Father’s Son, Mother’s Son: The Enduring Phantasmatic Father
In the process of putting the father to death, the bastardization of the bastard son is confirmed, out of which emerges the question of economic paternity. If the industrial economy is being destroyed by the bastard son, does this not make of all capital an illegitimate offspring (gain)? What is capital without paternity? Nasty, brutish, and everlasting?
Are we now free to declare, long after it is we should have done so, that all capital accumulation is illegitimate? Against parental, that is to say, God’s law?
What does the bastard son stand to inherit but his father’s ill-gotten gains? Must the mother and the father die so that the son can make of his bastardy a public declaration? Is it only when the father has been killed, laid to industrialist rest (that is, made subject to his first death), that the bastard son can pro-/claim, “I am not—I am no longer—my father’s son?”
This in the face of the immanent truth that is: The bastard son remains always, despite his every striving, his father’s son.
A futile gesture, in truth, because the son, avenging angel though he be, cannot resurrect the mother. The mother cannot be brought back to life. What is the bastard son to do, then, but seek his own validation through attaching himself to the Mary Magdalene figure that the fates present to him? Lost though he be, unable to find his way to his putative destination, the Regent Beverley Wilshire, he returns to it in the company of the wayward, lost daughter, the young woman from the New South who keeps herself alive through ill-begotten gains. Is it only the maligned Mary Magdalene who can restore the ethical to the bastard son? The fiction, the frisson, of the mother returned to nurture and to love, to nurture into self-love.
The self that must be made to turn to the work of making. The self that must, as if from the ground up, make itself into an ethical self that is felicitous to its own ethics. Self-making, on the order of Michel Foucault. Intellectually rigorous (Athens), severely disciplined (Spartan), scrupulously attaching itself to that desire which is unfailingly true. True to the imperative of philosophy’s first principle: know thyself.
The mother is invoked. Mourned, even. Grieved over, after which the son appears able to continue his life. But it is the father, as phantasm, as the amalgam of an absent-presence, a distinct kind of surrogacy, and the specter of Glissantian reversion-diversion, who haunts the bastard son. It is against the phantasmatic father that the bastard son sets himself, whom the bastard son seeks to undo only to find himself acceding to the very modality of capitalism that he is intent upon liquidating.
It is the phantasmatic father who makes possible the surrogate father’s ebullient declaration: “We’re going to build ships, great big ships.” By throwing an economic lifeline to Morse Industries, the bastard son resurrects not only almost-dead late industrial capitalism, but he brings the phantasmatic father back to life.
Who is it, exactly, saying, “I’m proud of you, son?” To which father do those words belong? Is it the phantasmatic father speaking through—as, with the words of—the surrogate father?
Is it only by, finally, agreeing to make something that the bastard son can speak to the father? Is this way as direct as possible to access the speaking of the phantasmatic father? Is life to be found in the entanglement that is the phantasmatic father?
At the very least, we can say that it is in the figure of James Morse that the phantasmatic father is re-turned to us. “Mr.” Lewis is the father who is never afforded a proper name; that is, he is not made distinct from the son. “Mr.” Lewis is the father who cannot be named, who is made unnameable by the son, is reduced to and therefore rises up asf a voluble, disruptive anonymity by the son. The son who contains within him the only living fragment of the phantasmatic father.
Within this figure of James Morse, the fragments, bastard son and disruptively anonymous father, find their entanglement. James Morse is that entanglement that brings into exchange the tangible fragment—the ships that Morse Industries will now be able to continue building—and the without-immanence whole that is postindustrial capitalism.
The phantasmatic father that is late industrial capitalism, we recognize, has been given a reprieve. Only a reprieve. The phantasmatic father will be doomed to extinction. Again. Only to assume a new-old guise. Perhaps even to, in the most phantasmatic way, place in the stead of the dead father an aging surrogate. The surrogate father who pronounces himself “proud” of the bastard son, the surrogate who can be spared the violence enacted against the absent-present (first) father. The phantasmatic father makes himself a present absence, lending his in-visibility the quality of the specter. The phantasmatic father allows himself to be seen, this time through the refraction that is surrogacy, thereby raising the possibility of the nostalgic.
The phantasmatic father will, as such, make himself always available as political instrument. The phantasmatic father will always have to live, in death, with the prospect of being asked to resurrect himself (itself?) back into (postindustrialist) life, to leap out of and over death, back into life. The phantasmatic father can, then, never be laid to rest. The phantasmatic father is too valuable an ideological asset to be declared dead and buried forever.
The phantasmatic father is, ultimately, the most enduring artifact that the bastard son has produced. The bastard son, in the act of leaping backward as only the patronymic allows, has made himself his father’s father.
No one, beginning with James Morse, can never again accuse Edward Lewis of not making something.
The bastard son has shown himself capable of extracting a benign late industrial Frankenstein out of the postindustrial wreckage that he, Mr. Edward Lewis, and the phantasmatic “Mr. Lewis,” in their brutal entanglement, hath wrought. Out of death, life. After a manner.