Incest Prohibitions Research Articles

Biopolitics: From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism

This essay advances a new theory of biopolitics by first showing that the shortcomings of both Michel Foucault's and Giorgio Agamben's theories are due to the fact that they do not approach biopolitics as both a historically specific and a transhistorical phenomenon. Based on a synthetic reading of Karl Marx's analysis of capital, labor-power, and commodity fetishism; Spinozian monism; Lacanian psychoanalysis; Claude Lévi-Strauss's analysis of the incest prohibition and the relation between nature and culture; Georges Bataille's theory of religion; and Étienne Balibar's differentiation of state capitalism as the era of ideology and market capitalism as the era of commodity fetishism, this new theory argues that biopolitical mechanisms are organized around the transhistorical prohibition of self-referentiality—a prohibition that constitutes the very precondition for any society to function. It then traces the concrete historical manifestations of this prohibition from archaic societies through the state and sovereignty to capitalism and its distinct phases. After showing that the primary referent of the prohibition of self-referentiality is blood—as in the incest prohibition of archaic societies, that is, the interdiction of same-blood marriage—the essay follows the subsequent historical “transubstantiations” of blood through theocracy and sovereignty to state and market capitalism. It concludes by addressing the contemporary biopolitical need for a racism—defined, following Foucault, as the break between those worth living and those who must die—that is based on a radical reconceptualization of humans as immortal beings.

How to Talk About Nature When There Is No More Nature to Talk About: Toward a Sustainable Universal

How to Talk About Nature When There Is No More Nature to Talk About: Toward a Sustainable Universal

Same/Sex: Incest and Friendship in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise

Same/Sex: Incest and Friendship in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise1 Michael Thomas Taylor (bio) It is only rarely noted that the word “Toleranz” appears nowhere in Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise, published in 1779, despite the ubiquity of the theme in the work’s reception. The Templar does call Nathan “der tolerante Schwätzer” (Lessing, Nathan IV/4, 587), though this is an accusation of hypocrisy; and while the German equivalent, “dulden,” also appears once, its sense further underscores a fundamental ambiguity regarding readings of the play as a plea for religious tolerance. The word is spoken by the judge in the fable of the rings, who has been asked to arbitrate between the brothers and who now offers a word of advice in lieu of the judgment that has proven impossible to render: Möglich; daß der Vater nun Die Tyrannei des Einen Rings night länger In seinem Hause dulden wollen! – Und gewiß; Daß er euch alle drei geliebt, und gleich Geliebt: indem er zwei nicht drücken mögen, Um einen zu begünstigen. – Wohlan! Es eifre jeder seiner unbestochnen Von Vorurteilen freien Liebe nach! (III/7, 559) The sense of “dulden” here of suffering something noxious or harmful is a first indication of how little eighteenth-century ideals and practices of religious toleration have to do with the ethos of love expressed by the judge. And this speculative opinion about the father’s intentions stands in contrast to the judge’s certain conclusion that the three rings are proof of the father’s equal love for his sons. This love marks the crux of Lessing’s play, its reception, and its ethical implications. What does it mean that the father loved his sons “gleich”? The answer lies in the love for which the sons should now compete. Yet the judge immediately describes this love with a list of (religious) virtues – “Sanftmut,” “herzliche Verträglichkeit,” “Wohltun,” “innigste Ergebenheit in Gott” – that further complicate rather than answer the question. By examining the complex meaning of “love” in Nathan der Weise, this article challenges readings of the play in terms of tolerance. It will follow Willi [End Page 333] Goetschel’s recent arguments that Lessing’s play challenges the epistemological framework of truth presupposed by notions of tolerance to expresses a deliberate “critique of tolerance as just another exclusionary mechanism” (Spinoza’s Modernity 232). Goetschel argues that the play develops, instead, a “pragmatic” critique of truth that makes it one of the first texts to “address the transformation of tradition into a modern concept” (232). Certainly this critique of truth can be extended to the concept of love expressed in the fable of the rings: Love is not a given, received truth but rather something to be redefined and rediscovered in the future as the evidence of ethical action. Yet among the play’s conceptions of love is one truth that is neither spoken aloud nor ever questioned in the course of dramatic events: the impossibility of tolerating an incestuous marriage between brother and sister. In the play’s romantic plot, the problem of incest supplants questions of tolerance: A marriage between a Christian and a Jew that appears to be hindered by religious intolerance proves to be impossible for a more absolute reason, because of the prohibition of incest. Of course, it might be argued that this passionate love and its recognition in marriage have little to do with the other kinds of love – of human friendship, of brotherhood in the fable of the rings, and of familial affection – that one finds in the play. Hannah Arendt is representative of such a view when she writes that friendship in the play is: obviously so much more important to Lessing than the passion of love that he can brusquely cut the love story off short (the lovers, the Templar and Nathan’s adopted daughter Recha, turn out to be brother and sister) and transform it into a relationship in which friendship is required and love ruled out. (25–26) This article will suggest, by contrast, that the play’s notions of love are all related and that the absolute prohibition of incest marks an absent point...

DISPLACEMENTS OF THE DESIRING MACHINE

The ‘cinematic gaze’ can be conceived today as a kind of metaphorical practice, particularly in relation to viewing Patty Chang's video artwork In Love (2001). Chang's artistic expression theatricalizes familial love and reveals how bodily inscriptions of sexuality and ‘race’ are still predetermined by an affected gaze. The original site of the ‘cinema of displacement’ was in the substitute of film wherein the erotic fantasy elicited from the cinematic expression displaces ‘real’ sexual pleasure by arousal through viewing. The idea of an erotic, filial love (even in fantasy) confounds the heteronormative while treading precariously on US juridical laws. The cultural intelligibility of incest prohibition relies on the authority of heterosexual kinship norms, ones that were articulated by Levi-Strauss's ‘universal’ kinship rules. This essay addresses the ways in which sexual fantasy informs a particular logic and history for understanding ‘queer’ and Chineseness. The terminology of ‘queer’ can be connected to a visual relationship with the colonial exhibitions of the ‘Siamese Twins’ Chang and Eng, primarily because the freak show provides something of a visual example for the nineteenth-century system of psychiatric power-knowledge. This system legitimated and determined ‘normal’ sexuality, which eventually led to the criminalization of same-sex fornication and incest as the highest examples of ‘immoral’ sexuality. As such, historical and contemporary visual expressions of queerness and Chineseness metaphorize the social conceptions from which the sexualized and ‘raced’ body evokes meaning. And these meanings are mutually constituted from the psychic realm since both sexual and racial significations are generally assumed from fantasy and imagination.

Grito e silencio: dois ecos que violam a escola

Scream and Silence: two echoes that violate the school outlines the theoretical lines to help analyze the survey data. The myths of the murder of the father of the horde and the prohibition of incest seen as a time comingfrom a culture. It seems that violence has a birthplace in the myth and the current moves by the fraying of the drive. Education must desire you need to give meaning to the word of the subject, and told in the words, and reveal that our lack is constitutive, since this subject is split, while object and cause of desire.

O tabu do incesto e a bioantropologia

O debate acerca do tabu do incesto tem sido amplamente discutido até mesmo antes da fundação da antropologia como disciplina. Porém, foi nessa área do conhecimento que o tema adquiriu atenção acentuada, em especial após a publicação do renomado trabalho de Claude Lévi--Strauss, As estruturas elementares do parentesco, em 1949. Grande parte das escolas de ciências sociais brasileiras toma o assunto como encerrado por esse autor, contudo, isso está longe de ser verdade. Neste artigo procuramos reacender o debate com o estruturalismo lévi-straussiano e a sua principal teoria a respeito da proibição do incesto – a teoria da aliança– através do levantamento de diversos estudos que de algum modo dialoguem com a obra desse autor. Deste modo, com especial auxílio dos trabalhos de fronteira entre a biologia e a antropologia – que muitas vezes não chegam ao contato dos cientistas sociais – desejamos reavivar essa reflexão no circulo acadêmico brasileiro.

Beyond nature and culture

Modes  of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called ―world views,‖ ―cosmologies‖ or ―symbolic forms,‖ all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as ―the modern West,‖ or ―shamanistic societies‖), ―families‖ of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the

La violence et son devenir chez l’enfant témoin de violences conjugales

Violence is inherent to human beings, it is even essential for the creation of a link with the other one, in the process of the psychological birth of the subject. The family is the place of prohibition of incest and murder where the child can learn how to manage his destructive impulses, but it is sometimes the place of his overflowing. At this point, it is about the destruction of the subject and the psychopathology of the link. Domestic violence prevails when the law of the strongest, exercised by one of the members of the family, replaces the common law of the exchange which is the basic foundation of the family as well as of the society. Child witness to marital violence attends with helplessness and thus with passivity, marital alarming scenes. It affects his psychic construction because these acting-outs meet his own destructive fantasies. Consequently, the anguishes are inescapable, but they differ according to the psychological maturity of the child, that is to say according to whether the scenes occur before, during, or after the oedipian stage. The future of the anguish will join or not to a trauma, in front of a situation that cannot be assimilated. “Identification with the aggressor” appears as the most frequent mechanism of defense, and will have long-term effects sometimes as generational repetitions, as we will show it in a clinical illustration revealing all the devastating impact of marital violence.

On law’s origin<br>Derrida reading Freud, Kafka and Lévi-Strauss

This article's main focus is 'Before the Law', a text by Derrida on Kafka's Before the Law , in which Derrida also comments on Freud's Totem and Taboo . Freud, in this text, enquires into the origins of religion, morality, social institutions and law. He contends that this origin is to be found in a crime, the killing of the primal father by a band of brothers, followed by the institution of totemism and the incest prohibition. Freud's psychoanalytical account of the origins of the totem and the prohibition of incest has been challenged from various quarters. The article enquires whether Freud's Totem and Taboo and its theory of the primal horde in relation to the origins of law should be dismissed in light of these challenges, or whether some insight can still be gained from it. The second option is affirmed, with Derrida's 'Before the Law' pointing to the importance of reading Freud in a way analogous to Kafka's Before the Law , and more specifically to the need for a reconsideration of the originary nature of the Oedipus complex, so as to arrive eventually at a kind of 'pre-origin' of law.

IMMANENCE AND ABJECTION IN SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

abstractIn this paper, I focus on the term ‘immanence’ in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master−slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi‐Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies “woman” is constructed as “absolutely other.” I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir.

"Every family become a school of abominable impurity": incest and theology in the Early Republic.

Using the controversy surrounding marriage with a deceased wife’s sister that occupied Presbyterian and Congregationalist theologians of the early Republic, this essay explores the eroticization of the sentimental family and the contours and crises of the incest prohibition in the wake of the Revolution. The essay begins by tracing the history of ecclesiastical trials of incestuous marriage in the Presbyterian church, arguing that the failure of the synods and General Assembly to offer definitive judgments of such marriages suggests a tension in the force of a transcendent incest prohibition. Two cases from the late 1820s, in particular, gained national attention in both the theological and secular press, and force the Presbyterian church to explore the legitimacy of their incest prohibition, and exploration that lead, ultimately, to a constriction of the incest prohibition as written in the Westminster confession of Faith. I then turn to the conjunction of kinship, sexuality, and sentiment that animates the texts comprising the controversy and argue that, in an effort to defend an expansive interpretation of the Levitical incest prohibitions these theologians were among the earliest writers to argue that sentimental, affectionate relations between family members were inherently erotic. In this sense, the family becomes the primary site for the deployment of sexuality. Such a concern about the incestuous nature of family relations, in turn, forced theologians to consider the problem of incest in the postlapsarian origins of society.

L’Œdipe et l’interdit de l’inceste

This article confronts anthropological and psychoanalytical data around the prohibition of incest and the Œdipus complex. Indeed, the contemporary social evolutions, the family reorganizations, question the organizing role of the Œdipus complex and its current forms: as a matter of fact, it seems that its cardinal role and the biphasic psychosexual development are questioned by the difficulties met by children in the implementation of the phase of latency. In front of the prohibition of incest, which has paternal “surmoic” origin, and originates from the œdipal crisis, more archaic bases can be searched. Would not it be necessary to think of a primary prohibition, of maternal origin, preliminary to the secondary œdipal time?

Devenir enseignant : quels « choix » inconscients ? Étude de cas

The authors analyze the elements, which lead to the choice of teaching. First, they approach the teaching function and the questions inherent to the evolution of the profession. Secondly, they present the various aspects of the parental function, the notion of prohibition of incest and the psychic dimension at work. The clinical analysis of a female schoolteacher then allows him to check the hypothesis according to which the oedipal problem in connection with parental images is present in the case studied and that it influences the unconscious professional “choice” of the subject.

Why a Cousin Becomes a Spouse. Elementary, says Levi-Strauss: A Tribute to Claude Levi-Strauss from India and Vistas of the Road Ahead

This paper recapitulates Claude Levi-Strauss' distinctive contribution to our understanding of cousin marriage and its refinements in the context of India. Going beyond Levi-Strauss' own framework, it argues, first, that incest taboos draw their strength from religious injunctions. From this perspective, the understanding of Muslim kinship in north India would want to include parallel-as well as cross-cousins within the elementary structure of marriage relationships that makes the cousin marriage practices of Muslims intelligible. At a second plane, it investigates the hybrid marriage practices of distinct social groups that grow out of assembling and re-assembling elements of Muslim and Hindu incest prohibitions as well as marriage preferences and thereby contributes to our understanding of sub-continental marriage patterns. From this matrix, the actual choice of a parallel- or cross-cousin as a spouse invites the exploration of kinship and social class, the significance of direct and indirect exchange in marriage and the gendering of cousin marriage practices.

Westermarck's altruism: Charity releasers, moral emotions, and the welfare ethic

The ethologically oriented method of social analysis developed by Edward Westermarck is applied to the subjects of charitable behavior, the welfare ethic, and the link between them. Westermarck dealt with these topics, but not in the depth he accorded the subjects of incest aversion, the incest prohibition, and the connection between them. Westermarck's approach to analyzing incest behavior and regulating institutions is also useful in the case of charitableness and the welfare ethic. Westermarck would have analyzed the welfare ethic as an institution derived from human nature--secundam naturam--in addition to an authoritative discipliner of behavior as proposed by Freud. Evidence is presented that this is the case with the welfare ethic in modern societies. This evidence includes the sensitivity of welfare to ethnic diversity. The latter decreases public altruism, whether expressed as charitableness to beggars, national charities, or public goods. The parochial leaning of charity and the welfare ethic is allowed for by Westermarck's empirically grounded ethics. Despite the passage of nearly a century, Edward Westermarck can still be an instructive guide to the biosociological enterprise. This continuing relevance shows what could have been, and can still be, done with the conceptual tools offered by an evolutionarily informed sociology.

Le concept d'originaire en psychanalyse

Advent of psychic life in infant faces researchers with the challenging question of primal object that is primal conditions of this emergence. Freud's answers consist mainly in “archaeological” models and hypothesis of phylogenetic inheritance. These hypothesis have been often examined critically. In this article, we propose a reality-based “primal device”. According authors' hypothesis mother and infant are structurally and mutually involved in a “primal gap” which demands regulation. For mother, regulation is carried out by primary maternal preoccupation and prohibition of incest. For infant, regulation is carried out by inner physiological and instinctive patterns, perceptive and interactional skills, and primary narcissism. So are defined setting and experiences resulting in construction of primary object which represents in authors' opinion the beginning of psychic life.

Coming too Close, Going too Far: Theoretical and Cross-cultural Approaches to Incest and its Prohibitions

Although interest in cultural explanations of topics like incest waned among Anglo anthropologists along with the abandonment of kinship theory in general, other paradigms provided a renewed interest in some older theories about the prohibition of incest. The approach presented in this paper gives due critical consideration to both evolutionary and ‘cultural’ explanations of incest and its prohibition suggesting their mutual involvement, but the necessity of a close analysis of the specificity of the cultural forms in which shared substance, connection, difference and nurture are expressed as reproductive ontology. Particular cases are discussed in the light of recent suggestions that the cross-cultural incidence of incest and its prohibition is to be understood via theories of dissociative disorders in the West that allegedly illuminate a wide range of practices claimed to be linked to sexual abuse in childhood.

Coming too Close, Going too Far: Theoretical and Cross‐cultural Approaches to Incest and its Prohibitions

Although interest in cultural explanations of topics like incest waned among Anglo anthropologists along with the abandonment of kinship theory in general, other paradigms provided a renewed interest in some older theories about the prohibition of incest. The approach presented in this paper gives due critical consideration to both evolutionary and ‘cultural’ explanations of incest and its prohibition suggesting their mutual involvement, but the necessity of a close analysis of the specificity of the cultural forms in which shared substance, connection, difference and nurture are expressed as reproductive ontology. Particular cases are discussed in the light of recent suggestions that the cross‐cultural incidence of incest and its prohibition is to be understood via theories of dissociative disorders in the West that allegedly illuminate a wide range of practices claimed to be linked to sexual abuse in childhood.

La femme, la famille et la communauté dans la source des logia

Nearly all the texts of Q dealing with the condition of women may be classified into the 3 structures of society C. Levy-Strauss brought to the fore : the division of tasks is described in Q 12, 24.27-28 ; 13, 18-21 and 17, 34-37 ; the prohibition of incest recalls the necessary division of families, as is mentioned in Q 12, 53 and 14, 26 ; finally marriage is dealt with in Q 16, 18 and 17, 26-27. Those structures are seriously questioned by the texts of the source of the logia, at the origin of which the life of a community is to be found, a community waiting for the Latter Day and living in a tension with the society they lived in, which was mainly of Jewish descent.

Différenciation entre autisme et psychose infantile

Taking into account corporeity (one of the very first kinds of thought representability) even more than words—which mean little when they exist at all for subjects in serious states of infantile psychosis and autism—the author proposes a metapsychological differentiation of these two psychopathologies, which are too often assimilated. The autistic withdrawal marks a failure of the dynamics of desire fastened, as it is, to the assumption of direct contact, when infantile psychosis makes obvious the impossibility for the child to access the figurative or metaphorical contact, which is born and enforced by the prohibition of incest. These two conditions thus undermine that way, each in its own manner, the coming of the subject to the “superior unity of contact” that Freud has theorized. To day it is seen as the first symbolisation, the foundation of the subjective process.