The Secret of Incest? Out of the Mise en Abîme of Family Stories

Abstract

In this paper I use my life experience as a case study to expose and explore a family secret and interpret its ethical implications and effects on parental and filial relationships. Michel Foucault argues that the stain of incest is part of the fabric of the bourgeois family. In the majority of stories of incest, there has been a process of covering up, of secrets and lies concealing the stain. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose that the only acceptable, ethical subjectivity is a continuous process of self-enrichment in relation to the world, a production that embraces ruptures of meaning in the fabric of dysfunctional and hegemonic forms of subjectification. I interpret the family story through a Deleuzian ethic of productive desire that exposes and exorcises the hidden stain of incest as an absent cause driving the failure of my parents’ marriage and of my family life. Secrets that cannot be told drive stories and are perpetuated and distorted with each retelling of the story. In my telling of the family story, I disclose the ambiguity of meaning and free myself from the secret, performing what Deleuze and Guattari call a schizoanalysis. By rupturing the ‘sense’ of a dysfunctional pattern of relationship, such a therapeutic analysis allows new ways of relating to self and others and new rhythms of existence to emerge. Out of loss and non-sense come survival and the revival of an exhausted terrain. My ethics of life writing is the desire to tell one's story and to understand something of the other stories within which it is enfolded and contained, so that it can be—so that I can be—set free to choose new stories; always knowing that they are just stories.