Sex, Sadism, Encrypted Loss and Encrypted History in Last Tango in Paris

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This is a shortened, somewhat altered version of a much longer chapter, entitled ‘Tortured History: Crypts, Collaboration, and Colonialism in Last Tango in Paris’, from my recently published book, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008). 1. Pauline Kael, ‘Tango’, New Yorker 47 (28 October 1972), pp.130–38. 2. Judith Christ, ‘“Last Tango”, But Not the Last Word’, New York Magazine (5 February 1973), pp.64–65. 3. Ultimo tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris], Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (United Artists, 1972). DVD: MGM Home Entertainment Inc., 1998. 4. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in The Shell and the Kernel [1978], trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.125–56. 5. Maria Torok, ‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse’ [1968] in The Shell and the Kernel, pp.107–24. 6. Torok does not use the term ‘crypt’ in her essay but ‘tomb’. The term ‘crypt’ and its complex functioning with regard to trauma and mourning were not articulated until her work with Abraham in ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ and ‘“The Lost Object – Me”: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’ (in The Shell and the Kernel, pp.139–56) and also in their The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy [1976], trans. N. Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). We can nonetheless read Torok's essay on ‘Illness of Mourning’ as a proleptic account of one kind of psychopathology that results in the formation of a crypt. 7. For more on fantasies of incorporation, the anasemic etiology of the illness of mourning, Jeanne's role in this sadomasochistic dyad, and the way the film stages and comments on psychoanalytic process, regression, and transference, see chapter 2 in my Unspeakable Secrets, pp.47–89. 8. Both statements in Le Monde (14–15 November 1954), p.3; my translation. 9. Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edn (Paris: Le Robert, 1985), gives 1955 for the first usage of ratonnade and cites, in support, a reference to the Algerian War. It also indicates that raton was already in use in 1937. 10. Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog]. Dir. Alain Resnais (Argos‐Como‐Cocinor, 1955). DVD: The Criterion Collection, 2003. 11. In several notable speeches at the end of World War II, Charles de Gaulle rhetorically rewrote French history by speaking of ‘Paris liberated by itself’, of ‘Eternal France’, and of a nation of resisters. He also refused to declare the rebirth of the Republic, which the National Assembly had dissolved in 1940, claiming that it had never ceased to exist. On postwar France's mythologized denial of the horrors of the Collaboration and of the Vichy regime, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, [1987], trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp.15–59.