Oedipus

In Sophocles’ stories, God is always an extremely important object. He always appears as an inviolable figure. In the story of Oedipus, no matter how hard Oedipus and his own parents try, the prophecies of the gods are always fulfilled. This great burden is present in the form of fate. Oedipus comes to Tiresias to explain who is the contamination, and because Tiresias points out that Oedipus is the contamination, the two begin to quarrel over who is the “blind” (370-410). This reminds me of Lacan’s reference in a seminar of The Purloined Letter to three different kinds of people: “blind, seer and robber”; blind does not see, seer knows that blind does not see and pretends not to see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface. Blind can’t see, seer knows blind can’t see and pretends he can’t see, and robber sees what lies beneath the surface.

Rather, for the Oedipus story, fate, oracles, and so on participate in the writing of Oedipus’ tragedy in the form of a signifier. For Oedipus, his fate is precisely the process by which he becomes phallus. His blindness also means precisely that the floating signifier rules his nonconscious. Joel Dor mentions an example of compulsion in Chapter 16 of his book Clinical Lacan. A man fantasizes about being caressed by a female nurse in a hospital. And such compulsion is caused by the child’s being aware of his mother’s absence as a libido projection object of his mother at an early age. Rather, I think that the highly paradoxical notion of “fate” plays a paternal role in Oedipus’ story. It is not so much that Oedipus identifies with Laius as with the Oedipus of destiny, and his constant refusal to become the prophetic self in turn recognizes the decisive role of prophecy as the name of father. Nietzsche’s “god is dead” does not imply the corruption of order and morality, but rather that if order and morality are thought to exist for god, it proves that god is not dead. In other words, all of Oedipus’ resistance against fate and prophecy presupposes the recognition of the existence of prophecy. It is for this reason that prophecy cannot be resisted precisely because it presents itself in the compulsive rejection of Oedipus. phallus presents as absent. In this way, the name of the father manifests itself: the opposition to the father is precisely the desire for incest. is the agitation for the semiotic order. emphasizes its own importance, while making Oedipus constantly phallus. I have always had an aversion to our upcoming tests (and the various memorizations of “years and titles”), almost a compulsive rejection (or a manifestation of it). I didn’t like the format of the tests and had a hard time getting good grades on them. Admittedly this has to do with my trauma of not being able to get good grades as a poor student in middle school. Such a compulsive rejection makes it nearly impossible for me to properly memorize “pure”. As a result, it is extremely difficult to remember the name of a new friend, the spelling of a name, or the year of an event. I don’t think it’s that I lack the ability to do this, it’s just that my nonconscious stops me from doing it. This makes my symptoms manifest as a kind of fetishism for words, rather than a rejection of symbols, which is itself a manifestation similar to that of Oedipus. Just as Oedipus blinded himself with his mother Jocasta’s brooch after her death, he refuses to face trauma. He refuses to come to terms with trauma, with all the evil he has done. Yet this is what the university as an ideological machine must necessarily become, and this is why all university professors have to become phallus (knowledge). We have to enter into such a bizarre system of capital transactions in order to show that our own credits prove to be of such exploitative value in the midst of the domestication of capitalism. University discourse necessarily serves as an authority that makes all the constituents within its apparatus its agents. In the story of Oedipus, then, we can see that Oedipus tries to break the command of the superego, while the university discourse tries to maintain the command of the superego, to make the subject subservient to the authority of knowledge, and that Sphinx, as a kind of intellectual authority, is challenged to death by Oedipus. However, Oedipus instead becomes a monarch again. In this way, it would be better to say that even if Oedipus did not kill, he essentially challenged the semiotic order and then became some kind of order. he had to do that, it was his superego’s order. I have to recognize that Oedipus himself, as a character who opposes the semiotic order, is bound to fail. This has to do not only with the writing style of the Sophocles period but also precisely with the father’s taboo. Even if he does succeed in opposing his fate, fate is still present, as Nietzsche comments.