Jacques Lacan:Oedipus

Introduction

Lacan's work in the 1950s placed emphasis on the role of language and the symbolic order.

The Law of the Father and the Superego

It is through the intervention of the father that the child is precipitated out of the imaginary world of infantile plenitude into the symbolic universe of lack. The Oedupis complex marks this transiiton from imaginary to symbolic, or, as Freud theorized in in such works as ‘’Totem and Taboo’’ (1913) and ‘’Civilization and its Discontents’’ (1930), the transition from nature to culture. The Oedipus complex for Freud marks the origin of civilization, religion, morals and art. It is only through the repression and sublimation of our incestuous desire for our mothers that civilization and culture can development. The Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, therefore, is associated with the prohibition of incest and the instigation of symbolic law. The symbolic order and the process of signification, according to Lacan, is ‘phalluc’ and governed by the paternal metaphor and the imposition of paternal law. The father is seen to embody the socio-symbolic law and the fucntion of the paternal metaphor is to substitute the desire for the mother with the law of the father. This is also the founding moment of the unconscious for Lacan and the point at which the phallus is installed as the central organizing signifier of the unconscious. The internalization of the paternal metaphor also creates something else, though, that Freud designates as the ‘’superego’’. Lacan has developed the notion of the superego in a very specfic and important way.

The superego emerges through the transition from nature to culture via the internalization of the incest taboo and is often associated with the development of moral conscience. Lacan retains this association between the superego and the law and poitns to an inherent paradox that Freud did not himself develop. In ‘’Totem and Taboo’’ Freud argued that the prohibition against incest provided the foundation for all subsequent social laws. In other words, the most fundmanetal desire of all human subjects is the desire for incest and its prohibition represents the governing principle of all societies. For Lacan, the superego is located in the symbolic order and retains a close but paradoxical relationship to the law. As with the law, the prohibition operates only iwhtin the realm of culture and its purpose is always to exclude incest:

“Freud designates the prohibition of incest as the underlying principle of the pimordial law, the law of which all other cultural developments are no more than consequences and ramifications. And at the same time he identifies incest as the fundmental desire.

The law, in other words, is founded upon that which it seeks to exlcude, or, to put it another way, the desire to break and transgress the law is the very precondition for the existence of the law itself. On the one hnad, the superego is a symbolic structure that regulates the subject’s desire, and, on the other, there is this senseless, blind imperativeness to it. As Lacan says in seminar XX, nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego: “The superego is the imperative of ‘’jouissance’’ – Enjoy!” The superego, therefore, is at once the law and its own destruction or that which undermines the law. The superego emerges at the point where the law – the public or social law – fails and, at this very point of failure, the law is compelled, as Zizek puts it, “to search for support in an ‘’ilegal’’ enjoyment.” The superego is, in a sense, the dialectical contrary of the pbulic law; it is what Zizek calls its obscene ‘nightly’ law – that dark underside that always necessarily accompanies the public law. According to psychoanalysis, there is simply no way a subject can avoid this tension ebtween the law and the desire to transgress it and this manifests itself as ‘guilt’. Indeed, for psychoanalysis, we are not simply guilty if we break th elaw and commit icnest, but rather we are always –already guuilty of the ‘’desire’’ to commit incest. Hence, the ultiamte paradox of the superego: “the more we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty.”

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!

Racism and anti-Semitism are both social and psychic structures. The unconscious, psychic, aspects of these processes are exemplary of superegoic structures.

Both racism and anti-Semitism are inherently contradictory ideologies.

In the United state, for example, we constantly hear and read in the media that immigrants are 'flooding' the country in order to feeload on the welfare of the state. At the same time, these very same immigrants are attacked for stealing our jobs and therefore putting ordinary citizens out of work. There is clearly a contradiction here - if immigrants are living a life of luxury on state benefits then they are not working; if on the other hand, they are working hard and taking out jobs, then they are clearly not living off the state but contributing to it.

What psychoanalysis adds to our understanding of this process is how subjects manage to sustain thee contradictory beliefs.

The relationship between racism and anti-Semitism is a complex and changing one. Zizek observes that traditionally anti-Semitim haas always been considered as an 'exception' and concpetualized differently to other forms of racism. Whereas classicla racism propounds an ideology of national superiority, whereby so-called 'inferior' races were enslaved, anti-Semitism involves the systematic and organized annihiliation of the Jewish people. Moreoer, Nazi propaganda linked the need for genoicde to another fundamental element of its ideology. It was not just that the Jews had to be killed because they represented a threat to the state, but more importantly that the socio-symbolic order itself - the new Aryan state - could not be fully realized without that process taking place; and it is here that the notion of the superego comes into play.

The 'Jew', or the Jewish race, is presented within fascinst propaganda as a figure who transgresses and undermiens the law and as such must be first punished and eventually eradicated so that a new harmonious Aryan society can emerge.

For authoritarian regime to exist, however totalitarian it may be, the active participation and support of a population is required, toerwise the regime will very quickly collapse. And yet, why would any population support an overtly repressive regime? This is where the ambiugity of the father and what LAcan calls the superegoic imperative to Enjoy comes in. When a subject identifies with a leader/father figur,e he or she identifies witha position of Oedipal power and authority. At the same time, however, the subject identifies with that curel and licentious father of the primal horde. If we do not have access to pleasure and enjoyment, we assume that it is because someone else has usurped our position and taken it from us. Hence the inflated iamges of power and potency ascribed to other 'minority' groups. Accoridng to Zizek, this is the logic that is at work in anti-Semitism. The efficacy of the figure of the 'Jew' relies on the assumption of a certain surplus - that Jews possess somthing that we do not and therefore they ahve access to pleasures that we are denied. For racism and anti-Semtiism to function psychically an impossible, unfathomable nejoyment, allegedly stolen from us, msut be attributed to the other. Paradoixcally, argues Zizek, what 'holds together' a given community is "not so much identification with the public or symbolic Law that regulates the communty's 'normal' everyday life, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form of enjoyment).

More specifically, what holds communitites together is the attribution of excessive enjoyment to other or alien groups; for instance, the sterotypical fantasy of seuxal potency associated with blakc men. This attribution of excessive enjoyment to the other then comes to operate as a specific form of theft for the subject - the theft of one's own enjoyment.

Psychoanalysis argues that the inehrent ambiguity of these psychic structrues - the superego, the father and fantasy - is a necessary and constituive part of all social roders and essential to their proper funcitoning. If the threat is not actually, empirically, there then it will have to be invented, just as Nazi ideology had to construct the 'conceptual Jew' in order to justify its own repressive regime. The poitn is that the Jews is not hte cause of that ideology, but rather something that is constitued in its effects, that it to say, the Jew is posited retrosepctively as the condition of possibility for the fascist regime. The notion of the 'conceptual Jew' is what gives the irrationality of fascist ideology its coherence nad consistency. Within racism and anti-Semitism, enjoyment, and aspecifically an 'excess' of enjoyment, is always imputed to the other: "the other may be lazy but they still have more fun than us; they live off our hard work, etc." However that is not enoguh in itself for racism to take hold. The enjoyment of the other must also be seen as depriving us of our own enjoyment: "we work hard to build a community we cna be proud of and be happy within, but this goal is denied us by lazy scrounging foreginers. We can therefor not enjoy our community because they have stolen away from ust aht which would most fully realize our enjoyment." This is what Zizek sees as the logic of racism and anti-Semitism: the theft of enjoyment.

Furthermore, the Nazis claimed that, because there were so many Jewish people who occupied positions of wealth and power, then the state mus tbe strong and authoritative to counteract them.

On the one hand, therefore, we find in fascinst propaganda the portrayal of Jewish people as less than human -as insects and rodents - o that it is easier to rationally justify their extermination and, on the other, the attribution to them of excessive power and influence. That is to sya, a dual process is taking plce whereby the dehumanizing of the o ther is accompanied by an inflation of the other's power and strenght. If a particular group is so small and significant that we can simply stamp them out then why bother? They cannot pose that much of a threat. We must eradicat ethe other precisely because by they are rich, powerful and influential they are depriving us of our rightful position in society. What wee find in anti-Semitism is that vicious cycle arituclated through the superego, whereby the law - the prohibition that maintains and regulates the social order - draws its strength from that which it excludes. The more authoritarian a regime becomes the greater the threat against it mus tbe presumed to be. Nazi ideology, therefore, involves a particualr fantasy structure that allows that subject to reconcile the apprently contradictory positions that the Jewish people are at once less than human and as such represent an insidious threat to 'our way of life' and at the same time are superhuman, hence their greater power, influence and success.

According to psychoanalysis, there is always a good and a bade side to fantasy. There is the blissful dream state beyond the mundane aspects of our lives and the horrors of modern civilization, but this is always acompanied by a darker side that involves envy, irritation and malice. Totalitarianism povides a perfect illustration of this dual structure. FIrs,t there is the utopian side - the fantasy of the perfect state as a unified harmonious community of organically, naturally, linked people. This utopianism however, is always accompanied by its opposite - those fantasies of plots, conspiracies and threats that stop the realization of this utopia. THus, argues Zizek, insoar as a community expeirences its reality as regulated and harmoniously structured, it has to repress the inehrent conflcit at its veyr heart. In other words, for a utopian fantasy to work, it presupposes the disavowal and repression of part of itself, and its effectiveness depends on how wwell it does this. Fo the Nazis, the Jews performed precisely this function. The figure of 'the Jew' is the preconditon for anti-Semitic ideology; it is that which sustains anti-Semitism. What Zizek calls the 'conceptual Jew' must be invented and sustained at the level of fantasy for anti-Semitic ideology to work. Interestingly, aruges Zizek, Nazi ideology was often most virulent in those areas of Germany that had the fewest Jews. PAradoxically, then the smaller the threat and the actual number of Jews present, the greater their power was perceived to be. This in turn, of course, legitimates a greater use of repression and force, which in turn presupposes a stronger threat agaisnt it. This is the vicious, self-punishing, cycle of the superego.

Summary

LAcan reformulated the central complex of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus omplex, as a symbolic structure.

Thus, for Lacan, the threat of castration does not involve an actual bodily threat but a symbolic process, as the infant assumes a psoition in the symbolic order as a desiring subject. Similarly, LAcan radically reformualted the role of the father. The role of the father in psychoanalysis depends not upon the presene of an actual father but upon a signifier, the paternal metaphor, which subsittues the desire fo the motehr with symbolic law. It is through the intervention of the Name-of-the-Father that the dyadic relationship of the imaginary is broken and the phallus is installed as the original lost object. The phallus is the original object-cuase of desire and the central organizing signifier of the unconscious.

These ideas are linked through the notion of the two fathers ot the function of the superego, as at once the itnernalization of the symbolic law and the desire to transgress this law.