Mladen Dolar. Oedipus Revisited. 2018

now to make a brief remark okay Britain very brief the question of VD was in psychoanalysis we seem to know everything about Oedipus and psychoanalysis has done a lot for the widespread of the Oedipus saga in the 20th century to the point of pushing it to a caricature so maybe the strangest thing is that something that appeared so utterly shocking and scandalous and bizarre when Freud first proposed it has become so utterly domesticated and commonly received in the zeitgeist so it takes a great effort to restore it's scandalous value but which perhaps lies somewhere else then where it is usually looked for there's the part there's turned out to be rather easy to swallow against all odds but there is a part that is easily overlooked so a brief genealogical reminder is perhaps needed so let me give you just one quote though everybody's familiar with this this is the first time that Freud ever speaks of Oedipus and the Oedipus idea came to him in his correspondence with him fleece and this is in the latter dated the 15th of October 1897 so this was luck in the process of his own self analysis with become fleece in this close companionship with his venerated friend so quote the first mention Freud ever makes of it was only one idea of general value has occurred to me I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood if that is the case the gripping power of King Oedipus becomes intelligible the Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and this dream fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state and of court so this is the first spot from which this model saga of video stems a new edition of the ancient saga and I must point out that frights promotion of Oedipus is tightly linked to the emergence of psychoanalysis and it rightfully roughly coincides with this advent of modernism that I am talking about in the in the class so first reinvention of the ancient hero is part and parcel of the modernist break but the way Freud puts it it this all sounds rather naive like everybody is a budding Oedipus everybody can unwittingly recognize himself in it of course but to kill the father asleep with the mother what else would a man ultimately want so there you have insistence prohibition as the universal condition of culture the name of the conflict that it secretly holds at his core the emergence of desire together with the prohibition the tomb of our childhood the irresolvable drama of subjectivity the paradigm and the parable of human condition so the idea would never abandon Freud for the rest of his career he kept persistently returning to it as something which constitutes the very course a chronology and in the interpretation of dreams in 1900 the idea items for the first time expounded at length the published form and then endlessly a broader upon an in a later edition of this interpretation of Dreams Freud has added a footnote where he says none of the findings of psychoanalytic research has provoked such embittered denials such fierce opposition or such a musical torsions on the part of the critics as this indication of the childhood impulses towards the incest which persist in the unconscious so they have the opposition to it and it but it was soon overcome and was become the most widespread commonly known idea that psychoanalysis proposed to the point that it obtained the status of a truism a cliche a triviality and the commonplace but something got lost in this smooth transition between shock and acceptance there is a real Indian able story which was obfuscated now Oedipus became such a vintage story of psychoanalysis as one of the most famous and most outspoken critics of psychoanalysis was launched under the title of aunty Edie's the critique I think was aimed at an easy target namely the alleged familial ISM the reduction of the productivity and heterogeneity of human desire to a family story the story of mummy and daddy the familial territorial ization I will not spend much time on this except for one simple remark that if this is indeed the reduction to family then this is the most dysfunctional family in human history and look not only the calamities that befell Oedipus but his whole ancestry back to Cadmus and then his progeny you know lévi-strauss has written a beautiful paper on this and to use the division parlors one could maintain in a position that Oedipus was indeed a nomadic subject if there ever was one he was expelled from his home at birth because of the Oracle he was a voluntary exile from Corinth from his foster family he was expelled from Thebes after this disaster and exile from the human society at colonists and finally dislocated at the moment of his death deprived of the grave so Oedipus rather than being an easy solution presents a field of conflicts and tensions which prevents any simple assumption of our desire and our symbolic mandate or placement in a family and I give you just one quote from a Ken bali-ba who nicely puts it the family structure is not based on Oedipus but it opposed to the contrary inscribes the conflict and the viral variability of subjective positions into its core and thus hinders any possibility for the family to impose the rose which it prescribes a simple functions for individuals individuals to fulfill so Oedipus is not a reduction to the family but rather the inner disruption of the family another way of putting this Oedipus is not an answer but the question now in order to see this in order to fully realize this we must turn to Oedipus at Colonus and a brief historic reminder is perhaps needed Sophocles first wrote Antigone and this was in the year roughly 442 BC which is chronologically the last part of the deepest saga where the protagonist Oedipus is children a tourism polyneices killing each other and Antigone then burying her band brother polyneices in courageous defiance of the Theban ruler and one could just point out that Antigone as opposed to Oedipus knows exactly what she's in for she nevertheless heroically follows her course at the Commission she commits her act and bears all the consequences then comes King Oedipus written in roughly 429 BC which is like 13 years later this is chronologically the first part of the saga recounting the notorious gruesome events in Thebes Oedipus tragic realization of having committed the parasite and the incest and finally there is a deposit colonist written 406 BC almost a quarter of a century later and this was written in the year of Sophocles death and he died at the age of 90 word was it written it was written at colonist and colonist was be Sophocles own birthplace where he turned to die he returned like Oedipus to die at colonist and where he indeed died before the first performance of display and the first performance was in the year 401 I just remind you this is two years before the trial of Socrates trial and death of Socrates so this is chronologically the second part of the story we can take the events following Oedipus's expulsion from Thebes and proceeding Antigone now everybody knows kangaroos everybody knows antivenom this is part of general culture minimal education it's around all the reading lists of all schools but how come the Sufi so few people know about Oedipus at Colonus it is as if some general amnesia has set in regarding this crucial part of the story and this is the point at which the count has existed throughout his teaching Macau insisted on two things first as one of the slogans runs this ruff quote Oedipus no doubt had many complexes but he didn't have the complex to which he gave the name so this is lakhan's famous claim Oedipus didn't have the Oedipus complex so this is why he's interesting he's an exception everybody else's the rule but the exception actually undermines the rule and second there is indeed a beyond Oedipus in psychoanalysis when definitely must reach beyond the EDP deepest scenario such as I roughly described in the beginning but what is beyond Oedipus is in the first place it puts himself namely a deposit columns Oedipus at Colonus is the true anti Oedipus and anti Oedipus was proposed by Sophocles himself to reach beyond Oedipus we needn't look as well now what happens at coroners what happens in this last play so focus is last play I would just add that I said so for class at the age of 90 came to die at columns just like Oedipus and there is actually more of an autobiographical note because in in the play you have eatables cursing his son polyneices and so for classes own son was getting impatient with his father's longevity he wanted to get hold of his inheritance and father was 90 which is a lot in Greek times and so Sophocles is and try to proclaim his father to be of unsound mind and legally not accountable there was a trial and Sophocles presented the play Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus at the court as a proof of his being of the sound mind person a person who can write this is of Sun so the Sun lost the case okay what happens at columns Oedipus is blind and expelled from Thebes and he is accompanied by his faithful daughter and sister Antigone his only help he's wandering around not finding a place of abode his story is known to everyone he's notorious for his horrible fate nobody would want to have him he is the source of illumination and embarrassment but on the other hand an Oracle predicted the place of his burial would secure peace and prosperity to the Polish birth he would be buried so he is also a desired present political asset and in the end is eros the Athenian King will finally accompany him to his death and his colonist was under the Athenian jurisdiction this would secure the future of heathers he had this trade of death of Oedipus against the political prosperity and future of Athens the first democracy so most importantly the strange thing is display is that Oedipus insists throughout the play on his innocence while at the same time occupying the position of an outcast of fate a figure of total expropriation he with is bereft of everything and he is insisting he didn't want to marry this woman the city gave her to him in gratitude for getting rid of the Sphinx he didn't want to kill his father this was done in defense against a stranger who had threatened him and at some point in the play he says but would you ask a stranger who threatens you whether he is by any chance your father look her act is rational you know so there is a maximal opposition between his position here in episode Collins and in King Oedipus in King Oedipus in Thebes he was the king the ruler who has obtained and acquired everything having heroically saved the city to become the king and marrying the widowed Queen as a reward he was at the height of his power in colonist he has fallen into the darkest of pits bereft of everything and he identifies precisely with this decrepit impotent repulsive refuse King Oedipus is the tragedy of appropriation and the price he had to pay for it Oedipus at Colonus is the tragedy of utter and absolute expropriation and his stubborn persistence in it and this is what gives a strange and far-reaching political dimension to this drama and I will briefly quote from Terry Eagleton who insisted on this the political dimension of he deposit columns he posted columns a quote becomes the cornerstone of new political order it opposes polluted body signifies among other things the monstrous terror at the gates of the policy in which if it is to have a chance of rebirth the police must recognize its own hideous deformity in becoming nothing but the scum and the refuse of the police the of the earth as st. Paul racially describes the followers of Jesus or the total loss of humanity which Marx portrays as the proletariat Marcus the Christians and the Praetorians Oedipus's divested of his identity and authority and so can offer his lacerated body as the cornerstone of a new social order and he quotes famous line from display am I made a man in this hour when I ceased to be or more more accurate translation am I to be counted as something only when I am nothing and them no longer human so this is what the beggar King wonders aloud and of Court so two things first Oedipus as the outcast the refuse of society functions as a symptom of the social order so that the polis should recognize itself in this figure of utter wretchedness and dejection it should see in it an indication of its own deformity it should not shy away from it nor put it down as the question of Oedipus is private guilt or his complicity in his destiny and second he is the figure of the loss of humanity the atonality that points to the negativity from which one can conceive a political action a lever to transform the social and political order from which he has been exposed so in this slide Oedipus is connected by Terry Eagleton this quote both to the early Christians and to the proletariat the potential lever of revolutionary transformation let's okay the unique trait of Oedipus is his adamant unwillingness to the subjective eyes his guilt his insistence in his dislocation so that one might say that he is an object rather than a subject an abject object rather subject precisely through the impossibility of subjective izing his position as a subject he appears to be perfectly rational and transparent even modern histones is this I can't be held responsible for the will of God I did a terrible deed but nobody can hold me accountable for it God's set me up so he adamantly in crucially insists that his desire was not implicated that there was no complicity of his spot either conscious or unconscious not only he didn't know he also didn't desire it was by sheer coincidence that I killed this stranger who turned out to be my father it was by sheer coincidence they married this woman the city pushed on me so he's an exception to the Oedipus complex the rest rest of us are drew okay but this clear conscious doesn't turn him in to hear anything but giggle says somewhere speaking of Greek tragedy therefore great characters in Greece it is a point of honour to be guilty and that one couldn't defend the moon then to consider them innocent they have done a deed but through a tragic flow through hamartia through a fatal blindness they produced unattended tragic consequences and they can only prove that they are worthy heroes by heroically assuming their guilt and face the consequences in this sense Oedipus is an antihero and the best way to describe his position would be not only did they commit a terrible crime actually two worst crimes I can't even be good for it this is a terrible thing I'm even expropriated of this dignity of being guilty and I take this reading actually from a Lanka's reading in in ethics of the river she has this formulation now this is the first occurrence of this type of argument I will be assisting on and ladies let us mark this particular phrase not even I did the crime but I can't even be guilty for it I come a little system this so this is viola Cohen from his early time zone since the seminar - and this is like 54 55 mid-50s institution existed so much that a deposit Collins was the key to edifice but has to go beyond Oedipus and what is beyond Oedipus is Oedipus himself at colonist one has to read double Oedipus the two kinds of eatables and which strangely recalls the fact that Freud and some crucial point insists on the fact that one has to redouble the unconscious I just read this sentence already when we posit one unconscious very proud that this is fantastic what will they say if we admit that we need two kinds of has to redouble the notion of the consumer has to redouble the figure of the Oedipus so one could say and I'm going through this quickly that first introduction of idiocy in the interpretation of Dreams was inscribed in the framework of pleasure principle a pleasure principle it's in in its conflict with the reality principle like there is the incestuous desire striving for pleasure and satisfaction and opposed to it there is the paternal law sustaining the reality principle prohibiting the striving for satisfaction in aversive columns to make it quick is placed precisely beyond the pleasure principle and has equally beyond the reality principle beyond the apparent conflict of the two it is placed in the RAM that fraud Freud marked by introducing the notion of the death Drive note that one of the most famous Freud's papers is called beyond the pleasure principle so death Drive as this persistence of life beyond the framework of both pleasure and reality principles and the Oedipus embodies the persistence of this life beyond life at which is alive wrought by negativity so this is what the most famous passage NIDA puss Colin's aim set he said the notorious verses pronounced by course witnessing Oedipus's fate I quote now and this is my where my title comes from not to be borne by all acclaim where best but once that gate be passed to hasten leader whence he came is man's next price and fast o fast okay a bit too much of a literary translation so to translate this into prose the best thing is not to be born at all and the second best ones born is to return where everyone came from as quickly as possible basically this is the line so it is the course who says there's not a because and now the first thing to note is that safa class is actually not saying something original here he's actually plagiarizing Eastern strife is grabbing some very famous lines by the openness who was the great ancient Greek poet and his lines back to Agnes were written a century and a half before around 550 BC and a quote the original now of these lines best of all for all mortal beings is never to have been born at all no never to have set our eyes on the bright light of the Sun but since he is born and men should make utmost haste through the day gates of death and then repose the earth piled into mount around himself okay and the ominous uses this this crucial word in Greek Metheny not to have been born the same esophagus and he misses verses already notorious they have been often presented as a some sort of quintessence of the Greek tragic view of the world and one can find very similar formulations in Bakke leaders another Greek poet and a new repeaters and both all these instances proceed he deposits columns so it's like he is already quoting it's already a commonplace what he's saying there now the best thing is not to be born how can one say this what is it in life that makes it possible to set myself against life to put life in question to negate it degraded to rank it second not only in relation to death but to the very possibility to come into life how can one subvert this hierarchy de spontaneous self-evident proposition of being life at all so what chorus is saying basically is life life as such is not worth living better not to be born and this looks like the ultimate complaint the complaint of all complaints the biggest grievous imaginable against one's own existence because all other complaints and protests against the world it's injustice since troubles is misery they all appear asbahna in comparison to this ultimate complaint so what is wrong is not this or that particular evil but ultimately the very fact to have been born at all other grievances caused some particular misfortunes calamities personal social political even cosmic but there in the end only partial limited and fragmentary metonymy of this highest complaint what are all disasters that can befall as compared with the ultimate disaster of having been born there is a very good short comment provided by our adjuster I very much recommend his book which called the trouble displeasure where he sums this up he has a theory of complaining summed up with this line the train is late best not to be unpaid bills best not to be I accidentally murdered my father and slap is my mother best not to be so this is the biggest lament against an irreparable wrong since we are here but it can only be uttered by someone who's who has already endured that wrong now suicide as compared to this is rather an act of impotence because it can merely end life but it cannot repair the ultimate trouble of having been born so you cannot repair it by suicide now there is something comical in this most tragic of all pronouncement and what I'm aiming at is sort of paradoxical trajectory that one can trace like from Oedipus to comedy okay now Lacan commented on this for the first time in his seminar - and then of other occasions throughout his career always pointing out the strange comical aspect of this of this now a quote from Lacan from seminar to best is not to be born of course it means that we are facing an inconceivable entity let me ask a son born about which one can say absolutely nothing before it passes into existence when it can persist but one can conceive that it doesn't persist and that everything returns to the universal peace and quiet of stars s Pascal says this can be perfectly true at the moment when one says best not to be born but the ridiculous thing is to say it it may be true it's he becomes comical the moment one says it it's a ridiculous thing to say it and that with us enter into a calculus of probabilities what is best being born spirit is spirit only by being so close to our existence that it can it can initiate it with laughter and of course so the source of the comical sentence is an impossible evaluation between how is it not to be born as compared to having me born from where can one consider this from where can one weigh the pros and the cons what is the probability of partaking in this highest happiness of not being born and the spirit in question that Lacan speaks about is the spirit of more display of the joke the word of spirit the spirit of width of a joke the capacity of a word to virtually do away with our existence and make it unhappen as it were and okay I will not insist here on the question of can one make something happen on the same marking this is also the Hegelian regalian word now dispute of model speak of the joke is the spirit in which actually Freud comments on this is kind of surprising on the one hand he considers King Oedipus in all seriousness in interpretation of Dreams and massively all over on the other hand he takes up this most most notorious centers from Oedipus at Colonus in his book on jokes so he takes this as a joke and I will just just mentioned it in a letter fraud implicitly mentions episode Collins letter to are not spike in the mid-thirties in his old age he speaks about his daughter Anna a quote as a compensation life has given me a daughter who in tragic circumstance would be as good as Antigone my faithful are now Antigone ii see freud identifying suddenly with a deposit columnist not the other oedipus and anna being his isn't even okay Freud considers this line from Oedipus of colors in the book of jokes and here a quote from the book on jokes never to be born would be the best thing for mortal man but adds the philosophical commenting even better this happens to scarcely one person in 100,000 Freud comments on this he makes this job he takes up this famous sentence but he he takes this famous scientist together with an appendix which is taken from a munich satirical journal reading the bladder as an example of a certain technique of jokes where a seemingly common sensical appendix actually subverts the initial statement in this place it's untenable nature now one should just briefly add that this joke actually is not original to joke that freud read in better it was not invented by the german one can find this joke in collections of yiddish stories this is an old jewish witticism and if you consider in this light then you have first the ancient Greek saying best not to be born and then the Jewish edition appendix but this happens only 200 in hundred thousand in Jewish tradition to Greek wisdom which lacks looks like some sort of conversation of European history its merger of the Greek antiquity with the joy judeo-christian legacy and since I'm having this giving this course on modernism James Joyce in Ulysses proposed this succeed definition of what is European in one word Jew Greek a Jew Greek one Jew Greek condensation of the Jewish in the Greek story and you considered after all Ulysses himself itself I mean the novel by by James Joyce is such a conversation it takes the ancient story they oughta see the homer and immediately maps it on the story of the wandering joke I mean it's the mapping of the Jewish story on the ancient Greek story now Freud commands these jokes as follows this modern addition addition to the ancient wisdom is an obvious nonsense which but the apparently cautious scarcely escapement scarcely becomes even more obtuse this appendix is added to the first sentence as an irrefutable correct limitation it can open our eyes to the fact that this venerable wisdom is hardly any better than nonsense this is fright slide anyone who is not born is not a modern man at all and there is no good or best for him the nonsense in the joke here serves to reveal and present another nonsense and of course so in some the Greek all the wisdom is ultimately nonsense it is uttered from an impossible position of renunciation or it contains in more technical terms what is called in domestic theory the performative paradox or pragmatic paradise which if it were to be true it couldn't be uttered at all it can be preferred only by someone already born the scanning miss the best so this is always the rich relative to make a rich reactive conclusion is absurd for the best is impossible given that this sentence exists at all he who has not been born is not in a position to proclaim that the best possible has happened to him there is no place for him from which to make the comparison one cannot experience both and compare which will be the best but this joke is perhaps not so innocent he circumscribes some basic impass of human life life is presented through despite loss of having survived not being born and only but by surviving our own non being can be retroactive Lee posited as the best or to put it in a short slogan being is a failed non-being this is the way of translators this line women know full well that it's best not to be born in general that non being is better than being but we fail to achieve we fail to achieve this and can only retrospectively regret it or perhaps in this light must consider human life as such as a kind of Freudian slip it would have been best not to be but oops we failed there was a slip over the slip the causing that we are now some Freudian slip happened already at our birth our birth was like a slip of non-being conditioning our coming into the world in the first place and again a quote from brief sentence from our own Shuster his brilliant formulation the human being is the sick animal that doesn't live its life but lives its failure not to be born okay now to put in more general terms being is the slip of non-being and what should take slip in the sense of the etymology of the Latin etymology of the word lapses as the for the lapse the fall of non-being into being we have always already fallen into being the result of having elapsed of lapses that non-being which would have been the best that could have befallen us but had we not for so there is a fall from the Eden of non-being into the hell of being the wrong being must have been a bit inattentive so in a moment of its distracted knees it has lapsed into being and okay just reference subway jiseok has written quite quite a lot in the question of the fall and the laps particularly his book on an event and now finally to make this even a larger question a minimum larger claim the most famous philosophical question why is there being instead of nothing stems from Leibniz funke's trace the lines of this question from libraries to Heidegger it has the same structure the moment we raise this lability on principle of sufficient reason how can one justify any existence against the backdrop of non-being so in line with Freud joke one could say there why is the rather being instead of nothing it would rather be nothing but it scarcely happens once in a hundred thousand times so we were fortunately not so lucky so and to make a sort of gallery prominent starting from this quote I connect to crown examples I mean as famous as an anvil torus as they come and the first first one are the most famous lines in German literature the lines put into the mouth of my Vista of the devil in goethe's faust you know the most famous part of first how that how does Mephisto present himself I quote in German he'd been the guys distasteful mind on dust meat wrecked then Alice was in state is where the segunda gate the room Besser Vestas next agenda I translate I'm the spirit that always denies the devil is the spirit of negation and rightly too for all the death begin should rightly to destruction run the very better that nothing very begun so this is the literary translation of these lines of the lines quite appropriately put in the mouth of the devil so literally it means it would have been better that nothing would become at all it would have been better than nothing would become at all since everything comes in that comes into existence runs into ruin it would be best at thing would come into being at all this is the first sort of crown example and the other one I am doing almost too embarrassed the quote like to be or not and you can see that it implies exactly the same structure the moment one poses this alternative like weighing being versus not being it's clear that they're not not to be care today it would be better not to be it's not just a question of whether one should make the end to one's life faced with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but ultimately best not to be borne but we didn't succeed in this so this is just a reminder that this kind of thought this logic the logic of this sort is presently some very crucial points in in our cultural history and I come to some more now let me now point out this form of argument that I have been pursuing here for some and give some more examples I'll give five examples first of this logic and then the sixth and the ultimate example as you might have been expected comes from Beckett which somehow reverses this logic so my first example with Oedipus we have already seen the formula not only did I commit the most horrible crime but can't even be guilty for it not this is not even argument now the second example I take from a link as wonderful book on comedy where she argues against this widespread idea that comedy is based on the Revenge of our finitude on the high ideas and striving for infinity and in this view which is promoted like by Samuel crudely many others comedy opposes the elevated ideas by our human finna cured and banality it destroys it unmask it ridicules the high ideals and provides constant reminders of our finitude in face of whose infinitive one short sentence ideas slip on a banana peel so as opposed to this view alengka proposes a truly excellent formula I quote not only we are not infinite we are not even finite you see it's the same logic not not even our finitude is like affinity to his a failure with a floor there's a slip the hole in it it's a failed finitude it leaks a bit and this is a driving force of comedy the point of comedy is not to play our fitna finitude against the infinity but to aim in the fact that we can't even be finite so I come to my third example which has an analogous structure and there was a witty proposal how to sum up Lubitsch's comedies and I think I was speaking about a little bit I mean he is one of the greatest directors of film comedies and this is a proposal how one can sum this up which runs like this human beings do everything they can to sabotage their own happiness but they fail even at that this is a structure you can see like happiness is the slip of unhappiness it's the lapse happiness some inadvertent misfortune it's a four we strive very hard to be unhappy and psychoanalysis presents the best evidence of countless and complex strategies and tools invented by humans with boundless creativity to block and sabotage their happiness but they even don't manage that they did not at least not always they even they botched occasion so this adage presents an aversion of the best is not to be born like striving for misery produces happiness by a slip happiness this kind of result of a failure is the ambiguity of this conjunction of happiness and failure which perhaps stands at the heart of human condition like happiness is subject to failure which it's failed and Happiness so I can read this subject to failure in in a common sensical manner of striving for happiness and this always goes wrong in one way or another on or in the far less naive psychometric sense of striving for unhappiness which occasionally fails and thus produces our fragmented access to happiness now my fourth example comes from Nietzsche and here again I'm indebted to a link up to date for this passage after she calls it a book on on sex this is from Nietzsche from gay science the European disguises himself with morality because he has become a sick sickly crippled animal for his almost an abortion scarce half made up that was harvest week awkward I'm not suggesting that all this is meant to mask human malice and villainy the wild animal in us my idea is on the country that it is precisely as tame animals that we are a shameful sight and in need of moral disguise so you can see again this is a version of the same argument Nietzsche's argument is not that we take on the cloak of morality in order to disguise the wild animal in us that our business villainy or whatever on the contrary the shameful thing is that we can't even be the animals sick as animals it's not a situation we are two worlds enemies and that we need the moral cloak as these guys we're not merely failed as humans not being able to cover up this hidden animality it's worse we are failed as animals we're half made up animals and while he covers up not the hidden animality but the failure value manacles and the fifth and ultimate example of the structure of argument is this best not to be borne but even that fails so it has always already failed or it happens to some lucky creature once in hundred thousand times but the fact that we can say this putting into suspense our lives and our being scrutinizing it from the perspective of non-being has consequences for our life and being this is a life that cassette itself against luck and makes it possible to live our lives against the background of non-being through non-being at our core which manifests itself as in excess the excessive cumbersome life which seemed to coincide with the death ride and first notion of a death Drive comes in not through the tragic perspective that death undercuts life and presents its bleak goal but through the comedic outlook of our failure to have access to the best of non-being which is what provides an access to our being at all there is at the core of psychoanalysis and this is a large claim something that one could call the failure of negation I think this really stands at the core of psychoanalysis for if we look at repression for dreaming what is repression it is an attempt to indicate in repress certain problematic content but a negation that fails so the repressed content makes its return the repression coincides with the return of the repressed what is after all the notion of the unconscious but an odd negation of the conscious the other of consciousness but a failed negation of an in the unconscious comes back in slips dreams jokes the tiny cracks it keeps coming back displaying the very impossibility of consciousness of ever closing upon itself and what is death drive but a failure of death is a negation of luck death that doesn't manage to negate life but keeps being inscribed in it insisting at its core as in excess of life that in life which is more than life more than survival more than finitude negation as a surplus that gives us access to enjoyment as opposed to pleasure and enjoyment beyond pleasure something in life that is not a life function and I have argued as word that we can consider some strange trait of Friday negativity which is in Cal encapsulated in fairing I know how many people speak German do you have fair words fair 9 negation third ring repression fare ver foreclosure fare Lloyd disavow verdict conversation searchable displacement six key notions in Freud six key concept of psychoanalysis what they have in common to having common depressing traffic's fair and if we look in the very dictionary as the first and foremost meaning of fair is deviation the aggression straying away its negation which is off-track which deviates deviated negation a negation a negativity that face negativity doesn't quite succeed in fulfilling its function of negating certain entity so all these words evoke something that persists not in spite of negation but through negation or more precisely something the negation produces in the first place in all of them negation produces something that then it cannot itself negate so not the rest of something that existed before and couldn't be fully negated with something that negation brings forth in the first place okay now as I promised we finally turned to Beckett and the subject of modernism for my sixth and ultimate example now Oedipus at Colonus is the last Greek tragedy it finishes the glorious century of isalus Sophocles and Euripides which is the peak of the culture of antiquity and which gave us the paradigm of theater the paradigm of what we understand in the world theater now Euripides was younger than Sophocles by 15 years but he died shortly before him so so focused outlived the moor and the folk performers of Oedipus at Colonus and 401 as said two years before the trial of Socrates marks the end of an era no Greek tragedies after that had been preserved and judging by testimonies none had the paradigmatic power of the classical figure of tragedy so as such any piece of coroner's on one hand looks backwards it takes up a number of themes from the tragic edition and most notably the theme of revenge and reconciliation and this reaches back to poorest area to the first to the eyes closed and the theme of the nation and salvation even uses this in appropriate Christian terms there is only someone who has been subject to FATA wretchedness can finally attain apotheosis in the moment of his death and bring about a reconciliation which will make possible a new social just political order the political stature of Athens is the heritage of Oedipus's death and I would just add the conference in essence in March and I made my point I I went to columns I made my way to college to see this place it's an absolutely bleak and know in nondescript suburb of the essence like three kilometers out of the center but there is one most remarkable feature I didn't realize that until I came to corners I mean Plato's Academy was established at columns it's still the circumscription of columns so had this kind of conversation the place where Oedipus died is precisely the place where Plato established Academy the origin of philosophy reaching back to the ways reaching back to the oedipal structure there ways to explain is why ET pusses is actually a very good book entry very interesting book by john joseph books which is called Oedipus philosopher so the connection between a Debussy philosophy is conceptually there okay we can we can in another vein see in Oedipus at Colonus the embodiment of the Agamben Ian Khama soccer he is literally the king and out in one and as an outcast entitled to Apple services in the end okay I've spoken in the class in paradigm despair problematics out of despair and only the worst can yield the best this this dialectical overturn from the worst to the best and it is problematic I don't subscribe to this paradigm but there is something of this in any episode columns now as the last tragedy it looks back to ask us etc but it's also the most modern one the one most immediately calling for a model continuation beyond the classic classical framework it reaches far beyond this framework Oedipus the outcast the resonated nomadic subject who has already the beginning fulfilled his destiny whose the refuse of his destiny wandering around the world identified to this refuse waiting for death he looks like the prototype of the model here he has no place under the Sun he has no place in the symbolic no place in the social hierarchies and positions and Lacan has proposed in the seminar of ethics the parallel with King Lear King Lear at the end of his path and Oedipus at the beginning of display indeed looks like King Lear at the end of Shakespeare's play but let me propose now finally despair of this Beckett namely it seems that all Beckett's heroes start off as a deposit colonist they already on page 1 the destinies over the journey is finished no new path opens up they start off as the refused with the empty time that remains waiting for the end so if Beckett's paradigmatic play bears the title endgame then the start of generically aroused the time loop which opens up in most of his works and I call this justice Parton striking Sanders back at Sanders the end is in the beginning and yet you go on so you start at the end you start at the end and then the true story the true thing begins it's finished this is the first line of anger it's finished as if the last Greek tragedy would find its sequel in the end game display about ending but an ending without apotheosis of reconciliation so the sequel to the question of how to attain an end now if I followed the red thread of the line best not to be born and in lies this line gets sukham a new modern is twist with Beckett no Beckett first was very familiar with this line he quotes this line in his early I say um post in 1931 he takes support in superpower and he actually prompted by some he quotes a line from Catherine the famous Spanish from the Spain famous Spanish Barak peace life is a dream and actually there in Calderon we also find this version of this line I quote from Beckett who relies on her and who quotes Catherine the tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin or the original and eternal sin of him and all his saucy malorum the sin of having been born he quotes in Spanish Western little mayor del hombre s awareness EDA the greatest sin of man is to have been born okay this is early Beckett so kind of quoting Calderon who like 2,000 years after sofa please take this up and then Beckett continuous three hundred years later but then from this point of young-young Beckett 31 to the endgame in 58 which is like a quarter century later [Music] there is a that will take place there's a twist to this line we seem to know everything about this line but actually Beckett gives a completely unexpected twist this and now anecdotally in October 1935 Beckett attended a lecture by Carl Gustav Jung at the Tavistock clinic in London and this lecture has profoundly marked him or rather what marked him was a sentence from this lecture which kept home to him for the rest of his life and now we have Jung's lecture notes for this lecture and now I never thought I would quote Jung in my life but here I go here I go this is a quote from Jung recently I saw a case of a little girl of ten who had some amazing mythological dreams her father consulted me about his dreams I couldn't tell him what I thought because they contained an uncanny prognosis the little girl died a year later of an infectious disease she had never been born entirely and this is the line this is the line this is the line that Beckett will keep coming back to she has never been entirely born now the little girl lived her life under the heavy shadow or having never been properly born and hence Beckett's obsession with this idea that in in a vase attended reserver and we find this organ in what this is a novel he wrote in France during the Second World War they find his wording never been properly born and then we have his remarks to an actress who was to play me in his footfalls this is mid-70s and this is what Beckett told her May hasn't been born she just began or it began there's a difference she was never born so the implication of the sentence is both and beginning don't coincide but the fact that it began doesn't mean that she was born properly so it began but the subject hasn't been entirely improperly born maybe the contingent beginning is coterminous with improper birth the impossibility to be entirely born and I have other testimonies on a more personal note Beckett wrote in a letter to his friend Alan Snyder in 59 I quote I'm afraid I don't know when life begins I'm still waiting personally this is Beckett's very intimate kind of thing and then you have Haman cloven in an end game the club says do you believe in life to come and ham says mine was always that I have the same logic mine was always that so waiting for the end which is kind of the manifest content of back its place in the endgame in particular actually coincides with waiting for the proper beginning this connection between the tool to put in the formula it can't end because it has never properly begun this is the problem this is white content so now in conclusion best not to be born this is what says the chorus in a deposit column in colonist but we are here we failed we will never Patek in the best we cannot make ourselves unborn being is the failed non-being but then here is the Beckett's modern twist we didn't even fail to be unborn we rather failed to be properly born so this would be this fine a twisted not even that I have been pursuing in these different registers subjects being being is affected no but the original sin of being born but rather by this not being quite born this is our problem not that we are born and we committed the sin of being born in the first place but we haven't been quite born failed birth entails that it is not possible to properly dissociate separate being and non-being the being hasn't properly parted with known being now cannot maintain the most spectacular of opposition's being being can't quite disentangle itself itself from non-being it is unplaceable situated in the gray zone between being and non-being and Beckett's heroes seem stuck there they're not quite there but not quite not there they wait for the end that face to arrive in the first place in the first place because there was no proper beginning there hasn't been a birth different from a contingent beginning when something began to take its course and there's a famous line recurring in the endgame something is taking its course something is taking its course like if you were to describe what what is the summary of endgame something is taking scores so so being is not just a failed non-being which would be the consequence of Sophocles line failed by the fact that it's there rather nothing being is failed above all in the sense that it cannot even be being that it hasn't even stepped into the clarity of presence it cannot even manage the metaphysics of presence it is a failed being instead of failed non being failed in itself by not cutting its umbilical cord with non being and this looks like the failure of the most spectacular difference there is the one with which philosophy began whisper many days they were being and non-being and there emerges the cat in question of minimal difference which is precisely the minimal difference to be disentangled from the opposition of being and non-being best not to be born sounds like a pathetic futile complaint something one can vainly wish for but we are under a Sibley here and Bacchus rejoinder is but unfortunately this is precisely what happened to you what was considered the humorous ultimate luck not to be born with what happens only to one in 100,000 is unfortunately the common lot this is the universal condition the trouble is that they've remade it we haven't even really been born we are the lucky bastards I said so you see the Beckett's back it's twist the the Sophocles formula I know we need to conclude Beckett looks like a postcard a strophic laritza some catastrophe has taken place but which one and you have two very serious philosophical readings of the endgame by big figures like Adorno and Cavell and the follower donor the catastrophe which implicitly forms the background is the Holocaust although it's never mentioned it's not hinted at Adonis's needs to be in line with the Jewish build of the book you should build for both you shouldn't picture it and to follow Cavell the catastrophe may well be that of atomic bomb maybe this was looming very large at the time the threat of universal destruction was in the air and we could read this play as the newest arc after the atomic Cataclysm all this may form the background of this ending the waiting game but through all this would break up I'd preoccupied Beckett most is the endemic catastrophe not to be done away with pertaining to the modern habitus not just that of being born at all which is a classical tragic view the original sin Sophocles to Hamlet to Calderon too fast but rather of failing to be born we have not even committed the original sin this is a trouble if we go back to this shop mehar and Acadian formulation is the original sin of having born but we haven't even committed it's worse you haven't even committed this original sin but perhaps this thermal provides another opening quite different from the expiation of original sin of existence and different from the nation and salvation and a different kind of politics and I think Oedipus would ultimately be the second ethnic name for this this could be the modern Paquette in here thank you you [Applause]

Channel: European Graduate School Video Lectures

Views: 4,935

Rating: 4.963964 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy (Field Of Study), University, Curriculum (Literature Subject), egs, European Graduate School (College/University), The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland (Country), Malta, PhD (Degree), Master's Degree (Degree), Critical Theory (Field Of Study), European Graduate School Malta, Mladen Dolar, 2018, Oedipus

Id: d2l8hZkskKI

Length: 63min 19sec (3799 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019