by her experience as a woman and African American and by the ancient stories of the African-American community” (3)

Chapter I: Introduction—The Ethics of the Lacanian Other in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Throughout her career as a writer, Toni Morrison dedicates most of her literary imagination and vision to the lives and experiences of black people, especially black women. As Jan Furman observes, Morrison’s work is “informed […] by her experience as a woman and African American and by the ancient stories of the African-American community” (3). Morrison herself also claims that “[i]f anything I do in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything” (“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” 344). Yet, this is not saying that Morrison aims merely at a narcissistic or self-serving portrait of African Americans; instead, the products of her craftsmanship are always replete with political tension and provocation. Morrison’s novels usually address how black people encounter and negotiate with the superimposed oppression and repression,¹ how they develop their identity and agency in the process of struggling with the psychological and material predicament, and to what extent they may in actuality repeat what they have intended to avoid during the search for a black identity.² Certainly, the potential for political contention in the corpus of Morrison’s works highly arouses critics’ attention. The way hierarchy and hegemony constructed along the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality configure the identity and subjectivity of black people seemingly becomes the best food for thought in the reception and criticism of Morrison.³

The plethora of political readings, though having an undeniable contribution to the studies

1 The source of oppression includes patriarchy, capitalism, the white society and ideology, the institutionalization of slavery, the criminalization of blackness, just to name a few.

2 As Linden Peach observes, Morrison’s fiction “resists essentializing notions of ‘black identity’ and

‘African-American community,’” which are the founding ideology of black nationalism and the associated Black Aesthetic (17). This essentialist attitude toward “black identity” and “African-American community” reiterates the narrative and ideology of the white American Dream and thus becomes what it originally intended to repudiate. For a review of Morrison’s relation to and critique of the 60s black nationalism led by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, etc., please refer to Peach 17-18.

3 For an overview of the different critical approaches applied to Morrison, please consult Matus 145-67; and Peach 26-31.

of Morrison, will be at stake when they fail to take into account the woman novelist’s ethical concerns. While politics discourses upon power relations between the master/the slave, the white/the black, and the oppressed/the oppressor, ethics concentrates on how and why these political choices are and can be made and what can be done to bridge the gap during and after the war declared in the name of politics. In other words, although the political language elucidates the sources of oppression and advocates the route to resistance and thus to agency, it can also lead to an endless battle or an unbridgeable gap among the conflicting sides. In contrast, ethics illuminates how the opposition caused in power relations and hierarchy of values can be better coped with rather than continued, and hence provides an alternative agency—a supplementary rather than substitutive or complementary kind—an ethical agency promising a dialogic space between Law and desire, conformity and free will, determination and agency, and society and self. If politics has been a popular and successful access to Morrison’s fiction and non-fiction, an ethical turn seems also necessary for a re-evaluation of the woman novelist and of the political framework along which her works have hitherto been interpreted. This proposal for an ethical approach to Morrison does not intend to overthrow the necessity of political readings. Rather, an ethical reading is designed and intended to broach the possible fallacies in and to strengthen the efficacy of the political approach. The attempt at an ethical reading of Morrison looks forward to a re-configuration of the critical rhetoric of gender, race, sexuality, and expects to supplement the political Morrison with an ethical Morrison.

Since a casual reference to the term ethics may run the risk of being vacant or even meaningless, I propose to narrow down the analytic scope to what Jacques Lacan calls “the ethics of psychoanalysis” (“l’éthique de la psychanalyse”) in his Seminar VII, or in my own term,

“ethicoanalysis.” Furthermore, in the thesis I adopt ethicoanalysis as the analytic approach to Morrison’s Paradise for at least two main reasons. First, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis revises traditional ethics developed in the Western philosophy. Indicating and criticizing the theoretical fallacies implied by traditional ethics, the psychoanalytic turn to ethics thereby illuminates a new path to the realm of ethical studies. In addition, with its specific contributions

to the field of ethics, the perspective of ethicoanalysis helps to uncover Morrison’s ethical strength in the exploration of black identity and subjectivity. I argue that it is consequential to read Morrison in light of the ethics of psychoanalysis so as to elucidate the ethical dimension of her fictional and non-fictional works. In this thesis, I intend to examine the possibility of an ethical approach to Morrison and analyze how the ethics of psychoanalysis enrich the study of Paradise. For a clarification of the efficacy of an ethicoanalytic reading of the novel, in this chapter I will deliberate upon three issues: how Lacan demarcates the ethics of psychoanalysis;

how Morrison develops and represents an ethical awareness in her literary and critical works;

and how psychoanalysis can function as an insightful approach to Morrison’s ethical world and also contributes to the reading of Paradise.

The Lacanian Ethics of Psychoanalysis, or, Ethicoanalysis

My designation of psychoanalysis as an “ethicoanalysis” aims not so much to create a shock as to foreground what is intrinsic to Lacanian psychoanalysis, i.e., its ethical nature. A review of how an ethical concern penetrates Lacan’s teaching will better manifest the role the former plays in the latter. Among all the seminars and works given by Lacan, Seminar VII, which is entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and addresses mainly the correlation of ethics and psychoanalysis, takes a central place.⁴ As Moustafa Safouan notes, Lacan once “said if he had to choose one among his seminars to edit by his own hand, he would choose The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”

(104; also see Lacan, S20 53).⁵ In this groundbreaking seminar, Lacan is centered around the

4 Lacan’s “formal” seminars began in 1953 and continued until 1980, one year before Lacan died; before the public lecture started, Lacan had already given two private lectures in the apartment of Sylvie Bataille, who was Lacan’s second wife. These seminars compose 27 “books,” each of which bears a distinctive title indicative of the focus of the seminar year. So far, only thirteen seminars (Seminar I to Seminar V, Seminar VII, VIII, X, XI, XVI, XVII, XX, XXIII) have been published in book form in French, with some edited scripts appearing in the journal Ornicar ?.

The English world has merely translated seven of Lacan’s seminars, including Serminar I to III, VII, XI, XVII, XX, with Seminar IV and VIII forthcoming. For a review of the history of Lacan’s seminars, please consult Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis 175-76; for a bibliography of seminar books published so far both in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds, please see <http://www.lacan.com/bibliographyxxa.htm>.

5 For the sake of clarity and convenience, in parenthetical information The Seminars of Jacques Lacan will be hereafter cited only as S, ensued by the “volume” number of seminar book quoted. When Lacan’s words are both quoted in English and French, I will specify the source in the English translation, followed by a slash and then the French original.

elaboration of what he means by the term the ethics of psychoanalysis, intending to foreground the ethical nature of the psychoanalytic discourse and, more importantly, re-evaluate traditional ethics with the latter. As Lacan claims, the purpose and intent of what is known as the return to Freud in 1950s is “to uncover the traces of a theory that reflects an ethical thought [which] is, in fact, at the center of our work as analysts [… and] holds together all those who constitute the analytic community” (S7 38). Later, Lacan adds: “If we always return to Freud, it is because he started out with an initial central intuition, which is ethical in kind. I believe it essential to emphasize that, if we are to understand our experience and animate it, and if we are not to lose our way and allow it to be degrade” (38). In other words, a recapitulation and elaboration of psychoanalysis in light of ethics can better guide the discipline and keep it on the track founded by Freud. Thus, Lacan devotes a whole seminar year to the issue of the ethics of psychoanalysis and deals with related topics, including the relationship between the service of the goods and desire, das Ding, the moral law, sublimation, jouissance, the tragic dimension of psychoanalysis, and the analysand’s demand for happiness, etc.⁶

Lacan’s insistence upon the ethical texture of psychoanalysis is right on the mark; it is true that the core of psychoanalytic concepts always demonstrate an ethical dimension. In the first analysis, as Lacan argues in Seminar XI, “the status of the unconscious,” which in the same seminar is thought of as one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, “is so fragile on the ontic plane” and “is ethical” (33). This thesis allows at least two ways of interpretation. First, insofar as ethics deals with the inter-human relationship, the ethical quality of the unconscious comes from its intersubjective nature. As Juan-David Nasio brilliantly shows, one’s unconscious is not “a hidden agency that is already there, waiting to be revealed by an interpretation” but takes someone else, e.g., the analyst, to make itself knowable and produced (47). As Nasio explains, “for [an] act to actually make the unconscious exist, it is indispensable that another

6 The scope of Lacan’s Seminar VII is too extensive to include every discussed topic in this thesis; therefore, in the following discussion I will only touch upon some fundamentals of ethics of psychoanalysis mentioned by Lacan and related to the reading of Paradise. For a detailed outline of the program of Lacan’s Seminar VII, please refer to Safouan.

subject, namely, the psychoanalyst, listen and recognize the effect of the unconscious” (46). In other words, the unconscious exists only on an intersubjective plane, as in the analysand-analyst relation specified here. Hence, Nasio writes that “[t]here is only one unconscious, the one that is produced in the transference” (47).⁷

Intersubjectivity also characterizes other key ideas developed in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s elaborations of the mirror image, desire, demand, the schema L, fantasy, four discourses, sexuation, etc. is grounded in an intersubjective relation between the self and the small other or the big Other, who plays the role of another subject for the subject.⁸ In the first analysis, the formation of the “I” (Je in French) in the mirror stage requires the infant’s projected and idealized image, the “the more constitutive than constituted” Gestalt, to get started (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” 76). Also, as Lacan reiterates, “man’s desire is the Other’s desire [le désir de l’homme c’est le désir de l’Autre)”(The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” 690). Demand is in itself an articulated call for satisfaction of biological needs and “a proof of love” to the mother or “a demand for happiness [la demande du bonheur]”

to the analyst (The Signification of the Phallus” 580; S7 292/339). The schema L both addresses the imaginary identification produced in the mirror stage and emphasizes that the analyst has to take the place of the big Other for the analysand-subject (S2 243-47). Fantasy pivots around the lack in the Other and the enigma of the Other’s desire; four discourses are centered around the interaction between two subjects; and sexuation copes with the interrelationship between the psychosexual position of Man and Woman, in which the latter is “the Other sex” and “becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for [the man]” (S20 39; “Guiding Remarks for a

7 However, this is not to say that the unconscious exists only in the session of analytic treatment; as long as transference starts, the unconscious is activated and the effects may go on even after the end of the analysis.

8 In fact, the status of big Other as another subject requires some small other (e.g., the mother, the analysis, etc.) to make possible its embodiment. Yet, it is important to bear in mind that, as Evans underscores, “the meaning of the big Other as another subject is strictly secondary to the meaning of the Other as symbolic order” (An Introductory Dictionary 133). Put differently, the big Other is both the Symbolic and another subject: it refers to the locus of

“language and law” and thus is equivalent to the Symbolic register; yet, the big Other is also “particularized for each subject” for its function to be realized and hence serves as another subject for the subject (133).

Convention on Female Sexuality” 616).⁹

Lacan’s designates the unconscious as ethical for another consequential reason: it leads the subject to be fully responsible for his/her action. That is, insomuch as ethics is also known as a philosophy of action, the fact that the unconscious desire has to be taken by the subject as the cause fully accounting for the committed act provides a dialogic space between psychoanalysis and ethics. The clue to the ethical relationship between the unconscious desire and the subject’s action can be found in Freud’s famous axiom “Wo es war, soll Ich warden.” In Seminar XI, right after proposing the thesis on the ethical status of the unconscious, Lacan interprets the Freudian formula as “[t]he ‘I,’ in fact [...] must come to be where ‘it’ was [Ce je, en effet, [...] doit advenir là où c’était]” (S7 7/16; translation modified). As Lacan further explicates, Freud puts down such a thesis “because, somewhere, this unconscious reveals itself” (S11 33). Here the “somewhere”

denotes das Es, the id, which literally means “the it” in English or “le ça” in French.¹⁰ In The Ego and the Id, Freud extends from Georg Groddek’s premise, which is in turn borrowed from Nietzsche, that “we are ‘lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces,’” and hypothesizes the existence of “the other part of the mind [...] which behaves as though it were Ucs., the ‘id’”

(23).¹¹ Described by Freud as “the great reservoir of libido,” das Es can be understood as the agency that powers the subject’s desire and the action committed thereby (30).

Freud’s postulation, nevertheless, may be treated merely as a psychological determinism,

9 Yet, it is noteworthy that, as Slavoj Žižek illumines, “by 1960 the term [intersubjectivity] has come to acquire negative connotations for Lacan” since it may suggest a misconception of the self-Other relation as harmonious and symmetrical (The Plague of Fantasies 8). Here I hold on to the characterization of psychoanalysis with the term

“intersubjectivity” with the proviso that such an intersubjective relation between the subject and the Other is a dissymmetrical one: to the subject the Other’s desire appears overwhelming but the negotiation with the Other’s desire also provides the locus for subjectivity to come into being. For a discussion of relationship between the self and the Other in terms of desire and subjectivity, please see Chapter IV and V in this thesis.

10 As the translator of Seminar VII, Dennis Porter, notes, the term das Es used by Freud is simply a common word in German; thus, Lacan renders it as ça, an equivalent in everyday French rather than adopts the Latin form, the id, applied by James Strachey, the translator of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, which is conventionally referred to as SE.

11 Das Es and the other two mental agencies, das Ich (the ego) and das Über-Ich (the superego), compose Freud’s second topography of the psychical apparatus. Nevertheless, one should not simply view the newly-formed mental schema as a reiteration of Freud’s first topography, which consists of the preconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious. In fact, throughout The Ego and the Id, it is emphasized that besides the id, the ego and the superego also carry an unconscious nature; the id, on the contrary, takes over the characteristics most commonly attributed by Freud to the unconscious.

reducing the subject to some automation who acts blindly according to the command of the id.

Such an observation, though not totally untrue, is still quite misleading. Certainly, Freud’s thesis das Es and, extensively, his “discovery” of the unconscious deconstruct the voluntarism which is intrinsic to the Western ethics and the general assumption of the subject as the master of his/her act. Nevertheless, the decentering tendency implicit in Freud’s assertion in no way suggests that psychoanalysis leaves no space for the subjectivity. If the action of the subject is in any sense psychologically determined, the relationship between the subject and the desire-mediated act is no less than a voluntaristic determinism. Put differently, while the unconscious desire operates as the incentive for the action, the subject has to assume the intention that works behind as his or her own and takes the exerted act as the result of his/her own choice.¹² Understood in the language of Alenka Zupančič, the choice made here is paradoxically a “‘forced choice’ […

which] is no other than the choice of freedom” (30). That is, the subject is always forced to choose the psychological motivation as his/her own so as to lay claim to freedom and subjectivity. Lacan is definitely aware of this when he underscores the significance of the soll in

“Wo es war, soll Ich warden” as a must, or, more specifically, “a duty in the moral sense” (“The Freud Thing” 347). Read along this line of thought, Freud’s formula can now be rephrased as follows: Where the das Es, the unconscious desire motivates his/her action, the subject must shoulder the duty of taking the full responsibility for the action caused by the impulse of the unconscious desire. Lacan is definitely aware of this when he refers to the ethics of psychoanalysis. This is why Lacan indicates that psychoanalysis is an “inquiry into ethics, that is to say, the meaning of desire” and “analysis progresses by means of a return to the [hidden]

meaning of an action” (S7 207, 314). This hidden meaning is the unconscious desire; the task assigned to the analyst is then to lead the analysand to encounter his/her desire and to take the responsibility for the act and its psychological cause.

12 The subject’s responsibility for das Es as the impetus for his/her perhaps best explains Lacan’s schema L, which is introduced to explicate the correlation of the subject with the other and the Other. There Lacan uses the letter S, which sounds the same as Es, to symbolize the subject and thereby anticipates his ethical narration of the subject’s duty with respect to the unconscious desire that determines his/her action.

More importantly, while the elaboration of the correlation between the unconscious desire and the action underscores the status of psychoanalysis as an ethical discourse, it also contributes to a radicalization of ethics. As Dylan Evans observes, Lacanian psychoanalysis differs from traditional ethics in at least three distinctive ways (An Introductory Dictionary 56-57).¹³ To begin with, Lacanian psychoanalysis questions the barrier imposed by traditional ethics upon desire, namely, “the tutelage and authority of the good [le bien]” (S7 218/257).¹⁴ Here Lacan’s program is to suspend the claim to “the service of goods” and to “demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good” and the utilitarian good that pivots upon the maximum happiness acquired by most of the members in a given society (S7 314, 216).

Generally, traditional ethics and its reinstatement in some psychological schools such as the American ego-psychology would set as their goals the pursuit of the Sovereign Good both at the individual and social level and such ideals as human love, authenticity, and non-dependence (S7 8-10). Nonetheless, Lacan insists that psychoanalysis rejects the adoption of the Supreme Good and service of goods as their target in treatment. The recourse to an ideal Good—either for the self or for the society—is synonymous with a demand for the restriction of desire and for a deeper psychological normalization. If analysis follows the principle of the good maintained in traditional ethics, it will thereby reinforce the superego—the pathogenic moral agency in civilization—in the analysand (Evans, An Introductory Dictionary 56). This way, the analyst will contradict the patient’s demand for happiness, i.e., for the truth about the cause of symptom that gives rise to suffering and for its dissolution. As a result, psychoanalysis cannot take up the task of asking the analysand to do good but instead has to take on the road not taken by traditional ethics.

However, this is not to say that analysis will simply work by satisfying the analysand’s wish for happiness understood in the traditional sense. In so doing psychoanalytic discourse will run

13 I owe to Evans the framework regarding how Lacan reformulates ethics. Although the following discussion of the relation of the two discourses is mainly mine, I will specify where I borrow from and paraphrase Evans’s reading of Lacan.

14 In Seminar VII, Lacan mainly treats “good” (“bien” in French) as a noun and even pluralizes it to denote various kinds of good that compete for the Sovereign Good.

the risk of reiterating the ethics of the good denunciated by Lacan. In the perspective of traditional ethics, good and happiness are actually allied with each other. As Roger Crisp expounds, when Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics begins with the concern with the good, his focus is in fact on “the nature of the human good, or human happiness” (x). Here the “or” used by Crisp is not an either-or type that characterizes Lacan’s reference to “pleasure or pain” in Seminar VII or “your money or your life” in Seminar XI (S7 189; S11 212). Rather, the description is more of a synonymous kind. It is clear that Aristotle himself equates good with happiness since he holds that “being happy [is] equivalent to living well and acting well” (Crisp 5). Also, the two words are etymologically related: the Greek word eudaimonia (happiness) is mainly composed of “eu” (well) and “daimon” (fortune) (Crisp 206).¹⁵ Even in French,

“bonheur” (happiness) contains “bon,” which also means “good.” In this regard, both good and happiness function as the overarching doxa of traditional ethics. Thus, if any analytic treatment aims at the satisfaction of patient’s quest for happiness, it will do nothing but resume the target of the Sovereign Good alias happiness.

In addition, Lacanian psychoanalysis in no way intends to fulfill the analysand’s demand for happiness for another consequential reason: the promise of happiness is illusory and does not help to cope with the core of the question about desire and symptom. Thus, Lacan proposes to frustrate the demand for happiness—not by telling the analysand that (s)he has not acted good enough, but by asking for a direct encounter with the opposite of le bien, namely, le mal. It is arguable that the ethics of psychoanalysis is fundamentally a discourse of le mal, which simultaneously means “evil,” “pain,” “suffering,” and “bad,” that is, what deviates from the domain of le bien.¹⁶ In the first meeting of Seminar VII, Lacan states that where psychoanalysis has to further examine “the attraction of transgression [l’attrait de la faute]” and “the universe of

15 In French, “bonheur” can also be read as “bon-heure,” which literally means “good time” and can extensively connote “to live well.”

16 Generally, “mal” in French is used both as a noun and as an adjective, the latter of which has the meaning of

“bad” in English. Yet, here I would follow Lacan’s nominalization of “good” and thus treats mal/bad as a noun.

transgression [l’universe de la faute]” (S7 2/10).¹⁷ As William Egginton interprets, the ethics of psychoanalysis hinges upon its attention to “the universal experience of the attraction exerted by wrong, evil, transgression” (29). Transgression (la faute) is irresistible because it is more difficult not to do so; as long as desire remains at work, suffering would persist. That is, attainment of the Sovereign Good as such is a mission impossible; thereby the subject starts to feel that there is something that has never been done and to which (s)he owes a debt. This feeling has a specific name known as anxiety and the very debt owed is the sense of guilt, which is powered by the superego.¹⁸ In addition, since the Good cannot be unconditionally followed, desire remains transgressive and corrupt, with the installation of the excruciating symptom and sense of guilt in the subject as the inevitable result.

Nevertheless, neither does Lacan side with submission to the suffering imposed by the superego. Rather, he foregrounds the enjoyment associated with le mal, which is elemental to the constitution of the Lacanian subject. In the 1975-76 Seminar on sinthome, Lacan postulates

“identification with symptom [symtôme] as sinthome” and thereby explains the correlation of enjoyment and suffering observed in symptom formation (Stavrakakis 133). In introducing the idea of sinthome, Lacan rearticulates two questions left unsolved in analytic treatment: first, the insistence of symptom in analysis after the work of interpretation and the traversing of fantasy have been done; and second, the ambivalent status of symptom as a combinatory of suffering and enjoyment.¹⁹ Since Freud, symptom has been treated as the specification of the return of the

17 As Porter mentions, since the English “fault” does not have the moral connotation as the French “la faute” does, he then renders it as “transgression” to put stress on the moral tone colored by Lacan. Yet, one has to notice that in Seminar VII Lacan also refers to the word transgression, which is again translated as transgression. Although la faute and la transgression are closely related in Lacan’s elaboration of the ethics of psychoanalysis, for the sake of clarity I will add the French when it is la faute mentioned by Lacan.

18 As Friedrich Nietzsche brilliantly observes, in German “guilt” and “debt” are etymologically connected: “the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]” (62-63). To Nietzsche, the formation of the sense of guilt/debt involves the process of “inpsychation,” which anticipates the Freudian premise of internalization of the cruelty of the paternal figure resulting in the genesis of the superego (57).

Freud’s Totem and Taboo provides a myth of the patricide of the primal father by his sons and seemingly dramatizes the Nietzschean thesis of guilt as debt.

19 As Žižek observes, psychoanalytic work is a tripartite process composed of “interpretation of symptom,”

“traversing of fantasy,” and “identification with symptom/sinthome” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 74-75).

Interpretation of symptom is designed to explicate the truth of the patient’s desire and the cause of his/her symptom formation; traversing of fantasy helps the analysand first to reconstruct his/her fundamental fantasy and then to keep

repressed, as a compromise-formation which attests to and acts as the price for le mal, the transgressive act committed by the subject. In other words, symptom takes the form of the substitute punishment, inducing suffering and waiting to be dissolved by analysis. Even in his structural and linguistic approach to psychoanalysis, Lacan deems symptom a ciphered message to be interpreted by the analyst.

The reformulation of symptom as sinthome no longer aims at its dissolution or its interpretation. Instead, enjoyment takes a prominent place and the subject has to fully shoulder the responsibility involved in enjoying the symptom. That is, symptom operates as a synthesis of suffering and enjoyment in which the subject enjoys his/her suffering. More importantly, this state of suffering as enjoyment or enjoyment in suffering denotes the subject’s “jouissance of being” (Braustein 109). This “jouissance of being” embodied through sinthome corresponds to the Lacanian Real, which always already resists symbolization, and suggests the impossibility beyond the interpretation the patient’s symptom.²⁰ It is this impossibility that makes possible the subject the kernel of his/her being; the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to identify with the impossible sinthome and enjoy his/her symptom.²¹ Consequently, Žižek writes that “[t]he analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom [as sinthome], the only support of his being. […] [I]n its ‘pathological’ particularity [the patient] must recognize the element which gives consistency to [his/her] being” (The Sublime Object 75). Put differently, identification with symptom/sinthome is neither an Imaginary identification (with the mirror image) nor a Symbolic identification (with signifier);

instead, it is a Real identification, with what is beyond symbolization and analysis, and with the

distance from the built fantasy; and identification with symptom/sinthome aims to deal with the enjoyment involved in symptom.

20 The Lacanian Real specifies the zone of impossibility, beyond the possibility of writing and symbolization. In Seminar XX, Lacan maintains that “[t]he ‘doesn’t stop not being written’ [ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire] […] is the impossible” (94). Since both the Real and the impossible are characteristic of the “doesn’t stop not being written,” i.e., the incessant resistance to the work of the Symbolic, they can be deemed synonymous. In fact, the relation between the Symbolic and the Real is a structural one: the latter indicates the lack in the big Other, the place where the former malfunctions. Also, the two registers interact in a dialectical manner: the Real simultaneously resists and invites the invasion of the Symbolic.

21 This truly accounts for why Žižek names one of his books Enjoy Your Symptom!

combinatory of suffering and enjoyment innate in the subject. Or, as Paul Verhaeghe describes, the identification with symptom “is a special one, because it concerns an identification with the [R]eal of the symptom, and thus concerns an identification on the level of being” (182).

The premise of symptom as sinthome, as the concatenation of enjoyment and suffering, summarizes another key concept developed by Lacan, namely, jouissance, whose elaboration in Seminar VII contributes to a second reformulation of traditional ethics.²² As Evans notes, the term jouissance is originally equated with “pleasure” in Seminar I and II (1953-55) and begins to mean “orgasm” since the 1958 article, “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”

(“An Exploration of Jouissance” 3-4). Yet, from 1958 onwards and particular in the 1959-60 seminar, Lacan, without completely discarding its previous denotations, imbues this word with

“a radical ethical stance” (Evans, “An Exploration of Jouissance” 6). Jouissance now indicates the register that is the beyond of the pleasure principle, or, in the playful phrase used by one of Lacan’s students and adopted by Lacan himself, “the zone between two deaths” (S7 270). Further, differentiating pleasure and jouissance, Lacan therefore posits a different ethical subjectivity in opposition to what Michel Foucault calls “the use of pleasure” (l’usage des plaisirs) and “the care of self” (le souci de soi) when characterizing the Greco-Roman ethico-aesthetical formation of self. In fact, the traditional ethical doxa of the Good is also a moralized pleasure principle, which seeks the self-mastery of desire without transgressing such moral codes of conduct as temperance and moderation. The excess of pleasure will cause both at the bodily and the virtuous level an experience of displeasure; hence, it is considered something mal, something bad, evil, and transgressive, and then expelled out of the confine of morality. Conversely, Lacan prioritizes jouissance, which is as such a “jouissance of transgression” by leaving the purview of pleasure

22 Jouissance is a French word and derives from the verb “jouir,” which basically means to have orgasm and to enjoy. “The closest literal translation” in English of Lacan’s jouissance, as Evans points out, is “enjoyment” (“An Exploration of Jouissance” 1). In addition, since jouissance, as Evans also manifests, has long been introduced into the Anglo-American branch of Lacanian psychoanalysis and become part of its language, I will not use this word as a loan word from French and leave it unitalicized it in the thesis. For a more detailed discussion of the translation of jouissance in the Anglophone and Germanic world, please also consult Braustein 102-03.

for that of the death drive (S7 194).²³ The ethical quality of jouissance derives exactly from its inherent nature as the will to death, “an absolute choice” of the journey to death (S7 240).

Lacan’s example par excellence of how jouissance understood as the will to death is ethical is the eponymous heroine in Sophocles’s Antigone. In contrast with Hegel, who understands the gist of this tragedy as a “clear opposition between the discourse of the family and that of the state,” Lacan argues that the ethical uniqueness of Antigone consists in her being willing to choose a path “that is motivated by no good,” namely, at the sacrifice of the sanctified good and pleasure (S7 236, 240). In the play, Antigone resolves to bury the corpse of her brother Polyneices, who commits the crime of treason in attacking Thebes and whose body is therefore banned by Creon from being interred.²⁴ If anyone breaks the prohibition, (s)he, as Antigone relays the edict to her sister, Ismene, “shall be stoned to death” (Sophocles 36).²⁵ Even so, out of her love for Polyneices, Antigone is determined to inhume his body and willing to accept the sweet death that will ensue. Deeming “her [own] life […] not worth living,” i.e., worth being sacrificed for her brother, Antigone goes across the Atè of the Law promulgated by Creon, chooses her own Symbolic death, and ultimately takes on the road to the physical demise (S7 263).²⁶ This way, she enters the ethical zone between two deaths, in which “one can only spend a brief period of time” and then immediately fulfills the destiny of death (S7 263). In her will to death, Antigone apparently transgresses the line of good and pleasure: she neither submits to the

23 Lacan’s jouissance is a rich and complex word, whose semantic scope cannot be exhausted here. Thus, in this chapter I will merely approach jouissance in terms of its ethical texture; as to its relation with perversion, I will explore in Chapter II. For an overview of the conceptual evolution of Lacan’s jouissance, please see Evans, “An Exploration of Jouissance.”

24 The main story of Antigone takes place after the rivalry between the heroine’s two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, and in which they are slain by each other’s hand. After Oedipus’s exile, Eteocles and Polyneices agree to rule Thebe alternatively. Yet, when the reign of Eteocles is due, he refuses to turn over the throne to his brother and even orders to exile him. Thus, Polyneices wages a battle against Eteocles and the bell tolls for both of them.

However, since at the time Eteocles is the king of Thebes, Polyneices’s attack makes himself a traitor and his brother a martyr to Thebes. As a result, the new ruler of Thebes, Creon, commands that Eteocles shall be “graced with funeral rites” and “[n]o man may bury [Polyneices] or make lament— / Must leave him tombless and unwept”

(Sophocles 20, 27-28)

25 The quotes from Sophocles’s Antigone come from the Project Gutenberg website. The on-line translation is based on Francis Storr’s 1959-61 version, which is the same one cited by Porter in translating into English Lacan’s French interpretation of the Greek. Since the on-line Antigone provides no pagination, here I add the line number to clarify the source. For the full text of this play, please consult <http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/31>.

26 Here the reading of “the zone between two deaths” as that between the Symbolic death and physical death derives from Žižek, The Sublime Object 132.

“golden mean,” the good of the State regulation, nor reconciles with the register of human pleasure, which has a general name, life (Sophocles 67). Put differently, the good and pleasure is a criminal one, a non-good good and a non-pleasurable pleasure (S7 240). Therein lies the

“splendor of Antigone”: the heroine, as Lacan describes, “pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such” (S7 243, 282).

Antigone’s will to death, to jouissance, and to the beyond of the Atè into the zone between two deaths truly dramatizes the ethical strength broached by Lacan in Seminar VII.

More importantly, the Lacanian ethics of jouissance, of going beyond the pleasure principle, is also an ethics of desire beyond the principle of good and pleasure, which later evolves into the ethics of drive. Here the desire does not denote, as Lacan defines in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” “a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (699). It is clarified that the experience of jouissance as such is transgressive and implies going beyond the limit of good and pleasure. Such an experience is to some extent traumatic as well. To cross the boundary of good and pleasure usually means to step into the domain of death. Thus, jouissance is usually what is intended to be avoided and postponed.

Immanuel Kant’s fable on “lust and death” discussed by Lacan in Seminar VII helps to illumine this. As Kant puts: “Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passion, if in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust” (qtd. in Evans, “An Exploration of Jouissance” 25).²⁷ The Kantian logic, as Lacan points out, goes that facing with this either-or question—to “spend time with the lady whom he unlawfully desires” and then to be “placed in the situation of being executed” or to postpone the desire so as to keep alive—“every man of good sense, will say no”

(S7 188-89).

Noticeably, to defer satisfaction is not so much to renounce desire as to sustain it. When one

27 Kant, Critical of Pure Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy 141.

has his/her wish fulfilled, desire is consommé (both “consummated” and “consumed” in English), which suggests its closure and disappearance. This moment of consummation is known to be jouissance. In order to retain the work of desire, jouissance has to be refused. Thus, Lacan narrates: “He rejects it, he censures it, he doesn’t want it. Here we encounter the essential dimension of desire—it is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire [… or,]

desirability” (S7 14). The thesis of “desire of desire,” of “desirability” has a second significance.

As Lacan contends, “if it is desirable for one to desire it, [t]he result is a kind of catalogue that in many ways might be compared to a second hand clothes store in which one finds piled up the different judgments that down through the ages and up to our time have dominated human aspirations in their diversity and even their chaos” (S7 14). In other words, to pursue “desire of desire” and “desirability” is to follow the Law of desire codified in a given socio-cultural context and to choose the proper cloak of desire that has been chosen beforehand. This certainly corresponds to the classical thesis that “man’s desire is the Other’s desire.” To desire is to desire of the operation of the Other’s (Law of) desire; to defer jouissance is to defend the Other’s desire and, extensively, the self’s desire.

By contrast, what concerns the psychoanalytic ethics is not the defensive desire against its fulfillment but the pure desire bearing “the structure of giving ground relative to one’s desire [cédér sur son désir]” (S7 321/370). This way, Lacanian psychoanalysis strikes its fundamental blow at traditional ethics: while the latter mandates the subject to “express the least surge of desire,” to “make [it] wait” on the basis of the “service of goods,” the former poses the question

“Have you acted in conformity with your desire” (S7 315, 311). The task of analytic treatment is therefore not to bring the analysand to a “cleaning up of desire, modesty, temperateness” or to the adherence to the principle of good and pleasure codified by the society (S7 314). Conversely, as Lacan asserts, the subject has to directly encounter desire and pursue without hesitation his/her wish (Wunsch) regardless of the regulation of the moral agency.

It is in the persistence in desire that the subject gives his/her act an ethical weight in the Lacanian sense and at the same time elevates him-/herself to the status of the drive and even the

Thing. The will to pure desire is a journey whose ultimate goal is death (first the Symbolic death and immediately after that the physical death) and therefore corresponds to the Lacanian statement that “every drive is virtually a death drive” (“Position of the Unconscious” 719). At the same time, in following the logic of drive and entering the zone between two deaths, the subject necessarily rids him-/herself out of the purview of good and pleasure and thereby turns into the Thing that is incommensurate with the Symbolic universe. The best illustration of the ethical strength of the will to pure desire is again, though unsurprisingly, Antigone. As Žižek narrates,

“Antigone […] for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision [i.e, the determination to bury her brother and to step into the zone between two deaths] […] is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations” (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism 163). Acting according to the (pure) desire to bury Polyneices, the heroine then divests herself of the Symbolic embodied by the service of goods and the confine of pleasure.

In pursuing the ethical aim of the pure desire, the subject does not renounce jouissance. In fact, the path of pure desire is also the way to jouissance. In the first place, the register of pure desire is the “zone between two deaths,” with the overlapping of Symbolic death and physical death as the final result. Since the will to death is that to jouissance, acting along the pure desire is the road that leads to jouissance (specifically, what Lacan in Seminar XX calls the phallic, masculine jouissance castrated from the subject). In addition, in the course of following the pure desire, the subject immediately experiences jouissance, though of a kind different from the phallic jouissance. The movement of pure desire, of this non-phallic jouissance constantly motivates its operation. Therefore, it resembles the death drive and corresponds to the feminine jouissance which simultaneously subjects to and supplements the phallic jouissance. Similar to the mechanism of drive, which takes its continuation as its own object, the feminine jouissance aims not at something forbidden such as the Thing but purely at its movement. The two types of jouissance create the “jouissance of being,” which configure the Lacanian ethical subjectivity born out of the negotiation with the Other’s desire.

Moreover, the ethics of pure desire and of drive can be reformulated in the perspective of Lacan’s later thesis, specifically, la traversée du fantasm (the traversing of fantasy) understood in terms of the identification with symptom/sinthome. Fantasy is basically designed to imagine the locus of jouissance, of the object that fulfills the question regarding the Other’s desire. In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Lacan also puts forward the matheme ($

◊ a), which is designed to address the logic of (neurotic) fantasy and thereby to expound how the constitution of subject is mediated via the Other’s desire. As Lacan reminds elsewhere, this algebraic formula on (neurotic) fantasy literally reads “S [subject] fading before the object of desire” (“The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” 542). That is, the splitting of the $—the notation for the barred or split subject—arises from the predominance of the enigma of Other’s desire, the answer to which takes the form of the a, the objet petit a, and turns into the object cause of the subject’s desire. A better understanding of the matheme of fantasy relies upon the thesis central to the “Subversion of Subject” article, which has been mentioned earlier, namely, i.e., “man’s desire is the Other’s desire.” One possible way of reading this famous statement goes that the subject models his/her desire upon the Other’s desire; in the course of looking for the very object that promises the fulfillment of the Other’s desire, the subject’s desire is consequently born. In fact, what the Other wants usually appears unknowable and therefore operates as a lack (note the statement “I want something” actually entails the other one that “I do not have that thing”). Due to the indecipherable nature of the Other’s desire, the subject does not know what the Other really wants/lacks. This way, (s)he can only fantasize about the object that can satisfy the Other’s desire. Understood in Lacan’s matheme, since the subject does not know the answer to the Othe’s desire, (s)he is no more than a barred subject and hence notated as $. All that the subject can do is to fantasize about the object that can settle down the Other’s lack and this very object turns into the target of the subject’s desire. This way, the Other’s desire constitutes the subject’s desire and therefore becomes the object-cause of desire, designated as a, the short form of objet petit a.

In addition, in relation to the Other’s desire, fantasy also carries a defensive function (Evans,

An Introductory Dictionary 60). When the question about what the Other wants keeps unsolved, it starts to become intimidating to the unity of the subject. As Bruce Fink indicates, “[l]ack and desire are coextensive for Lacan”: the Other’s desire is unknowable and as a result it is at the same time configured as a lack (The Lacanian Subject 54). Also, since “man’s desire is the Other’s desire,” the Other’s desire/lack will produce a certain “mirror effect,” threatening to create a lack in, namely, to castrate, the subject and to involve him/her in a condition called anxiety (Verhaeghe 182). In order to protect him-/herself from the (castration) anxiety, the subject then takes recourse to fantasy so as to fill up, if only temporarily, the lack in the Other. At the same time, the act of fantasizing about the object that satisfies the Other’s desire helps to negate (verneinen) castration and thus provides the way to imagine the forbidden jouissance.²⁸ As Lacan also claims in “Subversion of Subject,” “[c]astration means that [phallic] jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire” (700).

Specifically, the phallic, masculine jouissance is located in what has been castrated, what has been lost, in the subject and in the Other.²⁹ This way, when fantasy functions to cover up lack/castration, it also serves as the access to approaching the castrated jouissance; consequently, objet petit a becomes the medium by which jouissance can be acquired in imagination. More importantly, now that by means of objet petit a the subject can fantasize about what the Other wants, (s)he will not be overwhelmed by the Other’s desire/lack and thus find it desirable. This way, both the subject’s desire and the Other’s desire are put into work; this patently explains the status of objet petit a as the object-cause of desire. The function of fantasy, to recapitulate, is manifold: it aids to mediate the Other’s desire, to veil lack/castration, to imagine the lost, castrated jouissance, and to make desire possible.

However, in discoursing upon the logic of fantasy, Lacan does not only aim at a descriptive account of the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire. In fact, Lacan also attempts to broach an ethical possibility in subject and this possibility consists in the traversing of fantasy. My earlier

28 For a specific discussion of negation (Verneinung), please see note 32 in this chapter.

29 For a more specific discussion of the interrelation of castration, lack, and jouissance, please see Chapter II 38-41.

reference to Žižek has shown that the traversing work is intended to help the analysand to reconstruct his/her fundamental fantasy in relation to castration and jouissance and then to keep a certain distance from the enjoyment procured in fantasy. However, reconstruction and distancing are not sufficient for an ethical subjectivity to become possible. The true way for an ethical spark of light to shine out is to cross over the lozenge between $ and a in the matheme ($ ◊ a) (Verhaeghe 182). Put differently, as Bruce Fink designates, the subject “must subjectify [the]

otherness” (The Lacanian Subject 68). While a indicates the lost object-cause of the subject’s desire, the subject has to shoulder the duty of identifying with the lack in the Other, of assuming the lost object-cause of desire as his/her own, and thus taking the full responsibility for the enjoyment involved in objet petit a. Moreover, traversing of fantasy, as Yannis Stavrakakis contends, can be synthesized with identification with symptom/sinthome (133-34). Symptom reformulated as the enjoyment-providing sinthome can be recognizes as the fantasy that negates castration and maintain the access to jouissance. Yet, in the sythensized thesis, fantasy is now treated as irreducible, just as symptom/sinthome. Hence, the logic of traversing of fantasy can be realigned with that of identification with symptom/sinthome: both are the ways to respond to the Other’s desire, both serve as the access to enjoyment, and in both cases the subject has to enact the duty for the enjoyed jouissance. The jouissance acquired right now is simultaneously phallic and non-phallic, masculine and feminine. The will to the lack is an attempt to subjectify the lack in the Other, the zone of what is castrated and hence to lay claim to the phallic jouissance. On the other hand, since the traversing of fantasy keeps open the Symbolic cut, desire can never been realized and will always be deferred. This infinite deferment of consummation will drive the work of desire to go on until the moment of the physical death and thus renders accessible the non-phallic, feminine jouissance.

With this review of the way psychoanalysis is penetrated with an ethical concern and revises traditional ethics, I hope to legitimize my renaming of this discourse as an ethicoanalysis.

Perhaps a demarcation of what ethicoanalysis is not can better characterize its status. With ethicoanalysis, I aim at something different from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s

“schizoanalysis” introduced in their co-authored Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateau (1987). Deleuze and Guattari coin the word “schizoanalysis” out of the premise that this neologism depicts better the heterogeneity and acentrality of psycho-social identity and reality.

As they argue in Anti-Oedipus, “it [would] be better to schizohprenize—to schizophrenize the domain of the unconscious as well as the sociohistorical domain” (53). This way, schizoanalysis, as Steven Best and Douglas Kellner describes, comes to be “the antithesis of psychoanalysis,”

functioning to replace and displace the latter (90). My adoption of the term ethicoanalysis does not have such a displacing and replacing intention vis-à-vis psychoanalysis. Rather, it intends to accentuate the extent to which ethics is central to psychoanalytic discourse. Certainly, ethics is also the key to Morrison. In the next section, I will come to examine where Morrison has demonstrated an ethical thought and broach how an ethicoanalytic reading can be introduced in reading her literary and critical works, in particular Paradise.

Morrison’s Ethics of Race

Morrison’s interest in the topic of ethics consists mainly in the formation of racial identity and subjectivity of her people, to which I would give a specific name: “the ethics of race.” In the project of addressing “the ethics of race,” Morrison exposes the multilayered conflicts involved in the configuration of blackhood and explores the way to cope with the involved dilemma and how to lay claim to subjectivity thereby. Her ethical speculation includes at least the interracial rivalry between blacks and whites, intraracial confrontation between the black community and its members, and the possibility of attaining a certain ethical power both at the interracial and intraracial level. Throughout her career as a novelist, Morrison has problematized and discoursed upon these ethical issues in various ways. Her first two novels, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), foreground specifically the clash between the demand for the collective “service of goods” and the investment in personal wishes. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola takes “the bluest eye”

as the symbol of white prestige and superiority, thus stranding herself in the tug-of-war between blacks and whites, between the communal and the individual, values. Sula narrates the

same-name heroine’s transgression of the expectations and commands of her community, the Bottom, and dramatizes the corresponding disaccord between the individual will to desire and the communal appeal to unity.

In the 1980s and 90s, Morrison’s project of ethics of race broadens in different ways. With

“Recitatif” (1983), a fiction written for Confirmation, an anthology edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka, Morrison deconstructs the essentialist the constitution of black identity and African-American community promoted in the 60s Block Power movement in politics and the concomitant Black Aesthetic movement in art and literature. The depiction of Twyla and Roberta’s bed-changing game during the childhood spent at Room 406 in the orphanage St.

Bonny’s specifies that race is merely an empty identity category and its contents are historically contingent. Also, “Recitatif” exposes the underside of identity construction and suggests an ethical possibility that derives from the knowledge of this dark side. Twyla and Roberta’s recognition of their treatment of Maggie, Twyla’s mother, as the underdog against which their identities are constituted, demonstrates the advent of an ethical subjectivity. In Beloved (1987), Morrison attempts to broach the interracial ethics between a sixteen-year-old white girl, Amy Denver, and Sethe, the black mother who commits infanticide. The ethical agency culminates in the episode in which Amy Denver the helps Sethe to deliver her baby and encourages her to survive the journey of running away from slavery. Later, that Sethe reciprocates the white girl’s generosity by naming the newly born baby after her further complements the moment of the interracial ethics. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), hitherto the only critical work published by Morrison, examines how the literary imagination in American literature has been representing whiteness and blackness in a series of binary oppositions, including presence/absence, omnipotence/impotence, freedom/slavery, articulation/silence the representable/the unrepresentable, etc. In Love (2004), the latest novel by Morrison, Heed and Christine’s reconciliation with each other and resumption of friendship at the end of the story corroborate how love can break the animosity between the self and the other and thus fulfill an ethical action.

To Morrison’s program of ethics of race, Paradise (1998) adds its scope and complexity and is ethically related to other works without losing its distinctiveness.³⁰ On the one hand, this novel reiterates the interrelationship of those key factors that have a great impact on black identity/subjectivity, such as community, patriarchy, trauma, etc. Yet, it also exhibits a groundbreaking deliberation on the interface of ethics and racial studies. Specifically, Paradise addresses the traumatic experiences caused by the institutionalized slavery and racism and the consequent (self-)otherizing effects which pester from generation to generation African Americans.³¹ Also, in this novel Morrison once again denounces the essentialism and binarism inherent in black nationalism and puts into bracket the associated separatist version of black identity/subjectivity, which is embodied by the patriarchy of the Ruby community. More importantly, Paradise broaches an ethical path that goes beyond the separatist and exclusionist ideology when encountering the interracial/intraracial others and the black big Other is still an elemental task to African Americans. Precisely, the eminence of Paradise is attributable to its

30 Paradise is Morrison’s seventh novel and also the first one published after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. A lot of critics such as Matus, Marilyn McKenzie, Peach, and Kelly Reames regard this novel along with the previous two, Beloved and Jazz (1992) as a trilogy, though only a loosely connected one. Nonetheless, while the three novels demonstrate no explicit linkage in characters, plots, places, and evens, their shared thematic concerns qualify them as a trilogy. As both McKenzie and Reames observe, all the three novels are centered upon “excessive love”: “Beloved addresses mother-daughter love, Jazz romantic or sexual love, and Paradise religious love”

(Reames 16). Another common feature is the attention to the history and experience of black people, which reflects Morrison’s application of literary imagination to history. In fact, the scenario of each novel of the trilogy is based upon a certain historical (and mainly traumatic) event, whose impact on the development of racial identity is in particular accentuated: Beloved is “indebted to the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who killed her own child rather than have it taken into slavery—or rather to a version of the event published in a newspaper, the American Baptist”;

Jazz is inspired by a photograph taken by James Van Der Zee and collected in The Harlem Book of the Dead telling

“of a young woman who as shot by her lover”; and Paradise is modeled upon a story Morrison “heard while on a trip to Brazil in the 1980s about a convent of black nuns who took in abandoned children but who, regarded as an outrage, were murdered by a posse of black men” (Peach 28-29; Matus 16; Peach 29). For more comparative studies of the three novels as a trilogy, please consult Matus 15-16, 155-56; McKenzie 228-31; Peach 126-27; Reames 16-18; and Sweeney 42-43.

31 In Playing in the Dark, Morrison describes that in the history of American literature, American Africanism is thought of as “a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona” and has become a “particular

‘Americanness’” upon which is paradoxically founded “a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as [a] ‘knowledge’ [… which] holds that traditional, canonical American is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States” (7, 4-5; emphases added). That is to say, the African Americans are equated by their white racial others with the dark, the ignored, and the silent Other in American literary imagination and presentation. Thus, Morrison’s American Africanism in many aspects echoes Edward W. Said’s Orientalism. For example, the proposed “critical geography” in Playing in the Dark reads like a black feminist version and revision of Said’s mapping of Orientalism as an Eurocentric gaze projected onto its Oriental Other (Playing 3).

inquiry into the possibility of deriving an ethical subjectivity from the negotiation with trauma and the big Other constitutive of the experience of African Americans. Still, a careful examination of the language of psychoanalysis is necessary to bridge the gap between the discourse of trauma intrinsic to African American narratives and that of the Lacanian big Other. I contend that the oil to lubricate the joint of two discursive domains is the paradigm of ethicoanalysis. Only with the ethics of psychoanalysis, with its elaboration of the relationship between the self and the big Other can the traumatic experiences specific to black identity be better accessed and a new ethical agency of the African american subjectivity be thought of.

Trauma and its impact on black identity have been a centerpiece in African American literature and Morrison’s works. While bunches of writing have been contributed to the narration and negation (Verneuinung) of the traumatic history, the ghost of the traumatic past as is allegorized by the specter of Beloved haunts incessantly the black people with its powers of horror.³² In this way, the traumatic experiences and memories turn into the absolute otherness that simultaneously resists and invites symbolization and verbalization. Yet, this traumatic otherness is usually incarnated both at the intraracial and interracial level. The interraciality of otherness results primarily from the racism imposed upon African Americans. In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo, Morrison specifies that “racism is a scholarly pursuit. […] I’m talking about racism that is taught, institutionalized” (Angelo 258). In other words, slavery and education institutionalize and reproduce racism, which in turn triggers and sustains the traumatic experiences haunting black people in their search of identity.

On the other hand, the trauma resulting from the institutionalized racism and its otherizing effects are inscribed into the unconscious of African Americans and bring about an intraracial otherness: the (self-)otherizing of black people. The social and cultural production and projection of the image of black people as negative and inferior in the American society lead African

32 In Freudian-Lacanian language, the process of “negation” does not mean the rejection of any remembrance or representation of traumatic events; instead, to negate is more like to symbolize the trauma, to verbalize it and thus to mourn for the traumatic experience and past. In her Black Sun, Julia Kristeva has elaborated how the mechanism of negation can help to complete the ritual of mourning and to release, even though only temporarily, the depression and melancholy caused by trauma (43).

Americans to otherize themselves and the connotation of blackness. As Morrison states in the same interview with Angelo, “[e]verybody [of the black people] remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. That’s a trauma” (258; emphases added).

Also, as Jill Matus reveals, the traumatic memories related to slavery and its influence are maintained and reinforced in “racial inequalities and structures of oppression despite the civil rights and black power movements” (23).³³ These traumatic experiences and their subsequent power, as Matus further notes, can endanger the spatio-temporal coherence and consistence of these traumatized black subjects (25-26). That is, causing the temporal and spatial fragmentation and disunification, trauma becomes the inner otherness of African Americans and powerfully shatters black subjects’ “will to coherence, the suppression of [the] discontinuous and disruptive elements, and [the] insistence on closure as the reinstatement of intelligible order” (Matus 26).

It is through the grip of trauma on black identity/subjectivity that the ethics of race has to be sutured with the discourse of ethicoanalysis. In light of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the haunting traumatic history can be looked upon as the embodiment of the Real for African Americans. As Žižek asserts, in the 1970s Lacan begins categorize trauma into the field of the Real (The Sublime Object of Ideology 162). That is, the traumatic events and memories operate as the Real which denotes the incompleteness and inconsistence of the Symbolic and simultaneously resists and invites symbolization and containment. In the meanwhile, since the Symbolic serves as the locus in which and the model according to which subjecthood can be constituted, the failure of symbolization which denotes the lack in the Other forces the subject to encounter the traumatic Symbolic cut and the spatio-temporal splitting in him-/herself. In this logic, the confrontation with trauma at the same time stages the negotiation of the Symbolic with the Real; the confrontation between the two registers creates a space where Lacanian psychoanalysis finds its

33 My synopsis of the relation between trauma and racism derives from Jill Matus. Combining the trauma theories as proposed by Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman, Matus delves into Morrison’s interest in “the possession of history” by showing how trauma functions as a “disease [and dis-ease] of time” and, in Caruth’s term, “a symptom of history” and influences the characters in Morrison’s literary universe (24). For a more complete discussion regarding how Morrison dramatizes the relation between trauma and racism in her fiction, please refer to Matus 23-36.