“Celebration” tells us a lot about how today, in the false memory syndrome of remembering being molested by one’s parents, Freud’s Ur–Father is resuscitated. “Celebration” tells us this precisely through its artificial character. The ultimate paradox of the film is that it’s the ultimate nostalgia. This horror of the rapist father, instead of shocking us, it articulates a kind of nostalgic longing for the good old times when we had fathers who really had force, and when it was really possible to experience such traumas. This is the paradox I want to address. One would expect that fantasies are defenses against traumas. We have a traumatic experience, we cannot endure it so we build up a protective fantasy web of fictions. I claim that we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that concentration camp life would be the trauma and we build a fantasy to shield ourselves from it. But perhaps the trauma is the fantasy we construct to protect ourselves from something else. But what can be worse than concentration camp life itself? Let me return again to the opposition of the two fathers, imaginary and symbolic. I claim that what these horrifying figures fill in is the gap of symbolic authority. These two fathers, protective and rapist, have nonetheless something in common although they are opposed. They both suspend the agency of symbolic law, or symbolic prohibition, the proper paternal agency of authority whose function is to introduce the childhood into the universe of social reality with its harsh demands. The reality to which the child is exposed without any maternal protective shield. …Vinterberg’s rapist father is also a father outside the constraints of the symbolic law, with access to full enjoyment. …Vinterberg’s father is this very violence outside symbolic law, and again what is missing is simply the father as symbolic authority. So what happens with the functioning of subjects when symbolic authority loses its efficiency? I claim we get subjects who are strangely de–realized, deprived of their psychology as if we are dealing with robotic puppets that are obeying some strange blind mechanism.

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