You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If Freud's discovery of the unconscious has taught us to discern what lies hidden under the carpet of consciousness, it has done so in no small part by renewing our astonishment at human behavior that is immediately observable. It is in that spirit that, midway through the text of Totem and Taboo, Freud quotes a description of a fourth century Bedouin ritual of sacrifice. For Freud, as for Willliam Robertson Smith, from whom Freud borrows a record of the ritual, the very strangeness of the event it describes, the measured solemnity of ceremony followed by a frenzy of shocking violence, presents a powerful challenge for explanation:
The victim of the sacrifice, a camel, ‘is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound … and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short interval between the rise of the day star which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.’ (Freud 138).
Already in this picture of ecstatic savagery, itself a kind of primal scene, we are brought up short before one of the central mysteries explored by psychoanalysis, that in which an elemental fulguration of desire is released amid spectacular violence. We are confronted, that is, with the enigma of what Jacques Lacan has called “jouissance.” Equally remarkable is the fact that this eruption of violent excess is so elaborately staged in the architecture of a ritual. As a carefully orchestrated, collective murder followed by a feast on the body of the victim, the Bedouin sacrifice recalls for Freud the primal patricide from which all manne