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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking quote from a great psychoanalyst to reveal all its depth and richness. These often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
Arthur Rimbaud, in his correspondence on May 13, 1871, with Georges Izambard, his former teacher, which he reiterated two days later, revealed a groundbreaking discovery that resonated like a thunderclap in the history of thought. In just a few words, the young poet, who was only 16 years old at the time, shattered the Cartesian cogito, the idea of a self-transparent thinking subject. He paved the way for a revolutionary conception of subjectivity, which Sigmund Freud, some 30 years later, would place at the heart of psychoanalysis. This assertion was followed, a few lines later, by an even more striking clarification: “It is false to say: I think. It should be said: I am thought.” Jacques Lacan would later draw inspiration from this with his enigmatic aphorism: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” Through this thought, he underscored the recognition of otherness, the strangeness of oneself to oneself. No one can claim to have sufficiently complete knowledge of their identity: there will always be a part of us to which we remain foreign.
For Rimbaud, as for psychoanalysis, to affirm that “I is another” is to recognize that our identity is not reduced to our conscious self. It is to admit that within us exist obscure forces, thoughts and desires that elude the control of reason and will. “The ego is not master in its own house,” Freud would later add. The subject is inhabited, worked by an Other, this unconscious that speaks within him without his knowledge.
Thus, Rimbaud’s poetic intuition precociously heralded Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Our psyche is divided, split between conflicting entities: the impulsive Id, the moral Superego and the Ego, which tries, with difficulty, to reconcile these opposing demands. Our “I” is just the tip of the iceberg, beneath which lies the vast continent of the unconscious.
However, Rimbaud did more than just sense the Freudian unconscious. He also foresaw its intimate link with language. In stating “I am being thought,” Rimbaud anticipated Lacan’s discovery of the “parlêtre.” This crucial notion is posited as an attempt to grasp how language and the unconscious interact to form the identity of the thought subject. Rimbaud’s challenge, one might say, was to capture a different, new speech, freed from the norms, codes and confines imposed by society.
Thus, “I is another” is not just a poetic formula. It is also an existential truth which touches upon the very depths of the human condition. It reminds us that our identity is never given, never acquired once and for all. It remains a question, an endless quest. Our identity is always in the making, always to be built and rebuilt in the encounter with otherness, whether external or internal. We are invited, if we wish, to embark on this demanding adventure, sometimes frightening, but which can reveal the truth of our being.
Like the psychoanalytic cure, Rimbaud’s poetry is a dive into the depths of the psyche, an exploration of the unknown territories of the soul. It seeks to give voice to this “I” foreign to us, to translate into words the visions and indescribable sensations that emerge from the depths of being.
Psychoanalysis thus owes a debt to Rimbaud: more than a precursor, the poet emerges as a true visionary. With extraordinary acuity, he captured the underground movements that would stir modern subjectivity, the dark forces that would soon burst onto the scene of thought.
His formula “I is another” echoes like a prophecy, heralding the upheavals to come in our understanding of the human. It opens a new horizon, where the subject is no longer a fixed and transparent point, but a being of fissure and lack, worked by the unconscious and desire.
Rimbaud invites us to a vertiginous adventure, the discovery of our own strangeness. He calls us to plunge into the abyss of the “I,” to confront this Other within us that constantly displaces us from ourselves.
For Rimbaud, as later for Freud, it is a matter of truth. The truth of the subject, which can only be grasped in the tears of meaning, in the flashes of poetic speech, or in the meanderings of free association. A truth rebellious, insurgent, that shatters evidence and certainties.
“I is another” is not a resigned observation, but a cry of freedom. Freedom of the subject who breaks away from the illusions of the self, who ventures beyond the borders of consciousness. Freedom of the poet likened by Sarah Cohen-Scali to Prometheus, the “thief of fire,” who transgresses the norms of language to articulate the unspeakable. Freedom of the man who dares to face his own enigma and who finds in this confrontation the source of perpetual rebirth.
Across the centuries, Rimbaud extended his hand to Freud and Lacan. The poet and the psychoanalyst converge in the same quest for truth, in the same desire to explore the dark territories of the psyche. They invite us on a journey to the end of this “I” that never ceases to elude and astonish us.
“I is another:” a prodigious formula that opens the doors of the unconscious and unleashes the powers of language. A formula that continues to question us, disturb us and amaze us. It sheds light on our own mystery and reveals our own otherness. It is by embracing this otherness, by making this Other within us our own, that we can finally become ourselves.
