Dear Dan,
I don't! I agree. The incest taboo & castration, in Freud, are coproducers
of each other.
>seriously - i don't understand how or why you want to divide oedipus from
>the family. how exactly can oedipus not be familial? he marries his
>_mother_ !! that is a rather crucial detail, it seems to me. why do you
>want to keep oedipus as the figure of desire? an oedipus who no longer
>desires his _mother_ but a women who just happened to be passing? who
>doesn't usurp his father but just the man who he saw asking her the time??
>how is this still oedipus?? -- unless, of course, we already _know_ it's
>always always oedipus....
In AO, though, it seems to me that D&G are inviting is to see Oedipus
metaphorically. They might begin by interrogating the ubiquity of incest
taboos in savage soci, showing that Oedipus is not coeternal with
"humanity", but somewhere down the track Oedipus gets to stand-in for the
victim of almost any [modern?] despotic arrangement?
My own feeling is once you get *gens* you get Oedipus. I'm not sure whether
you always get Oedipus via [literal] castration? But in that case a critique
of castration is no longer, automatically, a critique of the gens (or
Oedipus). Now the gens is not just any arrangment. As Lacan & Levi-Strauss
note, the law of gens forbids cross-generational interfamilial [x] where x
is "sexual" as opposed to "nonsexual".
Freud says that the threat of castration secures the gens. Well some kind of
securing is obviously needed. But is it the threat of castration? Always
that particular threat? Now if ANY threat is really just a stand-in for
castration, Freud's idea of castration, and the whole focusing on generding
via penishere or penisnothere, falls apart. I'm happy with all that. What
I'm not happy with is the other thing - metaphorizing castration ... because
if we do that, then what are we arguing about castration for. We should just
forget that and get with the postFoucaultian orthodoxy.
Okay so lets do that. Freud was WRONG. Now castration just goes away? Nope.
Folks still get castrated. But what we see now is that catration is a cog in
many machines, not just the gens and Oedipus. Castration, for e.g., takes
its rightful place of honor in the terrifying strategic "toolbox" of the war
machine. And stays literal. Castration enters the world of art and medicine,
as a cog, and procves productive of fine art and good health. It enters the
state regime, as a cog, and produces the loylaty of ministers and the
chastity of concubines. And stays literal.
Now we got here by metaphorizing castration so that we could examine
economies of power qua Foucault (and letting the word vanish). But when we
did that, literal castration appears. See the twist? And maybe it worms its
way back into some moments of gens production too? Maybe we begin
re-metaphorizing Oedipus not just as the guy who wants to bonk mum, but as
any sad slob who is not the boss? Hell, why stop? The boss can be Oedipus
too!
Anyway, I just want to suggest that some weird things happen when castration
gets metaphorized.
:) Chris
________________________________________________________________________
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I don't! I agree. The incest taboo & castration, in Freud, are coproducers
of each other.
>seriously - i don't understand how or why you want to divide oedipus from
>the family. how exactly can oedipus not be familial? he marries his
>_mother_ !! that is a rather crucial detail, it seems to me. why do you
>want to keep oedipus as the figure of desire? an oedipus who no longer
>desires his _mother_ but a women who just happened to be passing? who
>doesn't usurp his father but just the man who he saw asking her the time??
>how is this still oedipus?? -- unless, of course, we already _know_ it's
>always always oedipus....
In AO, though, it seems to me that D&G are inviting is to see Oedipus
metaphorically. They might begin by interrogating the ubiquity of incest
taboos in savage soci, showing that Oedipus is not coeternal with
"humanity", but somewhere down the track Oedipus gets to stand-in for the
victim of almost any [modern?] despotic arrangement?
My own feeling is once you get *gens* you get Oedipus. I'm not sure whether
you always get Oedipus via [literal] castration? But in that case a critique
of castration is no longer, automatically, a critique of the gens (or
Oedipus). Now the gens is not just any arrangment. As Lacan & Levi-Strauss
note, the law of gens forbids cross-generational interfamilial [x] where x
is "sexual" as opposed to "nonsexual".
Freud says that the threat of castration secures the gens. Well some kind of
securing is obviously needed. But is it the threat of castration? Always
that particular threat? Now if ANY threat is really just a stand-in for
castration, Freud's idea of castration, and the whole focusing on generding
via penishere or penisnothere, falls apart. I'm happy with all that. What
I'm not happy with is the other thing - metaphorizing castration ... because
if we do that, then what are we arguing about castration for. We should just
forget that and get with the postFoucaultian orthodoxy.
Okay so lets do that. Freud was WRONG. Now castration just goes away? Nope.
Folks still get castrated. But what we see now is that catration is a cog in
many machines, not just the gens and Oedipus. Castration, for e.g., takes
its rightful place of honor in the terrifying strategic "toolbox" of the war
machine. And stays literal. Castration enters the world of art and medicine,
as a cog, and procves productive of fine art and good health. It enters the
state regime, as a cog, and produces the loylaty of ministers and the
chastity of concubines. And stays literal.
Now we got here by metaphorizing castration so that we could examine
economies of power qua Foucault (and letting the word vanish). But when we
did that, literal castration appears. See the twist? And maybe it worms its
way back into some moments of gens production too? Maybe we begin
re-metaphorizing Oedipus not just as the guy who wants to bonk mum, but as
any sad slob who is not the boss? Hell, why stop? The boss can be Oedipus
too!
Anyway, I just want to suggest that some weird things happen when castration
gets metaphorized.
:) Chris
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com