Unlike James Bond who only lived twice, I want to bring you the good news (or bad news) -- it all depends where you stand in relation to your narcissism and primordial so-called masochism -- that there are three Deaths... at least psychoanalytically speaking.

This may come to you as news, since there has been a curious tendency in North America, now spreading over the advanced industrial countries, either to overlook death or foreclose it altogether.

Two examples come to my mind:

1) Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' book: Death, the Final Stage of Growth where death is not conceived per se but as a somewhat non-conflictual part of life: "death, she says, is a highly creative force," and all of her efforts seem to me to have been an attempt to bring the "embarrassingly graceless dying" to an "acceptable style of facing death," although she also starts from the empirical observation that "Ours is a death-denying society" and her soothing conception of death may very well be a strategy to try to unknow the denial of death.

2) My second example is a casual remark uttered on the couch by a woman-analysand, Irene, who is also a prominent psychiatrist. It is a good example of death-denial or, in my opinion, death-foreclosure. She was thinking about the day when her mother would die and she said: "I wonder what illness will take her away."

- Why an illness? I asked.

- Why? but doesn't everyone normally die of some illness?

Of course she may have had pesonal reasons for putting it that way, although she was merely using one of the stereotypes she had been taught while studying medicine. A good example of "empty speech."

In these two examples, death on one hand is life (when it is not simply a door leading to eternal life), and on the other hand, it is an illness... although Irene did not mention if it were a somatic one or not.

It is curious to note that while being more and more generally foreclosed in every-day-life-and-death, in spite of the fact that it is still a classical literary theme, death, along with sexuality (though more recently in the case of death), has become a favorite object for specialised discourses. Philippe Ariès, a French historian who has written extensively on the history of death in occidental societies, notes that: "The difference between literary death which is loquacious, and real death whichh is shameful and silenced,is one of the strange, but significant characteristics of our times."

In spite of a somewhat frantic blooming of psychological, sociological, medical, anthropological and, more recently, historical studies on death on the book shelves of our libraries -- (at Barnes an Nobles in New York there is even a special section devoted to the literature on death), in spite of all this, man is deprived of his own death, mourning is prohibited, and funeral rituals -- at least in North America -- have become a last social call on a mummified living-dead lying among flowers in a bath of aerial music, with all the pastel colours of life painted on his or her face.

This general ban on death correlated with its exploitation as an object of profit on both the funeral and intellectual markets, (it is also an object of profit but to a lesser extent on the sexual market) shows that death is nowadays less and less symbolisable, less and less symbolised by the human subject. This is what I mean when I use the word foreclosure. And, as I shall try to show, "what has been foreclosed, comes back into the Real."

This thesis, as you may know, is Jacques Lacan's, although he did not apply it to death but more explicitely to castration. For clarity's sake I'll just mention, en passant, the example of foreclosure Lacan found in his reading of the Wolf-Man. The Wolf-Man, when confronted by the difference of sexes and the absence of penis in women, rejected it as if it did not exist. In other words he did not symbolise it. As a result, what he rejected into the unthinkable, reappeared in the Real as an hallucination: once, in the garden with his nanny, he clearly saw that his little finger was completely severed and that it was only attached to his hand by a little bit of skin. He shrieked in absolute horror, only to realise shortly after that his finger was intact.

It is fortunate that Freud did symbolise Death. He was living at a time when men (and women) were not deprived of their death. They were still able to feel the arrival of their on Death and to prepare themselves to die. They knew when the Time to die had come and they could die surrounded by their loved ones. What people were terrified of would hae been to die suddenly, without being prepared, withoug knowing it and/or alone, outside of their home, in a hospital. Whereas today, what was the terror of yesterday has become common wish: to die without feeling it, and common fact: one dies in hospitals, alone.

Freud witnessed the death of his father. And they both knew that the illness he suffered from some eight months before he died would be the last one. And when he died on October 1896, he was surrounded by his family, in his house, knowing he was dying.

"Yesterday, wrote Freud to Fliess, we buried the old man. He bore himself bravely to the end, just like the altogether unusual man he had been..." and although up until the very day of his father's death, Freud seemed to have taken the situation somewhat lightly, he confesses to Fliess in the following phrase of his letter: "All of it happened in my critical period, and I am really quite down because of it."

Critical period or not, Freud began mourning his father. He acknowledged his suffering from it, instead of denying it, as we are expected to do nowadays, he withdrew from social responsibilities and even, for a while, stopped writing to his beloved Fliess.

- What does mourning mean?

- It is the time necessary to symbolise death, that is to say: to gather a certain number of signifiers to replace the missing body, to fill the gap its disappearance has left, to bring together memory traces of the lost one, "facilitations" to use the terminology of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology: that is to say a "system of differences" constituting memory. But a "system of differences" is precisely the definition of the signifiers. This among other things, led to Lacan's definition of the unconscious structured as a language.

A constellation of signifiers, "a floating field of signifiers," as Michèle Montrelay would say, where the signifiers of his father would be mixed with Freud's own signifiers. We all know the product of Freud's mourning the death of his father. We have access to the constellation of signifiers he gathered to symbolise his father in his absence: it is The Interpretation of Dreams:

What was undoubtedly the most poignant discovery of this loss, was the discovery, while mourning his father, that psychically speaking, the father was already dead, for Freud, when he actually died and that he had died many years before, when Freud was still a child and when he wished him dead. The most poignant discovery brought about by this loss was the discovery of the Oedipus Complex with its central figure: the dead father. The mourning of Jacob Freud by his son Sigmund was all the more poignant because it was the deferred action of a death which had taken place almost thirty-five years earlier.

For if the death of Freud's father was Real, its being the most important event of a man's life is because, first of all it is a Symbolic Death essential to the structuration of the Subject. In other words, Freud could symbolise the death of his father by writing the Interpretation of Dreams because he had already symbolised it many years before during the Oedipal crisis.

This is the first of the three deaths I want to introduce you to: Symbolic Death. The death of the father, the dead father of the Oedipus Complex.

Freud could not avoid using a myth to introduce the Oedipal complex. This mythical dimension has sometimes blurred the importance of the Oedipal structuration. Some psychoanalysts have used this mythical dimension of the complex as an excuse to get rid of it altogether.

Others -- like Lacan -- have carefully re-read the myth in order to formalise its structure in more rigorous terms. I'll summarise extremely briefly Lacan's early reading of the Oedipus complex so that I can link the question of death with the question of Desire and its signifiers, and thus lead you back to that other death, which Freud named the death drive, and which I name: primordial death, which is the death I suggest can be metaphorised in the Real -- bizarre as it may seem -- by AIDS.

There is a pre-stage prior to the different steps of the Oedipal structuration: The Mirror stage. Then, three more logical than chronological steps constitute the Oedipal structuration of the Subject as such, all of them centered, according to Lacan, by what he called, for better or for worse since it led to a lot of misunderstanding, the phallus. Briefly speaking, let us say that the phallus is not a more or less abstract representation of the penis, it is a signifier -- or a set of signifiers -- of what the mother lacks and which she -- therefore -- desires. The lack of penis would simply be an illustration of the lack. Let's add that masculine desire is also defined in terms of lack.

Caught in a dual, specular relationship with the mother, the child, to please her, has no choice but to be what she desires, what she lacks, to be her phallus. This is the first step.

The second step is built by the introduction in the dual relationship of the mother and child of the No-of-the-Father, who interferes in this relationship on the modes of deprivation, interdiction, frustration. The three modes, once knotted together, lead to symbolic castration of both the mother and the child. Since on one hand the No-of-the-Father is an interdiction to the mother: "You shall not reabsorb your product," as well as to the child: "You are not the phallus of your mother." This would be the basic and first law of the taboo of incest, the strongest one.

The introduction by the mother of the No-of-the-Father obliges the child to stop being, to un-be (if I may thus ranslate French "desêtre") the phallus fo the mother, and he is therefore forced to recognise that it is his father who has the phallus: namely that some signifiers -- the Names-of-the-Father -- represent, replace, metaphorise, what were at first the signifiers of the mother. This metaphorisation constitutes -- according to Lacan -- primary repression.

According to the way the child accepts or not this new situation, he will be more or less caught in the law of language and he will only accede to the third step of the Oedipus complex, the decline of the Oedipus complex, by challenging the father in both a seductive and destructive manner in order to force him to prove he has the phallus. This is the first symbolisation of the death of the Father, and it leads to a gathering of partial sexual drives which are dominant in the first phases of the Oedipus complex, under the primacy of genitality.

I don't have time here to explain how I understand the primacy of genitality. Let us say that if we understand drives -- as Freud defined them in Beyond the Pleasure Principle -- as "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of thing," the primacy of genitality based on "Les-Noms-du-Père" (both the No-of-the-father, and the Names-of-the-father) is the interdiction "internalised" by the subject to step back to an "earlier state of things."

Desire will be sustained by this tension between the urge to restore an earlier state of things -- that is to say to go back to the loss of object of primarylove -- and the interdiction to do so: the object is lost forever. Substitutive objects have to be looked for elsewhere. This is the second and infinitely less stringent law of the incest-taboo.

I said that Freud was fortunate to have been able to symbolise the death of his Father. He was able to do so because in his time, men were not deprived of their death, and mourning was highly respected. Mourning which is nothing more than the space and time required to symbolise death a second time.

Today things have changed and to come back to Philippe Ariès with whom we started our journey, let's remark that: "La Défense du deuil pousse le survivant à s'étourdir de travail ou, au contraire, à la limite de la déraison, à faire semblant de vivre dans la compagnie du défunt, comme s'il était toujours là, ou, encore, à se substituer à lui, à imiter ses gestes, ses paroles, ses manies et parfois, en pleine névrose, à simuler les symptômes de la maladie qui l'a emporté."

"Forbidden to mourn, the one who is left behind either plunges into work to forget or, on the contrary, pretends, to the verge of madness, that he continues to live in company with the defunct as if he were still there. Or else, substituting himself for the dead, he imitates his gestures and words, his ticks, and even, in highly neurotic cases, simulates the symptoms of the illness that caused his death"... going so far at times, I might add, as to die from it himself.

Is there a beter way -- although Ariès is neither a psychoanalyst nor even a Lacanian -- of saying that what has not been symbolised reappears in the Real?

This non-symbolisation of death and its effects which Ariès has recognized as a new pheonomenon in the history of occidental societies, every psychoanalyst is confronted within his practice. This is perhaps why the concept of the Oedipus complex tends to disappear from psychoanalytic theory: because The Oedipus structuration of the Subject rearely reaches the third and final or conclusive step.

I will not speculate on the historical, social, political or psychological causes of this new situation. I'll simply give a clinical example of what happens when death has not been symbolised.

Rachel is a woman of 47. She is Jewish and she was born in Brussels shortly before the beginning of the Second World War. When she was two, a second child was born who had a spot on her face. The parents took greater care of the new born to the deep dismay of Rachel, who nevertheless found some consolation for her feeling of being abandoned in the fact that her father would mother her while the mother was taking care of the spotted sister.

Suddenly the Nazis came in. Belgium was invaded. Jews started to be arrested and deported. Fearing for their lives, unable to leave Belgium, the parents took their two little daughters to a convent in order to hide them under a false identity. A few years later the parents were denounced, arrested and deported. They never came back. "Pray God -- said the nuns to Rachel -- and if you are a good girl he will bring your parents back!"

Rachel prayed and waited. When she came to see me, forty years later, she was still waiting for the return of her parents although she was not praying anymore, and she had become in the interval a very, very naughty girl.

Indeed, she finally understood that in all probability her parents had been exterminated. She even received some money from the German State in order to compensate for the damages entailed by this loss. But unconsciously she never stopped waiting, she could not symbolise their death, not so much because she had not seen them dead, but because they disappeared before the completion of the Oedipus structuration.

To make a long and very complicated story short, the result of the non-symbolisation of death was that nothing interfered with the urge of the drives to restorie a previous state of things. All her life Rachel tried to rebuild, to recreate a love relationship with mothering men and a fusional relationship with women. On the other hand, her sexual drives remained partial -- in other words she displayed all her life a polysexuality the different facets of which were activated according to the kind of object of love to which she became attached. Instead of having structured an Ideal of the Ego, based on the dead father which would have prohibited the return to a previous state of things and bind together the partial drives, she remained trapped in the sado-masochistic reactions proper to polysexuality. On a singular level, she remained trapped in something analogical to what can perhaps be called at a social level: anal culture, and was dominated by the urge, as well as the fear, to regress. The fear is linked to her feeling responsible and guilty for the disappearance of her parents.

How far can the urge to return to a previous state of things go? Very far. As far as to the beginning of the Mirror Stage and beyond. Although this had not been Rachel's case for reasons we can't examine here.

Although The Mirror Stage is not a concept invented by Freud -- it was introduced in psychoanalytic theory by Jacques Lacan as early as 1936 -- it is a Freudian concept. It is the stage where the child emerges from the fusional relationship with the mother, from oneness, and apprehends his image in the mirror (be it the face of the mother)as an imaginary other, or the other (namely the mother) as a mirroring image of himself.

Now, I would like to focus on the primordial moment of the Mirror stage, the moment of emergence from a non-differenciated world and of constitution of a dual, mirroring relationship with the mother. This moment has been described by Freud in On Negation (1925) and also, in more details, in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). It is the encounter with the Thing, das Ding. I'll summarize it briefly. Freud approaches it while studying the first encounter of the subject-to-be with an altogether unknown aspect of his world. He names this aspect the Nebenmensch, it has been translated into English by "a fellow creature." What is it? Well, let us say that it is not necessarily a totally alien person but rather an unknown aspect of a well-known person, of a person of "a similar kind" says Freud, of the mother for instance, of whom the child is still a part, but the mother under an unusual appearance. In this case, Freud writes, "the perceptual complexes arising from this Nebenmensh will, in part, be new and non comparable... but other visual perceptions will coïncide in the subject with his own memory of quite similar impressions of his own body." Then Freud gives a more precise example: "If the Nebenmensch screams, a memory of the subject's own screaming will be aroused and will consequently revive his own experience of pain. Thus, the complex of the Nebenmensch falls into two parts. One of these gives the impression of being a constant structure and remains a thing that stands as a whole; while the other can be understood by the activity of memory."

That thing -- das Ding -- therefore is that which remains outside, which is the outside, since it is boath alien and painful, bad, for the subject. That thing, is that which is radically alien to the subject, it is the absolute Other. It may be seen as a pre-object, a nameless object which only exists because it is lost from the start, because it has never been possessed from the start, because the only trace it has left is the trace of its disappearance, of its absolute otherness, something that can only be actualised by a movement and/or by the memory of pain associated with its screams, which wake in the child's memory its own screams of pain. It is both the condition of all possible future object relation and the first limit that separates the Subject-to-be and his Imaginary world from the Real where das Ding dwells, the inside from the outside.

Now, in speculating on the screams of the Nebenmensch, the screams of the mother, I have tried to think of a situation where she would be completely alien to the child, because the child at that precise moment would not exist for her. The only situation I could think of which would be both drastically threatening for the child and "normal" for the mother, is a love-making situation. Why would the mother scream or simply moan? Because she is in bed -- or anywhere else -- with her sexual partner and she "jouit"; she has a good, strong, powerful orgasm and she "jouit." Curiously enough, English speaking people have no word for "jouir" -- nor for "jouissance." I'll therefore keep using the French word. While she "jouit," the mother doesn't think about the little baby lying nearby in the crib. At the very peak of her orgasm, of her jouissance, of her "joyance" -- as it has tentatively been translated -- she doesn't even think about her beloved partner, she is totally lost in what has been sometimes called a little death. She does not exist as a mother, nor as a wife, she is drifting in what could be called "the dark continent of her joyance."

[LA NOTE # 11 N'EST PAS INDIQUEE DANS LE TEXTE]

This jouissance cannot be symbolised of course by the child, it is only known through its impact on the child: his feeling of being expelled by the mother, which will be pre-symbolised by the screams of pain. Actually, I would suggest using "jouissance" to name this dimension of the mother's sexual pleasure which, for the child and the subject generally, remains outside symbolisation. The jouissance itself which the child might have felt without understanding it, will remain ungraspable un-symbolisable but at the same time it will remain the primordial condition of the first step of the emergence of the subject from an un-differenciated continuum, and his encounter with the known aspect of the continuum he is emerging from: namely his mother. But we can see -- if it is agreed to entertain my speculation -- that beyond the mother with whom the child will know all sorts of pleasurable and unpleasurable moments there is a "thing" which jouit. This, I thin, is one way of understanding the too-often misunderstood and ambiguous Lacanian statement: "la femme n'existe pas," "the woman does not exist" or "la femme n'est pas-toute," "woman is not-all." It means that a dimension of woman escapes symbolisation because it is the condition of the forthcoming possibility to symbolise. And that thing which escapes symbolisation is what she is for the child when she "jouit," that is to say, precisely, das Ding, the Thing.

This moment of emergence of the child under the impact of the screaming, jouissante mother, is a moment of radical expulsion from undifferenciated oneness. This is the first death. This is the primordial death I wanted to introduce you to, the Imaginary Death; as such it is intimately linked to an un-speakable, non-symbolised jouissance and to the memory of screams of pain (at least from the child's point of view. This point raises the question of primordial masochism as the first form of sexuality. I won't develop it here.).

This is the first state of things that drives urge the subject to restore, to return to, beyond which he will find again the non-differenciated world he emrged from and which Freud named Nirvanah.

Many ways lead back to Nirvanah, if the power of drives is uninhibited. Masochism is one of them when understood as a process of increasing pain, sought for in order to get closer and closer to primordial jouissance. Drugs is another. Frantic exploration of all the facets of polysexuality in order to seek a complete re-erogeneïsation of the whole body is also another. But they all lead toward primordial Death, the one Creon condemned Antigone'es brother to, by refusing to grant him symbolic death: i.e. a funeral inscription. The one Sade foresaw beyond crime which is always symbolised as such, i.e. absolute annihilation which would leave no trace at all, not one single signifier to symbolise it. A total annihilation within a limitless Real.

As you know some of us, including perhaps Michel Foucault, consider that our era is deeply marked by the triumph of Polysexuality and the development of an anal-oral-nacissistic culture. When I edited the special issue of Semiotexte on Polysexuality with some friends, we had two purposes:

1) to provide the readers with a sort of panoramic description of the world of Polysexuality;

2) and, at the same time, by inventing an illogical classification, in Luis Borges manner, to make an implicit ironical criticism of the way specialised discourses have taken polysexuality into account as well as into their custody. (This, as you know, is Michel Foucault's main assumption in the Will to Know, La Volonté de Savoir).

As I was preparing this work (about ten years ago) I visited many placed which were specialised in the mercantile exploitation of specific facets of polysexuality.

Apart from the case of ultimate sex where death was explicitely sought by some radical masochists in order to reach optimal jouissance, death was totally ignored, disentangled from sexuality, foreclosed, as it is throughout our society and in spite of the fact that the while movement of polysexuality, if understood in terms of un-inhibited drives, leads toward primordial Death, (like anal culture for that matter).

It was quite remarkable for us, the editors of Semiotexte, to observe that very few readers noticed that the pictures we used to illustrate the issue on polysexuality, were pictures of death, they were often seen as pictures of sexual ecstasy, of jouissance causing erratic behavior.

In a way, the foreclosure of death, its absence of symbolisation at the level of the Oedipus complex, does not prevent the polysexual subject from tending, through his acts, toward primordial death.

Incidently -- re-reading at this point Philippe Ariès text on "inverted Death" -- I am suddenly struck by the fact that the deep change in the attitude of man toward death dominated after World War II, and that it culminated once the mortal threat of syphillis ("Napple's decease" as they called it in France ) -- linked with all kinds of promiscuous sexuality had disappeared. As if -- at a social level -- death had to be intimately linked with sexuality to be symbolisable, as it is in the Oedipus complex.

Since the publication of the Semiotexte issue on Polysexuality, AIDS, has suddenly emerged from the core of polysexual circles. I thought at the time it would reintroduce a limitation to polysexuality, that it would somehow lift the denial of death, prevent its foreclosure. Two years ago I decided to verify what the impact of AIDS had been on the most radical polysexual groups, those most threatened by AIDS. I went back to some of the places I had visited ten years ago and to my utter amazement, I noticed that almost nothing had changed, except that the crowd was thinner: many had already died, at least in the most male homosexually oriented groups.

This was recently confirmed by a transvestite prostitute who is a patient of mine in Montreal and who talked about his surprise when he found out that he could not keep men at bay when he was exhausted, by saying he had AIDS, they just could not care less. The question whether AIDS has deeply transformed the sexual activity of polysexual groups or not is a highly controversial one, and testimonies and studies on the question are -- as it appeared during the last world meeting onAIDS in France in Juen 1986 -- quite contradictory. Judging by highly promiscuous homosexual, bisexual and transvestite or other "high risk" patients I listen to, it does not seem to have changed much.

Death is no more symbolised today with the presence of AIDS than yesterday without it. On the contrary it is silently acknowledged as being part of the jouissance polysexual subjects are looking for. And I could hear in some of these places I visited, screams of jouissance which were also screams of agony.

This could be illustrated in a less crude manner, by a dream a homosexual patient had shortly before he began to show signs of AIDS-related-symptoms. He was lying on a bed in a foetal position. My body was wrapped around his. He knew he was going to reach an unspeakable jouissance and die at the same time. He woke up when he began screaming, but he could not tell whether it was from ecstasy or terror.

AIDS, as youmay know, is not an illness. It is the progressive destruction, due to a virus, of the barriers which protect our "inside" from the "outside." It somehow recreates a limitless fusion of our body with the external world. It is another agent, coming in from the outer world, an opportunist agent as it has been curiously named, which causes us to die of the third Death, the Real one.

It is also remarkable that most of the first AIDS victims who dies, and most of those who died fast, seem to have been among those subjects who seek "jouissance" through sexual effraction of their bodies on one hand, and/or who have shown the first symptoms of AIDS-related-illness after a highly and painful emotional effraction or rupture of their emotional life, on the other. But it is even more remarkable that AIDS should seem to be thus linked to jouissance, (jouissance here should be understood as the ultimate previous state of things which can be restored) and also in correlation with primordial death).

This is why I suggest that death -- because it failed to be symbolised -- reappears in the Real as AIDS.

I dont' mean, of course! the immune deficiency syndrome as such nor the particular concrete virus which causes it, but the role AIDS actually play in the structuration of the subject in relation to his drives, their urge to restore a previous state of things, be it of an involutive organism, as we can see sometimes with some AIDS patients at the extreme end of their life and sufferings.

Whether AIDS will affect or not the actual denial and/or foreclosure of death which our society characterises, I cannot tell.

But I do know that by paying minute attention to the "psychological" or rather "subjective" aspect of AIDS' condition, we may learn a lot about the dark side of the unconscious: le ça, the id and its speechless powers of attraction toward jouissance and death.

François Peraldi