2023-10-06 19:20:04
The toxic era
by Clotilde Leguil
PUF, 204 p., €18
For a long time, the psychoanalyst Clotilde Leguil heard the word “toxic” without paying attention to it, seeing it as a word of the time, “a fashionable word”, “that everyone uses without knowing what it means”. But seeing him haunt her office, she chose to give him all her attention. Today, with this profound and inhabited book, she shows how rich this term is and outlines the iceberg of evil and suffering that it tries to bring to light.
Nearly a century ago, Freud, the “father” of psychoanalysis, was already interested in toxic substances. In Discontent in civilization (1930), he uses the term to designate artificial substances (wine, opium, etc.) which provide temporary relief from suffering, anguish and distress. The toxicant is then “worry breaker” putting displeasure to sleep.
From “refuge”, toxic has today become “danger”. By tracing the uses of the word, Clotilde Leguil shows that it covers a vast uneasiness and comes to name a “experience of violation”. “We say “toxic” to mean the too close proximity of a parent to their child, to say the devastating effects after the fact of a romantic relationship, we say “toxic” to mean the places where we lost, the experiences where we mishandled, mistreated, forced ourselves. We say “toxic” to try to say that “this is too much”. The term embraces both intimate and collective realities, because fake news, management, patriarchy or predatory economics can be said to be toxic.
The toxic of “always more” enjoyment
With great finesse, Clotilde Leguil draws the contours of this new experience which recalls our vulnerability to words and the fragility of our bodies. Step by step, she progresses in understanding the dynamics of the toxic, which acts like a poison, “a strange and poisonous thing”, which comes to force the limit – of bodies, of the Earth’s resources… – in the name of “always more” enjoyment. With the help of Musil’s reading, she also questions the subject’s participation in this “harmful enjoyment”which explains his difficulties in extricating himself from it.
With this book, the psychoanalyst designates a “new malaise in civilization”, which puts life at stake. Where will the antidote come from? Clotilde Leguil invites “a new form of ethical questioning”to think about “at the limits”in the awareness that “the right to enjoyment has led us astray”. Through the disgust it generates, the toxic in fact manifests “that below all norms, there are limits that the living encounters (…) It formulates the new necessity of a limit, where the prohibition of yesteryear no longer manages to regulate the aspiration to enjoy always more “.
For Clotilde Leguil, we see, the remedy is to be sought in psychoanalysis rather than morality. His critique of Kant, in the wake of Lacan, opens the debate on the existence of a “toxic superego”complicit in the injunction to enjoyment and therefore incapable of stemming the violence of the toxic.
Does this exhaust what morality would have to say on the subject? Probably not, but Clotilde Leguil prefers, for her part, to rely on the resources of psychoanalysis. Through words, she invites the subject to revisit his story and the way he was poisoned. To reconnect with his desire, because “only desire can limit enjoyment”.
#experience #violation