The Papin enigma

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 331-359

  Coffman, Christine E ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749563106     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-3-331     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Christopher Lane, "'The Delirium of Interpretation': Writing the Papin Affair," differences 5, no. 2 (1993): 25.
2. For an overview of the trial and of the journalistic coverage of the affair see Dr. le Guillant, "L'Affaire des sœurs Papin," Les Temps modernes, November 1963, 868-913.
3. For extensive excerpts of the trial transcripts and early articles on the Papin affair see Francis Dupré, La "Solution" du passage à l'acte: Le Double Crime des sœurs Papin (Toulouse: Erès, 1984).
4. See also Michel Coddens, "La Colère rouge: Le Procès des sœurs Papin," Revue Interdisciplinaire d'études juridiques 9 (1982): 95-171;
5. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l'âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960);
6. Gérard Bonnot, "La Soirée en enfer," Les Temps modernes 203 (1963): 1911-20;
7. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100-107, 126-31;
8. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939, ed. Irving Drutman (New York: Viking, 1972);
9. Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 145-50;
10. Nicole Ward Jouve, "An Eye for an Eye: The Case of the Papin Sisters," in Moving Targets: Women, Murder, and Representation, ed. Helen Birch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7-31;
11. and Frédéric Pottecher, Les Grands Procès de l'histoire (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 69-79.
12. The affair has also inspired several fictionalizations I do not discuss here: Paulette Houdyer, L'Affaire des sœurs Papin (Le Diable dans la peau) (Paris: Julliard, 1966);
13. Jean Genet's stage play Les Bonnes (Paris: Gallimard, 1947);
14. and Nico Papatakis's film Les Abysses (1962). All selections rendered in English yet cited with foreign title are my own translations; all selections cited with English title are drawn from the said translations.
15. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 221.
16. For the original text see Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
17. Jacques Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters," trans. Jon Anderson, Critical Texts 5, no. 3 (1988): 7-11.
18. For the original text see "Motifs du crime paranoïaque: Le Crime des sœurs Papin," Minotaure: Revue artistique et littéraire, December 1933, 25-28.
19. Technically, the event I discuss is the sisters' retrial. Because Christine and Léa had confessed to the murders immediately on their arrest, they were sentenced, respectively, to death (subsequently commuted) and to life imprisonment after three state psychiatric experts had deemed them sane and legally responsible. After Christine had begun to exhibit symptoms of self-punishment while separated from her sister, however, their sanity and culpability were reconsidered in a second trial, which is my subject here. For accounts of the two trials see Coddens, "Colère rouge";
20. Dupré, "Solution" du passage à l'acte;
21. Guillant, "Affaire des sœurs Papin";
22. and Lane, "'Delirium of Interpretation.'"
23. Quoted in Guillant, "Affaire des sœurs Papin," 884-89.
24. The screenplay for Sister My Sister was written by Wendy Kesselman, who seems to have taken much of its content from her stage play, My Sister in This House (New York: French, 1982). For this essay I have transcribed directly from the film.
25. Teresa de Lauretis, "The Stubborn Drive," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 869. De Lauretis specifically contrasts the open lesbianism of Meckler's Papin sisters with the disavowed lesbianism attributed to them by Lacan.
26. After the voice-over of the président, the close-up of the sisters' faces gradually fades to black and white during a voice-over of the imprisoned Christine's desperate cries for Léa. It does not mark the source of either voice-over, causing the police investigation to blur with the trial and with the sisters' imprisonment. Furthermore, it suggests that Christine is the sister to whom the interrogation is addressed, thus replicating the claims of those who have claimed that she was the stronger, more controlling sister in their délire à deux. See Guillant, "Affaire des sœurs Papin";
27. and Dupré, "Solution" du passage à l'acte.
28. Sigmund Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 21-144.
29. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 150.
30. For the original text see Cixous and Clément, La Jeune née (Paris: Union générale, 1975).
31. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White similarly argue that in Freud's case studies "the topography of desire . . . is traced out on the body of a paid servant" (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986], 153).
32. Jean LaPlanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smilh (New York: Norton, 1973), 144. LaPlanche and Pontalis further define the ego-ideal as "an agency of the personality resulting from the coming-together of narcissism . . . and identification with the parents, with their substitutes or with collective ideals" (144).
33. Cixous and Clément, Newly Born Woman, 150.
34. Lynda Hart's reading of My Sister in This House, like mine of the film, lays out a logic of parallelism between the Papin and Danzard "couples," emphasizing the contrast between the maids' overt sexuality and their employers' repression. Hart elaborates this doubling by exploring the way in which the Danzards remain patriarchy's "dutiful daughters" while their maids transgress the bounds of sexual propriety; she argues that the maids' room is a space of maternal love that evades patriarchal strictures. Yet although Hart claims that Madame "transfers her hostility to the maids" by reprimanding Léa because of an inability to express "sexual rivalry between mother and daughter," she avoids the possibility that Madame's act of projection arises from disavowed homosexuality - in other words, that there is an unconscious motive for Madame's fatal "homophobia"
35. ("'They Don't Even Look Like Maids Anymore': Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House," in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989], 144, 138).
36. For discussion of the relevance of "Motives of Paranoid Crime" to Lacan's later writings see Catherine Clément, Vies et légendes de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Grasset, 1981);
37. Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
38. and Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Context, trans. Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
39. Many accounts of Lacanian psychoanalysis reference "Motives of Paranoid Crime" as an important anticipation of the theory of specularity Lacan later would delineate in his famous article "The Mirror Stage," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7. While "The Mirror Stage" announces Lacan's move away from Freud's diachronous oedipal narrative, the assumption of my argument in the following pages is that the interest of his early work on the Papin sisters is not reducible to its relevance to his later, arguably more mature work. That said, it is important to note that my critique of the theory Lacan puts forth in "Motives of Paranoid Crime" may or may not apply as well to his later texts, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this essay.
40. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 10.
41. Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 9-16.
42. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 10.
43. Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of Paranoia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 12:62-63.
44. For the original text see "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschrieben Fall von Paranoia (Dementia paranoides)" (1911), in Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion, vol. 7 of Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973), 133-203.
45. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 259-62.
46. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
47. LaPlanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis, 162.
48. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
49. Sigmund Freud, "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality," trans. Joan Riviere, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 160-70.
50. For the original text see "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität," in Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion, 217-28.
51. Lacan, Psychose paranoïaque, 261.
52. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
53. Freud notes that the openly homosexual man differs from the heterosexual only because for the former "the detachment of social feeling from object-choice has not been fully carried through." He thus suggests a teleology of heterosexual development without presenting so-called homosexual underdevelopment as inherently harmful. By mentioning homosexuals' "devotion to the interests of the community," Freud suggests that their orientation is evidence of psychosexual underdevelopment, but not necessarily of social pathology ("Neurotic Mechanisms," 169-70).
54. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 10.
55. Similarly criticizing the "circularity" of Freud's account of paranoia, Judith Butler argues that by theorizing social integration and the formation of conscience as marked by the outward renunciation of a homosexuality on which the social bond nevertheless depends, Freud offers an etiology that "is already within the normative and regulatory domain of the social for which he seeks to give an account" (Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative [New York: Routledge, 1997], 120).
56. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), 69.
57. Lacan, Psychose paranoïaque, 251.
58. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," in Standard Edition, 14:169.
59. For the original text see "Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus," in Psychologie des Unbewußten, vol. 3 of Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), 341-54.
60. Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten," trans. Alix Strachey and James Strachey, in Rieff, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, 107-32.
61. For the original text see "'Ein Kind wird geschlagen' (Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Entstehung sexueller Perversionen)" (1919), in Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion, 230-54.
62. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 120-29.
63. One might recall the rhetoric Freud uses to account for Schreber's paranoia. As their nodal point, the mad Senatspräsident's delusions featured his bodily transformation into a woman: he sensed his chest developing the feeling he imagined to characterize women's breasts; he looked forward with pleasure to assuming the place of the woman in coitus. This evidence led Freud to assert that "the exciting cause of the illness was the appearance in him of a feminine (that is, passive homosexual) wishful phantasy" ("Autobiographical Account of Paranoia," 47). As in Freud's text on masochism, femininity is here understood only in the context of a relation between men.
64. Lacan develops his theory of "foreclosure" in The Psychoses, 1955-1956, bk. 3 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993);
65. and in "On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis," in Ecrits: A Selection, 179-225. Using a revised framework derived from Saussurean linguistics, Lacan's later work on psychosis figures the pathology of sexual variance somewhat differently from "Motives of Paranoid Crime." It is beyond the scope of this essay to reflect on the success, or lack thereof, of this later stage of Lacan's work.
66. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 7, 11.
67. Lacan, "Motifs du crime paranoïaque," 26. In "Motives of Paranoid Crime" Anderson's translation reads, "Yet we omit," which clarifies the sentence structure but elides the "still" [encore] that suggests the negation through which Lacan figures the rapes (7).
68. Dupré, "Solution" du passage à l'acte, 116, 127.
69. Lacan, "Motifs du crime paranoïaque," 28;
70. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
71. Guillant, "Affaire des sœurs Papin," 887. I do not wish to suggest that antipathy toward or fear of men caused the sisters to become lesbian; indeed, I would like to maintain the indeterminacy evidenced (sometimes unwittingly) in earlier representations of their enigmatic sexuality. I make no attempt to further epistemological arguments in which proof of their sexuality is at stake; what interests me is the way in which constructions of their lesbianism testify to phantasies and anxieties about gender, sexuality, and the bourgeois family.
72. Lacan, "Motifs du crime paranoïaque," 28.
73. My thanks to Christopher Peterson for suggesting that Lacan creates a lesbian version of the primal scene in his article.
74. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 126.
75. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
76. Freud's one case study of a female paranoiac similarly entails a contorted, insistent hunt for a homosexual kernel of her delusions ("A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytical Theory of the Disease," trans. Edward Glover, in Rieff, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, 97-106). Here too the phallus plays a significant role: the analyst insists that the paranoiac fears an older coworker, a mother figure displeased over the younger woman's illicit heterosexual affair.
77. My formulation echoes Sarah Kofman's discussion of the way in which psychoanalysis figures woman as enigmatic (L'Enigme de la femme: La Femme dans les textes de Freud [Paris: Galilée, 1980]).
78. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11.
79. Lane, "'Delirium of Interpretation,'" 25. I agree with Lane that the Papin affair presented a "crisis of meaning" in several discursive arenas in the early 1930s; however, given his indictment of the way in which male phantasy colors an account of the Papin sisters by Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret, I find it odd that his discussion and revision of Lacan's "Motives of Paranoid Crime" do not include an examination of that article's sexual politics.
80. Prior studies that have questioned inconsistencies in the sisters' testimony are undecided both about whether they had any complaints against the Lancelins and about whether their rage was an expression of class rebellion. See Guillant, "Affaire des sœurs Papin";
81. Dupré, "Solution" du passage à l'acte;
82. and Coddens, "Colère rouge." I do not intend to affirm that the murders were acts of revenge; instead, I would like to demonstrate that Lacan dismisses this possibility without a solid rationale.
83. Along with Paul Nizan and Jean Bernier, Crevel gives Lacan's Psychose paranoïaque a largely positive appraisal by underscoring its incipient analysis of class oppression. Elisabeth Roudinesco, who cites Crevel, points out that "Motives of Paranoid Crime" deploys an even more explicitly Marxist vocabulary than Lacan's thesis, supposedly demonstrating that Lacan had "listened to the message transmitted" by his communist fans (Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 62).
84. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., 127.
85. During the trial, the prosecution characterized the Papin sisters as beastly and animalistic in an attempt to persuade the jury of their inhumanity (Dupré, "Solution" du passage à l'acte).
86. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 11;
87. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co., 127.
88. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 8.
89. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," Ibid., 11, 8.
90. Ross situates Lacan's article on the Papins within the larger context of twentieth-century French literature and cinema, underlining the way in which the marginalization of both maids and schoolmistresses often leads to paranoia. In her discussion of Lacan's early work on "social tensions" in paranoid crime, Ross helpfully underlines the way in which Lacan opens up questions of gender and class in his other early writings. Oddly, though, she begins by citing "Motives of Paranoid Crime" as an example of unqualified success in theorizing paranoia's relation to social position and then shifts to an acknowledgment of the way in which "the specific class dimension of . . . rage . . . is kept at bay in Lacan's rhetorical interpretation" of the Papin affair ("Schoolteachers, Maids, and Other Paranoid Histories," Yale French Studies 91 [1997]: 18-25).
91. This double entendre obtains both in the English translation and in the French original, which refers to the Lancelins as "le couple" and "leurs maîtresses" (Lacan, "Motifs du crime paranoïaque," 28).
92. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 164.
93. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 47, 92-114, 120.
94. Lacan, "Motives of Paranoid Crime," 9.