Double Cain

Freud himself, In his irrepresible drive to recapitulate ontogeny 9 recapitulation of phylogeny, uses "animistic," "narcissistic" and *savage" more or less interchangeably, since `each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to [the] animistic stage in primitive men (46). The infantile ego, the Narcissus-child, is In short a contemporary reincarnation of the srage; Freud can thus write in Totem and Taboo that 'The animistic phase [in human history] would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content," and it's clear that narcissism must therefore be sacrificed (to object-love, as we'll see) if the child is ever to be properly "socialized" (90. The present essay could be thought to elaborate the Impossibility of just that sacrifice-the impossibility of socialization itself.

6 Cf. Borch-Jacobsen, LAcan 45: "In the presence of [the double], I am once more in an absolutely familiar relation with the notme, with the other-but In the form of a no less absolute uncanniness, since the other me is now seen on the outside.. ['T]he ego sees itself outside itself, in an image all the more estranging because it is narcissistic, all the more alienating because it is perfectly similar." My reading of mimetic violence owes an obvious debt to Borch-Jacobsen remarkable body of work though it should be clear that I'm finally more interested in the olfactorily debasing potential of the double than in showing, as he does, that the entire specular and theatrical vocabulary by which psychoanalysis comprehends the subject (mirror reflection, representation, the "other stage of the unconscious) is a kind of elaborate defense against the recognition of subjectivity as something profoundly anti-specular.

The names are virtually interchangeable for my purposes, so long as we remember that they very precisely do not designate a "father-figure Indeed, there can be no question here of a pacific-Oedipalizing identification with a paternal imago, since, as Borch-Jacobsen has cogently argued, the logic of the double marks the ruin of Oedipus by exposing the father as a mere brother(-rival) whose injunction to peaceable identification can carry no authoritative weight. See the final chapter of Freudian subj.

Freud seems dimly aware of this logic when, in a remarkable passage of The Uncanny " he describes a "silly" story that produced in him a powerfully "uncanny effect: "In the midst of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, amongst other not very interesting matter, I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odor that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness; they seem to see a vague form gliding up the st irs-in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the