Postmodern Subject's Anxiety and Obsessive Repetition in Paul Auster's Leviathan

탈근대 주체의 불안과 강박적 반복: 폴 오스터의 『리바이어던』 읽기

The purpose of this paper is to examine Paul Auster's Leviathan according to Slavoj Žižek's theory. Analyzing the characters in Leviathan, this paper chiefly discusses the postmodern subject's anxiety and obsessive repetition that the lack of the big Other led to. Section II explains the disintegration of the big Other and the subject's anxiety and obsessive repetition by the interpretation of the characters: Peter Aaron, Maria Turner, and Benjamin Sachs. Aaron wants to write on Sachs's life to overcome his uneasy subject's condition, and to establish the consistent and whole world. But his writing fails to meet his desire, owing to uncertainty of his understanding, and the incompleteness of his writing. In case of Maria, her uneasy subject's condition led to her obsessively repetitive picture-shooting herself and others, which proved to be a meaningless struggle for filling the void of the big Other and herself. Although Sachs already knows the lack and inconsistency of the big Other, he also repetitively tries to establish the consistent and whole Other. In Section III, this paper examines Sachs's terror as he struggles for the preservation of the big Other. His extreme striving also fails to reestablish the big Other as it loses its symbolic effectiveness in the postmodern era because he does not grasp the big Other as an empty Symbolic order, and rejects the premise of the big Other itself.