DE LA CIUDAD AUTONOMA DE BUENOS AIRES RESUELVE:

If Oedipus Rex were to begin at the beginning, with the prophecy given to Laius and Jocasta before the birth of their son, with the mutilation and banishment of Oedipus, it might still be a tragedy but not the tragedy of freedom; the belated arrival of Teirisius, however, is evocative of the haunting quality of the prophetic as such, displaced and pervasive, already and yet-to-come, that drives Schelling’s system of freedom. We learn that language, whether in the telling of Oedipus’ fate or in the peculiar discomfort of his own name, is both deceptive and revelatory. The prophecy protects neither Oedipus nor his family from evil; indeed, given the inevitability it lays claim to, we might wonder at how the speech act of the prophet assures the very future it proclaims. One is tempted to ask: If the prophecy were never received, would its truth have been secured in another fashion? The deeper impulse behind this question suggests that a central motif of Oedipus’ story is a destabilizing form of knowing—of receiving truth—that transforms what is known. It is in this space that prophecy and self-consciousness converge as acts of awareness that inevitably alter the truth they would get hold of. Here, where

subjectivity and interpretability do not exclude truth, Oedipus discovers his freedom. Oedipus recognizes that fate, like freedom, can become a mode of questioning and disrupting necessity; that his past (the meaning of the prophecy) is no more secured than

his future (the nature of its fulfillment) and that the lifeless closure of objective knowledge is not possible in matters of blood and guilt.104

Indeed, it is in regards to the familial—the abyssal beginning from which the prophet derives authority—that Schelling’s interpretation of Oedipus resonates with the aims of psychoanalytic therapy. The particular contents of the Oedipal complex are less important than the manner in which we take up its inexorable repetition. Oedipus, in killing his father and having sex with his mother, does not know what he is doing: his misrecognition of others, which offers the opportunity for authentic self-discovery, is a result of his conflating self-consciousness with objective knowledge. All of us, according to Freud, are destined to the same fate—to gain self-consciousness through

acknowledging our blindness to the sources of our aggression and desire. One might think that Freud, an atheist and dismantler of superstition, would have no use for an antiquated concept like fate. Yet accepting responsibility for the unconscious—working out how this is possible and indeed beneficial—is the goal of psychoanalytic therapy. That is, Freud as analyst is interested in analyzing and thus interrupting fate through the interpretation and integration of the repressed. The victim of fate, the analysand, is alienated from his unconscious desires. Or, as Freud puts it in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle,

What psychoanalysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics appears also in the life of normal persons. With such persons, one has the impression of a persecuting fate or of something demonic in their

experience, and from the outset psychoanalysis has considered such a fate to be mainly self-imposed by the individual and determined by early infantile influences (p. 63/SE XVIII p. 21).

104 _{Schelling’s emphasis on prophecy and the role of the prophet is particularly notable in Ages of the} World; prophecy is there presented both as the power belonging to the writer of the would-be “heroic

poem” (to whom, perhaps, the work is dedicated) and our mode of relating to the future (p. 119). In contrast to narrating the past and knowing the present—we “prophesize” the future (p. 113).

After briefly recounting the tale of Tancred and Clorinda, where the hero kills his

beloved twice, Freud concludes: “Given such observations…we will be so courageous as to assume that in the mind there really is a repetition compulsion which supersedes the pleasure principle” (p. 64/p. 22). But this is not to say that fate remains unchanged in psychoanalysis; that the necessity of unknown, external forces is merely transferred from supernatural powers to the unconscious. Rather, it is the pleasure principle that grounds Freud’s determinism—that functions as a mechanical, quantifiable explanation for psychical acts. Only the gradually acknowledged force of the compulsion to repeat—the great exception to the pleasure principle—and the connection between this compulsion to notions of fate and the “demonic,” is intrinsically related to the free act of questioning the coherence of our constitutive stories. Which is to say: pleasure and death are forms of compulsion that, at the same time, must be acknowledged in order to bring us a measure of freedom.

As I have suggested, the uncanny marks a similar disruption of reality—a possibility for the re-inscription of fate that presents itself as fate. More than that, the uncanny is a psychoanalytic acknowledgement of Schelling’s intuition that freedom is the hidden source of necessity—that order and reason can never entirely sublimate their dark and unruly origins:

Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear as original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths (FS, p. 34/SW VII, 360).

For Oedipus (and Antigone after him), the tragic task of freedom is to actively engage with this “irreducible remainder,” to articulate and deconstruct the prophecies we live out with the priority of the “unruly” ever in mind. As Schelling reminds us, and Freud the analyst exhorts us, we have the capacity and the obligation to see that we are blind: only then can we begin to take responsibility for the unconscious structures and wishes that guide and give meaning to our experience and to existence itself. To be free is not just to accept guilt for what we could not or would not know; we must remain available to the empowerment and vulnerability this transformative knowing entails.

All this is to suggest that the dichotomy of fate and freedom—a dichotomy that is sublimated for Schelling in his Philosophy of Art—itself demands interpretation. Odo Marquard, who has so fruitfully penetrated the interstices of psychoanalysis and

Schelling’s philosophy (and of transcendental philosophy more generally), opens up such an analysis in “The End of Fate?” Already in the title, Marquard plays with the

ambivalence of human ends: bearing finitude (death) and meaning (purpose), we question and struggle against fate while freedom is only proved in defeat. Tracing the development of the concept of fate in correlation with that of God, Marquard brings into focus our fixation on the rigid opposition: omnipotent or powerless. The death of God, no less than the death of (tragic) fate, signals a failed compromise-formation—betraying our resistance to the fundamental ambivalence and unknowability of the unconscious:

God is the end of fate. If that is the case, what does the end of God mean?...Is it possible that the official and manifest tendency toward human omnipotence of making is counteracted by a latent and unofficial tendency; an indirect reempowerment of fate…or, putting it differently, the outcome of the modern disempowerment of divine omnipotence is not only the official triumph of human freedom but also the unofficial return of fate (p. 72).

At the height of our belief in human freedom, at least insofar as it is understood in terms of powers of production and domination, fate returns. Here the convergence of freedom and necessity is a deception that calls out for a therapeutic self-questioning: What satisfaction is met, what defensive maneuver played out, by reifying the opposition between omnipotence and powerlessness?

Marquard’s analysis of the mutations of fate, from tragedy through divine providence, culminates in what we might call technological man. In Greek tragedy the prophesized fate was inescapable, personal and inscrutable; freedom was a defiant responsibility and a triumphant failure. In Christianity, necessity is reborn as providence; while fate remains personal and inscrutable, it differs from the tragic conception of freedom through faith in an ultimate end beyond this world. After the death of God, fate is given over to science—whether in the sense of a physical/psychical determinism that precludes freedom, or in the reappearance of divine omnipotence in the guise of human production and technology. Freud’s own account of fate, which would prove useful to Marquard here, is peculiar in that it straddles the modern/scientific and ancient/tragic views. Psychoanalysis offers a unique perspective on Marquard’s line of questioning: What desires (and defenses) lie hidden, repressed, in the concept(s) of fate? Might our philosophical accounts of freedom be similarly symptomatic?

It is, nota bene, worth pondering the fact that what stood at the beginning of this depletion of God’s power was the extreme theology of

omnipotence that marked the late Middle Ages. The path from the

theology of the potentia absoluta (absolute power) by way of the theology of the Deus absconditus and the Deus caché (hidden God) and the

theology of the Deus emeritus to theology after the death of God—is a remarkable sequence. Perhaps even omnipotence was already

The repeated polarization of fate and freedom, passivity and activity, conceals a

horrifying ambivalence: such clear oppositions would protect us from the overwhelming anxiety of fearing and desiring both power and vulnerability. The anxiety of the uncanny, marked by a return to the convergence of omnipotence and fate, signals a fault line in this dualistic structure. Freedom, insofar as it is equated with omnipotence (of God or Man), is only powerlessness—fate—in disguise.