This crisis found its most aggravated expression in the fate of Daniel Paul Schreber whose memoirs were analyzed by Freud: Schreber fell into psychotic delirium at the very moment when he was to assume the position of a judge, i.e. a function of public symbolic authority: he was not able to come to terms with this stain of obscenity as the integral part of the functioning of symbolic authority. The crisis thus breaks out when the obscene, joyful underside of the paternal authority becomes visible -- and is not Alberich the paradigmatic case of the obscene ludic father on account of which Schreber failed in his investiture? The most disturbing scene of the entire Ring, the mother of all Wagnerian scenes, Wagner at his best, is probably the dialogue between Alberich and Hagen at the beginning of the Act II of The Twilight of Gods: Wagner put a tremendous amount of work in it and considered it one of his greatest achievements. According to Wagners own stage indications, throughout this scene, Hagen must act as if asleep: Alberich is not effectively there, as a part of everyday reality, he is rather an undead who appears as Hagens Alptraum, nightmare or, literally, elf-dream (another occasion which would fully justify the procedure of staging part of the action as the delirious delusion of one of the stage persons). We all know the classical Freudian dream in which the dead son appears to his father, addressing him with a horrifying reproach Father, cant you see Im burning? -- what we have in this scene from The Twilight of Gods is a father appearing to his son, addressing him with My son, cant you see Im burning? -- burning with obscene enjoyment underlying his overwhelming passion to take revenge. When confronted with such a figure of a humiliated, ludic, tragi-comical dwarf of a father, what can the subject do but assume an attitude of shuddering coldness which contrasts clearly with fathers overexcited agitation -- it is here, in the figure of Hagen, that we have to look for the genesis of the so-called totalitarian subject. That is to say, far from involving a repressive symbolic authority, the totalitarian subject rather emerges as a reaction to the paternal authority gone awry, run amok: a humiliated father, a father transformed into the obscene figure of ludic enjoyment, is the SYMPTOM of the totalitarian subject. -- How, then, are we to resolve this deadlock of legal power which participates at what it officially prohibits, i.e. at illegitimate violence? The deadlock of property which is in itself, in its very notion, a theft, of contract which is in itself a fraud? Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, Operas Second Death, Routledge, 2001.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:01:52 +0000
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