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Nadine: It’s extremely perverse, the way you present your suffering to others, telling them afterward that, in any case, there’s nothing they can do. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to call Marie-Christine tonight and give her clearance. Under these circumstances, I’m no longer interested. You can’t say what you’ve just said and then play innocent, as if you hadn’t said anything, telling me it was just so I would know how you’re suffering.

Yvon Kermann: You have a sado-masochistic relationship with the public.

But most of all, during the night from the 1st to the 2nd, Marie-Christine had wept in my arms, telling me: I love only you, I’ve never loved any one but you, you’re the first and only one, but you don’t want me so I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to disappear, you won’t hear of me ever again, not ever. You can’t stop me, because I’ll do it when you’re not here.

The last few days (flashback)

Saturday, November 28th, in the evening, there’s a party at Nathalie’s, in the end I accept the invitation. I don’t watch Marie-Christine dance, I don’t dance, I pout, I tell everyone that I’m tired, exhausted, I’m told “not me, I spent the whole day kayaking and I’m not tired…” Or “drink a little whisky, it will wake you up.” Red wine makes you sleepy, and whisky wakes you up. Or “I’m sorry I told you the other day that you were overreacting. —Well, it’s your point of view. —No, I shouldn’t have said it. —It doesn’t matter.”

It was horrible.

The key moments:

We make love. My fantasies are often of humiliation. Marie-Christine humiliating a girl, who is such an idiot, she doesn’t notice that I’m there, I know what Marie-Christine is thinking, I get off on this. Marie-Christine doesn’t give a shit, while the other one would lay siege to her house for eight days just for a chance to sniff her. Marie-Christine will take advantage, will tell her “since you’re here, go ahead, lick me, you won’t have come here for nothing.”

Another element, a Freudian slip while writing yesterday, that encapsulates my sadistic and sadomasochistic disorders, instead of ‘vaginal penetration’ I wrote ‘vaginal, sodomization.’ And you see, the comma comes in, the virgule, the little verge, little penis, it’s starting all over again. As if my head, mounted on a pivot, had two faces always present, I connect, I associate, everything relates, that’s what I call my incestuous mental structure. Which I’m trying to lessen a bit, like a fracture and a facture. A digression on fracture-facture, on puns:

Puns, jokes

On multiple occasions, Freud used Witz as much to make fun of himself as to show those around him that he could laugh about the most dire realities. A joke is an expression of the unconscious. Like human sexuality, it has infantile and polymorphous aspects. Freud studied joke-techniques and the mechanisms of pleasure they generate. There are inoffensive Witze and those that are tendentious, motivated by aggression, obscenity or cynicism. When they hit the mark, jokes, which require at least three people, the author, the recipient and the spectator, render suppressed desires more bearable by giving them a socially acceptable mode of expression. According to Freud there is a fourth motivation, one more terrible than the other three: skepticism. Jokes in this register bring absurdity into play and instead of targeting a person or an institution, they attack the certainty of our common sense. They lie when they tell the truth and tell the truth with a lie. Jokes produce pleasure. If they rely on condensation and displacement, they are characterized primarily by the playfulness of language. Humor, the comic, and jokes, all three bring us back to an infantile state, because “the euphoria we try to reach along these routes is nothing other than the temper of our childhood, a time when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making a joke and had no need of humor to feel happy in life.” Freud did not consider his book on jokes to be very important, he viewed it as a psychoanalytical essay applied to literary creativity. The book was not received with much enthusiasm, the first edition of a thousand copies took seven years to sell out. Jacques Lacan was the first, in 1958, to raise Witz to the level of a concept.