Oedipus rex: The oedipus rule and its subversion

Abstract

The Oedipus triangle has been identified as the locus of passage out of infancy into language, into the symbolic order, into civilization and its sublime and indefinitely extended field of objects of desire, as the locus of the passage out of the closure of symbiotic infancy into the encounter with alterity, as the locus of the passage out of the anarchy, the hallucinatory omnipotence of infancy into the law and the reality principle. It is a locus of passage: the neurotic would be one who has not really left this place, but the psychotic one who has never really entered it. Deleuze and Guattari have undertaken a massive assault on this normalizing, socializing dominion of the Oedipus stronghold (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977). This destructive enterprise is philosophically armed, and it is only some of its philosophical munitions that I venture to report on here. The contestation is directed both against the structuring function of the Oedipus complex, and against its own constituent structure, more exactly, the dialectical and structuralist concepts with which it has been comprehended in recent decades. Psychosis, in this psychoanalytic optic, is retreat before the Oedipus triangle, a regression to a primary process nomadism without law, without alterity, without reality. The question will then be whether this nomadism does not have its own positivity and its own produc? tivity. That the parental closure has become the theater in which madness and sanity, language and society is decided - this is something that itself has a history. The Deleuze-Guattari thesis is that far from being the cellular machinery in which law is instituted, language is entered, socialization is decided, the Oedipus theater is itself staged at a cer? tain conjuncture of social history.