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→The Two Fathers
=The Two Fathers=
It is through the identification with the Oedipal father that the incest prohibition is internalized and Oedipal desire abandoned and it is this process, for Freud, that constitues the superego.
But what we find here in Freud is not one notion of the father but ‘’two’’.
There is first of all the father of the Oedipus complex, who intervenes and disrupts the relationship between mother and child and thus denies the child’s access ot the mother’s desire.
This is the father who transmits the laws to the child – the law of the incest prohibition – and subordiantes the child’s desire to the law.
It is important to keep in mind, though, that this father is himself subject to the law.
Second, there is the primal father of ‘’Totem and Taboo’’, who is perceived to be outside the law.
In Freud’s myth of origins the primal father is a figure of absolute power; the father who aggregates to himself the owmen and wealth of the primal ahorde by expelling his sons and rivals.
What distinguishes this tyrannical figure from the Oedipal father is that he is not himself subordinated to the law – the law that prohibits his son’s access to the omwn of the horde.
This other father, therefore – the cruel and licentious one – is the reverse side of the law.
Both fathers function psychically at the level of the superego.
Identification with the primal father involves amn ambiguous process whereby the suibject simultaneously identifies with authority, the law and, at the same time, the illicit desires that would trasngress and undermine the law.
As with the notion of the superego itself, the father functions in a peculiarly paradoxical way.
He is simultnaeously the agency of authority and a figure outside the law who actively transgresses the law that he imposes upon others.
The subject, therefore, is faced with its subordination to authority and the regualtion of its desires through the internalization of a signifier that is itself beyond the law.
At a psychic level, an overly punishing superego and subordiantion to the symbolic law is one way in which the subject comes to resolve this unbearable situation.
And yet, by implication, if one must exert strong measures to prohibit something, there msut be a correspondingly strong desire to commit the crime.
This vicious cycle of transgressiona nd punishment operates in the social domain through Zizek’s anlaysis of racism and anti-semitism.
=Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Imperative to Enjoyment!=
