Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: A Deconstructive Study (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE OEDIPAL DYNAMICS: A PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION OF SOPHOCLES OEDIPUS REX
This paper tends to appraise how psychoanalytic criticism has had an immense effect on both literature and literary criticism. Employing Sophocle’s Oedipal Rex as a vehicle of analysis and proper interpretation of the different concepts, it explores such key areas like wish fulfillment, Condensation, displacement, the unconscious and repression. The story and character of King Oedipus who suffers a terrible fate which psychoanalysts described as emanating from the unconscious is also explored.
Le présent article cherche à établir les influences possibles sur la théorie aristotélicienne de la tragédie. Les études érudites des influences textuelles en poétique ont jusqu’ici essayé de mettre en lumière ce que les théories post-aristotéliciennes de l’art doivent à l’Art Poétique d’Aristote, comment elles s’en écartent ou lui résistent. Cependant, la question de savoir à qui/quoi la théorie d’Aristote pourrait être redevable est restée marginale jusqu’à ce jour. Ce travail tente de combler ce vide épistémologique et heuristique. Il soutient que, comme Aristote a écrit son ouvrage au moins deux siècles après l’institutionnalisation de la tragédie en Grèce, sa théorie formaliste doit avoir été influencée par la pratique des plus grands poètes tragiques de l’âge d’or de la tragédie classique grecque. Pour étayer cette opinion, l’article essaye de dépister et d’illustrer les principes aristotéliciens de la construction dramatique dans Œdipe Roi de Sophocle, une tragédie qui est ici considérée comme l’une des influences majeures probables sur l’Art Poétique d’Aristote.
2020
Unearthing the Unconscious Passive Syntheses of Deleuze and Guattari in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles -- Abstract: Analysis of Oedipus play by Sophocles showing presence of Unconscious Syntheses from Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari. Also shows the anamorphic eventities of Zizek in Lacanian Registers. The Passive Syntheses forms an Emergent Meta-system within the play. -- Key Words: Deleuze, Guattari, Transcendental Empiricism, Bataille, Simondon, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles, Zizek, Lacan, Anamorphic Eventities, Lacanian Registers, Structuralism, Oedipus, Sophocles.
Can the Subaltern Smile? Oedipus Without Oedipus
This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. Keywords: decolonial intellectual; dramaturgical reading; subaltern; Gayatri Spivak; Michel Foucault; Oedipus Tyrannos
Road to Nowhere: The Mobility of Oedipus and the Task of Interpretation
The American Journal of Philology, 2014
This essay draws on a careful close reading of the language of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus to explore how the text problematizes concepts of place, space, and movement through the ambiguous figure of Oedipus. Considering Oedipus' role in the play as well as in Western intellectual tradition as an archetypal reader of signs and interpreter of riddles, the essay goes on to investigate how Oedipus' literal and figurative mobility reveals the elusiveness and instability that conditions not only our interpretation of the play, but also the practice of interpretation writ large.
Nothing is more open than a closed text: The case of Oedipus
This essay develops the multiple " passional " implications implied within every act of reading. Texts have the potential power to elicit the passions of the reader through various textual strategies that, in turn, enable the reader to become emotionally or passionally involved in the narration and, furthermore, to share in the emotions of the characters. The second part of this essay presents a reading of a story by Friedrich Durrenmatt, " One of the major themes that has shaped the work of Umberto Eco and runs through it at various levels is the issue of interpretation, understood as the principal way in which human beings comprehend the world around them, connecting individual phenomena to more general laws. Eco has dwelled at length on the dynamics of interpretation, exploring the processes at work both in lived experience and in the experience of the text, which are distinguished by the dialectic between freedom and necessity. The role of the interpreter, for example, is as necessary for the functioning of the textual mechanism, as is the cooperation of the reader. The reader has relative freedom that is, however, conditioned by the requirements of the text itself: of the anchoring to interpretative problems that it poses, the data through which it formulates them, and by a kind of ethics of faithfulness on the part of the reader to the " letter " of the text. This faithfulness is put to the test by the texts themselves, which may demand more or less cooperation from their readers , on the basis of what Eco describes as their degree of closure, or of strict programming in the construction of textual effects and in the text's request for
Re-reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Plays
Journal of Jungian scholarly studies, 2012
Written nearly 2,500 years ago, Sophocles's Oedipus plays continue to offer riddles for understanding psyche. The plots of the plays are well known. Oedipus Tyrannus1 presents a powerful ruler faced with grappling with the ego-shocking discoveries that he unawares killed his father, married his mother, fathered children by her, and thus became a pollution to his city. In his final dramatic creation, Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles renders his vision of how Oedipus has psychologically dealt with these discoveries and how his efforts are viewed by the gods. In this play, Oedipus has abjured responsibility for his parricide and incest and subsequently retaliates against his sons who did not help him when he was ostracized by cursing them with fratricide. He then exercises a hero's power to bless and is taken up with the goddesses of vengeance, long known as the Furies. This divine rewarding of Oedipus's repetition of his father's filicide illustrates the acceptance in the dominant Greek culture of the right of retaliation, the talio. Mary Whitlock Blundell explains that the Greek "twin principles 'Help Friends and Harm Enemies' are fundamental to the structure of Oedipus at Colonus" (62). She points out that Oedipus justifies both his killing of Laius and his cursing his sons with death in terms of the concept of "the right of retaliation within the family" (64). The value of retaliation was not, however, without its counter in Greek culture.2 Plato's early dialogues Crito and Protagorus contain the idea of not retaliating as virtuous. As in other realms of ideological conflict raised by the skepticism of the Sophists, Sophocles's plot in Oedipus at Colonus affirms traditional, conservative views. In Oedipus at Colonus he uses the Greek divinization of vengeance through the goddesses, the Furies, to divinize the avenging human, Oedipus. And therein lies the riddle of the Oedipus plays for readers who live in an era when unconscious psyche is grasped as real and when the challenge of integrating unconscious materials is understood as a human task of development, both personal and collective. Since knowing what has previously been unconscious is not the same as integrating that material, Oedipus is tasked with dealing responsibly with his self-discoveries, and Oedipus at Colonus consists of Sophocles's vision of what Oedipus psychologically has come to. Sophocles's divinizing vision of Oedipus has Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies 2 primarily been read as a resolution of Oedipus's previously troubled relations with the gods.3 In contrast, I read this divinization in terms of what it suggests about psychic integration of material horrendous to the ego, with a particular focus on the meaning of responsibility for guilt acquired unconsciously. This exploration leads to the argument that Sophocles divinized a cultural complex, a divinization that still imbues value systems today, including certain interpretations of the concept of archetype. The version of archetype I wish to challenge is given classical definition by Edward Edinger in his series of lectures "A Psychological Approach to Greek Mythology." Edinger says that myths are "the self-revelations of the transpersonal or archetypal psyche" (Lecture 1A). In response, I wish to insist that the myths differ among themselves, offering contradictory "self-revelations." Edinger deals with their differences by claiming that "only the archetypally relevant survives" (Lecture 1A). This criterion privileges dominant-culture selections among-and interpretations of-myths as timeless, a familiar Jungian bias that David Tacey critiques in Remaking Men. Tacey argues that "because of the illusory 'stability' and purported 'timelessness' of the archetypes, Jung has proved attractive to the conservative opponents of change, and the revolutionary possibilities of Jungian theory have been denied" (3). The revolutionary possibilities of Jungian theory, I submit, are, as Susan Rowland has frequently articulated,4 contained primarily in the creative powers of the unconscious psyche. In Jung's words, "the unconscious. .. is the very source of the creative impulse" (CW 8, par. 339). My readings depend upon the premise that imaginative literature is an expression of those creative powers, an expression that is not limited by the intentions of the artist, the cultural context of the writing of the work, or the perspectives of any particular culture and era of those reading it. That is why works such as Sophocles's Oedipus plays have the power to continue to unfold understanding of psyche. As psyche takes shape in differing cultures, eras, and individual readers, the latent meanings of imaginative works can continue to yield new understanding. Jung postulates the role of the unconscious in the creation of what he terms "visionary literature" (CW 15, par. 139). He speaks of art as a "creative autonomous complex" whose expression is an "image. .. from the deepest unconsciousness" serving in a "process of self-regulation in the life of epochs and nations" (CW 15, par. 122 and 130-31). Consequently, art makes possible realization of psychic realities of which audiences have been unconscious. Jung claims that through these images art presents "countless typical experiences of our ancestors" (CW 15, par. 127). He writes: "In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history, and on the average follow ever the same course" (CW 15, par. 127). Jung's emphasis on repetition and
Oedipus Rex and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis: A Tragedy of Desire and Otherness
Filozofski Vestnik, 44(1), 75–95, 2023
This article develops an analysis of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in relation to the mythological and literary-theatrical place the play holds in the history of psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan, not to mention Foucault's counter-psychoanalytic reading. How do we see the constitutive relation between this play and the Freudian complex? Does Lacanian psychoanalysis help illuminate the play as a tragedy of desire in alienation? The paper argues for a tragedy of desire's Otherness in Sophocles' play, showing how the parental alterity is configured in the shifting dynamics of paternal and maternal signifiers. Be it in the divine oracle or the chorus, the play accentuates the field of Other to activate the tragedy of desire and chanellizes it through affects like guilt, shame and self-reproach, inscribed on the subject's body in the form of scopic and invocatory drives. The paper concludes by reflecting on the status of the unconscious as knowledge, complicating Foucault's interpretation and presenting a tragedy of the desire-toknow that produces existence without desire as an experience of suffering.