live outside the law. Enough of these little games, your sex doesn’t belong to you, give it back, it belongs to the Universal Order, to Medicine, to the Family.
This libidinal dismembering will have what it takes to fluster children, in fact. But if our doctors cheerfully doll up their characters with shame and uneasiness, it’s only because such attitudes “are useful in the psycho-affective maturation of the individual.” And the “counterbalance” of this “repressive system” (which, doubtlessly, the poor little things have manufactured for themselves all alone, in order to “develop freely” at a distance from horrible things having to do with sex) will consist in rehabilitating… shame itself, by turning it into the essential and attractive sentiment that makes children cute like “tomatoes from the market.”
From the market: they don’t know how right they are. The purpose of the repressions, the goal of anti-sexual instruction, is not a simple castration, an impediment to knowledge and pleasure: it’s also the re-education of the child’s desire, so that it will show a servile respect for the market codes of adult sexuality, including its hierarchies and taboos. This panicked conformity will be the sign that the “individual” has attained his famous “psycho-affective maturity.”
This is the second point that I’d like to make: the libidinal misappropriation of children by the family. The family doesn’t totally “cut off” the sexuality of its “members”; it harnesses it, orients it, makes use of it through all the mitigations, all the perversions, all the masks. It’s not through “authentic schoolwork” or in “camaraderie” that the child reinvests his inhibited desire: it’s in family relations—with, as ancillaries, a few residual, solitary, ephemeral or shameful eroticisms. The outside world—friends, school—is useful to him only as a means of trying out, within little clans that copy public order, laws of the corporeal and libidinal market, whose main instruction and practice occur among one’s own and behind locked doors.
Libidinal family-centralization, of which the work I am discussing gives some too perfect but revealing examples, is composed of two stages. First, the child as sexed subject is discredited; in the economy of the family he becomes a neuter object, nondesiring but desirable and able to be gratified with pleasures—a way of recognizing that his desire exists and that all of it must be made use of by keeping it unnamed and buried. The doctors in the Encyclopedia even want that elimination to be so total that the child doubts having had sex organs when he was little: after the description of these organs, Jean thinks about it, then exclaims, “We had all that when we were born?” Yes, but it was hidden from all of you because you were criminals—and to prove it, Dad tells the story of Oedipus:
“There’s a period in childhood, around the age of three, when little girls become more attached to their father, and little boys to their mother. The child begins to notice the difference between the sexes of his parents, and also begins to notice their harmony, their intimacy. He doesn’t like sleeping alone, whereas the two of them sleep in the same bed… The little boy becomes instinctively jealous of his father. He gets the impression that his father is stealing his mom from him at night!”
“Did we do that?” say the children, astounded.
What a useful discovery! In the few lines of a story, you’ve shown that a child’s desire is bad—“instinctively” incestuous, selfish and cruel; that heterosexuality, conjugality, the need for sexual ownership over others are spontaneous and universal; that sons’ hate for their fathers is a pathetic amorous jealousy, that a balanced older boy shouldn’t feel it, because it would prove that he’s still a baby, that he’s sick; that “Mom,” wife and mother, is the center of the world; that the
This libidinal dismembering will have what it takes to fluster children, in fact. But if our doctors cheerfully doll up their characters with shame and uneasiness, it’s only because such attitudes “are useful in the psycho-affective maturation of the individual.” And the “counterbalance” of this “repressive system” (which, doubtlessly, the poor little things have manufactured for themselves all alone, in order to “develop freely” at a distance from horrible things having to do with sex) will consist in rehabilitating… shame itself, by turning it into the essential and attractive sentiment that makes children cute like “tomatoes from the market.”
From the market: they don’t know how right they are. The purpose of the repressions, the goal of anti-sexual instruction, is not a simple castration, an impediment to knowledge and pleasure: it’s also the re-education of the child’s desire, so that it will show a servile respect for the market codes of adult sexuality, including its hierarchies and taboos. This panicked conformity will be the sign that the “individual” has attained his famous “psycho-affective maturity.”
This is the second point that I’d like to make: the libidinal misappropriation of children by the family. The family doesn’t totally “cut off” the sexuality of its “members”; it harnesses it, orients it, makes use of it through all the mitigations, all the perversions, all the masks. It’s not through “authentic schoolwork” or in “camaraderie” that the child reinvests his inhibited desire: it’s in family relations—with, as ancillaries, a few residual, solitary, ephemeral or shameful eroticisms. The outside world—friends, school—is useful to him only as a means of trying out, within little clans that copy public order, laws of the corporeal and libidinal market, whose main instruction and practice occur among one’s own and behind locked doors.
Libidinal family-centralization, of which the work I am discussing gives some too perfect but revealing examples, is composed of two stages. First, the child as sexed subject is discredited; in the economy of the family he becomes a neuter object, nondesiring but desirable and able to be gratified with pleasures—a way of recognizing that his desire exists and that all of it must be made use of by keeping it unnamed and buried. The doctors in the Encyclopedia even want that elimination to be so total that the child doubts having had sex organs when he was little: after the description of these organs, Jean thinks about it, then exclaims, “We had all that when we were born?” Yes, but it was hidden from all of you because you were criminals—and to prove it, Dad tells the story of Oedipus:
“There’s a period in childhood, around the age of three, when little girls become more attached to their father, and little boys to their mother. The child begins to notice the difference between the sexes of his parents, and also begins to notice their harmony, their intimacy. He doesn’t like sleeping alone, whereas the two of them sleep in the same bed… The little boy becomes instinctively jealous of his father. He gets the impression that his father is stealing his mom from him at night!”
“Did we do that?” say the children, astounded.
What a useful discovery! In the few lines of a story, you’ve shown that a child’s desire is bad—“instinctively” incestuous, selfish and cruel; that heterosexuality, conjugality, the need for sexual ownership over others are spontaneous and universal; that sons’ hate for their fathers is a pathetic amorous jealousy, that a balanced older boy shouldn’t feel it, because it would prove that he’s still a baby, that he’s sick; that “Mom,” wife and mother, is the center of the world; that the
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