Honor Leviticus 90210 [excerpt]

From Honor Levy to Princess Bonaparte and back.

Honor Levy watching Tucker Carlson last night in an IG story reminded me of how Brett Easton Ellis once said on his podcast in 2019 that there are rumours Eve Babitz watches Fox News.¹ Eve’s dad was a violinist in the orchestra at Twentieth Century Fox, so yeah, figures, and both Eve and Honor have up-all-night-chain-smoking-at-Chateau-Marmont-ass prose that just about belongs to this century so, uggh, yah again. Princess Bonaparte had a well-known Orgasmic Quest that Freud helped along with, and with which Lacan no doubt had a go as well, or am I misremembering that. She wrote, ‘My great uncle, Napoleon, was the ultimate mass murderer. But I always had a thing for murderers, they are so interesting.’ Thinking of that, one can’t not remember Honor Levy’s ‘my family has financed both sides of ever [sic] war since Napoleon’ tweet. Bonaparte’s translation of a sentence in Freud’s thirty-first Vorlesungen, Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, was controversial. Strachey translated it into English as ‘Where Id was, Ego shall be’. Lacan, arguing that Freud used ‘das Es’ and ‘das Ich’ when he intended the meaning to be ‘Id’ and ‘Ego’, suggested Wo Es war, soll Ich werden be translated ‘Where It was, there shall I come to be.’ Bonaparte translated it into French as le moi doit déloger le ça, meaning in English roughly ‘Ego must dislodge Id’, which according to Lacan is directly contrary to Freud’s intended meaning. Princess Bonaparte translated more like Hölderlin, in other words, than either Lacan or Freud. Despite all that, Tucker Carlson is obviously the closest we have to Lacan’s Television across all media right now. Après Nous, Le Blow Job.

1. See ‘Immanentise the E-girl’ by Moselle K. for an account of the lineage between Babitz, Duchamp and the e-girl.