Lacan and Kabbalah

The World the Size of a Cat

A cat and the art of not being the addressee of everything

Some time ago, I lived with a cat. A cat who did not live in the world, but in a fragment of the world, cut precisely to his measure. I do not know what truly went on inside his head. I speak only of the cat as he appeared to me. And I knew him well enough that I could translate his actions into a handful of ideas:

I want to eat.

I want to play.

I want to sleep there.

I want to jump over there.

I want to go outside.

I do not like that.

The world meant only what entered the field of his desire. Of everything that existed around him, only what passed through an extraordinarily narrow filter entered his universe: food, danger, comfort, play. It was not that he ignored the rest. The rest did not exist. The expensive furniture, the paintings of doors, the stars outside, my grief over the death of someone important to me: none of it had a place in his world. It was literally not there. It had never existed for him as something endowed with meaning.

His universe was exactly the size of his pleasure, not a centimetre larger.

And I realised something. A world cut down to such dimensions has no need of God.

The cat never looked at a storm and wondered what it was trying to tell him. He never suffered a misfortune and searched for its lesson. He never raised his eyes to ask whether someone, somewhere, knew why things happened to him, or whether someone loved him. The storm was dangerous noise, nothing more. There was no message because there was no need for one. Things touched him, but none of them spoke to him.

The same is true of us, at least in the beginning. The world does not present itself to us whole either. Every living being cuts from it whatever desire, need and fear make significant. But we return again and again to the question the cat never asked: whether someone, somewhere, loves us.

What Is Not Desired Is Not Seen

The world is not information, as some would have it. The world is simply there, full of mute differences. It is the living being who turns some of those differences into information, according to what it needs or desires. Information does not reside in things. It is born when a difference stands out for someone. What is not desired is not seen; what is seen is either desired or feared.

And this is not merely a figure of speech. What lies outside that field is not seen poorly or dimly. It simply is not there. The cat had books before him, paintings, an open window onto the sky, and none of them existed, because none touched his hunger or his fear. For a living being, to see is not to receive the world. It is to cut it.

That is why two beings can inhabit the same physical space and live in entirely different worlds. And in the human being, something else happens. Desire can change. Then the same world changes even though nothing in it has changed. When we love someone, the whole city goes dark, becomes scenery in the way, because everything that is not the beloved ceases to matter. And when we stop loving them, the same city lights up again and returns to existence. When desire changes, what we see changes, and when what we see changes, the world we inhabit changes with it.

The Temptation to Be a Cat

And yet, something about that consolation fails to persuade me.

Because the cat is at peace, yes, but at what price? He is at peace because almost nothing matters to him. His world fits inside four things, and whatever does not fit there cannot reach him. If peace consists in that, in making oneself smaller until almost nothing concerns us, then it is not a peace I want. It resembles turning off the whole house so as not to pay for the light. I do not want a world that small. I want there to be room in me for the star that gives me no warmth, for the stories that make me dream, and for the gaze of someone to whom I exist as more than this damp shell. The problem is that the moment I let more of the world in, the opposite danger appears: endless accumulation.

The cat desires four things. We can desire a star, a theorem, the life of someone we will never meet. That is where the true magnitude of desire lies: not in desiring more intensely, but in how many different things are capable of mattering to us. And we carry, besides, a desire that never closes, the desire to mean something to someone, because its fulfilment depends not on us, but on the other.

Those two things together form the trap. Variety makes our world vast, but the desire to mean something to another cannot be soothed by accumulation. One may receive everything, read, travel, gather experiences as others gather money, and still mean nothing to anyone, because the person who accumulates without giving believes that this is how one becomes something for the Other, and is mistaken. For the Other, what matters is not what you kept, but what you gave. The person who only absorbs things or pleasures ends with an immense world that belongs to no one but himself, a full pantry no one else will ever open. He has received enormously and returned almost nothing. His soul is the size of the cat's, because he has learned nothing beyond how to follow the forms of his own pleasure.

And what does it mean to give? If it means giving things, that is not enough. Things are forgotten just as pleasures are. And if it means giving oneself to someone, that does not quite work either, because that someone never fully exists. They are always your idea of the other, a figure you have constructed so that something might be returned to you, the assurance that you exist. Whoever gives while waiting for something in return has given nothing. He is still accumulating, only in another currency. Truly giving, then, must be something else. Not simply to hand something over to someone. To break the chain of action and reaction, to do something and not wait for its immediate response. To release an act with the trust that at some moment, in some place, and in someone, it will do some good, without knowing where it falls, or whom it reaches, or when.

Writing as a Form of Return

Writing, I realise, is the closest I come to that. I receive the world, what I read, what I live, what I lose, and instead of keeping it and turning it over alone, where everything eventually becomes about me, I release it into words that may be of use to someone I will never know. Loss brooded over in silence always circles back to the self. Loss written down becomes, with luck, someone else's. Perhaps that is why the cat has no need to write. His world is already the exact size of his pleasure.

Mine is not. Mine keeps growing, and the only way I have found not to drown inside it is to release what comes in.

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