INCEST: PART FOUR

“Incest occurs in a context where it exists already.”

“In retracing the family histories of the prisoners interviewed, Dussy reveals that “incest occurs in a context where it exists already”. The majority of the 22 men interviewed in prison reported being aware of other incestuous situations in their family. Though they refuse to think that they acted in a way that imitated their past, seven men also reported having been sexually abused in childhood.” — Amélie Charruault discussing Dorothée Dussy’s Le berceau des dominations: Anthropologie de l’inceste

We misunderstand incest in a way that perpetuates it. The taboo against incest relegates it to the realm of unreality. Incest is so horrible, so disgusting, so unthinkable, that we exile it from humanity. We place it in the realm of monsters. This means that incest can never be here, and can never be now. It is only later, when incest breaks free from the realm of unreality and finds a way to be spoken, that people will wring their hands and insist that they didn’t know — in fact, they couldn’t know because incest could not be happening.

The truth is that incest is here and it is now. The truth is that despite the structural dissociation of everyone involved, there really is only one reality. And reality is actually not so slippery, not so impossible to know, to understand, or to make sense of. It only seems that way. We believe that incest is a horror that can only happen somewhere else, to some other people, and certainly in some other, more serious, more real way than what is happening here. (Because of course NOTHING is happening here.) But the truth is that incest is utterly normal, familiar, and unremarkable to many people. The realm of unreality is a part of this world to those who know it, just like the three dimensions, and light and sound. It’s strange how things shimmer and disappear, yeah maybe it is, but it’s always been that way, and besides we don’t talk about it, because we can’t be sure we even saw anything. For those who spend much of their lives in the realm of unreality, those who grew up in an incest family, it is difficult even to name what is wrong. This is just the ways things are and there are no words for it.