Abstract
There comes a moment when one is confronted by one’s ignorance and puzzlement, one’s aporia. Aporia arises when meaning grinds to a halt and a step must be taken, even against one’s best interest. It is related, on the one hand, to death, the limit condition of being, and, on the other, to truth and knowledge, which one man in antiquity—let’s call him Oedipus—could pursue rationally in the realm of the Law-governed city. Today one may still contemplate mortality and pursue truth and knowledge, but the horizon of the inquiry has changed to such an extent that the most pertinent question might not be ‘what is (my) truth?’ but ‘how will I recognise truth when I come across it?’. Aporia after Oedipus is political, technological, philosophical and ontological and must be addressed in its complexity. Towards this end, the book explores the common ground between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the works of Jean Baudrillard and Bernard Stiegler.
This chapter offers an overview of the cultural products discussed in this book: Tron Legacy (Kosninsky 2010), Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan 2010), Welcome to Thebes (Buffini 2010), The Photographers (Koundouros 1998), Prometheus (Scott 2012), and their ancient counterpart, Euripides’ Ion. The introduction also offers an outline of the uses of myth and tragedy in contemporary culture and a sketch of the works of Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Bernard Stiegler relevant to this project.
Whatever champions of contingency we might be, we cannot help expecting with part of our mind that the world will make sense, and feeling vaguely cheated if it does not.
(Eagleton 2003: 106)
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Notes
- 1.
There are three orders in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real . The Symbolic order encompasses language, representation, the Law as nexus of hierarchical organised relations in which we are emplaced as subjects, ideology, moral principles and values, and culture and society. The Symbolic order arises with the child’s entry into language and its separation from the mother. It entails the symbolic acceptance of the ‘Father’ as a representative of that order. The Symbolic is directly related to the unconscious and constitutes a double alterity often referred to as the big Other : both the essential alterity of the subject as unknown to itself (unconscious) and the otherness of mediated/represented reality (see Evans 1996: 133). The Imaginary is the order of vision, images as well as of narcissism in the Freudian sense. Wanting to be like others, for instance, falling in love, or being enchanted by others belong to the order of the Imaginary. Lacan locates the Freudian ego—a cluster of organised and relatively inflexible ideas about the self—in the order of the Imaginary, and often considers the latter as an obstacle to accessing the truth of the unconscious (see Evans 1996: 82–3). The Real is the order of the unrepresented, whatever resists symbolisation and remains repressed or unassimilable, outside language and consciousness (Evans 1996: 160). Unrepresented does not mean ‘lost’ and entails the possibility of ‘returning’ (e.g. return of the repressed). Thus, the Real is important for this disruptive and insightful power in various fields, from art and literature to politics. The Real is not a mere repository of traumatic events and repressed desires but a potential source of significant insight into experiences, practices, motivations, beliefs, and actions (Evans 1996: 159–160).
- 2.
The word ‘reflexive’ also means thinking uncritically, in the sense of reflecting back an image or a message unaltered. We will return to this usage later when we discuss Baudrillard .
- 3.
- 4.
The tragic genre flourished for less than a hundred years in Athens. Tragedy is a spectacle in which mortals try to cope with events at the limits of their comprehension. Even when comprehended, this comes too late, offering the audience an insight into how the world is. Gods rarely centrepiece in tragedy . The Gods of tragedy are partially comprehensible, and aspects of them remain unfathomable and unknowable (Buxton 2013: 135–144). The omnipresence of the divine influence on human action does not negate the importance of human choice. Oedipus Rex is the primary example. Tragedy emerged from religion. It was performed at particular times of the year as part of a religious festival. Fifth-century Athens espoused civic values like dike (justice) and sophrosyne (prudence). In tragedy the city, which still negotiates the best practices of democracy, was testing the norms, indeed ‘testing to destruction’ (Goldhill , 155). Tragic poets draw on familiar mythic themes, like the Homeric poems, moulding them to a new product the reception of which required the complicity of the audience. There is no fixed corpus of myth and no mythical orthodoxy (Burian 1997: 184). Euripides , for instance, appears to have written an Antigone in which the heroine survived and married Heammon.
- 5.
Vernant’s reading of tragedy belongs to the anti-Enlightenment, postwar French tradition which sought in antiquity a grounding for the postwar French democratic polis (see Leonard 2005). Vernant can be critiqued for making his insight emerge ‘organically’ from the tragic text as if structuralism ‘spoke Greek’. His position influenced Foucault who, in his own anti-Freudianism, read Oedipus Rex as a drama about the establishment of juridical truth , and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In the light of this intellectual political tradition, Lacan ’s reading of Antigone , indeed appears ahistorical and apolitical. Lacan systematically exiled the gods from his reading and, to a large extent, the polis itself. The complex relations between French thinkers, allows Leonard to quote Žižek asking, isn’t Anti-Oedipus the ultimate oedipal myth? Despite the antihumanism of that era, Leonard remarks, ‘man’ remains at the centre of interest.
- 6.
There is a long and interesting history of this exceptional place in French thought, the empty square from which one can speak critically. Bosteels (2003) examines its role in the thought of Foucault , Deleuze, de Certeau, Lacan, and others and, despite their differences, considers it in all cases as an effect of structuralist thinking. Whether it is the case or not for Baudrillard and Stiegler is not within the scope of the book. Suffice it to say that Baudrillard is ambivalent towards such a place. In Symbolic Exchange and Death he seems to be critiquing psychoanalysis for assuming such a place (2004: 228) but elsewhere he ‘sees’ as if from the outside (see Levin 1996). Stiegler (2013a) refers to the pharmacological properties of the geometrical vision which allows one to assume the position of the critical spectator-thinker.
- 7.
See Lacan (1991) for the role of perspective and the ‘deception’ of the eye in relation to being, the object a and death . In Holbein’s Ambassadors, the shapeless object in the middle (which turns out to be a skull if looked at from an oblique point of view) reflects human vanitas and mortality. Lacan also comments on the effect of the screen/painting as splitting between being and semblance (1991: 107), noting that man knows how to play with the screen as locus of mediation. A pictorial object (in the representational tradition at least) has a calming effect encouraging letting down the gaze (dompte-regard) (1991: 111). In the trompe l’oeil effect, the picture does not compete with reality but evokes the Idea (qua object a) as Plato would put it.
- 8.
See Zupančič (2000: 74) for the relationship between Lacan ’s schema and Kant ’s transcendental idea. Lacan relates the visual effect of the mirrors to the Ich-ideal which enables man to locate his imaginary and libidinal relation into the world (1991: 125). The function of the human Other in the process is both libidinal and ontological.
- 9.
For Baudrillard the screen (television and cinema) is the privileged postmodern surface upon which meanings and affects are projected. However, he also has a keen sense of the (theatrical) scene as a locus of convergence of disparate forces, ‘different from any unimaginative mise en scene capable of enchaining meaning’ (2004: 81). The best example of the scene as locus for implosion of meaning is his essay The Beaubourg Effect (2004) in which he reads the Parisian cultural centre as a heavily overdetermined locus of a multitude of converging meanings, fluxes, and flows and movements of people who interact with its evocative interiority and exteriority. Their assemblage is characterised by tension rather than integration in which its elements are held, lending themselves both to containment—coherent ‘meaning’ if one is keen on seeing it that way—and the opposite: meaninglessness, implosion.
- 10.
In Deleuze the plane of consistence or immanence is the plane of becoming, between (chaotic) events and structured thinking, on which some kind of unity can be thought (Parr 2011: 204–6).
- 11.
‘Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid’ is the title of Nobus and Quinn’s (2005) book on the epistemology of psychoanalysis. Staying stupid sums up the decision to remain open, inquisitive, to not-known in order to be able to see truth .
- 12.
See Freud ([1920]1991) for the child’s game in which the words fort/da (gone/here) were uttered as an attempt to verbalise absence and presence.
- 13.
Lacan (2007: 120–1) expresses similar reservations for Oedipus ’s lack of insight as we will see in the next chapter.
- 14.
This is Andre Green’s characterisation of tragic/Oedipal vision: excessive insight, what one might not want to see.
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Voela, A. (2017). Introduction: Aporia, the Sphinx, and the Hope that Life Will Make Sense. In: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Myth in Contemporary Culture. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48347-8_1
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