The Laius Syndrome, or the Ends of Political Fatherhood

Reading Oedipus has never strayed far from the political: his story is, after all, the story of the rise and fall of a city, and even those readings that appear to disregard the polis altogether, presenting him as a Wgure of solitary desire, feed off and into theories of law, community, and violence. Psychoanalysis is the best example of that. None theless, something changed drastically when Freud turned Oedipus Tyrannus into Oedipus Teknon, when the king becomes Wrst and foremost the child, and the father turns into Wrst and foremost an object of fantasy. This essay seeks to recuperate the Wgure of tragic paternity as a foundational trope of democratic politics. To Sophocles, Oedipus was very much king and father: in the Wrst lines of the tragedy, he ad dresses the citizens as “children,” and in its last scene, Antigone and Ismene are violently wrenched away from him. And yet, while Oedipus’s king ship has certainly been subject to debate, his paternity—symbolic and familial—has largely gone neglected. In the long history of classical reception, Oedipus has been read as either the universal subject or, after Freud, as the universal son as universal subject. And because Oedipus has exerted an identiWcatory pull matched, perhaps, only by Hamlet, post-Freudian subjectivity has become Wlial through and through. Who would want to, or dare to, speak in the name of the father these days? 1 Returning once again to Oedipus and his family will illuminate a gap in the long reading of a narrative that has given prominence and urgency to classical reception like only a handful of other ancient texts. This gap opens in the elision of paternity as the political trope that governs the story of Oedipus’s family. I will argue that the same history that has turned a blind eye to Oedipus the father created a shadow