The Emergence of a Novelistic Culture - Modernity and the Perverse Topography of Narrative Desire

The Emergence of a Novelistic Culture

&nbsp;&nbsp;In this essay, I attempt to connect the Luk？csian problematic of the "God-forsakenness of a world" to the breakdown of the premodern regime of "patriarchalism" in the passage to modernity, and proceed to explore the implications of the demise of patriarchalism for the modern subject by transposing the notion of "God-forsakenness" to the Lacanian schema of the "foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father." I argue that just as the absence of the symbolic paternity as the signifier of the Other in speech triggers off the psychotic process, the abolishment of patriarchalism in modernity ushers in an analogous process of disalignment and reshaping of signifier, whose end-result is the fundamental alteration in the topography of the subject.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;I turn next to Freud&quot;s theory of intrapsychical agencies, especially his account of "defusion of instincts," and to Lacan&quot;s topographical expositions of psychosis, in order to interrogate the implications of the altered structure of the subject for the transition to the modern symbolic. Based on my reading of Freud and Lacan, I develop the hypothesis of generalized perversion in modernity, in which the exorbitant gap between the imaginary ego and the symbolic ego-ideal sets off the two-fold process of desexualization and resexualization, which, I argue, is at the basis of modernity&quot;s narrative desire.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;From this, I proceed to advance a theory of modern narrative form as what founds and underwrites the new representational regime of sexual difference. I show how the antagonistic dialectic between the imaginary ego and the symbolic superego characterizes the modern split subject which replaces the premodern subject safeguarded by paternal authority, and how the modern subject operates by projecting the surfeit of differential flows induced by the paranoid dialectic onto "Others"－both domestic and colonial－thereby transforming the latter into the phantasmatic objects of desire.