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81 PRELUDE Siblings Children, where are you? Here, come quickly—Come to these hands of mine, your brother’s hands, your own father’s hands that served his once bright eyes so well— that made them blind. —Sophocles, Oedipus the King (1480–81) S iblings play a critical role in mimetic rivalries that characterize the family romance. As a consequence, our relations with siblings anticipate , for better or worse, later adult relationships. As we grow and our world expands beyond the immediate family to encompass other relationships , we may remain caught in rivalries that have characterized our initial relationship with our siblings. Or, diverging from that scenario, we may experience with our siblings and with others a supportive intimacy that enables us to overcome the effects of trauma and violence in our lives. Antigone is a timeless story about the vicissitudes of sibling relationships . With Antigone, Sophocles explores with great acuity the violence that attends sibling rivalries. So also does his tragic art open onto transformative 82 Prelude possibilities of an intimate domain that, opposed to an economy of sacrifice in which those around Antigone are caught, offers possibilities for healing and transformation. In what follows, I link Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic explorations of the embodied and affective aspects of mimeticism in sibling relationships with René Girard’s commentaries on Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus and his siblings. My goal is to strengthen the explanatory power of mimetic theory. When I draw also on a corporeal hermeneutics informed by the work of Julia Kristeva, I am able to address the role of trauma in ontological illness and illuminate a space for intimacy modeled by Antigone in her love for her brother, thereby expanding on Girard’s own insights. Girard glimpses this space when he refers to Antigone as figura Christi, but he does not elaborate on his observations, valorizing instead biblical narratives to which he compares Antigone. In what follows, I advance an argument that could have been Girard’s were he to have pressed forward with a full commentary on Antigone and linked that commentary with his extensive analyses of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Mitchell offers entrée to my project in her provocative study Siblings. She writes that, when she began research on a psychoanalytic theory of sibling relationships, she cornered colleagues with a question, “Did Oedipus have a sister?” In response, she received only blank stares. Eventually she determined that she would need to answer her own question: “Yes, Oedipus did have a sister. In fact, he had two. Ismene and Antigone were his daughters and his sisters (he also had two sons/brothers).”1 Mitchell suggests that her colleagues’ silence can be explained, in part, by the paucity of references Oedipus makes to his siblings in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Only once does Oedipus refer to Ismene and Antigone as his sisters, when he asks them to touch his hands.2 But Mitchell also finds reason to believe that her colleagues were flummoxed by her question because, as fellow psychoanalysts, they regularly undervalue lateral relations among siblings, preferring to emphasize children’s relations with their parents.3 She is troubled that, as a consequence of their neglect, psychoanalysts have developed a portrait of desire that bypasses some of its most significant currents.4 Mitchell writes that the displacement of a child by the birth or arrival of a sibling evokes a powerful desire to eliminate the sibling. Because this desire is not tethered to the Oedipal complex, siblings confront a taboo that is both weaker and stronger than the prohibition on parricide. On the one Siblings 83 hand, because violent desire a child directs toward its sibling is not shrouded in the complexities of the Freudian unconscious or a Lacanian lack, the child confronts a weaker “no.” On the other hand, prohibitions against the lateral violence that siblings represent are ensconced in social codes: “You must not kill your bother Abel; you must instead love your brother (neighbour) as yourself.”5 Injunctions against sibling violence mandate that a child’s violence turn into love; crucially, this love is already present as love one has for oneself. These injunctions form the foundation not only for relations among siblings but also for society itself, the fraternity of humankind. Mitchelloffersanexamplefromherclinicalpractice.Shehasobservedin the waiting room of her clinic a baby who is disturbed because another baby in the room is being nursed by its mother. So also has she watched as small children compete...

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