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.

Review: Silver Linings Playbook

No this is not a perfect film.
Yes, Jennifer Lawrence is superb as is everyone else. 
No the screenplay is not great and there are so many cliches especially at the end.
It is not a movie about two damaged people getting together.

It is NOT a movie about two damaged people getting together.

First it is about a particular dysfunctional family showing in a crystal clear way how the dysfunctional family creates madness. In this case what is diagnosed bi-polar disorder or ADD, for the purpose of labeling to prescribe meds.

In writing this book Jules Henry went to stay with a number of families. He ate with them, shopped with them, slept there, and went everywhere with them, recording everything. If you read it and then imagine living for awhile with the family in Silver Linings Notebook you will understand that it is not Pat who is damaged, but this entire American dysfunctional family that is damaged. They are the norm, not the exception.

Tiffany reads very much like Francoise Dolto in her case study Dominique: Analysis of An Adolescent Boy with her scene putting together the winnings of the teams and her presence with Pat during the plays of the teams. This is purely the chain of signifiers for those who have read and understood Lacan. If you haven't then it sounds crazy and schizophrenic. However it cuts into the resistance and resolves it, whether you are considering the case study or the movie.

These are two people who are realer than real. Our only way out of this mess we are all in.  Go on with your psychologizing and enter the "swamp of psychological interpretation" (Foucault) if you want. I won't meet you there.

http://www.amazon.com/Sanity-Madness-Family-Families-Schizophrenics/dp/0140211578/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362635350&sr=1-1&keywords=laing+madness+insanity

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Oedipus-Capitalism-Schizophrenia-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143105825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362635696&sr=1-1&keywords=deleuze+anti-oedipus

Review: Snow Flower And The Secret Fan;The Inscription of the Body

Official Site

Oh what a gorgeous film this is. Wayne Wang is the director and he never disappoints. Ebert doesn't like it much but I like to read him anyway so maybe you will too. The official site tells you much more.

BFF Best Friends Forever now was named lao tong in the 19th century. With parents' consent,  two girls with good astrologically compatible signs were paired often before birth. It resonates with the two Elizabeths - John the Baptist's mother and Mary's mother, both of whom desired a child desperately as they aged and prayed together for God to grant their wish, depicted in Giotto's murals in  the chapel in Padua.
Your lao tong is a serious  relationship and was considered for life, no matter what changing circumstances intervened decreed by fate. Two women bound for life in a man's world. Nu shu, a secret language was invented by women, forbidden an education, to communicate their secret heart to their Other in this world of men. Only a handful of women now know this language and it threatens to be lost. Ebert misses all this but then he is a man, so understandably. He confuses it with lesbianism which it is not. All cultures must have rituals and institutions where women interact with other women and men with men. In the middle east, men get together to decide whom their sisters, cousins, aunts, will marry - who they will fuck. Deleuze describes the homo-erotic aspect of this in his book Anti-Oedipus. I hope all this is enough to interest and inform you about this movie. But none of this is my interest, because it is the binding of the feet, the bound feet that has riveted my attention. Because this is a specific and ritualized Inscription of the Body. And the body is never - never - inscribed without the Inscription of the Mind accompanying it. But it is known as the Inscription of the Body after Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, where he lays out TORTURE as the necessary and sufficient condition for the dawning of human consciousness. Torture is required to inscribe MEMORY in the mind of primal unthinking and without language early humanity. Nietzsche acknowledges the ghastliness of the practice of torture as he tells us of its necessity.

Foucault will take torture up in his Discipline and Punish and elaborate its presence today in ensuring normality, normal behavior in both mind and body, in his 1974 Lectures on  Abnormal at the College de France. By the time you have followed Nietzsche and Foucault you will observe it everywhere in body language, in novels, in films, and you will never be free of it again. To inscribe the body is to inscribe the mind at the same time.   This is why human rights is not going to make a dent on the symbolic practice of genital mutilation of young girls to inscribe on their bodies and on their minds the excruciating torture and pain connected with sex.

Stephenie Meyer has made the Inscription of the Body a central theme in Twilight. Bella's heart races, it splutters, it stops, it restarts, her stomach clenches, her knees weaken, she swoons, she blushes, she stammers, she trips, she falls, and then in New Moon when Edward leaves her, all this is shut down, her mind is shut down, and she becomes the Deleuzean Body Without Organs. So I hope my readers are on the same page now with this Inscription of the Body.

The two young girls in the film are played in the 19th century and the present time by the same actresses. Wang keeps switching back and forth. One comes from a wealthy family and the other from a poorer one. The mother of the poorer child determines to ensure her daughter's prosperous future by binding her feet. This starts the day she is born. It continues as long as she grows. The torture is excruciating, relentless, unending and she is left with tiny stubs that cripple her for walking. She must be helped or carried as an adult. She spends much of her childhood in unending pain, her mother tosses in bed as she hears her daughter cry. But the mother deprives her daughter and herself of all compassion, pity, love, concern in her obsession to make her daughter's feet so perfectly bound that she will be married to an aristocratic son of a ruling family. Her face endures the torture without it marring her expression or her beauty. So we are witnessing a girl/woman who has endured unbelievable torture for all her growing life to avoid a primitive existence, in order to marry a wealthy and distinguished man from a ruling family. The perfection of the bound feet determined the quality of the husband. The miniaturization of the feet are the prized possession. We see a young woman, who has never run or walked any distance, who has a precarious sense of balance, totally dependent, who has been deprived of all love and affection, except from her beloved lao tong.

She marries and her new husband touches her first by kissing her feet, acknowledging the suffering she has undergone to be worthy of becoming his wife. She withdraws. She will never know any real physical pleasure, and will only submit to give birth to sons and serve her mother-in-law, who also has bound feet, is jealous, will not let her communicate with her lao tong. The older woman is a tyrant. But the older woman has endured the same Inscription of the Body and Mind and then we see its real purpose within the rituals of this culture before Chairman Mao. Lily will always serve her mother-in-law before anyone. She will always want the approval of this cold woman who is like her own mother. She will forever be trying to get too little too late. She serves her mother-in-law before her own children, with whom she is cold. Her only love is Snow Flower, her lao tong.

And so we see how this brutal Inscription of the Body holds up the entire aristocratic family, freezing it from change, determining its loyalties and practices, ensuring the care of old mother-in-laws by the accompanying practice of crippling the mind and the emotions. One can only imagine the horror of a girl child enduring this, and her emotional crippling as she suffered and suffered and suffered in an emotional void.

The American Quaker from Philadelphia, William Hinton was in China during the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960's spending the year in Ox Bow Village, telling about it in his book Fanshen, (turning about), while the peasants there went through the Cultural Revolution change. One older woman with bound feet at last liberated but crippled went and worked in the fields, attended all the meetings and proclaimed her freedom at last. I wonder.

At the end of Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body is another horrifying example of The Inscription of the Body.

I am nowhere near finished with this theme.