The “Totem and Taboo” Event
Assoun, Paul-Laurent
The “Totem and Taboo” Event - 2016.
4
To acknowledge Totem and Taboo in this day and age is to restore the unprecedented event of its production, one century later, namely the creation of an interface between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. “Smuggling” the unconscious into man’s knowledge involves, through an act of “in-discipline,” opening up an unprecedented trans-disciplinary space. This is a tight dialectic between the real of the symptom and the social institution, which opens onto the only de-mythifying and demystifying myth there is, namely the “scientific myth” of the Killing of the Father. The “Discourse on Method” of “psychoanalytical anthropology” is being engaged here, which takes on its signification in its “posthistory,” from the collective Ego Ideal to the death drive: from the Father to the worst, in this strictly Freudian sense. We line up a series of “facts” and a logic of crossover, which shows the epistemological scope of the text in which Freud “goes for broke.” It also an active memory for research, which grasps the collective through its structural unconscious nether side. It is “Just a story”, but one which remains chronically up to date.
The “Totem and Taboo” Event - 2016.
4
To acknowledge Totem and Taboo in this day and age is to restore the unprecedented event of its production, one century later, namely the creation of an interface between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. “Smuggling” the unconscious into man’s knowledge involves, through an act of “in-discipline,” opening up an unprecedented trans-disciplinary space. This is a tight dialectic between the real of the symptom and the social institution, which opens onto the only de-mythifying and demystifying myth there is, namely the “scientific myth” of the Killing of the Father. The “Discourse on Method” of “psychoanalytical anthropology” is being engaged here, which takes on its signification in its “posthistory,” from the collective Ego Ideal to the death drive: from the Father to the worst, in this strictly Freudian sense. We line up a series of “facts” and a logic of crossover, which shows the epistemological scope of the text in which Freud “goes for broke.” It also an active memory for research, which grasps the collective through its structural unconscious nether side. It is “Just a story”, but one which remains chronically up to date.
Réseaux sociaux