Deconstructive Reading to Jim's Itinerary through Lord Jim: Focusing on Events of his Mimetic Desire

『로드 짐』의 낭만적 편력에 대한 해체론 독법: 모방적 욕망의 사건을 중심으로

The objective of this paper is to explore Jim's itinerary journey in terms of both Girald's concept of triangular desire and Derrida's concept of event. According to the Girard's mimetic desire theory, human being's desire is not spontaneous like Romanticism thought, but mimetic to the mediator between the subject and the object. Thus there is no romantic desire understood as one's own desire except mimetic desire. In this regard, mimetic desire is compatible with the conception of Derrida's thinking of an event that is resistant to its absolute singularity. Because both mimetic desire and event cannot be defined by the fact of each spatio-temporal specificity, they can not be understood by a traditional metaphysics of presence. In this paper, by using Girard's concept of mimetic desire theory, I showcase why the tragic journey of Jim's telos as a mythic quest for his romantic ego(ipse) cannot help but face his death and by using deconstructive thinking of iterability, this paper analyzes why Jim's romantic ego imitated by the mimetic desire through a mediator cannot be encountered happily with his ipseity until his end. As a victim of triangluar desire, Jim's romantic ego is nothing but a notion of an ipsiety that has been defined in terms of presence central to metaphysics. This paper also makes an attempt to re-interpret some articles contaminated with post-colonial perspectives from Derridean views with deconstructive rigorous reading to those papers to uncover an essential ground of presence.