The Hold

An opening can appear and fall right back shut. This essay names the operation that maintains it over time without freezing it and without dissolving into it the one who holds it: the hold.

I. Agathe

Dorian, Agathe’s brother, hasn’t spoken to anyone in three years, drowned in hatred, alcohol, family resentment. When Agathe runs into him, he insults her; every word is turned around, twisted, wrung out. Conversation is impossible. Every three months, she sends him a very simple message. “Thinking of you, I hope you’re well.” “Happy birthday, your sister who loves you.” “I came across this photo of our vacation in Cagnes-sur-Mer with Grandpa and Grandma.” She expects nothing, no longer hopes. But leaves it open anyway.

Agathe is not trying to bring Dorian back. She only maintains that a return remains possible. She does not sacrifice. One message, period. She does not dissolve: her life goes on, full, elsewhere. She captures nothing. No expectation, no debt; she doesn’t even tell herself “I have to be a good sister.” She maintains, by a minimal, regular move, that a maille* stays open on the side of the bond, so that if one day, in a moment she may never see, Dorian looks for a threshold to land on, he finds one. The hold is that precise, modest, sustained operation, and its discretion is what separates it from the emphatic counterfeits of maintaining.

* Maille (French): a stitch, a single loop of knitting or of chain mail, the smallest place where the thread passes and holds. The word names the local place where a move can enter, be received, and change what follows. See The Maille.

II. Maintaining an opening

A maille alone is not enough. A fragment of world can open and fall right back shut. A right move is laid down, a moment of truth crosses a conversation, and ten minutes later everything has been erased. The maille had opened, and no one held it. Maintaining, others do approach it (the ethics of care, the phenomenology of caregiving, the thought of recognition). What is not isolated there as an operation of its own is that a fragment of world, once it has appeared, can be kept alive without being frozen. That is the slot the hold comes to fill.

So the hold is the operation by which a maille stays crossable over time, without being fixed by control or lost by dissolution.

The hold, for all that, does not guarantee that a move will come. It only maintains the spot where one could still come. Dorian doesn’t answer; the threshold, for its part, is not condemned. The hold has no obligation of result. Deep down, what comes out of it hardly matters. It is judged by what it actually keeps possible.

Structurally, the hold maintains an opening. Humanly, it takes the form of a presence without grasp. Ethically, it requires that this presence destroy neither the maille nor the one who sustains it. The three are linked; they are not identical. An institution can hold or not, a tradition too, a text that keeps a threshold open for its readers. The operation precedes human presence.

Three neighbors mark it out: endurance armors itself where the hold stays exposed; conservation freezes the form where the hold lets it change; sacrifice dissolves the subject, which the hold refuses by construction.

III. What is held is the opening

A form (a couple, an institution, a friendship) lets itself be described or measured. An opening is what makes the passage of a new move possible, what keeps a maille crossable. Now a form can stay identical while all crossability is dead; and a form can change deeply while the opening remains. So the hold does not conserve the form; it maintains the possibility that a new move can still pass there.

To hold is not to keep a form from changing; it is to keep an opening from dying.

Same bed, shared expenses, coordinated children, and nothing passing anymore. The flat twenty-two-year couple is the case where the form maintains itself perfectly and the opening is dead. What passes itself off as conjugal holding (“we stayed together”) is only the conservation of a form in an extinguished fabric. Conversely, a couple that goes through moves, crises, births, griefs, recomposed roles can keep the opening through all those changes: the spouses would not recognize themselves in their identities of fifteen years ago, and yet new moves keep passing there. That is what holding is. Hence the consequences: in the couple, fidelity shifts from maintaining the form (staying together) to maintaining the opening (staying crossable for each other); in the institution, from org charts to the capacity to receive new moves; in transmission, from frozen contents to the possibility that the tradition keeps opening a world for its heirs. It is the opening that decides, never the form.

IV. Its conditions

Humanly, a hold presupposes:

A presence: someone still sustains the maille. Without it: abandonment, indifference, flight.

A non-grasp: this presence does not command what must come there. The parental control that keeps the child from breathing, the fidelity that keeps the other by blackmail seize what they hold — it is the crossing you kill by squeezing.

A non-dissolution: the one who sustains remains capable of a life of his own. The hold is right only if the holder too remains crossable, by his own pleasures, his own bonds.

Then the test, which is not a fourth condition but the result sought, already present in the definition: when these three conditions hold, does the maille actually stay crossable? Could a new move still pass there?

V. Carla: the counterfeit

Carla, fifty-three. Marco, her husband of twenty-six years, has progressive multiple sclerosis; he was a doctor, he had to stop, he needs help with almost every daily move. Carla has reorganized her life around him: cut her work by half, then to three quarters, then stopped; stopped seeing her friends, dropped the piano she loved so much, no more weekends with her sister. She sleeps in the next room to hear him at night. She tells anyone who will listen that this is how she loves Marco, that this is her way of holding. Lucia, her sister, asks how she’s doing. “Fine, you know, Marco’s the one who’s sick, not me.” Lucia insists: “no, you, how are you doing?” and Carla searches, one second, two: every answer comes right back to Marco. She can no longer find, in her own life, a spot that is not organized by care.

Carla holds two of the three conditions (the presence, the non-grasp) and violates the most demanding one: she has dissolved. What she calls holding, and what many will wrongly call love, is a sacrifice of the subject: a total presence that erases the one who maintains it. Carla deserves help, not admiration.

The counterfeit is known by a few questions: does she still have, outside, a life of her own? a practice, a bond that is hers? And if what she holds ceased to exist, would she still know who she is? What is missing is not the intensity of the love; it is the consistency of the subject. This is the main counterfeit in a culture that prizes sacrifice in the name of care, and telling the hold from it is the central stake of this concept.

VI. Holding costs — without consuming the holder

The hold necessarily costs: Agathe pays in small disappointments; a parent, a teacher, a caregiver pay in time, in energy, in attention. So sacrifice is not defined by the cost. The difference lies elsewhere: in the hold, the holder remains a possible source of moves of his own; in sacrifice, all his capacity is absorbed by the maille he maintains. The hold accepts a cost; it refuses that this cost durably destroy the holder’s capacity to inhabit other mailles.

VII. The clean withdrawal

A complementary concept is necessary, without which the hold would become a religion of maintaining. A demand never to let go that would tip into getting mired. I call it the clean withdrawal. Withdrawal can become right in two cases: when the maille is no longer crossable; or when the only way to maintain it durably requires the disappearance of the holder. That is Carla’s case: Marco, and the maille of care, are not dead — but Carla can no longer hold them alone without abolishing herself, and her partial withdrawal is the condition for them to hold, again, a maille for two.

The clean withdrawal is not flight. Flight withdraws because holding costs; the clean withdrawal, because continuing is no longer right. It rests on a local judgment, revisable, sometimes tragically uncertain. Objectivity is almost never available. The questions that light it: do the available signs indicate that crossability no longer subsists, or only that it is difficult, intermittent, costly? Is the holder’s dissolution structural, or only felt as effort? And is the withdrawal accomplished with lucidity about what it leaves, or by avoidance? The clean withdrawal names what it leaves; flight disguises it. Far from being the opposite of the hold, it is its form when the operation is no longer possible: withdrawing from a dead maille takes as much presence as holding a living one. It takes keeping lucidity about what is going out, not profaning the maille’s death with a false maintaining. Without it, the hold would be dangerous. The culture that prizes maintaining under all its names (fidelity unto death, attachment to exhausted institutions) endlessly confuses holding and getting mired.

VIII. The tragic case: holding in the face of the irreversible

Edmond is diving with his son Léon, twelve years old. They spearfish, each tied to a buoy. Flat sea, no wind. You can hear everything. Edmond no longer picks up the sounds Léon was making in the water. He scans, dives, comes up, dives again. And he sees: Léon, seventy centimeters from the bottom, his buoy line jammed in a rock. There is nothing left to do. Nothing to say, nothing to understand. The child is dead, in a way without justification, without a usable lesson.

In our case, flight would turn the loss into delirium; closure would look for someone to blame, or armor up so as never to love again; sacrifice would probably make Léon’s memory the absolute center of a life. Grief is not a performance. The hold asks Edmond neither to forget Léon nor to give his death a meaning. It consists, if possible, in keeping a place for his son without his own life being converted into a mausoleum. In staying present to the loss without the loss entirely absorbing the living.

Here the hold meets its limit. When no passage is possible anymore, what subsists is no longer a hold in the strict sense, but a presence without grasp before the irreversible. That is my definition of love. Love as the hold of the uncrossable part. Besides, even in the most living bond, something does not pass, the irreducible opacity of the other, what you will never reach of him, and love is what holds that remainder, without forcing it or fleeing it. Love begins where transformation is no longer possible. It is what allows peace with what escapes us.

IX. Lineages

Winnicott, in Playing and Reality, described this structure clinically in the early relationship. Holding: the psychic carrying of the child by a “good enough” environment, which does not drop him, does not saturate him, and offers presence and withdrawal at once. The hold proposes an abstraction of it, and an extension to other mailles. Adult bonds, institutions, practices, relations to the dead. Weil, for her part, thinks, under the name of attention, a passive-active presence to what is, without seizing or projecting. The non-grasp, exactly. The line of demarcation is that the hold breaks with any ethics that would make the effacement of the self a value in itself. If it keeps attention, it refuses that the non-grasp require the disappearance of the holder. Arendt, finally, sees in the promise islands of security set in the flux of the future, where humans bind themselves to maintain certain things. A public, verbal species of the hold, which the hold extends toward the non-verbal. Agathe promises Dorian nothing, and yet she holds.

There remains care, which has been working this territory for a while. Dependence, the upkeep of ordinary worlds, the vulnerability of those who give care. The hold does not discover this continent. It brings to it a precise distinction — preserving a form is not maintaining its crossability — and the insistence on the holder’s margin. That debt must stay visible, especially when the concept passes toward the caring professions.

You will recognize it in a nurse before in any treatise.

X. Objections

Isn’t this an apology for conservatism? The distinction “holding an opening / conserving a form” is the parry. One will also answer that holding can require changing the forms, sometimes radically, and the clean withdrawal prescribes leaving what can no longer be held. The hold is not an argument against rupture; it says when rupture is right, and when it is flight.

Is it available to everyone? That objection is partly right. Obviously, precarity reduces the margins, exposes you more to dissolution by exhaustion. Still, Agathe’s hold (one message every three months) is within everyone’s reach; and the false hold is more frequent where economic dependence aggravates the dissolution of the subject who sacrifices herself. The guard against the counterfeit is therefore more precious for precarious subjects than for others. What makes the hold difficult in precarity is precarity itself.

Holding without believing

Holding means neither saving, nor conserving, nor believing that everything will become possible again. It means maintaining an opening as long as it still can be maintained, without locking the other inside it and without losing yourself in it. And when that opening requires your disappearance, knowing, sometimes, how to leave it cleanly.

Holding without believing: without believing the other will answer, without believing the form will return, without believing the move will be rewarded, without believing fidelity will guarantee a result. This is not holding without conviction; it is holding without guarantee. Agathe does not wait for Dorian to answer; Edmond does not ask for Léon to live again. The question that remains, and that can be put to any life, has two members: does what you maintain stay open, and do you still remain someone while maintaining it?

One day Agathe may stop sending her messages, without that silence canceling what she will have kept open for a few years. I cannot say when a hold can end without becoming an abandonment. The holder is the worst placed to judge his own hold. At the same time, no one else is better placed than he is. That difficulty has no solution; it marks the edge of the concept.