Racine, Oedipus, and Absolute Fantasies *

Mitchell Greenberg

Tout mythe se rapporte à l'origine. Toute question d'origine ne saurait ouvrir que sur un mythe [Every myth points back to an origin. Any questioning of origins necessarily opens onto myth].

--Jean-Paul Valabrega, Phantasme, mythe, corps et sens

Ainsi l'itinéraire de la psychanalyse freudienne est-il celui d'une recherche qui . . . se fait attentive à ce qui du corps réside dans les mots, s'inscrit dans les traces, reste gravé en mémoire au point de n'apparaître que comme réminiscence [Thus the itinerary of Freudian psychoanalysis would be a quest for . . . what of the body resides in words, is inscribed in traces, or remains engraved in memory to such an extent that it only can reappear as reminiscence].

--Pierre Fédida, "L'anatomie dans la psychanalyse"

Something happened in the seventeenth century. Somethings in this particularly conflicted period radically altered the ways in which human subjectivity was created and internalized to produce what in our late twentieth century we have come to call modernity. Despite the different and often contradictory inflections we like to give it, it now seems fairly certain that there was a "crisis of the seventeenth century," a crisis that was traumatic and that was marked, most significantly for our purposes at least, by an altering of subjective sensibility.

In an ever-crescendoing leitmotiv from Machiavelli to Montaigne, from Richelieu to Louis XIV, from Olivares to James I, we hear echoing across Europe the same strident clamor. An anxious, pervasive suspicion that the order of things was out of kilter, that in fact the world was sinking into disorder, seems to dominate European thought in the first half of the century. ¹ The fear of chaos, especially in societies whose past has been grounded in rigid hierarchical structures, is obviously exacerbated in periods of great [End Page 40] social change. Nevertheless, if we are to believe those political theorists influenced by the work of Freud, this fear, although enflamed by real experience of social unrest, reaches well beyond the actuality of a particular historical event and finds its terrifying power in the most archaic strata of the human psyche. "All civilization," writes Eugène Enriquez,

is a struggle against chaos. Not against chaos as it might or might not have actually existed in prehistoric times, but against the phantasm of a primordial chaos, of a primeval disorder, of an immixture, of the undifferentiated, against an ordinary violence. . . . Chaos is the constantly retreating horizon in front of which all social organization and institutions are constructed. It returns us to our ancestral fear. We embrace any and all protection against it. [101]

The stately image of Classical France, therefore, an image to which we have become accustomed by almost two hundred years of academic history and which finds its most paradigmatic icon in the tragic production of Racine, tends to obscure a reality of almost constant social and religious trauma. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to return to Racine, who is perhaps the most prominent representative of the aesthetic and ethical tradition of classicism, which, perfected in France in the mid-1600s, will go on to colonize European ethics and aesthetics into the eighteenth century. Despite the radical changes wrought by political, industrial, philosophical, and psychoanalytical revolutions, classicism, through its corollary myth of the unitary ego, continues to haunt our own inabilities to live unneurotically the various drives, contradictions, identifications, and projections that continually tell us that we are not one but many.

A central paradox exists at the heart of any discussion of Racinian dramaturgy. While the tragic dilemma of Racine's theater is profoundly anchored in the passionate, forbidden sexuality of its characters, passions that are inextricably tied to the desiring body, this body is absent, banished from the lexical construction of the Racinian text. How are we to understand the conundrum of a theater that, more than any other, presents incestuous sexual desire and its frustration as the enchafed crucible of tragedy, when the crucible itself has been exiled from the field of representation? In its plots and peripeteia, Racine's theater ingeniously reconfigures how his protagonists are to negotiate the difference between the generations and between the sexes without referring, except in the most oblique terms, to the body. It is this body, nevertheless, which bears the burden of failing to comply with a law that always proves too restrictive of the characters' passion. ² Tragically, death intervenes, in extremis, to remind us of the body's presence, but only, so it seems, when it is most definitively erased from the dramatic stage.

The justification most often invoked to explain the absence of any but the most veiled references to the body in its Kreaturlichkeit is, of course, the concept of "bienséance," which, when coupled with those other "dicta" of French neoclassical protocols, the "three unities," can be seen as doing to the theatrical body precisely what Foucault suggested the general epistemic shift of the seventeenth century did to those socially undesirable others--the mad, the heterodox, the "feminine." The body is circumscribed, limits are imposed on it (limits as to its visibility), it is objectified as foreign to a certain aesthetic (but also sexual and political) ideal, and then it is banished. ³ [End Page 41]

Can we not resort to allegory (perhaps the seventeenth century's preferred trope) and say that absolutism, pursued by carnality, finds its most succinct emblem in the myth of Narcissus and Echo? Denying the call to allotropic sexuality to protect itself from its own desire, absolutism must garb itself in a self-enclosed narcissism from which the desiring body (as Other) disappears: it fades to pure immanence, to disembodied discourse, and returns from the margins of representation as the haunting interpellation of Echo's evocative cry. In Racinian tragedy the presence of the body is not in the body but of the body, the body transformed into language. Paradoxically, this language, in order to be proffered, must be embodied, must be spoken to an audience, an audience whose participation in the passion and tragedy of the Racinian hero returns the body to itself but in a different place. For, confronted with a tragic world from which the body is effaced, Racine's audiences, he repeatedly tells us, respond corporally: they weep.

Yet the question remains, Why are these eyes weeping, what have they seen? Or rather, since we are dealing with affect, What have they heard, what has the Racinian voice told them that has reduced them to tears?

There is something compelling about voice in general, but the voice that carries the affect of Racinian tragedy is particularly seductive. What does the young Marcel, that precociously overstimulated theatergoer, desire of La Berma's rendition of Phèdre but to be transported out of his straightened bodily reality, moved, changed, by the way the famous actress will give voice to Racine's verses?:

La Berma dans Andromaque, . . . dans Phèdre, c'était de ces choses fameuses que mon imagination avait tant désirées. J'aurais le même ravissement que le jour où une gondole m'emmènerait au pied du Titien des Frari ou des Carpaccio de San Giorgio dei Schiavoni, si jamais j'entendais réciter par la Berma les vers:

On dit qu'un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,

Seigneur, etc.

Je les connaissais par la simple reproduction en noir et blanc qu'en donnent les éditions imprimées; mais mon coeur battait quand je pensais, comme à la réalisation d'un voyage, que je les verrais enfin baigner effectivement dans l'atmosphère et l'ensoleillement de la voix dorée. [Proust, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 440-41]

[Berma in Andromaque, . . . in Phèdre, was one of those famous spectacles which my imagination had long desired. I should enjoy the same rapture as on the day when a gondola would deposit me at the foot of the Titian of the Frari or the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni, were I ever to hear Berma recite the lines beginning,

They say a prompt departure takes you from us, Prince . . .

I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat furiously at the thought--as of the realisation of a long-planned voyage--that I should see them at length bathed and brought to life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the golden voice.] [Within a Budding Grove 14-15] [End Page 42]

It is the "golden" voice of the actress incarnating the sensuality of Racine's poetry that carries the audience out of its own body, back to a place it remembers but where it has never been. It is this sensuousness that interpellates the audience, seducing them, drawing them out of their quotidian existence, and, pied-piper-like, leads them down roads that although ignored by them they have traveled before: voice's primal affect directs the audience out of the present and back to a more primitive, less contingent fantasy of the body. ⁴ The enticing, evocative music of Racine's poetry sings a siren's song that seduces the audience into the meanders of the Racinian tragic labyrinth, in a quest that, although inarticulable by the audience, is the very crux of Racinian dramaturgy. It is a quest that begins with Echo's sad query, a query that reverberates throughout the tragic universe of Racine, the "Qui suis-je?" ("Who am I?") of the anguished protagonist. This question takes us to the heart of each character's tragic dilemma at the same time that it reflects the larger sociohistorical situation of the nascent absolutist subject. In this sense we must understand Racinian tragedy as in essence a tragedy of origins, a tragedy that reflects the impossible quest of a subject that is subjugated to both the imperatives of the absolute, imperatives that s/he be one, integral, a unified subject, and the contrasting claims of the material body that tell him/her that s/he is not one but two, not two but many. It is in the impossible desire to resolve their dilemma that the Racinian heroes and their audience are drawn on a labyrinthine journey to the origin: an origin that always entices because it holds out the prospect of recouping an initial (lost) unity, but that also, in its elusiveness, proves to be chaotic, fragmenting, multiple.

Psychoanalytically informed studies of Racine tend to describe his tragedy as "preoedipal," especially compared to "postoedipal" Cornelian drama. ⁵ This distinction seems to me to be justifiable, yet too unequivocal. Racine's tragedies function on several psychic, social, and dramatic levels, simultaneously and dynamically, each continually interweaving with the others. On the level of dramatic narrative, as Philip Lewis has exhaustively demonstrated, Racinian tragedy squarely confines us within the compass of the oedipal legend. ⁶ From the beginning of Racinian dramaturgy La Thebaïde plunges us into the trauma created by Oedipus's transgressions--murder and incest:

Mais ces monstres, hélas! ne t'épouvantent guères;
La race de Laïus les a rendus vulgaires;
Tu peux voir sans frayeur les crimes de mes fils,
Après ceux que le père et la mère ont commis,
Tu ne t'étonnes pas si mes fils sont perfides
S'ils sont tous deux méchants, et s'ils sont parricides?
Tu sais qu'ils sont sortis d'un sang incestueux,
Et tu t'étonnerais s'ils étaient vertueux. [1.1] [End Page 43]

[Alas! these monsters can't frighten you:
Laius's lineage has made them seem commonplace;
You can look at my sons' crimes without fear,
Considering the crimes committed by their father and mother,
You are not surprised if my sons are treacherous
If they are both evil and both parricides?
You understand that they both issue from incestuous blood,
And you'd be shocked all the more if instead they were virtuous.]

Racinian tragedy is born of incestuous blood. What Jocasta's speech does is to situate, by its reference to the "race de Laïus," the archeology of the Racinian universe in a genealogy that is marked by sexual, that is bodily, excess--the body gone wild. Yet the origin of Oedipus is not in Oedipus but, as Jocasta puts it, in his blood. Oedipus's misdeeds are but the punishment for prior derelictions: before Oedipus was his father and his (sexual) crime: the homosexual rape of Chryssipus, his host's son. From the beginning, the Oedipus legend returns us to the body, the body's desires that wreak havoc on civil life. ⁷ Homosexuality and incest, the legend tells us, by refusing the limits of sexual and generational difference, blur these primary distinctions, thus making political life impossible. Instead of order, incest produces chaos, metaphorized by those monsters both real and metaphoric that haunt the Racinian universe.

Trying to decide whether the Racinian world is "pre-" or "post-"oedipal seems to confuse several different layers of the tragic spectacle's impact, the layer of a persistent, preexisting cultural narrative, "un lieux de mémoire" (that is, the Oedipus legend), with the particular affective resonance this narrative has on the spectating public (the Oedipus "complex"). Once again we are situated in that indeterminate space between ideology and biology, between cultural narrative and sexual affect. In order to try to articulate their powerful hold on us, I suggest we begin by returning to that other indeterminate "corporal aura" that floats between body and mind, between body and bodies, the "voice," which with its bivalent nature can serve as a shuttle weaving the one to the other. ⁸

Freud tells us that we are particularly sensitive to Sophocles's Oedipus Rex because it reverberates within us with the echoes of a scenario we have heard before:

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny. . . . [4: 296] ⁹ [End Page 44]

Freud is saying that there is an affective resonance between the dramatic narration of Sophocles's tragedy and the affective lived experience of audiences, mediated by projection, identifications, and introjections. The theater functions as a mediating site between cultural myths and individual fantasy. ¹⁰ The place of the stage in all its ideological ambivalence always represents a transitional space, a space in which are mediated the sexual, political, and economic contradictions in whose intermeshings human subjectivity is constantly being repositioned.

The theater's dominance in periods of historical transition, in those periods of enormous social trauma and change, seems particularly acute perhaps because, more than any other form of representation, the theater most actively engages individual myths--those narratives individuals construct and are constructed by in order to explain and thus situate themselves within social and economic forces that preexist them--with collective narratives. ¹¹ If we agree with André Green, who defines the theater as "situated between dreams and phantasy," we can therefore see that the experience of the theater is always, on one level at least, the experience of a constant reprocessing and re-production (through a representation) of subjectivity--always an ongoing process of renegotiating the conflicting demands of individual desire and societal Law [see Green 2].

This renegotiation is articulated, as Freud suggests, by hearing anew echoes that reverberate within us. What Freud is describing when he refers to the "voice" we have all heard before will later be fleshed out in his theory of those "originary (or primal) fantasies," the "Urszenen," that we all enact for ourselves on the stage of our own "private theater." ¹² These originary fantasies, of which the "primal scene" is perhaps the most [End Page 45] overdetermined, are, according to the masterful analysis of Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, all attempts, each in its own way, of supplying a response to the unanswerable puzzle of subjective "origins."

Dans leur contenu même, dans leur thème (scène primitive, castration, séduction) les fantasmes originaires indiquent ainsi cette postulation rétroactive: ils se rapportent aux origines. Comme les mythes . . . ils dramatisent comme moments d'émergence, comme origine d'une histoire, ce qui apparaît au sujet comme une réalité d'une nature telle qu'elle exige une explication, une 'théorie. . . . Fantasmes des origines: dans la scène primitive, c'est l'origine de l'individu qui se voit figurée.; dans les fantasmes de séduction, c'est l'origine, le surgissement, de la sexualité; dans les fantasmes de castration, c'est l'origine de la différence des sexes. [16]

[By their very content, in their theme itself (primal scene, castration, seduction) the originary fantasies thus point to this retroactive solicitation: they refer to origins. Like myths . . . they dramatize as moments of emergence, as the origin of a history that appears to the subject as a reality of such a force that it requires an explanation, a "theory." . . . Originary fantasies: in the primal scene, it is the origin of the individual that is illustrated; in the fantasies of seduction, the origin, the eruption of sexuality; in the fantasies of castration, it is the origin of sexual difference.]

These "scenes" are important for many reasons. They help in any attempt at understanding the way a particular individual subjugates him/herself to Laws governing the sexual/political position s/he is to assume in order to find an adequate place in the social network. The question of origins that these fantasies answer is also "embodied," that is, these fantasies are always a question of families, of bloodlines, and genealogies, of, in other words, the particular fit of the subject (where does s/he come from?) in a line of descent and ascent that can only be inscribed in/as the body. Although the primal fantasies can be considered, on the one hand, at the extreme opposite pole of the Oedipus complex, on the other, they are inextricably connected to it. ¹³ They help us to see how the body is made an object of ideology as it incorporates, as "fantasy," an inscription of a semiotic network of power/knowledge that preexists that particular body's entrance onto society's stage, and, at the same time, they help us see how fantasies of the body become inscribed in lived sociopolitical experience. ¹⁴ In this sense the individual fantasies, in their attempt to answer the unanswerable questions of the subject, are analogous to the role that myth and [End Page 46] mythology play in the construction of a cultural identity. ¹⁵

In a long footnote found midway through his discussion of the "Rat Man" ("Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis"), where he is struggling with the problem of how, or indeed, of whether it is possible, to distinguish between fantasy and reality as they are reconfigured by memory, Freud proposes a tantalizing analogy between the construction of individual identities and that of national identities:

[W]e must bear in mind that people's "childhood memories" are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history. [206n1]

Although he will come back to the analogy between the individual and the collective in his later metapsychological studies, the point Freud is (tentatively) adumbrating here is suggestively rich. On the one hand, as his discussion points out, the elaboration of memory, a process that is a continual reworking of desire, affect, and trauma, never allows for a clear and distinct division of the experiential world into some pregiven "empirical" exterior reality and an inner subjective fantasy (desire). ¹⁶ The one is inextricably intertwined in the other. On the other hand, Freud is pointing to the necessity of narration ("legends"), the rhetorical elaboration, a subjective "poiesis," by which and through which the human psyche explains this originary confusion to itself. Human beings are, to paraphrase Jean Laplanche, "mythmakers" ("mythisants"), creators of their own personal narratives which propose to make sense out of a history (personal and transindividual) that eludes them. ¹⁷ Finally, Freud's brief footnote seductively points to this "mythmaking" as integral to and constituent of the elaboration of both individual identity and cultural ("social," "national" ) identity, to their mutual imbrication. ¹⁸ In other words, Freud encourages us to explore how analytic theory may help us toward a political interpretation of culture. It suggests with what tools--tools that are not innocent but fraught with their own ideological history and valency, the tools of fable, of myth, of tragedy--we may [End Page 47] begin to understand how the individual is sutured into the cultural and how, at the same time, the cultural responds to the most intimate fantasies of the individual.

In a sense, the Racinian question "Qui suis-je?" proferred by the tragic voice is the most poignant of questions, because no satisfactory answer is ever forthcoming. In its very demand, which is ultimately a cry for a grounding, an origin, it always contains within itself the illusory fantasy of the "perfection of an original unity" that would establish once and for all an absolute identity, and, at the same time, by the very presuppositions of the question, it precludes any satisfactory response. ¹⁹ Instead of an answer, culture, on the one hand, and the human psyche, on the other, respond with myths, with fantasies. ²⁰ These fantasies, these myths always return to the body, to the most basic questions of the body, the difference between the sexes, their conjunction in producing new bodies, and the concomitant and conflicted desires that constantly exceed the limits that any particular society with its laws and traditions might impose on it. ²¹ Before dealing with the narrative content of these proffered answers, I would like for the moment to return to Freud's initial clue, to concentrate on the importance of the medium that embodies the question: the voice in its role as an intermediary object mediating between the body and the world, between inner psychic life and external sociopolitical reality. Considerations of the role of voice will offer us a bivalent entrance into the particular fantasies that connect the oedipal narrative (which is a narrative of cohesion, and thus intimately connected to the absolutist quest) to the preoedipal fantasies (fantasies that because they are of violent fragmentation, of chaos, prove to be inimical to absolute desire) in Racinian tragedy.

In their study of originary fantasies, Laplanche and Pontalis tell us that from his very first, tentative theorizations, Freud recognized the importance of the "entendu" (the heard, the "overheard," the sound, the noise) in these fantasies. ²² For Freud, sound, the "overheard," could be interpreted as pertaining to a double register: on the one hand, as "noise" ("le bruit") to the register of the percept, the "sensorium," on the other to the "sound" ("le dit") the "articulation" of familial history, of legend. In other words, Laplanche and Pontalis split the "heard" into physical and metaphysical dimensions, both the "literal" explosion of sound into or onto the infant's perception of its environment and the ideological notion of the articulated "story," a political structure which gives meaning to the infant by placing him/her in a line of descent.

These two aspects of voice will be differently exploited by Freud's French followers. Laplanche and Pontalis, for instance, underline the idea of the voice's eruption into the uniform world of the infant, creating a tear, a rip in that undifferentiated perceptive field between the infant and the world. This sound can be the call of the mother or another [End Page 48] percept that effectively situates the infant in the position of interpellated subject. So in the first instance voice, as the overheard, situates the child, in his earliest subjective position as the object of another's (the Other's, in Lacanian terms) demand. ²³ The voice of the Other calls the infant into being: it functions as the origin of his subjectivity in that it acts as a division between the infant and the mother, and thus leads the infant out of that monad and into a relation to the Law orchestrating his world's symbolic systems. The second vector of the overheard would be its role of (familial) legend, that is, the call to the child to situate him/herself within a narrative in which s/he must assume his or her proper role: "le dit ou le bruit familial, ce discours parlé ou secret, préalable au sujet, où il doit advenir et se repérer" [Laplanche and Pontalis 51].

This distinction is taken up and expanded upon by Guy Rosolato, who divides the "heard" into the linguistic catergories of "Voice" and "Speech" ("Voix," "Parole"). For Rosolato (who is influenced by Theodor Reik's earlier writings about the "cry"), the Voice (as undifferentiated sound), by preceding Speech, is a vector of abstraction, emanating from and constantly reminiscent of, he says, an "origin," a "primal unity" (of child and mother?) and thus of leading us beyond or through myth to the primordial question of origins. ²⁴ Rosolato offers a complicated and enriching discussion of Voice as it intertwines with cultural myths (the "voice" of the shofar in Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac, for instance, representing the voice of God/father) and personal fantasies (paranoiac auditory hallucinations). At the same time his insistence on the function of the voice as leading back to myths of origins also connects the importance of the voice to the fantasy of the primal scene, that violent fantasy where the child situates himself in the (impossible) position of being present at the scene of his own conception. For Rosolato, the Voice leads through the myth of an initial unity back to the primal scene:

Le mythe serait plutôt dans la nostalgie idéalisée d'une unité originelle qu'entretient le fantasme infantile de la Scène Primitive. La remontée des confluences vers un amont, exige, ici, le retour à une source ponctuelle où se fondent (aux deux sens du terme) les générations, la différence des sexes, l'amour et la haine, et surtout les trois pôles oedipiens, l'enfant étant présent non seulement à l'union de ses parents mais aussi à sa propre conception. Ce fantasme est donc aux antipodes de la résolution oedipienne de la séparation, de la différence des sexes acquise, et de la castration corrélative. ["La Voix" 291]

[The myth would exist at the level of an idealized nostalgia for an original unity that the infantile fantasy of the Primal Scene keeps alive. The movement upstream of the various tributaries toward a source requires here a return to a precise source where are "fused" (in the two meanings of the word ["fondre"--to melt and to be confused together]), the generations, the difference between the [End Page 49] sexes, love and hate, and especially the three oedipal poles--the child depicted as present not only at the union of his parents but also at his own conception. This fantasy is thus diametrically opposed to the oedipal resolution of separation, the acquired sexual difference, and its correlative castration.]

Rosolato concludes his discussion of Voice by indicating where the two vectors he has adumbrated lead in the psychic construction of the individual. On the one hand, the vector of myth, he suggests, leads back to the primal scene and thence to the "phantasmatic metamorphoses" of the Father, as Phallus, the (Lacanian) arbiter of the law, and from that association to the ego-ideal and to the superego. On the other, the voice, in its return to the "origin" (in and through myth) carries us back to the id ("Cette zone d'abolition qui existe quand toutes les illusions se trouvent renvoyées à la préhistoire"). Finally, Rosolato proposes that the Voice as "corporal aura" can be considered an "intermediary object," insofar as its appeal to an origin leads us "through myth and fantasy to the superego, with the judgments of 'inner' voices, and through the superego to the id and its drives" ["La Voix" 302]. The Voice, therefore, for Rosolato, would be intermediate, situated at the confluence of id and superego and capable of resonating from the one to the other.

Still another Anglo-French analyst, Joyce McDougall, takes up the importance of the voice in its division between sound (which is, we remember, never "merely sound," that is, never affectless, meaningless) and speech. For McDougall, verbal communication, although she insists it is "transmitted by the mother," comes to represent an external or "third" power that will protect the child from being enveloped ("devoured") by the "siren-mother." "The mother's voice," she writes, "rekindles fantasies of the wish for fusion, with the consequent loss of both subjective--and sexual--identity, whereas the words learned from her compel separation and autonomy" [82]. McDougall thus underlines both the attraction and the danger of the "originary" voice. It is a siren's song that draws the child back into the desire for fusion, that is, nonindividuation, with the fantasy of an all-embracing and thus devouring mother. In order to protect the child from these tempting fantasies, McDougall translates the Lacanian "voix du père" back into the linguistic register (from which Lacan took it) of speech. Although she does not explicitly say so, this speech (as a structured symbolic system) would represent the intervention of the Father (the "Law") in the "edenic" but also "hellish" mother-child monad. The "speech" of the father prevents the child's reabsorption into the "voice" of the mother, thus allowing it access to politico-cultural existence. ²⁵

Finally, in her study of the role of women, of women's death, in Greek tragedy, Nicole Loraux informs us that since in "tragedy, everything happens [passe] by and through words," she will situate her study of tragedy under the sign of a sympathetic "listening." ²⁶ [End Page 50] [Begin Page 52] By emphasizing the importance of the aural over the spectacular aspect of tragedy, Loraux would seem to be positioning herself against the typical critical gesture, and certainly the gesture of the seventeenth century's most celebrated theoretician of the theater, the abbé d'Aubignac, for whom the theater was preponderantly a visual spectacle.

Loraux's use of the word écoute for her study of Greek tragedy resonates with all the associations the word carries with it of its particular reference to the analytic session. Écoute bears the echoes of the protocols of that session where the patient's free associations engage with the analyst's empathic, active listening. Loraux thus encourages us to lend an attentive, analytic ear to "tragedy," and to listen to the voices, the varied, nuanced echoes that, resonating from the suppressed body, continue to tell us what a purely visual interpretation would miss. Loraux's call to "listen" to the shouts and murmurs of the tragic protagonists tempts us beyond the spectacle and situates us in that "other scene," where the tragedy plays out scenarios unknown to the characters themselves and unknown even to the playwright. They are not, however, ignored by the audience, who react, as we have seen, with tears, the cathartic response of the body to the tragic voices it has heard before reverberating anew on its own inner stage.

Racinian tragedy is carried by this voice, a voice that is always, as we have just seen, for psychoanalysis (at least) double. It reminds us of the body which has been banished, functioning as it does as its stand-in. There exists in that voice both a seductive appeal to some originary unity that escapes the subject (both the subject of tragedy and the tragic spectator) and the vector of the law that recites the history of the subject, his/her place in a genealogy, a family, that is always a political (that is, socially symbolic) construct. We must be sensitive in our "listening" to the ambivalence of this voice. On the one hand it actively participates (by its superegoic function) in the construction of the absolutist desire for a coherent subject, by substituting a cerebral construct (the plot) for the body. On the other, it constantly demonstrates the impossible grounding of this subject and therefore its impossibility, tout court, in the disruptive primal fantasies, where the body returns but as violence, as fragmentation. An attentive listening constantly oscillates between plot and affect and results in sympathetic tears, thus reuniting in a cathartic gesture the most salient bodily features of Racinian tragedy-- the voice that speaks, the ears that hear, and the eyes that weep.

And what is the story that is carried by the Racinian voice? What does its melodious, seductive song recount? In essence, I would propose, that the narrative ("le dit") that this voice recounts is the conflicted coming into being of the absolutist subject, its genealogy, and its sacrifices, and it does so by a constant rescripting of the Oedipus legend. In his greatest creations--Andromaque, Iphigénie, Phèdre--Racine retreats from the stage of history and returns to the more archaic cosmology of myth. Each of these different scenarios is affiliated in their genealogy with the overriding myth of Oedipus, his family, his descendants, and with the consequences of his fate. Even those historically based tragedies, Britannicus and Mithridate, or the biblical tragedy of Athalie can be seen, conjuring up as they do forces of an "unconscious" familial-sexual terror, to supersede the merely picturesque qualities of the historical and to plunge back into the mysterious, sacred world of oedipal fantasies.

Without wishing to be too reductive of the enormous complexity of Racinian dramaturgy or to ignore the equally intricate involution of Racine's personal history in the social problems of his period, I think that we can, for hypothetical reasons, reduce the conflict of Racinian tragedy to the battle for integrity in a subject whose very existence is not integral, that is not one but two. At the same time, and by the very same token, this duality, this duplicity which must be removed, repressed, or extirpated, which forms the impediment propelling tragic action and informing the very being of the tragic hero, is at the very heart of the Oedipus myth as it constantly attempts to refashion the journey of Oedipus away from forces of duality and contradiction toward an attempted (but always [End Page 52] unsuccessful) compromise with societal laws. We should not forget that the story of Oedipus is first and foremost, as Marie Delcourt reminds us, "the most complete of all political myths," in that it presents, she says, the most detailed amalgamation in one narrative of the mythic preparations for kingship ("l'habilitation à la royauté"). At the same time, as Delcourt goes on to demonstrate, Oedipus's political role, his position of king, is inextricably tied to his erotic life, in which the horrors of uncontrolled, incestuous sexuality have from the beginning been predestined. Oedipus as king is the hero who saves the city, cleanses it, but is also the defiler who introduces impurity into the polis. In "Oedipus tyrannos," ambivalence resides in a single character who is at one and the same time father, king, and victim, an ambivalence that can be resolved only through death.

In the world of absolutist France, the question of political sovereignty--the role and status of the Monarch--is inseparable from the metaphysical, that is, psychosexual, aspirations of the absolutist subject inserted in the conflicted intermeshings of the emerging bourgeois family. Racinian drama inhabits a tragic locus, novel in its intensity and its narrowness of focus. André Green suggests that this constrained familial space most adequately represents the earliest and deepest ties, ties of love and hate binding children to parents, and thus also has the greatest potential for engendering tragic emotions. ²⁷ Michel Foucault, in a decidedly less psychoanalytic vein, has also pointed out that it was precisely during the course of the seventeenth century that the family, as the nexus in which the private (the sexual) and the public (the social) are inextricably intermeshed, came to assume an even more enchafed role as the mediator between societal (juridical) injunctions and (subjective) sexuality. Racinian tragedy, as the tragedy of conflicted origins, reflects this mediation between the public and the private, the political and the familial in scenarios of transgression and sacrifice.

The problem of political sovereignty so crucial for seventeenth-century French society was rescripted by Racine as the essential (but unrealizable) task of his protagonists. Inversely their desire for sovereignty, for the absolute, is inseparably connected in its plots and peripeteia to the "family romance" of Classical French subjectivity. ²⁸

While Racine's dramatic plots focus on the tragic predicament of his protagonist, this predicament is always foregrounded by a political crisis. What we hear echoing across the Racinian world, at the beginning of each play, is that something in the order of that world has irrevocably been changed: "Cet heureux temps n'est plus. Tout a changé de face," declares Hippolyte at the beginning of Phèdre: in Athalie, Abner tells Joad that "L'audace d'une femme, arrêtant ce concours / En des jours ténébreux a changé ces beaux jours," and in Britannicus, the play opens with Agrippine's declaration, "Tout ce qu j'ai prédit n'est que trop assuré: / Contre Brittanicus Néron s'est déclaré." Following the model of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Racine constructs his tragedies so that we are plunged from the [End Page 53] very beginning into a political crisis threatening the entire world order of the play. ²⁹

Quickly, however, Racine moves from the political instability of the outer world into the psychological turmoil of the play's protagonist. In an extremely subtle play of inversions, the tragic plot will work itself out, resolving the political crisis, by and through the sacrifice of the tragic hero. Racine moves from the larger political stage of an empire in crisis to the narrower but analogous ferment of the tragic hero, who, becoming the victim of that world's trauma, is immolated to expiate the sins of society and, by so doing, restores order to it.

If we were to follow Barthes's lead and pare down the entire corpus of Racinian tragedy to one "primordial tragedy," we might see the Racinian universe not only repeat the Freudian myth of the primal horde but also trace, in its great schematic parabola, the oedipal narrative of the coming into being of the King--as that figure came to represent the impossible "corps glorieux" of transcendental sovereignty. ³⁰ If we were to trace an arc from La Thébaïde to Athalie, we would be able, as Mauron has suggested, to see the gradual emergence and affirmation of the father first as Monarch, then as God, and at the same time see the defeat of the Mother/witch. In other words, what the essential Racinian tragedy would trace is the contested, conflicted battle for sovereignty, waged between forces of masculinity and femininity. ³¹ On this level at least, the political battle reveals its intense investments in establishing the reign of the masculine, as the model for political (and thus sexual) life. What the Sovereign cannot tolerate is division, be it the division of the physical or the political body, because it would render that body open, effluent, female, and thus vulnerable. The anxieties of the physical body reflect the anxieties of the "corpus politicum" and vice versa.

The sacrifice that is central to Racine's entire opus turns on ridding the community of the monstrous within itself. Concomitantly, this monstrous is centered on the woman and on the child. Because they are always perceived as double, both are inimical to the world of Sovereignty. When in Racine the tragic takes the form of child sacrifice as an attempt to shore up the ideology of the One, it is at the same time a perverse attack on Patriarchy by its own ideological predicates. The duality of being inheres in all of us, secretly undermining any ideology of the One. At the same time, however, the Father's acting out reveals the hidden ambivalence of all sacrifice, for by attacking the son, Patriarchy in a very obvious sense is shown to be obliged to always turn in and to attack itself. Destroying one's progeny, whose recognition the Father needs in order precisely to be the Father (without a child that recognizes and thus instantiates the role of the Father, there is no Father possible), destroys at the same time any link between a past and a future. ³² This is perhaps the greatest tragedy that Racine's theater stages: the imperious [End Page 54] desire to be absolute when that desire is shown to be (by the very predicates of absolutism) impossible.

The most spectacular sacrifice of the child in Racinian tragedy, Hippolyte's death, is evocatively represented for us in the famous "récit de Théramène" in the final act of Phèdre. Although a tour de force of Racinian dramaturgy, Theramene's speech nevertheless strikes many critics, Leo Spitzer first among them, almost as a rhetorical anomaly within the canon of classical rhetoric. Spitzer points out that this speech reveals the continued presence of the "baroque" within the canon of French classicism. ³³ I would like to enlarge the already notoriously capacious semantic field of the word baroque, which retains all the echoes of classicism's prejudices of what is excessive, indistinct, heterogeneous, of what it has had to repress in order to be classical, to make it ring synonymously with the term grotesque as Bakhtin uses it to describe the presence of the body in its unbound (by the predicates of absolutist ideology) presentability. In a sense the "baroque" body represented in the "récit de Théramène," in its bloodied disruption, acts as a pivot careening the Racinian text out of the political equipoise to which oedipal absolutism tends and plunges it back into a scenario of phantasmatic chaos.

What I am suggesting is that the intrusive reappearance of the excessive body, the body banned by the epistemic turn of classicism, reappears (fragmented, broken) in those pivotal textual anomalies that always address, in a highly charged concentration, elements of sexuality, as seduction, castration (that is, sacrifice) and dissolution. These "originary fantasies" of the Racinian universe include, along with the scene of Hippolyte's death, those famous, almost hallucinatory, nocturnal scenes wherein sexuality and violence intermingle in a nightmarelike vision: the destruction of Troy in Andromaque, the sack of Lesbos in Iphigénie, the murder of the innocents in Athalie, the massacre of the Jews in Esther, the apotheosis of Titus in Bérénice, Néron's fantasy of Junie's arriving in his palace in Britannicus, Mithridate's rhetorical fantasy of his destruction of Rome. What is particularly striking in all of these scenes is that carried along by the seductive melody of the Racinian voice, these scenes, in their ecphrastic excess, are projected out as a "vision," a vision that stops the ongoing flow of the narration and due to an inherent unfocusability creates a mise-en-abyme of tragic unknowability.

Although they are always present in these spectacular scenarios, Racine's protagonists gaze at their own interior vision with an intensity that reveals its at once alienating and fascinating hold on them. The scenes function as moments of fixation, arresting the protagonist in a reverie that combines the intense visual depiction with purely fictitious invention. Their visions are both a beginning and an end that they regard with endless fascination. By its intense libidinal affect their fantasy arrests the protagonists' gaze forever, preventing any adequate understanding and resolution. Borrowing from Christine Buci-Glucksmann, we might say that Racine's protagonists stare at their own inner scenes with such intense fascination "dans le seul but de, enfin, ne plus voir, mais être" [74] to find there in their unfathomable visions the answer to their original question "Qui suis-je?"--the question of their origins, but by the very force of their gaze no answer, except death, is ever forthcoming.

In his well-known essay "Racine et la poétique du regard," Jean Starobinski was one of the first to call our attention to the profound and impenetrable depths this inner vision opened before the mesmerized gaze of Racine's heroes: [End Page 55]

Chez Racine, derrière ce que l'on voit, il y a ce que l'on entrevoit, et, plus loin, ce dont on ne peut que pressentir la réalité sans en rien voir. . . . Leur profondeur tient à l'absence d'une nature établie et entièrement visible; elle résulte de quelque chose que l'on peut nommer tout ensemble un excès et un manque. [L'oeil vivant 73]

[In Racine, behind what one sees, is what one dimly perceives, and farther still the presence of a reality that one can intuit without seeing any of it at all. . . . Their depth (profundity) is due to an absence of an established and entirely visible nature; it is the product of what we can call at one and the same time an excess and a lack.]

Starobinski goes on to tell us that each of these famous "nighttime" scenes has the particular merit of referring to "un évènement premier, situé avant le début de l'action représentée" [80], of being, in other words, located on another scene, a scene that is absent from the tragedy but which never ceases to exert an influence over the entire represented drama. ³⁴

It is the originary aspect of these scenes that I find felicitously congenial with what psychoanalysis has termed originary fantasies. Tragedy results when the reminiscence of the originary fantasy erupts in the ongoing narration of the oedipal plot. It is in a perverse sense the primary "tragic flaw" that returns in the drama to destabilize both the reliability of the tragic diegesis and the protagonist who is the product of that narrative.

In general, psychoanalytic theory considers three (sometimes) four fantasies as "originary"; the "primal scene," that is, the view of parental intercourse by the subject, which would figure the origin of the subject him/herself; "castration," the origin of sexual difference; "seduction," the eruption of sexuality in the history of the subject; and less frequently, "the return to the maternal womb." What is important to understand in these diverse fantasies (and their mutual imbrication in the psychic life of the subject) is that they are all, as Laplanche and Pontalis point out, attempts to solve the riddle(s) of origins. Therefore, it is not surprising that in Racine's plays so much of the dramatic tension turns around Eriphile/Iphigénie's unanswerable question "Qui suis-je?," Bajazet's "Que suis-je?," Phèdre's constant oscillation between a desire that shames her and a familial curse that condemns her without her ever understanding why, and so forth. All of Racine's characters are condemned by a traumatic history that has inexorably shaped their destiny but that forever escapes their understanding. It is these originary scenarios that are the phantasmatic answer to the question of "origins," of who they are, of what they are, and of why they are the way they are. But it is an answer that, instead of providing them with a firm definition of their being, sends them reeling into the inchoate.

It is also important to understand that these phantasms are illusory reconstructions, and as such we must see them as attempts, localized "theoretical attempts," to answer the profoundly enigmatic questions of traumatic origins. As attempts they can only answer these questions, sybil-like, with new conundrums. They are in the most profound sense of the term "fictions," but necessary fictions. In their very constructedness, they are "historically" impossible (in the "primal scene" the subject would be present at the scene of his/her own conception) but psychically "true." The "theoretical" answer that they furnish to the subject's inquiries corresponds to that subject's psychosexual self-positioning in the symbolic constructions of the world, as that positioning is shown to be [End Page 56] forever beyond the grasp of the subject. ³⁵

Ned Lukacher reminds us that for Freud, in his initial exploration of these phantasms, they were never "found objects," that is, never "real" past traumata that analysis uncovered. Rather, Freud defined these scenes as "constructions." From Freud's initial definition of these originary fantasies, Lukacher goes on to define the importance of this phantasmatic construction in the following way: "The primal scene is a circumstantial construction that is predicated when there is a need to interpret but at the same time a fundamental concealment or absence of the sort of evidence that could definitively substantiate a particular interpretation" [330].

What is particularly telling for the connection of this analytic concept of originary fantasies with Racinian tragedy is that they seem to function for the individual psyche depicted in the tragedy in the same way myth functions in the constitution of collective self-identity. We remember that from the beginning of his thinking about the originary fantasies Freud likened them to "a complicated process of remodelling analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history," while Laplanche and Pontalis tell us that "comme les mythes . . . ils dramatisent comme moments d'émergence d'une histoire, ce qui apparaît au sujet comme une réalité. . . ." Finally, Rosolato has pursued most forcefully the relation between originary fantasies and myth in his "Les fantasmes originaires et leurs mythes correspondants," where for each of the major categories of originary fantasies he apposes a corresponding myth: for the primal scene, the creation myths, chief among them the myth of Adam and Eve; for castration, the different sacrificial myths of the Western monotheisms, which have at their heart, he tells us, "le souhait de mort, le meurtre du père"; for the fantasy of seduction, the myth of "revelation" in Western religions; and for the fantasy of the return to the womb, he proposes the myth of "Paradise" (in the "after-Life") [233]. ³⁶

For Racine, what we can call these imaginary scenarios have an overdetermined meaning for the tragedy in particular and for the role of the theater in communal life. On [End Page 57] the one hand what do these scenarios have in common? On the first and most general level, they are rhetorical "tableaux," staged scenes that exist as what Barthes has called "un théâtre dans le théâtre." ³⁷ If we follow a common analogy of seeing the theater as functioning like a dream, the "theater in a theater" would take on the significance of the dream within the dream, which presents the "true reality" of the dream. ³⁸ Like a dream, the play articulates, in the individual and collective unconscious of the spectators, the dialectics of Law and desire. Playacting, like dreaming, figures the dangerous intrusion of the passions into the universe of the Law, but also figures the reappropriation of these passions by the Law. In this way, Anne Ubersfeld suggests, the stage allows the transgression of the ideology it represents, but also the concomitant recuperation of that ideology's strictures. ³⁹

The relation between these scenes and the general oedipal narrative in which they are embedded is what intrigues us, as they serve each as the origin and end of the other. It is, I believe, by the fascination and pull of these erotic scenarios that Racine's theater opens up and away from the too tightly restrictive, political (oedipal) myth that the tragedy also and simultaneously enacts. Although Racine's nighttime scenes are highly constructed rhetorical artifacts meant to elucidate a character's tragic plight, their power and intensity break free of their anchoring in a particular character, and, borne by the seductive voice, that other echo of Racinian tragedy, they carry us back, away from "history," to the pulsations at the libidinal center of his tragic universe.

All of the scenes combine either overtly or covertly images of sexuality and violence, of sexuality as violence, and may thus be seen as variations on the themes of the primal scene, seduction, and castration. These are scenes of "ravishment," if not "rape." What is figured in them, in chiasmatic reversal, is the cataclysmic end of an entire civilization and the birth of a new order. In this sense, although always fixated on the individual's psychic trauma, they also, for Racinian tragedy, represent the primal scene, the sexualized scene wherein a "new world order," and the subject of that order, is conceived.

These are scenes in chiaroscuro, backlit by flames, where the distinction of integral subjects vanishes in the flash of arms, in the tumultuous--we might say, incestuous--inmixture of living and dead bodies, of bodies themselves arrested in the vision of their writhing violence as they pass from life to death. Finally, all this indeterminacy is seized in the horrified, ambivalent glance of the resisting, fainting, and finally vanquished victim. The very structure of the scenes effaces, in the swooning abandonment of the narrator, the possibility of a stable subjective grounding. These are fantasies, "à entrées mulitiples," as Laplanche and Pontalis write, where subjectivity is disseminated across the fantasy: the subject can be the ravished object, the ravishing conqueror, or, even more [End Page 58] radically, not actually present in the scenario at all, as an object, but as the "semantic structure" of its narration. ⁴⁰

The sexuality in these scenes bears the impress of an inherently sadomasochistic pulsation, returning us, as Freud would have it, to a state of primary, presubjective sexuality. It is the erotic charge of this sadomasochistic chiasmus that fuels the guilty pleasure of the tragic victim and of the tragedy itself. Their powerful erotic charge takes us out of the realm of linear dramatic narrative and plunges us back into a universe of chaotic violence, the violence of body parts, of blood, of death. It is this dispersion of the integral body into part-objects, objects of desire and terror, that corresponds to the violence of the "primal scene." For however elegantly his language protects the "bienséances," it is in these scenes, nevertheless, that Racine's text reveals the fantasies of traumatic ferocity that inform the inchoate sexuality below the surface of the oedipal, of what the subject had to traverse before arriving at the scene of the oedipal. ⁴¹ At the same time, this sexuality, its erotic charge recreated in and through the very seductive power of his verse, returns the body that has been banished to the center of his characters' "private theater." What these scenes reveal is the presence of the body, of the passion of that body, as that which the character (the oedipalized character) would not allow. The classically constructed body, which finds one of its greatest technicians in Racine, is a construction that includes, occulted within itself, what it cannot admit, what must be hidden from sight. The intrusion of these phantasmatic scenes functions to connect the violence inherent in classicism's ideology to the body, which in turn is made to represent, in its closed integrity, an entire weltanshauung based on a masculinist politics of order, of "reason."

The fantasized sexuality and violence of the originary scenarios are acted out in the tragic narrative, at the same time that this narrative returns us to the body only in order to eliminate it. The sacrifice at the center of any discussion of Racine's theater thus returns us once again to its compelling enigma. The theater, sacrifice, mediates, as we have said, the individual and the communal, sutures the individual into the communal by the constant relaying of private fantasies and cultural myths. There are, however, certain myths, the Oedipus legend, for instance, that seem to have a more compelling fascination for the [End Page 59] psychosexual and political subjects that we, in the West, are--perhaps because our political (in the broadest sense) structures find their origin in this myth, which in turn returns these structures to a corresponding psychosexual grounding--the roundelay of our subjective ideology. In the confusion of those turbulent changes taking place in in France and generally in Europe in the period 1630-80, Racine's dramatic production represents a particularly enchafed locus of cultural mediation. By its very stituation "at the crossroads of the individual and the collective," Racine's tragedy seems to double and relay, in an uncanny fashion, the mediating role between law and desire that Foucault attributes to the family. ⁴² Just as the family becomes the internalized interchange between the political and the personal, the theater, functioning at the junction of the public and private sphere, can be seen to relay, in a spectacularly seductive fashion, the dynamics of law and desire as incorporated in plots of tragic familial strife. The theater mirrors back to the spectators, who are already structured in a reciprocal role, the law of the Father/King, and through its pleasures elaborates this law as their sacrifice.

What is sacrificed on the altar of Racinian tragedy is the motley, the grotesque, the body in its Kreaturlichkeit, that the tragedies exclude as the troubling other--the body as nonintegral, the opposite of the classical "corps glorieux," bounded integral One, of the Father/King. In essence what Racine's theater both proposes and then denies is the production of the oedipal political/sexual subject as co-eval with the elaboration of the absolutist (classical) edifice. Sacrifice obliges this subject to assume its "proper" sexual position as male or female, in relation to absolutist desires--that is, in relation to the Father/King. At the same time, however, the originary fantasies upon which this "resolution" is based continue to "work" the text (scenes of murder, mayhem, sacrifice, and so on) and constantly undermine--by returning the body as fragmentation to the unconscious scene that denies--the stable fixation of culturally imposed models. This constant oscillation between oedipal sexuality (as resolution) and originary fantasies is responsible for the tragic tension of the tragedy. It is this oscillation that prevents the tragedy and its subject(s) from ever settling comfortably, that is, untragically, into hegemonic ideology.

What is defined as absolutism's "other"--the "feminine," the female body, the unstable bodies of the children in Racine--must be excluded from the evolving political structures of oedipal patriarchy. It is to the spectacle of this sacrifice that all of Racine's tragedies summon us. And we go: we attend the theater transfixed by the horror of Racine's plots and carried away by the seductive song of his verse. We are moved, as we've seen, to tears, that cathartic cleansing of our guilty souls. These tears are, however, ambivalent in their very nature. They are at one and the same time the bitter tears of loss, a sign of what we, the audience, have had to sacrifice of ourselves in order to become the Father's subjects and, perversely, the sign of what still resists that ultimate sacrifice, the continued presence of the body and its affects, which we carry with us on the private theater of our own originary fantasies.

Mitchell Greenberg teaches French at Cornell University.

Notes

* This paper appeared in another, shorter, less analytically inflected version in L'esprit créateur, Summer l998. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated.

1. Starting in the 1560s and continuing until at least 1648, religious wars sprang up all over Europe, carrying with them, as the engravings of Callot vividly show us, carnage, destruction, and horror. As an ancillary effect of the constant deployment of large numbers of mercenary troops throughout Europe, troops living in and inflicting unsanitary conditions upon an impoverished populace, Europe was ravaged by pandemic diseases in ways not seen since the great plague of the fourteenth century. To the terrors of war and plague must be added the horror of that other battle that was simultaneously being waged against an even more formidable--and this time eternal--enemy, the Devil, who was attacked in the person of thousands of witches (peasant women) whom the fear and fanaticism of the century sent to their fiery deaths. During the last third of the century the scourge of the witch hunts receded; war, however, did not. There was hardly a space of more than four years during this entire period when wars--local, national, or international--were not ravaging some corner of the European continent.

2. The two critics most profoundly marked by psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes and Charles Mauron, have underlined the essential "incestuous" kernel at the heart of Racinian tragedy: "L'inceste, la rivalité des frères, le meurtre du père, la subversion du fils, voilà les actions fondamentales du théâtre racinien [Incest, fraternal rivalry, patricide, the subversion of the son, these are the fundamental acts of Racinian tragedy]" [Barthes 21]; "L'inceste oedipien et ses dérivés se retrouvent partout dans Racine [Oedipal incest and its derivatives are found throughout Racine]" [Mauron 30].

3. I am referring here, as I will continue to do, to Foucault's idea of "le grand renfermement," the symbolic movement he describes in Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, by which difference is imposed through a defensive gesture of "othering." This gesture, translated into epistemic terms, is one way the early Foucault proposed to see the rupture between the world of the sixteenth century (of the "Renaissance") and that of the eighteenth ("classical representation") The seventeenth century straddling this divide participates unevenly in both.

4. Joyce McDougall, talking about the affective resonance of the voice, particularly the "maternal voice," suggests: "The mother's voice rekindles fantasies of the wish for fusion, with the consequent loss of both subjective--and sexual--identity" [82].

5. I am thinking here particularly of Mauron, who is heavily influenced by the British Kleinian school's approach to preoedipal fantasies: "La tragédie de Racine est pre-oedipienne; les principes de vie et de mort s'y affrontent. La tragédie de Corneille est post-oedipienne: le conflit est celui de la passion et du devoir [Racinian tragedy is pre-oedipal; life and death confront each other there. Cornelian tragedy is post-oedipal: there the conflict is between passion and duty]" [122]. Both Barthes and Leo Bersani see strong "pre-oedipal" patterns at work in the plays. Bersani writes, "The Oedipal stage provides a reenforcement for archaic pre-Oedipal passions" [38].

6. "So the point of departure of Racinian theater is a chilling evocation of the descendancy of Laius . . ." [Lewis 57]. But see his entire discussion of the oedipal legend, and his discussion of "oedipal effects" in all twelve tragedies.

7. Didier Anzieu reminds us, in his exploration of the construction and ramifications of the oedipal legend "Oedipe avant le complexe ou de l'interprétation psychanalytique des mythes," that even before the legend reaches his father, Oedipus's genealogy begins with sexuality and violence: "Oedipe, roi de Thèbes descend d'Harmonie, unique fille des amours illégitimes d'Arès et d'Aphrodite: chez lui l'inceste et le parricide trouveront leur expression la plus crue, de même qu'Arès et Aphrodite, représentent ouvertement l'agressivité et la sexualité [Oedipus, king of Thebes, is a descendant of Harmony, only daughter of the illicit loves of Ares and Aphrodite: in him incest and patricide will find their most unadorned expression, just as Ares and Aphrodite are the chief representatives of aggressivity and sexuality]" [682].

8. I take the term "corporal aura" from Guy Rosolato, who defines voice this way: "De sort que la Voix, apparue en un premier argument comme émanation, aura corporelle peut être tenue pour un 'objet intermédiaire' [So that Voice which appeared in a first discussion as an 'emanation,' as a corporeal aura, can be understood as an 'intermediary object'] . . ." ["La Voix" 302].

9. Ned Lukacher takes up this passage and comments on it in the following way to argue the importance of voice for the primal scene: "There is a 'voice within us' that enables us 'to recognize the compelling force' of Oedipus Rex because this voice has already told us all of this before. Because this voice has already called upon us and because we have already forgotten it, the repetition of the entire process gives Oedipus Rex the appearance of the 'compelling force' of destiny. Our aesthetic and intellectual response to the tragedy of Oedipus is in effect the unconscious repetition of the primal scene of the call to conscience" [81].

10. Many critics have pointed to the theater as a privileged dialectical site mediating between the public and the private. See, for instance, Anne Ubersfeld: "il devient clair que l'activité théâtrale, dans la représentation, est par excellence, un lieu dialectique [it becomes clear that theatrical activity, in its representation, is par excellence a dialectical locus] . . ." [39]; "tout texte théâtral est la réponse à une demande du public, et c'est sur ce point que se fait le plus aisément l'articulation du discours théâtral avec l'histoire et l'idéologie [each theatrical text is the response to a demand on the part of the audience, and it is on this precise point that the articulation of theatrical discourse with history and ideology is most easily made]" [265]. For his part the psychoanalyst and critic André Green writes: "Between the two, at the meeting-point of the individual and society, between the personal resonance of the work's content and its social function, art occupies a transitional position which qualifies the domain of illusion, which permits an inhibited and restrained jouissance obtained by means of objects that both are and are not what they represent . . ." [23].

11. "Le théâtre apparaît un art privilégié, d'une importance capitale, puisqu'il montre, mieux que tous les autres, comment le psychisme individuel s'investit dans un rapport collectif [The theater appears to be a privileged form of art, of capital importance, because it shows better than all the other arts how the individual psyche becomes invested in a collective dynamic]" [Ubersfeld 15].

12. In their classic essay on the originary fantasies, Fantasme originaire: Fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme, Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis remind us that originally Freud used the term "Urszene" as a general term; its more precisely limited sense came later. "Ces scènes des temps originaires,ces vraies scènes, Freud les désigne alors du nom de Urszenen (scènes 'originaires,' ou 'primitives') . Plus tard, comme on sait, ce terme sera réservé à l'observation du coït parent auquel l'enfant aurait assisté [These scenes of originary moments, these real scenes, will be called by Freud at this point in his thinking Urszenen ('originary' or 'primal' scenes). Later on, as we know, this term will be used only for the scene of parental coitus, during which the child is supposed to have been present]" [40].

13. Rosolato offers the most succinct (and contradictory) readings of the relation of the originary fantasies, particularly the primal scene and the Oedipus complex: "La scène primitive offre l'avantage d'être axée sur l'Oedipe . . . elle sert . . . de matrice à la situation triangulaire [The primal scene has the advantage of being exclusively turned toward the Oedipus complex . . . it serves . . . as the matrix for the triangular structure] . . ." ["Paranoia et scène primitive" 204] In the essay "La Voix," in the same book, he writes, "le fantasme est donc aux antipodes de la résoluton oedipienne de la séparation, de la différences des sexes acquise et de la castration correlative [the fantasm is thus situated at the extreme opposite pole of the oedipal resolution of separation, of achieved sexual difference and of the castration that is correlative to it]" [291]. J. -C. Lavie also reaffirms the connection between the primal scene and the Oedipus complex: "La rivalité oedipienne et la scène primitive ont fatalement partie liée [Oedipal rivalry and the primal scene are fatally interrelated]" [14].

14. Norman Bryson: "The Body is certainly that which is inserted into the given institutions of ideology, of economy and crucially of sexual identity, yet also it is that which forms those institutions, subjects them to endless revision, and if need be, overturns them . . ." [152].

15. In Primal Scenes, Lukacher concentrates his analysis of the interrelation of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis on the primal scene, one of the four "originary scenarios" (castration, seduction, and, for some analysts, return to the womb are the others). What Lukacher underlines for the primal scene--which I believe can be extended to the other scenarios--is its constructed (that is, its "poietic" rather than "mimetic") essence: "The primal scene is the figure of an interpretive dilemma; it is a constellation of forgotten intertexutal events offered in lieu of a demonstrable, unquestionable origin" [24]. That is to say, the primal scene, like all originary phantasms, is an "après-coup" reading of a never actually "real" event/trauma. It is an interpretation, a creation, a fantasy that, as Lukacher says, "lies beyond the history of the subject but nevertheless in history" [105].

16. Jean Laplanche, in his Problématiques, offers the most incisive elaboration on the importance for a psychoanalytic understanding of human psychic functioning of the difficulty of too radical a separation of "reality/fantasy." See, in particular, 3: 95 and 5: 89.

17. "Bien sûr que nous mythifions le passé, mais à la recherche de plus de vérité sur le passé. Ni au patient en analyse, ni à celui qui nous interroge sur notre savoir, nous ne pouvons répondre simplement que nous créons des mythes: ce dont nous avons à rendre compte c'est que l'individu humain soit mythisant (parfois: mythifiant), qu'il soit auto-mythifiant [Of course we mythify the past, but in the search for ever more truth about the past. Neither to the patient in analysis nor to the person who questions us about our knowledge can we respond simply that we believe in myths, what it is incumbent upon us to explain is that the human being is a 'mythisizing' being (at times 'mythifying'), that he is self-mythifying]" [Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements 57-58].

18. Eugène Enriquez, in De la horde, his application of psychoanalysis to political structures, writes: "tout phantasme tend à s'inscrire dans le réel, à l'organiser et à le produire [every fantasm tends to be inscribed in the real, to organize it and to produce it]" [148].

19. "[L]e mythe d'origine à partir de laquelle il ne pourrait y avoir que déperdition. Origine, c.à.d. aussi perfection d'une unitée originelle qui ne peut être que rompue [The myth of origins from which it can only be followed by a loss, a falling off. 'Origins' means also the perfection of an original unity that can only be fragmented]" [Rosolato, "La Voix" 290].

20. "[T]oute quête de l'origine, à condition de la pousser assez loin bute toujours sur l'inconnu. Nous verrons (donc) que pour le sujet le fantasme et pour la communauté le mythe viennent suppléer, par un scénario imaginaire, dans l'illusion d'un savoir, à l'inaccessible de l'inconnu [If it is pushed far enough any search for an origin stumbles up against the unknown. We will (thus) see that for the subject, the fantasm, and for the community, the myth, through the use of an imaginary scenario, come to stand in for the inaccessibility of the unknown]" [Rosolato, "Les fantasmes originaires et leurs mythes correspondants" 226].

21. Didier Anzieu, in The Skin-Ego, gives a succinct formulation of the interrelation between psychic structures and physical reality: "every psychical function develops by supporting itself on a bodily function whose workings it transposes onto the mental plane . . ." [96].

22. "Dans les premières ébauches théoriques que lui suggère la question des fantasmes, Freud valorise . . . le rôle de l'entendu [From his very first theoretical speculations that emerge from the question of the fantasm, Freud valorizes . . . the role of the 'heard']" [Laplanche and Pontalis 50]. In the following paragraphs, I will be following their argument on the importance of "sound."

23. The importance of the concept of "interpellation" for understanding the subjective positioning of "individuals" is used by Althusser (following Lacan) in Positions [118-19].

24. "[L]a Parole cède le pas à la Voix qui s'en détache pour n'être plus qu'un vecteur, une abstraction qui émane d'une origine, d'une unité première et d'une originelle adhésion au sens du sens. Ainsi . . . désignerons-nous la Voix: comme renvoyant dans le mythe, à l'origine, et plus généralement comme question implicitement posée sur elle, donc pouvant être captée par les fantasmes correspondants [The Word yields to the Voice which becomes detached from it and remains but one vector, an abstraction that emanates from an origin, from a primal unity and from an original fit of sense to meaning. Let us therefore . . . designate Voice: as in myth recalling an origin, or even more generally, as a question implicitly asked about the origins, and thus able to be woven into the corresponding fantasms]" ["La Voix" 291]. Rosolato expands upon many of the suggestions put forth by Reik in his Ritual; Psychoanalytical Studies. See in particular the sections "Kol Nidre" [167-220] and "The Shofar" [221-362].

25. Although this is an idiosyncratic survey, I would like to point out what strikes me as the resonances in the preceding psychoanalytic theories of voice with the early, preanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's notion of the "pre-oedipal Chora," the preverbal, presymbolic "language" that soothes the child in its rhythmic, modulated rocking tones and thus establishes a primary maternal linguistic stratum that is reawakened in the melodies and rhymes of poetry and music, is an important theoretical formulation for Racine's tragedies in that it provides one more way of thinking the affective power of the tragedies, in yet another declension of the way "sexual difference" comes to the subject [see Polylogue].

26. "Des mots lus, donc, pour remplacer sinon pour retrouver les mots entendus, ceux que la représentation tragique offrait à l'écoute active du public athénien. Des mots à double, à multiple entente. . . . [E]t c'est seulement pour le plaisir, ou pour mémoire, que j'évoquerai quelques-unes des raisons qui incitent à placer ainsi la tragédie sous le signe de l'écoute [Words read, therefore, to replace if not exactly to recapture words heard, those words that tragic representation offered to the ear of the Athenian audience. Words with double or even multiple meanings. . . . And it is only for pleasure, or for a reminder, that I evoke some of the reasons that push me to place tragedy under the sign of 'listening']" [Loraux 10].

27. "La famille est (donc) l'espace tragique par excellence. Sans doute parce que les noeuds d'amour, donc de haine, sont en elle les tous premiers en date et en importance [The family is (thus) the tragic space par excellence. Probably because the ties of love and thus of hatred are, in the family, the earliest and the most important] . . ." [Green, Un oeil en trop 69].

28. "Se demander si ce sont ces relations de parenté qui constituent le tragique ou si c'est le tragique qui éclaire ces relations de parenté n'a peut-être pas de sens, ainsi formulé. Disons plutôt qu'elles nous révèlent quelque chose d'essentiel sur la subjectivité qui est inséparable du tragique, par la mise au jour de la relation du sujet à ses géniteurs ou que l'étude de ces relations ne se conçoit pleinement que dans le cadre du tragique, pour dévoiler son rôle constituant de subjectivité [To ask if it is kinship ties that constitute the tragic, or if it is tragedy that illuminates kinship probably is meaningless, formulated that way. Let us say rather that they reveal to us something primordial about subjectivity that is inseparable from tragedy; or that the study of these relations can only be fully explored within the frame of tragedy, which by holding up to the light of day the relation of the subject to his parents unveils their constitutive role in the development of subjectivity]" [Green, Un oeil en trop 53-54].

29. As Mauron has pointed out in his reading of Racine, in the tragedies leading up to Mithridate, the political crisis is precipitated because the place of the father is vacant, creating turmoil in the universe of the drama. From Mithridate on, the father returns, only to find his place usurped or in danger of being usurped [26-31].

30. "Que l'on fasse des onze tragédies une tragédie essentielle; que l'on dispose dans une sorte de constellation exemplaire cette tribu d'une cinquantaine de personnages tragiques qui habite la tragédie racinienne, et l'on y retrouvera les figures et les actions de la horde primitive [Let us take the eleven separate tragedies and make of them one essential tragedy; let us arrange in a sort of exemplary constellation this tribe made up of fifty or so characters who inhabit Racinian tragedy, and then we will find there the figures and actions of the primal horde] . . ." [Barthes 20].

31. Here I am greatly simplifying Mauron's schema.

32. Enriquez remarks: "Si sans père, il ne peut y avoir d'enfants (au sens social du terme), sans enfants, c'est à dire, sans individus capables de reconnaître la loi du père et de s'identifier aux idéaux qu'elle véhicule, il ne peut y avoir de père non plus [If without a father there cannot be children (in the social meaning of the term), without children, that is, without individuals able to recognize the law of the father and identify with the ideals for which it serves as a vehicle, there cannot be a father, either]" [243].

33. Barthes also uses the word "baroque" to describe Racine, but for other, socioeconomic reasons: "Racine est certes un auteur très impure, baroque pourrait-on dire, où des éléments de tragédie véritable se mêlent sans aucune harmonie aux germes déjà vivaces du futur théâtre bourgeois [Racine is, clearly, an impure author, 'baroque' we might say, where elements of real tragedy intermingle without any harmony, with the already potent seeds of future bourgeois drama]" [143].

34. Barthes refers to these same scenes: "Ces scènes érotiques sont en effet de véritables fantasmes. . . . Ce qui frappe dans le fantasme racinien . . . c'est son aspect plastique . . . des tableaux, c.à.d. qu'ils se rangent délibérement sous les normes de la peinture [These erotic scenes are actually really fantasmatic. . . . What is striking in the Racinian fantasm . . is its plastic aspect . . . they are tableaux, that is, they are constituted with the norms used for painting]" [29].

35. "[R]ecollection does not represent what is, for the simple reason that the scene itself, including the subject's role in it, was never perceived by the subject . . . in place of the original impression, one has access only to its nonoriginary revision" [Lukacher 57]. A more detailed explanation is furnished by Fihman: "'Dans la scène originaire c'est l'origine du sujet qui se voit figurée.' Cette célèbre définition, que l'on doit à Jean Laplanche et J.-B. Pontalis, dit plus que celle de Freud. La scène originaire (Urszene ou 'proto-scène') n'est pas seulement l'observation réelle ou fantasmée du (d'un) coït parental, mais la scène de la propre conception du sujet. Hors lieu, hors temps, cette scène-là ne peut qu'être construite. La scène primitive tient son statut de la rencontre, dans un temps non assignable, de deux énigmes, celle de la sexualité et celle de l'origine du sujet. En tant que scène figurée, la scène originaire naît alors de la conjonction entre la cogitation du sujet sur son origine et l'agitation tumultueuse du coït parental ou de l'un de ses substituts ['In the primal scene it is the origin of the subject that is represented.' This famous definition, which we get from Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, says more than Freud's. The primal scene (Urszene or 'proto-scene') is not only the actual or imagined observation of parental coitus, but the scene of the very conception of the subject. Spaceless, timeless, this scene can only be a construction. The primal scene owes its status to the meeting, in an unspecifiable time, to two puzzles,the enigma of sexuality and the enigma of the subject's origin. Insofar as it is a figured scene, the primal scene is born from the conjunction of the subject's musings about his origin with the tumultuous movement of parental coitus or of one of its substitutes] . . ." [121]. Finally, Rosolato writes, "J'insisterai donc sur l'impossibilité de l'observation de la scène primitive, quand on reconnaït son antériorité postulée par rapport à la vie du sujet en fonction de cette causalité sexuelle qui cherche une origine aux lignées elles-mêmes [I will insist, therefore, on the impossibility of the actual observation of the primal scene, when one recognizes the presumed anteriority in relation to the life of the subject as it is produced by a sexual causality that searches for an origin in the conjunction of diverse lineages]" [229].

36. This is a cursory synopsis of Rosolato's complex argument. See his "Les fantasmes originaires" for the sophisticated working through of the relation between fantasy and myth.

37. "[L]a scène érotique est théâtre dans le théâtre, elle cherche à rendre ce moment le plus vivant mais aussi le plus fragile de la lutte, celui où l'ombre va être pénétrée d'éclat [The erotic scene is a theater in the theater, it wants to explain the most vivid but also the most fragile moment of the battle, the moment when the shadows are about to be penetrated by a burst of sunlight] . . ." [Barthes 32].

38. "It is safe to suppose, therefore, that what has been 'dreamt' in the dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection, while the continuation of the dream, on the contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes" [Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 4: 338].

39. "Le théâtre a le statu du rêve: une construction imaginaire dont le spectateur sait qu'elle est radicalement séparée de la sphère de l'existence quotidienne. . . . [Le spectateur] peut se permettre de voir fonctionner les lois qui le régissent sans y être soumis, puisqu'elles sont expressément visées dans leur réalité contraignante [The theater has the status of a dream: an imaginary constructiion which the spectator knows is radically separated from the sphere of daily existence. . . . The spectator can allow himself to watch the laws that control him function without being subjugated to them, because here they are directly attacked in their constraining reality]" [Ubersfeld 47].

40. Speaking of the fantasy "A father seduces a daughter," they say, "Le pôle du fantasme originaire, à l'inverse, se caracteriserait par une absence de subjectivation allant de pair avec la présence su sujet dans la scène: l'enfant par exemple est un des personnages, parmi les autres, du fantasme "un enfant est battu . . . ," "Un père séduit une fille," telle serait par exemple la formulation résumée du fantasme de séduction. La marque du precessus primaire n'est pas ici l'absence d'organisation, comme on le dit parfois, mais ce caractère particulier de la structure: elle est un scénario à entrées multiples, dans lequel rien ne dit que le sujet trouvera d'emblée sa place dans le terme fille; on peut le voir se fixer aussi bien en père ou même en séduit [The pole of the primal fantasm, on the other hand, would be characterized by an absence of subjectivization that is accompanied by the subject's presence in the scene: for example the child is one of the characters, one of many, in the fantasm 'a child is being beaten . . .' 'A father seduces his daughter,' this would be, for example the formula of the fantasm of seduction. The mark of the primary process here is not in the absence of organization, as is commonly said, but in the particular character of the structure: it is a scenario with multiple points of entry, in which nothing says that the subject will a priori find its place in the term daughter; one can see it just as easily attach itself to father, or even seduces]" [62-63].

41. See Laplanche and Pontalis: "il est dans la nature même de la sexualité d'avoir un effet traumatique . . . (et, inversement, qu'on ne peut à la limite parler de traumatisme et y découvrir l'origine de la névrose que dans la mesure ou la séduction sexuelle est intervenue) [it is in the very nature of sexuality to have a traumatic effect . . . (and, inversely, one can finally only talk about trauma and attempt to find in it the origin of a neurosis, to the degree that sexuality has intervened)]" [22]; and further: "[l]e fantasme de la scène primitive avec son caractère de violence témoigne d'une véritable introjection pour l'enfant de l'érotisme adulte [the fantasm of the primal scene with its violent aspect bears witness to the true (veritable) introjection of adult erotism by the child]" [28].

42. Besides the work of André Green on the mediating aspect of the theater [Un oeil en trop], see Ubersfeld: "il devient clair que l'activité théâtrale , dans la représentation est, par excellence, un lieu dialectique [it is becoming clear that theatrical activity, in representation, is par excellence a dialectical locus]" [39]. As for the family, it was during this period that, as Foucault writes, the family became "l'échangeur de la sexualité et de l'alliance: elle transporte la loi et la dimension du juridique dans le dispositif de sexualité: et elle transporte l'économie du plaisir et l'intensité des sensations dans le régime de l'alliance [the exchanger of sexuality and the law: it carries law and the juridical dimension into the sexual dispositif: and it transports the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensations into the realm of the law]" [La volonté de savoir 143].

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