Changes

Journal of European Psychoanalysis

Spring - Fall 1997

Why did Freud supplement the Oedipal myth with the mythical narrative of the "primordial father" in Totem and Taboo (T&T)? The lesson of this second myth is the exact obverse of the Oedipus: far from having to deal with the father who, intervening as the Third, prevents direct contact with the incestuous object (thus sustaining the illusion that his annihilation would give us free access to this object), it is the killing of the father, i.e., the very realization of the Oedipal wish, which gives rise to symbolic prohibition (the dead father returns as his Name). And today's much-decried "decline of Oedipus" (of the paternal symbolic authority) is precisely the return of figures which function according to the logic of the "primordial father" from "totalitarian" political leaders to the paternal sexual harasser. But why? When the "pacifying" symbolic authority is suspended, the only way to avoid the debilitating deadlock of desire, its inherent impossibility, is to locate the cause of its inaccessibility into a despotic figure which stands for the primordial jouisseur: we cannot enjoy because HE amasses all enjoyment...

http://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm