ABSTRACT

Patriarchal ideology is shown in the Henriad to create deep tensions which are not dispelled, are often exacerbated, by its mechanisms of repression and displacement. This is partly because the problems inherent in the cultural constructions of “natural” or jural fatherhood are carried into the wider sphere of national and dynastic politics in two uneasily related forms of symbolic fatherhood: the Christian principle of divine paternity, and the aristocratic principle of what might be called heraldic genealogy. The name of the Father, God, is used to authorize the distribution of patriarchal power into two axes of “descent”: the “vertical” axis of substitution called hierarchy, and the “horizontal” axis of succession, heraldic genealogy. In both axes, the formal “cause” or criterion is mimesis; but whereas, in the first, descent is organized in terms of declining resemblance to the Father, in the second, the Father ideally achieves genealogical immortality by reproducing its image in progenial replicas. 1 My emphasis in this essay will be on a certain disorder in the mimetic principle itself, a contradiction which, as Plato saw, causes the structure of genealogical mimesis to be contaminated by that of hierarchical mimesis.