Jacques Lacan:Oedipus

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Introduction

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

The Oedipus Complex

The Meaning of the Phallus

The Imaginary Phallus

The Symbolic Phallus

The Law of the Father and the Superego

The Two Fathers

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. 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