Abjection as Gothic and the Gothic as Abjection

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-126
Author(s):  
Jerrold E. Hogle
Keyword(s):  
Human Being ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Do So

Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) has had a profound effect on the analysis of Gothic works. Building on Freud, Lacan, and others, it posits a "throwing over" of the deepest anomalies at the roots of human being - the inseparable intermingling of life and death and self and other at the moment of birth - into what seems an alien, other figure (the 'abject', such as Frankenstein's creature) so that the abjecting subject can construct a wholeness of consistent identity over against it. This process, as Slavoj Zizek has emphasized, is even a socio-cultural one, whereby populations abject underlying social conflicts into supposedly alien others. The abject figures in many Gothic works, then, are fear-inducting sites prompting terror or horror because they enact this scheme. In fact, they do so because the whole idea of abjection hearkens back to the very nature of Gothic symbol-making from Horace Walpole on.

scholarly journals SEKS SEBAGAI TINDAKAN RADIKAL DALAM NOVEL SAMAN KARYA AYU UTAMI/THE SEXUAL ACTION AS RADICAL ACT IN SAMAN NOVEL BY AYU UTAMI

Aksara ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Sarwo Ferdi Wibowo ◽  
Hasina Fajrin R. ◽  
Puji Retno Hardiningtyas
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Activity ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Symbolic World

AbstrakElemen seksual dalam novel Saman karya Ayu Utami masih sering dijustifikasi melalui nilai-nilai kesusilaan yang merupakan bagian dari dunia simbol. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian deskriptif yang membahas karya tersebut dalam perspektif psikoanalisis-historis Slavoj Žižek. Metode psikoanalisis historis digunakan untuk melihat elemen seksual dalam karya Ayu Utami secara berbeda. Data dikumpulkan melalui pembacaan secara teliti dan berulang terhadap novel Saman untuk menemukan frasa, kalimat, paragraf, dan wacana yang memuat kualitas-kualitas subjek dialektis Slavoj Žižek. Data tersebut kemudian direlasikan untuk menentukan posisi subjek sebagai subjek radikal atau sebaliknya berdasarkan konsepsi pembentukan subjek radikal Žižek, yaitu konstruksi dunia simbolik-momen kekosongan-tindakan radikal-terbentuknya subjek radikal. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa tokoh dalam novel Saman, yaitu Laila dan Wisanggeni memiliki hasrat seksual yang lepas dari dominasi simbolik sehingga melakukan tindakan radikal. Melalui aktivitas seksual yang didorong hasrat yang murni tersebut, kedua tokoh tersebut memasuki momen kekosongan. Proses tersebut menyebabkan tokoh Laila dan Wisanggeni menjadi subjek radikal yang telah keluar dari dunia simbolik. Oleh karena itu, keberadaan subjek radikal dalam sebuah novel dapat dikatakan sebagai sebuah retakan dunia simbolik seksualitas yang secara ontologis konsisten. Kata kunci: seksualitas, tindakan radikal, psikoanalisis-historis  Abstract The sexual element in “Saman” by Ayu Utami frequently is justified by the value of decency which becomes a part of the symbolic world. This study is descriptive research that discusses the novel from Slavoj Žižek’s historical-psychoanalysis perspective. The historical-psychoanalysis method consents to uncover the sexual element in the novel by Ayu Utami differently. Data collected through reading carefully and respectively of Saman novel are done to find out the phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and discourses that contain qualities of Slavoj Žižek’s dialectic subject. Collected data are then related to determining subject position as the radical subject or otherwise considering the construction of the symbolic world-ex nihilio- radical act-radical subject. The result of this research reveals that Laila and Wisanggeni characters in the novel of Saman have a sexual desire separated from symbolic dominance, and its practice becomes a radical act. Through sexual activity driven by passion, they enter the moment of the void. The process caused the figure of Laila and Wisanggeni to be a radical subject that has been out of the symbolic world. Therefore, the existence of a radical subject in a novel can be said to be a maligned symbolic world of sexuality ontologically consistent. Keywords: sexuality, radical act, historical-psychoanalysis 

Untranslatable Community: Toward a Gothic Way of Speaking

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-150
Author(s):  
Reiko Shindo
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Traditional Form ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
People Search ◽  
Do So

This chapter examines how the various ways of dealing with the mismatch between visibility and audibility help one to imagine a social space centred on the failure of communication, or untranslatability. To do so, it considers the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Bonnie Honig, and Slavoj Žižek. Nancy theorises community in relation to failed communication, whereas Honig and Žižek focus on uncertainty as a key affective device to discuss the link between community and unintelligibility. Built on their works, the chapter develops an understanding of belonging centred on a gothic mode of relationality where people relate to one another based on ‘not knowing’ others let alone themselves. Unlike a traditional form of belonging to a community where people search commonality through intelligible communication between the self and the other, the gothic mode of belonging is realised in people's own inability to translate their voice, in the failure to achieve intelligibility.

scholarly journals Imagined Transcultural Histories and Geographies

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Winter
Keyword(s):  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cultural Location ◽  
Do So

In a globalised world, an assumption prevails that the nation has somehow lost its power to regulate our lives, being undermined by other forces, either top-down through the impact of global capitalism or bottom-up through migrations, transnational religious, ethnic or social movement communities or other transversal politics. A related idea is that ‘culture’ is now irrevocably hybridised and border-zoned, that we no longer live in a world of discrete, located, identifiable and historically grounded cultures but in some unstable and for-the-moment insterstitiality, a sort of cultural interlanguage that sits outside well-mapped structures of power. Yet, just as the nation and the boundaries it sets around culture are being conceptually chased from our maps of the world, they come galloping back to reassert themselves. They do so politically, economically, legally, symbolically. Amidst all the noise of our transnationalisms, hybridities and interstitialities, the idea of what it is to be ‘Australian’ or ‘French’ or ‘Filipino’ or ‘Asian’ reaffirms itself, in mental geographies and constructed histories, as our ‘imagined community’ (to use Benedict Anderson’s famous term [Anderson 1983]), or indeed, ‘imagined Other’, even if it is an imagined ‘Other’ that we would somehow wish to incorporate into our newly hybridised Self. Using the notion of transcultural mappings, the articles in this special issue investigate this apparent paradox. They look at how the Self and Other have been mapped through imagined links between geography, history and cultural location. They interrogate the tension between the persistence of mappings of the world based on discrete national or cultural identities on one hand, and, on the other hand, the push to move beyond these carefully guarded borders and problematise precise notions of identity and belonging.

Interpassivity and Misdemeanours: The Art of Thinking in Examples and the Žižekian Toolbox

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pfaller
Keyword(s):  
Specific Role ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Sublime

Starting from a passage from Slavoj Žižek`s brilliant book The Sublime Object of Ideology, the very passage on canned laughter that gave such precious support for the development of the theory of interpassivity, this chapter examines a question that has proved indispensable for the study of interpassivity: namely, what does it mean for a theory to proceed by examples? What is the specific role of the example in certain example-friendly theories, for example in Žižek’s philosophy?

Slavoj Žižek

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun Kang Kim ◽  
Ansgar Lorenz ◽  
Ansgar Lorenz
Keyword(s):  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Slavoj Žižek

Ivan Cankar’s National Narrative and Its Role in the Formation of the Slovenian Cultural Identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
Anna G. Bodrova
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Subject

Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), who occupies an honorable place in the Slovenian cultural canon, once changed the course of development of Slovenian literature and influenced the formation of national identity. The national narrative of Cankar was based on contradictions: living far from his people, he sometimes glorified them and sometimes attacked them with heavy criticism; he correlated his homeland with his mother, the mother though being dead. Cankar’s concentration on the subject of mother and homeland is interpreted here in the framework of psychoanalysis. Following Slavoj Žižek, the author develops the idea that it was the mother who became the Symbolic Order representative or Super-Ego for the writer. The concept of “Cankar’s mother”, which became a symbol of self-sacrifice and at the same time repressiveness in the Slovenian cultural space, is considered.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document