Recently, I was moved by the film In Her Hands (Au bout des doigts). This morning I felt the urge to put into words what the film brings back into circulation, and what I hear so often in the clinic: presence, absence, and that fleeting way in which a subject speaks itself in the singularity of what looks at them.
At the heart of the film, desire takes body. A desire that engages, that runs through, that inscribes itself in the very material of the gesture. For this young virtuoso, everything passes through the body: the hands, posture, breathing, repetition. Work becomes a place of incarnation, a discipline where the body is educated, transformed, refined over hours and hours. A presence is built up, dense, inhabited, fully engaged in what is at stake.
This considerable work unfolds within the field of the Other and the little others, as Lacan introduces it to us: the music as language, the institution, the symbolic scene where places, names, recognition are decided; and the little others, those singular figures, teacher, mother, peers, audience, girlfriend, who each, in their own way, address a gaze, a demand, an expectation. The subject stands in this constellation, caught in a network of addresses where their desire is already there, ahead of them.
“The gaze of the Other” names this symbolic place from which the subject feels targeted, assessed, sometimes called. From this place, the work gains consistency: he is not only playing in front of someone, he is playing for that point of address which goes beyond any individual. The others (a), those concrete faces, embody and shift this gaze, each with their own style, their own transfer, their own lacks.
Freud had already grasped the scope of this in the transference: that intensity carried by presence, which mobilises the body so that speech can come, which reactivates old scenes while opening new possibilities. Here, it appears in the form of demand and support, in the way some others sustain the subject so that he can go further into his gesture, while others, at times, slow him down or divert him.
A line of horizon accompanies this path, nourished by this incarnated desire and this patient work. It attracts, sets in motion, supports endurance, boldness, courage. At certain moments, something comes into tune: the body, time, the gesture, the scene and the gaze. A certain rightness emerges, brief and intense, carried by all that has been engaged, like an instant of coincidence between act and desire.
What moves us so deeply has to do with this experience of a body at work, traversed by desire, taken in the play of addresses to the Other and to others, and capable, at times, of letting a form of evidence appear. A singular way of inhabiting one’s gesture and, through it, inhabiting the world.