I am going to talk about a play, 4.48 Psychosis, written in 1999 by the English author Sarah Kane. I want to stress at the outset that it is very difficult to talk about this play – and certainly impossible to give a summary of it – because it traces, in its fragmentary form, nothing less than the implacable logic of a melancholic crisis. The author killed herself just a few days after having completed it. The 4.48 of the title is the time of the morning when the play’s subjective voice – and it consists of nothing other than this voice – repeatedly awakes to experience the ‘sanity’ of its ‘essential self’ precisely in the anticipation of suicide, definitively removed from the ‘vile delusions of happiness’. As this voice says, ‘sanity is found at the centre of convulsion, where madness is scorched from the bisected soul’. This time of ‘sanity’ frames and insistently interrupts into the play. Indeed, we might say that the play ultimately collapses into the eternity of this time. Its monologues – in which the voice speaks, as we will see, about the gaze, the body, language, jouissance, love, God and the father – and its dialogues – in which the voice reimagines its failed encounters with the barbarism of a series of psychologists – all disintegrate into the same abyss. In order to approach the play, I will follow the development of Lacan’s theory of melancholy; a development brilliantly recapitulated in Eric Laurent’s article ‘Melancolía, dolor de existir, cobardía moral’. Firstly, then, I will consider the clinical logic of melancholy that the play reveals. Secondly, I will consider this melancholy as what Lacan calls a ‘passion of being’ – this consideration opening up what we might call the ‘preliminary question’ of its ethical treatment in the psychoanalytic cure. Sarah Kane’s play, I want to suggest, has a lot to tell us about this. Lacan’s clearest exposition of the clinical logic of melancholy can be found in the last chapter of Seminar X: Anxiety. Formalising Freud’s insight that, in melancholy, ‘la sombra del objeto cae sobre el Yo’, Lacan defines it in terms of an identity – or as Eric Laurent says, a ‘collage absoluto’ – between the subject’s specular image (i(a)) and the object a. The only way the melancholic subject can access the object a is by attacking its own image in the suicidal precipitation. In 4.48 Psychosis, the ultimate suicidal identity of the subjective voice is with the object of the gaze. The voice, we might say, is swallowed, devoured by the gaze. I want to quote a passage – one of the moments of ‘sanity’ I referred to earlier – from the play’s first page: a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord body no longer expellent as the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever uttersI had a night in which everything was revealed to me. How can I speak again? the broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself alone finds the room in reality teeming and begs never to wake from the nightmareand they were all thereevery last one of themand they knew my nameas I scuttled like a beetle along the backs of their chairsRemember the light and believe the lightAn instant of clarity before eternal nightdon’t let me forgetThere are many things to say about this, the rendering of a hallucination, but what is important here is that, confronted with the gaze of the cockroaches, the subject is reduced to the status of a beetle scuttling ‘along the backs of their chairs’. It is this implicit identification with the object of the gaze that the play’s subjective voice consistently attempts to escape: ‘look away from me’, it repeatedly says, ‘I don’t know where to look anymore’. Finally, however, it can only succumb to this identification. ‘Watch me vanish’, the voice says again and again on the penultimate page; and, on the last, ‘please open the curtains’. Because melancholic suicides take recourse to the structure of the fantasy, Lacan says, they so often choose as their framework a window. The window has been replaced here, figuratively, by the proscenium arch.

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It is this identity between the mirror image of subject and object that also allows us to elucidate—very quickly—other aspects of the work.

First, it explains why melancholy is, as Eric Laurent says, a “decision for jouissance.” When the voice in the work speaks of cutting off his arm, and a psychologist interprets it as a “release of tension,” the voice immediately disagrees: it’s because “I feel fucking great. Because I feel fucking great.”

Second, if the mirror image is not constituted as distinct from the real of jouissance, this explains why the subject of the voice in the work says he lacks a meaningful relationship with the body: “body and soul can never marry”; “here I am,” he says, “and there is my body”; “my body is unbalanced/my body is flying to pieces.”

Third, if the signifying chain is completely disconnected from the body, this explains why it is reduced to the condition of the real. When the voice says, 'I feel eighty years old,' and a psychologist tells it, 'that's a metaphor,' the voice replies, 'It's not a metaphor, it's a simile, but even if it were, the defining characteristic of a metaphor is that it's real.' Or again, 'Please.../money.../wife.../every act is a symbol/whose weight crushes me'; 'Behold the eunuch/of castrated thought.'

Fourth, if, following Freud, both melancholia and love imply a crushing of the object—or as Lacan says in Seminar I, 'love is a form of suicide'—this explains the voice's concern with this theme: 'Love makes me into a slave,' it says, 'into a cage of tears'; ‘Cut out my tongue/pull out my hair/cut off my legs/but leave me my love/I would rather have lost my legs/pulled out my teeth/pulled out my eyes/than to have lost my love.’

Fifth and finally, also following Freud, what is loved-hated in melancholia, what is the object of identification, and what is reduced to an abject identity with the subject, is the dead primordial father—not as the Name-of-the-Father, insofar as this is foreclosed, but as object a. ‘I’ve always loved you/even when I hated you,’ says the voice, ‘what am I like?/just like my father’; ‘Fuck my father for having fucked up my life forever, but above all, fuck God for making me love a person who doesn’t exist’; ‘My love, my love, why have you abandoned me?’

To conclude, then, I would like to speak briefly about melancholy as an ethical ‘passion of being’. In his essay ‘Television,’ Lacan defines ‘sadness’—what is today called ‘depression’—as a ‘fault,’ a ‘moral cowardice,’ and adds that in psychosis, in melancholy, this ‘cowardice’ is subducted by a ‘rejection of the unconscious.’ Eric Laurent, in his treatment of melancholy, insists on clearly separating these two moments. ‘Moral cowardice’ points to a treatment that would implicate the subject in the structure of language and the unconscious as the discourse and desire of the Other, in what Lacan calls the ‘duty to speak well.’ The ‘rejection of the unconscious’ is much more radical, and therefore implies a much more radical type of treatment; one that takes into account the mortifying jouissance that is tied, for the melancholic, to the very origin of the symbol; which takes into account not the signifier but the letter, from which the melancholic subject is excluded as a living being; and which consequently interrogates this subject with the silence of the death drive.

In various places in 4:48 Psychosis, the text is interrupted by the dead letter. Kane writes abbreviations ('RSVP ASAP') or simply a series of numbers. What kind of treatment is possible for this mortifying jouissance? The author gives us some clues:
Inscrutable doctors, sensible doctors, absent-minded doctors, doctors you'd think were fucking patients if you weren't proven otherwise, ask the same questions, put words in my mouth, offer chemical cures for congenital anxiety, and cover each other's backs until I want to scream for you, the only doctor who once touched me willingly, who looked me in the eye, who laughed at my dark humor spoken in the voice of a freshly dug grave, who sneered when I shaved my hair, who lied and said he was glad to see me. Who lied. And said he was glad to see me.

Interrogating the melancholic subject from the silence of the death drive might operate, I'd like to suggest, beyond the devastating limits of this lie.