In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

179 PRELUDE Fathers Exile is a way of surviving in the face of the dead father, of gambling with death, which is the meaning of life, of stubbornly refusing to give in to the law of death. —Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” The Kristeva Reader T he father is dead. On this point, Julia Kristeva and René Girard agree. What then can be said any longer of the paternal function? What legacy of the father persists in ongoing economies of sacrifice? And, if the father is not actually dead but only missing in action within the family romance, site of our earliest mimetic rivalries, what role, if any, could a father play in an intimate domain characterized by positive, nonconflictual mimesis ? May a father yet live within intimate spaces? Endeavoring to answer these questions, I turn to literature, for Girard and Kristeva agree that literature is reflective and revelatory of human experience in the world. Literature attests to the vicissitudes of the paternal function in contemporary society; for, in bringing into view mimetic desire, trauma, and conflict, literature offers a setting in which we can analyze the misfortunes of the father. Moreover, literature is especially important because Girard and Kristeva assert that 180 Prelude literature can transform human experience. If there is any hope for the father, literature may enable us to glimpse that promise. In what follows, I make Julia Kristeva’s The Old Man and the Wolves my focus as I assess the paternal function. I take my cue from Maria Margaroni, who states that the Kristeva’s novel recasts Totem and Taboo. Not a battle between father and sons, the conflict in The Old Man and the Wolves turns on scission within the paternal function itself between the dead father of a sacrificial economy and the life-giving father of individual prehistory.1 In the novel, conflict besets the old men of Santa Varvara when wolves invade the community, setting off a violent contagion to which everyone in Santa Varvara is vulnerable. Nevertheless, woven throughout the narrative is testimony by the old men to affective, embodied experience that promises healing from violence inflicted by wolves. Consisting of memories that the old men retrieve and share, this hopeful narrative is grounded in compassion and intimacy. I focus in the chapters that follow on this narrative. Through our kinesic investments in it, we may find ourselves participating in hope that opens toward positive mimesis. I begin, however, by comparing Girard’s and Kristeva’s views on the paternal crisis. In the wake of the father’s demise, Girard emphasizes spiraling violence while Kristeva highlights suffocating meaninglessness; together, they offer complementary insights on our contemporary situation. The Demise of the Patriarchs and the Coming Apocalypse Girard signals in Violence and the Sacred that, in the modern world, the father is captured by a generative mechanism that issues in violent mimesis and scapegoating. Thus, the father of the family romance—the term I use to typify fundamental patterns of mimetic desire among family members—is no longer pulling his weight. Girard formulates his case by analyzing two of Freud’s most important ideas: the Oedipus complex and the parricide described in Totem and Taboo. Girard writes that the competition between father and son, which is the focus for Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, is of modern origin. In traditional societies, fathers are exemplary instances of external models: wanting to imitate their fathers, children respect the Fathers 181 enormous distance between themselves and their fathers. They cannot imagine competing with these towering presences; that they emulate their fathers in small ways is challenging enough. By contrast, in the contemporary world, fathers have become not only models but also obstacles. The weakening of paternal authority, which occurs when external mediation is replaced by internal mediation,2 makes fathers fair game for children. In a world where a son considers his dad his best friend, the father-son relationship features all the instability that shadows friendship. Thus, as differences between father and son dissolve in the contemporary world, parent and child compete for the same objects. Where paternal law is flouted, its force increasingly blunted, “The son looks everywhere for the law—and finds no lawgiver.”3 For Girard, psychoanalysis emerges at a particular moment in history to “announce and to prepare the way for something it cannot itself describe; an advanced stage of indifferentiation, or ‘decoding,’ which involves the complete effacement...

Share