ABSTRACT
The significance of the three coordinates we have discussed thus far is epistemic and ontic, concerning the possibilities of knowing and the conditions of our being-in-the-world. That is, they concern the productive structuration of the representational world and the transmutative momentum projectively caused by the desirous impulses of embodied experience that is unrepresented and unrepresentable. As I have indicated in the preceding chapters, the prior coordinates (the processes of repression and resistance, of repetition-compulsivity, and pluritemporality, and of the fundamentality of our sensual embodiment as conveying the desirous “unthought known” of experience) all depict dimensions of the structure and movement of representations in relation to that which is unrepresented and unrepresentable. But these processes are, in a certain rather limited sense, neutral with respect to the content of representations. For example, a representation that is repressed might be about anything that happens to be threatening to our egotism; although, as we will see in this chapter, there are certain – incestuous – experiences that are necessarily repressed and that determine the formation of the “repression barrier.” In a sense, the “Oedipal Complex,” which is the fourth coordinate defining psychoanalysis as a discipline, is of a different order from the other three (epistemically and ontically), in that it is bound to matters of particular content – namely the forbidden content of incestuous desire. It involves matters of conflictual relationships about and between representations of self and other that are loved and hated; but most profoundly, it concerns the limits of human desire in relation to the ubiquitous traumata of the incest taboo and the way in which the limits of desire delimit the possibility of our knowing and our being. As I will demonstrate, it is these ubiquitous traumata that are fundamental to the processes of necessarily not-knowing that characterize the human condition.
