Love's Body, Reissue of 1966 edition

IX: Food

IX Food There is only one psyche, in relation to which all conflict is endopsychic, all war intestine. The external enemy is (part of) ourselves, projected; our own badness, banished. The only defense against an internal danger is to make it an external danger: then we can fight it; and are ready to fight it, since we have succeeded in deceiving ourselves into thinking it is no longer us. Murder is misdirected suicide, to destroy part of oneself ; murder is suicide with mistaken identity. And suicide is also a case of mistaken identity, an attack on the (introjected ) other. A case of mistaken identity, an accident, at the crossroads ; the stranger is the father. Pater semper incertus; his identity is established by killing him. "Passing strangers 162 163 Food were regarded as manifestations of the corn-spirit escaping from the cut or threshed corn, and as such were seized and slain." Frazer, The Golden Bough, 439. Cf. Brophy, Black Ship to Hell, 97. An "accident." There is no death from natural causes; if a man is killed they do not blame the real murderer. "He had to die you see," they say, and set out in searchof a fictitious person, naturally a member of a foreign tribe, whom they regard as the real cause of death. The real cause of all death is the father (Der Erlkonig); the member of a foreign tribe is the culprit, scapegoat, or father. Cf. Roheim, Animism, 62; Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, 136. Killing is always inside the family (Oedipal). In the wisdom of primitive war, enemy blood is kindred blood; blood becomes kindred blood by being shed. Whatever is killed becomes the father. Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall. The boy kills his father in the person of an enemy. And then the slain enemy becomes his guardian spirit: the enemy head (super-ego) presides over the house; love your enemy. "We tend to identify ourselves with whatever we kill— and then reactively to venerate our victims." Or an enemy is killed to provide spirit for a son: the enemy is reincarnated in the son. The pile of skulls that represents the chiefs rrwna are those of enemies, ancestors. The super-ego is our god, enemy; and suicide (or any self-defeat) is our obedience and revenge. Roheim, War, Crime and the Covenant, 57. Cf. Tumey-High, Primitive War, 199, 222-226. LOVE'S B O D Y 164 We identify with what we kill. The hidden truth which makes peace: the identity of the killer and the victim. Whatever is killed becomes the father. All killing is ritual killing; totemic sacrifice; Holy Communion. We drink the blood of our enemies. Of. Turney-High, Primitive War, 87, 152,156,158, 191-192. Genocide, holocaust. "The practice of devoting a recalcitrant foe to destruction as a kind of gigantic holocaust to the national deity was apparently universal among the early Semites." Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, 230.DeuteronomyXX, 16. Hostilities: our enemy our host, who feeds us; to kill is to eat.Our enemy our host, hostia, our Eucharistic meal. All killing is sacrificial; and all sacrifice is eating. Killing is eating. "Dainties that would be hot and fresh, taken from the field of battle," to feed the sun, in Mexico;"delightful food of the warrior, the well fed Warrior's flesh of him who is slain in War" (Blake). Sejourn6, Burning Water, 32. Blake, Jerusalem, pi. 68, 11. 34-35 Cf. Balint, "Die mexikanische Kriegshieroglyphe," 414-415. The killing is cannibalistic, to incorporate the enemy. The brothers overcame the father, and all partook of his body. "This cannibalism need not shock us, it survived into 165 Food far later times. The essential point is, however, that we attribute to these primeval people the same feelings and emotions that we have elucidated in the primitives of our own times, our children, by psychoanalytic research. That is to say: they not merely hated and feared their father, but also honored him as an example to follow; in fact, each son wanted to place himself in his father's position. The cannibalistic act thus becomes comprehensible as an attempt to assure one's identification with the father by incorporating...