If I have chosen to talk about Francis Ponge, the French writer and poet who was born in 1899 and who died in 1988, it is because this work, in which each word is weighed up and which continues to have great bearing for our time, aims, both for himself and for the reader at being an object of « pleasure » (it is his word) and a lesson. Because also, it is a work which he addresses explicitly to the reader hoping that the latter will make of his reading « an act » … « as he says », a revolutionary act in the sense of universal gravity an act which holds the risk of being revolutionized oneself.

And above all because, being myself a psychoanalyst and a writer I have felt particularly concerned by the circumstances in which this work became possible, by the way in which time after time he inaugurates it, by the center around which it is built up, the movement it follows, and by what it produces and what it aims at. It seems to me that the works of F. Ponge and of J. Lacan, these two contemporaries have many points in common and throw light one upon the other.

I have tried to deal with his work, even if it be rapidly, in the same way as he uses words to deal with things, for you may know that what is new in Ponge is the fact of writing of things by keeping-account- of-words, according to his own formula.

Moreover his first book published in 1947 is called «Taking Sides with Things». Here are the titles of some of the texts : bread, fire, cigarette, oyster, orange, piece of meat, pebble.

It is necessary to say straight away that once people began to be interested by his work, Francis Ponge felt the necessity of giving explanations, that is to say of explaining how he fabricated his texts. As he says, he opens up his workshop making his work present and tangible in his own books. His whole work is divided into what he calls the expression of things, which according to him is not sufficient, and the lesson which can be made of this (one might say that the work has not as its sole objective the finished text). He therefore reviews the different drafts, versions and developments, and theorizes his practice of writing at the same time as he writes. By setting out from his work and by bringing to the fore certain distinctive aspects, I have tried to follow and retrace (Ponge would have liked this word) a part of his itinerary which has at its basis objects and which he characterizes as logical, since the writing is done whilst trying to adhere honestly to the effective functioning of the mind, according to Ponge. The objects in question are those about which Lacan says, in connection with sublimation, that they are raised to the dignity of «Das Ding», the inaccessible and forbidden Freudian thing.

To quote F. Ponge: «Our principal motif was undoubtedly a disgust for what we had been obliged to speak and say…» Further on (at the beginning of «Methods») : «I was no doubt not very intelligent; at any rate, I’m not very good at ideas. I have always been disappointed by them. The best argued opinions, the most harmonious and well built philosophical systems have always seemed to me to be absolutely fragile. They have caused me a certain disgust (a moody feeling) an unpleasant sense of inconsistency».

And he says elsewhere : «I chose this activity not at all in order to make poetical objects, but simply to denounce common language, to make or to help to make another one».

From this starting-point, it appears to me that the course of Ponge’s work begins with two successive negations which are not in a straight line, but which are separated from one another by a zig-zagmovement or a hiatus.

First of all Ponge refuses to adhere to opinions, ideologies and systems. «Truth is absent from their propositions», … for as he says «there is the non-signification of the world».

Is this not a way of saying that there is obviously something which cannot be resolved, for which no signification can give the answer and which is manifest in what we call the malaise, of which Freud talks or the symptom of which Lacan says that it is the same for everyone, though under different forms.

There is obviously something which is out of joint. The world cannot be explained, the universe cannot be embraced, all cannot be said, there is no final word. There is a contradiction which cannot be solved and which is masked over by systems.

When he speaks of «the non-signification of the world», it seems to me that F. Ponge is locating the incompleteness of the symbolical, the real hole which gives a center to the structure. He makes his own the prohibition (the negation, the cross), which are the conditions for the existence of the subject, founded on the paternal function as regards the incestuous pleasure, the supposed circularity of the signifiants and the supposed pleasure of the Other.

One can say that an analysand begins his analysis thanks to a similar negation, on account of his symptoms, which are incomprehensible to him, but which he suspects have a cause beyond his rationalizations.

However, having made evident what he calls the non-signification of the world, Ponge finds himself faced by a difficulty which leads to his second negation, his second «saying no».

«For several years at a period of my life when I had plenty of time, I asked myself the most difficult questions and I invented all sorts of reasons for not writing» he says and further on, continues: «one is discouraged and inclined to resignation by any attempt at explaining the world, but also any attempt at showing that the world is unexplainable».

Hence there follows a period of silence during which he does not publish or very little, a period of expectancy, during which F. Ponge examines the different solutions and the different arguments used to justify them which are for or against the structural malaise, the non-signification of the world.

During these years, Ponge was a member of the surrealist group, which he leaves. He joins the Communist Party which he quits, considering that it is incompetent for the questions concerning creative writing which interest him. He withdraws from the literary world with which he has little sympathy.

He reduces the transferential ties which linked him to Jean Paulhan, his editor and friend. It may be said that he dethroned the supposed knowledge of Paulhan by publishing, against the opinion of the latter his second book called «Proems». He frees himself too from the ideas of his friend Albert Camus. He is opposed to the notion of the Camusian «individuel», «who longs after the One and who demands a clear explanation, menacing otherwise to commit suicide. This is the individual that twenty centuries of idealistic and christian brain-washing have made ill».

Finally he says yes there is the non-signification of the world, the incompleteness, but no «it is not a tragedy for me to be incapable of explaining or understanding the world. What is tragical is the fact that men are unhappy about this and are hence prevented from trying to create a relative state of happiness …»

F. Ponge thus says no, not to the malaise, but to the defensive positions, which are caused by the malaise. Unlike the hysterical person he refuses to complain, to be revolted, to ask for explanations. (whom can one ask ?) He refuses avoidance, silence and obsessional procrastination.

He seeks after a way of speaking and of writing which is founded on something else. F. Ponge acknowledges that there is a malaise in his life but that there is no reason to oppose and to annul the terms of the conflict. As he says the two sides go together and : «I need the poetical magma in order to get rid of it».

Therefore, he says : «one must speak against words ; in these matters, silence is the most dangerous of things. One must speak out». Further on he says : «Expression is for me the only way, the passion for expression…» «It is a question of the positive part that poetry should play and no longer a question of wailing and moaning». In this respect he refers to the poet Lautreamont and speaks of «the stream of impersonal poetry and Lautreamont’s idea of an active poetry quite contrary to that which is usually encountered, i.e. poetry as a simple subjective outpouring».

Ponge presses his point much further, saying : «It is a question of the positive role of poetry as being an activity which produces political and moral laws». He thus links up his poetical work with ethics by saying: «I am tortured by a feeling of civil responsibility. I cannot admit that only objects of pleasure, of exultation, of awakening are all that is offered to mankind («What is language – a whip for stirring air?» to quote Alcuin.) Therefore there is no display of moods nor of pessimism. No despair, nothing which may flatter human masochism».

However it is not sufficient to say no, this «no» must be made into acts. It is not sufficient to proclaim I like or I do not like man in order to have something to say about mankind».

It is here that Francis Ponge takes a decisive step, that is to say invents something new : «After having gone through a certain crisis, I had to learn to speak again, to establish my own dictionary, I am not a man who can be got down. It was then that I chose to take sides with things».

At this point it seems to me to be necessary to read from one of F. Ponge’s texts called «The Shape of the World», which dates from 1928 :

«I must confess to a quite charming and irresistible temptation which is long-standing and quite typical of my mind».

Unlike most philosophers and unlike what is no doubt the most sensible thing to do, I tend to imagine the world and all the things I see or may visually conceive, not in the shape of a big soft, nebulous misty sphere or on the contrary in the shape of a big, limpid, crystal clear pearl, whose center, as one philosopher has said, is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere …

«But rather, and this in a perfectly arbitrary and variable way, in the shape of quite particular things – things which are asymmetrical and considered as contingent not only in their shape but in all their characteristics and their peculiar colours and scents».

It is interesting to note the words which F. Ponge sets asymmetrically one against another. On the one hand, we find sphere, geometry, infinite and on the other hand, thing, particular, contingent, asymmetry. These words recall to some extent Lacan’s topology. In both cases, a limit is surpassed, an act is done, with the emergence of a desire, which is what Ponge calls the charming and irresistible temptation.

Indeed as against a supposed circularity of signifiants, a language which could say and cover everything, a sort of completeness, a pleasure of the Other which systems might suppose, Ponge describes the radical character of things which are simply there. These things naturally bring to mind Freud’s partial objects, the objects of drives and fantasy, Lacan’s objects which are the cause of desire, appendices of the body which the subject introduces in the hole of the symbolic. As Lacan says : «It is in this object that the subject has to realize the nature of his very being as a being of desire by which he seeks to make up for the failing of the symbolic». It is through these objects which are substitutes for the Other that the subject succeeds in questioning the desire of the Other.

Not everything is in the signification vectorized by the phallic signifiant. There is a limit represented by the objects under the form of Ponge’s things objects which one must try to bring to light by constructing the edges through writing. As he says «At first I worked on words up to the point where a sort of body seemed to emerge out of their lacunas. Once I had recognized it, I brought it out into the world». As we shall see, all his work in writing will consist in bringing this body out into the world.

In 1942, F. Ponge puts an end to his silence and publishes «Taking Sides with Things», which to me is a work of resistance against the rise of totalitarism and fascism at that time (F. Ponge took part in the Resistance). It is a work whose texts were prepared like bombs and which were written in the half hour that his job as an employee left him each evening.

Thus for F. Ponge, the thing or the object is the very principle of his writing «the object, this way of being able to make man, in all his absurdity, leave his narrow routines».

How does Francis Ponge talk of these things with which he has decided to take up sides and which he calls too pre-texts. Throughout his work Ponge defines it in different ways, which can be compared with the three Lacanian registers of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

1) This object-thing is part of the reality of the physical world.

2) But Ponge says «It is not so much the object (it need not necessarily be present) as the idea of the object, including the word which designates it. It is a question of the object in the French language and in the French mind».

3) He also emphasizes the presence, the density, the concrete evidence, the palpable aspect of this object, in the same way as letters and words have a concrete evidence. They are there for the eye, for the ear and for the signification they carry. They are in three dimensions.

Are we not dealing here with the object a, situated in the chain of signifiants? Its extraction, operated by the division of the subject, takes the place thanks to the signifiant which insists, which comes up against the chain and which designates an object-referent, an «object-thing», one might say.

It is an object most often in reality whose sight brings about an incomprehensible emotion in him, an object which affects him, by which one may say he is intimately concerned and which is the cause of his desire to speak and to write.

These object-things, which interest him are in most cases ordinary, everyday, forgotten, things (for example a plate, an apple, a wash-tub). They are silent things, but as Ponge says : «Most men have been deprived of words and are as silent as a carp or a stone». This evokes the idea of a surface without a hole or of the world of the dead.

These things, which have no voice and whose sight is silent, matter very much to him, giving him a feeling of strange familiarity (It may be recalled that for Lacan, sight is an object, an a-object which, together with the voice and the Nothing, he added on to the oral and anal freudian objects).

Thus these things have no voice and it is as though their pregnant look prays to be spoken out, asks for someone to deliver the voice hushed up by indifference or covered over by opinions, ideas, systems.

Moreover Ponge says : «It is a look of such a sort that it should be told». For my part I would speak of the look of things, to which the resonance of words lends a new voice, or rather whose separation from ideas and opinions leads to the originating point of speech whose edges are crossed and cut again by the disengaged voice.

For Ponge it is no longer a question of turning away from this object nor of remaining fascinated by its contemplation in the pleasure which encountering it has produced. As he puts it : «The mind which at first is lost in the contemplation of things (which are nothings), is born anew by the naming of their properties». Furthermore «the best one can do is to consider each thing as being unknown, then to stroll along and lie down under a tree or on grass and to begin everything again from the beginning».

Any object-thing a word and its sonority for example is suitable – and can serve as a pre-text, such as a crate, a tree, etc – if it can bring the train of significants to a standstill, if it offers any sort of resistance, if it carries out this first division, provided that it is chosen for having caused the desire to write. It thus causes the displacement of the representations attached to this object which has been weighed down and held back.

The symbolic alliance is thus sealed, but F. Ponge considers it necessary to draw the ultimate conclusions of this pact through the work involved in writing. It means holding on to this object thing, accepting to be submitted to it, allowing oneself to be guided by it. One has «to think of it with fervour and ingenuousness» and not leave the field which could be said to be transferencial and which is determined by the object.

F. Ponge uses the metaphor of the wheel which circles round the object. This brings to mind the movement of the drive. Reference may here be made to what Lacan says of the analyst in the transference who is in the position for the analysand of the other and at the a-object – these two needing to be separated. Ponge describes the greatest difference possible between the metaphor and the object-thing : «The metaphor’s main purpose is to make the idea more striking. A metaphor does not break up an idea, does not offend it. It neither turns it aside nor makes it bow down».

Applying his refusal of ideas and opinions to his practice of writing, he maintains that – here I resume – it is impossible to explain and understand things, but one can give an account of them define them and as he says, make a new dictionary .

One has to bring to the fore the distinctive traits of things and their essential properties. This can be done by association of ideas and in particular those ideas which are the most forbidden, shameful and stupid, making use in this way of Freud’s fundamental rule.

Showing clearly what he thinks of formalists, he declares : «Each object imposes a particular rhetorical form on the poem. No more sonnets, odes and epigrams – the form of the poem must he determined by

its subject-matter». He goes even further saying : «Ellipsis, hyperbole and parabole etc … are Euclidean. Present day geometry is no longer Euclidean, physics are no longer the same, one cannot live … see .. act according to its figures».

This way of thinking recalls the topology and the sessions of variable length, the end of which does not depend on the whim of the analyst nor on a set rule, established outside the actual session, but much more on the consistency of the object, just as Ponge tells us.

«I have always sought to render to the French language the density, the materiality, the mysterious consistency which derive from its most ancient origins. I have wanted to confront not only the mother- tongue, but also the tongue of grand-mothers and of much more distant ancestors, and hence penetrate deeply into this concrete world, which is just as concrete and as sensitive as are the things of the physical world».

Francis Ponge knows full well that there is no question of attaining things. That is impossible, for as he says : «Things and poems are irreconcilable». On the contrary, it is a matter of using this impossibility, this realness in the Lacanian sense, in order to make the mind progress to obtain something which is satisfying and pleasing for those who speak.

«It is not a matter of rendering, of representing the physical world, but of presenting something which corresponds to it.

«It is a question of making the physical density pass over into the density of the text».

F. Ponge admits that his writing has effects on him which are beneficial. As he says : «Poetry is within the reach of everyone .. If everybody dared to express their preferences and their association of ideas and express them honestly the difficulty is that words are so dusty, one has to restore their vividness…» All this is to be done by the choice and the organization of words and letters (F. Ponge wrote «Taking Sides with Things» with an alphabet in front of him and the Littre dictionary beside him).

However during this delicate operation one has to try and reach the impossible object-thing. There is no hope, but, with tenacity and by following the course of the drive around the object and in accordance with this movement, one may write sentences, «which unroll themselves rather they are snatched up», in their attempt to catch the essential qualities and the distinctive traits of the object over and beyond opinions and ideas. By working in this way so as to strip off the drapings, to undress and deface this thing, one produces a line of writing, pushing on as far as possible the approach to the object and the failure to reach it (Moreover Ponge says that what he publishes are more descriptions that have failed than descriptions) .

His work aims at formulas, which Ponge sometimes calls «logical» formulas of things, i.e. formulas which are as concise, as synthetical, as impersonal as possible – one might say as close to the trait as possible.

But one can only give birth to such a text if the author with his ideas, opinions and systems disappears and if the object-thing is dissolved and its pregnant look is dissolved in the language of the poem.

One has to make a hole in this look, and empty it by the act of writing – it is, one might say, an act of mourning.

Indeed, what one aims at, is to bring down the inflation of meaning, of gossip to the level of the sentence, relying on the impossibility of speech which cannot be attained and resists being written. Perhaps it is a way of trying to form a new articulation, linking up the three registers – Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, what one might qualify as a borromean endeavour, which would bring to light what Ponge calls «the sort of body which emerges from the lacuna of words ; i.e. what escapes symbolization, what words cannot render, although they create it and build up the edges by the process of writing. Here we find Lacan’s a-object, which we met with named in the operation of what Ponge calls «the non- signification of the world», which we encountered again in the pregnant look and which appeared once more, dissolved and detached during its journey, as a «sort of body issued from the lacuna of words», the edges having been cut through.

Perhaps we are dealing with the Nothing in the Other, which Lacan says is what a psychoanalysis aims at – the Nothing from which comes a voice bearing words, issued from Nothing i.e. as Ponge says : «A word which sounds just as such, which lights up and turns red by the simple fact that it is said».

I am going to end this text by talking about one of Ponge’s books, called «the Soap» and which took him 23 years to write. It helped him to metaphorize his writing up to where it touches on the real. «There is much to say about soap. Exactly everything it tells about itself including its complete disappearance … the end of the matter. That is an object which suits me very well – when it has finished speaking, it ceases to exist…».

His style is thus soapy, bubbly, frothy. It stammers and stutters but it is also dry and boring, for «paragraphs of pure reasoning» come «and rinse all that out». The book is built up of repetitions, variations, fugues and recurrences, for to quote F. Ponge «One must not cheat with the motions of the mind».

From the very beginning Ponge places the soap in what I would call an inseparable trio – that of water, air and soap – each one over lapping the others so that the operation of cleaning out (the mind) whilst it acts as a dissolvant, brings to light – what ? What is wedged in – the bubbles, which escape symbolization.

«All that, I believe, is much more than continuous metaphors. These bubbles are beings in every respect. They teach you many things. They lift you up and carry you away. There are new and unexpected qualities, unknown and ignored up till now, which add on to the old ones to form the perfection and the particularity of a being-in-every-respect In this way they escape from the symbol, and the relation changes. It is no longer a relation of utility or of usefulness of man to object. Instead of being useful, it is a matter of creation and not of explications».