{"id":6991,"date":"2009-10-27T20:50:54","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T01:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=6991"},"modified":"2011-02-19T21:58:28","modified_gmt":"2011-02-20T02:58:28","slug":"totem-and-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/10\/27\/totem-and-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"totem and taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.<\/em> Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.\u00a0 152-<\/p>\n

Lacan regards the Freudian myth of Totem and Taboo <\/em>as a phantasy of origin, reading it as a cultural narrative that is both anterior and interior to modern social forms. In that narrative, patriarchy exists as a powerful cultural form. This cultural form posits the father as the bearer of social power, such that the father functions as the figure of the social ideal and of repressive authority (FC: 67\u2013 68). For Lacan, that cultural phantasy continues in modern social forms.<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s reading of Totem and Taboo<\/em> centres on the Father of pre-history, the father of the primal horde. Unlike Freud, Lacan does not perceive the primal Father as a real being whose existence continues in phylogenetic memory<\/strong>. Rather, he argues that the primal father is an imaginary figure that exists as part of a collective myth or social phantasy<\/span>. In this narrative of a \u2018traditional\u2019 patriarchy, the father rules the social world. This \u2018collective myth\u2019 of the prehistory of modernity describes a social order that the Father\u2019s Will founds. The primal father forbids his sons jouissance<\/em>, while claiming its pleasure for himself<\/span>(S17: 143). This myth imagines the father of pre-history as claiming and enjoying an unlimited pleasure of the mother, and hence as being an uncastrated father (S17: 115). He is the forbidding father who has all pleasure and who suffers no lack, while commanding his sons: \u2018do not enjoy\u2019<\/span>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

From his earliest work, such as the Family Complexes, to the later L\u2019envers, Lacan explicitly links the mythical murder of the primal father of the horde to a new social order and form of \u2018family complex\u2019<\/span><\/strong>. Lacan takes Freud\u2019s myth of traditional patriarchy, and rereads it as a mythical narrative of the emergence of a new and different socio-symbolic order. In this cultural phantasy, the sons unite against the fearful primal father, murdering him in order to establish their access to sexual objects (namely the bodies of women) that were previously reserved for the father\u2019s enjoyment, and in doing so establish a new form of sexual exchange and social order. For Lacan, the murder of the father is a narrative of the emergence of the modern Oedipal structure of the subject<\/span>. Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex<\/span> is contingent on the symbolic murder of the father because it establishes the interdict against the desire for the mother (S17: 139). Lacan describes the familial structure that produces this subjective complex as the conjugal patriarchal family. He characterizes this familial order as the structure of the modern family. The structure of familial desire is classically Oedipal<\/span> (and Freudian) insofar as the child desires the mother, while facing the father as the rival for, and bar to, that desire. The modern family remains a patriarchal family because of the primacy of the paternal figure, where the figure of the father represents a rival for the mother\u2019s affection as well as being a representative of the social world. That father must be symbolically murdered for the resolution of the Oedipus complex<\/span><\/span>. While the paternal figure is the pivot of the modern family complex, Lacan repeatedly insists that the decline of the paternal function and the failure of the Oedipus complex characterize modernity<\/span>. From his early work of Family Complexes to L\u2019envers thirty years later,<\/p>\n

Lacan argues that the rise of modernity coincides with the increasing failure<\/strong> of the Oedipus complex<\/span>. In 1938, Lacan describes the father as having both sexually repressive and identificatory functions<\/strong> in the paternal family.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Lacan, because the real father acts as the agent of the paternal function, the real father is too often inadequate to his function as Father. Lacan argues that the personality of the father is \u2018always in some way deficient \u2013 absent, humiliated, divided or false\u2019 (1938a: 200, FC: 73).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lacan echoes this description of the failing father in his later paper, \u2018On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis\u2019 (1958), where he argues that the father\u2019s position as legislator often reveals him to be a hypocrite or a fraud (\u00c9: 242).<\/p>\n

Lacan claims that the modern father is inadequate to his paternal function because he occupies the dual position of being a figure of repression and sublimation. In the Lacanian account, modern society suffers a decline in the paternal function because of the failure of the modern father. Because the father fails to secure the paternal law, the subject fails to identify with the father\u2019s interdict. The subject does not identify with the father as the agent of repression, and so does not properly form the paternal super-ego.<\/p>\n

As part of that formation, \u2018the paternal imago is invested by repression [and] it projects its original force in the very sublimations which should overcome it\u2019 (1938a: 197, FC: 66). Lacan claims that this process is the source of the creativity of modern Western culture because it does not accept paternal authority but instead constantly subjects it to \u2018creative subversion\u2019 (1938a: 199, FC: 70).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.\u00a0 152- Lacan regards the Freudian myth of Totem and Taboo as a phantasy of origin, reading it as a cultural narrative that is both anterior and interior to modern social forms. In that narrative, patriarchy exists as a powerful cultural form. This cultural … Continue reading “totem and taboo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6991"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7002,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6991\/revisions\/7002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}