Freudian Research Seminar – The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus

About this event

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months. ________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: This paper stages a psychoanalytic and phenomenological encounter between Freud and Levinas through a rereading of Oedipus Tyrannus. Beginning from Freud’s foundational claim that the tragedy externalizes the unconscious—the myth of Oedipus as “our own” primal scene—it interrogates how this reading has paradoxically dulled the ethical force of the play through mythologization. Drawing on what André Green calls “cultural immunity” to Oedipus, I argue that the familiarity of Freud’s interpretation has obscured a more disturbing dimension: not unconscious wish but ethical vulnerability. Through a close analysis of Jocasta’s rationalization of dreams and Oedipus’ final farewell to his daughters, the paper offers a Levinasian interpretation that shifts the focus from desire and repression to trauma, substitution, and infinite responsibility. In this reading, Oedipus is not merely the bearer of a repressed wish but the subject un-homed by an ethical demand he neither willed nor understood.