The murder of the dead father: The Shoah and contemporary antisemitism

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is suggested in this paper that in the Shoah one is confronted with the abolition of the Law of the Dead Father and the re-establishing of the tyranny of the narcissistic father. In the extermination of the Jews of Europe in the Shoah, the aim was the destruction of the rules of genealogy and filiation to both mother and father that establish the social and give rise to personhood and are at the core of the oedipal structure. The rule of absolute power – the destruction of any sense of maternal care and paternal rules – leads ultimately to the creation of the abject. Freud distinguished between two different types of obstacles to psychoanalytic treatment that are expressions of the death drive. The first is bound and is related to the superego; it is connected to the negative therapeutic reaction, masochism, and the unconscious sense of guilt. The other manifestation of the death drive is unbound and diffuse. If the first is understandable, the second, he suggests, escapes any understanding. The paper makes use of this distinction to examine Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.