16 April 2009: "My Dad is all sad about getting older"

This post is about the oedipal scene and castration anxiety. Consider the opening lines of Carles bold exploration of the roots of the anxious masculinity of our contemporary age:

I walked in on my dad looking at himself in the mirror
naked
He did not know I was watching him

Here reflexivity meets a recession of reciprocal gazes as they follow each other down the rabbit hole of primal libidinous urges and ego formations, giving rise to the monstrous proscriptive superego, here figured as father figure posed naked to reveal his potential potency. Threatened by the looming phallus and the coordinated law of the father it represents in a cultural era that mandates hedonism, Carles shows how our immediate impulse is to try to cripple the image of the father semantically, confine and contain the threat he metastasizes by denigrating him with the depredations of age. "Lately, my father has been losing hair gaining weight getting older," Carles notes, speaking of the father, the repressive conscience as psychic burden. The father is figured as trying to steal youth -- the superego trying to suppress jouissance (Carles too recognizes the danger in this, framing radical hedonism as an interrogative: "Just want 2 b happie?") and subjugate us all under the phallologocentric order of rigid and programmatic rationalism, an apathy that ironically Carles directs back at the superego: "Maybe there is just a time in ur life where u need to ’sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and stop sulking.’" Maybe the superego should take a vacation into the mindless and castrating entertainments it seems to prescribe to the wayward ego, to stifle unbounded subjectivity.