/lit/ - Literature

>>12978157
It's been ages, but form what I remember the Oedipus Complex is perpetuated in the family and ensures its own perpetuation through sexuality (it's passed on from the parents so to speak). Families also ensured without question that society with its economic structures could be reproduced without added cost (which is why the current birth rates are such a problem, society has to literally buy babies or solve the problem through imports). You also have to look at it from a more Lacanian perspective where desire, unable to exhaust itself due to always missing its transcendental unconscious "mark" (no matter what you desire, you will desire something or someone else later), the so called object cause of desire or object [small] a, leading to indefinite perpetuation of desire and surplus production. It gets even more complicated if surplus enjoyment is added to the equation because enjoyment, jouissance, is already caught in a logic of its own impossibility (you can have pleasure, but just like how the empirical object of desire does not coincide with and therefore exhaust the unconscious object cause of desire, jouissance would destroy the body because it exceeds it, you reach an overdose or a crash of some kind before you can reach it). This dictates how one behaves towards it. Basically this leads some to complete asceticism, others to self-destructive enjoyment, depending on how one's unconscious developed through the infantile stages and the Oedipus Complex. The psychoanalytical solution, of a healthy hysteria where you are content with desire's perpetual failure without allowing it to ruin you in some form or another (and Lacan's notion of feminine jouissance, of mystics and those who found pleasure in no longer seeking pleasure so to speak) can also be seen as a reterritorialization onto the family, at least in the initial Freudian context, in which all you can hope for is that someone accepts their lot in life..

By contrast, D&G have a different theory of the unconscious as a factory rather than as a theater (of the Oedipal drama and childhood complexes) and the hope that we can be self-aware enough of the conditions under which our desires come about and how they can be perpetuated in productive ways so that society and history (as the history of desire) can be transformed even through excessive esoteric excentric connections (as quite a few psychotics did throughout history despite their otherwise miserable condition). They accuse psychoanalysis of what most philosophers did, namely reducing desire to some form or another of pleasure (and pleasure is never enough so desire is a failure as a result) and of serving the status quo by reterritorializing every political problem a pacient might have on inescapable Oedipus . In their own example, the patient tells the psychoanalyst that they are concerned about the Vietnam war and went to protest it with their friend Rene (rebirth) and he's asked about his mother because rebirth.