Brother and Sister Incest.:Divergent and The Fault In Our Stars - WEIRD? STRANGE?

Shai Woodley and Ansel Elgort from Divergent and Fault In Our Stars

The genealogy of incest is interesting to think about. There was a time of universal copulation among the sexes in groups before any monogamy. The first men who wanted a woman for themselves only, had to buy them from the group, and this was frowned on. Mothers had children by sons, brothers, fathers, cousins, uncles, nephews, and knew nothing about kinship. Certainly those having healthy genes and inbred, survived and flourished, and those having genetic diseases who interbred were ill, died, tended not to have children and pass their defects on. 

An awareness of filiation evolved to inhibit certain men and women from copulation? Probably.

BUT the original prohibition of incest was between brother and sister. Sisters could be traded, sold, given as objects for the purpose of affiliation, with other groups.

Underlining the universal fact that marriage is not an alliance between a man and a woman, but an"alliance between two families," "a transaction between men concerning women," Georges Devereux drew the correct conclusion of a basic homosexual motivation of a group character. Through women, men establish their own connections; through the man-woman disjunction, which is always the outcome of filiation, alliance places in connection men from different filiations. .....Male homosexuality is therefore the representation of alliance that represses the ambiguous signs of intense bisexual filiation. .....and men are "never more homosexual than when they arrange marriages." (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 165)

This is difficult but stay with me:

 "Incest is only the retroactive effect of the repressing representation on the repressed representative; 

the representation disfigures or displaces this representative against which it is directed;

 it projects onto the representative, categories, rendered discernible, 

that it has itself established. 

In other words incest is now a category, a label, an observed object (Burroughs) that did not exist until it occurred to men to arrange their sisters's marriages with men they had homosexual impulses towards on a displaced filial bisexual phantasy. Now bolstered by the rationalization of alliance and alliance's perks.

The present modern "incest between brother and sister," has attracted a feeling of horror, weirdness, illegality, punishment, criminality, and whatever else one wants to attach to it. All it ever was, was projecting backwards onto a practice that allowed men to gratify their homosexual feelings with other men from different filiations.

Reading through Foucault the marriage alliances were cemented in time through the glueing together of property.When capitalism intersected, the marriage alliance was strengthened. And the original sexual impulses were buried in the folds of the established ritual. Women had to be pure, so the DNA of their child would inherit the property of their partner's  DNA (different filiation). So incest took on a greater taboo between brother and sister.

Speculating here on the early exchange of sisters, what if a brother did not want a sister to leave? What if he knew he were sexually attracted to his sister and did not want to share her with another man especially of a different filiation. What if the alliance and her monetary value were of no concern to him? Was that a bad thing? Maybe it was a better outcome for her too than to be "traded" to a strange man from another group?

Reading through Cleopatra, who was one of the most intelligent women of her time, speaking all the dialects of the inhabitants of Egypt up and down the Nile, overseeing the export of cotton, planning excellent strategy with Caesar to re-integrate Alexander's kingdom, having a child with him that by all reports was an exceptional adolescent before he was murdered by Augustus (too many Caesars).

Cleopatra was the daughter of a father and mother who were brother and sister. Her mother and father were brother and sister of parents who were also brother and sister, (and back for awhile) so proof of insanity, incompetence, inferior intelligence do not hold up unless those attributes are flagrant, and it certainly does not indicate a proof of any horror, criminality, weirdness, etc. I mean does anyone get the woolies because Cleopatra was the child of a sister and brother, who were themselves children of a sister and brother? Who even knew this before a minute ago?

All this is in our minds, carefully programmed to think of sex with one's brother as a terrible thing. Well in some cases it probably is. In many cases it would not be consensual. If it happens an abnormal guilt accompanies it. It is the abnormal guilt about it that causes the damage, not the act itself. What is the real danger? Worse even than genetic diseases being doubled and tripled? Other than pregnancy, which is not such a big deal now.

It is that there is no exchange and/or consolidation of property 

My reading BTW

It flaunts a fuck you in the face of capitalism. So at least if you "succumbed" you must torture yourself all your life about it. Hopefully you will ruin your life over it so as to receive the worse punishment possible on God's green earth that is turning not green.

All this is from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

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I can't stand it another minute. So many tweets on the fact that these two play brother and sister in Divergent and Lovers in The Fault In Our Stars and HOW STRANGE AND WEIRD that is. 

Ansel almost didn't get the role because of that. The producers were worried that the fans would be thinking

INCEST! OMG INCEST!

Obviously the ones who keep tweeting and tweeting about this can't tell the difference at some level between reality and a movie. Now if  you count the tweets - and they go on day after day - that is a scary thing among girls who are old enough to be online tweeting and writing tweets. What are they thinking, these primitive young women? They are now dragging "incest" a made up idea in the first place, into another level of simulation by imagining two actors in two different movies, being brother and sister and then lovers, and that being weird. 

This thinking is the beginning of madness.

THIS KIND OF THINKING IS AT THE ROOT OF VERONICA ROTH'S TRILOGY

 - DAMAGED GENES INSTEAD OF INCEST -

BOTH ARE MADE UP

Are you beginning to understand the Muslim world a little better?
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And I must add something here about ants. I used to be fascinated with this topic. Some ants in the nest are kept - fed differently like bees? - as royal progeny. In the spring they will be released to fly, mate, and form new colonies. Some related ant colonies are so large they encompass another state or two.
But the point I am getting to is that some of these ants commit incest in the nest. These females are kept from flying on the "maiden" journey flyaway. They are forcibly held in the nest to become queens to make more ants. Ant factories I might say.

MISSION BLACKLIST: The Will To Truth:Eric Maddox - Interrogator - Capturing Saddam

FOUCAULT

The pleasure that comes of exercising a power

 that questions, 

monitors, 

watches, 

spies, 

searches out, 

palpates,

 brings to light;

and on the other hand, 

the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, 

flee from it, 

fool it, 

or travesty it.

The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing;

and opposite it,

power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, 

scandalizing, or resisting. 

Capture and seduction,

confrontation and mutual reinforcement:

parents and children,

adults and adolescents,

educators and students,

doctors and patients,

the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts,

all have played this game continually 

since the nineteenth century.

These attractions, 

these evasions,

these circular incitements 

have traced around bodies and sexes,

not boundaries not to be crossed,

but

perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. 

The Foucault Reader:Paul Rabinow, editor
The Repressive Hypothesis - The Incitement To Discourse; The Perverse Implantation (p. 324)

The Will To Truth:Eric Maddox - Interrogator - Capturing Saddam

FOUCAULT

The pleasure that comes of exercising a power

 that questions, 

monitors, 

watches, 

spies, 

searches out, 

palpates,

 brings to light;

and on the other hand, 

the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, 

flee from it, 

fool it, 

or travesty it.

The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing;

and opposite it,

power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, 

scandalizing, or resisting. 

Capture and seduction,

confrontation and mutual reinforcement:

parents and children,

adults and adolescents,

educators and students,

doctors and patients,

the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts,

all have played this game continually 

since the nineteenth century.

These attractions, 

these evasions,

these circular incitements 

have traced around bodies and sexes,

not boundaries not to be crossed,

but

perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. 

The Foucault Reader:Paul Rabinow, editor
The Repressive Hypothesis - The Incitement To Discourse; The Perverse Implantation (p. 324)

The Hunger Games and Katniss Everdeen - Foucault: Fearless Speech and Parrhesia

Katniss Shooting

This is not a review review.


In a pre-introduction before the games, just as an American Idol selection or other somesuch reality show, Katniss is to show her stuff to the audience who isn't paying attention - she has been advised to get their attention -  as she sinks arrows into flat human body targets. So she aims at them, or rather the apple in the pig's mouth at the banquet table, aces it just whizzing by the head of the Master of Ceremonies of The Games. I can't find this image of Katniss in her sexy black leathers and marvelous hair arrangement with a bow and arrow, but you get the idea. The above image is in the beginning of the movie, when she is aiming at a deer.

The Evil One is on the Far Right

There is silence as her arrow goes to the heart of the apple. Astonishment. Shock. And then she bows  forward, making an age old gesture with her arms stretched out to her sides. She might be holding a ball gown in her fingers, making obeisance to a king. This is her gesture of utter contempt, as she inclines her head and says, "Thank you for your consideration," contemptuously uttered, just before she turns and leaves the stage/platform.

She wows them and when they vote she gets an almost perfect score.

What has she done? She has performed an act of parrhesia. And her insolent words complete her performance of parrhesia. She has "spoken truth to power," which must, by definition, include risk. It is a Greek term, and it often involved death for the speaker. 

Foucault discusses this in his book Fearless Speech as he does a genealogy of parrhesia.  Ayn Rand in her defense of William Hickman said, "He was condemned to death, not for what he did, but for what he said." (Journal of Ayn Rand;Letters of Ayn Rand)

Katniss is condemned to death for her audacity and her courage, giving too much hope to those watching screens, from the fringes of this world.

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity....  who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power.... With the intention  of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the "critical"tradition of the West. - Michel Foucault

Review: Viewing Eclipse Through A Foucauldian Genealogy of Sexuality

Foucault and Lightbulb

Well, what my wandering mind dredged up to shimmer on the surface was Foucault's History of Sexuality, and, this is where the lightbulb went on, OMG! Eclipse is a visual genealogy of sexuality! It's all there!


An object does not exist unless and until it is observed. - William Burroughs

Since my mind was and is interfaced with Foucault, Eclipse drifted into it. The lightbulb went on. I had seen Avatar the previous January and thought of writing about it from its deep meaning on Foucault's take on Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body.

The previous nine months I had spent 24/7 reading and thinking about everything Michel Foucault had written that I had so far read. Lots of books, internet articles, interviews (hard because his French accent makes him difficult to understand in English on youtube) and nothing else, and nothing criticizing him until I felt grounded in his work. Reading him is like getting the inside of your head cleaned out with steel wool.

So I immediately went back to see it again. And again and again, until I felt I really understood it from a genealogical reading.

As Foucault has said, the method of genealogy is a tool, not a theory. Genealogy is not chronology. Genealogy is not linear, not progressive, not Hegelian, not historical. 


Genealogical "cuts" can be synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time, they are  "cuts" into the Dominating Discourse of history, psychology, language, economics, and the arts. A "cut" into all human behavior, knowledge and thinking and feeling, ideology and concepts.


Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is made for "cutting". - Michel Foucault (The Archeology of Knowledge)

Foucault's Spiraling Powerful Prose Scouring Your Mind

Sexuality in Eclipse:


Courtly Love: Passion Love. - Cortezia - A ritual of sexuality originating in the 12th century in Western Europe, Southern France, the Languedoc region, in Eleanor of Aquitaine's court. Married and divorced from Louis VII, her court traveled to the British Isles when she married Henry II.  She took her troubadours with her. This is the romance of Edward and Bella that is based on Tristan and Iseult, true love, non- consummation, (chastity or abstinence), and unity in death.

Rape: This is James, present in Twilight, who is absent but present - in Eclipse -  through his avenging mate, Victoria.


Blood Lust: These are the newborns who fit perfectly into ancient warrior hordes who killed with lust. And raped of course as spoils of war. Caesar describes all this in his victorious campaigns if you have translated or read him. 


The newborns also are descriptive of Melanie Klein's work on orality which she divides into two stages: passive sucking orality and active, biting orality. As the infant 's teeth come in it bites the mother's breasts and blood is sometimes or often mixed with the milk. The unconscious phantasies of the infant are to devour all the goodness from the mother, leaving only a shell. Here we recognize Renesmee. Klein insists that the mother must remain with the infant after nursing, not just plunk it down to go to sleep.  It is required that the mother remain with the infant for the "period of "reparation", "restoration" so the mother can be seen as whole in spite of the oral aggressive, destructive phantasies. That feelings and phantasies are not real, and the mother is still intact. She will also go into the good and bad mother imagos.

The Stone Age infant confronts its 20th century mother. - R.D. Laing


Makes you wonder about the present and historical fascination with vampires, eh. 


Conjugal Sex: This is seen in the relationships within the Cullen family - Carlisle, Esme, Jasper, Alice, Emmett and Rosalie. Outside of  the Cullens in the parents of Bella's friends in Forks, the Quileutes, etc. Nothing much is explicit, although we are told in BD about voracious vampire sex between vampires, but we neither read nor see of any evidence of it. An example of normal, family sex from which undying passion is absent, as there is constant availability and consummation. Desire is inseparable from Lack  - in a matrix with lack. Lacan.


Homoerotic Sex: Only implied between Edward and Jacob in their triangular relationship with Bella. Discussed in Freud's case studies on male paranoia. We also see it in the Tribal relationship of the wolves. Again only implied. This cut in sexuality is unconscious in the Twilight Saga.


All of these "cuts" are synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time. "Cuts" are not chronological; therefore, not linear, progressive or historical. The modern temptation is to attribute levels of  consciousness to the different types of sexuality, but Foucault dispenses with the idea of consciousness and its raising. When you read him and he finishes with an idea or concept, it is time to give it up.


Eclipse is a film, and the film much more so than the book, makes the genealogy of sexuality explicit, and is a gem in elucidating "CAMP" and an aspect of post - modern theory. It is an introduction to Foucault's tool chest as he calls it.

Great "CAMP" Scene