• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.36
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• pp.37-59
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• 2014

William Wordsworth's "The Thorn" revolves around the following questions: Who is Martha? Why does she go to the mountain top and repeat her doleful cry? To these questions, it gives us two different kinds of answers; one derives from the villagers, and the other from the narrator. This essay attempts to examine how the answers exemplify two different critical approaches to the problem of community, using Jacques Lacan's account of sexual difference in his seminar on Encore as a guiding thread of analysis. The important thing to retain here is that sexual difference in Lacan's seminar on Encore does not so much indicate biological determinations as two distinct forms of relating to the other which are intimately bound up with the question of how a community is constructed and maintained. The first form, called "masculine," suggests that it is a radical exception to a community that makes possible the community as a field of totality or sameness; the second form, called "feminine," shows that each of the subjects cannot be regarded as a member of a closed community which is guaranteed by the exceptionality, but as an exception that is radically singular. This in turn leads us to consider the possibility that the masculine form has to do with the villagers' effort to distinguish themselves from Martha and the feminine form with the way in which the narrator confronts and represents her. In the course of his formulation of sexuation graph, Lacan stresses that the masculine side must be supplemented by the feminine side, which allows us to elaborate on why, concerning Martha, the narrator does not just keep the completely different position from the villagers'. This is to say that the villagers' representation of Martha as an exception to the community should be supplemented by the narrator's attempt to tell Martha's story as the villagers do and at the same time to capture something of her enigmatic unrepresentability. Bearing in mind Charles Shepherdson's elaboration of traumatic memory, this essay also tries to clarify how the narrator preserves and even transmits something of Martha's truth that is embodied in her uncontrollable and unassimilable cry.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.41-50
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• 2014

This study is the subsequent full-scale research of a TV drama writer who has been out of scholarly pursuits as it explores in-depth Su-Hyeon Kim's underlying consciousness with focusing on her male characters of the and . Su-Hyeon Kim shows difference which clearly distinguishes a melodrama from a home-drama by her own self control, a rare case in TV drama genres. This study, in her distinguished melodrama, analyses the writer's more clearly ignited consciousness. This study enlarges the result of the precedent study by applying the same Lacan's theory to the male characters with the study's female characters. Lacan's concepts of sexual difference notes that the sexual differences is not the product of the fixed differences from the biological organs or the inequal system, custom, but that of the psychological, cultural causes. According to Lacan's sexuation theory, the male subject is an all 'fractured' one of subordinating to symbolic/phallic order by becoming a exceptional being of breaking the order through a fantasy despite his existence of subordinating the order. The writer conceives men and women as the 'same', 'privative', 'fractured' subjects who search for the impossible phallic jouissance in their own different ways, which is the same method of Lacan's. Also the gap of 20 years of two works marks the writer's change of male perspective, in which shows being more accepting, more sex-neutral to a man who can only enjoy the phallic jouissance through a fantasy, while a woman who can enjoy both of the phallic and feminine supplementary jouissance.