Jouissance

The present research seeks to read Steve Toltz’s novel A Fraction of the Whole in terms of the Lacanian three orders. Its central argument is to reveal the affinity between Lacanian three orders that the characters undergo. In the course of A Fraction of the Whole , Martin Dean in pursuing his desire to gain power and strength, passes through three stages of Lacanian theory; the Imaginary Order, the Symbolic Order, and the Real Order. Both Martin and Jasper in Toltz’s novel have problematic relations with their mothers in different ways. Therefore, the Imaginary Order plays a vital role in shaping the characters’ subjectivity. To examine Lacan’s concepts of subjectivity, desire and Others in the Symbolic are the aims of this study. The main objectives are explaining the role of three Lacanian orders in shaping the identity and subjectivization of the characters. It is concluded that Jasper wanted to have an object of love in the Symbolic Order, so he preferred his own uncle, Terry Dean, over his own father. His father was the dominant figure in the Symbolic Order for Jasper as Martin tried to manipulate his son’s mind through words and language. Martin was stuck in a loop of life and death through the Symbolic Order of his life and there was no way out for him and he had turned into a traumatic character. Martin’s experience of the Real Order was shown as he found out that his own mother wanted to kill him by poisoning Martin.

Žižek supposes that traumas can turn into death-drives and offer the subject surplus jouissance. He warns that ideological systems can profit from traumas to further subjugate their citizens. Notwithstanding, Badiou construes that traumas can appear as tremendous moments of Truth/Events that betrays the voids of the Symbolic Order and actualizes the universal truths that postmodernism has constantly denied or endeavored to suppress. In so thinking, he hypothesizes that the Truth/Event will find/invent its own faithful subject that cooperate to actualize the suppressed or denied Real of their age. Badiou criticizes the Western Ethics for devising a secured mode of life that emasculates the subject of post capitalism age and deprives him of experiencing the sufferings that can confront him with the Real. Badiou states that the Western ethics deliberately ignores the positive effects of PTSD recoveries that can reveal a lot regarding the psychological and social weakness of the subject and the society as well. Defending the idea of traversing the fantasies and encountering the Real, Žižek, however, does not become convinced of the emancipatory force that Badiou attributes to traumatic Events. Instead, he announces that the subject’s fidelity to the Badiouian Truth/Event approximates to the devoted insurgents’ allegiance to the ‘mythic violence’ that enables them to disclaim responsibility for their deeds. Badiou himself is apprehensive of ever-present ‘simulacra’ that the sovereign ideology concocts to counterfeit the Truth/Event. What Žižek prescribes is an ‘Act’ that can be embodied in ‘divine violence’ that divulges the Symbolic Order’s void.

Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflict with his surroundings. The obsessional attachment of the narrator with his sixth-toe, however, poses significant questions regarding the nature of his symptomatic dependence on this apparently useless piece of flesh. Through a psychoanalytical reading of the story, the present article is an attempt to shed light on the psychological intricacies of this problematic relation. Drawing on the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the only solution to this enigma is to consider the toe as a materialization of the pure nothingness and lack which, from a psychoanalytical point of view, marks the very core of the subject in the symbolic universe and becomes the only venue for the safe flowing of jouissance. Through its inert presence, the toe embodies the Lacanian objet a as the most precious, albeit illusory, thing in the psychic life of the human beings, the removal, or the disclosure, of which could lead to irreparable consequences.