Reading Freud’s (1915) “On Transience”
As the candles were lit on the porches, balconies, patios, and window ledges of Mumbai tonight — an order from Prime Minister Modi, supported by Hindu nationalists — one could also hear chanting throughout the city: “Jai Hind!” A nationalist call for India to be victorious against a death drive that nonetheless forces us into a rather different approach: one of recognizing all nations as inadequate objects, all castes as part of the same dust, and all people as radically dependent upon one another for survival.
Freud opened his essay with an anecdote regarding two friends, one of them a famous poet. This anecdote will become important for the remainder of the essay. The poet looked at the beauty around him but was disturbed and hence without joy because he anticipated its eventual extinction. It is a bit like the Rolling Stones’ lyrics: “I see a red door and I want to paint it black.” The poet must have remarked about how all beautiful things reach an expiration date. Freud went on to claim that the awareness of eventual extinction brings about one of three possible attitudes: first, it can bring about a sort of joyless anticipation (like in the case of the poet); second, it can bring a rebellion. This latter ‘rebellion’ is not supposed to be understood necessarily as a conscious ‘fighting against’ but rather as a sort of ‘denial’ — which may be unconscious denial — giving rise to a defensive posture: ‘it can’t be true, all this beauty must persist against the powers that would destroy it.
These denials are linked by Freud into demands for immortality, or, rather, an inability to confront death. Yet for Freud the fleeting nature of the present beauty does not at all diminish its joy and its value but rather increases it. Thus, there are, once again, three attitudes: First, there is Freud’s attitude which finds joy also in face of that which is transient. Second, there is the poet’s attitude — most likely a form of denial — which believes there is transient beauty but cannot find any joy in it. Third, there is a further denial, which is the fact of not believing that it will come to an end (and hence, relieving oneself of the barrier not to find joy in it). Indeed, there are many ways to deny death, even, and especially, by consciously proclaiming that one cannot deny death. I am taken back to some of my own brothers who have said — members of my Masonic fraternity, and, for some reason there are strikingly large numbers of Masons who have stated this to me — that they are not at all afraid of death, it is even comforting for them. Is this not itself a form of denial, since, in this case, death becomes rendered through the prism of comfort rather than joy, through something that can easily be sustained.
Freud’s position was that the joy that one finds in beauty increases because of its transience. He put it like this: “limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.” It is by bringing in the perspective of time that one discovers the place of a limitation. Time itself introduces a limitation to eternal beauty, placing it within its own compartment, and, therefore, giving rise to a heightened enjoyment. It is precisely because you cannot see the beauty of nature every day that you value it when you do see it. This also is the truth of the orgasm. The orgasm achieves a sense of enjoyment in relation to its inability to be sustained in time. This is no doubt why tantric sex robs the enjoyment out of sexuality precisely by elevating its duration in time. Freud made remarks here which are reminiscent of Ecclesiastes: “each time […] the beauty of Nature […] is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal.”
Doesn’t Freud do what the set theorists were doing, in a sense, by finding eternity there within the moments of finitude? It is the temporal nature of summer which increases its value for us and it is the temporal nature of the orgasm which does the same. The symbolic power of time, in this case, is to demarcate moments of enjoyment, producing these moments of enjoyment precisely by barring them, and it in relation to this that the subject must make some peace. Yet, Freud noticed that his observations and feelings were nonetheless not shared by his poet friend or by his other friend. He deduced that there must be some emotional factor present which had been making their judgments different from his own. These are, of course, defences. He claimed that “what spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning.”
In other words, because mourning is associated with pain, and they were not prepared to accept that pain, they recoiled into attitudes that were different from Freud’s. He presents us with a theory: we are born with a certain quantity of libido which can be directed toward our own ego, our own self-presentation and self-awareness. This is a type of love, or self-love; otherwise known as primary narcissism. Later — but still while the child is quite young — this libido can become directed onto objects outside of ourselves, objects which become part of the subject’s own ego. The problem arises when one of these external objects is lost or destroyed — one imagines that the subject would experience it also as a loss to the self. Therefore, “mourning” is when there is a loss of the object and the ego cannot renounce that loss, cannot find any substitute (even where a substitute presents itself). This was written before his later essay on “Mourning and Melancholia,” so we do yet get the precise distinction between loss and ‘loss of loss’ yet.
Freud turned his attention next to the war. It destroyed all of the beauty of the countrysides and works of arts: “it shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races.” The war returned us to a situation of transience, to an ephemeral universe. I write this now — and I read this text now — at a time when there is a new war happening outside. It seems to me that something rather different is happening as a response: all of the art and beauty that we once found outside of ourselves, consumed into our ego-spheres, as it were, seems to have been put out of reach. We face an enigma which is not easily coded into the frameworks of our ego, a loss, a death drive, which pushes into our world and presents us again with transience. Yet, in this cold new world, mourning approaches a moment of invention. New social bonds are created using the tools of the civilization which we are all so proud of: the internet, fibreoptics, social media and social networking platforms, digital news infrastructures, food delivery services, bluetooth connectivity, and so on. The achievements of our civilization are remainders of a triumphant past and they remind us, whether we like it or not, of the superiority of our civilization.
Nonetheless, the enigma persists. Do we not now have the chance to confront the possibility of having an ego that can withstand the loss of the Other without subsequently losing the self? The pandemic is teaching us that this might be true. In any case, after the war, Freud remarked that those who are “bereft of so many of its objects” now cling “with greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those nearest to us […]” and so on. Indeed, as the candles were lit on the porches, balconies, patios, and window ledges of Mumbai tonight — an order from Prime Minister Modi, supported by Hindu nationalists — one could also hear chanting throughout the city: “Jai Hind!” A nationalist call for India to be victorious against a death drive that nonetheless forces us into a rather different approach: one of recognizing all nations as inadequate objects, all castes as part of the same dust, and all people as radically dependent upon one another for survival. It is this moment of renunciation of the old objects when a new freedom for substitution is developed. Freud wrote: “[w]hen it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war.”
And he reminded us: “when once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.” This, anyway, during the time of the plague — during the time when we are all rendered fragile, leaders and workers alike — is the hope, and this, moreover, is our chance.
