Paternal Law Research Articles

The value of owning the symbols that orientate us within Subjectivity

Judith Butler contests Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek's argument that the limits to symbolisation which shape political action are best accounted for through Jacques Lacan's account of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Butler agrees that we each emerge as social subjects on the condition of foreclosures, but disagrees that such foreclosures are prior to the social or explicable through a universal account of kinship. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyĕwùmí has a somewhat similar critique of the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts. She argues that Western hierarchies, organised through ‘bio-logic’ or ‘body-reasoning’ with an emphasis on the sex/gender binary, are culturally particular. Oyĕwùmí distinguishes between relational, dynamic, fluid social hierarchies organised by seniority, and hierarchies organised by body-reasoning which are orientated towards fixity, and certainties. In this article I outline Bracha Ettinger's matrixial theory and argue that while it does not do what either Oyĕwùmí (transcend the terms of the nuclear family) or Butler (divest Lacan's paternal law of its power) advocate, it does provide us with the language to better account for how ‘body-reasoning’ structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes. Through an account of multiple strata of subjectivity, within an expanded Symbolic, inscribed in social life through symbolic filters based on corporeality, matrixial theory enables us to account for the embeddedness of a strong orientation towards constant individuation, alongside a persistent disavowal and fear of processes of co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity within Western thought. In their exchange, Laclau theorises social transformation through articulatory logics whereas Butler stresses the need for the work of cultural translation. Drawing on Ettinger’s and Oyĕwùmí's work, I propose that practices of translation must include a rigorous accounting for our orientations and investments within Subjectivity.

Thoughts on the Abortion Taboo: Displacement of a Failing Incest Taboo?

The author suggests reading the forces culminating in the Dobbs’ decision and the dismantling of Roe v. Wade as the expression of an “abortion taboo,” which represents patriarchy’s refusal to concede to—and its failure to achieve—the incest taboo. The incest taboo, in turn, reflects a weakened paternal law, the failure of which pivots on an archaic and pervasive repudiation of the non-unitary feminine. The abortion taboo performs the labor of annulling (sexed/feminine) difference, on the manifest level advocating reproduction and the life of the unborn, while—latently—insisting on the reproduction of the (White-hetero-masculinist) same, thus reaffirming incestuous relations and their frozen temporality. This essay highlights the signifying and politically liberatory potential of the vaginal, which introduces uncanny contradiction and is disruptive of patriarchal sameness, as well as bearing accountability to a law beyond the paternal: feminine law.

An Application of ITO Analysis in Secondary Kinship Identification.

Objective As the methods of the paternity and kinship testing have been developed, the second-degree and more distant relationships remain challenging in forensic science. Currently, the ITO method is the mainstream method to clarify the kinship between two individuals. Methods In this study, the ITO algorithm was used to calculate the uncle-nephew index based on 55 autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) loci that were universally used for forensic identification. 19 STRs loci in Y chromosome were used for verification of the kinship. Results The cumulative uncle-nephew index between A and B was calculated to 0.993 by the analysis of the genotyping results of 21 STRs. When genotyping results of the other 34 STRs were added to the calculation algorithm, the cumulative uncle-nephew index between A and B was promoted to 227.928. Meanwhile, genotyping results of 17 Y-STRs loci showed that A and B shared the same Y-STRs haplotype that was in accord with the paternal inheritance law. Conclusion The biological uncle-nephew relationship between A and B are identified by applying the statistical principles and genetic technologies.

Bourdonnements de l’Autre. Trois jours chez ma tante d’Yves Ravey

The novel Trois jours chez ma tante (2017) by Yves Ravey presents a main character who fits well in the tradition of the narrators in the author’s work: untrustworthy and in the throes of a mania which leads him to betray the people who are close to him. I propose to explain the strange behaviour of this narrator, a certain Marcello Martini, with reference to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Jacques Lacan’s theories pertaining to obsessional neurosis. We shall see that Marcello’s tendency towards betrayal and self-destruction reveals itself to be a “jouissance,” an effect of the position he occupies within the family structure, where he finds himself alienated from the mother and subject to the paternal law. More broadly, this study examines the presence of evil in Ravey’s work, which can be seen to be less an arbitrary or an intrinsic phenomenon than the consequence of a psychological structure which puts the very existence of the human subject into question.

Paternal Law and the Abject in Ourika

Paternal Law and the Abject in Ourika

Primal Crime: Visions of the Law and Its Transgression in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Cinema

In this paper I consider contemporary expressions of what Freud called the primal crime and collapse of paternal law through an exploration of the cinema of the Danish-American Director Nicolas Winding Refn. Introducing the paper I outline Freud’s theory of the law, crime, and civilization, where social order and its transgression become caught in an endless cycle, before moving on to explore Winding Refn’s cinema. Following this work, where I centrally show how Freud founds the law upon structures of the family and criminality, I consider Winding Refn’s early Danish films, specifically the Pusher trilogy and Bleeder, in order to show how he imagines the collapse of law and order into crime and violence through stories of the ruined family. Moving on, I explore the consequences of this situation through reference to Winding Refn’s middle period films, Bronson and Valhalla Rising, where first crime completely dominates the law, and second this situation conjures the idea of escape from the dystopia of violence and crime into some other utopian space. Finally, I explore Winding Refn’s later works, Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon. In these films Winding Refn imagines the ruins of the family and the oedipal law of the father who is no longer on the scene and tells the story of the desperate orphaned child who grows up without the socio-symbolic structures in place in tell them how to live. At this point Winding Refn’s crime system is more or less entirely normalised with the result that it generates the idea of utopian possibility in order to imagine potential escape from the nihilistic horror of an asocial system where exchange is everything.

Maternal and paternal functions in the formation of subjectivity: Kristeva and Lacan

The Kristeva–Lacan relationship has been a difficult one, with commentators tending to either collapse the former into the latter or insist on an absolute division wherein Kristeva emphasizes the maternal function over Lacan’s privileging of the symbolic paternal law. In contrast, I argue that Kristeva’s actual position regarding Lacan and, by extension, the semiotic–symbolic relation is far more complicated than even her defenders often realize, before turning to the role(s) that the paternal function play(s) in Lacan’s analysis of the psyche’s movement into the symbolic to show that nevertheless Kristeva’s critique is based on a number of key misreadings regarding Lacan’s conception of (1) the paternal function, (2) the maternal–paternal relation and (3) the movement from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic. Rather than operating through a straightforward binary opposition between a maternal and a (privileged, repressive) paternal function, Lacan actually claims, in a similar vein to Kristeva, that the transmission of the symbolic law occurs through a complex and heterogeneous process wherein both the maternal and paternal functions are multiple and bound to and expressive of the other. This sheds light on the Kristeva–Lacan relationship, defends Lacan against the charge that he affirms a straightforward logic of patriarchy, identifies the multidimensionality inherent in both Kristeva’s and Lacan’s notions of the maternal and paternal functions and shows how the intertwinement of both functions aids the formation of subjectivity generally and the child’s symbolic acquisition specifically.

O direito constitucional pátrio: as implicações da utilização da teoria da reserva do possível

A Constituição da República do Brasil de 1988 incluiu normas valorativas e elencou extenso rol de direitos fundamentais que ampliou os limites do constitucionalismo tradicional. Entretanto, a consolidação legal das garantias basilares não é suficiente para a diminuição das desigualdades que afetam a sociedade. Nesse sentido, o artigo abordou a utilização da reserva do possível no Brasil pela pesquisa em duas esferas: a conceituação da teoria e a análise da atuação do Poder Judiciário na concretização de políticas públicas elaboradas pelo Poder Executivo. O artigo examinou a partir dos posicionamentos dissonantes os pontos positivos e negativos da aplicação da teoria no Direito pátrio e sua influência para a materialização das garantias sociais positivadas no Texto Supremo.Concluiu-se que a reserva do possível define-se pela certificação de um mínimo existencial de direitos de cumprimento obrigatório conforme o orçamento público. O Poder Judiciário auxilia na efetivação das garantias formais por meio da promulgação de sentenças que impelem a atuação do Poder Público na atenuação dos problemas sociais do país. A intervenção judicial deve respeito aos limites constitucionais, à razoabilidade e proporcionalidade e a tripartição de poderes. As referências bibliográficas utilizadas foram artigos científicos, doutrinas jurídicas e livros sobre a temática exposta.

'Amerika', de Franz Kafka: de pai para filho

Este artigo analisa, no romance O desaparecido ou Amerika, de Franz Kafka, a configuração da lei paterna enquanto sistema opressor que julga e sentencia o filho segundo uma lei-conceito predefinida, que acaba por tornar esse julgamento uma ficção. Dois territórios democráticos, um utópico e outro real, apresentam-se como o cenário do julgamento, da sentença e do castigo do filho. Diante da lei do pai, o filho não dispõe de nenhuma possibilidade de escolha, pois se encontra enredado em um pecado original que, antes de sua própria existência, já o tinha sentenciado como culpado. No desenvolvimento deste artigo, três narrativas curtas de Kafka são apresentadas como exercício de reflexão sobre essa lei paterna autocrática, são elas: A metamorfose, O veredicto e Carta ao pai. Textos de Jacques Derrida, “Préjugés: devant la loi”, e de Jacques Rancière, “O continente democrático”, dão a este artigo uma estrutura teórica pela qual a lei paterna kafkiana pode ser pensada. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n45a1066.

When Fathering Fails: Violence, Narcissism, and the Father Function in Ancient Tales and Clinical Analysis.

Manifestations of failures in both symbolic and actual flesh-and-blood fathering reveal the inescapable role played by the father's unconscious transmissions in the ever present triadic matrix. Perelberg's crucial distinction between the murdered narcissistic father and the dead symbolic father suggests the problematic internalizations that fail to uphold the paternal law required for oedipal resolution. Three father-child narratives derived from classical literature and mythology are presented in order to elucidate significant unconscious paternal fantasies pertaining to lethal rivalry and neglect of the child's otherness. These narratives suggest how the father's insufficient management of rivalrous, envious, and murderously aggressive impulses-as well as narcissistic needs that fail to take into account the child's alterity-combine with the child's intrapsychic propensities to constrict triangular space and restrict development. Consequently, unavoidable father-child rivalries, absences, neglect, and desires often make it vital to recover the "missing" paternal function in analytic space. A clinical example illustrates the impact of this absence on the analyst's countertransference.

Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt

Reviewed by: Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 by Katrin Berndt Renee Bryzik Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2017). Pp. 274. $140.00 cloth. Katrin Berndt’s Narrating Friendship takes on the difficult task of asking how friendship works in connection with formal and thematic developments in the novel during the second half of the long eighteenth century. The text uses moral sense theory to examine the structural underpinnings of friendship in the novel and to make legible the seemingly omnipresent themes of friendship by following values like other-regard and sympathy as they shape-shift through the complex plot twists of novels lauded for decades by feminist critics but left largely unexamined in studies like this one not specific to women’s writing. Berndt integrates years of work on male and female-only friendship, as well as historical research on changing family structures by Naomi Tadmor and Ruth Perry, to show how an enlightenment community spirit of friendship was replicated and reinvented in literature through the 1830s. The text is synchronic, including two chapters on novels from different decades in each of four thematically organized parts, which reinforces Berndt’s goal of demonstrating friendship’s flexibility, how it holds the “potential to embody established structures and sentiments as well as revolutionary tenets” within and between selected novels (38). Part 1 introduces narrative friendship as an Enlightenment principle that enables writers to critique conventions of traditional and modern British society. Chapter one uses Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) to show how feudal social expectations of patriarchal benevolence fail a family struggling to transition to modern society, and reads the tragic ending between would-be lovers as the unrealized potential of modern friendship (67). Berndt cites early modern divine Jeremy Taylor, whose reservations over modern friendship’s ability to reconcile the selfish desires of the new economy with longstanding Christian values of benevolence and civic concerns became a popular argument during the eighteenth century. Taylor’s appearance here contextualizes later references to Hutcheson, Smith and others who laud friendship for its ability to turn selfishness into morality. Chapter two, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), also reads tragedy in connection with friendship’s virtues, where catastrophes throughout the novel stem from the protagonist’s inability to transform childhood friendship into mature morality, and cites Francis Hutcheson on sympathy as an essential friendship value for Shelley. Victor’s “imagined sympathies” and “solipsistic contemplation” inhibit the active sensibility that would save his friends (84). Each of the novels in this first part uses a specter of friendship to critique the individual that imagines themself more powerful than their community. The second section argues that the friendship motif fostered the development of utopian and sentimental sub-genres by working at the interface between civic concerns and private desire. Through very different techniques and political positions, Sarah Scott’s utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762) and Helen Maria Williams’s Jacobin novel Julia (1790) employ narrative friendship as a structuring tool to reshape society and as a means of addressing the responsibilities of the individual within that society. Berndt depends on feminist readings by Alessa Johns and Janet Todd, who have articulated the centrality of women’s issues in these genres, but it is in this section where Berndt’s pioneering decision to include a range of friendships (all-female, all-male, and heterosocial) seeks justification. [End Page 483] While friendship in Millienium Hall supports a female utopia based on Christian charity, Berndt convincingly posits that this text is a challenge to “paternal law . . . not tantamount to the discrimination of men” and that heterosocial relationships are essential to transformations in public sphere life (117). Berndt’s reading of Williams’s Julia in chapter four also foregrounds heterosocial friendships despite its primary relationship between Julia and Charlotte. This later sentimental novel uses Romantic aesthetics and rational contemplation of feelings to create morally complex friend characters that demonstrate how private sphere decisions of the heart impact society at large. In part three, Berndt argues that while epistolary narration adheres to techniques established in the mid-eighteenth-century, it serves a unique historical purpose...

Lacan, Deleuze and world politics: rethinking the ontology of the political subject

In this fascinating study, Andreja Zevnik challenges dominant modes of global politics and their theorization. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book is Zevnik's use of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre as a prism through which she channels the light of Lacan and Deleuze, thereby illuminating the practices of sovereign power and resistance in a period in which what constitutes law at the domestic and international levels is contested. The focus of the book is on law as ‘an ordering principle that governs all forms of social exchange in the world’, with natural and positive law being in turn underpinned by psychoanalytic law (p. 23). Zevnik's unpicking of the edifice of law addresses the fictiveness of its foundations (p. 33). The key distinction Zevnik draws is between Oedipal law (based on Freud's treatment of the origins of the law in a mythic act of parricide and subsequent reinscription of the paternal law among the community of men who murdered the tyrant father), and sinthome law, which offers an alternative understanding of law as a knot conjoining the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, without recourse to Oedipal logic. Sinthome law allows law to be expressed in non-essentialist terms and crucially as a negotiation of rights as opposed to a series of paternal commandments. Rendering Oedipal law in fictive terms allows the exposure of the ‘very narrow expression of being-ness’ that it embodies and enables the proliferation of legal identities and processes beyond sovereign power and its associated paternalistic governmentality. Where the Oedipal law constrains and canalizes desire, sinthome law bonds authority and jouissance (a Lacanian concept, which in Zevnik's reading is synonymous with enjoyment and/or the affirmation of desire, broadly conceived), producing new forms of representation. The Lacanian idea of ‘not-all’ (a category of unknown pleasure/possibility) is opposed to the universalist and dominating tendencies of Oedipal law. Where Oedipal law orders and commands, ‘sinthomal law enables individuals to … escape rigid social structures’ (p. 46), thereby helping to create ‘a different ontology of thinking and making politics’ (p. 48). Oedipal law's weakness lies in its incapacity to deal with what lies outside its domain. Deleuze's significance for Zevnik's project is his identification of the category of the ‘thought of the outside’ that transgresses the limits of Oedipal law. Sinthomal law is typical of ‘the thought of the outside’ in that ‘a different political subject emerges’ but it is ‘an unstable form, more a break with the symbolic order than an institution of another different order’ (p. 68) in which the ‘subject is no longer at the centre of philosophical investigation. That place is not left empty or filled by practices, appearances and different chaotic movements and flows’ (p. 69).

The roots of violence in Brazil: Impasses and possibilities

Nowadays, violence appears in various forms in Brazil. From an agricultural country, Brazil became rapidly industrialized, which resulted in large rural exodus and explosion of population density in major cities. Brazil faces today a great social and economic disparity, added to endemic corruption of government, nepotism and lack of social planning. The roots of such violence can be found in our archaic heritage that has been forming Brazilian identity since its early days. The interest of former colonizers was to extract wealth, without regarding the establishment of a nation. This exploitation has been always done by force and violence, with the slave labor of native Indians and imported black people. As a state Brazil was exposed to the primal father’s law, and to the absence of a symbolic father, who could have provided his people with a more stable identity, only given by the paternal law. Is it possible to reframe archaic heritage, rebuilding the missing father image without resorting to a false savior of the fatherland? Is it possible to construct a more equitable society that could propitiate true conditions of citizenship in order to make every citizen, to the extent possible, the protagonist of his own history?

The Perverse Mother: Maternal Masochism in Ira Levin'sRosemary's Baby

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novelRosemary's Babyto contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity.

Writing and Traveling in Colonial Algeria after Isabelle Eberhardt: Henriette Celarié’s French (Cross) Dressing

In the years following her death in 1904, explorer Isabelle Eberhardt became an iconic figure for a number of groups: Orientalism-infused Paris and its lesbian community; subsequent French women writer-travelers in Algeria; and nostalgic male writers drawn to the mystery of Eberhardt’s enigmatic sexuality and gender identity. However, the same ambiguity that makes Eberhardt’s legend so engaging also generates an image that is as much a figure of paternal law as one that challenges gender norms for women in the space of a “new” France in colonial Algeria. This article unravels the complex heritage of travel imagery that informed the work of French women travel writers such as Henriette Celarie, paying attention to the ways in which Celarie incorporates Eberhardt’s legend as a new element that both deconstructs and bolsters the traditional views of gender and culture circulating in women’s travel writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The allusions that Celarie makes to Eberhardt in her writings to mediate cultural- and/or gender-crossing fantasies warrant careful analysis, particularly since authors such as Celarie have played a crucial role in crystallizing Eberhardt’s mythical status in the travel genre, a status that current feminist scholars continue to critique .

Chōra/Chōros: Samuel R. Delany and the masculine semiotic in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic chōra continues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction in La revolution du langage poétique – the fate of the chōra was left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive conception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of the chora with the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding the chōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semiotic chōra does indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by adding chōros, the masculine form of chōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film (review)

Reviewed by: Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film Susan McCabe Coffman, Christine E. Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. vii + 288 pp. $49.95. Christine E. Coffman’s book is tremendously intelligent and ambitious. It succeeds in undoing the love affair between modernism and the female hysteric, inserting the lesbian psychotic as the figure upon which much of twentieth-century [End Page 371] literature and film have depended upon in order to delimit sexual difference and “normalcy.” She establishes a lineage for this figure through careful readings of modernist texts, traversing Lacan’s writings of the 1930s, André Breton’s Nadja (1928), Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936), and several novels by H. D.; she concludes with popular films of the 1990s where the murderous lesbian persists as an object of paranoid projection and fantasy. Coffman nicely untangles the complexities of Lacan’s theories, making clear some of the mistakes in earlier critical interpretations, particularly in the frequently misused term, “foreclosure.” Judith Butler, for instance, sees Lacan as “foreclosing” the lesbian’s “intelligibility.” For Coffman, however, “the ‘Law of the Father’ induces trauma and foreclosure, but the psychotic forecloses the Name of the Father and thereby refuses paternal law” (20). This is a significant distinction, locating a refusal in the psychotic herself–though it is not clear if in her act of refusing the psychotic emerges in any way as triumphal. The distinction, however, is an important one, suggesting that only from within the Symbolic can one abandon it. In this conception, “the ‘transferable’ phallus (Butler’s notion) might even become dispensable, available–at least in theory–to play bit parts instead of the lead role in the dramas of desiring subjectivity” (179). Coffman implies an agency to the lesbian psychotic, while “ideology,” broadly configured, keeps reproducing her as the limit figure, marking where civilization ends and the primitive begins. I italicize “figure” because psychosis does involve literal mental instability–such as was purported in the case of the Papin sisters and described by H. D. herself–yet Coffman blurs the line between “real” madness and its creation through projection, especially when it is coupled with lesbian sexuality. I suspect the lesbian psychotic is not the only figure (as Coffman implies) who carries this burden of anxieties surrounding sexual difference from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. The hysteric may not have entirely run her course, as Coffman assumes. Yet Coffman traces a credible trajectory of the lesbian psychotic, who really is much more predominant than usually presumed. One may only glance at contemporary media to find unending examples well beyond the 1990s where Coffman’s book perforce ends. The offerings on Lifetime Movie Network, for instance, are prime examples of portraits of women, whose friendships are often fraught with criminal as well as lesbian overtones. Richard Eyre’s 2006 Notes on A Scandal is another recent reappearance of Coffman’s delineation of this persistent “type”–a character compelling in her violence and desire but insistently demonized. Based on Coffman’s provocative book, Lacan’s theories seem fuelled by the Papin case, which involved two sisters who slayed their employer mistress and her daughter. The notorious double murder stands as the signal emblem of paranoid homosexuality. Yet by rejecting the violence of the edict of “the Law of the Father,” the sisters expose juridical paranoia and repressive homophobia. In no way exculpating the women, Lacan considers them to suffer from “lesbian passion as an inherently morbid pretense to having the phallus” (56). Concluding that Lacan’s “representation of the Papin affair takes the form of a paranoid event” (57), Coffman nevertheless locates Lacan’s depiction of “the sisters’ ‘larval’ homosexuality” with the “surveillance of sexuality” (Foucault’s notion) as decisive in the spawning of the twentieth-century lesbian psychotic. It is striking that Lacan published his article on the “Motives” of the “maids of Le Mans” (with motives never to be fully untangled) in the 1933 issue of the surrealist journal Minotaure, placing the article within the context of surrealism’s exaltation of “psychical disintegration.” Likewise, Breton, training psychoanalyst turned surrealist, is invested in upsetting norms, aggrandizing...

Considerações sobre a filiação sócio-afetiva no direito brasileiro

The socio-affective filiation represents one of the great innovations in the array of paternal family law and consecrate the equality among children. The analysis of the characteristics, the requirements and the way how socioaffective filiation consubstantiates, brings to family relations a new specie of filiation not anticipated in the new Brazilian Civil Code. This type of filiation, although not disciplined, has been supported by the doctrine nad the paternal jurisprudence.

In the Name of the "Incestuous Mother": Islam and Excremental Protestantism in De Quincey's Infidel Book

Resisting most postcolonial readings of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, this essay argues that Thomas De Quincey's experience of Asiatic idolatry as excrement—the moment of radical abjection during the Malay encounter—is a crucial symbolic register for the failure to convert the pagan or infidel to the ways of Anglican Christianity. This disruption of the Trinitarian-imperialist ethos is uniquely Protestant in that the narrator's Lutheran-iconoclastic fascination with the power of the demonic "Other" requires the smashing of the dark idol, a series of psychotic parodies of the Christian resurrection that results (at the unconscious level) in Islamic abjection: the negation of the idolatrous Trinity (the paternal metaphor) in the name of the "incestuous (M)other." As a result, Confessions undercuts the paternal law of the Trinitarian mythos. An oriental-matrilineal narrative depicting maternal incest replaces the Christian Oedipal narrative, in which the son is reborn once he "murders" his father. I propose that De Quincey's ambivalent view of Islam calls into question essentialized notions of Romantic Orientalism and xenophobia as well as the psychoanalytic frameworks through which critics, since Freud, traditionally have interpreted the history of prophetic monotheism.

Paintings in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister Novels: The Dynamics of Erecting and "Eroding" the Paternal Law

Paintings in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister Novels: The Dynamics of Erecting and "Eroding" the Paternal Law