Forget Hamlet

For Jean-Joseph Goux and Luce Irigaray, it's the sacrifice of the penis that accords (symbolic) phallic power in an archaic scene of phallocracy.5 For Herbert Marcuse, it's the being-for-death-death as an ontological necessity-required in war and by the state of members of the polis, the sacrifice of the individual for the nation and ultimately for civilization itself.6 For Jacques Derrida, it's the sacrificial structure that goes by the name of carnophallogocentrism, eating and being eaten by the other, the sublime and symbolic ingestion (of words, concepts, the "body of Christ") and expulsion (of words, breath) that nevertheless leave a material trace elsewhere.7 During the Vietnam war Andrea Dworkin argued, as Edelman does, that the fathers ask their sons to submit in their stead, to offer themselves up sacrificially to honor the cult of their aging patriarchy (and for her this is most definitely a patriarchal order of things).8 Abraham raises the knife to slay Isaac, submitting to the commandment of his father.\n If Hamlet can be said to inaugurate something, I would venture that it is the order of brothers, the "fratriarchy" that dreams the demise of patriarchy and thus conceals its own patriarchal dream of rule. [...] like the genetic code that is, Edelman reminds us, where the thing and trace coincide, where living on and living after are confounded in what is inhuman within the human, we might think about what ghostly paternal injunctions and the living on in their spectralized and spectralizing sons attempt to extirpate (and "we" to sublimate) as part of their accession to the one, the law, futurity: the inhuman mattering of nonsymbolic reproduction, the code-thing whose liveliness survives and for which female embodiment is-at least in this tradition-a horrifying reminder/ remainder.