What is staged in Squid Game is how the Superego serves the Id: The game managers who play God over the players actually serve the perverted pleasure of the VIPs who wear beast masks and entertain themselves with the players’ utter misery [1]. The drama is based on subtracting the Superego and the Id from the game space and thereby cleansing the player Egos from the capitalist pathology which is then projected onto the Oedipal rival. But what the drama points beyond the drama is the fact that the Superego and the Id actually pertain to the players themselves: They don’t constitute a separate ruling class that one can simply overthrow and achieve the utopia.

The subjugation of the Superego to the Id recalls a story that falls into the impossible gap between religion and mythology: Jesus is born from Virgin Mary who had coitus with God. This story belongs to religion because the father of Jesus is the Superego.

But there’s another story: Some demons in hell were unhappy about the son of the Superego and they decided to beget a rival against him. One of the demons had coitus with a woman and Merlin was born as a cambion (half-demon). Since Merlin’s father was the Id instead of the Superego, this story belongs to mythology instead of religion.

Keeping in mind that the Superego is just a specialized part of the Id that actually serves the Id, it’s accurate to say that the mythical story about the birth of Merlin the cambion is the key to the truth about the religious story about the birth of Jesus the son of God.

It gets more interesting when one considers how cambions are begotten. The seed must follow a certain trajectory:

Man → Succubus → Incubus → Woman → Cambion

The seed must originate from a man, it must pass first through a female demon, then through a male demon, and it must finally reach a woman who will then give birth to the cambion. There are two human endpoints who can only relate through their demons. Isn’t this an accurate portrayal of the sexual non-relation?

According to Žižek, the sexual non-relation takes place between three persons: you, your partner and the big Other. According to Freud, it actually involves four persons: you, your partner, your Other and your partner’s Other.

Let’s raise this number to five: The fifth person is the imaginary child that is supposedly begotten by the sexual act. The true embodiment of the non-relation is the fifth term. So there is a Quinity instead of a Trinity.

It’s remarkable how the fates of Merlin and Jesus are so different. The son of the Id (Merlin) becomes an imaginary superhero with magical powers whereas the son of the Superego (Jesus) gets crucified by the society. Who do you think has won the competition?

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “The Superego Uniform and The Id Costume”