Sublime Ananke, Goddess of Necessity
Freud invokes the goddess Ananke in moments of high style—see for example, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, etc. The primordial Ananke, goddess of force, compulsion and necessity, formed herself out of chaos at the beginning of time. She was highest of the Greek deities and obeyed by gods and mortals alike—even Zeus and the sun must obey her destiny. Freud names her “sublime’ Ανάγϰη [Necessity],” or necessity more generally; sometimes she is “the educator necessity.”
Necessity is quite simply the demands of organic life on planet earth: the need to breath, to eat, to drink, to keep warm, the need to sleep, the eventual need to die. These “somatic needs” are what Freud also calls the exigencies of life—personified, at times, by the goddess Ananke. (Exigency, as far as I can tell, is a Stracheyism, a quirk of the standard edition, for in the original German it is more literally the “needs of life:” nots des lebens; exigency, for better or worse, has now become a key term in Laplanchian psychoanalysis. Lacan reads this less as needs than as Need, a continual pressure or urgency, something in excess of bare necessity. I think this is probably why Laplanche fixates on exigency as something stronger than need). Because this exigency is for the most part endogenous, it cannot be escaped; against this, as Freud notes in The Project For a Scientific Psychology, “the baby kicks and screams helplessly.”
The child’s helplessness, that other grounding concept in Freud, is in this sense made out of pure necessity. This helplessness of the baby requires their needs be met by the adult caregiver. The child’s reliance upon the caregiver, this “leaning-on” (anlehnung, or what Strachey obfuscates into anaclisis), means that vital needs are entangled with libidinal ones; the vital demands of the body are mixed with libidinal discharge, together with the hallucinatory power of imagination. This is precisely the point in development where necessity initiates the drive.
In mythology the goddess Ananke is the mother of the three fates, the Morai—and who also appear, in more sinister guise, as the Erinyes, those who drink blood and walk in darkness. They alone supply each human with their allotment of fate, otherwise known as the daemon; see Heraclitus: “human ethos is daemonic;” that is to say, overdetermined. Just as there is a direct lineage between Ananke and the figure of the daemon, as if the daemon were an emissary sent straight from divine compulsion and force, so there is also a continuum from sublime necessity—the exigencies of life—to the excesses of the drive.
In short: reading the mythology of Ananke retroactively we might conclude not only that your mother is your fate, but also that this fate is in excess.
