Is this going to be good, can you hear me?
Is this going to be good?
I'm really very delighted that we can hear now your lecture.
And I would say, if there are people who would like to see the performance of so Laflin,
and we should not be finished by accident at 8 o'clock,
then we will make a short break so that you can leave the room
without that there will be too much noise and continue.
You will have the possibility to ask some questions tonight.
In our summer academy in the internal program,
we will have a larger discussion than tomorrow morning.
So welcome and thank you for being here.
Thank you for the generous invitation and kind introduction.
My presentation tonight is selected from a study I recently completed
titled Spectre, James Bond, Melanie Klein, and the Superhuman,
wherein I contemplate the work or performance of morning and un-morning
via yet another track of bee culture.
The German translation is by Torsten Kastensen.
It's going to be projected, I think.
Derrida's study of hauntology in Hamlet and Marx's Oeuvre
held the place of a more recent spectral transmission
that at that time was already missing in name.
But even though Spectre apparently disappeared by metonymy with Blofeld,
its underlying significance or impact continues to bestow away
in every attempt to restart the James Bond film franchise.
The most recent two-part reopening of the projection of the Inflemings Bond
required two funeral plots.
From Casino Royale through Quantum of Solace,
the interpersonal loss of Vesper Lind
must be worked through to some point beyond revenge,
but the inimical force that organizes Bond's reality
functions as the intra-psychic and spectral counterpart to this morning work.
Separated from its measure of grief and solace,
Quantum comes to stand alone as another specter
that by any other name still sets a spell with good and evil.
Thunderball was rehearsed as Fleming's first attempt at screenplay composition,
which turned into a cumulative and collaborative effort.
When a certain Kevin McCleary discovered that Fleming had walked away
from the teamwork to write his novel, Thunderball,
he charged Fleming with plagiarism,
which psychoanalytically and always amounts to a form of or forum
for improper or incomplete mourning.
The main issue was the first appearance of Spectre in Fleming's writing.
This third-party organization, which holds together the screen versions of Dr. No
and From Russia with Love, but is without mention in those novels,
is in every sense a haunting projection that at the end of his career,
Fleming sought to reclaim, own up to, or release.
Because the legal complications that had Thunderball
and a deferred implementation of that made for the screen work,
Dr. No was the first Bond novel to hit the screen.
In Dr. No, as in From Russia with Love, the second Bond movie or projection,
Spectre was in full force.
In the novel From Russia with Love, in which the opposing force of evil
is the Soviet organization Smersch,
Bond's assignment is to get hold of a Russian cipher machine
clearly modeled after the Nazi German Enigma.
The novel calls the machine Spectre, the screen version says Lector.
When Bond's boss, Em, extols the plan as the most important coup
that's come our way since the war,
he lets slip what remains most alive even as dead
in the Cold War setting of Fleming's narratives.
A close look at the novels shows that this recent past of the Cold War
presses all over the place in the details.
In addition to a number of recycled Nazis,
the enemy organizations that Bond must battle include leaders
whose menace is hard to identify
and whose German surnames could also double as so-called German Jewish names.
Blofeld and Goldfinger, who in the book goes by just gold
when he's alone with his gangster cohorts going for the Fort Knox gold,
are just two or three examples.
Consider the dossier on the leader of the communist underworld
in Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale.
His name, Le Chiffre, he himself adopted
to go with the passport number he in a sense became when,
while registering as displaced person at the end of World War II,
his amnesia didn't lift.
This man, whose only recorded origin in June 1945
is as inmate of Dachau D. Peacamp in the U.S. zone of Germany,
is given a close description in search of broader origins.
Ears small, with large lobes, indicating some Jewish blood.
Racially, subject is probably a mixture of Mediterranean
with Prussian or Polish strains.
As freelance third-party operation that manipulates
the Cold War conflict between East and West
to obtain benefits of its own,
Spectre makes a crowd of World War II ghosts,
while also setting the father's missing place.
Ian Fleming's father, Valentin Fleming,
was killed in May 1917 fighting the Germans.
Toward the end of his career as the author of James Bond narratives
and thus in the close quarters he gave himself with Spectre
for making reclamation and reparations,
Fleming compiled and published a tour guide
in thirteen chapters for the adventurous,
titled Thrilling Cities.
Toward the close of the Berlin entry,
Fleming jumps the gun in a slipper typo
that identifies with the enemy.
From this grim capital went forth the orders
that in 1916 killed my father
and in 1940 my youngest brother.
Ian Fleming thus makes a date for his father
within a range of German planning and issuing of orders
which doubles as the span of the death wish,
that only the first date is tampered with,
shows that both father and brother are in it together
with the relationship to the father appropriately
bearing the brunt of murderously mixed feelings.
Once we arrive in Vienna,
Fleming, his tour guide, turns up the contrast
of this city he dislikes to recall
with the Tyrol where he lived with substitute
parental guidance following his father's death.
I learned German in the Tyrol from Mr. Ernan Forbes-Dennis
who was a student of the great psychologist Alfred Adler
and I learned far more about life from Ernan
than from all my schooling put together.
The Tyrolis even ended up remaining his favorite people in the world.
Through Adler, Fleming gained entry to greater psychoanalysis,
the whole diverging spread of all that took its departure
from Freud's science.
I remember in the days before the war
reading the works of those bizarre psychologists
Beininger and Groderk, let alone the writings of Adler and Freud.
According to Thrilling Cities,
Vienna in 1959 displays an utter lack
of the intellectual and cultural activity
that had defined the city like Berlin and Munich too
before the war or Hitler's rule.
Fleming attributes all these shortfalls
to the absence of the Jews
who create an atmosphere in which the intellect
appears to flourish astonishingly.
At Blofeld's introduction,
as the mastermind behind Spectre in Thunderbolt,
we learn that his charisma is of the same unbounded kind
that alone explains how Hitler could have enthralled
the most talented nation in Europe.
From the German perspective of his identification,
Fleming looks across a centuries-long generation of intelligent life,
both Jewish and Gentile, both émigré and silent majority,
that was utterly lost without the backup of proper succession
or substitution for a long time to come.
This circumscribed, Germany-centric framing of the view to a killing
belongs among the conditions for the existence of Spectre.
If the recent past is interject inside Spectre
appears in some instances as amalgamation of persecutors
with their victims,
then we must conclude that in that traumatic era
from which Fleming derived the bond,
there is no room for sentiment.
The denizens of Spectre are shaken, not stirred.
Fleming's decision, comparatively late in life to marry,
because he was expecting fatherhood,
coincides with the onset of his authorship of bond.
It was 1952 when he was already in some phase of retirement
from his former life in and around the UK,
spending the winter months in his home in Jamaica
where he would compose each of his bond narratives.
It was to bind his anxieties about the family complex
he was entering or returning to
that Fleming started typing the first sentences
of the first bond novel from which all the rest would follow.
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino
are nauseating at three in the morning.
Then the sole erosion produced by high gambling,
a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension,
becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.
He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough,
and he always acted on the knowledge.
This helped him to avoid staleness
and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.
At this opener, we already have two or more settings juxtaposed.
There is the den of iniquity which shakes up
as brink of exhaustion equal parts Christian soul care
and secular concern for nerves or psyche.
But then we switched to a body or mind maintenance program
that prompted the first critical readers of Fleming's novels
to identify Bond as the new cybernetic hero
whose relationship to his interiority
as clean and demeaned machine is covered by the double O icon
which in certain countries signifies the public restroom.
This is the aspect of the bond that will give way in its purity
before the emergence of specter
out of the initial juxtaposition of settings
of spiritual and psychic exhaustion.
Married with child, Fleming became the author of spy thrillers
that drew on his wartime work for British intelligence
but were engaged in the Cold War, the native habitat of their genre.
His literary day job was with the Sunday Times.
Fleming proposed as a series to appear in the Times
reflections on the seven deadly sins by seven distinguished authors.
In the foreword to their subsequent collection as Book of Essays,
Fleming slides into the James Bond mode of worldliness
and gives us the stiff upper flip off that the original seven
are by now outmoded, replaced by new and improved sins
with one exception which also belongs to the world of the bond.
Of all the seven, only sloth in its extreme form of Akedia,
which is a form of spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy
as my wholehearted condemnation,
perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its face.
In You Only Live Twice, the novel in which specter is busted or put to rest,
Blofeld looks back on his ordered attempts to be kind through threatened cruelty.
His third time around, Blofeld has set up a castle of death in Japan,
its garden stocked with poisonous plants and lethal reptiles
and insects allegedly for research purposes.
But the fortifications and the shark infested moat
like the large signs prohibiting trespass
instead advertised to countless persons seeking death,
the true garden of ending it.
In this final incarnation of specter,
which Blofeld no longer needs its name or allegorical caption,
the mastermind has taken up residence
in the close quarters of the deferral of his own suicidality.
I will make a confession to you, Mr. Bond.
I have come to suffer from a certain lassitude of mind
which I am determined to combat.
This comes in part from being a unique genius
who is alone in the world without honor, worse and misunderstood.
Without much of the root cause of this achivea is physical,
liver, kidneys, heart, the usual weak points of the middle age.
But there has developed in me a certain mental lameness,
a disinterest in humanity and its future,
an utter boredom with the affairs of mankind.
Though Bond succeeds in destroying the specter operation,
Blofeld restored following his defeat in thunderball,
and it is Blofeld himself, now referred to as the big one,
who gets away on Her Majesty's Secret Service.
In the wake of this getaway, his fiancé Tracy
calls Bond back to the onset of responsibilities.
You don't seem to think it matters to anyone
the way you go on playing Red Indians.
It's so selfish.
Bond reached out and pressed her hand on the wheel.
But it was true what she said.
It never crossed his mind that anybody really cared about him.
But now, in three days' time, he would no longer be alone.
He would be a half of two people.
Now, if he got himself killed, there would be Tracy,
who would at any rate partially die with him.
But Bond is only playing Red Indians
as the disparagement of his agency,
with which his antagonists regularly taunt him on the wavelength,
as we know from his bouts of self-recrimination,
of Bond's own superego.
Dr. Shatterhand, the pseudonym Blofeld
will assume in the next novel, You Only Live Twice,
is the old citation or introject of playing Red Indians
in the German-language world.
Kall Nye introduced alongside Binatou,
the Indian chief object of identification,
his good white friend and ally, old Shatterhand.
Thus, the Germanic niche or crypt of Fleming's parental bond
of coupletification and mourning,
the shattering of the end,
continues to summon his special agency for final reckonings.
While Mr. and Mrs. Bond drive to their wedding night
in On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
Blofeld and Ilma Bund,
revealed in this parting shot for the first time
as the other couple drive by shoot
Bond's partner in coupletification and successful mourning.
Just prior to this conclusion,
Bond had extolled to Tracy the main attraction
of their first stopover, Kofstein, in the Tyhul.
Bond put his mouth up close to Tracy's ear
and told her about the most imaginative war memorial
for the 1914-18 war ever devised.
Punctually at midday every day,
the windows of the castle are thrown open
and a voluntary is played on the great organ inside.
You only live twice because Dr. Shatterhand's
research establishment is strictly legal,
but also because the Japanese are paralyzed
before their biggest symptom,
in which they cannot intervene
because it is the open invitational
they already occupy or effect.
Bond is offered as rescuer in exchange
for Japanese cooperation with Britain's efforts
to restore the crumbling range
of influence of its secret service.
His host in Japan, Tanaka,
initiates Bond into Japanese culture
as the refined gathering of senses
and verities immersed in finitude.
His appointment to this task
comes out of the mix of his heritages.
Educated in the UK,
Tanaka nevertheless took the side
of his place of birth in World War II
all the way to the inside of preparedness
for the kamikaze defense.
The success or significance of Bond's assignment,
which requires that he go undercover,
depends on Bond's assumption
of a Japanese identity and identification.
In what amounts to their last prep session
on the way to the location of Bond's assignment,
several breakthroughs take place.
The day begins with a visit to Japan's oldest bravo,
which now the prostitution is illegal,
remains open as historical monument.
Bond's resistance, which takes the form
of prosecuting certain claims to sublimation
for the repression driving the stakes,
nevertheless crosses over into the kind of intervention
that presupposes identification.
Everyone tries to forget his rowdy past
instead of being proud of it.
But he concludes by overstepping his intervention
and setting himself up for the backfire of breakthrough.
You shouldn't try and pretend that your oldest whorehouse
is a sort of Stratford on Avon.
We are at the point of crossing over.
The next round of literary chit chat,
which shows up Bond's ignorance
of a certain 17th century haiku poet,
prompts Tanaka to summon as many big names
of Western literature as would fit into a hand of cards
to bear witness to the enormity of this loss.
Given out of chronological order,
the shelf life of Western civilization
is propped up by two bookends, Shakespeare and Grute.
Bond tries to be accommodating,
but he cannot accept Tanaka's claim,
based on several samples,
that the unknown poet is Shakespeare's equal.
Tanaka suggests that if Bond is to enter
into an understanding of the haiku,
he must try to compose one of his own.
The result is Bond's authorship
of the title of Fleming's narrative.
You only live twice, once when you're born,
once when you look deaf in the face.
Tanaka is delighted with what he considers a breakthrough,
a sincere effort that reflects on the mission.
But it is not until they check into the local police station
to look over surveillance shots of Dr. Shatterhand's castle
that the breakthrough occurs,
one that exceeds the kamikaze therapy
that aims at looking one's own death in the face.
Bond's dead are now in his face.
In the photographs, he recognizes
who's in this Dracula castle for keeps,
Blofeld and Ilma Bund,
the couple that is Specter,
now the ghost of his own couple's past,
both his missing marriage and the couple of parents.
He won't tell Tanaka who Dr. Shatterhand is
that would take the case out of his hands.
The photographic evidence transmits to him
the summons for revenge.
Remember me.
Under double cover in the fishing village
from which he launches his covert operations
against the castle of death,
the locals refer to Dr. Shatterhand as a foreign body,
both the devil himself
and the incarnation of all the evil in the West.
But local customs and shrines tend to make room for ghosts,
many of them friendly.
Bond encounters Blofeld on this questionable ground.
And so, Mr. Bond,
I came to devise this useful and essentially humane project,
the offer of free death to those who seek release
from the burden of being alive.
By doing so, I have provided the common man
with a solution to the problem of whether to be or not to be.
Spectre appears at the juncture of questioning
at which Hamlet encounters his specter.
Is the ghost of his father, the dead father,
doing the limbo because he has unfinished business
to entrust to his son,
or is he a demon sent from hell?
The infernal relation is never seriously pursued,
but there is yet another question
that is never raised as such,
but which Hamlet acts out as his famous procrastination.
What is the identity of or the identification with the ghost?
Or put differently, has there been a murder
or is not the ghost of the father
the strong sign that mourning at this juncture
is disturbed, interrupted, abbreviated,
and thus too successful by half, the vengeful violent half?
Isn't murder in Shakespeare's play
what successful mourning and ready substitution
inflict upon the dead?
There is the death of the other,
but then there's the second death, which is murder.
In Hamlet, there's no reason to trust the paternal ghost
who is otherwise the master of ceremonies
at the pageant of second death.
The secular mind was catching up with the goods of this world,
which, since hardly good enough in comparison
with what awaits us in the other world,
were consigned in the Christian era
to the trash heap of waiting around
or otherwise stored under projective layers
of evil and demonization.
Marlowe's, Dr. Faustus, steps up to the plate,
sweet, Mephistopheles,
and during the 24-year or hour span
of deathless consuming time,
he gets to know the world of his own making.
The medium for this driving is magic,
a good catch-all for everything Christianity
excluded and prosecuted.
The world opens wide to him via magic.
As secular subject, Faustus accepts the devil's best offer,
a finite span of quality time and then the deadline.
He translates hell with Elysium or with this world
and Christian devils with pagan demons
or spirits of the dead.
But once he binds himself to the most powerful devil
magic can provide, Faustus must endure
the sermonizing shine that Pestophilus takes to Christianity.
The problem Faustus faces at or as the end
is that he cannot be certain that there is a time limit
to his death or afterlife.
He knows that human striving, knowing, and consuming
cannot be reduced to lifetime.
His necromantic over-skills made it possible for him
to push button ghosts around as agents of long-distance travel
and communication.
Faustus does not want a slave as ghost
for the next in line with an owner's manual.
Focusing always only on his own death and life,
Faustus must look forward to his own ghostliness
as so abhorrent that it might as well be hell.
Uninhibited by Christianity, Faustus gets his groove back,
but he gets his grave back too.
With Shakespeare's Hamlet, we get to know ghosts
as the detour to self-knowledge missing from Faustus's
more direct and less protected hit of what's worth knowing.
In Hamlet, the second death or life is thus subsumed
by mourning, which in turn can be seen to replace
the magic central to the tragic history of Dr. Faustus
as the main medium for reopening the stage of the world
following the withdrawal of Christianity's dominion.
As was the case with magic in Dr. Faustus,
the medium of mourning in Hamlet still includes fragments
of the former Christian hierarchy as coordinates
for steering the course of ghost communication
and ghost making.
The ghost of Hamlet's father explains his in-between state
and schedule by the timing of his death.
Without a time-out for absolution,
he went down in the midst of his worldly life,
falling short of ethical cleansing.
Hamlet spares Claudius because he finds him at prayer
and thus in the ready position to let his soul
fly straight to heaven and escape the full weight
and waving around of revenge.
Dr. Faustus issues his ultimate affirmation
of the secular world and word in his embrace of Helen of Troy.
This first ending of Marlowe's Tragical History,
which the second ending takes back again,
was where Goethe picked up Hamlet to steer his Faust
clear of Christian doom to rescue.
Too briefly, Marlowe's Faustus proclaims
that his world is let go and recycled via Helen
and that all that is not Helen is what some still call hell.
At the end of Goethe's Faust, unstoppable mourning,
the eternal or internal feminine,
stays the end between Helen and hell,
Jerusalem and heaven, and cheats the Faustian deferral
of suicide of its infernal punchline.
Jacques Lacan raised his bar by lifting
Melanie Klein's 1940 essay,
Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States,
up inside the symbolic grid alongside Hamlet.
In Desire and the Interpretation of Desire and Hamlet,
Jacques Lacan, the analyst who avoided mourning
and melancholia like a past,
finds that he alone recognizes that in Hamlet,
all anyone talks about is mourning.
Phantoms arise because mourning rites have been curtailed
or otherwise improperly carried out.
The ritual value of mourning refers to and summons
a total mass intervention from the heights of heaven
to the depths of hell of the entire play
of the symbolic register.
For the Elizabethan frame, it would only be wishful thinking
to view the symbolic register in its entirety
as still home on the range of Christianity.
However, Lacan does admit that while only the totality
of the signifier can fill or fulfill the hole in the real,
we are faced in mourning with the inadequacy
of signifying elements to cope with the hole.
Just as mourning must mediate a strike of loss
that threatens the inner world inclines essay,
so in Lacan's reading of mourning and Hamlet,
the system of signifiers in their totality
is impeached by the least instance of mourning.
That's why the rites of mourning realign the gap
opened up by a direct hit of mourning
with the greater gap that is always also there,
the symbolic lack.
What does it mean that every encounter with the loss
of a loved one is the renewal of vows of substitution
with the separations and sacrifices already given
at the office of Oedipus by following the complex
into its decline?
If he rids his reading of loss of all singularity,
then Lacan overshoots Klein's mark, the inner world.
Freud's and Klein's attributions of reality testing
to the work of mourning press toward the encounter
with the specter.
According to Freud, the mourner is compelled to submit
the continuity shots of the departed to reality checks.
Lacan translates this into his symbolic grid
as a psychosis-like profusion of images rushing
to fill the gap in the real.
The consequence of Freud's decision to fill out
a missing person's report in consideration of mourning,
both Klein and Lacan note that Freud was the first
to assign an object to mourning, is in turn lost
if we view Freud's introduction of reality testing
in his 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia,
as exclusively in the disposal service of successful mourning.
Klein opens her mourning essay with three citations
from Mourning and Melancholia, in which Freud addresses
reality testing.
The third time, it's the harm apparently done by Freud's
passage on reality's verdict, decreeing the object's
non-existence, that alerts us to the closeness
of Klein's reading derived from Freud's collected work.
Freud states that he does not know if this is in fact so,
but that possibly the survivor lets the lost object go,
satisfied with the prospect of living on.
But the letting go of the goner is possibly possible
only because, over the time of mourning,
the requisite expenditure of energy has dissipated
and the task is more easily done than said.
As Klein shows, Freud's closing words could also signify
that the time of mourning undoes the initial period
at the end of the death sentence handed down to the survivor,
according to which he must choose either to let the dead go
or to join them.
In the time of mourning then, Klein situates reality testing
as the seance of communication, uniting living and dead objects
in the fight against direct hits of loss.
The 1940 mourning essay was Klein's more direct response
after a delay of seven years to the mysterious death
of her son, Hans, in a climbing accident.
Hans's death, which was rumored to have been suicide,
caused Sister Milita Schmittabec to break once and for all
with their mother, whom she blamed for her brother's death.
Lacan, like Klein in her essay, does not address mourning
at first contact, but in the sufferer zone of generic loss.
Only an investment, mourning is locked into the scheme
of development modeled for Klein by early experiences
of loss of the breast, the first cut that cuts deepest.
Lacan translates this into mourning for the phallus
as the decline of the Oedipus complex.
In Lacan's case, the mourning double take must also
swerve from the ghost on the same page he is on
with his reading assignment.
The phantom is the phallus that can't be struck down or mourned.
Only when ready to die oneself to immerse oneself
in the mass suicidal twilight of the gods
can one strike this phantom or phallus.
The contrast between them is that Klein addresses ghosts
and only ghosts, though in this essay not by name.
What Freud did for mourning or un-mourning,
namely fixed the focus on the object relationship,
Klein did for the inner world of identifications,
which are similarly embodied and personified as object relations.
Already the infant builds the internal world
through friendly cannibalism of the parents.
Even though altered by the infant's own phantasms and impulses,
the opening installation of the inner world
still corresponds to actual experiences and impressions
gained from the external world.
Unpleasant experiences out there cause reality testing to turn inward.
In the face of dangers, the child senses that he can retain
or re-attain his objects as well as their love for him
and his love for them, and thus preserve or re-establish
the internal good life.
Enjoyable experiences are equally necessary,
though differently applied.
They are the proofs that loved objects inside as well as outside
are measured, are safe, are not turning vengeful.
If the living is easy and love and trust increase,
then the baby is able to test his inner reality
by means of outer reality.
Freud argues that the mourner reinstates the lost object
inside the ego, Klein adds.
In my view, however, he not only takes into himself,
reincorporates the person whom he has just lost,
but also reinstates his internalized good objects.
Mourning thus means for Klein in the first place
to rebuild with anguish the inner world,
which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.
The case of Mrs. A is at the same time the case of Mrs. Klein, twice over.
That this case-example mother loses a young son who died while at school
encodes Hans's earlier appearances in Klein's Erwe,
the other inner world,
as Felix is presenting problem with his antipathy to schoolwork.
In 1940, through a relay of dreams,
the grief-stuck mother revisits early death wishes
addressed to a mother and son
resented by her brother with whom she identified.
But attending the identification was the deeply repressed wish
to punish two loved ones who by then were already dead.
Her brother and through him, her mother too.
She had been jealous of her brother.
The dream thought announced that it is the unpleasant woman's son
who hurt her brother and mother, who should die.
But what transmits between these lines?
My mother's son died, not my own.
A contrasting feeling was at the same time struck up,
sympathy with her mother and thus sorrow for herself.
Her mother should not lose her grandson too.
Thus grief goes to or through the internalized mother
who suffers together with her.
The tears which she shed were also to some extent
the tears which her internal parents shed,
and she also wanted to comfort them as they, in her fantasy, comforted her.
Only if life inside and outside can be secured as going on after all
can the mourner preserve her loved object,
admit him within her haunted corpus.
Mourning is just one more unhappy experience
that can deepen the relationship to inner objects
and thus allow one to dig in with one's ghosts.
There is even a happiness involved in regaining them
after you felt they were long gone upon impact of the new identifiable loss.
Mourning is not about contact with loss
except as developmentally first and, over time, repeatable.
The contact person, however, joins the other identifiable ghosts
in the inner sanctum,
which is what the next new loss will also ultimately threaten.
I'm leaving out a couple of paragraphs.
Among the posthumously published Last Great Adventures of James Bond 007,
Fleming's short story, Octopussy,
admits living off World War II as crime awaiting justice.
Okay, it's after this. No, one more. Here we go, sorry.
The remains of a murder victim have only now emerged
out of the thaw of a glacier grave.
The dead man, once a citizen of the Third Reich, Austrian annex,
had been Bond's pre-warsky instructor and father figure.
That is why Bond put in the request to track the fatal bullets
to the British officer involved at that time
in cleaning up hidden Nazi loot in the teahole.
Indeed, a certain major smite went into business for himself back then,
collected one stash from the documents on his desk,
and after reaching the area, shot his guide to be alone with the Nazi gold.
Fleming shares his Austrian father figure with Bond,
but he also draws himself a self-portrait
in the depiction of the perpetrator of the crime long time ago.
Smythe, who used the Nazi loot to go directly to Jamaica,
picking out his wife on the way,
living out his last days in self-medicated stupor between heart attacks.
Life Mary is recently dead. He misses her love of him.
Now he loves the reef fish as people,
which the narrator, as one who knows one,
dismisses as symptomatic of loss of contact.
Still, the recent turn to the non-human and maternal sphere
of mirroring and answering represents the beginning of first contact.
Of course, it is too late.
His inner world has taken the plunge,
but his people are not identifiable or recognizable as his loved ones.
His lifeline depends on the splitting image of mother or small octopus,
he named Octopussy,
the figure primarily seductive in part, murderous in the other part.
The second part, the paternal part,
comes out in Smythe's watch for the results of his experiment with the octopus.
Major Smythe was determined to find a scorpion fish and spirit
and give it to his octopus to see if it would take it or spurn it.
And if the octopus ate it, would it suffer from the poison?
These were the questions Bengree at the Institute wanted answered,
and Major Smythe had decided to find out the answers
and leave one tiny memorial to his now futile life
in some dusty corner of the Institute's marine biological files.
Major Smythe joins Fleming's identificatory lineup of figures of sloth,
but this time lined up with a death wish
that occupies a no man's land of unidentified dying between the other's death and one's own.
The truth of the matter was that Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death wish.
The origins of this state of mind were many and not all that complex.
He was irretrievably tied to Jamaica,
and tropical sloth had gradually riddled him
so that inside the varnish surface the termites of sloth,
self-indulgence, guilt over an ancient sin,
and general disgust with himself that eroded his once-hard core into dust.
After Bond has delivered the verdict but postponed the arrest,
Smythe proceeds with the experiment.
He spears the scorpion fish but finds the fish steered him too.
As the inevitable death by poisoning spreads up his body,
he uses his last fifteen minutes to take the second step of the experiment toward the octopus.
But the tentacles reach not for the fish but for Smythe,
his lips bitten in pain left a taste of his blood in the water.
Smythe, as casualty of this libous toot or love death,
will be reported, found, drowned,
but everyone concerned will understand as plain text committed suicide.
Smythe ends stuck then from the combined parents,
the double-backed creature inside him.
Failing to separate out and establish relations in mourning to each parent
and consequently to any complete object,
Smythe on his own or in his couple recycles love of him
without identifying or identifying with an underlying object relation.
He attempts too late to separate the duo-dynamic
that embraces him in the love death of their resistant amalgamation
as bit or bite parts.
The difference between Smythe and Fleming is that the latter's bond with father
could be rescued from the sloth or suicidal depression
washing up onto the frontier of the death wish.
The maternal relation, the other bond,
which follows from the separability of the father
and his reinstatement as loved object in the inner world,
informs James Bond's seductiveness as the intent caregiver
ministering to baby's basic needs.
Spectre, which appeared first as underworld of fragmented
and amalgamated figures from the recent past
ruled by the vengefulness of dead fathers,
conformed to the inner world in bits,
under attack by the mourning that would in time restore its foundations.
Thus, in the course of Bond's mourning assignment,
Spectre's underworld organization released the couple
at the busy intersection of missing couples and partners
and coupling as the recognizable format for final recognizance.
But following the putting to rest of the Blofeld couple,
you only live twice, doesn't really end there or anywhere.
Bond falls into traumatic amnesia
and into the lap of the better half of his undercover identity,
his Japanese wife who claims the decontextualized Bond as her own,
teaching him to be her baby with a sex manual.
In the year of his mother's passing,
Fleming died of his second heart attack, only twice,
on the twelfth birthday of his son Casper,
who in earlier years was known to ask his father
if he loved James Bond more than him.
Bond was Fleming's legacy, but not to his son.
Originally invented for his young son his bedtime story
and then written down while convalescing from his first heart attack,
Fleming's children's story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
emplaces the gadget love of the Bond world up on the screen
within a family's relationship to his magical car.
Once rescued from the scrap heap and repaired by the inventor father,
the car named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang can fly, float,
and save its loved ones.
The car is technically the father's prosthesis,
but its magical qualities, its uncontrollability and independence,
represent as separable the object relation to mother and all others.
This story, as happy medium for the father's relationship
to his beloved but neglected son,
separates out its transmission from its inheritance.
Fleming contains in the story's separate dedication
as tribute to the original car in which the story's magical car was based,
historical insides, German and provenance,
which are not those of Casper's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The original car, built near Canterbury in 1920,
had a pre-1914 war in Mercedes Chassis,
in which was installed a six-cylinder aero engine,
the military type used by the Germans in their zeppelins.
In 1975, Casper died of a drug overdose,
another mysterious death that could not be ruled unambiguously of suicide.
The OD victim left behind a note, which is not your usual testament.
If it is not this time, it will be the next.
While Casper's parting shot of indifference regarding first-timer contact
reverses and preserves the typical bond affirmation of the now as forever,
tomorrow is already dead,
the note also shares a curiously upbeat rhythm
with the stop-and-go ignition name of Casper's magical car.
The bond was first introduced between father and son
when the latter was conceived as accidentally or unconsciously on purpose,
if not next time than this time.
The surprise expectancy of fatherhood led Fleming to enter
and commence as writer exploration of the bond initially to assuage anxieties.
The heterosexual couple, beginning with its embodiment of the future,
was a piece of work of mourning for Fleming,
which led to the invention or projection of spectre,
and at least within the span of the three-spectre narratives
to its giving up the ghost.
Two identifiable losses, the recent deaths of his father
and of his son Hamlet, accompanied Shakespeare into the composition of Hamlet
and the original raising of the spectre.
The ghost in Hamlet, as father, commands that the son rerecord
or erase the record of his inner outer archive and sensorium,
the volumes of his brain, in order to admit the new medium of mourning.
Remember me.
But the paternal command also transmits the child's quavering wondering out loud
if he too will be admitted into this new echo chamber of remembrance and spectrality.
Remember me.
That leaves Hamlet, who transmits his story for recording and safekeeping to Horatio,
whose suicidality must be deferred to this end.
But then there was Casper, the friendly ghost,
who made it inside the very transmission of the inner world
without first filling the father's shoes on the outside.
He inscribes himself within a mourning process, revalorized, for example,
as magical car transmission rather than inheritance of the bond.
Huns, Casper, and Hamlet fall through the role of heir to or through mourning,
while their identification with the spectre is as strong in life as in death.
Huns, Casper, and even Hamlet conjure their ghostliness
between the tragic history of Dr. Faustus and Hamlet,
between wide open reception of media spooks unchecked by mourning
and plain posthumous, which reasserts the object relation but in reverse.
Without avenging his father or securing the inheritance of his patrimony,
without accepting the identification of the spectre as father's single occupancy or bequest,
Hamlet transmits the inner world of identification with ghostliness.
That transmits him.
I am dead, Horatio. Horatio, I am dead.
If it is not this time, it will be the next.
Thank you, and we're on schedule.
Thank you.
Yes, sure, if there are questions.
Questions, comments, preassociations, dreams?
Come on.
I thank you very much for this really very interesting interpretation
and surprising from a surprising interpretation of the stories of James Bond,
but I just want to ask you whether you could just comment a little bit more my question,
which refers to the fact that I got the impression that you don't really make a difference
between Hamlet, Hans and Kasper, but I mean Hamlet is a literal figure,
so how can you do that?
I mean, yes.
Oh, well, that's the easier part of it.
But you're right to point out, to underscore that moment,
it's a fast moment in the presentation, but I think it's an important one.
I don't know whether it's become clear, but I've tried to build up the case of Ian Fleming's
mourning work through James Bond, which presupposes in concert, it turns out,
with Melanie Klein and Kristeva too, this notion that the heterosexual couple
becomes this last resort for mourning in anyone's lifetime.
And certainly it's true that Ian Fleming mounted both Bond and his marriage on parallel tracks
as this kind of work that was very much interested in the messiness of the inner world,
of his underworld that he had to work through, a messiness largely illustrated
by the side-switching of the world wars as it were, internal to that underworld.
But then towards the end, as we've already touched on Casper, I left out some of those,
I'm sorry, we already touched on Hunt's, I left out some of those paragraphs.
But I do find that there is a kind of resistance to this construction of the couple
as the last resort of mourning work,
a form of resistance that takes the form of, at least in my fantasy,
Casper attempting to transmit the spectrality of the inheritance
without, however, inheriting from the father, without entering his shoes,
entering everything that would have to be preliminary to his also embracing
couplification as the medium of mourning.
So in the end, I see Hamlet, Casper, and Hunt too as figures who identify with spectrality,
who contribute to this kind of transmission, and yet skip in many different ways,
following in the, as I said, the footsteps of the standard of couplification,
the standard of exchange that I guess we could say is followed
and postulated in the name of the father.
So then I have another interesting, just going back to what you outlined,
because I mean, to the partner, she, to the partner, she tried to develop a critique
of this heterosexuality, heteronomativity, and I think that, I find it really very interesting
and persuading that she calls the heterosexual couple the melancholic couple.
And so perhaps you could a little bit just outline how you would refer to the partner's theory,
because she would deny that the heterosexual couple is the medium for mourning,
but the heterosexual couple is the resistance really to mourning.
It's certainly the resistance to melancholia.
But don't get me wrong, I'm certainly largely in agreement with Judith,
it's just that certainly this notion of coupling as the medium of mourning,
whether it's heterosexual or not, it could be the coupling in the analytic session even,
this notion of the couple which Freud already raised as the counter to group psychology, for example,
that certainly it's possible to follow the thought that suggests that certain conditions
are already set go for a successful work of mourning in the couple.
There's an allegiance to the next generation, so much is passing through.
And in this case, in this reading, where I've happened to have found someone who I think really based
his second life, his literary career on this notion, I try to follow it to its limit.
And there I tried to show also how it's not all-consuming, as fragile as the notion of successful mourning itself.
My question is maybe also a little bit related to the methodology of your readings.
What is, and maybe I missed something, what makes you identify immediately a specter of the society of evil
in James Bond with the ghost?
Is it just the fact that, of course, the French word, we read it in the name?
It's also, I mean, yeah, English, French, whatever.
Or, I mean, is it not always also a question that we at least have to take into account?
It could just be chance that a certain word was taken.
Are there signs for you also within James Bond that, within the James Bond,
know that this name has been given for good reason, so that it is a ghostly society?
And if so, could you maybe a little bit further elaborate in what sense?
So what I tried to show, even within the limited span of this presentation, is that what's key,
what's already crucial, I think, are the conditions under which specter is conceived or projected.
It's a moment between media.
Fleming is anticipating the projection of the Bond narratives onto the screen.
And ever since I started reading Freud, I've always kept in mind the possibility
that the projective medium is also somehow linked to Freud's theory of ghosts and totem and taboo,
which is about the projection of death wishes and mixed feelings onto the dead,
which thus creates a kind of ghostliness.
So in any event, he's anticipating the crossover into a new medium
and establishes this organization called Spectre,
which is spectral, I think, also in the way in which it manipulates existing oppositions.
Not only does it seem to include within itself, down to details,
this messy mix of the ingredients of the traumatic era of World War II,
but its operation, if you recall in those narratives, especially on screen,
the operation is to inhabit the opposition, to spook it, as it were,
and without leaving a trace almost, extract benefits from that foreground.
But there would be other things to consider.
In Thunderball, where Spectre is first named in the narratives,
Bond, who is the last to take Spectre seriously,
he just thinks it's another mask that the Soviet Union is wearing,
he will test one of the agents of Spectre, someone presumed to be an agent of Spectre,
by using the term Spectre as a mixed metaphor.
There's a game of cards, as usual, and he plays, it's not Blofeld, but someone else.
And he says, oh, I thought I noticed the Spectre of defeat on your shoulder, and he freezes out.
So I mean, in this exchange, I think Fleming sometimes does a good job,
but in this exchange you see that there is one side that is so enthralled to Spectre
that it can't even recognize the possibility of it being a word in the mix of metaphor.
So there are several indications, I think, that motivate a so-called literal reading
of the name of this organization.
But I think the major motivation for me, as when it pops up again as quantum in the most recent film,
is that there is in the orchestration of mourning in James Bond plots,
and the foreground and the background and the background takes the form of some kind of organization
that seems to be coextensive, secretly coextensive, with the world as Bond and M knows it.
And invisibly, it's always there, always watching, always able to intervene.
I mean, it seems to me to conform to certain tenets of Spectrality.
Yeah.
That was already good.
I just want to insist a little bit on the points that have been made.
It is for me not clear what is actually the epistemological status of what you say.
I mean, what is the position implied, what is the position of knowing that is implied in what you say?
So what is the epistemological condition of knowing that you must presuppose in saying this?
And I ask it to phrase it in a very straightforward way.
I think that quite some people who are not psychoanalysts would say your discourse is psychotic.
Let us, let me, psychotic, psychotic.
As a kind of structural place that you must imply in saying what you do
and the knowledge claims that are implied by what you say because there is no contingency possible.
Everything is one big construction in which everything leads to everything according to indications which you see,
to be honest, like with Hamlet, etc., which I don't see.
So that's why I ask, what is the kind of epistemological position if you should have to explain it
that is implied in what you say.
So what is, who is the knower who is speaking?
That's my, who is the knower, so the one who knows.
What is the knowing subject?
Okay, let me use this step.
What is the knowing subject that speaks here?
I'm really intrigued by it.
Well, first off, I would, I wouldn't say psychology.
I don't know to what extent you meant that because psychoanalysis isn't psychology, I don't think.
But we, maybe that's another discussion.
Anyway, as far as Hamlet goes, you know, that's an open field of interpretation.
I certainly don't claim to have wrestled that down once and for all.
But I do, you know, pass through that text, that intersection, in a certain way.
And the way is motivated by my being a writer with, you know, who for many, many, many, many, many years has been immersed in psychoanalysis.
So I would never deny that.
But my work is also deconstructive, and I've never allowed myself to be convinced that there is a place where psychoanalysis ends,
and B culture, for example, suddenly has a separate existence.
The organizing thought, I guess, has always been that psychoanalysis and B culture together explore the missing place of our death cult.
I was originally drawn to psychoanalysis because of my interest in mourning, and there is no other discursivity out there that takes mourning as seriously.
So I was, that was my complication.
I quickly wed Freud, and from Freud went on to include everything that followed Freud, and also those areas where psychoanalysis overlaps with philosophy and sociology,
notably deconstruction and Frankfurt School of Thought.
So I don't know if that's good enough when you ask, yes, people think that I should, you know, what should I say, minimize?
But I can't. I can't minimize the psychoanalytic perspective. I've just put too much of my life into it.
So that's where this discourse stands and falls with psychoanalysis.
But I'm hard-pressed to see, again, where the end of psychoanalysis is in the terrain that I choose to cross and interpret.
I just asked him to clarify this term, death cult, or say something more about it.
I'm just suggesting that there is, there are so many ways in which we seek to remain in touch with the recently departed.
There were perhaps more identifiable ways in the past, and one tends to think of these ways in terms of earlier death cults or whatever.
So I say it's the area that I occupy with my interests and with the discourses I bring along is the missing place of our death cult,
which still continues to press, but it's also something that has been removed or displaced or somehow rationalized.
And yet, in its fragments, it still can be gathered together in what I'm calling B culture.
B culture seems to be the one place remaining, and by B culture, I suppose I mean the culture industry.
But B culture seems to be the one place remaining where one can still discern questions like where did the dead go?
Where are they housed? Where are they kept? What is the schedule of the finite afterlife of finitude?
Everything that comes up with ghosts.
So when I say death cult, I'm referring to more ancient practices, of course, that no longer continue to exist as such in our midst.
And yet they, as I say, they press and they're missing this and in their fragments, and I try to discern their place.
Could you just say that the statement again about psychoanalysis, B culture and the death cult, you said something very clear with these three terms?
I was suggesting that psychoanalysis and B culture together address the missing place of our death cult.
Right. I'm using an analogy with B movies.
Actually, I was inspired to reuse the term recently because I finished a study of the novels of Philip K. Dick and in the simulacra.
He imagines a future world that is both Californian and German, in which society is divided up between the Geheimnesträger and the Beidesträger, not translated in German and the Californian original.
But the slang term by which that split is known as the B's and the G's, and the B's who are not initiated into certain secrets of that society are in the position of still being able to imagine or project
the prospect of occult variations on the relationship between life and death.
So, for example, the secret is that the First Lady isn't really the same First Lady, but a new actress is brought in every 10 or 15 years to replace her.
The other secret is that the president is known as Der Alte in this future society, based on Adenauer. That Der Alte is, in fact, an android.
But I think what's most important in this distinction is that the B's are in the position of still being able to traverse, however allegorically, the terrain of, again, these occult manipulations, mediatic of manipulations, too, of the relationship between life and death.
Hi. Sorry. I just wanted to ask quickly to make sure that I understood this properly. We had a workshop the other day and we were talking about Adenauer's couture industry.
And you mentioned the word culture industry and Frankfurt-Schuler and death cult. I was just wondering if this is to do with the replacement of metaphysics by the culture industry.
Did you say that it was an ancient practice that you're talking about of the difficult, or is it rather just this metaphysical religious type thing that we had before the alignment?
No, it can't be that. Just to put it very quickly, the questions that B culture raises, and as I said, they're raised in the midst of ruins.
Perhaps it might bear some resemblance to Benjamin's notion of allegory and origin of the German morning play, because I am talking about something that is radically admitted to be finite.
To my mind, that's what modern spiritualism really accomplishes, even if many spiritualists felt that this confirmed their Christianity and ended up quite devout.
What makes spiritualism a secular intervention is the investment in the recent past, the ghosts of the recently departed.
That already introduces, even especially into the afterlife, the finitude of remembrance and ghostliness.
What I'm thinking about, yes, that would be the difference. No, there's not going to be a jump cut to some old sense of immortality.
Whatever the B cultures might be in terms of former death cults, it's going to have to project its death cults, or the missingness of those death cults, in finite terms, complicated finite terms.
Thank you again for being here with us, answering questions. Thank you for this very dense, but I hope also inspiring reading of James Bond and the operations of mourning in many different contexts of psychoanalysis.
In the internal academy, we'll see you tomorrow again, for all others. On behalf of them, I think, thank you and have a good night.