ABSTRACT
Kazuyuki Hara’s “Deconstructing the Oedipus Complex: Ôe and Murakami on the Way to Global Culture,” considers the possibility of constructing a psychoanalytic theory of global culture that radically rethinks the Oedipus complex. What has unified previous theories of the Oedipal structure was a common desire to know. In order to show that this desire is not universal, Hara reads novels by two Japanese writers, Kenzaburo Ôe and Haruki Murakami, works that subtly question the usual issues defined by paternity, maternity, and childhood. Hara argues that these orders are deployed differently in the East. It is possible to conceive a psychoanalytically oriented platform on which non-occidental formations of subjectivity make sense without being reduced to pathology or to arrested development. This leads him to pose the question of what “maturity” means in all forms of subjectivity, whether Oedipal or non-Oedipal.
