• 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.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.1-27
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• 2016

This paper aims to explore an other way to reflect on the self through woman, through the feminine, as a mode of being. In other words, in order to say about "how to re-think the self, in a different way," if I start from the issue of the feminine, how and why can this "a different way" be linked to woman? This question implies several more questions; what is woman? what is the feminine? what does it mean "a different way"? how can we say of "a different way"? Or, why can we take woman as the medium to "be" in a different way? If woman gives us a "way out," that is to say, if (S)he opens out a way for our out-being, ex-sistence, standing outside ourselves, that is, ek-stasis, does this enable us to overstep egotism? Then, how can we re-flect and say about this "out (as 'ex-/ek-')" in terms of woman, the feminine? This paper starts from these questions. Woman is an explosive overflowing force, movement, and process, which displace 'within' into 'outside,' as what Irigaray would call a "disruptive excess." Thus, I start from saying of the "place" in which woman itself takes place as overflowing. By referring to Derridian, Lacanian, and Heideggerian terms, I hope to foreground the ex-sistential space of woman.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.129
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• pp.53-82
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• 2014

This paper analyzes the concept of Lacanian subject and the structural definition of sexual difference between man and woman, and criticizes some problems of those definitions. It seems to me, to do so, that it is important to know precisely the core terms of psychoanalysis quoted by Lacan. We should analyze the basic meanings and the relation of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real, of ideal ego and ego ideal, of phallus and signifier, of desire and the other, of consciousness and unconsciousness, of alienation and separation, etc. I'm going to discuss the relation between the Imaginary and the ideal ego in chapter 2, and then, deal with the relation between the Symbolic and the ego ideal in chapter 3. I'll explain both similarity and difference between the ideal ego and ego ideal through those discussions. In chapter 4, I'm planning to explain the relation among the other, desire and the subject of unconsciousness. In chapter 5, I'll analyze the meaning of phallus and signifier. I'll criticize the Lacanian structural definition of sexual difference on the basis of the work made in former chapters. These discussions will lead to my final conclusion that the concept of Lacanian subject and the structural definition of sexual difference are only dependent on reductionism regarding everything as symbolic, which has in itself a lot of contradiction. In order that All discussions about sexual difference have at least a objective meaning, they have to rely on anatomical differences between man and woman.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.9
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• pp.126-135
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• 2012

This study is the subsequent full-scale research of a TV drama writer who has been out of scholarly pursuits as it explores Su-Hyeon Kim's underlying consciousness with focusing on her heroines, the and . The author Su-Hyeon Kim clearly distinguishes a TV melodrama from a TV home-drama by her own self-control, which is a rare case in TV drama genres, therefore, her consciousness lights up at her melodrama. This study applies Lacanian theory to the author's melodramas for examining the author's under-lying thought. For Lacan the subject is an 'alienated', 'privative', 'fractured' 'being' as an imperfect language, the symbolic order, forms the subject through its signification. The subject desires the other's desire, and wants to become an object for the other's desire. The desire constantly demands an integral world, a perfect love, the wholly harmonious imaginary order. And it lasts up as it refuses the symbolic order's imperfection while it works its unconscious fantasy. Lacan states that only the 'traversing the fantasy', 'separation' would give birth to the real, liberated subject. Despite a 20-years of rift within two works, the and have an identical conflict core, that is a subject's constitutive, fundamental privation and desire of a human being. Su-Hyeon Kim's underlying consciousness complies with her continued theses of an inquiry into the subject's real liberation and freedom when desire of the rings produces the subject's alienation, privation, and the pursuit of a impossible perfect love.