Chapter 7 The Murder of the Dead Father as Habitus1

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

Wolfgang Sofsky’s account and analysis of Auschwitz, The Order of Terror (1993), which was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Prize, may be understood, in terms of the concepts developed in the present book, as the abolition of the law of the dead father. “God is dead” through the lens of the thoughts developed here refers to the murder of the dead father and the re-establishing of the tyranny of the narcissistic father.

In The Order of Terror, Sofsky analyses the concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1945 as a distinct system of power based on “terror, organisation and excessive violence”, a colony of terror at the far extremity of the social world (1993, p. 14).

Sofsky says, “The reality of the camps appears to burst the bounds of imagination, the precincts of conceivability. It still triggers diverse forms of defence meant to exculpate conscience, to extinguish memory” (p. 6). He warns, however, that “if something is labelled incomprehensible, one can avoid having to perceive its horror in all its details” (p. 9).

Violence takes place within a complex web that connects historical, social and psychological variables, and the psychoanalyst can address it only from one specific perspective. Although Freud’s

second theory of drives indicated the potential for violence in each human being, we are still left with questions about the specific political, economic and historical conditions of existence that allow violence to take a legitimate institutionalized form at any specific moment in time. Sofsky suggests the notion of a habitus – a concept first proposed by Bourdieu (1972) to indicate that which links wider social structures to specific praxis, principles that generate strategies.

Violence has been defined as “the