The history of critical thought is the history of its aversions, and since the 1960's certain prevalent hostilities tend to mark the contemporaneity of criticism. One of the most obvious of these is a hostility to the authority invested by previous generations in myths of origin. There are many examples of this intellectual tendency; one which comes to hand is Jacques Derrida's re-reading of Freud's account of the origin of the moral law in Totem and Taboo. Morality originates, says Freud, codifying our own favourite explanation into a kind of anthropological fable, in a unique historical event, namely, the murder of the primal father by the sons, and in their subsequent reaction to the deed:The earliest moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who performed it the concept of 'crime'. They felt remorse for the deed and decided it should never be repeated and that its performance should bring no advantage. The creative sense of guilt still persists among us.l Derrida simply asks the destructive question: how, and why could the sons feel remorse if this event is before morality, before law?The virus has been sown: immediate changes occur in the status of Freud's account. It is now impossible that anyone could have been present at this reported event, even though it is plain someone must have been. Derrida seizes gleefully upon Freud's fascinating note that it appears that none of the sons, in any case, was able to take the father's place; so the father is more powerful dead than alive. More alive, indeed, when dead. The moment of origin has become uncanny:Event without event, pure event where nothing happens, the eventiality of an event both demands and annuls the relation of its fiction. Nothing new happens and yet this nothing new would instate the law, the two fundamental prohibitions of toternism, namely murder and incest. However, this pure and purely presumed event nevertheless marks an invisible rent in history.zThe reality of the historical referent is 'irremediably fissured' and the result is 1
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.