The legend of Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of destiny. Tragedy of destiny is the attempt of man to defy the will of gods. The moral of tragic destiny is that man is unable to defy the will of god and realize how powerless he truly is in relation to the divine.

            The legend begins with the king Laius being told from an oracle that his son Oedipus would murder him and marry Laius’ wife. Laius sends away his son in hopes to stop this prophecy. Many years pass and just as the prophecy of Oedipus had stated he would end up killing Laius and marrying his own mother Jocasta. Time passes again and the oracle tells Oedipus that he has murdered his father and married his mother. Oedipus disgusted with himself blinds himself and forsakes his home.

            The story of Oedipus Rex had a deep effect on the audience that other tragedy of destiny was not able to produce. This effect doesn’t come from the battle between man’s will and destiny. Instead the effect comes from our childhood desires that became oppressed as they grew up. The curse put on Oedipus to murder his father and marry his mother is the same as our childhood impulses. Our first sexual desire is directed towards our mother and our first impulse of jealousy and hatred is directed towards our father. As a child our dreams reenacted this and confirmed our first desires. Oedipus ends up fulfilling our childhood wishes by making his prophecy come true. The great effect of this legend is that it reminds the audience to recognize those childhood impulses that we have suppressed in our own mind. Just like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these desires, which nature has forced upon us on purpose. Many men have had dreams of having sexual relation with their mother, and look back at the dreams with astonishment and indignation. In addition, men have a dream of murdering their father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction to these two common desires. These dreams as an adult are followed by feelings of repulsion. Just as adults dreams end in repulsion. The story of Oedipus ends in horror and self-punishment because of this repulsion. When Oedipus realizes our childhood impulse has come in to realization for him, he is unable to cope with what he had done. The story of Oedipus is not just a tragedy of destiny, but instead a realization for the audience of a battle their childhood impulses and the suppression of these desires as they grow into an adult.  

Foucault’s theories on the theory of sexuality bring us initially to the social mindset of the 17^th century, where he introduces the “repressive hypothesis.” This concept states that the “bourgeois societies” of the time were attempting to gain control over, what seems like, the very idea of sex and sexuality and proposed to do so with censorship. “It had first been necessary to subjugate it to the level of language…expunge it from things that were said and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.” (pg 1648, Norton) This censorship made public discussions of sex taboo, regulating it ok to talk about sex only under certain circumstances. This makes sex itself seem almost taboo, something to be shameful for. In order to even speak of sex, one must have had to have accommodated the topic of conversation with the right place, time and people (I’m thinking behind closed doors, at night, under a full moon, when Jupiter is at its brightest in the sky…) I’m agreeing with the idea that this entire thing was done to prevent promiscuity, which is highly frowned upon. “If sex is bad to talk about, I shouldn’t be having it.”

This censorship on the discussion of sex leads to the Church having to encourage and listen to the sexual confessions of its members. These confessions however begin to evolve not just to regrettable actions that people are looking to atone for, but feelings and desires as well. Confession becomes the only safe haven for people to talk about their…needs. In the 18^th century the ruling powers in European countries began to see the idea of population “as wealth, as labor capacity,” and realized the problem of “population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.” (1652-1653, Norton) They began to see the effects of sex itself. The growth of the nation is pretty much influenced by all the sex its people are having. Too much or too little sexual reproduction affects the amount of labor a country can provide and the resources it can create or consume. This forced sex to be discussed more openly, as it became recognized as an essential topic in economy and politics as a potential problem (or possibly even a strength.) Foucault also writes of 18^th century schools as an institution which inevitably had to acknowledge sex in order to function the way it did. What comes to mind is when he points out that dorms were fashioned certain ways depending on sex, and sleep times were monitored because of “the sexuality of the children.” The whole thing revolved around boys and girls turning into women and men, and therefore it could not hide from sex as a topic of discussion any more than the church or politics could.

Foucault shows how important sex is to the lives of everyday humans and that it is not something to run from or to be ashamed of. Despite the attempts to subdue and control it, it cannot be ignored from society. It is literally the driving factor for the continuation of our species for crying out loud. 

When freud talks about the “uncanny” he is referencing things people experience which can be both familiar, yet, at the same time, strange (and often creepy as a result). The early example for this is Ernst Jentsch’s take on the short story “The Sandman,” which features a doll that is to life-like for its own good. He argues that the uncanniness (if that’s a word) of the dolls in the story is the fact that they are made to look as though they are alive, despite the fact that the beholder of the doll knows they are not.

Freud takes a different route to arrive to the idea of uncanniness. Freud’s main focus is the fact that the Sand-man likes to collect children’s eyes. He relates this back to your childhood and genitalia (because he’s Freud, and that’s pretty much his whole deal).  He argues that people as a whole have come to dread injury to the eye far beyond anything else, and this starts when you are a child. Children rely on eyesight more so than the other senses. The eye is linked with knowing what’s going on around you, and as we know, knowledge is power. Transitively, losing your eyes is losing your power (what little you may or may not have). (It reminds me of when babies cannot see certain objects and they believe it has ceased to exist; should the baby not be able to see anything, he loses his sense of the world; possibly nothing exists. This can easily be passed on into childhood.)  While I can absolutely agree with this, I think the castration anxiety is a bit of a stretch. Leave it to him to think “I’ve lost my eyes! What does that mean for my reproductive organs?!” But I understand that maybe there’s a sense of vulnerability that is applicable to both the eyes and genitalia, as both a very important to human beings, and if that’s the case then I can roll with it. Both are essential to a normal human experience, to be complete.

Maybe (likely) it’s a lack of understand on the concept of “The Uncanny” but I kind of feel Freud doesn’t really stick to the original idea of “Uncanny.” I thought it was supposed to be something familiar yet simultaneously strange and unnerving. Lacking eyes is unnerving, yes, but what’s the familiar part of it? Having eyes? I quite enjoy using Zombies as an “Uncanny” example: the familiarity of having the body of a human being, with a history and social connections/relationships who maybe were loving and good, but, being zombies, they are dangerous and unfeeling. They embody both those who you love and a soulless monster; life and death. Call me biased but I think that’s the best example, but really, I’ll take any excuse to include Zombies in anything…

Of all the essays we’ve read this semester, Lacan’s piece on “The Mirror Stage as Formative” was definitely among my favorites. I’ve always been fascinated with child psychology and development. When I lived in Florida, I was lifeguard who taught swimming lessons for children between the ages two and ten, I was also a camp counselor during the summer and babysat a ton.

Lacan’s mirror stage is a concept of psychoanalytic theory that occurs sometime during the time a child is eight to sixteen months old. The mirror stage suggests that when an infant peers at their reflection in the mirror, they’re fascinated by the image of themselves and usually around the time of sixteen months are they able to recognize the reflected image is themselves. Once this recognition is made, the infant will often spend a great deal of time exploring the image in relation to their body.

The connection the child makes between the image and the body is vastly important to the cognitive development of the ego. The ego is constructed based off the result of the conflict between the child’s visual appearance in direct relation to the emotional experience. When a child is six months old, they still lack the physical coordination to move about with ease. Between the ages of eight to twelve months a child’s physical body is very imbalanced. For example, the arms and hands are much more developed than the legs and feet, the hands appear large in contrast to other parts of the body, the legs may still appeared bowed and feet appear flat as the arch has not fully developed yet. These all cause the child to move awkwardly through life which, causing an emotional experience of imperfection. According to Lacan, when an infant in this stage views their image in the mirror they experience a false sense of wholesomeness and idea perfection that is not felt from within.

This image proves to be fictional because although the child understands the reflection to be entirely them, the child still remains fragmented in its movements and expressing themselves. During this stage of the child’s life, they don’t yet have the ability to vocalize their thoughts, they can’t move about as they please, they can’t eat when or what they want, they can’t control their bowl movement. Their entire existence is completely dependent on the parents and this can be extremely frustrating, hence the period of the ‘terrible two’s”. Even though the image appears and invokes a certain emotion within the child, doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘who’ the child is inside.

Another example of this in term of an adult appearance would be anorexia (as was mentioned in a previous blog) who see ‘fat’ on their body when they’re actually skin and bones. You can also see example of a false mirror image with individuals who may have been overweight as a child and lost the weight during adolescence, but may still see the chubby false image of themselves in the mirror. We live in a society today that prizes external beauty much more than internal beauty.

I recently saw this slam performance that is really suiting for contrasting the social ideas of what is pretty. I think this suiting for the false image of a reflection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

Just a reminder that a) we’ll be doing exam review tomorrow, so come prepared with any questions you have (testing yourself against the study questions is the best way to dig for questions) and b) your blog “greatest hits” are due.  For b), just find the posts and then cut/paste the URLs (http://mybestpost.com) into an email to me.

Finally, don’t forget to review my course online using Hunter’s system.  Thanks!