“I was not there the night I was conceived. It is difficult to witness the day that precedes you. An image is missing in the soul. We depend on a posture that occurred in a necessary way but that will never reveal itself to our eyes. We call this missing image ‘the origin’.” [1]
Pascal Quignard, by these words indicates the part of enigma and of the impossible that the origins contain for him. From it, he made a beautiful book, The Sexual Night, where he demonstrates an intense study on the question of origins. The images that he offers us, come from all times, from all places, from all the famous names in the history of art. He also gives us a substantial succession of anonymous art works and, in this regard, Pascal Quignard is a thorough researcher. With his title and his remarks, he does not separate the question of the origins of the sexual and thus of desire, of misunderstanding and of the real that is at play.
Certainly, the image is missing but also the meaning and the response as shown by the installation of Christian Boltanski in 2017. What if, as you can read it in the edition, under François Ansermet’s pen, “the question of the origin can be an infinite source of misunderstandings,” it is exactly when facing the unthinkable, in the absence of possible response that the artist puts himself to work. That is how Boltanski’s original idea was born of installing large horns in northern Patagonia in order to capture the sound of the whales. Native American mythology recognises whales as knowing the mystery of the origins, the beginning of history. Here is what he says about it: “as I asked a lot of questions to a lot of people, as I thought a lot and hoped to understand what the beginning of history was, I wanted to ask these questions to whales. … The whales did not answer me …” [2] but “ one day, a storm will destroy this installation and maybe there will remain the story of a mad man who attempted to communicate with the whales.” [3]
What will then remain, will be a story, an impossible transmission!
History will indeed by discussed in this edition with the movie Private Life, portrait “of an organised civilization from a mass production of object-promises of satisfaction that would be lacking, leaving the parlêtre grappling with the real of life, sex and death” that Neus Carbonell analyses for us.
To make a work of creation starting from an unthinkable, is this not the way which emerges in the course of an analysis, knowing that “it will never be possible to account for the point of real that constitutes the subjective origin of each one …” [4]
Bibliography
Ansermet. F., “The Other Side of Procreation,” La Cause freudienne, n°65, 2007, p. 34.
Photography: ©Dominique Sonnet – https://www.dominiquesonnet.be/
[1] Quignard. P., “The Sexual Night,” Paris, Flammarion, 2007, p. 11
[2] Lequeux E, « Christian Boltanski : devenir artiste pour conjurer la folie », BeauxArts Magazine, 4 décembre 2019, disponible sur le site BeauxArts : https://www.beauxarts.com/grand-format/christian-boltanski-devenir-artiste-pour-conjurer-la-folie/
[3] Bordier J, « Christian Boltanski : Il faut attendre et espérer », L’ExpressDix, 28 octobre 2019, disponible sur le site de L’ExpressDix : https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/interview-christian-boltanski_2105094.html
[4] Laurent É., « Protéger l’enfant du délire familial », La Petite Girafe, n° 29, avril 2009, p. 7.
