The event is sense itself … Over states of affairs and their depth, their mixtures and their actions and passions, psychoanalysis casts the most intense light in order to reach the point of emergence of that which results, that is, the event of another type, as a surface effect. Therefore, whatever may be the importance of the earlier positions, or the necessity of always connecting the event to its cause, psychoanalysis is correct to recall the role of Oedipus as a “nuclear complex” [cf. “A World without Good Will,” post] – a formula which has the same importance as Husserl’s “noematic core.” For it is with Oedipus that the event is disengaged from its causes in depth, spreads itself at the surface and connects itself with its quasi-cause from the point of view of a dynamic genesis. It is the perfect crime, the eternal truth, the royal splendour of the event – each one of which communicates with all the others in the variants of one and the same phantasm. It is as distinct from its actualisation as from the causes which produce it, using to its advantage the eternal part of excess over these causes and the part which is left unaccomplished in its actualisations, skimming over its own field, making us its own offspring. And if it is indeed at the point where the actualisation cannot accomplish or the cause produce that the entire event resides, it is at the same point also that it offers itself to counter-actualisation; it is here that our greatest freedom lies – the freedom by which we develop and lead the event to its completion and transmutation, and finally become masters of actualisations and causes. As the science of pure events, psychoanalysis is also an art of counter-actualisations, sublimations, and symbolisations.
– Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 242-3
Are we not in the business of a phantasmatic progress in theatre? Or, in the theatre of a phantasmatic business? Are we not after all in reproducing a phantasm and rehearsing events, producing an event-phantasm?
The fact of the event’s communication with other events – and of what it lacks in doing so, what it wants for, what it lacks in order to do so – renders it a phantasm among equals. There is a point passing over events, an aleatory categorical, making distinctions. How psychoanalysis perverts an individual life could be seen to be similar to how cosmology perverts a cosmic history by focusing on its first moments of actualisation: in one, the schizoid explosion of pieces to the depressive consolidation of disconnected planes to the Oedipal substitution of parts; in the other, the Big Bang which starts time in which parts arrive at differentiation before they have left the whole and form wholes which depend for the laws of their deployment in spacetime on a prior substitution of a something for the nothing of dark forces in mathematical representation.
The two constitute schemata of events that are able to talk to us because before they can they share a phantasmatic reality. The excess in either makes them mutually irreducible. Nothing is not opposed to something. But the way in which each is too much insists as a metaphoricity to themselves. This, at least, is how I’ve understood metaphor, in terms of its productivity, beyond the substitutions of representation, whether mathematical or symbolic.
I can understand the phantasm as what works in its setting of a level at which events meet. This theatrum philosophicum reflects back, as far as I’m concerned, on the work of making that everyday thing we call theatre. It entails the consideration of theatre as an art-form among its initial coordinates. Thus, against this curve which we must not keep insisting is a force, and without a gold standard which we must keep insisting is the higher form of matter, insofar as its morality is, genitally and genitively, of the “perfect crime, the eternal truth, the royal splendour,” what are we called on to make by this philosophy if not the betrayal of its principles or ideas? which betrayal will insist as the slow unfolding of each of their secrets?
On the twelfth day, we, Barney, Jeff, Paul and I – Erika being called away to light the pizza ovens and Barney about to depart to Welly to be rehearsed in to Paolo Rotundo’s show and no dancer-character as yet – completely confused a number of lines and added some inconsequential actions. And only now, on reflection, am I beginning to see the sense in what we’ve done: the first substantial piece, Jeff’s, breaks down twice, once on “let me be more precise” and then on “perhaps.”
There will be a battle about a revelation which will refuse to occur on “perhaps.” A woman will not be. A man will not make her. A series of refusals will constitute the initial stations from which the dark matter will obtain, adsorb.
