• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.53
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• pp.103-130
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• 2018

The Chilean female writer María Luisa Bombal (1910 - 1980)'s "El ${\acute{a}}rbol$" (The Tree) (1939) tells the process of Brigida's epiphany. Brigida first tried to gain her father's love and failed, and later her husband's love and failed, then tried to substitute that love from men with solace from a tree. At the end of the novel, the epiphany occurs when the tree is cut down. In the present work, I explain the meaning of Brigida's epiphany, by comparing this Chilean short story with the Korean female writer Kim Chaewon(1946 - )'s "Trick of Water: A Kiss with Nothing" (2015). In this Korean short story, Kim insists that a woman who tries to find comfort in life through love with a man is destined to fail. I also examine the errors of the female characters' behaviors in these two short stories that led them to their self-destruction, trying to modify their behaviors in order to be loved by a man and their tendency to consider the man as everything in their life, and not as a part of their life. In order to explain the fated failure of finding comfort in life in the love of a man, I analyze the fleeting characteristic of acquiring an object of desire using Jacques Lacan's "Theory of Desire" and "The Destruction of the Elevated Object into the Dignity of the Thing." Thus, I conclude that women need to acknowledge that comfort in life cannot be found in the love of a man and that they should stop confining themselves to this fictitious characteristic of the dignified object called man.

• Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association
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• no.53
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• pp.57-87
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• 2014

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.