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Pedophilia, Leclerc breaks the silence on that evil mistaken for love

The things we cannot name are as if they did not exist. The same can be said for passions, essential human experiences that due to their ambiguity seem destined to remain unthinkable, and consequently deprived of the necessary condition to be said. In most cases, the silence that makes the ego sink into itself is, paradoxically, covered by a great clamor and by evident manifestations of that which cannot be shown.
Among the unsuspected, and therefore unspeakable, relationships there is undoubtedly that between the love for children and the sexual desire of the adult who goes so far as to abuse them, between the word «paedophilia» – in Greek: attraction to the child, where sex does not yet appear – and the corresponding «pedophilia», which has ended up designating only a question of sex.

Annie Leclerc's book in its contents, but one could say in its very slow construction - made of notes, continuous adjustments, left in the drawer until the publication after her death by her friend Nancy Huston - is the passionate and courageous attempt to give a "name", or at least a recognizable trait in its "infinite secrets", to a feeling "inscribed in the common destiny of humanity", in which beauty, love and violence mix to the point of confusion. The adoration of the child, for what it represents - the bliss of childhood, the defeat of death, the benevolent protection of the adult - unites everyone, but with different outcomes: it can reawaken joy, life and at the same time destructive, death-like impulses. It is difficult to identify the boundary between the voracity of kisses, of a mother's tender embraces, of a "body to body" that passes through the mouth, and the desire of the pedophile who in the surrender, malleability and impotence of the child "explores his power over the world", destroying and dirtying it at will:
"... he disembowels his teddy bear, he gouges out the eyes of his doll. He inspects his strength and realizes his pleasure made of unconscious and sovereign cruelty".

But who is willing to recognize that there are different ways of falling back into childhood, opposite paths to relive the "vertigo" of the original fusion with the mother, Ogres and Ogresses who can "nibble" the fresh flesh of a baby "without doing him the slightest harm"? Even the question - whether one can speak of love for the child also for the pedophile - seems "inadmissible". What is not wanted and cannot be considered is that "such disasters can be generated by love itself", that the adoration of life that is regenerated in the newborn is accompanied by the desire to destroy it.
What leaves one speechless is having to admit that life and death, tenderness and violence, as we have known them up to now, are inexplicably intertwined. If it is easy to take away the humanity of the child predator, to exercise one's "exterminating rage" on him, it is not so easy to focus one's gaze on the ambiguous feeling that leads him to return in such a devastating way to childhood and to himself.
"There are many ways to fall back into childhood. That of the pedophile consists in reactivating the infantile and archaic investigation of his own strength on the shoulders of the infant, his beloved, adored, lost object: himself. He puts in sexuality that he cannot direct elsewhere, an old child terrified by the irreducible power of the adult, kept on this side of the conjugation of desires, who rejoices under the table, unbeknownst to the adults, as other times, in the privacy of his den. He also rejoices in a ferocious revenge, surrendered without a doubt to the time when, in secret, he sought without knowing, without words, without references, the incomparable emotion of sex.. ».

The exploration of sex can be said to begin for the child with the traces that they leave, first the indistinctness and then the extreme closeness to the mother's body: a body - writes Elvio Fachinelli (Il bambino dalle Uova d'oro, Feltrinelli 1974) - "that touches him, caresses him, nourishes him, makes him jump, treats him delicately or not, with hesitation or not; a body that communicates heat, cold, balance, imbalance, pressure, contact, smells, rhythm, sound ... ". This early experience, destined to leave some "fundamental lines" in the child as a desiring and communicating body, occurs at the moment of his greatest dependence and helplessness with respect to the body that generated him, a body that could give him life or death, care or abandonment. The search for the object of his desire, even if no one comes to block his path, must therefore deal with an initial experience of passivity and impotence, on which fall with the heaviness of an indisputable order of the world, on the one hand the benevolence of adults towards childhood, on the other the secret locked inside the parents' bedroom.

Annie Leclerc, who experienced the «confusion», the «defeat», the «disorder», the bewilderment produced in her as a child by a sexual assault, knows how much «silence» can reappear, suddenly, unexpectedly, and bring back those who have already begun their journey to a sort of immobile, petrified childhood. It is to the violated child, betrayed in her trusting surrender to the benevolence of the adult, that the word must be given back and, even before that, the ability to listen.

«This kind of silence, the impossibility of speaking, is the regression to the depths of childhood and is the nectar of wolves. This silence can last a lifetime. It is something atavistic, linked to childhood, a poor, sad and surrendered submission to the doubled strength of the adult, of the prestigious male (…) a weakness that makes one fragile, a shameful disgrace, a mutism that «extinguishes every possible word. It is the silence of the sexually assaulted child. It is the unsaid of the deadly attack on the child, the unsaid hidden somewhere in the term ""paedophilia"".
"Go, I say to the little girl still terrified in her pitiful aphonia, it's never too late, make an effort, try to explain things from your point of view and why you didn't save yourself, and why you didn't scream, and why you didn't tell, and why even today we would have to tear out your tongue to get out the names of those who tried to forcefully impose on you what you didn't want. Because no, you didn't want, right? No, no, I didn't want".
The emergence from silence is in itself proof that the violence suffered was not the most destructive and that, "sunk within itself", the Ego has nevertheless managed to save a "truth" that is difficult to ferret out otherwise. What the “mutism” of years has held back, forced to dwell in the darkness of a drawer – repeated notes and adjustments – is the question that no one would like to answer:
“How is it possible that adults are able to inflict so many tortures on children whom they certainly love? Should we say that they are no longer under the influence of Paedophilia?”.
More explicitly, this means asking whether “also” pedophiles love children, whether it is not precisely their attachment to childhood, the impossibility of moving their object of love elsewhere, that makes them appear – as in fairy tales – wolves, ogres, “enormous monstrous children, stubborn, furious, who stupidly believe that the bliss of a time can be retained by ingestion”.

For wanting to get to the heart of the problem, with the certainty that "we have the means to think the unthinkable" - from the common passion for children, to sexual desire, to the traces in us of outraged childhood -, Annie Leclerc's book has shared the fate of all the great truths or revelations, brought to light only after the disappearance of the protagonists. Too many disturbing plots, too many ambiguities and secrets of that particular love that concerns children - protective and devouring, tender and angry, adoring and destructive - too many cultural and social barriers to keep the parents' bedroom closed with its secret and the order that has been built on it untouchable. With a writing capable of intense lyricism and unexpected thrusts into what remains of the "unthinkable" in psychic life, Leclerc first unmasks the "exterminating rage" of those who shout against pedophiles:
"Nothing better to seduce, to make us buy toilet paper, frozen fish, detergent, chocolate, cars, nothing better to intoxicate, to make us lose our minds, to distract us from the pain of living than these little sweet angels who are served to us in all sauces. At the same time that the great outcry against pedophiles is raised, childhood is sold, prostituted everywhere".
"Flagrant passion at every street corner, at every curve and bend of the road, inexhaustible manna that fattens all the merchants of the Temple, for whom Paedophilia has no secrets".

Immediately after, it is the turn of the "delicate pedophiles", the intellectuals, "the analysts of the human", who in the name of a misunderstood idea of ​​freedom are ready to see in pedophiles "the devoted executors" of the child's desire, the answer to what he "obscurely seeks". Against the "priests of devour", Leclerc will not hide that he has a grudge.
But where his analysis surprises for its interpretative originality, for its transgressive juxtapositions, is in describing the reasons for silence, the secret that, paradoxically, ends up bringing the victim and the aggressor closer together.

Both "terrified", albeit for different reasons, by the law that regulates the order of the world - the closed door of the parents' bedroom, the credit of benevolence granted to adults closest to the child's growth - if they remain silent it is not because they are ashamed of the sexual aggression, suffered or acted out, but because their words could provoke "an unsuspected hell": shame of having seen what one should not see, of revealing that one knows more than one should know.
Showing the horror of sexual aggression means, on the one hand, classifying some adults as "inhuman", turning others against them, "dividing the mother in two, breaking the family into four"; on the other, entering into a "disturbing solidarity" with the repugnant individual who holds the same secret and perhaps the same fears regarding the law as adults.

It causes anguish to deny the "law of benevolence", within which one would like to remain "like a fetus in its mother's womb", to disintegrate daily life, to sow discord and hatred, but also to deliver the executioner to the contempt of all, to the police, to prison.
To the "libertarian" friends of '68, who saw the pedophile as a "benevolent agent" of the child's enjoyment, to the psychiatrist who declares on television that he considers incest an extension of parental love, and as such "less traumatic" than other sexual assaults, Annie Leclerc responds with another truth, which sheds light on the secrets of devotion for children.
"How can we not see that incestuous pedophilia represents the purest expression of pedophilia, the one from which any reflection on the issue should start, to understand what the most terrible of adult sexual practices consists of, and above all the most devastating for the child?".

In its subtlest and most discreet matrix, pedophilia as a perversion is therefore not as far as one might think from Paedophilia, the adoration of the "divine child" to whom all humanity bows, in search of salvation and eternity. At the center remains the initial scene of life, the nostalgia for the harmonious unity of two between the son and the mother, before any separation.
But immediately after comes the "order" that history and culture have built upon it, and which can reveal itself to be a "trap", when someone tries to subvert it, "an evil without a name".

"All pedophilia is contained in this immeasurable violence that consists in plunging the child where clear orders become confused, in associating him with his executioner in silence, in disorienting him to the point of annihilating his sense of self".