life, a paradigm for the production of subjectivity that must be anthro-
pologically situated. It is one of the fundamental passages for understand-
ing Guattari’s thought as a critique of structuralism, in psychoanalysis as
well as in linguistics. Guattari did not, in fact, discard the Freudian notion
of the Unconscious, but he situated it both in the context that produces it
and in the one that it itself produces. The Oedipal complex, says Guattari,
is not a universal interpretive category of human psychogenesis, but
a model for the semiotization of familial, affective and erotic relations
which is precisely identifiable in the context of the modern bourgeois
family and of the monotheistic – Judaic, Christian, Protestant – sentiment
of guilt.When a Bahun child, reared on the purity of his caste, discovers a
father or close relative privately violating such behaviour, then he
comes to share a deep and wicked secret about high caste life, that it
masks a certain degree of fraudulence, that the high ideals of purity
are often something of a public façade; and the sense of superiority
is largely undeserved. In sharing this secret pollution of the Bahuns
as a caste, the individual then develops a secondary concern, that it
will be found out. Unlike the non-Bahun child, then, the Bahun does
develop a certain inner psychological dynamic that involves guilt.
Rather than motivating responsible behaviour, however, one of the
consequences of this guilt is a deep and widespread paranoia, that has
adverse effects in high caste social organization. (Dor Bahadur Bista,
Fatalism and Development, 73)The obsession with purity is the origin of the sense of guilt, and
the sense of guilt puts in motion the classical mechanisms of psycho-
analysis, the chain of the double bind implicit in prohibition and
transgression. But when we speak about psychopathology, we must
carefully avoid defining the description of universal categories. In a
culture based on the respect of caste purity, the originary scene will
not, in fact, be Oedipus, but the socially impure touch. It is from this
that a tear is made in the apparently tightly woven fabric of Being. This
feeling of inadequacy and the contrast between the interdiction cast by
purity (the tightly woven fabric of Being) and its inadmissible trans-
gression or an impure desire (the existential leak) does not function
according to universal modalities and categories, but according to
anthropologically determined modalities.
In Dor Bahadur Bista’s book, one can locate other useful elements
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