The Prohibitive Condition: The Performativity of the Incest Taboo and its Incestuous Remainders

This dissertation explores the political nature of the incest taboo, with an analytical focus on its object of prohibition: incest. From the perspective of political philosophy, the incest taboo appears as problem of an unruly human nature that must be subjected to a foundational civilizing law. To this end, the taboo’s authority seems to derive from its ability to evict tendencies and desires that are somehow deemed too dangerous for society. Yet, the aim of this dissertation is to discern what the taboo is supposed to prohibit in prohibiting incest and what the conditions are that purportedly justify and continue to authorize such a prohibition. To address these concerns, I turn to psychoanalytic theory with its genealogical roots in structural anthropology, specifically the work of Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan.

By arguing that these authors’ writings on the incest taboo can be read as a political theory – as a version of the social contract fable – I explore how their thinking engender incest as an object of prohibition; as something that must be excluded in order for a cohesive and harmonious political community to come into being. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I argue that the authority of incest taboo, as guarantor of political community, is established and reaffirmed through the iterative production and exclusion of incest as an object of prohibition. Through a queer and psychoanalytical interpretation of Bonnie Honig’s idea of ‘the remainder’, I use three cases from Sweden to illustrate how different subjects are performatively called into being as queer incestuous remainders, as figures who seem unable to comply with the normative conditions put in place by the taboo’s prohibition. As embodiments of such failure, the incestuous remainders appear uncanny and threatening to the political order constituted precisely through the exclusion of incest.

Thus, by bringing psychoanalytical theory, political theory and queer theory together in an effort to theorize incest from the queer position of the remainder, this dissertation offers a political theory of the incest taboo that critically interrogates what the taboo promises to make possible by prohibiting incest.