Peter Greenaway: BOOK / contents
Renata Salecl
Writing on the Skin - the Search for Father's Authority
A film still from "Pillow Book" (photography: Stephen Pyke)
A generally accepted thesis is that in today's society the way the subject identifies with the law or, better, with the symbolic order has changed. The dissolution of the traditional family structure changed the subject's relation towards authority, which means that the subject nowadays appears as someone who is in a position to freely choose his or her own identity, including even his or her sexual orientation. In the pre-modern society, initiation ritual situates the subject in the social structure and assigns to him or her a special place as well as his or her sexual role. In the modern, Enlightement society, we no longer have initiation rituals, but the authority of the law is still at work in this society. The law is linked to the role of the father; and in taking a position against this law, i.e. by distancing himself or herself from this law, the modern subject acquires his or her "freedom". In contrast, in post-modern society we have a total disbelief in authority and in the power of the symbolic order, which Lacan calls the big Other. But this disbelief has not simply resulted in the subject's liberation from the law or other forms of social coercion. The post-modern subject does no longer accept the power of the institutions or the society's power to fashion his or her identity, and sometimes believes in the possibility of self-creation, maybe in the form of playing with his or her sexual identity or making out of him or herself a work of art. However, in this process of freeing the subject from the big Other, one can also observe the subject's anger and disappointment in regard to the very authority of the big Other. It thus appears as if it was not the subject who recognized that the big Other does not exist and that the authority is just a fraud, but that the big Other has somehow "betrayed" the subject. The father's authority, for example, revealed itself only as a mask of his impotence, the social rituals in institutions appear more and more as a farce. However, this apparent liberation of the subject from authority can also be understood as a "forced" choice that the subject had to make when he or she acknowledged the impotence of the authority.
Renata Salecl
She is a philosopher and sociologist. She works as a Senior Researcher
at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, and
Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. She presented
her papers at several international conferences, and lectured at prominent
foreign universities universities in the USA, Britain and Germany (Kent,
Irvine, San Diego, Southampton, Mexico City). Her books include: Discipline
as a Condition of Freedom (Krt, Ljubljana 1991), Whay do we obey power?
(Drzavna Zalozba, Ljubljana, 1993), The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis
and feminish After the Fall of
Socialism (Routledge, London, 1994), (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso,
London, 1998). She has published theoretical articles and essays on social
control, psychoanalysis and philosophy in numerous local and foreign magazines
(American Journal of Semiotics, New Formations, Prose Studies, Emergences).
