Discharging the Sentence

Some final thoughts on The Judgement (continuing on from here).

[The Father] in a louder voice: "So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!"

Is not the judgement pronounced by the Father a little knot of sense, which suddenly condenses (and/or even disburdens him of?) his Paternity? His inchoate feelings towards the son have been ‘discharged’, expelled, taken over by the Other (ie the Symbolic, of which the decree is a manifestation). And there is, perhaps, a peculiar jouissance in this most Symbolic of acts – i.e., at this point the Father is gloved inside the Law, seems to speak as its mere instrument. He is suddenly taken over by the spirit of the Law. And ‘discharging’ this function bears also a discharge of perverse enjoyment, all the more enjoyable because it cleaves to what is supposed to be outside mere enjoyment (The Law).

And is not the sentence hit upon by the author a similar ‘knot,’ a point which (retroactively) gives shape and meaning to the entire story, so that the prior sentences ‘fall into place’ around this one? When the writer ‘discharges’ this sentence what is happening – the story becomes a story, which is to say fit for telling, publication, fit to be received by the Other.

Rewind:

The utterly naïve question here would be: who is the father to make such a judgement? Okay, the father makes judgements all the time – ‘this child is no good’ and so on, but a judicial decree?? A decree of unanswerable finality?

The point is that for a child, judgements like ‘this child is no good’ indeed do have the finality of a judicial decree. They indeed lodge in the child’s head as fatal pronouncements. The question, then, is not who is the father to make such a judgement, but from whose point of view is the Father a figure who can make such final judgements? It is the child’s. And so it is surely a fantasmatic father we’re dealing with here, a father who has undergone the anamorphosis of the child’s gaze.

Thus, the very father who reproaches him for prolonging his childhood is a father who exists only for childhood. The story constitutes an identification with childhood. Not an Imaginary identification (and the story seems to be precisely about breaking with this imaginary identification) but a Symbolic identification (by which Lacan means identifying with the point from which you are seen).

This on one level, the story stages a ‘death of childhood’. Indeed, might not 'death by drowning' indicate precisely re-birth/ baptism, the assumption of one’s Name, of adulthood itself? But the scène staged is staged precisely for or from the very perspective of childhood.