Twenty-Ninth Series -- Good Intentions are Inevitably Punished

Page 207: On the "double screen" or doubled surface.

In this chapter, D expands his psychoanalytic/schizoanalytic take on Oedipus. Though we may have good intentions, to intend anything is to use the negative arts. Conversely, the "sage" makes no decisions -- actions flow through him like Tai Chi. To act in the way Oedipus does, to repair the world, is to build the world by division, by a (false, inessential) taxonomy of good and evil. Hence, the player, Oedipus, upsets the structure of the game in attempting to fix it. The loose pieces are seemingly annulled, but then come back in a form more terrible and perverse than he could have ever imagined (cf. Freud's return of the repressed). Thus, our most beneficent acts actually harbor a (perverse) drive that we don't understand, the results of which are shown to us in plain light from a cracked mirror, a mirror turned inside-out, a fun house mirror, a monster, etc. (Follow the connection here to the doubling of events, twin faces of tragedy and farce, etc.)