소외의 주체와 타자의 무대화

The Alienation of Subject and the Staging of the Other in Don Delillo's The Body Artist

The purpose of this paper is to investigate issues of subject and the other in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist. Unlike DeLillo's other novels, The Body Artist is a short novella, depicting the life of one woman over a period of a few months and seems to leave the politics out, with no bomb and no world situation. The Body Artist is, however, an important reworking of some ideas of "the alienation of subject and the staging of the other." For Lacan, the ego is just an image of the other, being constituted of misrecognition. To constitute the subject he must enter the world of language and the symbolic order, which causes barred and spilt subjects. In Lacanian ontology, we can find the barred subject first and then the barred Other. I think spiltting(/) itself would be the very possibility of subject. Following Zizek, the barred Other(A/) means precisely the constitutive impossibility of the achievement of symbolic realization, because there is a void, a lack of the signifier. When we read The Body Artist on the ground of the psychoanalytic insights, we can recognize the deliberate strategy of resistance of DeLillo and his characters who try to display the indivisible residue the dominant culture cannot absorb.