In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), the authors take issue with Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex as a structuring account of the development of male sexuality and socialisation. This myth, they argue, instead is to be understood within the social function of the bourgeois nuclear family to repress desire. It directs libidinal energy into the form of a classical drama motivated by the extreme constraints imposed by the bounds of permitted sexual expression in bourgeois society, but is in no way a universal framework within which to understand infant development.
Viewed in a broader context, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s project is to answer, psychoanalytically, the great question posed by Spinoza: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Evidently, a form of social organisation generating the negation of self-interest was required by patriarchal societies to avoid the all-too-obvious outcome epitomized by the Mutiny on the Bounty: what we could call the “f*ck it I’m out of here” reflex. In his genealogical studies, Foucault correlates the development of some of the key institutions underpinning patriarchy with shifting social conditions, but does not endeavor to elucidate the underlying psychic forces which render the Freudian civilizational sublimation possible. Freud himself, of course, eventually posited a primary masochism. But primary masochism is only a condition of possibility, which still needs to be channeled into a structuring discourse in which it is reconciled with the pleasure principle.
Deleuze and Guattari derive their faith in the disruptive power of desire from ideas such as Nietzsche’s Will to Power and ultimately Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Though this has been criticised on the grounds of being a metaphysical abstraction and even an apotheosis (desire in practice seems often apolitical or even pro-consumerist), it remains clear that sexual desire in particular, regardless of the extent to which it underpins, through a process of sublimation, other kinds of desire, is suppressed and managed in capitalist society in order to achieve a degree of buy-in to a fundamentally alienating social order in which individuals pursue goals misaligned with their interests; and it is difficult to deny that a world in which it were set loose would be a very different one. In that sense its revolutionary import is indisputable even if its ethical consequences are undefined. At the same time, the social production of scarcity self-evidently generates a world in which important desires and needs of a great majority of people go unarticulated and unmet. In this sense, the expression of these desires in the political realm is an evident precondition for recasting the social order.
Foucault proposed that the book could be called Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life, using the term “fascism” to refer “not only [to] historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini… but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” (in other words, secondary masochism). He argued that putting the principles espoused in Anti-Oedipus into practice would involve freeing political action from “unitary and totalizing paranoia” and withdrawing allegiance “from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality.“
Anti-Oedipus, therefore, is a figure come to emancipate desire. But perhaps the issue with the Oedipal complex is not so much its contestable developmental inevitability as its proposed need for and form of resolution.
At this point I may simply intuit arguments that Deleuze and Guattari already make and which I have simply not sufficiently studied, for which I beg indulgence. Oedipus, of course, kills his father unwittingly but Ressentiment against the authoritarian impositions of the father within the nuclear family seems an inevitable and healthy development, as does the need to structure the development of the infant into its adult role in society, a responsibility, to whomsoever it belong and to whatever ends it be exercised, which one cannot simply neglect. This conflict, therefore, is inherent in the reproduction as well as the evolution of social norms. It seems, though, that Freud was right to reject a parallel Elektra complex for the female child; the object of Ressentiment is always the father as embodiment of the arbitrariness of the patriarchal order and the violence with which it seeks to perpetuate the existing social norms, easily perceived by the intuition of the child as blatantly at odds with the requirements of its nature. Resentment of the mother is secondary to the extent to which she buys into and underwrites this paradigm, or derives from her lack of courage in not resisting it.
This struggle, however, can easily be short-circuited and under differing social circumstances need not arise at all, just as, no doubt, it does not arise, or only in an attenuated form, in those families or other social units which have withdrawn consent from (or never given consent to) its unpitying dictates.
For, just as with problematic categories such as femininity and masculinity, the concept of “father” is an evident social construction which is highly overdetermined. From God the Father through filial piety, and from the President to the schoolteacher, the omnipresent Father demands obedience but offers little more in return than a highly conditional ticket to participate in the same alienating cultural forms with only relative advantage over one’s fellow human beings. By way of contrast, however, in primitive societies, paternity may have been absent as a concept worthy of any interest at all, and authority was more diffuse and contextual, female as well as (perhaps more than) male. [1] Even in early modern times, and into relatively late modern times, most people outside of a small elite were raised in a multi-adult environment, and often older living ancestors may have enjoyed greater authority over the clan than immediate parents. These societies did and do not lack any essential social function of cultural transmission (in due course they were complemented by apprenticeship and the school).
Of course, our contemporary social resources for child rearing may be considerably less generous than those available to our ancestors. Nevertheless, rather than accept his lot as a lightning-rod for adolescent frustrations, I suggest that the father engineer his disappearance. It is time to withdraw allegiance from this concept and, even acting within a narrow social unit, for “fathers” simply to define themselves within the childrearing context as benevolent and committed adult males. Just as I have long since abandoned inherently problematic labels like “heterosexual”, and notwithstanding its longstanding cultural pedigree, I feel no more need for this one. For to paraphrase Judith Butler, “[The father role] is not to culture as [biological paternity] is to nature; [it] is also the discursive/cultural means by which [fatherhood] is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts”. And whilst there is no Archimedean point available to us outside of culture, “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.” [2]
NOTES
[1] Ryan and Jetha, Sex at Dawn (2010), ch.6
[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1989)