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“It seems that if Freud did not exist we would have to invent him” (p 7). This is the Voltairian wager of Jerry Aline Flieger's Is Oedipus Online?, one of six books published so far in The MIT Press's promising new series Short Circuits. Series editor Slavoj Žižek explains that through the “privileged instrument” of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Short Circuits “intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presumptions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth” (pp ix, x). In Oedipus, Flieger does just this by confronting cyber theory and nonlinear science with their disavowed Freudian foundations. Her wager pays off handsomely. Claims of Freud's death, she demonstrates, are premature: he is alive and well, online and surfing through the millennial field.
Surfing with him is Oedipus, no longer the harbinger of the familial complex that produces individual subjects, but rather a search engine in the intersubjective cyberspace of knowledge and desire - a paradigm of “rotational site or differential position” (p 58). After the hits that Oedipus has taken over the past few decades, especially in the fields of gender and queer studies, Flieger's defense is daring, and it warrants multiple evidentiary approaches or “sitings”. In Chapter 2 (a chapter that also constitutes an extended response to Žižek's own flirtation with the possibility of Oedipus' dissolution in cyberspace), Flieger sits Oedipus within Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? routine, which comically collapses name and base position, and Lacan's Schema L, which graphs the quadrilateral relation between the barred subject, the object of desire, the ego ideal, and the Other. Focusing on the play of positions, the ability of subjects to move between positions in a symbolic field, Flieger frees Oedipus from his culturally specific moorings to make him our contemporary. Like Oedipus, she argues, we postmoderns are wracked with insecurities about our own iden