에이햅의 숭고와 그 너머: 라깡의 정신분석학적 윤리와 미학을 통한 접근

Ahab's Sublime and Its Beyond: An Approach by Lacan's Psychoanalytic Ethics and Aesthetics

This essay aims to find the part that cannot be reduced to the metaphysical concept of the 'sublime', by reexamining the problem of the sublime in Melville's Mo by-Dick. The sublime has been closely involved with idealization in the western metaphysics, for the sublime, especially in Kantian sense, is another name of spirit's transcendental ascent beyond the defective world tied up to causalities and material restrictions. The excess, impossible to reduce to the Kantian sublime would be explained properly by the concept of 'sublimation' raised by Lacan. Another purpose of this essay is to examine the risk that Ahab's sublime is likely to be misunderstood as ethical. But a close examination would uncover that Ahab is not so much ethical subject as the one who does not give up on his desire to avoid encountering the void of the Thing in the real. For Ahab, Moby-Dick as a kind of veil and stand-in for the real Thing is reduced to the imaginary other which should be eliminated out of vengeance or compensation for the loss of his leg. However, we would come to realize that Moby-Dick is not the imaginary other, rather objet pe/it a as an object elevated or sublimated to the dignity of the Thing. Ahab also reveals the characteristics of perversion. He not only coerces the crew of the Pequod into obeying his merciless superegoic command to slay Moby-Dick at all costs, filling in the vacant hole of the half-said moral law, but also takes pleasure in fulfilling his own command willingly. making himself the instrument of his inhuman Will. After all, although Moby-Dick as abjet petit a seems to be a sublime object supposed to fill up the lack of the subject perfectly if he seize it it turns out to be a pasteboard mask or veil that hides the nothingness as a vacant space behind it. This recognition of the Thing cannot be occurred at the level of the character Ahab, rather occurs at the level of the author or lshmael's narration. On balance, the gap between the sublime and sublimation suggested by Lacan is also created in Moby-Dick through Melville's artistic act.