biggest debate has always been over who did what.) ” Setouchi Jakucho the 77 years old japanese novelist and translator explains : “ It was the height of rudeness in the royal court to refer to names at all. In "Genji", everyone is referred to by the houses they live in or rooms they occupy. Calling anyone by name was an act of violence. The exception is Genji himself, otherwise known as the "Shining Prince". Born as the son of the emperor and his favorite concubine, Genji matures from a beautiful baby into the most handsome prince the court has ever seen. He seduces everyone, including his strepmother at the age of 12, and his adopted daughter when he was 27. Genji litteraly spends the entire tale flitting from one lady's chambers to the next. ” ”

- Dick : “ If we want to know the identification that fuels the energy of such a translation we only can read through the lines of Setouchi's declarations : “ I felt that Genji's women were such saps-always ditched for someone new, waiting in vain for him to come around. I couldn't identify with them at all. Then I discovered that after a certain point, they broke with Genji and became nuns. For them, nunhood was a declaration of independence. That was what got me hooked. ” Setouchi herself took the Budhist habit at 51, though she had been longing to do so all through her 40's. ”

- Daisy : “ That proves at least the force of the hysteric identification through language and time. ”

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our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

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- Dick : " What we want from a biography is to grasp the uses of fantasy of the author. This can be said in a lot of ways. John Updike appreciated the sense of unity one got from a god one. P.N. Furbank, author of a critical biography of Diderot, commenting in the TLS on biographies in general, calls for an "objective" approach. The example he gives is Richard Ellmann's, like everybody, but he adds : " Hermione Lee in her Virginia Woolf. It is characteristic of her that, having devoted quite a number of pages to the history of sexual abuse in Woolf's early life, and Woolf's own varying accounts of it, Lee concludes it is impossible to arrive at the truth ... She has given us the evidence, most fairly and "objectively" so far as one can tell, ... and it is up to us to interpret this. " What Burbank wants is not to be imposed too simplistic a meaning. He doesnt want the biography to show us the trauma, he wants the fantasy or what takes his place. "

- Daisy : " His approach is rather utilitarian. He wants a tool for his interpretation and he wants to be sure that he is the user of the tool. In this perspective he has a pleasant observation : " It may be significant that the French, who have never quite seen the point of biography, have also only recently discovered the index. A French author, traditionally, has expected to his or her book to be read in the order, and accordingto the logical arrangement, in which it was written, and has instinctively resented the idea, implicit in a index, that readers might simply use it as a tool - might come to it for all sorts of different purposes. " Two reflexions can be deduced from this remark. First, one can underline that Lacan's "Ecrits" had an index, this is the unfrench aspect of the author. Then, to explain the english taste for biography one needs not only to go back to english nominalism, but also to english utilitarianism. "

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- Daisy : " How strange ! The same week, we have a review of a huge number of biographies in the TLS, january 15, under the general headline " recalled to life " and a large paper by John Updike in the New York Review of Books under the title, " One cheer for literary biography ". It gives us the opportunity to test a difference between biographies, some are literary some are not. "

- Dick : " For instance, the biography of Arthur Koestler by David Cesarini, reviewed by Michael Shelden in the TLS, does not seem a literary biography. It is centered on the sexual practice of AK presented as a guy who forced girls to have sex with him with a sadistic tinge. The reviewer is scandalized, and why not? He could at least before telling how schocked he is, underline why it made AK so aware of the sadistic jouissance of the bolchevik prosecutors. His fame comes from this early warning, which was not without inner cause. "

- Daisy : " This kind of extraliterary biography has to be separated from the biographies classified by Updike as those " of which Lytton Strachey is the patron saint that ridicule and denigrate their subject ". Let's call tem the negative transference biographies. "

- Dick - " What Updike calls the literary biographies could be named "transference biographies". When it occurs says Updike " The life of a writer which spins outside of itself a secundary life, offers an opportunity to study mind and body, or inside and outside, or dream and reality, together as one. Consider the many inventive yet judicious connections Leon Edel makes between Henry James's evolving psyche and the accumulating corpus of work. The many people that James was ... to some extent unite ". Let's stress this unity. What a transference biography tries to grasp is the author's fundamental use of the fantasy. His sexual practice is only one aspect of it. "

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- Daisy : " If we can screen the forms of realism in contemporary novels, we can also verify the kind of irreality that old rhethoric provides. Henry Hyde, the representative of Illinois, summarizing the Republican case against President Bill Clinton concluded : " My solitary, solitary hope is that 100 years from today, people will look back at what we have done and say "They kept the faith" ... This case is a test of whether what the Founding fathers described as "sacred honor" still has meaning in our time. " The problem is there perfectly stated. The meaning of "sacred honor" is difficult to establish in our time. "

- Dick : " Maybe because the term has served dreadful purposes since the founding Fathers. Time Magazine last week reviewed the shift in tradition that takes place in Jordan over "honor killing" " the intrafamily slaughter of allegedly errant females. Women have endured the custom, while legal establishments have tolerated or even condoned it. But now activists in Jordan, backed by the royal family, are dragging the issue out of darkness ". "

- Daisy : " The "honor" ethic has a lot to do with the group one's want to belong to. In today's IHT, Arlie Russell Hochshild, sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, comments that one of the characteristics of America today is that " America does not have loyalty-inducing organizations, and did not have organization men without organizations ". The mechanism can go even further. The value of a particular subject is not to belong , but to be able to chose where to belong. " People move not only from one job to another, but also from one spouse - and sometimes one set of children - to the next. In "The new insecurity", Jerald Wallulis argues that society is changing from one that values employment and marriage to one that values employability and marriageability ". Here we have the "sacred honor not to belong". "

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our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

Nous avons reçu de New York la correspondance suivante. Dick and Daisy ont été ravis de voir leur conversation se poursuivre.

"Ventriloquie", by Suzanne Yang

De retour a New York, je me suis rendu compte d'un "culture shock". Permettez-moi donc cette ventriloquie :

(suite a la discussion de Dick et Daisy ŕ propos de "feminine seriousness")

- Dick : " Men have always been lunatics, trying to be heroes on the warpath while women exercise good sense in holding down the fort. Like Rosie the Riveter. "

- Daisy : " That's the way that the appearance of women in the workforce has had an apotropaic effect within the social. Perhaps they will learn how to use it. "

- Dick : " In the mean time they have to flirt. Flirting, as Adam Phillips implies, is a representation of the infinite, of something else. As when Socrates shows up at a dinner party, he flirts. But not ruthlessly. "

- Daisy : " And what of M. de Nemours ? One can't really say that he flirts. His striped outfit is just a decoy. He doesn't give up, and it drives the princess crazy. Now that's intimacy. "

- Dick : " Unlike the princess, women nowadays are expected rather to gossip. In the blablabla of gossip, they pretend to confess. That makes contemporary love even weirder than ever. "

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our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

- Daisy : " After all the jokes about Mrs Clinton being the de facto President of the US and the candidacy of Eizabeth Dole, we are witnessing a call for feminine seriousness as a remedy for too much phallic comedy. As Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times puts it : " Women were long considered hormonally unsuitable for high office or combat. But now it is the men who are acting hysterical, and Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr who are scratching each other's eyes out ... Women may be affected by lunar tides. But men are total lunatics. Women are sometimes driven by hormones. But men are pushed around by them all day long. " The biological argument against women is now turning. "

- Dick : " Mauren Dowd also points out that " there is an element of wishful thinking when men depict women as less driven by desire. Once they get the power, women can be just as sexually capricious and demanding as men ". She has an interesting point : " Men get into trouble by focusing on gratification. But women don't stay out of it by focusing on intimacy. Female pols often get burned on financial issues related to their mates. " In brief, the sexes don't have the same relationship with having and giving. To give what one's don't have is not the same whether you have it or not. Lacan said it beautyfully. "

- Daisy : " You can pick up the difference in the letters pro-Clinton William Safire published in his column (this friday in the IHT). A woman writes : " I prefer human leaders, and Bill Clinton seems to have a sin for each of us to identify with. While a man says " Our lives replay high school, Bill Clinton is the popular kid who runs afoul of the rules. Meanwhile the dutiful, diligent geeks (Republicans) just can't understand ". Women can perfectly cheat, that's what makes them human. They don't want to score all the men, they want to score on one at a time. That's the intimacy part.

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our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

- Daisy : " There is something quite special about the reception of the work of André Bazin, the French film critic in the US. Robert Sklar, Professor of Cinema at New York University, underlines it in his review of two recent books on the history of American Cinema (TLS, January 1 1999). The first effect of the "Cahiers du Cinéma" was to relieve the American film critics of their sociological approach to Films. One, author, Andrew Sarris " gives credit to "fellow film enthusiast" Eugene Archer, who, failing to launch his own book on American directors, went to Paris in the 1950s, discovered "Cahiers du Cinéma", and came back to "formulate" (surely a more precise verb would de "borrow" or "adapt") with Sarris the Cahiers du Cinéma aesthetic for American consumption. The French "politique des auteurs" became enshrined in "The American Cinema" as Sarris's "auteur theory"" . The second effect of André Bazin's reception is to influence also the anti-auteurist streak within American film critics. Another author, Thomas Schatz, chose as title of his book " the genius of the system ", following a coinage by the french critic. " André Bazin warned in 1957 against auteuristic excesses, suggesting that his colleagues admire "what is most admirable in American cinema, not only the talent of this or that film-maker, but the genius of the system". " "

- Dick : " In a certain sense, Bazin authorised both the nominalist approach to the genius of a film or a film-maker, and the realist approach of the genius of the system. It's what Lacan tried to obtain from the analysts in psychoanalysis, as the " Conversation d'Arcachon " points out. Even film critics help us out to behave accordingly. "

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- Daisy : " The law can present itself either as a juxtaposition of inconsistent individual judgments, or a tentatively complete system, cleaned of the ambiguities. The Romans had both. In the individual judgment, one can feel the will to name the thing at stake. One of the things that gives us the idea of the realism of the structures is the system of the law. That's why the great attempts in history to realise a complete system of the law are so pathetic. "

- Dick : " The final volume of the English translation of the " Digest of Justinian " is the occasion to remember some of the great moments in the history of mankind. Keith Hopkins, reviewing this translation in the TLS, 1st january, 1999 remarks that Justinian idea, in the sixth century, was not new but that he had new ambitions. " In the fourth century, Jewish rabbis had started the canonical collections of exegetical opinions on religious law embodied in the Palestinian Talmud. The much larger Babylonian Talmud dates from the sixth century ... In the early fifth century, the emperor Theodosius II had comissioned the Theodosian Code, a summary of laws passed by emperors in the previous century or so ... Justinian's ambition were far greater than those of Theodosius, although he began similarly with a collection of public laws ... he proceeded to the much larger task of systematizing private law. " The names of the 50 books commissioned have delightful opaque titles. For instance Books six to nine : " Vindication, Usufruct, Servitudes, If a four-footed animal is alleged to have commited Pauperies. " "

- Daisy : " It seems Borges Chinese Encyclopedy. Lacan was quite right saying that Law is at the bottom an enigma. That's why it gives place to so many glosses. The Justinian attempt was soon overflowed by new elaborations and from the moment he was rediscovered in the West, a formidable source of commentaries : " more than any Book except the Bible. " "

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our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

- Dick : " Since so many people want to conduct clinical trials with patients in psychoanalysis, let's consider the subjective consequences of the recruitment by pharmaceutical companies of sick people to enter these. Denise Grady, of the New York Times, has an interesting story in the january 11th issue of the IHT. A 55 years old patient did not have the money to pay for her treatment against Hepatitis C. Her insurance could not provide for it either : " her doctor encouraged her to volunteer for a study, in which she would receive medication at no cost. In september, she entered a 48 week clinical trial at the University of Nebraska, designed and sponsored by Schering-Plough Corp ... The experiment was to enroll 600 people at 40 to 50 medical centers around the US. Some participants would be given Rebetron, a treatment approved for hepatitis C by the FDA. It combines two anti-viral drugs injection of interferon and capsules containing ribavirin. Others would receive ribavirin with higher doses of interferon ... The study was not "blinded", that is both the subject and the doctors monitoring them knew which doses they were receiving. Researchers could not promise that she would benefit from the study ... Her plan was to watch her test results closelyy, particularly the measurement of virus level in the bloodstream. If it did not drop within a few months, and if the side effects were severe, she would consider dropping out of the experiment. " "

- Daisy : " That is precisely the data that the company withheld, to prevent the patients from dropping out. Now her case " has been taken by a patient advocacy group challenging drug companies over the way people are treated in clinical trials ". This is exactly the nightmare psychoanalyste don't want their patients to enter. No trespassing in the name of science. That's the hidden debate with the critics directed to psychoanalysts for not entering clinical trials. "

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- Daisy : " The feminist impact in Sadean studies is still limited in France, also more and more french women writers join the ranks of Sadean experts. In the US, a book has just been published that shows the trend : " At Home with the Marquis de Sade : A life, by Francine du Plessix Gray, Simon and Schuster ". The well known Robert Darnton, professor of history at Princeton, reviewing it in the New York Review of Books dated january 14, considers this work as negative biography. " It does not attack Sade directly, but it nudges him from the center of the story in a way that makes room for a substitute hero : his wife ... du Plessix Gray does not intend to write an academic book and does not pretend to produce new research. Nor does she breaks new ground, for the Sadeans have already turned out a small library of monographs on Mme de Sade, the Sade marriage, and the Sadean woman ... At the bottom of it all, she finds a love-hate triangle, composed of the marquis, the marquise, and the mother-in law, Mme de Montreuil. " "

- Dick : " Sade's wife as hero seems fine, but what kind ? That's what Lacan specifiedt in his " Kant with Sade ". Sade's position is accompanied by " the heroism relevant to the pathological ", heroism of those who were first " complacent to his excesses, his wife, his sister-in-law, his valet, why not ? ". This gave us a new perception of what was called the " perverse couple ". "

- Daisy : " Darnton goes on " Why consider her book a negative biography ? Du Plessix Gray treats Sade sympathetically, staying close at key points to the heroic version of his life propounded by Maurice Lever. But by making René-Pélagie the heroine of the story, she dissipates the aura of satanic divinity surrounding the marquis. In the end he appears pitiful, weak, whining ... "

- Dick : " In a way it's a rejoinder to Lacan's remack that Sade as subject, is not only weak, he disappears. "

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(encore un peu?  Pica-Pica précédent)

our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

- Daisy : “ Maupassant had a way to introduce his realistic description of oral sex : his oysters in “ Bel Ami ”. John Updike had another. Some of us remember his great novel, thirty years ago, named “ Couples ”. As David Streitfeld, from the Whashington post, puts it in the IHT of december 19-20th, “ "Couples" recounted in exalted prose the sexual intermingling of five husbands and five wives ... This was sex as the new religion, as the only thrill left. People read it as a report from the field, wondering in amazement if their neighbors were really living such erotic lives. The novel, which delighted in descriptions of the oral act, created a sensation, became a Nˇ 1 bestseller, was denounced as sensationalist. Updike made the cover of Time ” ... The critic adds that “ Today, people no longer read books like "Couples" or Philip Roth's "Portnoy complaint" simply because they describe physical acts. The battle for sexual realism has been won ”. ”

- Dick : “ Is it so sure ? One never can say he had the last word. Even the Other has'nt. Once you have an expectation, the expectation of the expectation just ruins the expected expectation. Updike himself likes to play with any question he is asked, treating them as expectations. To begin the interview with Streifeld, for instance, he begins with his end “ I could die in the middle of this interview, and at least I wouldn't have to go to the next one ”. When asked if he might run out of words, he replies : “ Maybe it's happening, even as we sit here I can feel it happening. The words are draining out of me ”, etc. He is a real clever deceiver. ”

- Daisy : “ Let's say that the battle for sexual realism has been won as far as the “ post-pill paradise ” was concerned. “ Now that sex has become fatally tainted ”, as Updike says, now that we were driven out of paradise, the boredom that went with it is over. A new realism is on the way. This is called an ethical crisis. ”

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- Dick : “ Have you read Bret Easton Ellis last novel, “ Glamorama ” ? It could be of some use in our debate on body realism. ”

- Daisy : “ I haven't but it seems critics have. The book has been reviewed in the IHT and the TLS. Here the realistic details are not substantives any more. They reduces themselves as Michiko Kakutani says in the IHT to “ complusive name dropping, an obsession with designer clothing ... a repetitious tale that crams more celebrity names and more designer labels between two covers than any book in recent memory with the possible exceptions of Andy Warhol's "Diairies" ”. Henry Hitchings, reviewing the book in the TLS says something similar : “ Almost immediately, we are threatened with information overload ; by the fourth page, the narrative is beginning to dissolve, as Victor demands alphabetical rundowns of those invited. ” In a way, the realistic obsession with substantives that Tom Wolfe has, gives way to the list of proper names. Either way they recall us of the basic flaw there is in naming. Naming does not generate a necessary universe. Things keep contingent and the need for “ focus ”, like Updike would say, keeps insisting. ”

- Dick : “ The bodies, like in Wolfe's novels are summoned to keep the focus. The use the novel makes of them convey what the focus is about. The more the characters are reduced to a pure narcissim, in the first part of the book, the more it describes the mutilations one body performs on another in a second part. One critic notes that “ the image-obsessed world ... can easily mutate into a world in which people are treated as disposable objects ”. The other hopes for a narrative “ less traumatized with pain and the description of pain, less intent on the pornography of violence, less intrigued with the brutalities of sex ”. Wolfe keeps the phallic signification of it all, Easton ellis tries to get rid of it. Beyond, you get meaningless description of mutilations. ”

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(encore un peu?  Pica-Pica précédent)

our pica-pica, by Dick and Daisy

- Daisy : “ The relation we have with our bodies is superbly symptomatic. We saw the Barbie/GI Joe significance in this line of research. Let's add some fuel. John Updike in its critic of Tom Wolfes “ A Man in Full ”, in the New Yorker, makes fun of the bodily and muscular descriptions in the book. What he calls the Wolfe's “ raptures of anatomical specification ”. Each character has its own. One has “ the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi ... his massive neck, his broad shoulders, his prodigious forearm ; but above all he was proud of his back ”. Another “ wore a black polo shirt ... wide open at the throat, revealing the long, thick pair of muscles that came down the sides of his neck and inserted at the clavicle ”. Farther, we get acquainted with “ his neck, which seemed a foot wide, rose up out of a yellow polo shirt and a blue blazer as if it were unit-welded to his trapezius muscles and his shoulders ”. Updike underlines “ All these bodies - not to mention those of the young women, "perfect boys with breasts", with their "loamy loins" and thighs that "tapered down to where they inserted into the knees" - illustrate the sociological fact that America in the nineteen-nineties is mad about conditioning and give a certain pumped-up sheen to the teeming cast of characters ”. ”

- Dick : “ In the debate about reality and detail, Updike justly points out that “ So much local information, so many well lighted settings, so much news do not quite knit into a novel powered by the human spirit as it gropes and struggles for focus ”. What Updikes fails to see is that all these bodies and these muscles are precisely here to supply the focus, to fascinate the “ mind's eye ”. The fact is that the present enhanced, conditioned, body fails to do what the painted body in the Baroque era did. In those days, it provided a sufficient focus for the Catholic reformation to proceed. Updike's catholicism blurs him the picture. ”

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- Daisy : “ As we are going out of the toy season, let's have a look at them. It's not only the Barbie dolls that give a strange idea of the body uses our culture makes. Natalie Angier, from the New York Times, notes that Barbies companion is also weird. The real companion is not the gentle Ken, it is rather the new modesls of GI Joe's. She notes that “ Some researchers worry that Joe and other action-hero figures may, in minor fashion, help fan the use of muscle - building drugs among young athletes ... Harrison Pope Jr, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, has studied how the morphology of G.I. Joe has evolved since the doll was introduced in 1964. Just as Barbie has become gradually thinner and bustier, Dr Pope said, so each new vintage of G.I. Joe has been more musculer and sharply defined or "cut", than the model before ”. ”

- Dick : “ These toys just underline the inconsistency of the law about what is legal or not in the body enhancement by drugs. The All American national hero, Mark McGwire, with his 62nd and 63d home runs has admitted he is consuming androsteniol. This would be considered unlawful in Europe and just throw him in jail. ”

- Daisy : “ Whatever the law, there is more and more consumption of these drugs that just keep the game running and the bodys growing. Natalie Angier again : “ 18 percent of high-school athletes in the US are thought to use anabolic steroids, about twice the figure of 10 years ago ... In addition health food stores now offer a variety of “ nutritional supplements ” reputed to have anabolic properties. ” ”

- Daisy : “ The dance critic from the New Yorker, Joan Acocella, has done a large introduction to a new and complete edition of “ The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky ”. One can read it in the New York Review of Books, in its january the 14th issue. This is the occasion to see how the evident psychiatric troubles of Nijinsky are received in modern sensibility.

- Dick : “ It is quite interesting to read the rhetoric precautions the critic must take to state the subjective impact the deterioration of Diaghilev's relationship had on him. After the scandal of the “ rite of spring ”, Diaghilev suggested to Nijinsky's sister “ Perhaps he should simply leave the Bellets Russes and not dance for a year ”. Nijinska recalls that Nijinsky was in a “ heightened state of nervousness ... as if he felt that a net was being woven around him ”. He married then to Romola de Pulszky, “ the daughter of Hungary's foremost classical actress ”. This led Diaghilev to fire him from the company out of jealousy. Joan Acocella states “ While Nijinsky's later psychosis was probably, in part, biologically based, even the firmest adherents of the biological theory of schizophrenia agree that constitutional vulnerability must be combined with some potent psychological stress in order for the illness to develop ”. ”

- Daisy : “ Starting from such a point, we understand that the fact his first “ nervous breakdown ” came, after a dancing failure, while his first child was born is considered nearly irrelevant. “ He couldn't sleep, was plagued by fears, went into screaming rages - a condition that was probably made worse by an increase in his responsibilities : the Nijinsky's first daughter, Kyra, was born in June 1914 ”. Eugen Bleuler, before he saw him in 1919 told his wife “ the symptoms you describe in the case of an artist and a Russian do not in themselves prove any mental disturbance ”. Ten minutes after he saw him he considered him “ a confused schizophrenic with mild manic excitement ”. Like Nijinsky said to his wife “ you are bringing me my death-warrant ”. ”