In the three essays that comprise Freud’s development of the Oedipus Complex, “Civilization and its Discontents,” “Totem and Taboo,” and “Nature of an Illusion”, we see him sketch out in the clearest possible terms a foundational violence that societies carry with them as trauma. However, as Laplanche, Guattari, Fanon, and others have noted, Freud seemed to be on the verge of making a radical diagnosis of western societies, but backed away from the praecipes and instead sought to universalise Oedipus as a primary neurosis.

This talk will think with Freud in an attempt to re-situate the Oedipus Complex as a diagnostic tool to understand the founding of Western States as predicated on male colonial violence. It will then look at the contemporary technocratic state, specifically its entanglement with Silicon Valley and AI systems, to show how this foundational violence continues to structure both State and social relations.

Bio:

Dr Anthony Faramelli is a psychosocial researcher and practitioner whose work is grounded in issues of coloniality and the theories and practices of institutional psychotherapy. Anthony is a lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London where he teaches in the Centre for Research Architecture. Anthony is the author of Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo to Assemblage Politics and an editor of Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault. His current research projects examine the digital cultures of the Far-Right, psychotherapy's aesthetics practices, and the resistant networks formed by Latin American diasporic communities.

The Oedipal complex, proposed by Sigmund Freud, has been analysed, critiqued, and developed by countless theorists and scholars through various lenses. Ne Zha, a Chinese mythological child deity, has been juxtaposed with Oedipus by academics for his patricidal tale. Often called the Chinese Oedipus, Ne Zha and his familial dynamics are usually analysed within the Freudian Oedipal framework. For example, Meir Shahar firmly believes that there is an Oedipal triad within nuclear families under the Chinese Confucian structure, despite the direction of violence usually being reversed due to the strong hierarchical architecture referred to as filial piety. However, what these scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, fail to consider is that the persistent application of the Freudian Oedipal framework risks reducing Ne Zha’s narrative to a structural analogue of Eurocentric familial psychology, thereby overlooking the significance of Confucian influence on familial hierarchy, desire, womanhood, etc., through which rebellion and authority are reorganised in the Chinese context.

This paper, drawing from Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Kojève, and a range of classical and contemporary texts and media productions on Ne Zha’s myth alongside Confucian philosophical writings, proposes the concept of the Ne Zha Complex as an alternative analytic framework. By conceptualising the Ne Zha complex, this paper also seeks to examine how the familial dynamic extends beyond the domestic sphere into configurations of national authority, moral governance and modes of resistance to power, particularly through a feminist lens.

Bio

Zihan Wang is a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the digital media environment in China and how young Chinese adults’—late millennials and early Gen Zs—subjectivities are created, transformed, and mutated through the usage of both Western social media platforms—facilitated by a VPN (Virtual Private Network)—and those of China.

This paper proposes an analysis of the internet's architecture as the core component of a contemporary institutional megacomplex. It argues that digital platforms constitute a total mega-institution in the Goffmanian sense. Their architectural designs (algorithms, interfaces, etc.) fundamentally structure interaction and mold subjectivity.

However, its mechanism for the mortification of the self is distinctive. It enacts a stripping away of other possible frames of reference through a homogenizing socialization, where the affective distress generated by the system itself is not repressed but rather channelled and formalized into a coprophagic loop of content sharing and re-sharing. This loop acts as the central mortifying ritual, offering a simulation of escape that, by turning catharsis into the very raw material of the platform, ensures that each purgative gesture reinforces the coupling to a carceral architecture that becomes internalized as subjective grammar.

The carceral imagination and space have become abstracted and internalized within us. Through social media and the coprophagic loop they generate, we ourselves have become the bearers and reproducers of the total institutional logic, normalizing its mechanisms of capture, control, and purge of the multiple in our daily digital and physical lives.

In Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother (2023) Juliet Mitchell

revisits the psychoanalytic family scene but shifts our attention from the vertical axis (the relationship between child and parent/father) to a horizontal one, where siblings form their peer relations via a trauma. A toddler fears being replaced by a newborn, resulting in a tension between loving too much and wanting to annihilate. The response to the ‘sibling trauma’ necessitates the same dual prohibitions as the vertical one (incest and murder) but now between the children through a ‘Law of the Mother.’ Mitchell calls this a rite of passage from pre-social infancy to social childhood, setting the foundations for sociality as such.

This paper takes Mitchell’s insights into already existing concepts of fratriarchy and fraternity as foundational to political orders, especially the modern nation-state. Putting Mitchell in dialogue with Carol Pateman (on modern statehood as fraternal patriarchy) and John Remy and Evelyn Reed on androcracy and fratriarchy as anthropological phenomena, I seek to revisit the classic question about post-King/Father political orders: what happens with the band of brothers that found the modern state?

I focus on this year’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States (in which its Revolutionary War “Sons of Liberty” were ceremoniously turned into “Founding Fathers”). I bring this discourse to the present manosphere, a space for trust-building rites of passage into brotherhoods seeking to escape the Law of the Mother through rebirth. I also examine two high profile cases of matricide. The 250th anniversary is thus a refounding of fratriarchal mythic violence via blood bonds (fasces) and femicide/matricide.