I’ve never been able to understand the forms of logic used by most people in Western society to attribute guilt. That’s why I didn’t comment on the story directly. It’s always surprising to me to see how blame is distributed. Normally, it is apportioned to the weak and vulnerable, which doesn’t make any sense, although you can kind of get a notion of how this tendency is systematized through reading Lacan and his ilk: the child is deviant because the child is necessarily “psychotic” and hasn’t been brought to order by baptism/castration (the Christian transformation). This is Lacan’s formulation. Therefore, the weak, the vulnerable and dependent in society, are necessarily the guilty ones who suffer from irrationality, whereas the powerful and dominant people represent rational states per se.
Definitely, this is hard to stomach, and I do also find my Zimbabwean culture generally makes much more logical sense, which is why I’m returning to it.
Musteryou – that sounds really interesting. I’ve read bits of Lacan (and liked him very much, although not the easiest read) but not come across this idea before. Got a link to some resources to find out more?
I can’t remember where I read that Lacan considered the early childhood stage to be “psychotic”. I read a lot of academic articles. Basically, the idea is linked to what similar psychological theories call the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, when a baby does not yet understand that objects are fixed and consistent with themselves. Objects seem to come into existence and then they pass out of existence whenever they are not present. But adults know that the lack of presence at any time doesn’t mean something stops existing. So much seems logical, but Lacan, and I would argue also Freud, puts childhood development into a patriarchal religious context. Lacan even uses overtly Catholic terminology, like the word of the father, or the name of the father. “Castration” in Lacan’s paradigm seems to have a similar meaning to “circumcision” in the Jewish religion. At least, I read one article by a German academic who pointed this out. She argued that the term, castration, should be changed (back?) to circumcision. Anyway, this flow of Lacanian thought seems to be a way of psychologizing already existing religious premises, such as a child being born into sin and needing some kind of dispensation in order to make them acceptable to adult society. This is my reading.
““Castration” in Lacan’s paradigm seems to have a similar meaning to “circumcision” in the Jewish religion. ”
- Circumcision of infants is, indeed, a castrating practice engaged in by insanely possessive parents. We have had a thread on this blog where said obsessive mommies defended tooth and nail their right to mutilate their sons’ penises.
“this flow of Lacanian thought seems to be a way of psychologizing already existing religious premises, such as a child being born into sin and needing some kind of dispensation in order to make them acceptable to adult society”
- Any psychoanalyst will be deeply opposed to the idea of castrating circumcision.
“Any psychoanalyst will be deeply opposed to the idea of castrating circumcision”
Perhaps so, but the term is used metaphorically in Lacan’s writing, to imply that one has moved passed the stage of expressing primitive desires and into a realm of civilizing norms. My argument is that the form taken by this normative idea of civilization is implicitly Judeo-Christian. In Lacan, it is Catholic society that one enters when one loses one’s childhood fantasies and desires. Obviously Lacan’s “castration” is not usually understood in any sense literally. He is just being playful and French. But, Nietzsche analyses that Christianity is a more extreme — that is, more ascetic — form of Judaism. So it makes sense that Jewish circumcision is replaced by Christian castration as a form of civilizing norm.
