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PARTISAN REVIEW
But of course birth dooms me to death
in time,
and the fantasy identi–
fication of birth with death implies an indifference to the time
between
the
two. Perhaps only a passionate interest in the •'unfolding" of my life's time
can soften the shock of that falling away from the self which is intimately
connected with death in both defecation and birth. In effect, we might say
that Artaud, in his panic, would abolish all temporal processes, and this has
important consequences for his revolutionary vision of the theater. To under–
stand this, we should look at some other aspects of birth and of the anus as
terror. For birth and defecation are instructive not merely about individuality
and death; they also throw light on self-repetition and character formation
in time. Birth is the fundamental example in human experience of self-repe–
tition as productive of new being. The infant's parents have reproduced
themselves in another individual. The untesolvable paradox of birth lies in
this equivalence between self-reproduction and absolute difference. Thus
birth is the model of all temporal processes which simultaneously establish
continuities and discontinuities . It is the major human experience of dif–
ference within repetition, of a repetition which does not simply reproduce
the same. On the one hand , birth is the model of all recurrences which make
it possible for us to
see
intelligible structures in the world; all sense-making
activity depends on the perception of repetition (or of parallelism and an–
alogy) . On the other hand , birth initiates us into the world of diversified
forms .
Among the latter, we might include the forms of an individual char–
acter. The diversified coherence of a particular psychological history consists,
precisely, in self-repetitions subverted and enriched by self-betrayals. And
there are , of course, possibilities of terror in this process . There is, first of all,
the terror of
mere
repetition, of that monotonous, timeless tick-tack of per–
sonality which obsesses Gudrun in Lawrence's
Women in Love.
There is also
the potential terror of having to recognize the self in a form alien to the self.
In one sense, both the infant and fecal matter defy us to recognize ourselves
in a foreign substance. And the history of personality includes numerous
shocks of similar (non)recognitions. In literature,
A fa recherche du temps
perdu
is the most exhaustive document we have of a man's incredulity in the
face of what he himself becomes. The most mysterious crises for Proust's
narrator are those moments when he can't find himself in the present, when
he perceives no repetitions but only difference. Finally, there is the terror of
loss-a terror which can be located both on the side of what has reproduced
itself and on the side ofwhat has been reproduced. In birth, defecation, and
the history of personality, the parent organism dissipates its contents merely
by allowing them to be manifested in external forms. The mother literally
loses a part of herself in the child; we throwaway some of what the body has
