CHAPTER ONEElectra as Female OedipusElectras suitability as the female Oedipus is, from the beginning, under some doubt. Not because Freud did not want a female Oedipus, a tragic Oedipette, but because he allowed the woman to gently slide into penis envy1 (as the female form of the unconsciousness), and so distinguished Electras symbolic seuence of acts from those ofOedipus at significant moments. Freud !udged the female immature in her morality and commitment, and as having not yet achieved consciousness and tragic greatness." #ut it isprecisely Electra who causes him problems, as the figure in whom the female inferiority system should have been incarnated in an e$emplary fashion. %nstead this young woman observes and comments on events li&e an embedded reporter, e$hibiting a thorough and high degree of &nowledge. For while the tragic hero Oedipus is unthin&able in the role of a virtual lover who only fantasi'es about the loving embrace of his mother, Ele&tras incestuous act is only an attempted attribution, as fantasy, as hallucination. %s this what distinguishes the girl from the young hero( %s this the )phase difference* that lies between the love of men and that of women(+ One could ob!ect that Oedipus did not wantto commit incest, and did not &now that he was getting involved with his mother. One could say then, that Electras hallucinations too& possession of him under reversed signs, ending in a physical connection with the not-mother (as he believed). Electra, on the other hand, has a non-physical connection with the real father. ,he result is that Oedipus acted before he thought and arrived at &nowledge, whereas Electras case is e$actly the opposite- she thin&s and &nows, but never acts. .hat Electra cannot make real is her love1 )Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex. [] In girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus complex is lacking. Castration has already had its efect Sigmund Freud, Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX, p. 256, 257 [Dt. S. 28] translated by James Strachey, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud. London: Hogarth press, 1953.2 % cannot evade the notion (though % hesitate to give it e$pression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. ,heir super/ego is never so ine$orable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we reuire it to be in men.* Sigmund Freud, Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX, p. 257 [Dt. S. 29]3 Cf. Sigmund Freud, Femininity. Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 598of her father0a mighty bastard, a merciless &iller, a hard/boiled warrior, who sacrificed his daughter %phigeneia to the goddess for a favorable military wind. 1ccording to 2ean 3iraudou$, in his rearrangement of the 3ree& material into a "4th/century theater piece, she once lay in his arms. Electra reports how she rushed to her father upon his return home-5y chee& against his chee&, % felt the hot blood of my father. %n the summer, sometimes the whole world is as hot as my father. %t ma&es me faint. 1nd with these arms % have embraced him. % thought that % too& the measure of my love, but it became the measure of my revenge. ,hen he was off, he mounted his horse again, still lighter, still more luminous. 1nd the assassination of Electra was consummated. % ran to the palace in order to see him anew, yet % did not encounter him ever again, but instead you, his murderers.6 7he has !ust awo&en, has !ust warmed herself on her father8 she wants more of him, to see him again0and already he is dead. 9er :action: is not as real, not as bombastic as that of Oedipus. Oedipus &ills his father, albeit unwittingly, but with his own hands, !ust as he sleeps unwittingly with his mother, albeit in a real and directly genital sense. Nevertheless, the suitability of the stories as analytical narratives is anticipated by the way that both figures, Oedipus as much as Electra, act in a way that is half active and half private. ,hey both act in this sense in a brac&eted or restricted form8 he does not &now what he does, and she does not do what she &nows. ,hus there is a certain parallel here inasmuch as they both arrived at the same result. For both there is a withdrawal of accountability for their actions, the one in &nowing and the other in doing, and this withdrawal can be read as a code concealing a collective phantasm. .hat would be tragic in the tragedy is what does not remain in the realm of fantasies, what, through a fertile form of ontological e$cess wasnt content with inner images but wanted to come out into the world. 1 murderous fantasy, li&e those innocent babies regularly have according to 5elanie ;lein, conseuently leads to a murder0the murder of ;ing + 82 Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Translated by Claire McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. [T]otemismthe social worship of animals[] is one of the few cultural forms that can justifiably be accorded a universal human significance. (p. 390)Then, totemism would primarily be the most primitive, as yet indirect, realization of self-consciousness. (p. 391).,hat this disposition stands at the beginning of social activity is also illuminated by a comment of 3abriel ,arde, who ma&es the connection with an other, or the imitationof the other the ob!ect of a philosophical sociology. For ,arde, )self/imitation,* which amounts to the assertion and maintenance of identity, necessarily divides into self/ and other/identification, for the simple reason that memory as a construct can integrate otherness in sameness and vice versa0thus, it sublates previous modes or stages of becoming that are encoded as sameness or as other, foreign sameness.>6 ,he concept of the Other is, however, too wea& for our investigation. .hen posing uestions that for us are encapsulated in totemism, it is less a matter of a dialectical difference between identity and otherness, or differences that arise within a whole,>B than of a first great difference that, li&e a repulsion that generates internal compression (as intimacy), ma&es discreet unities consistent. ,hat the motif of strangeness was also attractive for the age of metaphysics can be seen in the notion of the foreign 3od, in the dues absconditus, but also e. negativo in the commandments that are supposed to ma&e the foreign 3od appear terrifying. ,otemism gives evidence of the use of otherness, which, in the sense of 3abriel ,arde, has both a social and a mnemotechnical (genealogical) meaning. ,he strange functions less in the vertical0where one brings the totally strange at the highest 1rchimedean point into greatest tension with the world0than in the hori'ontal, enigmatic versimilitudes ta&e shape that call for e$planation. For this reason people reachfor the most curious e$planations of their origins, even though it seems obvious that they come from people. Only a philosophy that ignores growing and becoming will be indifferent in the face of these mysteries. Only a philosophy that is made by adults for adults cannot approach these uestions. 83 Gerhard Heard made the insightful remark that all parasitical relationships strive toward a stabilization of the symbiosis. Cited in Gehlen, Ibid., p. 292. 84 [I]t is a question of imitation of self; for memory or habit, its two branches, must be connected, in order to be well understood, with imitation of others, the only kind of imitation which we are concerned with here. The psychological is explained by the social just because the social sprang from the psychological. Laws of Imitation. (1903). Translated by E. C. Parsons. Reprint; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith: 1940; p. 14 (from the Preface to the secondFrench edition). 85 Aleida and Jan Assmann, in their conference volume Verwandlungen, have aimed at this kind of strong sense of alterity. My analysis of totemism goes, both structurally and psychologically, in the same direction. The discourse of identity that encompasses change excludes transformation as the other of itself. Exactly this has been our concern in this project; not only that which breaks the molds of identity, but also that which remains beyond these molds of identity.Verwandlungen: Archologie der literarischen Kommunikation IX. Mnchen: Wilhelm Fink, 2006; Einleitung, p. 13.,he unconditioned conditionality or the conditioned unconditionality is the signature of collective memory. %t forms a logical and affective plateau on which totemism ma&es its great entrance. %nasmuch as memory includes in itself an other, it presents a folding of otherness with the same, and reuires a principle0amnesia0that organi'es what fades away, forgetting itself8 a first amnesia that should stimulate anamnesis. .hat is the principle of forgetting( ,he principle of forgetting should be thought of as the cocoon left behind by the butterfly, li&e the childhood out of which the adult has grown. .hile all art of memory, philosophy of memory, and mnemotechnics aredirected toward the remembering of something &nowable and are thus based on a radical @latonism, in totemism the pre/conscious, the un&nowable and un&nown, is remembered. #ut then, how to recall a stranger( 5emory itself can be understood as that crossing where things a priori past impinge upon things of the future as upon a promise, which means that a first consciousness meets, in its specific (primitive) constitution, a first being (powerful, undifferentiated, all/encompassing). 1 mother surrounds the child like aliving hot house,>H she holds it in her arms. ,his image must always be recalled in the stranger, because consciousness has linguistically and structurally left behind the level ofthis e$perience. #ut in anticipation of a figure similar to the first intimacy, this congruence is invo&ed again, as the remembrance of the stranger. ,his memory first functions erotically, and then politically. Totemistic O&'ecti(ication%n a curious way, the condition of possibility for the 1thenian e$periment, i.e. the political organi'ation of a middle/format, is a successfully absolved totemism which standardi'ed the )imitation d)altrui* in order to drive out euality, even from beyond the realm of parental ascendance, and which identifies the free citi'ens of the polis as a homogenous group of animalia politica who tacitly agree to denounce the marriage rules which belong to )pre/history.* For this reason, it seems to me, the dream of Dlytemnestra 86 There are ideas that children have of their origins, which require new clothes if they want to grow along with thedeveloping consciousness. The development of the small childs ideas about the vagina is much affected by cultural pattern. D. W. Winnicott, On Human Nature. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1988, p. 44.in the older variants of the drama is e$panded and performed emphatically, and in the countless repetitions the new, revolutionary hermeneutics predict for the woman not her glory, but her demise. %n this the great 1thenian dramatists proved worthy of the tas& conferred on them. ,hey allow subtle echoes to be heard of the reasons for the rivalry between models of ascendance, but the low/threshold attention/span relevant to propaganda is directed to the political and legal irreconcilability between matrilinear (uterine, totemistic) and patrilinear concepts, and is absorbed there. ,hat in this constellation there lies a parable on the human ability or inability to have intercourse withthe Other has, for reasons of the historici!ation of cultural phases, been a reali'ation that has remained bloc&ed. One allocated the totemistic comple$ and its symbol/building function to a0let it be said, astoundingly successful0subordination within ethnological and intercultural fol&lore, which hindered those psychological, social, economic, and media/theory readings that would have put totemism at our disposal as an efficient modelof the contemporary situation. Even if the strange, li&e few other concepts, stepped into the center of a cultural studies preoccupied with the production of identities as well as a contemporary politics and arts scene, an ine$plicable superficiality still clings to it which is compensated for with increasing sophism. ;ristevas idea of becoming a stranger to oneself or of an otherness that one feels in or against oneself, or Merridas attempts to smuggle in the guest and friendship as figures of process into a philosophy of reduction and otherness, do little to modify this finding. .hat emerges here is a society that no longer seems to notice the primary worth of its symbolic e$change/value mar&et, even when this is the e$oticism that &eeps it operating. On the surface it may appear as if the pre/oedipal or totemistic constellation had in fact lost its rights. #ut if it really contains a fundamental e$perience (non/memory) of the soul, the recollection of which under different circumstances constitutes the sub!ect of our investigation, how could it ever not be fully within its rights( %t is much more a matter of locating and presenting the symboli'ations in which it has entered and in which significant elements appear ob5ectivi!ed. %n our study we assume that totemism is not a primitivism of specific groups, but a symbolic politics rooted in the pre-oedipality of the girl that actuali'es the desire for the lost as a desire for the )stranger.* 7o, what &ind of stranger can this be, and what &ind of desire is it to run towards it( .e will see what ob!ects fulfill this craving, this primary e$oticism, today. .hen the animals have served their totemistic function, then other means have to be found in order to satisfy this craving or this simple desire. .hat can a social formation do to meet this craving( .hich will be the suitable ob!ects whose e$oticism is a sufficient surrogate to allow that form of immersion resembling contact with the beloved stranger( .hat sort of totemism can win over modern society with such ease, because it comes across a well/prepared terrain(