Anti-Electra

The Radical Totem of the Girl

2019
Author:

Elisabeth von Samsonow
Translated by Anita Fricek and Stephen Zepke

A close examination of the relationship between media, art, and the “Electra complex”

The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra asserts that focusing on the escape of “the girl” from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. It offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.

Anti-Electra constitutes an occasionally uncanny and always fascinating work, which advocates a constellational, schizogamous relationality. This intellectually engaging and witty book will be of interest to art historians, scholars with interests in media studies, and those who are open to be challenged by an exciting feminist revaluation of ancient myths and their relation to the present.

Identities

The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of “the girl” as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl’s escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art.

Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra’s gadgets and toys. According to von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the “preoedipal constellation” that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a “radical totemism.” Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.

Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, writer, curator, and professor of philosophical and historical anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Two of her books have been translated into English: Transplants and Epidemic Subjects—Radical Ontology.



Anita Fricek is an Australian artist based in Vienna.



Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher and author of Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future.

Anti-Electra constitutes an occasionally uncanny and always fascinating work, which advocates a constellational, schizogamous relationality. This intellectually engaging and witty book will be of interest to art historians, scholars with interests in media studies, and those who are open to be challenged by an exciting feminist revaluation of ancient myths and their relation to the present.

Identities

Contents


Acknowledgments


Preface to the English Language Edition


Introduction


1. Electra as Female “Oedipus”


Positive Unrelatedness and Exogamy


Constitutive Strangeness or Primary Exoticism


Schizogamy


Xenological Anamnesis


Totemistic “Objectification”


2. Radical Totemism and Automatism


Theogenesis and the Twilight of Machines


Totem and Xenocracy


Animal Mummy and the Apparatus-Function


Anthropomorphization of the Deity


Apparatus or Weak Totem


3. Totemism and Sculpture: Preliminaries to a Theory of Schizosoma


Metabolism and Therapeutic Schizosoma


Pre-oedipality as a “Plastic Phase”


Excursus: Plasma, Forming, Sculpture


The Statue Delivering Oracles


The Two-Body Doctrine


The One and the Many


Social Sculpture


4. The Labyrinth: General Theory of Schizosoma


Pasiphae’s Cow


The Satellite


5. The Four Pre-oedipal Objects


Failing Equalization and the Emergence of the Complex


Electrification


Appendix


Index