OBSCENE UNDERSIDES SPECTRAL PRESENCES

If Beloved suspends the question of the guilt or innocence of its heroine it does so I want to argue in the interests of developing a more radical critique of the socio-symbolic universe in which the infanticide takes place In this, the novel appears to share ground with Zizek in his insistence that the act has political implications and is not a purely individual gesture The act Zizek (1989b) writes ‘‘takes place at the intersection between ethics and politics in the uncanny domain where ethics is politicized’’ (1989b p 148).

To illuminate Morrison’s critique and the role guilt plays in it, it is useful to turn to Freud’s 1913 Totem and Taboo, not simply because it is the text that perhaps is most resonant in Zizek’s Lacanian reading of psychopolitics, but because it constitutes the first and central step in Freud’s careerlong attempt to extend psychoanalysis from the consulting room by demonstra­ting its importance as a tool for understanding society and culture Totem and Taboo is in multiple ways apposite to Beloved; this book of Freud’s in its attempt to articulate the founding moment of social relations with the founding of individual subjects in positing a sense of guilt as the necessary supplement to subjection to the law conceals what Beloved uncovers.

We will recall that in the fourth chapter of Totem and Taboo, after reviewing a great deal of late 19th- and early 20th-century anthropological literature Freud himself indulges in the creation of what appears to be an anthropological fantasy As is well known he tells the story of ‘‘a., criminal deed which was the beginning of so many things: of social organization of moral restrictions and of religion” (SE XIII, p.

For Freud of course this is not simply an anthropological fantasy; neither is it a story whose historical status could be traced nor it could be the historical veracity of Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s ‘‘states of nature’’ any more In his recounting of this mythic crime which ‘‘the beginning of society and the sense of guilt,’’ Freud is attempting to account for the social institution of that which on the level of the individual subject he will later term the superego (SE XII) p. 150) In a sense then this too is a political fable but perhaps we are better off representing it as a fable that articulate the linkage between the political and the ethical. The founding of society is articulated with the constitution of subjects through the installation of a sense of moral guilt No longer held in thrall and terror by the violence of the all-powerful patriarch the brothers complete their transition from primal horde to social body through the internalization of prohibition rendering the primal father as an abstract figure of the law Joan Copjec (1996, p.

The story of the horde of brothers and their murder of their father operates in Freud’s text from 1913 on as a sort of primal scene of psychoanalysis Freud recurs to it implicitly and explicitly as he develops his ‘‘social theory’’ texts Richard Boothby [1991 ₽· 165] perhaps understates the case saying that the story ‘‘exerted an enduring hold on Freud’s imagination;’’ in fact, with the Oedipus frequently seen as the individual version of this broader socio-cultural narrative it is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory positing the universal origins of human sociality in a burst of violence that is thereafter only thinly restrained through the internalization of a repressive apparatus Yet, it becomes clear that there are some substantial differences between Freud’s Oedipal narrative and the Darwinian myth retailed in Totem and Taboo and the major difference that should concern us here is in the matter of guilt

Charles Shepherdson offers an insightful Lacanian gloss on the distinctly different logics that seem to operate in the Oedipus and in Totem respectively He notes that in the Oedipus guilt would seemingly attach to the individual who disobeys the injunction against incest whereas in Totem and Taboo, ‘‘it is precisely the reverse: the renunciation of incest has the surplus effect of producing guilt - as if the very subjects who follow the law are thereby guilty’’ (2000, p. 144) The horde of brothers experience guilt in the aftermath of killing the primal father; doing away with a figure depicted as all-consuming and violent results not in relief but in ambivalence And in this ambivalence the figure of the primal father is retained connected inextricably to a form of guilt that functions as a supplement to adherence to the law This is a distinctly different reading of the figure of the father than is found in the Oedipus where the paternal figure functions symbolically to prohibit incest and bring the child into world of language and mediation - signaled in most readings as the capacity to substitute other women for the maternal figure and it has consequences for an understanding of the role played by guilt In fact it demands that we resituate our understanding of guilt altogether

The Oedipus marks the installation of the version of the superego which is most commonly understood in terms of ‘‘conscience;” Freud tells us ‘‘the sense of guilt is the perception in the ego answering to the [superego’s] criticism” (1923/1991 p.

Shepherdson notes that whereas the oedipal narrative relegates ‘‘inces­tuous jouissance’’ to the realm of the preoedipal, marking it as that which is resolutely opposed by the intervention of the paternal Totem and Taboo ‘‘presents us with a relation in which the very constitution of desire produces a pathological surplus effect a dimension of jouissance that takes the form of guilt it is no longer a matter of going beyond a supposedly infantile sexuality in the name of a mature and civilizing law but of a contradiction internal to the law itself” (2000, p. 146) Totem and Taboo, in this reading becomes a parable indeed of the simultaneous beginning of the social order and the sense of guilt as Freud indicates; but in a way that permits us to see more clearly what Zizek means when he speaks of ‘‘the obscene underside of the law,’’ a shadowy zone of violence that coexists with nominal order and restriction the continued existence of the violent primal father in the dead father of the psychic law It also permits us to further clarify what Zizek means by the ethical act: by this act, the subject moves entirely outside the realm of the superego’s demands performatively underlining as Lacan (1992, p.

Here we will note some parallels and disjunctions between Beloved's depiction of sexual violence and Freud’s 1913 narrative which open a space for rethinking not only Sethe’s act not simply as the expression of one woman’s existential freedom but as something that occurs within a socio- symbolic order where opening a free space for her action means murdering her child her future To return to Totem, for a moment, then: Could we say that Freud himself is repressing something in his production of this narrative? The violent primal father is envied because of his possession of all of the horde’s women who are later distributed judiciously amongst the penitent brothers in order to forestall future violence: ‘‘Each of them would have wished like his father to have all the women to himself” (SE, XIII, p. 144) Yet these women barely appear alluded to only as objects of ravishment or later exchange In addition to the other aspects of Totem and Taboo signalled earlier it is arguably a story in which violence is predominantly articulated in sexual terms but in which the objects of that violence are excluded from active participation. Perhaps we can put it another way: that in this story sexual violence remains outside of representation to the extent that it is the incitement to the murderous act that founds the law That is as long as there is no law but that of the anal father there is no way of representing what we would term sexual violence except through elision Yet as our reading of Totem suggests the temporal coordinates of this narrative are neither historical or developmental; Totem represents a structure: ‘‘With its ‘aboriginal’ research into ‘prehistory’ Totem and Taboo would seem to isolate with greater theoretical rigor the difference between developmental time and the temporality of the subject’’ (Shepherdson, 2000, p.

In Beloved, sexual violence is refused with the elision associated with it in other texts but precisely through a delineation of the conditions under which it comes to be representable Sethe’s rememory marks it not as experience that is as Cathy Caruth (1996) has described the traumatic as yet unclaimed; but signifies its historicity precisely in the sense that it is excluded from the official histories and yet enabling of them For Sethe’s assault in the barn is not the only sexual assault of white men on slave women in the novel. Allusions to such assaults are repeated through the narrative for instance in the case of Stamp Paid’s companion Vashti, and that of Ella whose ‘‘puberty was spent in a house where she was shared by a father and son whom she called ‘the lowest yet” (1988, p. 256) The sexualized abuse of black women at the hands of white men is pervasive; but what happened to Sethe in the barn underlines its symbolic and its cultural force

The scene of sexual assault in the barn epitomizes Sethe’s experiences at the plantation ‘‘Sweet Home’’. It is the ‘‘picture., there for you waiting for you.” At times ‘‘the picture of the men coming to nurse her’’ is ‘‘lifeless’’ equated with the network of scars on her back which are always there, but which she never looks a) marking and figuring at once the memory she tries to keep at bay but cannot At other times as when Paul D tells her why her husband Halle failed to show up at the appointed place on the night of their planned escape from Sweet Home she ‘‘is full Goddamn it of two boys with mossy teeth one sucking on my breast while the other holding me down their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up’’ (1988, p. 70) For when Sethe at last learns what is known of Halle’s fate it turns out that he had witnessed the assault on his wife from the barn loft; having witnessed it, he went mad Thus this violence - simultaneously literalizing and figuring the destruction of the family under the system of slavery - is not quite an event without a witness; the figure of Halle here witnessing the assault on the mother of his children and going mad evokes Giorgio Agamben’s argument that there are events so thoroughly witnessed that there is no one left to symbolize them (Agamben 1999) ⁸

The resonance we can perceive between Morrison’s text and Freud’s are thus complex On several levels Morrison’s narrative brings out the underside of Freud’s story of the birth of society out of the sense of guilt We could in fact, say that the novel ironizes the psychoanalytic framework; yet such irony constitutes not so much a refutation but a supplement to the Freudian narrative It is a supplement that indeed operates to challenge Freud’s narrative in its claims to universality Exposing what Freud’s text conceals Beloved suggests that Totem’s claims for universal applicability can only succeed by virtue of what they exclude Its depiction of the violence exercised over the bodies of African women as intrinsic to the psychic and social laws governing the system of slavery illuminates the ‘‘contradiction internal to the law itself’’ in effect the intricate operation of the law’s own violence We could say that the novel relocates that violence to specific instances of the mediation of the psychic by the social to the patriarchalist plantation culture of the nineteenth-century south to the legal framework that upheld slavery especially the Fugitive Slave Law and to the larger discourse of 19th-century ‘‘race science.”

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