Repost: THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE AND CONCEPTUAL RIGIDITY

Revisiting the Oedipus complex:

An incorrect way of reading Marechera is:

1. nihilistically -- as a "postmodern" and as if he were merely rearranging ideas "on the surface", somewhat dadaistically, and in order to amuse himself, whilst not criticizing the established orders that he was actually intent on criticizing.

2.   Since, according to Michael Mack's Freud,  Kant's  Categorical Imperative is "The Oedipus Complex", due to its rigid structural imperatives relating to morality, one ought not to reads Marechera in a kind of subconscious tone of, "Yes, but all the moral answers are already entirely obvious to my abstract thinking mind."  If one does so, your own conceptual rigidity is blinding you to what the author has to say about social and psychological complexity.

T points the author wants to make are about society and how we actually experience it without a divine law to mediate its effects and empirical. "Blindness" is a feature of assuming one has already grasped everything about the world when there is still something more to grasp.

I perceive the whole Freudian system of complexes to be a huge metaphor about one's relationship to power.   In terms of this, the Oedipus complex leads to a division between the primeval self and the intellectual self, such that one is never satisfied by having assimilated language. One is in doubt whether this language is not the true language, the most efficacious language, the language that will nurture and not mislead one, the language of a true progenitor and not of a spurious host, the language that is likely to last, and not be cast aside by more superior linguistic forms, the language that really is what-it-seems-to-be and not other.

To assimilate the father's law through language under these terms is fraught. One may introject the law entailed in a number of languages -- but who is it to guarantee that this is THE language? -- the one guaranteed forever? According to my understanding of the logic that must hold sway over psychoanalysis as a structural mode, the resolution of the so-called "Oedipus complex" is facilitated through the acceptance of "castration".   This resignation to being controlled by the orthodoxy of power is the gateway that however takes us away from self-awareness and direct experience of personal impulses and above all mreoves one from mystical enjoinment with the world.  One enters into a fraught relationship with language itself through an excessive reliance on its pure potency.

This produces a cascading structure to reality, where one has to deal with more and more layers of the onion of identity.  The self is never viewed in is whole state, but always somehow perpetually changes before one's eyes as the levels of the self have been covered over more and more with layers of convention. In a lopsided manner, one keeps growing and growing as one assimilates new information about language, about its implications and insinuations that separate us from our primal layer of our self-perceptions. At the same time, the primal self keeps shrinking and shrinking as we find more in the language we had come to trust, which we had already assimilated and introjected as our own law,  turns out to be false. The self is thus constantly destabilized. The truth about one's condition ever recedes and reality has an elusive quality.

On the other hand, there is historically engendered instability.  A child of the colonies, for example, I, or Marechera, is the bastard child of an elusive father whose historical presence would not stick around long enough for an ideology to have become entirely entrenched.  Recent colonialism was, therefore, an ideology which produces children with an identity on the move. I am sure that Marechera and I failed to  'grow up' in quite the sense that those of a more predictable culture would have expected.  Perhaps we never become crystallized and firm.  It is a mistake to take us for plants or grass, since we are changelings.  We are capable of shocking and scandalizing through our non-acquiescence to expected norms, but we are rarely disappointing in our imaginative prowess.