Dinosaurs Come at Christmas

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”
Isaac 53:7

“The greatest part of our being is unknown to us. . . . We have a phantom of the “ego” in our heads, which determines us many times over.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Nachlass)

“On Saturday, August 10, 2019, at approximately 6:30 a.m., inmate Jeffrey Edward Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell in the Special Housing Unit from an apparent suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York, New York. Life-saving measures were initiated immediately by responding staff. Staff requested emergency medical services (EMS) and life-saving efforts continued. Mr. Epstein was transported by EMS to a local hospital for treatment of life-threatening injuries, and subsequently pronounced dead by hospital staff. “
Federal Bureau of Prisons (NY Times)

Epstein owned a historically significant bit of NY architecture in his East 71st street townhouse. Designed by Horace Trumbauer the property has gone through numerous incarnations. But this is pricey real estate; the Frick is just down the street and St James Church close by. The owner before Eptstein was his mentor Leslie Wexner, an investor from Dayton, Ohio and CEO of Victoria’s Secret, among other ventures. Wexner is accused of sex with underage girls. And he apparently gave (!!) the townhouse to Epstein.

This is the template, then. By the way, Bill Cosby lived on East 71st Street, too, around those same years.

The decor was described by Town & Country magazine : “Guests describe chairs upholstered in leopard print, a twice life-sized sculpture of a naked African warrior, and a framed picture of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a lion skin. In addition to photographs of pals like Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the Times reported a “life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier.”

Aesthetics matter.

The scene, and I remember some of this though I was not at all part of it, is described well by Virginia Grigoriadis: “Beautiful women also had currency in the city’s “models and bottles” scene, as the post-9/11 era of downtown nightlife was called. Manhattan’s legendary club scene of hip-hop stars, painters, and graffiti artists, where one gained entrée by virtue of one’s art rather than the size of one’s wallet, was going capitalist. A new nightclub formula had been devised: Ice buckets of Cristal and Cîroc bottles were set up at leather banquettes, alongside every kind of model—Victoria’s Secret model, runway model, supermodel, “just-off-the-boat model”—and if you were a rich older guy who wanted to take a seat, it could cost up to $10,000, though Puffy and Leo didn’t pay a thing.”
(Vanity Fair, Oct 2019)

I had left NY for good in the late 80s, but I did return to do several plays in the nineties. But that weird model scene was nothing I found interesting, and it was driven by Wall Street guys and I never could stand to be around them. Grigoriadis describing Epstein…

“He spent most of the day on speakerphone, and he liked them to listen in, rolling calls from financiers to heads of state. He did not drink or take drugs or smoke, and he didn’t like to be around people who did. He practiced Iyengar yoga. He showered many times a day. He abhorred restaurants and ate whole grains, proteins, and leafy greens 30 years before the rest of America.”

Whole grains, check, obsessive showering, check, and leopard print chairs, check.

“ The whole process of scandal developing to a breaking point is an unconscious one. Girard calls the identification and lynching of a victim the “single victim mechanism.” This mechanism or operation is the community’s unconscious way of converging upon someone it blames for its troubles. When this happens, the community actually believes the accusation it makes against the unfortunate person. One way to put this, in the language of the Bible, especially the Gospels, is that this entire single victim process is the work of Satan. Indeed, it is Satan.”
James G. Williamson (Introduction to I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Rene Girard)

The other current procurer and exploiter and celebrity extortionist is Sean Combs, aka P Diddy, aka Puff Daddy. And I sense a link between Epstein and Combs. Epstein’s was a white world. Almost exclusively. Combs was a black(ish) world. But Combs black-ish world was hugely mediated by white capital. And by white cultural influences. Combs story is set against the backdrop of whiteness.

“The Bible recognizes this in the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain murders his brother, God bans him from the soil, making him a wanderer on the earth, and God puts a mark on him, a sign to protect him from suffering what he made Abel suffer. Then Cain builds the first city, and so civilization begins. The story in Genesis 4 tells us, in effect, that the sign of Cain is the sign of civilization. The cross of Christ is the sign of salvation, which is revealed as the overcoming of mimetic desire and violence through the nonviolence of love and forgiveness.”
James G. Williamson (Ibid)

So again, the figure of the exile looms so hugely in all societies. Or call it civilization. The sublimation of mimetic desire and in theory violence. Except civilization remains stunningly violent. Contemporary Israel is the most violent and fanatical country perhaps in history.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. I think there is a fundamental error in Girard. It is perhaps not important but its certainly worth noting. In the Gospels, Jesus speaks of a ‘Kingdom of God’, a place without power and privilege (communism essentially, which is how Pasolini saw it).

“The first will be last. Blessed are the meek, says Jesus, those who renounce retaliation and serve the heavenly Father who makes his sun rise on those accounted “good” and those considered “bad.” God the Father takes care of all his creatures. Like a good shepherd he seeks even a single sheep that is lost.”
James G. Williamson (Ibid)

And Williamson rightly notes Nietzsche at this point. For Nietzsche misread the Gospels, too. For he saw in Jesus the origin of a new slave morality. And this says more about Nietzsche than it does about Jesus. The good shepherd seeks the lost lamb even if he knows its a shitty lamb, a weak lamb, a stupid lamb. For that is what equality means. The shepherd is smart enough to know who is weak and who is smart or strong. But he must find and protect all of his flock. And THAT is what threatened Rome. That sense of equality, which was being secularized. And it is true, of course, that this distinction, once lost, once conflated, leads to a form of wokeness. (sic). To deny the lost lamb (or any other) is weak and dumb is to deny reality and that is never a good thing.

“A parable is, first, a similitude. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?” (Mark 4:30): here the word for parable — parabole — could as well be translated “comparison,” and sometimes is. It means a placing of one thing beside another; in classical Greek it means “comparison” or “illustration” or “analogy.” But in the Greek Bible it is equivalent to Hebrew mashal, which means “riddle” or “dark saying,” but I gather it can extend its range to include “exemplary tale.” Sometimes the Greek word is also used to translate hidden meaning, “riddle.”
Krank Kermode (Genesis of Secrecy)

When Jesus was asked to explain what parables were, he said they were stories to be told to those ‘without’. Or outsiders, and that were to conceal a mystery. A secret or the solution of a mystery known only by the insiders (disciples).

“You shall not covet the house of your neighbor. You shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything that belongs to him. “
Exod. 20:17

The last of the commandments and as Girard notes, the only one about desire. Now there is an interesting aspect to the Epstein and Diddy stories. Men who held secrets, secret information. Information highly damaging to the those involved. The secret keeper (extortionist) can never live to the end of the story. Even benign secret keepers, therapists for example, rarely know how the story ends. Many therapists will tell you that patients who confess early in therapy often stop coming. The therapists role, then, is to be confessed to. The extortionist however arrives at a place where even those who employ him (if such is the case and it usually is, I think) cannot afford to allow this information to exist.

“And yet, despite these similarities, important differences will also have to be signaled. Modernists writing roughly from the 1870s to the 1940s are shaped by the experience of major technical innovations, increasing urbanization, colonial expansions, the
diffusion of mass media, not to speak of globalized wars based on fascist forms of collective psychology that subjugate not only individual bodies but also the entire body politic. These historical experiences shake the psychic, ethical, political, religious, and metaphysical foundations of the Western world. It is thus not surprising that significant shift s of emphasis appear in the modernist brand of mimetic theory I set out to unearth. For instance, unprecedented forms of sacrificial violence are indeed enacted in the modern period. And yet these massive outbreaks of violence do not offer cathartic resolutions to the horrors of mimesis. On the contrary, they seem to spread contagiously, generating more violence. Moreover, the problematic of desire, and the rivalries that ensue, continues to be part of modernist preoccupations; but the focus is less on mimetic desire as such than on a mimetic loss of the ego instead.”
Nidesh Lawtoo (The Phantom Ego; Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious)

This segues somewhat to theatre, again. And to infant mimesis. Acting is probably as much about listening as it is speaking. But listening is more difficult on stage. It is very difficult NOT to indicate listening (rather than actual listening). But one thing Girard observed was how many 19th century novelists wrote of looking at someone else’s eyes to read their thoughts. He was largely thinking of Proust, but there are a dozen other examples. And of course infants do this. Infants intuit, or deduce the intentions of their mother, and often her desire. Actors do this without ever thinking in terms of desire. Not consciously anyway (why so many actors have affairs with other actors).

“We do the same thing. Meltzoff explains: “A mother looks at something. A baby takes that as a signal that the mother desires the object, or is at least paying attention to it because it must be important. The baby looks at the mother’s face, then at the object. She tries to understand the relationship between her mother and the object.” It’s not long before a baby can follow not just her mother’s eyes but even the intentions behind her actions.”
Luke Burgis (Wanting; the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life)

Babies are born imitating. Mimesis is foundational to our psyche and this is one area Freud was wrong. And in fact it seems to me many philosophers are limited in their understanding of child development. And there was a scene recently in a somewhat formulaic crime show, Dark Winds (based on Tony Hillerman’s Navajo tribal cop books). The point was a young Navajo boy was waiting to be taken to his mother, who he had not seen in a while. A tribal Navajo cop sits with him. They chat. The boy asks about the cop’s clans. The cop shrugs and the boy says, ‘how do you know who you are?’- The cop then lists the clans (Water’s Edge, Mud clan, Towering House clan, etc). At the end the boy says ‘ hey , we’re related. In fact I’m your father’. The mother arrives and end scene. It speaks to just how totally eviscerated the western idea of family has become. The boy knows he is not ‘really’ the cops father. But spiritually he is. In terms of our ancestors he is. The cop knows this, too. Only western Christian time does not.

There is a deeper truth in this bit of genre TV, for just the ideas of clans or extended families registers as alien, as foreign. And so severe have been the erosion of family, both ideologically, and practically, in North America and obviously, particularly, in the U.S., that children are being born into pseudo families. And their mimetic instincts are there, but its like rowing in sand.

From such barren pre-linguistic nursery moonscapes come people like Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs (and Joe Biden and Gavin Newsome et al). One can sense the nearly forgotten missed maternal gaze on young Jeffrey. Was his Hebephilia the reproduction of something imitative? Epstein once said, or it was said of him, that he lost interest once their braces came off.

Now Nidesh Lawtoo while interesting as a commentator on Girardian ideas of mimesis is also very problematic. And this touches on some of the problems with Girard.

“…the experience of mimesis, in its polymorphous manifestations, informs the subject from the very beginning, and that it is through such bodily, affective relations, where imitation plays a decisive role, that the ego is born as a relational, communicative being. Their intuition that the ego is formed by the other, through the other, in a relation of unconscious communication with the other, is theoretically ahead of their times and testifies to the modernity and relevance of their approach.”
Nidesh Lawtoo (Ibid)

The problem is that term ‘affective relations’. Relations between what? The infant as mimetic I believe is true. But the ego is not formed ‘by’ the other. It is formed, in part, through the other. The infant is a material reality. The psyche is unformed but it is still in a relation with another, which may or may not yet be formed in some way. Imitation, the mimetic engagement of the infant is still a part of an ur-narrative that belongs to that infant, who is also simultaneously reproducing the narrative of his or her species. And it is worth a side bar note here because I looked up ‘gendered mimesis’…and ran into Lawtoo and a panel discussion (online) that is just hopeless academic jargon and rather stunningly insipid. But the idea of male or female mimesis is, I think, worth investigating.

Raymond Klassen is an interesting writer (and musician) and has an interesting blog. He grew up in a Canadian Mennonite Brethren Community, and had six older brothers. After his youth with the Mennonites….“Since then, I have been intimately involved with Catholic, Anglican, Church of Christ, and Christian Reformed congregations. The tendency in all of these communities is that the members are so immersed in the communal lives of these congregations, that individuals rarely “extract” themselves, as much as “time alone with God” is mentioned in these places. The individuals stay socially embedded, and the process of mimesis has an overpowering effect on the individuals. Individuals in these communities are overwhelmed by the sheer social power of mimetic desire. They rarely, if at all, get themselves to a place of recollection, of listening.” (Ideals and Identities, Sept 2023)

This is particularly interesting in the context of his observations on Peter Thiel…

“Peter Thiel, the famed libertarian venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, was a disciple of mimetic theory, and in turn, Rene Girard. He leveraged the insights of Girard and picked companies that capitalized on mimetic desire to invest in, including Pay Pal and Facebook. The danger that Thiel personifies is that mimetic desire can be easily manipulated and profited from if one happens to be in the right position to do so. Thiel is listed as one of Forbes top tech investors and richest people in the world. And many would argue he is also a model for one of the darkest forms of mass social disempowerment of individuals because he has contributed to great social manipulation.” (Ibid)

Well, ok, but one could just say ‘desire’. Propaganda works on people in various ways. Still, Girard is also correct about a good deal, I think. Cynthia Haven wrote…“Girard wrote that human behavior is driven by imitation. We are, after all, social creatures. We want what others want. Desire therefore is not individual but social. Others have colonized our desire long before we know we have it. “All desire is a desire for being,” René said, and it is one of my favorite statements from him. We long for what we lack, and what we lack we imagine in others. The pursuit of the desired object is thus a metaphysical quest to fill a hole within ourselves, because we glorify and idealize the “other.” So we attempt to imitate them. We want what they want because we hope to acquire their being—believing that if we get the same lover or spouse, the same job, drive the same car or read the same novel, we will somehow acquire their admired essence. It is the relationship of a relic to a saint, as Girard wrote.
(Church Life Journal, Dec 2019)

This is right, but its reductive, finally. It is not ‘just’ wanting what others have. Or others are. It is also a massive number of others things entangled in our death drive, our Oedipal complex, and in our capitalist environment. Mimesis is not unaffected by the society in which it takes place.

Speaking of society, and of Jeff Epstein, I think perhaps the strangest and most revealing (of society if not Epstein) is this interview with Stuart Pivar at Mother Jones.

https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-my-very-very-sick-pal/

Pivar emerges as such a monumental asshole that I would imagine more than a couple minutes in his company would send one screaming out into the night and into oncoming traffic. But I know that voice, I remember it from New York, in fact, back during my 70s period. Parties at the Factory, at Max’s Kansas City (the back room) and at innumerable gallery shows and openings. The desire in the room was for money. Not for ‘pussy’ as Epstein liked to put it, apparently. But money. Because money was the royal road TO pussy. Those Wall Street traders and hedge fund guys, nearly everyone of them physically repulsive, in one way or another, and nerdy and always bright but never actually smart — those guys were what kept escort services afloat. Their patronage of escort services was at a level, if my perception means anything here, that is unimaginable. The Pivar interview gives on a feeling of the banality of Epstein. The same banality you get from most Wall Street guys, too. The banality and insecurity (and Zionist superiority complex) of Ghislain Maxwell, too. The banality of the Epstein circle. He was not a brilliant pianist. He could play. Maybe he could have gotten a job at as a hotel lobby pianist. Maybe. He was teaching math at the Dalton school when he was twenty. And from all accounts Epstein was a decent if not actually good tutor. As a teacher he was, as one former Dalton student put it, ‘known as an easy A’. And once Donald Barr left the school (Barr had hired Epstein despite his lack of degree) the new dean dismissed him. Other faculty had complained he was a very poor teacher, in fact. But he did do ok at communicating the basics of geometry and algerbra, in one on one settings — and this was ‘that’ side of him. His Brooklyn Jewish accent (gated but middle class community background on Coney Island) was noticeable, and he personified that smart-ish social climbing Jewish kid who everyone recognizes. Epstein cultivated ‘one to one’ dynamics. Good tutor, bad teacher. Many described him as a good listener but he wasn’t really because his was a rapacious listening. He listened for clues, a vulturine like digesting of signs. Men like Epstein consume conversation, they are scavangers, hyenas and crows and Komodo Dragons that eat the conversation like carrion. This is my sense of men like Epstein. Maybe this is a quality found in all sociopaths.

Now Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert was a Mossad agent. And a very wealthy man. His daughter was father fixated. Epstein was a stand in for Daddy. And so whatever the proximity of Mossad to Epstein, and it might have been direct, its clear Epstein was running an extortion racket (honey trap). Mossad is big on honey traps. And so Epstein got rich, bought an island and flew his private jet dubbed Air Lolita. His island was the Isle of Babes, or Little St Jeff’s. And one suspects Epstein (and Ghislaine and Mossad) have a LOT of tapes. A lot of videos. Which means today Mossad has those tapes. As for Diddy; his was the Hollywood and music industry side of the Epstein dynamic. Born in Harlem, 1969. Attended Howard University (like Kamala) and then interned at Uptown Records. This is his official bio. But Diddy is missing the Mossad dimension, although perhaps not. His ties to Obama reeks of CIA/Mossad. So probably, like Epstein, Diddy was a lower level extortionist for state agencies. But the unpacking of rap music and white capital will have to wait for another post.

“…Girard throws light on the deep-seated unity around a common fulcrum: the revelation of the mimetic character of desire, of the systematic presence of a Mediator through which it is possible to have access to the object. Desire is a triangle: every straight line which links man to his own objects is a lie which hides the presence of the Other, the Mediator which gives meaning and value to that towards which men turn in order to desire.”
Maurizio Meloni (A Triangle of Thoughts, European Journal of Psychoanalysis)

Meloni sees Girard as wanting to keep the Freudian template but without the Oedipal narrative and without parricide, and without ambivalence. Though actually, Girard is basically a Freudian, in the same way Lacan was a Freudian. Both saw themselves as correctives to key Freudian theories. Now it is easier to see mimetic attachment to the Mother than it is to explain ambivalence to the Father as a stage in mimetic rivalry. The obstacle becomes the rival. The problem for Girard is that he loses the allegorical aspect (see Ferenczi) that is recapitulating the historical narrative of our selves. Girard is not interested in that.

“In describing a typical group phenomenon based on mimetic fascination, Freud says: We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance (…) originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object. The roots of sociality are to be found in this magic which turns hostility into a mutual agreement. The collective sentiment is born as a reactive formation against hatred: “What appears later on in society in the shape of Gemeingeist, esprit de corps, group spirit, etc., does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy.” Freud uses a particular term to describe this sudden turn-around in interdividual relations, the overwhelming way in which discord becomes concord: Umwendung [reversal]-that term signifies that which Girard, half a century later, will call the Sacred. Thus social feeling is based upon the reversal (Umwendung) of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification (…) This reversal seems to occur under the influence of a common affectionate tie with a person outside the group. Here the two viewpoints coincide as nowhere else: the violent resolution against the surrogate victim founds the Girardian society by making the astounding passage from mimetic disorder to sacrificial order. Analogously in Freud, the horizontal relations of tenderness–already the product of the inversion of the original hostility–become cemented into a social bond by means of the identification with the other who is extraneous to the group, with that leader of the group, who is the successor of the murdered father of the horde. We might say that also the leader of the group rises up in the same place as the surrogate victim. Talking of the girls around the pianist, Freud tells us that they have now renounced tearing each other’s hair; by means of a genuine sacrificial rite “they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions” and “would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks”. This is a gesture of supreme ambivalence, bordering on a totemic meal. But beyond a certain threshold of proximity, the distance between the two paradigms reappears: society for Freud repeats the intra-familiar rivalries, while for Girard the family is a crystallized precipitate of society. “
Maurizio Meloni (Ibid)

This is very dense and following this paragraph Meloni introduces Lacan’s reading of Freud. But in terms of the figure of the *Hyper Fixer*, the Epstein/Diddy figure, it is highly illuminating.

“In the “On Narcissism” essay, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that Freud sought to remove the rivalry—the mimetic truth of desire—in the development of his thought and that the actual rivalry between he and Jung formed an ‘other scene’ by which this evasion of mimetic desire took place for Freud. For Freud, the delusion of grandeur in narcissism is “not a return to the original solitude of a monad walled in upon itself.” This means that when I desire an object, I desire myself in it. To realize myself, in Freud’s estimation, I must resemble myself. The myth of narcissus is what adds the German word selbst (self) to Freud’s lexicon, which by implication means that the ego is always already homosexual, i.e., the first other is always first myself.”
Daniel Tutt (Notes Towards a Critique of Girardian Mimetic Desire Theory)

And this is, in a sense, part of what is missing in Girard. The first other is always myself. And Jung’s role in Freud’s thinking was clearly Girardian. The first other is myself does not preclude a later rivalry that reproduces something archaic. The otherness in me (per Tutt) is found in the ‘other’, and here this otherness is predicated on desire.

“In Borch-Jacobsen’s view, which he shares with René Girard, there is no “mimetic I” that precedes an identification we have with other persons. It is only through identification itself that the subject comes into being.[v] If desire is mimetic and rivalrous, this means that desire itself is what seeks to replace the other and it is the process of identification that brings the subject into being. Desire as such does not exist until it is staged or presented to the subject to be desired.”
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

This is a clearer version of Lawtoo’s statement, but its still incomplete. I say that because I am not sure replacing the other is what is going on here. Desire does not exist until it is staged….absolutely true. But this stage, this foundational psychic space that is the ‘scene of the crime’ is not a product of desire, but rather the theatre of desire. The subject (or Ego even) is theatre director, theatre owner (!) and the leading actor. The Other is offstage anyway.

Girard sees desire as wanting to replace the other. This in opposition to the idea of ‘having’ the other. But I think is not quite right. The idea of having, which implies sexual consumption somehow, is indeed probably incorrect. At this level anyway. But I don’t quite accept the replacement idea. Desiring to ‘be’ the other necessitates we explore what ‘be’ means in this context. And here one enters social theory itself. But Tutt is excellent in his analysis of Girard:

“… As Gillian Rose once said of Girard in the Broken Middle, “all desire is mobilized in the service of nothingness, from which only the novelist or the member of the group, gives up being an eternal victim and gives up seeing his beloved as a monstrous divinity.” Girard’s mimetic desire theory stands as a Gnostic rebuttal to Freud, and the Gnosticism in Girard argues there remains no mystery prior to the rivalrous identification. Direct knowledge of this rivalrous scandal has been made apparent. But the problem with this banal Gnosticism resides in the fact that Girard effectively sees the “scapegoat victim” in every social process of identification. The Girardian now possesses a transparent capacity to treat the crisis of the double bind and to locate and restore a “common direction for all” as well as to “explain myths of origin.”
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

and then to continue on to the social:

“an examination of how the era of neoliberal capitalism (1973–present) has exhausted the superego rooted in the transmission of ego ideals of the family. We then argued these dynamics have given rise to a “social superego” that does not operate on a function of binding and release from fgures of authority, and that it stunts subjects’ capacities to more adequately work-through that binding and promote autonomy and release. This process leads to the crisis of initiation. { } the neoliberal order has moved to a new stage of enforcement, a more reactionary stage that William Davies (2016) calls “punitive neoliberalism”. Neoliberalism was founded in its earliest iteration in the 1970s as an explicitly political contestation between the ruling class against socialist and labor union power; therefore, neoliberalism must be understood as a political movement that successfully enacted a series of policy overhauls that aimed to elevate the market as the primary vector of selfmaking and self-discipline. But this dream was not normalized until 1989, and the rise of the policy victory of the neoliberal order soon began to sediment into the fabric of social life throughout the 1990s. What Davies points out is the way the early period of neoliberalism from 1979 to 1989 was a period marked by a “combative” and explicitly political and anti socialist form of politics.”
Daniel Tutt (Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family)

Tutt notes that this punitive neoliberalism punishes the most vulnerable but then finds cause to punish them further. Today this seems highly prescient. The issue with the Oedipal narrative, is that advanced capitalism precludes its being worked through. Even in partial ways. Of course there is a darker aspect to it:

“We are suggesting that there is a general tendency for subjects to struggle to work-through parental dynamics, which is not necessarily the fault of the family, but should be understood as the result of the socialized family adopted by and enshrined in institutions. The family merely becomes the elementary model for the Oedipal structure that is transferred to institutions, and by Oedipal we mean that institutions, from wage labor jobs to colleges,forge relations of familial dependence and require submission to all sorts of hierarchies of order that reflect the family order.”
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

I have written of a lost patriarchy. Or an incomplete Oedipal drama. On a societal level.

“But as Lacan observes in the shift in the authority of the father in the modern period—a shift that was toward a more debased function of the father— this change altered the paternal function and changed the way ego ideals function in the wider society. This change in paternal authority also modifed the functioning of the ego ideal, resulting in two possible effects: ‘possible political catastrophes’ and ‘generalized psychopathological effects’. The “possible political catastrophes” are no longer merely possible, but seem to appear all around us, from the persistence of neofascist movements within the heart of Western European and even within mainstream parliamentary political parties, to structural inequality, and heightened racism. Such a situation of political catastrophe after catastrophe calls for a thinking-through of the ur-father who haunts the collective. A social order that cannot work-through authority fgures will invent monstrous figures of authority in the face of this impossibility, or it will tend to witness political upheaval after upheaval.
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

Patriarchy is misinterpreted by liberal sensibilities. Tutt quotes Lacan who observed Oedipus remains a problem for which a complete solution was never found. This was the message, in Jungian terms, of Bly’s Sibling Society. The decline of patriarchal authority at a time of growing feminist critique has led to a confusion in much leftist thinking, a thinking that came to reject much of Freud anyway. But which seemed in thrawl to an instrumental logic mistaking that logic for a very sober materialism. This was that vulgar Marxism that somehow suited community centers in American suburbia. But it is important to understand not just the exchange principle, but also the repercussions of an interrupted Oedipal narrative.

“The contemporary family is split in its composition. It is founded on a disciplinary class system tasked with reproducing an unjust social order and simultaneously possessing the trappings of collective demands of liberation and freedom. Many feminist writers commenting on the rise of the neoliberal era were writing when the social order was experiencing a decline in patriarchy and a general opening of subjective freedom. We track this complex split between the decline of patriarchal authority and the supposed decline of Oedipus as concurrent with this new, hypersocialized family thrown into the cycles of capitalist accumulation.”
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

In 1955 Adorno wrote a short essay (barely known it seems) on the family. This was the time when Adorno had returned to Germany and was becoming increasingly disillusioned. He had been back in Germany for a little over five years.

“The concept of the individual in the sense with which we are familiar can hardly be separated from that of the family. But the crisis of the individual today, the replacement of his autonomy by the adaptation to collectives, does not leave the family untouched. There is a contradiction between the type of human that is spreading today and the form of the family. The American mother cult, called “momism” by Philip Wylie, signifies not so much the breakthrough of primordial family forces as a questionable reaction formation to the experience of decaying family relations, which only just recently erected its puny monument on mother-day. Conventional exaggeration and emotional coldness correspond to each other. Like all forms of mediation between the biological individual, the atomic individual, and the integral society, the family is also deprived of its substance by the latter, similar to the economic sphere of circulation, or the category of education, which is deeply connected to the family. As a category of mediation, which in truth, even if without being aware of it, often only brought about the business of the entire totality, the family, apart from its eminent function, always had something illusory about it. And bourgeois society as a whole remained skeptical against the family as an ideology, especially insofar as it made social demands on the individual that seemed arbitrary and unreasonable from the individual’s point of view. This skepticism first found its social expression, however dull, in the youth movement. Today, the negation of the family gains the real upper hand. In fact, there is no longer the conflict between the powerful family and the no less powerful ego, but rather the gap between the two is equally small. Family is experienced less as a power of oppression then a residuum, a superfluous ingredient. It is no more feared than it is loved: not fought against, but forgotten and just tolerated by those who have neither reason nor strength to resist.”
Theodor Adorno (One the Problem of the Family)

Adorno adds: ” But the dynamics of society have not allowed the family, which is as immanent and cohesive to society as it is incompatible with it, to survive unchallenged. In Germany, at least since the first inflation and the accelerated expansion of women’s professional work, the family has reached its crisis. It is therefore wrong, as in a widely read American book, to blame the patriarchal German family structure for National Socialism. Not to mention the fundamental inadequacy of such psychological explanations, Hitler was by no means able to build on a firmly established tradition of family authority. In Germany in particular, taboos such as that of virginity, the legalization of cohabitation, and monogamy were probably much more thoroughly shaken after 1918 than in the Catholic-Romanesque countries and the Anglo-Saxon countries steeped in Puritanism and Irish Jansenism, perhaps because the memory of archaic promiscuity survived more stubbornly in Germany than in the thoroughly bourgeois Western world. In terms of a social psychology of the family, the Third Reich signifies an exaggerated substitute for a family authority that no longer exists, rather than one adhering to it. If the theory of Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” is correct, according to which the father imago can be transferred to secondary groups and their leaders, then the Hitlerian Reich offers the model of such transference, and the violence of authority as well as the need for it were virtually summoned by its absence in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. Hitler and modern dictatorships are indeed, to use the term of the psychoanalyst Paul Federn, the product of a ‘fatherless society’. How far, however, the transference of paternal authority to the collective changes the inner composition of authority; to what extent it still represents the father and not already what Orwell called the Big Brother, is open to question. In any case, it would be nonsensical to equate the crisis of the family with the dissolution of authority as such. Authority is becoming more and more abstract; but also more and more inhuman and inexorable. The gigantic, collectivized ego ideal is the satanic antithesis of a liberated ego.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

What is most interesting in the above is that the Third Reich stepped in as replacement for, really, an uncompleted Oedipal drama, a interrupted maturation of any kind in modern western society. For a receding Father. At least in one register. And yet again I am reminded of the Gramsci quote regarding morbid symptoms (or phenomena). The time before a new order arrives. And again, we are the people of the end, the departure. If early Neanderthals and very early Homo sapiens were at the dawn of some kind of awareness (John Berger said the people of arrival), we are at the end, the dimming of that awareness in preparation for something else.

“Comprehending the gobsmacking hugeness of deep archaeological time is much, much tougher.Handy mental tricks exist to bridge this gap between our mayfly existences and the abyss of time. Shrinking the universe’s 13.8 billion years to a single 12-month period puts the dinosaurs shockingly close to Christmas, while the earliest Homo sapiens arrive only a few minutes before New Year’s fireworks. But plotting time on that relatable scale doesn’t communicate the immense, yawning stretches of years. Surprising juxtapositions push it home a bit: for example, fewer years lie between Cleopatra’s reign and the moon landings than between her and the building of the Giza pyramids. That’s only the last few thousand years, whereas the Palaeolithic – the archaeological period before the last ice age – is even more mind-bending. Lascaux’s leaping bulls are closer in time to the photos on your phone than to the panels of horses and lions at Chauvet.”
Rebecca Wragg Sykes (Kindred)

Tutt quotes Catherine Malabou, who is referring to Heidegger but never mind, the point is the point

“What goes beyond the pleasure principle as the originary temporality is not the temporality of Dasein but the pure neutrality of inorganic matter. By pure neutrality, I mean a state of being which is neither life nor death but their very similarity.”
Catherine Malabou (Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

This reminds me of Peter Godfrey Smith’s book Metazoa. One cannot escape the scale of evolutionary ideas of the temporal. The book is about the origin of consciousness. Of sentience anyway.

“Animals of this kind are a product of the Cambrian, another pivotal time in the history of animal life. In the previous chapter we looked at the period just before it, the Ediacaran, the time of the first known animal fossils. This period took animals from flower-like stillness to crawling and burrowing. The Cambrian, beginning about 540 million years ago, seems to see a sudden shift, almost a rupture. Among its fossils are animals with hard parts, legs and shells, and conspicuous eyes. The pioneers were old relatives of that shrimp.{ } Environmental conditions had changed, with more oxygen available. The ocean chemistry was becoming more encouraging of animal life. But also, perhaps enabled by the oxygen but going beyond any merely chemical effect, a new regime began in evolution itself. Back in the Ediacaran, in the White Sea phase, we saw animals beginning to creep over surfaces and burrow a little way into the undersea swamp. We also saw the appearance of scavengers. An evolutionary pathway becomes visible, one that begins with moving slowly toward food, and then not so slowly, as others may get there first. ”
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Metazoa)

By the Cambrian there was animal *life*. Before that, in the Ediacaran, several millions of years earlier, there was something sort of like *life*. There was plant life, yes. But is soft coral sentient? Are plants sentient? The point here is that those combs and flatworms, and molluscs were there at the bottom of those ancient seas, doing whatever it was they did, for MILLIONS of years. They reproduced, ate, crawled a very short distance, and died. Over and over and over and over and over. I am always startled when I ponder this. So what is originary temporality? What is biological statis? I don’t know what these ideas mean at a certain point.

“At times Freud refers to the drives in mythical terms calling it “demonic” in the sense that a demon is a pure fgure of drive detached from the sexual drives. Freud writes, “the obscure anxiety of persons unfamiliar with analysis, who hesitate to awaken something they believe should be left asleep, is fundamentally a fear of the appearance of this demonic compulsion”. This compulsion is discoverable in the repetition of dreams, the spontaneous play of children and in war traumatized patients
in psychoanalysis.”
Daniel Tutt (Ibid)

I credit Tutt, too, for footnoting A.O.Scott’s NYTimes article The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.

“We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” But the antics of the comic man-boys were not merely repetitive; in their couch-bound humour we can detect the glimmers of something new, something that helped speed adulthood to its terminal crisis. Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavour (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys and other readily available symbols of settled male authority? That was only half the story, though. As before, the rebellious animus of the disaffected man-child was directed not just against male authority but also against women.”
A.O. Scott (The Death of Adulthood in American Culture)

Another symptom of the eroded family drama. Just as Jeff Epstein was, and Puff Daddy is. The death drive, said Freud, was the sadistic component in Eros. Epstein and Diddy were super Fixers. They kept secrets and the bill for this is death. That is the bargain the Devil makes. For He knows that power is like a cancer. It eventually eats you. Secrets, secret knowledge even, requires deep ritual structure to stop the metastasizing of those spiritual poisons that will eat your soul.

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