Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

child patients.⁵ Sándor Ferenczi, a member of Freud’s inner circle, and president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, concluded that his own patients were telling the truth about child sexual abuse, verifying this through his work with other patients in the same family. Freud eventually came to the opposite conclusion with his own patients, theorizing that these accounts were fantasies, but, paradoxically, perversions of his theories led to a hunt for these very memories he denied, which then led to a hunt for pedophiles.

As John Lechte has succinctly explained, the Oedipus principle inevitably leads to the notion of an original event, or trauma, which the authors of Anti-Oedipus found to be unimaginatively reductive. They refused the theory of desire, based on lack, and rejected Freud’s theory of repression. Repression, for Freud, occurs in the process of the child’s separation from the mother and its entry into the symbolic order, the order of the Law and the Name-of-the-Father. This father principle, the principle of the origin as identity, was rejected outright by Deleuze and Guattari, because for them there is no distinction between the individual defined by desire and the collectivity defined by the law. There is only social desire. As a result, desire is always made up of different elements, depending on the situation; it is machinelike rather than an oedipal theatre of representation.⁶ Abuse, like capitalism, is theft, stealing from the machine, where children themselves are the investment.⁷ For Deleuze, selling is capitalism’s, hence our, supreme thought and concept.⁸ Under the rule of the performance principle, both the body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labor. All texts, be they films, Web-based media, newspapers, or even our own psyches, are constructed in relation to ideological codes that are primarily concerned with selling and promotion.

Bearing this Deleuzean trajectory in mind, I use here a broad theoretical approach, utilizing Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. I venture into discussions of public rhetoric and mass murderers, while