Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Ecriture feminine...2nd WAVE of feminism...
Gopa B. Caesar:
The murder of the mother →
the non-punishment of the son (Orestes), but punishment on daughter (Electra)
the burial of the madness of women (e.g. Clytemnestra)
the burial of women in madness (e.g. Jocasta)
In the process of the forming of the new order (based on matricide), a symbolic murder of the father is necessary for the coming of the son’s revenge (murder of ) on the mother:
Gopa B. Caesar:
e.g. p. 38 1. Oedipus’ re-enacting of the madness of Orestes (primal crime—“It was a son’s duty to kill his father’s murderer’s, a duty that came before all others. But a son who killed his mother was abhorrent to gods and to men. A most sacred obligation was bound up with a most atrocious crime†(Hamilton 256))
Oedipus—violates the law of the father (Oedipus Complex): ambivalence (“focused on the father, but which is retroactively projected on to the archaic relationship with the body of the motherâ€) towards his father
Gopa B. Caesar:
The mother’s body as an object for cathecting (to invest emotional energy in (a person, object or idea)) and later decathecting (i.e., separate, detach, give up, repress)
After the bodily encounter with the mother, Oedipus grows up (to establish a new social symbolic order)
mother already torn into pieces:
by Oedipus’s hatred
torn between the sons and the fathers, between sons (p.27, 38)
Gopa B. Caesar:
the mother’s body (the life of the drives)
Partial drives – the body (primal womb—first home, first love) which brought us whole (bound together) into the world
Q: “The genital drive is said to be the drive thanks to which the phallic penis takes back from the mother the power to give birth, to nourish, to dwell, to centre. The phallus erected where once there was the umbilical cord (the first bond with the mother)?†(p.38)
the father and his law: sever the over-intimate bond with the primal womb (the danger of fusion, of death, of the sleep of death)
a proper name/forename [an extra-corporeal identity card] (language which privileges the masculine genre) replaces the most irreducible mark of birth: the navel (the irreducible trace of identity: the scar left when the cord was cut)
Gopa B. Caesar:
Psychoanalysis:
take a dim view of the first moment (bond with the womb and the imaginary and the symbolic of intra-uterine life)—“a taboo is in the airâ€
Psychoanalysis (the social order/our culture) → “the mother must remain forbidden, excluded. The father forbids the bodily encounter with the mother†(p. 38)
placenta (the first house surround us- child’s security blanket):
men tend to go back to the primal womb [the devouring mouth (p.41)] , seeking refuge in any open body (of other women as well) [danger, threat of contagion, contamination, engulfment in illness, madness and death] but are NOT allowed.
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