![]() (Paradoxically, then, an origin substitutes for a replacement.) Intimacy and education tie the few children in the family to parent imagoes and eclipse the law of exogamy (which Freud interpreted as incestuous itself, if by transference). She, in turn, as the new center of the family, takes the place of the nurses of old. Burdened with the responsibility of being more symbolic than ever, the biological father surrenders his preeminent position to the mother. The household becomes the family unit, which assumes all tasks of socializing a small number of children-who, moreover, are planned. Now political, juridical, and economic power are no longer linked to kinship structures. The code governing the conjugal, nuclear family-which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the intellectual bourgeoisie and became universal in the nineteenth-stands opposed to the code of the clan on every point. The incestuous double bond vanishes without consequence. And because Trevrizent tells Parzival of his expectant mother’s dreams, which she never revealed to her son,⁴ there is no unspoken remainder that might haunt the hero and open the way for psychology or psychoanalysis. Parzival’s innocence ends when the symbolic order, which Herzeloyde has kept silent, is voiced. Finally, the boy’s uncle on his mother’s side-who (as in other cultures) wields greater symbolic power than a biological father precisely because he is not the child’s actual sire-articulates, in the capacity of father confessor, debts of blood to relatives and, as a genealogist, the alliances between two clans. Taking the place of Parzival’s father, old Gurnemanz prohibits the youth from appealing to childhood and motherly words at all, in order to inscribe him into the axis of succeeding generations. Condwiramurs (whose name says what it means- to conduct love) initiates him into strictly exogamous eroticism-and as amor de lonh ( love from afar) at that. ³ She does so to no avail, however, for an ars amandi and law that are one and the same remove Parzival from the double bond with his mother. Instead of promoting the play of metaphor, Herzeloyde, out of love and fear, clothes the adventuresome boy in a fool’s garb, so that its worldly echoes may bring him back to her. The clan is governed by the metaphor visselîn = swert, ² a figure running this way and that-which Freud took up to his own ends and confused with natural fact. Coded in terms of sex, the boy receives a phallic attribute that symbolically couples desire and power: now he is destined for exogamous alliances and knightly adventures. ![]() When they discern the visselîn (which translates into today’s English as willie), they lavish affection on the child. When Parzival is born, Wolfram von Eschenbach simply mentions that his mother and her ladies-in-waiting spread the legs of the infant. Families, on the other hand, introject norms and imagoes into offspring, thereby subverting binary sexual difference and generating souls sexualized by incestuous desire. Clans were connected by the law of exogamy, which linked them and inscribed scions along the axes of generations and races. Since the eighteenth century, the code for kinship has been called the Family. The Middle Ages had something called the Clan. Read moreġ Poet, Mother, Child: On the Romantic Invention of Sexuality The twenty-three pieces gathered here document the intellectual itinerary of one of the most original thinkers in recent times-sometimes baffling, often controversial, and always stimulating. Exemplary essays illustrate how matters of form and inscription make heterogeneous source material (e.g., literary classics and computer design) interchangeable on the level of function-with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the humanities and the "hard sciences." Rich in counterintuitive propositions, sly humor, and vast erudition, Kittler's work both challenges the assumptions of positivistic cultural history and exposes the over-abstraction and language games of philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. "Media studies," as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany.
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