“THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TERROR IS GOOD”

Abstract

This article performs an analysis of Aeschylus’ tragedy the Oresteia within the Lacanian model of the Four Discourses. The author contends that the myth, which dramatizes the transition from the ancient conception of the law based on familial revenge to the modern institution of law, may be viewed as a shift from a failed Master’s Discourse to the University Discourse. The cycle of revenge killings performed throughout the tragedy, culminating in Orestes’ murder of his mother, may be considered signifying acts of self-sovereignty in the name of Dikê, or justice. However, the traumatic “product” of these acts – the murder that signifies the enactment of the law of revenge – parallels the product of the Master’s Discourse, the objet a, or traumatic kernel of the real. Ultimately, with the implementation of Athena’s new legal order based on alienating institutionalized knowledge and practices, this traumatic product is rearticulated in the formation of the superego and in relation to the Sovereign Good.

Keywords:

• Lacan
• Four Discourses
• Oresteia
• psychoanalysis
• jouissance
• law

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to Trisha Brady for providing an early version of this paper its first critical hearing on the “Psychoanalysis and Greek Tragedy” panel at the 2017 Northeast Modern Language Association convention. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for Angelaki whose suggestions were invaluable to the amelioration and completion of this manuscript.

1 As the Lacanian theorist Joan Copjec has observed, the phenomenon of negation is, at its most fundamental level, an effect of the lack in the signifying system itself. She explains:

The signifier’s difference from itself, its radical inability to signify itself, causes it to turn circles around the real that is lacking in it. It is in this way – in the circumscription of the real – that its nonexistence or its negation is signified within the symbolic. (Read 121)

Paul Verhaeghe has noted that this “flywheel movement” (“Causation” 168) of the signifier that designates the lack in the symbolic order may be viewed as a “retake” on a primal or “anterior” lack, which concerns the “price life has to pay for the acquisition of sexual reproduction” (ibid.). The process of negation (circulation and repression of real jouissance) concerns the essential correspondence between these two lacks.

2 Classical scholars of the Oresteia typically view the trilogy as a form of public political discourse intended for democratic education and reflection on the meaning of Dikê. See, for example, Elizabeth Markovits, who maintains that the trilogy principally represents the problem of justice as one of “intergenerational responsibility” and “intergenerational violence” (431), and J. Peter Euben, whose examination of gender roles in the tragedy highlights the importance of “mutuality” and balance in conceptions of justice (27). In their introduction to the Oresteia, Robert Fagles and W.B. Stanford point to the psychological dimension of the trilogy’s educational purpose, arguing that Orestes’ “guilt becomes the basis of Athens’ greatness” (20). As a new model for justice, “tragedy […] might empower the young democracy” (21). My purpose here is not to argue against such valuable historically and socially inflected readings; rather, I aim to develop a complementary psychoanalytic reading that, in particular, examines the implications of the myth at the level of discursive structure.

3 The formulae for the discourses are as follows: Master, University, Analyst, and Hysteric (Verhaeghe, Woman 106):

4 See also Amber Jacobs’ compelling psychoanalytically informed reading of the Oresteia in On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother (2007). Although Jacobs’ position is distinct from that of Irigaray, her analysis also emphasizes the imaginary conflicts within the myth as the basis for a critique of patriarchal law. In particular, she contends that because matricide does not assume a symbolic representation in the Oresteia in the form of a “metaphorical loss” (98), the mother cannot become an object of mourning. Consequently, “dead mother(s)” in the Oresteia are “concrete embodiments or psychic hallucinations, ghosts or Furies or undead phantoms that threaten the psyche as bad persecutory objects fixed in the imaginary” (103). Because Jacobs identifies the Furies exclusively with the matricide and suggests that they should be viewed as the hallucinatory projections of Orestes’ (individual) psyche, her reading implicitly privileges an imaginary and, in my view, somewhat limited conceptualization of Das Ding in the form of the “mythic body” of the dead mother. Consequently, and contrary to the interpretation developed in the present essay, Jacobs concludes that “Athena’s order […] fails to provide subjects with symbolically mediated relations” (175).

5 This observation is speculative in nature and should not be viewed as a dogmatic statement concerning the structural relationships between all discourses in all circumstances. The reader will have already noticed that I have not, in the preceding discussion, made such an observation concerning the structural relationship between the Master’s Discourse and the Analyst’s Discourse even though such a “diagonal” relationship would seem, at first blush, to pertain:Throughout this paper, I have argued that the violence in the Oresteia may be interpreted, within the context of a failed Master’s Discourse, as objet a, the real traumatic kernel around which repetitions, specifically signifying acts of retributive justice, form. In my analysis of the Oresteia, in other words, I have interpreted this objet a as a waste byproduct, an excessive, heterogeneous surplus of the discourse, not the agent of a new discourse in the enigmatic form of the object-cause of desire. This is a crucial distinction because the Analyst’s Discourse refers less to the subject’s uninitiated encounter with the anxiogenic manifestation of objet a than to the complex psychoanalytic procedure which helps the subject/analysand move from the position of alienation to what Lacan refers to as “separation.” Lacan explains that by “representing, through being the agent, the cause of desire” (Lacan, XVII 176), the analyst assists in the emergence of “another style of master signifier” (ibid.) in the subject. For the subject, this means working through a heightened experience of alienation brought about by the analytic process in order to potentially achieve a new amount of freedom in the transformation of the ego ideal in its relation to the symbolic order. As Mark Bracher observes, such an alteration “entails an altered sense of identity as well as new meanings and different values” (72).

6 As both Paul Verhaeghe and Bruce Fink point out, the true implication of the Hysteric’s Discourse is the expansion of the body of knowledge. This, I am arguing, ultimately helps to reinforce the superegoic power of the University Discourse. However, Fink suggests that such an expansion of knowledge also reflects the hysteric’s ability to challenge the master, holding him or her to account for his or her theories. Fink explains that while

the university discourse takes its cue from the master signifier, glossing over it with some sort of trumped-up system, the hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge. (“Master” 34)

Inevitably, under the pressure of the hysteric, the master’s theories – Freud’s nascent psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, for example – become elaborated, revised, and expanded within a body of institutionalized knowledge and practices. While the master’s central beliefs and ideas are, one would hope, improved upon through this process, they are also effectively amplified (codified, remapped, rearticulated, clarified) within the symbolic order. One could easily apply this logic to an evolving body of knowledge concerning best legal practices and the distribution of justice according to the letter and spirit of the law.