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A life-long struggle (info # 011212/7 EV)

© Metula News Agency
Wednesday 12 December [08:30:00 UTC]

By Llewellyn Brown

To groan, weep, implore is equally craven.

Accomplish energetically your long and weighty task
In the path Destiny chose to call you to,
Then after, like me, suffer and die without speaking

English
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Our news media may have abandoned the warrior perception of history, but they have not ceased to depict
bloody conflicts, so much so that the killing of innocent victims has become a commonplace phenomenon
called terrorism. In the Middle East excessive media exposure has made war an object displayed before our
eyes on a daily basis: a conflict that is largely supported by and for media consumption. In these multiple
conflicts it would seem that misfortune is diversely experienced as drama (distressing antagonism of rival
forces), tragedy (where the victim is definitively seized by an element that is constitutive of his very
existence), or disaster (which escapes all of these effects of meaning).

Whereas these calamities demand analysis and intervention on the strategic and political levels, their measure
remains what is at stake for the speaking being, on a one by one basis. This perspective invites us to grasp the
importance and the often incommensurable scale of battles undertaken in areas that escape the collective
attention. Among these battles is one waged by numerous individuals against cancer, an illness that is taking
on epidemic proportions today: according to information published by the Curie Institute in Paris, one person
out of every two in France will be affected by this illness once in his life. For these persons, an unnamable
strangeness, devoid of any common measure with their choices and their actions, suddenly arises within their
body, so that the latter no longer appears to be their inalienable property. They struggle against something that
ravages their lives; an illness where no case resembles another and whose evolution remains totally
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ravages their lives; an illness where no case resembles another and whose evolution remains totally
unpredictable. A merciless combat where some show an exceptional courage that commands our admiration.

Thus it was for Marie-Hélène Aimé, who was by my side for seventeen years and who, for three long years,
showed incomparable force and determination in fighting the illness that ended up carrying her away on
August 31 2007 [1].

Marie-Hélène Aimé marked in a perfectly singular and indelible manner each person she encountered,
sometimes bringing them to reorient their lives. Driven by an intense and insatiable — an impatient —
curiosity, her thirst for knowledge was manifest in all her exchanges. Her discourse expressed determination,
a singular address, gravity of intention, intellectual intransigence. She took extremely seriously everyone she
approached, listening with utmost attention, seeking for the most appropriate response. She communicated the
reality of a vital commitment rooted in her very personal implication, endeavoring to awaken in each person
that which he aspired to most but had not yet taken form.

To words she gave the force of acts that her projects, elaborations and gestures inscribed incessantly: a
writing in constant evolution, punctuated by achievements that were striking in their singularity. Such is the
idea I attempted to define one day when I evoked “her just and precise sense of writing in the slightest details
of life”. Each word was crucial and could not be left to chance.

She put into action, in everything she undertook, her keen sense of aesthetics, asserting that “the precious is
necessary in order to anchor the symbolic”: that is to say, to give body and consistency to the bonds she
created. Preciousness was woven into her life like a golden thread and was the hallmark of her creations. She
theorized its function in her professional work with marginal youths, where her interventions necessitated “a
sufficiently precious support to arouse curiosity, stimulate desire and anchor the decision to settle down to
work”. Preciousness was the quality she invested in her relationships with others: commitment, confidence,
bonds consolidated by sharing, a call to renew and extend these bonds with others. Such was the spirit that
animated a generosity that knew no reserve: she could not encounter others without offering something
special, without giving of her time, her inventiveness, her energy. She spared herself no pains — never
considering her own comfort — even in encounters that seemed the most ordinary and inconsequential.

A graduate from the National School of Public Health, a knight of the National Order of Merit, a knight of the
Order of Academic Palms, she conducted her work, not by constructing edifices but by remaining — in her words
— “at the grass roots”, particularly in the team of street educators that she directed. Her refusal to exercise
power exemplified her choice to remain at grips with creative emergence. She chose to mobilize her
exceptional gifts in a work that solicited the substance of others’ desire. It was an enterprise that aimed at
arousing speech, bringing the other, in turn, to creation. She knew how to federate talents, offering each
person, such as he was, complete liberty to create — accepting without hesitation all the risks that this choice
entailed — and giving him full recognition in the event of success. In the meantime, she never ceased propel
the work in a most concrete and material manner, through reflection, elaboration, orientation and
implementation. The work she accomplished — right up to her very last hour — was of a magnitude and a
quality worthy of a ramified institution. She did so, moved by the primordial concern to transmit knowledge
and the desire to “institute” those she was responsible for; to found productive and enriching bonds.

The absolute coherence that characterized her thought and acts was based on her acute awareness of the “bite”
language inflicts in the flesh, producing the definitive inscription of a subject in this foreign structure with
which there can be neither assimilation nor harmonious coexistence. This experience prompted her entry into
psychoanalysis: the only practice to allow the articulation of the dimension that, in each person’s singularity,
suffers the effects of language, along with its treatment by the spoken word; the latter henceforth marked by
elevated intellectual exigencies and the seriousness of acts. To this effect she struggled, during her lifetime,
against the inhuman side that, hidden in the heart of each person, reveals itself in unconscious repetition.
Displaying the keenest vigilance, Marie-Hélène never explained things away, refusing to reduce acts to the
status of “normal” or “understandable” reactions, or to complacently ascribe them to the pressure of
circumstances. She constantly called into question her own actions, asserting the necessity of assuming all the
consequences of our choices, including the unimaginable “consequences of the consequences”. Thus, she
weighed up each idea in its slightest detail: she was moved by an untiring reflection.
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weighed up each idea in its slightest detail: she was moved by an untiring reflection.

Hers was a relentless struggle that entailed sustaining a double postulate: on one hand, a perception of the
limitless and unpredictable nature of human baseness and, on the other hand, the necessity — truly an
impossible wager — to reduce its devastating effects in order to humanize relationships between individuals.
She radically believed in the possibility for each one to achieve, within himself, a substantial transformation
for the better. However strange such an assertion may seem, in our times when we consider we have put all
our ideals behind us, she was thoroughly good: a stranger to malevolence, devoid of all interested calculation,
never causing others to bear the burden of her own failings or suffering.

A wager that is taken to such an absolute degree is doubtless inspired by a certain belief: hers was a life
resplendent with faith, not of a confessional nature but a postulate that was indispensable for her and that
could assume diverse names: “psychoanalysis”, “creation”, “intellectual honesty”… The term “faith” names
what allowed her intellectual bid to support itself in a corporeal manner, for it to be embodied.

Without a shadow of a doubt such a principle found its roots in its absolute negation: in the inhuman
dimension of being that leaves no reprieve. In an unshakeable decision to resist, Marie-Hélène was inhabited
by an indomitable determination to live and to maintain her moral rectitude in the face of hatred and malice,
which she knew only too well. Not only did her acts give their real meaning to the values of honor, dignity
and devotion, she did everything with enthusiasm, with an honesty devoid of ulterior motives and a total
commitment. With each person she was faithful in all trials.

In spite of her determination, in spite of her unyielding will to resist, human malignity ended up by affecting
her exactly where language is bound to flesh — where words give life and death —, where she placed her
entire confidence and her aspiration to overcome evil. Her struggle then became double: her intimate moral
struggle — which she never abandoned — was compounded by the confrontation with her illness.

She never gave up hold for an instant, continuing to resist with the same determination and the same rectitude
as ever, while her forces diminished dramatically. Refusing to associate others with her suffering, affronting
the extreme solitude that such a trial imposes, she exemplified in the most rigorously exact and literal sense
the remarkable stoic exhortation that concludes the poem “ The Death of the Wolf ” by Alfred de Vigny [2] and
that struck her when she was a child at school. In the triple dimension of misfortune we evoked above, her
place was ordained…

Marie-Hélène Aimé embodied a bid for life in its most demanding and enriching aspect. Toward each person,
she turned her radiant smile and her alert gaze — singular traits that expressed her curiosity and her
generosity. Her strength consisted in transmitting this dynamism: such is the heritage that she leaves all those
who knew her, and that it behooves us to perpetuate.

Notes

[1] We must pay tribute to those — researchers, doctors, nurses — who work with devotion, relentlessly, to
help those who suffer. I personally wish to express my profoundest appreciation and gratitude to those who
supported and encouraged Marie-Hélène Aimé with the greatest professional conscientiousness,
thoughtfulness and even affection: Doctors Philippe Beuzeboc (Curie Institute, Paris), Claude Nos (Hôpital
Européen Georges Pompidou, Paris), Yann Curran (Centre Hospitalier de Saint-Malo), Christian Foussier
(dentist, Paris); the nurses of the external care unit of the Curie Institute.

[2] “To groan, weep, implore is equally craven. / Accomplish energetically your long and weighty task / In
the path Destiny chose to call you to, / Then after, like me, suffer and die without speaking.” (1843).

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