Encountering the Impossible Gaze of the Outcast

• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: Heewon Kang
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제16권 2호, 269~290쪽, 전체 22쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2011.12.31

영문 초록

The question that orients the examination of the ethical issues embodied in William Wordsworth’s poetry is how one should encounter or represent the outcast figure as a rupture in meaning. The ethics of subjectivity which Jacques Lacan explores in terms of his theory of the gaze, and the reconsideration of the nature of community which this entails allow us to see more clearly the importance of the profound and mysterious encounters found in Wordsworth’s poetry―often between a speaker and some “outcast” other. This essay rereads the Blind Beggar episode included in The Prelude on the basis of Lacan’s insights concerning psychoanalytic ethics. The first thing to note in respect to the Blind Beggar episode is that it is a beggar whom the speaker encounters unexpectedly and is fascinated by in some way. Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on homo sacer as limit figure helps us to examine some important points about the status of the beggar in relation to the society. This prepares the way for a thought of community that would not be based on the symbolic order as a field of totality, but that would instead be capable of registering its own incompleteness, its own relation to the void in meaning. Lacan’s concept of the gaze gives us an important clue when we attempt to answer the question of why the speaker is caught precisely by the blind beggar. For the concept of the gaze allows us to understand the speaker’s encounter with the blind beggar as a specific moment in the constitution of the subject. The speaker’s relation to the beggar can thus be read not simply in relation to the beggar (who he is, what his legal status is), but also in relation to the speaker himself.

목차

Works Cited

Abstract

키워드

outcast figure community exception homo sacer psychoanalytic ethics gaze