In Sophocles’ play “Oedipus the King”, the protagonist, upon learning that he had murdered his father and married his mother, sticks gold needles into his eyes. This aberration was due to unbearable guilt and a “wrong incest” performance. Blindness, in this case, serves as a symbol of not wanting to see that wrongness. But is there a correct way to incest?
Although psychoanalysis thinks that the “Oedipus complex” is a pathology, other schools sometimes consider that this maternal regression can be healing. It is as if the crisis had a happy resolution, as if blindness were necessary to later be able to see the light. As they postulate, the “incest that cures” is one that liberates through a mystical experience.
This experience, according to religious wisdom, occurs when a subject “dis-subjects” himself, being thrown into an amniotic “globality”. Symbolically, it is as if the state of fetal darkness was revived to later, from a “second birth”, achieve “enlightenment”. After the “dark night” a new day arises. It is the transcendence of itself. A transmutation. This is understood in the “myth of the hero’s journey”, where dying is subsumed in the entire underworld to later be reborn victorious. For the ancient Egyptians, the Sun died every afternoon, dissolving in its western sepulcher. The case of the event of the cross is symptomatic of other ancient myths. The drama of Christ when he is sacrificed, buried in the “womb of the Earth” and resurrected on the third day, had already been experienced by various ancient gods such as Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus or Mithras.
Now, the mystical crisis, where the subject claims to have an “oceanic experience”, beyond a mythical correlate and a psychological hermeneutics, can also be projected onto a philosophy of history. Under this logic, when one observes the present globalization, one can compare it to the situation of our world, as if it were immersed and disoriented within its own “collective mystical experience.”
Actually, today there is only one power: I am talking about the advance of an Empire under the banners of a “New World Order” (this expression was used by the former president of the United States George H. W. Bush to refer to the new geopolitical context during the Postwar period). cold). This “order”, by its very nature, does not allow “an other” as a dimension of the possible, the “One” does not admit the negativity of contrast and in this way our civilization is suspended in a death in the same. Georg W. F. Hegel would say that a unique stage does not have a dialectic, the antithesis is absent, falling into an “infinite absolute”.
Without dialectic, history is inert, it cannot come out of its maternal blindness and be reborn in the light. All globalization is a murder of time, like a “mystical sacrifice” of times. This is what is sought in totalitarianisms: the uniform. Hegel, by claiming synthesis, killed history; Karl Marx, by supporting his dialectic, tried to revive it by taking it to a socialist utopia, to progress, to the “trans”. Is the Marxist ideal the one that can take us out of the fetal globality of history and lead us to another dawn? Let’s analyze the matter.
The class struggle, in theory, postulated their uniformity and if they achieved equality, socialism would no longer make sense. That is why his theory is built on the need to produce his own market of proletarians to equalize them and thus sustain the drive for their existence. But also, in the scope of his chimera is the germ of his own dissolution in the inane of the same.
It is notable that the goal they sought was finally reached by capitalism, which far from surpassing it has become an economic, political and military totalitarianism that lacks meaning in itself. The dialectic of history has no place within the Empire since it acts under the premise of “preventive war”, where a single power assumes the hegemony of the world.
The need to get out of the “same” means that the inhabited subject, when he looks towards the future, within his Oedipal blindness does not see any way out of his sameness, and for this reason he is condemned to myth, that is, to return to the apocalypse. If man is not capable of obtaining the means to get out of the “One” he must surrender to providence, to God also “One”. Perhaps for this reason the active presence of monotheistic religions and their radicalization is a clear symptom of the obscurantism of our times.
However, waiting for salvation by divine hands has a limit: the border of non-compliance. The prophecy is expected in the cycles. And that is its weakness: its unrealization. When the gods are not capable of taking the world out of totality and making it revive, it is there that men free themselves from them and precisely the “thinking subject” is born. By making himself a subject, he takes control of his time, formats and resurrects the times towards a new “telos”, in other words, he “deglobalizes” it.
Towards this reborn dialectic the alienated masses intend to go to “emancipate themselves from the mother”, in progress, inquiring a new vision. But even so, even if it seems otherwise, the revolution is still regressive since deep down it only seeks “the mother” as a return to utopia.
The revolution, despite the fact that it preaches the logic of getting out of the global, produces a similar effect in the long run, therefore it is “blind” and clouds its ideal reason in order to impose ideologies, to standardize, to propose a “new Same”. It ends up being as inappropriate as the universalization of the world that it wants to overcome, both are Oedipal and blurred, both are incestuous and, as Walter Benjamin said, ultimately highly mythical.
The revolution aspires to be the “substitute wife” of retrograde theocracies and the alternative to capitalist totalitarianism, but it seems not to see that it insistently falls into the same error: in the inbred search for global control of the population.
The relationship between “Oedipus” and Marxism is not new, it has already been worked on by literature. In the work of Milan Kundera “Life is elsewhere” the maternal idea of socialism is shown. Kundera, despite the fact that he belonged to the Communist Party, “jokes with him”, with his idea of ”farce”. Jaromil’s mother, the protagonist of the novel, is a possessive woman attached to her son, whom she excessively protects and, on the contrary, she feels a deep rejection of her husband. Jaromil must leave his mother for another feminine archetype: the class struggle. This dilemma is articulated here as a dissonant x-ray of a past century, complex and unintelligible, like the fetal state to which the revolution aspires.
That is why it is time to think about some option to start the train of time, without forgetting that all hope in providence or in the revolution is dreaming of changing reality so that nothing changes, it is the sublimation of the human to find a alternate meaning to the anguish of finitude, a shortcut to another idyllic place that will end in the inevitable: in the same capitalist accumulation that it insults.
