last cannibal syndrome

nationality

American

university professor

University of Chicago

innovator in the field of

literature

psychoanalysis

is a reference to the joke 'there are no more cannibals... I ate the last one' as a way to talk about laws that are transgressed in order to bring a new law into order, by which that very deed is viewed as a transgression.

Santer writes, 'The cosmogonic deed of the culture hero, insofar as it is a disruption of the previous order, not only brings the law into existence but also thereby condemns itself with the same law' (Paul, p. 75). It was no doubt in response to this structural necessity that Freud posited the murder of Moses as the traumatic secret at the heart of Jewish monotheism. Indeed, something about Moses had to be made to disappear, to vanish, to be finished off. I would like to call this dilemma last cannibal syndrome, according to the witticism: 'There are no more cannibals... I ate the last one.' Moses is such a 'last cannibal' in that the deeds he performs in God's name leading to the revelation at Sinai are transgressions in the context of that same revelation.' (Santer 1999: 31)

Eric SanterThinkers

Eric Santer