ANTHROPOLOGICS

Dressed up as an anthropological experiment executed by Schoolteacher an amateur participant in the practices and assumptions of 19th-century ‘‘race science” the assault indicts not only the behaviors of these particular characters nor solely the system of slavery they represent, but also the larger cultural assumptions that enable the system ‘‘I told you to put her human characteristics on the left, her animal ones on the right And don’t forget to line them up’’ (1988, p.

Positioning Morrison’s narrative of the entry into historical subjectivity of African-Americans alongside Freud’s myth of the emergence of social formations and guilty subjects the force of her critique comes sharply into focus The scene of the brothers holding Sethe down and nursing from her breasts while their uncle takes careful notes inverts the scene of the primal horde killing their father The compulsive rationality and orderliness of Schoolteacher is not simply juxtaposed to but part of the violent act Sweet Home is owned by an extended family a purportedly ‘‘civilized’’ kinship system; it passes from Garner the original owner whose relative liberality with his slaves is signaled by his insistence on treating his slaves as ‘‘men’’ to his brother-in-law Schoolteacher on his death If Garner’s pride in showing that a ‘‘real Kentuckian wa^.

We can say that the superegoic structures of the white plantation society, of Schoolteacher function most regularly when the violence they accrue can be vented upon a group who have been designated within this symbolic economy as less than human as is underlined by the very particularity of the nature of the assault inflicted upon Sethe Appealing to science to research, to the need to describe the differential between human and animal in positive terms Schoolteacher authorizes and annotates the brutality in which his nephews function as his delegates enacting the assault In effect, Schoolteacher’s subjectivity is distributed between two entities: the persona of rational observing researcher the subject of science and the pure aggressivity of the boys themselves doing his bidding and betraying his racialized anthropologizing as they do for indeed it is their behavior that is bestial

We can see how vividly the specificity with which Morrison brings sexual violence to representation serves to expose the hidden supports of Freud’s narrative of fathers sons and the social order We can also see how it illustrates the mediation of psychic laws with social law and convention It is in large measure the authority of an alleged science of which Schoolteacher is just one representative that legitimates the system of US slavery that implicitly and explicitly underwrites the Fugitive Slave Law for instance or Roger Taney’s opinion in Sandford v. Scott The violence of Schoolteacher and his nephews nominally forbidden violence is in fact made possible by laws that articulate its parameters and determine its forms Read in this way the issues at stake in Totem and Taboo, itself intricated in a discourse on race culture and otherness⁹ are indeed the founding of a social order an organization for the appropriate distribution of women and the sense of guilt if by guilt we want to indicate the obedience to a law that is necessarily supplemented by the jouissance that derives from transgressing it But there is also something else at stake in this reading of Totem through the prism offered by Morrison’s novel: the founding of a social order is articulated with a violent delineation of the category of the human a marking out of the domain of the human and that of the animal a process that perhaps cannot really achieve completion and thus is grimly repeated over and over again

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