Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
imaginary identification with the father facilitates ‘the spreading’ of the Discourse of the Master, rather than the repressive formation of the super-ego. In this way, we can see the link between the modern form of paternal identification and the modern predominance of the Discourse of the Master. Lacan proposes that the modern Oedipal form inaugurates a new form of the social tie. This social tie takes the form of a fraternal relationship, in which a relationship between brothers founds the social order. Lacan argues that an analysis of the Oedipal myth reveals the phantasy of the brothers of the primal horde and of the fraternal social relation (S17: 131). He suggests that this symbolic murder of the father founds modern fraternal social forms (S17: 131– 132). For Lacan, the Oedipus complex is contingent on the murder of the father, because it establishes the interdict against the jouissance of the mother. The brothers are the murderous sons, who after killing their father enter into the pact between them that will constitute the Symbolic order. In Family Complexes, Lacan argues that the fraternal complex (the imaginary relation between siblings) involves the subject’s recognition of the other as another with whom he will either fight or contract (FC: 46). In his later seminar, L’envers, Lacan describes the Discourse of the Master as a founding myth of Western (capitalist) culture (S17: 207). Lacan suggests that the fraternal social relation is a social and symbolic tie between brothers, forming the modern social bond with its founding discourse of equality, liberty and brotherhood (S17: 131– 132). The sons of the primal father inaugurate a new cultural form – that of fraternity. They are no longer the sons of the father, but brothers. Lacan’s work does not provide a theory of fraternal sociality. However, his account of the fraternal tie permits us to trace the relationship between the fraternal social bond and the pact of the Symbolic order. It enables us to understand how paternal identification produces the fraternal tie. In the fraternal order, the brothers imagine a relation to each other through their relation to the murdered father. They represent this relationship through the symbolic father, so that they imagine the dead, primal father to be the symbolic father – the father that does not know that he is dead. The paternal identification of each of the sons and their recognition of each other as brothers through the paternal line produces the fraternal bond. This relationship between paternal and fraternal identification thereby founds the Symbolic order and the Law of the Father. Unlike the primal horde, the Law of the Father is not a law of brute force, but a symbolic law that describes a cultural order of the exchange of women between men. The pact of the Symbolic order founds the fraternal tie. It represents a symbolic law that forms the fraternal social bond. The Symbolic order is the social pact between subjects that forms their relationship as social subjects. 2 This Symbolic structures the social order, because it produces subjects and the relation between them. In this sense, the Lacanian Symbolic order, and its later reconception as ‘discourse’, describes the pact that founds the social tie between
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 158.
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