A Study on Wajdi Mouawad's 'Incendies' based on Lacanian Thoughts of the Woman

여자의 사랑, 행위 그리고 정치 - 와즈디 무아와드의 <그을린 사랑> -

This article re-reads the messages of the text, 'Incendies', the uncanny actions and the strange words of protagonist Nawal, through the ideas of Jacques Lacan, particularly his notion of sexuation with posing questions about most of the previous reviews which are based on femininity or motherhood. For Lacan, masculinity and femininity are not biological essences but symbolic positions, and the assumption of one of these two positions is fundamental to the construction of subjectivity. So 'man' and 'woman' are merely signifiers that stand for these two subjective positions. Each side is defined by both an affirmation and a negation of the phallic function, by both an inclusion and exclusion of absolute non-phallic jouissance. Unlike the man, the woman is 'not-all' identified with the phallic function, demonstrating the undecidability and impossibility of totalising the woman. Although the woman is bound to do castration through being subject to the phallic function, she is also related to the signifier of the barred Other, S(Ⱥ) which stands for a gap or lack in the Other. Thus, as a consequence of not being entirely within the symbolic, she has an Other Jouissance, Feminine Jouissance, because it's possible to face emptiness of the Symbolic, the Real only in the place of the woman for new Ethics/Politics. This paper finds that Nawal is not completely defined by the phallic function and she is a subject of death drive that practices the signifying cut with passing through the fantasy as a screen for the desire of the Other. Nawal is situated on the position of the woman as 'not-all' unlike masculinity in Lacanian sexuation. This article shows that her strange acts are love, that is the true ethical acts. Above all her acts are related to the ethics of pure desire beyond the ethics of the Good of Aristotle. In that sense the character of Nawal of 'Incendies' is similar to the one of 'Antigone' as a character in all aspects. In psychoanalysis they all are true subjects that face a void, emptiness in a symbolic structure. They assume underlying impossibility of being/the Symbolic. They don't represent the images of compromise and peace in the normally accepted meaning of the word. A love that they show is not compassion but blind recognition of the excluded, embracing uniqueness of the excluded. This thesis finds resultingly Nawal's acts which can't be understood from viewpoint of feminism practice the ethics of the real, the politics of the real.