Anti/Oedipus (Or, Why Oedipus?)

I've been trying to think about like, Why Oedipus? It's the story of the birth of the Symbolic yes, but like, why this story? You can take the D&G line on Oedipus and write it off as a particularization that has been illicitly universalized, under the very specific conditions of capitalism. Which is of course a really nice way to give it a historical-materialist reading. And from here you attempt to give an account of anoedipal operations of desire and so on.

But, under the influence of Colin Drumm's dissertation, and having just reread Shoshana Felman's absolutely magical reading of Oedipus, what if they key to Oedipus is that it functions as an auto-critique of itself? Like, what is Oedipus? Oedipus is effectively the most basic attempt to put a stop to circulation - the circulation of woman. Incest is the hoarding of sovereignty among patrilineal descent so that no other bloodlines can be introduced. This is Drumm's reading: "Incest between son and mother is the zero-point of aristocratic inbreeding at which the matriline and the patriline can be forced into absolute identity." Or: a repression of difference.

But what if the whole point is that this cannot possibly work? As in, what if Oedipus is read as the attempt to reduce circulation to the most elementary "cell" possible while excluding every other consideration, only for it to be shown to be a reductio so that difference cannot but be introduced? This is Felman's insistence - that the Oedipus myth does not end with Oedipus Rex but with Oedipus at Colonus. And what happens at Colonus? Oedipus is rendered Other to himself: "Is it now that I am nothing that I am made to be a man?". Or, Felman: "[At Colonus, Oedipus], assumes the Other ... and it is this radical acceptance and assumption of his own self-expropriation that embodies, for Lacan, the ultimate meaning of Oedipus' analysis".

Felman is even more explicit at the end of her essay: "Misleadingly, the Oedipus appears at first to be a myth of possession (of a kingdom, of a woman, of the solution to a riddle, of one's own story). But, as it turns out, the Oedipus is not the myth of the possession of a story, but the myth, precisely, of the dispossession by the story-the dispossession of the possessor of the story. Any kingdom or possession coming out of the psychoanalytic riddle solving is, in fact, incestuous and, as such, is bound to bring about a plague. Psychoanalysis can only be a gift of speech from the exile of Colonus."

In this case Oedipus is already a kind of Anti-Oedipus: its auto-destruction is built-in from the very beginning. To route the birth of the Symbolic through Oedipus is to subject it to the most impossible conditions all the better to show how those conditions cannot hold: that the attempt to stifle circulation can only ever lead to a return of the repressed. In this case patrilineal identity is rendered ex-centric to itself: difference here is heighted to the point of reflexivity, rather than - as with D&G - proliferated outwards and otherwise in a thousand different directions. In this case the much derided ahistoricsm of Oedipus is not a bug but a feature: it is ahistorical to the extent that there is no history that cannot not involve circulation.

This also brings Lacan and D&G much closer than either would probably like. And it's funny because Felman's essay opens with a critique of Melanie Klein who reads like a parody of exactly the kind of thing D&G abhor - the reduction of everything to 'daddy mommy me'. Like this could be straight out of Anti-Oedipus (Klein talking about her child patient, whose name is Dick):

Dick's behaviour had no meaning or purpose, nor was any affect or anxiety associated with it ... But he was interested in trains and stations and also in doorhandles, doors and the opening and shutting of them ... I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them "Daddy train" and "Dick-train." Thereupon he picked up the train I called "Dick" and made it roll to the window and said "Station." I explained: "The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy." Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: "Nurse?" I answered: "Nurse is soon coming," (Felman, "Beyond Oedipus, p106)

And Lacan's commentary on this is positively D&Gian: "She sticks symbolism into him, little Dick, with the utmost brutality, that Melanie Klein! She begins right away by hitting him with the major interpretations. She throws him into a brutal verbalization of the Oedipus myth, almost as revolting to us as to any reader whatever- you are the little train, you want to fuck your mother." So even Lacan is like, you can't just fucking do that!

But the difference would be that if D&G attempt to explode Oedipus from the outside, Lacan attempts - at least on this reading - to explode it from the inside. And there are, I guess, various pros and cons to these operations, depending on what is of interest to you. And there's also the possibility of reading this debate alongside Derrida and Foucault's treatment of madness in Descartes too. Where Foucault might be seen to take the D&G route of historicization-from-the-outside, while Derrida takes the Lacanian route of internal undoing. Funny thing is that Felman has a reading of that debate too, and in both cases she emphasizes the role of narrative and myth in mediating between 'inside' and 'outside'.

To elaborate a little more, since I'm reading Irigaray's critique of Nietzsche right now, one of the issues she raises is how - in line with the traditional reading of Nietzsche and against Deleuze - the eternal return's return of the same is a valorization of self-production: to give birth to the self by means of the self. The fun thing is to read this in Oedipal terms, which is, in a way, what Irigaray does:

To overcome the impossible of your desire—that is surely your last hour's desire. Giving birth to such and such a production, or such and such a child is a summary of your history. But to give birth to your desire itself, that is your final thought. To be incapable of doing it, that is your highest ressentiment. For you either make works that fit your desire, or you make desire itself into your work. But how will you find the material to produce such a child? And, going back to the source of all your children, you want to bring yourself back into the world. As a father? or a child? And isn't being two at a time the point where you come unstuck? Because, to be a father, you have to produce, procreate, your seed has to escape and fall from you. You have to engender suns, dawns, and twilights other than your own. (Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche)

 If this is right, then Nietzsche can be subjected to the critique of Oedipus: the effort to stifle circulation, and - since this is Irigaray's reading at isssue - the circlation of women! Irigaray thematizes this in terms of the 'circle', and, despite the effort to contain all production with the circle (of return), it turns out that 'children still escape':

But in fact isn't it your will, in the here and now, to pull everything back inside you and to be and to have only one sun? And to fasten up time, for you alone? And suspend the ascending and descending movement of genealogy? And to join up in one perfect place, one perfect circle, the origin and end of all things? But things have a beginning and end. And where your child begins, there your body is reproduced and finished. And those two bodies cannot only make one. And even though your children have a place only in your words, yet they still escape you, and those little beings wander far away from you. And if, wishing to keep everything inside you, you sow seed in your own mouth, doesn't that masterly trick reduce you to silence? To thwarting your own ecstasies—isn't that your highest will? (Irigary, Marine Lover)

 So yeah, basically: to read Oedipus as Anti-Nietzsche. Interestingly, Nietzsche's own reading of Oedipus in The Birth of Tragedy comes very close to this, but with the slightest of twists. He recognizes too, the way in which Oedipus' incest is a kind of anti-nature that, because it undoes the natural order, gives birth to the new:

Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the Sphinx's riddle! What does this trinity of fateful deeds tell us? There is an ancient popular belief, particularly in Persia, that a wise magician can only be born out of incest; the riddle-solving Oedipus who woos his mother immediately leads us to interpret this as meaning that some enormous offence against nature (such as incest in this case) must first have occurred to supply the cause whenever prophetic and magical energies break the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and indeed the actual magic of nature. 

How else could nature be forced to reveal its secrets, other than by victorious resistance to her, i.e. by some unnatural event? I see this insight expressed in that terrible trinity of Oedipus' fates: the same man who solves the riddle of nature - that of the double-natured sphinx - must also destroy the most sacred orders of nature by murdering his father and becoming his mother's husband. Wisdom, the myth seems to whisper to us, and Dionysiac wisdom in particular, is an unnatural abomination: whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in his own person. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy)

Parenthetically, this this nothing other than the template for 'Nature' offered in A Thousand Plateaus: Nature as a matter of 'unnatural participations' and 'abberant nuptials': "That is the only way Nature operates - against itself." (ATP 242).

But, back to Nietzsche - where psychoanalysis reads Oedipus as its own undermining, Nietzsche reads Oedipus as the "prelude to the victory hymn of the saint". Both Nietzsche and Lacan understand Oedipus as the elementary cell of (non)-circulation, but each ascribes to it an opposite value: for Nietzsche, this can only be a good thing - that to which one must strive for (Dionysos is the final name of Oedipus); for Lacan, this can only attest to its failure (which is 'good' in its own way, qua guarantor of circulation). Oedipus in the Lacanian reading operates - if all the above is right - according to the logic of the not-all: there is nothing that is not subject to (the failure) of Oedipus. This is the 'ahistoricsm' of Oedipus. D&G by contrast read Oedipus according to the simple logic of the universal and its exception: everything is bound by Oedipus (except for [the anoedipal]).