Analysis in Power historical evolution, and concerned the symbolic authority the father Or his substitute was constrained to assume: . , . the Oedipal triangle is only the reduction to the natural group, operated by an historical evolution, of a formation in which the authority preserved for the father, the only trait remaining from its original structure, shows itself to be increasingly unstable.2 One recognizes in this argument the idea advanced by Levi-Strauss that
incest is universally forbidden, not because of events in the mythical pre history of humanity, which might be thought to be simply the projection of Victorian fears or dissatisfactions, or a revival of Biblical mythology , but in
order to insure the social relations of reproduction, and to insure them through symbolic systems. Read in this way, the universality of the Oedipal
Complex is no longer falsified by cultures with kinship systems other than
that of the monogamous bourgeois family -or at least the ethnologist is so
re-assured.
In fact Lacan does make use of this argument, but for a quite specific
purpose: to transfer the Oedipal Complex from the framework which places the child
("Ie petit d'homme")
in relation to members of his family , to
another , which .'places him in relation to his Culture and its symbolic fonns. For Lacan, the Oedipal Complex is the theory of the relation between one's
childhood, shrouded in amnesia and "absence" of origin, and one's assump tion of a place within a culture. Comments Althusser: Herein no doubt lies the most original aspect of Lacan's work, his discovery. Lacan has shown that this transition from (ultimately purely) biological existence to human existence (the human child) is achieved within the Law of Order. , . . and this Law of Order is confounded in its formal essence with the order of language.3 But Lacan gives a rather speCific interpretation to this "Law of Order." He
identifies the authority of the father with a religiously consecrated "[une· tion" whieh the real father of the family or SOme substitute (e.g. even the
real mother) must "assume": It is not only the way in which the mother accommodates the person of the father with which one should be concerned but with the case she makes of his Word (parole), let us say the word, of his authority , in other words, the place she reserves for the Name of the Father in the promotion of the law.4 This Name-of·the·Father is of course not identical to the actual father's legal
name and the actual legal, contractual, and property relations in which it
figures as signature, any more than
the
Law is identical to any particular law
or interdiction. The "function" of the Name·of-the-Father is perfectly com
patible with a matronymic or matrilineal society. The Law, on the other hand, prevails in every society, or wherever people speak; it presides over the
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