Excess and Utopia: Meditations on Moravian Bethlehem
Excess and Utopia: Meditations on Moravian Bethlehem Seth Moglen The problem o excess is, at once, psychological and material. It is a matter both o feeling and politics. Since it is, in part, psychological, let me begin with one o Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic parables—in this case, a parable about excrement. Freud tells us that before toilet training, little children experience defecation as a pleasurable act o creation. So imagine, i you will, a young child, enraptured with the productions o her own body, who leaves in some public part o the home, as a git to her parents, a turd. Her parents may respond in various ways. In the culture o Freud’s bourgeois fin-de-siècle Vienna, revulsion was perhaps the most likely: a sense o distress that something expelled from the body—waste, excess—had been deposited where it did not belong. The child is then taught that waste must not merely be expelled from the body, but purged from the home, family, and civilized community. It must be expunged, buried, washed away, disposed o without a trace, separated from the senses and from feelings o pleasure or desire. The boundaries o the ego, the domestic sphere, and the social order are constructed in this way. In order to become a normative subject, the child must internalize this prohibition against taking pleasure or feeling pride in waste, in excess. This internalization entails the development o feelings o shame or guilt in rela- tion to objects and emotions that must be repudiated. So the psychoanalytic problem o excess is an emotional problem: it is the problem o how one feels and how one is supposed to feel about those things culturally marked as excessive—as abject, forbidden, beyond the pale.
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